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violence toward women would be sexist against women because a lot of them contribute to the industry and make a living in the field of games, anime and manga, such as the legendary Naoko Takeuchi who created the very popular Sailor Moon franchise.
Banning any material that contains sexual violence against women would effectively close down a lot of publishing houses that actually hire a lot of women, thus putting lots of women out of work… all so that the United Nations can feel good about pretending to protect fictional women.
More than anything, it makes the United Nations look racist for not understanding Japanese culture, it makes them look ignorant for not having looked into the employment statistics relating to women in the creative arts field in Japan, and it makes them look sexist for trying to put women out of work.
Then again, this is the same United Nations whose peacekeepers rape and kill kids, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we could add “misogynists” as a descriptor right up there alongside “pedophiles” when it comes time to quickly describe what the United Nations seem to be known for.
The post on the WICMC blog ends with the following…
“As stated above, we cannot say that banning the sale of manga and video games that “depict sexual violence” is valid, even if we were to agree that the goal of protecting the rights of women is correct. “There is nothing to be gained from regulating fictional sexual violence. However, while you’re trying to fix the rights of fictional characters, you’re leaving the human rights of real women in the real world left to rot.”
And with that, Japan has firmly said “No” to the U.N.’s request to ban games, anime and manga containing “sexual violence”.Auxerre striker Yaya Sanogo has, more or less, confirmed his move to the Gunners for next season.
The French U21 international told Sky Sports (assuming they actually spoke to him and not Carl Jenkinson by mistake), “Arsenal could be a great club for me, I scored nine goals this season with Auxerre and they think I can improve my level in England.
“I am pleased to be following in the footsteps of Abou Diaby who came through from Auxerre. There are many teams interested in me, but Arsenal is my choice.”
Considering the injury problems he’s had, Gunners fans will be hoping he doesn’t follow too closely in Diaby’s footsteps.
Crutchsteps.
Stump trails.
We’re sorry.
I guess this is as close to official as you can get without it being official. We suspect they’re just dotting the Ts and crossing the Is on the Jovetic and Higuaín deals before announcing.
That’s it. That’s surely it.367 SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit Stumbleupon Pinterest
The unfortunately named South Carolina Alimony Reform – a small but loud group of 200 or so men (and, unfathomably, some women) – are celebrating this month as the SC General Assembly moved one step closer to making SCAR’s dreams come true: the elimination of permanent alimony in SC divorce cases.
On March 8, 2016, the House Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to send a bill that radically rewrites the longstanding South Carolina laws on alimony in divorce cases to the House floor for a vote.
SCAR is an organization formed for the express purpose of advancing a political agenda that sounds a whole lot like the MRA-approved alternative. Men’s rights activists (MRAs) and the smaller, equally chauvinistic subset called “father’s rights activists” have long been howling that divorce laws and family court judges treat them unfairly by not giving them everything they want in the wake of a marriage’s dissolution.
SCAR’s sole function, as laid out by its chairman, Wyman Oxner, is to seek an end to something called permanent alimony. Permanent alimony is basically just what it sounds like: alimony paid by one spouse to the ex-spouse after the divorce is finalized until one of two things occurs: one of the parties die, or the party receiving the alimony begins to cohabitate with a romantic partner. In South Carolina, cohabitation must exceed 90 days in order to justify a cessation of alimony payments from the ex-spouse.
In a letter to the editor of the Charleston Post & Courier, Oxner protests that “practicing family court attorneys and judges know that if a man is ordered to pay permanent alimony, his standard of living decreases.” Of course, this complaint doesn’t exactly jibe with the experiences of millions of divorced women in the United States.
What SCAR and many groups like it in other states across the country want is a legislative ban on permanent alimony in favor of a much more limited span of time. In SCAR’s case, their proposals to the SC General Assembly called for alimony to be limited to half the term of the length of the marriage – and then, only for marriages exceeding 30 years in length.
From the SCAR website:
For example, let’s imagine a couple that divorces after being married for 30 years where the wife stayed at home to raise their two children, both of whom have reached the age of 18. Under existing law, the wife would be entitled to alimony for the rest of her life. If she dies at the age of 80, and was 48 at the time of the divorce, her ex-husband would be on the hook for alimony for 32 years.
Under SCAR’s preferred model, she would only be entitled to alimony for 15 years. So at age 63, she’d be summarily robbed of the money that supported her for the vast majority of her adult life. Thrust back into the workforce at an age where most employees are winding down their careers, and where many employers mask age discrimination in a long laundry list of pretextual reasons for not hiring, our hypothetical woman would find it nearly impossible to find another means of supporting herself.
Leading South Carolina divorce attorney Robert N. Rosen pulled no punches in an op-ed he wrote for the Charleston Post & Courier. He called SCAR’s proposed bill “one of the worst pieces of legislation ever filed in South Carolina.”
Rosen knows what he’s talking about. He co-authored the current SC alimony statutory provisions back in the 1980s:
Our Family Court judges hear a multitude of cases and decide them wisely and fairly pursuant to the alimony guidelines set forth by law, which addresses the parties’ ability to earn, health, assets and length of marriage.
Alimony laws are gender neutral. Few alimony cases are actually tried. Members of the very group protesting the current law were asked by the chair of the House subcommittee how many of them were ordered to pay alimony, and no one raised his hand. Apparently they all had agreed to pay alimony to settle their cases (and they may have received a benefit in exchange).
Rosen also points out that it’s impossible to draw a bright-line rule on alimony that’s fair to all parties in all cases. Noting that very few cases require a judge to rule on a contested issue of alimony – the vast majority of alimony provisions are actually agreed to by the parties and included in a written agreement which the judge then merely approves and incorporates into the case’s final order – Rosen stresses the flexibility afforded family court judges, who are after all in the best position to judge the credibility and interests of both parties:
“In the small number of cases where alimony is a true issue to be decided by a judge, the court often is faced with spouses who have limited employment opportunities because they are unwell, are under-educated, are rearing children — often with special needs — or are unable to work for other reasons beyond their immediate control. Without alimony, some abandoned spouses will never live a lifestyle even close to that which they experienced during the marriage.
In the small percentage of cases where alimony is awarded by the courts in the absence of an agreement of the parties, the alimony-receiving spouse has demonstrated a need for alimony to the satisfaction of the Family Court judge who has heard the witnesses, reviewed the evidence in the case, and considered the many factors required by law.”
Currently, South Carolina family court judges who are asked to decide issues of alimony can choose among several different types of alimony, including limited alimony, rehabilitative alimony, and lump sum alimony, among others.
SCAR would take that discretion away from family court judges, and put in its place a bright-line rule that would apply in every case, across the board.
It’s not hard to imagine scenarios in which this rule would work severe and unjust hardships on a spouse. Take our hypothetical situation above, and now add to it the husband’s harsh, abusive, and controlling treatment of the wife. Or imagine the wife is disabled and unable to support herself through employment of any kind.
Intriguingly, Rosen raises the question of whether SCAR is related to a known “father’s rights” group, Family Law Reform USA. Rosen states in his op-ed that the FLRUSA website referred to SCAR as a “state chapter.” As of the time of this writing, I can find no mention of SCAR on the FLRUSA website at all.
Another SC attorney, Vickie Eslinger, likewise pulled no punches in her response to the proposed changes. Calling the SCAR platform “an attack on South Carolina women,” Eslinger further asserted:
A lot of these men in South Carolina don’t want their wives to work. They want them to stay home and raise the children. The men advance their careers and build up their retirement and the wives have nothing.
It’s hard to conclude anything except that this is exactly the way SCAR wants it.
Featured image via Flikr by Ceridwen available under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic licenseBitcoin, digital currency and blockchain technology experienced another explosive year in 2016. While bitcoin breached the all-time high in USD market cap, several new digital currencies claimed a place in the spotlights as well, while the blockchain buzz arguably peaked it all.
Of course, Bitcoin Magazine kept up with all of it. Looking back on 2016, we compiled three top 6 lists, with our best-read topics in technology, business and news.
These were 2016's six top developments in business, by popularity.
6: Circle Continues Its Move Away From Bitcoin
In a move that should not have come as a surprise, payments application Circle continued their pivot away from Bitcoin and toward more general, blockchain-based solutions in 2016. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire even went so far as to claim that it's highly unlikely anyone will be using Bitcoin in five or ten years.
Shortly thereafter, Circle announced that they would no longer allow users to buy and sell bitcoin on their platform. The company still uses Bitcoin in the background for settlement purposes, although they've now also integrated other blockchain solutions. Circle users can also still use the platform as an effective bitcoin bank where the payments company stores bitcoins for them.
Allaire has noted his frustration with what he perceives as the slow speed of development in Bitcoin on multiple occasions. Circle's move away from Bitcoin is a story that could continue to develop further in 2017.
For now, it secured a top 6 spot in our list for 2016.
5: Santander Uses Blockchain Technology for International Payments
While the debate between Bitcoin and blockchain technology has raged for a couple of years now, 2016 saw the rollout of an actual consumer application from a big bank based on blockchain technology. In June, Santander U.K. announced the introduction of a pilot application that allows users to make international payments by way of blockchain technology.
In their announcement of the application, Santander's Sigga Sigurdardottir claimed that blockchain technology will play a transformational role in the way the bank achieves their goals in the coming years.
The technology used by Santander in their payments application was developed by Ripple, a company in which the fintech venture capital wing of Santander Group has invested.
4: Alphabay Integrates Monero
Some may not think of AlphaBay when trying to come up with some of the most important businesses in the blockchain industry, but the darknet's largest market was able to put its own stamp on the digital currency space in 2016. Privacy-conscious altcoins are often a topic of conversation when it comes to the darknet markets, and AlphaBay brought this topic to the forefront again with their integration of Monero.
AlphaBay was the second darknet market to implement Monero in 2016, although the other market, Oasis, appears to have run off with their users' money. In recent comments to Bitcoin Magazine, an AlphaBay support representative claimed Monero currently accounts for 2 percent of the market's business. The support representative also claimed that Zcash (another privacy-focused altcoin) integration could make sense in the future.
Although some blockchain enthusiasts are not fans of the darknet markets, the reality is that they still play a large enough role in the development of this technology to merit the number-four most widely read business story on Bitcoin Magazine this year, for a top 4 spot on our list.
3: Deutsche Bank Understands Blockchain Technology's Disruptive Potential
The year 2016 is when banks became more serious than ever about blockchain technology, and a statement from Deutsche Bank illustrated this sentiment early in the year. In a statement from February, the bank was quoted as saying, "Banks must partner with fintech and digital currency businesses or risk disappearing altogether."
Deutsche Bank is one of the members of the R3 consortium that has been researching blockchain technology on behalf of the member banks. 2016 also saw the release of Corda, which is a distributed ledger created by the R3 consortium.
Although Deutsche Bank mentioned digital currencies in their statement, the bank's focus with financial technology has been on creating more convenient banking and payment solutions for their customers.
Deutsche Bank has been working on partnerships with various fintech startups over the course of 2016 in an effort to keep up with disruptive financial technologies.
2: Gem Launches Health Network With Philips Blockchain Lab
In April, Gem announced the launch of Gem Health, which is a network for developing healthcare applications powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Philips was the first major healthcare operator to join the Gem Health network.
According to the Gem website, the Gem Health network allows for the creation of global healthcare data standards that do not compromise on privacy and security. Identity schemes and smart contract applications are executed against a shared data infrastructure on the platform. Earlier this year, Gem CEO Micah Winkelspecht told Bitcoin Magazine, "A lot of companies were suffering from these same pain points - working with siloed data that we could bridge together."
Gem also announced a $7.1 million Series A funding round in the early days of 2016.
With that, the startup places second in our most popular business developments of the year.
1: PwC Report Describes Blockchain's Disruptive Impact on Fintech
The top business story on Bitcoin Magazine in 2016 was a PwC report that found blockchain technology may disrupt traditional fintech startups. The report was based on a survey of 544 executives and top management personnel at various financial services companies around the world.
Although the report also discussed the fintech industry more generally, blockchain technology was specifically mentioned on multiple occasions. The report found that "blockchain technology may result in a radically different competitive future in the [financial services] industry." The potential value of smart contracts was also discussed in the report.
The report identified 700 blockchain companies, 150 of which they deemed worthy of being tracked. Only 83 percent of the respondents in the survey considered themselves at least moderately familiar with blockchain technology, which led PwC to conclude that a lack of understanding of this technology may lead to market participants underestimating the impact of the blockchain on their activities.The PIA workers’ strike has entered its 7th day. Following the murder of three workers by security forces in Karachi last Tuesday, when the workers’ peaceful protest against privatization was brutally attacked, the intensity of the strike has peaked.
News of the tragic events soon spread to the other parts of the country. A complete shutdown of operations was initiated by the workers, grounding flights. This marks the first time in the history of the Pakistani labour movement that PIA workers, flight operators, pilots and ground staff have all struck together.
The Prime Minister, Nawaz Shariff, government ministers and officials, have denounced the strike and refused negotiations with the strikers. Shariff has even threatened the union leaders, as well as the striking workers, with dismissal and one year's imprisonment on the violation of the so-called “Essential Services (Maintenance) Act, 1952”.
The workers have not only continued their strike, but intensified their protests. Collections among the wider working class are being made in order to meet the daily expenses of the strike, such as food and tea. In Rawalpindi, Hidayatullah, the president of the “People's Unity with the PIA Employees Union”, senior vice-president Zameer Chandio, and two other union leaders, Mansoor Dhillo and Saifullah Larak, have been abducted and moved to undisclosed locations. The police is denying responsibility.
The comrades of the PTUDC (Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign) are intervening in these protests with full force, trying to connect this struggle with the anti-privatization movements in other areas like WAPDA ( Water and Power Development Authority) and on the railways. These efforts have strengthened and encouraged the striking workers, breaking the isolation of this movement to some extent.
Many PTUDC comrades have addressed the PIA workers throughout the country, exposing the real character of the government regime and imperialist institutions like the IMF, who are implementing the policies of privatization and austerity all over the world.
The workers have welcomed the role of PTUDC, and even publicly praised the role of the IMT in their speeches. The striking workers have also asked for solidarity statements condemning the privatization, state oppression and abduction of union leaders.
We appeal to all trade unions, workers’ organizations and comrades from other countries to send solidarity messages. Such messages will be read in protests and meetings and will play a vital role in boosting the morale the PIA workers.
Send messages of solidarity to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.Diego ‘Cabrón’ Costa: Copa del Rey top scorer fighting his way to the top
By Paul Morrissey, in Madrid – Follow on Twitter here
More likely to lob a loogy right in your eyeball than execute a stepover; more British bulldog in style than Brazilian ballerina, more hood rat than suburbanite. This season’s Copa del Rey top scorer doesn’t have the touch of a Benzema, the class of a Falcao, or the predator’s instinct of a David Villa.
You won’t find him on the front page of Esquire or parading himself on social networks. Too underground. Too raw. Diego ‘Cabron’ Costa is a fighting striker like no other. Who lets his fists talk before his feet. Who carries the street in his soul; the streets that defined him as a man and as a player. Diego Costa is a puto cabron and he doesn’t give a fuck what you think.
Why? Because he started from the bottom and is currently the most effective, selfless striker in activity. To put it simply, he is probably the best bad player in the world.
‘I grew up thinking landing elbows was the normal thing. My school was the street.’
It all started in Lagarto, a forgotten little pueblo of the suffocatiing metropolis of Sao Paulo, Brazil. A nod to geographic determinism, Lagarto meaning ‘alligator’ in Spanish, so reptilian is our cabron in his movement and acts. Orwell said ‘every man has the face he deserves at 50’; Costa’s applies at half that.
At 24, its got the streets etched all over it; the streets where he learned the game and lived his life.
Far from the praihas maravilhosas of Rio or the gleaming futsal centres of Porto Alegre, Costa learnt everything he knows en la calle, a stray alley cat. No nets, no grass; just blood sweat and tears. ‘We weren’t hungry or poor, but we had it tough. My pueblo had no football structures or resources. So we made our own street teams and played against other pueblos.’
Hardcore. What he missed in coaching, he gained in resourcefulness. A Masters in how to live by your wits from the shcool of life.
It’s where he became the ruthless Malandro that he is today. Not the flip-flap type who uses his tricks to evade challenges; the fighting type. At the age Wayne Rooney signed his first professional contract and scored his first Premier League goal and Radaemel Falcao played in the U-17 World Cup, Costa was still a street baller ducking and diving, smuggling counterfeit merchandise across the Paraguyan border (who hasn’t?), just so he could have a few Reias to take a girl for a drink.
The life of a vagrant; a million miles from the pristine sheen of La Liga BBVA. A footballing OVNI, an alley cat who broke all the rules on how to become a professional footballer. At this stage of his life, he had a far greater chance of fulfilling the destiny of a Lil Ze than a Lil Ronaldo.
But the ball kept him clean. He trained every day because that was what you did. Spotted by a Sporting Braga representative in a game he wasn’t even supposed to be playing (suspended, obviously), Costa was offered a contract on the spot, and set sail for Europe. ”Graças a Deus”.
‘I couldn’t control myself, I had no respect for opponents. A footballing education would have taught me these things”
Cue culture shock. The lack of a conventional footballing education showed itself all too regularly, as Costa struggled to cast off the mores of the street in this civilised association version of futebol.
Erring from one Iberian minnow to the next (four loan moves involving seven different clubs) collecting 63 bookings and 4 red cards – his trajectory reflects more the life of an 1850s prize-fighter than the cocooned life of the modern professional footballer. That’s because nothing was ever given to Costa.
Deprived of a footballing education, Costa is slowly turning this to his advantage. Modest to a fault, he not only admits he’s no crack, he goes as far as insisting he’s a bit of an imposter. A bit shit really. ”I run. If you run at least you can trick people into thinking you’re playing well.” A bit of a Brazilian Heskey. This is a striker who’s Wikipedia page describes him as ‘a footballer’, in very deliberate inverted commas. A fighter before a futbolero.
If he’s partnering Radamel Falcao in La Liga’s current second best team, he owes it all to work and sacrifice: he’s scrapped, fought, spat and screamed to make it to the top. Metaphorically and literally. Because with Costa, it seems try as he may to self-gentrify into a prim and proper futbolista, the street will always out. He’s the wildcat who won’t be tamed.
El Cholo Simeone, Pi Patel to his Richard Parker, is convinced he can ease Costa’s street spirit through Good Will Hunting, while maintaining that grinta that defines this Atleti side. Simeone, an exponent of the dark arts himself as a player (Becks likes this), is only too aware of the balancing act required. The tipping point came during Atleti’s Europa League match at Viktoria Pilzen last November. Sent off for a needless act of aggression on a hapless Czech, Simeone decided this would be the last time Costa ‘lost his papers’.
It had to be. Simeone saw second place was up for grabs, and that Costa was of no use to him sitting in the stands. ‘Everything goes, as long as you can keep yourself on the pitch to do it.’ His teammates told him the same.
Falcao-Costa, the Original Odd Couple
That really was the tipping point. Costa’s gone from being an unpredictable liability to Atleti’s most important player. It’s not like he’s become a zen peacemaker; he’s just working to keep his temper in check, but the trash talking will never leave him. Booked a mere three times since the ‘change of chip’ (old habits die hard), he’s provoked 14 yellow cards and 4 reds out of duped opponents, along with being La Liga’s most fouled player. Maybe a source of shame for other strikers, a boon for Costa.
And a boon for Atleti: the more time rival defenders spend trying to kick, spit on, and stamp on him, the less time they’re spending on his striker partner, that guy Falcao. Falcao-Costa, the original odd couple: the clean, fair, wapo Falcao; and…Costa.
When asked about incidents with the pair, Ramos described it perfectly: ‘I have no problem with Falcao, he plays with respect, never looking for contact…the total opposite of Costa.”
It’s an old school partnership that’s flourishing into one of La Liga’s best, with Costa dropping deep and running into the channels, and Falcao loitering up top with intent. If Falcao finishes the chances, Costa makes them. Just don’t ever call Costa a ‘false 9’; he’s a runner, a fighter, and a worker. Basta.
But Beyond the uncouth, uncultured style, there’s a bit of a footballer in there. His performance in the Copa del Rey semi-final was classic Costa: a goal, a brilliant one-two assist with Falcao, and the provocation of two opponents, resulting in red cards for Gary Medel and Kondogatoire. Where most strikers count their goals, Costa’s now counting the ire and hate he attracts.
Playing by his own rules as he always has.
This dedication to the cause ha seen him go from being a clumsy unwanted back-up for Forlan and Aguero, to a Colchonero idol.
As much as they love their cracks, a luchador will always find his way into the hearts of Atleti fans.
Contacted via mail, Dani Ldo Hidalgo of Madrid daily AS sums it up:
‘He became a real Atleti player after the games against Madrid and Betis. He was a bit out of order spitting on Ramos, but he unjustly became the focus of a negative media campaign, when really it was Ramos who’d instigated it. Just like Ujfalusi’s tackle on Messi a few seasons ago, when one of our own hard workers comes under attack, we rally around him. Now he’s one of us.’
Enough to catch the eye of the Selecção?
Steady as she goes. On the night he overtook his very antithesis, Cristiano Ronaldo, as Copa del Rey top scorer with seven tantos, our cabron inevitably had to mar the achievement with the controversy that shadows his every move: Sevilla’s Kondogatoire accused him of making monkey noises at him. Progress is a slow process.
Diego Costa, the bad guy turning good who just can’t leave the streets behind.
All quotes via El PaisMark Liberman at Language Log tries to set the record straight -- yet again:
Presidential pronouns: This time it's Ron Fournier: Ron Fournier, "Is Obama More Interested in Progress or Politics?", National Journal, 1/20/2015:
Count how many times Obama uses the words "I," "me," and "my." Compare that number to how often he says, "You," "we," "our." If the first number is greater than the second, Obama has failed.
This leads naturally to a different question: "Is Ron Fournier More Interested in Analysis or in Bullshit?"...
If Ron Fournier had spent a minute or two looking into the facts of the matter, he might have discovered... ALL presidents since WWII have used substantially more first-person-plural pronouns than first-person-singular pronouns in the SOTU messages; Adding second-person pronouns makes the disproportion even larger; Obama is pretty much in the middle of the pack on all the relevant measures....
Mr. Fournier is reprising a sub-theme of the Great Obama Pronoun Fantasy, variants of which seem to draw pundits like flies to rotting meat....Now that it’s 2013, can you imagine how embarrassing it must feel to have authored the Patriot Act a dozen years earlier? Especially considering that we live in an age where Americans are increasingly outraged that the National Security Agency tracks their phone calls—an act made legal through a secret court interpretation of that very law.
The Patriot Act’s author, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), is going to try and fix it.
He’s introducing the USA FREEDOM Act, a bill specifically aimed at countering the portions of the Patriot Act that were interpreted to let the NSA collect telephone metadata in bulk.
Sensenbrenner’s stance—he opposes bulk collection of American calls, rather than just tracking specific terrorism-related suspects—isn’t new. He’s been vocally opposing that interpretation of his infamous bill since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden first leaked evidence of the program in June. He voted for Congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.)’s attempt to defund the program. And on Wednesday, he wrote to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that the “collection of a wide array of data on innocent Americans has led to serious questions about how government will use—or misuse—such information.”
The USA FREEDOM Act, as Sensenbrenner explained Wednesday to a laughing crowd at a Cato Institute talk (he wasn’t laughing), is an absurdly long acronym, standing for United and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet Collection, and Online Monitoring. According to a fact sheet a Sensenbrenner aide provided to the Daily Dot, the bill is U.S. citizen-centric but would address the bulk of privacy advocates’ concerns.
That includes ending bulk metadata collection, requiring Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts to have a privacy advocate present, and increasing oversight of the NSA’s stated practice of discarding intelligence if it finds out it’s that of an American not considered a target of an ongoing investigation.
However despite public, and possibly congressional, support for those sentiments, it’s unclear if Sensenbrenner’s bill will ever get off the ground. There are more than a dozen NSA reform bills currently before Congress. Besides, Congress isn’t even working right now.
Illustration by Fernando Alfonso IIIYou may have wondered why, since it was Columbus who discovered America, why wasn’t it named Columbia, after him?
Historians tell us that when Columbus discovered our land, he didn’t believe that he had found a new continent; he simply believed that he had found an unexplored part of the continent of Asia. He even believed this until his death in 1506.
Meanwhile, another explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, made four voyages to this land, beginning in 1497. He realized that this was a new, unknown land and simply called it the “New World,” and never suggested giving it his name or any other name for that matter.
Yet America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, and under strange circumstances. It seems that Vespucci wrote many letters to his friends describing the New World. A dishonest author was said to have gotten hold of some of these letters, rewritten them, and published them in a book.
This book found its way into the hands of a German map maker, who decided to call this new land after Amerigo. It would be Americus or America on his new map. He decided on America since that was the feminine form of the name, just as Europe and Asia are feminine names as well.
Other map makers followed this German’s lead, and America was born.
Amerigo Vespucci died without ever knowing that this land was named after him!The Fed chairman is 100% confident inflation can be contained. Rapidly spreading rioting (5 countries so far) would take the under on that.
Latest on Tunisia:
Twelve people were killed in overnight clashes in the Tunisian capital Tunis and the northeastern town of Ras Jebel, according to accounts from two medical sources and a witness on Friday.
Ten of the victims were killed after clashes in the capital, two sources from Charles Nicolle hospital told Reuters.
A witness from Ras Jebel, who identified herself as Narjes, said: "I saw two dead people with my own eyes after police fired at youth".
Tunisian officials could not immediately be reached for a comment. It was not immediately clear whether the shootings took place before or after the country's president ordered police to stop using lethal force against demonstrators.
And now the violence has spread to Jordan:
Food price protests sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East reached Jordan on Friday, when hundreds of protesters chanted slogans against Prime Minister Samir al-Rifai in the southern city of Karak.
The peaceful protest was held despite hastily announced government measures to curb commodity and fuel prices. Similar demonstrations were held in three other towns and cities across the country, witnesses said.
"We are protesting the policies of the government -- high prices and repeated taxation that made the Jordanian people revolt," Tawfiq al-Batoush, a former head of Karak municipality, told Reuters at the protest outside Karak's Al Omari mosque.
Three days ago, after riots in Algeria and Tunisia over high prices, unemployment and falling living standards, Jordan announced a $225 million package of cuts in the prices of some types of fuel and of staple products including sugar and rice.
Other Arab countries have taken similar steps. Libya abolished taxes and customs duties on food products and Morocco offered compensation to importers of soft milling wheat to keep supplies stable after a surge in grain prices.
...Morocco (google translated)
Protests against price rises and unemployment moved from Tunisia to Morocco, where the streets of Rabat, yesterday, saw clashes between young protesters and police forces, which tried to prevent them from organizing a demonstration outside the Moroccan parliament, in protest against unemployment and high prices and the cost of living in Morocco
And Yemen:
In Yemen, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh fired Minister of Oil and Chief Executive, the Yemen Petroleum Company Omar Arhabi, yesterday, due to a lack in the supply of petroleum products, not available in the market, which led to bottlenecks in front of gas stations and the creation of indignation among the citizens.
Not like there is much to add here, but we would like to add that if a rising stock market was indiciative of "wealth" then the citizens of Zimbabwe have to be the richest people in the universe.Police are touting the seizure of $205 million in pot. But what if it just further enriches foreign drug cartels?
California law enforcement is proclaiming a major success in the war on drugs. "Ventura County authorities this week eradicated the largest plantation of marijuana in the history of the county, pulling up more than 68,000 plants in Los Padres National Forest, north of the city of Ojai, authorities said Thursday," the Los Angeles Times reports, adding in a followup story that "nearly 68,500 pot plants valued at $205.46 million were eradicated after the discovery last week in the rugged mountains north of Ojai, according to a sheriff's statement. No suspects were arrested."
It's impossible to predict what the effects of this raid might be, or what percentage of the black market it affects. Perhaps it'll have no effect at all on the price and availability of the drug. But let's imagine that it has the intended effect: that after this raid, it is harder to grow marijuana in the United States, that the overall supply of domestically grown pot is smaller, and that the price of the drug is higher.
If that is the best case scenario, is it really a victory?
Again, it's tough to know exactly what's going on in this black market. But one possible effect of a smaller supply and increased difficulty growing the drug in the United States is for marginally more of it to come from abroad, at higher prices that further enrich and empower violent narcotics cartels.
At the very least, the uncertainty is a good reason for newspapers to stop reporting on these seizures as if they're clear victories in the War on Drugs.
For all we know, they're making us less safe.
Image credit: ReutersAlthough we have already had a chance to check out Samsung’s Galaxy Note5 and write a detailed preview about it, we got another opportunity yesterday to play with one at the New York Unpacked event.
The Note5 is the successor to the Galaxy Note 4, a phone we really liked. It is the fifth phone in Samsung’s series of Note devices that started the whole large-screen phablet revolution back in 2011.
This year, though, Samsung has radically transformed the Note5 into a device that perhaps doesn’t honor the tenets that made the Note series of phones great. The capitulation to market (and perhaps a little media) pressure made Samsung abandon a few of the core features of its Galaxy S series of phones this year. The Galaxy S6 and S6 edge are crafted from premium materials – glass and metal – but by incorporating them, the battery became non-removable, and the microSD slot was removed.
The new Note has befallen the same fate. Its battery is fixed in place, and the microSD slot is nowhere to be seen. However, if these sacrifices were the only way to achieve the what we saw today (which was a gorgeous device), perhaps we could learn to live with the omissions. We’re sure, though, that some of you won’t be able to.
One thing to keep in mind, even if you are unhappy with the changes, is that there are number of other improvements outside of its physical design that do make the Note5 somewhat of a worthy successor to the phablet throne.
Hardware Specifications
Samsung Galaxy Note5 Display 5.7-inch SAMOLED @ 2560x1440 (518 PPI) SoC Samsung Exynos 7420 CPU Core ARM Cortex-A57 (4x @ 2.1GHz) + ARM Cortex-A53 (4x @ 1.5GHz) [big.LITTLE] GPU Core ARM Mali-T760MP8 @ 772MHz Memory 4GB LPDDR4 Storage 32GB, 64GB Battery 3000mAh, non-removable Front Camera 5 MP, f/1.9 Rear Camera 16 MP, 1/2.6" Sony IMX240 Exmor RS or Samsung S5K2P2 ISOCELL, 1.12μm, f/1.9, PDAF, OIS, automatic HDR, object tracking autofocus, LED flash Connectivity Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2x2 MIMO), Bluetooth 4.2 LE, NFC, 4G LTE (Cat 9), microUSB 2.0 Special Features S Pen (stylus), Multi |
were answered," he said.The MH17 aircraft, with 298 passengers and crew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was believed to have been shot down in the Donetsk region, east Ukraine on July 17.A total 43 Malaysians were killed in the incident.(Ricardo Stuckert/ Instituto Lula)
SÃO PAULO - A decisão do plenário do Supremo Tribunal Federal de afastar o presidente do Senado, Renan Calheiros (PMDB-AL), da linha sucessória da presidência da república foi além da grave crise institucional instaurada entre os poderes Judiciário e Legislativo. Enquanto alguns se indignavam com o fato de um parlamentar réu ser mantido em cargo de destaque de um dos poderes da república, contrariando também decisão liminar do ministro Marco Aurélio Mello -- previamente desdenhada pela própria Mesa Diretora do Senado --, outros especulavam sobre quais poderiam ser os efeitos de tal decisão sobre a corrida eleitoral de 2018.
Um dos personagens que acompanhavam com atenção especial o caso, calculando os possíveis impactos sobre suas aspirações políticas para os próximos anos, foi o deputado Jair Bolsonaro (PSC-RJ). Ele chegou até a desenvolver uma espécie de teoria da conspiração: "Essa decisão do Supremo Tribunal Federal em tirar Renan Calheiros da presidência do Senado, por ele estar na linha sucessória presidencial, pode me atingir em 2018. Até alguns falam que esse seria, talvez, um dos objetivos", afirmou o parlamentar em entrevista ao portal Poder 360.
A preocupação do deputado, interessado em se candidatar ao posto máximo da república no próximo pleito, tinha motivo: em 21 de julho deste ano, ele se tornou réu no STF, acusado de apologia ao estupro após discussão ríspida com a também deputada Maria do Rosário (PT-RS).
Bolsonaro não é o único. Simpatizantes e opositores à ideia de uma volta de Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva à presidência da república também levantaram suas hipóteses -- muito embora o líder petista não seja nome confirmado para o pleito de 2018, mesmo despontando atualmente como a alternativa mais viável dentro do PT. Conforme apontam pesquisas, o ex-presidente é nome com densidade para figurar entre os favoritos para um eventual segundo turno, apesar do "teto" baixo devido ao elevado índice de rejeição.
Na contramão da eventual preocupação de quem já prepara o plano de voo para 2018, o professor de Direito Constitucional da FGV e coordenador do Supremo em Pauta Rubens Glezer explica que a decisão da corte Suprema envolvendo Renan Calheiros "não teria nenhuma aplicação" sobre casos como o de Lula ou Bolsonaro.
"Pela Constituição, os crimes que permitem o afastamento são aqueles cometidos relacionados à função", observou. Conta o especialista que o Supremo tenha a intenção de aceitar denúncia contra mandatários por questões previstas no Código Penal, seria necessário submeter a decisão ao Legislativo. Já para o caso de candidaturas, incide a Lei da Ficha Limpa, que apenas barra nomes que tenham sido condenados em segunda instância.
Na hipótese de um candidato réu vencer as eleições, conta Glezer que os processos são suspensos e apenas poderão ser retomados após o mandato, assim como os prazos -- o que retira o risco de prescrição nesse intervalo. A medida visa garantir maior estabilidade à gestão. A Constituição também prevê que os mandatários não sejam responsabilizados por atos estranhos ao exercício de suas funções enquanto as exercerem.
Sendo assim, se até a disputa os candidatos não forem condenados em segunda instância, estes serão elegíveis. Caberá aos eleitores optar pelo sim ou por outras opções.
Veja o que diz o Direito sobre o assunto:
Determina a Constituição Federal:
Art. 86. Admitida a acusação contra o Presidente da República, por dois terços da Câmara dos Deputados, será ele submetido a julgamento perante o Supremo Tribunal Federal, nas infrações penais comuns, ou perante o Senado Federal, nos crimes de responsabilidade.
§ 1º O Presidente ficará suspenso de suas funções:
I - nas infrações penais comuns, se recebida a denúncia ou queixa-crime pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal;
§ 4º O Presidente da República, na vigência de seu mandato, não pode ser responsabilizado por atos estranhos ao exercício de suas funções.
***
A Lei da Ficha Limpa (Lei Complementar 135/2010) prevê:
Art. 1º São inelegíveis:
I - para qualquer cargo:
e) os que forem condenados, em decisão transitada em julgado ou proferida por órgão judicial colegiado, desde a condenação até o transcurso do prazo de 8 (oito) anos após o cumprimento da pena, pelos crimes: (Redação dada pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
1. contra a economia popular, a fé pública, a administração pública e o patrimônio público; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
2. contra o patrimônio privado, o sistema financeiro, o mercado de capitais e os previstos na lei que regula a falência; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
3. contra o meio ambiente e a saúde pública; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
4. eleitorais, para os quais a lei comine pena privativa de liberdade; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
5. de abuso de autoridade, nos casos em que houver condenação à perda do cargo ou à inabilitação para o exercício de função pública; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
6. de lavagem ou ocultação de bens, direitos e valores; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
7. de tráfico de entorpecentes e drogas afins, racismo, tortura, terrorismo e hediondos; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
8. de redução à condição análoga à de escravo; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
9. contra a vida e a dignidade sexual; e (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)
10. praticados por organização criminosa, quadrilha ou bando; (Incluído pela Lei Complementar nº 135, de 2010)A Republican plan to dismantle key banking reforms passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis has been dubbed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) the "Wet Kiss for Wall Street Act."
Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a Republican from Texas, outlined his proposal—the Financial CHOICE (Creating Hope and Opportunity for Investors, Consumers and Entrepreneurs) Act—in a speech at the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday. The legislation contains "sweeping provisions that effectively constitute a wish list for Republicans," according to American Banker.
"If unity means a marriage between Donald Trump's toxic racism and Jeb Hensarling's Wall Street giveaways, then I think they'd be better off with division."
—Senator Elizabeth Warren
The plan would roll back a slew of Dodd-Frank regulations; reduce the power of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created by Warren; repeal the Volcker Rule that aims to stop banks from making risky bets with taxpayer-backed deposits; and prevent the Financial Stability Oversight Council from labeling insurers and other non-banks as "systemically important financial institutions"—or too big to fail—making them subject to federal constraints.
Furthermore, the proposal would give megabanks the ability to "opt-out" of Dodd-Frank by holding a higher amount of capital. Bloomberg described this aspect as a sort of "deal" between House Republcians and U.S. banks: "Raise several hundred billions of dollars in additional capital and Washington will let you break free from a litany of burdensome rules."
Or, Hensarling told the Economic Club, "Think of it as a market-based, equity-financed Dodd-Frank off-ramp."
But Warren offered a different take at a Banking Committee hearing on Tuesday, saying the legislation would allow financial institutions to "return to the good old days before the 2008 crisis when these banks could run wild."
She noted that Hensarling "is in New York today meeting with Donald Trump to discuss what we could call his Wet Kiss for Wall Street Act."
"Now while most Republicans are debating not whether to run away from Trump, but how far and how fast, Congressman Hensarling is sprinting toward Trump Tower," she said. "You know, I get that the Republicans want unity right now...but if unity means a marriage between Donald Trump's toxic racism and Jeb Hensarling's Wall Street giveaways, then I think they'd be better off with division. That is not what the American people are looking for and it is a path to ruin both for our economic system and for our country."
Watch Warren's full take-down below:
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Warren wasn't the only lawmaker to blast the plan on Tuesday. Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said that with such efforts, Republicans were trying "to make life easier for mega bankers and tougher for ordinary Americans," while Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) called it "a special interest wish list that would deregulate the financial sector to the detriment of consumers and investors."
Hensarling's proposal "takes a page from Donald Trump's casino playbook by gambling with the American economy," Waters added. "We cannot allow Republicans to take us back to the depths of the financial crisis by weakening regulatory oversight and giving banks the tools to game the system once again."
Meanwhile, consumer watchdog group Public Citizen similarly decried the so-called CHOICE Act as "a major financial deregulation plan" that would mark "a retreat from regulating the very firms that brought on the biggest economic crisis in generations."
"Hensarling's plan would be abysmal for the Main Street economy," said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch division.
"Eviscerating the most important legacy of the Obama administration, namely U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is but one of the elements that renders this proposal nothing more than a fundraising tool for lawmakers soliciting contributions from Wall Street."
Indeed, Hensarling has received nearly $5.5 million in campaign contributions from key financial industry interests since 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
It looks like all that cash "bought a really good friend in Congress," said Liz Ryan Murray, policy director of People's Action Institute, on Tuesday.Actress Preeti Gupta's nude photos were leaked last week. Gupta, who recently acted in the film Unfreedom, spoke out about the leak, calling it a violation of her privacy.
Unfreedom, directed by Raj Amit Kumar, was banned in India for showing explicit scenes between a lesbian couple and for its portrayal of religious fundamtentalism.
The leaked nude pictures that are being circulated are allegedly screenshots from the film.
Speaking with the Hindustan Times, Gupta said, "It's true that the actors are vulnerable, and I am actually very angry about it. It's bizarre and a violation of privacy. It's not cool, and if there is anything to be banned, it's such kind of things."
The actress, who made her acting debut with the TV drama Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii, also talked about the rigour and effort that goes into shooting these scenes.
"Shooting such scenes needs dedication and discipline. It's very challenging. The concept of the film made sense to me and that's why we decided to show the truth of the situation. Ultimately, we were trying to recreate two hours of reality. Our intention is not to titillate but to show you the truth. It needs courage," Gupta said
Gupta is the second actress to have faced this situation in recent times. In April, Radhika Apte found herself in a similar situation when a private video was leaked online.Michael Seto It's about time. People don't have any.
For the ninth straight year Fox News is cable television's top News Network. This year, it beat CNN and MSNBC combined.
And, the top five cable news programs among 25-54 year-old viewers were all on Fox: The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, Glenn Beck, On the Record and, get this, The O'Reilly Factor repeat show.
This year, for the first time, MSNBC has moved into second place, with CNN dropping to third place. CNN's marquee shows -Anderson Cooper's 360 and Parker-Spitzer have been extremely weak.
Politics and prejudices aside, there is a central theme to this change, and it's not an altogether positive one. I don't believe this is about one political opinion versus another. I believe this is about people wanting, and needing, to form opinions faster and with less work on their own part.
It is, frankly, easier for someone to turn on either Fox News or MSNBC, listen to the frequent opinion expressed, right or left, and benchmark themselves against that opinion rather than forming their own opinion based on independent thinking.
So if a new Supreme Court Justice was named tomorrow, more people would check out what Fox and MSNBC said about him or her, and then quickly decide whether or not they were in favor or opposed to approving the candidate. "If Fox (or MSNBC) like him, so do I," a viewer can decide, (or the opposite) based totally on that viewer's political stance and how it relates to Fox or MSNBC.
In the past, many of those people would have spent the time with a more objective outlet, like CNN or the New York Times, done more research of the candidate, and made up their own minds. Now, it's just faster to have someone do that for you.
It's a bad thing for democracy. We are creating a less-informed but more opinionated public.
By the way, it does not mean that more objective sources CAN'T be more interesting. They just aren't. In an effort to appear totally unbiased, CNN ridded itself of opinion or emotion. You CAN express opinions and still present a balanced report. It takes more work on the news gathering side to both report and curate.
But that will be the future of Journalism.
Larry Kramer is the founder and former CEO of CBS Marketwatch.com, and the first president of CBS Digital.This post originally appeared on C-Scape.MPAA
A senior executive that Hollywood hired last year to be its chief technology policy officer has undergone a remarkable about-face: he now opposes the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Paul Brigner, who was until last month a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, has emerged as SOPA's latest critic. "I firmly believe that we should not be legislating technological mandates to protect copyright -- including SOPA and Protect IP," he says.
In a statement posted on CNET.com, Brigner says that his time at the MPAA -- which, more than any other advocacy group, was responsible for SOPA and Protect IP -- led him to realize that new laws to block allegedly piratical Web sites simply won't work.
"Did my position on this issue evolve over the last 12 months? I am not ashamed to admit that it certainly did," Brigner writes. "The more I became educated on the realities of these issues, the more I came to the realization that a mandated technical solution just isn't mutually compatible with the health of the Internet." (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)
A spokesman for the MPAA said his organization would not comment on Brigner's volte-face.
Hollywood, meanwhile, has hardly given up on SOPA. MPAA chief Christopher Dodd said recently that he was "confident" that President Obama was using his "good relationships in both communities" -- that is, Silicon Valley and Hollywood -- to advance the measure. And last week, the White House said that "we believe that new legislative and non-legislative tools are needed to address offshore infringement."
Some MPAA allies also remain optimistic. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the more ardent defenders of the bill, said it "will continue to work with Congress." Cary Sherman, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, wrote in a February 7 op-ed in The New York Times that his industry wants a "workable" legal framework -- after dubbing January's protests "misinformation," a "dirty trick," and "hyperbolic mistruths" that "amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power."
Brigner's statement on CNET.com came in response to an article last week about his new job as head of the Internet Society's North America efforts.
SOPA and its Senate cousin, the Protect IP Act, were yanked from congressional calendars after January's historic online protest--which included Wikipedia going dark for a day, warnings about Internet censorship appearing on the home page of Google.com and Craigslist.org, and Senate Web sites being knocked offline due to a flood of traffic. The bills are opposed by a long list of Silicon Valley's most successful entrepreneurs and executives.
Both proposed laws are designed to target so-called rogue Web sites by allowing the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines and Internet service providers that would force them to make the suspected piratical site effectively vanish. But such broad censorship orders can jeopardize innocent Web sites, a point that constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe made, as well as negatively impacting U.S. cybersecurity.RadioShack's stock has passed a milestone — a bad one.
The company's stock price dipped below $1 on Friday. In late morning trading, the stock was trading at $0.93. RadioShack's market cap is now $92.7 million, compared with $9.9 billion for rival Best Buy.
See also: RadioShack May Soon Be Over and Out
The $1 mark is more than just a psychological barrier; the New York Stock Exchange can delist the stock. As USA Today's Matt Kranz noted in a 2009 column, "falling below a $1 a share is normally the beginning of the end for many stocks." The NYSE normally launches a review when a stock drops into the single digits.
RadioShack could conceivably engineer a reverse stock split to bring its price back up again. If NYSE delists the stock, it can still trade on the OTC Bulletin Board or Pink Sheets. RadioShack reps and NYSE reps could not be reached for comment.
Earlier this month, RadioShack reported a $98.3 million loss and a 14% drop in revenues, marking the ninth consecutive quarter that sales fell at the chain. In response, B. Riley & Co. analyst Scott Tilghman cut RadioShack's target price to $0.On September the 11th, 2001, terrorists hijacked four American commercial jets with the intention of crashing them into large, visible buildings in both Washington, D.C., and New York City. As we all know, the terrorists were successful in three of the four cases; the fourth plane's assault on the United States Capitol -- the presumed target -- was thwarted by the heroic passengers on board. While we now believe that no other planes were targeted, at the time, each of the other 4,000-plus flights scheduled to be in American air space at the time were at risk. But Ben Sliney, the Federal Aviation Commission's National Operations Manager on duty that morning, prevented future harm.How? He made an unprecedented decision, making the call to ground every single commercial airplane in the country.That, of course, is not news -- in fact, it's rather common knowledge. While hindsight teaches us that the call was correct, at the time, it was a rather aggressive decision. Thankfully, it was the type of decision which Sliney was well-equipped to make. He had 25 years of experience in air traffic control and/or as part of FAA management, including a leadership position at New York TRACON, which has responsibility over the air traffic for New York City's three major airports and a few smaller regional airports nearby. His position as National Operations Manager gave him immediate access to information as it became available. But the decision to ground the planes -- that was Sliney's to consider, and ultimately, to make.In all, Ben Sliney's initiative makes for an incredible story. When Universal Pictures decided to turn the heroism of the passengers of United Flight 93 into a movie, they did not overlook Ben Slney's role -- they even asked him to play himself in the movie, as seen below.A San Francisco police officer was booked into County Jail on Monday for overtime fraud, according to the department.
Dean K. Lee, 41, turned himself in and was booked on four felony counts of defrauding a government agency and one felony count of theft, police said. It is unclear when the alleged crimes occurred.
Lee, a 15-year veteran and Daly City resident, was last assigned to the operations division. He has been placed on unpaid suspension.
No mugshot was available Monday. Lee’s bail is set at $50,000, according to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department.
“The public’s trust is of the utmost importance to the members of the SFPD and the Department will continue to work hard to build and maintain this trust,” said a department statement on the case. “As San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and Chief [Greg] Suhr have emphasized, Department members will continue to hold each other accountable and will act swiftly to report any behavior that might bring dishonor to the Police Department and the City of San Francisco.”
During an April press conference, Chief Suhr said the department’s Internal Affairs Division initiated an investigation of an officer for allegations of overtime fraud, according to SFPD.
The District Attorney’s Office was credited as participating in the internal investigation.
Read more criminal justice news on the Crime Ink page in print. Follow us on Twitter: @sfcrimeink
Click here or scroll down to commentThe shipyard tasked restoring the guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) was awarded a $29.4 million for the initial planning work to repair the warship, according to a recent Pentagon contract announcement.
The service announced the ship would be repaired at Huntington Ingalls Industries yard in Mississippi in August.
Fitzgerald collided with a merchant ship on June 17 resulting in the death of seven sailors in a shipping channel off the coast of Japan. In addition to a hole punched in the ship below the waterline, the collision damaged to several high-end electronic systems, such as the integrated radio room on the ship and the starboard forward array of the ship’s A/N-SPY1D(v) air search radar.
“This initial planning and preparation phase of an availability will include a combination of restoration and modernization of USS Fitzgerald,” read the announcement.
“USS Fitzgerald is planned to arrive at Ingalls Shipbuilding in December 2017 via heavy lift ship.”
The service is set to award a modification to cover the full restoration in December, the announcement said.
According to an early Navy estimate obtained by USNI News, the total cost of the repair to Fitzgerald is about $367 million — to include the transport and refurbishment. The repair will take more than a year and be paired with a planned modernization for the ship that was planned before the collision.
The Navy is also evaluating repairs to USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) that was struck by a merchant tanker on Aug. 21 off of Singapore that resulted in the death of ten sailors. The ship set to be taken to the U.S. naval base in Yokosuka, Japan by heavy-lift transport for further evaluation. Early estimates put the repair cost at $223 million. It’s unclear if the ship will have to be transported back to the United States.
The following is the complete contract announcement.
Huntington Ingalls Inc. – Ingalls Shipbuilding, Pascagoula, Mississippi, is being awarded a $29,378,128 cost-plus-fixed fee contract for initial planning of USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) emergent repair and restoration. This initial planning and preparation phase of an availability will include a combination of restoration and modernization of USS Fitzgerald. USS Fitzgerald is planned to arrive at Ingalls Shipbuilding in December 2017 via heavy lift ship. A contract modification to incorporate full restoration and modernization scope is anticipated December 2017. The initial phase of work will be performed in Pascagoula, Mississippi and is expected to be completed by Dec. 31, 2017. Fiscal 2017 operations and maintenance (Navy) funding in the amount of $29,378,128 will be obligated at time of award and contract funds in the amount of $29,378,128 will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured. The contract was awarded on a sole-source basis under an unusual and compelling urgency basis (Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)) FAR 6.302-2 as outlined in Justification and Approval 41,320 dated Aug. 28, 2017. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, District of Columbia, is the contracting activity (N00024-17-C-4444).The day after 21-year-old Dylann Roof allegedly gunned down nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., the coverage of the coverage was already piling up, much of it lamenting the apparent pass the media was giving Roof.
Despite the fact that the attack meets the textbook definition of terrorism, critics noted that the press was, by and large, not identifying Roof as a terrorist:
“Listen to major outlets, and you won’t hear the word ‘terrorism’ used in coverage of Wednesday’s shooting” (Anthea Butler in the Washington Post );
); “When US citizens … appear to be ‘normal,’ that is white and/or Christian, terroristic violence is rarely labeled as such, even when the political roots of the killing are clear” (Robert Jensen, quoted in the International Business Times );
); “#CharlestonShooting terrorist wore an Apartheid flag on his jacket. If a Muslim man wore an ISIS flag, he wouldn’t get past mall security” (Samuel Sinyangwe on Twitter, quoted in the New York Times );
, quoted in the ); “Few media sources use the term [terrorism] for violent actors motivated by, for example, white supremacy or anti-government rage” (Brian Phillips interviewed by the Washington Post ’s Monkey Cage blog);
’s blog); “It leaves us with the question of whether or not there is a disconnect between how black and white people view violence against black bodies” (Terrell Jermaine Starr in AlterNet );
); “Don’t call this the act of a madman. It is an insult to those battling mental illness and it is also a degree of deference you never saw given to men like Osama Bin Laden” (Shaun King republished in Daily Kos).
Items in this vein have continued to crop up over the ensuing days.
Yet there was at least one news item that ran the day after the shooting that was not afraid to refer to it as a terrorist attack: “US State Senator Killed by Terrorist With White Supremacist Sympathies, 8 Others Dead,” reads the headline of a news item that appeared on Sahara Reporters, a New York City-based news website that primarily covers government corruption in Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria.
The Sahara Reporters piece uses the word “terrorist” six times to describe Roof and his alleged action, including in the headline, the subhead and a photo caption. The words “mental illness,” “troubled” and “loner” do not appear — in fact, no speculation whatsoever is made regarding Roof’s mental state or stability. Instead, South Carolina’s “known hate groups” are mentioned to provide context for Roof’s alleged actions, and Roof’s white supremacist activities and the historic allusions made by the patches on his jacket are front and center in the piece. And the massacre is clearly contextualized as occurring at “a time where the persecution of black ethnic minorities in the United States has been making world headlines.”
The piece’s distinctiveness from typical US reports on the attack doesn’t end there. The story’s lead prominently identifies Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and one of the shooting victims, as a South Carolina state senator. While it seems clear at this point that Roof targeted Emanuel AME in part because of its history as a center of black resistance to white supremacy, it is not apparent that Roof was targeting Pinckney personally or because of his office. But one might expect the highly unusual fact of an elected official being killed in a terrorist attack to feature prominently in coverage–as it likely would have, had a white politician been killed by a person of color.
The straighforwardness of the reporting in the Sahara Reporters piece makes it easy to identify what many observers have asserted is missing from the US media’s coverage. Perhaps it’s not surprising to see an outlet that frequently covers Nigeria–which, after all, has some experience with ethnically motivated violence–get it right. Sahara Reporters earned wide notice in 2009 for publishing the first photo of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber” of Northwest Flight 253, and again in 2011 for breaking news, reactions and photos of the car-bombing of a United Nations outpost in Abuja, Nigeria.
Journalists covering stories like Charleston, Ferguson and Baltimore–and other racial flashpoints that will undoubtedly continue to explode–would do well to take notes.
Shane Smith (Twitter: @JShaneSmith) is a freelance writer based in Jersey City, N.J.Add a few hundred million extra into the potential price tag for the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion.
Building a new tube for the HRBT counts as a "compensation event" under the state's much-maligned contract with Elizabeth River Crossings, the conglomerate brought in years ago to add a new tunnel under the Elizabeth River, as well as maintain and toll the Midtown and Downtown tunnels.
The $3.3 billion HRBT expansion is expected to siphon traffic from those tunnels, cutting into ERC's revenue from tolls charged under its 58-year management deal. Just how much the figure changes will be the subject of intense negotiation, but the contract says the state will make up lost revenue.
ERC, a partnership between construction company Skanska and investment group Macquarie, has not given the state an estimate. But in bond documents from 2012, analysts for the group estimated the revenue hit as high as 5 percent, which adds up fast between an expected opening of the new HRBT tube in 2024 and 2069, when ERC's deal runs out.
It's in the neighborhood of $300 million, based on those 2012 documents. The Washington Post was the first to report this figure, and on this issue, in late December.
CAPTION Virginia Peninsula residents react to the controversy involving Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in a racist yearbook photo. Virginia Peninsula residents react to the controversy involving Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in a racist yearbook photo. CAPTION Virginia Peninsula residents react to the controversy involving Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in a racist yearbook photo. Virginia Peninsula residents react to the controversy involving Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in a racist yearbook photo. CAPTION Trump doesn't rule out another government shutdown during Super Bowl Sunday interview on CBS's 'Face the Nation' and during the network's pre-game coverage. By declaring a national emergency, Trump could redirect military construction money to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. Trump doesn't rule out another government shutdown during Super Bowl Sunday interview on CBS's 'Face the Nation' and during the network's pre-game coverage. By declaring a national emergency, Trump could redirect military construction money to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. CAPTION Protesters demanding his resignation gather outside the governor's mansion in Richmond on Saturday, February 2, 2019 after a racist photo of Gov. Ralph Northam was found in his 1984 medical school yearbook. Protesters demanding his resignation gather outside the governor's mansion in Richmond on Saturday, February 2, 2019 after a racist photo of Gov. Ralph Northam was found in his 1984 medical school yearbook. CAPTION US Economy Suffered $11 Billion Hit From Government Shutdown But, the CBO's report adds that $3 billion of the total loss is gone for good. The shutdown, caused by President Trump's request for border wall funding, lasted a record 35 days. US Economy Suffered $11 Billion Hit From Government Shutdown But, the CBO's report adds that $3 billion of the total loss is gone for good. The shutdown, caused by President Trump's request for border wall funding, lasted a record 35 days. CAPTION Trump Will Not Deliver State of the Union on Tuesday. Tuesday was the day the address had been originally scheduled to take place. An aide for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that President Donald Trump's address will not take place. Trump Will Not Deliver State of the Union on Tuesday. Tuesday was the day the address had been originally scheduled to take place. An aide for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that President Donald Trump's address will not take place.
There are caveats to the 2012 analysis. Researchers assumed a larger HRBT expansion than the two lanes transportation planners now expect to add. They also assumed certain toll rates for the new HRBT tube, and those have not been set.
The state will doubtless have its own take on how much the HRBT project affects the Midtown/Downtown tunnels, and the two sides will have to negotiate a price or head into mediation. Money won't be due until the new tube opens and actual effects can be seen, though a negotiated price could be settled on beforehand.
"Our starting position is it's zero," Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne said.
An ERC spokeswoman said in an email that "any response to questions related to possible compensation and pursuit of such would be purely speculative and premature at this time."
Other planned projects, such as the High Rise Bridge, would also trigger payouts under the Midtown/Downtown contract. If Hampton Roads were to add a third crossing in the next half century, or build Patriot's Crossing, the costs would be higher. Both were rated in the 2012 analysis with higher revenue impacts than the HRBT.
Layne told House budget writers this week that the estimates run more than $700 million with all projects considered.
"I'm not saying I agree with that, but that's what they believe," he said.
Committee member Del. Matthew James, D-Portsmouth, shook his head and quietly said, "Wow."
For state officials unhappy with the Midtown/Downtown deal, it's impact on the HRBT is just one more bitter pill to swallow. Problems with the contract, and with a separate failed public-private partnership to build U.S. 460, led state leaders to overhaul Virginia's rules for these deals.
The HRBT charge alone "should have been a deal-killer on our part," said House Appropriations Chairman S. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, who was heavily involved in that rewrite.
Initially billed as a $112 million state investment, with ERC financing most of the construction, the Midtown/Downtown deal has cost taxpayers roughly $582 million, much of it to buy down unpopular tolls. The state lost an additional $200 million on the U.S. 460 deal.
"If we had put this money up front we would not have needed a partner (on the Downtown/Midtown tunnels)," Layne, who was on the Commonwealth Transportation Board for both these deals, told House Appropriations members. "Monday morning quarterbacking, I fully admit that. We would have been better off doing this deal ourselves."
Fain can be reached by phone at 757-525-1759.Wanna be on Comic Book Men AND get in the Guinness Book of World Records?!
To celebrate both the 20th anniversary of Jay & Silent Bob's Secret Stash as well as my 47th Birthday, I'm trying to break into the most famous records book of all time with the largest gathering of Jay and Silent Bob cosplayers ever assembled! Come dressed in your best Jay or Silent Bob costume and get ready to mingle with the luminaries of the Secret Stash - Walt, Bryan, Ming and Mike (aka the Comic Book Men) before you take a giant group photo with all the cosplayers and the REAL Jay and Bob - JASON MEWES and KEVIN SMITH!
PLEASE NOTE:
All participants are to report to Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash by 6:00am.
ALL attendees MUST be in a Jay or Silent Bob costume in order to participate.
All costumes must be full, head-to-toe screen-accurate representations of the Jay or Silent Bob characters from one of Kevin Smith's films
If under the age of 18 you must be accompanied by a parent or guardian (parent or guardian must be costumed in order to enter holding area).
What constitutes an official Jay or Silent Bob Costume?
The costumes must consist of the following at a minimum:
Dark/Black toque/knit hat.
Long sandy blonde hair worn down on the front of the torso
Printed t-shirt
Track pants/trousers
Black boots
Yellow, lightweight winter jacket
Baseball cap worn backwards
Medium length dark hair
Dark beard trimmed short
Long dark |
In January 2001, he was released by Prokom, and the next month he returned to Italy and signed with Virtus Ragusa for the rest of the season. For the 2001–02 season, he moved to Basket Club Ferrara. For the 2002–03 season, he moved to Spain and signed with Tenerife of the LEB Oro. The next season he also played in LEB Oro but moved to Bilbao Basket. For the 2004–05 season, he moved to the Spanish ACB League club DKV Joventut. From 2005 to 2009 he played with Real Madrid. With Real he was the Spanish champion and ULEB Cup winner in 2007. In 2011, he played only game with Gran Canaria. In 2014, he played with KB Besa of Kosovo and his last club was RSB Berkane of Morocco.[2]Productivity increased in nine manufacturing industries in 2015, as output increased in 12 industries and hours worked fell in seven industries (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Interestingly, robot sales have also risen: According to the International Federation of Robotics, 2015 saw a 15% increase in sales, the largest ever. The top countries for robot sales include China, the Republic of Korea, Japan, the US, and Germany.
Does this mean robots are killing jobs? Not at all. What it means is that robots, especially collaborative robots like Sawyer and Baxter, are allowing manufacturers, such as Tag Team Manufacturing, to take on high volume production gigs without having to hire more people.
For more headlines, videos and news about collaborative robots and manufacturing automation, check out the rest of the Rethink Robotics blog or drop by Cobot Central. Also, subscribe above to receive the next Cobot Recap and other blog post alerts delivered right to your inbox.
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About the AuthorBoeing has launched a 737-800NG freighter conversion program on the basis of orders and commitments for up to 55 conversions from seven customers, the company announced Wednesday. Dubbed the 737-800 Boeing Converted Freighter (BCF), the program marks Boeing’s first ever conversion offering involving the 737NG series. The company expects operators to use the airplanes mainly to carry express cargo on domestic routes.
“The Next-Generation 737 provides exceptional value to express freight carriers through its superior payload, range, reliability and efficiency,” said Boeing Commercial Airplanes Commercial Aviation Services senior vice president Stan Deal. “While the recovery of the global cargo market has been slow, we see demand for freighters, such as the 737-800BCF, that will carry express cargo on domestic routes...Over the next 20 years, Boeing forecasts customers will need more than 1,000 converted freighters the size of the 737, with China’s domestic air freight carriers accounting for nearly one-third of the total market.”
The 737-800BCF carries up to 52,800 pounds (23.9 metric tons) of cargo, flying routes of nearly 2,000 nautical miles (3,690 kilometers).
Twelve pallet positions—11 standard pallets and one half-pallet—provide 5,000 cu ft (141.5 cubic meters) of cargo space on the main deck, supplemented by two lower-lobe compartments providing more than 1,540 cu ft (43.7 cubic meters) of space for revenue-generating cargo.
Boeing has won firm orders for a total of 30 737-800BCFs along with commitments for another 25. YTO Airlines, based in Hangzhou, China, has ordered 10 conversions and signed commitments for another 10; China Postal Airlines, based in Beijing, has ordered 10 conversions and GE Capital Aviation (GECAS), which has agreed to provide the initial airplane for conversion, has ordered five conversions. Meanwhile, an unannounced customer has ordered five conversions and placed two commitments.
Other signatories for a total of 13 commitments included SF Airlines, based in Shenzhen, China; Cargo Air, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, and another unidentified customer.
Boeing expects to deliver the first 737-800BCF in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Plans call for existing passenger airplanes to undergo modification at “select” facilities located near conversion demand, including Boeing Shanghai. Modifications include installing a large main-deck cargo door, a cargo-handling system and accommodations for up to four non-flying crewmembers or passengers.Which input method is superior for gaming? If you’re talking about first-person shooters, then the answer is an obvious one: keyboard and mouse wins. I’m sure some gamers out there will argue against that, but the accuracy offered by this combination can’t be matched by thumbsticks on a typical console controller.
Now PS4 (and PS3) owners will have the opportunity to experience such control because they are getting the option of a keyboard and mouse setup from Hori. It’s called the Tactical Assault Commander, and consists of a mini keyboard and mouse configuration.
The keyboard has 16 main keys for input, a D-pad, dedicated Walk key, a touch pad on the back, and three profile settings. The mouse looks to have a total of 8 buttons. It’s currently listed on Amazon Japan for 14,904 yen, which is roughly $120, so it’s certainly not a cheap control option. It’s also not going to be available until November 30. Whether it makes the trip West is unknown, although other Hori products have for years now.
This isn’t the first version of the Tactical Assault Commander Hori has released. It released an officially licensed version for the PS3 back in 2011 and can be seen in the review video below (it’s not great).
Having a keyboard and mouse should offer an advantage when playing FPS games online, however, that all depends on how well the controller performs. If this new Tactical Assault Commander is anything like the last one, performance will not be great. It also seems likely a game will have to choose to support the controller hardware to make it work properly, so it’s usefulness will be quite limited.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Demonstrations were held worldwide on Sunday to call for action in Paris
Nearly 150 global leaders are gathering in Paris amid tight security for a critical UN climate meeting.
The conference, known as COP21, starts on Monday and will try to craft a long-term deal to limit carbon emissions.
Observers say that the recent terror attacks on the French capital will increase the chances of a new agreement.
Around 40,000 people are expected to participate in the event, which runs until 11 December.
The gathering of 147 heads of state and government is set to be far bigger than the 115 or so who came to Copenhagen in 2009, the last time the world came close to agreeing a long term deal on climate change.
Rallies call for action
One important part of the conference started on Sunday evening. The Adhoc Durban Platform on enhanced action was brought forward to "offer an opportunity to make the best possible use of the very limited time available", the UN said.
While many leaders including Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping were always set to attend this conference, the recent violent attacks in Paris have encouraged others to come in an expression of solidarity with the French people.
Unlike at Copenhagen, the French organisers are bringing the leaders in at the start of the conference rather than waiting for them to come in at the end, a tactic which failed spectacularly in the Danish capital.
On Sunday hundreds of thousands of people took part in demonstrations worldwide to demand they take firm action.
Considerable differences
Delegates are in little doubt that the shadow cast over the city by the attacks will enhance the chances of agreement.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Emma Ruby-Sachs of the Avaaz campaign group: ''These are shoes from the closets of average citizens''
Image copyright Hawkey Image caption Religious pilgrims have walked to Paris from many parts of Europe to support a strong outcome
"I believe that it will make a deal more likely, because what I feel from the parties is that they are very eager to move," said Amjad Abdulla from the Maldives, who chairs the Alliance of Small Island States in the negotiations.
A former UK government adviser on climate change and now chairman of environmental think tank E3G, Tom Burke, believes that some leaders will push the line that, by tackling rising temperatures, you remove one of the causes of terrorism.
While the mood music around the event is very positive, there are still considerable differences between the parties.
Security for the summit
Already planned to be tight even before the attacks
Following the attacks, border controls temporarily imposed. They were set to begin on 30 November anyway
Almost 1,000 people considered security risks refused entry since 13 November
8,000 police and gendarmes to carry out border checks
2,800 extra police at the conference venue at Le Bourget north of Paris
120,000 police and troops already mobilised across France since the attacks
Sale and transport of flammable materials such as gas cylinders, domestic solvents, barbeque firelighters and firecrackers banned until 13 December
Some major roads to be closed for two days
One key problem is what form an agreement will take. The US for instance will not sign up to a legally binding deal as there would be little hope of getting it through a Senate dominated by Republicans.
"We're looking for an agreement that has broad, really full participation," said US lead negotiator Todd Stern at a news briefing earlier this week.
"We were quite convinced that an agreement that required actually legally binding targets would have many countries unable to participate."
Many developing countries fundamentally disagree. As does the European Union.
Image copyright Hawkey Image caption Security all over Paris is highly visible ahead of the arrival of world leaders
"We must translate the momentum we have seen on the road to Paris into an ambitious, operational, legally binding agreement," said EU commissioner Miguel Arias Canete, in a statement.
As well as the form there are also many issues with the content.
There are a wide range of views on what the long-term goal of the agreement should be.
While it will ostensibly come down to keeping temperatures from rising more than 2C above the pre-industrial level, how that will be represented in the text is the subject of much wrangling.
Some countries reject the very notion of 2C and say 1.5C must be the standard. Others want to talk about decarbonising the world by the middle or end of this century.
For major oil producers the very idea is anathema.
Climate change 1C rise in average temperature since 1850 2C agreed 'gateway' to dangerous global warming
30% rise in CO2 levels since the Industrial Revolution
4% decline in Arctic sea ice per decade since 1979
9 out of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000
Six charts that explain climate change
'Trust and confidence'
While the fact that more than 180 countries have put forward national plans to cut emissions is a major strength of this conference, there are still big questions marks about how to verify those commitments that will actually be carried out.
"People in the negotiations, people outside the negotiations are going to be looking for the capacity to have trust and confidence in what countries say they are doing," Todd Stern told reporters.
"[You] can't run the system without that."
UN climate conference 30 Nov - 11 Dec 2015
COP21 - the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties - will see more than 190 nations gather in Paris to discuss a possible new global agreement on climate change, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the threat of dangerous warming due to human activities.
COP21 live: The latest updates from Paris
Explained: What is climate change?
In video: Why does the Paris conference matter?
Analysis: From BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath
More: BBC News climate change special report
While there is some consensus among the parties that the plans will need to be reviewed every five years, there is no question of punitive restrictions if a country doesn't meet its targets.
And among the many other issues in dispute, almost inevitably, is money. While rich countries promised they would give $100bn by 2020 to the developing world back in 2009, the cash has been slow in coming. Right now there is no agreement about what happens after 2020.
While there is a general air of optimism and a willingness to get a deal done, success isn't guaranteed this time round. Many believe that a country such as India, with close to 300 million people without electricity, will refuse to sign up to a strong agreement that limits future fossil fuel use.
If that happens, the whole process could come unstuck, as nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.
Tom Burke for one believes that going against the flow will be particularly difficult this time round.
"I think one of the reasons people will find it hard to hold out at the end will be because of the level of political capital that Obama has invested in climate change, making it clear it is a primary legacy issue for him," he said.
Follow Matt on Twitter @mattmcgrathbbc.
Do you have a question about climate change? Or a question about COP21? Our correspondent Matthew Price will answer a selection of yours on 1 December in Vanuatu, South Pacific.
Send your questions for Matthew in the following ways:House Republicans released a tax reform plan Thursday that would eliminate a tax break for Americans with student debt.
The student loan interest tax deduction saves people as much as $625 a year, though most see a smaller benefit.
The sweeping legislation was described by House Speaker Paul Ryan as a series of tax cuts aimed at helping most Americans. But it eliminates or limits some tax deductions and exemptions to fund those cuts.
The student loan interest tax deduction is just one on the chopping block. The bill still needs to be approved by both the House and Senate, and signed by President Trump, who has said it will be done "before Christmas."
Related: What's in the House tax bill for people
Here's how it currently works: Those eligible can claim up to $2,500 of what they paid toward the interest on their student loans, but not the principal.
It's an "above the line" deduction that can be claimed without itemizing. But it's only available to borrowers with a modified adjusted gross income of less than $80,000 ($160,000 for married couples filing jointly.) The benefit is gradually reduced once you earn at least $65,000 (or $130,000 for couples).
About 12 million people claimed the student loan interest deduction in 2015, according to the IRS. More than 40 million Americans have student debt.
Related: Don't worry, your 401(k) plan is safe
The student loan interest deduction cost the federal government $2 billion in foregone revenue during 2016, according to a report from The Pew Charitable Trusts.
The cost has more than doubled since 2007 as student loan balances grew, even though the maximum deduction ($2,500) hasn't changed since 2001, the report said.
Still, it costs less than the American Opportunity Tax Credit. That allows families who are paying for college out-of-pocket to claim up to $2,500 per student. The benefit, which cost nearly $18 billion in 2016, would be preserved under the House Republican plan.
Even if the federal student loan interest deduction is repealed by Congress, you may still qualify for a state deduction. Thirty-seven states and D.C. offer a similar benefit, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.
The House bill also proposes nearly doubling the standard deduction. It would raise it for singles to $12,000 and for married couples filing jointly to $24,000.How to Beat the Lottery
Are you having issues when choosing the lucky numbers? You have already used all the numbers you could think of and they did not bring any luck? No worries, we’ve got you covered! This quick guide will show you how to choose the right numbers fast, easy and with no stress!
Best Lotto Winning Secrets
A Quick Guide to Picking Lottery Numbers to Win the Lottery
First, always keep track of the numbers that have already been played. Having a list with the numbers that you used so far is very important, but try to check the numbers that were declared winners. A frequency chart can show you how often a specific number has been drawn, so that you know the chances of using that specific number. Never throw away old records, since having a large time-frame is very important. If you want to win the Powerball, then search for all the lucky numbers that have been drawn during the past months, years, decades (if you can find them). Picking lotto numbers can be easy, if you understand the numbers that are usually lucky.
How to Win the Lottery: Picking Winning Lottery Numbers
How to Win a Lotto
Second, some people think that their lucky numbers are related to the date of birth. If you are born on March 15th 1985, you can consider that among your lucky numbers you have 3 (March), 15, 19, 85, 1, 5 or any combination taken out from your birthday. Also, if you have children, you can use their date of birth as a combination of lucky numbers, you can use other numbers from family, friends, date you got married or engaged, or even phone numbers, addresses, current date or age. You only need a little imagination and you can easily find a combination of lucky numbers.
Third, the Delta lotto system is a good tool to choose your combination of numbers. You need a pen and a paper and a number range to choose from, let’s say 1 to 50. First, choose a very low number, then choose a number between 1 and 8. Then, select a number that is close to 8, pick two numbers between 8 and 15, making sure you are writing all these numbers down when choosing them. You can even write each number on a small paper and mix them so that they can be in a different order than ascending. Once they have been mixed, write down the first delta number, which will be used as your first lottery number. Then, add the second number to your first one, to get a result of your second lottery number. The third number is chosen from adding the second lottery number to the third number you have chosen and so on. Keep in mind that all numbers have equal chances of winning and that sometimes the lottery numbers that are chosen are the two-digit numbers.
As an alternative, you can use random numbers generated online. There are various websites that work on various algorithms and can help you picking lotto numbers. You just need to input the range (the minimum and maximum limits of your number range) and you will get a result with random numbers chosen within your limits.
How to Win the Lottery: 5 Concealed Secrets to Being a Powerball or Mega Millions Winner!
Secrets to the Lottery
Is there a scheme happening in the lottery games for Power ball and Mega Million, which you are unaware of? Have you been a faithful player but have not received the first money you invested?
If your answer is affirmative to the initial question, then you are right on the two accounts. A scheme does exist in these games which you do not know of. Actually, it is connected to 5 concealed secrets for these two lottery games which no one reveals. These secrets raise your chances of being a winner in these two games by more than 50%! Yes, 50%…and this amount is conservative.
Lottery Secrets you are unaware of about the two Great Lottery Games!
Tips to Win Lotto
If you are going to be a winner in these two major lottery games, you should not utilize a single set of numbers regularly. For many years, a lot of players play similar numbers with the expectation of winning and for every ticket bought, they fall short. The only way of winning these two lottery games is just one, by playing sets of various numbers.
After the cash jackpot goes up to more than 20 million dollars, the chances of you winning reduce. For each 5 million dollars of more than 20 million dollars, the chances of winning reduce by a big percentage point. The insiders who become regular winners in these games are aware of this fact and do not normally play these two games if the cash price exceeds 20 million dollars.
The winning tickets for Mega Millions and Power ball lottery games have numbers which are low, middle and high. If you are using numbers which do not have these ranges of numbers, this eliminates your chances of winning. Lottery insiders guard this secret highly.
Using a number generated by a computer is a great plan and it can be utilized in addition to your personal set of playing figures. A lot of constant lottery winners do not disclose this strategy. Now that you know, do not hesitate to utilize it!
The insiders who are constant winners each utilize strategies and a number system, so as to win. This is a secret which is rarely revealed among insiders.
How to Win the Lottery: Is a Strategy Really Required to Win the Lottery?
All of us dream of the things we would do if we won the lottery. However we do not really implement a strategy to make this possible. Why does this happen? The answer is because we do not have faith.
All things in life require work and some universal principles are applied which work. This applies to winning Powerball and Mega Millions lotto. Having a strategy is key. A lot of people believe this game involves taking chances. However, the winning chances are raised highly when a strategy is implemented.
People believe that it is almost impossible to win these two major lotteries. They might be correct as there is one in a million chance of winning.
However, winners of Powerball and Mega Millions have proven severally that it is possible to be a winner in these great lotteries!
Lottery Numbers – Does a Magic Formula Exist?
Learn How to Increase the Chances of Winning the Lottery
Does magic apply in the system or formula for selecting Lottery numbers? Generally, the answer is no. It is not possible to assure a winning set of figures for any jackpot in any part of the world, unless of course, rigging has been done and you have been presented with the winning numbers!
However, just like anything which is selected at random, these competitions are just and open to anyone in possession of a ticket. The jackpot for a really big Lottery like the Mega Millions does not fall below $15 million and the Powerball starts at a minimum of $40 million, even though at times it can exceed this amount by far, with rollovers and reach more than a $ billion.
The other likely reason may be because selecting the winning numbers is difficult. The largest jackpot ever won was a mind-blowing $390 which was divided between two winners, the only couple of people who were able to match the winning numbers for Lotteries.
Playing to Win – Lottery Secrets
In order to play this game, you require selecting five key numbers beginning from 1 to 56. You then need to select a golden ball, known as a Megaball as well, starting from 1 to 46. This ball is picked from a dissimilar machine to the key balls, which signifies that you are able to select a similar number from the major draw, like for the golden ball. This is if you see a possibility of similar number being drawn again.
You can utilize an Easy Pick option as well; here the machine will choose numbers randomly for you so that you can play. You can only win the jackpot if you are able to match all the six numbers. You therefore require obtaining the golden ball and the main ones also, or you will attain the runner up prize.
You are not able to interchange numbers either, therefore, if you do not get the golden ball right but the number is drawn in the major section, you cannot interchange it. This rule is applicable to each lottery which has sections for bonus ball.
However, matching only a single ball, which should be the golden one, will provide you with a prize of $2. This may sound little, but will cater for the price of the ticket, which is $1. It will also cater for purchasing another ticket; therefore, do not lose hope if you match just one. The prizes rise as you match more balls until you match each of the five as well as the number of the bonus ball.
Exciting Lotteries to Play in Various Countries
Remember there are a number of other lotteries you can play and you do not require being restricted to the one in your home country. Spain, USA and UK are examples of countries which offer lotteries with large jackpots. Any person can play them provided you utilize a reputable company. You can verify this by initially checking their status and feedback from different clients.
Explore the USA Powerball and Mega Millions, the Euro millions game and the UK Lotto as well as the Spanish El Gordo draws. Each of them has their personal set of regulations and a quantity of numbers which is fixed which you should pick so as to win. Remember that playing in an online lottery group also increases your chances of winning a jackpot by up to %10,000.
Every draw also consists of its personal set of lucky numbers which are commonly drawn. Therefore, remember this and use the internet to conduct some research!
Sharing is caring!Pro-migrant groups say they expect a surge of migrants to illegally enter the western Canadian province of British Columbia as temporary residency permits for asylum seekers in the United States expire.
Pro-migrant groups like the Inland Refugee Society say they are preparing for a wave of migrants to enter British Columbia in coming months as the residency permits for some 195,000 Salvadorans and 60,000 Hondurans expire in the U.S.
The Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) has also sounded the alarm saying they expect the number of illegal migrants across Canada to rise sharply, the Ottawa Citizen reports.
Special projects coordinator for the Inland Refugee Society Julia St. Pierre said that the society has seen a large increase in Central American migrants recently. “We’ve had a number of clients from Honduras and El Salvador,” St. Pierre said.
She said that most of the migrants have crossed the border into Canada illegally on foot after reading online and hearing through the word of mouth that Canada would support them.
“People think it is going to be a lot easier, that they’ll get housing, they’ll get support, that they will be welcomed when they come,” she said adding: “They have no idea that there’s really no support for them.”
Harsha Walia of the pro-migrant group “No One is Illegal” put some of the blame on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who tweeted that all migrants were welcome to Canada earlier this year.
To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 28, 2017
“Trudeau tweets about it. … That doesn’t change the material realities for people,” she said.
Trudeau has since scaled back his rhetoric insisting that he was not talking about economic migrants.
Since the start of the year, the Canadian border has been stormed by thousands of migrants, primarily in the French-speaking province of Quebec.
The numbers have become so large that the Canadian military has been forced to set up a reception centre on the border and part of the Olympic Stadium in Montreal has been converted into an asylum accommodation.
Some of the migrants entering illegally have also caused further controversy after being found possessing child pornography.JUST CAUSE 4 © 2019 Square Enix Ltd. Published by Square Enix Ltd. Developed by Avalanche Studios AB (Fatalist Production AB). SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. JUST CAUSE is a registered trademark or trademark of Square Enix Ltd. AVALANCHE, the AVALANCHE logo, and APEX are trademarks of Fatalist Development AB, companies in Sweden, the U.S. and/or other countries. XBOX, XBOX ONE, XBOX ONE X, the Games for Windows logo and Xbox logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies and are used under license. "PlayStation" and the "PS" Family logo are registered trademarks and "PS4" is a trademark of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc. The PlayStation Network Logo is a service mark of Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc. "Steam” is a trademark of the same company. ©2019 Valve Corporation. Steamworks and the Steamworks logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Valve Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.by
Photo by Gerry & Bonni | CC BY 2.0
The Trump administration is making its first radical policy change in the Middle East by escalating American involvement in the civil war in Yemen. Wrecked by years of conflict, the unfortunate country will supposedly be the place where the US will start to confront and roll back Iranian influence in the region as a whole.
To this end, the US is to increase military support for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and local Yemeni allies in a bid to overthrow the Houthis – a militarised Shia movement strong in northern Yemen – fighting alongside much of the Yemeni army, which remains loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
If ever there was a complicated and unwinnable war to keep out of, it is this one.
Despite Saudi allegations, there is little evidence that the Houthis get more than rhetorical support from Iran and this is far less than Saudi Arabia gets from the US and Britain. There is no sign that the Saudi-led air bombardment, which has been going on for two years, will decisively break the military stalemate. All that Saudi intervention has achieved so far is to bring Yemen close to all out famine. “Seven million Yemenis are ever closer to starvation,” said Jamie McGoldrick, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen in an appeal for more aid this week.
But at the very moment that the UN is warning about the calamity facing Yemen, the US State Department has given permission for a resumption of the supply of precision guided weapons to Saudi Arabia. These sales were suspended last October by President Obama after Saudi aircraft bombed a funeral in the capital Sana’a, killing more than 100 mourners. Ever since Saudi Arabia started its bombing campaign in March 2015, the US has been refuelling its aircraft and has advisors in the Saudi operational headquarters. For the weapons sales to go ahead all that is needed is White House permission.
A bizarre element in Trump’s decision to take the offensive against Iran in Yemen is that the Iranians provide very little financial and military aid to the Houthis. Saudi propaganda, often echoed by the international media, speaks of the Houthis as “Iran-backed”, but Yemen is almost entirely cut off from the outside world by Saudi ground, air and sea forces.
Even food imports, on which Yemenis are wholly reliant, are more and more difficult to bring in through the half-wrecked port of Hodeida on the western coast.
The resumption of the supply of precision-guided munitions is not the first indication that the Trump administration sees Yemen as a good place to put into operation a more hawkish strategy in the region. On 29 January, days after he took office, Trump sent some 30 members of US Navy Seal Team 6, backed by helicopters, to attack an impoverished village called al Ghayil in al-Bayda province in southern Yemen. The purpose of the raid, according to the Pentagon, was intelligence-gathering – though it may well have been a failed attempt to kill or capture Qassim al Rimi, the head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Whatever the aim of the attack, it swiftly turned into a bloody fiasco, with as many 29 civilians in al Ghayil killed along with one Seal, Chief Petty Officer William Owens. The Pentagon’s explanation of what happened sounds very much like similar attempts to explain away civilian killed and wounded over the past half century in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The head of the US military’s central command, General Joseph Votel, told a Senate hearing that between four and 12 civilians might have died in the raid, adding that an “exhaustive after-action review” had not found incompetence, poor decision making or bad judgement.
For its part, the Trump administration tried to shut down any investigation into what had really happened at al Ghayil by saying that an inquiry would be an affront into the legacy of the fallen Seal, William Owens. This stance was swiftly criticised by the father of the dead man, Bill Owens, who said the government owed his son an inquiry. “Don’t hide behind my son’s death to prevent an investigation,” he said.
In the event, the White House and the Pentagon have so far hidden fairly successfully from any real examination of the destruction of this remote Yemeni village, perhaps calculating that no independent journalist could make the dangerous journey to the site of the attack. But a lengthy on-the-spot report by Iona Craig, entitled “Death in al Ghayil” and appearing in the online investigative magazine The Intercept, convincingly rebuts the official version of events, little of which appears to be true.
Craig quotes surviving villagers as saying that the Seal team came under heavy fire from the beginning and attack helicopters were sent in. She writes: “In what seemed to be blind panic, the gunships bombarded the entire village, striking more than a dozen buildings, razing stone dwellings where families slept, and wiping out more than 120 goats, sheep and donkeys.” At least six women and 10 children were killed in their houses as projectiles tore through the straw and timber roofs or were mown down as they ran into the open.
The Trump administration says this was a “highly successful operation” and there had been an assault on a fortified compound – except that there are no such compounds in the village. Trump claimed that a “large amount of vital intelligence” had been obtained and the Pentagon released video footage seized in al Ghayil only to later admit that the footage had been around for 10 years and contained nothing new.
Ironically, the villagers who fought back against the Seal team actually belonged to the forces opposing the Houthis and the pro-Saleh forces and, on the night of the assault, “local armed tribesmen assumed the Houthis had arrived to capture their village”. It was only when they saw coloured laser lights coming from the weapons of the attacking force that they realised that they were fighting Americans. As the Seals retreated, with one dead and two seriously wounded, the MV-22 Osprey that was to extract them crash-landed and had to be destroyed by other US aircraft.
The Trump administration’s first counter-terrorism operation was a failure for the US and much worse for the Yemeni villagers who are dead, wounded, homeless and have seen their livestock, on which they depended for their livelihoods, all killed. But when Senator John McCain, who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that the raid has been a failure he was promptly denounced by Trump who said that Owens “had died on a winning mission” and to debate its outcome would “only embolden the enemy”.
International media coverage tends to focus on the wars in Syria and Iraq, but in those countries Trump and the Pentagon are largely following the policies and plans of Obama.
It is in Yemen that new policies are beginning to emerge as the Trump administration carries out its first counter-terrorism operation against al Qaeda – if that was what it was – leading to the slaughter of civilians and a botched cover-up. Yemen may soon join Afghanistan and Iraq as wars in which the US wishes it had never got involved.There is a big controversy raging in the tech world after Adria Richards, a former developer evangelist for email delivery company SendGrid, was offended at a conference in Silicon Valley.
Richards was sitting in front of two men who were making jokes about "dongles" and "forking". She stood up, took a photo of the men, and sent it out to her 10,000 Twitter followers.
This resulted in one of the guys, a mobile engineer at Play Haven, getting fired from his job and subsequently Richards getting fired from her job as well. It may seem like a harsh punishment, but in the male-dominated world of tech, an accusation of sexist behavior is serious.
The bizarre situation has divided the tech community. Here's a sample of some reactions:
SendGrid, Richards' former employer issued a statement about her termination. SendGrid said that Richards had a right to stand up for herself when she felt offended, but the way she handled it was inappropriate and divided a community that she was supposed to be working to unite.by
In a blog post this past November 2013, this writer offered a contrarian analysis of the October 2013 government jobs report. That report indicated a jobs gain of 204,000 for October. While others heralded the number, claiming it was evidence that the US jobs market had (yet again) ‘turned the corner’, this writer forewarned the October job gains would prove temporary. My contrarian view was that the October job gains reflected a temporary surge in 3rd quarter U.S. GDP, which was itself based largely on a short term surge in business inventory accumulation that Qtr., with a lagged October hiring effect. The October jobs numbers were therefore “nothing to get excited about” and “can disappear quickly from the economy and may in fact do so by December should consumer spending come in well below expectations.” (see my ‘False Positives’ piece on this blog, of November 12, 2013).
It appears that ‘disappearance’ is what has happened, as last week’s December jobs report showed a net job gain of only 74,000. So what’s going on?
Last month’s jobs report shows not only that job creation has relapsed once again, but that weak job creation is not the only problem with the US labor market. While only 74,000 jobs were created, the labor force in the US shrunk by a further 347,000 workers in December as well. Hundreds of thousands of workers have been dropping out of the labor force in recent months. Both indicators—weak job creation and massive labor force exiting—reflect a labor market in deep trouble still, after nearly five years of so-called recovery.
The 347,000 exits from the labor force in December follow another, even greater exodus of 700,000 in October. Even if half of that number may be due to the government shutdown event of that month, it’s still another 350,000 exits. What the last three months shows, therefore, is that at least as many workers are leaving the labor force, as there are jobs are being created. A kind of a ‘churn’ is therefore taking place.
During the first six months of 2013, about two thirds of all the jobs created were ‘contingent’ jobs—i.e. part time and temp jobs—paying well below the average hourly rate. So in the first half of 2013 another kind of ‘churn’ was also taking place: full time jobs were being lost while part time and contingent jobs were being created. That also meant that higher paying jobs were being replaced by lower paying—a trend that has been going on for several years now.
That contingent hiring trend in the first half of the year has moderated somewhat in the second half |
pandas,” Iain Valentine, a director at Edinburgh Zoo, informed the BBC.
Described as impossibly pompous, this isn’t the first time the ex-President raised a few eyebrows. In 2009, Giscard d’Estaing published a book titled The Princess and the President, a fictional romantic novel that stirred speculation of an intimate relationship with Diana, Princess of Wales. While these rumors were never confirmed, one thing’s for sure: Giscard d’Estaing has a knack for storytelling.
VIDEO: Sneezing PandaThe 2001 Miami Hurricanes were famous for a lot of things. Amazing talent, abusive football, and on-the-field celebrations that would make your grandmother change the channel. Perhaps a lesser known aspect of those teams, though, was that they didn't require coaching. Butch Davis built the program, put the fail-safes in place, and then, for lack of a better term, let the inmates run the asylum. When Davis bolted, the players lobbied for Coker to take over. Not because he was a genius coach, or a crack recruiter, but because they knew that he would get out of their way and not disrupt the ecosystem they had cultivated. He was the chain around the neck of the guard dog, nothing more, nothing less. The administration cow towed to this whole scenario, most likely for one reason. Winning. Well, that and money, but mostly the winning. If things aren't broken, why bother fixing it?
Fast forward to present day. The current Miami team, in what I am sure is purely coincidence, has begun following the same footprint of the teams of old. Wide spread reports that a handful of players have taken the team upon themselves, and they are running things outside of the coaches as much as they can. Whether it be to draw the team closer together, or to show the fans that they actually care about Miami, they are drawing upon the recently released documentary The U: Part 2 for their inspiration. The players are responsible for themselves, not the coaches.
Now, of course, the talent level is markedly different between the two eras. That much is painfully clear. The mindset, though, is a very welcome sight. This is what great teams do. Not only do they buy in to whatever program the staff has put in place, but they take it upon themselves to make sure that each and every cog in that wheel is accountable. Miami's problems, though, don't stem so much from the cogs anymore. They stem from the wheel itself, and, on a larger scale, the gearbox that houses those wheels.
The staff issues are numerous and well traveled. Assistant coaches that clearly aren't living up to expectations. Position coaches that leave fans dumbfounded as to why they are even employed at all (looking at you, Paul Williams). A culture that, while it plays well in the media, clearly does not work in actual practice, at least not at Miami. There are conflicts at every level. Golden is a known control freak, and he is so to an absolute fault. D'Onofrio is stubborn and slow to adjust. Coley is green and safe, and hasn't yet proven that he can take the step needed to be the great offensive coordinator that he can be. Then you dip into the position coaches. Franklin is either in over his head or his modes are outdated, I'm not really sure which. Williams, quite frankly, is useless. His coaching fails, his recruiting is worse, and I get the feeling he is only mentioned in recruiting articles because he happened to be brought along on the trip. Folks like Carrol are fun and engaging, but you aren't totally sure what they really do besides tweet.
There are a few bright spots, of course. Kehoe is a legend, and is absolutely still effective at his job. Hurlie has been a revelation, and you needn't look further than what he pulled out of Armbrister this past season. Then there's the new blood, Baez, Ice, Beard. Guys with bright futures that were culled from the local high school ranks in order to give Miami connections to the recruits they so desperately need.
All of these things and more are all there, staring fans straight in the face as to why Miami seems like they are on the uptick, but still shows up stagnant on Saturdays. The overarching reason for this is a tad more complex, yet painfully simple. The main issue Miami currently has is not with the staff, or the talent level. The staff, while still deservedly in the cross-hairs, has actually improved somewhat. The talent has unquestionably improved over the last few years. The larger issue is the system that helped put all of this in place.
The current Miami administration is, in a word, horrendous. Sure, Shalala has done extremely well in raising a metric ton of money for Miami, but the secondary concern on her ledger while doing so was always he own public perception, rather than ensuring that the majority of that money went to what brought Miami to the forefront. That's the politician in her, and some level, it's forgivable. It's old hat at this point. Her bigger failing, though, was building an administration staff with absolutely zero backbone, and following that up by openly allowing a coach and his staff to do whatever the hell they want, simply because they showed a bit of loyalty.
Golden was the right hire for Miami at the time. There is almost no debating that. He was a tad on the safe side, but he was a guy that would clean up the program of it's lackadaisical nature, and he can hit the recruiting trail and sell ice to an Eskimo. The only question mark was his prowess on the sidelines, but he had improved the lowly Temple, so there has to be something there, right? The downfall started when he chose to stick with Miami through the NCAA mess. Not because he should have just bolted, either. What he did was exactly what this program needed at the time. A guy willing to say "screw all the outside noise, this is Miami, let's rebuild this thing."
No, the issue came when the administration saw this, and decided the best course of action was the turn around and present themselves rather than giving him a modest raise and a small extension. Instead, they gave him the fucking farm, then for the most part let him do what he wants, and they haven't looked back since. They burned through AD's like matches, and when it came time to hire again, they chose to promote from within. Here's the problem, though. Remember back to the beginning of this piece, when I talked about the reason that Coker was promoted from within. The same applies here. Blake James was handed the job because he was Shalala's prototype. Be a public face, raise money, but don't you dare touch a thing in Golden's purview.
For the past 2 years, it has become clear that Golden is the college version of John Fox. Hired to rebuild a struggling program, but absolutely not the guy that will take said program to the next level. As a Broncos fan, I can 100% make this comparison. Fox this year had ELEVEN Pro Bowl caliber players on the Denver roster, and lost in the first round of the playoffs. This is after an epic collapse in last year's Superbowl. Compare that to this year's Miami squad. A handful of players who underachieved at Miami go to the Senior Bowl, and all we hear about for two weeks is how they took everyone and blew them away with their abilities. See the parallels?
For 2 years, Golden, or at the very least multiple members of his staff, have been in desperate need of a piece of pink paper with the Miami logo, and yet nothing came. The status quo was held in the name of continuity. For a single year, that excuse holds water. For multiple years, though, it's a sign that not only does this administration have zero ability to be proactive for the sake of the football program, but that they may not actually have the power to do so. You get the feeling that there's a direct line between Golden and Shalala, like he's protected. To distract you from this, they constantly pump out catch phrase after catch phrase, followed up by slick info-graphics and references to past NFL success.
It's sickening to watch a group of professionals tasked with the well being of a football program be so completely unwilling to do what is right, all because of a small amount of loyalty shown by a middling coach. The on the field product has suffered, at times on a national stage. Recruiting has largely suffered, save for a few bright spots that managed to break through and aid in the job security of the staff. Perception has suffered on most levels. Miami is still a viable brand name in the college football world, but 90% of that is build off of the teams of old, and that rope is going to run out eventually. Recruits still want to come to Miami because of that same ideal, although we are now to the point where the majority of them get their information from the ESPN documentaries. Fans are in a constant state of uproar over all of these things, and are letting their voices be heard through signs, flown banners, social media, emails, letters, hell I'm convinced they would etch it into stone tablets given the chance.
In it's current state, Miami football is dying.
There is, though, a glimmer of hope. Shalala is stepping down soon, and a new president will be hired. With any luck, the new president is not a Donna clone, because whoever fills those shoes will have some very large decisions to make if they want Miami to live up to that large Adidas contract hype. First of all, the new president should go scorched earth on the current administration, starting with James. He's a great guy, I'm sure, but he's the Larry Coker of his office. Miami needs an admin staff that won't accept mediocrity, while at the same time holding strong their position on the payroll. They are in charge of the coach and his staff, not the other way around.
Secondly, Golden has run his course. At this point, there should be no "fire the assistants and see what happens then" reprieve. He had his chance to play that card, and he chose not to. His ship is halfway under the water, and at this point he will go down with it. This obviously means the assistants will be gone as well. There are the ones named above that personally I think should be kept on and their futures left to the new staff, but even then I could easily justify starting completely from scratch.
To hearken back to my Denver analogy, Miami needs a president not unlike Elway. Denver was embarrassed in the big game because of the lack of a defense. Elway went out and completely rebuilt it. This year, the team was failed by the staff. Elway fired the head coach, and told everyone else they were free to pursue other opportunities. He hit the reset button, because there is only one thing that is important to him, and that is winning it all. Nothing less will suffice. THIS is the mentality that the new president must have, if Miami will ever get back to relevancy. There's a clear organizational flow chart, and accountability is paramount. Loyalty is a motivational poster at best.
So, there's a chance. Things absolutely can get better. Whether they will, or whether they will stay the same remains to be seen. That all hinges upon the new name plate that is installed on the president's door.(David Calvert/Getty)
I’ve been a movement conservative since college. My first job out of college was working for Paul Weyrich; I worked in the Reagan White House; I’m a single-issue life voter, and just like you, I take it as a badge of honor when the national press call me a right-wing nut.
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This memo is for people who care about replacing Justice Scalia with a constitutional conservative, people who care about stopping abortion and defending unborn babies, people who care about rebuilding America’s defenses, people who want to protect the right to keep and bear arms, people who want to stop this mindless slide toward a culture of dependency on government, people who oppose the increasing secularization of American culture, and people who think free speech and religious liberty are of vital importance.
Consider the following:
‐If we fail to elect a conservative to the White House this November, we are toast.
‐Ted Cruz is a conservative.
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‐Marco Rubio is a conservative.
‐Donald Trump is a great entertainer, he amuses me, and he’s a wild card who could do just about anything in office.
Okay, so far so good. Now consider:
‐Rubio has an excellent chance of winning in November against either Clinton or Sanders.
‐Cruz has an excellent chance of losing in November against either Clinton or Sanders.
‐We’re not sure whether Trump could win in November, but we have no idea what he would do on any issue, so it really doesn’t matter much.
#share#Stick with me here, if, you are a real conservative who is more dedicated to your principles than you are to any particular candidate.
We have to win. Rubio would likely win. He is a conservative. If you care about the issues listed above, you have to help him win. It is that important. Maybe you like him, most conservatives do. But maybe you don’t for some reason, maybe the Gang of Eight thing sticks in your craw. Okay. You have to decide — are you a conservative? Or just a grudge-holder? Does it matter if we rebuild America and stop the crazy leftward lurch toward moral relativism? I think it does. Get over yourself, and get with the program, before we screw this country up in a fatal manner. Obama and the left-wing crazies have done massive damage. This is not a game. We have to win.
Here’s how:
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‐Advertising against Trump and calling him names and exposing his madness is pretty much a waste of time, and will not accomplish much right now.
‐As long as we have three, or four, or five candidates running, Trump will win. He will get 30 percent to 40 percent of the votes and will win most states. No amount of ads or rational arguments will do anything to stop this. Nada.
‐It would be nice if Kasich and Carson would go away, but their vote share is shrinking, and they will effectively go away soon, whether they know it or not.
#related#‐The really important thing now is to get rid of Cruz and send him back to the Senate. Sorry. You may like him, you may not, but if you are a real conservative who actually cares about your principles — it’s time for Cruz to go away.
‐There is only one way to get a conservative in the White House, which is what we must do, and that is to eliminate Cruz so we can defeat Trump.
‐You cannot get rid of Trump until you reduce the field to two candidates — a Trump, and a conservative. That’s when and how we can be rid of Trump.
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‐If we can force Trump to have to get 50 percent in a Republican primary, we can beat him.
‐If we wait too long, it won’t happen. So it’s time for us to have Cruz involuntarily committed... and placed back in the U.S. Senate.
Again, this only matters if you are conservative who is more wedded to your principles than you are to any particular candidates. It only matters if you are serious about your convictions. It only matters if you care about the future of your country.Iranian newspapers have come back from a two-week Nowruz vacation ready to renew old partisan fights with new talking points. While websites and news agencies continued to cover the significant stories of the country, it is the print media where the partisan divide is the most obvious. This year it seems that the US presidential elections have sparked an early row.
“The wisest plan of crazy [Donald] Trump is tearing up the nuclear deal,” Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, told Fars News Agency when asked about the Republican front-runner’s opposition to the nuclear deal. Shariatmadari called the nuclear deal a “golden document” for the United States but insisted that for Iran it has caused nothing but “damages, humiliation and deception.” Instead of making proclamations, Shariatmadari invited the administration to show one achievement of the nuclear deal.
While the director general for political affairs of the Foreign Ministry, Hamid Baeidinejad, responded that Shariatmadari’s comments were surprising, it was Reformist Arman Daily that compared Shariatmadari to Trump, who is sometimes simply referred to as “crazy Trump” in Iranian media. In the front-page story titled “What Shariatmadari and Trump have in common,” Arman Daily wrote that Trump’s opposition to the nuclear deal has made “domestic critics happy,” and that Shariatmadari “once again become one voice with American extremists.”
Two and a half months after the implementation of the nuclear deal, there still continue to be serious disagreements within Iran over its achievements. In an interview with Iranian television April 2, Abbas Araghchi, deputy foreign minister and chief of staff for the implementation of the nuclear deal, appears to also be tasked with the job of asking Iranians to be patient to see the results of the deal.
Araghchi said all the sanctions that were planned to be removed have been removed, but warned it would take time for Iran to get back to where it was pre-sanctions, given that they went from selling 2.5 million barrels a day to 1 million barrels. Perhaps showing frustration with domestic criticism, Araghchi said, “The West promised to lift oil sanctions — they did not promise to find us oil customers.”
While there have been questions over other countries seeking to do business with Iran fearing the remaining US sanctions not related to the nuclear program, Araghchi also addressed other concerns that foreign businesses may have, saying, “Sometimes we fuel distrust a little bit and if we want to solve problems quicker we have to create this trust.”
While the administration is hoping that the results of the nuclear deal improve the economic situation, a number of Iranian media looked domestically toward Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s slogan for the year: "Economy of Resistance: Action and Implementation." The Iran newspaper, which operates under the administration, dedicated four articles to the topic. Most of these articles had a positive spin, with Economy Minister Ali Tayebnia suggesting that the implementation of the resistance economy had already begun. Hard-line Vatan-e Emroz, which has been opposed to many of President Hassan Rouhani’s policies, dedicated four of the six articles on its front page to the economy, perhaps suggesting that this is where they will be able to apply the most pressure on the administration in the upcoming year.
One interesting topic raised in the Iran newspaper was whether or not Iranian newspapers should take a two-week holiday for Nowruz. On April 1, many newspapers published their first papers since March 18, two days before the Iranian New Year. The author wrote, “A two-week media holiday in a world where the media says the first word is unacceptable in every way.” The article continued, “Any country that can have no newspapers for two weeks can go all 52 weeks of the year without a newspaper.”
The author conceded that the biggest obstacle is the distribution networks to newsstands during the holiday schedule, when many kiosks are closed. According to the author, only a few voices each year raise this issue. However, the author believes that it would not be difficult to change the holiday schedule to only the four official days that are given for Nowruz. The article asked readers to write in and ask the newspaper owners and editors to change this policy.Your daily dose of news and tidbits from the world of money in politics:
BP TRIES TO TURN ON CONTRIBUTIONS: BP may still be reeling from its tarnished reputation following last year’s BP may still be reeling from its tarnished reputation following last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but it continues its attempted comeback — at least in the political sphere.
The comeback, however, is contingent upon acceptance from elected officials, many of whom are trying to distance their re-election campaigns from BP
And after months of little or no activity, BP’s political action committee has pulled out its checkbook once again, writing two checks to congressmen in April, according to the most recent campaign finance documents it filed with the Federal Elections Commission
Reps. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) and Michael Burgess (R-Texas) received $1,000 checks each from the BP PAC. In past election cycles, both have benefited from large contributions made by the people and PACs associated with oil companies.
OpenSecrets Blog in an email that her boss has returned BP PAC’s check — and he’ll return all future contributions from the company. But Burgess’ Campaign Manager Kim Garza toldin an email that her boss has returned BP PAC’s check — and he’ll return all future contributions from the company.
Burgess, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, raised more than a $1 million during the 2010 election cycle. He received $58,600 of those funds from the oil and gas industry.
Burgess’ actions fall in line with those of other congressmen who also rejected contributions from the BP PAC.
BP PAC’s most recent disclosure document lists as “uncashed” a $5,000 check it wrote to Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in March. Upton has maintained that he will not be cashing in the amount as a result of last year’s spill, which leaked an estimated 205 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The initial Deepwater Horizon explosion also killed 11 oil platform crew members.
It is uncertain whether Black, who was the other beneficiary of BP PAC’s contributions last month, will be cashing in the $1,000 check. Her campaign was not immediately available for comment.
Black, a freshman representative, raised $2.24 million during the 2010 election cycle. Associates of Hollingsworth Oil Company in Nashville were among the top contributors to her campaign.
The documents also show that dozens of BP employees — from the vice president of government and public affairs to its attorneys, engineers, analysts and other executives — are forgoing small portions of their monthly earnings to contribute to the BP PAC, which had $354,799 on hand through April.
NOT SO QUIET ON THE NORTHEASTERN FRONT: Happy Election Day, residents of New York’s 26th Congressional District! And boy must you be glad to be here.
Traditionally a safe Republican U.S. congressional seat, this Upstate New York district has been the scene of a fierce political battle in recent weeks. Much of the artillery has been fired by independent outside groups, who have aimed millions of dollars in political advertising to sway the outcome of the race.
OpenSecrets Blog As previously reported, left-leaning and conservative groups have spent about $2 million on independent expenditures and electioneering communications to either promote or attack the three candidates in the race. That includes an intense barrage of spending during the last four days.
Such groups have dropped more than a quarter-million dollars since just last Friday. Left-leaning House Majority PAC, a new Democratic-aligned super PAC, alone reported spending more than $221,000 on television advertisements to oppose the Republican candidate, Jane Corwin, in a single day on Friday. During the weekend, the conservative group Independent Women’s Voice followed suit by calling up $14,250 in support of Corwin, money that was primarily used for phone banks.
Corwin is being challenged by Democrat Kathy Hochul, who has looked strong in recent polls. That strength, however, can in part be attributed to the presence of a third-party candidate in the race: Jack Davis. A former Republican-turned-Democrat-turned independent, Davis is affiliating himself with the Tea Party this go around.
In the last 24 hours, two conservative outside groups have also made small expenditures in support of Corwin: the American Conservative Strikeforce PAC spent $3,700, primarily for a tele-conference with supporters and American Action Network spent $2,000 on a last-minute Facebook ad.
Have a tip or a news link to pass along? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Last Thursday, on the one-month anniversary of the suicide of his boss, Missouri’s Republican auditor and a candidate for governor, Spence Jackson took the day off.
Tom Schweich’s suicide came amid what had become a brutal campaign for governor and shocked the state’s Republican Party.
The circumstances surrounding his death, including nasty, anti-Semitic rumors, pitted donors and party elites like former U.S. Senator Jack Danforth against Missouri Republicans like former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and former U.S. Senator Kit Bond, who were calling for party unity.
Jackson, Schweich’s spokesman, was in the middle of that fight.
And last week, Jackson took his own life.
Police say it was the fear of losing a job, not political whispers, that may have haunted him the most in his final days.
Until about three weeks ago, Jackson, like a loyal soldier without a commander, continued to carry the torch in Schweich’s memory.
Only moments after Schweich’s funeral, Jackson was one of the first to call for the resignation of John Hancock, the chairman of the Missouri Republican Party who Schweich believed had orchestrated an anti-Semitic “whisper campaign” against him (Schweich was Episcopalian, but had Jewish heritage).
Jackson pushed the late auditor’s side to reporters and influencers in the state party as he and others tried to shame Hancock out of the office.
But, Hancock—who has vehemently denied the allegation that he was pushing an anti-Semitic message against Schweich—has not stepped down, and on Friday, Catherine Hanaway, who Schweich was challenging in what had already become a brutal Republican primary for governor, reemerged on the campaign trail.
On Friday, Jackson was back in the auditor’s suite in an office building the street from the state Capitol for part of the day.
But after lunch, Jackson did not return to work, police here said.
Those who knew him said when Jackson left the office, he turned out the light and closed his door.
But on Friday afternoon, he left his lights on, the door open and his things as they were.
At some point later in the day, Jackson returned to his apartment only a couple miles away from his workplace.
There, he penned a note and left it in his living room before disappearing into his bedroom, where police say he fatally shoot himself with a.357 Magnum revolver, which was found with him in his bed.
It was not until Sunday night, when Jackson’s mother was in Jefferson City to meet with him in advance of a scheduled doctor’s appointment on Monday, that Jackson was found dead in his apartment by police responding to a “check well-being call.”
Jackson, who had worked as a Republican communicator for nearly two decades, had served in former Governor Matt Blunt’s administration as a personal spokesman for the governor and then for the Missouri Department of Economic Development. When Blunt decided to not seek reelection and Democrat Jay Nixon was elected to take his place, Jackson was let go and left without a job.
“I am so sorry. I just can’t take being unemployed again,” Jackson apparently wrote, according to Captain Doug Shoemaker of the Jefferson City Police Department.
David Luther, a spokesman for John Watson, Nixon’s temporary appointee as auditor as Nixon seeks a full-time replacement to fill out Schweich’s term though 2018, told reporters on Tuesday that senior staff had been told last week that “if there was a change in the interim auditor, that might impact them.”
But, Luther said, nothing was specific, and nobody had been told they would soon be out of a job.
“Everybody was going to continue to be under employment, but in the political landscape, those things can change,” Luther said. “No one had been told their job was in jeopardy, but knowing that there would probably be a change down the road, I’m sure they were all understanding of that.”
Jeff Layman, a fraternity brother of Jackson who attended Missouri State University with him 25 years ago, said he was “heartbroken over the loss.”
“Spence was kind, caring and loyal; but most importantly, he was like a brother to me. Spence was a savvy political communicator who was passionate and intense about his politics. I will miss his huge smile, infectious laugh and larger than life personality,” Layman said on Monday.
Jackson’s coworkers and other Schweich staff members would not speak on the record for this article. But, speaking privately, one Republican who knew both Schweich and Jackson said the two had “emotional highs and lows” and “wore their emotions on their sleeves.”
Still, the fear of losing a job, at least immediately, should have been unfounded, the Republican said: “Nothing was going to happen immediately. He had a job and people were looking out for him to find something next. It doesn’t make any sense.”Image copyright Getty Images Image caption China has focused on building up its navy, investing heavily in submarines and other warships
China is to focus on projecting its military presence beyond its borders at sea, according to a strategy document.
The navy will shift its focus to "open seas protection", rather than "offshore waters defence" alone.
It will also speed up developing its cyber force to tackle "grave security threats", the State Council said.
China has been accused of aggressively pursuing territorial claims in the South China Sea which has sparked concern in Washington.
The strategy document highlighted four areas of critical importance - the ocean, outer space, nuclear force and cyber space. Its recent naval policy has prompted the most controversy.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Satellite imagery showed China building an airstrip in the Spratlys
In recent years, China has focused on building up its navy. It has launched an aircraft carrier and invested heavily in submarines and other warships.
It has also exercised its claims over islands in the South China Sea which the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei variously dispute.
In one disputed area, the Spratly Islands, US officials say China has created about 800 hectares (2,000 acres) of dry land since 2014 that could be used as airstrips.
The strategy document warns of threats to China's maritime rights and interests.
It says China "will not attack unless [it is] attacked, but will counterattack" and mentions the "provocative actions of certain offshore neighbours" and "outside parties involving themselves in South China Sea affairs".
On the same day that the strategy document was released, state news agency Xinhua reported two 50-metre high lighthouses were to be built on a reefs in the Spratly Islands, which are claimed by Vietnam and the Philippines.
At a news conference to release the document, defence ministry spokesman Yang Yujun said: "Looking from the angle of sovereignty, China's development of construction on its islands is no different at all from all the other types of construction going on around the country."
He said island building was "beneficial to the whole of international society" because it aided China's search and rescue, and environmental protection work.
China criticised Washington after a US spy plane flew over areas near the Spratly Islands last week, with both sides accusing each other of stoking instability.
The strategy document also says China's air force will shift its focus from territorial air defence to both offence and defence, and building airspace defences with stronger military capabilities.The Chinese city of Huainan is rich in coal—very rich. By one 2008 estimate, it has nearly a fifth of all of China’s coal reserves.
Now the city has become home to the world’s largest floating solar farm. Appropriately, it has been built atop a former coal mine, which had become a lake after being flooded with groundwater. The China Daily reports that the farm started generating electricity earlier this week.
The 40-megawatt power plant consists of 120,000 solar panels covering an area of more than 160 American football fields. The $45-million investment could help power 15,000 homes. Here’s a drone tour of the solar farm, set to electronic music:
Floating solar farms are not new. But China is taking them to another level altogether. The previous record for the largest such farm was set in the UK by a farm that has the capacity to produce just 6.3 megawatts.
A floating solar farm is more expensive to build than one on land, because it must be designed to withstand salt and humidity from water. But it has advantages: It can be built on otherwise unused surface. It works more efficiently, because the presence of water cools the panels as they generate electricity. It can mitigate evaporation of water, keeping the lake full for longer.
The “pleasing symbolism” of building the solar farm on a flooded coal mine, as the World Economic Forum put it, is also practical. China, the world’s biggest investor in wind and solar energy, looks committed to creating space for renewable energy projects. In a recent visit to a newly built Chinese coal-fired power station, I was greeted at the entrance with a hillock covered in solar panels. “We want to make sure we’re using free space effectively,” the plant manager said.
In a bid to clean up its smog-filled skies, China has also announced closures of coal-fired power plants and suspension of plans to build new ones.Red Bull Cape Fear event sees big-wave surfers chase monster waves at Cape Solander
Updated
While most Sydneysiders ran for cover from the storm that lashed Australia's east coast a group of big-wave surfers confronted it head-on in the Red Bull Cape Fear contest on Monday.
The event was organised at the last minute on Sunday night after swell forecasters anticipated huge, rideable waves at Cape Solander, on the southern side of Sydney's Botany Bay.
Sixteen surfers were invited to take part in the event which featured waves of more than six metres breaking closing to rocks.
Two hour-long heats, featuring four surfers in each, were held before conditions became too dangerous to continue on the dropping tide.
Few clean waves were ridden with several of the competitors suffering heavy wipeouts. Renowned big-wave rider Justen Allport, from the New South Wales Central Coast, suffered a gash to the head and an injured neck while the rest of the field miraculously escaped unscathed.
Allport was taken to hospital for further assessment.
Former world tour surfer Blake Thornton managed a clean ride as well as suffering a few wipeouts.
"I think everyone in the event would agree this is the biggest the Cape has ever been surfed," Thornton said.
"Even though I got absolutely smashed, at the end of the battle it's going to be a surf I remember for a long time, with one great wave and one of the worst wipeouts I've ever had."
Allport is leading the event from Russell Bierke and Evan Faulks.
Surfing commentator and former world champion Mark Occhilupo, who grew up in the Botany Bay area, said the waves ridden on Monday were the most dangerous to have been surfed at the spot also known as "Ours".
With two heats still to be contested, Cape Fear event organisers are hopeful of completing the contest on Tuesday. The event is closed to spectators due to safety concerns.
Topics: surfing, sport, maroubra-2035, nsw, australia
First postedIf booming levels of self-employment are an indicator of a thriving economy, then Greece is the powerhouse of Europe. Just under a third of the population of this austerity-ravaged nation are self-employed, more than double the EU average. Spain is another go-getters’ paradise, it seems: with half an entire generation out of work, self-employment among the young has surged. And then there’s Britain, where around 40% of the rise in jobs since 2010 is down to self-employment. If our rulers are to be believed, here is entrepreneurial flair and British dynamism in action, a vindication of the government’s “long-term economic plan”. But the plight of the self-employed is being ignored. It is time that the left began championing their cause.
Self-employment surge across UK hides real story behind upbeat job figures Read more
Independence, flexibility, “being my own boss”: this is how many self-employed people positively appraise their situation. In a country where power in the workplace has shifted so decisively towards employers – benevolent or tyrannical, it’s the luck of the draw – you can see why self-employment is almost a refuge for many. But self-employment spells precariousness, insecurity and falling living standards for all too many. Last week George Osborne lauded figures indicating that wages were rising; but what is often neglected is that the 15% of British workers who are self-employed are stripped out of these figures. There is little up-to-date research on their income, but the Resolution Foundation suggests that between 2006-07 and 2011-12 their weekly earnings dipped by a staggering 20% – and there was a big rise in underemployment, or self-employed people doing far fewer hours than they would like.
“Look at the new businesses being created under our watch!” proclaim the Tories, hailing booming levels of self-employment as an exercise in job creation. But only 17% of self-employed people in this country have any employees at all, lower than anywhere else in Europe. Self-employment is often a means for businesses to hire workers without offering the rights and responsibilities that normally come with employment: private pensions, paid holidays, sick pay or maternity leave, for example.
According to the Royal Society of Arts, only 11% of self-employed people believe the welfare state is fair for people like them. “A self-employed builder has no recourse to statutory sick pay should they have an injury on site,” its report, Boosting the Living Standards of the Self-Employed, points out; and “a self-employed cleaner would have no access to statutory maternity pay were they to become pregnant”. As one self-employed academic and writer put it to me: “Getting a mortgage, impossible; renting a flat, very difficult; you get ill, you lose money; you go on holidays, you lose money; you run out of work, getting benefits is a lot harder than when you get fired from a job.”
A sign-language interpreter tells me that many work for less than the minimum wage after costs are taken into account. “The most difficult part is chasing up unpaid invoices,” says a make-up artist in the Lake District, voicing a common complaint. A data inputter similarly has to wait weeks for a school academy federation to cough up, and resents the lack of social security. “If the government expects a significant proportion of the working population to be self-employed it needs to provide a safety net.”
Then there’s the phenomenon of what could be called “self-unemployment”, a convenient means of massaging the employment figures. One former delivery driver told me he became self-employed to escape the “usual silly sanctions” imposed by jobcentres, but ended up |
. The other vision involves investing in education, infrastructure and alternative forms of energy, investing in health care and students, as well as preserving programs that made the working class thrive and allowed a middle class to pull itself out of poverty, programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Democrats are about building the future, Republicans are about destroying their opponents no matter what the cost, even if it hurts America, and taking us back to a broken past. There is a BIG difference. Hell, one side refuses to admit that the Confederacy lost the Civil War. One side believes in trickle down economics and if you don't totally agree they believe you are a socialist. There is no breathing space in between for logic or facts to exist. One side believes every damn lie they hear on Fox News, they are divorced from reality and should be kept as far away from places of power as possible.
So stop telling me "both sides do it". When you say that you are just giving cover to the obvious liars so they continue selling their obvious lies about death panels and climate change is a hoax and whatnot. One party fought to end the health care industries ability to deny you coverage based on pre-existing conditions, the other party wants to bring back exclusion based on pre-existing conditions, which will cause some Americans to die. That's a BFD.
The floor is now yours....
You can follow me on Twitter @JesseLaGrecaA time-lapse image of the March 1 launch of two communications satellites on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral. Commercial efforts like SpaceX have helped reshape, and strength, the domestic space transportation landscape recently. (credit: SpaceX) Shaping up: the future of US space transportation
Surprisingly, in 2014 the US space transportation picture took shape in the sense that a viable way forward became clearer, although with no guarantee of ultimate success. As has been obvious since 2009, NASA is not going to directly replace the Space Shuttle. That horse left the barn and the door is closed. The earlier demise of the Ares launch system as part of the cancellation of the Constellation program made that reality clear. Therefore, the question becomes, what now? What happened? Since the mid-1990s, the US government has struggled over the question of its space launch capabilities. The game changer is the growth in a viable independent private commercial sector. The private sector, from the inception of the Space Age in the 1950s, has been dependent on government programs. Until recently, that dependence was total, but now the situation is more complex but also intriguing. Since the mid-1990s, the US government has struggled over the question of its space launch capabilities. The game changer is the growth in a viable independent private commercial sector. For example, the Department of Defense (DOD) in 1995 pursued its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program to handle its needs. The Atlas V and Delta IV in various configurations provides what the DOD demanded, redundancy in the event of a flight failure, and reliability of operations. Both launch systems proved not as cost efficient as originally desired, but the costs are considered reasonable given national security priorities. Those cost parameters are being revisited in a renewed wave of development and competition, but the larger immediate question is the viability of the Atlas V given political upheaval between the US and Russia (discussed below). There is significant skepticism about the actual cost reductions to be acquired (See “EELV’s era of transition”, The Space Review, February 17, 2014). Meanwhile, NASA struggled mightily in its pursuit of a shuttle replacement, a process that began in earnest after the Challenger accident in 1986. That pursuit, however, contained a large caveat: the proposed vehicles—including the X-33 and X-34 spaceplanes as well as other paper projects under consideration—were all low Earth orbit (LEO) in terms of capability, meaning duplicating to a large extent the shuttle but with less lift capacity. That limitation meant that space exploration for the United States would remain a goal, and not a reality, outside of the excellent robotic missions being flown to the planets and beyond. The 2004 decisions by President George W. Bush opened the door for human space exploration over time beyond LEO to the Moon and elsewherem while scheduling the Space Shuttle’s retirement for 2010 after completion of the International Space Station (ISS). The Ares became the ticket to the future of US space exploration while the shuttle fleet focused on ISS construction. The long delay in instituting a space station program had obscured the fact that the shuttle’s original reason for being was to build and support an Earth-orbiting space station as a base camp for further exploration. The Bush Constellation program essentially abandoned the ISS and pushed for exploration essentially in a standalone mission profile similar to Apollo program. This meant the Orion spacecraft would carry crew outward with supply missions sent ahead, or as part of the spacecraft itself in a reconfigured mode once in orbit. Several difficulties immediately arose primarily in the political sphere but were accentuated by delays in Ares development. The latter were, in principle, recoverable, but the former were not. No president or Congress since Lyndon Johnson has been committed to funding NASA to the extent required given the agency’s expensive ambitions. Even Johnson ultimately backed off as other budget priorities took precedence: a slowing economy, escalating Vietnam War costs, and the expenses for the Great Society. More telling, public support for the space program even during the Apollo era was never sufficiently overwhelming that Congress felt the program was truly an enduring national priority. Unlike military space activities, space exploration is considered by both the public and Congress a “nice to have” but not a national necessity despite occasional political rhetoric to the contrary. The Apollo program arose in the midst of singular historical circumstances not duplicated since that time despite several attempts, notably the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, to generate similar excitement. The proposed Block II version of the SLS, capable of placing up to 130 metric tons into low Earth orbit. (credit: NASA) Space Launch System The new administration of President Barack Obama took a new look at the Constellation program in 2009 in the form of the Augustine Committee. The committee’s conclusion was that chronic underfunding to that point, and likely future funding shortfalls, made Constellation program success problematic. The Constellation program, despite congressional resistance, was terminated although several components, notably the Orion spacecraft, continued. The new program also called for development of a new heavy-lift launch vehicle, the Space Launch System (SLS). This new NASA launch vehicle, like the Ares, is explicitly designed to go beyond LEO orbit out into the solar system. The system has also been labeled by some the “Senate Launch System” given the strong push made by certain members of the Senate to get an Ares or shuttle replacement underway. The senators from Texas (Kay Bailey Hutchison) and Florida (Bill Nelson) pushing the SLS felt that not having any replacement vehicle underway was to permanently remove the US from human space exploration except at the sufferance of others, i.e. the Russians. Their judgment was that that Constellation was politically dead, so one needed to move on. This fragmented reality signals the understanding that there exists no widespread strong congressional or public support for greatly expanded NASA funding for human space exploration. The Russian option, however, was only for LEO operations related to the ISS. The SLS initiation personifies the political problem: the program came into existence in response to efforts by a small but intense faction in the Senate drawn from states with a significant NASA human spaceflight presence, another prime example of constituency politics in NASA affairs. Others resisted until it was clear the SLS was politically feasible while also protecting NASA workforces in their states. There was no intense congressional majority in favor of an expanded NASA human exploration effort. Instead, traditional “log-rolling” explained the SLS’s birth and continuation, plus a general notion among members that the US should continue to operate a human space exploration effort (see “The downhill slide of NASA’s ‘rocket to nowhere’”, The Space Review, August 25, 2014). That general notion reflects the inertia behind the US space program, insuring broader congressional support as long as costs are considered “reasonable”—whatever that means. Regardless, other members disagreed, including those who supported the Constellation program—especially Ares—because that program was already underway, while some sought an expanded opening for commercial space flight to replace the Space Shuttle. Others were opposed any significant funding for NASA because their preference was to divert the funding to other programs (non-space related) joined by those opposed to government funding of any non-essential programs. This fragmented reality signals the understanding that there exists no widespread strong congressional or public support for greatly expanded NASA funding for human space exploration. There is no “race” to or in space today, with the Chinese serving as the surrogate for the earlier Soviet Union in the 1960s, to drive or motivate expanded American government human space exploration endeavors. Larger budget concerns and a general movement away from government-funded programs translate into generally lean times for NASA. But, one should note that NASA’s budget to this point has not been decimated but instead moves in a pattern similar to general government spending. The SLS moves forward under the same constraints as Ares, with its first launch after 2017. Its high cost is further exacerbated by a low projected launch rate, so each vehicle become a hand-tooled version equivalent to a Rolls Royce rather than a Ford or a Chevy coming off an active assembly line. Ironically, the Apollo-era Saturn V launch vehicle was deemed too expensive to continue, but the Space Shuttle, despite its obvious technical advances, proved to be neither cheaper nor more reliable compared to the Saturn. The low projected launch rate for the SLS reflects two factors: a lack of broader budget support and disputes over future goals for US human space exploration. Both are clearly interrelated but distinct but this translates into a slow-motion program, not one with a vision so compelling that it can overcome political inertia. Budgets are the lifeblood of any space activity, crewed or robotic, because without funding, nothing is possible. Space activities are expensive since much of the costly hardware is lost during operations. This reality is not restricted to government space programs but true for all sectors. Space operations flounder if funding is not available or not continuous. The bar is even higher for commercial space because profits are crucial for funding future operations and technology development. Lack of funding or investment explains why earlier commercial space ventures often failed: funding ran out in the absence of profits to fuel further work. Investors expect a return, and their time horizon is often shorter than that of the visionaries who develop the technologies and push the flight envelope. By contrast, the SLS possesses no inherent commercial purpose, so government funding remains the entire ballgame. NASA funding, in the context of federal government budgeting, is considered discretionary. Being discretionary means not absolutely necessary so funding can, in principle, be eliminated. DOD funding is also considered discretionary yet also absolutely essential for national survival in a hostile world. There are debates over how much security to purchase given rapidly evolving threat perceptions. As a consequence, discretionary funding in the form of NASA is subject to attack from several directions. In NASA’s case, the attacks are both general and specific. As mentioned above, some object on general grounds, as they want the resources presently committed for NASA human space exploration employed for other purposes, including funding other space programs (space science, for example), or for general budget reduction. Another group argues the private sector should conduct all such exploration beyond LEO, including exploiting the Moon and asteroids for natural resources. NASA, in this case, becomes restricted to space and Earth science. Many assume that needed technology will also come from the private sector in the future. The more fundamental objection is that the SLS is a “ticket to nowhere.” This dispute appears in the context of where the first missions for the SLS should go: should that focus be on reaching the Moon as a precursor for future exploration of Mars? The Augustine Committee proposed a “flexible path” as the next step for US human space exploration. For example, the Orion vehicle could be sent to an asteroid as prelude to longer missions in space; a build-up to a multi-year mission to Mars. The space environment continues to provide surprises in terms of significant hazards, especially radiation in various forms. The goal of such missions would be assessing the crew’s ability to live and function away from LEO while testing the equipment that makes such long-duration missions possible. Constellation supporters reject this approach, feeling that NASA requires a well-defined program with clearly identified goals, such as returning to the Moon and then on to Mars. Lunar bases would become the testbed for technologies facilitating long-duration human operations in space and on hostile surfaces. Private sector groups have proposed their own missions to the Moon and asteroids for purposes of mining resources found there. Usually, the effort begins with great publicity and enthusiasm but falters in the absence of funding or income generation. This argument rests on the Apollo experience (clear objective) with the shuttle era presented as the antithesis (no immediate goal except sustaining human spaceflight). The latter is not insignificant but human space exploration, some argue, floundered as a result. The lack of such specificity becomes troubling for several reasons. The result has been a slow-motion political struggle in which the administration pushes its asteroid mission while Congress restricts or rejects that approach. Given the slowness of SLS development given its budget situation, resolution of this question will take time. The original proposed asteroid mission saw the Orion going out to the asteroid to conduct operations. The newer version, called the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), has shifted from Orion visiting an asteroid in its “native” orbit to a mission profile where an asteroid is captured and brought closer to Earth to be visited by an Orion spacecraft. Given the relative paucity of resources, nothing will happen quickly regardless of which mission profile is adopted. Private sector groups have proposed their own missions to the Moon and asteroids for purposes of mining resources found there. Such efforts are hampered by the high cost of operations and the question of profitability of any resources returned to Earth for use. Use of onsite materials to support a human installation still demands significant resources to support initial settlement efforts. More usually, the effort begins with great publicity and enthusiasm but falters in the absence of funding or income generation. Current examples include Mars One and Elon Musk’s plans for a Mars colonialization effort. Their prospects are all difficult to envision without significant government funding since few individuals possess the resources necessary for such an accomplishment. The business case is not clear at this point going forward. An Antares rocket lifts off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia on July 13. The rocket placed a Cygnus cargo spacecraft into orbit. (credit: J. Foust) LEO supply options The other side of the question of US space transportation appears more positive. The Space Shuttle will not be replicated but its missions of transporting crew and supplies to the ISS are being assumed by NASA-funded commercial spacelift options. For all the criticism of NASA, the cargo portion of its effort, embodied in the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, has worked despite some delays and the first in-flight loss of a supply mission. SpaceX and Orbital ATK have successful flown resupply missions until last October, when an Antares vehicle blew up seconds after liftoff. Early reports focused on the engines, the AJ26, a recycled 1960s-era Russian product known as the NK-33 that failed to launch the Soviet N-1 Moon rocket. Problems apparently had arisen previously, raising quality control issues which now have to be explicitly addressed. There are indications that Orbital ATK is seriously considering another Russian engine, the RD-181, as the replacement for the AJ26. This decision illustrates a serious problem hindering development of American space transportation, dependence on Russian engines for critical launch vehicles. The RD-181, though, comes with the restriction of no use for national security payloads. In principle, a truly globalized economy means that one purchases necessary materials and technologies from whoever has the best product at the best price. The problem is not the technology but rather the dependability of the supplier, in this case, Russia. Since the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and resulting US and EU sanctions, Russian officials have threatened to cut off or reduce the delivery of rocket engines for the Atlas V, and now the Antares is being placed in a similar situation. The US government has lagged in terms of new engine development since the 1970s and now confronts the necessity to reinvigorate that sector for government payloads. The US private sector until recently relied on government contracts if there was to be any effort at developing new engines. The Russians continue to deliver engines but the vulnerability continues subject to the political decisions made outside the control of the companies. United Launch Alliance (ULA) has an agreement with Blue Origin to develop a new engine, the BE-4, and Congress has appropriated money for new engines while also banning use of RD-180 engines for national security payloads in 2019. SpaceX has long worked on developing its own engines, which is the backbone of the company’s ability to fly more cheaply than competitors. In a related matter, SpaceX is aggressively pursuing US Air Force contracts for launching national security payloads. To this point, ULA has had a series of sole source contracts to launch such payloads on either the Delta IV or Atlas V. With SpaceX’s entry into the competition, the Air Force acquires even more launch redundancy and expected cheaper launches. In any case, SpaceX becomes a central player across the spectrum of US space transportation, government and private. In the 100th anniversary of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA returns to its roots as a facilitator of technology development without operating the system. The Antares accident had the immediate effect of leaving NASA with only one domestic flight option to resupply the ISS. Since the Challenger accident, NASA has been forced by circumstances to accept the early Air Force’s position that you need, if possible, two launch options, and thus no single-point failures. That dispute first arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s when NASA convinced President Carter to require all US payloads to fly on the shuttle. The expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) of the day were government owned, meaning government choices determined how and when US payloads would be launched. After Challenger, the US was effectively out of the space launch business for a time as the existing ELVs also encountered flight failures. The Challenger accident signaled the end of that requirement and the restart of the Air Force expendable launch fleet, ultimately leading to the EELV program. Furthermore, after Challenger, the Air Force transferred its ELV fleet to the private contractors operating the launch systems. The other result of the Challenger accident was the liberation of NASA space science payloads from flying on the shuttle, reducing costs dramatically since there no longer was a requirement for rating the payloads for crew safety. SpaceX resupply missions have been successful, albeit with launch delays, while their recent efforts have begun to focus on establishing reusability of Falcon boosters. This involves landing the booster on a ship at sea, eventually moving to a return to a land base; Launch Complex 13 is being leased as a possible landing site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Success would mean that reusability might be achievable and a cost game-changer. The shuttle, for example, was only partly reusable, as the external fuel tank was lost. The key question, though, is whether the Falcon 9 boosters can be refurbished for reflight economically while maintaining reliability of operations. That will not be known until successful recovery occurs several times, providing a larger experience base for determining costs and reliability since those factors will drive reuse. The potential is obviously exciting but reality may be more problematic than claimed. Orbital ATK was successful in its early resupply missions until the 2014 launch failure. If Orbital ATK is able to re-engine the Antares while keeping it cost competitive, the US will be in a stronger position regarding ISS resupply. Having both systems operational translates into redundancy, which is critical for space operations. Otherwise, the customer gets locked into single point failure if a launch system fails. For NASA in the long term, the optimal situation would involve development of other launch options so that it does not become locked into only one or two suppliers. NASA has shown that it can continue to help build the US commercial space launch industry through adroit use of its contracts. In the 100th anniversary of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA returns to its roots as a facilitator of technology development without operating the system. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk poses with the Dragon V2 spacecraft the company unveiled at an event at the company’s California headquarters in May 2014. (credit: J. Foust) LEO options for crew With resupply operations under way at least through 2020, NASA is focused on the question of moving crew to the ISS on US flag carriers. Through a series of competitions, NASA selected Boeing and SpaceX to provide rides for crew to the ISS using their new vehicles, the CST-100 and the Dragon V2, respectively. A protest by Sierra Nevada delayed final approval but the protest was denied in January, so progress should be seen fairly quickly. The plan is for flights in 2017 although slippage will likely occur given the vehicles must be safety rated for humans. Again, NASA opted for redundancy for reasons discussed above. Boeing is launching its CST-100 on the well-established Atlas V. That, however, raises the issue of feasibility given Russian threats to cut off shipments of RD-180 engines in response to US sanctions after the Ukrainian invasion. The threatened Russian embargo referenced only national security payloads, but that would affect NASA launches as well. In a crunch, DOD takes precedence over NASA payloads in order to preserve the capability to launch national security payloads. Development of a replacement engine will take time, which may not be quick enough to minimize all Russian impact on flight availability. Recent statements indicate the new engine would come in 2019 at the earliest; moreover, as noted above, Congress prohibits use of RD-180 engines for national security payloads around that time, adding even more impetus to the effort. But, one must note, the US just signed for more Soyuz rides for astronauts to the ISS in 2018 so, in theory, there is no pressure if the two systems are slower to develop and test than now thought possible. Assuming both flights options materialize as projected, NASA immediately solves its problem of sustainable reliable crew access to the LEO. More broadly, the possibilities for commercial human spaceflight proliferate. Space access will remain expensive but now the prospects for space tourism become more realistic. If Bigelow Aerospace’s proposed habitats work, the possibilities become dramatically greater for humans living in outer space for some interval. SLS moves slowly, but there exists no alternative if NASA is to pursue deep space exploration with a crew. Any momentum from the shuttle era has evaporated, encapsulated in IMAX films and museum displays. Government is effectively stepping aside as long as NASA’s essential launch needs are met. This tracks what was done in the early days of aviation. Then, mail contracts beginning in 1925 were the vehicle for developing the aviation industry. Now launches to the ISS become the means by which an industry, now freed from government control, grows in capability and sophistication. Congress still holds to the older model with its continued insistence that the SLS and Orion be configured as a backup to the commercial vendors. At some point, you have to make the break and let NASA be NASA in space technology development, space science, and space exploration. The agency did its stint as the trucking company to LEO and the ISS, now NASA needs to move outward. Human spaceflight can only benefit, but such opportunities contain the potential for failures. Commercial space has experienced several booms and busts. What supports the possibility for success now is that the ultimate stumbling block, reliable and less costly launch, may be finally at hand. Further efficiencies may occur if reusable spaceflight truly becomes a possibility. This was the original vision for the Space Shuttle: building cheap, reliable transportation to LEO, as the stepping-stone to the solar system. That effort, unfortunately, was taken by NASA as license to funnel all payloads to the space shuttle, effectively damaging the prospects for commercial alternatives until 1986. Conclusion SLS moves slowly, but there exists no alternative if NASA is to pursue deep space exploration with a crew. Any momentum from the shuttle era has evaporated, encapsulated in IMAX films and museum displays. Of course, given American politics, SLS could also be dumped as Constellation was in 2009–2010. However, two consecutive failed major NASA launch startups—Ares and SLS—raises the danger of totally dissipating all serious political interest in human space exploration. Come 2017, a new presidential administration could address once again the SLS mission profile. The Moon may become the immediate objective but one must remember the other states, especially China, are also moving their space programs forward at the same time. This raises the possibility for joint missions, or else a slow motion competition or withdrawal. Given the political situation regarding US human space exploration, the latter is not excluded as a possible future. Recapturing momentum does not require another Moon race because such politically hyped competitions lack staying power. Better is the path driven by success combined with a sense of urgency to reach the next level. Creating the latter cannot be done through hype: the attention of the political elite wanders too quickly to other matters. A more fundamental problem that must be addressed is the issue of US rocket engine development: reaching out to the Russians for recycled 1960s–1970s technologies is not the path to a sustainable future. SpaceX again shows the way, while others such as Blue Origin suggest other alternatives. Congress has appropriated money for an RD-180 replacement but for a sustainable commercial launch industry, one cannot proclaim your superiority over government and then wait around for another government program to build your tools. The legacy launch companies are accustomed to that model but NewSpace advocates suggest there is another way. Now is the time to walk the walk, not the talk. HomeThis time I would like to share my experience of keeping a codestyle in one of my working projects. This is about a new tool called JSCS which we have recently chosen with the team and now are very pleased with the result.
Once I joined SC5 Styleguide project, I discovered that it was not consistent enough from its codestyle perspective. It was not frightening by that time, but it was already clear that the project was going to grow fast and the sooner we start bothering about keeping the codestyle the better. I was already aware about JSCS and its features because had published a translation of author’s tool introduction in one of my side-projects. So the decision which tool to use was made quickly.
There are indeed many other solutions, such as JSLint and JSHint, the most mentioned once. But let me first tell you a story.
Interesting enough that JSHint authors liked JSCS so much that they prefered to contribute into it rather than develop style checkings in their tool. So they removed all the style enforcement rules out of JSHint and keep it now for more complex things not about coding style but about programming patterns.
And with that, JSCS now has all the style enforcement rules that are being dropped in @JSHint 3.0: https://t.co/W98EMSiTN5 cc @valueof — Mike Sherov (@mikesherov) 4 Jan 2014
This means that there is no question if you choose JSLint, JSHint or JSCS. Currently you can choose between JSLint and JSHint + JSCS working together.
gulp. task ( 'jslint', [ 'jshint', 'jscs' ] ) ;
Assuming that JSCS is a new tool with not yet spoiled structure, I suppose that it would be a pleasure to contribute into it. Also, the tool’s youth promises that future possible bugs would be fixed soon as there is no legacy.
Moreover, I personally find encouraging that JSCS has been already chosen by such respectable teams as jQuery, Bootsrap and AngularJS.
Long story short, JSCS is an npm package. You can install it either globally or locally for a particular project:
npm install jscs
Besides, you will need a configuration file.jscsrc and define what kind of JavaScript style you prefer for the project. This file should be put into the root of your project.
JSCS support tonns of rules. Nethertheless, your config file would not be too heavy thanks to presets. In most cases we choose from popular JavaScript styles and so there is no need to define the rules over and over again. You only need to write who you prefer to look like:
airbnb
crockford
google
jquery
mdcs
wikimedia
yandex
Even if you want to be special, you still can choose the most similar preset and redefine some of its rules below.
Important thing is that JSCS is already quite a mature thing, which means that you can easily find acompanying packages and needed plug-ins for editors.
The Success Story
Assuming these facts, we decided to give JSCS a try. We started with defining a lovely configuration but excluded all the files from the checking process yet. Our project already had modular structure, so this was easy.
{... "excludeFiles": [ "node_modules/**", "src/modules/a/**", "src/modules/b/**", "src/*.js ] }
Then, we agreed that if any of us starts coding or changing a module, he/she will fix the codestyle and swipe out the fixed module from the excludeFiles list. Following this, we got our files fixed quite fast and even avoid conflicts.
Keeping the codestyle when maintaining these files lately turned out to be more challengeable. Automatic checkings are very helpful here, but we needed to decide how strict we should be. The codestyle should not be our main goal instead of development.
Finally we came up with “separation of concerns” model. Thus, for the upstream repository we have strict codestyle policy, and for the forks it is more suggestive. We taught Travis to check codestyle in the pull requests we are getting. If codestyle is broken, the Travis build fails. So, pull requests with wrong codestyle cannot be merged into the upstream. This ensures us that we will never get bad code there. However for the forks it is not that strict. We turned down the idea of using pre-push hooks but recommend a developer to install a pre-commit hook in their repository clone as well as using JSCS IDE plugins in order to learn about wrong codestyle while developing and not when their pull request gets broken. These recommendations are described in our documentation for developers and all the team members follow them.
Everyone especially likes that JSCS can work with the code editors. The codestyle configuration is stored in the project repository and so an editor reads on its own. The most wonderful thing is that when switching between the projects with different codestyles, it does not require any change of settings.
And of course it is always possible to check the codestyle manually running a gulp task.
Word of caution
We faced a couple of problems when applying the tool. I believe they are worth to be mentioned, especially as I can provide the solutions.
The most painful was “out of memory” error when running a gulp task with JSCS checking. Turned out, that excluding files in the configuration is not enough. Gulp tries to process all the files that match the mask and is soon run out of memory. We fixed this with using gulp-ingnore package:
gulp.task('jscs', function() { return gulp.src([ '**/*.js' ]).pipe(gulpIgnore.exclude([ 'node_modules/**', 'demo-output/**' ])).pipe(jscs()); })
This is not the best solution because we need to list the excluded files in both.jscs configuration and the gulpfile.js. But there is nothing better yet.
The second trick is about checking the codestyle while watching the project files with Gulp. You would probably like to see the errors reported in your terminal but still have the watch task running. This is possible with the help of gulp-plumber :
gulp.task('jscs', function() { return gulp.src([ '**/*.js' ])....pipe(plumber()).pipe(jscs()); });
This is all, we did not face any other problem with the tool. It works just fine and has already saved thousands of man-hours.
Besides
If you are interested in the slides for this talk, here they are http://varya.me/jscs-talk/.America needs to keep its eyes on the prize; an election to decide the country’s fate for the next four years. The FBI has a history of presidential election interference, and has done so again, says Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.
FBI Director James Comey, after discovering thousands more emails that may be related to national security, sent a letter to Congress last week that sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party. It read, in brief: “Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant… I believe it is important to update your committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.”
Read more
A few months ago Comey recommended to the US Justice Department that no charges be filed against Hillary Clinton. She was at the center of an FBI investigation after it was discovered she had used a private computer to send classified government documents. Comey now finds himself at the center of a political controversy, with Clinton supporters saying he may be attempting to manipulate the election.
RT: Hillary Clinton says there is no case here after the FBI announced it will be investigating new emails found in an unrelated case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner. What is your take on this?
Katrina Vanden Heuvel: I think that in the end this is going to be a side show that will do more to discredit James Comey and the FBI than to impact the election. I do think we’ve seen abuse and overreach of power by the FBI institution; it’s long been a politicized institution. J. Edgar Hoover is smiling somewhere as he watches pundits marvel at the politicalization of the FBI. I think there is a more serious problem. I think we are witnessing the criminalization of our politics. The morning of the day when Comey announced this new round, Representative [Jason] Chaffetz [Rep, UT] said he has two years of investigations planned if Clinton is elected. I think this is very dangerous for our country; I think we need justice and transparency, but we are not getting it in this process.
Our political process (…) is so extremely polarized; there is not a lot of patience with the political class to wait to see what the truth is and the facts are, they are more apt to jump to conclusions. It is pretty universally accepted that [FBI Director James] Comey is a man of integrity and in fact he was appointed by a Democratic administration. My suspicion is that something came to light of such significance that it had to be reopened. - Chad Peace, president IVC Media LLC, to RT.
RT: We are living in different political climates where both candidates have got trust issues with the public. Do you see criticism for what James Comey did?
KVH: I think put aside the two candidates - the two most widely disliked, mistrusted candidates in modern history, Trump wins that one. But the real problem here is that many have commented in the last 48 hours that Comey violated long-standing Department of Justice procedures, policies, precedents. That is a trans-partisan verdict on Comey. I think that at the bottom of this, to some extent, is a director of the FBI who wanted to cover his behind. And I think that has motivated him from the beginning that press conference in July, essentially clearing Secretary of State Clinton, even while attacking her, going to testify before Congress, giving Congress raw, unfiltered material. All of this is really not fitting for the director of an institution, which, as I’ve said, has a long history of abuse of power, of spying covertly on any civil rights activists…
FBI Director Comey, in letter to members of Congress, says FBI is investigating additional emails in Clinton private server case pic.twitter.com/Ue0qlhqT5w — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016
RT: Full disclosure has been a theme of both campaigns. Do you think that this played into Comey’s decision? Because imagine he holds back the information, there are new emails, then there is election and then it comes out, and you can see where this could unravel. What are your thoughts on that?
KVH: But it is not his job to come forward. As a director of the FBI, his job is for his investigators to organize material and to bring it to the Department of Justice. It is the case that it takes two to tango. And the fact that former President Bill Clinton met with Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac a few months ago probably made it much more difficult to follow normal procedures. I go back to Bernie Sanders, who said in the first debate: “Enough with those damn emails”. This is an election when this country faces historic choices and you have on one side someone who believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, and Hillary Clinton who would appoint a very different Supreme Court. Both of them on foreign policy are troubling. But I think we need to continue to keep our eyes on the prize, which is an election that will decide the fate of this country for the next at least four years. And an FBI that has a long history of interfering in presidential elections has done so again.Two thirds of Australians are now aware they own a contactless payment card and 53% have made a contactless transaction, research released by RFi Group has revealed, taking the country to the top of a leaderboard for both contactless awareness and usage rates.
The ‘Global Payments Evaluation Study’, based on 32,000 respondents in 16 countries, found Singapore to be the second largest market with 54% owning a contactless card and 45% having made a purchase using one. Taiwan came in third place, with 41% of its population now having used their contactless card to pay, and 37% of Canadians have also paid using contactless, compared to 29% a year previously.
New Zealand registered the highest growth in contactless card ownership and usage compared to 2014, reaching 52% from 34% and 35% from 18% respectively. The US is currently the western country with the lowest penetration, with just 14% of Americans owning a contactless card, up from about 10% in 2014, and 9% have used their contactless cards to make a payment.
Furthermore, 60% of contactless card users use their cards at least once per week, up from 43% in 2014, and, while contactless card ownership is low in the United Arab Emirates (7%), users have one of the highest propensities to use their card at least once a week, 64% against 60% for the global average.
Likewise, while the US has one of the lowest rates of contactless usage, 80% make a contactless purchase at least once a week.
According to the research, 37% of contactless users |
2006 exchange among anonymous posters named CorsicaRiver, RockyRacoonMd and others. Brodie is not certain which poster is responsible for that and other remarks that he claims were defamatory, and he has only their screen names. Brodie is demanding that Independent Newspapers Inc., the company that owns the site, divulge the identities of his critics.
A Circuit Court judge in Queen Anne's County ordered the company to hand over the information. The company appealed, setting up yesterday's argument in Annapolis.
In a sign of the significance of the issue, Independent Newspapers has been represented by the litigation arm of Public Citizen, the national consumer advocacy organization, and by a leading First Amendment lawyer, Bruce W. Sanford.
For advocates of strong protections for anonymous speech and the Internet, online chat rooms are the 21st-century successors to the town square and the political pamphlet.
"There's a long tradition in U.S. history of at least anonymous political speech, and certainly when you contemplate the Internet and the new opportunities it offers, this is the way a lot of speech happens," Sam Bayard, assistant director of the Citizens Media Law Project at Harvard Law School, said in an interview.
At the same time, however, many argue that the First Amendment should not become a shield for those responsible for defamatory remarks. The reach of the Internet has allowed anonymous speech to potentially influence more people than ever, compounding the harm of a false claim.
In the case of Independent Newspapers v. Brodie, the right to free speech has bumped up against the right to seek redress in court for civil wrongs.
For a little more than an hour yesterday, Paul Alan Levy, a lawyer for Public Citizen, and E. Sean Poltrack, a lawyer for Brodie, argued before the seven members of the state's high court over how the judges should balance those rights.
Filing a lawsuit would ordinarily allow a plaintiff to begin the process of requesting relevant information to which it is entitled, known as discovery, not only from the defendant but also from third parties such as, in this case, the newspaper company.
But with the defendants' right to express themselves anonymously in the balance, such information should not be easily compelled, Levy argued. Instead, plaintiffs should have to present more evidence in support of their claim than what is typically required to initiate discovery. "Otherwise, you don't have the compelling government interest to set aside the First Amendment right," Levy told the judges."
Judge Joseph F. Murphy Jr., the most active questioner in the case, challenged Levy about how such a showing would be made. Would an affidavit suffice? Would a hearing be necessary? And he wondered whether a trial judge's preliminary determination that the statements could be defamatory would be a sufficient basis for the plaintiff to obtain the identities of the posters.
Levy did not suggest that the right to speak anonymously is absolute. But caution is in order because once anonymity is gone, it cannot be restored, he said.
A number of state courts have heard similar cases, and Levy urged the Maryland judges to follow the lead of New Jersey, where in 2001 an appeals court crafted a standard for cases involving subpoenas to identify anonymous Internet speakers. The court required plaintiffs to produce "sufficient evidence" of their cause of action and mandated that judges balance First Amendment rights against the strength of the plaintiffs' case and the need for identities to be disclosed.
But Poltrack argued that the circuit judge, Thomas G. Ross, conducted a balancing test of his own and concluded that Independent Newspapers was obligated to identify the users sought by Brodie.
Poltrack said that requiring plaintiffs to provide evidence at such an early stage was unfair. "It's a tremendous and onerous burden," he told the judges.Reuters/Joe Burbank/Pool Ben Kruidbos, an IT worker from the state attorney's office, testifies during a pre-trial hearing for George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida on June 6.
An employee of the Office of the State Attorney in Jacksonville, Fla., who testified that prosecutors withheld evidence from George Zimmerman’s defense team has been fired, his lawyer told NBC News.
Ben Kruidbos, who testified for the defense before the trial began and identified himself as a "whistleblower," alleged that his former employer concealed or was slow to deliver discovery information obtained from Trayvon Martin’s cell phone – including pictures of a hand holding a gun and a gun on a bed.
Zimmerman’s defense team has filed a motion of judicial sanctions against state prosecutors, alleging discovery violations. The state has denied these violations.
When reached for comment, state attorney’s office spokesperson Jackelyn Barnard confirmed that Kruidbos “is no longer an employee at the State Attorney’s Office.”
“Due to this being a personnel matter, there will be no further comment at this time,” Barnard said.
Kruidbos, the state office’s former information technology officer, testified at a June 6 pre-trial hearing that he discovered the photos after using software to analyze the raw data from the phone, put it all in a report and turned it over to Assistant State Attorney Bernie de la Rionda – who, he said, gave him mixed signals about whether he intended to pass it on to Zimmerman’s lawyers.
He said that in May he brought his concerns to Wesley White, an ex-prosecutor, who contacted the defense.
“I think all of the information being shared in the process is important to make sure it’s a fair trial,” Kruidbos testified, saying that he was concerned he would be held liable if he didn't share the information.
White, who resigned as a state prosecutor in December and now represents Kruidbos in private practice, shared with NBC News on Saturday a purported six-page termination letter his client received.
The letter, dated July 11, states: “It has come to our attention that you violated numerous State Attorney’s Office (SAO) policies and procedures and have engaged in deliberate misconduct that is especially egregious in light of your position as Director of Information Technology (IT).”
“Your egregious lack of regard for the sensitive nature of the information handled by this office is completely abhorrent. You have proven to be completely untrustworthy. Because of your deliberate, willful and unscrupulous actions, you can never again be trusted to step foot in this office,” the letter states.
The letter, signed by the state attorney office's managing director, Cheryl R. Peek, alleges that Kruidbos' intent "was not pursuant to any pure motive or genuine concern."
"Your feigned and spurious claim of possible liability was nothing more than shameful manipulation in a shallow, but obvious, attempt to cloak yourself in the protection of the whistleblower law," referencing the Florida statute that bars retaliation against state employees who disclose protected information.
The jury in the Zimmerman trial was deliberating for a second day Saturday with no indication of how long they might take to reach a verdict in the death of Martin.
Zimmerman, 29, who pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, says he shot Martin in self-defense when the teen attacked him after they crossed paths Feb. 26, 2012, in a gated community of Sanford, Fla. Martin, 17, was unarmed.
James Novogrod and Tracy Connor of NBC News contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: George Zimmerman has sued NBC Universal for defamation. The company strongly denies the allegation.Foreigners are growing crops in East Africa: Good or bad?
Subodh Mathur Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 14, 2016
In Uganda, the Financial Times reported that a German company is growing rice and corn in a Nwoya district in Uganda, which is far from the capital Kampala. [I have visited the nearby Nebbi and Arua districts. Indeed, the land there is fertile. However, the security conditions used to be challenging. Perhaps the situation is better now.]
The company planted 2,700 hectares by the second of 2015’s two growing seasons and expects to plant 3,300 hectares, mainly of rice and maize, by the end of 2016.
In the same region, a South African lends farmers money for seeds, fertilizer and machinery, and provides advice. It also offers a transparent market for farmers’ crops — mostly maize and rice — which it then processes and sells on to national and global markets.
In nearby Gulu district, a South African company has expanded into sesame oil, sunflower oil, chilli and maize. The company now works with more than 80,000 farmers and had a turnover last year of $10m.
Uganda’s President Musveni supports the foreign companies.
Three IMF and World Bank economists wrote about the move of foreigners into Africa in the Global Land Rush. They suggested a strategy to attract investors to fill the current yield gaps in Africa and allow local farmers to thrive can generate large benefits, provided local community rights are respected and investors pay a fair price for the land.
Prf. Brautigam’s book Will China Feed Africa studied the entry of China into African agriculture. The book concluded:
There are common misconceptions surrounding Chinese investments in Africa. “We investigated the 60 largest reported Chinese agricultural investments and tracked each one down,” Bräutigam said. “If all of these had actually happened, China would now be holding over 6 million hectares, about 1 percent of all the arable land in Africa.” Instead, China’s farmland acquisitions across Africa seem to have amounted to less than 250,000 hectares (by 2014).
Most existing Chinese farms grow food for local markets and are run by private entrepreneurs. “No one has yet found a village of Chinese farmers anywhere in Africa,” Bräutigam said. “Moreover, China’s policy incentives do not make it easy to import staple grains like rice. Trade data show that China exports far more food to Africa than it imports.”
To feed its own population, Bräutigam stressed that Africa must move from subsistence to commercial agriculture, and China may play a role in that transition. “China’s agricultural modernization could offer useful ideas for African leaders and lessons on how foreign skills and talents can be channeled into positive outcomes for their people,” Bräutigam writes. “But Africans themselves must make these decisions.”
But not everyone is convinced. In 2011, the Economist concluded:
“When land deals were first proposed, they were said to offer the host countries four main benefits: more jobs, new technology, better infrastructure and extra tax revenues. None of these promises has been fulfilled.”
In 2015, ActionAid, an NGO reported:
Rural communities in the Bagamoyo district of Tanzania are opposing a much-lauded sugar cane plantation project planned by EcoEnergy, a Swedish-owned company that has secured a lease of over 20,000 hectares of land for the next 99 years and which is about to push smallholder producers off their land. Although the company has conducted consultations with affected villagers, the research conducted by ActionAid found that the majority have not been offered the choice of whether to be resettled or not, and have not been given crucial information about the irreversible effects the project may have on their livelihoods and their rights to food and land. By failing to obtain the free, prior and informed consent of the communities in the area affected by the project, EcoEnergy is grabbing the land of these communities, or risks doing so.This article is about a sculpture by Rodin. For other uses, see Age of Bronze (disambiguation)
The Age of Bronze French: L'Âge d'airain The Age of Bronze, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2006). Artist Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) Year 1877 (first exhibited) Type Statue Medium Bronze Dimensions Life size
The Age of Bronze (French: L'Âge d'airain) is a bronze statue by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). The figure is of a life-size nude male, 72 in. (182.9 cm) high. Rodin continued to produce casts of the statue for several decades after it was modelled in 1876.
Rodin had a Belgian soldier pose for the statue, keeping photographs which survive (in the Rodin Museum). The pose partly derives from Michelangelo's Dying Slave in the Louvre Museum, which has the elbow raised above the head.[citation needed]
History [ edit ]
When the statue was first exhibited at the 1877 Salon in Paris, France, Rodin was falsely accused of having made the statue by casting a living model, a charge that was vigorously denied. This charge benefited Rodin though, because people were so eager to see this for themselves.[citation needed]
Casts of the statue can be found in many museums, including:
Gallery [ edit ]
Plaster from 1877
Plaster, detail
Bronze cast
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]Forty vehicles have been reported stolen to Bakersfield Police Department this last week, according to the department’s crime map.
A local pickup truck group, Motor City Throwdown, said twelve Chevy and GMC pickup trucks have been stolen this month.
Dylan Moore told 23ABC his 2006 Chevy Silverado was stolen two months ago. He said he is still in shock, “Knowing that it happened so quickly, is just, it’s mind-blowing to be honest.”
Dylan Moore was at work when he says his truck was stolen. One moment he was outside taking out the trash. Ten minutes later when he checked on his truck, it was gone. He says what hurt him the most was this truck was used by three generations in his family.
“It was babied," Moore said. "The four-wheel drive has never been engaged. It had 80,000 miles on it. And keep in mind it was an 11-year-old truck. So it was still going strong.”
Moore said he got a call saying his truck was found in a junk yard, stripped and burnt. He said he wishes he parked where his work’s surveillance camera could have caught the thieves in the act.
According to the BPD crime map, vehicles thefts are being reported all over the city.
While CHP officers said they’re seeing a slight down tick in car thefts lately, they are expecting an increase during the holidays. And Chevy Silverados are the highest targeted car in the area, due to durability and popularity.
That’s why a local Chevy/GMC dealer and Motor City Throwdown this week is trying to help Bakersfield truck owners better protect themselves. They say hoods and tailgates are easy targets.
Billy Simkins with Motor City Throwdown said, “There’s something called a pivot locking device, that actually goes on one side of the tailgate. And it makes it so the tailgate can’t be removed.”
Simkins also says Chevy and GMC have changed the key on newer trucks to make it harder for thieves.
Moore said if he ever meets who stole his truck, he'll tell them, "Imagine it was yours is all I’d have to say. I mean it's devistating."
CHP officers also suggest not to leave anything of value in your truck. That way if it's broken into, there’s nothing of significance for them to take.Giganews is celebrating a hard-fought legal battle against adult publisher and serial copyright litigant Perfect 10. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed the Usenet giant a comprehensive victory in the long-running case, one that will prove so financially damaging to Perfect 10 that the company will go into liquidation.
Over the years, adult image publisher Perfect 10 developed a reputation for making a business out of suing Internet services for alleged copyright infringement.
The company targeted Google, Amazon, MasterCard and Visa, even hosting providers such as LeaseWeb and OVH. After securing several private settlements in earlier actions, the company sued Usenet provider Giganews after Perfect 10 images appeared on Giganews servers. Things didn’t go well.
In November 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found that Giganews was not liable for the infringing activities of its users. Perfect 10 was subsequently ordered to pay Giganews $5.6m in attorney’s fees and costs.
With Perfect 10 not quite done the case went to appeal, but in an opinion just handed down by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the adult publisher has received a crushing defeat. The panel held that to be held liable for direct copyright infringement, Giganews must have committed some voluntary act that caused the infringement to occur. The requirements for such “volitional conduct” were not met.
“The panel concluded that the evidence showed only that Giganews’ actions were akin to passively storing material at the direction of users in order to make that material available to other users upon request, or automatically copying, storing, and transmitting materials upon instigation by others,” the ruling reads.
The panel also found that Giganews was not liable for contributory infringement after Perfect 10 failed to show that Giganews “materially contributed to or induced infringement.”
On Perfect 10’s claim for vicarious infringement, the panel upheld the district court’s summary judgment in Giganews’ favor, noting that Perfect 10 failed to show a “causal link between the infringing activities and a financial benefit to Giganews.”
Ron Yokubaitis, Co-CEO of Giganews, said that his company’s decision not to give in to Perfect 10 had resulted in a long and hard-fought battle, but the end result meant it had been worth it.
“We decided that it would be important to stand up to Perfect 10 and not be bullied by its abusive litigation tactics. We were not going to settle this case just to avoid the risk of potentially catastrophic statutory damages in today’s crazy copyright world, a threat that unscrupulous plaintiffs like Perfect 10 use to extract unjust settlements from more timid companies,” he said.
“We took a stand for Usenet, for technology and online platforms, for the public, and for ultimate benefit of rational copyright law. We were not just battling Perfect 10: standing behind Perfect 10 – and even sharing in its oral argument at the court of appeals – was the Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA), which tried to argue that it was voicing the interests of small copyright holders.”
Giganews went on to thank several groups that gave it support during its battle with Perfect 10, including the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, EFF, and Public Knowledge. While Giganews will continue in the Usenet business, Perfect 10’s efforts to extract billions in damages from the provider have essentially developed into a suicide mission.
“With this decision, Perfect 10’s days as a copyright troll masquerading as a porn company are now finished,” Giganews said.
“The case now moves to its final stage to collect attorney’s fees from Perfect 10. Giganews is seeking the appointment of a receiver to take charge of all of Perfect 10’s copyrights, trademarks, and domain names and to liquidate them in partial satisfaction of Giganews’ judgment against Perfect 10.”
The only area where Giganews failed to convince the court was in its request to add Perfect 10 founder Norman Zada to the verdict. The district court already denied that request and the panel at the court of appeal upheld that decision.
The full ruling is available hereKorean (Hanja) English Comment
당중앙
(黨中央) Central Committee of the Worker's Party of Korea The first of Kim Jong-il’s titles. Has been in use since 1973 after Kim was secretly appointed as his father’s successor and until it was officially announced in order to mention Kim Jong-il in press without calling him by name.[4]
웃분 Superior Person The title has been in use since the middle of the 1970s.[4]
친애하는 지도자
(親愛하는 指導者) Dear Leader This title was the most common title during Kim Il-sung’s rule.[4]
존경하는 지도자
(尊敬하는 指導者) Respected Leader The title has been in use since the middle of the 1970s.[4]
현명한 지도자
(賢明한 指導者) Wise Leader
영명하신 지도자
(英明하신 指導者) Brilliant Leader
유일한 지도자
(唯一한 指導者) Unique Leader The title has been in use since June 1975.[4]
령도자가 갖추어야 할 풍모를 완벽하게 지닌 친애하는 지도자
(領導者가 갖추어야 할 風貌를 完璧하게 지닌 親愛하는 指導者) Dear Leader, who is a perfect incarnation of the appearance that a leader should have In use since the mid-1980s on special occasions.[4]
최고사령관
(最高司令官) Commander-in-Chief First mentioned in the middle of the 1980s before Kim was officially appointed as Korean People's Army Commander-in-Chief.[4]
위대한 령도자
(偉大한 領導者) Great Leader The most common of current Kim Jong-il's titles.[4]
인민의 어버이
(人民의 어버이) Father of the People In use since February 1986.[4]
공산주의 미래의 태양
(共産主義 未來의 太陽) Sun of the Communist Future In use since the middle of the 1980s.[4]
백두광명성
(百頭光明星) Shining Star of Paektu Mountain
향도의 해발
(嚮導의 해발) Guiding Sun Ray
혁명무력의 수위
(革命武力의 首位) Leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces In use since December 21, 1991, when Kim Jong-il became Commander-in-Chief of the Korean People's Army.[4]
조국통일의 구성
(祖國統一의 構成) Guarantee of the Fatherland's Unification
조국 통일의 상징
(祖國 統一의 象徵) Symbol of the Fatherland's Unification
민족의 운명
(民族의 命運) Fate of the Nation
자애로운 아버지
(慈愛로운 아버지) Beloved Father
당과 국가와 군대의 수위
(黨과 國家와 軍隊의 首位) Leader of the Party, the country, and the Army
수령
(首領) Leader Became common after Kim Il-sung's death.[4]
장군
(將軍) General One of the most common titles. In use since 1994.[4]
우리당과 우리 인민의 위대한 령도자
(우리黨과 우리 人民의 偉大한 領導者) Great Leader of our Party and of our Nation In use since 1994.[4]
위대한 장군님
(偉大한 將軍님) Great General
경애하는 장군님
(敬愛하는 將軍님) Beloved and Respected General
위대한 수령
(偉大한 首領) Great Leader When Kim Il-sung was alive, this title was used only to refer to him.[4]
경애하는 수령
(敬愛하는 首領) Beloved and Respected Leader
백전백승의 강철의 령장
(百戰百勝의 鋼鐵의 靈將) Ever-Victorious, Iron-Willed Commander In use since 1997 after the 3-year mourning for Kim Il-sung ended.[4]
사회주의 태양
(社會主義 太陽) Sun of Socialism
민족의 태양
(民族의 太陽) Sun of the Nation
삶의 태양
(삶의 太陽) The Great Sun of Life
민족의 위대한 태양
(民族의 偉大한 太陽) Great Sun of The Nation In use since 1999 after the new DPRK constitution was accepted in 1998.[4]
민족의 어버이
(民族의 어버이) Father of the Nation
21세기의 세계 수령
(21世紀의 世界 首領) World Leader of The 21st Century In use since 2000.[4]
불세출의 령도자
(不世出의 領導者) Peerless Leader
21세기 찬란한 태양
(21世紀 燦爛한 太陽) Bright Sun of the 21st Century
21세기 위대한 태양
(21世紀 偉大한 太陽) Great Sun of the 21st Century
21세기 향도자
(21世紀 嚮導者) Leader of the 21st Century
희세의 정치가
(稀世의 政治家) Amazing Politician
천출위인
(天出偉人) Great Man, Who Descended From Heaven
천출명장
(天出明將) Glorious General, Who Descended From Heaven
민족의 최고영수
(民族의 最高領袖) Supreme Leader of the Nation
주체의 찬란한 태양
(主體의 燦爛한 太陽) Bright Sun of Juche
주체의 찬란한 태양
(主體의 燦爛한 太陽) Bright Sun of Pudank
당과 인민의 수령
(黨과 人民의 首領) Leader of the Party and the People
위대한 원수님
(偉大한 元帥님) Great Marshal
무적필승의 장군
(無敵必勝의 將軍) Invincible and Triumphant General
경애하는 아버지
(敬愛하는 아버지) Dear Father
21세기의 향도성
(21世紀의 嚮導星) Guiding Star of the 21st Century
실천가형의 위인
(實踐家型의 偉人) Great Man, Who Is a Man of Deeds
위대한 수호자
(偉大한 守護者) Great Defender
구원자
(救援者) Savior
혁명의 수뇌부
(革命의 首腦部) Mastermind of the Revolution
혁명적 동지애의 최고화신
(革命的 同志愛의 最高化身) Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradeship
각하
(閣下) His ExcellencyWhile we were gallivanting around Iceland last month, we were guided through a harrowing snowstorm by a lovely Belgian couple, and while we wound down from our near death experiences over an overpriced pizza, we began discussing our travel plans. When they heard that we were going to be spending some time in Bruges and Brussels, they had one piece of advice: Skip both of those and go to Ghent. Ultimately, that turned out to be the best piece of travel advice we've received so far aside from "You can bring your own mini bottles of liquor on an airplane".
Ghent was founded in 650 AD, and by the middle of the 13th century had become the second largest city in Europe after Paris. That's right, GHENT WAS THE SECOND BIGGEST CITY IN EUROPE AND YOU HADN'T HEARD OF IT BEFORE YOU READ ABOUT IT ON GETTING IN THE MAP. When Ghent's role as a metropolis of Europe was ended in the 17th Century by the Eighty Years' War, the city became an afterthought on the Trafalgar Tours' which wind their way through Northern Europe. While Paris is the City of Love and Amsterdam is the Venice Of The North, this stunning port city has no nickname. The medieval structures in the City Centre are so beautifully well-preserved because they escaped the bombing of World War II that decimated so many cities like their Dutch neighbors Rotterdam, and the three most famous relics (St. Michael's Cathedral, St. Nicholas' Church and the Belfry) are literally within shouting distance of each other. FUN FACT ALERT: The Belfry has a golden dragon on top, which (in medieval times) they would pump smoke out of the snout as enemies approached so that they would think A DRAGON PROTECTED THE CITY. THIS IS SOME GAME OF THRONES SHIT WHY IS GHENT NOT THE MOST POPULAR CITY IN THE WORLD?The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
Mirror, mirror on Donald Trump’s 2,000-mile wall! Who will pay $25 billion for you to be built long and tall? “Mexico. Yes, Mexico, will pay for the wall,” whispers the mirror.
Last Wednesday, Trump accepted a meeting invitation that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, turned down. A meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Proving himself to have the thick skin necessary of America’s top executive, Trump flew to Mexico to meet Peña Nieto on his home turf, despite the fact that Peña Nieto had previously compared Trump to vile German dictator Adolf Hitler and his Italian ally, despot Benito Mussolini.
Flip-flopper! Wavering! and Photo-Op King! Such insults were hurled at Trump after he met with Mexico’s president.
Why? Because Trump supposedly reneged on his long-standing campaign promise to make Mexico pay for the wall that he plans to build along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Reality check: Trump didn’t flip-flop. Mexico will pay for the wall if Trump becomes president. Furthermore, the wall’s cost and payment are negligible in the big picture. Here’s how, and why.
November 8, 2016: America’s Big Payday
Election Day (Tuesday, Nov. 8) will be America’s big payday if Trump is elected president. Not because Mexico will literally write us a check for $25 billion with Border Wall Project on the memo line.
Every savvy businessperson knows there is more than one way in which to collect proper payment from a debtor. Banks, for example, place liens against homes for which they offer mortgages. If a bank’s customer fails to make payments, the bank will enforce the lien by initiating foreclosure procedures and seizing the home.
Every year, Mexicans working in the U.S. send at least $20 billion back to Mexico in the form of remittances, placing a huge drain on our economy. Through a combination of legal and procedural challenges, Trump could impound such remittances.
Tune into your local Spanish TV or radio network on any given day and—if you’re fluent in Spanish—you’re bound to catch frequent advertisements from organizations promising to help you send money home to Mexico. Trump’s administration could have the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enforce large fines on networks that air such commercials.
Mexico’s government, unsurprisingly, threatens that if the U.S. impounds remittances, it will feel harsh consequences—like an uptick in money laundering. But the U.S. could easily push back even harder—legalizing drugs and effectively snuffing out Mexico’s drug cartels and crime rings overnight.
Besides cracking down on remittances, “visa fees,” “visa cancellations,” and the enforcement or enactment of “trade tariffs” are three additional ways in which Trump proposes to make Mexico pay for the wall.
Stopping Sneaking Syrians
Securing the U.S.-Mexico border is necessary because it will help safeguard our country from terrorists who originate far beyond Mexico. USA Today and many other major news outlets have confirmed that refugees originating from the terror hotbed of Syria are using our porous border with Mexico to slip into the United States without detection.
A 2016 study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs indicates that nearly two in three Americans do not support accepting Syrian refugees into the United States. Hillary, meanwhile, has voiced a willingness to outdo President Obama’s recklessness by welcoming around 550 percent more (65,000) incompletely vetted Syrian refugees into America.
Anyone who tells you that Trump’s immigration views are “hardline” or “alt-right” is disingenuous. It is Clinton’s immigration policy that is “alt-left” and far outside the realm of what most Americans desire in terms of national security.
It’s Not the Money, Honey
If you still doubt Trump’s ability to compel Mexico to pay for the wall, stop focusing on the cost. The cost of building the wall—estimated to range between $10 and $25 billion—is negligible in comparison to the billions we routinely squander on programs that set back our national security.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has an annual budget of $2 billion. For this expenditure, we the taxpayers receive a TSA that corrals us like cattle every time we fly—only to have a 96 percent fail rate at catching weapons and explosives.
Trump could ask America to cover every penny of building his “tall, physical, impenetrable, beautiful wall along the southern border to stop the influx of illegal immigration” and our country would be far more secure than after dumping billions down the TSA Toilet.
1st-Timer vs. 4th-Timer
Don’t buy into claims that Trump is a flip-flopper because he went from claiming to be “softening” to “hardening” his immigration stance within a matter of days. We can’t forget that this is Trump’s first rodeo. Hillary has run for president four times if you include her husband’s two runs. She has been a politician for at least 20 years whereas Trump has been a politician for barely one year.
Hillary has scripted her views to the point where even she sometimes forgets her “lines,”—like when she said she would increase taxes on the middle class. Trump, in contrast, has to force himself to use a teleprompter to organize his naturally free-flowing communication style. It takes time to convert strong ideologies and values like those Trump espouses into public policies that are applicable in the real world. Trump isn’t wavering on immigration. He’s refining.
So give Trump a chance, especially when he insists Mexico will pay for the wall. As I’ve shown above, even if Mexico didn’t pay for the wall—which it will, one way or another—the wall’s cost is negligible. And Hillary’s alternative immigration plan will compel you to house and clothe improperly vetted refugees and immigrants.
It only takes one criminal crossing our border to succumb your son or daughter to the tragic fate of Kate Steinle and Sarah Root. Build it tall. Build the wall.The City of Detroit tried to file for bankruptcy last week. A state judge initially blocked the filing, but a federal judge ruled Wednesday this week that the bankruptcy case can move forward. More legal maneuvering is ahead and Detroit may well succeed in the end. After all, Detroit owes somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 to $20 billion to over 100,000 creditors. One group of creditors particularly wary of a municipal bankruptcy is Detroit’s public sector labor unions. They fear a bankruptcy judge might allow the city to cancel or reduce their pension or retiree health benefits. The unions have a lot of law on their side, but they are still right to be worried.
More importantly, this situation should serve as a warning to every person expecting to retire one day and collect a pension or other retirement benefits: do not trust other people with your future.
Detroit’s city workers have two significant legal advantages compared to many workers. First, Michigan’s state constitution specifically protects workers’ pensions from being reduced. Second, Michigan state law requires public pension obligations to be fully funded every year. That means the only reason Detroit may owe money in pension obligations is because the emergency manager thinks the city used favorable actuarial math in the past to save some money. In general, Detroit’s city workers have pension funds that are better funded than most workers. Yet, by some estimates, Detroit’s pension fund is as much as $3.5 billion short of what is needed to pay promised benefits.
For many reasons, Detroit’s bankruptcy, if a judge eventually allows them go through that process, will not set much of a precedent for other cities. As mentioned, Michigan law protects public sector workers more than the law in most states. Also, it is highly unlikely another city of Detroit’s size will go bankrupt any time soon.
So rather than discuss Detroit’s case specifically, let’s look at the larger lesson that its workers are now learning.
Many American companies have gone through bankruptcy, reduced or eliminated workers’ pensions, and then emerged from bankruptcy to continue operation. Delta Airlines is one recent example; its pilots lost millions in promised pensions. In such cases, the federal government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation steps in to provide much smaller pensions, but workers are still big losers in such actions.
I really dislike when companies or governments use bankruptcy to break employment contracts for workers that continue to perform the same job. (It is different when a company truly liquidates and goes out of business.) Obviously, bankruptcy is a legal process for breaking contracts of many kinds, as the party going bankrupt seeks to discharge debts it legally owes. Yet it is clearly unfair that workers agree to a package of wages and benefits, including future retirement benefits, and then discover that the deal is suddenly broken, and broken in a retroactive way.
To change future employment contracts through the bankruptcy process is reasonable, but pension benefits already earned in previous years are essentially deferred compensation. Those employees could have taken higher wages payable immediately, but instead elected to take less pay in exchange for pensions (and possibly other retirement benefits).
While it might be moral or equitable to protect already-earned pension benefits during a bankruptcy, bankruptcy law allows pensions to be reduced or eliminated. Therefore, given the uncertainty involved in pensions, whether private or public sector, smart workers should learn to avoid them. And the way to avoid such problems is to not trust anybody else with your retirement savings.
Workers can get retirement benefits as part of a compensation package in two possible manners: defined contributions or defined benefits. Pensions are defined benefit plans. You earn specified benefits according to a formula while working and collect them upon retirement. Social Security is also a defined benefit plan; you pay taxes while working, earning credits towards Social Security payments when you are older.
Defined contribution plans include 401(k) and 403(b) plans. In a defined contribution plan, employers and/or the employees contribute specified amounts to a personal retirement account each pay period. The employee generally has some amount of control over investing the contributions while they are working. At retirement, the worker gets to keep the balance in her retirement account, whatever it happens to be.
Many workers, particularly union workers have resisted defined contribution plans, preferring the “certainty” of defined benefit plans. What an unfortunate number of workers have learned to their detriment is that defined benefit plans are only for certain if the employer keeps its promises. Workers avoid the risk of poor investment performance in exchange for taking a risk that their employer will not sufficiently fund their pensions as they go or will not have enough revenues to cover the cost when the pension payment are due.
Those risks are not small ones. The Pew Center for the States estimated that public pension plans nationwide were underfunded by $1.4 trillion in 2010. An improving stock market since |
to accept a full retraction of their statements and an unconditional apology. (The ministers did not attend the court in person, pleading that they were required in parliament.) The court accepted the apologies, the Chief Justice stating that there had been a prima facie case for prosecution both of the ministers and of the newspaper, and that the ministers' contempt had been aggravated by the delay in providing a full retraction of the statements and in making an apology.[72][73][74] Shortly before giving its decision about contempt, the court delivered its decision on the appeals, in which two of the sentences were substantially increased.
(iii) Bankrupt or insolvent [ edit ]
Nile v Wood (1987) [ edit ]
A third part of Nile's challenge to Robert Wood's election was that Wood was insolvent,[23] with Wood being described as "probably the only Member of Parliament to have been elected while on the dole".[24] The High Court held that it was not enough to allege that Wood was insolvent; he had to have been adjudged to be an "undischarged insolvent".[23]
Culleton (2017) [ edit ]
Other proceedings concerning Culleton concerned a creditor's petition in the Federal Court, seeking to have Culleton declared bankrupt. On 23 December 2016 the Federal Court made a sequestration order which had the effect of making Culleton an undischarged bankrupt.[75] On 11 January, after receiving an official copy of the judgment, the President of the Senate wrote to the Governor of Western Australia, to notify her that Culleton's seat had become vacant due to his having become an undischarged bankrupt on 23 December 2016.[76] Culleton commenced proceedings in the High Court to challenge the power of the President to declare his seat vacant, but this challenge was rejected by Justice Gageler on 31 January 2017.[77] The sequestration order and therewith the finding of bankruptcy were confirmed by a full court of the Federal Court on 3 February 2017.[78]
However, Culleton's bankruptcy ceased to determine his eligibility when, later on the same day but in a separate case, the High Court declared that he had been ineligible for election to the Senate owing to his conviction of an offence punishable with a sentence of one year or more, under subsection 44(ii).[79]
(iv) Office of profit under the Crown [ edit ]
Subsection 44(iv) refers to an "office of profit" in the traditional sense of a position carrying an entitlement to any form of financial benefit, including salary. As with the reference to "pension", part of the intention is prevent the Executive from corrupting a member by offering such a position.[80] However, the provision has been interpreted to prevent any individual who is already in state employment from standing for parliament, even if they would have had to resign from that position if elected.
The Constitutional Commission report of 1988 recommended that s 44(iv) be replaced with more specific provisions;[81] likewise in 1997 a committee of the House of Representatives, which termed s 44(iv) "something of a minefield".[82]
Sykes v Cleary (1992) [ edit ]
In 1992, Independent candidate Phil Cleary was declared elected to the House of Representatives in a by-election for the Victorian seat of Wills. Sykes claimed that Cleary was disqualified by Constitution s 44(iv) and others by s 44(i). Cleary was a permanent secondary school teacher in the Victorian public school system. Mason CJ, Toohey and McHugh JJ held in a joint judgment (with which Brennan, Dawson and Gaudron JJ generally agreed) that the centuries-old phrase "office of profit under the Crown" includes today not only public servants as ordinarily understood, but extends to “at least those persons who are permanently employed by government” (para. 16). The Court decided by a 6:1 majority that Cleary held an “office of profit under the Crown” within the meaning of s 44(iv) and so had been “incapable of being chosen”.
The reasons behind s 44(iv), so far as it concerns public servants, were said to derive from traditions of the British House of Commons: that a public servant could not simultaneously attend adequately to both the duties of a public servant and those of a member of the Parliament, and also could be subject to the opinions of the minister to whom they were responsible; this situation would impinge on both the independence of members of the Parliament and the maintenance of a “politically neutral public service”. That neutrality also requires public servants to refrain from “active and public participation in party politics” (para. 14). These reasons apply to a public servant who is a permanent teacher, even though (it was accepted) “a teacher is not an instance of the archetypical public servant at whom the disqualification was primarily aimed” (para. 18).
It did not matter that Cleary was employed by “the Crown” in right of the State of Victoria and not in right of the Commonwealth; since the exception to s 44(iv) includes ministers of a State, s 44(iv) itself must include State officers. Nor that Cleary had been on leave without pay in order to fight the election; he continued to occupy the position. It did not matter, either, that Cleary had resigned from his position on hearing the outcome of the distribution of preferences and before the result was declared. The words “being chosen” were held to refer to a process of choice, which begins on the polling day. More fully, “incapable of being chosen” extends back to nomination. The process does not include the" declaration of the poll, which is only “the announcement of the choice made” (para. 25).
Deane J dissented, holding that it was sufficient if the candidate is qualified at the moment when the result of the poll is declared, by which point Cleary had resigned from his position. Deane was concerned that to require candidates always to be qualified at the point of nomination deters the more than ten per cent (at that time) of the workforce who are employed in the public service of the Commonwealth or a State. He thought that taking leave without pay or other emoluments, intending to resign if electoral success became apparent, is “preferable […] to the rather devious procedure of an ostensible termination of employment” under a guarantee of reinstatement if not elected, as has been established by Commonwealth and State legislation (para. 19).[note 3]
Jeannie Ferris (1996) [ edit ]
During the period between the declaration of her election in March 1996 and taking her seat on 1 July of that year, Jeannie Ferris had been employed by Liberal Party Senator Nick Minchin. It was unclear at the time whether this constituted holding an "office of profit under the Crown" as specified in subsection 44(iv). To avoid the possibility of her election being declared invalid, Ferris resigned from the Senate only to be immediately re-appointed by the Parliament of South Australia to fill the casual vacancy that her resignation had created.[83]
George Newhouse (2007) [ edit ]
At the 2007 federal election, it was claimed by the Liberal Party that George Newhouse, the high-profile Australian Labor Party candidate for the seat of Wentworth, was ineligible to stand for parliament under subection 44(iv). The basis of the claim was that Newhouse had not resigned from the New South Wales Consumer Disputes Tribunal and so was occupying an "office of profit under the Crown". Liberal frontbencher Andrew Robb claimed that a by-election in Wentworth would be necessary if Newhouse were to win the seat, due to his ineligibility.[84] The matter never came to a head, however, as Newhouse was comfortably defeated by the incumbent Liberal Party candidate and federal Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Re Nash [No 2] (2017) [ edit ]
In the course of the 2017 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, replacements were appointed on 10 November 2017 to all Senate vacancies resulting from disqualification except the seat that had been occupied by Fiona Nash.[85] The recount had indicated that Hollie Hughes should be declared elected and the Attorney-General had asked the High Court to so declare, but Hughes had then notified the Court that there was now a question over her eligibility. After the election, the Attorney-General had appointed defeated candidate Hughes to the federal Administrative Appeals Tribunal; it was not disputed that this was an office of profit under the Crown, which would disqualify Hughes under section 44(iv), and Hughes had resigned from it immediately after the Citizenship Seven decision, hoping that she would then be eligible in the recount. On 15 November the High Court heard submissions on this issue and declared Hughes to be ineligible, reserving its reasons. The reasons were given on 6 December. The Court unanimously found that the words "incapable of being chosen" in section 44 refer to the whole "process of being chosen", the "end-point" of which is a declaration that a candidate has been elected, and no declaration as to this seat had yet been made. A candidate had to be eligible throughout the process; Hughes had been ineligible during part of the process, owing to her tribunal appointment, and therefore could not be declared elected. [86] The recount resumed excluding both Nash and Hughes, electing Jim Molan, the seventh candidate on the Liberals' and Nationals' joint ticket.[87]
Andrew Bartlett (2017) [ edit ]
During the 2017 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, Andrew Bartlett replaced Senator Larissa Waters after a recount. At the time of nomination, Bartlett had been an academic employed by the Australian National University. He claimed to have legal advice that this did not disqualify him under s 44(iv) and his eligibility was not challenged at the same time as that of Hughes. However, the Commonwealth Solicitor-General has suggested that the Senate may need to refer his position to the High Court and the Greens are seeking further legal advice.[88][89]
Steve Martin (2018) [ edit ]
After Senator Jacqui Lambie was found to be ineligible under s 44(i) owing to foreign citizenship, her apparent successor was deemed to be Steve Martin. Martin was mayor of Devonport, Tasmania throughout the period of the election; the question arose whether this was an office of profit under the Crown. The parties agreed that his position was an "office", that it was "of profit" and that the Executive branch of the Government of Tasmania was an element of "the Crown"; the issue was whether the office was "under" the Crown. This was understood to turn upon whether the executive government had "effective control" over appointment to the office (which was by election) or over the tenure or conduct of the office. The High Court, sitting as the federal Court of Disputed Returns on a reference from the Senate, reviewed the Australian and prior English history of the term "office of profit" and determined unanimously that Martin was not ineligible by reason of s 44(iv), there not being a sufficient degree of ministerial control over the tenure or conduct of the office of mayor.[90]
Martin was the second-listed candidate for the Jacqui Lambie Network party in Tasmania. When found to be eligible, he could have stepped down, creating a casual vacancy to which Lambie could have been appointed. He refused to step down and was expelled from the party for disloyalty.[91] He took his seat as an independent.
(v) Pecuniary interest in an agreement with the Commonwealth [ edit ]
As with subsection 44(iv), the aim of subsection 44(v) is to prevent corruption of members by the Executive. It is also to avoid a conflict of interest that could lead a member of the Parliament to give priority to their own financial interest over impartial judgement of policy.
Re Webster (1975) [ edit ]
What constituted a "pecuniary interest" did not arise for consideration by the High Court until 1975 when the Senate referred questions concerning the eligibility of Senator James Webster who was a shareholder in and managing director of a company founded by his late grandfather. The company supplied timber and hardware, by public tender, to both the Postmaster-General's Department and the Department of Housing and Construction. Barwick CJ considered the history of the section and its predecessors, describing it as a vestigial part of the constitution. In his view, it had been inserted not to "protect the public against fraudulent conduct of members of the House", but rather to protect the independence of the parliament against influence by the Crown. On this basis Barwick CJ concluded that the interest "must be pecuniary in the sense that through the possibility of financial gain by the existence or the performance of the agreement, that person could conceivably be influenced by the Crown in relation to Parliamentary affairs".[92]
The decision has been criticised as taking a narrow approach to the construction of the section[93] that robs it of most of its efficacy, rendering it almost useless as a check upon would-be fraudulent politicians[94] and offering "little practical protection to the public interest or Parliament's reputation".[95]
If Webster had been found to have sat while ineligible, he would have been liable to a daily penalty under section 46 of the Constitution,[96] which could have accumulated to more than $57,200.[97] One consequence of the question about Webster's eligibility was the passage in 1975 of the Common Informers (Parliamentary Disqualifications) Act which limited any penalty prior to commencing the suit to $200; although, after the suit has commenced, there is a daily penalty of $200.[98]
Warren Entsch (1999) [ edit ]
The issue arose again in 1999 concerning Warren Entsch and his interest in Cape York Concrete Pty Ltd who had a $175,000 contract to supply concrete for RAAF Scherger.[99] Kim Beazley, the Leader of the Opposition moved that the Court of Disputed Returns should decide whether Entsch's seat in the House of Representatives had become vacant because he had a pecuniary interest in an agreement with the Commonwealth. The motion was lost and the House passed a resolution declaring that Entsch did not have a pecuniary interest within the meaning of section 44(v).[100] Whether the House had power to pass the resolution has been questioned.[101]
Re Day (2017) [ edit ]
On 1 November 2016, Bob Day resigned his seat as a Senator for South Australia, with immediate effect.[102] Shortly after Day's resignation, the Senate referred the question of whether Day had been disqualified from sitting or being elected as a Senator due to an indirect pecuniary interest in the proceeds of a lease of part of a building in Adelaide which Day indirectly owned, as Day's electorate office. The Attorney-General argued that the reasoning of Barwick CJ in Re Webster was incorrect and that the purpose of the subsection was to protect the parliament from the potential for influence, whether that potential arises from the conduct of the executive or a conflict between the duty of a Parliamentarian and their financial interests.[103] On 5 April 2017 the High Court held that Re Webster was wrong and should not be followed; its reasoning was based on consideration of the Convention Debates, as permitted since Cole v Whitfield in 1988. The Court held that Day had an "indirect pecuniary interest" in an agreement with the Commonwealth since at least February 2016 and therefore had not been eligible for nomination as a senator in July 2016. Consequently, his seat was declared vacant.[104][105]
Barry O'Sullivan (2017) [ edit ]
In August 2017, it was reported that Liberal National Party Senator Barry O'Sullivan could be in breach of s 44(v) as a shareholder in a family construction company subcontracted for work on a federally funded road project in Queensland. O'Sullivan denied that the company had such a connection.[106] O'Sullivan is a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, which is reviewing s 44.[7]
David Gillespie (2018) [ edit ]
Nationals member of the House of Representatives, David Gillespie came under scrutiny after the High Court ruling in the Bob Day case. In April 2017, the High Court found that, under section 44(v) of the Australian Constitution, Senator Day had not been eligible to hold public office because of an indirect pecuniary relationship with the Australian government. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) opposition and some community groups believed that Gillespie also had an indirect financial relationship with the federal government, in that he owned a suburban shopping complex in Port Macquarie which leased premises to an Australia Post licensee. In July 2017, the ALP launched a High Court challenge to Gillespie's eligibility as an MP. The case was formally brought by Peter Alley, the ALP candidate for Gillespie's seat of Lyne at the 2016 federal election.[107] Hearings began on 23 August 2017,[108] separately from the s 44(i) cases that commenced in the High Court on the following day.
The action against Gillespie was brought under s 3 of the Common Informers (Parliamentary Disqualifications) Act. This statute is a substitute for Constitution s 46 as authorised by that section. It provides that any person (known as a "common informer") can bring an action for a penalty against a Member of Parliament for sitting in Parliament while disqualified from doing so. During the proceeding, a question arose as to whether a common informer action could be brought against a Member of Parliament without a prior finding by the Court of Disputed Returns or the relevant House of Parliament. The High Court decided unanimously on 21 March 2018 that the Common Informers Act does not confer jurisdiction to determine the eligibility of a member: such jurisdiction is conferred exclusively by Constitution s 47 as substituted by s 376 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 and can exercised only upon a referral by the Parliament to the High Court under s 376; therefore the proceeding under the Common Informers Act "should be stayed until the question whether the defendant is incapable of sitting is determined" following such a referral.[109] The Parliament has not made a referral with respect to Gillespie.
Peter Dutton (2018) [ edit ]
A Federal Court challenge to a migration decision made by Peter Dutton as Minister for Home Affairs claims that the decision is invalid because he was disqualified under Constitution s 44(v). It is claimed that he had a pecuniary interest in an agreement with the public service of the Commonwealth, consisting of an interest in a childcare business that received a Commonwealth government subsidy. He had previously resisted Labor attempts to secure a referral to the High Court on this ground; Labor and he had produced conflicting legal advice. Government lawyers contend that the Federal Court does not have jurisdiction regarding parliamentary eligibility.[110][111][112]
Exemptions [ edit ]
The office of Ministers of State are one category exempted from disqualification under subsection (iv). This exemption is necessary because Constitution s 64 requires a federal Minister (at least after three months from appointment) to be a senator or a member of the House of Representatives.[113] The position of ministers assisting, parliamentary secretaries and for ministers without portfolio is problematic.[114]
The wording of the exemption in relation to the armed forces has been described by law professor Tony Blackshield as "extremely obscure". In his view, while it is generally assumed to apply to "persons who are members of the defence forces other than in a full-time capacity", the obscurity renders that assumption doubtful; and there is some question as to members of the RAAF, which can be comfortably read as part of the "military forces" as elsewhere in the Constitution, but it is harder to include it in the expression "navy or army".[114] It was not thought that active military service during World War I acted to disqualify Senator James O'Loghlin.[115]
Free v Kelly (1996) [ edit ]
One aspect of the challenge to the election of Jackie Kelly in 1996 was that she was serving as an officer of the Royal Australian Air Force at the time of her nomination on 2 February 1996 prior to her transfer to the Air Force Reserve on 17 February. The majority in Sykes v Cleary had determined that the process of being chosen commences on nomination.[26]:at [27] Kelly subsequently conceded that she was incapable of being chosen because she was a full-time officer of the RAAF at the time of her nomination as a candidate.[28]:at [3] Blackshield suggested that Kelly's concession may have been greater than was necessary.[114] Kelly won the subsequent by-election with an increased margin.[83]
Notes [ edit ]
^ [10] In contrast, the Constitution of the United States, which was the principal model for the Australian Constitution, restricts election to Congress to persons who have been US citizens for seven years (House) or nine years (Senate). ^ They were naturalised before 1986, when the renunciation requirement was removed. ^ Each judgment is separately paragraph-numbered.If Canada’s efforts to secure a massive Pacific Rim trade deal indeed pan out, voters may find themselves marking a ballot on Oct. 19 without having had a chance to examine the fine print.
Teams of negotiators, including Trade Minister Ed Fast, are in Atlanta to continue talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a long-awaited 12-country pact that could generate an agreement in principle as early as this week.
Canada, however, finds itself in a unique situation: it’s the only country in the talks that’s in the throes of an election campaign.
With the election less than three weeks away, it’s not clear how much Canadians will learn about the deal, which has stirred up bitter opposition among stakeholders in the dairy, poultry and automotive industries.
“I guess the headlines (of any deal) would be made aware straight away, but it’s probably quite true that it would be a number of weeks before the detail surrounding the agreement would happen,” Noel Campbell, the president of Australian Dairy Farmers, said Wednesday from Atlanta.
“That may well be the case — that the finer detail would not be known (before Oct. 19).”
With speculation that a long-awaited deal could be reached in the coming days, the TPP talks have been prominent on the campaign trail this week.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Tom Mulcair have both accused Conservative Leader Stephen Harper of keeping Canadians in the dark about the talks.
Canadian sources say it’s true the final text might not be publicly available for weeks, but they add they would likely release briefing materials and consider different ways of releasing information to the public and opposition parties.
On Wednesday, Fast said his delegation has asked that the text be made available “immediately” after an agreement.
“We certainly requested that and there are some discussions on the timing of the text, but I believe it is certainly possible.”
If the deal is signed before the election, the Conservatives would surely use it to woo voters, trumpeting the agreement as evidence of their prowess as builders of economic prosperity through freer global trade.
But the Harper government’s trade pacts have a tendency to take months — sometimes years — to see the full light of day.
The agreement in principle for the Canada-Europe free trade deal was signed in October 2013, but the treaty still has yet to be finalized as it undergoes “legal scrubbing” by lawyers. An overview of the deal is available online.
In another case, the Harper government’s initial announcement about its foreign investment protection agreement with China — FIPA — turned out to be different than advertised when the final text was released eight months later, said international investment law expert Gus Van Harten.
“We do have examples where the government has taken advantage of the absence of a public text, which of course it controls, in order to make misleading claims about its supposed achievements,” said Van Harten, a York University professor and author of “Sold Down the Yangtze,” a book about the FIPA deal.
In February 2012, Van Harten said Harper indicated the FIPA would protect foreign investors from discrimination to create a level playing field that would prevent a government from favouring domestic companies over foreign firms.
But when the details were made public in September 2012, he said agreement had a very broad exemption for existing discriminatory measures, meaning any law or policy that existed at the time the pact was put into force could continue indefinitely.
Van Harten said he was “pretty shocked” to see how many concessions Canada gave up in the deal when he read the final document.
Nonetheless, there are good reasons to withhold specifics, especially during the negotiation period or when lawyers comb through the text after a deal has been signed, he added.
“The problem is when I see a kind of manipulation of timing to maximize the political benefit when the text is not available,” Van Harten said, adding that he doesn’t expect the public to see a copy of the text until after the election.
If full details of the deal aren’t released before the vote, Campbell said he believes the Harper government could find itself in an uncomfortable position as the election campaign winds down.
“I think that government would come under a fair bit of scrutiny in that time frame to try and get them to open up as to what the deal was about,” said Campbell, who is also chairman of the Australian Dairy Industry Council.
“Yeah, it would be quite a difficult situation.”Chris Algieri is the underdog in the Barclays Center here this Friday night but if he does lose as expected to Amir Khan he will pick up an important consolation prize.
As the two welterweights came together for the ritual head-to-head stare-down in Brooklyn, Algieri revealed: 'The purse here will get me close to finishing paying off my student loan.'
Algieri graduated from college with a degree in sports science and nutrition and is planning to seek a master's degree at university once his boxing career is over.
Amir Khan and Chris Algieri pose after taking part in a press conference ahead of their fight on Friday night
Khan and Algieri stare each other down at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon
Algieri has thanked Khan for giving him an opportunity but insists he is confident ahead of Friday's fight
'I'm confident,' says Algieri. 'But whatever happens I say thank you to Amir for giving me this opportunity.'
Khan turned up in a Brooklyn Nets baseball cap in support of the basketball team which uses the Barclays Center.
He reminded everybody: 'The last time I fought in New York I defeated another local guy, Paulie Malignaggi. I'm expecting to give everyone another performance to enjoy.'
Khan trains at Private Gym in Brooklyn with trainer Virgil Hunter as he prepares for Friday's big fight
Algieri takes part in a media workout at the Barclays Center - the venue where he will take on KhanThese lawsuits are expensive, with Justice Department lawyers doing battle, often for years, with the largest law firms in America. But the return on the agency’s investment is substantial. The Justice Department recovers hundreds of millions of dollars every year in cleanup costs to replenish the Superfund program’s coffers, which enables the E.P.A. to conduct more hazardous waste cleanups, including emergency responses to chemical releases like those that occurred after Hurricane Harvey.
For the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department, which represents the E.P.A. and other federal agencies in court, funding from the E.P.A. is essential. In its budget proposal for 2018, the Justice Department indicated that it expected to receive approximately $25 million from the E.P.A., enough to pay for 69 lawyers as well as support staff, nearly 20 percent of the division.
If the E.P.A. stopped paying for Superfund work, significant layoffs would be likely at the Justice Department. But that would be just the beginning. More than half of the Environment Division’s work is defensive, meaning it represents the E.P.A. and other agencies in lawsuits brought by regulated industries, environmental groups and state attorneys general. That work is considered nondiscretionary — the Justice Department must represent the government when federal agencies like the E.P.A. are defendants — so the spending cuts and layoffs would have to come from elsewhere in the Environment Division.
As a result, there could be cuts exceeding 40 percent from the Environment Division offices that prosecute environmental crimes like the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal, seek civil penalties and natural resource damages in cases like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and sue polluters that are responsible for Superfund hazardous waste sites.
Mr. Pruitt’s proposal is a breathtakingly bad idea, giving polluters license to do their dirty work with less fear of punishment and a greater ability to outlast an understaffed Justice Department in court. The victims would be ordinary Americans, many of them poor and minorities, who often live closest to where environmental violations occur and where the worst Superfund sites are located.2019 Honda CRF230F, Looking to upgrade your ride today? We take trade ins year round! Top dollar for trades! At RC Hill Honda of Deland, ALL 2009 AND NEWER USED METRIC STREET BIKES FALL UNDER THE RC HILL CERTIFIED USED MOTORCYCLE PROGRAM AND COME WITH A FREE SIX MONTH LIMITED WARRANTY. At RC Hill Honda of DeLand, we use MARKET BASED PRICING to make sure our customers are getting the best values in the market, and our market is the entire state of Florida. You may not believe this, but...the local, state and national governments do not care about treating you as well as we do. They actually require us to collect tax, title, license, and other fees. Can you believe the nerve??? We try to make up for them by offering our customers the best prices in Florida on new and pre-owned motorcycles. Out of state pricing may vary and will be assessed a convenience fee of $189.00 for title processing, tag work and fex-ex shipping of paperwork. We are here to serve you Tues-Fri 9-6, Sat 9-5. * Shipping is available to anywhere in the USA! Call for details* **We will buy your bike even if you do not buy ours** ALL PRICE INCLUDES ALL HONDA BONUS BUCKS, DEALER BUCKS, ACCESSORY BUCKS, REBATES, INCENTIVES, PROMOS or DEMO'S, must add tax, tag and dealer admin, fees. Come on in and check us out! 2019 Honda® CRF230F Nature Is Your Playground. Here’s the beauty of Honda’s CRF dirtbike lineup: There’s something for everyone. Sure, our motocrossers are spectacular machines, but we also know that most of us just want to get out in nature, relax, and enjoy a great trail ride—especially with friends and family. Sound like a great time to you? Then here’s your bike—the CRF230F. It’s just the right size for most adults or larger teens. It offers plenty of suspension travel for taming the bumps and lots of ground clearance, all without a saddle height that’s intimidating. An effortless electric starter and a proven air-cooled Honda four-stroke engine are paragons of convenience and reliability. So grab your riding gear and head for an open trail. We’ll take care of the rest. Features may include: Reliability—That’s a Honda Four-Stroke. For years, Honda has made the best and most reliable four-stroke engines in the business. And that certainly includes our air-cooled off-road singles. Top it off with gas, check the oil, and you’re good to go. Push-Button Convenience. You don’t hand-crank your car—why kick-start your dirtbike? Turn a key, push a button, and you’re on your way, even on cold mornings or at high altitudes. Sharp, Motocross-Style Graphics. Our entire line of CRF off-road machines look great, driven by the fluid designs of our race bikes. But that bodywork is more than just beautiful—it’s tough enough to shrug off the inevitable dings of ofImage copyright Gabriella Engels
Zimbabwean First Lady Grace Mugabe has so far failed to appear in a South African court over an assault case despite officials saying she would do.
South African police said in the late afternoon they did not know where Mrs Mugabe was.
A 20-year-old South African woman has accused Mrs Mugabe of hitting her on the head with an extension cord during a confrontation at a hotel.
She released an image of a face injury online. Mrs Mugabe has not commented.
Gabriella Engels accused Mrs Mugabe, 52, of hitting her after finding her with her two sons in a hotel room in Sandton, a plush suburb north of Johannesburg, the BBC's Pumza Fihlani reports.
The attack is said to have happened on Sunday evening.
Africa Live: Updates on this and other African stories
"The negotiations over the suspect handing herself over have not concluded and our investigations have not finalised," police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo told AFP news agency.
Police Minister Fikile Mbalula earlier said Mrs Mugabe had handed herself over to police but was not under arrest, and would appear in court early on Tuesday afternoon local time.
Hours later Mr Naidoo clarified: "The minister learned later that it just didn't materalise as it was supposed to."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Grace Mugabe may face assault charges
What does Engels say?
In a phone interview for South Africa's News24 news site, she said she and a friend had been visiting the sons, Robert and Chatunga, at the Capital 20 West Hotel.
A bodyguard asked her and her friend to wait in a separate room, after which the assault occurred, she said.
"When Grace entered I had no idea who she was," she told News24.
"She walked in with an extension cord and just started beating me with it. She flipped and just kept beating me with the plug. Over and over. I had no idea what was going on. I was surprised… I needed to crawl out of the room before I could run away.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Grace Mugabe, 52, is the Zimbabwean president's second wife
"Her ten bodyguards just stood there watching, no-one did anything, no-one tried to help me."
"There was blood everywhere," she added. "Over my arms, in my hair, everywhere."
What do the police say?
In a statement, they confirmed that on Monday an unnamed 20-year-old South African woman had registered a "case of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm".
She was "allegedly assaulted by a prominent woman at a hotel in Sandton," they said, without naming Mrs Mugabe.
Who is Grace Mugabe?
Image copyright AFP
Began affair with Robert Mugabe, 41 years her senior, while working as a typist in state house
Mr Mugabe later said his first wife Sally, who was terminally ill at the time, knew and approved of the relationship
Married Mr Mugabe, her second husband, in 1996 in an extravagant ceremony. They have three children
Nicknamed "Gucci Grace" by her critics who accuse her of lavish spending
Along with her husband, is subject to EU and US sanctions, including travel bans
Praised by supporters for her charitable work and founding of an orphanage
Received a PhD in September 2014, a month after being nominated to take over the leadership of the Zanu-PF women's league
Why was she in South Africa?
She was due to be treated for an ankle injury, sustained during a road accident last month, according to Zimbabwean media.
It is not clear whether she was travelling on a diplomatic or a normal passport.
Mrs Mugabe is seen as a staunch defender of her husband, 93, and is the leader of the powerful women's league of Zimbabwe's governing Zanu-PF party.
Zimbabwean Information Minister Christopher Mushowe told the BBC he was unaware of the allegations against her.The US patent system is a mess. One way to fix it is to abolish software patents.
That is by far the most incendiary proposal the Electronic Frontier Foundation offers in its comprehensive report on overhauling a painfully broken patent system. The report, two years in the making, suggests everything from strengthening the quality of patents to making patent litigation less costly. And there, on page 27 of the 29-page report, is "Abolish software patents."
The argument is that software patents may not just be flawed, but utterly unnecessary. This hasn't always been EFF's stance on patents, says Adi Kamdar, one of the report's authors. But as the group compiled the report, it received 16,500 public comments from people in the business, academic, and policy communities. The idea that patents should be eliminated entirely was a common theme.
"A big chunk of the engineers we talked to, and even some of the lawyers and activists and policy folk don't like software patents at all," Kamdar says. "They said it hinders their innovation flows when they think about creating new things, and the idea of operating in a patent minefield really hurts them."
And so the EFF came around to the idea that, at the least, Congress should commission a study to determine if software patents should exist to begin with. That is not as crazy as it may seem. As the report notes, New Zealand—albeit a country with a comparatively tiny tech community—recently amended its laws to prevent patenting software. And Kamdar adds that patents haven't always been such an integral part of the software world. Microsoft, for one, acquired just five patents in its first 15 years, during which it became a $1 billion company. Today, Microsoft applies for 2,000 to 2,500 patents annually.
"It's a peer pressure, all-the-cool-kids-are-doing-it system right now," say Kamdar. "As soon as one company starts acquiring patents everyone else thinks they need to for defensive purposes. That puts pressure on the whole system."
The problem is, unlike with other types of patents, software patents often cover every solution to a certain problem, rather than a specific solution, with a specific implementation. That leads to an abundance of vague, broad patents, so that even when smaller companies do acquire patents, they're unlikely to do them any good against a patent troll. And so, Kamdar says, many of the startups EFF talked to over the course of its research are operating as if patents can't protect them anyway, and forgo them altogether.
And so, if software patents were to disappear, Kamdar believes not much would change, except that patent trolls would lose their power, and large companies like Apple wouldn't have to keep paying them hundreds of millions of dollars for infringing on decades-old, overly broad patents.
Of course, Kamdar acknowledges that convincing Congress to take up such a controversial and fundamental reform would be "a heavy lift." Which is why he says, in the mean time, there are steps that the business community should be taking to obviate the software patent system.
For starters, they could sign the License on Transfer agreement, which says that in the event that they sell their patents to a third party, every other company in the License on Transfer network would receive a license for those patents. That would keep patent trolls from attacking other companies in the network. While that wouldn't stop patent trolls from defending their existing |
to hotel security.
Metro Police attempted to contact Brown in the hotel room, however they were not permitted entry, and it was later determined that he already left the location prior to officers’ arrival.
Police have not heard from Brown regarding the incident and the investigation remains on going.
This isn't the first incident involving Brown at the resort.
In May of 2015, Police said a man got into an argument with Brown on a Monday morning and that Brown punched him.Marco Grob for TIME
If soccer is a religion in England, then the Slug and Lettuce pub in Putney is its Vatican. There, over warm beer and soggy fries, middle-aged men pontificate on everything from the inherent sinfulness of the offside trap to the fallibility of Wayne Rooney's left foot. But like church officials confronted with Galileo's telescope, football's high priests can't quite make sense of Didier Drogba. "He's a weapon, not a footballer," says one. "A specimen," says another. "The scariest footballer in the world."
Drogba, 32, a striker for England's Chelsea Football Club and the captain of the Côte d'Ivoire team, has shown the world what's possible when power and grace fuse on the soccer pitch. Imagine the body of an NBA star with feet as nimble as a prima ballerina's. When the World Cup kicks off in South Africa in June, he will carry the hopes of a continent as Africa's best-known soccer star. (West African fans will toast him with a beer glass called the Drogba. It's nearly twice the size of a normal mug.)
No one knows the rickety and high-spirited but often heartbreaking touring bus that is African soccer better than Drogba. At the 2006 World Cup, his homeland ravaged by civil war, he organized a statement from the Elephants, as the Ivorian national team is referred to, calling for peace. Many credit the ensuing calm for allowing reconciliation to begin. At a match last March, 22 Ivorians were killed in the crush to see their beloved heroes play. After the game, Drogba resolved to donate every dollar he earns from endorsements to a charity he set up to build new hospitals in the country.
Drogba is conflicted about his stardom; the same love of No. 11 that brought Ivorians together in 2006 also led to the fatal tumult last year. "I'd like the country to ultimately be able to deal with political problems itself," he says in his soft, French-accented English. "It's not really good to depend on the win or defeat of the national team. That means there is something wrong."
On the pitch, Drogba is known for the strength with which he holds off opposing defenders; it's that awesome ability that scares and baffles the high priests at the Slug and Lettuce. But why should it surprise them? This sensitive young man already carries so much of Africa's weight on his wide, sturdy shoulders.
TIME 100 Social-Networking Index: 97,611
Next Graça MachelReal-world testing of Li-Fi, an advanced wireless communication technology, has found it to be 100 times faster than currently-available Wi-Fi networks. Reporting impressive data transmission rates of around 1 GB per second, the new system was recently trialled, for the first time, in office and industrial settings in Tallinin, Estonia. At such speeds, it would take mere seconds to download a high-definition film of 1.5 GB.
Developed back in 2011 by scientist Harald Haas, of the University of Edinburgh, Li-Fi is a high speed, bidirectional wireless technology based on visible light communication (VLC). Using visible light ranging from 400 to 800 terahertz (THz), the technology can transmit data in binary code, by switching LED bulbs on and off within nanoseconds. The bulbs are turned on and off at too high a speed to be visible to the naked eye.
In the past, lab tests of Li-Fi have yielded incredibly high speeds of up to 224 gigabit per second. Apart from faster data transmission, Li-Fi boasts several advantages over current Wi-Fi technologies. Sicne light waves cannot pass through walls, it ensures less interference between different devices and greater security against hacking. Furthermore, unlike other networks, it can be safely used in sensitive areas, like hospitals, airplane cabins and nuclear power plants, without causing any kind of electromagnetic interference.
While Li-Fi indeed has the power to completely replace current Wi-Fi networks in the coming decades, researchers believe that creating a whole new infrastructure for the latest technology would prove difficult. Perhaps, the most efficient system would be one in which the two technologies work in tandem. As a result, scientists are currently looking for ways to retrofit existing devices to make them compatible with the new technology. Haas, the inventor of Li-Fi, said:
All we need to do is fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device and this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission. In the future we will not only have 14 billion light bulbs, we may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide for a cleaner, greener, and even brighter future.
For the very first time, the technology has been tested in real-world environments, by Estonia-based company Velmenni. According to Deepak Solanki, the CEO of Velmenni, high speed Li-Fi networks will likely be available to consumers within the next three or four years. He added:
We are doing a few pilot projects within different industries where we can utilize the VLC (visible light communication) technology. Currently we have designed a smart lighting solution for an industrial environment where the data communication is done through light. We are also doing a pilot project with a private client where we are setting up a Li-Fi network to access the internet in their office space.
A few months back, we talked about a similar technology, currently being developed by Brown University scientists, that uses terahertz waves to wirelessly deliver data at speeds hundred times faster than the Wi-Fi and cellular networks of present times.
Via: IBTimes UK / Image Credits: Belfast TelegraphThey focused on up close objects in the video. Definitely impressive. But I am interested in far away objects like in Elite Dangerous or Assetto Corsa. Not the cockpit but down the road or deep space. Where most of attention is while in game. Im sure the cockpit experience in the 8k will be amazing because its close. I am concerned with DISTANT objects. Not incredibly up close pics of dashboard numbers. It really seems like the fine folks at Pimax are not Gamers, and need some guidance as to what gamers are looking for. No offence intended. But in some games, far distance is what you are looking at. Im very impressed by Pimax’s more than willingness to bend over backwards for backers. Even through the last few days, I believe in this company and believe that they have learned from there mistakes and are desperate to meet the communities expectations. If they continue this course, i will be first in line for there next hmd.Justise Winslow hit the jackpot at the 2015 NBA Draft. Sure, there is some disappointment that comes along with slipping in the draft, but it is invaluable for a player to go to a good situation with a great franchise.
Getting drafted to the right team will always be better than simply being a top-five pick. It's one of the biggest factors in a player's ability to sustain success and longevity in an ever-changing league. While the talent and offered experience of today's prospects has changed, the expectations of these young men have not. They're expected to lead struggling franchises out of the league's basement and into the playoffs. The truth is that many of them aren't ready for such a task, but that doesn't matter. They'll quickly go from shaking hands with Adam Silver to a team with guys who are a year, maybe two, older than they are, guys who were put in the same position a season earlier. It's a dangerous mix that many times turns these once promising prospects into NBA journeymen. The Miami Heat helped Winslow avoid the pitfalls that many of his contemporaries will soon be forced to deal with.
Winslow won't be asked to carry the team. He won't be asked to do more than what his abilities allow. He won't be the reason for the team's success or failure. Winslow enters an environment where he'll be able to learn how to be a professional before he's asked to take the reins. He'll be allowed to grow into an All-Star before being asked to perform like one. He'll have Dwyane Wade (provided he stays with Miami), Chris Bosh and Pat Riley as resources to help him along the way. He wasn't the top-five pick that many projected him to be, but he won the night and could win a lot more as a member of the Heat.
"It's always been a dream of mine to be in the NBA and to go to an organization like the Heat," Winslow said. "[With] Pat Riley and what he's done for the team, where he's brought them from, how far they've come, winning championships, it's just a blessing."
Winslow has experience, at least at the college level, playing alongside another dominant player after winning a national championship with Jahlil Okafor, the third pick in last night's draft. That time spent at Duke will go a long way with helping him play with Wade and Bosh, something he's looking forward to.
“I feel like we can mesh well," he said. "I feel like we're all so talented and can do so many things on the court that we'll be able to complement each other's skills and our presence on the court will be great."
He'll quickly learn that Miami is about competing for championships. There is a winning culture in South Beach where championships are a top priority and expectation. The Heat want back in the NBA Finals after missing the playoffs this year. There is great motivation in Miami to prove this year was a fluke and that they can again be champions without LeBron James. Winslow has won on every level, so the culture in Miami should work for him; they want to win now and so does he.
"Yeah, that's something that's definitely attractive and I like," Winslow said. "I've always won, always been a winner. So to have a leader of an organization like Pat Riley, he's not trying to rebuild or look down the line, he's focused on right now. That's something that really intrigues me and motivates me. I don't want to look a couple years down the line; I want to win now. And so to be a part of an organization with a leader like that is something that I really like."
Considered a steal by many, Winslow isn't too focused on where he was picked. To the 19-year-old, the process and opportunity are both blessings. While being No. 10 could factor into his motivation at some point, it's clear to most that the young man won the night. He's a professional basketball player for a great organization with strong leadership. Not only is he blessed, he's been positioned to succeed and you can't ask for much more than that.
"It's not about the number I go," Winslow said. "It's just about being part of the league and being a part of such a great organization. I'm very happy. You can say a blessing in disguise, but I just see it as a blessing, nothing disguised about it. Being able to play professionally is something I always dreamed of, so obviously I'm just very happy."Governor Sarah Palin is headed to New York for a dose of international politics. She may meet some foreign leaders, and she is set to speak at an anti-Iran rally outside the United Nations complex. But what would happen if she were to ask for a briefing from former Republican Secretaries of State to prepare for her foray into foreign policy? The answer is she would learn that the McCain foreign policy has an extremist approach to Iran.
On Monday, five former Secretaries of State had an open forum at George Washington University, which is scheduled to be televised this weekend by CNN. At the forum, the five former Secretaries -- Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Colin Powell, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright -- agreed on one important change in U.S. policy. All said it was time to talk to Iran. Each of the five had their own preferences for how that dialogue would be conducted. But they all said the United States and Iran should engage in direct diplomacy in which all of the issues in dispute would be covered.
John McCain has a different view. He says there is nothing to discuss. Iran's government is abhorrent. The world should ratchet up economic sanctions until Tehran capitulates on its nuclear program by stopping the enrichment of uranium. Stopping Iran's enrichment program is the one thing everyone agrees is necessary -- Democrats, Republicans, Europeans, and even Russia and China. Nobody accepts the idea of an Iran with nuclear weapons. The issue is how to prevent that nightmare scenario from happening. McCain, meanwhile, seems to favor a policy of Bush plus.
For almost five years now, the Bush administration has been trying to get a permanent freeze on Iran's enrichment of uranium. But whether it has chosen unilateral demands, military threats, unilateral economic sanctions, or even multinational action at the United Nations, Washington has failed to stop advanced in Iran's nuclear program. All along, the administration has refused to do what most others countries have done: Offer a direct dialogue with Tehran with no pre-conditions.
John McCain not only agrees with the Bush administration, he has even accused the Bush White House of not acting aggressively enough. Indeed, he has been the clearest about the possible need for military force against Iran, saying in a way no other major politician has, that the only thing worse than using military force against Iran is an Iran with a nuclear weapons capability. This kind of argument for military force is consistent with what McCain has said on the question of using force against North Korea, Iraq, Syria, and others. In the case of all those countries, he has made arguments or proposals indicating that in McCain's world view the use of military force may not be a first resort but it is also not a last resort.
The Democrats have a better idea. Let's propose talks with Tehran. That is what Washington did when it engaged in vigorous diplomacy with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and it what the Bush administration is doing by negotiating nuclear agreements with North Korea today. At the same time, Senators Obama and Biden say we should develop a new proposal of incentives and disincentives, secure the support of our friends and allies around the world, and then put that new proposal directly to Iran. This approach is the best way to find out if Iran's nuclear ambitions can be checked with diplomacy. If not, we will be in the best position internationally to pressure Iran with economic sanctions or more.
In other words, the Democrats are proposing a path of sensible diplomacy. That path has now been endorsed by these five Secretaries of State.
As part of her visit later this week to New York and the United Nations, we are going to hear Governor Palin talk about the danger of Iran and probably repeat the McCain policy prescriptions. If properly reported by the media, at least voters will have a clear choice. On one side we have Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and James Baker. On the other side, there is Sarah Palin backed by a bellicose John McCain. That is a debate the Democrats should win.They can also pose as free WiFi in public areas to hijack personal data. Talking Point explores how people need to protect themselves better from cyber attacks.
SINGAPORE: The host of Talking Point Steven Chia was engrossed in conversation with a friend at a food court, oblivious to the fact that someone else was watching and listening in - via his own mobile phone on the table.
The hacker, who was able to manipulate the phone’s camera and other functions remotely, was able to pinpoint where Mr Chia’s lunch location was, and even read the contents of an SMS message that he had just typed out.
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“Whatever you were doing, we had knowledge about it,” Mr Wong Wai Tuck told Mr Chia later. “While you were having lunch at Food Republic, we took a few pictures and a video. We also found out what you were talking about.”
Fortunately for the Mediacorp host, the ones who broke into his mobile phone were ethical hackers from the Whitehat Society at the Singapore Management University. The exercise was part of an experiment to show how hackers could easily compromise a mobile phone, starting with just the knowledge of its owner’s number.
WATCH: More on how your phone can be hacked (2:08)
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In an era of hyper-connectivity, one in three Singaporeans does not have anti-virus software on their handphones, according to a survey by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA). Some reasons cited were that they did not know the software exists, or that they simply did not see the need for mobile security.
This issue of how Singaporeans are not doing enough to protect themselves from cyber threats like ransomware and phishing attacks was discussed on a recent episode of Talking Point, a current affairs show on Mediacorp Channel 5.
BEWARE PUBLIC WIFI DANGER
For example, connecting to a free WiFi network in public places can be risky, as you may be open to a man-in-the-middle attack.
This is where a hacker uses his phone’s own hotspot to pose as a free WiFi network, and when you connect to it, it gives him access to your phone, personal files and credit card details.
Hackers can use their phone hotspots to pose as a free Wi Fi network.
The CSA survey found that more than six in 10 respondents connect to such WiFi networks in public places, whether or not they are familiar with them. And, worryingly, a third of them make online purchases and conduct financial transactions on these networks.
This means that hackers could potentially access your sensitive information and sell them on the Dark Web, a hard-to-access part of the Internet often used for illegal activities.
Tom, a Dark Web operator who declined to give his real name for security reasons, said that a hacker can buy your stolen data and slowly build a profile around you, gathering your personal information, where you work and the credit cards that you own.
“After that, I can initiate a lot of attacks. For example, I can call your bank and say that I lost my credit card. I can impersonate you and do bank transactions on your behalf,” he said.
Using what appears to be a free Wi Fi network in a public place can pose a risk.
Mr Richard Koh, an industry partner of Cyber Security Awareness Alliance and chief technology officer of Microsoft Singapore, warned that “there is a huge urgency for us as a nation to learn more about what the threats look like and how to protect ourselves”.
Some measures include using strong passwords - a combination of characters, numbers and symbols - and religiously updating the operating system of devices.
Watch this episode of Talking Point here on Toggle.A long-awaited sports facility officially opened in Frederica this month and is already booked solid with games and tournaments.
Delaware Public Media's Katie Peikes reports on DE Turf's bookings and expectations for its contribution to Delaware's economy.
Delaware State University’s women’s soccer team is moving its home games to DE Turf Sports Complex and they’re one of many local teams using the field. Goalkeeper Leslie Fazzio said she is excited to leave behind sharing Alumni Stadium on campus with football and other sports.
“As a soccer player, it’s just so much more exciting that it’s brand new and top notch,” Fazzio said about the complex.
The 12-field, 84 acre facility is on pace to host 20 tournaments this year — double what DE Turf Executive Director Chris Giacomucci said he had expected. The tournaments range from football to ultimate frisbee and will serve athletes of all ages. Giacomucci said they will help fuel tourism in the First State.
“When mom and dad are coming to watch their son or daughter play they need a place to stay, they need a place to eat,” Giacomucci said. “So we work with a housing company that schedules all the hotel rooms in the area. We already have blocks set up with hotels in Kent County and the entire state really.”
Giacomucci anticipates close to 500 hotel rooms to be occupied per tournament. The complex is expected to have an economic impact of $18 million per year, based on a recent study.
The facility is also drawing in sponsors. M&T Bank announced Monday that it invested $20.7 million in the construction and development of DE Turf.
Initially, they began a partnership with DE Turf when they looked at offering some bond financing to help out with the construction of the facility. Nick Lambrow, M&T’s regional president for Delaware said after that was completed, they decided to invest in a sponsorship with the field because “it’s such a great investment for the state.”
“If you think about what this sports complex is — an asset for the county and the state — it really does embody a community spirit and we love to invest in infrastructure projects that help the state or the county out,” Lambrow said.
They signed a three-year sponsorship to name Field 2, the northwestern-most field facing Route-1, as M&T Bank Field.LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) - The Republican Governors Association on Wednesday released its first television ad in the Kentucky governor's race, but a portion of the ad features stock video of miners in Mexico.
The RGA's ad criticizes Democrat Jack Conway's position on federal energy regulations that would impact the state's coal industry. It seeks to tie Conway with President Barack Obama, who is unpopular in Kentucky.
Until this week, the RGA had been absent from the television airwaves following Republican Matt Bevin's primary victory in late May. The group didn't disclose how much it was spending on the ad buy.
The ad shows video of miners walking through a mine. Kentucky Democrats pointed to a stock video website, which allows users to download the mining clip for $97. The RGA appears to have inverted the stock video for its use.
See the ad here, and the stock video here. Supporting information for the stock footage shows it was shot at Mina el Nopal, a mine in Guanajuato, Mexico.
Jon Thompson, a spokesman for the Republican Governors Association, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Some of the ad's claims themselves also need clarification, according to a WAVE 3 News Reality Check.
"Conway supported Obama on cap-and-trade," the ad's announcer says. "It's been called a national energy tax that could kill thousands of Kentucky jobs and hike our utility rates."
Cap-and-trade puts limits on greenhouse gas emissions by providing companies with allowances -- the "cap." Companies can then sell their unused allowances -- the "trade."
Conway's position on cap-and-trade during his 2010 U.S. Senate campaign was cloudy. In 2009, he opposed President Obama's initial plan but said he could support it with certain changes. When Congress didn't make the changes, Conway came out against the bill.
"I'm against cap-and-trade, too -- always have been," Conway said during a 2010 debate with Republican Rand Paul on Fox News Channel.
"No -- that's not true," interrupted moderator Chris Wallace.
The Republican Governors Association ad also portrays Conway as a supporter of the national health care law. It quotes Conway saying he would've been "proud" to vote for it, something he said during an April 2010 interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal's editorial board.
"There was a time for Democrats to stand up and be a Democrat. I would've been proud to vote for it," Conway said. Yet he later said he had concerns that the law didn't allow the federal Medicare program to buy pharmaceuticals in bulk, which Conway said would've saved money.
Conway began running television ads of his own on Tuesday. Bevin has yet to air a TV ad in the general election, although he spent more than $1 million during a closely contested Republican primary.
Copyright 2015 WAVE 3 News. All rights reserved.Introduction
Specifications
DPI: 8200
Sensor Type: Laser
No. of Buttons: 7
Game Genre: RTS, MMORPG
Memory Size: 128 KB
No. of Macro Keys: 11
No. of Game Profiles: 5
Lighting Effect: Yes
Pause-Break Effect: Yes
Color Options: 7
USB cable length: 1.8m
Weight-In Design: No
Graphical UI: Yes
Industrial Rubber-Coating: Yes
Weight: 185 g
Gold-Platted USB: Yes
Dimension: 147 x 67.5 x 38.8 mm
Tt eSPORTS has been around for some time now, and they offer a great deal of gaming gear. Today, we will take a thorough look at their Level 10 M gaming mouse that was designed in collaboration with BMW's design department in the US. The result is a very odd-looking mouse by normal standards, with several novel features. Currently priced at $99, it is also one of the most expensive mice on the market. This mouse is, aside from its BMW exterior, equipped with the Avago ADNS-9800 laser sensor—the best laser sensor currently available. It is capable of tracking at up to 8200 DPI and has a very high failure speed. The mouse also has seven buttons and a four-way slider button.In what is increasingly looking like a tit-for-tat game of politics, mere days after Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva formally introduced federal legislation declaring 1.7 million acres around the Grand Canyon a national monument, his colleague, Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, introduced another piece of legislation intended to undermine it.
In a statement, Gosar says his bill, called The Protecting Local Communities from Executive Overreach Act, will “protect property rights, water rights and jobs from presidential abuse of the Antiquities Act” — the federal legislation granting the president executive authority to declare national monuments — but Grijalva says this is just classic Gosar railing against the federal government and touting the agenda of a few small interest groups.
“His opposition is based on myths,” Grijalva tells New Times. “Gosar needs to own up to the fact that he’s on the fringe of every public-land argument we have in this country.”
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Whether to establish a national monument for the watershed area around the Grand Canyon is a bitterly contentious debate in Arizona, and lately, Gosar, who is known for his relentless desire to curb “federal overreach,” has stepped up his fight.
Gosar did not respond to a request for comment, but in a recent statement, he claims: “While originally created in good faith, the Antiquities Act has been repeatedly abused in order to appease special-interest groups and bypass the legislative process.”
He believes no president should have the “unilateral authority to create massive new national monuments by executive fiat without local public input [because] it is, after all, the people living near these national monuments who will be the most affected by their creation.”
(The U.S. Supreme Court has considered and upheld the broad powers given to the president under the Antiquities Act three times since it was passed in 1906.)
As he’s done in the past, Gosar then goes on to state that the proposed monument has “significant local opposition” — a claim that environmentalists and Grijalva say is false.
“[Gosar’s] wrong. First of all, local communities have given their input and there’s signifcant support [for the monument],” Grijalva says, “but the premise that if you have some groups opposed to it that are supposedly local [means that] no one supports it is false.”
Grijalva makes a point to mention that his legislation has drawn wide praise from a variety of people and organizations both locally and nationally.
“I know of nothing but overall support for the monument and for protecting public lands in Arizona. I think [Gosar] is just throwing [criticism] out there,” Sandy Bahr, director of the Arizona Chapter of the Sierra Club, tells New Times.
(A 2015 Colorado College study found that 73 percent of Arizonans support monument status for the Grand Canyon watershed.)
Proposed National Monument Sierra Club
"The Antiquities Act has withstood the test of time, helping to protect places such as Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Saguaro; it can withstand the short-sighted and uninformed attacks of Congressman Gosar. He truly is out of step with the American people and the people of Arizona when it comes to public-lands protections,” she adds.
Grijalva also points out that when the Secretary of the Interior was considering a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon in 2012 and more than a million people contributed to the public comment period, 85 percent were in support of the action.
“That seems to suggest some level of support nationwide since anyone who supported the moratorium would logically be in support of permanent protection [for the area],” he explains.
Gosar, in defending his stance that the monument has little local support, also suggested recently that Grijalva is using “tribes as political pawns to implement a misguided agenda of extremist environmental groups.”
“It is insulting at best, and a lie,” Grijalva says. “One of the things that he fails to recognize is that the affiliated tribes around the Grand Canyon support the legislation. And they support it because they were the architects of it.
“The area is sacred to tribes, honeycombed with sacred sites and historical sites. The preservation of those is a big top priority of the tribes… Our office didn’t just file a bill, we spent considerable time [drafting it] with the tribes, and it is unique in that it calls for the tribes to have a role in the land-use decisions and long-term planning [for the monument].”
The ironic aspect of Gosar’s comment, he adds, is that “he has consistently ignored what native tribes want. That is his record…Maybe if Gosar and his staff had taken any time to talk to the tribes [about the monument] he would understand that they support it.
“Do you want to know what this is really about?” Grijalva asks. “It’s about mining [interests], in general, and uranium mining specifically.
“Gosar has been [the mining industry’s] water-boy since the time he’s got into Congress…He might try to disguise it, but that’s the water he’s carrying. And to me, it’s a threat to the Grand Canyon’s existence.”
Read Grijalva's Bill:
Read Grijalva's Response to Grand Canyon Watershed Monument Myths:Amid shouts and catcalls from both sides of the political divide, Ari Goldkind lobbed one-liners at Doug Ford on Thursday night as the leading candidates to be Toronto’s next mayor gathered for their latest debate.
Though he appeared to pay little attention to the fourth-place contender at earlier debates, Ford took aim at Goldkind early in the evening, describing him as a “big, rich defence attorney” out of touch with the difficulties faced by “hard-working people.”
Ford has frequently levelled similar criticisms against rival John Tory.
“Let me just say this,” Goldkind responded. “Ford — what does it stand for? Falsify. Overstate. Repeat. Deny.”
The quip brought a roar from the crowd. Many shouted at Goldkind to “go home” while others sounded their support.
Goldkind then added: “Nobody knows more about defence attorneys, and the need for them, Doug, than you,” to a further eruption from the crowd.
Ford shot back that he has “never needed a defence attorney” in his life and called on Goldkind to retract his remark.
“I don’t even know why you’re at the table,” Ford added.
Goldkind, smiling, appeared to ignore Ford and at one point stopped the moderator, former Toronto mayor John Sewell, from quelling the noisy crowd.
“I’m fine with it,” he told Sewell.A consignment of emergency woolly jumpers have been sent to the Australian island of Tasmania to help protect a colony of penguins from oil spills.
Hundreds of volunteers started knitting when a conservation group warned that Australia's population of fairy penguins - also known as little blue penguins - was under threat.
About 1,000 of the jumpers, which cover the penguins from neck to foot, have been specially knitted, based on a pattern provided by the Tasmania Conservation Trust.
"They have come from everywhere, even as far away as Japan," Trust spokeswoman Jo Castle said on Monday.
"Someone in New York asked for a pattern, but we haven't received it yet," she said.
Protection from toxins
The penguins, which are indigenous to Australia, live on a small set of islands near a shipping route and are often hit by oil slicks.You will have to forgive Orlando City forward Cyle Larin if he looks a bit starstruck before Saturday’s game against the Montreal Impact.
The rookie forward has a plan to approach his childhood hero, Didier Drogba, before the game and ask to exchange jerseys. That plan doesn’t include exactly what he’s going to say.
“I might just stare at him for a couple seconds first,” Larin said, chuckling.
Larin has become one of the top goalscorers in MLS in his first professional season, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of facing off against a player he used to watch religiously.
Drogba, the former Chelsea star who has scored seven times in six MLS games, will try to play the role of foil in Orlando City’s inaugural season. Larin will try to outproduce the player he once watched in the Champions League as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto.
It’s all a bit surreal for the 20-year-old.
“He’s my favorite player in the world,” Larin said. “It would feel good [to score], but it would be a very memorable time because I wouldn’t think I’d be playing against him in the future and now I am. … I’m going to have a little jitters, but once the game starts I’m going to be fine.”
Larin recently broke out of a slump of seven straight games without a goal to notch his second career hat trick in a 5-2 win over the New York Red Bulls last Friday night. The last time the former UConn striker scored three in a game, against NYCFC in a 5-3 loss on July 26, Larin followed it up with a two-goal performance against Columbus at home.
Orlando City hopes the floodgates have opened up once again for the record-setting rookie.
“Cyle’s been great this season, probably he is going to be the rookie of the year in MLS and has scored a lot of goals and probably he’s going to score much more in these [last] three games,” Kaká said. “He’s so important for us because he is increasing his game, his movement, everything. He’s a smart player, very talented. Cyle is very good for us.”
Email at ptenorio@tribune.com. For more soccer news, visit OrlandoSentinel.com/OnThePitch or follow on Twitter @oslions.The Association of Native Americans at Yale is calling for Yale’s all-female Polynesian dance group to disband. ANAAY claims the dance group is appropriating Hawaiian and Tahitian culture.
In a post on their Facebook page, ANAAY demands that the dance group, Shaka, be abolished due to their “continued hypersexualization and appropriation of Hawaiian and Tahitian cultures.”
“Shaka perpetuates stereotypes of Pacific Islanders as ever-welcoming and uncritically ‘open’ to cultural sharing during their performances,” ANAAY the Facebook statement continues.
One of ANAAY's prime concerns is that white men dance with Shaka dancers in select routines, which apparently is reminiscent of historical oppression of Native Indians by English settlers.
“Historically, they have brought white men onto the stage to 'Shake it with Shaka,' which is in line with a history of hula being manipulated and sexualized by settlers in the islands,” ANAAY states. "While they have since cut this routine, the fact that the current leaders did not see a problem with this until we called them out shows that they are not fit to lead this group.”
The Shaka dance group was founded four years ago and is named after the Hawaiian gesture ‘shaka,’ meaning ‘hang loose.’ According to the group, the hand gesture is used to convey “the friendship, love, and compassion of the ‘Aloha Spirit’ among friends and strangers alike.”
Shaka has put out their own statement addressing the accusations of cultural appropriation.
“Shaka does not intend to sexualize Polynesian culture, as we recognize the real harm that comes to indigenous peoples through the commodification and sexualization of their cultures … All of our moves are accepted within Hawaiian and Tahitian culture,” Shaka’s Facebook statement reads in part. “Our costumes are also typical and culturally appropriate.”
According to a recent publication by the Yale Daily News, animosity between ANAAY and the Shaka dance group has been going on for years. Shaka stated in an email to the Yale Daily News that efforts to collaborate with ANAAY in order to establish a “space for a productive discussion” are in progress.
ANAAY, on the other hand, believes that further allowing the dance group to exist will prolong the notion that English settlers have a right to Native-owned property.
Haylee Kushi, a Native Hawaiian and former president of ANAAY, says she doesn't like the dance group representing her culture.
“International hālau are very controversial within the Hawaiian community, so don’t take advantage of Yale students’ ignorance about the subject to act as if they are universally accepted,” Kushi stated. “You get to take off your ‘Hawaiian’ costumes at the end of the day. I don’t, and still have to face the political consequences of what you do.”
Isaiah Denby is a college freshman from Tampa Bay, Florida studying economics and political science.Revolutionary Guards destroyed 6,000 satellite dishes in Shiraz on January 20 as part of a ceremony celebrating Iran’s “Fortification of Honor and Nobility.”
“Satellite dishes are a silent invasion,” announced Gholamhossein Gheybpour, commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards of Fars Province. “They target the foundations of the family and seek to deprive society of its religious values. And, unfortunately, they have been successful to some extent.”
The destruction of the dishes took place at the city’s Bahaman Stadium and Commander Gheybpour said households had “voluntarily” given up the dishes, doing their part to “promote religious values”.
“Nobody is against science and history,” he said, but |
to achieve the best results. Using the Oculus Touch controllers felt more natural, as the control stick was a much more intuitive movement device than the Vive’s inaccurate touchpad.
And since I’m not one that’s typically susceptible to VR sickness, it was surprising that I did feel myself start to get a bit dizzy at times. Particularly during multiplayer matches on levels like the Desert Temple, which feature a lot of launch pads, my legs got wobbly. But that’s what the optional teleport method is for. I also found it incredibly awkward to use the grip button to jump on the Vive controller.
During matches, players that were using teleportation movement often appeared to be glitching across maps when they were in fact just using their preferred teleportation method of movement. As a result, it was often difficult to track them while shooting, which felt a bit silly and unfair from the perspective of a player using full standard locomotion.
The core of the game is about what you’d expect from something that originally released 15 years ago. Levels are mostly linear with some hidden secrets here and there, enemies often resort to the ‘run directly at you while screaming, shooting, or exploding’ strategy of early 2000s AI technology, and the textures are flat and bland, even for something that was remastered in 2009.
Visually, it’s not the prettiest thing I’ve seen in a VR headset, but I don’t think it needs to be. Right now in the VR market, if you want a fast-paced shooter in the style of Unreal, Quake, or Serious Sam, there aren’t many options.
Most of the prominent competitive shooters on VR devices are either platform exclusives, such as RIGS on PS VR, take place in space, such as EVE: Valkyrie, or feature an obtuse control scheme, such as Hover Junkers, or the teleportation-only format of Arizona Sunshine. Onward has full movement, but scratches a very different military simulation itch, and Battle Dome is more like Splatoon than an action-packed shooter like this. It’s a far cry from the breakneck speeds and gratuitous violence on display here.
What you’ll find with Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter is a 15-year old game with a relatively fresh coat of paint, new control methods, and the same rip-roaring intensity you remember. It’s not really new or inventive, but it fills a void that VR gamers have been craving for quite some time.
Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter is now available on Steam Early Access with official support for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with tracked motion controllers required. The full price is $39.99, but there is currently a 10% discount until 12/27. Additionally, if you own Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter on Steam, you can earn an additional 10% discount, as well as another 20% discount if you own Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope.
Tagged with: action, croteam, devolver digital, FPS, locomotion, serious sam, shooterCU student Max Demby awarded Vice Presidential Coin of Courage
"Max is a hero" - @VP Biden w/ @CUBuffsRalphie handler Max Demby who stopped a sexual assault last year. #ItsOnUspic.twitter.com/QoSu2f4eYG — CU Boulder (@CUBoulder) April 8, 2016
Walking home through campus on a Friday night last spring, Max Demby heard screams and ran toward them to find a man pinning a young woman up against a wall. He scared the attacker off and walked the woman home, making sure friends were there before he left.
It all "happened in a matter of seconds. It began and ended before I could even comprehend what was happening,” Demby says of the event.
Last Friday, Demby’s intervention became the centerpiece of Vice President Biden’s speech about ending sexual assault at the University of Colorado, where Biden wrapped up a Week of Action campaign -- part of the White House’s It’s On Us initiative -- as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Initially, Demby had been asked only to give a short speech prior to the vice president’s appearance, but in a surprise move, Biden brought him up to the podium and praised his courage.
RELATED: 'Crying silently': VP Biden advocates for sexual assault victims during Week of Action
“It’s not so easy... he prevented a sexual assault. Max is a hero. Like my son Beau, who just passed away... when he was a sophomore at Penn, did the same thing,” the vice president said.
After the attack last spring, the CU-Boulder Police chief also called Demby a hero, telling the Boulder Daily Camera that the "event would have ended much worse than it did." The police eventually caught the 27-year-old assailant.
Demby, the fifth-year concurrent accounting student, disagrees.
“I guess I don’t think of myself as a hero as much as someone who did the right thing," he tells USA TODAY College. "Not right by my standards, right based on what everyone should do. Because I truly believe everybody should do what they can to intervene in a situation like that."
He says he strongly agrees with the It's On Us campaign's call on men to help change the culture. At his speech on Friday, Biden said that anyone who sees someone "walking an inebriated freshman up the stairs, (should) walk up and say 'not in my house, Jack.'"
"Every guy has a woman in their life they care about. And as soon as you realize that sexual assault could happen to a loved one, like a sister or girlfriend or someone’s mother, it hits a lot closer to home. I think that would be the way I would try to involve men on campuses nationwide,” Demby says.
Before the event even started, something even more exciting than being introduced to the crowd took place: Demby was awarded the Vice Presidential Coin of Courage.
It happened after Demby, CU’s Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano, Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), the student government’s tri-executives and star basketball player Josh Scott greeted the vice president.
“Joe Biden arrives, it's this larger than life thing, this shining moment when the second-most powerful person in the world is walking in the same room you’re in and you’re trying to take it all in,” says Demby, who didn't expect the vice president to know who he was.
But the vp gave him a hug -- and then the Vice Presidential Coin of Courage.
“The tradition is that if someone gives you one of these coins, only the president and vice president have them," says Demby, who adds there are string attached. "If I should ever meet him again and I have it with me, drinks are on him. If I don’t, drinks are on me.”
Demby is a student athlete who participates in a unique sport. Tradition at CU mandates that Ralphie, the school’s live buffalo and mascot, run around the field of the football stadium prior to each half. Running alongside the buffalo are six lightening-fast students in traditional cowboy garb, admirably referred to as the "Ralphie Runners."
And athletes, he says, play an important role on campuses.
Max Demby, third from right, at the Rocky Mountain Showdown Colorado football rivalry game against Colorado State University. (Photo: Asher Vandevort)
“As college students, sometimes we’re not very receptive to things. It’s tough to relay messages if you’re an adult, if you’re a (school) administrator. And for better or worse, (sports are) what we pay attention to … and I think that student athletes are an excellent driver (of messages) because they’re popular on campus and students pay attention to them.”
According to CUs recent sexual misconduct survey, administered between Oct. 19 and Nov. 16, 2015, 28% of the 11,362 undergraduate women at CU were sexually assaulted, or about 3,181 women in total. According to the CU-Boulder Police Crime Statistics, only 16 sex offenses were reported in 2014, which would indicate an approximate reporting rate of about 0.5%.
“Imagine if 75% reported, imagine how much that alone would lower sexual assaults," says Demby. "That has to happen.”
Brooke Fox is a student at University of Colorado at Boulder and a USA TODAY College digital producer.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2PbZLkiJharkhand's Energy department will set up rooftop at 100 government office buildings, an official said on Friday.
"Khuti district court is first court in India to establish rooftop solar power. Similar rooftop solar power connected with power grid will be established on 100 government buildings," Energy secretary S K G Rahate told reporters here on Friday.
He said: "Sixty-eight potential sites have been identified for small hydro power projects in the state."
He said the Deoghar and Basukinath national highway is now lighted by solar power. The energy department has distributed 32,000 solar study lamps among students of Classes six to 10 in the state.
The energy secretary also said that 26,976 of the total 29,494 villages have been electrified and rest of the electrification work would be completed by this year-end.FOXBORO, Mass. — New England Patriots wide receiver Danny Amendola has a 50-50 shot of playing Sunday for the New England Patriots, according to the team’s injury report.
Amendola is among seven players officially listed as questionable for the Patriots’ Week 13 matchup with the Philadelphia Eagles.
Tight end Scott Chandler was a new addition to the injury report Friday. He was a full participant in practice with a knee injury. Rob Gronkowski, the Patriots’ starting tight end, unsurprisingly was ruled out with his knee injury.
Linebacker Jamie Collins officially is listed as questionable, though he told the media Friday he’s ready to play after a long illness kept him out four games.
Check out the full injury report:
OUT
WR Julian Edelman (foot)
TE Rob Gronkowski (knee)
QUESTIONABLE
WR Danny Amendola (knee)
SS Patrick Chung (foot)
CB Justin Coleman (hand)
LB Jamie Collins (illness)
DT Dominique Easley (ankle)
LB Dont’a Hightower (knee)
TE Michael Williams (knee)
PROBABLE
DT Alan Branch (elbow)
OT Marcus Cannon (toe)
TE Scott Chandler (knee)
DE Chandler Jones (abdomen)
Thumbnail photo via Jeremy Brevard/USA TODAY Sports Images
Thumbnail photo via Aug 28, 2015; Charlotte, NC, USA; New England Patriots wide receiver Danny Amendola (80) stands on the sidelines during the second half against the Carolina Panthers at Bank of America Stadium. The Patriots defeated the Panthers 17-16. Mandatory Credit: Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY SportsBRIGHTON (WWJ/AP) – Authorities say a Livingston County man accidentally shot himself while shopping at a home improvement store with the gun he was legally carrying.
The incident happened around 6 p.m. Thursday at the Home Depot in Brighton, near I-96 and Grand River Avenue.
Police say the 32-year-old Green Oak Township man, who was not named, was apparently reaching into his pocket for his wallet when he inadvertently grabbed his pistol and a shot fired, striking him in the buttocks.
The man was treated for minor injuries at a nearby hospital. No one else was injured.
Police say the man had a license to carry the concealed weapon and no charges will be filed.
TM and © Copyright 2013 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2013 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.Papadopoulos Met with MP Tobias Ellwood Multiple Times
The meetings happened in New York City and London.
Scott Stedman Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 9, 2017
George Papadopoulos met with a Member of Parliament and the
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence People and Veterans, Tobias Ellwood in September 2016, per two UK government sources briefed on their meetings. Mr. Ellwood’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The two men first met in New York in mid September 2016 as the UN General Assembly was taking place. I’m told that this first meeting was fairly informal on the sidelines of the UN gathering. It is unclear how they got in touch with each other and what they discussed. Papadopoulos and Ellwood met again in London later that month. A meeting that Papadopoulos had in London in the same month was described to me as a “working-level meeting” by two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the topic. I am unable to confirm that Ellwood was the Official that had this working-level meeting with the Trump adviser.
MP Tobias Ellwood
Ellwood has a long résumé in U.K. politics. He is a member of the Conservative party and was elected in 2005. Previously, he served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Middle East, Africa and Counter Terrorism from 2014–2017. The meetings with Papadopoulos took place during this time. Ellwood’s superior was the UK Secretary of State, Boris Johnson, who assumed that post two months prior to the Papadopoulos-Ellwood encounters.
In 2013, Johnson called for the end of providing police resources to guard WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The current CIA Director Mike Pompeo has labeled WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service…often abetted by states like Russia.” The US intelligence community (CIA, NSA, ODNI, DHS) concluded as a whole that Russian hackers passed the stolen DNC and John Podesta emails to WikiLeaks to release to the public. WikiLeaks denies that the emails came from any Russian sources.
The White House has repeatedly claimed that the 31-year-old Papadopoulos was a “low-level volunteer” who didn’t play much of a role in foreign affairs and they maintain that Papadopoulos was nothing more than “the coffee boy.” The Papadopoulos relationship with the U.K. Under-Secretary of State for the Middle East, Africa and Counter Terrorism casts doubt on these claims. In addition to Ellwood, Papadopoulos has had discussions with the Greek Defense Minister, Greek President, Cyprus officials, and Israeli officials.
Correction: A previous version of this story said that Boris Johnson spoke about freeing Julian Assange in 2016. The quote is from 2013.
Contact the Writer: @ScottMStedman
Contact the Editor: Nathaniel de GalaThe two-party system in U.S. elections has been criticized since America's founders warned the nation about it. Yet, nearly 250 years later, two parties still command the country's politics. Now, a new House bill could finally change how congressional elections work in this increasingly polarized political climate.
The week prior to the Fourth Of July holiday weekend, Virginia Rep. Don Beyer introduced the Fair Representation Act to reform voter representation in Congress. Introduced by Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), and currently co-sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the bill would do away with gerrymandering and the winner-takes-all approach. All districts would establish ranked-choice voting, where voters can rank candidates in order of preference — so second and third choice ranking would have weighting, too. Independent redistricting commissions would also be in charge of drawing congressional districts, and states with six or more members in the House would turn single-member districts into multi-member districts. Electoral reform organizations Fair Vote and Third Way support the bill.
"The Fair Representation Act is designed to restore the faith which so many Americans have lost in our political system," Beyer said in a press release. "This bill would ensure that every voter has their voice represented in Congress, and make real progress towards bipartisan focus on getting results for the American people."
The ranked-choice voting system aims to make representation more proportional to voter preferences. Currently, the winner-takes-all-system gives only Democrats and Republicans a realistic chance of winning, sometimes even if they have less than the majority of votes. As a result, third-party candidates are oftentimes considered "wasted votes." This can encourage candidates to run only in these two parties and talk only to the party's core base, leaving out centrists, party moderates, and people who hold cross-party stances that fall outside the typical left-right political spectrum.
In ranked-choice voting situations where people vote for one candidate, such as for governor, a candidate can win with support from second and even third choices. If no one receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes would be eliminated. In the second round, voters who chose the eliminated candidate would have their second-choice votes added. This process would continue until one candidate reaches the majority of votes.
Ottawa Ranked Ballots on YouTube
As of now, 10 U.S. cities have adopted this system for local officials and in 2016, voters in Maine approved a proposal to allow ranked-choice voting for elections for governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and state legislature. However, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court found parts of the voter-approved law in need of revision.
Another part of the Fair Representation Act targets partisan gerrymandering, where party leaders re-draw district lines to boost their chances of victory, as demonstrated in this handy visual:
Re-drawing districts can turn a majority into a minority, which allows lawmakers to essentially cherrypick votes. The House bill, however, would give the power of redistricting to independent commissions that could draw district maps based on set criteria that maximize citizen participation.
As for larger states, the House bill could help ensure that more voters have a lawmaker who they elected. Single-member districts currently make up the majority, meaning each of these districts only have one representing lawmaker. By establishing multi-member districts in more populous states, voters in these districts could elect two or more representatives.
In order for the Fair Representation Act to move forward, the two-party members of Congress would have to put aside partisanship to approve the bill — even if it works against their individual gain.Making the Save
You couldn't clear it in time, a shot is about to be made. Now what?
"Ready Position"
How to hit the ball
Well get between the ball and the net. Obviously.you want to be slightly inside the net to give yourself more time to react. Remember: the goal isn't scored unless it's all the way in. Don't camp at the back of the net, but give yourself an extra few feet so you can push OUT rather than in. The most important thing is to not panic, and having that extra few milliseconds of space can often mean the difference between a goal and a save.Sidenote: be aware that if you do this you are vulnerable to "tip ins" by opponents coming in from the sides. Always be aware of where your opponents are, and if you need to get out of the net to keep another opponent from interacting with the ball, do so.orient your car in that direction and stay OUT of the net. The main reason for this is you want it to bounce off your car outward, and it's easy to have the ball bounce in your net if you're not careful. Better to eliminate that possibility. This also helps deal with cross passes, where you can intercept passes and knock them towards the enemy net.Most ground based saves should be done just boosting at the ball and hitting it away. Unless there's an opponent directly on the other side of the ball, they can go very far into the opponents side of the field.When you need to get in the air, your best options is always front flips. (That is when you jump and then jump again while holding forward.) They have a good amount of power behind them, especially if you just boosted. They also give you a lot of control, and you will often clear it well past half field from net. These are also great opportunities on easier saves to aim straight for the enemy net and hope for the best.In order to cover last stretch of the top of the net you should know how to do basic aerials. They don't need to be anything fancy and you CAN get by without them, but if the ball is coming in high, it's helpful to stop the ball before it's too late.The San Francisco 49ers announced on Friday that they have signed Alabama linebacker Reuben Foster to his rookie contract. The 49ers traded up into the bottom of the first round to select him at No. 31, netting them a guy they ranked third on their big board.
All draft picks get a four-year contract, while first round picks have a fifth year option. However, one other difference that happens just within first round picks is in fully guaranteed money. Picks on the higher end of the first round generally get a contract that has all four years fully guaranteed. Picks in the back end of the first round get some fully guaranteed money, but not usually into the fourth year.
It would appear Reuben Foster is an exception. In reporting on the deal, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport said that the deal includes, “a series of guarantees that extend into the fourth year of his deal.” Jason Hurley will keep an eye out for specifics, but according to Jason, fourth year guarantees would appear to be unprecedented for someone selected No. 31 overall since the current CBA was negotiated.
Jason tweeted that fourth year guarantees never happen with pick No. 31. We don’t know how much Foster got in fourth year guarantees, but even $1 would appear to be a first. I don’t have all the numbers in front of me, but in looking back at the rookie deals for the past six years at No. 31, it would appear to be the case. Here are the Over The Cap pages for pick No. 31 dating back to 2011. I use 2011 because that is when the current rookie wage scale was put in place.
Vernon Butler
Stephone Anthony
Bradley Roby
Travis Frederick
Doug Martin
Cameron Heyward
For each player, guaranteed base salary is listed in parenthesis below the base salary. Butler, Anthony, and Roby are all still on their rookie deal, and not into their fifth year option. You see no italicized base salary for year four. Frederick, Martin, and Heyward have all since signed some kind of contract extension. Frederick’s fourth year shows italics for guaranteed base salary, but that was guaranteed with his contract extension, not on his rookie deal.
Foster was projected as a high first round pick entering the draft process, but a torn rotator cuff, a failed drug test, and a heated exchange with a medical person at the Combine all led to him slipping. It leaves me curious as to the negotiation process with the guarantees.
Back in May, Peter King published an article title 24 Hours... With John Lynch. In it, he followed Lynch around all through the first day of the draft. The 49ers had a wild day one, with their move down from No. 2 to No. 3, and then their move up to No. 31. The 49ers were not sure if the Chicago Bears might take Solomon Thomas at No. 2, but if Chicago did that, the 49ers were prepared to take Reuben Foster at No. 3. King reported that the 49ers had assurances from Foster’s agents about contract contingencies if they picked him at No. 3.
If they pick Foster at three, the Niners have some assurance that the agents for Foster will put contingencies in the contract to cover some of the off-the-field risks he presents. Foster tested positive for a diluted drug sample at the scouting combine, meaning there may have been an attempt to drink enough water to hide a positive drug test. And Foster flipped out on a hospital employee over the extended wait for combine medical tests in March; he was expelled from the combine for that. “They [Foster’s agents] are all in on that if we pick him up here,” Lynch says.
I don’t know if we’ll ever find out the full details, but I’m fascinated to know what potential contingencies the 49ers deal has with Foster having picked him at No. 31 instead of No. 3. And considering they included what seem to be unprecedented fourth year guaranteed money, one has to wonder if there are any sort of contingencies in place for the rest of the contract. Paraag Marathe has proven himself to be a great contract negotiator. Rookie deals are not overly complicated compared to veteran free agent contracts, but Foster’s might be a bit more complicated than your average deal.It’s that time of year again, where team loyalties are cast aside, and tribalism expands to state-wide levels. Where once were were fighting on the same side are now sworn enemies. It’s one of the biggest sporting events on the calendar. NRL State of Origin. Queensland vs New South Wales. Maroons vs Blues. State vs State. Mate vs Mate.
But what’s sporting competition without a set of guidelines to help sail you through the midweek excessive* drinking process? We here at Pedestrian.tv are more than happy to be your co-pilots on your journey through the sevens seas of rye whisky. Here is your one hundred percent, totally official**, guaranteed to get you to where you need to go, Origin 1 Drinking Game for 2014!
PRIOR TO THE START OF THE GAME
New South Wales fans should stand in reserved silence and allow Queensland fans to shout “QUEENSLANDER!” 8 times in a row, signifying the current Maroons winning streak. It will suck for Blues fans, but it’s only fair.
Before kick-off, and in the spirit of fair play (or, at least, to give the illusion of it) Queensland fans raise a XXXX, whilst NSW fans will try to ignore the fact that their boys are carrying Victoria Bitter logos on their chests and raise a Tooheys New to toast the forthcoming battle.
EVERYONE TAKES ONE DRINK EACH TIME
– Queensland score.
– New South Wales score.
– Ray Warren’s commentary makes you feel like you could PUNCH THE FACE OF GOD.
– Phil Gould’s commentary makes you feel like you could punch the face of Phil Gould.
NEW SOUTH WALES FANS TAKE ONE DRINK EACH TIME
– Greg Inglis does something that makes you bitch about how he should be a Blue.
– Laurie Daley is shown and even the smallest part of you kind of wishes it was Ricky Stuart.
– Paul Gallen leads from the front and displays the kind of intestinal fortitude that New South Wales Origin is known for.
QUEENSLAND FANS TAKE ONE DRINK EACH TIME
– Greg Inglis does something that makes you glad you broke the rules to put him in Maroon.
– Mal Meninga is shown and you cannot locate his neck.
– Paul Gallen acts like a complete tosser.
EVERYONE TAKES TWO DRINKS EACH TIME
– Fights. It’s inevitable. It’s what makes State of Origin great. Bray and hoot and holler and enjoy the kind of unregulated violence that’s only legally permissible in this kind of arena. One drink at the start, another at the conclusion.
ADD AN ADDITIONAL DRINK IF…
– During said fight, someone pulls off something more spectacularly brutal than Michael Jennings’ Superman Punch of 2012.
A LONG, SLOW, DISAPPROVING SWIG IF…
– The refs make a bad call.
– The refs make any call.
– The refs call for a needlessly lengthy score review.
– The refs do anything. Anything at all. Move, talk, whatever. Anything. Drink.
FINISH YOUR DRINK IF…
– A “dog act” is perpetrated, and is agreed to be a dog act by a two-thirds majority of the room.
– A streaker interrupts the game again.
– A streaker shows more athletic ability than any prop on the field.
FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN…
– New South Wales lose. Because it’s definitely going to happen.
Photo: Scott Barbour via Getty Images
*Please drink responsibly.
**Probably not officially endorsed by anyone with the power to do so.Neoclassical economics does not have a term to explain the divergence between labor productivity and wages, but Marxism does: It’s called the rate of exploitation. And the rate of exploitation is growing.
In their write-up of the latest census poverty numbers, Elise Gould and Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute are blunt : “real median earnings of full-time workers — male and female, black and white — have been relatively flat since 2000.” Productivity — output per worker — grew by over 20% in the same time period, but the share of that value that workers take home has continued to decline.
Wages are not rising the way they should, and that’s a problem for the majority of Americans who pay their bills with money they earn by working. It’s a problem for the economic theories that claim to map how everyone gets their share of a growing economy. And it's a problem for the economists who sound tone-deaf when they explain that the recovery is finally going great — except for wages. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any good answers for this, because nobody thinks this is how it’s supposed to work.
Wages stagnating while unemployment falls and the economy grows goes against mainstream economic theory, which holds that when unemployment falls, the labor market tightens and workers can demand higher pay. The more that businesses need labor, the more workers can charge; it makes sense, but it’s not happening.
You would think the business press would be ready with some explanations, but they’re struggling. At Bloomberg, an explainer on why wage growth is sluggish begins by agreeing that it’s “a puzzle.” Conservatives believe the best way to increase wages is to grow the economy, but the connection between the two isn’t as tight as they had presumed. “That’s a puzzle” isn’t going to cut it.
For years, liberal thinkers have been offering their own formula that they claim leads to better pay. “Education Is the Key to Better Jobs” declared Brookings in 2012; “A Simple Equation: More Education = More Income” wrote New York Times economics columnist Eduardo Porter in 2014. The Democrats even made a riff on this in their party slogan this summer. It’s now a mainstream view that education is a solution to economic inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality, bigotry in general, job growth, economic growth, and winning elections: a “silver bullet” as a West Wing monologue once put it. But once again, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding sucks.
There are many connections between education and individual, family, local, state, and national economic success. The most accessible, reliable way for Americans to improve their circumstances is to learn to do more things that employers are looking to pay people to do. The Democrats understand that, and they’ve consistently put education — as a form of skilling and job training, rather than intellectual exploration — near the center of their largely unsuccessful agenda. Despite general wage stagnation, the premium for workers with bachelor's degrees or better has increased significantly. It’s get skilled or get left behind in 21st-century America, and the Democrats don’t want people left behind; how could that be a bad plan or a hard sell?
I think most Americans understand something about the “skilling” theory that the Democrats don’t. To convert education into better life outcomes, you can’t just take your diploma to the bank. Skills are supposed to help workers get good jobs and perform well, rinse and repeat. Education (or “human capital”) makes workers more productive, which makes their workplaces more profitable, which means their bosses can afford to pay them more.
By now you may have spotted the problem. When workers improve their skills it doesn’t entitle them to more pay, or ensure them more pay — it merely enables companies to pay more. And given the option, companies would rather not pay you more.
Employers like to talk about the “skills gap,” but there is a permanent and unbridgeable divide between the supply of and demand for skilled labor. Business owners want a flood of applicants for every position, who are so well-qualified that they require no training — and they want that flood of competition to allow them to offer lower pay. Workers, on the other hand, want to get paid as much as possible, preferably without having to apply for 100 gigs at a time, or spend a decade and tens of thousands of dollars developing their skills.
The idea that these two sets of interests could ever come into a happy balance is a myth perpetuated by factory owners looking for ways to save money.
Wages will not go up just because the economy improves or because workers improve their skills. In 2015 some of the world’s biggest tech firms, including Apple and Google, paid over $400 million to settle accusations that they colluded to keep engineering wages low. Apple's and Google’s engineers are both educated and productive — among the most productive people in the world, by most measures. Their employers have so much cash they literally don’t know what to do with it all — and yet they’re still willing to tangle with the law just to pay people less.
Does anyone really believe employers in the rest of the economy, whose profits are rapidly being transferred to Silicon Valley, will somehow be more willing than Apple and Google to voluntarily offer up higher pay?
Republicans and Democrats alike don’t even have a name for what’s happening, let alone a serious idea of how to fix it. It’s not surprising then, that people are looking to Marx and socialism for explanations about the rate of exploitation. Employers can yell “skills gap” all day long, but they can’t keep workers fooled much longer, and their shareholders are not going to be happy when the only solution left is pitchforks at their doors.
Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and The Making of Millennials and a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.Tuchel managed Gundogan and Mkhitaryan at Borussia Dortmund before they both left last summer for Manchester City and Manchester United respectively.
Gundogan joined City for a fee of £21million, making 16 appearances for Pep Guardiola’s side before suffering a knee injury last month.
Mkhitaryan moved to Manchester United for around £30m, starting slowly at Old Trafford before finding his feet with three goals in his last six games.
And Borussia Dortmund boss Tuchel claims he is happy for both players, but revealed his disappointed at Gundogan’s exit.
GETTY Ilkay Gundogan became a key player for Manchester City before his injury
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"We sat there with my wife, we did not try to convince him otherwise because he made a very hard decision and he made his decision,” Tuchel said of Gundogan, 26.
“In the end, my wife said, 'You can't believe how sad my husband is. He will not show you right now, we wish you all the best.'
“And she was right, we wish him all the best. We're still in touch."
On Mkhitaryan, he added: “We're still in touch with Micky and when he scores like he scored [the scorpion kick goal against Sunderland], when he assists like he does, it's what he deserves after a difficult start at United.
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GETTY Henrikh Mkhitaryan has burst into life for Manchester United
"I was blessed to train these players [Gundogan and Mkhitaryan] and you have to let go. I can totally be happy for them."
Tuchel also discussed the future of his latest Dortmund star, 18-year-old midfielder Pulisic.
Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp has been linked with a move for the United States international, but Tuchel has big plans for him in the Bundesliga.
"I'm very happy with his development this season,” Tuchel told ESPN FC.
GETTY Christian Pulisic has broken into the Borussia Dortmund teamThe line at the concession stands in Beaver Stadium might be a little longer this season. Six flavors of Berkey Creamery ice cream will be sold in pint sizes during Penn State home games.
The flavors available will be vanilla, Peachy Paterno, cookies-n-cream, Death by Chocolate, chocolate and chocolate chip cookie dough.
“We’ve known for a while that our customers would appreciate the convenience of buying ice cream directly at the stadium,” Creamery assistant manager Jim Brown said in a statement, “And we’re very excited to make that a reality this fall.”
Fans will now be able to avoid the long lines that are a staple at the creamery during football weekends as alumni return to campus.
“It’s sort of a tradition to stand in that line,” Brown said. “But not everyone has the time or wants to do that for every football game. So we’re hoping that this will mean that everyone who wants our ice cream can get it every time they come to campus.”A short film collaboration by 30 students from the University of Michigan in Screen Arts & Culture's Screenwriting Practicum. Students from the School of Art & Design, School of Music, Business School and Literature, Science, & Arts will work together in order to produce a 20 - 30 minute short film which will premiere at the Traverse City Film Festival in August 2013.
Open House is a murder mystery whodunit set in a dark world full of deceit, treachery, and danger: a high school party. Our wallflower of a protagonist, Luke, gets drawn into a half-baked homicide investigation when his best friend, Jonah—the Sherlock to his Watson—finds that a guest has been murdered upstairs. The only clue points to the girl Luke’s loved from afar since middle school, who he knows couldn’t possibly be a killer. Everyone at the party is a suspect and no one can be trusted—because this is high school, where everyone is hiding who they really are. Like anyone who’s ever survived adolescence, Luke must learn to separate truth from image and to see past the false fronts his peers have put up.
But he must grow up quickly, in order to find the killer lurking among the guests before the night is out.
Starring Nick Skardarasy as Luke, Philip Maxwell as Jonah, Quinn Scillian as Edie and Ashley Park as Stacy.
Directed by Dustin Alpern
Screenplay by Brad Schwartz
Produced by Nick Inchaustegui, Dakota Hadfield, Brian Van Timmeren, JD Biskner and HY Fong
Cinematography by John Fisher
Production Design by Layne Simescu & Anna Baumgarten
Assistant Director: Raj Sosale
Sound Design by Thomas Halpin
Composer: Simon Alexander-Adams
Recordist: Summer Krinsky
Boom Operator/Mixer: Drew Elder
Gaffer: Kenny Moffitt
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UMP: I thought that the statement put out -- the mother’s statement I thought was a beautiful statement. I will tell you, it was something that I really appreciated. I thought it was terrific. And, really, under the kind of stress that she’s under and the heartache that she’s under, I thought putting out that statement, to me, was really something. I won’t forget it. Thank you, all, very much. Thank you. Thank you.
Reporter: Will you go to Charlottesville? Will you go to check out what happened?
TRUMP: I own a house in Charlottesville. Does anyone know I own a house in Charlottesville?
Reporter: Where is it?
TRUMP: Oh boy, it’s going to be –
Reporter: Where is it?
TRUMP: It's in Charlottesville. You'll see.
Reporter: Is it a winery or something?
TRUMP: It is the winery. I mean, I know a lot about Charlottesville. Charlottesville is a great place that's been very badly hurt over the last couple of days.
(chatter)
TRUMP: I own, actually, one of the largest wineries in the United States. It's in Charlottesville.
Reporter: Do you believe your words are helping to heal this country right now? What do you think needs to be done to overcome the racial divides in this country?
TRUMP: Well, I think jobs can have a big impact. I think if we continue to create jobs -- over a million, substantially more than a million. And you see just the other day, the car companies coming in with Foxconn. I think if we continue to create jobs at levels that I’m creating jobs, I think that’s going to have a tremendous impact -- positive impact on race relations.
Reporter: Your remarks today, how do you think that will impact the racial, sort of conflict, today?
TRUMP: The people are going to be working, they’re going to be making a lot of money – much more money than they ever thought possible. But that’s going to happen.
Reporter: Your remarks today–
TRUMP: And the other thing – very important – I believe wages will start going up. They haven’t gone up for a long time. I believe wages now – because the economy is doing so well with respect to employment and unemployment, I believe wages will start to go up. I think that will have a tremendously positive impact on race relations.The head of Nato and Russia's foreign ministry have become embroiled in a Twitter spat, with both sides taking shots at each other over the Ukraine crisis.
Taking diplomacy to the world of Twitter, Anders Fogh Rasmussen and "MFA Russia", the Twitter name of Russia's foreign ministry, fired a number of tweets at each other during a visit to Warsaw by the Nato secretary general, which was dominated by Ukraine.
In the first exchange Moscow took offence to a post by the Nato chief which said Moscow's "behaviour doesn't belong in the 21st century & your rhetoric draws on outdated clichés of Cold War".
<noframe>Twitter: AndersFogh Rasmussen - <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=hash&q=%23NATO" target="_blank">#NATO</a> sent <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=hash&q=%23Russia" target="_blank">#Russia</a> unmistakable message: your behaviour doesn’t belong in 21st century & your rhetoric draws on outdated clichés of Cold War</noframe>
Responding promptly MFA Russia fired back by asking "'Cold War rhetoric' do you mean Nato countries appeal to isolate Russia and sanctions?"
<noframe>Twitter: MFA Russia - <a href="http://www.twitter.com/AndersFoghR" target="_blank">@AndersFoghR</a> By "cold war rhetoric" do you mean <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=hash&q=%23NATO" target="_blank">#NATO</a> countries appeal to isolate <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=hash&q=%23Russia" target="_blank">#Russia</a> and sanctions?</noframe>
The exchange continued a short while later with Mr Rasmussen posting a tweet referring to Russia's claim that it had started to withdraw its troops from the Ukrainian border, saying that so far "we have not seen any signs" of the withdrawal.
"For those with a blind eye as suggest to follow President Putin's statement of May 7," countered MFA Russia.
Not to be outdone Mr Rasmussen replied by tweeting: "I have very good vision but while we've noted Russia's statement so far we haven't seen any, any indication of troops pulling back." He later added that he would be the "first one to welcome" any "visible signs" of a "meaningful pullback."
Nato estimated that Russia had some 40,000 troops stationed near the Ukrainian border, and on Wednesday Vladimir Putin said they would be removed from the frontier and placed in "training and exercise grounds".Tala Anati has visited Jerusalem only twice, but she is very much opposed to the recent U.S. announcement declaring it the capital of Israel.
"Jerusalem is like our second mother, and it's the heart of Palestine," Anati said while clutching a Palestinian flag. "It's the capital, it's the one and only capital for Palestine."
Anati, 16, was one of hundreds of Palestinians who demonstrated on Thursday in the West Bank city of Ramallah as part of a general strike by Palestinians that saw schools, universities, government offices and many shops shuttered for the day.
In a speech on Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump called Jerusalem the capital of Israel and announced plans to move the American embassy there from Tel Aviv.
"I've judged this course of action to be in the best interests of the United States of America and the pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestinians," Trump said.
In a speech responding to Trump's announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the decision was "an important step towards peace, for there is no peace that doesn't include Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel."
Netanyahu also called on other nations "that seek peace to join the United States in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and to move their embassies here."
While the move was not a surprise, it still landed like a body blow for many Palestinians, who are now wondering whether there will be U.S. recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of a potential future Palestinian state.
"We're so angry today and we, all of the Palestinians, stopped their work and didn't go to school, just to prove to the world that we are here and we will keep going and we will not stop," Anati said.
'Our message to the world'
Demonstrators in Ramallah chanted "Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine."
Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, called for a "day of rage" on Friday, which he said should "be the first day of the intifada," which was essentially a call for a new uprising against Israel.
In a speech on Wednesday, Haniyeh called Trump's statement a "declaration of war."
Basel Razzaq brought his young son to the demonstration in Ramallah. (Derek Stoffel/CBC)
Fatah, the faction led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, is looking to the United Nations Security Council and the Arab League to launch diplomatic protests against the U.S. policy shift.
Clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces broke out in the West Bank cities of Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and other centres.
Basel Razzaq brought his young son to the demonstration in Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital. They watched as Israeli police officers fired tear gas and rubber bullets, to try to deter young Palestinian men from hurling rocks.
"You have to come out [to the streets], because this is how you get the message across," said Razzaq, a Palestinian-Canadian who spent four years studying in Windsor, Ont.
Razzaq said because the Palestinian Authority is "too weak," Palestinians must resort to demonstrations to "send our message to the world."
'It's not going to be calm'
Like most Palestinians, Razzaq can only enter Jerusalem with special permission from the Israeli authorities. He last visited the city earlier this year to celebrate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
"Jerusalem is very important, not only as a [place for] religion… but we all have family there, and we are not free to visit them," he said.
In some of the demonstrations, people could be seen burning U.S. and Israeli flags as well as photographs of President Trump.
According to Palestinian medics in the West Bank, more than two dozen Palestinians were injured by Israeli gunfire, which were a combination of rubber bullets and live fire.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military said "riot-dispersal gear" was deployed against hundreds of Palestinians throwing rocks during demonstrations.
Israel's army has sent additional soldiers into the West Bank to deal with the unrest, which is expected to last over the coming days.
Palestinians vowed not to let up the pressure.
"You can see what the message of the street is," Razzaq said, pointing to billowing smoke from tires that had been set on fire. "It's not going to be calm."Interview: What they don’t tell you about capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang, James Stafford
Ha-Joon Chang is Reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge, and the author of two popular and influential critiques of approaches to development advocated by major international institutions: Kicking Away the Ladder (2002) and Bad Samaritans (2007). Since the global financial crisis, Chang has adopted a still-higher public profile as a critic of the economic orthodoxies that brought about the global financial crisis. His most recent book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (2010) aimed to debunk some widely accepted arguments put forward by what he terms the ‘priesthood’ of the economics profession, and redefine the boundaries of the discipline.
Chang’s writing is polemical and frequently amusing, but also features a sharp analytical intelligence. Avoiding jeremiads about the state of the world economy, it combines persistent optimism with flashes of anger at the consequences of mistaken policies. His underlying conviction is that there are few ‘realities’ in economics that cannot be changed by human agency.
Responsible capitalism?
British political parties now seem to be converging around a rhetoric of ‘responsible capitalism’. Is this a positive development? Is it likely to cause any real change?
It’s positive of course, but really what do they exactly mean by it?
Take the case of high pay. Whether the pay gap is growing and so on of course is an important issue, but I think the bigger issue is what these people are being paid for. In my view the bigger problem is that these people are being paid for running companies in short-term orientated ways, and then in that process very often (if not always) destroying the firm in the long run by not investing in technology, in training. They are making money by increasing market power through take-overs, when mergers and acquisitions don’t necessarily result in better performance. They get paid high salaries for paying high dividends and engaging in share buybacks, once again weakening the company in the long run and in the process squeezing workers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
I think that’s the bigger problem. We really need to question those practices. But I think the Tories are not interested and Labour, so far, only marginally so. It’s good that people talk about ‘responsible capitalism’, but when they say the solution is to give more power to shareholders I have a huge problem. The increased power of short-term floating shareholders is at the root of this problem.
What other forms of accountability are likely to be more effective?
You would have to weaken the short-term shareholders by making mergers and acquisitions more difficult, by making it – through regulatory measures – compulsory for managers to take care of other stakeholders; we have to reform this very notion that companies are properties of shareholders. They are the property of every stakeholder.
We also need to make sure that managers do not get compensated well for doing things that harm society, harm the long term future of the company, exploiting the weaker stakeholders. I think it’s actually quite sad to hear people say that the shareholders can take care of all these problems because it’s in their own interest. What is being forgotten is that, unlike the traditional capitalist, the shareholders don’t have any long-term commitment to the company.
Do the shareholders themselves lose out in the long term from this ‘shareholder value’ approach?
Yes, they also suffer; but they have more options. They can go buy a Korean company or invest in Chinese assets. They think that if this particular goose that lays the golden eggs dies, we can get another goose. But if you are the goose, you are in trouble.
You’ve written that the values of a more responsible capitalism are not necessarily of the left or of the right, and that those political labels are shifting and contingent in political economy. Do you think that conservative parties, not just in Britain but also in Europe and America, have an equal capacity to undertake the reforms you want to happen?
Funnily enough conservative parties have often brought about the biggest changes – Otto Von Bismarck introduced the first welfare state in the world, Disraeli nearly doubled the British electorate with the 1867 Reform Act. Paradoxically, exactly because these people represented the ruling class, the ruling class went along with it, because they think ‘if these guys think this is necessary, then maybe it is necessary’. If the people advocating reform are supposed to be on the other side, then the ruling class becomes suspicious and resists it. Depending on the particular issue and the political forces involved, sometimes it can be the supposedly more conservative party that is more effective in bringing about changes.
Unfortunately I don’t think this is the case in the current British setting. The Conservatives dominate the Coalition, and the Conservative ideology is still basically Thatcherite. I don’t see that these people have an actual vision to reform society in the way that people like Bismarck had.
In making that case for reform, there seem to be two sorts of rhetoric in play. There’s the ‘moral’ or ‘fairness’ case that advocates reform so that people receive ‘just rewards’ in the economy, but there are also arguments for increased efficiency and performance.Which one is more important?
The bland answer is that both are equally important. But my real answer is that actually the dichotomy itself is the problem. As I tried to argue in my book and in other writings the very notion that there is this neatly separable, through scientific method, domain of economics (or the market sphere) that has its own logic and shouldn’t be tampered with by political or moral considerations – that notion itself is at the heart of this free market ideology. If we really want to change this we have to break this distinction. Efficiency cannot be defined without reference to some shared sense of justice and fairness.
So the question really is ‘efficiency for whom’?
Yes, exactly. If you believe that there’s no justification for, say, protecting children and educating them and so on, banning child labour is a huge infringement on efficiency. In some developing countries, close to half the population are children under sixteen. In that kind of context banning child labour would be equivalent to the British government banning anyone with an odd-numbered National Insurance number fromworking from tomorrow. But if we accept those values about education, child protection and so on, it doesn’t appear to be intervention, and there is no question of efficiencythere. You cannot define efficiency without discussing for whom. You cannot define fairness and justice without some discussion of the economic parameters.
That’s the fundamental point, but another important point is that this alleged trade-off between justice and efficiency does not exist. If being fair and equitable is so bad for economic growth, how do you explain that countries like Sweden and Finland, with welfare states more than double the size that of the US, have been growing faster than the US? The famous slogan of the Swedish Social Democrats is ‘secure people dare’. Providing security and second changes through retraining actually enables people to be more flexible, more willing to accept changes, which help Sweden and Finland restructure their economy quickly in response to changes in conditions.
There are good reasons why fairness and efficiency go hand in hand, but it is often completely ignored, even by many people (if not necessarily the majority) on the left, who buy into this false trade-off and say: yes, it might reduce growth but we need a fairer society; even if people created less wealth that would be OK if it brings about a fairer society. I think we should be aggressive and say that a fairer society is also a more efficient society. Except, of course, the whole notion of efficiency is meaningless without a shared sense of fairness andjustice.
The EU and the crisis
How much scope is there for Britain to pursue a more expansionary fiscal policy in the world economy as it stands today? Is the government right to say that they can’t spend any more on a discretionary basis without the bond markets coming down on them? Is that a ‘real’ economic constraint?
Put it this way: if you are Ecuador or Guinea-Bissau you cannot really change the economic reality. But Britain is a big country and has a big role in forming the international discourse. It could have changed the reality by adopting a completely different narrative from the beginning.
But when you have already said that in the past eighteen months, and done quite a bit of it to show your commitment to cutting spending, now if you suddenly say you are going to spend more, then you will be subject to the wrath of the bond market. When the government first got into power, as a right-wing coalition, had it advocated a different approach, not least because Britain has its own currency, it could have done a lot that was different. But it is too late now: they have tied their hands. They have dug their own grave. But you never know – if there is a collapse in the eurozone, or something big, then there might be a chance to change the narrative without losing credibility. Short of that kind of event, I think this country is stuck with this really bad plan.
What factors are likely to determine whether or not the Euro survives in its current form?
It depends on whether or not the Germans decide that the EU, or at least the eurozone, is their own economy. California gets into terrible financial trouble but no-one thinks that the United States will break up, because somehow the federal government will patch it up and make it sustainable. The Germans do not adopt this attitude to the Greeks or Spaniards, so unless they adopt this attitude that now we are not Germany, we are a United States of Europe, then this will be insoluble.
The plan they have come up with is completely depressionary. They will allow a 0.5 per cent structural budget deficit; even in cyclical terms it will be no more than 3 to 3.5 per cent. This is ridiculously low. What if there is another crisis like the one today, where countries need to run 10 per cent, 11 per cent budget deficits? Would Germany then invade Greece?
Do the attitudes have to change before the institutions change? Can institutions will the attitude into existence?
These things are a little inter-related, although attitude is the ultimate problem. If the ECB or another institution did certain things differently and they seemed to be working, then people might begin to have a slightly different view as to how to treat these different economies. It is an interactive process.
The problem is bundling up very different economies under a monetary regime without fiscal transfers and effective freedom of labour migration. Obviously, there is legal freedom of labour migration, but the language barriers are such that an unemployed Greek labourer cannot move to Finland. It could have worked to an extent if the surplus countries had a commitment to treat the other countries as part of their own economy, as the people of New York and New Jersey treat Mississippi or Arkansas, which in some respects are practically Third World economies. But without that kind of attitude, I think that, even if this particular crisis passes, in the future there will be events which continuously test that resolve.
Are social democrats in Europe right to say that social and economic reform now has to be pursued without significant new public spending?
This is basically a defeatist attitude, buying in to your opponents’ agenda. I am perfectly happy to say that until the financial crisis is over we cannot definitelypromise to spend much more. But to say this should be permanent is unacceptable – when is the word ‘permanent’ acceptable in politics? Even if you don’t follow Harold Wilson and say that ‘a week is a long time in politics’, by talking about a permanent reduction in the welfare state then you are getting into something highly dangerous.
Having said that, the view that was prevalent in New Labour-type social democratic parties was that ‘in the end it is about money’. If you tax the rich more, then you can improve society more, and in order to get more tax you let the rich do whatever they want. That was a critical flaw. I sometimes liken it to traffic rules. If the government said that we need to abolish speed limits so that people can get from A to B quickly and make more money, then you would probably have a bit more money going around and you can spend more on people in need. But by abolishing the traffic rules you wouldhave created more needy people because there are more traffic accidents! I think that approach was deeply flawed: you actually have to change the way some of these financial and corporate institutions work. You are not going to solve these problems by collecting more taxes from under-regulated businesses. So in that sense overemphasis on spending itself was the problem.
But then instead of realising that this wasn’t a fundamental solution, and that structural change is necessary, the move has been to buy into the other side’s fundamental solution, which is shrinking the state. I don’t know what other solutions are being advocated as a substitute for social spending.
As I understand it, it’s an emphasis on putting more resources into industrial and regulatory policy and less into clearing up the traffic accidents.
If that’s the line, then it is not totally negative. But I would have to see what exactly is being proposed to ascertain whether it is a viable alternative social democratic agenda.
Is the EU, as it is currently constituted, a legal and institutional obstacle to member states pursuing active national economic policies of the sort you have defended, involving infant-industry protection, state grants and state-owned enterprises? Does the EU institutionalise free market approaches?
Unfortunately the EU has fundamentally changed its character. In the early days it was a collection of economies at very similar levels. This was equivalent to the customs union in Germany in 1834. Countries at similar levels having bigger markets and more competition can be positive. But for countries that are not yet fully developed – the poorer Eastern economies that supply cheap service labour to the rich countries in the EU – they will never become rich in a nationalistic way. The only alternative is for the richer countries really to treat the whole of the European Union as a single economy and believe that they really need to invest in a major way to lift the poorer countries to rich levels. We are talking about a nationalistic policy but for a nation that has beenexpanded to the EU level. But that kind of attitude does not exist.
The incomes squeeze
Why do you think real incomes have stagnated for so many workers in Britain over the past decade? What are the sorts of jobs that are likely to escape this trend in future?
A common view is that this is all because of competition from China. But it wasn’t an inevitable outcome. That was used as an excuse and as a threat to dissenting workers, but essentially what has happened is that the floating shareholders and professional managers went into a kind of alliance: ‘We give you huge dividends, in return you give us mega salaries. We need more money for that, so we will squeeze everybody else’. So in my view it is more about the corporate-financial structure rather than simple competition from China, although there is some of that there.
So in that sense very few jobs are immune from that kind of pressure. Let’s face it, how many jobs are there that cheaper immigrants cannot perform? I’m an example of that, I have a PhD! A lot of high-tech firms now have highly skilled scientists and workers who are immigrants from poorer countries. When those people come here, you cannot pay them Chinese wages or Brazilian wages, but it still exerts downward pressure. There is no job that can be safe from this.
The whole point is that in no country are these outcomes inevitable. If you had more restrictions on corporate dividends, more emphasis on worker training, more regulation on immigration, if you did not bring the Eastern countries into the EU and permit full mobility of labour... These are all deliberate decisions. I am not debating whether or not they are on balance good decisions. But they are all results of active human decisions. Unless you realise that, you will never change it. If you think that my income is squeezed because someone is working in Beijing for a lower wage and kids are being exploited in Pakistan, then you cannot change that.
Do you see a trade off between equitable, continued prosperity in advanced countries and development in the Global South? The choice is often framed that either you allow these countries to compete with the rest on cost and labour or they will never develop. Is it a zero-sum game?
No, because if these economies become larger, then richer countries cansell more to them. The question of internal distribution – both in China and in Britain – is crucial. Economic growth in China didn’t have to mean the kind of income inequality that it has today, which is now equivalent to those found in the lower division of the Latin American income distribution league – that is, Latin American countries that have relatively low income inequality by the standard of the continent, which is very high by international standards. In both countries decisions have been made that benefited certain groups much more than others. Apart from that, there is nothing inevitable about it being a zero sum game. Somehow, in both sets of countries those who have money and power have rigged the game so that only they benefit.
In relative terms the biggest losers have been the workers of the rich countries, because in poorer countries similar levels of growth (and the growth in poorer countries has been more rapid) have a greater power to improve people’s lives. In the rich countries you have reached a certain level of income that means additional income means more things, but in poorer countries it means better nutrition, longer life, a shorter working day.
But there doesn’t have to be a trade off. In Switzerland, inequality has fallen over the past couple of decades. Switzerland is a famously open economy – it cannot simply be international trade with China that is lowering wages.
How significant are the constraints imposed by resources and climate change on further economic growth, even in a reformed world economy? Does this make development more difficult?
On that front I think we need to be a bit less dogmatic. What is a ‘resource’ is dependent on technology.
I still remember when I was a little kid in the early 1970s I heard a report from the Club of Rome – I only understood it in a very primitive, simplified way – but to me the message was that by the year 2000 we will run out of oil and we will all die. Actually the prediction came true. Oil, as defined by the technologies of the early 1970s, has more or less run out. But since then we have found ways to find even more oil, so we still haven’t run out. This mineral called Coltan, which is very rare and used in the making of microchips for mobile telephones. This didn’t used to be a valuable resource, but now there are warlords in the DRC who fight wars to control this particular mineral and use captured enemies as slaves to extract it. So that has become a resource. I have more faith in human ingenuity than many other people.
But when it comes to global warming we are racing against the clock. For all I know maybe we will have perfect alternative energy technologies in five years. If it takes five hundred, then we are all dead. But I would be strongly against preventing poorer countries from developing for these reasons. People who have worked on this have come to the conclusion that countries reaching the $8,000, $9,000 level of per capita income have very little impact on climate change. That would still make a big difference to those countries. It would be wrong for rich countries to say that those countries have to live in poverty because we have used up the atmosphere.
This then means significant changes in consumption patterns in rich countries like the United States. ManyAmericans seem to think that wasting energy is their God-given right. And frankly the country is organised in such a way that it is more difficult to change that. Europeans find it easy to feel virtuous compared to Americans when they hop on their bikes and commute in the greenest way, but if you are stuck in a suburb in Texas you cannot cycle seventy miles to get to work. Changes in consumption patterns also have to involve more equitable income distribution. Countries with more than, say, $25,000 per capita GDP can easily provide a decent living standard for everybody. But even in those countries there are significant pockets of poverty. This has to be solved through redistribution. Politicians love growth because it allows them to avoid difficult choices. But when you have reached the level of income we have in most OECD countries, you have reached a point where that kind of easy way out is not feasible.
Are you saying then that it would be difficult to achieve this kind of adjustment away from carbon in advanced economies without simultaneously constraining growth?
Yes, but growth is measured in a particular way. Having less growth doesn’t necessarily mean people living less comfortably. There are lots of ways in which you can improve society without increasing the output. But all of this assumes that there won’t be any huge technological innovation that solves the problem in the new future. If this doesn’t come quickly, then we will have to change our understanding of growth and welfare.
The strange non-death of neo-liberalism
Is economics teaching in universities culpable for what has happened in economic policy over the past thirty years?
It is one of the main reasons, yes. The spread of free-market economic theories, and even more importantly, the kind of quasi-religious status that these doctrines have assumed, has been culpable.
I see orthodox free-market economics today as the equivalent of Catholic theology in medieval Europe. A lot of academic economics is harmless enough, if usually useless – ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ kind of questions – andyou might think that economists are weird people working on weird problems.
Unfortunately, that is not all. There is a very strong core, basically a priesthood, that preach certain kinds of doctrines. After you have flooded the world with that kind of view for thirty years, you have a whole generation of government officials, business managers, journalists – all spouting these views. Unfortunately when you begin to work in the world outside the universities, you don’t have much time to reflect on the basic theories and what you think are facts. Once they are released into the world, they operate with what they learned at university. They popularise these things as journalists or economists working for think tanks, and that’s been hugely harmful, basically making people think that you can leave things to the market and everything will be sorted out. That has been at the root of the crisis.
Apart from the specifics of the doctrine, it strikes me that the majority of that could have been said by a neo-liberal economist in the 1960s or 1970s. There was an interview with Colin Crouch in the last issue of Renewal about his book The Strange Non-Death of Neo-liberalism (2011). What explains the comparative resilience of neo-liberalism? Welfare economics and Keynesianism had its crisis in the 1970s and largely disappeared as an economic paradigm.
The ‘resilience’ of this economic theory is explained by the fact that it says things that support the interests of the rich and powerful – those who disproportionately benefit from the system. If most of the media say ‘no, this theory is still OK’, then ordinary people don’t have time to dispute this. If most professors are neo-liberals and they either pretend that nothing has happened, or argue that we need at most minor tinkering, then that will be accepted as the professional consensus.
The fundamental problem is that economics is not a science, in the sense that physics or chemistry is a science. Even those are affected by the political climate – it was a heresy to say that the sun doesn’t circle the earth. But economics is not a science in the much more fundamental sense; there is no clear boundary that says what should be in economics. Who decides what goes into economics itself is a political struggle: economics is a fundamentally political project. What is considered the right economic theory is fundamentally affected by politics. Approaches such as Keynesianism, and to a lesser extent welfare economics, were just about acceptable when there was a political consensus on the need for a more controlled capitalism and the need fora more credible alternative to socialism. When the political climate changed they went into decline because they didn’t have inherent systemic support, which neo-liberalism has today.
If any other profession failed in the way the economics profession has failed as it has in the last three decades – most dramatically manifested in the 2008 financial crisis, but even before that in the repeated failure of IMF structural adjustment programmes, the Mexican peso crisis, and the 1997 Asian crisis – it would havebeen banned. If it was proven that, say, homeopathy had created 80 million unemployed people, people would hunt down the homeopaths and hang, draw and quarter them! But because this kind of economics is so integral to the system, this doesn’t happen.Photo Illustration by Troy Dunham. Stock from Getty / Shutterstock.
ISTANBUL -- Last fall, Islamic State fighters launched a coordinated, large-scale assault on the Kurdish town of Kobani on Syria's northern border with Turkey. Fresh from victories that granted them an aura of invincibility, the extremists were about to remove the single irritant on a wide swath of the border they otherwise controlled. The world watched in resignation. The lone superpower said it would not help. U.S. officials grimly predicted the city would fall. Yet the small band of Kurds held on for days, then weeks. The U.S.-led coalition against the self-described Islamic State began to help, first with a smattering of airstrikes then with daily assaults. And by January, in a stunning turnabout that has been called a contemporary Stalingrad, the Kurds won. In succeeding, the Syrian Kurds defended not just a strategic outpost in the Middle East, but also a utopian idea of government they're putting into practice -- what they talk about as a space where decisions are made at the neighborhood level, where gender equity and ethnic inclusion are legally mandated, and where barter is becoming more important than currency. The Kurds' inspiration? Survival, sure. But also the ideas of one specific Bronx-born, Vermont-based philosopher. Their leaders developed their guiding philosophy out of a long engagement with Murray Bookchin, who fused Marxist and anarchist ideals into a vision of a world where citizens' assemblies supplant state bureaucracy and environmentalism is king. A contemporary of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, Bookchin considered the socialist politician far too conservative. Bookchin, who described himself as a libertarian socialist, died nearly a decade ago. His passing sparked a celebration of his life in the Kurdish regions. And now, Syrian Kurds have -- at the urging of Abdullah Ocalan, an imprisoned Kurdish icon -- built a Bookchin-inspired society that is the antithesis of the Islamic State. The territory where the 1.5 million or so Syrian Kurds have launched this social experiment, carved out of the wreck of Bashar Assad's police state, includes Kobani and two other small "cantons," or regions. They call it all Rojava -- "Western Kurdistan" in Kurdish, the language the Syrian Kurds have only been able to use freely since Assad's control loosened a handful of years ago. Washington sees the Syrian Kurds' success defending Kobani -- and other parts of Rojava -- as the chief example of how U.S.-led air power and partnerships with forces on the ground can effectively defeat the Islamic State. But this is an especially odd partnership. The Syrian Kurds' ties to Ocalan and the PKK, the designated terrorist organization he leads, enrage Turkey, the most important U.S. ally in the region. And the Rojava vision is dramatically at odds with the more feudal nationalism of another group of Kurds who are used to being Washington's favorites -- those in Iraq. The Syrian Kurds' growing autonomy and unwillingness to launch an all-out offensive against Assad has also upset the Syrian Arab nationalist rebels that the U.S. has courted for years. A quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall suggested the taming of the left, the U.S. is providing air cover for radical Marxist-inspired militants its closest allies can't stand. Welcome to Rojava. [This story is part of a series exploring the U.S.'s relationship with the Syrian Kurds. Go here for the other story, which chronicles how Washington's other alliances in the region make the most important relationship in the Islamic State fight also the most precarious.]
John Moore via Getty Images Members of the female division of the Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPJ, take part in the funeral of eight comrades on Nov. 8, 2015, in Derek, Rojava, Syria.
Bookchin, who died in Burlington, Vermont, in 2006, grew up speaking Russian. His parents were Russian Jews who were active in the movement against the Tsar -- "Russian revolutionaries," he called them in a 2001 interview. "I learned English in the streets" of a multi-ethnic New York, Bookchin said. Bookchin was a young communist, but he knew early that he would not be following any party line. He left the Young Communist League in his teens because he was worried that his fellow leftists were collaborating with the bourgeoisie and becoming less militant. Bookchin remained involved in the U.S. Communist Party through the end of the Spanish Civil War, which he later said he would have participated in personally had he been older. But he left the party again before he graduated from high school, adopting Leon Trotsky's view that the Soviets had the right idea but were implementing it wrong, and got a job as a foundryman in New Jersey. After 10 years as a labor organizer, Bookchin ditched orthodox Marxism altogether after the World War II -- disappointed, he explained in the 2001 interview, that "the war ended without a revolution." Bookchin set out to "rethink everything," he said, as he watched fellow workers in the auto industry become too passively middle class for his taste and labor's role in post-war America shift rapidly. Bookchin began to dream of a future in which machines could replace most human effort and free individuals could develop themselves as they saw fit. But he believed that in the interim, social problems -- the biggest among them the struggle between amoral corporate power and humanity's best interests -- would lay waste to the natural world. " |
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The UAE has sought to distinguish itself in a region mired in war and strife as a high-tech, forward-looking society.
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It plans to send an unmanned probe to Mars by 2021, the Arab world's first mission to space, and Dubai has in many ways led their showy march into the future by introducing the region's first driverless metro and robot policemen prototypes.Northwest Side parents and public education advocates speaking out against Noble ITW-Speer Charter High School's proposed expansion at a news conference Monday afternoon. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Mina Bloom
CHICAGO — Northwest Side aldermen and community leaders are speaking out against a proposed expansion of ITW David Speer Academy in Belmont Cragin. They say expanding the Noble charter school will take resources away from the area's neighborhood schools, which they argue desperately need investment.
"Our schools are falling apart. We have 40 kids in classrooms, we have kids in hallways. Instead of investing in our neighborhood schools, CPS is investing in charter schools," said James Rudyk, executive director of the Northwest Side Housing Center, which is based in Belmont Cragin.
Rudyk was among a group of local leaders, including Ald. Milly Santiago (31st), Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th) and Northwest Side parents, who spoke out against the expansion at a press conference in front of the Chicago Board of Education office, 42 W. Madison St., Monday afternoon.
Last month, Ald. Emma Mitts, whose 37th Ward includes the school, 5321 W. Grand Ave., announced the expansion at a Ward night event.
The expansion, which calls for an addition in an adjacent building, would mean a few hundred more seats at the school, according to Cody Rogers, a spokesman for The Noble Network of Charter Schools.
According to Rudyk, Noble has already bought the building, but Rogers couldn't immediately confirm the sale.
Rudyk said the neighboring school communities weren't notified of the meeting.
"We feel tricked by CPS. They made a commitment to us not to open any new charter schools in our community," he said.
"When CPS intentionally disinvests from the public schools and invests in charter schools, it's taking away from us and our community. We can't help but think there's some tie between the population of Austin and Belmont Cragin that's black and brown. It's really concerning to us and our parents."
CPS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a prepared statement, Rogers defended the expansion, saying the demand at ITW-Speer Charter High School is "off the charts."
According to Rogers, last year the school saw 1,200 applications for 150 freshman spots. This year, the school received nearly 2,000 applications for 150 spots.
Noble issued the following statement: "It's really unfortunate that a group of politicians decided to try to hijack today's board hearing with a cheap political stunt, in direct opposition to thousands of parents who are desperate for quality schools."
But both Villegas and Santiago argued existing neighborhood schools should be the priority right now — not charter schools, especially given the dire financial state of CPS.
"When we see we don't have the same support, we question [it]. Where are their priorities?" Santiago said. "The schools in our area have lost about $20 million within the last four years. This is a lot."
The coalition of local leaders crafted a letter it intends to deliver to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools officials. In it, the group argues that "there is capacity at all of our local high schools to meet the needs of our children."
Mirella Bandera, a parent at Steinmetz College Prep, said there's room for more students at Steinmetz, which is also located in Belmont Cragin.
"Steinmetz enrollment drops every year. There's room there. All of our neighborhood schools lose students every year. So there's no need for this expansion," Bandera said.LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A Los Angeles police officer is being investigated after video showed him punching a woman twice in the face while she was in lockup.CBS2’s Investigative Reporter David Goldstein obtained a copy of the confrontation.The incident occurred late at night in February in the LAPD’s Van Nuys division and was also recorded on the station’s surveillance tape.The 35-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of petty theft.The officer said the woman “aggressively” moved toward him. He said because of her aggressive move, he was forced to kick and punch her.Authorities told Goldstein there were inconsistencies in the officer’s report about the incident.The story also comes to light at the same time the CHP is involved in a case involving an officer caught on video repeatedly punching a woman in the face along a freeway.The tape involving the LAPD officer shows him kicking and then punching the woman twice in the face.The struggle between the officer and the woman, and then the officer’s partner, is brief. It lasts about 15 seconds.Goldstein showed the video to Cheryl Dorsey, a former LAPD officer who retired after 20 years in the department. He asked her if the tape shows the use of excessive force.“Absolutely, it’s excessive,” Dorsey said. “I don’t see anything that she did that would warrant that kind of assault.”She said she felt the officer’s actions crossed a line.“The kick was inappropriate, in my opinion,” Dorsey said, “and the subsequent blows, the closed fists to her face, head, was inappropriate. It was excessive.”According to the arrest report obtained by CBS2 News, police said the woman was arrested Feb. 23 at a 7-Eleven store in Van Nuys after allegedly failing to pay for a can of beer and some candy.In his report, Officer Alvin Clark said the woman who is described as Hispanic told him: “You (expletive) negroes don’t know who are you are dealing with.”He said she began to spit, excessively throw her head violently from side to side and bite at the air.The woman was taken to the Van Nuys station and put in a holding cell. In the cell, suspects are monitored by closed-circuit video without sound.After about 25 minutes, Clark returns to the holding cell and takes off the woman’s handcuffs. He said in his report that he asked the woman to take off her jewelry.When she dropped an earring to the floor, the officer writes, he asked her to pick it up.Goldstein froze the video at the point where Clark said the woman advanced toward him. He said she advanced toward the door with her body in a fighting stance, “hands closed in a fist.”He said he “executed a side kick” and then approached her “to apply handcuffs.”After restarting the video, Goldstein says, the tape shows the woman moving and Clark kicking and then following up with punches and a struggle.Richard Lichten, a use-of-force expert who spent 30 years with the LA County Sheriff’s Department, says what he saw on the video doesn’t match the report.“After the officer kicked the suspect,” said Lichten, “from what I saw on tape, he immediately went up to her and began using his fists, punching her. I did not see any attempt to handcuff her.”He adds: “To me, it looks like punishment. It looks like ‘You didn’t do what I told you to do. I’ve been dealing with you for the ride here and now you’re going to pay.’ “LAPD officials told Goldstein the confrontation has been under investigation since it happened, both an internal and criminal probe. They told him there are “some” inconsistencies between the arrest report and the videotape.“The inconsistencies indicated there was a discrepancy between the kind of force reportedly being used and the actual force that was observed on the tape,” LAPD Lt. Andy Neiman said.Police officials wouldn’t get into specifics with Goldstein about the inconsistencies. They did say the two officers involved in the confrontation have been assigned home with pay while the investigation continues.The woman was treated for wounds and charged with resisting arrest.[Editor's Note: CBS2 did not release the suspect's name because we have been unable to track her down.]Earlier we highlighted how over half of Q2's 1.6% GDP growth could be explained by government spending. The government contributed +0.86% to the Q2 figure based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). You can see how Q2 GDP growth was unusually reliant on government spending here.
As a follow up to that post, we've now broken out the different types of government contributions to Q2 GDP, and it turns out that defense spending was a massive component, accounting for +0.39% of the total 0.86% government GDP contribution.
Meanwhile, state consumption actually fell, sub tracing 0.10% from US GDP growth. You can see the breakdown below. Note that the numbers don't add up to precisely 0.86% due to rounding. All data is from the BEA.
So a large part of Q2 GDP performance, +0.39% compared to the 1.6% total GDP growth for the U.S., was thanks to wars and general defense.The huge, wrought gold gates that marked the entrance to the Von’Faygan estate sparkled so brightly in the morning sun; it was difficult to discern whether or not they were real or a desert mirage. The dizzying effect helped none by the waves of heat that rose from the reddish-orange sands of the desert, to distort the immense structure even further.
Tayne Blinked as he shook his head in a futile attempt to wipe away the illogical vision that stood before him. Surely no one can have that much money? Strangely, the gates didn’t vanish as expected, but continued to grow larger as they trudged forward through the hot sand. Thorne’s blue eyes locked to Tay’s bare feet as they strode over the sandy dunes, an expression of wonder seemingly locked in place as it had been for the past mile or so. Thorne started as he realised his gaze had been noticed, his face suddenly a shade darker as he blushed in embarrassment.
“Your feet, they do not burn?” The knight queried, strangely without any form of belittlement… It seemed a genuine question rather than a way to rub it in Tay’s face that he didn’t own any shoes.
“Uh…” Tayne had been barefoot for as long as he could remember, even when he had had the money to buy some footwear, his purse full after a good nights gamble, the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. In fact, now that he thought about it, he seemed to have a severe distaste for any form of footwear. Quickly, the degenerate realised he had lost himself to thought and completely ignored the, potentially most deadly man he had ever come into contact with, completely. Tay shrugged and began to reply, his heart rate rose rapidly as he began to panic. His thoughts tumbled one over another as he desperately searched for an excuse that wouldn’t give away quite how pathetic he really was.
Luckily, the beautiful rich girl that strode along beside him, saved him from the need to use his brain any further. A welcome relief, as it had actually begun to hurt.
“The man just took out the most dangerous person in Sulpi unarmed, and you’re worried about his feet?” She laughed a beautiful little laugh that sounded half like a giggle and half a hiccup. Thorne’s eyebrows rose in contemplation of what she had just said, still the look of confusion remained. “Anyway, It’s obviously some form of warrior’s pain training. Right?” Amelia’s huge stormy eyes landed back on Tay’s own, a small bit of her lip held between her teeth absently. absent or not, the effect devastated the hungover gambler; blood started to rush down south again as he stared into her eyes, her ample breast heaved up and down within the desert style corset she wore, the swells emphasised as the pressure of the garment pushed them upwards to burst over the top of the fabric like two perfect mountains of flesh.. Dear Tarran…
“Right…” Tay replied without thought, well. Not without thought as he was most definitely thinking about something, although that something involved a lot of sweaty flesh. None of which being feet. Tay leant forward awkwardly in a feeble attempt to disguise the slight tent that had begun to grow around the crotch area of his filthy trousers.
“I admire your conviction.” Thorne’s words roughly yanked the degenerate back from his erotic fantasy. Tay’s head snapped towards the warrior in panic. Please Tarran; please don’t say the bloody Blood Thorne just watched me eye fuck his niece. Thorne met his gaze with a smile. Phew. Strangely, even some of the previous uncertainty had dissolved at Amelia’s explanation. Apparently, a warrior’s conviction was something the man could relate to, the excuse had somehow forged the foundations of some kind of warriors trust between the two. Shame it’s bullshit. Tay coughed to cover the giggle that escaped before he could surpress it. Get your shit together Tayne.
“Thank you.” Again the voice emerged in the drunk’s interpretation of a posh voice, paired with as serious a face as he could muster.
“Where are you from Sir Tay? I don’t believe I recognise that accent. Dagonian maybe?” Dagonia? He thinks I’m a Tarran damned warrior monk? Tayne stole a quick look down over his bare chested body. Ah… The warrior monk caste of the Dagonian wastes were renown for there fighting ability, followers of the Dagonian god of war, Kironyte. They lived in monasteries atop the jungle infested mountains of the Dagonian planes, their life spent training, day in day out, completely secluded from the outside world. So secluded, in fact; that barely a person alive knows their true appearance… The only thing that people seemed to agree on was that they held no materialistic possessions and fought unarmed. Ain’t no monk Mr Thorne, just poor M’afraid. Tay nearly snorted at the thought again. Instead, his usual bleary eyed look focused into one of intense concentration, palms rose up to meet flat handed with the fingers pointed upwards as if in prayer before he bent at the middle in a half bow.
“My lord knows his speakens truly well.” Tay’s posh voice was beginning to grate on even his own ears.
“Truly?” Thorne’s sapphire blue eyes widened in astonishment, his mouth half agape. Tayne slowly inclined his head the barest of fractions, as if in acknowledgement of the Lord’s question. “we must spar!” the charming grin shot back across the warriors face as he stepped forward toward Tay, a gauntleted hand slammed roughly into the drunk’s upper back, obviously meant as a friendly gesture, but damn near snapped his spine.
“My Lord is to kind. Unfortunately the secrets of Kironyte are denied use, unless in Battle of course.” Tayne intoned through gritted teeth as he waited for the pain to subside. Bloody bones on fire, how did I come up with that? The self congratulative thought sprung to the forefront of his mind as Tay battled with a victorious smile.
“Of course Lord Tay. I must admit I am dissapointed, but I respect and honour your traditions.” Tayne nodded to the Knight somewhat haughtily.
“Uncle!” the urgency in Amelia’s voice caused both men to spin immediately around, the movement so abrupt that a cloud of sand rose in the wake of their boot(less)s. The beautiful girl stood stricken with fear, her pale hand pointed off to the side with a single manicured finger extended. Tayne followed her gaze… and nearly wet himself. Two great desert wolves bounded straight for them, yellowed fangs bared viciously as they snarled their intent.
“I guess I’ll get to see some of your secrets after all Lord Tay!” The madman laughed in good humour as he drew the huge sword from it’s equally huge scabbard. Look what you’ve gone and done you idiot. The panic began to build at such a speed that all other thoughts were immediately wiped out, his bladder suddenly felt ready to burst. Fuck this. Tayne’s survival instinct kicked in and he was off.
“That’s the spirit!” Roared Thorne as he pounded on past Tay, his colossal sword held high above his head as his booted feet kicked up a storm of orange sand in his wake. What the hell? Tayne looked up. Dammit. In his panic, the only thing he had thought was “Run”. Unfortunately, his legs didn’t seem to be as smart as his thinkbox, as the direction they had obeyed the order, was directly towards the oncoming, small-pony size, man eating wolves. One had split from the other to flank the two men; Thorne had veered off to confront this one before it was at their back. With another roar, his great blade flashed through the air.
Suddenly, the half-naked drunk’s line of sight was obscured by a huge bulk of shaggy brown fur. A low growl rumbled in the wolf’s throat as it eyed him up hungrily.
“Good doggy… gooood doggy….”
With a howl, the wolf was on him; claws painfully pressed against his chest as it pinned him to the sand. The great beast leant back, its muzzle pointed towards the bright blue sky as a wild howl let rip. Tay’s arms flailed about his body in a frenzied panic as his hands desperately searched for something to use as a weapon. Come on… Come on… Anything. Nothing. Well nothing but a damn pebble. Well, that’s it then. I’m done. The direwolf lowered its red eyed gaze down to meet the eyes of it’s prey, as if in taunt. Tay’s leg grew warm as the wolf growled once more; the stench of his own urine filled his nostrils. As a final act of defiance and a pathetic one at that; Tayne clenched his hand around the small stone he had found on the floor next to him, and with all of his might, launched the pebble, right at the creature’s muzzle.
Amazingly, in this exact moment, the wolf’s jaws parted as it prepared for the kill; the small rock flew between the two rows of razor sharp teeth and continued onwards into the gullet of the powerful animal. The growl stopped immediately, it’s red eyes widened in surprise. A noise similar to that of a cat, mid attempt at dislodging a fur ball, began to emerge from the wolf’s mouth. Then a whimper as the canine blinked rapidly, its chest begun to heave up and down. What? This continued for another minute or so, until suddenly; the large creature dropped bodily forwards. It’s huge bulk covered the poor man completely, too heavy to budge. In fact, the weight was so great; Tayne realised he was about to lose consciousness. The darkness had already begun to seep in from the corners of his vision.
Suddenly he was weightless. The bright light of Tarran’s garden almost blinding as the giant brown wolf vanished. One of the Lord’s disciples extended an arm, fingers outstretched to help him up. Tay smiled dreamily as he grasped the proffered appendage and allowed the disciple to haul him to his feet.
“Lord Tay!” Huh? “Incredible!” What? Tayne blinked as he sucked in a deep breath. Slowly, the image of the disciple faded and unblurred. Thorne. The man stood before him, a jovial expression on his face, almost that of childish glee. “I never would have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes!” What in the name of Tarran is he on about? “Bare handed!” The knight cursed in excitement. “How! How did you do it?” Thorne barely paused before he answered his own question. “Sorry, sorry, I know. Secrets and all that. But really, just wow.” The blonde warrior slid a plated arm over Tay’s shoulder as he led him towards the gate; a number of Von’Faygan guards pelted the ground with speed as they made their way towards them, evidently alerted to the wolves, but too late in their arrival. What the hell happened? Tay stole a glance behind himself as they strode lazily towards the great gates. The huge brown wolf lay on its side, unmoving and lifeless. Crimson eyes still open wide with shock. Well I’ll be fucked. What are the chances? Choked to death. A cold breeze made Tay suddenly very aware of the wet patch that lined the inner side of his left leg. Shit. The drunk had pissed himself with fear.
“Bastard pissed on me.” He mumbled awkwardly as they continued on through the grand gates.
AdvertisementsIn the video, Karnataka Minister is seen saying, "If they (police) don't answer the phone of the district minister, why should they stay?"
To an audience of party workers, Karnataka minister PT Parameshwara Naik brags "She did not take my call. She did not receive it. So I had her transferred. If they don't answer the phone of the district minister, why should they stay?"Enthusiastic applause follows.The comment may have been well-received at the gathering, but there was a tactical error for a politician showing off his clout - the conversation was filmed and has been uploaded on social media days after the minister floated the idea that he had no role to play in the transfer of a senior police woman Anupama Shenoy.The Congress, which governs Karnataka, is scampering around, somewhat ungracefully, for a defense. "I don't know what prompted the minister to make that statement. The party will look into it," said minister TB Jayachandra.Ms Shenoy was transferred about a week ago from her post in Ballari, which the Congress has assigned to the charge of Mr Naik. Her transfer came two days after she put the minister on hold when he called her, reportedly to answer another call from her boss.At the time, Mr Naik had denied any role in the shuffle, insisting that Ms Shenoy's reassignment was an administrative decision taken by the police.The US Marine Corps’ portion of the future vertical lift programme will be an optionally manned platform, the service’s deputy commandant for aviation says.
While many have forecasted unmanned aircraft as the future of aviation, Lt Gen Jon “Dog” Davis believes the next generation of medium-lift, long-range rotorcraft should still have a pilot in the cockpit for some missions.
“That’s what we definitely want, why wouldn't you want that?” Davis told reporters following a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington today. “Especially for a high reliability airplane, we view that airplane as a manned platform.”
Much like the US Defense Department’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme, the FVL programme is a joint effort led by the US Army to create a common helicopter across the US armed forces. The next-generation aircraft could be fielded by the 2030s and would recapitalise several helicopters including the Bell OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, Boeing CH-47 Chinook and Lockheed Martin C-130 transport aircraft. For the Marines, the rotorcraft could offer a cheaper version of the MV-22 Osprey for a medium assault mission.
The Defense Department entered into co-operative research agreements with four industry teams, including Boeing-Sikorsky, Bell, AVX and Karem for a demonstration phase. Bell’s V-280 Valor and Sikorsky’s SB-1 Defiant are expected to fly their prototypes, the only two for the programme, by late 2017, FlightGlobal previously reported. Bell or Sikorsky should be able to put forth an unmanned version of the V-280 and SB-1, since both helicopters offer fly-by-wire control systems, Davis said.
Whether the helicopter is prosecuting a strike mission or carrying valuable cargo could determine how many pilots are necessary, he said. Davis questioned whether two pilots were needed in the aircraft at all times, noting that Lockheed Martin’s single-seat F-35 completes strike missions. But the helicopter could also require at least one pilot while operating in a GPS or information denied environment where controls may fail, he added.
An unmanned aircraft could also open the door to a successor to the K-MAX, Lockheed Martin and Kaman Aerospace’s single-seat, optionally piloted helicopter which the Marines deployed in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2014. Two K-MAX helicopters are stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Arizona and the service is studying the option for that platform, Davis said. Still, Davis must make sure the requirements process guides the Marine Corps to an unmanned aircraft like the K-MAX.
“If we have a logistics helicopter requirement we’re looking at K-MAX would be one of the players out there,” Davis says. “It’s a hot line, it’s a good airplane, so we’re very interested in that airplane.”May 7th, 2017
Topics Covered:
Disc Golf Etiquette
Disc Golf Rules
How To Play
Disc Types
How To Throw
Terminology
Next Steps
Location
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Fly By Disc Golf is very excited to be hosting a new player instructional day at Amesbury Pines Disc Golf course in Amesbury, MA.This two and a half hour instructional course is geared towards the very new or never played before player. This event is limited at 16 spots total and we expect it to sell out quickly. Pre-registrations only for this event. There will be no spots available for purchase on site.The event is taking place at Amesbury Pines Disc Golf Course.Amesbury Pines Disc GolfHighland StAmesbury, MA The course is pretty easy to find and most GPS apps are accurate when searching by name. The meeting spot is the back of the parking lot. You won't miss us!N o one answers the phones at Cricket Media.
The company has fully embraced the opaque, untouchable nature of most contemporary companies: a pretty website, a menu of general email addresses, and a fully automated phone system.
You press 1 for one set of publications, 2 for another, 3 for the dial-by-name directory. Or you can hold the line for a receptionist who simply doesn’t exist.
In the course of researching this story, I’ve dialed many names, held the line, emailed addresses both general and specific, and tweeted at Cricket. But I failed to reach anyone who currently works there.
Cricket wasn’t always so unavailable. Founded in 1973 by an educational reformer, Cricket has been accessible to so many children for the last 44 years. Generations of young readers cut their teeth on the pieces in Cricket: work by writers like Lloyd Alexander, George Selden, Ursula LeGuin, and Julius Lester.
In a time when children’s magazines mostly featured hidden object drawings and games, Cricket stubbornly refused to underestimate its young readers. It welcomed their correspondence, and was such a human endeavor that for many readers, finding Cricket in the mailbox every month was like a visit from a friend.
In a time when children’s magazines mostly featured hidden object drawings and games, Cricket stubbornly refused to underestimate its young readers.
Kelly Link, whose collection of fantastical short stories Get In Trouble was a Pulitzer finalist in 2016, loved Cricket so much as a child she’s kept all of her back issues — she could not bear to get rid of them. Cricket influenced her to become a writer “one hundred percent,” she says, and more than that, nudged her toward writing short stories.
“[Cricket taught me] that poetry and short stories could be playful,” Link said. “That you could write contemporary short stories deliberately. That I liked some short stories better than others, and I especially liked stories of the fantastic.”
Laura Newcomer, a professional writer and editor, also read Cricket as a child. She loved that the magazine felt like it was written for her.
“I was an intelligent and extremely imaginative kid, and I felt like the magazine didn’t patronize me. Instead, it felt like it celebrated me and other kids like me, and provided a space for us to come together and be smart and imaginative together,” Newcomer wrote to me.
That sense of kids being taken seriously was no accident. It was the whole idea.
In the early ’70s, Marianne Carus received a submission for her fledgling literary magazine. It was from Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking. The submission was part of her manuscript for her latest novel, The Brothers Lionheart.
It was a children’s book, but not a happy one: within the first three chapters, the titular characters both die and go to the afterlife; the older brother sacrifices his own life to save the younger in a housefire, and the little brother later dies of tuberculosis.
Carus read it, loved it, and decided she had to publish a portion of the book. It was excellent literature, and that was what she wanted in her newest endeavor, Cricket, a literary magazine for children, a curated collection of the cream of children’s literature, that would eventually come to be called “The Little New Yorker.”
When Carus, now 89, talks about her philosophy in creating Cricket, she paraphrases English poet and children’s author Walter de la Mare, saying only “the rarest kind of best in anything is good enough for children.”
“We only accepted stories and art of the highest quality,” she said. But “the rarest kind of best” and “the highest quality” didn’t always align with what people thought was appropriate for children.
Carus’s staff balked at The Brothers Lionheart. The story’s themes of death and disease seemed too dark for a children’s magazine.
Her art director, Trina Schart Hyman, called from her home in New Hampshire to tell Carus that the new magazine could not publish the story. It was too dark, and too sad. Carus was unmoved.
“I said ‘Trust me, Trina. I will have it in Cricket,’” she said. “So we did.”
Her art director called to tell Carus that the new magazine could not publish the story. It was too dark, and too sad. Carus was unmoved.
Marcia Leonard, then on staff as an assistant editor, remembers not loving the story, less because of the themes and more because of its presentation, but she also trusted Carus’s judgment.
“Although Marianne sought her editors’ opinions, we recognized that she was in charge and the magazine was her baby, so she made the final decisions,” she wrote in an email.
There was no watershed moment when Carus, a German immigrant and mother of three, decided to found a literary magazine for children. Instead the magazine was born out of a cluster of enterprises, pressures, needs, and about 13 years of interest in educational reform.
A poem from Cricket Magazine featuring art by Eric von Schmidt. (Courtesy of Caitlin von Schmidt)
It all started when André Carus, the oldest child of Marianne and her husband Blouke, started first grade for the second time in the fall of 1959. He had already attended school in spring of that year, when his family was on a year-long trip to Germany. When the Caruses returned to Illinois, his parents were appalled by the repetition and the limited vocabulary of the Dick and Jane books he was given to read in school. That experience prompted the Carus family to launch the Open Court Readers, a reading curriculum that relied on phonics and engaging reading material.
Starting publications is a Carus family tradition. In 1887, businessman Edward Hegeler — Blouke Carus’s great-grandfather — started the Open Court Publishing Company. The original goal of the company was to publish two journals: The Open Court, a journal which aimed to reform religious thought using the principles of science, and The Monist, a philosophical journal. (The Open Court put out its last issue in the 1930s. The Monist is still published today, now by Oxford University Press.)
So when the Carus family, in the early ’60s, decided that their son’s reading material was substandard, they used the family publishing house to publish the Open Court Basic Readers.
Blouke Carus is an engineer by training, but absolutely dedicated himself to improving the U.S. education system. He found himself up against not just the Dick and Jane see-and-say method of teaching reading, but inertia in the educational system.
It’s been a long battle. When I reached Marianne Carus to talk about Cricket, Blouke had left their home in rural Illinois to go to Washington, D.C. to talk to education officials.
“He’s 90 now, my husband,” said Carus. “But he’s still very young at heart, and very fortunate that he can still travel to Washington and talk to the most important people there. They listen to him, but they don’t do very much about it.”
While the Open Court Readers were Blouke Carus’s project, Marianne was brought in early on as a kind of tastemaker. The Open Court Readers focused on phonics paired with good reading material, so that children would be interested in reading. Marianne, who studied literature at the University of Freiburg, the Sorbonne, and University of Chicago, knew good work when she saw it, and was able to identify selections that should be included in the readers.
Carus is one of those rare adults who seems to understand children; when you talk to her about the choices she made as Cricket’s editor, she draws on her own experience of being a child who loved to read.
“Short reading material is very important. It gives you a certain sense of accomplishment if you finish a story or if you finish a short book,” she said. “When I was a child, and I was reading one book after another, I was very happy when I did finish a book and didn’t just leave it because I was not interested in it anymore.”
She founded Cricket because in her work with the Open Court Readers, she discovered a dearth of good short material for children.
In the early 1970s, there were about 100 children’s magazines on the market. None of them carried great material, in Carus’s opinion. She recalls reading Highlights for Children to André when he was sick with a sore throat. Highlights did the trick — it put him to sleep. It also put Marianne to sleep.
“I was reaffirmed in my belief that children needed something they would stay awake for,” she said.
“I was reaffirmed in my belief that children needed something they would stay awake for.”
Carus modeled her new project after St. Nicholas Magazine, a literary magazine for children which ran from 1873 to 1943, and had been edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, the author of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates.
The magazine began in 1972 with a small staff: Marianne and a part-time secretary worked on-site in the company’s office in LaSalle, Ill. Trina Schart Hyman, whom Carus had met at a book fair and hired as Cricket’s art director, worked remotely from her home in New Hampshire, sending her work in through the mail.
Carus also brought on an editorial assistant, Marcia Leonard, a recent college graduate with a degree in children’s literature. Leonard had been taking a summer course at Radcliffe in magazine and book publishing when one of her classmates showed her an ad for a new children’s magazine. She had been planning to go to New York, but she couldn’t pass up an interview with a new children’s magazine in her home state of Illinois. So she drove out to LaSalle, a little town in farming country.
“After I talked to Marianne about the magazine and her plans for it I knew I had to be there,” she said. “That was very exciting, to be in on the very beginning of something.”
Carus asked Leonard to commit to two years. Leonard promised one. She was there for six and, in that small office in that little midwest town, Leonard received a more rigorous training in editing than she might have gotten in New York.
“Marianne was a great mentor. She would sit beside me and go through a manuscript I had edited and she would talk with me about [why I made the edits I’d made]. I learned tremendously from that experience,” said Leonard, who is now a freelance editor and the author of more than 100 children’s books.
The cover of Cricket’s first issue. (Courtesy of Marcia Leonard)
In 1972, Carus, Hyman and Leonard put together a pilot issue of Cricket. There was only one problem with it: Drawing from the example of St. Nicholas, the magazine’s titles were hand-lettered, which made it hard to read. So Carus brought in a designer: John Grandits.
While Grandits, who is now a children’s author, started with the Carus Publishing Company as a typographer, he quickly learned through working with Carus and Hyman a truth about Cricket’s philosophy: good storytelling wasn’t just about the printed word. The stories should be linked to the best illustrations possible.
“Illustrations are a speciality field, and in ’73 there were many great illustrators still working and still alive and Trina was able to corral them and get them to work,” said Grandits, who later became Cricket’s art director and took the magazine from its original 6 by 9 size to its now-iconic 7 by 9 format.
All of the artists in Cricket were remarkable; Grandits recalled one conversation in which Wally Tripp painstakingly explained how to correctly alter a horse’s anatomy so it could be anthropomorphized.
“He says, ‘Well, horses have hooves. They have no opposable thumbs. If you’re given a story to draw with a horse, how do you resolve the thing where he has to have a top hat and cane? He can’t put the hat on. He can’t hold the cane. What do you do? There’s a lot of illustrators who sort of lay it nearby, and it looks as if they’re holding it maybe, and nobody ever addresses the question of how the hat got on the head. But what you have to do is make adjustments to the anatomy of the horse.’ So he said, ‘Here’s a horse skeleton.’”
Tripp sketched out a horse skeleton in the dust of the fireplace where they were sitting. He went on at length, about how many fingers a horse should have, and how the cleft part of the hoof could work as an opposable thumb.
“He’s worked through all this, |
technically, particularly on the Vita, which is what I played the game on. (Blackgate also sounds very good, too and makes great use of audio cues to signal the location of some collectibles as well as to distinguish some parts of the prison from others.)
At the start of his adventure, Batman only has his batarangs, a grappling hook that can pull him up ledges and a basic bat-suit. The Blackgate prison is full of problems he doesn’t have the gear with which to immediately deal. There are doors he can’t unlock, grates he can’t pull off walls and chasms he can’t pass. He’s mostly trapped, options limited. From this predicament spills the great flow of a Metroid game, masterfully presented by the Armature team. You walk around and notice a door you can enter or a computer you can hack. You spot a ledge and climb to it, notice a little air shaft you can duck into. You crawl between the walls into a room you feel you’re probably not supposed to be in. Eventually you’ll be finding hidden entrances and exits in and out of the game’s three major sectors, repeatedly bridging the wonder of how-will-I-ever-get-over-there to—minutes or even hours later—the epiphany of wow-I-am-finally-over there.
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In the Metroid Prime games, players had to use a variety of visual filters to scan their environment, spot clues, discover enemy weak points and learn lore. That concept was already borrowed by the Arkham series and presented as a blue-toned “detective vision” view of the world that players could toggle on or off. In the Vita version of this new game, players can tap the screen to toggle it on or off. But to find the really hidden stuff, they need to touch the screen with their thumbs—literally touch the part of the Blackgate environment about which they’re curious and they’ll scan it. If there’s a clue, it’ll show up in a different color or as an icon. This way, players discover weak points in walls that they can blow through (only once they attain the gadget that lets them do so, of course). They will discover clues to mysteries Batman is solving while going through Blackgate, learning about stuff the Joker or other bad guys did before Batman got to the prison. They’ll also find batsuit upgrades and eventually a full armament of gadgets. The scanning system has come full circle here and works wonderfully. So too does the melee combat system, pulled not from the Metroids of the past but from the Arkham games. The fluid, acrobatic, counter-based melee flows well in 2D. It’s a pleasure, if not much of a challenge, to clean Blackgate’s rooms of their idiot thugs.
The quality of a Metroid-style game can be measured in the amount of intangible delight that they give a player as he or she explores and suddenly figures out that they now have the ability to go back to an old area and get past whatever was blocking them. These games are essentially designed to make players feel smart and they do this best when they hide some of their clues well. Blackgate is a winner in this regard and will likely provide even players who follow only its critical path of mandatory missions with some head-scratching moments and some moments of eureka breakthroughs. The game’s optional items are hidden even more deviously, giving the sense that its creators and their team are smiling at finally getting a chance to vex players like this again.
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Blackgate also illustrates, to its detriment, how well Metroid-style games work when the new abilities that players attain are fantastical. It’s too bad that Batman’s abilities really aren’t that amazing. In a Metroid or a Castlevania, the player is attaining freeze rays and magic spells; they’re getting the ability to roll into a ball, run through walls or magnetize themselves to the ceiling. Batman’s best moves, even with all his gadgetry, involve little more than grapple hooks and wires, batarangs and explosives. Late in Blackgate, Batman finally learns a move that lets the game’s creators become playful with how their level layouts force him to use it, but otherwise, the game is limited in how grounded Batman is. Many times while I was playing, I found myself wishing Warner Brothers had asked Armature not to make a game about Batman in a prison but about Green Lantern or the Flash trapped, I don’t know, in the Justice League satellite or some place. Those heroes would have more interesting move sets to play with in this genre, I think. Either that or, if they make one of these gain, Batman just needs some way weirder gadgets.
Or maybe Batman simply needs more interesting enemies to bring some more fantastic moves out of him. Metroid’s Samus Aran and Castlevania’s various Belmonts have enemies to roll under, zap with the aforementioned freeze rays, or to cut down in midflight. In Blackgate, Batman’s mostly got dudes in orange jumpsuits to punch. Send in the space aliens. Or… at least do more with the surprise enemies that Blackgate teases will show up in a some sort of sequel. I won’t ruin it here, but as been-there-done-that as Blackgate’s setting and enemies are, a subplot and ending sequence introduce some classic DC characters into the fiction who seem primed to torment Batman in a future game. For fans of a certain DC cast of characters that I won't ruin for you now, this game ends on a very exciting and promising note.
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It’s a credit to Armature’s designers that neither Batman's lack of flashy maneuvers nor the game’s too-familiar plot and setting keep Blackgate from being consistently fun to play. It surely helps that Batman himself is a character who is as much about the excellence of the mind as he is about the power of the well-placed fist and is therefore still pretty well-suited to star in a Metroid-style mystery adventure. Armature, happily, is well-suited to make such a game. Their Blackgate, if nothing else, is a satisfying multi-chambered puzzle for gamers to solve. It’s a pleasure to finally play a new game from these guys. Their return should be considered a successDining out in Madison, Wisconsin on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2016
Please note: This list is no longer being updated. There is no new list for 2017.
This list began nine years ago in 2007 as a post on my personal blog listing Chinese restaurants in the Madison area open on Christmas. It proved to be incredibly popular, drawing thousands of visitors. The following year, in 2008, we expanded the list by adding non-Chinese restaurants.
Over the years, publishing this list has become a very popular holiday tradition for us: We’ve welcomed thousands and thousands of visitors during the holiday season who are looking for this information — and learned that lots of people don’t dine at home on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day. In 2015, we moved the list from our Madison on the Cheap website (which is on hiatus) to Quintessential Madison, a new website featuring stories about Madison people, places, and history.
Compiling and updating the list takes an enormous amount of time: Every restaurant on the list is called to confirm when they’re open.
Adhering to tradition, our list is divided into two sections: The first features Chinese restaurants; the second features other locally-owned Madison-area restaurants, most of which serve from their regular menus rather than cooking up Christmas specials. At the very end of the listings is a link to a list of “Restaurant Chains Open for Christmas 2016.” This list is compiled by RestaurantNews.com and it provides general, not specific, information about these options.
Important: Even though a restaurant is open on December 24th and/or December 25th, it may have limited hours or menu options. Plus, plans change. Please call ahead to confirm details.
Part I: Madison-area Chinese restaurants open December 24th and December 25th
A-8 China, 608 University Avenue, 608-250-8888
Open December 24th from 11 a.m. until 11 p.m. Close December 25th
Chang Jiang, 948 W. Main Street, Sun Prairie, 608-825-9108
Open December 24th from 11 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. and December 25th from noon until 10 p.m.
China Inn, 4702 Cottage Grove Road, 608-222-8829
Open December 24th and 25th from 10 a.m. until 9 p.m.
China Kitchen, 6608 Mineral Point Road, 608-826-4432
Open December 24th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m. and December 25th from 2 p.m. until 9 p.m.
China Wok Buffet, 6913 University Avenue, 608-826-0333
Open December 24th and 25th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m.
Fugu Asian, 411 West Gilman Street, 608-286-7277
Open December 24th and 25th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m.
Great China, 617 N. Sherman Avenue, 608-244-9988
Open December 24th and 25th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m.
Hong Kong Cafe, 2 S. Mills Street, 608-259-1668
Open regular hours December 24th and 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. on December 25th
Imperial Garden West, 2039 Allen Boulevard, Middleton, 608-238-6445
Open December 24th from 4 p.m. until 10 p.m.); closed December 25th
Reservations strongly suggested
Jade Garden, 1109 South Park Street, 608-260-9890
Open December 24th and 25th from 11:15 a.m. until 10 p.m.
Nani Dim Sum Restaurant, 518 Grand Canyon Drive, 608-826-9300
Open December 24th and 25th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m.
Oriental Wok, 532 S. Park Street, 608-255-1288
Open December 24th and 25th from 11 a.m. until 12:30 a.m.
Tai’s Asian Bistro, 638 S. Whitney Way, 608-661-8889
Open December 24th and December 25th from 1 p.m. until 8 p.m.
The Journey Buffet and Grill, 4325 Lien Road, 608-663-6686
Open December 24th and 25th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m.
World Buffet, 2451 W. Broadway, 608-222-2962
Open December 24th from 11 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. and December 25th from 11 a.m. until 8 p.m.
World Buffet, 499 D’Onofrio Drive, 608-833-6789
Open December 24th and 25th from 11 a.m. until 9:30 p.m.
Part II: Additional Madison restaurants open on December 24th and December 25th
1847 at the Stamm House, 6625 Century Ave, Middleton, 608-203-9430
Open December 24th from 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. and closed December 25th
Angkor-wat Cambodian Thai Restaurant, 602 South Park Street, 608-422-5666
Open December 24th and 25th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m.
Blue Moon Bar & Grill, 2535 University Avenue, 608-233-0441
Open December 24th from 11 a.m. until “5ish” and December 25th from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m.
Edo Japanese Restaurant, 532 South Park Street, (608) 268-0247
Open from 11 a.m. until midnight on December 24th and 25th
Edo Garden Monona, 6309 Monona Drive, (608) 226-9828
Open December 24th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m. and December 25th from 4 p.m. until 10 p.m.
Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar, 750 North Midvale Boulevard, 608-233-9550
Open December 24th from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. and closed December 25th
Reservations recommended
Gus’s Diner, 630 North Westmount, Sun Prairie; 608-318-0900
Open December 24th from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. and December 25th from 6 a.m. until 4 p.m.
Layla’s-Persian food with a local flare, 141 South Butler Street, 608-216-4511
Open December 24th from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m. Serving a specias Hanukamas (Haaa-new-ka-mas) menu, including Sufganiot Burgers, latke bar and more!
Liliana’s, 2951 Triverton Pike in Fitchburg, 608-442-4444
Open December 24th from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Serving a four-course dinner.
Open December 25th from 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. Serving a Christmas buffet
Reservations highly recommended
Om Indian Fusian Cuisine, 3517 East Washington Avenue, 608-467-2110
Open December 24th from 11:30 a.m. until 10 p.m. and December 25th from 11:30 a.m. until 9 p.m.
Parkway Family Restaurant, 1221 Ann Street, 608-255-2355
Open December 24th and 25th from 5 a.m. until 9 p.m.
Taste of India, 2623 Monroe Street, 608-218-9200
Open for lunch from 11:30 until 2:30 p.m. and dinner from 5 p.m. until 10 p.m. on December 24th and 25th
The Edgewater Hotel, 1001 Wisconsin Place, 800-922-5512
The Grand Ballroom
Open December 25th for Christmas Brunch from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.
Reservations highly recommended
Tandoori House Restaurant, 6713 Odana Road, 608-833-1824
Open for lunch from 11:30 a.m. until 3 p.m. and dinner from 5 p.m. until 10 p.m. on December 24th and 25th
The New Paradise Lounge, 119 East Main Street, 608-256-2263
Open December 24th and 25th from noon until 1:30 a.m.
Tip Top Tavern, 601 North Street, 608-241-5515
Open “regular hours” (11 a.m. until 2 a.m.) on December 24th and open December 25th from 5 p.m. until midnight (bar service only, no food)
Tully’s II Food and Spirits, 6401 Monona Drive, Monona; 608-222-4995
Open “normal hours” on December 24th and December 25th from 10 a.m.
Restaurant Chains Open for Christmas 2016
If you know about a Madison-area restaurant that will be open on December 24th or December 25th, please share the information with us by sending an email to us at madisononthecheap@gmail.com
Last updated 11/08/2017Militants set off a car bomb and used rocket-propelled grenades to storm the entrance of an airbase outside Jalalabad, near the Pakistani border Wednesday.
The Taliban say six suicide bombers killed dozens of Afghan and foreign forces in the brazen daylight attack. But NATO spokesman Brigadier General Josef Blotz refutes that claim.
"In this incident several insurgents were killed and I can tell you that the security perimeter was not breached and the insurgents were being stopped by Afghan and ISAF forces very effectively," Blotz said.
The attack appeared planned and coordinated, much like a Taliban assault last May on the Bagram air base, NATO's biggest in Afghanistan.
June has been the bloodiest month of the near nine-year-old war for foreign troops, with over 100 killed. The rising toll comes amid a troop surge for an operation that seeks to take on the Taliban in their heartland.
On Tuesday in Washington, U.S. General David Petraeus warned there are still difficult days ahead.
"My sense is that the tough fighting will continue, " he said. "Indeed, it may get more intense in the next few months. As we take away the enemy's safe havens and reduce the enemy's freedom of action, the Insurgents will fight back."
Petraeus has been nominated to head the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan after his predecessor, General Stanley McChrystal, resigned. McChrystal and his aides had made disparaging remarks about Obama administration officials in a magazine interview.
At Tuesday's Senate confirmation hearing, Petraeus said he believes the Afghan government and its international allies can still succeed in the fight against the Taliban.
But many observers say any progress will be slow. Jeremy Binnie, a terrorism and insurgency expert at IHS Jane's defense group, says instead of making sustainable gains and winning over the public, coalition troops have been preoccupied with chasing insurgents.
"What we're typically seeing that the coalition and Afghan allies are capable of securing sort of district centers, the center of these towns, and displacing the Taliban out of them," he says. "But the insurgents merely move a few miles down the road and they sort of set up a new safe haven and then they do their absolute utmost to undermine any perception of security."
Rampant corruption in the Afghan government is also raising doubts about the overall war strategy that is now aimed at winning the support of civilians and potential militant defectors.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder arrived in Kabul Wednesday to discuss the country's anti-corruption efforts. He also will discuss ways to improve Afghanistan's judicial system in his meetings with Afghan and U.S. officials.Kanye West appeared on this morning's broadcast of "On Air With Ryan Seacrest" to discuss a variety of topics such as his comments at the Grammys, his relationship with Taylor Swift, and the impending launch of his Adidas shoe line. You can listen to audio of the interview above.
In particular, he said he and Swift are planning to collaborate on music. "She wants to get in the studio and we’re definitely going to go in," he said. "Any artist with an amazing point of view, perspective, fan base, I’m down to get in the studio and work."
Kanye said that the "voices in his head" told him to go on stage at the Grammys, but that he refrained from grabbing the microphone because he didn't want to take away time from Beck's acceptance speech. "Beck is one of the nicest guys and one of the most respected musicians in the game," he said. "There’s nothing that I will want to do as a fellow musician to disrespect him in any way." He said he misworded his comments and added: "Obviously Beck is one of the most respected artists, and respects artistry."
He also said, "But Taylor Swift came up to me right afterwards, literally right afterwards, and tells me that I should have went on stage. This is the irony of my life."
He called himself a "chiropractor," and said he provides jolts of truths in these candid moments. "Everyone feels better after the fact, or everyone is way more famous after the fact, or everyone sells way more albums after the fact, and then Kanye just goes on being an asshole to everyone."
Additionally, he said the Yeezy 750 Boost, his shoe line with Adidas, will launch tomorrow.February 16
Disclaimer
Problem
Sources
Model parameters
Muzzle velocity
Range
Drag characterstics
round-to-round dispersion
Implementation
Results and validation
45mm gun:
6-pdr gun:
17-pdr gun:
88mm gun:
Conclusions
As we have mentioned before, we will be posting regular devblogs about the progress of our Eastern Front DLC development. Here is the first one (and sorry: it's really big).Everything we mention or describe below is a work in progress. Any methods, numbers, figures and visuals posted in devblogs are not final and may change by the time DLC will be released officially.Weapon accuracy is one of the challenges we are faced with the development of Khalkhin-Gol pack. As this will be our first Eastern Front DLC, the Estab will likely be used later as the base for other EF packs, so we should be very careful about decisions we make and steps we take.New pack will bring two whole new nations into the game: Soviet Union and Japan. While some captured Soviet equipment was already introduced in previous packs and custom scenarios, this is nowhere near the introduction of the whole Japanese and Soviet arsenal.At first we thought we could reuse the Soviet 1942/1943 Estab we have been developing during late 2000s (and which never resulted in official DLCs). However, as it quickly turned out, values there were coming from different people who were creating that Estab over several years, and those people had different ideas in mind, and also they have been using different sources. Names for weapons and vehicles were inconsistent sometimes, but, what's even worse, we have identified some very different approaches for defining weapon accuracies and penetration figures. So this was definitely not the way we wanted to go.As we are not only going to add two new nations, but also later we would like to have added also Germany, Poland, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia (and may be other nations of the Eastern European Theater), we have concluded that we need to develop completely new accuracy calculation system. The system that will be:- consistent across all the weaponry of all the Eastern Front nations;- transparent;- based on a reasonable scientific methodology;- simple and quick to use, so that it may be reused by any Eastern Front DLC developer without any special knowledge or skill.Consistent would mean, that we need to create the generic approach to define weapons not only for this particular DLC, but also for all the other (future) Eastern Front DLC. That means, whenever we decide to add German Eastern Front weapons later, we will need to re-define their accuracies according to the new model (so they may be a bit different to what we have been using with old DLCs, but consistent with the rest of EF data).Transparent would mean the methodology is well-defined, documented and is independent of any subjective opinions, "secret documents" or religious beliefs (which you could sometimes find in Internet battles between e.g. Wehrmacht and Red Army fanboys).Scientific methodology means the following. There are different opinions about the hit probability: Thomas Jentz, for example, have described a probability to hit 2 m x 2.5 m target for German 88mm KwK 43 tank gun at 1000 m range as 0.85 (see here ). But others may say that, e.g. 88mm Flak was able to score just one hit per eleven rounds fired (no source given, though, for this), etc.So we definitely can not rely on these contradicting figures coming from different sources, comparing combat to non-combat conditions. Our approach should be based on math, theory of probabilities and ballistics.Simple and quick to use would mean, that we prefer to have it implemented as a script or a tool, which could be run by anyone and calculate accuracies for any substantially large number of weapons.We were able to meet all these goals, and results are presented below.Our approach will be based upon works of Ballistic Research Laboratory (Aberdeen, MD). Namely, it is the article by E.C.Christman " The effect of system design characteristics on first round hitting probability of tank fired projectiles " published in February, 1959 (declassified).This article establishes a mathematical model of hit probabilities under "quasi combat conditions" and provides a whole lot of nomograms connecting hit probabilities with firing conditions (firing range, muzzle velocity, drag characteristics defined through ballistic coefficients and G-shape models and targeting systems).We are interested more in "follow-up hit probability", the definition of which can be found in " WORLD WAR II BALLISTICS: Armor and Gunnery " by L.R.Bird and R.D.Livingston, and is given as "...probability appears to be maximum obtainable accuracy after several shots at target, with errors in range estimation and target speed reduced to zero, mean jump and throw-off adjusted for". Command Ops 2 models continuous engagements rather than just first hit, so this is exactly the kind of probability we could use in our game.Even though Christman's article deals with the "first round hit", we can still use their data. The fire control "System C" (which produces a standard error in range which remains constant for all ranges of interest) described there is something that could roughly represent "follow-up shot probability" we are interested in.Same as Christman, we will be using several input parameters (factors listed below) that would affect our calculations.is one of major factors, which determines the flight time and also projectile trajectory. The higher is velocity, the better are your chances.also one of the most important factors, because it affects flight time and shell dispersion. Naturally, the larger is range, the worse are your chances.are defined by the projectile shape (described by one of G-model types) and ballistic coefficient. The former is rarely known for non-US projectiles, but may be roughly assumed from the shell's shape. Of course, for that we need to have a picture of a shell.Below you can see a picture of Soviet BR-350A APHEBC shell used in various 76.2mm tank and field guns. Like with other ballistic-capped projectiles, we assume it to be of type G8 (secant-ogive flat-based projectiles).Ballistic coefficient is calculated from the form-factor (which is also rarely known for any non-US projectiles, but can be either assumed using US projectiles of similar shape and purpose, or considered to be equal to 1.0), projectile diameter and projectile weight.One may think all these ballistic nitpicks are of only minor importance (compared to the range and velocity), but actually they are very important. Drag characteristics are exactly the reason why low caliber high velocity guns (like 37mm or 57mm) may have accuracy similar to 75-90mm guns at ranges up to 500-800 m, but become less accurate beyond that range. So drag characteristics are very important things to consider if we ever want our weapons to behave realistically.Last, but not least is. This describes the variability of shell parameters (like variations in gunpowder amount, projectile surface and shape production quality etc). We consider this to be a rough representation of "weapon quality".This is the only "subjective" parameter in our model, because it may not be derived from any kind of public data. For simplicity, we assume round-to-round dispersion to be low ("good") for countries known for using advanced industrial technologies, metalworking in particular (e.g. Germany, US, may be UK etc). Also we assume dispersion to be high ("bad") for countries known for their problems with the quality of their industrial production (e.g. USSR), as well as for any other country not fitting into the first category.For the first category we assume round-to-round dispersion to be equal to 15 mil (low dispersion), and for the second category we assume dispersion equal to 60 mil (high one). Both USSR and Japan fall into the second category.12-years-old boy operating milling cutter, USSR, 1943.We have manually digitized most of Christman's nomogramms; these have resulted in several thousands of data points for different ranges, muzzle velocities, ballistic coefficients and dispersions. It took us whole week just to enter all the data from the article, but now we have a huge array of multidimensional data to interpolate and extrapolate for nearly any possible combination of parameters. Some parts of this data array you can see on the screenshot below:For interpolation within this multi-dimensional data we will be using free math package GNU Octave, there we have created a simple script using two-dimensional cubic spline interpolation to process CSV data, calculate ballistic coefficients from shell data and produce a list of hit probabilities for all the required ranges.We will be using "standard" list of ranges for all the direct firing guns - 100 m, 500 m, 1000 m, 1500 m, 2000 m and 2500 m -Now, all we need to do is to create CSV file with the list of Soviet and Japanese guns (and their shells' parameters) and pass it to the script.Below you can find the diagram showing comparison of three kinds of accuracy data:- solid lines - accuracies generated with our new approach that will be used in upcoming Eastern Front DLCs (and Khalkhin-Gol in particular);- dashed lines - accuracies available in previous Command Ops 2 DLCs and also in previous iteration of CO2 Soviet Estab (deprecated);- dotted lines - literature (Jentz and Bird).Comparison is made for following systems:- 45mm 19-K AT gun;- 57mm QF 6-pdr AT gun;- 76.2 QF 17-pdr AT gun;- 8.8cm KwK 43 L/71 tank gun.In all cases projectile type G8 was used for ballistic-capped shells (45mm BR-240 APHEBC shell, 6-pdr Mk.9 APCBC, 17-pdr Mk.8 APCBC and 8.8cm PzGr.39/43 APCBC), form-factor set to 1.0.- accuracy drops over distance with the new math more significantly than with old CO2 data;- with the new math 45mm gun has significantly worse accuracy than 6-pdr beyond 500 m range, whereas with old CO2 data they would be nearly identical.- new math accuracies are much closer to historical references (Bird) than old CO2 accuracies.- new math accuracies are closer to historical references (Bird) than old CO2 accuracies.- new math accuracies are closer to historical references (Jentz) than old CO2 accuracies.We have received a new powerful and scalable approach to calculate direct firing gun accuracies consistently. The approach is easy to use, integrated with spreadsheets import/export (CSV) and requires little manual work to prepare data.New math produces values similar to old CO2 data, so you will not see any dramatic gameplay changes.However, comparing new math to old CO2 data (especially comparing it to previous Soviet Estab developed in 2000s), our new model yields numbers closer to the historical references.In some cases new math even feels more realistic. E.g. if we check accuracies for 45mm and 6-pdr guns, new math makes 6-pdr much better than 45mm starting at 500 m and beyond. Old CO2 Soviet estab would make them nearly identical in performance. And this is exactly what we would also expect, comparing 45mm and 6-pdr in real life.We hope, that with our new math model we will deliver new content faster. We also hope, that the new model will better and more uniquely model particular guns, which will grant you better and more realistical battle experiences.Virginia's Governor Just Gave 206,000 People The Right To Vote
Enlarge this image toggle caption Brian Vander Brug/LA Times via Getty Images Brian Vander Brug/LA Times via Getty Images
Two hundred six thousand Virginians will newly have the right to vote this year. That's according to the office of Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who signed a bill on Friday that would allow felons who had completed their sentences to vote.
In addition to granting voting rights, the executive order will also allow released felons to run for office, serve on a jury, and serve as notaries public, the governor's office said in a release. It will apply to any felon who "completed his or her sentence and all other requirements" like parole or probation, as of April 22, the office said. The governor also plans to issue additional monthly orders to grant voting rights to future released felons.
"Too often in both our distant and recent history, politicians have used their authority to restrict people's ability to participate in our democracy," McAuliffe said in a statement. "Today we are reversing that disturbing trend and restoring the rights of more than 200,000 of our fellow Virginians who work, raise families and pay taxes in every corner of our Commonwealth."
As of 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, Virginia had one of the highest levels in the nation of people who could not vote because of felony convictions: 7.3 percent, according to the U.S. Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates for sentencing reforms.
However, since then, several thousand felons have already been added to voter rolls. Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2013 issued an executive order making it easier for nonviolent felons to regain their voting rights. McAuliffe's office also estimates that he had restored voting rights to an additional 18,000 people prior to today's move.
Where laws stand in your state
State laws differ on whether felons can and cannot vote. In only two states, Maine and Vermont, all felons — whether in prison or not — can vote. And in three — Iowa, Kentucky and Florida — no one who has been convicted of a felony can vote, according to the ACLU.
Altogether, around 2.5 percent (or 1 in 40) of Americans were disenfranchised as of 2010, according to the Sentencing Project. And that group is disproportionately African-American — by the same data, more than three times the share of blacks (7.7 percent, or around 1 in 13) couldn't vote. Here's where the laws stand in states nationwide:
Here's how many voting-age people in each state were not able to vote, as of 2010, the latest year for which data are available. The organization says it hopes to release new data later this year.
The political battle over disenfranchisement
The felon disenfranchisement debate isn't just a fight over who should and should not get to choose elected officials; it also has potentially heavy political implications.
Republican critics are painting McAuliffe's action as a political move in a swing state that could be consequential in this year's presidential election.
"I am not surprised by the lengths to which he is willing to go to deliver Virginia to Hillary Clinton in November," Virginia House Speaker Bill Howell wrote in a statement. McAuliffe is a former DNC chairman and also served as chairman of Clinton's 2008 run for the presidency.
This is by no means the first time ex-offenders' voting rights have come up in a presidential election. After the 2000 presidential election, for example, some argued that the state's laws barring felons from voting were what allowed George W. Bush to win the state and, therefore, the election.
The issue of felon disenfranchisement also arose on the campaign trail this cycle, when in December Ted Cruz told radio host Hugh Hewitt that Democrats "go in and fight to give the right to vote to convicted felons. Why? Because the Democrats know convicted felons tend to vote Democrat."
A 2014 study did show that in a few states that were surveyed, released felons were more likely to register as Democrats than Republicans (as reported by PolitiFact). However, the study covered only three states and did not include the many felons who didn't register to vote, PolitiFact also reported.
The politics of enfranchisement extend well beyond the topic of felons. Cruz has also accused Democrats of wanting to give citizenship to immigrants in the country illegally because, he said, those immigrants would vote Democratic. And Ohio Gov. John Kasich this week said he opposed D.C. statehood because "that's just more votes in the Democratic Party."The president of the Constitutional Court, Francisco de Mata Vela speaks during a press conference in Guatemala city on Aug. 29, 2017. (Photo: Johan Ordonez, AFP/Getty Images)
GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemala’s highest court ruled Tuesday that President Jimmy Morales cannot expel the head of a U.N. anti-corruption commission from the country.
The president had issued his expulsion order for Ivan Velasquez early Sunday, two days after Velasquez and Guatemala’s chief prosecutor announced they were seeking to lift Morales’ immunity from prosecution in order to investigate alleged illegal campaign financing.
But the Constitutional Court, the country’s highest tribunal, quickly suspended the order Sunday, and on Tuesday the justices negated Morales’ order declaring Velasquez persona non grata. The court ruled the order was issued improperly.
The U.N. panel and local prosecutors have built popularity among many Guatemalans over the last decade by attacking the corruption long endemic in Guatemala, including helping force the previous president from office two years ago.
Morales’ order was met with anger from many Guatemalans, and it drew a barrage of criticism from the international community, including the United States. Earlier Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was shocked by the president’s action and expressed full support for Velasquez.
Although he initially defended the expulsion order, Morales softened his stand Monday and said he was willing to abide by court decisions on his action.
“People of Guatemala, as president of the republic I have and will respect the decisions of the other branches of government. The rule of law should always prevail,” he wrote in his Facebook account.
On Tuesday, Morales made his first public appearance since the crisis exploded, meeting with loyal mayors who voiced their support for him. The government distributed a video clip through its Twitter account that was just 14 seconds of mayors applauding Morales.
The mayors may have some self interest in seeing Velasquez go. The U.N. commission issued a report in 2015 saying that drug trafficking financed many political campaigns in Guatemala, especially in mayoral races.
Velasquez and chief prosecutor Thelma Aldana also have targeted several political parties, including Morales’ National Convergence Front. Prosecutors allege that about $825,000 of financing for his 2015 campaign was hidden and other expenditures had no explainable source of funding.
With the Constitutional Court’s ruling now out of the way, Guatemalans are watching the Supreme Court as it considers |
desc: Runtime timer (--runtime) delayed the program exit when using a huge list of hashes
trac: #93
type: bug
file: host programs
desc: fixed a bug in NetNTLMv2 parser, did not took client challenge into sort for unique
trac: #106
type: bug
file: host programs
desc: rare triggered crash when file opening/writing fails
trac: #111
type: bug
file: host programs
desc: fixed a bug in NetNTLMv2 parser, only cracking first hash in file
trac: #114
type: bug
file: host programs
desc: fixed a bug in NetNTLMv2 parser, using --remove option replaces all the old users
trac: #115
type: bug
file: host programs
desc: ensure that DES output does not contain plains with lengths greater than 8
type: bug
file: host programs
desc: don't force to update.restore too often e.g. when using -i and/or maskfiles
type: bug
file: host programs
desc: fixed output of show/left when there are colons in the plaintext part (in hashcat.pot)
type: change
file: host programs
desc: updated default values for --gpu-accel and --gpu-loops for NVidia
cred: Rolf
type: change
file: host programs
desc: changed speed display, now divides speed by number of uncracked unique salts
type: change
file: host programs
desc: updated --help text regarding --username
cred: #121
type: feature
file: rules
desc: added a more more complex leetspeak rule from unix-ninja
trac: #112
type: feature
file: rules
desc: added a more more complex leetspeak rule from Incisive
trac: #119
--
atom This version is the result of over 6 months of work, having modified 618,473 total lines of source code.Before we go into the details of the changes, here's a quick summary of the major changes:New supported algorithms:New supported GPUs:NVidia:AMD:And last but not least, lots of bugs have been fixed. For a full list, see the changelog below.This was by far one of the most requested features. We resisted adding this "feature", as it would force us to remove several optimizations, resulting in a decrease in performance for the fast hashes. The actual performance loss depends on several factors (GPU, attack mode, etc), but typically averages around 15%.Adding support for passwords longer than 15 characters required removing the following optimizations for fast hashes:We've spent a lot of time focusing on these issues, trying to minimize the impact of each. The good news is that we were able to solve #2 and #3. But, because there is no solution for #1, there will still be some performance loss in some cases.The precise decrease depends on GPU type, algorithm, number of hashes, well... just about everything! But, we also managed toperformance for some algorithms, too. In order to solve #2, we rewrote nearly all candidate-generating code, and found some sections that could be optimized. In other words, the solution to #2 was to optimize the code in special sections, and then use the resulting performance increase to compensate against the performance decrease. Also, some of the algorithms do not require a lot of registers. All in all, the losses are less than expected.To solve #3, we had to rewrite the workload dispatcher from scratch. There's a special subsection about that topic below, since it contains some other important information as well. As a positive sideeffect of this solution, the host memory requirements are now less than those of v0.14!The slow hash types willdrop in speed, except for phpass and md5crypt:If you're curious about real-world performance losses and gains between v0.14 and v0.15, we've compiled a table that compares the two versions for each architecture:This table shows single-hash MD5, which has been choosen since it's a very sensible hash-type. Changes to this hash-type typically reflect onto other hashes as well.Note: Because we've had to make a lot of deep changes to the core of hashcat, there can be no "old" method for < 16 character support as many people already suggested. The changes we made are to deep and they are no longer compatible to old-style kernels, and we really don't want to maintain two different tools.One last note about performance. There was a change to the status-display of the speed value which does not affect the real performance. With new oclHashcat-plus v0.15 the speed that is shown gets divided by the number of uncracked unique salts. Older oclHashcat-plus versions did not take this into account. Don't get shocked when you're cracking a large salted hashlist and the speed dropped by hundret of times (or to be exact by number of hashes/salts), the total time will stay equal.We can help hashcat compensate for the performance decrease by preparing our dictionaries!Get hashcat-utils, and run your dictionaries through. Using rockyou.txt as an example:The example works on windows, too.This typically gives 15% speed boost, because we get much higher cache hits. This is essential, especially for VLIW4 and VLIW5 systems.Adding support for passwords longer than 15 characters does notremove the length limitations in hashcat. Generally speaking, the new maximum length is, except in the following cases:For slow hashes:NOTE: We're planing to remove the limits for these modes in the next version.For fast hashes, the important factor is the attack mode:Just to make this clear: We can crack passwords up to length 55, but in case we're doing a combinator attack, the words from both dictionaries can not be longer than 31 characters. But if the word from the left dictionary has the length 24 and the word from the right dictionary is 28, it will be cracked, because together they have length 52.Also note that algorithms based on unicode, from plaintext view, only support a maximum of 27. This is because unicode uses two bytes per character, making it 27 * 2 = 54.Finally, we have a TrueCrypt cracking mode that fully computes on GPU -- everything is written 100% on GPU! There is no copy overhead to the host, thus our CPU will stay cool at 0% and we can do whatever we want to do with it.Current implementation is able to crack the following supported hashes:For the ciphers, we're currently doing only AES, and of course the XTS block-cipher. Serpent and Twofish -- and their cascaded modes -- will be added next.Here are some speeds from 2x hd6990:These tests show oclHashcat-plus is world's fastest TrueCrypt cracker!! :)Here's the original article: http://hashcat.net/forum/thread-2301.html Mask files are very easy to understand: they are just plain text file with one mask per line. Supply the filename instead of a mask on the command line, and hashcat will automatically loop through the masks in the file -- see some examples here: http://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mask...mask_files Until now to use a list of masks, we would need to manually iterate (or using some self-made wrapper scripts) through the set of masks, fully restarting hashcat on each loop iteration. It worked, but we suffered from the startup and shutdown times for each invocation. Storing those masks into a hcmask file and using this new feature is much faster, especially when we have lots of small masks.The coolest thing though is what iPhelix from Team Hashcat made out of this feature...If we're a pentester, and we're to audit an AD domain, we typically face a password policy. Password policies aren't always very clever; most of the time, they force users to select passwords with predictable patterns (you can read more about this topic in Minga's Passwords13 talk). Using a specific set of masks we can avoid candidate passwords that do not match the policy, thus reducing the keyspace efficiently. There are a few ways to do this. For example, we could pre-check our password candidates against a policy, which requires some branching, and we all know GPUs are bad when it comes to branching.Therefore, it's far more clever to simply never generate those candidates which do not match the password complexity policy, and that's where this new feature comes in. iPhelix, the autor of the PACK, wrote a tool to automatically create mask files for us based on a password policy. He also added some preset mask files for default AD password policies! I strongly recommend you take a look at PACK: http://thesprawl.org/projects/pack/ With Hashcat, PACK, and mask file support, we now have a completely unique and powerful feature that no other password cracking program supports!You already know that with straight mode, you can specify a directory directly on the command line, and hashcat will loop through all of the dictionaries in that directory automatically.Now you can do this in hybrid modes, too!The same is true for using multiple dictionaries on command line. For hybrid-mode, the mask is always just a single argument. That means that for instance for -a 6, all arguments except the last one can be dictionaries.This was required to solve problem #3 from the password length increase, but it quickly turned out to add some unexpected benefits. One benefit is the way smaller workloads are handled.A problem that every one of us ran into was that, with small workloads, oclHashcat-plus did not fully utilize the power of all GPUs. To fully utilize the GPUs, there need to be enough different input data for the calculation. For example, when oclHashcat-plus displays that it is cracking at a rate of 8.3 GH/s, the program actually requires us to feed it with 8,300,000,000 different words per second. We get that high of a number because of the attack modes. Our dictionary does not need to have 8,300,000,000 different words, but if we were to run it in -a 0 mode with 40,000 rules, we still need to feed it with 207,500 words from our dictionary per second (207,500 * 40,000 = 8,300,000,000). Well actually that's not entirely correct. We still need to invoke the GPU kernel and compute the hashes on it and this tasks takes 99.9% of the time. So to load this stuff, we actually have just a few miliseconds otherwise our cracking speed will drop since the GPU is idleing.The typical process is that our host program parses the dictionary, then copies it to the GPU, then runs the kernel and collects the results. Now, because of the old caching structure, oclHashcat-plus was a bit more complicated than this. It was not loading 207,500 words from our dictionary per second -- it was loading much more. And then it was sorting the words by length into specific buffers. Once a buffer's threshold was reached, it pushed the buffer to GPU, processed it, and collected the results.The typical dictionary does not contain only words of one specific length (unless we run it through splitlen.bin from hashcat-utils). Typically, most of the words range from six to ten characters. We know these graphs, right? Let's say the distribution for all words of length 6 - 10 is all the same (which it isn't really, but it's easier to explain this way), then only every 5th word has a length of 8 characters. In other words, to feed oclHashcat-plus fast enough, the host program needed to parse 5 * 207,500 words from our dictionary per second.Now think of a small dictionary, like milworm with 80k or what it has. We cannot even feed the 207,500 words required with it. And it's actually much worse, since the 80k has to be divided by 5 because of the above reason. So, we only provided oclHashcat-plus with 16k words from our dictionary per second, not with 207k. So the GPU wasn't able to exceed ~7% utilization. And then, we still have some small number for length 22 or 43 left that need to be checked... what a waste of time! This is typically what we saw at the end of each run.With oclHashcat-plus v0.15, this structure has radically changed. There is still some caching, but it's totally different. We don't want to go to much into detail, but typically the divisor is now just 2. We still can not fully utilize all power with a tiny dictionary, but the requirement from huge dictionaries is much less.Many thanks to our beta testers, and everyone reporting bugs on the hashcat TRAC system. This is really pushing the project forward, and we greatly appreciate your effort. Please continue to support us!We also want to thank KoreLogic for the "Crack Me If You Can" contest and the organizers from PHD's "Hashrunner". These contests give us a good view on what a typical pentester / IT-forensic needs and shows a direction to go.--atom Website Find tbm
Junior Member Posts: 30
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Joined: Apr 2013 #2 at last, thanks atom Find Rolf
Товарищ Ролф Posts: 601
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Joined: Apr 2010 #3 Good job, may the cat be with all of you. Find zarabatana
Junior Member Posts: 30
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Joined: Jun 2013 #4 Thank you very much for your efforts atom.
Amazing job. Find User
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Joined: Dec 2010 #5 Absolutely amazing.
Nobody can imagine the time behind each optimization or new feature.
Thanks. Find Si2006
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Joined: Nov 2012 #6
How does does hashcat work with 1Password algorithm. The same as jtr method?
http://pastebin.com/mNmNsxZW Congrats another milestone. ;-)How does does hashcat work with 1Password algorithm. The same as jtr method? Find vrposter
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Joined: Jun 2013 #7 Wow, thx a bunch atom!!! Find forumhero
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Joined: Aug 2011 #8 great write up. thank you for all the hard work Find Kuci
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But I'm still sad for a little bit. My dear HMAC-SHA256 is still not implemented as I requested on Trac I hope it will be implemented in the next release... Amazing! Thank you for this great release! As a coder, I really understand what were the past 6 months like and I really appreciate your work.But I'm still sad for a little bit. My dear HMAC-SHA256 is still not implemented as I requested on TracI hope it will be implemented in the next release... Find mastercracker
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Joined: May 2010 #10 Amazing release. Even passphrases are not safe anymore. A quick note for amd/ati users: Don't use catalyst 13.8 beta2, it's been reported to have some problems. You need 13.8 beta (the first released). FindWhile addressing a Republican rally in Texas on Tuesday, George P. Bush said he’s the only member of the Bush family who will be voting for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE, The Associated Press reported.
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When the AP asked the eldest child of former Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush to clarify his remarks, he said he didn’t know how former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush voted.
“I’m speculating, to be honest,” the Texas land commissioner said.
He then said they could “potentially” vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE but it would be “hard to speculate.”
Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen Harrington Kennedy Townsend, wrote in a Facebook post in September that George H.W. Bush told her he planned to vote for Clinton.
The Bush family has not denied the report, but Jeb Bush called the Facebook post “inappropriate.”
George W. Bush’s daughter Barbara attended a Clinton fundraiser in Paris in early October, posing for a photo with longtime aide Huma Abedin.The United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals just rejected an appeal from TV networks against web-television company Aereo by a 2-1 vote, concluding that Aereo's system does not infringe the broadcaster's copyrights. Broadcasters argued that unlike Cablevision, Aereo lacked the proper license to operate — but the court ruled that the license doesn't matter since Aereo customers are streaming their own unique copies to themselves. The remarkably tech-savvy decision for Aereo today clears major legal difficulties for the web-television broadcaster, and will force TV networks to win an appeal either in front of the full Second Circuit or Supreme Court if they want to shut the streaming service down. "The Second Circuit stomped the broadcasters pretty hard," said The Verge's Nilay Patel, a former copyright attorney.
"The Second Circuit stomped the broadcasters pretty hard."
It is beyond dispute that the transmission of a broadcast TV program received by an individual’s rooftop antenna to the TV in his living room is private, because only that individual can receive the transmission from that antenna, ensuring that the potential audience of that transmission is only one person. Plaintiffs have presented no reason why the result should be any different when that rooftop antenna is rented from Aereo and its signals transmitted over the internet: it remains the case that only one person can receive that antenna’s transmissions. Judge Christopher Droney, Second Circuit Court of Appeals
Aereo allows TV watchers to stream HD video over the web with a proprietary remote antenna and DVR service. For $12 a month, customers can watch more than 20 local broadcast networks, including CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC, PBS, and the CW. The company employs a fleet of miniature antennas that pull broadcast signals from the air, like the classic "rabbit ears" that capture local TV signals, and each customer receives their own antenna; from the start, Aereo contended that it was actually providing a use license for the antenna and the cloud DVR, and not the content itself. Upholding a long tradition of fighting innovation, the broadcast television industry immediately attacked Aereo in court, with a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters saying that "they're charging a fee for content they do not own."
"We are confident that we will prevail."
Open internet advocate Public Knowledge quickly hailed today's court decision. "Only in the world of copyright maximalists do people need to get special permission to watch over-the-air television with an antenna," said Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer. "Just because 'the internet' is involved doesn't change this." But CBS, a plaintiff in one of the groups suing Aereo, appears undeterred by the decision. "As the courts continue to consider this case and others like it, we are confident that the rights of content owners will be recognized and that we will prevail," a CBS spokesperson told The Verge.
The National Association of Broadcasters, part of another major group suing Aereo, expressed similar confidence; in a statement released today, the NAB said "today's decision is a loss for the entire creative community. The court has ruled that it is ok to steal copyrighted material and retransmit it without compensation." The NAB says that "we have and are considering our options to protect our programming," and "we remain confident that we will ultimately prevail." An NAB spokesperson tells The Verge that "NAB is disappointed with the Second Circuit's 2-1 decision allowing Aereo to continue its illegal operations while broadcasters' copyright actions are heard."
"The promise and commitment to program in the public interest in exchange for the public's spectrum remains an important part of our American fabric."
Aereo naturally welcomed the victory; "Today's ruling sends a powerful message that consumer access to free-to-air broadcast television is still meaningful in this country and that the promise and commitment made by the broadcasters to program in the public interest in exchange for the public's spectrum remains an important part of our American fabric," said Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia. "We may be a small start-up, but we've always believed in standing up and fighting for our consumers."
Aereo's legal difficulties are said to have stunted its growth in markets across the US, and has reportedly caused potential partners, like DirecTV, to shy away from cooperation. For now, today's court decision alleviates Aereo's biggest albatross, allowing it to focus on expansion.
Nilay Patel and Greg Sandoval contributed to this report.No. No. in
series Title Directed by Original air date UK viewers
(millions)[4]
1 1 "China" Krishnendu Majumdar 23 September 2010 ( ) 1.24
Gervais and Merchant send Pilkington to China with the goal of seeing the Great Wall. Pilkington lands in Beijing but is unimpressed by the pollution and a population that does not speak English. He wanders the streets and is repulsed by the different types of food as well as its door-less public restroom stalls. He meets a fortune teller, gets a fire-based massage, and participates in Shaolin Kung Fu. At the Great Wall, he receives a call from Merchant who insists that he travel the entire length of the wall.
2 2 "India" Luke Campbell and Krishnendu Majumdar 30 September 2010 ( ) 1.38
Pilkington's next Wonder to visit is the Taj Mahal in India. He rides down the middle of a busy highway in a cycle rickshaw. He is about to stay the night in a shop stall but his hosts place him in an apartment bedroom. He encounters a religious festival known as Holi day, where he is pelted with coloured paint powder. He attends the Kumbh Mela festival where he visits the religious Babas who practice extreme forms of yoga, such as being naked with strange piercings. He tries the lotus position, and visits a Baba who has had his right arm raised for the past twelve years. He meets with the Elephant Baba, who has a deformed face that is in the shape of an elephant on one side, and his assistant who winds his genitals around a walking stick and bounces. He meets an American Hindu acolyte who brings him to a Hindu holy man. He bathes with them in the River Ganges. On his way to Agra he visits a cow sanctuary. He is later stationed in an inn "nearby" the Taj Mahal, but is disappointed by the filthiness of its honeymoon suite. The next morning, he visits the Taj Mahal and also sees the wonder from a small boat.[5]
3 3 "Jordan" Luke Campbell and Krishnendu Majumdar 7 October 2010 ( ) 1.85
Pilkington intends to go to Petra in Jordan, but first makes a stop in Israel. He visits the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. He gets abducted, but it is a simulation; the group then teaches him kidnap survival training. He shares a lift with a group of Na Nachs who jump out at street stops and dance. He crosses over to Palestine where he visits the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He visits the Dead Sea where he enjoys floating around until somebody's "goz" gets stuck in his navel. Later on, he goes to Jordan where he rides a camel for eight hours and spends time in a Bedouin settlement where they prepare lamb eyeballs and testicles for dinner. He forgoes more camel riding and arrives at Petra where he stays the night in one of the caves nearby.[6][7]
4 4 "Mexico" Jamie Jay Johnson and Krishnendu Majumdar 14 October 2010 ( ) 1.65
5 5 "Egypt" Krishnendu Majumdar 21 October 2010 ( ) 1.62
Pilkington visits Egypt to see the Great Pyramids. He wanders the streets of Cairo, where he gets swarmed in a market by pushy restaurant salesmen. He goes to the Pyramids on camelback, but his visit is ruined by poor visibility. He receives a lesson in how to barter with Egyptians, then is bored by a visit to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, after which he has lunch at a deaf KFC. He then takes a cruise on the Nile and visits a couple who believe that the Pyramids were built by extraterrestrials. Finally, he returns to the Pyramids, and this time succeeds in seeing them.[8]
6 6 "Brazil" Krishnendu Majumdar 28 October 2010 ( ) 1.54
Pilkington goes to Rio de Janeiro to see the towering statue of Christ the Redeemer. His visit to Brazil coincides with Carnival, which he finds too noisy, crowded, and stressful. He attends a block party, learns to dance, and marches in a parade. He then meets his guide, Celso, who takes him for a Brazilian wax and assists him in shopping for ultra-tight Brazilian beachwear before taking him to a gay beach. Finding his accommodations – an overcrowded hostel in which guests sleep together dormitory-style – unacceptable, Pilkington agrees to spend the night at Celso's home, where Celso dresses as a female impersonator. Pilkington then seeks peace and quiet at a secluded beach, only to discover that it is a nude beach. Eventually he fulfills the main goal of his trip, visiting the statue of Christ The Redeemer on foot and then taking a helicopter tour.[9]
7 7 "Peru" Krishnendu Majumdar and Richard Yee 4 November 2010 ( ) 1.92
Pilkington goes to Peru to see the pre-Columbian Incan site known as Machu Picchu, an "Old Mountain" perched on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley. First, however, Gervais and Merchant send him on a three-day trip in the Amazon Basin, where he camps, travels by boat, is frightened and annoyed by the presence of insects and dangerous creatures, and tries to feed a biscuit to a large boa constrictor. He also spends time with a tribe of former cannibals, with whom he practices throwing arrows. He complains that Sir David Attenborough mostly hosts television nature documentaries with voiceovers made in the comfort of a studio in London rather than experiencing the danger and discomfort of traveling and camping in the wild himself, and wonders why he (Pilkington) could not do the same thing for An Idiot Abroad episodes. Finally, he embarks on the 11-hour hike up to Machu Picchu, during which he is serenaded by his guides. After eight hours of hiking, he gives up about three-quarters of the way to Machu Picchu, and instead provides a voice-over where he spoofs Attenborough as the episode ends with film of the ancient city taken by his camera crew.[10]
8 8 "Karl Comes Home" Krishnendu Majumdar 11 November 2010 ( ) 1.60....................................................................................................................................................................................
SANTA FE, N.M. — The FBI says a New Mexico sheriff and his son have been arrested in an ongoing investigation.
Rio Arriba Sheriff Thomas R. “Tommy” Rodella and his son Thomas R. Rodella Jr. were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of man they chased down in a high speed chase last march.
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Both men appeared before a federal magistrate Friday morning and pleaded not guilty to the charges. A judge on Friday afternoon released them on their own recognizance. As a term of his release, Sheriff Rodella will not be allowed to carry a firearm.
According to a federal indictment returned earlier this week, Rodella’s son drove the sheriff’s personal car in the high speed chase, eventually stopping the man identified only as M.T. and challenging him to a fight.
M.T. then drove away and the chase began again, the indictment charges. The second time the Rodellas stopped the man, Sheriff Rodella, in uniform, jumped into M.T.’s car brandishing a silver revolver and assaulted the man.
The indictment charges the younger Rodella dragged the man out of his car.
Sheriff Rodella had other deputies comes to the scene and book him into the Rio Arriba Detention Center. The indictment charges that both Rodellas made false representations that the man had attempted to injure Sheriff Rodella.
The indictment also charges both men with falsifying records to charge M.T. and cover up what occurred.
They are charged with conspiracy against the free exercise of civil rights, deprivation of rights, brandishing a firearm and two counts of falsification of documents.
Rodella was arrested at his office Friday morning. His son, Thomas, Jr., was arrested at the family’s Española home.
U.S. Attorney Damon Martinez said the federal charges filed against Rodella do not mandate his removal from office. Rodella’s role as sheriff will need to be decided on a local level, Martinez said.
In June, FBI agents raided Rodella’s home in connection with an aggravated assault case. The raid occurred just hours after Rodella lost re-election.
Rodella’s home was search earlier this year by FBI agents.
Albuquerque attorney Robert Gorence is representing Rodella. Jason Bowles is representing Rodella Jr.
This is a developing story. Check back later for more information.contributing editor, is a senior fellow at theThe modern Middle East has had numerous "game-changing" moments, when history turned. Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798, Muhammad Ali's conquest of the Nile Valley in 1805, and the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 introduced Europeans and European ideas into the region. The British discovery of oil in Persia in 1908, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the Saudi conquest of Mecca and Medina in 1925, the awakening of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, the Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1936, and the God-father-like victory of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo in 1954 further accelerated tradition-crushing Westernization and gave birth to nationalism, pan-Arabism, and contemporary Islamic fundamentalism. The Israeli triumph in the 1967 Six Day War, the Iranian revolution of 1979, the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and the birth of Iraqi democracy two years later buried secular pan-Arab dictatorship, politically inflamed the Islamic identity, and set the stage for the growth of representative government in a more religious Middle East.
The Iranian presidential election of June 12 may soon rank with these history-making events. We may well look back on it as the "June 12 revolution" even if--especially if--the regime cracks down on the supporters of Mir-Hussein Mousavi, the candidate who ran second to incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the dubious official vote tally. Since the end of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), which almost destroyed the Islamic Republic and forged the reputation and character of then-Prime Minister Mousavi, most Iranians have been exhausted revolutionaries. More like sheep than foot-soldiers of a dynamic faith, Iranians have largely veered away from confronting their increasingly unpopular rulers.
Now the election appears to have stiffened their backbones and quickened their passions. They've had enough of their unpleasant, joyless lives. The election has given a wide variety of Iranians--many of whom would not voluntarily associate with each other because of religious, political, and social differences--a simple and transcendent rallying cry: One man, one vote! Even the supreme leader's favorite, President Ahmadinejad, must obey the rules. It is in some ways a bizarre situation when hundreds of thousands of Iranians rally to protest the outcome of an election that was rigged from the beginning: All candidates must pass a revolutionary litmus test, and the vast majority of contenders, even from well-respected, nonthreatening families, cannot. Yet it is in part precisely because this election was so strait-jacketed that it has become pivotal.
We don't know yet how aggressively Iran's clerical overlord, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Ahmadinejad rigged the balloting. Ahmadinejad remains popular in small town Iran and among the urban poor. His constant attacks on the corrupt revolutionary elite--especially the fabulously wealthy cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who probably bankrolled Mousavi's run for the presidency--resonate, even among highly Westernized Iranians who align themselves with the "pragmatic" Rafsanjani. Ahmadinejad's undiminished Islamic zeal, which he marries with Iranian nationalism, appeals to many, especially those who fought in the ghastly Iran-Iraq war and retained their faith. Nevertheless, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad felt compelled to cheat.
It is the crudeness of it all that is so revealing and damning. Although Iranians have a reputation for being subtle, elegant, and polite, their political manners are usually pretty rough. The government blatantly announced a majority of 63 percent for Ahmadinejad less than two hours after the polls closed. If Khamenei had only allowed a respectable delay for counting all the paper ballots, and then had Ahmadinejad win by just a few points (as he might actually have done), the massive protests probably would not have happened. Khamenei surely knew that Mousavi could be a stubborn man, blessed with a real revolutionary's sense of honor and no awe whatsoever for Khamenei's status as successor to the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But Mousavi isn't an open book, which has probably redounded to his advantage among his followers. One can drape the Islamic color green (the more typically Shiite black had already been co-opted by the regime) all over Mousavi and no one, including Mousavi, probably has any firm idea of what it means--except to say, We are good Muslims, so don't shoot.
Khamenei, who worked with and struggled against Mousavi for a decade, knows the former prime minister politically as well as anyone. The supreme leader knows that what Mousavi lacks in charisma he has always made up in doggedness. That Khamenei baited the candidate, and so carelessly denied millions of Iranians the illusion that their votes mattered, shows how insular and insecure Khamenei, a politicized cleric of some intellectual sensitivity, has become in his august office. Whatever Mousavi has inside, it was enough to scare Khamenei profoundly, and not just because the supreme leader didn't want to hand a victory to Rafsanjani, Khamenei's brother-in-arms-turned-foe. Without Rafsanjani, the reformist cleric Mohammed Khatami would never have risen to the presidency, which he held from 1997 to 2005. Once Khatami was in office, both Khamenei and Rafsanjani worked to gut the reform movement that enveloped him. Regardless of their deep personal differences, Khamenei and Rafsanjani no doubt could work together in the future to gut Mousavi if the Machiavellian Rafsanjani felt so inclined.
For now, though, Rafsanjani is backing Mousavi for his own survival. Ahmadinejad dreams of downing Rafsanjani and his entire spoiled clan. For the poor-boy former Revolutionary Guardsman who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, Rafsanjani is the quintessential target of the anti-mullah jokes that are a staple of life among Iran's poor. Ahmadinejad also undoubtedly remembers that Rafsanjani, for good reason, once tried to abolish Ahmadinejad's beloved Revolutionary Guard by folding them into Iran's regular army.
Similarly, Khamenei backs Ahmadinejad overwhelmingly for one reason: fear of Khatami. (Hurting Rafsanjani is an ancillary pleasure.) Not Khatami personally, but what he represented between 1997, when he won the presidency by a landslide, and 2000, when the regime fully recovered its authoritarian composure. Although certain American analysts like to belittle the historic importance of Khatami ("Really just Khamenei with a smile"), the movement behind him terrified Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran). Among intellectuals, journalists, academics, students, and clerics--and among women from just about every walk of life--an intense discussion began in the mid-1990s about how Iranians could honor the revolution but also leave it behind them. The scholars Olivier Roy and Farhad Khosrokhavar, a Franco-Iranian sociologist who has been the most insightful observer of his homeland, wrote a book in 1999 that captured in its title the mood and debate within the Islamic Republic, Iran: Comment sortir d'une révolution religieuse ("How do you exit a religious revolution?"). Roy and Khosrokhavar were not optimistic that the reform movement could pull it off peacefully. They were right.
Khamenei didn't, at least for a time, share the French scholars' pessimism. Not before or since have we seen such ferment among Iranians about the Western idea of civil liberties. Serious men with impressive Islamic pedigrees tried to devise an Iranian civil society with a bill of rights that could withstand the challenges posed by anti-democratic clerics hurling Islamic law and custom at the importation of Western models, clothed in Muslim dress, into the body politic. The enormous tension between theocracy and democracy, visible in the Islamic Republic from its founding and only quelled in the early years by the awesome, exquisitely Shiite charisma of Khomeini, exploded. Iranian intellectuals, including well-known and fearsomely bright members of the clergy, started to question the very foundations of |
PwC was very focused on the Uptown demographics and having a live-work-play environment in order to attract the millennial workforce,” he said. Identity also was critical. PwC was the last of the Big 4 accounting firms to have top-of-building branding; its deal also gives them naming rights. Klyde Warren Park was a huge draw, as were the amenities surrounding Park District. Finally, Puckett said, the Park District tower offered efficiency, with floor plates of about 28,000 square feet, along with abundant parking.
Park District’s residential tower is being developed by High Street Residential, a Trammell Crow Co. affiliate, led locally by Joel Behrens. The 33-story highrise will feature 253 luxury units and 13,000 square feet of retail space fronting Klyde Warren Park. The retail space will have 20-foot, floor-to-floor glass on two levels. The two buildings will be connected by a plaza that’s being designed by The Office of James Burnett, the landscape architecture firm behind Klyde Warren Park.
Project renderings provided by Trammell Crow Co. Event photos by Lara Bierner.It’s still a toss up whether Gravity, 12 Years a Slave or American Hustle will take home best picture during Sunday’s 86th Annual Academy Awards on Mar. 2. But this much is certain: several winners will get played off by the orchestra, host Ellen DeGeneres will make a joke about the show’s interminable length, and someone will remark that the ceremony is being watched by “a billion people.”
That’s an impressive figure, to be sure. It’s also a complete fiction.
Last year’s Oscar ceremony drew a United States audience of 40.3 million, making it the seventh highest-rated telecast of 2013 (the other top 10 shows were all NFL-related). That would mean that elsewhere in the world—the Academy says Sunday’s telecast will be seen in “more than 225 countries”—an additional 960 million people are interested enough to tune in and see what gown Cate Blanchett will wear and which film will win best production design. Roughly 13% of Americans watched last year’s ceremony; 14% of the remaining global population would also need to view the show in order to reach that mythical billion-viewer figure. Comparatively, the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremonies in Beijing were viewed by an estimated billion people, but those numbers were bolstered by more than half of China’s 1.3 billion population.
According to The New Yorker, the first mention of the Academy Awards reaching an audience of a billion occurred in an 1985 AP story. That unattributed figure was cited onstage the following year by the Academy’s then-president Robert Wise, and has been since treated as gospel in nearly three decades worth of Oscar acceptance speeches and news stories.
Even as the dubious “billion” number has come under scrutiny in recent years—Nielsen has no historical data that backs up that figure, and even the Academy itself now officially estimates that the ceremony’s global viewership is “several hundred million”—it continues to be referenced by both Oscar hopefuls (in recent weeks, both current best actor nominee Leonardo DiCaprio and former nominee Bill Murray mentioned it) and in news stories like this Reuters wrap-up of last year’s Oscars.
In other words, despite all rational evidence to the contrary, the b-word is now a key part of Oscar lore and—much like the ceremony’s often-interminable movie montages and production numbers—won’t be going away anytime soon.
This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.“The Asian pickers are suddenly more expensive and low-wage European pickers have become interesting to employers again. It is hardly a surprise that this is happening,” said Tord Ingesson, expert on migration policy at the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Landsorganisationen – LO) to news agency TT.
The new guidelines stipulated that berry pickers could only be hired by a foreign company with an affiliate in Sweden, which would be held responsible for following the work conditions in the contracts.
Further, the company had to be able to prove that it could pay the berry pickers’ salaries even if the harvest was poor and it was required to show proof that it had informed the pickers both of what kind of job they would be carrying out and of the work conditions involved.
However, as EU citizens don’t need a work permit the new guidelines don’t apply to them.
According to Ingesson this has meant that the problem has shifted from Asian berry pickers being mistreated to EU citizens.
Monday saw the remand hearing in Uppsala of a Bulgarian resident under suspicion of people-smuggling berry pickers to Sweden.
The 43-year-old man was arrested last week after allegedly luring other Bulgarians into coming to Sweden with the promises of a salary, a home, and a job.
However, instead the workers ended up in a makeshift campsite in Mehedeby, south of Gävle, with no running water or bathroom facilities.
The camp was initially set up with permission from the land owner and is home to several hundred berry pickers, most of whom are from Bulgaria.
Lately, however, tensions have been escalating and the camp was targeted by what was believed to be a stone-throwing attack carried out by local youths.
After a few dramatic weeks, the Bulgarian ambassador is scheduled to meet representatives for the Söderhamn and Tierp municipalities on Tuesday to discuss the problems with the berry picker camps, according to local paper Söderhamns-Kuriren.
The more than one hundred berry pickers resident in the camp now risk eviction but so far the planned action has been halted, pending investigation from the Swedish Enforcement Authority (Kronofogdemyndigheten).
The Stora Enso forest company applied for the berry pickers to be removed as early as last week, but they are also waiting to see what will happen next.
“We are planning to have a meeting at the Tierp municipality tomorrow with representatives from the local authority as well as the police. The aim is to discuss how to move forward from here. There are so many involved now and one mostly feels sorry for these people. For their own good it is vital that we deal with this swiftly,” said Lars Berglund of Stora Enso to TT.
TT/The Local/rm
twitter.com/thelocalswedenIt’s a done deal: Thierry Henry will be heading back to Arsenal for two months.
On Friday, Red Bulls GM Erik Solér, following earlier comments from Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, confirmed to the New York Post that the 34-year-old French striker will suit up for the Gunners once more. It’s a move that would benefit everyone involved, Solér said.
“[The loan deal was] the total package,” the Norwegian told the Post. “[…] We feel it’s a good honor for a guy who’s been with us 18 months. This is something he thought he wanted to do, and it’s easy to see. And on [the] sporting side, it’s better for him to train at Arsenal than if we turn something like that down. I couldn’t find a single reason to say no.
“I was approached by them, and of course I wanted to check if that was what Thierry wanted, and make sure my ownership was happy with it. I did the necessary calls on my part, and on the sporting side both Hans [Backe, Red Bulls head coach] and myself think it’s a very good idea. Thierry will be working hard. He’ll be coming to our Phoenix trip. He’ll be coming straight from training and playing with Arsenal, which is a good thing for us. In the end, it’s very easy for us to see this as good idea.”
The agreement between New York and Arsenal for Henry should be finalized by Sunday. If so, Henry, who’s been training with the Gunners during the MLS offseason, would be available to take the field as soon as Jan. 2 against US international Clint Dempsey and Fulham in a crosstown matchup. Henry would rejoin New York by Feb. 20, in time for the team’s preseason training camp in Arizona.
“If it’s finalized, the idea would be to have him from Sunday, Jan. 1,” Solér said. “[Arsenal] have a Champions League game on the 15th [against AC Milan], and he would come after that.
"We think it’s good," added Solér. "He’ll come back high level and have a great experience."China's southern border consists of the Himalayas in the west and hilly jungle country in the east. It is impossible to conduct major military operations in the Himalayas, so talk of a Chinese-Indian conflict is only possible for those who have never tried to supply an army. Similarly, as the British and Americas have discovered, conducting military operations in the hilly jungles of southeast Asia is a nightmare. China can't invade anyone through the south over land, nor can it be invaded. Southern China is protected by a true Great Wall.
To the north, the PRC is bordered by Siberia. In the far east of Siberia, it is possible to conduct war, but no country has ever tried or conceived of waging an extended war, including invasion into Siberia, nor has any country attempted to mount an invasion from Siberia. Therefore, except for the Pacific Coast, China is secure and contained.
There is occasional talk about Chinese military operations in Central Asia. First, this would have to take place through the hostile territory of Tibet or Xinjiang. The major forces and supplies would have to be transported over 1,000 miles from the industrial base in Han China to the Chinese border. The supply lines would pass through desert and mountains. An invasion of Astana in Kazakhstan would require traveling a distance of at least 700 miles through mountains and near desert grasslands. Fighting in these ranges is as unlikely as invading over the Himalayas.
In effect, China is an island in Eurasia. It can move money around and sometimes technology, but not large modern armies. Therefore, China is not a threat to its neighbors, nor are they a threat to China. China's primary strategic interest is maintaining the territorial integrity of China from internal threats. If it lost control of Tibet or Xinjiang, the PRC's borders would move far east, the buffer for Han China would disappear, and then China would face a strategic crisis. Therefore, its goal is to prevent that crisis by suppressing any independence movement in Tibet or Xinjiang.
An equally urgent task is to assure that social conflict does not arise between the coastal region and the Han interior. The loss of foreign export opportunities has placed pressure on the coast. Beijing's interest in maintaining stability in the interior requires transfers of money from the coast. However, the coast's interests are focused on the United States, Europe, and the rest of Asia since these are the coast's trading partners and the interior is incapable of purchasing the coast's products. No stimulus imaginable can raise the interior's income levels to the point that this area could become a market for the coast given the poverty they live in currently. This would be a multi-generational project.
This is not a new problem for China. Prior to Britain and the Opium Wars in the 19th century, China was enclosed, isolated, and relatively united. When the British opened China, massive inequality between the coast and the interior arose with the coastal region being more integrated into the global economy than into China's economy. This led to regionalism and warlords, as each region had unique interests. Mao went into the interior on the Long March, raised a peasant army, destroyed the regional leadership, and enclosed China. China was poor but united. With his death, China went into the next phase of its cycle—reopening itself and betting that this time the coastal-interior split wouldn't arise.
The split has arisen, but the political consequences have not yet played themselves out, and the strategy of the Communist Party is to forestall this by a combination of repressing any sign of opposition and a massive purge among the economic leadership. This is designed to both hold the coastal wealthy and the interior poor in check. Whether this will work depends on whether the People's Liberation Army, essentially a domestic security force, can withstand the forces tugging it in various directions. Notably, a purge and reorganization has just begun in the PLA.Canada's Environment Minister Peter Kent met with The Huffington Post Canada's editorial board on Thursday and took the time to answer some of the best questions sent to us by readers.
Kent answered reader queries on climate change, China, the funding of environmental charities and his famous 1984 documentary "The Greenhouse Effect."
PHOTOS: KENT VISITS HUFFPOST
Here are the questions and answers (in some cases HuffPost had follow-up queries).
From argcargv
Q: Do you support current scientific theories that state the planet is undergoing global warming and that it is in part caused by us?
A: Yes. The official government position — the Question Period line in the 35 seconds you have to answer questions from the Opposition is Canada recognizes that climate change is a global challenge that requires global solutions. But we do recognize and observe science alone shows that we are warming. The Canadian Arctic is already warming at above the two degrees we're hoping to prevent on a global basis.
From Kris Dubuque
Q: Can you explain how it is in Canada's best interest to sell oil to a communist dictatorship? Don't you think Canada loses credibility to preach about human rights when we're enabling one of the worst offenders on the planet?
A: Well, we've found that, and again the foreign policy side of this is beyond my jurisdiction, but we've found that isolation of a country which has practices which are counter to Canadian values or policies, human rights, democracy, pollution, that sometimes engagement is the best way to affect change. There are signs, I mean certainly there has been massive change in China over the past couple of decades. We are an exporting nation. We still, and the Prime Minister made it clear on this most recent trip, that even while we were exploring new trade agreements, some of which involve resources, he made quite clear that we haven't modified or moderated our positions on principles regarding human rights, regarding pollution and so forth.
I had some fairly strong exchanges in Durban with the the Chinese minister over whether or not they should engage in helping to create and participate in a new climate change regime. And that is continuing.
Q: Will the prospect of us selling them more oil change their bargaining position on climate change?
A: They have moved toward the centre quite tangibly in the last few years. They do recognize, they speak to the concept of participation. We know that they are spending in dollar amounts more than any other country in the world to research ways of combating pollution. But there is some way to go and we will continue to engage and encourage. Obviously the world's largest polluter needs to be engaged in helping us meet the challenge of reducing greenhouse gases.
Q: Does it weaken our bargaining position if we're concerned about China's greenhouse gas emissions and using that as one of the reasons for pulling out of Kyoto if we're then selling them oil which they will burn to create more greenhouse gas emissions?
A: Well if it is burned, if it is extracted and processed responsibly with improved technology, better practices, better containment of the greenhouse gases generated and if when they use it for whatever applications they have, for transportation or industial uses, if they adopt those best practices. They are interested for example, and there may be eventually from our initial commercial carbon capture projects in Western Canada, Estevan, Saskatchewan, they may eventually be interested in buying that technology, because obviously domestically within China we know there are concerns about pollution, about air quality, water quality and any responsible government responds to its population, if not at its own risk. So I think going forward there is a possibility.
Q: But we don't have any strings attached to the oil we're selling. I'm wondering if it's kind of the equivalent of selling alcohol to someone who is visibly drunk?
A: (Laughter) They are going to continue to develop their industrial base whether we sell them the product or not. But if we are engaged at that level as well as on any number of other levels... They have a great many interests, they attend all of the international conferences, some as observers some as full members. So that's just another point of engagement.
From theLastEssayist i.e. Marc Cameron
Q: Last month, troubling accusations were made that your government and the Prime Minister's Office have made backroom threats to remove the charitable status of environmental protection organizations in an attempt to stymie the voices of Canadians who oppose pipeline development from the Alberta oil sands. Do you agree that, if these accusations are true (as represented in Andrew Frank's affadavit from 23 January 2012), it is an affront to Canadian democracy and the processes that protect our nation's common interest?
Will you go on the record, stating that environmental protection and conservation groups are not enemies of the state, nor of the government of Canada, by virtue of their opposition to any development plan or industrial endeavour?
A: First of all I think we have to recognize there is no single category of environmental non-governmental agency (NGO). There is quite a range and the focus of their interest or opposition to resource projects, for example, is again a very broad range. There are some groups which would, as the Prime Minister said, reduce Canada to one great national park, with no resource development of any sort. There are others who are narrowly focused on one specific issue with regard to resource development. There are some who may have hidden agendas and some of the offshore, foreign funding, and we do have a concern about money coming from abroad that could represent rival resource interests disguised as environmental concern. In other words, to protect market or some other interest.
In question to those who say, "Why are you concerned about foreign money coming in from opponents to resource projects when you're not against money being spent by the resource companies themselves in promoting their engagement?" Well the resource companies are doing it as responsible guest corporate citizens. They're investing, they're paying taxes, they're paying royalties, they're being regulated, they follow the regulations of Environment Canada, of Natural Resources, of Aboriginal Affairs. And some of the funding from abroad is well-intentioned, it's from groups like Ducks Unlimited, from any number of organizations — conservation-minded groups which have concerns but are not focused on obstructing despite any mitigation measures or corrective measures. There are others that would simply oppose everything, no matter how the resource practice might be regulated or controlled or in some cases rejected when they go through the environmental assessment process.
Q: So if the government was to find that a foreign government or a foreign corporation was funding an environmental group with the objective of stopping resource development what action would you take?
A: It depends how they are doing it. I think our concern initially was that some Canadian agencies registered as charitable organizations were receiving funds from individuals, organizations in the United States or abroad and that that money was being used to subvert the legitimate process of environmental assessment or consideration of resource projects. If that was the case, then the charitable status of those Canadian groups would be put at risk, because the criteria which surround a non-for-profit organization's ability to work as a charitable organization are quite clear; that would be a contravention.
The blogosphere has changed the way discussions of this sort are conducted, the reason that we are here is a reflection of that. But people like Vivian Krause for example, the West Coast blogger, who has probably done more due diligence on the sourcing of foreign funding to Canadian environmental groups than anybody else, has come up with some very interesting points of reference in terms of the objectives expressed by U.S. philanthropists, U.S. NGOs, U.S. public action committees (PACs) and again the thought of PAC money coming into Canadian societal considerations of any sort I think should be considered as ominous. We know what the PAC funding has done to the American political system and a lot of that money is anonymous and could be qualified as ominous in the way it's gathered and the way it is spent.
From Facebook: Elizabeth Maria Seger (question rephrased)
Q: Given that you're now being forced to balance short-term economics with long-term environmental issues, what do you think the 1984 you who made that pioneering "Greenhouse Gas Effect" documentary would feel about your decision to pull out of Kyoto?
A: If I had known then what was about to happen 20 years later and then 12 years after that, I would hope that logic would prevail and that I would come to exactly the same conclusion. I mean Kyoto was an aspirational protocol which didn't engage, even in its original form, most of the world's greenhouse gas emitters. And as we've seen over the years, some of the countries that committed, the Liberal government before us actually allowed emissions to go up 35 per cent rather than down six and hadn't considered what its impact would have been on Canada, how it was a protocol that worked well for some countries but would have been economically devastating for others, like Canada. So no, I think logic has to prevail.
As important as having a binding protocol, as important as having a defined protocol, is having a defined protocol which is also effective and will actually get what it's aimed at achieving. And I think that Kyoto was a good idea in its time, but it's almost irrelevant now.
Some of my critics love to quote Nature magazine when it suits them, but in November, before Durban, they had a themed edition which, whenever Kyoto comes up, deserves a little revisiting. And basically this respected journal concluded Durban was the place Kyoto should go to die. And it almost did. And it doesn't matter that it didn't, because we've moved on now, we're into post-Kyoto. There is a very small group of countries, mostly in Europe, that are clinging to Kyoto, but the world has moved on. We're now looking at Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban — Durban platform and the future.
PHOTOS: KENT VISITS HUFFPOSTDonald Trump. Richard Drew/AP Photo; Win McNamee/Getty Images President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday morning to ask the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Trump's possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, to instead look into "Fake News Networks."
"Why Isn't the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!" Trump tweeted.
Trump's tweet continues a media offensive that began Wednesday morning when NBC News reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called Trump a "moron" over the summer.
Tillerson held a press conference Wednesday in which he said Trump "is smart," though he did not explicitly deny having called him a moron. Instead, he dismissed the report as "nonsense" that he would not address.
"The @NBCNews story has just been totally refuted by Sec. Tillerson and @VP Pence. It is #FakeNews," Trump tweeted on Wednesday.
"It was fake news — it was a totally phony story," Trump told reporters during a visit to Las Vegas to meet some of the victims of Sunday night's mass shooting. "It was made up by NBC. They just made it up."
A representative for Tillerson did later explicitly deny the "moron" quip, but NBC News told Business Insider that it stood by its reporting.
According to the latest statement by Senate Intelligence Committee leaders, "the issue of collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia "is still open." Additionally, an obstruction-of-justice case may be building against Trump after he fired the head of the FBI while the bureau investigated his campaign.
The committee on Wednesday also acknowledged the propaganda, or disinformation, that infiltrated US social-media networks before the election. Large tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have struggled lately at preventing their products from distributing fake news, but it's unclear whether Trump meant to include these companies in what he called "Fake News Networks."culture Icons of Mid-Century Modernism
New book explores the legacy of architect John Cresswell Parkin, who dragged an extremely conservative Toronto into the modern age.
John C. Parkin and John B. Parkin (no relation) hit it off right from the beginning. In 1944, fresh off his studies at the University of Manitoba, John C. Parkin, 22, met John B. Parkin, an established Toronto architect 11 years his senior. They agreed to form a partnership, but first John B. insisted his Sheffield-born colleague accept a scholarship for graduate studies in architecture under Walter Gropius at Harvard—rightly believing that the knowledge he would gain about International Modernism would help their firm to distinguish itself in the ranks of architecture’s avant-garde. When John C. Parkin returned to Toronto in 1947, the pair formed John B. Parkin Associates as planned, forging an extremely effective partnership that drew on both their strengths.
As perhaps the leading proponent of modern architecture in the country, John C. oversaw all design work. John B., who possessed a keen mind for business, drummed up their commissions from clients ranging from local school boards and industrial conglomerates, to the Salvation Army and the federal government. “Through the following two decades, the two Parkins and their associates built the largest and most distinguished Canadian firm of the period,” writes architecture professor Michael J. McMordie, co-author with Linda Fraser and Geoffrey Simmins of a recently published book, John C. Parkin, Archives, and Photography: Reflections on the Practice and Presentation of Modern Architecture (University of Calgary Press, 2013), which examines the firm’s architectural output from the late 1940s until about 1970.
It’s an important book because, although John Cresswell Parkin did more than anyone to drag “Toronto, and Canada, kicking and screaming into the modern age”—as Christopher Hume has argued—the architect and his work have never before received such an extended treatment. Moreover, Parkin’s modernist legacy is slowly disappearing from the Toronto streetscape: the Bata Shoes Canadian Headquarters, the Toronto Aeroquay, the Pitney-Bowes office, and the Salvation Army’s National Headquarters have all fallen victim to the wrecking ball. So too have John B. Parkin Associates head office at 1500 Don Mills Road and the residence John C. Parkin designed for himself at 75 Bridle Path.
(Left: George Harvey Vocational School, Toronto, 1953. From Panda Associates fonds, Canadian Architectural Archives (PAN 53753-23).)
The time is ripe, the co-authors suggest, to introduce Parkin’s most important works to a generation that doesn’t (or can’t) know them first-hand and to reassess the architect’s legacy. The resulting 176-page volume falls somewhere between a coffee table book and an academic work. There are numerous photographs, most black-and-white, taken at the time by Hugh Robertson’s Panda Associates on commission to John B. Parkin Associates. But as the co-authors take pains to explain, John C. Parkin, Archives, and Photography is not intended as a comprehensive biographical monograph. Rather, it’s made up of a series of stand-alone articles examining themes and aspects of John C. Parkin’s career from the varying perspectives of archivist and historian, architecture professor, journalist—and Parkin himself.
“We knew perfectly well that if we were going to practice contemporary architecture in what was at that time an extremely conservative city…then we had to be, in effect, much more efficient than anyone else and have more versatile resources,” John C. once said of the firm’s early aspirations and challenges. “We had to reject the notion that contemporary architecture was more expensive, wilful, capricious, and somehow not functional. In effect, we had to be just a little bit better, just a bit more efficient, and our buildings had to be, above all, completely and consistently contemporary in every detail. We had to have clean and orderly premises, in effect to get rid of the idea that, well, ‘they’re a bunch of arty, young men more concerned with design and not at all concerned with the hard realities of building.'”
And so, the two Parkins brought all the requisite design skills—including structural, mechanical, and electrical engineering, landscape design, interior design, and industrial design—under one roof, each associate concentrating on an area of specialization. The innovative structure—illustrated through a circular organizational chart reproduced in the book—meant that commissions could be carried through all stages from specification writing, to cost estimating, to site supervision while the partners exerted a high degree of control over cost, schedules, and the quality of technical work.
(Right: Model of Terminal 1, Toronto International Airport, Malton, 1958. From Panda Associates fonds, Canadian Architectural Archives (PAN 58312-3).)
Parkin’s emphasis on promoting a cohesive corporate identity and presenting the firm as cosmopolitan and urbane meant the firm’s employees conformed strictly to his unspoken expectation they be clean-shaven and wear suits with crisp white shirts, knowing—as a Globe Magazine article put it in July 1969—”that a man of eccentric dress ‘might not get to meet a client.'” Parkin was also quick to recognize the potential of promotional photography, and enlisted photographer Hugh Robertson.
Harnessing lighting, shadows, and creative angles to capture modern structures with great artistry, Robertson played an instrumental role in “selling” modern architecture to the public when his work was reproduced in magazines and promotional publications. “In many cases, [Panda Associates’] photographs created iconic architecture from designs that would seem to ‘typify the sterile glass box,'” Fraser and Simmins assert.
John C. Parkin, Archives, and Photography beautifully reproduces 71 of the photographs found in the extensive Panda Associates collection at the University of Calgary Archives, capturing the range of commissions—major and minor—with which John B. Parkin Associates was involved in the 1950s and 1960s, including Toronto City Hall, the Ontario Association of Architects Headquarters, the Toronto-Dominion Centre, Yorkdale Mall, and an assortment of public schools, TTC bus exchanges, and a gas station. One might quibble that some examples of the firm’s designs for bank branches, or for the York University master plan, might have been included. But, considering the breadth and depth of John B. Parkin Associates’ prodigious body of work, not everything could make it. All the firm’s iconic landmark buildings are well represented among the book’s photographs.
An interview McMordie conducted with Parkin in late winter 1975, reproduced here as the closing chapter, provides the greatest rewards for readers. In what amounts to an extended monologue, Parkin reminisces about his early career and his collaborative partnership with John B. Parkin, and provides insights into his philosophy and practice. He references, for example, an outspoken curmudgeon who complained that Viljo Revell’s design for Toronto City Hall was setting up “vortex currents around the council chamber that would cause it to lift-off,” and his own proposal to preserve the city’s historic buildings by relocating them to the district around St. Lawrence Hall so that the downtown core could be a blank slate for development. With only one part of a three-part interview included, though, the chapter—and book—ends rather abruptly.
The co-authors’ stated purpose is to cover only John C. Parkin’s peak period, which concluded when, in about 1970, John B. Parkin decamped to Los Angeles, and the firm split to form Neish, Owen, Roland and Roy (NORR) and the Parkin Partnership. Presumably, the available archival fonds don’t include holdings on John C. Parkin’s later, albeit less celebrated, career, or projects like his unbuilt plans for the National Art Gallery in 1975. Nevertheless, it’s disappointing to need to go elsewhere for discussion of the period up to his retirement in 1987, when John C. Parkin, Archives, and Photography could have easily included a timeline of key moments in Parkin’s life to fill in blanks not covered in the text—or just a full list of the projects Parkin designed throughout his career (and their specific addresses).
(Left: Toronto Transit Commission Bus Terminal, Bay and Adelaide, Toronto, 1947. From Panda Associates fonds, Canadian Architectural Archives (PAN 47645-7K).)
The authors have combed through the archives to present an interesting and illuminating introduction to and overview of John C. Parkin’s work—though in doing so, they’ve just started scratching the surface of the vast material available in the John B. Parkin Associates Fonds and Panda Associates Fonds. One hopes that this will be but the first in a series of books exploring Canadian architectural history and photography through the trove of resources held by the Canadian Architectural Archives at the University of Calgary—which features the largest collection of architectural drawings, photographs, and business records in the world.If President Trump wanted to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons, the hard truth is that no one could stop him.
On Thursday, Trump escalated his harsh rhetoric about North Korea by telling reporters that “things will happen to them like they never thought possible” if Pyongyang attacked the US or its Asian allies. The bellicose talk came just days after Trump stunned leaders around the world by promising to hit North Korea with “fire and fury” if it continued to threaten the US.
For its part, North Korea announced plans to fire four ballistic missiles toward the US territory of Guam, which houses 6,000 American troops. Pyongyang often issues such threats without following through, but North Korean missiles are notoriously imprecise, which means there’d be a real chance of one of those missiles landing on Guam. If it did, some form of military confrontation between the US and North Korea might be inevitable.
It’s important to take a deep breath. The North Korean regime isn’t irrational, and the ruling Kim family has spent decades working to guarantee it maintains power. It’s difficult to imagine Kim Jong Un, the current ruler, launching a nuclear missile at the US when he knows the US response would erase his country from the map.
It’s also hard to imagine Trump, for all of his tough talk, actually giving an order that would lead to millions of deaths.
But if he did give the order, the military would be duty-bound to carry it out. Trump, and Trump alone, is vested with the power to order the use of the most destructive weapons the US possesses.
“We have a nuclear monarchy,” said Joe Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a security foundation that tries to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and the author of Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late. “Once he gives the command, he cannot be overruled.”
If Trump did give the command — a very big if — here’s what would happen between the time the president made the decision and the time the missiles started to fly:
1) The president receives word of an incoming attack.
Experts I talked with said it’s unlikely that either North Korea or the United States would turn to nuclear weapons, especially as a first resort. There are other, nonnuclear options that both countries would consider first, such as sending artillery across the Korean border or launching airstrikes.
“Nuclear war is not about to break out, but [Trump’s] language increases the risk of miscalculation,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to public education on arms control. “And when it comes to the Korean Peninsula, when there’s a miscalculation in war, then there’s a possibility of nuclear war.”
That war would begin with Trump receiving word of an imminent North Korean attack.
2) The nuclear briefcase, or “football,” is opened.
After the president learns of the attack, the military officer who is always by the president’s side opens a briefcase known as the “football.” The black case contains an outline of the nuclear options available to the president and instructions for contacting US military commanders around the world and giving them orders to launch their missiles.
3) There’s a conversation with two top military officers.
As mentioned earlier, the president is the sole decision-maker. But he must consult two people to make that decision.
He must talk with the Pentagon’s deputy director of operations in charge of the National Military Command Center, or “war room,” the heart of the Pentagon from where all US military operations are directed. The current deputy director is Lt. Gen. John Dolan. The president must also speak with the commander of US Strategic Command, currently Gen. John Hyten.
The length of the conversation depends on the president. It also doesn’t have to be held in the White House’s Situation Room; it can happen anywhere over a secured phone line.
The president can include whomever else he wants in the conference, meaning son-in-law Jared Kushner could in theory help Trump decide whether to use nuclear weapons. He would almost certainly include Defense Secretary James Mattis and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But the only people who really matter are the deputy director of the National Military Command Center and the Strategic Command commander. The officers could try to convince the president not to launch an attack. They could resign on the spot in protest. Even if they did, though, they would most likely be replaced by officers willing to issue the command to strike.
4) The president makes the decision, and the order is given.
To verify that the command is coming from the president, the officers recite a code (“Bravo Charlie,” for example). The president must then respond with a code printed on a card that he carries with him at all times, known as the “biscuit.”
Then the two officers communicate with the people who will initiate and launch the attack. Depending on the plan chosen by the president, the command will go to navy crews operating the submarines carrying nuclear missiles or troops overseeing intercontinental ballistic missiles on land.
5) Launch crews prepare to attack.
The launch crews receive the plan and prepare for attack. This involves unlocking various safes, entering a series of codes, and turning keys to launch the missiles. The crews are trained to “execute the order, not question it,” said Cirincione.
6) Missiles are launched.
It could take about five minutes for intercontinental ballistic missiles to launch from the time the president announced his order. Missiles launched from submarines take about 15 minutes.
The whole process is designed to be fast because if missiles are heading toward the United States, they could land within 30 minutes. If the president chose to, he could launch US missiles before the enemy ones hit.
“The president can order a nuclear strike in about the time it takes to write a tweet,” said Cirincione.The first chapel of the Capuchin Crypt
A bone chandelier in the Capuchin CryptThe Capuchin Crypt is a famous Bone Church in Rome, decorated with 3700 skeletons. It is situated in the less suitable area for an ossuary, the fancy Via Veneto street, made popular by the movie "La Dolce Vita", right below the church of "Santa Maria della Concezione dei C |
to a screeching halt earlier this week, sources familiar with the matter tell Re/code.
The timing of the attack coincides with the imminent release of “The Interview,” a Sony film that depicts a CIA plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. The nation’s ever-belligerent state propaganda outlets have threatened “merciless retaliation” against the U.S. and other nations if the film is released.
The film is a comedy and features actors Seth Rogen and James Franco as celebrity journalists who score a rare interview with the North Korean leader, played by the actor Randall Park. In the film, the journalists are enlisted by the CIA to assassinate Kim.
https://twitter.com/Sethrogen/status/476859502059601922
Sony and outside security consultants are actively exploring the theory that the hack may have been carried out by third parties operating out of China on North Korea’s behalf. The sources stress that a link to North Korea hasn’t been confirmed, but has not been ruled out, either.
The hackers, operating under the name “Guardians of Peace,” or #GOP, left an image bearing a message on the computers screens of Sony employees Monday morning. The message threatened to release sensitive data supposedly stolen from Sony servers if certain demands were not met.
On Wednesday, some of those files were said to have leaked on the Web by way of a thread on Reddit, though their veracity hasn’t been independently confirmed. The attack is said to have locked Sony Pictures employees out of their computers entirely, forcing them to resort to pen and paper to do their jobs.
Sony declined to comment beyond a statement it issued Tuesday: “Sony Pictures Entertainment experienced a system disruption, which we are working diligently to resolve.”
Similarly devastating attacks have been blamed on North Korea in the past. Last year, North Korea was said to have been behind an attack against two South Korean TV broadcast networks as well as its financial system. Employees of the two TV networks were said at the time to be left with blank computer screens. That attack also paralyzed South Korea’s network of ATM machines, preventing people from withdrawing money from their bank accounts.The lawless shanty town is now awash with armed gangs making a mass assault on the border ahead of the crackdown. The race to get across the Channel illegally comes after the French government agreed to shut down the slum this year and Britain considers tougher border controls in the wake of the Brexit vote. No official closure date has yet been set but plans are in place to clear the site, possibly as early as next month. Meanwhile, there is a shocking breakdown of law and order. People who have travelled thousands of miles to northern France make no secret of their plans to work in Britain in the black economy.
GETTY Migrants from the Calais Jungle said how they were plotting to sneak in to Britain
Sudanese migrant Mohamed, 18, said: “It is my dream to reach England and I will try every day.” Eritrean Dawit, 18, said: “I want to get to the UK. I want money and freedom. It’s dangerous here and I might get killed but I try.” Algerian Samir, 25, added: “The Jungle is full of mafia and guns. “They demand money for a place on a truck and will kill. It is a very dangerous place.” Migrants said people smugglers were now charging £850 for a crossing before the Jungle is flattened.
GETTY The lawless shanty town is now awash with armed gangs making a mass assault on the border
Charlie Elphicke, the Tory MP for Dover, said: “We need urgent action to restore order before someone gets killed. Britain and France should work together to dismantle the Jungle immediately, set up a repatriation centre and target the people traffickers. “They are making nightly attacks on tourists and truckers. “One driver I spoke to told me it was only a matter of time before someone is seriously injured or worse.” Security is being beefed up as migrants realise they will be forced to claim asylum in France or be repatriated once the camp is cleared.
Jungle Migrant Camp in protests Mon, October 3, 2016 Up to 10,000 migrants are now living at the camp and are using desperate and violent measures to try and board trucks heading for the UK. Play slideshow REUTERS 1 of 24 Demonstrators protest near the area called the
Evidence that the authorities are bracing themselves for a fresh wave of attacks was visible yesterday, as more layers of barbed wire fencing were laid to repel marauding gangs. Hundreds of extra riot police have been drafted in as tensions reach boiling point. Eurotunnel warned passengers last night that “reinforced security checks” were being carried out at its terminal in Coquelles. Yesterday the Daily Express disturbed a brazen daylight attempt by two men to stow away on a UK-bound truck as its driver refuelled.
EXPRESS French riot police were caught up in further violence in the Calais camp
Fresh calls to end the mayhem came after migrants were involved in ugly clashes inside the camp, hours after an anti-Jungle protest. Violence erupted again after Calais was crippled with a “go-slow” by French truckers in response to an upsurge in attacks on drivers.
GETTY/EXPRESS The French government has agreed to shut the camp down
In what are frequent scenes, heavily armed officers were taunted as darkness fell. Migrants lit fires and hurled rocks on to the N216 motorway leading to the ferry terminal.
We are struggling to cope. Our numbers have increased, but we are stretched to the limit.
And for the second time in a week riot police fired tear gas to quell the disorder. Despite the southern section of the Jungle being cleared earlier this year, the camp has grown and now contains around 10,000 migrants. They outnumber French police by more than 10 to one. A riot squad commander said: “We are struggling to cope. Our numbers have increased, but we are stretched to the limit.” Ukip leadership candidate Bill Etheridge said: “The French should tear down the camp immediately. It is against decency and the rule of law.
GETTY Truck drivers and farmers protested on the motorway calling for the camp to be dismantledThe "Iron Man 3" and "All Hail the King" screenwriter reveals some of the Marvel projects he's worked on that didn't end up getting produced.
All Hail the King, the Marvel One-Shot short that appears on the Thor: The Dark World DVD and Blu-ray, may mark Iron Man 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce's directorial debut on a Marvel Studios project, but it could have gone so differently.
"I'd been trying to direct and write a One-Shot for Marvel since Runaways was picked up," Pearce told Total Film magazine. "The One-Shot program comes in and out of existence at points, and you have to will the shorts to happen … I'd written a few different characters across a few One-Shots, and so when Sir Ben [Kingsley] said he'd do this one, oddly enough that tipped this over the line -- that one of the greatest actors of his generation was agreeing to do what is essentially my ridiculous student film."
STORY: Remember When Loki, the Mandarin and Sinestro Teamed Up to Sell a Car?
Pearce talked about some of the One-Shots he's written that haven't ended up in production. "One was Sin and Crossbones [the latter character will appear in Captain America: The Winter Soldier]," he revealed. "I love Jessica Jones, and while obviously Jessica Jones and Alias is now going to exist in the Netflix part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I'd always obsessively been trying to put her in stuff I'd been working with Marvel on … but about three or four other ones, too."
He also named his great Marvel white whale: "My Marvel obsession with Damage Control [a comedy series about the company tasked with cleaning up after large-scale superhero battles] is still there, but it's pretty difficult to make into a short," he said. "The clue is in the title that you have to do a lot of damage to then control it -- and that's not really in the budget of a short movie. I just think it's got huge potential as a franchise."
Psst, Marvel: Given the success of Iron Man 3 and Pearce's apparent luck in focusing on properties that end up in development or used elsewhere on the Marvel Studios slate, maybe you should think about a Damage Control movie after all…Paranormal romance author Lynn Viehl bared all last week — she posted her complete royalty statement from her publisher, for her New York Times bestselling book Twilight Fall. And the details might make you reconsider a career as a novelist.
Twilight Fall was a top 20 bestseller on the New York Times mass market paperback list — so, not the main fiction bestseller list, but still impressive. According to Penguin Group, the publisher, the book has sales of 89,142 copies, minus returns of 27,479, for total sales of 61,663 copies. (As far as I know, the books are counted as sold until the bookstore chooses to send them back — but I could be wrong about that.) The publisher is holding back reserves against royalties for another 7,350 copies to be returned.
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In any case, the bottom line is that Viehl got a $50,000 advance for Twilight Fall, and she's unlikely to earn it out for up to a year — which means no royalty payments. After taxes, expenses, and her agent's cut, she gets to keep about half that advance. As she notes:
My income per book always reminds me of how tough it is to make at living at this gig, especially for writers who only produce one book per year. If I did the same, and my one book performed as well as TF, and my family of four were solely dependent on my income, my net would be only around $2500.00 over the income level considered to be the US poverty threshold (based on 2008 figures.) Yep, we'd almost qualify for foodstamps.
It's pretty great of Viehl to share her royalty statement with the world — apparently the last time she did that, she got some flak online, and here's hoping that doesn't happen this time. The only caveat I'd toss in there is that most of us don't reckon our incomes on an after-tax basis — if we did, I suspect we'd all be horribly depressed. So if you leave taxes out of her estimation of her income, she's probably making closer to $35K or $40K per book, rather than $25K. [Straight Goods]Berkman returns to Rice as volunteer coach
When he retires from playing baseball, Lance Berkman has a job lined up.
Call him "Coach Berkman."
Berkman has joined coach Wayne Graham's staff as a volunteer assistant, returning to Rice where he was a two-time All-American and national player of the year in 1997.
Berkman, 36, will work as a volunteer this spring and has an open invitation to stay with the staff regardless of whether the free-agent first baseman plays a 15th major league season.
"Coaching is something I want to pursue after I am done playing," Berkman said. "If you have any aspirations to be a college baseball coach, the one guy you want to learn from is coach Graham."
Berkman said the position on the Rice staff "gives me flexibility" in case he decides to play another season.
"Having flexibility if I want to play another year or two was important," Berkman said. "If I decide to hang it up, I have something to step into immediately."
Astros may be an option
His career plans as a player are up in the air, but Lance Berkman will take advantage of his role with the Rice baseball team. (Karen Warren / Houston Chronicle) His career plans as a player are up in the air, but Lance Berkman will take advantage of his role with the Rice baseball team. (Karen Warren / Houston Chronicle) Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Berkman returns to Rice as volunteer coach 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Berkman had an informal meeting with Astros owner Jim Crane last week and expressed interest in returning to the team for which he played the first 12 seasons of his career. The switch-hitter could be an option at designated hitter with the Astros moving to the American League next season.
Berkman worked with Rice players during fall workouts with the Owls' staff short-handed following the departure of assistant coach Mike Taylor.
A mentor
Graham said Berkman could serve as a student assistant next fall. Berkman plans to begin taking online courses next summer and needs about a year to complete his degree.
Berkman will work with hitters and serve as mentor to the Rice first basemen, Graham said.
"He brings instant credibility as a person and as a hitter," Graham said. "He loves coaching, and the kids just love hanging out with him. If he could just avoid telling too many stories about me."
Berkman holds several Rice records, including home runs in a single season (41) and in a career (67).
After 12 seasons with the Astros, Berkman spent the final few months of the 2010 seasons with the New York Yankees and the past two seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, winning a World Series title in 2011.
He's a six-time National League All-Star.
Berkman hit.301 with 31 home runs and 94 RBIs during the Cardinals' championship run, earning the NL comeback player of the year award.
But he was limited to 81 at-bats this season because of a knee injury.
Contender or coach
Graham said Berkman "wants to play for a contender" if he plays this season.
Berkman said he's trying to acclimate himself to one change.
"The guys call me coach," he said. "I told them to call me Lance. Coach sounds weird."
joseph.duarte@chron.com
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The mayor of the French city Montpellier, who officiated the first same-sex wedding in the country last week, has received threats in the post, including a package of faeces.
Vincent Autin, a 40-year-old PR firm head, and his husband Bruno Boileau, a 29-year-old government worker, were married in Montpellier’s town hall on Wednesday afternoon.
The City’s Mayor Helene Mandroux, officiated, called the ceremony an “historic moment”, and said the couple represented a “united France”.
According to Montpellier daily newspaper Midi Libre, whilst opening mail regarding the passing of equal marriage, government officials found threats, including a package of faeces addressed to the mayor.
Mayor Mandroux has since married another same-sex couple, Rouesne Saunier and Carole Leonard, on Saturday.
Thierry Speitel, mayor of Sigolsheim in eastern France was forced to make a complaint to police after being sent bullets in the post following an interview he gave during which he discussed equal marriage and adoption.
The Speaker of the National Assembly, Claude Bartolone, also received a threatening letter containing ammunition powder, asking him to delay the vote on equal marriage.
Socialist deputies Sylviane Bulteau and Hugues Fourage also received letters from anti-equal marriage extremists, which threatened their families with kidnap, the equal marriage bill was not withdrawn.
Following months of sometimes violent protests, and a substantial rise in homophobic attacks, French President Hollande signed the law making France the fourteenth country in the world to allow equal marriage, two weeks ago.
Last Sunday, at the end of a day of tense, but relatively peaceful anti-equal marriage protests, which saw tens of thousands take to the streets of Paris, riot police clashed with hundreds of violent demonstrators.
One of the leaders of France’s vocal anti-equal marriage campaign comedienne Frigide Barjot, since sent her “best wishes” to the couple, but has vowed to keep fighting to now attempt a repeal of the country’s new equal marriage law.A new survey on the intersections of religion, values, and attitudes toward capitalism, government, and economic policy was released on Thursday by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. There’s a lot of interesting data and analysis to wade through, including an effort to better identify and understand religious progressives.
I was most struck by this piece of data: 50 percent of white evangelicals say they believe capitalism and the free market are at odds with Christian values. According to the survey, white evangelicals are more likely to say the free market and Christian values are at odds than black Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and religiously unaffiliated Americans. On first glance that seems difficult to accept given white evangelicals’ overwhelming electoral support for the Republican Party.
But that finding is buttressed by another one: that only 44 percent of white evangelicals are economic conservatives in this survey’s analysis, while nearly two-thirds are social conservatives. That helps explain why some progressive economic policies like boosting the minimum wage draw high and cross-cutting support. Religious conservatives are far more likely than religious progressives to say religion is the most important thing in their lives. This is an answer to the “what’s the matter with Kansas?” question. Many evangelicals and religious conservatives don’t agree with right-wing economic policies, but those concerns are trumped by social issues which they are more likely to see in religious terms.
Columnist E.J. Dionne, co-author of a report on the survey, noted that this finding demonstrates the bind facing Republicans who want to broaden the party’s electoral coalition. De-emphasizing social issues and pushing conservative economic policies would bring with it some danger to Republicans’ electoral coalition. As one questioner noted, that puts Dionne in rare agreement with conservative religious leaders like Tony Perkins who are always warning GOP leaders not to abandon social conservatives.
There’s a lot of grist for future analysis, including interesting breakdowns on people’s response to the assertion, “It is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.” Survey author Robert Jones has posted about the survey’s findings on religion and the millennial generation for the Washington Post’s On Faith blog. Audio for the full two-hour briefing and panel discussion on the survey that was held at Brookings on Thursday afternoon is here.
(Full disclosure: before becoming an RD associate editor, I did some work for PRRI as a consultant.)The history of science is replete with examples, from plate tectonics to prions, of heretical ideas that received a poor reception from the scientific establishment when they were first proposed. The apparent resistance to new ideas has earned scientists a fair bit of criticism. But some recent publications have indicated both that it is possible for fringe ideas to get a hearing from mainstream science, and that their proponents may end up wishing they didn't.
Fringe ideas that go against mainstream scientific thought are effectively a constant in most areas of science, and there are a number of examples where the ideas have moved from the fringes to the mainstream. The classic example here is Alfred Wegener, who is celebrated for his development of the ideas we now know as plate tectonics, a phenomenally successful scientific theory. At the time, however, his ideas were ridiculed. "Reaction to Wegener's theory was almost uniformly hostile, and often exceptionally harsh and scathing," as the Berkeley site notes.
Many have used that as a cautionary tale, a warning that the conservatism of the scientific community might interfere with achieving its goal of understanding the natural world. But, as we noted, fringe ideas, often dozens of them for every successful area of science, are a constant. Inevitably, the majority of them will necessarily wind up being not only wrong, but uselessly so. This forces the scientific community into a balancing act; in the words of Richard Feynman, scientists have to "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."
From open minds to falling brains
But, despite the ostensible conservatism of the scientific community, it's pretty shocking how often ideas from the fringes wind up getting published. A great example of this is last week's publication of a paper that discussed attempts to use Newtonian mechanics to explain a Universe that, as most scientists have concluded, is driven by relativity and dark matter.
MOND theories, as the neo-Newtonian ideas are termed, is definitely on the fringes of mainstream thought, given that they can't explain a wealth of observations that are consistent with dark matter, and don't currently handle relativistic effects very well (and we know that relativity works with everything from black hole binaries to GPS satellites). Still, people continue to do work on MOND (and continue to get published), in part because, relativity's accuracy notwithstanding, we don't currently have a satisfying theory of gravity. And the people working on MOND theories at least seem to be making a serious attempt to come to grips with real-world data.
But it's possible to go further on the fringes (and rack up a higher crackpot index score) without leaving the scientific literature. A paper was recently published by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science that was so far out on the fringes, we labeled it Weird Science. Its author, Donald I. Williamson, argued that separate larval and adult stages of insects didn't arise due to different selective pressures during these stages; instead, he suggests the modern species are the product of the hybridization of a velvet worm (the caterpillar) and a flying insect (the butterfly). The idea is at least vaguely scientific in the sense that the paper was able to make some testable predictions.
As we mentioned at the time, however, there was enough data to indicate it was wrong right from the start. And, in fact, a follow up paper has already been published showing that some of the predictions made in the original publication could be tested—and shown to be false—using public databases of biological information. In fact, the authors of the second paper have apparently been publishing papers showing that Williamson's hybridization ideas are incompatible with data for a few decades, apparently without making much of an impression on Williamson.
All this seems to suggest that this is a case where Williamson has abandoned the scientific fringes and simply stopped paying attention to reality.
Ignoring reality is a remarkably frequent problem as one heads deeper into the fringes. For example, there's a retired geologist named Nils Axel M�rner who apparently thinks, despite copious evidence to the contrary, that ocean levels aren't rising in any significant way. Similarly, Peter Duesberg attempted to raise doubts about the HIV/AIDS connection by claiming that HIV did not satisfy Koch's postulates. In doing so, he completely ignored that there are exceptions to these postulates, like asymptomatic disease carriers, that were recognized by Koch himself.
Heretics and public perception
Fringe ideas do play an essential role in science; they bring new ideas and perspectives to unsolved problems and, in rare cases, end up finding a permanent home in the mainstream. But it's important to remember that there will always be far more fringe ideas than there will ever be space in the mainstream. By necessity, the majority of heretical ideas will be wrong, and most of them won't ever be useful in their failure. If the scientific community reacts as if new ideas are probably wrong, it's because they are. This negative response is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of people on the fringes wind up being crackpots, unconstrained by either the scientific method or reality.
All of that is important to recognize, because fringe ideas seem to have a lasting popularity with the public. There's a certain appeal to the narrative of the lone genius bucking the system that resonates, even within the scientific community. And, in many cases, the fringe ideas are popular outside of the scientific community because the public isn't comfortable with mainstream scientific thought for social (evolution) or political (climate change) reasons—or simply because they can't come to grips with the strange worlds of relativity and quantum mechanics.
You can see this in the discussion of the recent MOND article, where, for every person who discussed the copious data that has led most scientists to conclude there must be dark matter, you'd find someone voicing the nagging suspicion that it's all little more than an accounting trick.
Still, the MOND work provides a useful guide to the sort of fringe science that should be accorded some respect. Even if their models perform poorly when confronted with real-world data (especially when compared with alternatives) the people working in the area are at least trying to revise their ideas to come to grips with reality. In contrast, Williamson appears to maintain his ideas despite repeated intrusions by reality.Hillary Clinton’s emails reveal how Google wanted to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad using a mapping tool.
At a time when America's foreign policy was to topple Assad, the tech giant - whose corporate motto is 'Don't Be Evil' - sought to encourage further defections from the leader's regime and boost the confidence of the opposition.
The plan's details were passed along to Clinton's team by a Google executive Jared Cohen, who was a senior advisor to Clinton until 2010 and is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The 34-year-old left his State Department position after being poached by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to run Google Ideas, now known as Jigsaw.
The revelation comes as Google’s plans to expand Internet access in Cuba were revealed by President Barack Obama on Monday.
Obama, who is on a historic trip to the communist nation, said in an interview with ABC News: ‘One of the things that we’ll be announcing here is that Google has a deal to start setting up more WiFi and broadband access on the island.’
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Jared Cohen (right) emailed several members of Hillary's team in 2012 with the plan to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad using a mapping tool.. It was forwarded to Clinton (pictured today) by her deputy chief of staff with the note: 'FYI — this is a pretty cool idea'
In 2012, Google’s intention to get involved in Syrian affairs is highlighted in a memo from Cohen, who ran the company's think tank, which has now changed its name from Google Ideas to Jigsaw, to a number of senior members of Clinton’s team.
Cohen addressed his email, with only the word 'Syria' written in the subject box, to deputy secretary of state Bill Burns, Alec Ross, a senior advisor to Clinton and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan.
In it, he explained that the mapping tool will track and map the insurgents defecting from Assad.
Google also planned to stealthily hand the reins over to Al-Jazeera to ensure the data is broadcast into Syria, encouraging further defections and give confidence to the opposition.
Cohen wrote: ‘Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.
'SUBJECT: SYRIA': GOOGLE IDEAS CHIEF JARED COHEN'S FULL EMAIL Deputy Secretary Burns, Jake, Alec, Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from. Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition. Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria. I've attached a few visuals that show what the tool will look like. Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything eke [sic] you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact. Thanks, Jared
‘Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually tracking and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.’
The message was then forwarded by Sullivan to Clinton on July 25, 2012, with the note: ‘FYI – this is a pretty cool idea’.
The email exchange was shared on Saturday by WikiLeaks.
Earlier in the week, the website shared an archive of more than 30,000 emails from the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s tenure as Secretary of State, obtained through a Freedom of Information Request.
Cohen addressed his email to deputy secretary of state Bill Burns (pictured) and a couple of other members of Hillary's team
Elaborating on the plan to get the information to their intended recipients, Cohen added: ‘Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria.’
Cohen also include an attachment, a PDF called 'Defection Tracker', showing what the tool will look like in the email.
He added: ‘Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything eke [sic] you think we need to account for or think about before we launch.
‘We believe this can have an important impact.’
Google's code of conduct famously opens with the company's corporate motto: 'Don't Be Evil'.
Parent company Alphabet, whose executive chairman is Schmidt, dropped the slogan last year, changing its code of conduct to encourage employees to 'do the right thing.'
Google Ideas was founded in 2010 by Schmidt to understand and tackle global challenges.
Cohen left his job on the State Department’s Policy Planning Committee, where he was an advisor to Condoleezza Rice and later Clinton, when Schmidt approached him to head the New York-based 'think/do tank'.
The company later became Jigsaw, with Cohen still serving as President.
Its mission is 'to use technology to tackle the toughest geopolitical challenges, from countering violent extremism to thwarting online censorship to mitigating the threats associated with digital attacks.'
Meanwhile, Jigsaw has come under scrutiny for its attempts to incite regime changes and its close ties to the State Department.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Google 'is not what it seems' in an article for Newsweek in 2014.
He described Cohen as a 'fast-talking "Generation Y" ideas man' who had thrived at the State Department under two administrations before he was 'poached in his early twenties.'
However, Cohen reportedly used social media to incite uprisings even before leaving the State Department, according to the Washington Examiner.
He reportedly asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay system maintenance that officials though could have obstructed an uprising in Iran in 2009.
But ironically, it was the efforts to overthrow Assad by supporting Syrian rebels which was exploited by ISIS and led to the rise of the terror group.The world may be talking more about upcoming flagships like Apple's iPhone 8 aka iPhone X and Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 but these mobile phone making companies have failed to find much ground in world's biggest smartphone market China. A research study has found out that domestic companies like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi dominate Chinese smartphone market that contributes to almost 30 percent of the global smartphone volumes.
Apple rocked Chinese smartphone market in 2015 with its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus but that magic didn't repeat with the iPhone 7, and Samsung's presence in the country has been badly affected. Now, domestic companies are dominating, capturing 87 percent of the Chinese smartphone market in the second quarter of 2017 (Q2 2017).
Also read: Battle of Chinese brands: Xiaomi to take on OPPO, Vivo and others with new smartphones
According to the research from Counterpoint's Market Monitor service, smartphones shipments in China continues to grow, witnessing a 3 percent annually during Q2 2017 (April-June). Huawei and Vivo were the fastest growing brands followed by OPPO and Xiaomi. It may be noted that Xiaomi bounced back strongly after starting the year on a slow note. Apple showed a little improvement in Q2 over the first quarter but it was seasonal, while Samsung has lost its grip.
"The Chinese market showed a positive uptick in demand as well as supply during the June ending quarter. June seasonally is a strong month for China as it is usually buoyed by portfolio upgrades from major brands such as Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi. The top four Chinese brands now capture close to 69% of the market as these brands have raced ahead of international and other local brands with expansive distribution reach and exciting portfolio," said Research Director, James Yan.
"As predicted, last quarter, the Chinese smartphone market saw a healthy sell-out through April, May of the second quarter with some level of inventory correction allowing the Chinese brands to ship more smartphones in June with a revamped portfolio," added Yan.
Huawei's smartphone shipment share in Q2 2017 is 20.2 percent against 16.9 percent during the corresponding period in 2016, while that of OPPO is 18.8 percent in Q2 2017 against 16 percent in Q2 2016. Vivo's smartphone shipment share in the country is 17 percent in Q2 2017 compared to 13.2 percent during the same period last year and Xiaomi registered a 13 percent shipment share against 11.2 percent in Q2 last year.
However, Apple's share saw a marginal fall from 8.5 percent in Q2 2016 to 8.2 percent in Q2 this year, while it was a big fall for Samsung, from 7 percent in Q2 2016 to 3 percent during the same period this year.
Associate Director of Counterpoint Tarun Pathak said that Huawei captured the top spot this quarter while OPPO and Vivo grew significantly with their handsets from mid-tier and high-tier series catering demand from tier-1 cities to tier-4 towns.
However, Research Director Neil Shah said the days of easy growth are over for Huawei, OPPO, Vivo and Xiaomi in China.
"The competitive landscape is converging as all the top four Chinese brands have reached a steady and dominant position in a very slow growing market. The race for the top two spots is always up for grabs as one misstep can push a brand easily two spots behind," said Shah.Arsene Wenger has confirmed he’ll be rotating his squad for the FA Cup fifth round tie with Liverpool after a tough week which has seen his squad lose to Liverpool and draw with Manchester United.
While the boss refused to be drawn on specifics, the Telegraph have speculated that the Gunners could make as many as six changes to Sunday afternoon’s starting line-up with the likes of Lukasz Fabianski, Nacho Monreal, Mathieu Flamini, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Serge Gnabry and Lukas Podolski all tipped to start. Nicklas Bendtner, Yaya Sanogo and Carl Jenkinson could also be involved.
“We gave a lot [against United] and certainly for Sunday I will have to make some changes,” Wenger said on Wednesday. “But still, it’s a big game for us and we want to win it.”
Given Arsenal host Bayern Munich at the Emirates three days later it’s hardly surprising that the boss is pondering fresh legs for Sunday. That being said he’ll be keen for his squad to exact revenge on Brendan Rodgers’ side for the thrashing dished out last Saturday.
It’s a tough call especially as Liverpool, without European football to think about, will likely field as strong a line-up as possible. For what it’s worth Wojciech Szczesny says he’d rather be in Arsenal’s position, testing themselves against the continent’s best, than twiddling thumbs waiting for the next game.
“I don’t know whether that’s an advantage,” the Pole said after the game with United about the bin dippers break.
“I wouldn’t give up European football. It’s very enjoyable. You can also look at it as gaining experience when you do play in the Champions League. Maybe they will have more energy but I wouldn’t swap it. There are four teams in the title race and it makes it more exciting.”Veteran suicide numbers have gone up in recent years with much of the attention focused on veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan killing themselves. However, almost seven out of 10 veterans who have committed suicide were over the age of 50, according to a Department of Veterans Affairs study.
Even as the agency collects data to better understand the issue, independent experts acknowledge that finding all the answers won't be easy.
"Nobody knows anything about [why], but we suspect a combination of factors," said Dr. Tom Berger, a Navy corpsman in Vietnam and today executive director of the Veterans Health Council at Vietnam Veterans of America. "Certainly we share some of the risk factors with the younger guys," including post-traumatic stress disorder, high rates of depression and combat.
Older veterans are at an age when the structure they built into their lives starts to loosen up, he said.
"A lot of guys went in, and then they came out and became a workaholic rather than deal with depression and PTSD," he said. They covered over stresses born of service with work and family, but the stresses remain today and the vets are going into retirement and the family structure dissipates as children go or have gone their own ways.
For Korean War veterans it may even be worse. Many of these veterans would have been in their 40s before the VA - under pressure from Vietnam veterans and politicians - acknowledged PTSD was real and began providing services to veterans.
"The Korean guys don't talk about their service, and some of them were involved in the bloodiest battles... in brutal, cold weather," Berger said.
The VA study found that the percentage of older veterans with a history of VA healthcare who committed suicide actually was higher than that of veterans not associated with VA care. Veterans over the age of 50 who had entered the VA healthcare system made up about 78 percent of the total number of veterans who committed suicide - 9 percentage points higher than the general pool.
Notwithstanding the ongoing controversy over VA wait times for care and claims, the higher percentage of suicides in this group of veterans is not necessarily an indictment of the healthcare system, officials said.
Veterans receiving VA healthcare would be at a higher risk of suicide because they have a disability and with it, perhaps, chronic pain and a greater likelihood of depression, according to Dr. Craig Bryan, a clinical psychologist and executive director of the University of Utah's National Center for Veterans Studies.
Injuries to limbs, migraine headaches or any other condition that carries with it chronic pain all increase a person's risk of suicide.
"But only if they also have depression... It's not the event itself, the injury, it's what you associate with it, how you perceive it limiting your ability and your identity," said Bryan, who served on active duty at Wilford Hall Medical Center as chief of primary care psychology services. In 2009, he deployed to Iraq as clinical director of the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic |
's car on Thursday during her bid to enter the Haji Ali dargah in Mumbai, prompting the police to whisk her away to another location. While a defiant Desai was planning another attempt to enter, crucial time was lost and the dargah was shut down for the day.
An angry Desai now plans to go to the Chief Minister's residence to voice her protest on being denied entry to the dargah.
The activist, who has entered a number of places of worship that had barred women from the sanctum sanctorum, had resolved to enter the dargah - one of the most recognisable landmarks of Mumbai. "When I reached Haji Ali dargah, the protesters tried to enter my car. The police immediately took me to another place," she told reporters.
The Bhoomata Ranragini Brigade president had launched a forum 'Haji Ali For All', along with several other women, NGOs and social groups, to campaign for women's entry into the shrine. After battling for women's right to worship and enter temples like Shani Shingnapur in Kolhapur and the Trimbakeshwar temple, Desai brought her protest for women's rights to the Haji Ali dargah.
Meanwhile, several people gathered outside the dargah to demand equal rights for men and women and extend their support to Trupti Desai.
Earlier in the day, AIMIM had threatened to smear ink on Desai if she tried to enter the dargah. Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat has also warned Desai not to touch the mazar-e-sharif at the dargah.
In February, the Maharashtra government had supported the entry of women to the dargah. However, the Haji Ali dargah Trust justified its stand on the ground that allowing women to the shrine would be against the religion.Published: - Nov 02, 2017
Researchers estimate that the world will be 4ºC hotter in 2050
Leer en Español: 2016 rompe récords en concentración de CO2 atmosférico
According to the World Meteorological Organization, during 2016, scientists reported that Earth had a historical concentration of CO2. The organization assured that they registered 403.3 parts per million of carbon dioxide molecules, 3 ppm more than the previous year. Professor Euan Nisbet from the Royal Holloway University in London explained to the BBC "the 3ppm CO2 growth rate in 2015 and 2016 is extreme. Double the growth rate that in the 1990-2000 decade".
World Meteorological Organization: in 2016, the planet increased 3 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere breaking the 800,000 years record
The researchers warned that it was the highest amount of CO2 particles in 800,000 years, 100 times more than what it was at the end of the ice age. According to the study, it can "initiate unpredictable changes in the climate system (...) leading to severe ecological and economic disruptions".
This year's WMO report published data from 51 different countries after measuring the concentration of harmful gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, among others.
According to the report, despite the absorption mechanisms of the planet, which includes oceans and plants, the high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is caused by human activity and El Niño weather phenomenon.
The last time Earth experienced a similar CO2 concentration was, approximately, 3-5 million years ago. Then, the climate was 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer and the sea levels were 10-20 meters higher.
Increasing the temperature
Meanwhile, another study from the Valladolid University in Spain predicts that the temperature in planet Earth will increase 4 degrees Celsius by 2050. The paper, published in the Ecological Economist journal, studied the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) which are the promises that every country made in the Paris Agreement to reduce their CO2 production.
Valladolid University: Even if all the countries fulfilled each self-imposed commitment, the planet’s temperature will increase at least by 3C.
The Paris Agreement seeks to prevent the increase of the temperature by 2 degrees Celsius, an average concluded from the temperatures from the year 1850. However, the research assured that even if all nations fulfilled their commitment to the planet, the temperature will still increase by at least 3 degrees Celsius. Jaime Nieto, Valladolid University's research expert, explained that China and India will be the most responsible countries.
With just a 2 degree Celsius, the world would be victim of longer heat waves, droughts in the tropics, reduced crop fields, and coral reefs dying off
According to climate experts, just a 2-degree Celsius increase could make climate change irreversible and will cause catastrophic consequences, like longer heat waves, greater droughts, reduced crop yield, while putting all coral reefs in great danger.
The results were published days before the Climate Conference in Bonn, Germany, where delegations from all over the world will meet to discuss the Paris Agreement implementations.
Latin American Post | Santiago Gómez Hernández
Copy edited by Susana CicchettoAngelenos might actually come face-to-face and meet each other this summer.
Downtown Los Angeles is about to be reoriented around a four-block, 12-acre park scheduled to open in the heart of the city over the summer. The park will stagger openings of each phase starting in late July.
The Performing Arts Center, more commonly known as the Music Center, will line up music festivals, theater, educational programming and farmer's markets for the green space. The County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to put the Music Center in charge of the space and to change the park's name from Civic Center Park to Grand Park.
The $57 million park is bordered by the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Grand Avenue, City Hall on Spring Street, Temple Street to the north and First Street to the south.
Construction of the park began in July 2010. And while some parts of the Grand Avenue Project have stalled, construction of this park has moved ahead, as is evident from the photos below.
Some elements of the previous park will remain, such as the Arthur J. Will Memorial Foundation, but the new park, funded by developer Related Cos., includes changes that encourage community.
Grand Park, which will have an 18,000-person capacity, will feature a large event lawn directly in front of City Hall, smaller lawns and groves for more intimate gatherings, a three-quarter mile promenade loop, dog running tracks, smaller walking paths through gardens and a new Starbucks. The central fountain is being renovated to include surrounding jets that pop up for children to play in.
"It was a nice park before but there was really no interaction," said Dawn McDivitt, county project chief. "It's [about] people just enjoying everybody and getting out to meet everyone again. I think that’s really lacking in this society, especially in Los Angeles," she added.
Click through renderings and construction photos of Grand Park:
All photos by CEO Photo Unit, County of Los AngelesElections 2016, Brother Nathanael Channel
How Bernie Sanders Lost His Hair
By Brother Nathanael Kapner July 30, 2015 © Support The Brother Nathanael Foundation!
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YOU CAN TAKE THE JEW
out of the Democratic Party but you can’t take
the Democratic Party out of the Jew.
Brooklyn-born Jew Bernie Sanders is an ‘independent’ but when viewing his voting record he sure looks like a ‘Jewish Democrat.’
Bernie calls himself a “socialist” but he’d fit right in with Bill Kristol and his fellow Jewish neocon right-wing militarists.
While Sanders is “not a big fan of Netanyahu,” he supported and voted in favor of his genocidal attack on the Gazan Palestinians in 2014. After all, Bernie’s a Zionist at heart.
Bernie fits the neocon bill when it comes to bombs and passing the ammunition against independent-of-Jewmerica countries. He supported the Nato bombing of Christian Serbia, and once in, backed the ongoing neocon war against Iraq.
If Bernie Sanders feigns to have been against the invasion of Iraq, why did he repeatedly vote to fund it?
When it comes to Feinstein and friends, Sanders outdoes them all. Abandoning his Vermont “pro-gun” stance, Bernie betrayed his local constituency by currying to a broader Jewish-Democratic base.
In an about-face on Meet The Press this past Sunday, Sanders ‘adjusted’ his position on guns and advocated for a gun ban that would outlaw most firearms used for home and self-defense.
Although the previously pro-gun Sanders won his first House seat with the help of an endorsement from the NRA, realpolitik kicks in.
After all, Bernie’s a Jew, and so what if he changes his stance? Isn’t it more important to gain the Jewish-run Democratic party’s favor than to stick with “principle?”
But what “principles” do Jews like Sanders have anyways? Bernie wants a good job with Hillary.
Perhaps a renewed Clinton “kosher cabinet” as Secretary of the Interior?
THAT WOULD BE a nice cushy job for a pseudo-socialist like Bernie, wouldn’t it?
You’ve come a long way Bernie since your ‘kibbutzim’ days in Israel, followed by your ‘back to the land’ trek to Burlington.
Why bring that all to a screeching halt? You’ve got a great JEWISH future ahead of you!
No worries. Like most Jews who lose their hair, you’ll be wearing a nice new hat with Hillary.Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, calls for consensus before talks this month on land governance, as commercial pressures mount
Governments should be wary of speculation and concentration of ownership when land rights are transferred to investors to "develop" farmland, a UN expert has warned before key UN negotiations on land governance.
"We must escape the mental cage that sees large-scale investments as the only way to develop agriculture and to ensure stability of supply for buyers," said the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, amid concern among civil society groups about "land grabs".
The recent surge in food prices has prompted investors and governments to focus on agriculture after decades of neglect. Attention has also focused on land deals in developing countries.
A report by Oxfam, published last month, identified 227m hectares (561m acres) of land – an area the size of north-west Europe – as having being reportedly sold, leased or licensed, largely in Africa and mostly to international investors in thousands of secretive deals since 2001. This compares with about 56m hectares identified by the World Bank earlier this year, again predominantly in Africa.
UN talks on land governance, which begin in Rome on 17 October, are the culmination of six years of negotiations involving governments, international organisations and civil society groups brought together under the UN's committee on food security (CFS). The session is expected to adopt the voluntary guidelines on responsible governance of tenure of land and other natural resources.
Urging participants to find a consensus, De Schutter said the world needs to establish general guidelines on land governance before adopting rules on land investment.
"Commercial pressures on land are rapidly growing. Biofuels, large-scale infrastructure projects, carbon-credit mechanisms, and speculation lead to rapid changes in land rights, creating new threats for vulnerable land users," he said.
"Climate change and population growth will exacerbate tensions within countries and between them. We need to establish general guidelines on land governance before we adopt rules on land investment. Harmful investments to the detriment of local populations – so-called land grabbing – can only be warded off if we first secure the underlying rights of farmers, herders and fisherfolk."
In its report Oxfam said many land deals in recent years often intended to grow crops for foreign food and biofuel markets, and can rightly be called land grabs as they violate human rights, particularly the equal rights of women; flout the principle of free, prior and informed consent of the affected land users, particularly indigenous peoples; ignore social, economic and environmental impacts; and avoid transparent contracts.
Much of the land grabbing has been driven by the expansion of sugar cane and oil palm for biofuel production, with thousands of evictions taking place in Uganda, Guatemala and Honduras.
Oxfam said most of the land deals in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal and Tanzania have been done to grow crops for export commodities, including cut flowers, as well as biofuels. Luca Chinotti, an Oxfam policy adviser in Rome, said one of the most critical issues at the Rome talks will be that all land deals should have the prior consent of communities. He also said the current draft of guidelines was "dramatically weak" in terms of women's rights.
The EU, particularly Germany, has strongly supported incorporation of international human rights standards into the guidelines throughout the negotiations. Brazil and Zimbabwe actively opposed the application of particular human rights standards, while the US and Canada came out strongly against the principle of consent, insisting any such notion be non-binding. Australia adopted a strongly unfettered market approach.
De Schutter said the voluntary guidelines could provide much-needed guidance about how conflicts over land use should be addressed. In May 2011, he issued a detailed set of proposals to ensure that these land guidelines are consistent with internationally accepted human rights standards, including the right to food, which have concrete implications for land issues.
"States have nothing to fear," De Schutter said. "There is much to gain in adopting guidelines that will improve the ability of governments to defuse land-related conflicts, in times of growing tensions over access to natural resources. The guidelines will also strengthen the bargaining position of states when negotiating with private investors. This could help avoid the current 'race to the bottom' in which countries compete in order to attract investors, dismantling any existing protection land users enjoy."All that’s left is the white antique stove in the kitchen, where Sam Darnold builds tuna rolls from baggies of fresh-caught bluefin. Twenty-four years ago, the house was one story and the ceiling was streaked dark yellow. The backyard was dotted with patches of dead grass, and the garage was filled with motorcycle frames hastily left behind. Neighbors assumed the place was a crystal-meth lab, and that’s what they told the young couple who pedaled up on mountain bikes in the winter of 1993, their weekend ride through Capistrano Beach halted by the sight of a FOR SALE sign. “This is a dump,” Mike Darnold told his fiancée, Chris Hammer, which meant it was perfect.
Mike was a medical gas plumber in Orange County who serviced hospitals throughout Southern California. Chris was an aspiring P.E. teacher in San Clemente who waited tables at Corky’s. They couldn’t afford to be picky. They walked gingerly up dilapidated steps to the roof of the garage, which a boy was using as his personal roller blade park. Mike gazed west, over Interstate 5 a block and a half away, through palm trees that framed the coastline like goalposts. He could see, just barely, a sliver of the Pacific Ocean. “We can do this,” he told Chris.
Instead of a wedding at the Marriott in Dana Point, they threw a modest reception at Chris’s family home in Long Beach followed by a two-night honeymoon at the Blue Lantern Inn, using the money they saved for a down payment. Mike scrubbed every inch of the ceiling, trashed every stitch of the carpet. He chopped down overgrown fruit trees, ripped out doors, tossed blinds and shelves. He painted walls and laid tile. In May 1994, Chris gave birth to their first child, a girl named Franki, and three years later, a doughy redheaded boy named Sam. Through elementary school, the siblings shared a tiny first-floor bedroom until Mike designed a second story with peekaboo views all the way to Catalina Island. Growing up, Franki used to pause a tear-jerking Home Depot commercial at the scene in which two newlyweds brush their teeth with bottled water. “That was you,” she’d say, and her dad would tell the story all over again about the drug den that became a dream house.
Mike and Chris raised their kids in the water two miles away—“The beach,” Chris says, “is everything”—but when Sam started swimming lessons at three, his mom noticed that he kept paddling in circles. Such was the preternatural strength of his right arm.
Sam learned to throw not at a skills camp but at a surf break. He’d charge down the steep wooden stairs at the San Clemente cliffs to Lasuens Beach, known as Lost Winds because it’s easier to pronounce. Anyone who rode the Metrolink from Los Angeles to San Diego over the past decade might have spotted Sam along the shore: slathered in sunscreen to protect his alabaster skin, waves up to his waist, hurling footballs over five-foot swells. Friends fought to find the pigskin in the whitewash, scoring a point for each recovery. The group would bodysurf until dark and then grab dinner at Pedro’s Tacos, one of a hundred low-slung storefronts on San Clemente’s vintage main drag, where all the patrons seemed to recognize the ringleader. Back then, Sam Darnold was the perennial champion of the Triton Toss, a distance-plus-accuracy throwing competition held at halftime of a high school game. Today he is the USC quarterback and the Rose Bowl king, the Heisman Trophy favorite and quite possibly the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft.
Robert Beck
“Don’t go be a big shot,” his grandfather used to say, and coming from Dick Hammer those words carried weight. Strangers knew Dick as a USC basketball star (1951 to ’54), Olympic volleyball player (1964) and part-time actor who graced billboards as the Marlboro Man. But friends knew him as a firefighter and special-ed teacher at Nightingale Elementary School in Long Beach, jobs that suited him because he could pull people from cars and lift children from wheelchairs. His home was open to visitors, but only if they first picked up 10 pieces of trash at El Dorado Park across the street.
Dick was the one Mike and Chris called in late 1993—“I can give you a blowout of a wedding,” he said, “or help with this down payment”—and after he died six years later, relatives wondered if he also bequeathed his physical gifts to his precocious grandson. Sam played basketball with his black Lab in the backyard, mud football at Sunset Park, Wiffle ball in Nick Crankshaw’s cul-de-sac. Franki was a volleyball star, and when she entered a mixed doubles tournament in Hermosa Beach one summer, she brought Sam because she couldn’t find another partner. “He’s just learning,” she informed their opponent before the match. His opening serve was the first of many aces. “They thought I was hustling them,” Franki says. “I had to tell them, ‘I’m sorry, my brother is a weirdo.’ ”
Among blue-chip quarterbacks, Sam was extraordinary for other reasons. As a sophomore at San Clemente High, he played linebacker and wide receiver, and he was as unfamiliar with recruiting rankings as with hieroglyphics. When he was invited to join a 7-on-7 club team, he called it “fake football,” and when dads from a private school approached him about transferring at a basketball game, he told them, “I play with my buddies.” Not until his junior year did he have a personal quarterback coach, Bob Bosanko, who charged him only $50 a session. Sam mulled scholarship offers from Duke, Northwestern and Utah, amusing to anybody back home. “I never even went up to Laguna,” he says about a coastal town not even 20 miles north. In fairness, when Franki played volleyball at Rhode Island, Sam did take a cross-country flight to visit her, reporting that the landscape reminded him of the set of a horror movie. “If there were a University of San Clemente,” Franki says, “that’s where he’d have gone.”
He settled for another USC, but unlike every other recent Trojans quarterback, he declined to enroll early and skip the second semester of his senior year of high school. Sure, he had to compete with another five-star passer in his class, but he’d already lost one hoops season, by breaking his hand in a brawl with a locker after a last-minute collapse. A sweet-shooting wing with range to 25 feet, he couldn’t stand to sacrifice another season. “This is different,” said USC head coach Clay Helton, then the offensive coordinator, when Sam called to share his plan. “This is cool.”
Darnold (14) rose to the challenge just when Penn State appeared primed to take control of the Rose Bowl, finishing with 453 yards and five touchdowns. Robert Beck
On a sun-soaked afternoon in late July at Heritage Hall, Sam Darnold is wearing his San Clemente High basketball shirt and riding a homemade skateboard carved by San Clemente High student Trey Russell. Trey’s older brother is USC receiver Jake Russell, Sam’s roommate, fraternity brother and best friend. Today, though, someone has come between them, and his name is Tito. Technically, Jake is not to blame for Tito’s presence. Linebacker Cameron Smith, who shares the off-campus duplex with Sam, Jake and tight end Tyler Petite, decided they needed to have a kitten. When Smith went to a local shelter and adopted the kitty, black with a white face and white paws, Sam was at the Manning Passing Academy in Louisiana. He returned to Los Angeles and discovered the new roomie purring on his bed. “Sam told me he was allergic,” Smith says. “But I think he really believed the cat would be a distraction, so we took it back.”
Think what poor Tito will miss this fall: a Heisman Trophy campaign for Sam, a Butkus Award drive for Smith, the Sept. 16 game against Texas—the first meeting with the Longhorns since they beat the Trojans for the 2006 national championship. “I was super bummed,” says Sam, who was eight when Vince Young crossed the pylon at the Rose Bowl. “Super” is his adjective of choice. His parents are “super chill,” his mom is “super emotional” and Petite’s family is “super nice” for letting the roommates use their beach house in the South Bay to barbecue and play spike-ball.
Life in the duplex can also be “super hectic,” with Smith finding photoshopped pictures on Instagram of Darnold in a 49ers jersey, a sign of draft hype to come. “That would be pretty cool,” says Smith, a Niners fan. It was less than two years ago that Smith wanted nothing to do with Darnold. The surfer kid (who doesn’t actually surf) arrived in the summer of 2015, trailed by a notorious Twitter account rife with arrogant posts about NFL aspirations and vulgar cracks about SC women. “This,” Smith thought, “is a terrible person.” A couple of weeks into fall camp, the Trojans were eating in the players’ lounge when Darnold lamented the proliferation of social media fakes. “Wait,” Smith piped up, “your account isn’t real?” Darnold, who scrawled a list of life goals in ninth grade that included “Be remembered as the nice one,” was mortified.
Few college quarterbacks get mistaken for middle linebackers, but strangers occasionally see Darnold and Smith engaged in one of their standard debates—“Who wins a fight between a lion and a grizzly bear?”—and ask if they’re twins. Darnold hasn’t blitzed anybody since his sophomore year at San Clemente, when he replaced an injured QB and lofted a game-tying 40-yard fade down the sideline. But he stands 6' 4", 225 pounds, and teammates appreciate that he neither looks nor acts like a test-tube signal-caller. Southern California produced two far more prominent passers in the year Darnold graduated from high school: Josh Rosen, who went to UCLA, and Ricky Town, who signed with USC. It is unusual for highly rated quarterbacks to choose the same college, but Darnold was either unfamiliar with protocol or undaunted by it. He followed Town to Troy.
“Best kid plays, right?” he asked Helton, who assured him that snaps would not be predetermined by private coaches or recruiting stars. By the time Darnold finished his first camp, Town was in the process of transferring to Arkansas, and Trojans safety Su’a Cravens, now a member of the Redskins, was offering encouragement rarely afforded a scout-teamer. “Dude, you keep it up,” Cravens told Darnold during practice. “You’ll be all right.” The freshman called home to parrot the exchange.
Darnold redshirted in 2015 and expected to sit behind junior Max Browne in ’16. That spring he took a class called Sports, Business, Media, taught by professor Jeff Fellenzer, who invited agent Scott Boras to speak. The class runs from 6 to 9:30 p.m. on Wednesdays, and when it ended, about 75 students lined up to meet Boras. Darnold was last. A sports nut who devours Colin Cowherd’s radio show and Joe Rogan’s podcast, Darnold could have quizzed the hardball agent on arbitration-eligible Dodgers, but what he wanted was advice. Introducing himself as “a backup quarterback,” he asked how Boras would advise a client stuck on the bench.
“Backup?” Boras remembers saying. “You may be unproven. You may be untested. But your status is never permanent. You’re no backup, and you can’t label yourself that way.” Boras does not represent football players, but he understands athletes, and for the next 45 minutes he sat with Darnold inside Annenberg Auditorium, explaining the importance of thinking, preparing and identifying as a starter. When they parted, near midnight, Boras left Darnold with a prediction: “Your time is coming.”
After an impressive close to a season he started on the bench, Darnold is on this year's Heisman Trophy short list. Chris Williams/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images
The only college game Sam Darnold lost was his first one, late last September at Utah, and afterward he called the guy whose jersey he used to wear. “Don’t do anything crazy,” Matt Leinart said. “Be yourself.” Darnold is not prone to panic. He feels most relaxed outside the refuge of the pocket, relying on what he calls his peripherals, firing to a flash of cardinal from an assortment of arm angles. Coaches speculate that winters on the basketball court sharpened his vision and summers on the baseball diamond varied his delivery. Darnold disdains the specialization of youth sports. The son of a volleyball player at Long Beach City College and an offensive lineman at Redlands, he fashions himself a natural athlete, not a born quarterback. He just happened to wind up under center. And while he welcomes the significance of the position, he dismisses the stress surrounding it.
“You look at USC QBs before him, you see guys who were dead serious, every drive of the utmost importance,” says Browne, now at Pitt. “Sam’s out there flinging the ball around like he’s back in recess at elementary school, playing catch with his friends.”
Browne and Darnold competed furiously for the Trojans’ starting job, yet when Browne bought a Razor scooter with oversized tires to get around campus, Darnold called Walmart and ordered another for himself. He defuses awkward situations with disarming gestures. His high school basketball coach, Marc Popovich, used to call timeout before late-game free throws so he could tell the shooter a cheesy joke. (Sample: “What do you call a doctor who flunked out of med school? A dentist.”) In Sam’s senior season, teammate Scott Herrod was fouled late in a game against Tustin, but Popovich was out of timeouts. He couldn’t tell his joke. Sam walked over to Herrod. “Don’t worry,” he said, “only the season on the line.” Herrod stopped laughing in time to sink the free throws.
Darnold wonders, now that he is a redshirt sophomore, if he must expand his laid-back leadership repertoire to include sweeping speeches and dramatic chair-tosses. He hopes not. He is reading a book called Extreme Ownership, written by a pair of Navy SEALs who led a unit in Iraq. “You hear about all these huge CEOs who are the first guys to blame somebody else,” Darnold says. “If you start taking ownership and taking blame, that’s how you get people on your side. You have to give them a reason why. I can’t tell a receiver, Hey, you ran the wrong route! I’ve got to be like, Dude, if you don’t run the right route, then you’re not going to catch the ball and you’re not going to score. And I need to be able to trust you.” Asked what tome he might crack next, Darnold demurs. “I don’t want to broaden myself too much.”
He spends free time with private quarterback guru Jordan Palmer, tightening a throwing motion that resembles Clayton Kershaw as much as Aaron Rodgers. “When you’re teaching a Little Leaguer how to pitch, you tell him to set the ball on the table behind him, so he gets a bigger arc,” Bosanko says. “That’s not ideal for a quarterback. You want to be more compact or your release can become too slow. But Sam gets away with stuff that isn’t necessarily mechanically sound. It’s because he is a freak, but also because he never developed all these robotic habits when he was eight, so he doesn’t think too much about his arm slot and his delivery. He just anticipates where a guy will be and puts it there. That’s a quality you can’t teach. That’s feel.”
The first time Helton watched Sam play in person, as a senior at San Clemente, the coach expected the recruit to be nervous. It was Sam’s first game in nearly a year, after breaking his foot early in his junior season, an injury that prevented him from flooding college coaches with tape. He knew Helton was in the stands, eyeing him. Sam started 13 for 13 with five touchdowns, shedding linebackers like ankle-slapping surf. “Imagine,” Helton says, “if he ever really focused on this sport?”
Brent Pry witnessed the result on Jan. 2. Pry is the defensive coordinator at Penn State, which was pureed by Darnold in the Rose Bowl for five touchdowns, 52 points and 453 yards. “I really felt like we didn’t see it coming,” Pry says. “We watched so much film and we knew he was athletic, but it wasn’t the same as being out there on the field with him. When that kid got going it was like, Who the hell is this? Rushing four is not enough for a guy like that. He just kind of jimmy-jammed through and kept the play alive and found a seam.”
Penn State only rushed three with 1:27 left, leading by a touchdown, and USC receiver Deontay Burnett broke off his flat route. Super chill, Darnold waited out Burnett, who regrouped and dashed to the post. Darnold found him at the goal line, over two Nittany Lions and in front of a third. “That spiral,” Darnold says, “felt like it was in slow motion.” He celebrated with a 70-mile drive south down I-5, to the beige two-story traditional with the black Toyota Highlander in front, DARNMOM on the license plate. Don’t go be a big shot. He walked in the front door at 11 p.m., his parents on the couch, replay on the TV. “Don’t you dare wash this,” he cooed, flipping Darn Mom a grass-stained jersey.
Darnold’s high school coach, Jaime Ortiz, sent him a text message that night: “Your life has forever changed.” The next day, he was mobbed at a Buffalo Wild Wings and at a Concordia University volleyball match. He confined himself to the house for most of the remainder of winter break. Not that staying home—and munching bluefin caught by Sean Donnelly, a San Clemente quarterback turned fisherman—is any punishment. “I don’t come back as much as I used to, and hopefully one day I won’t need it,” Darnold says. “But for now I still do.” His mother remains a P.E. teacher at Shorecliffs Middle School. His father oversees the plumbing at UC Irvine Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of Orange County, occasionally working successive shifts from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., then 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. As property values in SoCal beach communities continue to spike, Sam begs his parents not to sell.
“People always ask, ‘When your brother makes it, will he buy them a house?’ ” Franki says. “And I tell them, ‘No, but he’ll probably buy their house.’ ”Introduction
When I first joined BHP IT Newcastle in 1996, I recall one of the senior managers there mentioning a recent TV interview he’d done for the local station. As I recall it, the interview was about some new investments being made by BHP IT in Newcastle, and the journalist at the time wanted to do the interview in the computer room, standing in front of a bank of computers.
The “bank of computers” they picked was actually the primary network rack. Why? Because they had the most blinking lights.
The early years – The unfathomable future
I was introducing “Alien” (1979) last night to Darren and a couple of friends, and at one point when we paused the movie, we paused, not to discuss the relative merits of the thriller genre, or chestbursters, but the computers that were envisaged when the movie was produced. I’m not talking about the displays, mind you; while they’re incredibly primitive, they’re a symptom of the time and they can be accepted as having a certain kitsch nostalgia:
Enduring 8-bit graphics and primitive vector graphics are a necessity when you watch a movie of this age, and you just learn to deal with them.
What’s most noticeable though is how computers were presented. Let’s look at a couple of stills from “Alien”, as an example:
These images represent a lot about how computers – even futuristic computers – were imagined. In particular, common themes were:
Lots of blinking lights. (The “mother” room in the shot with Tom Skerritt is perhaps one of the best examples of this.)
Lots of buttons. Rows and rows and rows of buttons.
The vast majority of the buttons have no label on them whatsoever.
“Alien” was released in 1979, and it was indicative of the attitude towards computers from that era. For comparison, consider “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, released in December 1979:
Lots of flashing lights – Check
Lots of buttons – Check
Buttons without labels – Check
Even if we go back to 1968, when “The Ultimate Computer”, an episode of “Star Trek” was first aired, we can see that overall there were a lot of similarities between how computers were represented:
Buttons. Lots of buttons.
Jumping forward to 1984 when Doctor Who, “Resurrection of the Daleks” was broadcast, we see a console in the TARDIS that looks like the following:
Again, don’t get focused on the graphics on-screen, but check out the interface – a keyboard (and an ABCDEF… rather than QWERTY style layout, to boot).
Jumping to “2001”, released in 1968, the presentation of computers even then was focused on buttons and flashing lights (with the exception that HAL of course was AI and had a full speech interface):
Bearing in mind at this stage – anywhere between 1968 and 1984 – computers were devices that were barely understood by lay people; in 1968 in particular, one of the founding computers of the “new digital age”, the IBM S/360, had only been out for four years. People were, quite frankly, only just barely starting to get their minds around what even these primitive (by our current standards) systems could do.
By 1984, while there were 8-bit desktop computers (Commodore, Apple II series, etc.), the burgeoning industry was really only just starting to strap the training wheels on; Apple’s pivotal 1984 ad (January 22, 1984) to introduce the Macintosh didn’t actually feature the computer itself, and interfaces in terms of what the average person might be aware of were well and truly mired in the keyboards and the flashing lights. Computers were still often seen as the domain of men, and computer users were still closer to mechanics than consumers.
The changing face
Eventually though, something significant started to happen with the representation of computers on-screen. This change profoundly demonstrated the evolving attitude of people towards these previously enigmatic devices.
1987 represented a good turning point in the way computer interfaces were shown on screen, with the start of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. This introduced a touch-screen interface used throughout the series, LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) which had no hardware based buttons at all:
Since these interface boards were completely workshop developed, the most they featured on screen in terms of human interaction were blinking lights and changing light levels in response to touch; it would be relatively easy to imagine though that the specific purpose of such a touch-screen interface would have been to allow the interface to be redesigned/represented on the fly based on the operational function being performed at the time.
Jump forward to 2002, with the release of “Minority Report” (a populist B grade movie), and you had the presentation of an alternate to a touch interface – a gestural augmented reality interface:
This style of interface had the user wear gloves that allowed motion tracking and interaction with the interface to the point that gestures could be used to slide content around, bring it in and out of focus, etc. While futuristic, and predictive of interfaces being developed along the Kinect product line, it did always seem an awful lot of hard work, as exemplified by the exasperated and overly theatrical gestures used in the German science fiction spoof, “Dreamship Surprise” (2004):
(Difficult to portray in a single image; the Queen becomes particularly frustrated with the continual flicking of the zoom |
, stood with friends in the Columbus North parking lot after the game.
"You hear about this happening to guys in college and the pros but you just don't think about it happening at a high school game," Shadiow said. "He was our age, I just can't believe something like this happened at our game."
When news that Stewart was dead reached the fans, many broke down and fell to the ground sobbing.
Bryan Sirbu, a Lawrence North senior, stood in the parking lot and cried.
"This was one of the leaders of our school and we really needed him," he said.
After Stewart collapsed, the teams went to their locker rooms. The game was halted for about 30 minutes.
Once Stewart was taken away, Lawrence North was given the option of suspending the game. An announcement was made over the loudspeaker that the players and coaches had voted to continue the game. Bloomington South went on to win in overtime, 55-50.
At Lawrence North in Indianapolis, a school crisis team was assembled Friday night. Duane Hodgin, assistant superintendent of Lawrence Township Schools, was at the school organizing counselors for the students.
"John was an outstanding young man," he said. "The first and most important thing is I send my deepest sympathy to his family. It's a terrible tragedy.
"John was a very positive role model since he's come here to Lawrence North for all the kids. Just a very fine young man. He'll be missed."
Smith had said, around the time of Stewart's signing, that he looked forward to Stewart contributing to the school's program.
"He comes from a quality high school at Lawrence North, and with his size and strength we hope he can be a force in the post for us in the future," Smith said.Are you looking for new methods of employees motivation or you wants to know how to motivate employees? In order to obtain the effective performance from the employees in the organization, employees motivation has utmost importance and organizations are always looking for the new methods of employees motivation or wants to know How to Motivate Employees? Because when employees are better motivated, there are more willing to exercise their full potential in the assigned tasks of the job. Here the question is how you may better motivate your employees to get better results on regular basis. There are number of methods of employees motivation or how to motivate employees. You just need to know which Method of Employees Motivation is right now you need to use.
How to Motivate Employees – Methods of Employee Motivation
Rewards Challenging Jobs Using Merit Pay Using Spot Awards Using Skill Based Pay Using Recognition Using Job Redesign Using Empowerment Using Goal Setting Methods Using Positive Reinforcement
Now each of these methods of how to motivate employees or employees motivation are discussed below one by one in detail.
Rewards
The first way of employees motivation or how to motivate employees is the use of proper reward system in your business organization. It is natural that the people try to act in a certain way that they consider to be beneficial for them. Similarly, employees in the organizations perform their duties in that manner which they think is in their best interests & therefore they continually look ahead towards the resulting benefits of their efforts. Their expectation is based on the accomplishment of the organizational goals through their effective performance, which would in turn help them in accomplishing their personal goals as well. So it is one of the influential methods for motivating employees to become efficient performers by offering them certain rewards for accomplishing standard performance. In this way employees consider rewards as beneficial for them & hence they perform well in the organization.
Challenging Jobs
The nature & number of activities in a job constitute job design. When a job is in the design phase, then there are some important issues that should be covered first like either the job is kept as specialized or a non-routine & more enriched? There are several ways of implementing a job. One way is the job enlargement in which the additional tasks of the same level are added to the existing tasks of the job for the employee. The second way is through job rotation in which the employees are rotated from one particular position to another in a systematic manner. Job enrichment is referred to as making the job more challenging & interesting by developing opportunities like opportunities of achievement. Furthermore, job enrichment may also include the following.
Formation of natural work groups
Combining tasks
Establishing client relationships
Vertically loading the job
Including open feedback channels
Using Merit Pay
Merit pay is referred to as a permanent increase in the salary of the employee on the basis of his individual performance. It’s not a bonus which is paid in a single payment rather it is continuing increment in the salary. The reinforcement benefits of merit pay are ascertained on a yearly basis, therefore depending much on the merit rewards is problematic.
Using Spot Awards
When an employee shows a laudable performance, then spot award is given to him immediately. The spot awards also serve as one of the methods for motivating employees because they are based on the effective performance & given immediately.
Using Skill Based Pay
Methods for Motivation, also include skilled based pay, which is provided to the employee on the basis of the number & types of skills and knowledge that he hold rather than on the basis of the particular job. The skill based pay is also useful for motivating employees because employees try to fulfill their need of self actualization by exercising their full potential. The sense of self-efficacy of employees is also stimulated through skilled based pay because they are recognized as capable of performing more challenging jobs efficiently & effectively.
Using Recognition
There are many employees who have a strong desire to be recognized as effective workers by their supervisors & team members on a routine basis. In fact, they wanted to be appreciated for their effective work by others. So recognition becomes a motivating factor for the satisfaction of the need that employees feel in the area of their achievements that are recognized by others.
Using Job Redesign
The number & nature of activities included in a job refer to as job design. The main point that should be kept in mind while designing any job is either to make that job enriched or non-routine or more specialized one. There are several methods through which a job can be redesigned. Job can be redesigned through job rotation in which an employee is rotated from one particular post to another over a specified period of time so that the employee can learn new skills & knowledge. Job enlargement is another method in which the number of tasked for a particular job is increased. Job enrichment can also be used to redesign any particular job.
Using Empowerment
When employees are given more information, authority & tools they become more self confident & perform their jobs with more autonomy, which help them in performing their jobs in an efficient & effective way. Empowerment is also included in the influential methods for motivation, because the employees exert their full potential in performing their tasks.
Using Goal Setting Method
In this method the employees set their own goals in participation with the management of the organization. By doing so they become more motivated to accomplish all those established goals. But the establishing goals should be clear & specific, challenging & realistic and measurable.
Using Positive Reinforcement
The behavior can be changed through the principles of operant conditioning, which are included in the programs of positive reinforcement. Therefore, organizations that employ various methods for motivation, also use positive reinforcement method that focus more on polishing the desirable behavior than on reducing the undesirable one. There are certain consequences of using positive reinforcement like social consequence, tangible consequences & intrinsic consequences. Now i’m sure you will be able to use a proper employee motivation system in your business organization. So instead of asking for how to motivate employees? Just focus on them and at the end of the day, you would the results, you wants to achieve.Aztec Gods - Who's Who
The study of Aztec gods and Aztec religion has been the subject of a lot of speculation and misinformation. The sacrifices performed by Mexica priests at the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon are legendary. However, there's more to Aztec religion than just blood, though many of their rituals were bloody. Here's a look at some of the major Aztec gods in the pantheon and their significance in Aztec religion.
The pantheon (numerous gods) of the Aztec civilization was enormous, with hundreds of gods and goddesses worshipped. Many of these gods were agricultural, since the culture relied heavily on farming. Elements of nature, heroes, and ancestors were also revered. It was believed that the balance of the natural world and the destiny of humanity depended on these gods, some of which were benevolent, and others of which were insatiable and terrifying.
Perhaps the most influential,
Huitzilopochtli
The Aztec gods didn't all come from the same source. Many different cultures made up the empire, so their gods were frequently adopted and either added to the descriptions of existing gods, or simply put into the pantheon.
Huitzilopochtli, for instance, was a Mexica god (the Mexicas being the people who founded what is commonly called the Aztec empire), while the traditions of existing cultures were adopted into a series of creation myths. The Toltecs were considered the origin of all culture, and the Aztecs adopted a great deal from them.
Major Aztec gods
Ometecuhtli and his female counterpart, Omecihuatl, represented the primordial forces of nature and duality, and were the parents of many of the other major gods. Sometimes they are called husband and wife, but they were really considered two sides of the same dualistic god. They were sometimes shown as a half man, half woman figure. Read more about this god in the Aztec creation story.
One of the most famous Aztec gods,
Quetzalcoatl,
eating a man
Quetzalcoatl was an important deity, since he had been the creator of humans. However, he wasn't the first to create them. The world had been created four times before, and destroyed by infighting each time. Quetzalcoatl retrieved the bones of humans from the underworld and added his blood to bring them to life. This god was represented by a feathered serpent, and can be seen in many different carvings and paintings.
This is only one variation of the creation story. Here's another version of the story of Aztec religion, with a picture of a common image of Quetzalcoatl, on of the more important Aztec gods.
Interestingly, it was believed that Quetzalcoatl introduced cocoa beans to humans.
Huitzilopochtli (Hummingbird of the South/Left) was a warrior sun god, requiring blood sacrifice to help him win the battle against darkness (more about Aztec sun gods here). This was not always in the form of human sacrifice - sometimes ritual blood letting was used. However, sacrificed warriors were thought to rise and fight with Huitzilopochtli, so sacrifices increased in frequency.
Xipe Totec
British Museum. Courtesy of Bill Hails
Battles were sometimes fought for the sole purpose of capturing more sacrifices. These battles were called flower wars Huitzilopochtli was the great god of the Aztecs. His worship fuelled the battles and sacrifices of the people, and his temples were built in the hearts of cities. The Templo Mayor contained his temple, and his image was on Moctezuma's Throne
Xipe Totec, or the Flayed one, was the god of the seasons, renewal, and growing things. He was also the patron of gold workers. However, his rituals were still quite bloody. He flayed himself to give humanity food, and was shown as wearing a flayed human skin. Sculptures of this god may have been dressed in the skins of sacrificial victims.
His festival was celebrated on the spring equinox, and required the flaying of victims to produce a skin. The priests would wear these skins for twenty days after the sacrifice, and they were thought to have magical and curative properties.
Xipe Totec was one of the Aztec gods of the four directions - he was west.
See a mask representing Xipe Totec.
Tlaloc
Photo courtesy of Neil Alejandro.
Tláloc, the god of rain and water, was associated with life giving and sustenance and fertility, as well as springs, mountains and caves. He was often depicted with goggle eyes, fangs, and a curled nose. Child sacrifices were made to him, and children were expected to weep in order to bring rain.
Less gruesome sacrifices occurred as well, with little statues being made from dough and offered to him. These dough children were eaten at banquets.
There was a surprising find related to Tlaloc and child sacrifice at the Cholula Pyramid - read more.
Read more about the sun gods here and also in the creation story. See more Aztec gods with pictures here.This article contains spoilers from season three of House of Cards.
It’s entirely possible that I’ve been staying up too late this week. After leaving the lab at the end of the day, I’ll head home to binge on the political drama House of Cards, the third season of which has been dumped onto our Netflix queues.
Simultaneously, the National Sleep Foundation is sponsoring Sleep Awareness Week from March 2nd to 8th, which makes me feel guilty for how poor my sleep hygiene has been lately. But perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself – after all, I’m not the leader of the free world who needs to make rational, clear-headed decisions about my country on a daily basis.
Since the first episode of the show, I’ve been pretty appalled by the Underwoods’ poor sleep habits. So here are three simple sleep hygiene rules that Frank and his wife Claire would be wise to follow.
Get those laptops out of the bedroom
Rarely does an episode go by that we don’t see Claire lounging in bed, papers strewn across the blanket and MacBook screen glowing in the reflection of her wayfarers. Frank is guilty in a different way, suited up and typing away at his computer in the Oval Office in the middle of the night or playing games on his tablet. Reading and working late are one thing, but the blue light from their screens is probably destroying their bodies’ natural circadian rhythms.
The pineal gland is a small, pine cone-shaped structure near the center of the brain that secretes the hormone melatonin at night in response to darkness. While it is sensitive to all wavelengths of light, blue light in particular (460-480 nanometers) suppresses melatonin release proportional to both the intensity and duration of the light exposure. A 2006 study by Steven Lockley and colleagues at Harvard found that when participants were exposed to 6.5 hours of either blue or green light, blue light suppressed melatonin twice as long, shifting the circadian rhythm by three hours (versus 1.5 hours with green light). Blue light exposure also reduced delta, or “deep,” sleep at night.
Regardless of intensity, blue light – like that emitted from television, computer, tablet, e-reader, and phone screens – is wrecking our natural sleep and circadian rhythms. It’s estimated that 95% of Americans use some sort of electronic device at least one hour before bedtime. A study by Anne-Marie Chang and colleagues published in December found that compared to reading a paper book before bed, reading from an iPad increases sleep latency, decreases REM sleep, and enhances feelings of sleepiness during the day, even when both groups sleep the same duration the night before.
Shut off the screens at night, Mr President and First Lady. If you must work so late, consider downloading the application f.lux or investing in a pair of orange glasses to block out the blue.
Exercise is no replacement for sleep
Rarely do we see Claire run in daylight. In earlier seasons, she bustles around the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning in running spandex, and is later seen darting headstones in the dark graveyard.
In the middle of season three, we watch Claire go for a midnight run to ward off stress, flanked by security. And with his late-night indoor rowing habit, Frank isn’t off the hook either. The Underwoods are busy public figures, and incorporating vigorous exercise into their hectic schedules is to be commended – but not at the expense of their sleep.
Exercise is great for sleep. Indeed, a 2011 study reported that 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week can improve sleep quality by 65%. Using actigraphy, study authors Paul Loprinzi and Brad Cardinal examined the exercise habits of over 3,000 adult men and women. Those who met minimum physical activity requirements reported less daytime sleepiness and better overall sleep quality, regardless of factors like age, body weight, and depression. Similar findings on the benefits of exercise on sleep were reported by the National Sleep Foundation’s 2013 Sleep in America poll.
The timing of exercise is a little more controversial. It’s a common sentiment that late-night exercise destroys sleep. After all, exercise ramps up your heart rate, raises body temperature, and causes release of the stress hormone adrenaline, making us active and alert. A 2011 study, however, reported that participants slept just as well on nights when they exercised just half an hour before bed as they did on nights when they didn’t exercise at all. For those prone to bouts of insomnia, though, most sleep physicians recommend not exercising for several hours before bed.
Kudos on your exercise habits, Frank and Claire. You’re way more disciplined than I am. Just work on the timing a bit, okay?
Ditch the alcohol before bed
One of the silliest moments in season three is when Russian president Victor Petrov, on a visit to the US, challenges the White House dinner party to shot after shot of pricey vodka. Not long after, Claire and Secretary of State Cathy Durant play a friendly game of beer pong. What is this – the White House, or a college fraternity party?
Netflix
Alcohol has a strange, dichotomous effect on sleep. On the one hand, it helps us fall asleep faster and increases slow-wave, or deep, sleep during the first half of the night. The second half of the night is not so pretty, however.
In 1972, Williams and Salamy experimented with different concentrations of alcohol in the evening. Thirty to 60 minutes before bed – in an effort to yield peak blood alcohol concentrations at lights-out – participants were assigned to consume anywhere between one and six drinks. (A “drink” is defined as 350ml beer, 150ml wine, or 44ml of 80-proof distilled spirits.) Although those who consumed the most drinks fell asleep the fastest, they also woke up more frequently during the night.
Alcohol mimics gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. When bound to a GABA receptor on a neuron, alcohol allows either the influx of negative or efflux of positive ions, giving the cell a more negative charge. Thus, the neuron’s attempt to fire an action potential is thwarted. After an evening of drinking, GABA dominates the first half of the night, which explains why we fall asleep so deeply.
The bad news comes when GABA is recycled into glutamate, the brain’s major excitatory neurotransmitter. Once GABA is metabolized halfway through the night, glutamate-releasing brain regions like the reticular activating system – which, among other things, regulates sleep, waking and arousal – are likely to be where the midnight disruptions kick in.
Frank and Claire are a fascinating character study in power, ruthlessness, and the human condition. If you want to learn how to get to the top fast, take notes (minus the criminal bits, perhaps).
But if you want to improve your sleep hygiene, don’t take a page from their book. After all, if the Underwoods have trouble sleeping after their heads hit the pillow, it’s probably not their consciences keeping them awake.Fellows in Code Club 2015 work at the Hehe Labs headquarters at "The Office" in Kigali, Rwanda, a coworking space for young entrepreneurs.
Correction appended : April 10, 2015.
Twenty-one years ago Tuesday, a genocide began in Rwanda that would claim as many as 1 million lives over the next 100 days. Today, the small East African nation has progressed remarkably from a history plagued with corruption, ethnic divisions and underdevelopment.
Under President Paul Kagame, who some credit for helping end the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has taken a number of steps to turn itself around. Provincial boundaries were redrawn, infrastructure was strengthened, a transitional justice system convicted the worst Génocidaires — even a new flag was unveiled to promote national unity and reconciliation. While some accuse Kagame of using his country's history as a means of controlling its modern politics, there's no doubting his country's economic success.
But as Rwanda heals its past, the nation is also forging ahead — aggressively. A government initiative is underway to expand technology and connectivity, with the goal of transforming the agrarian economy into a highly digitized, middle-income country by 2020. With its population projected to reach 16 million by 2020, from 8 million in 2000, the country is looking beyond state funds and international aid to develop its economy : "While both of these must contribute, the backbone of the process should be a middle class of Rwandan entrepreneurs,” according the plan, called Vision 2020.
Vision 2020 is bold, but it’s working. And many outside Africa — and inside — are marveling at how an economy long-dominated by subsistence farming is becoming a high-tech hub — and one of the 20 fastest-growing countries in the world.
The Rwandan five hundred francs bill features students on laptops, representing the one laptop a child movement. Cassandra Giraldo
“It’s apparent if you walk around [the capital city, Kigali]. They have currency with kids on their laptops. Everyone has a cell phone, and these cell phone companies have their advertisements painted all over the country, even if you drive into the rural parks,” says New York-based photographer Cassandra Giraldo, who took the images in this story during her February trip to Rwanda under the International Women’s Media Foundation's African Great Lakes Reporting Fellowship. “It’s a very different narrative that we don’t see coming out of East Africa or Africa as a continent."
The rapid adoption of mobile technology in particular has been vital in paving the way for a new generation of Rwandan entrepreneurs. In the early 2000s, Rwanda's government kicked off Vision 2020 by linking the country to an international network of undersea cables and global wireless networks. The use of mobile phones has skyrocketed in Rwanda since then, so much that Nsengimana even launched the country's first high-speed 4G LTE network last November:
One such entrepreneur working to drive Rwandan progress is social entrepreneur Aphrodice Mutagana. Mutagana, 30, is the founder of FOYO, a mobile pharmaceutical directory that provides education to Africans relating to medicine, including dosage information, drug-food interactions and side effects. Mutagana’s interest in healthcare has also led him to launch the Incike Initiative, a mobile crowdfunding app that raises funds for elderly survivors of the genocide, some of whom are the only remaining members of their families.
Last year, Mutagana raised 1.7 million Rwandan francs ($2,500), an amount he hopes to top in this year’s campaign, which launched this week and is timed to coincide with the national commemoration of the genocide from April to July. “We decided to dream big,” Mutagana says. “Technology is affecting everything, and now you can contribute in ways you didn’t have 20 years ago.”
Aphrodice Mutangana, 30, working at the kLab co-working space in Kigali. Cassandra Giraldo
Like many Rwandan entrepreneurs, Mutagana frequently works at kLab, an open space for IT entrepreneurs to collaborate. kLab, which stands for “knowledge lab,” is designed to help students, new graduates and other innovators to turn their ideas into viable business models under experienced mentors and tech workshops. Other co-working spaces, like " The Office ", have given other entrepreneurs the tools to launch their ideas, including Clarisse Iribagiza, 26, CEO of software development company HeHe Labs.
With HeHe Labs, which was started in 2010 after development in an MIT -run startup incubator, Igibagiza offers a Code Club fellowship to recently graduated high school students, who serve as leaders and mentors in schools around Kigali. Her interest in inspiring Rwanda’s youth has also led her to actively encourage young girls to consider careers in technology, including having partnered with Nike to design the mobile software Girl Hub, which allows girls to use their mobile phones to provide feedback to weekly radio shows. “We want to create homegrown solutions and to focus on the now,” says Iribagiza.
HeHe Ltd. coding fellows Honoré Yves, 18, left and Yannick Kabayiza, 18, right at after school program at S.O.S. Kagugu Tecnhical High School. Cassandra Giraldo
As entrepreneurships emerge in Rwanda, the push for greater technological growth has also enticed multinational businesses, investors and institutions to establish a foothold in the country. Carnegie Mellon University, for example, opened a Rwandan campus in 2012 to attract students interested in the country’s efforts to boost its tech sector. Smaller companies like laptop and smartphone maker Gira ICT have partnered with manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, HP and Lenovo to offer customers a monthly payment system to boost affordability. Meanwhile, Rwandan partnerships with Microsoft and Intel have launched a number of educational initiatives in Rwandan schools to ensure a new generation is equipped with the skills to continue the technology initiative.
Still, some companies and investors treat Rwanda with caution. A high cost of credit has led to businesses paying upwards of 20% of interest on their loans to banks, despite the ease with which many entrepreneurs describe launching their companies. Additionally, some see Rwanda's steady GDP growth — about 8% last year — as being possible only due to the country's historic poverty. In fact, Rwanda is still classified as low-income country with a ways to go until it reaches a middle-class designation, according to the World Bank.
But in a small landlocked country lacking in natural resources, technology is one of the few domestic resources that Rwanda may be able to mobilize in order to decrease its high dependency on foreign aid. Even more visible changes may lay ahead with the last stage of Vision 2020, which uses the new infrastructure and technology to improve education, communities and the private sector.
"Not only are they reducing the cost of making technology accessible, they're also creating jobs," says IDC Sub-Saharan Africa analyst Mark Walker, who is based in South Africa. "Rwanda is neither mineral-rich nor oil-rich, and to that end, technology is a great enabler."
Correction : The original version of this story incorrectly identified who was responsible for launching the Vision 2020 program. It was initiated by the Rwandan government.(UPDATED with Jill Soloway statement) EXCLUSIVE: Three weeks after Amazon Studios boss Roy Price resigned over sexual harassment claims, the company is conducting an investigation into allegations against Transparent star Jeffrey Tambor. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Deadline that the company has initiated an investigation. In a statement, Tambor himself calls the claims “baseless.”
In its early stages, the probe primarily stems from allegations by Tambor’s former assistant Van Barnes of implied inappropriate behavior on the part of the Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Awards winner. The investigation into the claims by the transgender Barnes, which she made online in a private Facebook post, began earlier this week, we hear. In the post, she claims that her former boss, whom she does not identify by name, had repeatedly propositioned her, made lewd comments, groped her and threatened to sue her if she spoke up.
“I am aware that a former disgruntled assistant of mine has made a private post implying that I had acted in an improper manner toward her,” Tambor told Deadline today. “I adamantly and vehemently reject and deny any and all implication and allegation that I have ever engaged in any improper behavior toward this person or any other person I have ever worked with. I am appalled and distressed by this baseless allegation.”
Amazon’s stance on such allegations is to investigate promptly and thoroughly, a source says. The investigation is in the process of speaking to members of the Transparent production and Tambor personally. The Jill Soloway-created series, Amazon’s flagship comedy, is currently not in production.
“Anything that would diminish the level of respect, safety and inclusion so fundamental to our workplace is completely antithetical to our principles,” Soloway said in a statement today. “We are cooperating with the investigation into this matter.”
As well as working for Tambor on Transparent, Barnes has also appeared on E! now-shuttered I Am Cait with Caitlyn Jenner and the Amazon documentary anthology miniseries This Is Me back in 2015.
This investigation into Tambor comes as the Jeff Bezos-founded studio has seen a near exodus of executives in recent weeks, led by studio head Price, who was suspended and subsequently resigned after details became public about how he had lewdly propositioned The Man in the High Castle executive producer Isa Dick Hackett during San Diego Comic-Con in 2015.
Price had been the subject of an investigation by Amazon after Hackett relayed the Comic-Con incidents to company executives. The studio later said that “we looked closely at this specific concern and addressed it directly with those involved.” Price stayed in his job for over two years until the spotlight on disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein’s alleged decades long behavior of sexual harassment and sexual assault also turned toward Price and his conduct.
Tambor is repped by the Gersh Agency and the Burstein Company.Written by The Wall Street Journal editorial board
President Trump fired James Comey late Tuesday, and better now than never. These columns opposed Mr. Comey’s nomination by Barack Obama, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Director has committed more than enough mistakes in the last year to be dismissed for cause.
Mr. Trump sacked Mr. Comey on the advice of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a former U.S. Attorney with a straight-up-the-middle reputation who was only recently confirmed by the Senate. In a memo to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mr. Rosenstein cited Mr. Comey’s multiple breaches of Justice Department protocol in his criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified material.
The FBI isn’t supposed even to confirm or deny ongoing investigations, but in July 2016 Mr. Comey publicly exonerated Mrs. Clinton in the probe of her private email server on his own legal judgment and political afflatus. That should have been the AG’s responsibility, and Loretta Lynch had never recused herself.
“It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement,” Mr. Rosenstein wrote. “The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a conflict. But the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department.”
Mr. Rosenstein added that at his July 5 press appearance Mr. Comey “laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”
Then, 11 days before the election, Mr. Comey told Congress he had reopened the inquiry. His public appearances since have become a self-exoneration tour to defend his job and political standing, not least to Democrats who blame a “Comey effect” for Mrs. Clinton’s defeat. Last week Mr. Comey dropped more innuendo about the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia in testimony to Congress, while also exaggerating the new evidence that led his agents to reopen the Clinton file.
For all of these reasons and more, we advised Mr. Trump to sack Mr. Comey immediately upon taking office. The President will now pay a larger political price for waiting, as critics question the timing of his action amid the FBI’s probe of his campaign’s alleged Russia ties. Democrats are already portraying Mr. Comey as a liberal martyr, though last October they accused him of partisan betrayal.
The reality is that Mr. Comey has always been most concerned with the politics of his own reputation. He styles himself as the last honest man in Washington as he has dangled insinuations across his career about the George W. Bush White House and surveillance, then Mrs. Clinton and emails, and now Mr. Trump and Russia. He is political in precisely the way we don’t want a leader of America’s premier law-enforcement agency to behave.
As for the Russia probe, if Mr. Trump is trying to cover up anything, firing the FBI Director is a lousy way to do it. Such a public spectacle will make details more likely to leak if agents feel their evidence is being sat on. Mr. Comey’s credibility was also tainted enough that whatever he announced at the end of the probe would have been doubted.
As Mr. Rosenstein put it in his memo, “I agree with the nearly unanimous opinions of former Department officials. The way the Director handled the conclusion of the email investigation was wrong. As a result, the FBI is unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a Director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them. Having refused to admit his errors, the Director cannot be expected to implement the necessary corrective actions.”
A new FBI Director who looks at the Russia evidence with fresh eyes and without the political baggage of the last year will have a better chance of being credible to the American people. Mr. Trump should now devote himself to nominating someone of integrity who can meet that standard.A tweet from Tesla Motors' CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday about setting up a Tesla factory in India may have taken some electric-car fanatics and Wall Street by surprise.
@ elonmusk
But if a deal with India didn't seem like it was among the top items on Musk's mind, that's because many have missed a budding "Twitter EV bromance" between the Tesla founder and CEO and Indian auto executives and government officials.
On June 2, Anand Mahindra, the head of India's leading automaker Mahindra and Mahindra, invited Musk to come to India and be part of the country's budding electric-vehicles market.
Musk's response was short, noncommittal and guarded:
@ elonmusk
Unlike China, the other big emerging market, Musk has been blowing hot and cold for some time now on the question of Tesla's foray into the Indian market. In February one of Tesla's Indian fans took to Twitter to ask about the automaker's plans for the India launch.
Musk responded with a tease of summer plans.
@ elonmusk
But later in May, when another fan posed a similar question on Twitter, Musk backtracked, citing regulatory hurdles around local sourcing requirements.
@ elonmusk
On the face of it, Tesla and India seem to be an ideal fit for each other. Both are committed to the cause of renewable energy and green mobility. Tesla is a sustainable energy company that is pushing for a world of zero-emission vehicles, and India is on course to become the world's third-largest auto market, tied to an ambitious vision to do away with fossil-fuel cars in favor of all-electric cars by 2030.In this post I will examine how Angular applications grow in size when moving beyond the “Hello World” baseline example.
This is important since the size of your JavaScript affects not only download times. It's also increases the time the browser has to spend parsing the incoming JavaScript.
Angular 1.x vs Angular >= 2
Angular 1.4.7 is around 59k after minification/gzip. Including the optional router library ui-router adds another 10k, so you are probably looking at a total of roughly 70k.
Angular 1.x ships as a pre-built “one size fits all” bundle, with no way to customize the bundle based on application needs. This is where the bundling of Angular 1.x and Angular >= 2 differ the most.
Post Angular 1.x the bundling strategy has moved to a strategy where devs can opt-in to only the parts of Angular needed to run their specific application.
The mechanism behind this is called Tree Shaking.
Tree Shaking means walking the code dependency paths of your application, top to bottom. Any unused code can be excluded from the final bundle, leaving you with a potentially much smaller application bundle.
The less you use of the Angular framework, the smaller your bundle will be. At the time of writing the smallest possible Angular application is roughly 48.7k. This is of course nothing more than a “Hello World” app that utilizes just the bare minimum of the Angular framework.
Going Beyond Hello World
The baseline size is pretty impressive, but what happens when you start building a more substantial application?
Tree Shaking is a process of removing unused code. You have to expect to give back some of your size reduction when more of the Angular framework is exercised.
Adding Modules
In the following section I will measure the impact of extending the Hello World application by brining in the different Angular modules one by one.
The samples are intentionally left simple since the point of this experiment is to measure the size impact of the Angular framework itself.
The point here is to provide implementations that force inclusion of enough Angular modules to be realistic in a real world application.
Hello World
The baseline experiment is the Hello World application. This application is of course just of academic interest, but it gives us the lower boundary for the size of an Angular applications
The minifed/gzipped size is 48.7k with the following source map explorer snapshot of the bundle.
If you examine the bundle you will see very few Angular modules included.
FormsModule
Next I have extended the application to include the FormsModule in my application. The FormsModule gives you access to ngModel and Template based forms. Both of these are key features and likely to be needed by most applications.
The application builds a simple form with some basic validation and form submission logic:
After including the FormsModule my bundle size increased to 61.3k. Here is the updated source map explorer snapshot.
ReactiveFormsModule
The FormsModule has a sister module in the ReactiveFormsModule. This module opens the door to ReactiveForms, which represents a different approach to building forms.
Most applications may choose either Template forms or Reactive forms, but it's not unlikely for a large application to benefit from both.
I extended the application to include a Reactive form as well:
The impact of adding the ReactiveForms module is barely noticeable in the bundle size. The new size is 62.6k, which is only 1.3k bigger.
Here is the updated source map explorer snapshot.
HttpModule
Next I will examine the impact of adding the http module.
In this implementation I've added three very common patterns of http requests: Single request, chained requests and parallel requests.
Angular has decided to move in the direction of an RxJs based http implementation. This means we also have include a few RxJs operators to support the http module (flatMap, forkJoin and map).
After adding the three types of http request my application looks like this:
The new size of my bundle is 71.3k with the following source map explorer snapshot.
RouterModule
Finally I will add the |
qbal’s revelations will help buttress India’s claim that Pakistan is harbouring Dawood. They will also help the local police verify if Dawood was involved in extortion rackets in Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai.
First Published: Sep 21, 2017 20:49 ISTLOWELL -- The Lowell police officer who was placed on paid administrative leave for allegedly sleeping, with a pillow, in a marked cruiser while on-duty was previously disciplined for a very similar offense, The Sun has learned.
The police officer in question is Jeffrey Moore, a patrolman on the overnight, or 1-9 a.m. shift, who earns nearly $85,000 annually.
The Sun published a photograph on Page 1 last Friday showing a Lowell police officer who appears to be asleep behind the wheel of his cruiser with his seat reclined on Highland Street near the Rogers School. The reader-submitted photograph was snapped at about 5:30 a.m. the previous day.
Four independent sources have confirmed the officer in the photograph is Moore.
Police Superintendent William Taylor has not identified Moore. But Taylor did issue a press release Saturday afternoon confirming the police officer was placed on paid administrative leave.
In the short statement, Taylor said internal affairs investigators have spent two days reviewing the images of the officer. Their probe is ongoing.
"While extremely embarrassing, this is not representative of the hardworking and dedicated men and women of the Lowell Police Department," Taylor said in the statement. "In the past two years the Lowell Police have made great progress toward our goal of making Lowell a safer city. Two consecutive years of crime reductions, nationally recognized community policing programs, and a commitment to archive accreditation are the true measure of the employees I am proud to work alongside.
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This behavior will not be tolerated, the citizens of Lowell and my brother and sister officers deserve better."
But on at least two previous occasions, the police department discovered Moore asleep while on duty, sources told The Sun.
According to those sources, in the spring of 2014 Moore was found asleep in his cruiser on the grounds of the former Middlesex Training School in the Highlands. The Princeton Street grounds is currently occupied by UMass Lowell. Moore was suspended.
Previously, while Moore coached the Dracut High School football team, Dracut officials discovered him sleeping in a school athletic complex off Lakeview Avenue during his shift. As coach, Moore had access to the facility. Dracut officials brought it to the attention of Lowell officials. It is unclear if Moore was suspended for that.
But just six months ago, Moore was suspended for five days when he left his gun and gun-belt in his cruiser at the end of his shift. The equipment was found by the police officer who took over the cruiser for the next shift.
The Sun reported in February that Moore, who lives in Nashua, was named head football coach at Bishop Guertin High School, also in Nashua. He also served as defensive coordinator at Framingham State University and helped coach the Lowell High and Groton School football teams.
But it was in Dracut where he made his mark. In 2008 he earned Sun and Merrimack Valley Conference Coach of the Year awards after taking the MIAA state championship.
Moore did not return a message left on his cell phone or an email. Moore is the son of Gerald Moore, who served as city solicitor under former City Manager Joseph Tully in the early 1980s.
Follow Scott on Twitter @cscottlowellsun.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
March 6, 2013, 3:34 PM GMT By Rajeshni Naidu-Ghelani, CNBC.com
It's already home to some of the world's most expensive properties and considered one of the most costly places to live in. Now, the island state of Singapore is also one of the priciest places to own a car.
Recent cooling measures for the car market that include increasing the minimum down payment for a car to 40 percent, plus capping loans at five years from the previous 10 years together with a hike in ownership taxes have priced many households out of the car market.
Even though the wealthy financial hub has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, there are few who can afford to buy a new car.
"It's out of my reach, very far away," said 43-year-old Andy Siew, a personal trainer with a monthly household income of 12,000 Singapore dollars ($9,650). "Any couple earning within that region cannot afford to buy a new car right now."
Read more: Singapore Central Bank to Limit Auto Loans
According to Mohit Arora, Asia-Pacific executive director at market research firm J.D. Power and Associates, Singapore is the world's most expensive car market.
"You can look at the average price of a Toyota Corolla on the U.S. website, Indian website and Chinese website and you can look at it in a Singapore website. I don't think there will be anything left to debate there," he told CNBC.
Before the recent moves, the cost of buying a vehicle in Singapore was already very high compared to other developed economies. All new cars sold attract an ownership tax of at least 100 percent of the cost price. On top of that, anyone who wants to buy a car in Singapore has to first obtain a certificate of entitlement (COE), which gives them the right to own and drive a car for 10 years. The measure was introduced to limit the number of cars in the city that has an area of just 276 square miles.
Currently, the average cost of buying a COE is around 87,000 Singapore dollars ($70,000). The COE, for example, hikes the total price of an average sedan like a Toyota Corolla Altis to almost $120,000 in Singapore, compared to neighboring Malaysia where the same car starts selling for about $34,000. The latest Corolla models in the U.S. start at about $16,000, and $20,000 in the U.K.
Pricing Out Buyers
"Anywhere in the world owning a car is the announcement of coming to a particular status in society. I think this is going to become harder for an average Singaporean," said Arora.
Even at the higher end of the market, car buyers are feeling the pinch owing to the latest curbs by the government.
More from CNBC: Singapore's High Cost of Living May Come at a Cost
A salesperson at a luxury car retailer in Singapore, who did not want to be identified, told CNBC that since the measures were introduced last week, it was becoming a "really uphill task" to find buyers.
"The general mentality at the moment is that if I have 100,000 Singapore dollars in cash - I wouldn't fork out that much for a car, maybe I'd rather buy a property," said the salesperson at the dealership of high-end cars where average prices hover around 200,000 Singapore dollars.
While the government's latest moves are an attempt to reduce household credit risk along with further controlling Singapore's more than 965,000 car population, it is also squeezing out marginal buyers, according to Vishnu Varathan, market economist at Mizuho Corporate Bank.
"The hit will probably be higher on lower income households given that lower income households are less likely to have a disposable 50,000 Singapore dollars to buy an average car," Varathan said. "Arguably, quality of life for the overall population has declined given all the transportation woes that we see."
Singapore boasts of world class infrastructure but as the city's population has grown from 4.2 million to 5.3 million in just 10 years, it has led to overcrowding in trains, buses and on the roads. The government plans to boost the city's public transportation system to encourage less people to drive, but analysts said until those increased services become available, it will impact people's mobility.
According to Arora, Singapore does not offer the kind of alternate public transport that is available in other parts of the world like Tokyo where you can implement such kind of highly restrictive policies.
More from CNBC: A Wealthy Nation That Can't Afford to Retire
"Our transport system is not exactly that good, the infrastructure is not catering to us right now," Siew, who lives in Singapore's northeastern suburb, said. "The trains and buses are not on time, and taxis are so difficult to find sometimes, especially, on rainy days and peak hours."
As the burden on the city's transport system increases, owning a car for some becomes a need more than a luxury.
Forty-year-old Mike Tan, who has to travel a lot being a salesperson, is relieved he bought a brand new car a month ago before the tightening measures were introduced.
"If the policies came into effect before I changed my car, I probably would have kept my old car until the end of my COE," said Tan.
But Siew was not that lucky. He would have liked the "luxury" of replacing his seven-year-old Hyundai Avante with a new car as the COE on it expires in three years and will cost him more than $72,000 to renew. But now he may have to even give up on owning a car altogether.As President Barack Obama prepares to address the nation tonight, a new survey provides a boost to his claim that the health care system is at a perilous place and in need of reform. Since September of last year, nearly five million adults have lost their insurance.
A survey of more than 29,000 individuals in June by Gallup shows that 16 percent of Americans over the age of 18 are currently without health insurance. That number reflects what the survey's authors describe as a "small but measurable uptick in the percentage of uninsured adults."
Indeed, the average number of uninsured adults recorded by Gallup in 2008 was 14.8 percent. In September 2008, the monthly total recorded was at a yearly low of 13.9 percent.
While the difference in percentage may seem small, the aggregate number of additional uninsured is vast.
According to 2007 U.S. Census data, the population of those 18 years or older stood at 228,196,823. By using that figure, in September of 2008, the number of uninsured adults would have totaled approximately 31.7 million. Today, the figure stands at 36.5 million -- meaning that 4.8 million adults have, in less than a year, lost their insurance coverage.
That said, the percentage of uninsured adults stood at 16.6 percent in May 2009, meaning that the situation has improved slightly but still remains dire.
Digging deeper into the numbers, one gets the sense of just how tricky a political situation the health care debate poses for both parties. The demographic that stands to gain the most from an increase in insurance coverage happens to represent the fastest-expanding voting bloc. More than 41 percent of Hispanic Americans are uninsured, Gallup reports, which is by far the largest segment of the U.S. population. The next highest groups are those who make less than $36,000 a year (28.6 percent uninsured) and those aged 18 to 29 (27.6 percent).
It is hard not to see the benefits for the political party that steps up to help resolve the health care problems of millions of Hispanic and young Americans. Just as, conversely, it is conceivable that the party that is blamed for obstructing comprehensive reform could suffer serious consequences at the polls.
It should be noted just how comprehensive the Gallup is in recording this data. Officially titled the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the study involved conducting at least 1,000 tracking interviews each day and 178,000 since the beginning of the year. The maximum margin of sampling error is plus-or-minus one percentage point.A MUMMIFIED "2,600-year-old princess" that became the subject of a frenzied tussle for ownership between Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan last year is believed to be the body of a murdered 21-year-old woman, according to archaeologists.
Asma Ibrahim, the curator of the National Museum in Karachi, in an 11-page report, said: "After detailed studies, it is quite evident that this object is modern and a fake. A cut on the body over the region of the stomach looked like a wound. Dislocation or damage of the lower vertebrae could be the cause of death." The jaw of the woman is also believed to be broken.
The "mummy", encased in a gilded wooden coffin set in a stone sarcophagus, was found during a police raid on the home of a Baluchistan chieftain in Kharan, a town in the Pakistan desert bordering Iran, after a tip-off that antiquities were stored in his house. For several weeks the mummy had been stored in the basement, while a buyer on the black market was located.
Sardar Wali Reeki, the chieftain who had been trying to sell the mummy for £35 million, claimed that it was uncovered near Quetta after an earthquake in Baluchistan. He and his family have now been arrested and police are considering launching a murder investigation.
Police moved the "mummy" to the National Museum in Karachi, where curators were convinced that they had come across one of the most exciting archaeological finds ever made in Pakistan. On the mummy's head was an exquisite gold crown embossed with seven cypress trees, the emblems of the ancient Persian capital of Hamadan. Gold ornaments in the coffin also suggested that the mummified body was of royal blood.
The find provoked a tug-of-war between Iran, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and Pakistan, all of whom laid claim to it. Experts from all over the world congregated by the "princess's" bedside to argue their case for ownership.
One of those not convinced despite the excitement over the "mummy" was Prof Ahmad Dani, the director of the Institute of Asian Civilisations in Islamabad. He said: "It was quite clear from the beginning that she was fake. The inscription on her chest read: 'I am the King of this Land', in ancient hieroglyphics. Yet she was a woman."
Prof Dani said that the wooden coffin was "not as old as her body" and, while the gold crown on her head looked genuine, her mask was relatively modern, "perhaps 100 years old". Most revealing was the mat on which the body was resting. He said: "I would guess that the mat was five years old."
He reported his findings to Ms Ibrahim. "She is a former student of mine. I reminded her that no mummy has ever been found in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran. It is not part of our tradition. Only the Egyptians preserved their dead in bandages." He added that the words on the breastplate were copied from a statue of King Darius at Persepolis in central Iran that dated back to 486bc.
After visiting Karachi, Prof Dani flew back to Islamabad. "I believed that the mummy was of no historical importance. If it was real, it could only be Egyptian. If it was fake, then it wasn't terribly well put together."
His words disappointed the police chief who raided the chieftain's house and took the mummy to Karachi. Prof Dani said: "This man flew me to Karachi, hoping I would say the mummy was of archaeological importance. He wanted to be paid for his find."
Meanwhile, the mystery 21-year-old "mummy" has been shifted from museum to morgue. In the process, she has had to suffer the humiliation of being demoted from "princess" to "object" in the words of museum officials.HINGHAM - If a man is naked in the woods and no one's around, does it count as open and gross lewdness? Not according to a Hingham judge.
Heather Bradley, the first justice in Hingham District Court, last week threw out two felony charges in a Hanover case based in part on video that police say shows a 61-year-old defendant walking half-naked through a town park when no one else was present. Bradley let stand a third count of open and gross lewdness that was based on what police officers say they saw when they staked out the trail where the defendant, Allen J. Costa of Somerset, had allegedly made a habit of taking mid-day strolls while naked from the waist down.
Costa, an employee at a nearby chemical company in Rockland, was banned from Hanover in April after police say they confronted him during one of his strolls and placed him under arrest. Police said a Rockland woman had reported seeing a half-naked man in the area about a month earlier, prompting the officers to set up a camera on a trail known as Old Molex Road near Forge Pond Park and athletic fields off King Street.
Police said images from the camera showed a man wearing a black coat without any pants, shorts or underwear walking the trail around the same time on two different days. After he was booked, police said Costa admitted that he was the man in the images and said he knew he’d been seen by a woman walking a dog as well.
But in a motion filed this spring, defense attorney Patrick Noonan argued that it didn't matter whether Costa was naked if there was no one around to be "alarmed or shocked" by his nudity. Noonan pointed to a 2003 case in which the state’s Supreme Judicial Court established that the charge of open and gross lewdness only applies to lewd behavior that is conducted in the presence of at least one other person.
"The law requires that the person expose himself to a person – that there be a person present to see it," Noonan told the Ledger. "What we have here is an inanimate object – a camera – and no human being there to see it."
Judge Bradley agreed, dismissing the two counts based on the images from the camera and leaving a third that was based on what the officers saw during their stakeout. She also left the door open for prosecutors to file new charges against Costa, who is due back in court Aug. 26.For the first time in almost 17 years, Fox News Channel finished third among its competitors within the top viewership demographic for prime time.
Fox News finished behind MSNBC and CNN among 25-54 year olds during primetime last week amid a tumultuous week for the Trump Administration, AdWeek reports. MSNBC came out on top with on average 611,000 viewers between ages 25-54 years old, and 2.44 million total. Fox News had 497,000 viewers in that category, and 2.4 million in total. Fox News still has the top primetime ratings and all-day ratings among its competitors for the full month, Business Insider reports.
Reports of President Donald Trump‘s disclosure of classified intelligence to Russian officials, and reports that he had asked then-FBI Director James Comey to end his investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, dominated cable news last week. Fox News has faced a challenging year with primetime shake-ups and a number of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and racial discrimination within the company. Last month, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News’ top anchor, was ousted from the channel amid a number of sexual harassment allegations from his colleagues and past guests. He has denied those allegations.
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has since filled the 8 p.m. slot left open by O’Reilly. In the last year, former Fox News anchors Megyn Kelly and Greta Van Susteren left for NBC and MSNBC, respectively.Introduction
0:00:07 Phil Fogg Resumes Control Over Game Under Enterprises
0:01:50 Sammy Sosa Softball Slam
Trademark Banter *Some Vague Spoilers for Last of Us^
0:02:05 Best Endings of the Generation
0:04:10 Worst Endings of the Generation
0:15:14 Weird Al Jankowich
0:16:15 Parody in Games
0:17:13 Abyss Odyssey's Problems (No review yet)
Featurette
0:19:47 Cognitive Understanding 2D Vs 3D (Polygonal)
0:23:23 "Don't confuse the presentation of the game to the design sensibilities of the game."
Featurette
0:24:00 No Man's Sky/ Minecraft - Game as ecosystem, not a goal.
First Impressions
0:29:08 Wolfenstein: The New Order
0:30:34 Wolfenstein 3D (Memories of)
Featurette - Phil Fogg Editorial
0:34:34 "Realistic" Video Games are still on the level of Puppet Shows
0:37:30 The Last Gen was on an Increasing Arc of Impressiveness
0:39:32 Tom - A Shift in Direction (films as well)
First Impressions
0:44:13 Wolfenstein: The New Order
Featurette
0:56:17 Gender Roles
1:03:05 Why is There Chick-Lit? (And the hostile environment of gaming)
News
1:14:09 The News
Final Impressions
1:27:27 I Have No Mouth Yet I Must Scream (and extendend analysis of adventure games and literature)
Harlan Ellison Interview
2:22:35 ^Leopard Ambushes Wary Warthog in Burrow at Kruger Park
Watch this incredible video of a leopard as it ambushes a warthog leaving its burrow early in the morning. It was captured by some tourists in Kruger National Park.
Kruger Park in South Africa is a great place to see some incredible sights in nature. This awesome video of a leopard ambush on a warthog filmed by some tourists is a great example of this.
Life is tough, and often short, when you are a prey animal. Watch the video to see what I mean.
Was that leopard ambush incredible or what? That particular warthog was just unlucky that it happened to be the first one out of the burrow that morning because it never even had a chance against that leopard.
Like what you see here? You can read more great hunting articles by John McAdams on his hunting blog. Follow him on Twitter @TheBigGameHunt.
NEXT: Only in Africa: Lion Causes Traffic JamA TV dinner (also called prepackaged meal, ready-made meal,[1] ready meal, frozen dinner, frozen meal and microwave meal) is a packaged frozen meal that usually comes portioned for an individual, but may also be a single dish intended to be shared. It requires very little preparation and may contain a number of separate elements that comprise a single-serving meal.
A TV dinner in the United States usually consists of a type of meat for the main course, and sometimes vegetables, potatoes, and/or a dessert. The main dish can also be pasta or fish. In European TV dinners, Indian and Chinese meals are common.[citation needed]
The term TV dinner was first used as part of a brand of packaged meals developed in 1953 by the company C.A. Swanson & Sons (the name in full was TV Brand Frozen Dinner). The original TV Dinner came in an aluminum tray and was heated in an oven. In the United States, the term is synonymous with any prepackaged meal or dish ("dinner") purchased frozen in a supermarket and heated at home.[2]
Now, most frozen food trays are made of a microwaveable and disposable material, usually plastic.
History [ edit ]
Several smaller companies had conceived of frozen dinners earlier (see Invention section below), but the first to achieve success was Swanson. The first Swanson-brand TV Dinner was produced in the United States and consisted of a Thanksgiving meal of turkey, cornbread dressing, frozen peas and sweet potatoes[3] packaged in a tray like those used at the time for airline food service. Each item was placed in its own compartment. The trays proved to be useful: the entire dinner could be removed from the outer packaging as a unit, the tray with its aluminum foil covering could be heated directly in the oven without any extra dishes, and one could eat the meal directly from the tray. The product was cooked for 25 minutes at 425 °F (218 °C) and fit nicely on a TV tray table. The original TV Dinner sold for 98 cents, and had a production estimate of 5,000 dinners for the first year.[citation needed]
The name "TV dinner" was coined by Gerry Thomas, its inventor. At the time it was introduced, televisions were status symbols and a growing medium. Thomas thought the name "TV Dinner" sounded like the product was made for convenience (which it was), and the Swanson executives agreed.[4]
Much has changed since the first TV Dinners were marketed. For instance, a wider variety of main courses – such as fried chicken, spaghetti, Salisbury steak and Mexican combinations – have been introduced. Competitors such as Banquet and Morton began offering prepackaged frozen dinners at a lower price than Swanson.[citation needed] Other changes include:
1960 – Swanson added desserts (such as apple cobbler and brownies) to a new four-compartment tray. [ citation needed ]
1969 – The first TV breakfasts were marketed (pancakes and sausage were the favorites). Great Starts Breakfasts and breakfast sandwiches (such as egg and Canadian bacon) followed later. [ citation needed ]
1973 – The first Swanson "Hungry-Man" dinners were marketed; these contained larger portions of its regular dinners. The American football player "Mean" Joe Greene was the "Hungry-Man" spokesman.
1986 – The first microwave oven-safe trays were marketed.[ citation needed ]
Modern-day frozen dinners tend to come in microwave-safe containers. Product lines also tend to offer a larger variety of dinner types. These dinners, also known as microwave meals, can be purchased at most supermarkets. They are stored frozen. To prepare them, the plastic cover is removed or vented, and the meal is heated in a microwave oven for a few minutes. They are convenient since they essentially require no preparation time other than the heating, although some frozen dinners may require the preparer to briefly carry out an intermediate step (such as stirring mashed potatoes midway through the heating cycle) to ensure adequate heating and uniform consistency of component items.[citation needed]
A British Spaghetti carbonara ready meal after being microwaved
In the United Kingdom, prepared frozen meals first became widely available in the late 1970s. Since then they have steadily grown in popularity with the increased ownership of home freezers and microwave ovens. Demographic trends such as the growth of smaller households have also influenced the sale of this and other types of convenience food.[5] In 2003, the United Kingdom spent £5 million a day on ready meals, and was the largest consumer in Europe.[6]
Unfrozen pre-cooked ready meals, which are merely chilled and require less time to reheat, are also popular and are sold by most supermarkets. Chilled ready meals are intended for immediate reheating and consumption. Although most can be frozen by the consumer after purchase, they can either be heated from frozen or may have to be fully defrosted before reheating.[citation needed]
Many different varieties of frozen and chilled ready meals are now generally available in the UK, including "gourmet" recipes, organic and vegetarian dishes, traditional British and foreign cuisine, and smaller children's meals.[citation needed]
Invention [ edit ]
The identity of the TV Dinner's inventor has been disputed. In one account, first publicized in 1996,[7] retired Swanson executive Gerry Thomas said he conceived the idea after the company found itself with a huge surplus of frozen turkeys because of poor Thanksgiving sales. Thomas' version of events has been challenged by the Los Angeles Times,[8] members of the Swanson family[9] and former Swanson employees.[10] They credit the Swanson brothers with the invention.
Swanson's concept was not original. In 1944, William L. Maxson's frozen dinners were being served on airplanes.[11] Other prepackaged meals were also marketed before Swanson's TV Dinner.[citation needed] In 1948, plain frozen fruits and vegetables were joined by what were then called 'dinner plates' with a main course, potato, and vegetable. In 1952 the first frozen dinners on oven-ready aluminum trays were introduced by Quaker States Foods under the One-Eye Eskimo label. Quaker States Foods was joined by other companies including Frigi-Dinner, which offered such fare as beef stew with corn and peas, veal goulash with peas and potatoes, and chicken chow mein with egg rolls and fried rice. Swanson, a large producer of canned and frozen poultry in Omaha, Nebraska, was able to promote the widespread sales and adaptation of frozen dinner by using its nationally recognized brand name with an extensive national marketing campaign nicknamed "Operation Smash" and the clever advertising name of "TV Dinner," which tapped into the public's excitement around the new device.[12]
Manufacturing [ edit ]
The production process of TV dinners is highly automated and undergoes three major steps. Those steps are food preparation, tray loading, and freezing. During food preparation, vegetables and fruits are usually placed on a movable belt and washed, then are placed into a container to be steamed or boiled for 1–3 minutes. This process is referred to as blanching, and is used as a method to destroy enzymes in the food that can cause chemical changes negatively affecting overall flavor and color of the fruit and vegetables. As for meats, prior to cooking, they are trimmed of fat and cut into proper sizes. The fish is usually cleaned and cut into fillets, and poultry is usually washed thoroughly and dressed. Meats are then seasoned, placed on trays, and are cooked in an oven for a predetermined amount of time. After all the food is ready to be packaged, it is sent to the filling lines. The food is placed in its compartments as the trays pass under numerous filling machines; to ensure that every packaged dinner gets an equal amount of food, the filling devices are strictly regulated.[13]
The food undergoes a process of cryogenic freezing with liquid nitrogen. After the food is placed on the conveyor belt, it is sprayed with liquid nitrogen that boils on contact with the freezing food. This method of flash-freezing fresh foods is used to retain natural quality of the food. When the food is chilled through cryogenic freezing, small ice crystals are formed throughout the food that, in theory, can preserve the food indefinitely if stored safely. Cryogenic freezing is widely used as it is a method for rapid freezing, requires almost no dehydration, excludes oxygen thus decreasing oxidative spoilage, and causes less damage to individual freezing pieces. Due to the fact that the cost of operating cryogenic freezing is high, it is commonly used for high value food products such as TV dinners, which is a $4.5 billion industry a year that is continuing to grow with the constant introduction of new technology.[13]
Following this, the dinners are either covered with aluminum foil or paper, and the product is tightly packed with a partial vacuum created to ensure no evaporation takes place that can cause the food to dry out. Then the packaged dinners are placed in a refrigerated storage facility, transported by refrigerated truck, and stored in the grocer's freezer. TV dinners prepared with the aforementioned steps—that is, frozen and packaged properly—can remain in near-perfect condition for a long time, so long as they are stored at -18 °C during shipping and storage.[13]
Health concerns [ edit ]
The freezing process tends to degrade the taste of food[citation needed] and the meals are thus heavily processed with extra salt and fat to compensate.[14] In addition, stabilizing the product for a long period typically means that companies will use partially hydrogenated vegetable oils for some items (typically dessert). Partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are high in trans fats and are shown to adversely affect cardiovascular health.[15] The dinners are almost always significantly less nutritious than fresh food and are formulated to remain edible after long periods of storage, thus often requiring preservatives such as butylated hydroxytoluene. There is, however, some variability between brands.[16]
In recent years there has been a push by a number of independent manufacturers and retailers to make meals that are low in salt and fat and free of artificial additives. In the UK, most British supermarkets also produce their own "healthy eating" brands.[citation needed] Nearly all chilled or frozen ready meals sold in the UK are now clearly labeled with the salt, sugar and fat content and the recommended daily intake. Concern about obesity and government publicity initiatives such as those by the Food Standards Agency[17][better source needed] and the National Health Service[18][better source needed] have encouraged manufacturers to reduce the levels of salt and fat, but curiously not industrial carbohydrates, in ready prepared food.[improper synthesis?]
More recently, frozen dinners have been created that are designed to be used with a steamer, allowing rapid cooking of essentially raw ingredients (typically fish and vegetables) immediately before consumption.[citation needed]
See also [ edit ]Newly uncovered emails show the White House closely monitored Energy Department deliberations over whether to make a $535 million taxpayer-backed loan to Solyndra, a politically-connected solar energy firm that went bankrupt and now is the focus of a criminal investigation.
The company's solar panel factory was heralded as a centerpiece of the president's stimulus-backed green energy plan - billed as a way to jumpstart a promising new industry while creating jobs. The internal emails, excerpts of which were obtained by iWatch News and ABC News, show the Obama administration keenly monitored progress of the loan, even as analysts voiced serious concerns about the risk involved.
With Obama about to take a trip where he might be able to announce the loan in March 2009, top White House officials were pressing for a quick answer.
"If you guys think this is a bad idea, I need to unwind the WW [West Wing] QUICKLY," wrote Ronald A. Klain, then chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, in an email sent March 7, 2009.
Three days later, an analyst at the Office of Management and Budget cautioned against moving too quickly. "This deal is NOT ready for prime time," the analyst wrote in a March 10, 2009 email.
Only 10 days later, the Energy Department formally announced its commitment to guarantee the loan, which the administration had fast-tracked as the first green energy project backed by stimulus dollars.
The administration wanted to unveil the announcement while Obama was on a visit to California, according to excerpts of the emails, among information that has been uncovered by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and obtained by iWatch News and ABC News. As previously reported by iWatch News, recurring red flags failed to slow the administration's race to approve the loans. [A complete timeline of key events involving Solyndra is here]
White House officials said the email excerpts obtained Tuesday do show White House interest in the timing of the Solyndra decision - but only because the president was considering announcing the decision himself while on the trip. One administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly for the White House, said pressure did not play a part.
"I think that it is clear that folks understood at DOE that they were supposed to make their decision on the merits and do whatever they were supposed to do to kick the tires on the decision," the administration official told ABC News. "Folks were interested in being updated as to whether the decision making process was completed."
Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the loan guarantee that March, and Obama toured the company's plant a year later, portraying Solyndra as a symbol of how government and industry can come together.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is to hold hearings on the Solyndra loan Wednesday. The Republican led House has been investigating the Obama administration's green energy loan program for months. That probe took on new urgency two weeks ago, when Solyndra abruptly shut its doors and laid off 1,100 employees. Last week, the FBI raided the factory as part of a joint investigation with the Energy Department's inspector general.
"This is not right. This is not good," said Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who chairs the House committee that is examining the loan. "It makes you sick to your stomach. This is taxpayer money."
As federal authorities examine whether Solyndra misled the government about its true financial state, the Obama White House is fielding fresh questions over why it pushed so hard for Solyndra. Officials with DOE and the Office of Management and Budget are expected to testify Wednesday.
Late Tuesday came word that executives with Solyndra, invited to appear as witnesses, will not attend Wednesday's hearing. Instead, they'll appear next week.
The White House has argued that any effort to finance startup businesses in a relatively new field like solar energy is bound to include risky ventures that could fail. They reject the notion being pushed by Republicans that Solyndra was chosen for political reasons. One of the largest private investors in the deal, Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, was also a prominent fundraiser for Obama's presidential campaign.
In advance of intensifying scrutiny of the loan, the White House has noted that the Bush administration was the first to consider Solyndra's application, and that some executives at the company have a history of donating to Republicans.
Obama's Energy Department has said it backed Solyndra as a potential game changer in the clean tech movement, but as iWatch News has reported, clear warning signs indicated the venture was a high risk from the start.
The report prepared by congressional investigators notes that, in the weeks before President Bush left office, on January 9, a credit committee at the Energy Department, which reviews loans for approval, had voted against offering a loan commitment to Solyndra.
Even after Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, analysts in the Energy Department and in the Office of Management and Budget repeatedly questioned the wisdom of the loan. In one exchange in August 2009, a month before the loan closed, an Energy official wrote of "a major outstanding issue" - namely, that Solyndra's numbers showed it would run out of cash in September 2011.
There also was concern about the high risk nature of the project. Internally, the Office of Management and Budget noted that "the risk rating for the project sponsor [Solyndra]... seems high." Outside analysts had warned for months that the company might not be a sound investment.
Peter Lynch, a New York-based solar energy analyst, has said even a cursory glance at Solyndra's prospectus revealed a problem with the company's numbers.
"It's very difficult to perceive a company with a model that says, well I can build something for six dollars and sell it for $3," Lynch said. "Those numbers don't generally work. You don't want to lose three dollars for every unit you make."
In 2008, as Solyndra, then just three years old, pushed ahead with its application for government backing to build a new plant to produce its unique solar panels, an outside rating agency, Fitch, gave it a B+ credit rating. Two months earlier, in June 2008, Dun & Bradstreet issued a credit appraisal of the company. Its assessment: "Fair."
Those are not top of the line scores. Fitch Ratings spokeswoman Cindy St |
in-app purchases, and is published by the developer, Frogmind Games. It was released in December 2015, so the Android version is already lagging a full seven-plus months behind the iOS version. Second, this Android version is free to play. And yes, you should be "uh-oh"-ing at this point. The in-app purchases range from $0.99 to $9.99. There's an energy bar. And push-to-win power-ups. And in-game currency that lets you go back to the last checkpoint for the low cost of 10 coins or a video advert.
The original Badland Android release also has in-app purchases, but they're decidedly more benign: one IAP allowed you to remove ads from the game, while another unlocked the second half of the game's levels. The price of both IAPs together was $3.99, and buying both netted you the same experience as the full iOS version of the game at the same total price. A model that actually seemed respectable.
But this new Cheetah Mobile partnership on Badland 2 feels a bit like a bastardization of a perfectly good game with a far more scummy approach to in-app purchases. Fans of the original will likely be in full revolt (and download sketchy cracked versions that Cheetah Mobile is already trying to kill), as there is no IAP in Badland 2 to just go back to a "normal" experience. You either live in Cheetah Mobile's free-to-play world, or you buy it on another platform.
For now, the game appears to be in a geo-restricted beta. We've asked Frogmind what's up with the Clean Master Games deal on Android, and whether it covers all regions where Badland 2 will be released, or if this is some sort of regional deal, with a proper Frogmind version coming out for other countries at a later date. That would be odd, though I doubt unprecedented.
The game itself is still fun, with all of the odd, dark charm of the original, but the experience is utterly tainted by Cheetah Mobile's money-grubbing touch. The more difficult the game gets - and this is not a particularly easy game - the more you'll be tempted and goaded into buying cheat buttons, coins, or watching video ads.
It just doesn't feel right. If you're morbidly curious, though (or just don't mind the IAPs), you can get the APK at APK Mirror right here.While I personally tend to tip more to the side of the extrovert scale (I will talk to strangers at length but you will never find me dancing on a table in a crowded bar) I do know that a world full of only extroverts would be a terrifying existence indeed. I also recognize the importance of being happy just the way you are — introvert, extrovert or something in between — an idea that is not so obvious to whoever is behind Lexus’ Twitter account.
“Introverted? That can be changed. #LexusIS #itsyourmove” Lexus tweeted yesterday with a photo of a dark shiny car that apparently has some mysterious personality-changing power. Cue a torrent of ticked off replies from the Twittersphere.
Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, took Lexus to task on Twitter, writing:
Dear @Lexus, you owe introverts an apology. RT @Lexus: Introverted? That can be changed. http://bit.ly/1gvUryP
Other Twitter users also expressed their dislike of the tweet, tweeting things like:
Why would I want to change? RT @Lexus Introverted? That can be changed. #LexusIS #itsyourmove @Lexus Being an introvert rocks, so I guess I don’t need your car, is what you’re telling me. Thanks for the heads-up..@Lexus Yes, I’m introverted. Lots of badass people are. Half the world or more. Probably an equal percentage of your customers.
As of this writing, Lexus hasn’t responded to the complaints on Twitter. We’ll update this post if the company makes any attempt to clean up this prime example of Think Before You Tweet. Your move indeed, Lexus.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The fans were caught on video pushing Souleymane Sylla off a train
Four Chelsea fans accused of aggravated violence against a black man on the Paris Metro have been given suspended one-year sentences by a French court.
Joshua Parsons, 22, and James Fairbairn, 25, had denied their actions of February 2015 were racist in nature.
Their co-accused, fellow Chelsea fans Richard Barklie, a 52-year-old former policeman, and William Simpson, 27, from Surrey, were tried in absentia.
They were also ordered to pay the victim 10,000 euros in compensation.
Souleymane Sylla was targeted at Richelieu-Drouot station as football fans made their way to a Champions League match between Paris Saint Germain and Chelsea.
The hearing at the Palais de Justice saw a video recorded by a passenger of fans pushing him off the Metro train.
Image copyright AFP Image caption James Fairbairn, from Kent, (left) and Joshua Parsons appeared at the Palais de Justice
Supporters can be heard chanting "we are racist, we are racist and that's the way we like it".
The AFP agency reported that after giving evidence Parsons apologised to Mr Sylla, a Frenchman of Mauritanian origin, but denied there was any racist aspect to what had happened.
Turning to Mr Sylla in court, Parsons said: "I am very sorry to Mr Sylla, but I was not racist in any way."
Image copyright AFP Image caption The men's victim, Souleymane Sylla, had described the episode as "humiliating"
Parsons, from Dorking, Surrey; Simpson, from Surrey; and Barklie, from Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, have already been banned from football stadiums in Britain.Mumbai is losing a battle with a bug which has been devouring its already scant green cover.
Maealybug, a grain-sized scaly parasitic bug, has been voraciously attacking thousands of rain trees in the financial capital of India.
Several hundreds of these trees have been decimated so far.
2011: Satellite images of a locality in Mumbai show the diminished green cover. Maealybug, a grain-sized scaly parasitic bug, has been voraciously attacking thousands of rain trees
2012: Rain tree is the most common tree planted by authorities in Mumbai wing to its fast growth and wide canopy. The trees also serve as a natural host for the parasite
2014: The trees, over the years, have found it increasingly difficult to resist infestations by Mealybug. Observers are of the opinion that the rapid urbanization of the city has helped the bugs
Though the infestations had been noticed for the past four years, this year’s attack has proven to be more pronounced and fatal.
Rain tree is the most common tree planted by authorities in Mumbai wing to its fast growth and wide canopy. The trees also serve as a natural host for the parasite.
The Mealybug sucks the trees sap and subsequently the tree dies.
Moreover, the bug also shares a symbiotic relation with ants, which produce a sweet secretion to protect the bugs.
This secretion, when it falls on leaves, prevents the process of photosynthesis accelerating the tree’s death.
The trees, over the years, have found it increasingly difficult to resist infestations by Mealybugs.
Observers are of the opinion that the rapid urbanization of the city has helped the bugs.
“More trees are falling prey to Mealybugs wherever there are concrete roads,” an environmentalist Kshitij Ashtekar said.
Ashtekar has mapped the loss in the city’s green cover with the help of an app that he developed with colleague and friend Ninad Pathak.
The duo conducted a survey in which they found that lack of planning by road builders has not left any breathing space for the tree at its base thus choking it.
The concrete, which surrounds the trees on all the sides, is also preventing the rain water from seeping into the tree’s roots.
In addition, pits which have been dug for utility work are also affecting the rain trees as they draw the surrounding ground water into them.
Ashtekar and his friends have surveyed about 650 trees in Goregaon, Andheri and Malad in western Mumbai.
“A year ago, 55-60 per cent of the trees were infested but about 90 per cent of the trees, surveyed by us, have been devoured by Mealybugs,” Ashtekar said.
The group sent the samples of mealybugs to the National Bureau of Agriculturally Important Insects (NBAII) in Bengaluru.
Officials at the bureau advised the group to deploy Cryptolaemus to prevent further infestations. Cryptolaemus, an insect of the ladybug family, is a natural predator of the Mealybug.
“We deployed about two dozen beetles on each of the infected trees.
"There is noticeable difference but we realised that we needed to deploy over a hundred beetles with a crane on each tree’s canopy to save it.
"We do not have the resources to undertake the process,” the environmentalist said. Mumbai has an estimated 5,000 rain trees which would require about 5 lakh beetles.The driver was brutally attacked on 10 June in Sunnyside.
"This incident is deeply upsetting to all of us at Uber. This driver-partner is a part of our community. Our thoughts are with his family during this difficult time. We have a team of former law enforcement professionals who are working with the police to support their investigation‚" Allenberg said.
She said the security response teams the company has hired would continue to provide additional security support to drivers.
"We are doing everything we can but Uber is not a security company and so we need the help of Law Enforcement to resolve these issues as soon as possible‚" Allenberg said.
Zweli Ngwenya‚ spokesperson of The Movement‚ formed by Uber drivers concerned with their safety‚ said the driver from Tembisa in Ekurhuleni succumbed to his injuries in the early hours of Monday.
"It is difficult and heartbreaking to lose somebody you have worked with. We are still in shock and we are yet to meet his family‚" he saidThe Stack Archive
Google submits patent application for online voting
Thu 18 Feb 2016
In a patent submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Google has outlined a concept for real-time online voting, right on the Google home page.
The patent, submitted yesterday, is entitled “Social Voting-Based Campaigns in Search” and encompasses a voting user interface (VUI) that will enable a user to submit one or more votes in a voting-based campaign. It also proposes leveraging social content, social networking services, and search results with the VUI.
The advantages of Google’s proposed voting user interface are included in the submitted patent, and specifically reference providing a channel through which users can participate in voting-based campaigns, providing a more accurate reflection of user preferences, and by enabling voter participation right on the search page, the VUI “users can be more informed in the votes they make based on information surfaced in search results.”
The example provided by Google to the patent office showed a search page entitled “Vote for the Top American Singer”, with images, news, and search results related to the fictional “Top American Singer” program.
The patent includes a computer implemented voting method comprising user authentication, identifying user-indexed content through the search engine, identifying contestants, receiving votes, and identifying one or more social networking profiles and social content items relevant to the vote at hand.
Integration of online voting with a search engine could serve several functions at once. With integrated searches directly related to the voting question at hand, voters would be better informed about their choices. By processing votes in real time, user preferences would presumably be more accurately recorded and instantaneous with voting. Finally, by offering the capacity to submit a vote online, increasing the ease of voting could increase baseline voter participation.
In the example submitted, that of voting for a “Top Singer” on a reality show, Google offers a construct that most people are familiar with, having seen or heard of voting based reality shows in the past. However, an online voting system is a concept that many have debated for political uses. While some argue that increasing the ease of voting would increase voter participation, particularly in the youngest, technologically-savvy group of voters, others have argued that electronic voting (e-voting) and internet based voting (i-voting) is a method that is vulnerable to fraud, unnecessary, and expensive.
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.News outlet Salon accused memes of “destroying democracy” in an article that was posted yesterday morning. This article appears to be inspired by President Trumps tweet of his actions during a WWE event with a photoshopped CNN logo over the person slammed by Trump.
The article claims it was a showing of “increasing power and presence of the alt-right ” on different social media networks. It also says that the alt-right has had major success in shaping public opinion.
“This means that the real lesson for CNN and other mainstream news outlets is not that the president is immature enough to share a stupid meme attacking the news but rather that their focus on fake news has distracted them from the real story: the rise of emotional, aggressive, inflammatory, bigoted communication on social media and the power these posts have had in shaping the ideas of the Trump-supporting alt-right” the article continued.
As per the orders of Salon, CNN, and the rest of the leftist media, say good bye to Pepe and your other favorite memes, otherwise you’re a Nazi.Two people were removed from the Republican National Convention Tuesday night following an incident involving a black, female camera operator, who allegedly was racially taunted on the convention floor.
Current TV host David Shuster tweeted late Tuesday night: “GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African American camera woman + saying ‘This is how we feed animals.'”
NBC News has not confirmed the incident.
CNN issued the following statement, after a CNN employee initially declined to comment on the incident at their booth at the RNC, referring theGrio to a public relations representative:
“CNN can confirm there was an incident directed at our employee inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum earlier this afternoon. CNN worked with convention officials to address this matter and will have no further comment.”
It was not clear whether the people who were reportedly removed were delegates, alternates, or other convention attendees.
“Two attendees tonight exhibited deplorable behavior,” convention spokesman Kyle Downey told The Hill. “Their conduct was inexcusable and unacceptable. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated.”
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport.President Donald Trump showed off a few too many trophies in his display Cabinet.
Trump opened part of a Cabinet meeting to the press Monday and filled that time with self-congratulation as well as praise from his team. On multiple fronts, that celebration of achievement was unearned.
A sampling of his comments:
—"Great success, including MS-13. They're being thrown out in record numbers and rapidly. And they're being depleted. They'll all be gone pretty soon."
THE FACTS: There's no publicly available information to back up Trump's claim that this violent gang is about to disappear.
Deportations are actually down slightly compared with the same time last year, as arrests of people caught crossing the Mexican border have dropped to historic lows. More than 100 MS-13 gang members have been arrested in recent weeks, though the government hasn't said how many of those people have been deported.
In any event, deportations alone cannot eradicate MS-13, a homegrown gang with ties to El Salvador that includes U.S. citizens. The government has not said how many of the estimated 7,000 to 10,000 gang members are Americans, who cannot be "thrown out." The group's roots in the U.S. go back more than 20 years to Los Angeles.
The gang was in decline in Southern California long before Trump was elected. During a recent raid of MS-13 members in Los Angeles, Police Chief Charlie Beck said the gang's membership has been declining for several years in part because of law enforcement crackdowns.
MS-13 has been in the crosshairs of federal law enforcement since at least 2012 when the group was designated a transnational criminal organization and subjected to financial sanctions by the Treasury Department. Three leaders of the gang were targeted for sanctions in 2015.
———
— "I recently returned from a trip overseas that included deals for more than $350 billion worth of military and economic investment in the United States. These deals will bring many thousands of jobs to our country and, in fact, will bring millions of jobs ultimately and help Saudi Arabia take a greater role in providing stability and security in that region."
THE FACTS: Trump's $350 billion figure includes hundreds of billions of dollars in aspirational deals with Saudi Arabia that have not been signed yet and could be revised or eliminated. He's relying on a 20- to 30-year projection of what the government believes will be the contracts' long-term value because of the cost of sustaining them. When he visited Riyadh, agreements on more than $110 billion in foreign military sales were pledged, according to the State Department. But many of those — along with a significant amount of the $80 billion in announced commercial civilian sales — were memoranda of understanding or letters of intent and not sales contracts.
Arms sales make up the vast majority of Trump's total, but those must be approved by the State Department and Congress.
Since Trump's trip, the State Department has notified lawmakers of only a small fraction of the total — $1.7 billion, mainly in naval and air force training contracts, and some Democrats say they want to hold those up over human rights concerns and Saudi Arabia's conduct in the war against rebels in Yemen. And while U.S. officials say further approvals, including large-ticket items such as a high-altitude missile defense system, could be approved in the coming weeks, there is no guarantee Congress will go along.
In addition, some of the business he's claiming to have generated was agreed to during the Obama administration.
———
—"I will say that never has there been a president - with few exceptions; in the case of FDR, he had a major Depression to handle — who's passed more legislation, who's done more things than what we've done, between the executive orders and the job-killing regulations that have been terminated. Many bills; I guess over 34 bills that Congress signed. A Supreme Court justice who's going to be a great one...We've achieved tremendous success."
THE FACTS: He has little to show for his first five months in office, in concrete ways, other than the confirmation of a justice.
Trump's two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, accomplished more in their early months. Trump has achieved no major legislation. The bills he is counting up are little more than housekeeping measures — things like naming a courthouse and a VA health care center, appointing board of regents members, reauthorizing previous legislation. He has indeed been vigorous in signing executive orders, but in the main they have far less consequence than legislation requiring congressional passage.
Trump's big agenda items, like his promised tax overhaul, have yet to pass or even reach Congress. His attempt to secure the borders from people from terrorism-prone regions is so far blocked by courts.
By contrast; Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus package into law in his first month, while also achieving a law expanding health care for children and the Lilly Ledbetter bill on equal pay for women in that time.
Bush got off to a slower start, in part because he did not take office in a deep recession requiring quick action, as Obama had done. But by this point in his presidency, Bush had signed a huge tax cut into law.
Associated Press
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Subscribe nowRussian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday vowed to annihilate "terrorists" following two deadly bomb attacks in less than 24 hours in the southern city of Volgograd that raised security fears ahead of the Winter Olympics.
The uncompromising remarks in a New Year's Eve address were Putin's first public comments since suicide bombers killed at least 34 people in attacks on a railway station and a trolleybus on Sunday and Monday.
The bombings raised fears of further attacks before Russia hosts the Winter Olympics in less than six weeks in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, a major prestige project for Putin.
"I am certain that we will fiercely and consistently continue the fight against terrorists until their complete annihilation", Putin said, according to Russian news agencies.
"Dear friends, we bow our heads before the victims of cruel terrorist acts," the Russian leader said on a visit to the east coast city of Khabarovsk.
Putin, who first became president when his predecessor Boris Yeltsin stepped down and named him to the post exactly 14 years ago on Tuesday, has been unable to crush Islamist militants in the Muslim provinces of the North Caucasus.
Police on Tuesday detained dozens of people in sweeps through Volgograd, although there was no indication that any of them was connected to the attacks, for which nobody has claimed responsibility.
Mourners laid flowers at the site of the bombing that tore the bus apart and left residents fearing further violence.
"I'm frightened," said Tatyana Volchanskaya, a student in Volgograd, 700 km northeast of Sochi, where the Games start on Feb. 7. She said some friends were afraid to go to shops and other crowded places.
Deadly violence
Volgograd — formerly Stalingrad — is a city of about 1 million and a transport hub for an area of southern Russia that includes Chechnya and the other mostly Muslim provinces of the North Caucasus, where the insurgency generates deadly violence almost every day.
The bombing was the second deadly attack in Volgograd in two days. (Denis Tyrin/Associated Press) A car bomb killed a prosecutor's assistant in Dagestan, a hub of Islamist militancy in the Caucasus, on Tuesday, and two people were killed in a bomb blast there late on Monday, authorities said.
Putin has staked his prestige on the Games in Sochi, which lies at the Western edge of the Caucasus Mountains and within the strip of land the insurgents want to carve out of Russia and turn into an Islamic State.
He ordered increased security nationwide after the attacks, the deadliest outside the North Caucasus since a suicide bomber from a province next to Chechnya killed 37 people at a Moscow airport in January 2011.
In Volgograd, more than 5,000 police and interior troops were mobilized in "Operation Anti-terror Whirlwind", Interior Ministry spokesman Andrei Pilipchuk, said on state TV.
He said 87 people had been detained after they resisted police or could not produce proper ID or registration documents, and that some had weapons. State TV showed helmeted officers pushing men up against a wall. But there was no sign any were linked to the bombings or suspected of planning further attacks.
The Itar-Tass news agency said police were focusing on migrant workers from the Caucasus and ex-Soviet states - groups that rights activists say face prejudice and are often targeted by police indiscriminately.
Investigators said they believed a male suicide bomber was responsible for Monday's morning rush-hour blast, which turned a trolleybus into a twisted wreck and left bodies lying in the street.
In Sunday's attack on the station, authorities initially described the bomber as a woman from Dagestan, but later said the perpetrator may have been a man.
Olympic fears
Citing unnamed sources, the Interfax news agency said the suspected attacker in Sunday's blast was an ethnic Russian convert to Islam who had moved to Dagestan and joined militants there early in 2012.
Volgograd was also the scene of an attack in October, when a woman from Dagestan killed seven people in a suicide bus blast.
The violence raised fears of a concerted campaign before the Olympics, an important project for Putin, who secured Russia's first post-Soviet Games in 2007, during his initial 2000-2008 stint as president.
Intended to showcase how Russia has changed since the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991, the Games have also been a focus for complaints in the West and among Russian liberals that Putin has stifled dissent and encouraged intolerance.
This month, Putin freed jailed opponents including oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Pussy Riot punk band in what critics said was an effort to disarm Western criticism and improve his image.
In an online video posted in July, the Chechen leader of insurgents who want to carve an Islamic state out of mainly Muslim provinces south of Volgograd, urged militants to use "maximum force" to prevent the Games from going ahead.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach condemned the "despicable attack on innocent people" and said he had written to Putin to express condolences and confidence that Russia would deliver "safe and secure games in Sochi".
The U.S. government is concerned Islamist militants may be preparing attacks aimed at disrupting the Olympics and has offered closer cooperation with Russia on security.
In Canada, the RCMP issued a statement saying the police force will have a presence at the Games, acting in a "liaison capacity" to assist Canadian Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
"The RCMP will have security liaison officers (SLOs) assigned to the Canadian teams during the Games who will be acting in a liaison capacity between the Canadian teams and the host Games security providers," the RCMP said. "SLOs are responsible for continually monitoring the security situation during the Games and for making security recommendations to the Canadian team."Today’s guest post is by Elliot Severn, one of StarTalk Radio’s volunteer photographers. You’ve seen his photos of StarTalk Live: The Particle Party and other events. Here, Elliot describes his trip down to the Wallops Island Launch Facility to watch a test flight of the Antares, one of the new breed of commercial rockets flown by corporations under contract to NASA.
Since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, the United States has had limited access to space. But now, an increasing number of commercial rockets and spacecraft are starting to launch from American soil. This is rapidly restoring America’s presence in space and is driving innovation through competition in the spaceflight industry.
Back in April, I travelled to Wallops Island, Virginia to witness the first test launch of the Antares rocket. Antares is a new commercial rocket manufactured by Orbital Sciences Corporation. Its intended purpose is to launch Orbital’s Cygnus spacecraft, which will carry cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. Orbital is hoping to follow the recent success of SpaceX, which has already flown three missions to the ISS under commercial contract. (See Blue Bell Ice Cream, Liquid Gold, and the SpaceX Launch) Although I wasn’t able to stay for all three launch attempts, it was an exciting experience and I got an inside look at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport and some of the actual flight hardware.
My trip to Wallops was far from sane. I was in my last few weeks at Alfred University and had to skip three days of school to go. Thankfully, my professors were supportive. The day before the first launch attempt, I went to a GIS conference in Rochester, met up with some friends from Buffalo, and then took the 9 hour drive to Chincoteague. We arrived at our hotel after 3am. It was just a few miles from Wallops Island and you could see Antares lit up on the launch pad from our balcony.
We woke up the next day nervous to learn that the weather forecast was only 30% favorable, but remained optimistic. I’ve seen the space shuttle launch on the first day with the odds against it and this test flight had a launch window extending all the way from 5pm to 8pm. Later, the forecast increased to 40%, making us more optimistic, but the weather would be on everyone’s mind until the moment of launch.
We headed to the NASA Visitor Center to check out the viewing sites and go to the press briefings. My first impression of Wallops was that it is extremely casual compared to Kennedy Space Center. There was no launch day traffic, no media circus, and the only roads closed off were the bridge to the launch pads and the road to the press site. The public was allowed to view the launch anywhere along the coastline, as close as 1.6 miles from the pad. I stopped to see the rocket from the closest vantage point and talked to some of the people who were waiting in umbrella chairs with their feet in the water. Many of them were employees of Orbital who worked on Antares, anxiously waiting to see years of their work finally pay off.
Back at the visitor center (which has a great museum), we found the press area and mingled with the other journalists and NASA Social participants. Several officials came in to answer questions and give us technical details about the test flight. I was interested to learn that the Aerojet AJ26 engines which power the first stage of Antares were actually salvaged Russian NK-33 engines that powered the failed Soviet N-1 moon rocket. Aerojet is modifying the Russian engine and is planning to make an American-built version for NASA’s Space Launch System.
The primary payload was a Cygnus “mass simulator”, which is essentially a giant tin can the same size and weight as the Cygnus cargo vehicle, carrying an array of sensors to evaluate the rocket’s performance. But what I found much more interesting was the secondary payload. Antares also carried the first three “PhoneSats” into orbit. These miniature satellites are among the first spacecraft to be powered by Android smartphones and only cost $3,500. Each PhoneSat consists of an HTC Nexus 1 or a Samsung Nexus S smartphone encased in a 4-inch metal cube, outfitted with a Li-ion battery, solar panels, a GPS receiver, and a two-way S-band radio. To create a mini antenna that would self-deploy, engineers used a piece of metal measuring tape that would naturally spring into position after the PhoneSat separates from the rocket. The three PhoneSats on this flight were named “Alexander”, “Graham”, and “Bell”. One of the backup PhoneSats was passed around the room so we could inspect it closely.
The weather officer gave us a briefing and the chance of favorable conditions had increased to 60%. Low clouds were approaching the area, so they were aiming to launch at the very beginning of the window. This meant we only had one shot. Next thing I knew, it was time to load up our camera gear and get on the bus for the press site. Before we left for the press site, we were given an extensive safety briefing. The likelihood of a catastrophic failure is over 10% for an untested vehicle and watching from so close has risks. In the event of a launch failure, we could foreseeably be in the debris field and certainly could be exposed to volatile gases. The instructions were clear. “If the rocket blows up, get in the bus. We’ll have to get out of there fast.” I will admit, realizing we’d be THAT close got me a little excited.
Arriving at the press site, the first things I noticed were all the long-range tracking cameras. Telephoto lenses and telescopes ranging up to 16’’ were set up on elaborate tracking mounts. Some were on trailers and some were in permanent observatory domes. Then I saw Antares across the marsh, fully fueled and ready to go. Steam was flowing along the sides of its chilled liquid oxygen tank. It was so close, binoculars and telephoto lenses weren’t even necessary. I quickly set up my cameras and started taking test shots, making sure everything was perfect. There were low clouds to the West, but the sea breeze seemed to be holding them off. This breeze was just outside the launch constraints, but launch control decided to raise the limit and push on anyway. Soon, we received confirmation from the NASA TV feed that weather was GO and all systems were GO! Everyone seemed to think we would surely be flying. Concern turned to excitement as the minutes ticked by.
Suddenly, at T-12 minutes, everyone yelled “Hold!” There was lots of radio chatter, but it was hard to hear. They said something about an umbilical. Someone near me had a radio and I asked if they are going to recycle the count. Then there was an eruption of steam on the pad. It was the liquid oxygen being purged from the tanks. We knew that was it for the day. A NASA official came out and yelled “The launch has been scrubbed!” The field erupted with groans and expletives. It turned out an umbilical that connected an Ethernet cable to the second stage flight computer separated prematurely. The cable is designed to unplug itself when the rocket lifts off the pad. The abort required a 48 hour reset. That meant the soonest they could launch was Friday and the forecast was bad. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay, so we headed back to New York that night.
The next launch attempt on Saturday was scrubbed due to high upper level winds and Antares finally flew successfully on Sunday, April 21st. The launch vehicle performed flawlessly and the PhoneSats were a success, even sending back cellphone camera images from orbit. The first test flight of the Cygnus spacecraft was slated for June, but ISS scheduling conflicts with European and Japanese cargo flights pushed the launch to September. Eight Cygnus flights are planned after the test flight this spring, so Antares should be launching at least 9 more times out of Virginia. With new vehicles finally flying and NASA’s upcoming commercial crew program taking shape, this is quickly becoming an exciting new era in spaceflight.Conservative columnist Ann Coulter on Wednesday said that President Barack Obama was campaigning with women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke because his base was “stupid single women.”
At a campaign event in Denver with the former Georgetown University Law School student who Rush Limbaugh called a slut in March, Obama warned that GOP hopeful Mitt Romney’s policies on rights for women were “more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”
Romney has said that he would “get rid” of Planned Parenthood and “kill” the Affordable Care Act health law, which provides free contraception for women.
“I think it’s probably a good sign that Obama is so desperate just to get the base Democratic voter — stupid single women — to vote for him,” Coulter told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday. “This is good news that he needs to lock up that part of the Democratic vote.”
“He’s trying to get the stupid single women voter, which is the Democratic Party base,” Coulter repeated. “And I would just say to stupid single women voters, your husband will not be able to pay you child support if Obamacare goes through and Obama is re-elected. You are talking about the total destruction of wealth. It is the end of America as we know it.”
“Great, you will get free contraception; you won’t have to pay a $10 co-pay, but it will be the end of America. Think about that!”
The latest Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll found Obama was leading Romney among women in Colorado, 51 percent to 43 percent. Among all voters in the state, the president trailed Romney, 50 percent to 45 percent.
Watch this video from Fox News’ Hannity, broadcast Aug. 8, 2012.
(h/t: Media Matters)Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Liverpool FC and Everton FC fans are today taking part in a protest against football match ticket prices.
Around 1,000 supporters are expected to march on the Premier League headquarters in London.
They will be demanding more is done to curb the cost of match tickets, particularly for away games.
Roy Bentham, from the Spirit of Shankly Liverpool FC supporters’ group, previously told the ECHO: “A lot of fans are being priced out of the game.
“We have some of the most expensive tickets in Europe.
“We won’t take this any more so we are making a stand.”
Organisers of the march are hoping fans from every Premier League club will turn out to protest.
Simon Magner, secretary of Everton’s Blue Union, said: “We want a commitment from the Premier League to put money aside to bring down ticket prices.
“In an ideal world, all fans would be charged exactly the same as all other clubs in the same league.
“Everyone is counting the pennies at the moment but football has lost touch with ordinary people, who are the life and soul of the game.”
Spirit of Shankly's Jay McKenna speaks at the protest:
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A similar march last year led to the creation of the Away Fans Fund – which saw each Premiership club handed £200,000 to subsidise away ticket prices.
Demonstrators are hoping for a similar or bigger result after today’s march.
The Football Supporters’ Federation, which organised the rally, said in a statement: “The game is swimming in money like never before, with clubs pocketing record amounts from broadcasting deals while squeezing everything they can out of their fanbase with some of the highest ticket prices in a generation. Something has to give.
“There is little sign of anything being done to make life easier for the lifeblood of the game – the match-going supporter.”Netflix has boosted its slate with the upcoming “The Most Hated Woman In America,” starring Melissa Leo as prominent atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
Tommy O’Haver (“An American Crime”) will direct from his own script, and “Pitch Perfect 2” producers Max Handelman and Elizabeth Banks will produce through their Brownstone Prods. banner. Netflix has worldwide rights and will release “The Most Hated Woman” day-and-date on its streaming service and in theaters next year.
Netflix has also acquired Netflix has also acquired “XOXO,” which marks the directorial feature debut of Chris Louie and stars Sarah Hyland (“Modern Family”), Graham Phillips (“The Good Wife”) and Chris D’Elia (“Undateable”). “XOXO” follows six strangers whose lives collide in one dream-chasing romantic night. Produced by Joe Russell, Netflix has worldwide rights and will release the film in the summer of 2016.
The streaming service has also acquired worldwide rights on “Rebirth,” a psychological thriller from writer-director Karl Mueller and producer Ross Dinerstein, with plans for a fourth-quarter release. The story involves an ordinary man at a weekend self-help retreat that becomes increasingly bizarre.
Wednesday |
].
Order of Application of Quantifiers When more than one variables are quantified in a wff such as y x P( x, y ), they are applied from the inside, that is, the one closest to the atomic formula is applied first. Thus y x P( x, y ) reads y [ x P( x, y ) ], and we say for some y, P( x, y ) holds for every x.
The positions of the same type of quantifiers can be switched without affecting the truth value as long as there are no quantifiers of the other type between the ones to be interchanged.
For example x y z P(x, y, z) is equivalent to y x z P(x, y, z), z y x P(x, y, z), etc. It is the same for the universal quantifier.
However, the positions of different types of quantifiers can not be switched.
For example x y P( x, y ) is not equivalent to y x P( x, y ). For let P( x, y ) represent x < y for the set of numbers as the universe, for example. Then x y P( x, y ) reads "for every number x, there is a number y that is greater than x", which is true, while y x P( x, y ) reads "there is a number y that is greater than any number", which is not true.
Test Your Understanding of Quantification
Back to ScheduleRandomness and the Netscape Browser
How secure is the World Wide Web?
by Ian Goldberg and David Wagner
Netscape Communications has been at the forefront of the effort to integrate cryptographic techniques into Web servers and browsers. Netscape's Web browser supports the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a cryptographic protocol developed by Netscape to provide secure Internet transactions. Given the popularity of Netscape's browser and the widespread use of its cryptographic protocol on the Internet, we decided to study Netscape's SSL implementation in detail.
Our study revealed serious flaws in Netscape's implementation of SSL that make it relatively easy for an eavesdropper to decode the encrypted communications. Although Netscape has fixed these problems in a new version of their browser (as of this writing, Netscape 2.0 beta1 and Netscape Navigator 1.22 Security Update are available), these weaknesses provide several lessons for people interested in producing or purchasing secure software.
Back to Basics
At its most basic level, SSL protects communications by encrypting messages with a secret key-a large, random number known only to the sender and receiver. Because you can't safely assume that an eavesdropper doesn't have complete details of the encryption and decryption algorithms, the protocol can be considered secure only if someone who knows all of the details of these algorithms is unable to recover a message without trying every possible key. Ultimately, security rests on the infeasibility of trying all possible decryption-key values.
The security of SSL, like that of any other cryptographic protocol, depends crucially on the unpredictability of this secret key. If an attacker can predict the key's value or even narrow down the number of keys that must be tried, the protocol can be broken with much less effort than if truly random keys had been used. Therefore, it is vital that the secret keys be generated from an unpredictable random-number source.
Randomness is not a black-and-white quality: some streams of numbers are more random than others. The only truly random number sources are those related to physical phenomena such as the rate of radioactive decay of an element or the thermal noise of a semiconductor diode. Barring the use of external devices, computer programs that need random numbers must generate these numbers themselves. However, since CPUs are deterministic, it is impossible to algorithmically generate truly random numbers.
Many common computer applications (games, for instance) use any readily available source of randomness to provide an initial value, called a "seed," to a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). PRNGs operate by repeatedly scrambling the seed. Typically, the seed is a short, random number that the PRNG expands into a longer, random-looking bitstream. A typical game might seed a PRNG with the time of day; see Figure 1.
srand(time(0));... printf("You rolled the die, and got a %d.
", 1 + (rand()%6));
Figure 1: A typical C program that uses a PRNG.
For a simple game, the seed only needs to change each time the game is run. Though the seed will be predictable, this is not a major concern in applications where security is not an issue. In cryptographic applications, however, the seed's unpredictability is essential-if the attacker can narrow down the set of possible seeds, his job is made significantly easier. Since the function used by the PRNG to turn a seed into a pseudorandom number sequence is assumed to be known, a smaller set of possible seeds yields a correspondingly small set of sequences produced by the PRNG.
A good method to select seed values for the PRNG is an essential part of a cryptographic system such as SSL. If the seed values for the PRNG can easily be guessed, the level of security offered by the program is diminished significantly, since it requires less work for an attacker to decrypt an intercepted message.
Netscape's Implementation
Because Netscape would not release detailed information about this section of its program, we resorted to the tedious task of reverseengineering Netscape's algorithm by manually decompiling their executable program.
The method Netscape uses to seed its PRNG is shown in pseudocode in Figure 2. This algorithm was derived from Version 1.1 of the international version of Netscape's Solaris 2.4 browser. Most other versions of Netscape for UNIX use the same algorithm; the Microsoft Windows and Macintosh versions have slightly different details (for example, they use a particular system timer instead of the process ID), but the techniques employed are fundamentally the same across all architectures and operating systems.
In Figure 2, it's important to note that mklcpr() and MD5() are fixed, unkeyed algorithms that will presumably be known by an adversary. The seed generated depends only on the values of a and b, which in turn depend on just three quantities: the time of day, the process ID, and the parent process ID. Thus, an adversary who can predict these three values can apply the well-known MD5 algorithm to compute the exact seed generated.
global variable seed; RNG_CreateContext() (seconds, microseconds) = time of day; /* Time elapsed since 1970 */ pid = process ID; ppid = parent process ID; a = mklcpr(microseconds); b = mklcpr(pid + seconds + (ppid << 12)); seed = MD5(a, b); mklcpr(x) /* not cryptographically significant; shown for completeness */ return ((0xDEECE66D * x + 0x2BBB62DC) >> 1); MD5() /* a very good standard mixing function, source omitted */
Figure 3 shows the key-generation algorithm, also reverse-engineered from Netscape's browser. An attacker who can guess the PRNG seed value can easily determine the encryption keys used in Netscape's secure transactions.
RNG_GenerateRandomBytes() x = MD5(seed); seed = seed + 1; return x; global variable challenge, secret_key; create_key() RNG_CreateContext(); tmp = RNG_GenerateRandomBytes(); tmp = RNG_GenerateRandomBytes(); challenge = RNG_GenerateRandomBytes(); secret_key = RNG_GenerateRandomBytes();
Attacks on Netscape
We used the information we uncovered about Netscape's internals to formulate a more intelligent attack against Netscape's encryption scheme. According to Figures 2 and 3, each possibility for the time of day, process ID, and parent-process ID produces a unique seed, which in turn produces a unique encryption key.
When a connection is first established, a challenge value is calculated and sent unencrypted from the Netscape client to the secure server. This allows an attacker to learn that value, which will be useful later.
Netscape's UNIX browsers are more difficult to attack than its browsers for other platforms, since the seeding process used in the UNIX browsers utilizes more-random quantities than does the process used in the browsers for other platforms. We will only discuss attacks on the UNIX browsers; it should be apparent from this discussion how to attack the other versions.
An attacker who has an account on the UNIX machine running the Netscape browser can easily discover the pid and ppid values used in RNG_CreateContext() using the ps command (a utility that lists the process IDs of all processes on the system).
All that remains is to guess the time of day. Most popular Ethernet sniffing tools (including tcpdump) record the precise time they see each packet. Using the output from such a program, the attacker can guess the time of day on the system running the Netscape browser to within a second. It is probably possible to improve this guess significantly. This recovers the seconds variable used in the seeding process. (There may be clock skew between the attacked machine and the machine running the packet sniffer, but this is easy to detect and compensate for.)
Of the variables used to generate the seed in Figure 2 (seconds, microseconds, pid, ppid), we know the values of seconds, pid, and ppid; only the value of the microseconds variable remains unknown. However, there are only one million possible values for it, resulting in only one million possible choices for the seed. We can use the algorithm in Figure 3 to generate the challenge and secret_key variables for each possible seed. Comparing the computed challenge values to the one we intercepted will reveal the correct value of the secret key. Testing all one million possibilities takes about 25 seconds on an HP 712/80.
Our second attack assumes the attacker does not have an account on the attacked UNIX machine, which means the pid and ppid quantities are no longer known. Nonetheless, these quantities are rather predictable, and several tricks can be used to recover them.
The unknown quantities are mixed in a way which can cancel out some of the randomness. In particular, even though the pid and ppid are 15bit quantities on most UNIX machines, the sum pid + (ppid << 12) has only 27 bits, not 30 (see Figure 2). If the value of seconds is known, a has only 20 unknown bits, and b has only 27 unknown bits. This leaves, at most, 47 bits of randomness in the secret key-a far cry from the 128-bit security claimed by the domestic U.S. version.
A little cleverness can reduce the uncertainty even further. First, ppid is often 1 (for example, when the user starts Netscape from an X Window system menu); if not, it is usually just a bit smaller than the pid. Furthermore, process IDs are not considered secret information by most applications, so some programs will leak information about them. For example, the popular mail-transport agent sendmail generates Message-IDs for outgoing mail using its process ID; as a result, sending e-mail to an invalid user on the attacked machine will cause the message to bounce back to the sender; the Message-ID contained in the reply message will tell the sender the last process ID used on that machine. Assuming that the user started Netscape relatively recently, and that the machine is not heavily loaded, this will closely approximate Netscape's pid. These observations mean that the amount of unpredictability in the pid and ppid quantities is quite small.
The most unsophisticated attack on any encryption scheme is to try all possible key values by brute force. Naturally, this approach can be expected to take a long time. For the domestic U.S. version of the Netscape browser, trying every possible 128-bit key is absolutely infeasible. However, the problems with Netscape's seed-generation process make it possible to speed up this process by trying only the keys generated by the possible seed values. Optimizations such as those described earlier should allow even a remote attacker to break Netscape's encryption in a matter of minutes.
Future Impact
Very soon after we announced these attacks, Netscape responded with a new version of the browser, which uses more randomness in producing the encryption keys. Since only the older versions are vulnerable, the direct, long-term impact of our attack should be small. Still, we can learn several lessons from this experience.
The Achilles heel of Netscape's security was the way in which it generated random numbers. The cryptography community has long known that generating random numbers requires great care and is easy to do poorly; Netscape learned this lesson somewhat painfully. If you need to generate random numbers for cryptographic purposes, be very careful.
In a narrow sense, the security flaw we found in the Netscape browser serves merely as an anecdote to emphasize the difficulty of generating cryptographically strong random numbers. But there's a broader moral to the story. The security community has painfully learned that small bugs in a security-critical module of a software system can have serious consequences, and that such errors are easy to commit. The only way to catch these mistakes is to expose the source code to scrutiny by security experts.
Peer review is essential to the development of any secure software. Netscape did not encourage outside auditing or peer review of its software-and that goes against everything the security industry has learned from past mistakes. By extension, without peer review and intense outside scrutiny of Netscape's software at the source-code level, there is simply no way consumers can know where there will be future security problems with Netscape's products.
Interestingly, Jim Bidzos of RSA Data Security reports that he offered to review Netscape's security before its initial release, but that Netscape declined. Now the company has changed its tune. "They're asking us to review it this time," Bidzos said.
Since we announced our attack, Netscape has publicly released the source code to its patch for independent scrutiny. But the company has not made available for public review any other security-critical modules of their programs. Until they learn their lesson and open their security programming to public evaluation, many security experts will remain justifiably skeptical of the company's security claims.
The growth of Internet commerce opens wonderful new opportunities for both businesses and consumers, but these opportunities can be safely exploited only after all parties are satisfied with the security of their online financial transactions. We are concerned that companies are hiding information about their security modules and shunning public review. We hope that the lessons learned from this incident will encourage software companies to openly embrace in-depth public scrutiny of their security software as both a natural and necessary part of the software-development cycle.
Resources and References
Another helpful resource is "Randomness Recommendations for Security" (RFC 1750). (RFCs are widely available memos detailing information of broad relevance to the Internet community.) Also, Bruce Schneier's book Applied Cryptography (John Wiley & Sons, 1994) offers a helpful introductory discussion of randomness.
Finally, we have collected links to many resources for generating cryptographically strong random numbers on a supplemental World Wide Web page at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/netscape-randomness.html, which includes links to:
Ron Rivest's "The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm" (RFC 1321) describes this popular mixing function in detail.
Adam Back, David Byers, and Eric Young's "Another SSL breakage...". Post to cypherpunks mailing list, August 15, 1995.
Damien Doligez's "SSL challenge-broken!". Post to cypherpunks mailing list, August 15, 1995.
Marc Van Heyningen's "Re: What's the netscape problem." Post to www- security mailing list, September 20, 1995.
"International Traffic in Arms Regulations," 22 CFR 120-130. Federal Register, vol. 58 no. 139. July 22, 1993.
Sameer Parekh's "Community ConneXion Corrects Inaccuracies in Netscape Press Release."
Acknowledgments
DDJBy its very nature, open source -- and its most famous creation, Linux -- relies upon the open exchange of ideas. While that happens largely on a free, net-neutral internet, it also needs face-to-face meetings. President Trump's ill-considered, anti-immigration executive order is completely contrary to the spirit of open-source software.
Linux was started by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish citizen who immigrated to the US and became a citizen. So, it comes as no surprise that Linux's leaders are denouncing Trump's position.
Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO, blogged on Jan. 29: "Red Hat and our global economy benefit from immigration laws that both seek to protect the public and recognize that we have diverse backgrounds."
Trump's immigration executive order makes Whitehurst "concerned that the changes are inconsistent with Red Hat's values, including diversity."
He concluded, "Red Hat is strong because of the thousands of diverse voices that comprise our company. Our continued work to advance the technology industry depends greatly on our ability to attract the best and brightest talent from around the world."
In an internal memo from Jan. 30, IBM, which was the first major technology company to support Linux, said: "As IBMers, we have learned, through era after era, that the path forward -- for innovation, for prosperity, and for civil society -- is the path of engagement and openness to the world. Our company will continue to work and advocate for this."
Jim Zemlin, The Linux Foundation's executive director, wrote on Jan. 30: "The Linux operating system underlies nearly every piece of technology in modern life, from phones to satellites to web searches to your car... openness is both a part of our core principles and also a matter of practicality. Linux, the largest cooperatively developed software project in history, is created by thousands of people from around the world and made available to anyone to use for free."
When it comes to travel in particular, Zemlin continued, "The Linux Foundation also hosts dozens of open-source projects covering security, networking, cloud, automotive, blockchain, and other areas. Last year, the Linux Foundation hosted over 20,000 people from 85 countries at more than 150 events."
Therefore, "The administration's policy on immigration restrictions is antithetical to the values of openness and community that have enabled open source to succeed. I oppose the immigration ban."
Abby Kearns, executive director at Cloud Foundry Foundation, an open-source, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud, took a stronger position on Jan. 30:
At Cloud Foundry, we believe strongly in diversity. Diversity of thought. Diversity of opinion. Most importantly, diversity in terms of gender, race, religion and orientation. This week, the new President of the United States signed an executive order that indefinitely suspends admissions from Syrian refugees and limits the flow of other refugees from seven other countries into the United States by instituting what the President has called "extreme vetting" of immigrants. We believe this goes against the very fabric of the United States.
Kearns added, "The United States is a nation of immigrants. We believe migration to escape inhumane treatment is a human right. We do not believe in discriminating against people coming to the United States based on gender, race, religion, and orientation."
In an email, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, told me:
Today is a good time to appreciate that our work in open source underpins innovation and access to knowledge equally, everywhere. It also depends on generosity and talent that is truly global. I would like to publicly thank participants in the global free software movement who live in, and come from, the countries singled out in this travel ban. Their circumstances make their contribution - of time and insight and energy - even more compelling. Let us celebrate the free-software and Ubuntu communities in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and the broader open-source communities behind them, for their spirited and multi-cultural contribution to the body of open source and our everyday sense of community. Recent divisive presidential orders present Americans with a deeply unsettling but unavoidable choice - to resist and defeat this dark tide, or tacitly support it. It takes courage to stand up for ideals in the face of authority. I saw that courage in action in South Africa in the days of Apartheid, and I would urge American friends and colleagues to find strength, energy and motivation for courageous dissidence in their long tradition of openness, on which so much of the nation is built. Self-respect can only be created through the patient commitment to values that transcend our individual immediate desires and fears. History is on the side of those who defend the equality of all human beings - a notion expressed most eloquently in the US' founding documents. Waves surge back and forth, but the current of progress moves us towards a better world for all. That progress is grounded in the determined and often unpopular sacrifice of those who marched for civil rights of all forms, in all countries, often at great personal cost. This present wave will be shocking and difficult to overcome, but I also have no doubt that time will restore progressive values, as those ultimately create more productive and happier societies. We would be foolish to downplay the economic changes which have distressed large swathes of the Western world and which underpin the regressive movements of Trumpism and Brexit. Globalization has not proven a universal boon, and both left and right must work to find more effective approaches to global trade and financial integration. Nevertheless, complexity and interdependence are facts of modern existence, uncomfortable as they are. Isolationism will prove even more toxic to the people now disaffected with globalization. To those who have found themselves frustrated, and rejected integration, I wish to express empathy. Wherever I have traveled I have found people to want the same things--freedom to pursue their interests, freedom of expression and association, a desire for fairness in their treatment, and confidence that the future will improve their lot. But those common wishes don't translate to common circumstances. On any given day, life can be miserable for lots of us. Nevertheless, artificial boundaries offer no respite from those challenges. Neither personal security nor prospects will be improved by divisive and isolationist posturing. In history, this xenophobic rhetoric and behavior commonly result in poverty and shame.
The Linux and open-source communities are standing against Trump's immigration executive order. Hopefully, Shuttleworth is right, and eventually, the current presidential embrace of irrational fear and nativism will be lifted for a freer, more open and hopeful tomorrow.
Related Stories:Red light cameras are a hot topic across the Sunshine State, but rarely do they land someone in jail.
66-year-old Mark Schmidter was arrested Saturday in Apopka after an officer spotted him wearing a "Ban the Cams" sign around his neck and handing out flyers to drivers at the intersection of U.S. 441 and Park Avenue, according to the arrest report.
After asking Schmidter earlier to avoid the roadway, Officer Robert Campbell approached Schmidter for violating Florida's statute on obstructing public streets and protesting without a permit.
Because Schmidter hadn't been driving, he didn't have his license with him but he refused to give the officer his name after several requests, according to the arrest report.
Schmidter was placed under arrest, which caused other protesters across the street to "heckle" the arresting officer, the report read.
Once at the Apopka Police Department, Schmidter still refused to give his name, telling Campbell that he wanted legal counsel and asked to see the law that requires people to identify themselves during a police investigation.
"I then told him if he did not provide his name, I would book him as John Doe and that he will have to sit in jail for however long it takes for the jail to identify him," Campbell wrote in his report.
Schmidter eventually gave his name to a nurse at the Orange County Jail. He was charged with obstructing an officer without violence and was given a citation for obstructing public streets.
This stint in jail only lasted about 11 hours, but it wasn't Schmidters first time behind bars.
Schmidter made headlines in 2011 when he was found guilty of indirect criminal contempt for handing out pamphlets to potential jurors for the Casey Anthony trial and for violating free speech zones.
Schmidter served 104 days and was released in June. He's currently appealing his conviction.The Cincinnati Bengals were ecstatic when Carl Lawson fell to them in the fourth round during the 2017 NFL Draft. A pass rushing specialist from Auburn, Lawson encountered multiple injuries during his college tenure, which is the reason he dropped to the fourth. But he bounced back in 2016, racking up 9.5 sacks, leading the Tigers in that category.
Nonetheless, Lawson showed the team why it was right to be excited when he blew away coaches and players alike during OTAs. In fact, he was so impressive during OTAs that Cole Thompson of Draft Wire predicted Lawson to be the heaviest contributor in a talent-laden 2017 draft class for Cincinnati.
It’s often difficult for defensive ends to transition to standing linebackers at the next level. Lawson isn’t one of those cases, as he has blown everyone away at OTAs and mini camp so far. Comfortable in space, the former All-American has seen quality reps with both first and second-team defenses this offseason. If he’s able to prove he can play up to speed game situations, the Bengals could find their long-term strong side linebacker in a Day 3 pick.
That’s an impressive feat for such a late pick, especially one they’re asking to transition from his more natural position at defensive end into a hybrid stand-up linebacker. However, if all goes according to plan, coach Marvin Lewis may have finally found the hybrid linebacker/defensive end prospect he’s been searching for since he coached Peter Boulware for the Baltimore Ravens.
During Lewis’ tenure in Cincinnati, he tried to find this type of player through the draft and free agency, though never quite getting it right. He drafted David Pollack in 2005, who looked promising but had an unfortunate career-ending neck injury. Lewis nabbed Ahmad Brooks in 2006 during the supplemental draft, but he didn’t work out either due to multiple clashes with the law. (He instead he went to the 49ers and flourished. Go figure) Dontay Moch was drafted in 2011 with the hopes of filling that role, but we all know how he turned out. And finally, James Harrison somewhat filled that role when he played for the Bengals in 2013, but not quite to the extent fans had hoped.
Related Carl Lawson continues to get rave reviews during OTAs
So if everything works out with Lawson, Lewis can finally stop searching for the elusive pass rushing linebacker he’s wanted for so long. Here’s to hoping Lawson reaches his potential and flourishes with Cincinnati.Who are Two Guys in the Car in the Sonic Commercials?
Celebrity Q&A, Featured Article
https://americanprofile.com/articles/who-are-two-guys-in-the-car-in-the-sonic-commercials/
By Ken Beck
https://americanprofile.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/sonic-two-guys-commercial-150x150.jpg
Who are the two guys in the car in the Sonic commercials?
—John Daniel, Albuquerque, N.M.
Improv comedians T.J. Jagodowski and Peter Grosz have played the two quirky Sonic guys since 2002. New Yorker Grosz, 39, has appeared on TV’s “The Weather Man,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Veep.” He received two Emmy Awards for his writing on “The Colbert Report” and frequently may be heard on NPR’s “Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!” Jagodowski, 41, a native of Holyoke, Mass., has been an improvising on stage in Chicago for more than 15 years with the groups Second City, Improv Olympic and Annoyance. His movie credits include “Oz the Great and Powerful,” “Prison Break,” “The Ice Harvest” and “Stranger Than Fiction.”Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Now, he has written a science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025.
Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet. Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he's starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son's family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access--through nodes designed into smart clothes--and to see the digital context--through smart contact lenses.
With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination.
In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built-in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert's son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot.
As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re-trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected. This is science fiction at its very best, by a master storyteller at his peak.This Sept. 7, 2013 photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows a church in Maaloula village, northeast of the capital Damascus, Syria. (Photo: AP)
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Syrian rebels led by al-Qaida-linked fighters seized control of a predominantly Christian village northeast of Damascus, sweeping into the mountainside sanctuary in heavy fighting overnight and forcing hundreds of residents to flee, activists and locals said Sunday.
The battle over Maaloula, an ancient village that is home to two of the oldest surviving monasteries in Syria, has thrown a spotlight on the deep-seated fears that many of Syria's religious minorities harbor about the growing role of Islamic extremists on the rebel side in the civil war against President Bashar Assad's regime.
The prominence of al-Qaida-linked fighters has factored into the reluctance of Western powers to provide direct military support to the rebels. It has also figured in the debate underway in the U.S. Congress over whether to launch military strikes against Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack last month.
After days of clashes in and around Maaloula, rebels captured the village following fierce fighting late Saturday, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group. Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said the assault was led by Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida-affiliated group, as well as by the Qalamon Liberation Front.
He said around 1,500 rebels were inside Maaloula, while the army had the village surrounded.
Syria's state news agency provided a dramatically different account of the battle, saying the military reported "progress" in its offensive in Maaloula.
"The army continued its military operation against terrorist elements in Maaloula village and its vicinity, inflicting a heavy casualty in the ranks of the terrorists, including their leaders," the news agency said.
State-run TV reported that all churches in Maaloula were now safe and the army was chasing gunmen in the western hills.
But residents of Maaloula reached by telephone described fierce battles in the streets that forced them and other locals to flee as opposition fighters flooded the village.
One resident said the rebels — many of them wearing beards and shouting, "God is great!" — attacked Christian homes and churches shortly after seizing the village.
"They shot and killed people. I heard gunshots and then I saw three bodies lying in the middle of a street in the old quarters of the village," the resident said by telephone. "So many people fled the village for safety."
Now, he said, Maaloula "is a ghost town."
"Where is President Obama to see what befallen on us?" asked the man, who fled the village on Sunday. He declined to give his name out of fear for his safety.
Another resident who escaped earlier in the day said Assad's forces were deployed on the outskirts of the village, while gunmen inside refused to allow anybody in. He said that one of the churches, called Demyanos, had been torched and that gunmen stormed into two other churches and robbed them.
A third resident reached by phone said he saw militants forcing some Christian residents to convert to Islam.
"I saw the militants grabbing five villagers Wednesday and threatening them: 'Either you convert to Islam or you will be beheaded,'" he said.
The two other residents said they heard rumors about such conversions but did not see them. The reports could not be independently verified. All three residents spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
Situated about 40 miles (60 kilometers) northeast of Damascus, Maaloula had been firmly under the regime's grip despite sitting in the middle of rebel-held territory east and north of the capital.
The village was a major tourist attraction before the civil war. Some of its residents still speak a version of Aramaic, the language of biblical times believed to have been used by Jesus.
The attack highlights fears among Syrian Christians that the alternative to Assad's regime — which is made up mostly of Alawites, followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam — would not tolerate minority religions.
Such concerns have helped Assad retain the support of large chunks of Syria's minority communities, including Christians, Alawites, Druze and ethnic Kurds. Most of the rebels and their supporters are Sunni Muslims.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1fLTzpeTottenham have sacked Harry Redknapp after almost four years in charge.
Veteran manager Redknapp, who was heavily linked with the England job before the Football Association opted for Roy Hodgson, had denied speculation that he had resigned on Tuesday.
The 65-year-old had a year left on his contract but reportedly failed to agree a new deal with chairman Daniel Levy.
Analysis Redknapp still has a right to feel harshly done by after bringing back some of the most exciting times in White Hart Lane's recent history. Read McNulty's blog
"I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at Spurs and am proud of my achievements," Redknapp said on the Spurs website.
"I have had a fantastic four years with the club, at times the football has been breathtaking. I am sad to be leaving but wish to thank the players, staff and fans for their terrific support during my time there."
Everton manager David Moyes has been installed as one of the early favourites, along with Rafael Benitez, Roberto Martinez, Andre Villas-Boas and ex-Spurs striker Jurgen Klinsmann, currently coach of the United States.
Levy thanked Redknapp in a statement on the club's official website, which read: "This is not a decision the board and I have taken lightly. Harry arrived at the club at a time when his experience and approach was exactly what was needed.
"This decision in no way detracts from the excellent work Harry has done during his time with the Club and I should like to thank him for his achievements and contribution. Harry will always be welcome at the Lane."
Redknapp left Portsmouth for Tottenham, who were four points adrift at the bottom of the Premier League, in October 2008.
Media playback is not supported on this device The story of Redknapp's departure from Spurs
He guided Spurs to a first-ever Champions League campaign in 2010.
After finishing fourth last season, Tottenham only missed out on a repeat of that when Chelsea won the Champions League.
Redknapp was immediately installed as the favourite to replace Fabio Capello when the Italian resigned from the England job in February, only for the FA to move for Hodgson.
He admitted last week that he would have left Tottenham if he had been offered the national job.
When Capello left his post as England boss on 8 February, Spurs were third in the league, 10 points clear of a faltering Arsenal but they eventually finished a point behind the Gunners.
Levy is understood to have been left disappointed by Spurs' end-of-season slump, and is said to be in no rush to replace Redknapp with the club privately expressing a determination to conduct a "properly run process" to find their next manger.
It is understood no contact has been made with either with Everton or Moyes, who has been on holiday in the US with his family and is said to have been unaware of the overnight speculation linking him with the Tottenham job as he arrived back in the UK.
The 49-year-old Scot has a year remaining on his contract and met with Everton chairman Bill Kenwright at the end of the season to seek assurances that would persuade him to sign a contract extension. Five weeks on, Moyes' new contract remains unsigned.
One key factor could, however, be that Moyes does have the final say on all football matters at Goodison Park, something he would not have at Tottenham.
Meanwhile, sources close to Villas-Boas claim the former Chelsea manager is not being considered by Spurs.
Outgoing boss Redknapp has consistently rejected suggestions that Tottenham were affected by the speculation linking him with England.
Last week he urged Spurs to resolve his future, insisting that the uncertainty could cause problems in the Tottenham dressing room.
He said: "The simple situation is I've got a year left on my contract. It's up to Tottenham whether they want to extend that contract or not.
"If they don't extend it and I go into my last year, it's not an easy one when players know you've only got a year left.
"It's up to Tottenham. If they think I'm OK and I've done a decent job and deserve an extension, they'll give it to me."
But having been the longest-serving Tottenham manager since Terry Venables, whose reign ended in 1991, he has now left the club.
Redknapp spent most of his playing career with West Ham and Bournemouth and managed both |
venues that host gigs on a regular basis.
But what about the all-ages or 18-and-over crowd? We’ve seen the demise of such strongholds as Luigi’s Fun Garden in recent months. Do spots like Witch Room, The Colony, Midtown BarFly, Naked Lounge Downtown and Shine ensure that the younger locals will have plenty of options for years to come?
Witch Room co-owner Olivia Coelho takes offense at the idea that the scene is dead. “Who are you talking to? What scene? There is an entire range of ’scenes’ that are building, growing, flourishing,” she argues. “Does a scene have to be one type of music? The beauty of Witch Room is that there is a vacuum in Sacramento where bands are too tired of playing for free in someone’s basement, but they can’t yet book out Harlow’s or Assembly. We fill that vacuum.”
The city loves to hassle musicians and venue owners
What's the hardest thing about live music? “The rules,” says Liles.
She and other musicians like to point to the city’s rules for all-ages gigs. Namely, that these shows for concertgoers under 21 years old need to be done by 10 p.m.
The argument goes like this: Why kick young adults out of a show, where they’re staying out of trouble on a Friday night and doing something safe, and onto the streets, where they can get into all kinds of problems?
“But I wouldn’t say the city has it out for live music,” says Coelho, who’s worked with staff at City Hall and the police department for years as a venue owner in Sacramento. “I get the general feeling that they want us to exist, they realize that [music] makes the city more enticing and vibrant, and also brings in revenue to the coffers that is always desperately needed.”
The music scene is easy money
Running a music venue isn't like owning a coffee house or a bar.
Liles has a full-time job at B Street Theatre, along with Witch Room co-owner Liz Mahoney, who also does paint jobs on the side.
Garcia was a bartender for nearly 20 years, and her husband was in a touring band for almost a decade. Now, she likes to joke that she’s the owner, booking agent, bartender—and also the janitor, accountant and more at the new Blue Lamp.
And, of course, local bands aren’t making a living doing gigs. So why do they do this?
“Because it’s my passion,” Liles says. “I don’t care if I ended up now working 100 hours a week. I love it and will continue to try my best to bring music in a legit manner to the city I was born and raised in and plan on dying in.”
The new arena and downtown is going to blow the music scene's mind
Mayor Kevin Johnson and Co. don't refer to the Sacramento Kings arena as the “entertainment and sports complex” without reason. They argue that after years of top-notch acts skipping Sacramento, we'll be getting a taste of Beyoncé and Rolling Stones gigs.
I’m not here to debate that—the proof will be in the promoter’s pudding. But will the new arena usher in a more vibrant downtown music scene?
“I think the music scene in Sacramento is definitely changing and shifting back to a centralized downtown scene again like it was more then 10 years ago,” Rushing observes. Gone are the days of The Boardwalk ruling the young-kids scene. Or even smaller bar-venue type spots like Fire Escape Bar and Grill in Citrus Heights. “Things have shifted.”
So much so that Rushing and his partners are opening a new spot, a country-music bar and venue on J Street called Goldfield Trading Post, next month.
“I think that there will be lots of surprises in the market, especially with a new arena and tons of redevelopment,” he says. “I just hope that it doesn’t become oversaturated.”
Oversaturation is years away, if it ever comes to fruition. Even with another rumored forthcoming venue on the 700 block of K Street, just next to the future arena, and old-school spots such as Harlow’s Restaurant & Nightclub and Marilyn’s on K, the city’s showgoers seem plentiful, eager—and growing.The talented 3D printing channel Chaos Core Tech returns with a new design for its 10K subscriber special, this time from Batman V Superman.
It’s none other than the kryptonite spear. This version was modelled in Fusion 360 off of some stills from the film, and then printed on both the Da Vinci Pro 1.0 and a Creality CR-10.
The shaft of the spear is made up of smaller sections which slot together, which is then given extra rigidity with a steel rod through the middle. Some spray paint was used to add colour and acrylics for the highlights.
The kryptonite head is printed in a transparent green PLA, which is lit up by a cheap LED set from Amazon.
You can find the files to make your own kryptonian-killing spear over on Thingiverse. Make sure you watch the accompanying video too.
More Batman V Superman 3D prints can be found online, including Batman’s cowl, grenade launcher and grapple gun.The British perpetrated many insults upon the American people when they burned Washington in 1814, perhaps the worst to contemporary eyes being the destruction of the Library of Congress. Over 3,000 books went up in flames. But the disaster had the unintended consequence of making the national library better than ever. At his home Monticello in Virginia former President Thomas Jefferson read an account of the loss in the newspaper and was duly horrified:
“I learn from the newspapers that the vandalism of our enemy has triumphed at Washington over science as well as the arts, by the destruction of the public library with the noble edifice in which it was deposited.”
I first learned of Jefferson’s role in restocking the Library of Congress when I studied the history of American Libraries for my MLS. We must have glossed hastily over the subject because I was left with the impression that he donated his library to the nation out of magnanimous patriotism. In fact, as with many aspects of Jefferson’s life, he mixed noble idealism with self-interested pragmatism. He had debts to pay, so he took advantage of Britain’s brief triumph and offered to sell his personal library to Congress.
At the time Jefferson’s library was the largest in the New World, despite the fact that he lost much of it to a fire at his home Shadwell in 1770. In the intervening years he had continued his avid book collecting and could now offer 6,487 volumes to the Library of Congress. Then as now Congress had an anti-intellectual and anti-science bent for Jefferson’s offer sparked a partisan debate over the kind of books in his library. What use did Congress have for books in foreign languages or on obscure subjects? One Cyrus King argued that:
“Jefferson’s books would help disseminate his infidel philosophy and were good, bad, and indifferent … in languages which many can not read, and most ought not.”
Jefferson, ever mindful of his creditors, responded indignantly:
“There is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”
Jefferson’s library was indeed an eclectic mix of books, both philosophical and practical, reflecting his varied preoccupations and interests. They were arranged according to his own classification scheme inspired by Francis Bacon’s division of knowledge into Memory, Reason, and Imagination, which Jefferson renamed History, Philosophy, and Fine Arts. They included everything from the Greek and Roman classics, Cicero was a Jefferson favorite, to bee keeping, horticulture, child rearing, chess, and hawking. Architecture was well represented; Jefferson designed Monticello himself based on drawings by Palladio. Though the subjects of history and jurisprudence unsurprisingly took up the most shelf space, Jefferson was also interested in cutting edge technology. Among his 134 Technical Arts titles was Explanation of a steam engine and the method of applying it to propel a boat by James Rumsey.
As Cyrus King and his fellows perused Jefferson’s book list they would have found plenty to tut at, notably a still controversial copy of the Koran and novels in French. Quelle horreur! Yet we might agree with these 18th century congressmen that bawdy Restoration drama was unlikely to prove useful in their deliberations. Jefferson owned quite a collection of plays under his category Comedy including The Busie Body by Susanna Centlivre, The Provok’d Husband by Sir John Vanbrugh and The Careless Husband by Colley Cibber. Once I started browsing the list it was hard to tear myself away. I was heartened to find that the slave-owning Jefferson owned a copy of The history of the rise, progress, and accomplishment of the abolition of the African slave trade by the British parliament, an 1808 publication by Thomas Clarkson. But further down I found he also owned Slavery not forbidden by scripture, or a defense of the West Indian planters by Richard Nisbit, 1773. If a man can be known by his bookshelf, Jefferson’s famous ambivalence on the moral issue of his times is confirmed.
Despite their misgivings Congress eventually agreed to purchase Jefferson’s library for $23,950. They based the price on the measurement of the size of the books, rather as modern interior decorators sell books by the yard to clients wanting an instant library. Jefferson hired Joseph Milligan, a Georgetown book dealer, to oversee the packing and transportation of the books, which took over a month in the spring of 1815. The books were hauled away in their original bookcases by ten wagons. I wonder at Jefferson’s feelings as he watched the last wagon disappear down the mountain. In June of that year he wrote wistfully to John Adams:
“I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”
Perhaps he felt as bereft as my father must have when he sold some of his books for extra cash. I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother told me that when money was short my father packed a suitcase with books and took them to a book dealer who had a stall on Romford market. That explains why my search for an art book I absolutely knew I had seen before was so hopeless. It was a history of sculpture. In the prehistoric section I had seen the crude figure of a squatting woman with a baby emerging from her body. I was completely innocent of the facts of life at the time and turned hot and cold all over with shock. Later, when I wanted to confirm what I had seen, the book was nowhere to be found. I thought my father must have seen me looking at it and hidden it away. The truth was more painful. Like Jefferson my father was a lifelong collector of books on all subjects and passed this love on to his children.
In Washington on Christmas Eve 1851 another fire destroyed thousands of books, including two thirds of the Jefferson Collection. This time the British were innocent; a faulty chimney flue was blamed. What remains of the original collection can still be seen in a special room in the magnificent Italian Renaissance style Library of Congress building constructed in the late nineteenth century. For several decades now the Library has been scouring book dealers worldwide to acquire exact copies of the original books lost to the fire. On the shelves Jefferson’s books are marked with a green ribbon, replacement copies with a yellow ribbon. White boxes indicate the books that are yet to be found.
As for Jefferson, he continued to purchase books, building a new collection of several thousand by the time of his death in 1826. In 1829 they were sold at auction to pay his debts.
AdvertisementsJames Comey, the former FBI director, delivered a blistering, emotional opening statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee during his blockbuster Thursday hearing, taking aim at President Donald Trump in the process.
Comey, fired by Trump in early May, said the administration tried to "defame" him and the FBI by spreading "lies, plain and simple" after his departure.
The ousted FBI director bypassed reading his opening testimony that he authorized to be released Wednesday, instead opting to deliver a brief, punching statement.
"I understood that I could be fired by a president for any reason or for no reason at all," he said. "And on May the 9th, when I learned that I had been fired, I immediately came home as a private citizen. But then the explanations, the shifting explanations, confused me and increasingly concerned me."
The Trump administration initially pointed to Comey's handling of the investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as the reason for his dismissal. But Trump later said in an interview with NBC News' Lester Holt that Comey was fired in with the Russia investigation on his mind. Comey oversaw a bureau investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.
Comey said the "shifting explanations" confused him because Trump, in "multiple conversations," had "repeatedly" told him that he was "doing a great job" and "hoped I would stay on." The former FBI director added that Trump said he was told by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that Comey was "doing a great job" and "was extremely well-liked by the FBI workforce."
"So it confused me when I saw on television the president saying that he actually fired me because of the Russia investigation," Comey said. "And learned from the media that he was telling privately other parties that my firing had relieved great pressure on the Russia investigation."
That latter point was a note of a New York Times report saying Trump told Russian diplomats in an Oval Office meeting that Comey was a "nut job" and that his firing eased the pressure of the Russia investigation.
"I was also confused by the initial explanation that was offered publicly that I was fired because of the decisions I had made during the election year," he said. "That didn't make sense to me for a whole bunch fo reasons. including the time and all the water that had gone under the bridge since those har decisions had to be made. That didn't make any sense to me."
"And although the law required no reason at all to fire an FBI director, the administration then chose to defame me, and more importantly the FBI, by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader," he continued. "Those were lies, plain and simple. And I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them, and that the American people were told them."
Comey said the FBI will "be fine without me" after saying he "worked every day at the FBI to help make that great organization better."
"The FBI's mission will be relentlessly pursued by its people, and that mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States," he said. "I will miss being a part of that mission, but this organization and its mission will go on long beyond me and any particular administration."
He concluded his statement by offering a message to the American people and his former colleagues.
"I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest, the FBI is strong, and the FBI is an always will be independent," he said. "And now to my former colleagues if I may: I am so sorry that I didn't get the chance to say goodbye to you properly. It was the honor of my life to serve beside you, to be part of the FBI family, and I will miss it for the rest of my life. Thank you for standing watch, thank you for doing so much good for this country, do that good as long as ever you can."For the past three months, I’ve been writing a second blog under the nom de plume “Virginia Robinson,” soi-disant “red pill woman,” “Christian housewife” and “submissive.” In that time, I’ve made a three-figure sum hocking a halfwit erotica e-book, built a blog that gets about 500 hits a day from search engines alone, and assembled a nice coterie of beta orbiters.
Why am I telling you this now? Because if I have to write another article as “Virginia,” I’m going to vomit.
I trolled the manosphere, and I trolled it hard. This is my story.
Origin of a Trollblog
Virginia’s Secret Garden was the culmination of about a year’s worth of frustration and amusement at the more obnoxious quarters of the manosphere. Mainly, I was getting sick of both all the “red pill women” who were suddenly flooding in and doing a virtual striptease to the delight of every paper alpha jerking off in their blog’s comments. Don’t get me wrong; there are some smart and interesting chicks in this part of the Internet, and the mere presence of all these girls is proof that our ideas are gaining traction; women always side with the winners.
But after watching one girl detonate her marriage just so she could hook up with a manosphere blogger (and having my own share of “good girl” groupies), you’ll forgive me if I look askance at all these Janey-come-latelys.
If there was any single impetus for creating my troll persona, it was Kaitlyn Sploosh’s blog. No disrespect to Kaitlyn: I’m sure she’s a nice girl, and I know Jeremy in real life; he is a righteous dude. But watching all those chumps slobbering over her meandering articles and topless pics was too much for me to handle. It was time to take action.
I had a few other reasons for blogging under a female pen name. One was to exploit the massively underserved market for “red pill woman” books. Despite all their giggling and teasing, none of these girls seem the slightest bit interested in monetizing their blogs. I figured that if none of them wanted to make money, I’d gladly take all those ducats for myself.
I suspect that’s also a prime motivator for whoever’s running Return of Queens.
Additionally, I wanted to experiment with different writing styles. I was looking to improve my ability to write female characters and in a female voice; practice makes perfect. I also wanted to advance some ideas that I didn’t want to put under my real name. Even in the so-called “manosphere,” women can get away with saying and doing things that men can’t. When a man writes about how women crave being dominated, he’s called a monster; when a woman does it, she’s praised for being “honest.” Even if she’s attacked, she’s still given a measure of sympathy as a victim of Stockholm syndrome.
The hall was rented, the orchestra engaged. Now it was time to see if I could dance.
Birth of the Perfect Woman
I threw together Virginia’s Secret Garden over Christmas break, using my knowledge as a long-time online hustler (U C WAT I DID THAR?) to create what I thought was a bulletproof facade. Despite this, I still left two clues as to “Virginia’s” real identity. Her surname is derived from Journey to the End of the Night: in that book, Robinson was Ferdinand Bardamu’s nemesis. (“Virginia” was the name of an ex of mine.) More obviously, anyone who did a WHOIS lookup on VirginiasSecretGarden.com would see that it had the exact same IP address as MattForney.com. Finally, I all but gave the plot away during the live New Years’ Eve podcast I did with Davis Aurini and Remy Sheppard. I even re-Tweeted this on “Virginia’s” Twitter page in case people still didn’t get it.
The evidence was lying in plain sight.
A few people did know that “Virginia” wasn’t real:
Runsonmagic was the first to figure it out on his own; he intuited it based on his knowledge of the erotica industry.
Remy figured it out because I basically told him in that podcast.
Mitch Sturges and TempestTcup, who’d I deliberately linked to in “Virginia’s” first post in hopes of getting their attention, told me at the New Orleans meetup that they’d figured out the truth as well, though they still thought the whole thing was hilarious.
Kaitlyn and Jeremy Sploosh found out by accident: Kaitlyn emailed “Virginia” asking for a review copy of her book and I accidentally signed my reply with my real name.
Zampano I told because I was asking him for SEO advice.
Tom Wald I told just because.
There are a few other people who I either told or who I suspect found out on their own, but none of them come to mind right now.
As it turns out, my initial thesis was right: any woman, no matter how lackluster her writing ability, can get attention just by talking about sex. In the first month that Virginia’s Secret Garden was in operation, it rocketed up to around 800-1,000 hits a day due to a few articles going viral. The most notable articles include “My Husband the Rapist” as well as “Virginia’s” beginner’s guide to Christian Domestic Discipline (i.e. why you need to spank your wife to make God happy). I primed the pump by linking to “Virginia’s” articles on my Twitter account (a move that probably helped a few people figure out the truth) and seeding links to them on my blog, Roosh’s forum and other sites.
For comparison’s sake, Virginia’s Secret Garden got eighteen times the amount of traffic in its first month then MattForney.com got in its first month.
I also had other successes. Barely a week into the new year, a radio station in Calgary emailed “Virginia” offering to interview her for their morning show. Last month, I successfully trolled Donlak and Becky into talking about punishment spankings on their podcast. And of course, I was inundated with beta orbiters. I got at least two soppy emails a week from lovelorn guys praising “Virginia” for her femininity and wondering how they could get a wife like her. You can also see their groveling comments all over the blog.
Dear Sir or Madam, Will You Read My Book?
Crucial to my trolljob was my erotic story collection Daddy’s My Favorite Girl and Other Stories. As it turns out, I’m not the only person running this scam; as Runsonmagic told me, a large percentage of erotica is written by men using female pen names because women are only comfortable buying smut from other women. Not only that, the bar for erotica is so low that it’s buried in the ground. Several months back, I was hired on Fiverr to write a testimonial for an erotica collection; the writing was so bad that it would have failed a community college ESL class. Here’s an actual quote:
After a while, he lay on his back and asked me to suck his cock. His cock was huge. Some of my friends told me that black men usually had very big cocks and I did not know if that was true. However, it certainly was true in the case of the client lying naked with me in back that day. I put a condom on his cock and sucked it until he shot his load.
Wow, how riveting! Aren’t you feeling aroused?
Additionally, I had also read English Teacher X’s articles on writing erotica. I figured I could outdo him by making two tweaks. One, by establishing a brand in the form of the blog, I would be able to sell more consistently than if I were to just publish books on Amazon or wherever. Second, I would charge more than $.99 for my books (and subsequently write books that were long enough to justify higher prices).
With all this in mind, I decided to write my own smut collection. I should thank Arya Blue for inspiration; some of the links she posted on her Twitter page helped me come up with ideas. I knocked out eight stories over Christmas break, thematically linked around the “loss of innocence” and packaged them together in a single volume. After buying a custom cover, I was in business… or was I?
While Barnes & Noble and Smashwords accepted Daddy’s Favorite Girl as is, Amazon and the Kobo Store both rejected it because the title implied incest. Not wanting to pay for a redesign (which is also why the book says “Favourite” instead of “Favorite”), I hastily Photoshopped “My” onto the cover and re-uploaded it. Score!
Within the first month, I’d sold over $300 worth of copies.
Writing erotica is an enormously unglamorous enterprise. To be frank, it’s as fun as doing data entry. Unless you’re willing to go into taboo territory—say, describing a girl who gets banged in the ass so hard that her bladder bursts and she pisses herself—you’re basically just finding new synonyms for “fuck,” “dick” and “pussy.” While I like to think that my textual porn is above average (mainly because I know how to spell), it felt like an assembly-line production from beginning to end.
I have no clue how people can write erotica for fun.
Nonetheless, this assembly-line book got me a nice chunk of change and I was prepared to write sequels… until a month ago.
The Rise and Fall of Virginia Robinson
I had planned to keep Virginia’s Secret Garden going for at least a year, at which point the site would have accumulated enough SEO juice and credibility to become a source of passive income. My blueprint for the site was based off a short-lived trollblog I’d written a year ago called Schwyzered.com. After Hugo Schwyzer wrote that ridiculous Jezebel column on why straight guys should let their girlfriends peg them, I was planning to pull a Santorum and turn “schwyzer” into a synonym for getting fucked in the ass with a strap-on, all the while ridiculing male feminists in general. Unfortunately, a botched database update led to all my work being wiped out; lacking any backups, I gave up a week into the project.
The only remaining evidence of Schwyzered.com is the long-dormant Twitter page.
I’d been planning to write Schwyzered.com for at least a year and had sketched out a loose character arc for its intrepid author, Butt-Boy. His backstory is that he was supposed to be a proud male feminist and pegging enthusiast living in Portland, Oregon with his “pleasantly curvy” girlfriend Dick-Girl. After a series of expository posts in which he talked about his upbringing in the “intolerant” land of upstate New York and his molestation as a child, Butt-Boy would become so enamored of pegging that he’d stop having actual sex with Dick-Girl. Frustrated with her perverted simp of a boyfriend (though he would be too dense to figure it out), Dick-Girl would pressure Butt-Boy into a polyamorous relationship, in which it’s implied that she gets laid way more than him. Finally, their relationship would devolve into cuckoldry, Butt-Boy crying in the corner while watching the love of his life getting railed by strapping black bucks.
The story/blog would end with the two breaking up, Dick-Girl leaving Butt-Boy to peg himself with his collection of unwashed buttplugs while she ran off with a man who wasn’t a complete fag.
When I sat down to create Virginia’s Secret Garden, I wrote a similar character arc. Virginia Robinson was to be a young housewife living in the Midwest (Iowa specifically) who had salvaged her marriage by discovering both the Red Pill and Christian Domestic Discipline. While on the surface their relationship was perfect, I planned on sowing the seeds of doubt as time went on. For example, the fact that Virginia’s husband had been a player before marrying her. The fact that she was an “everything-but” virgin before tying the knot (i.e. one of those religious girls who will do blowjobs, dry humping, buttfucking, everything but vaginal intercourse). The fact that she had to prod her husband into becoming more of a man (if your wife has to badger you into being “alpha,” are you really alpha?).
And the obvious contradiction of a supposedly devout Christian writing about her sex life in graphic detail on the Internet.
I planned to end Virginia’s blogging career with a bang: her head flush with constant praise from her beta orbiters, she would announce that she was divorcing her husband with a flurry of hamsterbations. After surrendering sole custody of their newborn son to her husband, she would announce that she was moving to the big city (Chicago) to restart her career as a librarian and “find herself” (by sucking off every douchebag in Wrigleyville). The fallout from her “betrayal” would last for weeks.
So why am I giving away the ending now?
Simply put, writing Virginia’s Secret Garden is making me nauseous. The praise that “Virginia” gets from men, the confessions piling up in her inbox, the weak-ass attempts to win her over: all of it is unbearable. I thought that making fun of these people would be good for a few laughs; instead, I just feel like a jerk. As pathetic as some of these guys’ panegyrics to “Virginia” are, intentionally deceiving people for the purpose of mocking them is a lousy thing to do.
I felt like a teenage boy who steals his little sister’s diary just so he can read it aloud to his friends.
With that, I’m signing off Virginia’s Secret Garden for good. I’ve pulled “her” book from sale and I doubt I’ll be renewing the domain in December. While, as I said, the blog is getting a good amount of search traffic (despite being dormant for nearly two months), it’s not something I want to continue doing.
I Guess We Learned Not to Do it Again
Despite all this, I learned a couple of valuable lessons from writing Virginia’s Secret Garden.
The first is that women really do have it easier, even when blogging pseudonymously. Yes, we all know this to a certain extent, but having experienced it, I have actual proof. All you lady bloggers reading this article have no idea how good you have it. Even in the so-called “manosphere,” you can get twice the attention that men do even when you only work half as hard. I don’t get mad at this anymore, not after figuring out how to leverage it for my own gain.
If you can’t beat ’em, bilk ’em.
The second is that inventing an entirely new persona is far more difficult than it seems. This is why I laugh at people who accuse me or other bloggers of trolling and running sockpuppets. Reorienting your entire writing style in an attempt to fool people requires an enormous amount of work, enough so that only a clinical psychopath could pull it off. On average, I spent three times as long writing “Virginia’s” posts compared to my own, trying to affect a more girly, emotive writing style, and I still got found out because bits of my persona leaked out into her articles.
Sorry dorks, there really are that many of us evil “misogynists” out there. Feeling a little scared? You should be.
While this will be the last time I attempt a project on this scale, the lessons from writing Virginia’s Secret Garden will likely inform my future work. I’ve learned more about how to craft a convincing female voice and how to create profitable brands out of thin air, which will make my future writing that much better.
As the idiots say, it was a learning experience, one I won’t be repeating.
Read Next: “You’re Just a Troll”: The Manosphere vs. the Narcissistic Left
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WhatsAppWe all wish we were financially independent, but the sad truth in Australia today is that few of us ever get there. This is despite a ridiculous number of advantages:
Accounting for the purchasing power of an Australian dollar, we are, at the time of writing, the 8th best paid nation in the world.
We have an amazing and temperate climate
Little political risk
A nearly 30 year unbroken run without a recession
And yet according to a recent article in the Australian, an astounding 90% of retirees are reliant on the pension. Clearly a host of advantages aren’t enough, what’s really needed is a shift in mindset.
The most common thing I hear about reasons for not retiring early is that it is too hard, relies on having many millions of dollars, is for rich people or relies on winning the lottery. Complete crap.
Early retirement is absolutely achievable for working Australians by following these simple steps.
The important thing is to go through the steps, even in a rough way, because they are a cycle, not a linear process.
Step 1: Size your stash
Imagine you woke up tomorrow and discovered you could not work again. Maybe Australia breaks that 26 year streak and unemployment rises. Or maybe you can’t (or won’t) work for personal reasons. What would your early retirement look like?
Take all your assets (excluding Super) and add up their value. For me, that’s $229,282 AUD as of August 2017, and for many people it’s much less, or even zero. Record the size of your stash, we’ll come back to it later.
Now divide that by 1300 (based on the 4% Safe Withdraw Rule of thumb). For me, $176. This is the weekly pre-tax income you have to live on, to pay for absolutely everything you and any dependents you have.
The rough lifestyle you’d have can be found estimated here. I’ve recently graduated from hobo level retirement, meaning I could afford to put a roof over my head but very little else.
If you are happy with what this level of lifestyle, congratulations! Invest sensibly, and you can retire today.
If not, you should be a little anxious, because early retirement doens’t always come by choice. If you are at a level where you would be welfare dependent or homeless, building your assets isn’t just a dream, it’s an emergency.
Step 2: Aim low, and mind the gap
Our second step is to identify our retirement point, or what I call the point of indifference.
This is the minimum weekly income level (pre-tax) where we would be perfectly comfortable if we had to stop working. Note, this is NOT the level at which we would be able to live like a celebrity, it is a minimum level.
Take this number and multiply it by 1300. Finally, add the cost of real estate if you intend to live in owner occupied property. I would be ok with around $300 a week and living in property worth around $400,000. My point of indifference is around $300 * 1300 + $400,000 = $790,000. We’ll round things off to $800k.
Take away the size of your current stash, and this gives you your gap. For me, $800k minus $229,282 yields around a $570,000 gap to reach my point of indifference.
Watch out for the ego. The biggest problem I see with most people considering early retirement is a completely unreasonable and excessive image of what they “need” for retirement. While everyone is different, if your idea of comfort is spending thousands of dollars on a weekly basis, it is highly likely you are imagining prestige rather than enjoyment.
The biggest barrier to early retirement is setting up unrealistic and infeasible goals. If early retirement means you need to save $10 million and you earn $70,000 a year, it is clearly a pipe dream rather than a serious plan.
Step 3: Earn more with career growth and a side job
This is a huge topic in itself, and normally neglected by early retirement advocates. The more you earn, the faster you can retire. Earning more generally falls into three categories for wage / salary earners:
Get a payrise or promotion where you currently work. Nice when you can pull it off, and in my experience typically leads to 5 – 10% increases. I call this the slow lane.
Change employers. In today’s workplace, employers need particular skills yesterday, and are often willing to pay a premium to import them from other businesses. In my experience you can expect a 10% – 30% increase, and gain new skills that will lead to future promotions. Just watch out you don’t jump so often you get a reputation.
If you aren’t getting a promotion or employer change every three years at least, you are leaving significant money on the table. The longer you stay doing the same thing, the less employable you become for anything other than that one thing.
Get a side job. I won’t use the phrase “side hustle”. A hustle implies that what you are doing is illegal or shady, like selling counterfeit clothing on a street corner, or brewing moonshine in your bathtub. We’re not going to hustle, we’re going to make a little extra money doing something we enjoy anyway. I personally love cycling, so I deliver for Uber Eats when I have a couple of hours spare in the evening or on weekends. It’s easy and fun work. If you do decide to drive a car and love driving, I hear you can make more money driving for regular Uber. Better still, when our side businesses relate to something we do anyway, you can rack up some tax advantages. (e.g. my bike repairs & maintenance are partially a business expense). Other neat options include renting out spare rooms on AirBnB, selling & making craft on Etsy or doing odd jobs advertised on Gumtree or Airtasker. I would have difficulty holding down a second job with fixed hours due to my schedule.
Having a side job is so important and not just for the income. Firstly it’s fun. After 40 hours a week, work is often a chore, but getting on my bike and doing a few hours of deliveries here and there is exciting. Secondly, it builds humility. You only truly recognise the value of a dollar after you’ve sweated out a few hours at near minimum wage, and you have that much more appreciation for all the workers out there.
Once you’ve determined your post tax annual income, you can work out in a simplistic way how far you are from retirement. Exclude any investment earnings from this calculation for now.
After tax (and after numerous promotions, job changes and a bit of Ubering) I am fortunate enough to earn around $125,000 per year after tax.
Divide your gap ($570,000) by your after tax income ($125,000) to reach your zero expense years to retirement. For me this is $570,000 / $125,000 = 4.56 years to retirement if I spend zero dollars per year until then. Clearly unrealistic, but it represents a lower bound of working life.
It should also help you evalute whether your goals are realistic. If it is going to take 20+ years to retire even with saving 100% of your income, there’s a high likelihood you’ll never get there at all, unless you are in the very earliest stages of a career and making very low pay.
Step 4 |
that America does have adversaries in the world, and not all governments have virtuous motives. Some of them are watching what we do, seeking to outmaneuver us.
Trump wants to keep ISIS on its toes by not openly disclosing strategic planning when it comes to U.S. troops. Rightly so. But ISIS probably doesn’t have the intelligence capabilities to analyze troop movements, making the secrecy less necessary. That said, other countries are paying attention—like China, Russia, or Iran. When we broadcast where we’re sending our troops, we are also indicating to other countries where those troops are not going. This can endanger the efficacy of our strategies in other regions.
Whether or not this policy of non-disclosure will extend beyond Syria and Iraq remains to be seen, though it would be consistent with Trump’s previous comments. It’s also unclear whether Trump will ultimately strike the proper balance between secrecy and transparency, which is required in a democracy. He could well take this new policy too far. But, for now, the Trump administration’s understanding that the element of surprise is an important tactical tool in any conflict is a welcome change from the Obama era.Conservative media outlets and former Republican officials falsely accused President Barack Obama on Wednesday of instigating a closure of the U.S. embassy to the Vatican — when in fact the embassy is moving closer to Vatican City.
Think Progress reported that outlets like the Drudge Report and the Daily Caller accused Obama’s administration of “insulting” Catholics.
But in reality, the embassy’s move in 2015 will fulfill a plan developed during George W. Bush’s presidency, when a new building was acquired adjacent to the compound in Rome where the U.S. Embassy to Italy is located. A State Department official said in a statement that the move will save the U.S. $1.4 million a year in operational costs.
“There is no reduction in diplomatic staff, there’s no reduction in ambassadors, there’s no reduction in mission. There is simply a reduction in overhead,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
Talking Points Memo reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee set up a website criticizing the White House over the perceived closure.
“This is just the latest anti-religion pursuit of this Administration, a slap in the face to Catholic-Americans around the country that weakens America’s position as a global leader,” the webpage stated.
Despite this, former U.S. Ambassador James Nicholson was quoted as telling the National Catholic Reporter that the new facility turns the Vatican embassy “into a stepchild of the embassy to Italy.”
However, a Vatican official downplayed the potential impact, telling CNN it was “an exception, not the ideal, but not the end of the world.”
[Image via Agence France-Presse]"A very large section of the media has accepted'supari' for finishing off AAP," Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal declared on Sunday, employing Bollwood-esque language as he upped the ante in his battle against the fourth estate.
Having defined the threat, Kejriwal then went on to offer the antidote
"If you see that a particular channel is showing something factually incorrect, then you should raise the issue...There can be a public trial. There can be 8-10 spots in Delhi where we can collect a group of people and show the erroneous clip. That way we can start a 'janta ka trial'," he told the audience at the launch of jantakareporter.com.
He, thankfully, didn't have a plan yet on what he would do with the verdict of such a 'janta ka trial'.
It's not difficult to see why the Delhi chief minister is eager to take on the media.
Since coming to power in Delhi, his party seems to have made headlines more for its internal strife, than over any policy decisions it has made as the ruling outfit in the state.
And just as he ostensibly ended the Yogendra Yadav - Prashant Bhushan controversy by kicking them out of the party after a long drawn out, highly public and ugly struggle, a farmer hanged himself at an AAP rally organised to protest against the land bill.
This incident, which occurred during a rally that was ostensibly meant to signal the return of AAP to politics as usual, gave the central government the upper hand in the battle of words and put the party on the defensive as a police case was filed against it.
Kejriwal was barely able to take a breath, when the controversy regarding his law minister Narendra Tomar and his allegedly fake university degrees delivered more bad news.
As all good politicians, Kejriwal knows all too well, when the message is unwelcome, it is best to kill the messenger -- or rather, accuse the messenger of trying to kill you.
This is not the first time that Kejriwal has fallen back on media conspiracy theories to paint himself as a victim. This is what he said while launching a anti-corruption helpline in April:
"From the day our government was made, there was a big conspiracy being hatched against me and my government by trying to defame us and make us unsuccessful...Today, anyone starts abusing me it becomes breaking news. If someone has to get fame in 24 hours then start abusing me and TV camera will focus on them. People are writing blog and posting against me on Twitter. This is all part of a conspiracy,"
In another incident, Kejriwal had sparked controversy ahead of the general election by alleging that the media had taken money in exchange for favourable coverage of the BJP. And then there have been multiple conspiracy theories that have been the subject of the party's exposes in the run up to the general elections of 2014. Like the boy who cried wolf, Kejriwal has bandied about the C-word over and over again.
None of this is new. Political leaders are adept at detecting devious plots the moment they land in trouble. Conspiracy theories help deflect attention from the issue at hand, and buys time for damage control. But it's also the classic trapdoor for any politician to evade blame for pretty much anything.
Now,Kejriwal has constantly claimed that he's not your typical politician. And he is hardly in a typical situation.
There's no doubt, given his adversarial relationship with the central government, Kejriwal will struggle to pass any legislation through the Delhi Assembly. And with every misstep and stumble will come criticism - especially after the massive mandate he was given in the last assembly polls.
The media, as in the case of the farmer's hanging, is also bound to make errors, either consciously or unconsciously. A case in point is the Zee News report against Kumar Vishwas, which reportedly accused him of saying 'latak gaya' when farmer Gajendra Singh had hanged himself. The report was subsequently debunked by the party using footage from other media outlets.
But a constantly combative attitude to the media is not going to really help AAP either. Instead of adopting terms like'supari journalism' from political rival General (retired) VK Singh (who also infamously has led the charge against 'presstitutes'), Kejriwal would do well to learn how to take it on the chin better.
Unlike its bigger competitors, and whether they like it or not, the AAP will face more pressure and criticism as it goes through its five years given the promise with which it came to power. But this is just part and parcel of electoral politics in an era of 24X7 media coverage. Every other party knows the score. The UPA government came in for intense relentless criticism ahead of the general election, and mostly took it on the chin. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown a better ability to hold his tongue despite widespread criticism over statements made by his legislators and followers.
Kejriwal and the party are going to continue to face reports that may even be inaccurate but they can't scream and run into battle mode every time.
With the social media reach that the party has among its volunteers, it is difficult to see why the Delhi Chief Minister wants 'janta darbars' to judge the media, given that party leaders have already been using Twitter and Facebook to take on the press. Instead of inventing demons to divert attention from his troubles, the Delhi Chief Minister would do well to restrain himself. After all, where is the sense in fighting bad news by creating more of the same?
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect is a book by New York Times bestselling author Ronald Kessler, published on August 4, 2009, detailing the United States Secret Service involvement in protecting the president of the United States. The book is based on interviews with more than 100 current and former secret service agents.[1]
The book reveals that during Barack Obama's term the threats on the life of the president have increased by 400% compared to his predecessor. Also, Obama has not given up smoking according to the agents interviewed to the book – contrary to what the public has believed after Obama said not to be smoking in the White House at the beginning of his term.[2] The book also makes numerous other previously unpublicized allegations about the personal life of many 20th century United States presidents and their families, as related by their personal security personnel.
The book was described by USA Today as a "fascinating exposé... high-energy read... amusing, saucy, often disturbing anecdotes about the VIPs the Secret Service has protected and still protects... [accounts come] directly from current and retired agents (most identified by name, to Kessler's credit)... Balancing the sordid tales are the kinder stories of presidential humanity... [Kessler is a] respected journalist and former Washington Post reporter... an insightful and entertaining story."[14] Newsweek said of the book, "Kessler’s such a skilled storyteller, you almost forget this is dead-serious nonfiction... An afterword reveals new details about Kessler’s discovery of a third uninvited intruder during last year’s White House State Dinner... The behind-the-scenes anecdotes are delightful, but Kessler has a bigger point to make, one concerning why the under-appreciated Secret Service deserves better leadership."[15]
References [ edit ]
The book on Amazon
Publisher's pageOverview
Will a Palestinian state, no matter how sovereign, fulfill the Palestinian right to self-determination? In this policy brief, Al-Shabaka Policy Advisor Ali Abunimah reviews the evolution of the concept of self-determination, its applicability to the Palestinian people, and its gradual erosion since 1991. He argues not only that self-determination must return to the center of the Palestinian struggle; he also shows how the Palestinian exercise of this right can be compatible with eventual coexistence with Israeli Jews.
How the "peace process" eroded self-determination
In his 1974 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasir Arafat addressed "the roots of the Palestine question," declaring, "Its causes do not stem from any conflict between two religions or two nationalisms. Neither is it a border conflict between neighboring States. It is the cause of a people deprived of its homeland, dispersed and uprooted, and living mostly in exile and in refugee camps."
How ironic then that the "peace process" has reconceived the Palestine question precisely as little more than a border dispute between Israel and a putative Palestinian state. The "roots" were first reduced to a laconic list of "final status issues": borders, settlements, Jerusalem and refugees and then gradually buried. Lost has been any commitment to self-determination in principle or in practice.
Although they have rarely been formally discussed, it has long been conventional wisdom in peace process circles that the "final status" issues have already effectively been settled, largely according to Israel's requirements (we have heard ad nauseam the refrain "everyone knows what a final settlement will look like"). The United States and its hand-picked Palestinian leaders have accepted that large Israeli "settlement blocs" housing most of the settlers, will remain where they are in the West Bank.
The same formula has been adopted for Jerusalem, as per the so-called Clinton parameters: Israel would get "Jewish neighborhoods" and the Palestinian state would get "Arab neighborhoods." What this means in practice is that Israel would keep everything it illegally annexed and colonized since 1967, and Palestinians might get some form of self-rule in whatever is left – which is shrinking daily as Israel aggressively escalates its Judaization of eastern Jerusalem. While everything east of the 1967 line is divisible and "disputed," the same does not apply to the west. Palestinians would not be entitled, for example, to seek the return of their West Jerusalem neighborhoods ethnically cleansed and colonized by Israel in 1948. The "peace process" has actually created an incentive for Israel to accelerate its colonization of eastern Jerusalem because Israel knows that whatever is left uncolonized would become the new maximum ceiling of what the United States and other peace process sponsors would support as Palestinian demands.
Similarly, the refugee question has been virtually "settled" as well. Palestinian Authority-appointed chief negotiator Saeb Erekat revealed in a paper he circulated last December that Fatah leader and acting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had proposed to Israel that no more than 15,000 Palestinian refugees per year for ten years return to their original lands in what is now Israel. According to Erekat, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had countered with an offer of 1,000 refugees per year for a period of five years. In other words, the parties had already agreed to abrogate the fundamental rights of millions of Palestinian refugees, and were haggling only over the difference between 5,000 and 150,000, or less than three percent of the Palestinian refugees registered to receive services from UNRWA (the United Nations Works and Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).
So what is left to negotiate? Camille Mansour's policy brief accurately summarizes the outstanding issues – as seen from within the peace process – the final borders and attributes of sovereignty of the Palestinian state. Mansour doubts that negotiations in present circumstances would lead to a peace treaty in which "Palestinian sovereignty requirements could be attained."
Let us assume for the sake of argument that Israel were to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip that satisfies official Palestinian positions and provides for a state no more or less sovereign than any other. The question that then arises is: Does this sovereign state provide for the self-determination of the Palestinian people? Does it restore and guarantee their fundamental rights? As argued, below, the answer is a clear no. And this underscores the need to distinguish the limited goal of sovereignty from that of self-determination.
Sovereignty is exercised by a state through the fulfillment of commonly agreed functions: effective control of territory, borders and resources, and maintenance of political independence among others. Self-determination is exercised by a people legitimately inhabiting a given territory. Self-determination may result in a sovereign state, but it may not. It is fundamental to understand this difference and to recognize that self-determination remains at the heart of the Palestinian struggle.
Understanding the principle of self-determination
The principle of self-determination as it is understood today was enunciated by US President Woodrow Wilson toward the end of World War I. In Wilson's words, "the settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship" is to be made "upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not on the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for sake of its own exterior influence or mastery."
Put simply, territories and people could no longer be shifted around between empires and sovereigns like pieces on a chessboard. Any political arrangements – particularly in territories undergoing decolonization – had to enjoy the freely given consent of those who would have to live under them. The principle was no sooner enunciated than effectively violated in many cases after World War I, particularly in Palestine. However, it gained ground and was later enshrined in Article 1 of the United Nations Charter and other instruments, assuming particular importance in post-World War II decolonization.
Tomis Kapitan, a professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University, who has also previously taught at Birzeit University, provides an excellent summary of the history of the principle and its application. He argues persuasively that as conceived and practiced, the right belongs not to national groups qua national groups, but to the legitimate residents of any region whose status is unsettled (e.g. because it was previously colonized or under no sovereignty) or which is endangered because the current sovereign has persistently failed to protect, or has itself consistently violated the fundamental rights of the legitimate residents. The residents of regions meeting these criteria "have a right to determine their political future either by constituting themselves as an autonomous political unit, or by merging with another state, or by dissolving into smaller states."
Palestine, as Kapitan observes, "is the only territory placed under a League of Nations Mandate in which the established inhabitants were not granted this privilege." Instead, Great Britain, the mandatory power, agreed to partition the country over the unified opposition of the overwhelming indigenous Arab majority, and aided and abetted the build up of settler-colonial Zionist forces arriving from other parts of the world and which eventually carried out a violent takeover of much of the country. By endorsing partition with Resolution 181 of 1947, Arafat noted in his 1974 speech, "the [UN] General Assembly partitioned what it had no right to divide – an indivisible homeland" and thus contributed to the denial of the right of self-determination. No form of consultation through referendum or plebiscite or other democratic process was ever contemplated.
Today, Kapitan argues, the legitimate residents of historic Palestine include at least all Palestinians living in any part of the country, and all refugees outside the country. "Because expulsion does not remove one's right of residency, then these Palestinians also retain residency rights in those territories from which they were expelled." Thus, the Palestinian people collectively retain "an entitlement to being self-determining in that region [historic Palestine]… not qua Palestinians, but qua legitimate residents. That force was used against them has not erased the fact that they are, and are recognized as being, a legitimate unit entitled to participate in their own self determination."
The peace process that began with the 1991 Madrid Conference has gradually excluded the majority of Palestinians from having any role in determining the future of their country. In the eyes of peace process sponsors, the "Palestinian people" constitutes at most residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, though even Gaza now finds itself as marginalized as the Diaspora. It is this exclusion that has allowed a cause of decolonization and self-determination to be reduced to little more than a "border dispute."
Palestinian self-determination and the rights of Israeli Jews
How and on what terms could a Palestinian exercise of the right to self-determination throughout historic Palestine be compatible with eventual coexistence between Palestinians and Israeli Jews? The concept that a settler-colonial community is entitled, under specific conditions, to participate in self-determination, not as a distinct national group, but as legitimate residents, accords fully with international law and with precedents in other decolonizing countries including South Africa, Namibia, Northern Ireland and Mozambique.
Omar Barghouti, a leader in the Palestinian campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel, has argued strongly against recognizing Israeli Jews as forming a national community in Palestine. Barghouti warns that "[r]ecognizing national rights of Jewish settlers in Palestine cannot but imply accepting their right to self-determination." This would, he argues, contradict "the very letter, spirit and purpose of the universal principle of self-determination primarily as a means for ‘peoples under colonial or alien domination or foreign occupation,' to realize their rights." Such recognition, he warns, "may, at one extreme, lead to claims for secession or Jewish ‘national' sovereignty on part of the land of Palestine."
There can, Barghouti argues, be no "inherent or acquired Jewish right to self determination in Palestine that is equivalent, even morally symmetric, to the Palestinian right to self determination" as this would blur "the essential differences between the inalienable rights of the indigenous population and the acquired rights of the colonial-settler population."
Yet under Kapitan's formulation, Israeli Jews would be entitled to participate in self-determination not as a distinct national group, but to the extent that they are or become legitimate residents of the region. Barghouti spells out conditions under which colonial settlers can be accepted by the indigenous population as equal citizens living in a society "free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination." It would require the settler-colonial community, in this case Israeli Jews, to relinquish their colonial character and settler privileges, and accept "unmitigated equality," including the right of return and reparations for Palestinian refugees.
Inspired by the South African Freedom Charter and the 1998 Belfast Agreement, a group of intellectuals including Palestinians and Israelis set out similar principles in the 2007 One State Declaration:
The historic land of Palestine belongs to all who live in it and to those who were expelled or exiled from it since 1948, regardless of religion, ethnicity, national origin or current citizenship status;
Any system of government must be founded on the principle of equality in civil, political, social and cultural rights for all citizens. Power must be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all people in the diversity of their identities.
Finally, the notion that Israeli Jews are legitimate residents, provided they shed their colonial character and privileges, derives directly from the traditional conception of Palestinian self-determination. As Arafat put it in his 1974 UN speech, "when we speak of our common hopes for the Palestine of tomorrow we include in our perspective all Jews now living in Palestine who choose to live with us there in peace and without discrimination."
Focusing on self-determination
Placing self-determination back at the center of the Palestine question compels us to formulate a strategy that addresses the rights of all segments of the Palestinian community inside and outside historic Palestine, and which ensures their right to participate in the struggle for, and enjoy the fruits of, self-determination.
It requires setting out an agenda that addresses the three historic and current sources of injustice, the "roots" of the conflict. Such an agenda, as stated in the widely-endorsed 2005 Palestinian call for BDS, demands that Israel recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and uphold international law by:
(1) Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the [West Bank separation] Wall;
(2) Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and,
(3) Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.
It is clear that the limited goal of sovereignty that a West Bank-Gaza state would achieve addresses at best only the first point and cannot possibly meet the minimum requirements of Palestinian self-determination. Therefore, the formula "everyone knows" is the answer – a state on a fraction of Palestine for a fraction of the Palestinian people – would only perpetuate the denial of self-determination for the vast majority of Palestinians no matter how "sovereign" that state.
It is of course possible in principle for all three demands to be met within the context of a two-state solution, but this would still require Israel to forgo its Zionist character and become a state of all its citizens in which Jews enjoy all the same individual rights and rights to community life and cultural expression as everyone else but no more.
The 1998 Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland is an example of such a "two-state solution." It maintained two separate jurisdictions on the island of Ireland: Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but each is bound constitutionally, by treaty and under European law to be a state of all its citizens. Northern Ireland ceased to be, as it long was, "a Protestant state for a Protestant people." Indeed, the core of the peace process has been to dismantle state institutions, symbols, laws and practices that enshrined second-class citizenship for Irish nationalist Catholics and to replace them with strong mechanisms to redress the historic imbalance in terms of political and cultural power, access to jobs, housing and other resources.
At the same time, Northern Ireland has no inherent "right to exist" as a separate jurisdiction. If a simple majority of the people who live in it vote for a united Ireland, the Belfast Agreement binds the United Kingdom and Irish governments to give effect to this wish. Protestant unionists – descended from settlers who arrived from England and Scotland in the 17th Century – thus established no right to self-determination as a separate national group even after more than three hundred years.
After 62 years, Israel is no closer to establishing its legitimacy. Neither passage of time, nor declarations cajoled, bullied or bought out of successive leaders of the Palestinian national movement, have settled the questions of Israel's creation, or its demand to be recognized as a "Jewish state" with the right to discriminate against Palestinians. Palestinian claims for self-determination have not been extinguished, nor have Palestinians generally pursued them with any less vigor.
Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's demand that Palestinians must accept Israel's "right to exist as a Jewish state," is nothing if not an implicit recognition that without the active consent of the Palestinian people, the Zionist project can never enjoy legitimacy or stability. Palestinians have steadfastly resisted granting such recognition because to do so would negate their rights and indeed threaten their very existence.
Conclusion
There has never been a more opportune moment for Palestinians to put forward their demands for equality and justice in clear, principled and visionary terms fully rooted in international law, numerous precedents and accepted principles. The tenacious resistance on the ground – in all its legitimate forms – and the growing global BDS solidarity movement need to be complemented by a program worthy of such efforts and sacrifices. Our energy should be invested in developing support for such a program rather than worrying about the minutiae of moribund negotiations, which cannot result in the restoration of Palestinian rights.
Once the equality principle at the heart of the Palestinian struggle is recognized, it becomes easier and more logical to conceive of a solution involving a single, democratic state encompassing Israeli Jews and Palestinians as equal citizens, albeit with necessary mechanisms to protect collective cultural rights and other interests, and explicit, vigorous and appropriate mechanisms for decolonization, restitution and correcting entrenched social and economic injustices.
Whether in one or more states, the focus of Palestinian efforts should be on the fulfillment of the rights of all Palestinians and achieving equality rather than perpetual negotiations, which serve to undermine both.A former Labour aide who was forced to apologise for calling the Queen a "scrounger" has been appointed Jeremy Corbyn's new spokesman.
Matt Zarb-Cousin was an adviser to Hammersmith MP Andy Slaughter when he launched the tirade on Twitter in 2012.
He said: "Congratulations this morning to Queen Elizabeth II. 60 years of scrounging benefits off the taxpayer without being caught."
After the tweet sparked a row, Mr Zarb-Cousin said: "To clarify earlier comments about the Queen: it was a joke & wasn't meant to be taken literally. I didn't mean to cause offence & apologise.”
He left Mr Slaughter's office shortly afterwards and was most recently employed by the Campaign for Fairer Gambling.
It has now emerged that he was the successful candidate for the job of media spokesman for the Labour leader.
The £41,000-a-year post was advertised last month and caused confusion after it appeared to suggest that Mr Corbyn could be gone by the end of the year.
The job ad said the contract would last "for the period only that Jeremy Corbyn is the Leader of the Labour party, or until 31st December 2016, whichever is sooner". Officials later blamed an "administrative error".
One Labour MP said: "It seems like if you want to work in Corbyn's office, slagging off the Queen is an advantage."
A Labour party spokeswoman said: "We do not comment on staffing matters."
ANDREW FISHER
Meanwhile, it also emerged today that a controversial senior aide to Jeremy Corbyn is in line to take an executive role controlling all policy in the Labour leader's office.
Andrew Fisher, who was suspended from the party last year after it emerged he campaigned against Labour at the general election, is to become executive director of policy, according to The Times.
The move comes six months after Mr Fisher was suspended for backing a left-wing candidate against Labour's Emily Benn.
The influential aide caused further controversy last month when he said the steel crisis had “played very well” for Labour, despite thousands of jobs being at risk.
At the annual conference of the PCS union earlier this week, Mr Corbyn described Mr Fisher as a “fantastic person” who was “devastatingly good” at attacking the Conservatives.
One MP told PoliticsHome: "He was previously devastatingly effective at telling people not to vote Labour, now he's devastatingly effective at putting people off voting Labour.
"When Corbyn is finished screwing the Labour party, the likes of Fisher will go back to chaining themselves to trees."Florida will take on Tennessee this week in the SEC opener for both teams. Most people, myself included, expected Florida to be coming into this game 2-0 rather than 1-1 but the goal doesn’t change. The Gators are still the masters of their own destiny and if they take care of business this week and every Saturday, will still wind up in Atlanta representing the East in the SEC Championship game.
However, before the Gators can take on the Vols, I have to answer your questions in our weekly mailbag. Let’s dive in.
Q: How are the backup quarterbacks doing? Will Staver get any playing time this year? Anything about Chris Wilkes?
A: Max Staver is heading for a redshirt unless something catastrophic happens to both Driskel and Murphy this season. Also, don’t expect to see Wilkes at any point this season either. Florida is all-in on Jeff Driskel and Murphy is the backup.
Q: Who on Tennessee’s 2-deep depth chart would start for Florida?
A: On offense I think there are three players, all offensive linemen that would start for Florida, Antonio Richardson (LT), Zach Fulton (RG) and Ja’Wuan James (RT).
On defense, I think Daniel McCullers could play at nose tackle for Florida, and A.J. Johnson would start at linebacker for Florida.
Q: Do you detect any concern among the coaches or players about Jeff Driskel leading the offense?
A: The coaching staff would never come out and say that they have lost confidence in Driskel. Muschamp’s body language after the Miami game seemed like he was very disappointed in Driskel’s decision making. I think, for the most part, that the team is still behind Driskel. You have to remember this is a quarterback that led his team to 11 wins last season. He has coughed the ball up this year but he is putting up better passing numbers as a junior than he did last season as a sophomore.
Q: What freshmen are likely to see increased playing time?
A: Vernon Hargreaves isn’t listed as a starter on the two-deep, but he might as well be the starter. He’s listed as a backup at both cornerback spots as well as the backup nickel. With the amount of nickel and dime that Florida plays expect to see Hargreaves on the field as much as Loucheiz Purifoy or Marcus Roberson.
I would also expect to see Kelvin Taylor get more touches from here on out. Will Muschamp said as much on the SEC teleconference this past week.
“Very, very excited about some young guys coming along,” Muschamp said. “Kelvin Taylor is a guy that we’re going to continue to try to get involved in the offense.”
I expect that Kelvin will take a similar trajectory as Matt Jones did last season. Kelvin needed to realize that he’s not in high school anymore and that he needs to do more than just be good at carrying the ball. I’ve been told that the light is starting to turn on for Taylor and I wouldn’t be surprise to see him take over the No. 2 spot on the depth chart by the end of the season
Q: Given the injuries on the offensive line is the depth not of the quality that was forecast?
A: No, I think the depth that was talked about before the season began was real. Losing Chaz Green was a big hit to that and losing Jon Halapio for the first two games was an even bigger hit. Not having a completely healthy D.J. Humphries has been another obstacle to overcome.
I think the injuries show what kind of depth Florida has. These injuries last season or two seasons ago would have crippled the team. This year Florida has been able to stay afloat even after the injury bug hit the line hard.
Q: Will the offense ever develop a legitimate vertical passing game?
A: When the offensive line, quarterback and receivers get on the same page they will. They aren’t anywhere close to having one right now.
Q: Does Clay Burton as the starting tight end demonstrate Muschamp’s obsession with running the ball and de-emphasizing of the passing game?
A: I believe the coaching staff when they say that the best 11 will play. It’s no secret that the Gators want to run the football and if Burton is the best blocking tight end, he’ll continue to start. I still think Colin Thompson is the best tight end on the team but he hasn’t played a meaningful snap yet.
Q: Do you think we will begin to see an improvement from the offense?
A: Yes, but not in the way you are probably looking for. I think the turnovers and red zone offense will get better but you’re not going to see a vertical passing game like most fans want to see and I think Florida’s offense will continue to be boring.
When you win football games with a boring offense nobody complains (just kidding). But when you lose football games and the offense looks like it did against Miami there will be a loud crowd with pitchforks outside of your house demanding for change. Florida had a very boring offense in 2012 and they won 11 football games. I don’t think a complete overhaul is necessary but the Gators MUST stop turning the ball over.
Q: Since Halapio still has a weak pectoral muscle and we can assume he will not be able to get the same type of punch he had prior to the injury, is it realistic to expect improved play from the offensive line?
A: Yes. I have nothing against Kyle Koehne, he’s a very versatile player and has played a lot of roles for the Gators but Halapio at 75% is better than Koehne at 100%.Sevilla - Next Game Tip And Odds
Sevilla Season Away Results
Sevilla Form and Facts
Sevilla BTTS Statistics - Both teams score in 52% of games involving Sevilla (both teams scored in 13 out of 25 Sevilla games played this season). The average percentage of games in which both teams score for Spain Primera Liga is 51.44%
Sevilla Over/Under 2.5 Goals Statistics - There was over 2.5 goals in 48% of games involving Sevilla (12 out of 25 games this season involving Sevilla have finished with 3 or more goals). The average percentage of games where there were over 2.5 goals in Spain Primera Liga is 47%
Sevilla Corners Statistics - Games involving Sevilla average 10.84 corners in total. Sevilla home games average 10.83 corners, and Sevilla away games average 10.85 corners. The average number of corners in games in Spain Primera Liga this season is 9.74 (home team average corners won - 5.74, away team average corners won - 4.01).
Sevilla Half-Time Over/Under 0.5 Goals Statistics - There was over 0.5 goals at half-time in 60% of games involving Sevilla (15 out of 25 games this season involving Sevilla have had more than 0.5 goals at half-time). The average percentage of games where there were over 0.5 goals at half-time in Spain Primera Liga is 66%
Sevilla Half-Time Over/Under 1.5 Goals Statistics - There was over 1.5 goals at half-time in 32% of games involving Sevilla (8 out of 25 games this season involving Sevilla have had more than 1.5 goals at half-time). The average percentage of games where there were over 1.5 goals at half-time in Spain Primera Liga is 28%This vegan fast-casual chain is aiming to beat traditional fast food at its own game
Unless you live on the West Coast, you may not have heard of vegan fast-casual chain Veggie Grill. But, thanks to a recent $22 million dollar investment, that's about to change.
Veggie Grill opened its first restaurant in 2006 and, over the past decade, has added an additional 27 locations spread throughout California, Oregon and Washington State. Now, the 100 percent animal-product-free mini empire plans to double that number in the next four years, hopping on America's growing interest in sustainable eating and health-conscious quick bites, and, as Business Insider says, even daring to challenge McDonald's market domination.
And with the introduction of the game-changing meatless Beyond Meat burger, available today at all Veggie Grill spots, that lofty dream a might soon become a reality.
A photo posted by Veggie Grill (@veggiegrill) on Dec 14, 2016 at 11:23am PST
Beyond Meat is a California-based company that touts its signature product, the Beyond Burger, as "the world’s first plant-based burger that looks, cooks and tastes so much like fresh ground beef." It's the brainchild of founder and CEO Ethan Brown, and counts financial heavyweights like Bill Gates and Twitter's Biz Stone among its backers. Veggie Grill serves up the juicy plant-protein patty on a classic sesame bun and tops it with grilled onions, vegan American-style "cheese," tomato, iceberg lettuce and a house-made special sauce. So, yes, it's basically a Big Mac—minus all the delicious, artery-clogging goodness.
"Our goal is to bring the Beyond Burger—and the benefits of delicious, plant-based protein—to as many people as possible," Brown says in a press release. “Like Beyond Meat, Veggie Grill’s consumer base includes the large and growing market of flexitarian consumers who seek plant-based meats as a way to enjoy the traditional dishes they love without the downsides of animal protein.”
RELATED A New Crew of Chefs Are Redefining Vegetarian and Vegan Cooking »
"Today’s consumer is more mindful and aware that eating a diet made up primarily of veggies, fruits, grains and nuts is better for you |
in planning phases or state austerity measures. The main problem, he says, is a lack of decisiveness on the part of political leaders. "There's no master plan. There's no clear decision on a federal level where existing funds should go," he said.
Kooths has suggested supplementing budget resources with private investment, saying those who use infrastructure must be involved in financing matters much more than in the past.
PricewaterhouseCoopers has calculated that the logistics sector would have to double investments in transportation routes in order to keep up with future growth. The firm added that this would only be possible with the help of private investors. This is, however, still a sticking point with Germany's Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, as well as the state parliaments.
Let citizens have a say
Citizens have formed cooperatives to help finance projects
While politicians are still pondering the actual reasons that prevent infrastructure construction from going ahead, there seems to be agreement where civil protests are concerned: in future, they will no longer interfere with projects, or to a lesser degree.
"We must include citizens in construction planning at a much earlier stage and give them actual participation rights," Green Party parliamentarian Ingrid Hönlinger told DW.
In practice, citizens in several communities could form cooperatives to help finance, for instance, wind turbines. The communities would be making money from the turbines, so they wouldn't file suits, said Hönlinger.
This method worked in Frankfurt, where residents affected by aircraft noise at Germany's biggest airport were involved in the decision-making processes for expansion plans from the beginning. Planning and permits took longer than usual, but in the end, the project was realized.
Author: Wolfgang Dick / db
Editor: Martin KueblerPublic opinion in the US is changing, as a lot of Americans, especially those who supported Trump, see what somebody has called “Trump derangement syndrome beginning to merge with Putin derangement syndrome,” said former US diplomat Jim Jatras.
Earlier this week, the FBI confirmed it’s investigating alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign team and the Russian government to influence the outcome of the US presidential election.
READ MORE: Russia hearing: Kremlin says US intelligence committee is ‘confused’
Jim Jatras joined RT America’s Simone Del Rosario to discuss what is known about the investigation so far and how to interpret Americans’ changing attitudes towards Russia.
RT: Is it getting hotter for Russia or are things starting to cool off?
Read more
Jim Jatras: I think things are starting to cool off. Look, if you watch that House Intelligence Committee hearing, there were two completely different hearings going on. The Republicans wanted to know what was going on with the leaks – these are criminal activities and the FBI is supposed to investigate when they have evidence that a crime has been committed. And we know the crime was committed. The FBI refused to confirm they were investigating this. Meanwhile, they did confirm they are looking into collusion which, if it occurred, might be a crime, might not be a crime. They do not have evidence that a crime has taken place. So I think they are chasing something that very well may not be there. And I think people are starting to catch on to that.
RT: How do you see public opinion changing in the US?
JJ: I think something rather strange is going on, that a lot of Americans – especially those who did support Trump – see what somebody has called “Trump derangement syndrome beginning to merge with Putin derangement syndrome” – this whole fantastic conspiracy that Trump and Putin and Marine Le Pen and everybody else in the universe are in some kind of cahoots with each other. And as that falls apart, I think people are beginning to say – especially on the conservative side of the American political spectrum – “there’s nothing to this here. Maybe the stuff they are saying about Russia and about Putin is a bunch of lies too.”
READ MORE: House Intel chair orders Russia-Trump election hearings closed to public
RT: An annual poll by Gallup, which was released in February, showed that Americans’ unfavorability of Russia is 70 percent – that’s the highest since 1989. Around 28 percent of the respondents said their overall opinion about Russia was “favorable,” while two percent had no opinion. What do you make of those results?
JJ: It’s interesting to break down those results into parties and terms. The bulk of the negative opinion is on the left of the American political spectrum; on the right it’s much more balanced, it’s virtually 50/50. [It’s] even more positive towards Russia among younger conservatives. It’s hard to say what accounts for all of this. Part of this I think is skepticism about all this conspiracy blather about Trump, but I think part is that some people are starting to figure out that Russia is not communist any more, that in many respects it’s a very traditional, very conservative country. I can remember when I was at the State Department years and years ago, the only thing that my progressive colleagues liked about Russia was its progressive ideology. Ever since Russia dropped communism, they don’t like it any more. There is something going on in American opinion, and we don’t know fully what it is.
READ MORE: 'US Democrats and neocons need some anti-psychotic medication over Trump’
RT: Collusion allegations aside, have you seen the Trump administration act favorably toward Moscow?
JJ: No. But I think part of the reason is because there’s this whole witch-hunt mentality going on here and especially in the MSM. There has been no movement toward any kind of grand deal... On the other hand, what we have seen are some practical steps, military steps on the ground in Syria. And that’s really a good place to start with. General [Joseph] Dunford met with his Russian and Turkish counterparts earlier this month. It looks like the Russians and the Americans are beginning to coordinate airstrikes on Al-Qaeda in Idlib, Syria. So maybe there are some moves in that direction, especially as the offensive [against ISIS in Raqqa] builds up. But it’s being kept relatively quiet.The upcoming silver-screen remake of Stephen King’s It has generated a massive amount of attention. The new trailer floated up nearly 200 million views in its first 24 hours, smashing a world record for first-day trailer traffic previously held by Fate of the Furious.
But It hasn’t had the smoothest road to theaters. In 2015, True Detective director Cary Fukunaga walked away from the film, leaving Mamá director Andrés Muschietti to helm a new version of the script. That script, judging by remarks from a disgruntled Fukunaga, is likely a much more “conventional” version than the “experimental” film he wanted to make.
It’s ironic that the idea of “conventional” horror should have attached itself to such a notoriously unconventional horror novel. The difficulty of adapting King’s 1986 magnum opus for the screen means that until now, Hollywood hasn’t tried to top the 1990 Tim Curry miniseries, which is iconic for Curry’s performance but otherwise mediocre. And the newly released trailer from New Line and Warner Bros. for Muschetti’s film illustrates why adjusting King’s novel for cinema is so daunting.
Put simply, this trailer feels far more conventional than it should. And that’s worrisome.
Technically, this looks like It. It definitely doesn’t suggest an experimental take on It, but Muschetti appears to have painstakingly replicated many of the main elements of the King novel. It has the requisite scary clown and terrified bicycle-riding children’s ensemble.
So if it looks like It and floats like It, why doesn’t this trailer feel like It?
It isn’t a modern horror story
King’s It is all about slow dread — specifically the slow, lingering nightmares that frighten children. Pennywise’s power is that he feeds on the real fears of children, fears so primal that he’s able to return to torment them as adults decades later, continuing his generational cycle of violence. Over the course of It’s sprawling 1,500 pages, the group of children at the book’s center come of age by uniting to defeat It, but evolve into messed-up adults still haunted decades later by their memories. King unfolds their past and present simultaneously in a temporal juxtaposition to emphasize that present fear can only really be dealt with by reconciling with the past.
It doesn’t conform to typical genre norms; its horrors are derived from Lovecraftian weird fiction converging with the building terror of real-life child abductions and scary clown hoaxes that were rampant in the early ’80s when It was being written. King wasn’t writing a genre novel following the typical build-grab-release plot beats that work well in horror movie trailers; rather, he was creating a rich universe with a large cast of characters and a central evil at its core.
The miniseries dealt with this complexity by turning the narrative into a two-part series. The film adaptation has reportedly been cleaved into two separate movies — with the sequel relaying the adult half of the story after the kid’s half. (The trailer would seem to support this, as we don’t get a glimpse of the kids as adults.)
Suffice to say, King’s novel isn’t one that would seem to translate easily to modern horror, and there’s been plenty of skepticism that the onscreen adaptation could do It justice. Writing about the problems adapting It in the Guardian, Charles Graham-Dixon sums up this basic conflict:
New Line wants a film with jump scares and other typical multiplex horror cliches, but the terror of IT has nothing to do with cheap shocks. Many of the novel’s most unnerving passages do not take place at night in haunted houses, or have screaming cheerleaders chased by knife-wielding boogeymen... all these unforgettable moments take place during the day in a town so painstakingly evoked that we feel like citizens ourselves.
The trailer, then, gives us our first glimpse of how the new film might navigate these potential pitfalls.
It doesn’t really mesh with modern horror trailers
Modern horror movie trailers like this new one for It tend to mimic the structure of modern horror films, with the same suspenseful build-up and release — even if that’s not what the film is really like. In the case of It, it’s possible that Muschietti has embraced a more conventional approach to King’s story, one which, as Graham-Dixon fears, relies heavily on “cheap shocks.” But it’s also possible that the trailer’s editing is suggesting beats that aren’t in the actual movie.
For instance, what most people remember about It (apart from that orgy) is its most conventional scene of horror: the opening, when Georgie Denbrough meets Pennywise in a storm drain. This is the scene we get the biggest glimpse of in the trailer, but Georgie’s drawn-out, paralyzing fear as described in the novel — which jumps back and forth in time to great effect in this scene — isn’t present here. Rather than introducing Pennywise as an eerie anomaly, a glitch in the universe, the trailer presents the moment as a straightforward jump scare.
The trailer’s conventional beats continue for the next two minutes. The introduction of the film’s tagline (“What are you afraid of?”) over scenes of escalating horror feels especially off-kilter for those familiar with the story, because these scenes aren’t escalating — It’s narrative doesn’t build to the kind of natural climax that works well in a typical horror trailer.
The painstaking evocation of slow, creeping suburban dread that King achieved with It is completely antithetical to the tone and pacing of most modern horror movie marketing. Judging from this trailer, we can already see a discrepancy forming between expectations, marketing, and the film’s actual content.
This discordance between expectation and reality in horror trailers has a recent precedent in the polarizing but critically acclaimed The Witch. Even though The Witch doesn’t really have any of the typical horror beats, its trailer is edited to make it seem as though it does. Because it’s structured like a typical horror trailer, it built up an expectation among horror fans that The Witch would be a typical horror movie; when it wasn’t, the ensuing outcry from disappointed viewers prompted Uproxx’s Chris Eggertsen to note that the film’s marketing had “sold audiences on a movie they apparently didn't even want.”
In The Witch’s case, audiences got lucky, because The Witch is amazing. But with a beloved and iconic property like It, it will be even more crucial to judge the film by its content — not by the way that content is presented.
In a way, seeing through It’s trailer is a trick like seeing through It itself. You’ll need to look carefully at the onscreen images and dialogue, ignoring the way they’re being enhanced through editing and audio, to see how well the movie is recapturing your childhood terrors — and how faithful it’s being to King’s original vision.Anti-folk (sometimes antifolk or unfolk) is a music genre that arose in the 1980s in reaction to the insularity of the remnants of the 1960s folk music scene. The defining characteristics of anti-folk are difficult to identify, as they vary from one artist to the next. The music tends to sound raw or experimental with the intention to shock and protest.[1] It generally mocks perceived seriousness and pretension in the established mainstream music scene.[2] Artists of the anti-folk genre seem to observe the "rules" of music, but then deliberately break them.[citation needed]
History [ edit ]
In the United States [ edit ]
Anti-folk was introduced by artists who were unable to obtain gigs at established folk venues in Greenwich Village such as Folk City and The Speakeasy.[3] Soon after, singer-songwriter Lach started The Fort,[4] an after-hours club on NYC's Lower East Side.[5] The Fort's opening coincided with the New York Folk Festival, so Lach dubbed his event the New York Antifolk Festival.[5] Other early proponents of the movement included The Washington Squares, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Brenda Kahn, Paleface, Beck, Hamell on Trial, Michelle Shocked, Zane Campbell, and John S. Hall.[3][6] Roger Manning,[7] Kirk Kelly,[8] Block[9] were also early anti-folk artists.
The original Fort was shut down in 1985, and the club moved from location to location, including East Village bars Sophie's and Chameleon, before winding up in the back room of the SideWalk Cafe from 1993.[5] The New York Antifolk Festival continues to be held annually at the SideWalk Cafe (long outlasting the original Folk Festival).[10] Events have also taken place in the band shells in Tompkins Square Park and Central Park.[5] While living in San Francisco for a few years in the early 1990s, Lach helped establish a West Coast anti-folk movement at the Sacred Grounds Coffee House.[11]
In the United Kingdom [ edit ]
In the 2000s, the label was adopted in Britain, particularly in the London underground scene, with acts including David Cronenberg's Wife and The Bobby McGee's.[12] The UK anti-folk scene (largely centred in London and Brighton) has established its own identity, which has been written about in a six-page feature in the September 2007 issue of Plan B magazine.[13] Plan B held an anti-folk night at the Huw Stevens-curated Sŵn in Cardiff in November 2007. The beginnings of the UK anti-folk scene were in London, with shows promoted by Sergeant Buzfuz that, although not billed as anti-folk, featured many U.S. and UK anti-folk singer/songwriters. In 2004, the lo-fi musician Filthy Pedro started seasonal anti-folk festivals, which he promoted with Tom Mayne of the band David Cronenberg's Wife.
The Brighton anti-folk scene was quick to follow[citation needed], curated primarily by Mertle. Other key figures within the UK anti-folk community include Dan Treacy of Television Personalities, Jack Hayter, Milk Kan, Extradition Order, Benjamin Shaw, Lucy Joplin, Candythief, JJ Crash, Larry Pickleman and Paul Hawkins. Emmy the Great is loosely connected with the English anti-folk scene, having played at Sergeant Buzfuz's nights in 2003 as part of the duo Contraband. Kate Nash started her music career playing anti-folk-style shows, including a concert promoted by Larry Pickleman and Mertle in Brighton. Laura Marling is sometimes linked with anti-folk, although this is less to do with the UK movement and more to do with her perceived musical style.
Anti-folk-influenced acts such as The Bobby McGee's picked up regular national radio airplay and media coverage. In August 2006, Time Out called anti-folk "One of London's hottest subcultures". The first anti-folk UK compilation album, Up the Anti, was released in 2007, mastered by Mark Kramer. The Welsh anti-folk artist Mr Duke has gained some popularity in Wales.
The anti-folk scene continues today, although in recent years it has found fewer venues in London (with the closure of 12 Bar and Buffalo Bar):[14][better source needed] Nambucca hosted the 2016 Anti-Folk Fest, with newer acts such as Warmduscher, Goat Girl and Black Kes (who were not part of the anti-folk scene as was in 2008-2012), as well as (more or less) established AF acts such as David Cronenberg's Wife.
See also [ edit ]You might notice that the story of Paul Revere that you've always heard happens to rhyme. If you ever took a creative writing class, or actually listened to the lyrics of a Kanye West song, you might have noticed that the truth really doesn't give a shit how well it rhymes.
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But it's still somewhat surprising to learn that Paul Revere got sole credit for the ride because "Revere" rhymed with "hear." We wish we were joking. Longfellow was not out to write accurate history, in fact he gets many other facts seriously wrong in his poem. What he wanted was a poem that reminded those who read it of the glorious beginnings of the United States. Why was that so important? Because he wrote it in January 1861, and the country was about to be torn in half. He wanted to inspire New Englanders in the face of the looming Civil War.
This would hurt way more if I didn't know the story of Paul Revere.
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The story starts to fall apart when you look at the facts. First of all, this was a covert operation. Screaming the "British are coming" at the top of your lungs when up to 20 percent of the population are loyal to the crown is a good way to get busted. He did quietly warn other men, but whispering your warning is a lot slower than shouting it from horseback. To get the drop on the British, they need an estimated 40 people to take part in "Revere's" ride. The only two other names we know are William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, and the latter only took part because they ran into him "returning from a lady friend's house at the awkward hour of 1 a.m."
Another thing that slows you down when warning of a potential invasion is stopping, and having a beer. Yep, the three men took a break from starting America by stopping at a pub, where some British sentries decided to investigate these patriotic ne'er-do-wells. Dawes and Prescott led the sentries on two exciting chases through the woods, both managing to evade capture and reach the towns they were supposed to warn. Revere? Well, he gave up without a fight at the pub. Yes, of the 40 people involved in the operation, we know about three, and Revere was the least heroic of the group. But because his name is easier to rhyme, we celebrate his achievements instead of the guys who actually completed their rides.Members of a county Republican Party in Idaho are to take up a measure on Tuesday evening that would declare the state a Christian one to bolster what the proposal calls the “Judeo-Christian bedrock of the founding of the United States.”
The resolution to be voted on by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee is non-binding, meaning it does not have the effect of laws or rules.
The proposal seeks that Idaho be “formally and specifically declared a Christian state,” guided by a Judeo-Christian faith reflected in the U.S. Declaration of Independence where all authority and power is attributed to God, the resolution reads.
The measure argues that the Christian faith is under “strident attack” in the United States, and cites as evidence the absence of Christian traditions and symbols in public institutions such as schools.
The issue has sparked debate within the Republican stronghold of northern Idaho, once known for harboring leaders of the so-called Christian identity or white supremacist movement such as the late Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler.
Supporters say the measure echoes the Christian principles espoused by early U.S. presidents such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and that it has added significance at a time when Christians are subject to persecution in countries such as Syria where it is not the dominant religion.
“We’re a Christian community in a Christian state and the Republican Party is a Christian Party,” said Jeff Tyler, a member of the committee and backer of the draft resolution.
“It’s important that Christians stand up and be unashamed to say they’re Christians.”
Other committee members said they opposed the proposal, but that it placed them in a difficult position because if they voted against it they risked being unjustly labeled as anti-Christian.
Bjorn Handeen, a committee member who described himself as a Republican with libertarian leanings, said he is opposed to any document that puts the government in charge of defining Christianity.
He said the resolution was pushed by a small group within the committee that is bent on creating division among its about 70 members.
“Ultimately, I’m not in favor of dividing us by religion; I’m in favor of uniting us by freedom,” Handeen said.
If approved, the resolution would be submitted to the state Republican Party for a vote by its members.
Idaho has long been a Republican bastion, with party members holding the majority of state offices.
(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Mohammad Zargham)Actor Michael B. Jordan says it isn't easy sharing names with the famous basketball player. ABC / Jimmy Kimmel Live screencap Last night, Michael Jordan appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live."
No, not THAT Michael Jordan.
Actor Michael B. Jordan.
You probably recognize the 26-year-old actor from his roles on "The Wire," "Friday Night Lights," and last year's superhero flick "Chronicle."
He went on "Kimmel" to discuss his highly-acclaimed new film out this weekend, "Fruitvale Station."
However, when you have a name one initial away from, who Kimmel dubbed, "the greatest basketball player who ever lived," it's easy for the conversation to shift to something Jordan has heard his entire life.
When Kimmel asked him whether its a nuisance sharing the same name with the basketball star, the actor addressed the difficulty of what others with similar celebrity monikers most likely experience.
"A little bit," says Jordan. "It gets annoying."
Jordan recounted how it's not so easy ordering something as simple as pizza because it will come over as a prank.
"I actually went down there one time, slammed my I.D. on the counter." said Jordan. "He gave me two free pizzas. It worked out."
The confusion doesn't stop there. Jordan's father, Michael A. Jordan, shares the same name, too.
"He didn't really realize what he was going to put me through the first 26 years of my life," the actor added.
Soon, no one will be confusing the rising star with the NBA's Jordan.
"Fruitvale Station," inspired by the true events surrounding the death of a 22-year-old who was gunned down by a cop in 2008, won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Jordan has also been rumored as a frontrunner in a "Fantastic 4" reboot.
Check out the interview below.Who might Michelle Obama have been thinking about when she said "words matter" and "you don't tweet every thought"?
The audience gathered for the Obama Foundation's inaugural summit exploded in laughter and applause, but the former first lady demurred: "I'm not talking about anybody in particular," she said.
She never mentioned President Trump's name, but she was clearly warming to the subject.
"You're the first lady or the president, the commander in chief, and you have that voice," she said. "You have that power — what comes with that is the responsibility to know that every word you utter has consequences."
"At this level, you see how much words matter," said added. "You can't just slash and burn up folks because you think you are right."
The former first lady was freer with her own words than she was during her eight years in the White House as she shared her reflections on everything from speaking out against sexual harassment to her parenting philosophies. She sat on stage for an hour for a relaxed and wandering conversation with her friend Elizabeth Alexander, a poet who has known the Obamas for more than 20 years.
In response to a question about how she found her voice, Obama said her parents had always solicited her opinion and encouraged her to speak her mind.
She quickly segued, however, from her childhood reminiscences to a topic that is very much in today's news.
"When we think about women in particular, we ask them to speak up. We ask them to speak their mind. We ask them to just say no, to speak out against sexual harassment, to speak out against inequality," Obama said. "But if we don't teach our young girls to speak at an early age, that doesn't just happen. It takes practice to have a voice. You have to use it again and again and again before you can say, 'No' or 'Stop. Don't touch me.' "
The former first lady has maintained a light schedule since leaving the White House. Her time is spent working on her memoir, planning for the Obama foundation and library, and traveling for paid speaking gigs.
She is said to relish the return to a private life, and focused her early months on getting her family settled in their new home and, then moving her elder daughter, Malia, to Cambridge, where she is a freshman at Harvard.
She has rarely weighed in on politics, though at one recent speaking engagement, talking with feminist author Roxane Gay at a business conference, Mrs. Obama said that "any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice."
She and Alexander, who read a poem at Barack Obama's first inauguration, didn't broach questions about electoral politics. Instead, Michelle Obama seemed deeply nostalgic.
With her mother Marian Robinson in the audience, Obama turned nostalgic and reflected on the way her childhood on Chicago's South Side shaped her.
Obama also talked about the importance she had placed on maintaining her "circle of girlfriends" during her White House years and raising their children.
"I had to plan my time with my girlfriends that kept me grounded," she said. "Women, we do it better than men."
To the male members of the audience, she added: "Y'all should get you some friends. Get you some friends and talk to each other."
Historian Burton Kaufman, who recently paid $95 to see Michelle Obama in an onstage interview with David Letterman, said that her remarks had a practiced rhythm to them and that she is talking more about the topics she loves.
"She went out of the way to make it clear that they want to stay away from politics. They don't want to be involved on a day-to-day level," said Kaufman, who is writing a biography of Barack Obama. "They are putting a lot of time into building future leaders."
Questions about whether Michelle Obama will run for office continue to percolate through the political world. She did not address the topic Wednesday.
"I would be the most surprised person on the planet," said David Axlerod, who was her husband's chief political strategist. "She was a conscript to politics. She wasn't someone who rushed to it or who loves it."
Hannah Wiley contributed to this report.× New Illinois law designed to teach youth how to handle police interactions
CHICAGO (AP) — A new Illinois law aims to teach drivers how to act if they’re stopped by a police officer.
The Chicago Tribune reports that the measure comes amid increased tension in Chicago and across the nation over how traffic stops can go terribly wrong and turn deadly in the worst cases.
The law targets the youngest and newest drivers, mandating that all driver’s education classes include a section on what to do during a traffic stop.
The bill went quickly through the state Legislature and was signed into law by Gov. Bruce Rauner last month.
Democratic state Sen. Julie Morrison of Deerfield, who was a co-sponsor of the bill, says it’s more about commonsense than innovation. She says she hopes it protects both the driver and the office from the incident escalating.Editor’s note: I wrote this article a long time ago (August). I’ve never been closer to pulling an article off my posting schedule (I’m writing this within three hours of posting time). In some posts, like this one, I try to challenge your thinking without necessarily dictating an action for you. I’m trying to challenge traditional thinking in light of the gospel. If your thinking was stimulated, then this article is a success.
The reason I feel increasingly uncomfortable with this post is because if people (without consideration of their specific situation) followed the tenants in this post it could be very detrimental to their personal financial situation. What this post may mean to you is determined by your debt level, how long you’ve been investing, and how much you have saved. Providing for your family is necessary so that you do not become a burden to the church. If you have not saved enough for retirement it is quite acceptable to save more than you give.
Think about this post as a challenge to the status quo, not an action I’m advising every Christian to go out and follow. Ultimately I decided to publish the post because I’m trusting my readers are mature enough to get new information, evaluate it, and apply it to their own lives in a way that honors God.
In a two part article I asked the question Is it Biblical to Save for Retirement. I agree with the fundamentals of that article. It is appropriate for Christians to save. It is a blessing to both families and churches when we save. However, I am reconsidering the question how much should I contributed towards retirement.
The probing question is –
Should I be saving more for my future retirement than I am currently contributing to God’s present work of the Kingdom of God?
photo by Mykl Roventine
How we frame a question gets us halfway to the answer so I want to point out the six words I intentionally put in comparison:
Group #1: My vs God’s
Group #2: Future vs. Present
Group #3: Retirement vs. Kingdom of God
My Vs. God’s
In some ways Group #1 could misrepresent reality. It depends on your understanding of retirement. Are you saving for yourself as a means to an end, or are you saving for yourself in order to:
Provide for your family Remove yourself as a burden to the church Help others in need.
Depending on your theological understanding of retirement, it may or may not ultimately be for yourself.
Future Vs. Present
Group #2 is the most challenging word group for me. One of the key differences between the wealthy and the poor is their view of money. For the poor, money is for today because money is a tool of survival. For the rich, money is a resource used to be invested and grown. Thus, money is for tomorrow. As Christians we know our future is unknown. James writes:
Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:14-15 NIV)
Granted, James is not talking about ignoring tomorrow, but he does want to acknowledge that ‘tomorrow’ is God’s decision – not our own.
There is an immediacy to the presentation of the gospel.
He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. (Luke 10:2 NIV)
Said another way, the harvest is ready. Fruit and agricultural harvesting is time sensitive; if you delay, the fruit will be lost. There is much evangelistic work to be done today and my disproportionate focus on tomorrow may have negative implications for today.
There is an immediacy to the issues of poverty.
Bread for the World reports:
1.02 billion people across the world are hungry. Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes–one child every five seconds.
Why focus sole on my tomorrow when the ‘today’ of so many has an immediate need?
Retirement vs. Kingdom of God
Again, I’m putting these two items against each other so the differences are highlighted. As I said regarding group #1, these two things are not necessarily pitted against each other depending on your mindset as to the reason and function of retirements savings. In fact, I would say the Kingdom of God can be advanced by Christians who are responsible with their finances. In fact, if I misappropriate my funds today I may hinder the work of the Kingdom of God by becoming a burden to the church.
What is the solution?
After dealing honestly with this issue my conclusion (a personal decision for myself) is that I cannot continue to contribute more to tomorrow’s retirement than I do to today’s work in the kingdom of God.
Coming into 2010 my wife and I made some adjustments to what I thought was a lack of balance between our giving and my saving for retirement. I felt like at the least those two amounts should be equal. So we now give as much as we save for retirement. This was not a decision made by guilt or legalism. But, because of our relationship with God we felt compelled by the love of Christ to make a change.
Most financial advisors suggest we save 10 – 15% of our income towards retirement. Many Christians give 10% while ministers and others suggest we give even more. You’ll need to find your right saving balance.
Lord willing, God will open the door in the future that our giving will far exceed my saving, but as for today in my financial situation I want to ensure that at the very least I am not giving more to retirement then I am to God’s Kingdom Work.
Editor’s note: I wrote this article a long time ago (August). However, I didn’t realize that it would be posted so closely to other “counter cultural” posts. In many posts, like this one, I try to challenge our thinking without dictating action for you. I figure there are a lot of sources out there that will give you the best financial advice only. I’m trying to balance that by challenging traditional thinking in light of the gospel. If your thinking was stimulated, then this article is a success.
Anyone else have thoughts about the relationship between retirement dollars and giving dollars? Any reflections?President Donald Trump has now been in office for 50 days, and his administration has moved swiftly to get America back on the right track.
Since taking office 20th January, Trump has signed 16 executive orders, met with an array of foreign leaders, delivered an unforgettable speech to congress, and made a meaningful impact on restoring the nation to prosperity. Here we look at what Trump has achieved in his first 50 days in office.
National Security
To stop the inflow of unvetted individuals from terrorist states that was taking place under Barack Obama’s refugee resettlement program, Trump signed an executive order suspending Obama’s refugee program and introducing a temporary travel ban from seven terror-prone countries. However, following multiple lawsuits, the U.S. Appeals Court upheld a ruling overturning the ban.
Our legal system is broken! "77% of refugees allowed into U.S. since travel reprieve hail from seven suspect countries." (WT) SO DANGEROUS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 11, 2017
Since that ruling, Trump has signed a revised executive order that blocks the arrival of most travelers from six terror-prone countries for 90 days, and freezes the inflow of refugees from any country for the next 120 days. Iraq has now been dropped from the list of countries and green card holders remain exempt. However, four Democrat-led states are now reopening legal action against the latest order.
Immigration
Trump’s trademark project of building a wall along the Mexican border, which will prevent the flow of illegal immigration into America, is already taking shape. In his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to “secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border, monitored and supported by adequate personnel so as to prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism.”
Although construction of the wall has not yet begun, Trump has begun formulating plans for its construction, adding that the design phase is already in place. Trump’s Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), retired Marine General John Kelly, claimed that the wall will be built in under two years.
Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
However, the greatest impact so far has come from the Trump administration’s guidance to Immigration Enforcement Agencies for stricter enforcement, directing them to hire thousands of new agents to apprehend illegal immigrants, and if necessary, send them back to their country of origin. Illegal border crossings have fallen by 40% in the months of January and February.
Jobs and the economy
Since his election in November, Trump has prioritized bringing jobs back to America, especially those from companies planning to outsource overseas. Having met with a range of business leaders, he has received assurances from companies such as Ford and Carrier Corporations to cancel their overseas plans and instead invest in America. Leading technology firms such as Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and Intel have also pledged to create thousands of new jobs in America over the coming years.
https://twitter.com/foxnation/status/839645962796683265
Reducing levels of regulation has also been a priority for the Trump administration. Following a year of record regulation, Trump has signed two executive orders attempting to slash regulation. His initial order stipulates that for every new regulation created, two other regulations must be cut. His second order will introduce “regulation watchdogs,” which will require federal agencies to dissolve their power as rule makers.
Trump has also promised significant tax breaks for both individuals and companies, although Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week suggested the necessary reform might not be implemented |
is essential to creating a meaningful relationship with them. Athletes are eSport's greatest asset; their connection to the fan-base is what makes or breaks tournaments and teams.
More of this, please.
Hell, I have never played Magic: The Gathering, but while watching a tournament with my brother I rooted for a player because of a relationship I built with him throughout the course of an interview. On a mainstream level, the Olympics thrive on a connection between the viewer and athletes. Weeks before the Olympics begin advertisements and news stories are released featuring Olympians; eSports needs something like this, too. Tournaments and, to a greater extent, teams should be releasing content on their competitors for a few weeks leading up to, during, and shortly after an event. Through interviews, recaps of their play at previous tournaments, and projections of players' paths through current endeavors, viewers can connect with players and, in turn, events on a more meaningful and lasting level. Even something as small as a
Ads like this hype athletes before tournaments; this image promotes Michael Phelps just as much as it does Head and Shoulders. eSports athletes need more hype.
But where do we fit this in? Interviews posted to youtube don't get too much traction and most shows outside of
As much as I like cheerfuls, I would prefer to see some shoulder content.
GSL is ahead of the curve in regard to shoulder content, largely due to the extended format of the league. GSL's
Hype; profiles; recaps: needed.
Hey guys,I'm an American student studying at Oxford University in the UK and am president of the the OUSS: Oxford University StarCraft Society. I have worked with IGN in the past as a reporter and am currently a content creator for ROOT. In addition, I am consulting an LA-based entertainment company looking to get into eSports. As of late, with all of this talk about how we can improve eSports, I have wanted to share my thoughts with the community.I wrote three op-ed pieces about a month ago on how I believe event organizers and hosts can better eSports. These pieces are roughly the same as my presentations to the companies I am consulting and I'd like to see what you guys think. You are the most active members of the community and, as such, should have the best insight into what will really improve our industry.The topics of the pieces are:1.2.3.Despite all the growth that we are seeing in eSports, I can't help but think that it's stunted. I don't believe that eSports is a bubble that's on a timer to burst, not at all, but I do believe certain steps that could be taken to expand the industry are largely ignored. At the most basic of levels, as eSports fans, we all want to see this fledgling community burgeon into an entertainment giant that fills stadiums, makes the news, and connects gamers around the world. To do this industry leaders, teams, tournament organizers, and fans are all going to have to branch out in a different direction and take eSports down a path foreign to the gaming world but familiar to other forms of competition-based entertainment. The presentation I'll give here is, with some necessary embellishment, in the same vein as that I have presented to a few companies interested in entering eSports. It is based upon my studies of traditional sports marketing and how it relates to eSports and will be released in three parts.Before we get into specifics, I should start by saying that what I see lacking in eSports are means through which individuals not yet exposed or acclimated can enter into and feel a meaningful connection with the scene. A tournament's primary goal should be to facilitate the connection between its viewer and the eSports community through its own lens. If the viewer makes this connection through the tournament then a degree of brand loyalty will develop, both helping the tournament acquire a dedicated viewer base and fostering the growth of the eSports community. For example, the first StarCraft league I ever watched was the Ongamenet Star League and to this day I give it precedence over other tournaments because of the connection it facilitated between myself and the eSports community. There is an element of romance that can develop through a viewer's early interactions with eSports, and it should be taken advantage of from a tournament organizer's perspective.Likewise, a team manager's primary goal should be to allow for the creation of this connection through their players and organization. A team wants the fan to interact with the scene via their name or the name of their progamers. If my interactions with the community are centered around, say, posting on a forum every time EG plays or keeping up with the latest drama surrounding Destiny on reddit then my interaction with the community is beneficial both to myself and the team I support. My eSports experience is, then, essentially related to loyalty to a team or player.Ultimately, both teams and tournaments are out to make a profit, but this shouldn't necessarily interfere with creating a meaningful connection between the fan and the eSports scene. Brand loyalty to a team or tournament promotes spending both from the consumer, who wants to pay to view events or purchase merchandise, and sponsors, who are happy to spend more money if they are connected to an organization favorably viewed by fans.Anyone hopeful about eSports growth would say that the majority of the scene's fan-base at the end of the next ten years is not currently active. This accentuates the importance of organizations actively seeking out new fans to bring into the eSports fold. Teams and tournaments should be looking out for every opportunity to promote themselves and eSports to the unexposed. Now, here is the first step I believe should be taken to strengthen eSports:At the most basic level, a fan's connection to eSports is entirely a result of competition between progamers. The easiest way for a viewer to connect to eSports is, then, to build a personal relationship with a player. To build these relationships the players have to make themselves, their personalities and histories, accessible to eSport's fan-base; this means that teams and tournaments have to actively work to craft players' past and present endeavors into a malleable story-arch with which viewers can relate. For example, I have come to know about Stephano's personality, experiences, and struggles through interviews and documentary content and I am more likely to follow events he attends and support the team he is on because of this. Players need to be allowed and encouraged to show their true personalities and it must become a requirement of the job to act as a public figure, even a celebrity. What I am not calling for is the TMZ-style garbage that destroys players' reputations and careers, but a knowledge of competitors' personality and history is essential to creating a meaningful relationship with them. Athletes are eSport's greatest asset; their connection to the fan-base is what makes or breaks tournaments and teams.Hell, I have never played Magic: The Gathering, but while watching a tournament with my brother I rooted for a player because of a relationship I built with him throughout the course of an interview. On a mainstream level, the Olympics thrive on a connection between the viewer and athletes. Weeks before the Olympics begin advertisements and news stories are released featuring Olympians; eSports needs something like this, too. Tournaments and, to a greater extent, teams should be releasing content on their competitors for a few weeks leading up to, during, and shortly after an event. Through interviews, recaps of their play at previous tournaments, and projections of players' paths through current endeavors, viewers can connect with players and, in turn, events on a more meaningful and lasting level. Even something as small as a thirty second intro or a two minute recap can help foster a connection. In sum, more hype is needed.But where do we fit this in? Interviews posted to youtube don't get too much traction and most shows outside of SOTG and Real Talk have poor viewership (a good Gimble and Arn cast with interesting guests gets 100-200 views on youtube). I think the answer is obvious: how much downtime is there at MLG and IPL? The time between sets? Between matches? How often are viewers left to sit and watch scenes of the crowd? This time should be filled with shoulder content, like interviews, recaps, and projections. Some three million unique viewers tuned into IPL4, why not help them foster a connection with both players and the tournament itself by giving them a shoulder to rest on between games? Each of these periods of downtime should, in effect, become a half-time show rather than a mind-numbing experience for the viewer. I attended MLG Raleigh this year and was hardly aware of who was advancing in the tournament and what the best games that had been played were. If, between games, I had been given recaps of recent events instead of total downtime, then I would have been much more excited and engaged with what was happening in the tournament.GSL is ahead of the curve in regard to shoulder content, largely due to the extended format of the league. GSL's GNN and Baneling are prime examples of good shoulder content. They recap, look into future matches, and give some insight into players who would otherwise remain faceless. Project A, documenting YellOw's attempt to qualify for GSL, was also great shoulder content and actually made me tune into the Code A qualifiers. I remember a spot I saw on LosirA in between GSL matches about a year ago; I know more about him than I do about almost any other player due to that five minute profile and I am still more likely to watch his matches because of it.Hype; profiles; recaps: needed. ZerO - Seal - Life - Taeja - Parting - SquirtleWarhammer 40,000 - set in a science fantasy universe - has just turned 25. Why are grown men still launching tabletop war?
You may have walked past one of the hundreds of Games Workshops on the High Street. You may even have wandered in, especially if you are a teenage boy or the parent of one.
If you know your Necrons (virtually invincible soulless metal warriors) from your Dark Eldar (sadistic elfin pirates), the chances are you are one of the dedicated tribe who have signed up to what fans call The Hobby.
Most days of the week, on table tops in "hobby centre" shops, in office lunchrooms, and bedrooms, players gather around home-constructed battle fields with miniature ruins and petrified forests. They assemble and paint small model fighters from a chosen army (several to collect) and using dice, tape measures and special rule books, battle rival militia in a fictional science fiction universe set in the 41st Millennium, called Warhammer 40,000.
Launched 25 years ago, 40K was so named to distinguish it from traditional fantasy Warhammer of elves and vampires. Both lines, together with a Lord of the Rings brand, continue to attract hundreds of thousands of new fans in Britain and across the world - 70% of sales are abroad.
Image caption Dark Eldar on left (photos by Jordan Louis); Necrons on right (photos by AdmGR and Victor Yoon)
The appeal is in collecting, assembling and painting the models, for play, which are manufactured in Nottingham (and Memphis, Tennessee) and sold through the Games Workshops chain and by mail order. Blood, torn flesh, grimacing skulls and very large guns and tanks feature prominently in the detailed artwork.
Despite the competition from online or console-based gaming, Warhammer continues to thrive, with successful spin-off novels set in the 40K universe. How many other British companies, for example, could report a 40% rise in their latest half-year pre-tax profits?
Image caption A tournament at the company's castle-themed HQ
"It's like why theatre remains popular in the age of cinema," says 32-year-old Andrew Ruddick from Cambridge, explaining its enduring appeal. He describes himself as a "relapsed" Warhammer gamer, slipping back into it in his 20s with friends. "There's an intimacy. With tabletop gaming you are there."
Several hundred such gamers gather regularly at Games Workshop's Hall of Fame, next to its Nottingham factory, for tournaments. Most, but certainly not all, are male.
They play on teams with names like Alfa Geek, Purple Pain and I See Lead People. Heavy rule books or codices (all published by GW) are consulted intently. Templates and tape measures are used to confirm terrain advanced and numbers of casualties. Occasionally a whoop of victory goes up from a table.
Kathryn Turner, 13, is playing a doubles match with her father Stephen against two strapping 30-something blokes. The poker-face calm with which she deploys her Tyranids (world-devouring aliens) is impressive.
You need at least £200 just to set up a half-decent legal army Craig Lowdon
"It's fun and I like spending this time with my dad," she says. Her mother Sue is one of the crop of self-confessed Warhammer Widows who spend all day in the cafe. Kathryn admits to sometimes wearing pink on the first day to psych out the male opponents. "I'm moving on to play with Sisters of Battle next," she says - it's an army of fanatical warrior nuns with flamethrowers.
The whole aesthetic is, as Andrew Ruddick puts it "very masculine". But the appeal is its epic scale, says Warhammer fan and Marvel X-Men comic writer, Kieron Gillen. "It's a hilariously OTT maximalist universe at an operatic pitch. There are some people who think less is more. Warhammer, conversely, believes that more is always more."
Foot-high model Titans can be brought out for particular battles. "Warhammer gone nuts," as my 12-year-old son puts it.
Image caption Figurines are painted by hand
Gillen contrasts Warhammer 40K to role-playing fantasy gaming like the online World of Warcraft (the modern equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons). "In Warcraft it's made so there are no bad guys. In Warhammer there are no good guys. They're all bad. It's a universe that's simultaneously nihilistic and joyous. It's incredibly British in that way."
Gary Chalk, a 59-year-old fantasy game creator and illustrator, knows all about its Britishness. He used to design Warhammer and Warhammer 40K games in the 1980s and 90s. His trademark wit is evident in Bloodbath at Orc's Drift (an elvish version of the Michael Caine film Zulu) and a naval ship battle he called "All the Dwarves Love a Sailor". Still an enthusiastic table-top gamer, he does, however, believe Games Workshop uses its monopoly on the products to target and exploit increasingly younger fans. The prices for essential models, paints and books are "eyewatering", he says.
"They are not selling a hobby. They are selling a craze."
Several players say they feel exploited. "You need at least £200 just to set up a half-decent legal army for a game, and if you want a board and scenery to go to play with friends you're looking at least £200 on top of that," says Craig Lowdon, 25, of Crewe.
Games Workshop's executives say they don't do media interviews, preferring to focus on their hobbyists. But chief executive officer Mark Wells emails me about the claim of price exploitation. "That would go against everything we stand for. It's just not in our nature," he writes.
Image caption Women and girls do play, but are outnumbered
And Chalk claims the game is now less interesting. "The original rules were about fantasy combat and creating character. Now the rules only work within their imaginary world, with their figures and it cuts out all the other influences."
But its legion of fans, including older fans, see a timeless appeal.
"[There's] the satisfaction of looking at ranks of badly-daubed Skaven (man-sized anthropomorphic rats) and knowing they're yours and you made them in a real way," says Kieron Gillen.
"It's absolutely the part of the brain that made other generations make model trains."Senators voted 54-45 Thursday to kill an Obama administration coal mining rule, giving President Trump his first chance to formally take off the books an environmental rule from the previous administration.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) challenge passed by the Senate undoes the Interior Department’s Stream Protection Rule, a regulation requiring coal firms to clean up waste from mountaintop removal mining and prevent it from going into local waterways.
The coal industry and its congressional allies have looked for ways to kill the rule since Obama regulators began crafting it early in his term.
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They argued the regulation would be such a financial hindrance for the coal industry that it would kill jobs in economically distressed areas of Appalachia already struggling due to the sector’s market-driven downturn.
The Office of Surface Mining finalized the rule in December, and the GOP this week quickly introduced and voted on a CRA resolution taking the rule off the books and blocking regulators from writing a similar rule in the future.
The House passed the bill 228-194 on Wednesday night. Trump supports the legislation, Republicans said, meaning the rule will come off the books as soon as he signs it.
Sens. Joe Manchin Joseph (Joe) ManchinThe Hill's Morning Report - Dems appear to have votes to counter Trump on emergency Border rebuke looms for Trump Trump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill MORE (D-W.Va.), Heidi Heitkamp Mary (Heidi) Kathryn HeitkampOvernight Energy: Trump taps ex-oil lobbyist Bernhardt to lead Interior | Bernhardt slams Obama officials for agency's ethics issues | Head of major green group steps down Trump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary On The Money: Shutdown Day 27 | Trump fires back at Pelosi by canceling her foreign travel | Dems blast 'petty' move | Trump also cancels delegation to Davos | House votes to disapprove of Trump lifting Russia sanction MORE (D-N.D.), Joe Donnelly Joseph (Joe) Simon DonnellyOvernight Energy: Trump taps ex-oil lobbyist Bernhardt to lead Interior | Bernhardt slams Obama officials for agency's ethics issues | Head of major green group steps down Trump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary EPA's Wheeler faces grilling over rule rollbacks MORE (D-Ind.) and Claire McCaskill Claire Conner McCaskillCORRECTED: Hawley used a state-owned car for campaign travel as AG: report Poll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell McCaskill: Lindsey Graham 'has lost his mind' MORE (D-Mo.) were the only Democrats to support the measure in the Senate. Sen. Susan Collins Susan Margaret CollinsWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Cohen grilled by Senate Intelligence panel Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Maine) was the only Republican to vote against it.
“In my home state of Kentucky and others across the nation, the stream buffer rule will cause major damage to communities and threaten coal jobs,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Senate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Ky.) said on Thursday, noting industry opposition and state lawsuits against the rule.
“We should heed their call now and begin bringing relief to coal country. Today’s vote on this resolution represents a good step in that direction.”
Environmentalists, public health advocates and Democrats broadly support the rule, saying it will protect waterways and prevent health risks for people living in coal-heavy areas.
“If you want to help miners, then come address their health and safety and their pension program,” Sen. Maria Cantwell Maria Elaine CantwellSenate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' This week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks MORE (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said during floor debate
“You can protect the coal industry here with special interests and the amount of lobbying they do, or you can step up in a process and have a regulation that works for the United States of America so the outdoor industry and sportsman and fishermen can continue to thrive.”
The resolution will be the first CRA challenge undoing an Obama-era rule to hit President Trump’s desk.
The CRA, which gives Congress the power to undo rules shortly after they are finalized, is a rarely successful tool: It has only been used to undo a rule once, in 2001.
But Republicans have pledged to pass several CRA resolutions blocking late Obama rules this session.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on another House-passed CRA resolution undoing a Securities and Exchange rule, and the House is considering three more resolutions under the law this week.
“We’ll continue to chip away at the regulation legacy of the Obama years with more CRA resolutions in the coming days as well,” McConnell said Thursday.
“Let’s pass these two resolutions without delay so we can send them to the president’s desk and continue giving the power back to the people.”
—Updated at 3:20 p.m.Rioting and looting erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, late on Sunday as protests over the killing of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer turned violent, law enforcement officials and media reports said.
Crowds broke the windows of cars and stores following a day of demonstrations over the death of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old shot dead on Saturday by a Ferguson police officer.
"We are currently experiencing a riot," a Ferguson police dispatcher said.
About 150 officers in riot gear from throughout St. Louis County, along with canine units, were sent to the area, a dispatcher for the St. Louis County Police Department said.
There was no immediate word on injuries.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported several businesses were looted, demonstrators blocked traffic and a civilian was severely beaten.
Sunday's protests turned violent after dark, according to news station KMOV-TV, with rioters smashing the window of a store and damaging cars. The crowd broke the windows of a news truck, the station said.
A teenage girl told KMOV that a QuikTrip convenience store was being looted. Asked what looters were taking, she said, "Everything. They destroyed everything."
Missouri community outraged over shooting. Missouri community outraged over shooting. SEE MORE VIDEOS
Earlier on Sunday, police said the shooting incident was started by a fight between the victim and an officer in a squad car that quickly escalated.
Police said Brown physically assaulted the officer from the Ferguson police, who then fired multiple shots at Brown after he left the car on Saturday. The officer, who was not identified, is a six-year veteran and has been put on administrative leave, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told a news conference.
"It is our understanding at this point in the investigation, that within the police car, there was a struggle over the officer's weapon," Belmar told reporters as voices from hundreds of demonstrators shouting outside the building could be heard.
According to Belmar, Brown was walking with a friend in the middle of the street when an officer attempted to exit his vehicle, the Los Angeles Times reported. Police said Brown pushed the officer back into the police car.
David Carson / St. Louis Post-Dispatch Police face off with demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Police face off with demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. (David Carson / St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
Brown then entered the officer’s vehicle and a struggle ensued over the officer’s weapon, according to police. During the altercation a shot was fired inside the car.
The officer and Brown then exited the vehicle and at that point the fatal shooting occurred, Belmar said.
Witnesses have had different accounts.
Dorin Johnson, a friend of the victim, told Fox 2 that he was walking in the street with Brown when the police squad car pulled up. The officer said to "Get the eff onto the sidewalk," he recounted.
"It was not but a minute from our destination and we would be off the street," Johnson said.
Johnson said the officer didn't get out of his police car, but "reach[ed] his arm out the window and grabbed my friend around the neck."
"I witnessed the police chase after the guy, full force," Piaget Crenshaw said. "He ran for his life. They shot him and he fell. He put his arms up to let them know that he was compliant and he was unarmed and they shot him twice more and he fell to the ground and died."
A crowd of some 200 people gathered at the site of the shooting on Saturday, some of them shouting "kill the police" and yelling profanities, a county police spokesman said.
"Emotions were running very high," Belmar said.
St. Louis County police said Brown was unarmed and they would turn over investigation findings of what happened in Ferguson, northwest of St. Louis, to local prosecutors.
Brown's mother told local TV broadcaster KSDK that her son was a good child getting ready to go to college and was visiting his grandmother when the incident took place.
"He didn't bother nobody," she said. "They told me how many times my son was shot - eight," she added, and then directed her comments at police.
"You not God. You not decide you are going to take somebody from her," she said in an interview with KSDK.
The St Louis County branch of the civil rights group NAACP has said it wants the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into the case, with many in the community telling media that race played a factor in the shooting.
The race of the officer was not released.
Reuters, Los Angeles TimesYogi Adityanath
Lucknow, Aug. 14: Documents The Telegraph has seen contradict the Yogi Adityanath government's claim that it became aware only on August 4 about the dues owed to the gas vendor to the Gorakhpur hospital where 30 children died on Thursday and Friday after supplies were stopped.
The government has blamed the delayed payment on Rajiv Mishra, principal of the Baba Raghav Das Medical College, and suspended him before accepting his resignation.
Here's what the records of the state's medical education department say (represented in the form of a calendar):
March 22: Mishra writes to the director-general of the medical & health department, which functions under health and family welfare minister Siddharth Nath Singh, to clear the vendor's dues.
He has attached a copy of a payment reminder he has received from the vendor, Pushpa Sales Pvt Ltd, the same day. Mishra forwards copies of his letter to medical education minister Ashutosh Tandon and Siddharth Nath.
Result: Nothing.
April 3: Mishra sends a similar letter to the additional chief secretary of the medical education department, with copies to the directors-general of the medical & health and medical education departments. He attaches the latest reminder from the vendor, received the same day.
Result: Nothing.
April 17: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, with copies to the directors-general, attaching the latest reminder, received the same day.
Result: Nothing.
April 24: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, with copies to the directors-general, attaching the latest reminder.
Result: Nothing.
May 2: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, with copies to the directors-general, attaching the latest reminder.
Result: Nothing.
May 6: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, with copies to the directors-general, attaching the latest reminder.
Result: Nothing.
May 29: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, with copies to the directors-general, attaching the latest reminder.
Result: Nothing.
June 28: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, with copies to the directors-general, attaching the latest reminder.
Result: Nothing.
July 6: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, with copies to the directors-general, attaching the latest reminder.
Result: Nothing.
July 18: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, with copies to the directors-general, attaching the latest reminder.
Result: Nothing.
(At least five of the reminders from Pushpa Sales that Mishra has attached to his letters threaten stoppage of oxygen supply.)
Aug. 1: Mishra writes again to the additional chief secretary, attaching the latest reminder, signed by Pushpa Sales executive Dipankar Sharma, which says the dues have grown to Rs 63.65 lakh and must be paid immediately to ensure "uninterrupted supply" of oxygen. A copy is marked to minister Tandon.
Aug. 4: Tandon receives a letter sent by Mishra and learns - for the first time, according to the minister - about the dues and the threat.
Aug. 5: Tandon orders Rs 2 crore transferred to the Gorakhpur treasury towards the payment of the dues, according to the minister. Money reaches the treasury the same day, according to the government.
Aug. 7: Money arrives in treasury, according to Mishra.
Aug. 8: Mishra sends college accountant to treasury to get a token clearing the payment.
Aug. 9: The vendor writes directly to Tandon, sources in Pushpa Sales say.
The letter from company director Maneesh Bhandari says the six-month dues have risen to Rs 68.65 lakh despite the principal being informed "many times through letters, orally, telephone, email and a legal notice".
"We personally handed this letter to the minister on August 9 morning. He and (chief minister Yogi) Adityanath went to the medical college the same afternoon to hold a review meeting," an executive of Pushpa Sales said.
"We came to know from hospital authorities that they had told the chief minister about the problem and he had looked questioningly at Tandon. After that, Adityanath apparently stayed silent."
Vendor still unpaid. No work possible because the chief minister was at the medical college and "we were busy with him", Mishra says. Doesn't explain why a Net-banking transaction that should have taken the accountant just a few minutes was not done.
• Vendor stops supply in the evening after Adityanath leaves.
Aug. 10: After 23 babies die,Adityanath tells reporters he hadn't known about the delayed payment or oxygen crisis at the hospital, located in the parliamentary constituency he has represented continuously since 1998.
Vendor still unpaid. Mishra doesn't explain why.
On August 14, Mishra does not take calls from this newspaper, which wanted his reaction to reports that he had been away in Rishikesh on August 10.
Aug. 11: A sum of Rs 52 lakh is finally transferred to the company's account through RTGS. Vendor begins steps to resume supply.
Aug. 12: Siddharth Nath announces suspension of Mishra, accusing him of delaying the payment. But even before a probe starts, the government insists that lack of oxygen didn't cause the deaths. Late at night, government accepts Mishra's resignation.
Aug. 14: Siddharth Nath tells reporters in Allahabad that the oxygen supply was disrupted because "some people wanted kickbacks". He does not say who they are.
(A health department source had told this newspaper on August 12 that the medical college's account had a balance of Rs 3.86 crore on August 9, and that the vendor had gone unpaid because he had "failed to oblige some senior members in the government".
("No such business operates without kickbacks," the source said. "But the principal had recently received orders from Lucknow to stop the payment.")
• Adityanath, who used to call Gorakhpur bandhs against "misrule" by the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party, faces a shutdown against him in his hometown for the first time in his political career.
Most Opposition parties participate in the protest. So do the Hindu Samaj Party and Nagrik Manch, two social welfare organisations once closely associated with Adityanath.HULU PLUS™ SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE LAUNCHES FOR $7.99 PER MONTH
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Hulu is an online TV service whose mission is to help people find and enjoy the world's premium content when, where and how they want it. As we pursue this mission, we aspire to create a service that users, advertisers and content owners unabashedly love. Hulu was founded in 2007 and is operated independently by a dedicated team with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Beijing. NBC Universal, News Corporation, The Walt Disney Company, Providence Equity Partners, and the Hulu team share in the ownership of the company. (www.hulu.com)The story of traditional Chinese martial arts:
History of Hakka Martial Art and its relationship to Southern Chinese and Shaolin martial arts
By Salvatore Canzonieri, Boonton, New Jersey
The Hakka
The Hakka people are thought to be originally from the Henan and Shaanxi (not Shanxi) provinces in the Yellow River area (not far from Shaolin). They speak their own language, said to be of the original Han Chinese people from there. It took a few thousand years for the Hakka to fully migrate to the south of China (to the Fujian, Guangdong, Jianxi, and other provinces). They also moved west to Sichuan province. Notice, everywhere that they settled are the same areas that the southern martial arts styles that look related to each other (White Crane, Southern Mantis, Yongtai Tiger, Dragon, etc.) and to Southern Tai Tzu Quan are mainly located.
The Hakka are noted for their preservation of certain cultural characteristics that are traceable to pre-Qin period (about 2200 years ago), which are expressed in their common customs, foods, spoken language, etc. The Hakka a mixed group that might include many ethnic groups as a result of 2000 years of migration, which makes things harder to trace. The original Han people were also of mixed ancestry to begin with.
It seems that the Hakka migrated southward in waves during different time periods. According to research by Luo Xiang Lin, at least five mass movements of Hakka took place as they moved south from their original place of residence in the Central Plains in the Huang (Yellow) River Basin. Most scholars agree that the Hakka people migrated from parts of northern China to the southern regions starting from the time of the East Jin dynasty (317-420 AD). Some even date the first migration as being further back, from the Qin dynasty (220 -206 BC), when China was under attack by five tribes during the time of Qin Shi Huang. The capital at Luoyang was removed to Nanjing and large numbers of people, including aristocrats, the general populace, and the ancestors of the Hakka, fled south to escape.
Subsequent migrations occurred at the end of the Tang Dynasty (907 AD) with the fragmentation of the Chinese empire, the displacement of the Tang drove the predecessors of the Hakkas |
iedad es la misma que hace 3, 4 ó 5 décadas: subsidios condicionados para paliar el paro y la pobreza. Una incapacidad aterradora de comprender la nueva realidad. Como si pudiera ser una opción retroceder en el tiempo.
En la bibliografía que adjuntamos hemos desarrollado las respuestas a las críticas habituales a la RB: "la gente no trabajaría", "se dispararían los precios", "es mejor el pleno empleo", "son mejores los subsidios dirigidos a los pobres" y muchos otros. Aquí nos limitaremos a hacer un breve resumen de las críticas (y respuestas) más repetidas.
Sobre que la "gente no trabajaría". Entre los que hacen esta crítica hay al menos una confusión habitual: los que piensan que trabajo remunerado o empleo son equivalentes y abarcan todo el trabajo (Raventós y Wark, 2016). El trabajo remunerado es un subconjunto del trabajo. El trabajo remunerado es una forma de trabajo. Existen al menos otras dos formas: 1) trabajo doméstico o reproductivo y 2) trabajo voluntario. Hay personas que reciben alguna remuneración pública o privada por su trabajo y no sólo no hacen nada útil, sino que realizan actividades socialmente perversas, pero no es este punto el que queremos destacar aquí. Pero si la crítica se reduce a que la gente no trabajaría remuneradamente (variante que desinfla la crítica muchas atmósferas porque una cosa es no trabajar y la otra no trabajar remuneradamente), nuestra respuesta va en la siguiente dirección: se suele criticar la RB teniendo en la cabeza los subsidios condicionados. Los subsidios condicionados sufren de lo que se conoce como "trampa de la pobreza". Esta trampa aparece como consecuencia del sistema de incentivos y penalizaciones que ofrecen los subsidios condicionados. Dado que las cantidades monetarias de los subsidios condicionados no pueden acumularse al sueldo (o no de una manera significativa), no hay el menor estímulo para aceptar empleos a tiempo parcial o de cualquier remuneración. Desde un punto de vista técnico, la trampa de la pobreza puede expresarse haciendo la equivalencia de que el tipo impositivo marginal que se aplica es en muchos casos de hasta el 100%, es decir, se pierde una unidad monetaria de prestación por cada unidad monetaria de ingreso salarial que se pueda obtener, o incluso superior si se incurren en costes de transporte o de manutención fuera del hogar para ir al lugar de trabajo. La trampa de la pobreza aparece cuando para percibir los beneficios, fiscales o de otro tipo, es condición que se verifique, por parte de las autoridades, la suficiencia de los ingresos recibidos en el mercado laboral. Nada de esto sucede con la RB por su carácter de incondicional.[8] Por el contrario, análisis de modelos econométricos y diversas experiencias piloto demuestran que la RB incrementa o no disminuye significativamente la oferta de trabajo y mejora otros aspectos sociales.[9]
Del mismo modo se habla de la trampa de la precariedad, la que aparece cuando la concesión de un subsidio condicionado se retrasa en el tiempo desde que se tiene derecho. Esta situación desincentiva aceptar trabajos temporales, de corta duración, pues en el cómputo global la suma de las prestaciones sociales es mayor que la suma de prestaciones, sueldos y períodos de carencia de por medio.
Sobre que "se dispararían los precios". En primer lugar, ya hemos dejado apuntado que la financiación de esta propuesta de RB se concreta mediante una gran redistribución de la renta, no mediante creación de masa monetaria. Además, para hacer una crítica cuidadosa, habría que distinguir una situación económica como la actual (más deflacionaria que no inflacionaria pese a los denodados esfuerzos del BCE), de la de una situación económica "normal". Por imposibilidad empírica de mostrar si la situación "normal" se dará antes de 20 años, más racional será dejar aparcada esta hipótesis de futuro. Vamos a la situación económica actual. Una medida económica que creara un cierto aumento de la demanda (y la RB crearía un pequeño incremento de la demanda de bienes de primera necesidad) en una situación como la actual, no hace falta decir que tendría efectos positivos. Hacer equivaler un aumento de la demanda con una presión inflacionaria, al margen de la coyuntura económica, no es correcto. Innecesario es recordar que hay mecanismos de política monetaria que pueden compensar determinadas tensiones inflacionistas.
Sí creemos más probable que una RB ayude a emanciparse a los jóvenes y presione al alza el mercado de la vivienda, pero no podemos decir que emanciparse antes en nuestro país sea un mal paso, al contrario, lo que se necesita son políticas públicas de vivienda social que complementen la RB. La RB es una formidable palanca para la emancipación en muchas dimensiones: de los jóvenes, de las mujeres dependientes, de los emprendedores, actúa de caja de resistencia e incrementa la capacidad de negarse a aceptar cualquier trabajo precario, y elimina las exclusiones financieras y a la vivienda, entre otras.
"Es mejor el pleno empleo". Esto suena a la repetición de viejos esquemas como si el mundo fuera igual ahora no ya que antes de la crisis sino igual al de hace más de cinco décadas: frente a la RB hay que conseguir el pleno empleo. Esto es fe, no racionalidad. Sí, fe: creer sin la menor prueba empírica. El pleno empleo puede ser un loable objetivo. Pero el pleno empleo puede hacerse en condiciones semiesclavas de trabajo remunerado (“más vale cualquier empleo que no estar en el paro”, escuchamos a menudo entre los patronos y políticos de amplio espectro) o en condiciones que, para abreviar, llamaremos dignas: jornadas laborales más cortas, salarios decentes... Nadie está pensando seriamente en plena ocupación (nos atrevemos a decir que en ninguna de las dos variantes) en los próximos 10 ó 15 años. Por lo tanto, resulta grotesco oponer un objetivo como el pleno empleo a la RB que es una propuesta inmediata para garantizar la existencia material de toda la población. Hay que recordar que el Reino de España es el Estado de toda la OCDE con más años, de 1978 a 2016, con una tasa de paro superior al 15%: 26 para ser precisos. El segundo es Irlanda y a mucha distancia: 10 años. La opción neoliberal para solucionar esta disfunción es bajar más los sueldos, y abaratar más el despido para favorecer la contratación empresarial (es decir, ponerse a competir en sueldos con los países menos desarrollados y contra los robots o algoritmos) y simultáneamente reducir los subsidios de desempleo y empujar a los desempleados a aceptar cualquier trabajo (las cada vez más extremistas políticas de ayudas condicionadas o workfare). A veces, un poco de empiria es suficiente para dejar los prejuicios irracionales en el triste lugar que les corresponde. De hecho la RB se complementaría de manera muy racional con políticas de reparto del tiempo y de los puestos de trabajo remunerado[10] y en las simulaciones alternativas de nuestro modelo se demuestra que incrementaría el porcentaje de la población ganadora.
"Nos invadirían los inmigrantes". Una constatación y una reflexión. En primer lugar la única comunidad autónoma que no ha experimentado inmigración significativa en las últimas décadas es la CAV, a pesar de tener, como comentaremos más adelante, el mejor programa de subsidios del Reino. Y esto nos lleva a la reflexión: los inmigrantes se mueven por efecto "patada" de su lugar de origen, no por efecto llamada. Y en todo caso, siempre se pueden fijar períodos de carencia (como ya se hace con otras ayudas monetarias o con prestaciones en especie) para acceder a la RB. “No es sostenible políticamente porque la clase trabajadora no quiere que haya un colectivo de gente que viva del subsidio pagado por todos”. Esta es una de las opiniones más ruines. En primer lugar porque ya existe una clase, la del 1% más rico, que vive a costa de los trabajadores, mediante el cobro de rentas obtenidas por sus inversiones financieras ya sean productivas o especulativas (¿o es que incrementar el precio de los alquileres de las viviendas un 15% en la ciudad de Barcelona es una actividad productiva?). En segundo lugar presupone que los 4,5 millones de parados actuales, más los 2 millones que trabajan a tiempo parcial, más el millón de personas que no buscan empleo activamente según la EPA pero quisieran trabajar, más los 22 millones de mujeres que trabajan 55.000 horas de trabajo reproductivo de más que los hombres a lo largo de su vida (30 años de trabajo a tiempo completo) sin cobrar... todos estos millones de personas son unos vagos. ¿Alguien en su sano juicio y después de una reflexión puede pensar que esta vagancia está generalizada? O, en claro contraste, es más razonable constatar que solo se da en algunos casos concretos, muchas veces debidos a circunstancias personales, culturales o de salud, y que el coste es infinitamente inferior al de los verdaderos parásitos del sistema que eluden pagar sus impuestos y extraen rentas continuamente de los más pobres a través de intereses, dividendos y rentas del capital? Sistemáticamente cuando se pregunta a la gente o cuando se analizan los comportamientos de los rentistas sobrevenidos (como a los que les toca la lotería en forma de renta vitalicia) la respuesta es que con una RB los demás dejarían de trabajar… pero ellos no. Económicamente no hay discusión. Nuestra propuesta, con algún retoque o variante, puede garantizar que el 80% de la población salga ganando, o sea existe una clara mayoría electoral que, si nos ciñéramos exclusivamente a un aspecto pecuniario y dejando de lado valores más altruistas como la eliminación de la pobreza y reducción de la desigualdad, votaría a favor. Y en la versión de cálculo con umbrales de pobreza OCDE, el tipo impositivo es inferior al actual tipo máximo marginal, por lo que incluso los ricos podrían tener motivos para votarla, o en cualquier caso una vez implantada no podrían quejarse de que sus incentivos a trabajar han disminuido. Y para acabar este punto, fijémonos en esta frase de hace escasos días llegada a los servicios sociales del ayuntamiento de Barcelona que está entregando una ayuda de 100 euros mensuales por menor de 0-16 años a las familias de la ciudad por debajo del umbral de riesgo de pobreza (casi 20.000 menores del total de 225.000 de su grupo de edad) para gastarse en bienes de primera necesidad: “El jueves 27 de octubre llamó XXXXX, que trabaja en la gran superficie YYYYY. Comenta que todas las cajeras están hartas de ver como las tarjetas de Barcelona Solidaria se utilizan para todo: maquillaje, colonias de marca, alcohol, televisiones de grandes dimensiones, para todo menos para comer e higiene. La mayoría gana 800 euros al mes, no pueden acceder a tener una tarjeta y les molesta este mal uso de la tarjetas.” Alguien llamó a esto la guerra de los penúltimos contra los últimos, el germen del populismo de derechas. Parece normal que los ricos no quieran pagar más impuestos para que se redistribuyan hacia los pobres, pero que el segundo escalón más bajo, los que trabajan y ganan menos de lo que necesitarían para vivir en una ciudad como Barcelona, se ponga del lado de los ricos solo es consecuencia del lavado de cerebro que les han practicado los primeros, de las políticas equivocadas de rentas condicionadas y del asistencialismo caritativo-paternalista (de profundas raíces monoteístas) que impregna nuestra sociedad. Algo que podríamos cambiar con una RB en donde también estas cajeras pudieran beneficiarse de ella o incluso quedarse en casa hasta que su trabajo fuera mejor valorado. Aprovechemos esto para hacer un apunte más sobre la estigmatización y su derivada, la culpabilización de los pobres. Estamos siguiendo el debate, asombrados más que extrañados, sobre la ley de renta garantizada de ciudadanía de Cataluña, como paso previo a una RB. Decimos asombrados porque percibimos en algunos partidos políticos un ensañamiento implícito con los pobres, a los que se les pone como condición inexcusable para acceder a la renta garantizada la condición de que se muestren activos (por no decir muy activos ) en las políticas de inserción laboral, una especie de trabajos forzados posmodernos. Es un ensañamiento similar al que nos llega a veces cuando se discute acaloradamente si una madre soltera puede recibir una ayuda monetaria y gastársela comprándole una chocolatina a su hijo o hija o abonándose a un canal de televisión de pago para tenerlo entretenido solo en casa mientras ella está haciendo un trabajo de mierda. Es la servidumbre, digámoslo una vez más, de la perversidad propia de los subsidios condicionados. La dignidad humana, la confianza en el criterio de los humanos para administrarse sus exiguos ingresos (una de las pocas libertades que al menos deberían tener los pobres, a no ser que un médico determine que no están en su uso de la razón), junto con la evidencia empírica de la inutilidad de estas políticas condicionantes, deberían ser suficientes motivos para un replanteamiento completo de estas propuestas absolutamente intrusivas en la vida personal e inútiles en la práctica. Añadamos la perspectiva de que el trabajo remunerado se termina de la manera que lo hemos conocido en los últimos siglos, o el necesario reconocimiento de las tareas domésticas no remuneradas, pero absolutamente necesarias, para reforzar en nuestra opinión la inutilidad e inconveniencia de los condicionamientos. En resumen, la RB permitiría una recuperación de la dignidad humana de la gente más necesitada, de los escalones más bajos en especial, dándoles libertad y confianza, lo cual debería acompañarse de salarios dignos y buenas políticas activas de inserción, y no de calificar a los beneficiarios como personas sin escrúpulos que deben demostrar su arrepentimiento para darles una caridad. "Tendremos que hacer 45 millones de cheques cada mes". La RB se puede cobrar mediante la nómina, pensión o subsidio de paro, de la misma manera que se paga la retención del IRPF, incluida la parte proporcional de los hijos dependientes. Esto reduce los cheques o transferencias adicionales mensuales a un 10 por ciento de la población, nada que no pueda asumir una administración potente como la nuestra. Y el desincentivo al fraude fiscal sería evidente: el riesgo de declararse insolvente para pagar las sanciones tributarias desaparece con la posibilidad de embargo de la RB.
"Los millonarios también cobrarían". Pues sí, pero ya hemos visto que si se financia con un nuevo IRPF los ricos salen perdiendo en el cómputo neto RB + nuevo IRPF. Actualmente los ricos ya cobran implícitamente muchas RB con las reducciones y deducciones del IRPF (mínimos personales y familiares, deducciones por planes de pensiones, por donaciones, etc.). Y muchas deducciones del IRPF actual son regresivas.
“La financiación propuesta perjudicaría a las clases medias”. Esta crítica es ridículamente pobre. Es fácil e inmediata de responder: el problema es el IRPF tal como lo tenemos hoy en día y el tremendo fraude fiscal que constata este impuesto. Tomando como ciertos los datos que ofrece la muestra del Instituto de Estudios Fiscales resulta que pierden las dos decilas superiores, las dos decilas más ricas. Basta con acudir al cuadro 7 para ver que un declarante cuyos rendimientos totales consignados en el IRPF superen los 42.000 euros forme parte del 10% de las personas declarantes más ricas y que una persona declarante que supere los 55.000 euros esté ya en el grupo del 5% más rico es un problema no del modelo de financiación sino del enorme fraude fiscal que hacen las personas más ricas. Un problema al que tendrá que hacer frente no ya un proyecto de financiación de la RB, sino cualquier reforma fiscal que quiera hacerse en beneficio de la mayoría de la población no rica. Si nuestra propuesta de financiación hace perder a las dos decilas más ricas según los resultados actuales con el fraude mencionado, poca duda puede haber de que si las personas más ricas estuvieran bien detectadas por el IRPF, o existiera un verdadero impuesto sobre la riqueza o sobre sucesiones bien diseñado, la financiación sería más fácil, el tipo único sería más bajo y algunos sectores que se consideran medios que ahora salen perdiendo en nuestro modelo con los datos vigentes, pasarían a formar parte de los ganadores. Todo eso es elemental. Hasta trivial. Algunas opiniones que consideran que nuestra propuesta perjudica a las clases medias, pretenden hacer sugerencias más moderadas y alejadas de la RB con un resultado contrario al pretendido: las mencionadas clases medias resultan más perjudicadas. En cualquier caso, también hemos apuntado una fácil solución a este respecto y, además la hemos cuantificado: un 0,6% del PIB, poco más de 6.200 millones de euros de financiación adicional al IRPF, eliminarían los perdedores cuyos rendimientos brutos se sitúan por debajo de los 40.000 euros anuales. El exponente más tangible de dichas clases medias.
También se nos ha hecho la crítica según la cual la RB debería ser financiada no solamente mediante una reforma del IRPF sino mediante otros impuestos. Nosotros disponíamos, tal como hemos explicado, de una muestra de casi 2 millones de contribuyentes al IRPF aportados por el IEF y por ese motivo se trabajó con este material: Pero es que adicionalmente, permitía comprobar el enorme efecto redistribuidor de la RB que dejaba el índice Gini al mismo nivel que las economías más igualitarias del mundo. Pero es evidente que hay fuentes alternativas o complementarias para financiar una RB. Por ejemplo:
*Revisión del cálculo de las bases del IRPF (cambiando la estimación de rentas de actividades económicas por módulos por estimación directa por ejemplo).
*Impuestos adicionales: Impuesto a las Transacciones Financieras, impuestos ambientales (actualmente los menores de toda la UE), revisión o supresión del impuesto sobre el patrimonio y creación de un verdadero impuesto sobre la riqueza.
*Revisión del IVA: eliminación de los tipos reducidos y compensación mediante RB (hasta 6.000 millones adicionales).
*Eliminación de los topes a la cotización a la S.S. (hasta 10.000 millones adicionales).
*Armonización Impuesto Sucesiones y Donaciones.
*Mejora en la lucha contra el fraude y la elución fiscales.
Y recordemos que el Reino de España está hasta 8 puntos del PIB por debajo del promedio europeo en recaudación fiscal, más de 85.000 millones de euros, cuando la renta per cápita de este Reino está rozando la media europea. Con esto podríamos pagar la RB (incluso asegurando que hasta como mínimo la decila 8, es decir el segundo 10% más rico de ingresos de la población, nadie perdería, quedándose algunos así sin su argumento de que “pierden algunos que no deberían perder”, aunque quizás la confianza en la racionalidad no debiera ser excesiva visto lo visto), cumplir con el déficit exigido por la UE (sin evaluar ahora su grado de injusticia), revertir los recortes del PP, ponernos al día en estado del bienestar y sostenibilidad generando millones de puestos de trabajo y desarrollarnos científica y culturalmente como toda racionalidad demanda. No debería ser una utopía, como todos los partidos desde el PSOE hacia la derecha, y algunos representantes a su supuesta izquierda, argumentan de manera indecente.
Incluso la crítica de que eliminamos el tramo de las pensiones por debajo de la RB (para ser substituida por ésta) en el cálculo de su financiación es tosca. En primer lugar decir que los sistemas de pensiones de reparto están en todas partes avanzando hacia sistema de financiación y cálculo mixtos de las pensiones, con una parte fija o mínima no contributiva que no se calcula en base a las cotizaciones de la vida laboral (como de facto ya pasa en el Reino de España con los complementos de las pensiones mínimas, las pensiones de viudedad, las de discapacidad o las no contributivas) o por ejemplo las holandesas (el primer tramo de la pensión de jubilación se calcula en función de los años de residencia en el país, se haya trabajado o no). O también podemos hacer un cálculo alternativo: paguémoslas enteramente y que contribuyan mediante el IRPF a la financiación de la RB como el resto de rentas: las pensiones más bajas saldrán ganando y se necesitará que los ricos paguen más (y aun seguiríamos con una presión fiscal por debajo del promedio de la UE).
Finalmente, merece un comentario particular la crítica según la cual "son mejores los subsidios dirigidos a los pobres". Vamos a mirar esto en serio.
Lo diremos claro y breve: los subsidios condicionados dirigidos a la pobreza y a la insuficiencia de rentas son mejores que nada, sin duda. Además: en el caso de la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca (CAV) han alcanzado unos niveles muy superiores a buena parte de Europa, incluso pueden equipararse entre los mejores, otra vez sin duda. Pero son muy ineficaces y pobres respecto a los objetivos propuestos por los propios programas de los subsidios condicionados y se sitúan muy por debajo de lo que la realidad demanda, por tercera vez sin duda.
Con mayor detalle. La forma más breve y a la vez más contundente de mostrar la evidencia de esta última afirmación es evaluando con algún detenimiento el mejor programa de estas características que hay en el Reino de España: el de la CAV. Empleando datos del propio gobierno vasco y el informe demoledor que escribió a finales del 2015 un buen conocedor de los más de 25 años de experiencia de estos subsidios en la CAV (Uribarri, 2015), explicábamos en un artículo reciente (Arcarons, Raventós y Torrens, 2016) que la política de renta para pobres, que ha recibido diferentes nombres a lo largo del cuarto de siglo de experiencia en la CAV, contiene tres tipos de prestaciones: renta de garantía de ingresos (RGI), la prestación complementaria de vivienda (PCV) y las ayudas de emergencia social (AES). Después de analizar los resultados de "Las Encuestas de Pobreza y Desigualdades Sociales" (EPDS) de 2012 y 2014 del mismo Gobierno Vasco, las conclusiones a las que llega Uribarri son las siguientes.
• La pobreza de mantenimiento, que mide la dificultad de hacer frente, con los ingresos que se perciben, a gastos vitales, ha pasado del 5,7% en 2008, al 7,3% en 2012 y al 8,2% en 2014.
• La pobreza de acumulación (precariedad relacionada con las condiciones de vida a largo plazo y que expresa la forma más dura de pobreza económica), que se situaba entre el 3,65 y el 4,2% en el periodo 1996-2004, y que bajó mucho en el periodo 2008-2012 (1,5% y 1,4%, respectivamente en estos años), repuntó en 2014 al 2%.
• En el período 2012-14 la crisis empieza a poner en duda los avances observados hasta 2008, y aparecen por primera vez, desde que se realiza la EPDS (final años 1980), procesos destacados de movilidad descendente en Euskadi.
• Aunque el sistema RGI / PCV / AES sigue teniendo un impacto positivo que previene el avance de las expresiones más graves de la pobreza, contribuye a mantener en niveles bajos los indicadores de percepción subjetiva de presencia del fenómeno, aparecen aspectos estructurales que plantean dudas respecto al rendimiento futuro del sistema de protección. La más significativa se vincula al incremento de la población en riesgo que no accede al sistema de prestaciones: de 47.542 personas en 2008 a 50.313 personas en 2012 y 56.307 personas en 2014. Este colectivo representa el 27,1% del total de personas en hogares en riesgo.[11]
• En los últimos años, en este colectivo de personas en hogares en riesgo, se acentúa la distancia existente entre los ingresos disponibles y el umbral de riesgo de pobreza de mantenimiento. Así pues, esta distancia pasa del 21,3% en 2008 a 24,9% en 2012 y 30,5% en 2014. La situación de este grupo de personas, caracterizado sobre todo por el acceso a los bajos salarios o bajas pensiones, tiende por tanto a deteriorarse en términos comparativos respecto a la población beneficiaria de la RGI.
• El informe FOESSA de 2014 muestra que la RGI vasca no reduce la desigualdad de manera significativa, manteniendo el índice de Gini por encima del 0,30 y con valores no muy alejados del resto de CCAA con sistemas de rentas garantizadas condicionadas mucho menos ambiciosos.
• En la CAV no ha fallado la gestión de un modelo de rentas mínimas garantizadas y acondicionadas, ha fallado el modelo en sí mismo. La alternativa es un modelo que se aparte de cualquier exigencia de condicionalidad, sobre todo que se desate absolutamente del empleo, que establezca un nivel de renta garantizada con carácter universal e incondicional dotada con un importe superior al umbral de riesgo de pobreza, única forma de erradicarla. Este es el modelo de los que defendemos la Renta Básica incondicional.
Si este es el balance del sistema de rentas condicionadas para pobres indiscutiblemente mejor del conjunto del Reino de España, es fácil imaginar para cualquier persona sin prejuicios como debe ser el de las CCAA más deficientes. Y hay algunos estudios comparativos donde se muestran con detalle las enormes diferencias. Ante el argumento de "bueno, extendamos el modelo vasco que es mejor", hay un argumento más racional: pongamos en marcha un modelo que garantice a toda la población salir de la pobreza y que garantice su existencia material. ¿Por qué se sigue proponiendo lo que ya se ha demostrado que, en el mejor de los casos es insuficiente, y en el peor, tiene efectos perversos? Creemos que se debe a varias razones, pero nos referiremos sólo a dos: una, entre mucha gente se dispara el miedo a lo desconocido y, en consecuencia, se prefiere lo conocido aunque sea deficiente; dos, hay personas que, no estando conformes con la actual situación social y económica, se limitan a proponer medidas que, según ellos, son realistas porque son compatibles con las limitaciones que impone la UE. Esto ya no es de recibo. ¿Realmente estamos dispuestos a aceptar este razonamiento? Porque que la conclusión a la que lleva no ofrece dudas: lo más "realista" es aceptar lo que actualmente está realizando la actual UE. Y la UE, por cierto, no pide que estemos 8 puntos por debajo de lo que "nos tocaría" en presión fiscal.
Finalmente, algunos economistas del mainstream neoliberal empiezan a aceptar que una RB va a ser inevitable ante las gigantescas transformaciones estructurales de nuestro modelo económico. El reto es evitar que la RB que surja sea en beneficio real de los que menos tienen y no un puro sistema asistencialista más barato y eficiente económicamente (que lo es también). Así una RB progresista o de izquierdas o en beneficio de la mayoría social, como se prefiera, debería ir acompañada (autorreforzarse) con:
-Salarios y condiciones laborales dignas en todos los sectores, con ayudas y políticas activas de empleo selectivas adicionales para los colectivos desfavorecidos y para la transición de modelo productivo. Con sindicatos fuertes con caja de resistencia gratis aportada por la RB.
-Un reparto equilibrado entre géneros y generaciones de todos los tipos de trabajo, impulsando la buena nueva economía y el bien común. Haciendo innecesario mercantilizar los trabajos reproductivos para ocultar la incapacidad de generar empleos reales.
-No rechazar los avances tecnológicos que eliminan empleos y respetar los límites del planeta, creciendo y decreciendo allí donde sea necesario y que los índices de crecimiento de la producción y el gasto dejen de ser los indicadores estándar de bienestar.
-Cogestión, superando las actuales formas capitalistas de propiedad y control. Manteniendo una economía con mercados pero sin dictadura de los mercados, que financie y retribuya justamente el espíritu emprendedor y las innovaciones que mejoren el bienestar general y la sostenibilidad del planeta.
-Un estado del bienestar reforzado que asegure la accesibilidad a la vivienda, la educación, la sanidad, el soporte a la autonomía personal y unas pensiones dignas
En caso contrario, si parte de las fuerzas progresistas y sindicatos continúan oponiéndose a la RB y poniendo parches a los sistemas de rentas condicionados que no funcionan, podemos encontrarnos con que es muy posible que la RB se implante desde los partidos neoliberales al estilo Friedman (llámese Impuesto negativo de renta o complemento salarial):
-Con una desfiscalización y desmantelamiento del estado del bienestar (la RB se convierte en un cheque universal para comprar en el mercado los antiguos servicios públicos que se privatizarán, generando nuevas desigualdades de acceso y servicio)
-Con desregulación laboral y capitalismo salvaje y más trabajos de mierda, aprovechando las tecnologías para mutar hacia una nueva economía precarizadora de las condiciones laborales y privatizadora del bien común.
-Sin avances en el reequilibrio de tareas reproductivas y siguiendo instalados en el paradigma del crecimiento eterno, que conforme se agoten los recursos naturales derivará en el ecofascismo.
Debemos elegir… Sería deseable que sobre la RB no se tarde demasiado en decir por parte de muchos: "¡Ya dije desde el principio que era una buena idea!". El tiempo dirá.
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AUTORES
Jordi Arcarons es catedrático de Economía Aplicada de la Facultad de Economía y Empresa de la Universidad de Barcelona. Es miembro de la Red Renta Básica.
Daniel Raventós es profesor de la Facultad de Economía y Empresa de la Universidad de Barcelona, miembro del Comité de Redacción de sinpermiso y presidente de la Red Renta Básica. Es miembro del comité científico de ATTAC. Su último libro es ¿Qué es la Renta Básica? Preguntas (y respuestas) más frecuentes (El Viejo Topo, 2012).
Lluís Torrens es economista, profesor asociado de la Escuela Superior de Comercio Internacional-Universitat Pompeu Fabra y Director de servicios de planificación e innovación en el Área de Derechos Sociales del Ayuntamiento de Barcelona. Colabora con iniciatives pel decreixement que impulsa un nuevo modelo económico sostenible y estacionario. Es miembro de la Red Renta Básica.
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BIBLIOGRAFIA CITADA
Arcarons, Jordi, Daniel Raventós and Lluís Torrens (2014): “Feasibility of Financing a Basic Income” [en línea]. Basic Income Studies. Volume 9, Issue 1-2, Pages 79–93, ISSN (Online) 1932-0183, ISSN (Print) 2194-6094, DOI
Arcarons, Jordi, Antoni Domènech, Daniel Raventós y Lluís Torrens (2014): “Un modelo de financiación de la Renta Básica para el conjunto del Reino de España: sí, se puede y es racional”. SinPermiso.
Arcarons, Jordi, Daniel Raventós y Lluís Torrens (2015a): “La Renta Básica y el llamado rescate social. Las propuestas de Podemos, CCOO, UGT, Ciudadanos”. SinPermiso.
Arcarons, Jordi, Daniel Raventós y Lluís Torrens (2015b): “El ‘trabajo garantizado de Izquierda Unida y el ‘plan de garantía de rentas’ de Podemos contra la pobreza: unas propuestas muy pobres”. Sin Permiso.
Arcarons, Jordi, Daniel Raventós y Lluís Torrens (2016): La Renta Básica incondicional: una propuesta racional para el siglo XXI. (Respuesta a algunas críticas). SinPermiso.
Bertomeu, María Julia (2005): “Republicanismo y propiedad”, El Viejo Topo, 207.
Bertomeu, María Julia y Daniel Raventós (2006): “El derecho de existencia y la renta básica |
instance. Do you think we could have a complete "theory" for the human brain that can quantitatively calculate all brain states leading to consciousness and our reaction to the external world? How about trying to build a "theory" for signal transduction that would allow us to not just predict but truly understand (in a holistic way) all the interactions with drugs and biomolecules that living organisms undergo? And then there's other complex phenomena like the economy, the weather and social networks. It seems wise to say that we don't anticipate real overarching theories for these phenomena anytime soon.
On the other hand, I think it's a sign of things to come that most of these fields are rife with explanatory models of varying accuracy and validity. Most importantly, modeling and simulation are starting to be considered as a respectable "third leg" of science, in addition to theory and experiment. One simple reason for this is the recognition that many of science's greatest current challenges may not be amenable to rigorous theorizing, and we may have to treat models of phenomena as independent, authoritative explanatory entities in their own right. We are already seeing this happen in chemistry, biology, climate science and social science, and I have been told that even cosmologists are now extensively relying on computational models of the universe. My own field of drug discovery is a great example of the success and failure of models. Here models are used not just in computationally simulating the interactions of drugs with diseased proteins at a molecular level but in fitting pharmacological data and x-ray diffraction data, in constructing gene and protein networks and even in running and analyzing clinical trials. Models permeate drug discovery and development at every stage, and it's hard to imagine a time when we will have an overarching "theory" encompassing the various stages of the process.
Admittedly these and other models are still far behind theory and experiment which have had head starts of about a thousand years. But there can be little doubt that such models can only become more accurate with increasing computational firepower and more comprehensive inclusion of data. How accurate remains to be seen, but it's worth noting that there are already books that make a case for an independent, study-worthy philosophy of modeling and simulation; a recent book by the University of South Florida philosopher Eric Winsberg for instance extols philosophers of science to treat models not just as convenient applications and representations of theories (which are then the only fundamental things worth studying) but as ultimate independent explanatory devices in themselves that deserve separate philosophical consideration.
Could this then be at least part of the future of science? A future where robust experimental observations are encompassed not by beautifully rigorous and complete theories like general relativity or QED but only by different models which are patched together through a combination of rigor, empirical data, fudge factors and plain old intuition? This would be a new kind of science, as useful in its applications as its old counterpart but rooting itself only in models and not in complete theories. Given the history of theoretical science, such a future may seem dark and depressing. That is because as the statistician George Box famously quipped, although some models are useful, all models are in some sense wrong. What Box meant was that models often feature unrealistic assumptions about the details of a system, and yet allow us to reproduce the essential features of reality. They are subject to fudge factors and to the whims of their creators. Thus they can never provide the certain connection to "reality" that theories seem to. This is especially a problem when disparate models give the same answer to a question. In the absence of discriminating ideas, which model is then the "correct" one? The usual, convenient answer is "none of them", since they all do an equally good job of explaining the facts. But this view of science, where models that can be judged only on the basis of their utility are the ultimate arbiters of reality and where there is thus no sense of a unified theoretical framework, feels deeply unsettling. In this universe the "real" theory will always remain hidden behind a facade of models, much as reality is always hidden behind the event horizon of a black hole. Such a universe can hardly warm the cockles of the heart of those who are used to crafting grand narratives for life and the cosmos. However it may be the price we pay for more comprehensive understanding. In the future, Nobel Prizes may be frequently awarded for important observations for which there are no real theories, only models. The discovery of dark matter and energy and our current attempts to understand the brain and signal transduction could well be the harbingers of this new kind of science.
Should we worry about such a world rife with models and devoid of theories? Not necessarily. If there's one thing about science that we know, it's that it evolves. Grand explanatory theories have traditionally been supposed to be a key part- probably the key part- of the scientific enterprise. But this is mostly because of historical precedent as well a psychological urge for seeking elegance and unification. And even historically sciences have progressed much without complete theories, as chemistry did for hundreds of years before the emergence of the atomic and structural theories. The belief that a grand theory is essential for the true development of a discipline has been resoundingly validated in the past but it's utility may well have plateaued. I am not advocating some "end of science" scenario here - far from it - but as the recent history of string theory and theoretical physics in general demonstrates, even the most mathematically elegant and psychologically pleasing theories may have scant connection to reality. Because of the sheer scale and complexity of what we are trying to currently explain, we may have hit a roadblock in the application of the largely reductionist traditional scientific thinking which has served us so well for half a millennium
Ultimately what matters though is whether our constructs- theories, models, rules of thumb or heuristic pattern recognition- are up to the task of constructing consistent explanations of complex phenomena. The business of science is explanation, whether through unified narratives or piecemeal explanation is secondary. Although the former sounds more psychologically satisfying, science does not really care about stoking our egos. What is out there exists, and we do whatever's necessary and sufficient to unravel it.
This is a revised version of a past post.AquaDams ® are the ideal tool for emergency flood control! Just look below to see how this homeowner used AquaDams ® to prevent pounding wave action from destroying his home! AquaDam ® gives homeowners a fighting chance! Water-inflated cofferdam flood control barriers have proven to be very effective tools for flood fighting and protection. Affordable, effective, safe and easy to install, they save time, labor and money when compared to sandbags and other flood control devices! Just look below! The Facts:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates the cost of using and removing sandbags to be in the area of $3-$6 per bag. To achieve a 3-foot high barrier, they estimate that it would take approximately 34 sandbags per linear foot. At a conservative cost of $3 per sandbag, the price of a hypothetical 3 foot high by 100 foot long barrier would be $10,200. The Difference:
An AquaDam® the same size, in contrast, would cost $2,400 just to purchase, an immediate savings of over $7,500. On top of that, the AquaDam® can be installed easily in only 20 minutes using only 2 workmen, compared to 4 hours using 5 workmen for the sandbag wall. That's a 200-minute difference, and 200 minutes is a long time when floodwater is filling up your home. In the long run, the savings are exponential. The AquaDam® is simply filled with on-site water, while the sandbags require that sand be imported. Then, after the event, the sand and bags must be removed and thrown into a landfill. Since the AquaDam® was purchased, it is simply drained and rolled up in anticipation of the next flood event.In a 2015 judgment, Justice Misra had written a 192-word sentence.
Chief Justice Dipak Misra has done it again.
The judge known to quote extempore from Shakespeare peppering his orders/judgments with words from ancient texts/literature and famous for his word play has written a 148 word long sentence in an order he pronounced three days ago.
In a 2015 judgment, Justice Misra had written a 192-word sentence.
The 148 word sentence is the first paragraph in the November 28th order in M L Sharma Vs Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
The order dismisses a petition filed by advocate Manohar Lal Sharma seeking to restrain Director Bhansali from releasing his controversial movie abroad.
Unlike Justice Misra’s many sentences, this one however does not contain any tough words or literature and reads simple.
Here it is:
“The instant writ petition has been preferred under Article 32 of the Constitution of India giving it the nomenclature of public interest litigation basically with twin prayers that a film titled “Padmavati” should not be exhibited in other countries without obtaining the requisite certificate from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) under the Cinematograph Act, 1952 (for brevity, ‘the Act’) and the Rules and guidelines framed thereunder and further to issue a writ of mandamus to the Central Bureau 2 of Investigation (CBI), respondent No. 5 herein, to register an FIR against the respondent Nos. 1 and 2 and their team members for offence punishable under Section 7 of the Act read with Sections 153A, 295, 295A, 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code read with Section 4 of the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986 and to investigate and prosecute them in accordance with law”
As a judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Misra had written a 192 word para in a judgment delivered in 2015 (Priyanka Srivastava and Anr vs State of UP -2015)
The judge intended to say that the case was a frivolous one filed only to harass the opposite party and force him to agree to an out-of-court settlement. This is how the sentence read:
“The present appeal projects and frescoes a scenario which is not only disturbing but also has the potentiality to create a stir compelling one to ponder in a perturbed state how some unscrupulous, unprincipled and deviant litigants can ingeniously and innovatively design in a nonchalant manner to knock at the doors of the Court, as if, it is a laboratory where multifarious experiments can take place and such skillful persons can adroitly abuse the process of the Court at their own will and desire by painting a canvas of agony by assiduous assertions made in the application though the real intention is to harass the statutory authorities, without any remote remorse, with the inventive design primarily to create a mental pressure on the said officials as individuals, for they would not like to be dragged to a court of law to face in criminal cases, and further pressurize in such a fashion so that financial institution which they represent would ultimately be constrained to accept the request for “one- time settlement” with the fond hope that the obstinate defaulters who had borrowed money from it would withdraw the cases instituted against them.”
In the opening paragraph of 'defamation' Judgment Justice Misra wrote;
"This batch of writ petitions preferred under Article 32 of the Constitution of India exposits cavil in its quintessential conceptuality and percipient discord between venerated and exalted right of freedom of speech and expression of an individual, exploring manifold and multilayered, limitless, unbounded and unfettered spectrums, and the controls, restrictions and constrictions, under the assumed power of “reasonableness” ingrained in the statutory provisions relating to criminal law to reviver and uphold one’s reputation".
Some examples of Justice Misra’s word play
Shyam Narayan Chouksey vs Union Of India (Uoi) And Ors. on 24 July, 2003 (The national anthem case in Madhya Pradesh High Court)
“National Anthem is to be sung with magna cum laude and nobody can ostracize the concept of summa cum laude. In the case at hand, as we have noted earlier the son of the protagonists sings the National Anthem as a surprise item. The presentation, according to us, is in medias res. The child actor forgets the line and utters the term "sorry". To some it may appear lapsus linguae, slip of the tongue or a natural forgetting but if the whole thing is perceived, understood and appreciated in complete scenario, it is the script writer's fertile imagination and the Director's id est"
Another para-- “The national anthem is pivotal and centri-podal to the basic conception of sovereignty and integrity of India. It is the marrow of nationalism, hypostasis of patriotism, nucleus of national heritage, substratum of culture and epitome of national honour.”
Voluntary health association of Punjab vs State of Punjab (Importance for creating awareness on female foeticide)
“They must understand and accept that it is an art as well as a science and not simple arithmetic. It cannot take the colour of a routine speech. The awareness camps should not be founded on the theory of Euclidian geometry. It must engulf the concept of social vigilance with an analytical mind and radiate into the marrows of the society. If awareness campaigns are not appositely conducted, the needed guidance for the people would be without meaning and things shall fall apart and everyone would try to take shelter in cynical escapism.”It's late September - the weather is great, and we're in London for a few days of band rehearsals.
Because this is the same lineup as last Octobers tour, we don't need a long a rehearsal period as usual, just getting up to speed on the songs, in a large studio on the outskirts of London.
Linnea is joyous when coffee arrives (as am I)
Ben's got a new sound desk to play with...
and there are lots of repairs to be made...
That's my synth they're looking at... midi issues!
Maybe it's because I keep so much of my stuff on the keyboard! I know some players use them just to play -- for me it's sort of a table too, and still taped up with lyrics from tours long past...
(Not long ago there were still lyrics from the Seal tour I had done - but from the 1990 Anderson Wakeman Bruford Howe tour, just the background lyrics to Close to the Edge filled up every unused space on the keyboard!)
Michele, my long time bass tech, came across the control instructions that came with my NS bass, way back in '94. I've sure used the bass a lot since then.
Michele is working on an effect pedal of his own
which occasionally gets worked on, from the inside
Finally, day 3, our own tour espresso machine arrives. This will be a popular item with the crew and band!
Leaving soon for Denmark, where we'll rehearse a few more days with full production.
Maybe time for the next tour page.Matt Murray's Focus is on the Journey, Not the Destination
The Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender already has his name on the Stanley Cup — twice. Matt Murray may be a champion, but he’s still working diligently to improve his game.
by Mike Prisuta | Photos by Tom M Johnson
(page 1 of 2)
M att Murray doesn't know where he’s headed, but he couldn’t be more certain how he will get there.
His approach, as much as his ability, has led the Penguins’ 23-year-old, two-time Stanley Cup-winning goaltender to the rarified territory he occupies among the NHL’s netminders. Murray’s advanced understanding of the game has made the difference at each step of his young career.
Yet despite all that success, Murray displays a desire to grow — to hone the skills that already took him to the promised land.
“It’s just about trying to make your job as easy as possible, fundamentals-wise,” Murray explains. “Every time a goal goes in, I know exactly what I should have done better and what I could have done better. There’s an answer to everything. That’s kind of how I like to approach it.”
Murray has worn this philosophy throughout his journey to Pittsburgh — from growing up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, to his junior hockey days with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds of the Ontario Hockey League, to the American Hockey League’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, to a couple of championship parades down Grant Street.
That calculated, analytical approach accompanies Murray’s determination to compartmentalize in-game occurrences good and bad with a demeanor that Penguins head coach Mike Sullivan recognizes as “stoic” — factors that have conspired to make Murray unbeatable when it matters in his brief-but-decorated NHL tenure.
So far, at least.
“There’s lots of evidence to this point to suggest that he’s a mentally tough and mentally strong kid,” Sullivan says.
Anyone looking for that evidence need gaze no farther than the rafters at PPG Paints Arena, where the two most recent additions to the collection of championship banners qualify as exhibits A and B.
Because Murray only played in 13 regular-season games as a rookie — when that first banner was earned in 2015-16 — he was still considered a rookie in 2016-17, when the Penguins successfully defended their championship and secured the second.
That made Murray the first rookie goalie in NHL history to win two Stanley Cups.
In addition to being mentally tough, Murray is statistically in a class by himself.
Game photos courtesy pittsburgh penguins
In July 2015, Murray was a 21-year-old former third-round draft pick of the Penguins who had yet to appear in an NHL uniform.
He was coming off a game-changing season in the AHL. In the 2014-15 season, Murray led hockey’s top minor league in goals-against average (1.58), save percentage (.941) and shutouts (12) while posting a record of 25-10-3 in 40 regular-season games. Murray’s perception-altering campaign included an AHL-record shutout streak; for more than 304 minutes of ice time (in excess of five full games), Murray did not allow a goal. He was named the AHL Goaltender of the Year and Rookie of the Year.
Suddenly, he was on the Penguins’ radar — but there was work yet to be done.
Murray mapped out in detail what he needed to achieve during the Penguins’ development camp that summer. His perspective as he entered camp: “I know for sure if I’m going to make the jump it’s going to be because my play-reading ability is going to have to be a lot better.”
In junior hockey, Murray acknowledges, his height — he stands 6 foot 4 inches — brought him success. At the AHL level, he thrived after a realization: He’d have to come further out of his net and cut down angles against professional shooters that might otherwise pick him apart.
The last step, Murray was convinced, would be anticipation.
“I study a lot of goalies in the NHL right now,” Murray said at the time. “I watch a lot of film on YouTube and stuff. That’s kind of the biggest thing I notice, they’re almost moving into the play before it happens. They kind of see the play before it happens and know what the [attacking] player is going to do even before he does.”
The Penguins had brought him to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton to join their farm team following his last junior season. And while the AHL Penguins worked on a run that took them to the conference semifinals, goaltending guru Mike Buckley worked to get Murray to play a more professional game.
“He wasn’t worried about playing in games, so making changes at that time was perfect,” says Buckley, then the Penguins’ goaltending development coach and now the goaltending coach at the NHL level.
Buckley sold Murray on his cause-and-effect theory of puck-stopping.
“When you’re more aggressive, you’re at cause,” Buckley explains. “When you’re deep in the net, you’re at effect. When you’re at cause, shooters come down, they don’t see much net, they tense up, they tighten up, they’re less likely to score or they’re more likely to flat-out miss the net, so you’re in control.
“That was a big boost to his confidence, understanding, ‘Wow, if I step out [of the crease], I have control now. I can dictate what these players are doing.’”
He made his NHL debut on Dec. 19, 2015, the first of four games he’d play for the Penguins that December. Murray eventually went back to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton but returned to the Pens two months later; he wound up playing nine games in March and April, including the last five of the regular season, after Marc-Andre Fleury suffered a concussion.
Murray suffered a concussion of his own in the regular-season finale at Philadelphia; the team turned to goaltender Jeff Zatkoff in Games 1 and 2 of the first round against the Rangers. Murray returned for Game 3 — and went on to win 15 of 21 postseason starts while backstopping the Pens to the Cup.
Defenseman Ian Cole marveled at Murray’s signature steadiness after the Pens’ 4-1 victory over Nashville in Game 2 of last season’s Stanley Cup Final.
“He’s just such a calming presence back there,” Cole said that night. “He never gets rattled. A goal goes in, and he can play the exact same way right after that — which is hard for any goalie to do, but especially one that’s still really quite young... I think the guys feed off that calmness and that confidence that he has.”
Sullivan does, too.
“Part of it is his demeanor,” says Sullivan, who coached Murray in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton before beating him to Pittsburgh by only a week; Sullivan was named head coach of the Penguins on Dec. 12, 2015. “He has a very stoic approach. When I say that, I speak to how he handles the adversities, the challenges. If he lets in a bad goal or things don’t go his way, he responds the right way to those situations.
“And then part of it is his style of play. For a goaltender, he reads plays extremely well. He has a high hockey IQ. His anticipation skills are extremely strong. He has an economy of motion about him. He’s never making flailing saves. The puck just seems to hit him because he’s in the right place at the right time, and that goes back to his ability to read plays. He can anticipate, get to spots, square up to the puck — and he makes difficult saves sometimes look routine.”
Buckley agrees, saying that he considers Murray’s “mental component” to be his “biggest strength.”
“He’s definitely mature beyond his years,” Sullivan adds. “Just being around him for a week or so and watching how he carried himself, that’s when it jumped out at me. It’s more in the subtleties, how he carries himself in the locker room and how he carries himself on the ice, his approach to the game every day.”This is a cross post by Veaceslav Gaidarji, open source developer and contributor to the Jenkins and Bitrise projects.
Some time ago I encountered a LIFX smart bulbs. These are the bulbs with a chip inside - 50% bulb, 50% chip. There are mobile applications for easy configuration and remote control of the bulb. Nothing special here, it simply works and is very convenient to have such bulbs in dormitory.
First option is always easy and effortless, but second one is more challenging.
forget about building something new and just use the plugin
Before starting to work on such Jenkins plugin, I searched for similar projects on Google and the first links pointed me to existing LIFX notifier plugin and a blog post from Michael Neale who created the plugin. Michael’s post describes exactly what I had in mind.
The idea was: to connect a LIFX bulb to Jenkins server and update the color according to a job’s state.
And as it always happens, the developer inside me generated an idea which, as it always happens, was implemented by someone else already.
99% of ideas which come to our minds either were already implemented by someone else or they are useless.
Improving an existing plugin
The existing LIFX notifier plugin did its job really well and I was able to connect my bulb to Jenkins and test it. But it wasn’t complete and had no configurable at all, therefore no possibility to change the colors.
First, I read Jenkins contribution guidelines, which encourage developers to improve existing plugins (if any) and not create other versions of plugins with similar functionality. Then I contacted the plugin author, Michael Neale, via email and kindly asked for the contributor access in GitHub for the existing plugin version. After a short discussion about my plans on this plugin, Michael added me as a contributor to GitHub repo and wished me good luck. Thanks Michael!
I wanted to improve the LIFX notifier plugin to add the ability customize the colors ( in progress, build success and build failure ). This is not a hard task actually. A 1000+ plugins were developed for Jenkins by the hackers like me, which means that I should have no problem to do it as well. Fortunately for me, I have used some plugins already which had a UI similar to that I had planned to add to the LIFX notifier, such as:
Reviewing the code for these plugins, plus Jenkins plugin development documentation, and of course looking over Jelly components helped me to:
Better understand the Jenkins architecture.
Learn how Jenkins plugins work in general.
Learn how to create the UI components for a plugin.
Learn how to subscribe to Jenkins job state changes using appropriate extension points.
In a few weeks I’ve finished my plugin modifications and added unit tests for its major parts. As a result, the plugin now has a UI configuration section in Post-build Actions which is self descriptive:
The last step was to prepare new plugin version and publish it to the world! The Jenkins "Hosting plugins" document describes step by step process of how to publish a plugin.Just one day after Charlie Jacobs vocalized his disappointment in the performance of the 2014-2015 Boston Bruins, Claude Julien and his team grabbed a critical two points from the Pittsburgh Penguins defeating them 3-2 in overtime. The win snapped the Bruins three game losing streak as they improved to 20-15-6, while the loss sends the Penguins to 24-10-6.
The first period saw the Penguins grab an early lead thanks to a goal by Beau Bennett, his second goal of the season. Down early captain Zdeno Chara looked to create a spark on the Bruins bench, and in the final minutes of the first period he did that by beating Marc-Andre Fleury for only his third goal of the season and first since October 18th. The late goal by Chara tied the game at 1-1 entering the second period.
Entering the second period both teams were looking to not give up another goal and falling behind once again, coming into tonight’s contest the Penguins had dropped a game to the Montreal Canadiens 4-1. It was a lockdown on both ends of the ice during the second period, for the Bruins Tuukka Rask stopped all the Penguins shots he saw in the middle period. For Fleury though he let a puck rebound to the stick of Patrice Bergeron and he sniped it past Fleury to give the Bruins a 2-1 lead heading into the final period.
Coming into the third period the Bruins knew they were a solid 20 minutes of work away from taking two points from one of the best teams in the National Hockey League and something like that would be a big morale boost especially after Jacobs comments. But like they have all season, they slipped and let the Penguins back into it. Just 14 seconds into the third period Evgeni Malkin drove down to the Bruins end of the ice and fired a slap shot that rang off the post and beat Rask for his 18th goal of the season and tying up the game at 2-2. Allowing that goal didn’t knock the Bruins out though as they battled for the remaining 19 minutes of the period and were able to get the game into overtime.
Getting at least a point from Pittsburgh can be considered a success in it of itself, but at their current state the Bruins need more than just one point. So when push came to shove, Patrice Bergeron answered the call as he’s done so many times in the past. After a wrist shot from Milan Lucic, Bergeron was able to deflect the puck in air and redirect it past Fleury and after initial discussions whether it was a high stick or not the referees concurred that the goal was good.
For the captain Zdeno Chara he indicated after the game that after a slow start by the Bruins they were able to turn up the intensity, “It’s always nice to win, especially right now, we need those points, I felt that we started the game on our heels, and after the first 5-10 minutes we kind of picked it up and played better, more puck-possession game. It was a pretty even game, I think, the whole game.”
The Bruins are right back at it Thursday night when they face the New Jersey Devils who enter with a 15-20-7 record. Puck drop is at 7:00pm and you can watch the game on NESN or listen live on 98.5 The Sports Hub.
For the Penguins they are at it again with the Canadiens this time in Montreal on Saturday night. Puck drop is at 7:00pm and can be seen on the CBC Network in Canada.
Make sure to check out this past week’s CC Podcast, and keep an eye out for another episode this coming weekend.Microbes capable of stunning metabolic feats—such as thriving in extremely hot or acidic conditions —might not require a trek to an exotic hot spring. The neighborhood pond might do just fine.
That’s the implication of a new study in Biology Letters. The researchers find that, far from being confined to extreme environments, organisms that grow in extreme conditions can also grow very well in non-extreme environments, such as freshwater lakes. For those keen to find microbes that could be put to work in settings such as factories, this will be welcome news. “Bioprospecting for industrial relevant organisms with exceptional capacities may thus be done as efficiently in a nearby pond as in exotic extreme locations, such as soda lakes or hot-springs,” says co-author Etienne Low-Decarie, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.
His group’s findings were born of methodological frustrations. While studying the response of phytoplankton to environmental changes in the lab, Low-Decarie grew dissatisfied with the tools at his disposal. One can only infer so much when studying organisms in a flask, disconnected from their natural environment and biological community, he says. “I was thus looking for better ways to emulate natural conditions, while still allowing us to alter the environmental conditions.”
His lab devised what they call an “amplifying bioreactor,” a vessel (or mesocosm) in which fluid is constantly flowing in and out. The bioreactor received a constant input of organisms from the environment, in this case lake drainage from the watershed of a protected old-growth forest. In this set-up, the authors write, even extremely rare taxa can amplify if they can reproduce in the vessel faster than they are washed out.
With the device in hand, the team imposed ever-larger environmental changes, changes that eventually became extreme. Somewhat to their surprise, they found productive communities of algae and bacteria that could grow in very acidic (pH 2), basic (pH 12), and saline (40 ppt) conditions.
“The vast abundance and diversity of microorganisms living in even a single drop of water do lead to the expectation that at least a few of these organisms are capable of impressive feats,” says Low-Decarie. Even so, he was surprised to see these microorganisms—taken from lake water that’s probably safe to drink—growing in media “that has a pH equivalent to that of household bleach or stomach acid or that is saltier than the ocean.”
It is also surprising, he adds, to find that these organisms have no trouble growing both in these harsh conditions and in the conditions of the lake. Jennifer Martiny, a microbial ecologist at the University of California, Irvine agreed.
“The result that communities, selected for extreme environments, grow just as well under benign conditions is certainly counter-intuitive,” says Jennifer Martiny, a microbial ecologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the research. “It shows again how little we know about the organization and distribution of microbial communities. It also demonstrates that microbes offer us many opportunities for clever experiments that we can’t do with larger organisms.”By Salena Zito - May 11, 2014
Delvis Dutton shuts the door of his white-and-blue utility truck and walks up to the camera.
“The other guys are running for Congress,” he says. “Well, me, I am running against Congress. If you want more of the same, I am not your guy. But if you want to send a message, I am your man.”
Smiling, dressed in a blue short-sleeved shirt, one arm leaning on his truck, he ends his ad: “I am Delvis Dutton and I am running against Congress.”
Rarely have 15 seconds so captured the sentiment of most of America beyond Washington.
It doesn't matter what team jacket you wear: This guy says what everyone else is thinking, that Washington is broken.
Most campaign ads tell no story; most can compel even the calmest viewer to contemplate hurling the television into the yard of the candidate in the ad — and that's what we want to do to the ones we like.
Sometimes, though, political ads define the moment.
Dutton is a young man with a wife and two kids; he grew up on the family farm, attended Georgia Southern University and, at age 22, started a small water-well drilling business, General Pump and Well. In 2010 he decided that the way to make more of a difference in his community was to run for state representative in Georgia.
No one knows yet if Dutton will win his bid for Congress; he is just one candidate in a five-person Republican primary in Georgia's 12th Congressional District, fighting to face U.S. Rep. John Barrow, an Augusta Democrat.
One thing Dutton already has won is the sentiment of a country dumbfounded that President Barack Obama last week defined climate change as the most pressing issue facing the country. Obama did so as part of a huge public relations campaign — yes, campaign — that included asking people to pressure Washington to act on the issue.
Not jobs. Not the economy. Not rebuilding our aging infrastructure. Not gang violence, or education.
Climate change.
And he and his party ridiculed anyone who disagrees.
A couple of things about all of this smack the sensibilities of regular folks.
First, most people know Earth's climate always has changed; everyone knows about this little thing called the Ice Age. What most people don't care for is the issue being used politically to slice and dice the country, the same way the minimum wage, gender, race, immigration and religion have been used by this administration.
This is why folks do not look toward Washington, D.C., to solve problems anymore. This is why young people — the Millennials — are so turned off by the brands of both political parties, a one-time advantage that Democrats have completely squandered.
And this is why we have wave-election cycles.
Also, most folks who don't live in the privileged enclaves of high society or high academia or high government would argue that other, more pressing crises — most of them hidden in plain sight — should be considered the gravest threat to our country in our lifetime.
Things such as subpar graduation rates in our inner-city schools, or the 90 million people who have left the nation's workforce in the past six years, or our economy being less entrepreneurial now than at any point in the last three decades — or that a Brookings study showed, between 2009 and 2011, small businesses were collapsing faster than they were being formed.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka cautioned Obama and Democrats to consider how millions of livelihoods outside of D.C. would be impacted: “We are prepared to... make sacrifices, but not while the most privileged in our society stand on the sidelines and expect our poorest communities to bear the costs.”
A wave election is building beyond Washington — not a tsunami, but a wave — yet most experts don't see it because they define an electoral “wave” as a large flip to the party in power; Republicans already control the House and probably will add more seats to their list.
Those experts should review the results of November's races for state legislatures, governors' mansions and the U.S. Senate, and then rethink their definition of a wave.
And Democrats should rethink what really constitutes a “pressing issue.”City transit officials are telling riders not to charge — or even use — their Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on subways and buses because of a safety hazard. NY1's Lori Chung has the details.
"I've heard that it's been exploding, fires."
Reports that the battery on the Samsung galaxy note 7 can ignite and burn leading to a bad reputation and now a warning from transit officials — tweeting Monday:
MTA customers are urged not to use or charge their #Samsung Galaxy Note 7 mobile device on trains and buses. — MTA (@MTA) September 13, 2016
"I can sort of understand why they wouldn't want it on the train," said one straphanger. "I don't think I'd be comfortable on the train with that to be honest."
"If it's going to keep us safe why not," another rider asked.
Some commuters glad to hear that straphangers are being advised to turn the smartphone off even before entering the station. The problem? The note 7's lithium ion battery which can catch fire when overheated.
Samsung has issued a global recall on the device saying in a statement "customer safety is our highest priority. We are asking owners to power down their Note7 devices and exchange them today." While none have ignited on MTA property some aren't surprised the agency is playing it safe with a potentially dangerous device.
"When the hoverboards came out they also caught on fire too and inside the train stations they put up signs 'don't ride with them, if you're traveling be safe or don't travel with them at all,'" said another subway rider.
Some now hope officials take enough action to get the word out so that everyone with the Note 7 gets the message.
"I guess it should be a better effort to let the public know what's wrong with the phone that way it can prevent any injuries or anything like that," said one.
This comes after the federal aviation administration issued a similar warning urging travelers not to use the Note 7 on planes.Planned Parenthood’s Virginia affiliate will spend $3 million in an effort to elect Democrat Lt. Gov |
Mayor Herbert Bautista’s signature for it to take effect.
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The ordinance, which the city council passed on March 13, provides for “comprehensive animal regulation and control in Quezon City.”
It consolidates previous regulations covering pet ownership in the city, including Ordinance No. 2155 approved in 2012 which requires the registration, vaccination and tagging of pets and Ordinance No. 1373 passed in 2004 which empowers the city veterinarian to regulate stray animals.
Section No. 6 of the new ordinance, however, sets a new restriction for animal lovers: “Pets should be kept to a maximum number of four per household.” The ordinance’s definition of “domesticated animals” covers only cats and dogs.
However, domesticated animals “that are not space-consuming” such as fish and lovebirds, can exceed four but not more than 30, it pointed out.
If pet owners want to keep more than the allowed number, they will have to secure the P500 special permit required of commercial breeders, traders and trainers. They should also comply with other requirements such as vaccination and the space to be occupied by the animals. Based on the ordinance, this will depend on the pet’s size. For cats and dogs, these can be between 12 and 24 square feet.
This is on top of the pre-existing requirement for owners to register their pets with the city veterinarian for P200 each once these reach three months of age. Pets are also required to have an antirabies vaccination before they can be registered.
According to the explanatory portion of the ordinance, “there is an increasing number of incidents of animal bites in Quezon City, and the city places consistently high in positive rabies cases in the National Capital Region.”
Aside from rabies, the ordinance authors also expressed apprehension over “zoonotic diseases” or diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans such as salmonella and ringworm.
Violators of the ordinance, depending on the number of times they are apprehended, can be fined up to P2,000. Their pets may also be confiscated or their permits revoked.
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MOST READBillionaire investor George Soros has re-emerged this election cycle as a major Democratic donor, committing more than $25 million to Hillary Clinton and other party candidates and causes, according to Politico.
Soros spent roughly $27 million in a bid to unseat then-President George W. Bush in 2004 but later scaled back his giving, the website reported. Some associates of the Soros Fund Management chairman told Politico they expect him to give even more as Election Day approaches.
The Hungarian-born financier is worth $24.9 billion, according to Forbes' most recent estimate, and his return as a big-time contributor will be a boon to the party as it seeks to retain control of the White House and regain a majority in the Senate.
Soros advisor Michael Vachon told Politico that Soros "has been a consistent donor to Democratic causes, but this year the political stakes are exceptionally high."
Vachon confirmed to CNBC Politico's report of the roughly $25 million in donations so far this cycle.
Soros' charity, Open Society Foundations, did not respond to CNBC's requests for comment.
Read the full Politico article here.
More From CNBCGeorge W. Bush and his father share more than a last name. Reports show that August’s unemployment rate increased past the level initially forecast, rising to 6.1 percent. But even more disturbing is the fact that the misery index — unemployment aggregated with inflation — also soared to its highest level since 1991, when George H.W. Bush was in office.
Bloomberg:
The U.S. lost more jobs than forecast in August and the unemployment rate climbed to a five-year high of 6.1 percent, a sign that the economic slowdown is worsening two months before Americans elect their next president.
Payrolls fell by 84,000 in August, and revisions added another 58,000 to job losses for the prior two months, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The increase in the jobless rate sent the misery index, which adds unemployment to inflation, to 11.7 percent, the highest level since 1991.
Treasuries gained as some traders bet the Federal Reserve’s next move will be to cut interest rates, rather than raise them, and stocks sank. Today’s figures increase the risk that President George W. Bush will become the first president since Richard Nixon to oversee two recessions, and may hurt fellow Republican John McCain’s campaign to succeed him.
Read moreOnce again, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a BFI screening of two films in the BBC’s new Hollow Crown season, Henry IV parts I and II, both directed by Sir Richard Eyre. There was a Q&A afterwards in which executive producer Sam Mendes interviewed Eyre and Simon Russell Beale, who stars as Falstaff. I have blogged an account of the Q&A here.
I should probably say that the two parts of Henry IV are among my very favourite Shakespeare plays and certainly my favourite among the histories – and Orson Welles’ Falstaff adaptation, Chimes At Midnight is my some measure my favourite Shakespeare film – so I approached Eyre’s contributions to the Hollow Crown tetralogy with both excitement and trepidation.
The first thing to say is that, once again, the performances are matchless. Jeremy Irons as Henry IV dominates – no mean feat in a play that also features Falstaff – hollowed out though he is by the burden of the crown. He is a man, as Prince Hal himself notes, eaten away by the responsibilities of power – and by the knowledge of what was done in order for him to claim it. And he is eaten away too by his son’s apparent recklessness and contempt for what Henry has bought so dearly, by the fear that Hal will fail to redeem his Plantagenat inheritance, and throw away all that Henry won. The correlation between the health of the body politic and the health of the king has rarely been more eloquently portrayed.
The casting of father and son actors Alun and Joe Armstrong as Northumberland and Hotspur is a stroke of brilliance. In particular – and not to take anything away from Alan Armstrong – Joe is the best Hotspur I have ever seen. As a rule, I have tended to find the character something of a swaggering boorish dullard, but here the force of the man’s blunt personality was almost intoxicating: high on emotion, with a compelling, passionate, willful charm, he was a genuine counterpoint to the self-contained and withheld Prince Hal.
I have written more about Tom Hiddleston as Hal in my review of Henry V. Again, his piety is subtly emphasised here – we see him cross himself several times – and here it serves to show how wrong Henry IV is when he frets that his son might be as feckless a king as Richard II. The quiet contrast between Hal’s purposeful self-doubt – his spiritual humility –and the religiouse self-pitying sentiment of Richard II is understated but highly effective.
And if Hiddleston seems to play Hal with a cool, insouciant self-contained sense of entitlement, the shocked tears when his father slaps him in the face are thrilling. We are startled to see the mask Hal has made for himself break, so that he is again the frightened, adoring son eager for his father’s approval. It’s a brilliant moment, laying bare Hal’s vulnerability, his frailty, while also further clarifying his relationships with Falstaff and his father, and his rivalry with Hotspur too.
I think of the plays as dominated by Falstaff, but Eyre’s versions – in line with the whole season’s focus on the idea of kingship – place as least as much emphasis on the young Prince Hal’s troubled relationship with his father, Henry IV, as with his wayward, overweight tutor. Inevitably, in reducing the plays to two-hour films much has been lost, and it is perhaps Falstaff and the Boar’s Head that suffers most from this.
Falstaff is nothing if not an expansive character – in every sense of the word – and inevitably to cut him is to reduce him. Falstaff lives a life of happenstance and appetite in a perpetual Now, imagining his world afresh whenever he speaks, reckless of the passing time, and it is his particular tragedy that he pins his hopes for redemption on Hal whose providential destiny is fixed by his paternal inheritance, and who cannot but help betray Falstaff’s dream simply by being party to it.
But Falstaff needs space to spread his charm, which to some extent the edits here deny him. Hal’s betrayal of Falstaff is foreshortened, his slightly bullying, bating tensions with the Boar’s Head rabble foregrounded.
Beale’s Falstaff caught his sly, glancing wit perfectly, and his slow descent into the desperate melancholy of age and failure, but I would have liked to see more of the character’s slow, beguiling, quixotic charm.
I should really also mention Maxine Peake, whose Doll Tearsheet is extraordinary, sliding perfectly between a blunt, angry, brutalised hurt and a tender untouchable humanity.
But there are lovely little moments everywhere here: Henry IV forgetting Walter Blount’s name; Doll Tearsheet being unable to read the papers Hal steals from Falstaff’s pocket;
Falstaff’s own half-wounded, half-stabbing “Depose me?” to Hal as they play-act the king.
Mendes’ stated aim as producer was to make four films, not four films of more-or-less theatrical productions. On that basis, I would say that Eyre’s are the most successful of the four: his films have more confidence and energy in the direction than Goold’s or Sharrock’s: the pace is sharper, the cutting more effective, the camerawork fluid and involving where theirs was more static. It is as if the latter were still too wedded to how they might block a scene for the theatre; Henry V, in particular, seemed conceived in permanent mid-shot.
But the biggest criticism I have of the Hollow Crown is that the same actors did not carry the parts of Henry and Northumberland through from Richard II into Henry IV. I have no argument with the individual actors in either film, but there was a real opportunity to see more clearly how Shakespeare’s characters develop through the films, and moreover an opportunity that is unique to this kind of film project.
When challenged about the decision by an audience member in the Q&A afterwards, Sam Mendes seemed rather defensive, citing scheduling conflicts, noting the period of time elapsed between the plays – in fact, only a couple years – and saying that anyway it wasn’t that important. Well, perhaps not, but given that the stated aim was to create a filmic rather than a theatrical experience, the choice was certainly a regrettable one.
But these are minor criticisms, since the series as a whole is a tour de force of imaginative retelling, and each film is superb in its own right, confident in their own visions of the texts and drawing wonderful, sharply delineated performances out of a glorious cast.
My reviews of the other films in the series are here: Richard II, Henry V. I have also posted an account of the Q&A with Sam Mendes, Sir Richard Eyre and Simon Russell Beale after the screening of Henry IV at the BFI.
AdvertisementsFast cars! Explosive action! This is ON THE RUN! Take the wheel and make your getaway! The cops are on your tail - get to the next checkpoint before time runs out! Show off your driving skills: catch the slipstream of other cars to go even faster, and build up a combo for super-speed! Smash your way to freedom: collect boosts to clear a destructive path through traffic! Ride with style: your style! Choose your car from a large fleet, then upgrade your ride to make it even faster and stronger. Look out for transporter trucks to grab a special vehicle! Fancy a bigfoot? We got ya. Feeling more like riding a tank? No problemo. Perhaps with a side of warplanes? We got that too, and then some! What are you waiting for? Get in, hit the gas and let’s go On The Run! FEATURES • Dodge, smash and crash your way through the streets! • Race through exotic locations, evading police and helicopters! • Grab destructive power-ups: speed boosts, fire trucks, planes and tanks! • Upgrade and unlock better and faster cars! • Stay ahead of your friends, and top global leaderboards! **************************************** Find out more about Miniclip: http://www.miniclip.com Follow Miniclip on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com//miniclip Follow Miniclip on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/miniclip Follow Miniclip on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/miniclipMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Energy Secretary Chris Huhne: "We intend to keep our carbon trading options open"
Chris Huhne has committed the UK to halving carbon emissions by 2025, from 1990 levels, and changing the way that the country produces energy.
The energy secretary - who is battling claims he asked someone close to him to take speeding points for him - briefed MPs on the UK's fourth "carbon budget".
He said there would be a review of progress in early 2014 to ensure the UK's targets were in line with Europe.
Labour accused him of a "go-slow" on green progress.
'Green growth'
Addressing the Commons, Mr Huhne said the decision would be reviewed in three years to ensure the targets are "aligned" with other members of the European Union, which he said made "pragmatic sense".
Countering claims that energy consumers would face price hikes as a result of the measures, he said it would result in no additional cost for the consumers during this parliament.
Analysis The announcement makes the UK the first country in the world to have declared a "legally binding" target on greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2020. The set of five-yearly carbon budgets maps out the stages the UK should go through on the way to its long-term goal of cutting emissions by 80% by 2050 by what advisers consider the most economic route. Political squabbles in cabinet have left their scars. Energy-intensive industries will gain relief from rising electricity prices, via details to be announced later, while the carbon budget will be reviewed in 2014 in case UK ambition means it is losing out against continental rivals. I understand that a key factor in the decision to go with the carbon budgets advisers recommendations was a threat by Greenpeace to take the government to judicial review if it gave way to business lobbying. The budget's adoption has been applauded by a group of leading UK companies for giving "greater certainty for business to invest in green technologies". Will the UK's low-carbon ripples spread?
He also revealed the government was "working up a package of measures" to be announced by the end of the year to help energy-intensive industries "adjust" to the transformation while remaining competitive.
Mr Huhne told MPs the budget would "set Britain on the path to green growth".
"It will establish our competitive advantage in the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy," he said.
"It will generate jobs and export opportunities in these sectors - maintain energy security and protect our economy from oil price volatility. It's a framework for growth, not just for action on climate but for growth and prosperity."
The Climate Change Act 2008 sets a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK by at least 80% on 1990 levels by 2050, and also requires the government to set carbon budgets - limits on emissions - for consecutive five-year periods.
These carbon budgets must be set at least three budget periods in advance, and the fourth carbon budget - the limit on emissions from 2023 to 2027 - has to be set in law by June 2011.
The 2027 targets follow recommendations from the government's official advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
Mr Huhne said he agreed with the committee that net emissions over this period should not exceed 1,950 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent - a 50% reduction from 1990 levels.
"We will aim to reduce emissions domestically as far as is practicable and affordable," he said.
"But we also intend to keep our carbon trading options open to maintain maximum flexibility and minimise costs in the medium term. Given the uncertainty of looking so far ahead, this is a pragmatic approach."
'Delighted'
Shadow climate change secretary Meg Hillier accused Mr Huhne of a "go-slow" on green progress, saying that the "long-awaited Green Investment Bank" was unable to borrow until 2015, pointing out: "So no rush there."
She said meeting carbon targets was impossible without cutting domestic emissions, adding: "Policy needs to be joined up if we are going to get the green industrial revolution we need in this country."
But CCC chief executive, David Kennedy, said he was "delighted" the government had accepted its recommendations and that it would "ensure that we make the right investment choices, maximising long-term growth and reducing our reliance on imported fossil fuels".
However, Green MP Caroline Lucas remained critical of the announcement which "risked being a sham", she said, citing the "slipped in a concessionary review clause which will allow the government to backtrack on the fourth carbon budget".
She concluded: "On the crucial issue of how we now meet the targets, the government has shunned the CCC's recommendation that the budget should be met through domestic action alone.
"Allowing the use of trading mechanisms such as offsetting essentially means outsourcing our emission reduction responsibilities to other countries - thereby weakening the drive to achieve more green technologies and industries, with all the jobs those can bring, here in the UK."
But Matthew Spencer, director of the Green Alliance, suggested the government would find it hard to weaken the budget in 2014 without facing a legal challenge.
"The 2014 review is very unlikely to change anything since the EU will not have decided on its trajectory by then," he said.
"The Prime Minister has shown real leadership, and we should celebrate the fact that the UK can now become the lead location for investors in low carbon infrastructure and technology and maximise the advantage for UK business."
Friends of the Earth welcomed the budget but said the "get-out clause" could undermine business confidence in investing in a greener future.
Consumer watchdog Which? has expressed concern that domestic customers will not be similarly shielded from price rises.
The Committee on Climate Change has forecast that to meet emissions targets the average household fuel bill will go up by £1 a week until 2020 when it will plateau out with no major rises after that.
Mr Huhne faced taunts from some Labour MPs over allegations he asked someone close to him to take speeding points on his driving licence - which are firmly denied by the minister.
Labour's Geraint Davies asked if the carbon targets "would be helped by lowering the speeding limit for cars or does he think the speeding limit for cars should be raised like the transport secretary and presumably his wife?"
Mr Huhne replied that the question was "well above his pay grade".One of the fundamental problems with the 2016 online census was the architecture. Not the building the ABS works in, but the way the computer system built to handle millions of Australians was designed. Turns out two uni students designed a better way to do it in just 54 hours on the weekend – at a cost of just $500.
If there’s one thing a computer programming student loves, it’s a hack-a-thon. Now, for the uninitiated, this is not an event where smart people hack innocent people’s computers over and over again – it’s a concentrated period of time within which teams are required to come up with an idea and build it.
Pizza is a vital ingredient, as is a lack of sleep.
But for two Queensland first-year uni students, the idea was simple – Make Census Great Again.
Austin Wilshire and Bernd Harzer are both from the Queensland University of Technology. Austin studying IT, Majoring in Computer Science, while Bernd is studying Creative Industries and Information Technology.
They teamed up and set to work on their Trump-like goal for the failed 2016 Census.
And their approach – vastly different to the ABS and their contracted developer IBM.
Scale. That’s right, Austin and Bernd wanted to design for scale.
The traditional approach to designing web services is “on-premise” – this means that somewhere there are a bunch of computers all built to serve up the content – in this case, census forms. This is what IBM and the ABS did with the actual Census.
But at the Code Network “winter hack-a-thon” on the weekend, these two smart cookies went for a “cloud-first” design which can quite simply “infinitely scale”.
What this means is, you use a service like AWS (Amazon Web Services) and the software is built to simply grow, as load increases, it re-deploys itself to continually be able to cope with the demand.
Think about it – does Amazon.com go down often?
They built the site, and even “load tested” it – remember the ABS spent almost half-a-million dollars on Load testing their failed site? In addition to the $9.6million to design and build it?
On the weekend “Make Census Great Again” was load tested to 4 million page views per hour. And 10,000 submissions per second – insane numbers.
This proves a couple of things. Firstly, innovation is alive and well in Australia.
Secondly, Governments have a habit of over-engineering everything, and it’s that simple thing which ruined Census 2016.
$500. And 54 hours of development time by two young first-year Uni Students. Take that Malcolm Turnbull – Take that ABS. Perhaps worst of all – take that IBM.
54 hours? That’s the time allowed at the Code Network Hack-a-thon, it’s also pretty damn close to the amount of time the Census site was down for too.
For the record, Code Network is a volunteer student-run organisation based at the QUT. It was founded last year and it’s aim is to help produce the best software developers on the planet and has 1500 members.
We all know who to ask for help on the next big government project don’t we.
As for Austin and Bernd – they won a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 donated by event sponsor Technology One.
Web: Make Census Great Again
Photos by Mathew Taylor
Trev is a Technology Commentator, Dad, Speaker and Rev Head. He produces and hosts two popular podcasts, EFTM and Two Blokes Talking Tech. He also appears on over 50 radio stations across Australia weekly, and is the resident Tech Expert on Channel 9’s Today Show each day and appears regularly on A Current Affair. Father of three, he is often found down in his Man Cave. Like this post? Buy Trev a drink!
Co Authors :A year ago, it would have been unthinkable that Rand Paul’s presidential campaign could underperform that of his father, Ron Paul. Rand had expanded his father’s presidential base, attracting Tea Partiers and Evangelical Christians and even winning over Establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell. Time ran a cover story proclaiming Rand Paul is the Most Interesting Man in Politics [by Michael Scherer, October 16, 2014] and most polls showed him at or near the top of GOP pack—indeed, a May 28-31, 2015 Washington Post/ABC poll found Rand Paul tied for first place with Jeb Bush (!). However, after that Paul failed to receive double digits; he had been below 5% since August [ 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination, Real Clear Politics]. Now he’s out. What happened?
The most obvious answer: Donald J. Trump, who announced his candidacy just as Rand Paul’s numbers began to fall. Rand Paul was on the receiving end of numerous Trump stumpings. Thus when Paul tried to attack Trump by saying “I think there’s a sophomoric quality about Mr. Trump … about his visceral response to attack people on their appearance, short, tall, fat ugly," Trump hit back brutally: “I never attacked him or his looks, and believe me, there’s plenty of subject matter right there." [Donald Trump hits Rand Paul on his looks during GOP 2016 debate, by Adam Edelman, New York Daily News, September 15, 2016]
But Rand Paul has been an afterthought since Trump began his campaign, and Trump’s insults were not really key. Instead, three other aspects of the Trump campaign—Trump’s opposition to Political Correctness, his celebrity appeal, and his nationalism—have deflated whatever air was left in the Ron-Rand Paul “Liberty Movement.”
Political Correctness
Shortly before dropping out, Paul complained to black MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall: “I’ve been one who says we have to have a bigger, better, bolder party, and that means a more diverse party. And I think Donald Trump will make us, sort of the lily White party, which is not going to win any elections” [ Rand Paul: Trump will make GOP a 'lily-white' party, MSNBC, January 31, 2016].
This was just the culmination of Paul’s long retreat on questions of race and immigration. While it would take a dissertation to document all of Paul’s pathetic pandering, he’s been pro-Amnesty and very vocally sided with black criminals and against police, going so far as saying that the GOP should attend Black Lives Matter events and that “I'm for most of the change and most of the things they have supported” [Rand Paul Wants GOP To Join Black Lives Matter Town Hall, by Phillip Lewis, Huffington Post, November 5, 2016].
Paul might have gotten away with this if Donald Trump had not happened to him. Few on the Right have criticized Paul for his Leftist views on law and order, and criticizing them has been an afterthought even for Trump. However, Trump created a very clear contrast. While Paul pandered to Black Lives Matter, Trump said he and his supporters would physically remove Black Lives Matters disruptors—and they’ve made good on the promise.
More importantly, Donald Trump has pushed the discussion away from outreach to minorities, and, instead, towards inreach to working class whites. Rand Paul calls himself a “Detroit Republican.” But the GOP will never win the blacks in Detroit, no matter how many times he promises to free its criminals. It can, however, can appeal to the white union members who fled that once-great city and have seen their jobs sent overseas.
Pop Culture Icon.
Some say Rand Paul was doomed because he alienated his father’s supporters by compromising some libertarian principles. While this is true, it’s not really responsible for Rand’s failure. After all, Ron Paul did not win a single state in 2008 or 2012. Rand had to expand beyond ideological libertarians to have a chance to win.
Had Paul grown his audience, he could have done with a few less libertarians. But he needed to keep the kind of excitement that surrounded his father’s campaigns.
While few libertarians will admit it, Ron Paul’s movement was about more than ideology. While I was very critical of his candidacy, there was a real energy to it, and there was something exciting about supporting him. Paul supporters dominated social media and the Internet and had the best memes. I recall watching Ron Paul on the Tonight Show, and the other celebrity guest—comic Joe Rogan—showed up in a Ron Paul shirt and had the whole crowd on its feet for Paul. He attracted rappers KRS One and Snoop Dogg, A-List pop stars and actors like Kelly Clarkson and Vince Vaughn, athletes like Peyton Hillis, and even some of the conservative B-list celebrities who support Republicans, like Chuck Norris.
Much of this energy was not libertarian. In fact, Clarkson supported Barack Obama in the general election. [Famed Singer Kelly Clarkson Switches Vote From Libertarian Ron Paul to Obama… Because He’s a ‘Great Guy’, The Blaze, October 23, 2012]
Joe Rogan is now a Bernie Sanders supporter. Many of the college students who supported Paul may well have liked him because of his oddball celebrity status and stance on drug legalization and civil liberties [How Bernie Sanders helped kill Rand Paul’s campaign, Iowa Starting Line, January 14, 2016].
I suspect that Rand Paul’s pandering on Black Lives Matter was motivated not just by a desire to appease the Main Stream Media, but also to try to keep Ron Paul’s celebrity and liberal supporters.
But it didn’t work. None of the elder Paul’s supporters seem to be backing the younger one, except poker player Dan Bilzerian (who has since switched allegiance to Trump—‘King Of Instagram’ — I Endorse Guns, Girls And Donald J. Trump, Daily Caller, December 16, 2015.)
Sanders and Trump are the only candidates with a Ron Paul-type celebrity following, and those on the Right naturally gravitate towards Trump. Trump was already a celebrity before he ran and has won the endorsements of big names like Tom Brady and Kid Rock, along with the bulk of the conservative B-listers like Stephen Baldwin and Ted Nugent. He’s winning the Internet and meme wars. If you want to support a candidate because it’s “fun”—the Make America Great Again rope hats and watching Trump’s outrageous statements is much better than Rand Paul trying to look cool by wearing blue jeans to all his events.
Nationalism vs. Libertarianism:
The GOP had been headed in a more non-interventionist and civil libertarian mode until late 2014. Many opposed Obama’s Libya intervention, were horrified by Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA spying, and cheered Rand Paul’s filibuster against Drone strikes. Now, however, the rise of the Islamic State and the San Bernadino terror attacks have forced non-interventionists onto the defensive.
Rand Paul countered, correctly, that past American meddling in the Middle East led to the Islamic State [How U.S. Interventionists Abetted the Rise of ISIS, Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2016]. But many Republican voters view this non-interventionism as weak pacifism.
In contrast, Trump has managed to stake out a relatively non-interventionist position without falling to the trap that ensnared Paul. He opposed the War in Iraq, opposed deposing Assad in Syria, and does not want antagonize Putin. Libertarian non-interventionists like Doug Bandow acknowledge that Trump has the best foreign policy. [Filled With Bombast And Excess: Donald Trump Still Is The Best Of A Bad GOP Lot On Foreign Policy, Forbes, August 26, 2015]But he doesn’t reach these positions by sounding like Ron Paul. As Pat Buchanan has put it, “Trump recognizes the inner hawk in Republicans” [Pat Buchanan says Donald Trump is the future of the Republican Party, by Chris Cillizza, Washington Post, January 12, 2016]. For example, Trump praises Putin for “bombing the hell out of ISIS” and suggests we should let him keep it up to save money [Donald Trump supports Putin ‘bombing the hell out of ISIS’, RT, October 5, 2015].
Beyond foreign policy, Trump has exposed the embarrassing fact that the vast majority of GOP voters are simply not libertarian on economics. Trump’s positions on trade, Eminent Domain, ethanol subsidies, taxing hedge funds, and Social Security and Medicare are at odds with free market dogmatism—but GOP voters have come to him.
Notably, Ted Cruz, who began his career parroting Rand Paul, has more recently been sounding like Trump on trade and immigration. National Review once complained Trump rarely uses the words “liberty” or “freedom” in his speeches [The Words Trump Doesn’t Use, by Jim Geraghty, September 10, 2015] But Cruz has also abandoned his libertarian rhetorical talking points for Trump’s populism (at least until Paul dropped out). At Cruz’s rambling Iowa victory speech, he only used liberty once and did not use “freedom” at all. Yet he pejoratively denounced the “media,” “establishment, and “lobbyists” six times.
It is the Paul family tragedy that, at the peak of their careers, they chose to abandon what used to be called paleolibertarianism, which offered them a real, intellectually-coherent opportunity to appeal to immigration (and American) patriots. Regardless of whether Donald Trump ultimately wins the nomination, his remarkable success, and Ted Cruz’s attempt to co-opt it, has demonstrated conclusively that the “Liberty Movement’s” strange brew of Left-Libertarianism, the Tea Party, and Political Correctness has failed with American voters.
Washington Watcher [email him] is an anonymous source Inside The Beltway.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
BRENDAN RODGERS is set to hand teenage striker Samed Yesil his Liverpool FC debut in Thursday’s opening Europa League group game against Young Boys.
The Reds boss will take a youthful squad to Switzerland with a number of senior players being rested ahead of Sunday’s Premier League visit of Manchester United.
Luis Suarez is unlikely to travel with Rodgers looking to Yesil and Academy graduate Adam Morgan to provide the firepower.
When Yesil was snapped up from Bayer Leverkusen for around £1million last month, Rodgers said it would be up to two years before the 18-year-old German youth international was a first team player.
However, Liverpool’s failure to replace Andy Carroll before the transfer window shut has seen Yesil swiftly promoted from the reserves.
“Yesil will certainly be fast-tracked,” said Rodgers.
“He will be involved in the Europa League game.
“I watched him play against England Under-19s during the international break and he scored two terrific goals and set up another.”
Yesil was a prolific goal scorer at youth team level for Leverkusen and earned the nickname ‘Gerd’ after the legendary German striker Gerd Muller.
He attracted interest from a number of top European clubs after netting six goals in seven games at last year’s FIFA Under-17 World Cup but remained with the Bundesliga outfit.
Yesil was handed his first team bow by Leverkusen boss Sami Hyypia against Hertha Berlin back in April and the former Reds defender played a key role in the youngster’s switch to Anfield.
Having played an hour in Liverpool Under-21s’ win over Chelsea last Friday night, Yesil is ready for his senior debut.
Rodgers believes all the club’s youngsters have been inspired by teenage winger Raheem Sterling’s meteoric rise so far this season and is happy to put his faith in youth.
“The biggest thing for young players now is that the introduction of Raheem has given even the seven and eight years olds the one thing in life you want – hope,” added Rodgers.
“Every young Academy player, every parent or guardian has got hope that a young player will play at Liverpool.
“I saw it last week after moving a lot of the young players up to Melwood with it being international week. You could see it in their attitude. They had a spring in their step.
“They feel that they have got a chance and they will get that. There is nothing better than when you see a young kid come through. There will be that chance for Yesil and one or two other boys over these period of months now.”Compounded is a game about building chemical compounds through careful management of elements, a fair bit of social play and trading, and just a bit of luck. In Compounded, players take on the roles of lab managers, hastily competing to complete the most compounds before they are completed by others – or destroyed in an explosion. Some compounds are flammable and will grow more and more volatile over time; take too long to gather the necessary elements for those compounds and a lot of hard work will soon be scattered across the lab.
Although Compounded does involve a fair share of press-your-luck tension and certainly some strategic planning, the most successful scientists will often be those who strike a good trade with their fellow lab mates. Players are able to freely trade elements, laboratory tools and even favors – if there is truly honor among chemists!
Compounded will offer the same hallmark replay value as other Dice Hate Me Games titles, with high-quality components. Compounded will include five thick cardboard personal Work Benches where players manage their experiments and tools; thick punchboard player claim tokens, tools and the coveted lab key that marks the Lead Scientist; 100 plastic "element" crystals in six different elemental colors; a bag for storing and blindly pulling elements during the game; and 70 square compound cards, printed on high-quality cardstock. There's also a thick cardboard scoring track (it's the periodic table!) and we'll even throw in some plastic baggies to organize and store all your cardboard goodies!
Compounded will come in the Dice Hate Me Games "Rooster"-sized box - halfway between a Monkey (Carnival, The Great Heartland Hauling Co.) and a Tiger (VivaJava). What's this crazy talk? Take a look here for more information on our box sizes and game categories!
Compounded is a game for 2 to 5 players, ages 12 and up, and designed by Darrell Louder. Compounded is a distinguished three-year alum of Cartrunk Entertainment's Unpub program - a series of public and private playtest events held each year to help designers present, hone and polish their game designs with the gaming public, as well as board game production professionals.
If you'd like to dig deeper into Compounded, you can download the rules here. Please bear in mind that the rules design is still a work in progress - we're working on editing, refining, and adding art and examples to make them as clear as possible before the game goes into production. Well, hopefully into production - that's where you all come in!
Achieving our base funding goal ensures that Dice Hate Me Games will be able to publish Compounded with the quality that we all have come to expect. However, the base game of Compounded is priced according to our initial funding goal; exceeding that funding goal will allow us to add more to the game, such as select component upgrades, an in-game expansion (or "inspansion"), and maybe another special goodie or two if the campaign does well. So spread the word, get your friends and family to pledge, and stay tuned for updates for more information on those special stretch goal rewards! Remember, backers who pledge for a copy of Compounded (CHEMISTRY 101 pledge level and above) receive ALL stretch goals - so pledge early and rest easy in knowing you'll never have to upgrade your pledge to get more goodies.
Our first stretch goal has been reached - an upgrade to the Lab Key Lead Scientist token! This hefty wooden token will signify who gets to do all the cool stuff first in the turn. In other words - when you're holding the key, you're in charge! For more info. on the $35K stretch goal upgrade, check out Update #2.
Our second stretch goal has been reached!. We will be adding the Lab Partners Inspansion! The Lab Partners Inspansion includes 20 large cards (standard "tarot" size) that represent much larger compounds available for completion |
serious moto gear, and their Kevlar jeans are no exception. A pair of D1s cost $220: For that, you get CE-certified soft-armour and an almost bullet-proof Kevlar lining. From a style perspective, they aren’t going to fool anyone by pretending to be “normal” jeans, but then again, you didn’t want to be normal anyway. [Buy]
Icon Hooligan Jeans Icon’s latest pants boast a heavy-duty denim chassis, reinforced Aramid knees, and Field Armor knee impact protectors. You get the choice of two colors, and a neat touch is the additional of external zippers—so you can take out the knee armor before you walk into the bar. The fit is relaxed, and so is the price: a suggested retail of $120.00. [Buy]
Resolute Cruiser Jeans Resolute is an Australian company that produces single-piece DuPont™ Kevlar® lined jeans with full European CE certification. The single piece of Kevlar covers the backside, hips and knees, and removable CE armour is fitted into knee pockets. I’ve spoken to a few guys who own and wear the $160 Cruiser jeans and I haven’t heard a bad word from any of them. One of the guys mentioned that he tried to get married in them but his fiancée wouldn’t let him … [Buy]
Kyrano C6 Jeans Despite the somewhat Asian-sounding name, Kyrano is a British company owned by Hood Jeans. They started Kyrano as a new label to sell a highly advanced line of ‘Para-Aramid’ reinforced motorcycle jeans fitted with flexible D3O™ armor in the hips and knees. I picked up a pair of these £140 C6 jeans last year before a motorcycle road trip to Vietnam, and I have to say, they’re exceedingly well built. The added security of having D3O™ armor in common impact areas is a huge plus—despite the armor they look like a regular pair of around-town jeans. [Buy]
Draggin/Drayko Drift Jeans Drayko are widely regarded as one of the best motorcycle jeans manufacturers in the world. They submit all their products to strict European CE testing, and the company founder tests new models by being dragged on his ass behind a superbike. Additional knee armour is an option with the $180 Drayko Drift jeans and the boot cut fit is ideal for people with hefty protective footwear. [Buy]
Maple Jeans 1941 Maple has been stirring up a huge amount of interest in the US and European motorcycle communities. The company is relatively new on the scene, but has made a splash due to its focus on aesthetics. The £250 Maple 1941 jeans are fitted with DuPont™ Kevlar® over the knees, thighs and backside; there’s also the added benefit of Forcefield CE-approved knee and hip armour. Despite being motorcycle jeans, they look exactly like the jeans all the cool kids are wearing, and are made from 13.5oz raw selvedge denim. [Buy]
Check out our other gear guides, covering classic motorcycle boots, the best motorcycle jackets and textile jackets for warm weather riding.A24 has released a series of brief but enticingly strange and funny teasers for How To Talk To Girls At Parties. Consider what’s featured: Alien Elle Fanning being introduced to the ways of punk; Nicole Kidman, evoking Bowie, leading a revolution; tons of latex. Put all three together and it looks like a romantic comedy coming-of-age story along the lines of Sing Street, just mixed with some freaky sci-fi body horror. And if that’s not intriguing enough, it comes from Hedwig And The Angry Inch’s John Cameron Mitchell and is based on a short story by Neil Gaiman.
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In the clip above, Fanning’s character Zan learns what humans like to do from Enn (Alex Sharp) and frolicking ensues.
And here we get a taste of the movie’s wilder elements as Enn and his pal witness some extraterrestrial oddities. The movie premieres at Cannes. It doesn’t have an official release date yet.Microsoft just beefed up its custom creation tool for building apps for businesses called PowerApps. While the name PowerApps might surface visuals of Excel, Word, and PowerPoint on some sort of features steroid, the reality is much more mundane but overall useful.
Microsoft’s PowerApps are actually a neat resource businesses can use to spin up quick divisional apps to be distributed and used throughout a company without the need to employ someone with an extensive programming background. With Microsoft’s PowerApps, users get an Office-like experience where they can make use of template layouts, tap into 3rd party support such as Slack, Google Drive or Twitter and the ability to publish and use on the web or mobile devices.
Now, in addition to all of those features, PowerApps users now get an update that enables users to:
Create and modify an app in a browser
Create an app from within a modern list in SharePoint
Other mainstay features include:
Create a new app from scratch
Create app from gorgeous templates
Create apps from data connecting to SharePoint, Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive and more
Use the app yourself or share them with colleagues in your organization
Add business logic and intelligence using the power of Excel-like expressions
Compose rich interactive visuals and media to create custom, unique apps
Interested users can grab Microsoft’s PowerApps from the Windows Store (barring some System Requirements) today or visit the PowerApps site here.
PowerApps Developer: Microsoft Corporation Price: Free
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Further reading: BusinessReverse-engineering the brain to improve machine learning
Researchers are working to reverse-engineer how the brain’s visual system processes information in hopes of advancing machine learning algorithms and computer vision.
The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) research program seeks to unlock the brain’s learning methods in an effort to make computers process information more like humans do. The five-year, $12 million research project funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity are will be led by Tai Sing Lee, professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
The researchers will attempt to improve the performance of neural networks. Currently, man-made neural nets process information in one direction, from input nodes to output nodes. But the brain likely works in quite a different way, according to CMU officials. Neurons in the brain are highly interconnected, but what these connections are doing computationally is a mystery. Solving that mystery could enable the design of more capable neural nets.
Using molecular sensors to monitor neural activity, researchers can simultaneously track the neural dynamics within a brain region and produce a massive dataset that will provide a detailed picture of how neurons in one region of the visual cortex behave. With that database, plus others compiled by the project's collaborators, researchers can evaluate computational and learning models as they reverse-engineer the data to build computer algorithms for learning and pattern recognition.
“Extracting the brain’s secret algorithms in learning and inference from this massive amount of data to advance machine learning is extremely ambitious and might be the most uncertain part of this project,” said Andrew Moore, dean of CMU’s School of Computer Science.
“The hope is that this knowledge will lead to the development of a new generation of machine learning algorithms that will allow AI machines to learn without supervision and from a few examples, which are hallmarks of human intelligence,” Lee said.By Lewis Dolinsky
A fast-pitch pick-up softball game that began at UC Berkeley celebrated its 50th year on Saturday. It has survived through ten presidents and at least ten locales while hundreds of players, ages 12 to 70s, have come, gone and sometimes returned years later.
Memorable characters include the first World Frisbee Champion, a soap opera star, a porn actor, a plumber with guns, a Communist woman second baseman, a longtime mayor of Berkeley, pitchers from Guatemala and Colombia, and the Statman, who kept records of every at bat until the responsibility overwhelmed him and he burned all the pages.
The founders were four members of Occident, the Cal campus literary magazine: Gary Robinson, Bruce Hawkins, Steve Kellman, and me. The first fields were upper Barrows, then lower Barrows, which became the site of the Pacific Film Archive before it moved to Center Street. We played doubleheaders on Saturdays and Sundays, triple headers on holidays. Now it’s one game on Saturdays, April through November at Oakland’s Montclair Park, where good young players mix in with the veterans.
Some veterans remember checking out Bushrod field in Oakland in the 1970s. There, practicing, were former minor league baseball players in their 60s and 70s, skills diminished but passion intact. That’s how we want to be, we said. And in a way, we became what we beheld.
Journalist Lewis Dolinsky spent 26 years at the San Francisco Chronicle as an editor and foreign affairs columnist.I'll start this blog with some introduction. For those of you who know who I am, you know that I am a mapmaker famous for maps like Fighting Spirit in the beta, Neo Enigma in the ESL cups and Ithaca in the ESV Korean Weeklies amongst other things. About six months ago I was getting very burned out. Making maps, commentating, watching the same shit play on the same shit maps, etc. I was frustrated and becoming increasingly strapped for time and my priorities needed changing. After awhile I came to the conclusion to retire from mapmaking, take a break from SC2 as a whole and maybe try commentating again a little later.Fast forward to about two months ago. OverKlocked is a LAN center in Edmonton that had finally opened up and it's first event was (you guessed it) a StarCraft 2 tournament that I was invited to commentate. The day went very well, I became acquainted with a lot of people and had a great time. As the weeks passed, more and more SC2 events happened in the community. MLG viewings at Overklocked, tournaments, group practice sessions, barcraft, etc - my love for the game and that spark for lack of a less cheesy term was starting to come back.One of the people I met in the community is Jacqueline "Versailles" Geller. You might recognize the name from one of the billions of eSports pieces she writes. She had asked me to teach her how to make maps and I can't say no to a pretty face~ Every time her and I met she would ask me the same thing - teach me how to make maps. This proceeded for a few weeks and during that period I found myself spending more and more time looking at and analyzing maps and becoming more and more inspired.Eventually, I caved (hence why I'm writing this TL blog now) - I agreed to teach Jacq how to make maps which we turned into an educational show for not only her but the viewers as well called "MapCraft - State of the Terrain" (4th episode this sunday! :D ) and I began working on my first original design since my retirement (not counting the 2v2 maps I was contracted to make for the Prodigy Team Starleague).I spent at least a dozen hours trying to find the right way to execute the concept I had in mind - a map with a relatively ambiguous expansion path and a backdoor leading to the main base that is somewhat out of the way, similar to Crossfire/Peaks of Beakdu. I axed design after design, sketch after sketch and I recently finally hit a personal milestone: I'm finally content with the design and started working on aesthetics. (Huge shoutout to Monitor and the rest of the ESV Mapmaking team for helping me out a TON with this - mapmaking without more than one brain is not possible IMO as well as Lokgar for the man cuddling and emotional support)I wanted to share with everyone the progress I made. Unfortunately I don't have screenshots of every single design I made between then and now but I'll post everything I do have. I hope you enjoy and maybe even learn somethingI know I didWe’re excited to announce that web vulnerability scanning powered by Tinfoil Security is now available for Azure App Services! This will enable you to scan your Azure Web Apps and help secure your web app as you develop it. According to the Web Application Security Consortium,“more than 13%* of all reviewed sites can be compromised completely automatically” and “about 49% of web applications contain vulnerabilities of high risk level”. Tinfoil Security’s own statistics show that 75% of web apps they scan have a vulnerability on the first scan. As web applications become the cornerstone of more and more businesses, they also become a potential source of threats to the IT security of a company. Tinfoil Security scanning through Azure App Service offers developers and administrators a fast, integrated and economical means to discovering and addressing these issues before they can be abused by a malicious actor. Microsoft Azure App Service chose Tinfoil Security because they are a trusted name in web application security and offer a strong set of services that will help our customers keep their web apps secure. For Azure Web Apps, Tinfoil Security is the only security vulnerability scanning option built into the Azure App Service management experience. We hope you enjoy utilizing Tinfoil Security during your development and as always, we look forward to your feedback.
How do I set it up?
Go to the Azure Management Portal and select the Web App that you would like to enable scanning on. After selecting the Diagnose and Solve Problems option you will find the “Diagnostic Tools” box as shown below:
From there, select "Security Scanning".
Selecting this option will give you several plans. Clicking through the license agreements will complete the purchase for you. Once complete, you will see a link to the management dashboard on the Tinfoil Security blade ( shown below). Browsing to this site will take you to the Tinfoil management dashboard. When you browse to the management dashboard it will automatically install the latest version of the dashboard and you might see a dialog box notifying you of the installation. After this installation completes, you should see a dashboard that looks like the image below. You can immediately start a scan from here or schedule scans under the Settings tab. The Results tab will have the results of your scan once it is complete.I’m excited about the new ProRugby in the USA but don’t know that much about the teams. So I asked my friends over at Red White and Black Eye, the American Rugby Pod, if they could write me a preview of there new teams in ProRugby and here it is.
The following is a look into the teams that make up PRO Rugby, the first professional rugby competition in North America. If you love rugby as much as I do, this will be a great way to familiarize yourself with the teams and players. It is almost all my opinion, and should be taken with a grain of salt. I can guess as to who the top teams will be, but until we see them on the field it is just that: a guess. They’re really good guesses though.
Ohio
The Village of Obetz wasn’t on many people’s radar when it came to PRO Rugby. Outside Columbus, Ohio, it’s near a rugby strong hold and should surprise people with their fan support and talent on the pitch. Given they are the only team in the East, they have a large area to represent.
In the pack, the most recognizable name from abroad is Jamie Mackintosh. Former All Black and Super Rugby journeyman will partner with Angus MacLellan, who has been on the fringe of the Eagle squad. Hooker Cameron Falcon recently received his first Eagle cap in the new Americas Rugby Championship. He’s young and has been around rugby for a long time.
A name in the engine room to look out for is Nick Civetta. He left the states in 2013 to further his rugby career in Italy. Now with the opportunity of PRO, he is returning. In the back row Pierce Dargan makes the trip back to the States after featuring for Trinity. He’s an athletic runner and is always hunting for the turnover.
Three scrummies find themselves on the roster- Shaun Davies, Chris Saint, Robbie Shaw. If I had to guess, Davies will be the starter, but all three will play. It’s a better guess that JP Eloff will lead the team at 10. He also played in the ARC at flyhalf and fullback. Eloff is a skilled 7’s player that can quickly hit a gap in a sleeping defense. Lining up in the centers are some new comers and a veteran. Ahmad Harajly traveled with Mike Friday and the USA 7’s squad for a couple stops, but hasn’t been back in camp. Another new name is Matt Hughston. He’s been a mainstay on the USA South Panthers that play in the NACRA tournament. Adding a little seasoning to the backline is Roland Suniula. He led the Eagles at #10 during the 2011 World Cup. Despite only amassing one victory, Roland showed himself to be a solid choice. He’s listed at center, but could find himself anywhere. The most recent addition to the team in Dominic Waldouck from London Irish. Ohio has quietly assembled a well rounded and dangerous team.
Denver
Denver was one of the first cities to be speculated on, but one of the last to be announced. Unsurprisingly for American rugby fans, they have an extremely well built roster. They have the highest contingent of capped Eagles, although some of those are brand new. They also have a heavy South African influence, so if you’re looking for a braai, Denver is the place to hang.
Zach Fenoglio is one of the more senior Eagles on the team with only 8 caps. He’ll also be one of the more active players. Chris Baumann, Ben Tarr, and two Australians, Jake Turnbull and Luke White provide plenty of options at prop. Baumann recently entered the Eagles team and has helped turn a pretty poor scrum into a consistent, stable platform. Ben Landry and Brodie Orth are two more newly capped Eagles. These two might be the best lock pairing in all of PRO. Hanco Germishuys is a young flanker who stands to gain a lot with Pedrie Wannenburg in the squad. Germishuys will miss the first several weeks due to captaining the USA u20s in the Junior World Rugby Trophy.
Niku Kruger was in the running to be the Eagles next scrum half, but there’s been some competition there recently. He’s still in the lead to start in Denver. The other option is Mose Timoteo, who is one of the better players in the Pacific Rugby Premiership.
There are two strong options at fly in Will Magie and Ata Malifa. Magie represented the U.S. in their successful championship run at the 2012 JWRT. Malifa comes from the PRP. The rest of the backline rivals San Diego as far as talent. Mike Garrity and Chad London are two more Eagles to watch out for. Justin Pauga is a huge (literally) player in the PRP and should break out here. With Australian dual code player Timana Tahu, Denver has a lot to be confident about heading into their first match.
Sacramento
Sacramento isn’t known as a rugby hotbed, but with recent showings at Bonny Field to see the Eagles play they’ve shown that they can put butts in seats. As of now, they are actually playing out of the largest stadium- Bonny Field holds over 11,000. Led by head coach Luke Gross, famous Eagle from the late 90’s, they may not have the name recognition that other teams are full of, but they have a strong forward pack and plenty of talent 9-15.
There’s no lack of size in the front row with prop Olive Kilifi, capped Eagle, and hooker Ray Barkwill, capped Maple Leaf. Flanker John Quill should vie for most pilfers by the end of the season, and No. 8 Kyle Sumsion from BYU brings a little more ball handling skill. Sacramento doesn’t have as many forwards signed as other teams, which means there should be a couple players that aren’t full time filling out the squad. That doesn’t mean a drop off in talent, it’s possible some players can’t leave their full time jobs.
Jope Motokana is an electric scrum half that gets the ball out quick. He’s U.S. eligible so it will be interesting to see if he challenges for a spot on the Eagles roster for the June test matches. Garrett Brewer should be his other half and was a St. Mary’s product that most recently played in Ireland. Their strong point should be in the centers, with Mirco Bergamasco and Nemia Qoro. There won’t be another center in PRO with as much experience as Mirco, and Nemia cut his teeth in the Junior World Rugby Trohpy. The danger man comes in the form of Australian Harry Bennett. He’s been a continuous threat to score in the Pacific Rugby Premiership and should be able to compliment the inside and outside backs.
San Diego
Of all the talent to go around, it is my opinion that San Diego came out strongest, but an argument could be made for Denver. The roster hasn’t been fully fleshed out, but there isn’t a position that doesn’t have a well known player listed. Ray Egan is at the helm and his assistant is also John Mitchell’s backs coach, Rob Hoadley. My heart may be elsewhere, but my brain might be picking San Diego for the first championship.
Canadian props Hubert Buydens and Jake Ilnicki were great signings for San Diego. Having two players with an international background up front will go a long way in this first season. One of the break out players for the Eagles over the last year is hooker Joe Taufete’e. He’s deceptively athletic and has a penchant for sneaky picks in rucks. A pair of locks to rival Denver will be playing in San Diego. Tai Tuisamoa and Brian Doyle both play for Old Mission Beach Athletic Club in the PRP. They’ve been instrumental in bringing the team into second place in that competition. Two more players come from the PRP in the loose. Tim Barford, also from OMBAC, and Jabari Zuberi from Santa Monica finish off a formidable pack.
The talent in the backline starts out strong with Tom Bliss at scrum half. He’s a young American that’s played professionally in England for several seasons. U.S. fans are high on him and PRO should be a informative look into his future with the Eagles. Kurt Morath from Tonga should get the nod at fly. Although he’s 31, he should be head and shoulders above his opposing number. What’s really scary is who he has to work with: Phil Mackenzie (Maple Leafs), Ryan Matyas (USA 7s), Andrew Suniula (Eagles), Jean-Baptiste Gobelet (Stade Francais), Taku Ngwenya (Biarritz), Tim Stanfill (Eagles), and Mike Te’o (Eagles). I could go into further detail, but that would take too long. There doesn’t look to be a weak spot anywhere on the roster.
San Francisco
It’s really no surprise California has three teams in the inaugural PRO season, and it’s less of a surprise that San Francisco is one of them. Young, newly capped Eagles highlight the roster, and they are bolstered by some strong foreigners. Mils Muliaina is probably the biggest name in the entire organization. He won’t single handedly win the championship, but he brings talent and experience like none other.
Patrick Latu has been getting a lot of hype heading into the season, and at prop it’s hard to hide once the game starts. He’s been around the Eagles before, and San Francisco will be heavily reliant on him for a stable scrum. Making his return to the States at hooker is Tom Coolican. Coolican was a reliable pick for the Eagles a couple years ago and it looks like he’s interested in pushing for that spot again. Two big names in the loose forwards are Alec Gletzer and David Tameilau. Gletzer is a University of California product with tremendous upside. He’s a powerful runner, but he was shifty enough to help Cal win a 7s National Championship. Tameilau has been in the pipeline since his days with the U20s, and when he had his time to shine in the Americas Rugby Championship he exceeded expectations. If he doesn’t stiff arm you to the ground or bowl you over, he just might out pace you.
Orene Ai’i leads the backs. As a former Player of the Year on the 7s World Series, he’ll be pleased with the players around him. The power at inside center comes from Nick Blevins, a stand out for Canada. Despite his size he’s a sneaky runner. Kingsley McGowan and Colin Hawley come from rival colleges and have different playing styles, but they’re both dangerous wings and looking for a spot on the national team. Then there is Mils Muliaina. The fact a 100 cap All Black is about to play in America shows how far the game here has come. He’ll do more good for the team than just his on field performance, and the time spent around him by the younger players will be invaluable.
There’s your round up of all the teams, I’ll be including the scores in my Weekend Rugby Reviews. For a weekly reviews and opinion subscribe to Red White and Black Eye podcast on iTunes or follow them on twitter. Also I’ll be running a prediction league on SuperBru so join me in guessing the results.
Update – ProRugby will be streamed live by AOLSports.About Dunkin' Donuts
Since Bill Rosenberg opened the first Dunkin' Donuts in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1950, the shop has blossomed into a one-stop coffee and breakfast restaurant familiar to millions of morning commuters and third-shift workers.
Dunkin’ Donuts is one of the world's leading coffee and baked providers. They serve more than 3 million customers each and every day. The entire enterprise is centered on the customer. Chefs create new flavors to satisfy customers, who expect freshness, and crew member that serve with a good advice that allows choosing the most suitable option while going on the way. As they describe themselves and their mission: "We strive to keep you at your best, and we remain loyal to you, your tastes and your time. That’s what America runs on.”
Beyond the bakery storefronts, the company aims for social responsibility by supporting community volunteer efforts and sourcing 100% fair-trade-certified espresso beans.Sometimes, an increase in the unemployment rate is good news for the economy. October was one of those months.
The rise, to 7.9% from 7.8% in September, was due to more people entering the job market. Many of those who had stopped searching for work were encouraged enough by the economy to start looking once again.
In determining the unemployment rate, the Labor Department surveys households to see how many people are in the labor force -- either on the job or looking for work. October's survey showed 578,000 more people than in September. About 170,000 of those have yet to find work, thus the slight uptick in the jobless rate.
"If the unemployment rate is going to rise, this is the way we want it to happen," said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
Only once during the last five years -- in May 2012 -- have so many people returned to the labor force at one time. In September, an additional 418,000 people returned, marking two months of strong growth.
"The data is volatile, but two months like this suggests we might be starting to see people be more confident in the job market," said Shierholz.
Related: It's not just a low-wage recovery
There are other signs of growing confidence in the labor market. Consumer confidence reached a four-year high in Thursday's reading, largely due to improvements in how people viewed the condition of the job market.
"The high level of consumer confidence indicates that voters are feeling better about the economy and its prospects," said Sung Won Sohn, economics professor at Cal State University Channel Islands.
The rise in unemployment comes even as more of the working-age population found jobs -- an increase of 410,000, according to the Labor Department's household survey.
Related: Best jobs in America
The other reading in the October jobs report found an increase of just 171,000 people added to payrolls, according to a survey of businesses that determines how many workers they have. But people who have gone into business for themselves, those who work for start-ups, or those who are contract employees can show up in the household survey's employment calculation before they show up in an employer's survey.Our society not only tolerates the sort of people who want to wear uniforms and want to use weapons against civilians, it actually employs them to do so. And today some of these people may well be using Tasers against travellers at Dale Farm.
Of course, having a professional and trained police force is better than the alternative, and in no sensible way can we be described as being in a police state. However, there will be those who read the first paragraph of this post and will be outraged at my apparent disdain. The police do a difficult job, they will say, and one should just be grateful for what they do. One should not be so dismissive, others will remark, especially if you do not know the pressures and stress that the police face routinely. The feature that many of these responses will share is they are non sequiturs: they deal with something which has not been said, and criticise objections which have not been made.
There are many people -- not just police officers -- who do not want to hear any criticism of the police and will immediately seek to close it down. Any adverse comment about the police will mean that one is either a dangerous anarchist wanting a lawless and brutal society, or a naive fool not realising just how lucky they are to be kept safe. It is easy to be brave from a distance. And so on. One must always remember the thin blue line.
Such responses are part of a wider problem. As a society we are actually not very good at holding the police to account, and -- frankly -- the police are not very good at taking criticism. Accordingly, we have a situation where the police are generally left to get on with their work in return for them generally not misusing their rights and privileges. The failure of any efficient mechanisms for scrutinising the police then only become obvious with a suspicious death or some public order failure which cannot be ignored. In the meantime, the police can get away with, say, casually exceeding their powers or taking payments from private investigators as long as our streets are safe and they respond promptly to 999 calls.
One can wonder how long this unofficial social contract can last. It surely is not sustainable, especially with modern communications. The police have been caught out repeatedly lying in the aftermath of fatalities. Their attempts to spin and evade legitimate concerns about misconduct are legion. Individual police officers often threaten those who criticise with libel actions, whilst chief constables employ ever-growing (and often unhelpful) PR departments. And, as for the police complaints commission, one can be surprised that its formal name includes the word "independent". But it may be that an age of deference is passing.
It is right that in a liberal and democratic society the State has a monopoly in the use of coercive force against citizens, but this monopoly has to be balanced with accountability and transparency. Those who rush to rubbish anyone questioning the police, or are quickly dismissive of those complaining of the use of force, are in fact not helping serving officers. They are instead entrenching a needless lack of effective communication. The abuse of libel and the over-use of PR professionals are similarly undesirable features of modern policing. However, policing ultimately requires practical co-operation and implicit consent. Wise police officers know this.
The more openly critical we can be of those who have the power to coerce us, the better. And the more the police can explain their decisions and justify their actions, the better. After all, they can have nothing to hide; even the ones wearing paramilitary uniforms and using weapons at Dale Farm.
David Allen Green is legal correspondent of the New Statesman. He also writes the Jack of Kent blog and at The Lawyer.“They cloak themselves in our shared heritage, in the wisdom of our religions, but make no mistake: they are terrorists and criminals.”
–Inspector Lakhani, Cybercrimes Division
Let the mind games begin: The Liberated Mind Data Pack is now available for Android: Netrunner!
With its sixty new cards (including a complete playset of nineteen different cards), The Liberated Mind explores the unique confluence of traditional Indian cultures and virtual reality taking place within the streets, temples, and corporate divisions of Mumbad. Will you expand your consciousness under the advisement of Guru Davinder (The Liberated Mind, 84) and the Temple of the Liberated Mind? Will you delve further into the secrets of telepathy and the unique defenses they allow Jinteki to develop?
The Liberated Mind brings all the Network's most transcendent qualities to the fore. Life, death, and rebirth—you can find them all among the dizzying array of virtual realities made available on the Network.
Devoted to the Noble Path
At its core, Android: Netrunner is a game about cybercrime. The elite, individualistic hackers known as Runners conduct raids upon Corporate servers, hoping to bypass all the best security that credits can buy in order to steal valuable data. Still, they come to these runs from a wide range of different motives. Some are in it simply to make a credit. Some see their runs as personal challenges or art. Some run because they hate the Corps and want to tear them apart. And some run for nobler causes—perhaps to help others, to discover hidden truths, or to unlock and disseminate the secrets to healthy living that Corps won't share freely.
Still, even those who run to help others are transforming themselves into criminals. They're breaking the laws and treading a fine line between vigilantism and terrorism. In The Liberated Mind, we find new options for these nobler Runners, including the new Anarch event, The Noble Path (The Liberated Mind, 77).
By divesting themselves of all other trappings, the Runners who pursue The Noble Path gain freedom from all damage they might suffer during their runs. The purity of their approach allows them to ignore such potent ice as Komainu (Honor and Profit, 17) and Janus 1.0 (What Lies Ahead, 12), as well as traps like Data Mine (Core Set, 76). It also allows them to ignore the damage they would otherwise suffer from such assets and upgrades as Snare! (Core Set, 70) and Self-destruct (The Source, 112). It even offers protection from the damage the Corp players would hope to deal with Jinteki: Personal Evolution (Core Set, 67).
Altogether, this means that their pursuit of The Noble Path may allow some of the game's nobler Runners to launch powerful, late-game runs that go deep into a Corp's fully protected R&D. Historically, Corps like Jinteki don't mind too much if you can access five cards from R&D in one fell swoop because it likely means you'll flatline along the way, but while you're following The Noble Path, there's no number of Snare! or Shock! (True Colors, 63) that can stop you.
Precognition and Protection
The Runners aren't the only ones seeking to expand their consciousnesses in The Liberated Mind. Despite the contentious tenor of the Indian Union's heated national election season and the political controversy surrounding the Clone Rights movement, Jinteki continues at full speed with its research into the limits of the human (or clone) mind, gaining the use of two new psi cards, Chetana (The Liberated Mind, 89) and Dedicated Neural Net (The Liberated Mind, 88).
Although it doesn't end the run with either of its subroutines, Chetana may still manage to end some early runs against your early Jinteki: Personal Evolution decks. Play the psi game correctly, and you'll strip the Runner of cards, meaning if he or she were to access an agenda, the net damage your identity would cause would prove lethal. Accordingly, the Runner is likely to jack out before accessing cards in that situation.
Chetana may not play as well in the late game. It is, after all, only a three-strength sentry, but because it's a piece of Jinteki ice, it can always Mutate (Upstalk, 4). Since Jinteki is so closely aligned with constant evolution, you may find your early-game Chetana could become a late-game Curtain Wall (True Colors, 78) or Wotan (Second Thoughts, 30). And you can always speed the process along with your Heritage Committee (Kala Ghoda, 13).
Of course, you could just leave your Chetana rezzed in front of your HQ and let the Runner through. Unless the Runner pays to break the first subroutine, you'll gain two credits, and then if you've managed to score a Dedicated Neural Net, you can simply win a psi game to steer the Runner into your Snare!. Even if you don't have a Snare! in hand, you can make sure the Runner simply accesses your ice or operations, not your agendas.
Free Your Mind
Expand your consciousness. View the cyberstruggles of Android: Netrunner in a new light. The Liberated Mind is now available at retailers in the United States and online through our webstore. Availability in other regions may vary.Reporter feels mob's hate in the Holy City
Updated
The ABC's Middle East correspondent Anne Barker became caught in violent street protests involving ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem at the weekend. This is her graphic account of her ordeal.
As a journalist I've covered more than my share of protests. Political protests in Canberra. Unions protesting for better conditions. Angry, loud protests against governments, or against perceived abuses of human rights.
I've been at violent rallies in East Timor. I've had rocks and metal darts thrown my way. I've come up against riot police.
But I have to admit no protest - indeed no story in my career - has distressed me in the way I was distressed at a protest in Jerusalem on Saturday involving several hundred ultra-Orthodox Jews.
This particular protest has been going on for weeks.
Orthodox Jews are angry at the local council's decision to open a municipal carpark on Saturdays - or Shabbat, the day of rest for Jews.
It's a day when Jews are not supposed to do anything resembling work, which can include something as simple as flicking a switch, turning on a light or driving.
So even opening a simple carpark to accommodate the increasing number of tourists visiting Jerusalem's Old City is highly offensive to Orthodox Jews because it |
7.
The last time he was healthy, the 2013-14 season, he averaged 21.8 points and 10.8 rebounds for the Hornets. However, over the past two years he put up 14.7 and 7.6.
[Heat see Hassan Whiteside getting even better once he gets his money]
[2016 NBA free agents: Top five teams for Hassan Whiteside if he leaves the Miami Heat]
[Chris Bosh’s situation complicates Heat’s summer free agency plans]Take Charge Plus
Take Charge Plus provides health coverage for family planning and family planning related services.
What does Take Charge Plus Cover?
(Services, prescriptions and supplies must be related to family planning.)
7 office visits (per calendar year) including a well visit and care related to family planning
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Males and females with income equal to or below these limits
Family Size Monthly Income Limit 1 $1,387 2 $1,868 3 $2,349 4 $2,829 5 $3,310 6 $3,791 7 $4,272 8 $4,752 For each extra person, add $481
How do I apply?
You can apply online, through the mail or over the telephone. For more information about how to apply, click here to visit the Self-Service Portal.
TAKE CHARGE plus ResourcesWhen Esther McVey eventually agrees to meet me, it is at a cafe in West Kirby train station called Toast.
Is this a sign that the Conservative minister for employment has a cracking sense of humour? Toast is, after all, exactly what she could be, politically, by Friday, her constituency of Wirral West being a key marginal, and polls putting her neck-and-neck with her Labour rival, Margaret Greenwood.
But within moments of meeting McVey, it becomes clear that she is not in the mood for a laugh. Election campaigns are rarely courteous, but this one has been particularly unkind.
The battle for Wirral West has partly been fought on West Kirby beach, where John Prescott turned up the other day to say he could only remember her because of her frocks.
“I know I’m told not to say this, but that was a lovely dress she was wearing when she was announced as minister. Oh, anti-woman, I know… That’s terrible, you might say… but when she appeared outside No 10 that wasn’t something she threw on from Primark, was it?”
Yet Prescott’s sexism is one of the milder moments of the campaign to oust McVey as MP after just one term.
Last year it was reported that Labour MP John McDonnell had been to a party event where he publicly suggested “lynching the bastard”. The Wirral TUC union group have released a song in her, um, honour. Sack Esther McVey is a jolly ditty you can find on YouTube that refers to her as the wicked witch of the Wirral because of the cuts she presided over during her time as under-secretary of state for disabilities. (Sample of comments that are fit for publication: “This woman is evil in its purest form”; “Esther McVile, the smiling, jack-booted assassin of welfare reform”; “Keep Esther McVey at Esther McBay”).
Protesters have marched through the streets of Wirral West wearing blonde wigs. Graffiti has been daubed on the walls of the local jobcentre. “MCVEY MURDERER” was the charming message, which was quickly removed by the council.
The 47-year-old initially ignores my calls and messages, and the day before my trip to Merseyside she pulls out of a planned interview with LBC in Liverpool, citing the need to canvas in the constituency. Eventually I am granted an audience, but the former GMTV presenter seems nervous and defensive, the weight of potentially being the only Conservative Cabinet minister to lose her seat weighing heavily on her.
Watch @EstherMcVeyMP explain how our plan is giving more people the security of a pay packet: https://t.co/zIPTZMtKj7 #VoteConservative — Liam Walker (@_Liam_Walker_) April 17, 2015
The past few weeks have been, she says in her heavy Liverpudlian accent, “intense”. She describes the campaign against her as one of “bullying and intimidation”.
“They want to stop you doing what you’re doing, to not allow you free speech. On my campaign team there are a lot of young women and a lot of schoolgirls who are leafleting, and now they will say: 'I thought I wanted to go into politics but actually do I want this abuse?’
“It chips away at the fabric of politics. It is utterly corrosive, especially for future generations of girls.
“When you’ve got a former deputy leader of a party [Prescott] showing off and demeaning a woman politician — and he seemed to be proud of himself, because he had journalists and a crowd of people around him, and he knew what he was saying — then that has a very negative effect.”
McVey says she has never had an apology from John McDonald for his lynching comments. “It was never condemned by the party. Ed Miliband never said, 'this isn’t what we should be saying.’ That to me makes the pink bus look like sheer hypocrisy. It makes a mockery of it.” She describes Miliband as a “socialist academic”. His policies “might make a great essay if he was your professor at university, but in real life it doesn’t quite work like that”. She adds: “Life is not a theoretical problem to be solved in class. My Dad always says: anybody can spend money, but it takes a lot of hard work and vision to create money.’”
It was growing up in Liverpool under Labour that turned her into a Tory, she says. “When I became minister for employment, that was my ideal job, because it meant I was able to reflect on what I saw growing up and actually try to change it.” Wirral West is a constituency of two sides, on the one, the huge detached houses that surround the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, peppered with McVey placards, on the other the more deprived areas, such as Woodchurch, loudly proclaiming their support for Greenwood.
The Labour candidate, a former teacher, is clear that she does not condone the sexist campaign against McVey. But it shows no sign of abating. Last Friday, members of the TUC and Unite held a “Sack Esther McVey Special Social Night” in Heswall, featuring comedians, singers and poets, with attendees again planning to show up in blonde wigs. Which begs the question: what on Earth has a woman’s hair colour got to do with anything?
Publicly, McVey is not preparing for life after politics, but I wonder if, after all this, she wants to continue with it. “The people who get hurt most by these comments are your friends and family.”
As for herself, she claims to have a thick skin.
“I’d say to them: you’re picking on the wrong person.”
At last, McVey’s battle cry has been sounded.Two low-cost, car battery-sized Canadian space telescopes launched today
(Nanowerk News) Two nanosatellites were launched from Yasny, Russia, at 15:11:11 Eastern Daylight Time today by Anthony Moffat, of the University of Montreal and the Centre for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec, and the Canadian research and technology team he leads. Costing a fraction of conventional space telescopes and similar in size and weight to a car battery, the satellites are two of six that will work together to shed light on the structures and life stories of some of the brightest stars in the sky, uncovering unique clues as to the origins of our own Sun and Earth.
Together, the satellites are known as the BRITE-Constellation, standing for BRIght Target Explorer. (Image: UTIAS Space Flight Laboratory)
Together, the satellites are known as the BRITE-Constellation, standing for BRIght Target Explorer. BRITE-Constellation will monitor for long stretches of time the brightness and colour variations of most of the brightest stars visible to the eye in the night sky. These stars include some of the most massive and luminous stars in the Galaxy, many of which are precursors to supernova explosions. This project will contribute to unprecedented advances in our understanding of such stars and the life cycles of the current and future generations of stars, said Professor Moffat, who is the scientific mission lead for the Canadian contribution to BRITE and current chair of the international executive science team.
Luminous stars dominate the ecology of the Universe. During their relatively brief lives, massive luminous stars gradually eject enriched gas into the interstellar medium, adding heavy elements critical to the formation of future stars, terrestrial planets and organics. In their spectacular deaths as supernova explosions, massive stars violently inject even more crucial ingredients into the mix. The first generation of massive stars in the history of the Universe may have laid the imprint for all future stellar history, Moffat explained. Yet, massive stars rapidly spinning and with radiation fields whose pressure resists gravity itself - are arguably the least understood, despite being the brightest members of the familiar constellations of the night sky. Other less-massive stars, including stars similar to our own Sun, also contribute to the ecology of the Universe, but only at the end of their lives, when they brighten by factors of a thousand and shed off their tenuous outer layers.
BRITE-Constellation is in fact a multinational effort that relies on pioneering Canadian space technology and a partnership with Austrian and Polish space researchers the three countries act as equal partners. Canadas participation was made possible thanks to an investment of $4.07 million by the Canadian Space Agency. The two new Canadian satellites are joining two Austrian satellites and a Polish satellite already in orbit; the final Polish satellite will be launched in August.
All six satellites were designed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies - Space Flight Laboratory, who also built the Canadian pair. The satellites are were in fact named BRITE Toronto and BRITE Montreal after the University of Toronto and the University of Montreal, who play a major role in the mission. BRITE-Constellation will exploit and enhance recent Canadian advances in precise attitude control that have opened up for space science the domain of very low cost, miniature spacecraft, allowing a scientific return that otherwise would have had price tags 10 to 100 times higher, Moffat said. This will actually be the first network of satellites devoted to a fundamental problem in astrophysics.
The nanosatellites will be able to explore a wide range of astrophysical questions. The constellation could detect exoplanetary transits around other stars, putting our own planetary system in context, or the pulsations of red giants, which will enable us to test and refine our models regarding the eventual fate of our Sun, Moffatt explained.Ark Ecosystem — Frequently Asked Questions (September 2017)
Jarunik Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 18, 2017
There are a lot of reoccurring questions on reddit and slack. Here is a short compilation of the most important once. I will try to keep the answer short and to the point.
How can I get Ark?
You have to buy it on an exchange. The current exchanges are:
The current main exchange is Bittrex. You will have to buy Bitcoin (BTC) first and send it to Bittrex. After that you can trade your BTC for Ark.
What do I do with this passphrase?
The passphrase is the master password for your coins. You have to secure the passphrase in order to keep control over your wallet. With the passphrase you can sign transactions to send your Ark. Do not lose it and do not share it with others or you will lose your coins.
I can’t send a transaction because of a wrong passphrase. What should I do?
You can’t do anything without the correct passphrase. Please be aware that every character and space counts. Try to remove spaces at the beginning and end. Try to check wrong capital letters. Try to spot wrongly written words. If you do not have the correct passphrase … your coins are lost.
I can’t send a transaction because of some time stamp thing. What should i do?
Please synchronize your computer time with the internet. You can google guides how to do that for every OS.
My bittrex withdrawal does not work. Why?
You most likely forgot to confirm the withdrawal. Please check your emails. If it still did not work you should contract bittrex support.
Can I vote from an exchange?
No. You need to send the Ark to the desktop wallet in order to vote.
How can I find and chose a delegate?
The best places to find delegate information are:
How much profit will I get from voting?
You can check profit approximations in one of the calculators:
How much Ark do I need to vote?
The fee to register your vote is currently 1 Ark. Your remaining balance will decide how much profits you will make. Please check profit sharing calculators. Then you can estimate how long it takes to gain back the fee. It is important to check the delegates proposals. Some do have requirements that you need to fulfill in order to get rewards. Some also deduct the transaction fee to pay out the profit from your profit share. If you can find a good delegate it makes sense to vote even with around 100 Ark. But the entire voting system is subject to the ever changing delegate market. Please educate yourself before voting.
Is voting a risk for my wallet?
No. All you can loose is the 1 Ark voting fee. All other coins will stay in your wallet and you have full control over them. Please do not send coins to delegates! That will not count as vote and you might lose your coins.
How can I change my vote?
You can remove the vote registration from a delegate (unvote). Then you best restart the desktop client and vote for the delgate of your choice.
Can I vote for multiple delegates?
You can only vote one delegate from one wallet. If you want to support multiple delegates you will have to create more wallets and split up your funds.
Do i have to re-vote when I receive additional coins in my wallet?
No. The vote contribution will automatically adapt to your wallet balance.
How much do the different transactions cost?
Send Transaction: 0.1 Ark
Vote: 1 Ark
Unvote: 1 Ark
Register second passphrase: 5 Ark
Register a delegate: 25 Ark
Why do I need a second passphrase?
The second passphrases will improve security by adding another 12 words that are needed to control your wallet.
What use have these “Offline” folders in the wallet?
You can use the offline folders to split-up your funds within a wallet. This allows you to better manage your Ark without paying any fee. The splitup is local to your computer and not stored on the blockchain.
Do you have more questions?
We got an awesome community willing to help. Please get in contact and ask your question:
And if you can’t get help anywhere please contact your delegate.
delegate jarunikOntario: Get ready for June 12 election
Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath is pictured in the Ontario Legislature on April 8, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
TORONTO - Ontario was plunged into a five-week election campaign Friday after Premier Kathleen Wynne decided it was better to pull the plug than wait for her minority Liberals to be defeated in the legislature on their brand new budget.
She visited Lt.-Gov. David Onley to ask him to call a June 12 election after the NDP dropped the bombshell that they would join the Progressive Conservatives to shoot down the $130.4-billion spending plan.
Ripping a page from the playbook of her new nemesis Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Wynne painted the decade-old Liberal government as the safe, steady alternative to the "reckless schemes" of the opposition parties.
Voters shouldn't consider veering to the political left or right, she warned, but stick to the balanced Liberal plan for job creation and economic growth that they proposed in Thursday's budget.
Tory Leader Tim Hudak and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath decided to force an election rather than supporting a plan that would see Ontario through its fragile economic recovery, she said.
It would also improve people's lives with a made-in-Ontario pension plan, billions for transit and transportation infrastructure and grants for businesses to create jobs, Wynne said.
"Quite frankly I thought there was a lot in the budget that would recommend itself to both the Tories and the NDP, but she made a different decision," she said. "I think a lot is at risk."
Although the NDP wrung concessions out of the Liberals in the last two budgets, Horwath said she could no longer prop up a government that was plagued by scandal after scandal and couldn't trust the Liberals to keep all their budget promises.
"I cannot in good conscience support a government that people don't trust anymore," said Horwath. "This budget is not a solid plan for the future. It's a mad dash to escape the scandals by promising the moon and the stars."
The controversies kept piling up, from the costly cancellation of two gas plants to the police investigation into the Ornge air ambulance service and potentially unsafe girders that were installed in the Windsor parkway, said Horwath.
"It's one scandal after another, it's continued behaviour from a government that hasn't seen the way to change their path, and so it wasn't only the $1.1-billion (gas plants) scandal itself, but it's the continuous cover up of information," she said.
"The leopard is not changing its spots."
Wynne put on a brave face when asked whether the scandals she's inherited from her predecessor Dalton McGuinty would finally end the Liberals' decade-long rule.
"I will continue to provide the openness that I have brought to this job since I came in just over a year ago," she said.
The dissolution of the legislature scuttles highly anticipated appearances of senior staff in McGuinty's office before a legislative committee looking into the gas plants scandal.
It also means there won't be any finding of contempt against the Liberals for the deletion of emails and wiping of hard drives in the premier's office because the committee is now disbanded.
The premier took several shots at Harper for failing to fund infrastructure to develop the Ring of Fire mineral deposit in northern Ontario, or help improve retirement income for people without a workplace pension plan.
But she reserved most of her vitriol for the NDP and the Tories.
"The NDP make pie-in-the-sky promises but they won't say how they'll pay for them," Wynne said. "So now is not the time for pipe dreams."
The Tories would "roll back the clock" in Ontario by "declaring war" on organized labour and slashing government programs people rely on, she added.
"Their cuts would devastate crucial public services in health and education," she said. "Their cuts would take us along a path towards a low-wage, low-growth economy."
Hudak said he has no qualms about taking his ideas to voters, which include lower corporate taxes and an across-the-board public sector wage freeze.
Horwath is hypocritical for taking so long to defeat the Liberals, which they should have done at least a year ago, he said in Ottawa.
"If you're looking for who's going to be the best actor on the stage, if you're looking for someone who's running a popularity contest by promising funding on all kinds of projects but they don't have the cheques to cash in, well then vote for the Liberal leader or the NDP leader," he said.
"But if you want a turnaround plan to get Ontario working again, look at me, look at my team, look at my plan."
Several large labour groups, including the Unifor and the Ontario Federation of Labour, had urged the NDP to pass the budget and avoid an election, but public sector unions complained the fiscal plan puts jobs at risk.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union — which has been in a tough labour fight with the Liberals — said they support Horwath's call to go to the polls.
Despite the left-leaning goodies in the budget like the pension plan, the Liberals can't be trusted, said OPSEU president Warren "Smokey" Thomas.
There needs to be an election, even if it runs the risk of producing a right-wing Conservative government that "hates unions" and will tear down the province's public services, he said.
Even though Wynne asked to have the legislature dissolved on Friday, and it won't sit again until after the election, the campaign period doesn't officially begin until next Wednesday.The report below is based on research published in the journal Addiction. It appears there under the title The origin of MDMA (ecstasy) revisited: the true story reconstructed from the original documents. It is by Roland W Freudenmann, Florian Öxler and Sabine Bernschneider-Reif.
Sorted. More than two decades after the dance drug ecstasy burst on to the scene, chemists have finally pieced together the true story of the origins of one the most influential and controversial substances ever to come from a test tube.
According to popular history the drug, first discovered in 1912, was developed by the German pharmaceutical giant Merck as a lucrative way to suppress the appetites of soldiers in the German army - a plot foiled by reports of bizarre side effects among the first human guinea pigs. Merck, the story goes, was forced to withdraw the compound and consigned it to the pharmaceutical scrap heap, where it lay until resurrected by 1970s drug guru Alexander Shulgin.
This version of events appears regularly in medical reports, newspaper articles, textbooks and even on the official website of the US drug enforcement administration. But Merck has decided to set the record straight.
In an unusual step, the company got experts from its corporate history department and a local doctor to trawl through thousands of original documents in its archive at its headquarters in Darmstad.
For more than a year, they searched for references to ecstasy in laboratory journals, annual reports, patents, letters, interview records, memoirs and the other historical detritus thrown up by six decades of scientific research from 1900 to 1960.
Their verdict? The company did develop the drug in 1912, but the appetite suppressant story is an urban myth, passed on from source to source through "uncritical copy-paste procedures". Instead, documents from the time show that ecstasy emerged during the company's efforts to develop a potentially life-saving medicine that would help blood to clot.
The best available blood clot medicine at the time, hydrastinin, was patented by Merck's local rival Bayer. Merck chemists believed that a similar compound called methylhydrastinin would be equally effective and set about trying to make it from scratch in a way not covered by the Bayer patent. Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, was first produced during these experiments, but attracted little attention. Merck's recent search found just a passing reference to the drug: in a patent the company filed in 1912 to protect its new blood clot agent, which had been tested on patients in a Berlin hospital. Patent 274350 did not refer to MDMA by name, but described its properties among a list of other new intermediates: "colourless oil, boiling point 155C at 20mm pressure, its salt forms white crystals".
Tellingly, there were no references to any experiments to test the biological effects of ecstasy, then known as methylsafrylamin. As the official report of Merck's historical detectives puts it: "In clear contrast to what is usually claimed by the 'ecstasy' literature, MDMA was neither studied in animals nor humans at Merck around 1912."
This is not the first time that the appetite suppressant pill story has been exposed as false - Dr Shulgin and others have published more accurate accounts - but Merck hopes its rewriting of history will put the myth to bed. The false story probably started, the company says, because a US laboratory studied a similar compound called MDA as a possible diet drug between 1949 and 1957.
No one from Merck's corporate history department would comment, but a spokesman said the company had decided to act because it was regularly asked about its role in ecstasy's development. Its report appears this month in the journal Addiction.
What happened next? The Merck archive reveals that the company revived its interest in ecstasy in 1927, when the first tests were carried out on animals. The details have been lost, but it seems that a chemist called Max Oberlin had stumbled on the original patent and thought MDMA might mimic adrenaline because it had a similar structure.
Oberlin described the results of his tests as "partly remarkable" but the research was halted because of steep rises in the price of chemicals needed to make the drug. He recommended the company "keep an eye on this field". Further Merck tests in 1952 showed that the compound was toxic to flies. More controversial is the first testing on humans. The US air force is known to have carried out secret tests of MDMA and other drugs in the early 1950s. The experiments are often described as a search for a truth serum, but were carried out on animals, and it is more likely the military was searching for new chemical weapons.
The Merck archive suggests one of its scientists may have administered the first human tests in 1959. Wolfgang Fruhstorfer, a company chemist, was interested in the production of new stimulants and the report found "insinuations" that he had cooperated with an institute for aviation medicine. But it says: "Despite all efforts, it remains unclear whether he also investigated MDMA effects in humans."
By now, others had picked up the baton and run with it. A year later, in 1960, the first official recipe for ecstasy appeared in a scientific journal (in Polish) and by 1970 MDMA was cropping up in tablets seized in Chicago.
Dr Shulgin, a former scientist with the chemical company Dow, says he was told about the compound in the early 1970s. He synthesised the drug in 1976 and later tested it on himself - the first recorded human trials. His enthusiasm for the effects brought the drug to mainstream attention, for which he is often called the "godfather" of ecstasy. But the new Merck report reveals the drug's true heritage.
Buried in the archive, the Merck team found the original laboratory annual report for 1912, which describes the first synthesis, and names the scientists involved. The true father of ecstasy, the Guardian can reveal, was an anonymous German chemist called Anton Kollisch, who died in 1916 with no idea of the impact his legacy would have.
Timeline
1912 First synthesis of MDMA by Kollishch at Merck in Darmstadt
1970 First detection of MDMA in tablets seized in the streets of Chicago. By the mid-1970s the drugs expert Alexander Shulgin had begun to research its effects
1977 MDMA classified as a Class A drug in UK
1984 MDMA's street name of 'ecstasy' coined in California
1985 MDMA becomes a Schedule 1 controlled substance in the US
In the UK the street price of ecstasy is £25
Mid to late 80s Raves become increasingly popular, spreading out from the centres of London and Manchester
1989 Raves, and the electronic dance music and ecstasy, which fuels them, lead to a'second summer of love'. Acid house, with the accompanying smiley-face T-shirts, goes mainstream and into the pop charts. This year also sees the first recorded ecstasy-related death in the UK
1994 Parts of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act target raves, or gatherings with music which is characterised by 'a succession of repetitive beats'
1995 Death of Leah Betts after taking an ecstasy tablet on her 18th birthday
2003 6,230 people found guilty, cautioned or fined for ecstasy related offences
2005 In a survey of 500 Edinburgh students, 36% said they had taken ecstasy and of those, 75% considered ecstasy a 'positive force' on their lives
2006 The current street price is £3-8
Helen O'BrienNow lemme get this straight, as Harry Nilsson said. President Donald Trump is going to kick the DACA can over to Congress for six months, which was Monday’s reporting on Tuesday’s expected announcement. And then Congress is going to do… what? Pass a bill extending Barack Obama’s executive order?
Is that a fact? This House, with that Freedom Caucus, is going to make an Obama order the permanent law of the land? One supposes there are ways to tailor it—to change it and restrict it so that it no longer applies to anywhere near the current 800,000 people but also technically doesn’t constitute doing away with it, so Speaker Paul Ryan can stand up there and say DACA has been “reformed,” kinda like the way he’s always wanted to “reform” Medicare.
But it seems pretty likely that to pass anything that’s actually decent and humane, Ryan may well have to break the Hastert Rule (nothing can pass the House that doesn’t have a majority of Republicans behind it), letting a bill slide through with the support of most Democrats and some Republicans.
Of course, he’d lose the speakership if he did that. So that’s out.
The other alternative is they do something decent on DACA but attach it to funding for a wall or reduced legal immigration or more deportations of other categories of people. But that might just be a little controversial. And the Republicans’ track record on this kind of thing is less than impressive.
So here we are, heading into the fall. Trump and the GOP had a disastrous summer. As summer wound down, we saw these stories every once a while about how they’re looking for an autumnal reset. Steve Bannon’s out. John Kelly is keeping Trump away from Breitbart stories. They’re getting serious about tax reform. It’s all gonna be so different, folks, you have no idea.
Yeah. Go Google “Trump reset.” There’ve already been about five. The first “Trump hits the reset button” story was from Feb. 28, just five weeks after the he started the job! This was after the joint speech to Congress. Remember that night? Proved he could read a teleprompter? (Hey, all you people who made fun of Obama for reading from teleprompters—Trump is proving that it’s actually kind of a skill!) Remember how they were telling us on cable TV that he “became president” that night? How’s that verdict looking in retrospect?
So now we approach fall, which shows every sign of being as bad as summer or worse. Let’s start with tax reform. Administration officials and congressional Republicans have agreed, I’ve seen it reported, on how they’re going to pay for their big tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations.
Get this. I mean, get this. They’re going to try to eliminate the home mortgage interest deduction. And do away with the state and local tax deductions. And tax 401Ks up front. Right now, people contribute to their 401Ks with pre-tax dollars, and you pay the tax later in life, when you start cashing it in.
In other words, they’re going raise taxes (in effect; doing away with a deduction is raising a tax) on middle-class homeowners and pension-payers to pay for tax cuts for corporations and the 1 percent, whose top rate would be cut by 4.6 percent, which would save someone making $2 million a year around $75,000.
Are they kidding? That’s going to be about as popular as gonorrhea. Here’s some polling for you to look over if you wish (PDF). In April, Pew asked people how much certain aspects of the tax system bothered them. To “the feeling that some corporations don’t pay their fair share,” 62 percent said they were bothered a lot. To the feeling that some wealthy people don’t pay their share, 60 percent said a lot. Also, 67 percent and 63 percent respectively said corporations and rich people pay too little. Only 14 percent said poor people pay too little (sorry, Mitt Romney!), and just 6 percent said middle-income people pay too little.
With numbers like that, how is a tax plan written to benefit corporations and 1 percenters going to fly? Like the Hindenberg. One of the few reassuring lessons of the Trump era so far is that public opinion still matters. Our democracy may be corrupt in any number of ways, but at least that much remains true. You can’t pass a health care bill that has 17 percent support, and you probably can’t pass a tax bill whose benefits are going to two groups that two-thirds of the country thinks have it too easy as it is.
What else might autumn bring? He’ll try to start a war with North Korea? If they start one with us, that would be one thing. But if Trump starts it, when literally everybody else in the world is saying sanctions and diplomacy, that, too, would be highly unpopular (aside from of course being potentially disastrous in scarcely imaginable ways).
Fire Bob Mueller? Now that we know via The Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff that Mueller has hired IRS agents, we have a sense of some the rocks he’s turning over, and we know Trump wants nobody touching those rocks. Firing Mueller would mean alienating his support in Congress, especially in the Senate. But that’s probably a risk he’s willing to take if he thinks Mueller really has something.
So media, let’s stop using these random turns of the calendar to write stories about how Trump might change. He won’t change. Neither will the congressional GOP. We just have to hope that the only damage they do is to their own reputations and not the economy or race relations or the city of Seoul.Entrance Information Desk Just the Facts Up The Wright
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Please: Contact Us Available in Française, Español, Português, Deutsch, Россию, 中文, 日本, and others. he Wright family was one of the oldest in Ohio; Wilbur and Orville's grandfather had helped settle Miami County. Because of their father's occupation, they traveled a good deal during their early childhood, but the Wrights eventually came to rest in Dayton, Ohio. Parents Milton Wright and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright, married in 1859.
Milton Wright, born 1828 on his father's farm in Rush County, IN. He worked as a farmhand until he joined the Church of the United Brethren 1847 and he was ordained a minister in the church in 1856. While he was assigned to Hartsville College, a United Brethren school, in 1853 he met Susan Koerner. The two were married in 1859 and had seven children between 1861 and 1874. Over the years, Milton served as a circuit-riding Minister for the United Brethren Church, a professor of theology, editor of the Religious Telescope (the United Brethren newspaper), and an elected Bishop in his church. His assignments within the United Brethren Church required him to move his family often. The Wrights lived in Dayton, OH, Cedar Rapids, IA, and many locations in Indiana. His responsibilities required that he travel extensively, sometimes as much as 8000 miles in a single year. During these travels, Milton kept in close contact with his wife and children, exchanging hundreds of letters. He could be stern, but he was also an affectionate and supportive father. He and Susan encouraged their children's natural curiosity and kept two large libraries in the home for them to use. Occasionally, he would let his sons and daughter take a day off from school to pursue their own interests. In 1889, Milton Wright broke with the liberal leadership of the United Brethren Church and started his own conservative sect, Church of the United Brethren, Old Constitution. For a while, he was that most prominent member in the sect, but his inability to compromise and sometimes caustic personality eventually eroded his support. The United Brethren Church leaders forced him into retirement in 1905 at the age of 77. He died in 1917.
For more details about the life of Milton Wright, see: Bishop Milton Wright.
Milton Wright, age 44
Milton Wright, Age 86 Susan Wright, born 1831 in Loudoun County near Hillsboro, VA. He father John Gottlieb Koerner was a skilled wagon maker who had immigrated to America from the tiny village of Förthen, Germany (near Schleiz) in 1818. He worked as a carriage maker in Baltimore for a time where he married Catherine Fry in 1820. The couple moved in with Catherine's parents on their farm in Loudoun Country where John made carriages and operated a forge. In 1832, just after Susan was born, the Koerners moved to a 170-acre farm in Union County, Indiana south of the town of Liberty. He prospered in Indiana from both farming and wagon-making, and became a citizen of the United States in 1840. Orville remembered that his grandfather's farm was like a small village with fourteen buildings. Many of these were workshops filled with woodworking and metalworking tools. Susan, although she was a woman, learned to use many of these tools with considerable skill. Her family remembered her as being mechanically adept and very handy, making household appliances and toys for her children. John Koerner had been a Presbyterian, but converted to the United Brethren faith shortly after arriving in Indiana and became a prominent member of the Franklin United Brethren Church. Susan was baptized into the United Brethren faith in 1845 when she was fourteen. In addition to being skilled with tools, Susan was also a scholar and the head of her class in school.
In 1853 when she was 22 years old, Susan attended Hartville College in Indiana, a United Brethren school. It was unusual for women of this time to attend college, and the United Brethren were unusually progressive in their attitudes concerning education and women's rights. At Hartville, |
ho as a Christian sign before Constantine. Its first appearance is on a Constantinian silver coin from c. 315, which proves that Constantine did use the sign at that time, though not very prominently. He made extensive use of the Chi-Rho and the Labarum only later in the conflict with Licinius.
The accession of Constantine was a turning point for the Christian Church, generally considered the beginning of Christendom. After his victory, Constantine took over the role of the patron for the Christian faith. Constantine made Sunday a holiday and day of rest throughout the empire. He built three huge churches, St. Peter's in Rome, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.[18] Throughout his rule, Constantine supported the Church financially, built various basilicas, granted privileges (for example, exemption from certain taxes) to clergy, promoted Christians to high ranking offices, and returned property confiscated during the Great Persecution of Diocletian and spent enormous amounts of money from the state treasury to pay clergy.[19]
In doing this, however, Constantine required the Pagans "to foot the bill".[20] Christian chroniclers tell that it appeared necessary to Constantine "to teach his subjects to give up their rites (…) and to accustom them to despise their temples and the images contained therein." This led to the closure of pagan temples due to a lack of support, their wealth flowing to the imperial treasure. Constantine did not need to use force to implement this although his subjects are said to simply have obeyed him out of fear.[21]
The reign of Constantine established a precedent for the position of the Christian Emperor in the Church; Constantine considered himself responsible to God for the spiritual health of his subjects, and thus he had a duty to maintain orthodoxy. Indeed, he called himself "a bishop, ordained by God to oversee whatever is external to the church." The emperor ensured that God was properly worshiped in his empire; what proper worship consisted of was for the Church to determine.[22]
In 316, Constantine acted as a judge in a North African dispute concerning the heresy of the Donatists. He ruled that Cæcilianus, not Donatus, was the rightful Bishop of Carthage. In 317 Constantine ordered the confiscation of Donatist churches in Carthage and the death penalty on those who disturbed the peace. Constantine's actions resulted in banishments and even executions when violence erupted. It also failed completely, as the Donatists grew all the more fierce in their convictions. By 321 Constantine changed his approach and granted toleration to the Donatists, asking the catholic bishops to show them moderation and patience.
Council of Nicaea
Icon depicting the Emperor Constantine and the Fathers of the First Council of Nicaea (325) holding the Nicene Creed in its 385 form.
More significantly, in 325, Constantine summoned the Council of Nicaea, effectively the first Ecumenical Council. He called it because of the social discord and disunity caused by arguments between Christians of different beliefs. Christians within the empire, and thus the empire itself, were divided over what they believed about Jesus and the Trinity. In Alexandria there was a group who were followers of Arius with whom the majority of Christians disagreed. The resulting argument led to threats to close the port and thus had economic and political implications. Constantine wanted to end this disagreement and called the council on the advice of Bishop Hosius of Cordoba
The Council of Nicaea was historically significant because it was the first effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all of Christendom.[23] Constantine invited and offered to sponsor all 1800 bishops. In fact around 300 attended nearly all of whom were from the east. "Resplendent in purple and gold, Constantine made a ceremonial entrance at the opening of the council, probably in early June, but respectfully seated the bishops ahead of himself."[24] As Eusebius described, Constantine "himself proceeded through the midst of the assembly, like some heavenly messenger of God, clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glowing radiance of a purple robe, and adorned with the brilliant splendor of gold and precious stones."[25] He was present as an observer and he did not vote. Constantine organized the Council along the lines of the Roman Senate with Hosius presiding over its deliberations.
The council came out against Arianism and five dissenters were banished and Constantine threatened with death anyone who did not deliver Arius' books up to be burned. Constantine later discovered that most Christians in Asia Minor were Arians and called another council to try to achieve consensus. In all this he, and later emperors, were motivated by a desire for uniformity that would be promote social peace and imperial cohesion.
By convoking and presiding over the council, Constantine signaled a measure of imperial control over the church. Although Constantine was not baptized and held no position within the church, the church did not resist being co-opted for imperial purposes. On the contrary, many Christians saw his elevation to the emperorship as part of God's providence. Up until this time the church had not had to articulate its beliefs in a binding creed which would determine who was a Christian and who was not. The council also promulgated a number of enforceable canons to regulate church governance thus creating a disciplined institution. From this time on the relationship between church and state became very complicated with the church co-opting the state to enforce its beliefs and persecute those it deemed heretics.
Constantine also enforced the prohibition of the First Council of Nicaea against celebrating Easter on the day before the Jewish Passover.[26] Some commentators have concluded that the desire for an independent Christian calendar was motivated by bitterness towards Judaism.[27] A circular letter of Emperor Constantine issued during the Council with strong anti-Jewish language lends weight to the charge of anti-Judaism, stating that that: "…It appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy festival we should follow the practice of the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin, and are, therefore, deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul. …Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd; for we have received from our Saviour a different way."[28]
Constantine instituted several legislative measures which had an impact on Jews. They were forbidden to own Christian slaves or to circumcise their slaves. Conversion of Christians to Judaism was outlawed. Congregations for religious services were restricted, but Jews were allowed to enter Jerusalem on Tisha B'Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. From the time of Constantine more and more anti-Jewish legislation was passed as Christianity grew in prestige and power.
Reforms
Constantine's iconography and ideology
Coins struck for emperors often reveal details of their personal iconography. During the early part of Constantine's rule, representations first of Mars and then (from 310 C.E. ) of Apollo as sun god consistently appeared on the reverse sides of the coinage. Mars had been associated with the Tetrarchy, and Constantine's appropriation of this symbolism served to emphasize the legitimacy of his rule. After his breach with his father's old colleague Maximian in 309 C.E. –310 C.E., Constantine began to claim legitimate descent from the third century emperor Marcus Aurelius Claudius Gothicus, the hero of the Battle of Naissus (September 268). The Augustan History of the fourth century reports Constantine's paternal grandmother Claudia to be a daughter of Crispus, who himself was reportedly the brother of both Claudius II and Quintillus. Modern historians, however, suspect this account to be a genealogical fabrication intended to flatter Constantine.
Follis by Constantine. On the reverse, a labarum with the chi-rho. Coin from CNG Coins
Gothicus had claimed the divine protection of Apollo-Sol Invictus. In mid-310 C.E., two years before the victory at Milvian Bridge, Constantine reportedly experienced the publicly announced vision in which Apollo-Sol Invictus appeared to him with omens of success. Thereafter the reverses of his coinage were dominated for several years by his "companion, the unconquered Sol"—the inscriptions read SOLI INVICTO COMITI. The depiction represents Apollo with a solar halo, Helios-like, and the globe in his hands. In the 320s Constantine received a halo of his own in images. There are also coins depicting Apollo driving the chariot of the Sun on a shield which Constantine is holding and in one example, from 312, shows the Christian symbol of the chi-rho on a helmet worn by Constantine.
An example of "staring eyes" on later Constantine coinage. Coin from CNG Coins
The great staring eyes in the iconography of Constantine, though not specifically Christian, show how official images were moving away from early imperial conventions of realistic portrayals towards schematic representations. Namely, they projected a stylized image of the emperor as emperor, not merely as the particular individual Constantine, with his characteristic broad jaw and cleft chin. The large staring eyes loomed larger as the fourth century progressed: compare the early fifth century silver coinage of Theodosius I.
Constantine's legal standards
Constantine passed numerous laws, encompassing such mundane matters as making the occupations of butcher and baker hereditary. More crucially, supported converting the coloni (tenant farmers) into serfs—laying the foundation for European society during the Middle Ages.
Constantine's laws, in many ways, improved upon those of his predecessors, and enforced and reflected his Christian reforms though they also reflected the growing violence of his age, as the following examples suggest:
For the first time, young females could not be abducted (this may actually refer to elopements, which were considered kidnapping because girls could not legally consent to the elopement).
A punishment of death was mandated to anyone collecting taxes over the authorized amount.
A prisoner was no longer to be kept in total darkness, but must be given access to the outdoors and daylight.
A condemned man was allowed to die in the arena, but he could not be branded on his "heavenly beautified" face, just on his feet (because God made man in his image).
Slave "nurses" or chaperons caught allowing the girls they were responsible for to be seduced were to have molten lead poured down their throats.
Gladiatorial games were ordered to be eliminated in 325 C.E., although this had little real effect.
, although this had little real effect. A slave master's rights were limited, but a slave could still be beaten to death.
Crucifixion was abolished for reasons of Christian piety, but was replaced with hanging, to show that there was still Roman law and justice.
Easter could be publicly celebrated.
Sunday was declared a day of rest, on which market activity was banned and public offices were closed (except for the purpose of freeing slaves). However, there were no restrictions on farming work (which was the work of the great majority of the population).
Constantine's legacy
Although he earned his honorific of "The Great" from Christian historians long after he had died, Constantine could have claimed the title on his military achievements and victories alone. In addition to reuniting the empire under one emperor, Constantine won major victories over the Franks and Alamanni (306 C.E. –308 C.E. ), the Franks again (313–314), the Visigoths in 332 C.E. and the Sarmatians in 334 C.E. In fact, by 336 C.E., Constantine had actually reoccupied most of the long-lost province of Dacia, which Aurelian had been forced to abandon in 271 C.E. At the time of his death, he was planning a great expedition to put an end to raids on the eastern provinces from the Persian Empire.
The Byzantine Empire considered Constantine its founder and the Holy Roman Empire reckoned him among the venerable figures of its tradition. In both East and West, emperors were sometimes hailed as "new Constantines." Most Eastern Christian churches, both Catholic and Orthodox, consider Constantine a saint. In the East he is sometimes called "Equal-to-apostles" (isapostolos) or the "thirteenth apostle."[29]
Legend and donation of Constantine
A thirteen century fresco of Sylvester and Constantine, showing the purported Donation. Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome.
In later years, historical facts became clouded by legend. It was considered inappropriate that Constantine was baptized only on his death-bed and by a bishop of questionable orthodoxy, and hence a legend emerged that Pope Silvester I (314-335 C.E. ) had cured the pagan emperor from leprosy. According to this legend, Constantine was baptized after that and donated buildings to the pope. In the eighth century, a document called the "Donation of Constantine" first appeared, in which the freshly converted Constantine hands the temporal rule over Rome, Italy and the Occident to the pope. In the High Middle Ages, this document was used and accepted as the basis for the pope's temporal power, though it was denounced as a forgery by Emperor Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor and lamented as the root of papal worldliness by the poet Dante Alighieri. The fifteenth century, philologist Lorenzo Valla proved the document was indeed a forgery.
Notes
References
All links retrieved March 20, 2017.The lion’s share of Minnesota’s new tax revenue was sunk into human capital. While the state’s Constitution required that half of the new revenue balance the budget in 2013, Mr. Dayton invested 71 percent of the remaining funds in K-12 schools and higher education as well as a pair of firsts: all-day kindergarten and wider access to early childhood education. Minnesota was one of the few states that raised education spending under the cloud of the Great Recession.
By contrast, Mr. Walker’s strategy limited Wisconsin’s ability to invest in infrastructure that would have catalyzed private-sector expansion, and he cut state funding of K-12 schools by more than 15 percent. Per student, this was the seventh sharpest decline in the country.
Health care presents another difference. When Mr. Walker refused to establish a state health insurance exchange or to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government covered all costs for three years and most costs after that, ideology trumped pragmatism. The uninsured and the ill bear the burden. Many of the 10 percent of uninsured Wisconsinites were denied new Medicaid benefits and were shunted off to the federal exchange’s stumbling website.
Mr. Dayton is on course to improve Minnesota’s already low uninsured rate. He expanded Medicaid to cover an additional 35,000 people and accepted Washington’s offer to pick up the cost — as half the states, including a growing number with Republican governors, have. Mr. Dayton also created a state insurance exchange, which enrolled more than 90 percent of its first month’s target. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s tradition of innovative medical care and nonprofit insurers produced premiums in its insurance exchange that are, on average, the lowest in the country, well below premiums in Wisconsin.
Mr. Dayton’s embrace of progressive fiscal policy is matched by a fierce crackdown on lenient payments to insiders. Cuts in payments to managed care organizations serving Medicaid saved $175 million and produced lower rates in 2013 than in 2010, despite higher costs over all.
Of course, liberal aspirations contend with stubborn realities. Minnesota is a health reform pioneer, but it is dogged by entrenched problems in rural areas, where medical costs and premiums remain relatively high and the capacity of medical care providers may be overstretched by new demand. As for fiscal policy, Mr. Dayton would have applied sales taxes more broadly, while lowering their rates, but faced intense protests from a broad section of businesses and Democratic legislators who blocked him.
Even after tempering their initial plans, Democrats face a backlash. According to a recent Minnesota Chamber of Commerce survey, a quarter of Minnesota companies — a 10-year high — describe the state’s business climate as worse than elsewhere. Mr. Dayton and his colleagues got the message and are likely to roll back new sales taxes on farm equipment and warehousing facilities that had threatened to leave.
Evidence and common sense should matter more in our overheated political debates. The lesson from the upper Midwest is that rigid anti-tax dogma fails to deliver a convincing optimistic vision that widens economic opportunity and security. The excesses of liberalism may lurk, but Minnesota is building a modern progressivism that plows a hopeful path.2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda
Lubang Island, Philippines
Surrendered - March 5, 1974
The most famous of all Holdouts, his story was widly reported in the world media, and he wrote a book translated to English about his wartime experiences and 29 years as a Japanese holdout.
Background
Born in the town of Kainan, Japan in 1922 and when he turned seventeen, he went to work for a trading company in China. In May of 1942, Onoda was drafted into the Japanese Army. Unlike most soldiers, he attended a school that trained men for guerilla warfare.
Assignment to Lubang Island, Philippines
On December 26, 1944 (age 23), Hiroo Onoda was sent to the small island of Lubang Island, approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Manila in the Philippines. Shortly after Americans landed, all but four of the Japanese soldiers had either died or surrendered. Hiroo Onda was also with three other holdouts, who all died over the decades: Private Yuichi Akatsu, Corporal Shoichi Shimada (died 1954), Private Kinshichi Kozuka (died 1972).
Circumstances of His Surrender
Despite the efforts of the Philippine Army, letters and newspapers left for them, radio broadcasts, and even a plea from Onoda's brother, he did not belive the war was over. On February 20, 1974, Onoda encountered a young Japanese university dropout named Norio Suzuki who was traveling the wold and told his friends that he was “going to look for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the abominable snowman, in that order. The two became friends, but Onoda said that he was waiting for orders from one of his commanders. On March 9, 1974, Onoda went to an agreed upon place and found a note that had been left by Suzuki. Suzuki had brought along Onoda’s one-time superior commander, Major Taniguchi, who delivered the oral orders for Onoda to surrender. Intelligence Officer 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onada emerged from the jungle of Lubang Island with his.25 caliber rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition and several hand grenades. He sureendered 29 years after Japan's formal surrender, and 15 years after being declared legally dead in Japan. When he accepted that the war was over, he wept openly.
Afterwards
He returned to Japan to receive a hero’s welcome, and world media attention, and was hounded by the curious public everywhere he went. He was unable to adapt to modern life in Japan, but wrote his memories of survival in "No Surrender: My Thirty Year War" After publication, he moved to Brazil to raise cattle. He revisited Lubang island in 1996, and still alive today. He then married a Japanese woman and moved back to Japan to run a nature camp for kids. Anyone with contact information for Mr. Onoda, email me
Hiroo Onoda Photo Gallery
Hiroo Onoda as a young officer in the Japanese Army Onoda's father travels to Lubong with a Japanese deligation to attempt to convince Onoda the war is over and to come home. Hiroo Onoda posing for Norio Suzuki in February 1974. Norio Suzuki and Hiroo Onoda in February 1974 on Lubong Island, before he decided to surrender. Suzuki is holding his rifle. Hiroo Onoda photographed immediatly after his surrender in 1974 Turing over his sword to Philippine President, Ferdinan Marcos, March 10, 1975. Marcos returned the sword to him. Onoda returns to Japan Returning to the Phillipines: Hiroo Onoda, 74 In May 1996: leaves Narita airport near Tokyo for his first trip to the Philippines to visit his former island hideout. Kyodo News Service Lubang Island - Placing flowers at a monument on Lubang Island in the Philippines on May 2, 1996 during his first visit to the island in 22 years. Kyodo News Service Onoda in 1996 Filipino protestors on Lubang Island seeking compensation for the damages Onoda caused during his g
Books on Hiro Onoda
Articles on Hiro Onoda (English Language)
"Hiroo Worship." Time 25 March 1974: 42-43.
"Old Soldiers Never Die." Newsweek 25 March 1974: 51-52.
"Where It Is Still 1945." Newsweek 6 Nov. 1972: 58.
Coltheart, Max and Martin Davies, eds. Pathologies of Belief. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Cook. Japan at War: an Oral History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.
Dilman, Ilham and D.Z. Phillips. Sense and Delusion. New York: Humanities Press, 1971.
"Imperial Family Hosts Annual Autumn Garden Party." Japan Economic Newswire. Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. 13 November 1992.
Morton, Louis. The War in the Pacific: the Fall of the Philippines. United States Army in World War II Series. Washington. D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1969.
Reyes, Joel M. An Online Guide About the Philippine History
Thurber, David. "Town Seeks Compensation from Japanese WWII Straggler." The Associated Press. Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. 21 May 1996.
Waddington, Richard. "'Too Much Concrete and Cleanliness Makes for Weak Children'; Last Japanese to Surrender Offers Lessons of 29 Years in Jungle." Los Angeles Times. On-Line. Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. 29 December 1985.
Internet Links about Hiro Onoda
Famous WWII Fighter... till 1974
Webpage about Hiroo Onoda, including a bit about his life and retirement. James Oglethorpe contributed this link.
Former WWII Soldier Visits His Philippine Hideout CNN article with several photos, movies and news story. James Oglethorpe contributed this link.
alt.folklore.urban Quick note about Onoda's return to Philippines with news pictures.
Hirro Onoda: 30 Years War Website by Jennifer Bern
CNN Former WWII Soldier Visits Philippines
News story with short video clips
Hide & Seek
Article about Hiro Onoda and Shoichi Yokoi
Recollections of Hiro Onoda
Stories, meetings and memories of meetings and interactions with Onoda
Robert C. Hamer recalls:
"During the early 1980s, I was working for the (short-lived) Oil & Gas subsidiary of Inco Limited in Calgary. During this period, Nichimen opened an office in Calgary staffed by Juro Nakagawa. He was an "unusual" Japanese businessman in that he enjoyed overseas assignments. He was interested in finding business opportunities and we were full of ideas, none of which worked out. Nevertheless, Mr. Nakagawa and I formed a friendship that has lasted, although, we have not been in constant contact. He went on to be vice president for Nichimen Americas in New York City while maintaining a small presence in Calgary.
Some time after, Inco sold its oil & gas assets, CP Rail was seeking bids on a new tunnel through the Rogers Pass and several Japanese companies expressed interest. Mr. Nakagawa convinced one that it should consider using Inco's continuous mining machinery in tits bid and I arranged to take them to Sudbury to view the equipment in action. About that time, possibly 1987, Mr. Nakagawa called to invite me to reception he was holding for Mr. Onoda in Calgary.
Before coming to Calgary, Mr. Nakagawa had represented Nichimen in India and Brazil where he met Mr. Onoda. He felt that Mr. Onoda had been treated fairly shabbily by the Japanese Government, more of an embarrassment than a hero. His compensation ( back pay for the 27 years amounted to very little - a yen a day or month or something and no attempt to help him adjust to the new Japan.
Because of his experience with cattle, that he had become very familiar with cattle during his years on Lubang Island. Every now and then he would kill a cow for meat. The villagers would get alarmed and the army would embark on yet another unsuccessful search for him. Onoda decided that was something he could do usefully and Brazil seemed a better place to do this than Japan. His next project was to establish a sort of "Outward Bound" school for Japanese youth to teach the survival skills he had honed on Lubang Island. Part of that was to include several weeks in the Banff back country. That's when Mr. Nakagawa jumped in to help him. As I recall it, the purpose of the reception was to introduce Mr. Onoda to people in Calgary who might be interested in raising funds.
My wife and I lingered after the reception at Mr. Nakagawa's request and that was when he drew his motto for us, "Futu Fukutu" (sp?) or Never Yield, Never Surrender. A year or two later, Mr. Nakagawa invited me to meet Mr. Onoda again as he arrived in Canada to go to Banff to scout locations for his back country experience. Mr. Nakagawa retired from Nichimen and took a post as Professor of International Business at a University in Tokyo. He has planned to come to North America several times for a sabbatical, but ill health has intervened to prevent this. I imagine he has retired to look after himself. I don't know if he is still in touch with Mr. Onoda or not.Android realizes parts of its sandbox model for the apps with SELinux. SELinux blocks the access to resources on your device by default. You have to specifically write rules to grant access. It appears Android allows all apps the access to the /proc/net directory by default. Some background information about proc:
The proc filesystem (procfs) is a special filesystem in Unix-like operating systems that presents information about processes and other system information in a hierarchical file-like structure, …
/proc/net/, a directory containing useful information about the network stack, in particular /proc/net/nf_conntrack, which lists existing network connections …
This means that every app on your Android smartphone can monitor which apps connect to the internet and also when and where they connect to, without having to ask permission do so. People familiar with SELinux will find the related rule in the untrusted_app.te policy file under android / platform / external / sepolicy:
# access /proc/net/xt_qtguid/stats
r_dir_file(untrusted_app, proc_net)
Untrusted apps means:
In current AOSP, this domain is assigned to all non-system apps as well as to any system apps that are not signed by the platform key.
This rule does not only give access to the stats file as indicated but also any other file under /proc/net.About
What if we didn't know the whole story? Watch the Teaser Trailer Here! The Back the Future trilogy opened up our imagination to the possibilities of time travel, but also left us with many questions. Yes, we’re the guys who tweet about hover boards, subscribe to Doc themed RSS feeds and spend all night posting to B2TF message boards.
While, we’ve learned more about B2TF than anyone should ever learn about any film, we’ve found that there is one question that the Back to the Future trilogy has never answered until now…
We want to solve a mystery linked to the alternate universe established in Back the Future 2 as Doc here explains to Marty:
Doc: “Obviously the time continuum has been disrupted creating this new temporal events sequence resulting in this alternate reality… Let me illustrate.. Imagine that this line represents time, the present 1985, the future and the past. Right around this point in time somewhere in the past the timeline skewed into this tangent creating an alternate 1985”
The moment that Doc is referring to is when Biff from 2015 hands an almanac to Biff from 1955 altering everyone’s projected paths and thus instantly creating an alternate tangent universe with an alternate series of possibilities.
Doc: “An alternate you, me Einstein…”
In other words: an alternate everything… And in the original trilogy we learn the fate of almost everything in the alternate universe, with one exception… Where did Biff hide that Delrorean? And what if someone discovered it. This is where the Paradox Film Project begins.
But in order to chase the missing DeLorean down the proverbial rabbit hole we need your help first. We are looking for funds to cover our costs of productions, from crew to locations and from actors to yes, you’ve guessed it a fully ready for the silver screen DeLorean (it is SWEEEEET). We are offering some awesome incentives including signed scripts, original story board art and the opportunity for a few lucky individuals to join our cast & crew live on set. This project is after all by the fans, for the fans.
We have decided to keep Paradox a non-profit project and because we love Michael J Fox and his cause we will be donating 100% of every dollar made from this film directly to the Michael J Fox foundation.
We are calling on everyone who has ever owned a Back to the Future lunchbox or who has ever dreamed of riding a hover board to come help us journey back to 1955 so we can finally learn the fate of the second DeLorean.
Welcome to Paradox!
Like us on FACEBOOK for exclusive content.Every year, some smart folks at leading US colleges put together some key technological innovations with a savvy business plan and go for the MIT Clean Energy Prize (MIT CEP). Recently, we reported on the finalists hoping to go home with this year’s $200,000 Grand Prize winnings. Now–drum roll, please–we have a winner: C3Nano from Stanford University.
Founded by by students Ajay Virkar and Melbs LeMieux, C3Nano is a start-up built around a new transparent electrode material that they believe will make photovoltaic solar panels cheaper and more efficient. The major market for such a technology is, of course, the burgeoning solar industry, but there are other potential applications as well, including touch-screen electronic devices.
The MIT CEP is organized and run by students enrolled in MIT’s science and engineering schools as well as those from MIT Sloan School of Management, and over the past two years, it has helped launch more than a dozen companies that have raised in excess of $65 million in private and government funding.Putin’s Response Options To U.S. Cyber Attack
Jeffrey Carr Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 16, 2016
On October 7th, the U.S. government formally accused the Russian government of interfering with the U.S. election process.
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
On October 14th, NBC News reported that the CIA is planning a cyber attack against Russia, and that the target is Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders.
On October 15th, Russian Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov said in response to that news — “We will react, of course, especially given specific figures from the Russian government were mentioned.”
From the U.S. government’s perspective, it is the victim of Russian aggression; that the evidence pointing to the Russian government is sufficient to meet the attribution standard of “reasonable certainty”[1], and so it is entitled to respond in self defense as long as its response is proportionate to the attack[2].
What If?
It’s certainly possible that Putin directed the FSB and GRU at different times (one in 2015 and one in 2016) to mount a secret influence operation that would favor Donald Trump’s run for President, and that those normally competent spy agencies executed this secret operation by using not one but two blown threat actor groups (Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear), Russian servers and tool sets, free Russian-hosted email accounts on Yandex, and distributed the files via Wikileaks (a long suspected Russian front). Oh, and also create a FancyBear[.]net website and a character named Guccifer 2.0 who negotiates with reporters and speaks at security conferences. Because, you know, SECRET.
Or, it’s possible that the Russian government hasn’t directed this attack, and that the White House, in the midst of the ugliest election season in our lifetime, fueled with Russophobic hysteria generated in part by headline-grabbing cyber intelligence firms, has mis-attributed it to a State actor and is now about to launch a cyber attack against a nuclear power w/ cyber capabilities close to our own.
What then?
Under international law, Russia could pursue remedies at the U.N. Security Council and the International Court of Justice, or it could respond with countermeasures proportionate to whatever action the U.S. takes.
No one knows what Russia’s actual cyber capabilities are, but based upon the quality of their scientific universities and the world-wide respect garnered by their computer science engineers, they certainly are superior to the Keystone Cops antics of Fancy Bear, Cozy Bear, and Guccifer 2.0.
We already have enough real problems with Russia in Syria and Ukraine. Someone, maybe Russian, has embarrassed the Democrats but there’s no hard proof as to who’s responsible. And the bottom line is that the DNC bears at least some of that responsibility no matter who attacked them.
This decision by the White House to name the Russian government in the DNC hack and threaten them with a response is both inflammatory and irresponsible; especially when our entire U.S. network infrastructure is so vulnerable to retaliation by cyber means.
NOTES:
[1] Kenneth P. Yeager v. The Islamic Republic of Iran, Iran-U.S. C.T.R., vol. 17, p. 92, at pp. 101–102 (1987) — “in order to attribute an act to the State, it is necessary to identify with reasonable certainty the actors and their association with the State.”
[2] Jensen, Eric Talbot, Cyber Attacks: Proportionality and Precautions in Attack (October 1, 2012). 89 Int’l L. Stud. 198 (2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2154938 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2154938Jirawiwat Thitasiri is your 2018 San Jose Regional Champion. Despite the rather important implications of this tournament, the event flew under many people’s radars due to the lack of a stream as well as it occurring right after Thanksgiving. Despite the lack of direct coverage, there are still a few interesting story lines worth talking about from this past weekend.
Results & teams (Top 8)
1. Jirawiwat Thitasiri
2. Emilio Forbes
3. Rene Alvarenga
4. Matthew Greaves
5. Karim Dabliz
6. Patrick Smith
7. Mitchell Davies
8. Sam Pandelis
As there was no stream, there isn’t much to say specifically about the interesting Pokemon or teams that made it to San Jose’s Top 8. One thing of note is that both Mudsdale as well as Muk have been picking up late season popularity. Other players seem to have resorted to teams resembling the FAKEPG archetype as a means of achieving consistent results this late into the season.
International impact
Fun fact: three out of the eight players in the Top 8 are players from outside the U.S. The overall champion, Jirawiwat Thitasiri, is a name you’ve probably seen before as he’s been in a couple Top Cuts throughout the 2017 season. He is a player from Thailand who is currently attending university in San Francisco. This is his first major tournament win, putting him at 250 Championship Points out of the 300 he needs to qualify for the World Championships.
Another international player who was present in the Top 4 was El Salvador’s own Rene Alvarenga. Coming off his 7th place finish at the 2017 World Championships, Alvarenga has been attending a few tournaments here in the states. His finish in San Jose puts him at number one in Championship Point standings for Latin America, which has earned him a travel award to the 2018 Oceania International Championships.
Lastly, our current World Championship runner-up, Sam Pandelis was in attendance in San Jose. Pandelis funnily enough wasn’t using his team that earned him that second place trophy back in Anaheim, but I’d say his team was pretty good according to popular opinion. Like Alvarenga, Pandelis is another player who has been attending events here in America who has finally earned a solid result post-worlds.
Travel awards decided
November 30th is the cutoff date for deciding travel awards based off current Championship Point standings. San Jose gave North America two more Worlds invites, bringing the total to six. The current Top 4 will receive full travel awards to Melbourne while the rest of the players in the Top 8 will receive stipends.
One notable player that earned his stipend this weekend was Ray Rizzo. Rizzo unfortunately missed the Top 32 in the Regional tournament, but thanks to a Midseason Showdown victory, Rizzo’s Championship Point total of 370 was enough to place him in North America’s Top 8.
Just like old times
Another veteran player who came back to competing was official Pokemon commentator Duy Ha. Seeing Duy Ha and
Ray Rizzo competing in the same event made this tournament feel like it was happening back in 2012 or ’13. Ha’s 5-3 finish in Swiss put him at 28th place, just above Rizzo, who finished at 34th with the same |
back.Posted August 13th at 12:00am.
NHL®14 will feature a number of key gameplay improvements, including improved Hockey I.Q., better goal-scoring balance, more realistic goalie behavior, refinements to True Performance Skating and enhanced Stick Skills.
This week, the focus is on goalies and incidental contact with NHL® Collision Physics. Goalies are live and fully integrated into the play in NHL 14, so incidental contact (with players and goalies) occurs more frequently based on speed and momentum. At the same time, a lot of work has been done to tune penalty calls so that they’re realistic.
See the improvements in action:
Improved Goalie Collisions
Goalie Reactions to Contact – Goalies will be live in all areas of the ice and their reactions to contact are much more realistic, utilizing the improved ragdoll physics models introduced with NHL® Collision Physics.
– Goalies will be live in all areas of the ice and their reactions to contact are much more realistic, utilizing the improved ragdoll physics models introduced with NHL® Collision Physics. Goalie Interference – Improved logic ensures that big collisions with the goalie will result in penalty calls. Additionally, goals that come as a result of goalie interference will be called back more consistently.
More Realistic Incidental Contact
Speed and Momentum Matter – Not only will incidental contact occur more frequently, but speed and momentum will determine whether players colliding incidentally will trip and stumble or remain in control. Player balance attributes will also play a significant role in the outcome.
Penalty Calls
Interference – Expect stricter calls. Defenders won’t be able to hit attacking players as late after they release the puck.
Expect stricter calls. Defenders won’t be able to hit attacking players as late after they release the puck. Boarding/Hitting from Behind – Enhanced penalty logic judges the appropriate circumstances of a hit (angle, speed and result of the hit) and ensures the right call is made in each situation.
Enhanced penalty logic judges the appropriate circumstances of a hit (angle, speed and result of the hit) and ensures the right call is made in each situation. Charging – Additional logic has been added to understand the variables of each hit, such as the hitter’s speed and line taken.
Learn more about all the other improvements to NHL 14.
NHL 14 hits store shelves on September 10th, only on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Be sure to check out our NHL 14 Pre-Order Offers before it's too late.
Stay in the conversation and follow NHL 14 on Facebook and Twitter.The Gaza Strip is rapidly becoming one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. Israel has cordoned off the entire area, home to some 1.4 million Palestinians, blocking commercial goods, food, fuel and even humanitarian aid. At least 36 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since Tuesday and many more wounded. Hamas, which took control of Gaza in June, has launched about 200 rockets into southern Israel in the same period in retaliation, injuring more than 10 people. Israel announced the draconian closure and collective punishment Thursday in order to halt the rocket attacks, begun on Tuesday, when 18 Palestinians, including the son of a Hamas leader, were killed by Israeli forces.
This is not another typical spat between Israelis and Palestinians. This is the final, collective strangulation of the Palestinians in Gaza. The decision to block shipments of food by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency means that two-thirds of the Palestinians who rely on relief aid will no longer be able to eat when U.N. stockpiles in Gaza run out. Reports from inside Gaza speak of gasoline stations out of fuel, hospitals that lack basic medicine and a shortage of clean water. Whole neighborhoods were plunged into darkness when Israel cut off its supply of fuel to Gaza’s only power plant. The level of malnutrition in Gaza is now equal to that in the poorest sub-Saharan nations.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert uses words like war to describe the fight to subdue and control Gaza. But it is not war. The Palestinians have little more than old pipes fashioned into primitive rocket launchers, AK-47s and human bombs with which to counter the assault by one of the best-equipped militaries in the world. Palestinian resistance is largely symbolic. The rocket attacks are paltry, especially when pitted against Israeli jet fighters, attack helicopters, unmanned drones and the mechanized units that make regular incursions into Gaza. A total of 12 Israelis have been killed over the past six years in rocket attacks. Suicide bombings, which once rocked Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, have diminished, and the last one inside Israel that was claimed by Hamas took place in 2005. Since the current uprising began in September 2000, 1,033 Israelis and 4,437 Palestinians have died in the violence, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. B’Tselem noted in a December 2007 report that the dead included 119 Israeli children and 971 Palestinian children.
The failure on the part of Israel to grasp that this kind of brutal force is deeply counterproductive is perhaps understandable given the demonization of Arabs, and especially Palestinians, in Israeli society. The failure of Washington to intervene — especially after President Bush’s hollow words about peace days before the new fighting began — is baffling. Collective abuse is the most potent recruiting tool in the hands of radicals, as we saw after the indiscriminate Israeli bombing of Lebanon and the American occupation of Iraq. The death of innocents and collective humiliation are used to justify callous acts of indiscriminate violence and revenge. It is how our own radicals, in the wake of 9/11, lured us into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Israel has been attempting to isolate and punish Gaza since June when Hamas took control after days of street fighting against its political rival Fatah. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah leader, dissolved the unity government. His party, ousted from Gaza, has been displaced to the Israeli-controlled West Bank. The isolation of Hamas has been accompanied by a delicate dance between Israel and Fatah. Israel hopes to turn Fatah into a Vichy-style government to administer the Palestinian territories on its behalf, a move that has sapped support for Fatah among Palestinians and across the Arab world. Hamas’ stature rises with each act of resistance.
I knew the Hamas leader Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who was assassinated by Israel in April of 2004. Rantissi took over Hamas after its founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated by the Israelis in March of that year. Rantissi was born in what is now Israel and driven from his home in 1948 during the war that established the Jewish state. He, along with more than 700,000 other Palestinian refugees, grew up in squalid camps. As a small boy he watched the Israeli army enter and occupy the camp of Khan Younis in 1956 when Israel invaded Gaza. The Israeli soldiers lined up dozens of men and boys, including some of Rantissi’s relatives, and executed them. The memory of the executions marked his life. It fed his lifelong refusal to trust Israel and stoked the rage and collective humiliation that drove him into the arms of the Muslim Brotherhood and later Hamas. He was not alone. Several of those who founded the most militant Palestinian organizations witnessed the executions in Gaza carried out by Israel in 1956 that left hundreds dead.
Rantissi was a militant. But he was also brilliant. He studied pediatric medicine and genetics at Egypt’s Alexandria University and graduated first in his class. He was articulate and well read and never used in my presence the crude, racist taunts attributed to him by his Israeli enemies. He reminded me that Hamas did not target Israeli civilians until Feb. 25, 1994, when Dr. Baruch Goldstein, dressed in his Israeli army uniform, entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs, which served as a mosque, and opened fire on Palestinian worshipers. Goldstein killed 29 unarmed people and wounded 150. Goldstein was rushed by the survivors and beaten to death.
“When Israel stops killing Palestinian civilians we will stop killing Israeli civilians,” he told me. “Look at the numbers. It is we who suffer most. But it is only by striking back, by making Israel feel what we feel, that we will have any hope of protecting our people.”
The drive to remove Hamas from power will not be accomplished by force. Force and collective punishment create more Rantissis. They create more outrage, more generations of embittered young men and women who will dedicate their lives to avenging the humiliation, perhaps years later, they endured and witnessed as children. The assault on Gaza, far from shortening the clash between the Israelis and Palestinians, ensures that it will continue for generations. If Israel keeps up this attempt to physically subdue Gaza we will see Hamas-directed suicide bombings begin again. This is what resistance groups that do not have tanks, jets, heavy artillery and attack helicopters do when they want to fight back and create maximum terror. Israeli hawks such as Ephraim Halevy (a former head of Mossad), Giora Eiland (who was national security adviser to Ariel Sharon) and Shaul Mofaz (a former defense minister) are all calling for some form of dialogue with Hamas. They get it. But without American pressure Prime Minister Olmert will not bend.
Israel, despite its airstrikes and bloody incursions, has been unable to halt the rocket fire from Gaza or free Cpl. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured in the summer of 2006. Continued collective abuse and starvation will not break Hamas, which was formed, in large part, in response to Israel’s misguided policies and mounting repression. There will, in fact, never be Israeli-Palestinian stability or a viable peace accord now without Hamas’ agreement. And the refusal of the Bush administration to intercede, to move Israel toward the only solution that can assure mutual stability, is tragic not only for the Palestinians but ultimately Israel.
And so it goes on. The cycle of violence that began decades ago, that turned a young Palestinian refugee with promise and talent into a militant and finally a martyr, is turning small boys today into new versions of what went before them. Olmert, Bush’s vaunted partner for peace, has vowed to strike at Palestinian militants “without compromise, without concessions and without mercy,” proof that he and the rest of his government have learned nothing. It is also proof that we, as the only country with the power to intervene, have become accessories to murder.
Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author most recently of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” can be found every other Monday on Truthdig.GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida College of Pharmacy researchers have discovered a marine compound off the coast of Key Largo that inhibits cancer cell growth in laboratory tests, a finding they hope will fuel the development of new drugs to better battle the disease.
The UF-patented compound, largazole, is derived from cyanobacteria that grow on coral reefs. Researchers, who described results from early studies today (Aug. 7) at an international natural products scientific meeting in Athens, Greece, say it is one of the most promising they've found since the college's marine natural products laboratory was established three years ago.
An initial set of papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society also has garnered the attention of other scientists, and the lab is racing to complete additional research. The molecule's natural chemical structure and ability to inhibit cancer cell growth were first described in the journal in February and the laboratory synthesis and description of the molecular basis for its anticancer activity appeared July 2.
"It's exciting because we've found a compound in nature that may one day surpass a currently marketed drug or could become the structural template for rationally designed drugs with improved selectivity," said Hendrik Luesch, Ph.D., an assistant professor in UF's department of medicinal chemistry and the study's principal investigator.
Largazole, discovered and named by Luesch for its Florida location and structural features, seeks out a family of enzymes called histone deacetylase, or HDAC. Overactivity of certain HDACs has been associated with several cancers such as prostate and colon tumors, and inhibiting HDACs can activate tumor-suppressor genes that have been silenced in these cancers.
Although scientists have been probing the depths of the ocean for marine products since the early 1960s, many pharmaceutical companies lost interest before researchers could deliver useful compounds because natural products were considered too costly and time-consuming to research and develop.
Many common medications, from pain relievers to cholesterol-reducing statins, stem from natural products that grow on the earth, but there is literally an ocean of compounds yet to be discovered in our seas. Only 14 marine natural products developed are in clinical trials today, Luesch said, and one drug recently approved in Europe is the first-ever marine-derived anticancer agent.
"Marine study is in its infancy," said William Fenical, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of oceanography and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Diego. "The ocean is a genetically distinct environment and the single, most diverse source of new molecules to be discovered."
The history of pharmacy traces its roots back thousands of years to plants growing on Earth's continents, used by ancient civilizations for medicinal purposes, Fenical added. Yet only in the past 30 years have scientists begun to explore the organisms in Earth's oceans, he said. Fewer than 30 labs exist worldwide and research dollars have only become available in the past 15 years.
HDACs are already targeted by a drug approved for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma manufactured by the global pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. Inc. However, UF's compound does not inhibit all HDACs equally, meaning a largazole-based drug might result in improved therapies and fewer side effects, Luesch said.
Since 2006, Luesch and his team of researchers have screened cyanobacteria provided by collaborator Valerie Paul, Ph.D., head scientist at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce. They check the samples for toxic activity against cancer cells and last year encountered one exceptionally potent extract — the one that ultimately yielded largazole.
To conduct further biological testing on the compound, Luesch and his team have been collaborating with Jiyong Hong, an assistant professor in the department of chemistry at Duke University, to replicate its natural structure and its actions in the laboratory.
Luesch said that within the next few months he plans to study whether largazole reduces or prevents tumor growth in mice.
Luesch has several other antitumor natural products from Atlantic and Pacific cyanobacteria in the pipeline.
"We have only scratched the surface of the chemical diversity in the ocean," Luesch said. "The opportunities for marine drug discovery are spectacular."
Source: University of FloridaMainContent
Albany Law School announced a partnership with the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) that will allow students to work with startup companies, help develop products from idea to commercialization, work in a Tech Transfer Practicum, and extern at the CNSE Office of Technology Innovation and Commercialization. The partnership is considered the first of its kind in the country.
See the full announcement below.
SUNY NANOCOLLEGE AND ALBANY LAW SCHOOL PARTNER TO CREATE FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND NANOTECHNOLOGY EDUCATION AND TRAINING PROGRAM
‘Ecosystem for Nanotechnology, Entrepreneurship and Law’ (eNTEL) will provide unmatched student experience as launch pad for development of startup companies and attraction of business investment
Albany, N.Y. – In support of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s nanotechnology-based education and economic development strategy, the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) and Albany Law School (Albany Law) today announced the launch of a joint educational program, “Ecosystem for Nanotechnology, Entrepreneurship and Law” (eNTEL), which will integrate the strengths of each institution to uniquely prepare student entrepreneurs to launch startup companies and attract business investment as a means of further driving New York’s fast-growing innovation economy.
“We look forward to this collaboration and to playing a defining role as New York leads the world in 21st century entrepreneurial opportunities.”
“This partnership is a testament to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s visionary blueprint for economic growth, including the groundbreaking ‘Start-up NY’ initiative, which is laying the foundation for New York to expand its global leadership in nanotechnology research, development, commercialization and manufacturing,” said Dr. Pradeep Haldar, CNSE Vice President of Entrepreneurship Innovation and Clean Energy Programs and Head of CNSE’s Nanoeconomics Constellation. “We are excited to embark on this partnership with the prestigious Albany Law School to create a one-of-a-kind program that will further enhance New York’s ecosystem for nanotechnology-based entrepreneurship and set the stage for retaining top talent and attracting business and investment growth that will benefit our region and state.”
“Albany Law School is excited to partner with the globally recognized SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering to create the cutting-edge eNTEL program, which will draw business investment and the resultant jobs to the region, and attract and retain top-tier students who are interested in the exciting area at the intersection of law, science, technology, engineering, and entrepreneurship,” said Penelope Andrews, Albany Law School President and Dean. “We look forward to this collaboration and to playing a defining role as New York leads the world in 21st century entrepreneurial opportunities.”
Through the eNTEL program, both CNSE and Albany Law will foster a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration that will assemble the experience, knowledge, and expertise of each institution’s faculty and staff, as well as practitioners and experts in the Capital Region, to create training opportunities, joint classes and collaborative projects, all intersecting with technology, entrepreneurship, and the law, which will be issued jointly by CNSE and Albany Law.
“We look forward to this collaboration and to playing a defining role as New York leads the world in 21st century entrepreneurial opportunities.”
Students will work in teams to explore ways to develop products from idea to commercialization; create a “Tech Transfer Practicum” in which students from both CNSE and Albany Law will bring business ideas generated by CNSE student researchers to market; provide Albany Law students with vital real-world experience through placement in an externship with the CNSE Office of Technology Innovation and Commercialization; and, in collaboration with Albany Law’s Government Law Center, the school’s Tax and Transactions Clinic will provide free start-up legal assistance to selected very early stage businesses and nonprofit organizations, including those founded by CNSE students that have educationally appropriate legal needs. These initiatives will give students from both institutions opportunities to bring ideas to market and grow them into successful businesses to create economic development opportunities in the region, and to provide opportunities for area attorneys to service the businesses after the initial stage.
Portions of the program will be implemented over the next five years, with more than 200 students expected to be trained in the scientific, commercial, and legal aspects of nanoentrepreneurship, simultaneously strengthening the network of alumni, faculty, engineers, entrepreneurs, and practicing attorneys involved with the nanoscale industry in the Capital Region and throughout New York State. Additionally, the program aims to attract top engineering, business, and law students to the region to enhance enrollment at both institutions.
CNSE is a critical enabling resource in catalyzing new research, development, and business investments from the various sectors of the nanotechnology industry across New York State, fostering critical partnerships to produce and commercialize nanotechnology innovations, leading to economic development and job creation. Albany Law is America’s oldest independent school of law and is a nationally recognized center of learning and teaching as it provides opportunities to develop habits of critical analysis, understanding of theory, and the acquisition of professional skills. Through this agreement, each institution offers an affiliation with a distinguished cadre of faculty, researchers, students, experts, and leaders who are notable in their respective fields of study.
About CNSE. The SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) is the first college in the world dedicated to education, research, development, and deployment in the emerging disciplines of nanoscience, nanoengineering, nanobioscience, and nanoeconomics. With more than $17 billion in high-tech investments, CNSE represents the world’s most advanced university-driven research enterprise, offering students a one-of-a-kind academic experience and providing over 300 corporate partners with access to an unmatched ecosystem for leading-edge R&D and commercialization of nanoelectronics and nanotechnology innovations. CNSE’s footprint spans upstate New York, including its Albany NanoTech Complex, a 1.3 million-square-foot megaplex with the only fully-integrated, 300mm and 450mm wafer computer chip pilot prototyping and demonstration lines within 135,000 square feet of Class 1 capable cleanrooms. More than 3,100 scientists, researchers, engineers, students, and faculty work here, from companies including IBM, Intel, GlobalFoundries, SEMATECH, Samsung, TSMC, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, ASML, and Lam Research. CNSE’s latest expansion, which includes NanoFab Xtension (NFX), headquarters for the world’s first Global 450mm Consortium (G450C), and the Zero Energy Nanotechnology (ZEN) building, a living laboratory for green energy technologies, will add more than 1,000 scientists, researchers, and engineers from CNSE and global corporations. CNSE Kiernan Plaza in downtown Albany is home to CNSE's Smart Cities Technology Innovation Center (SCiTI). CNSE’s Solar Energy Development Center in Halfmoon, which provides a prototyping and demonstration line for next-generation CIGS thin-film solar cells, and the CNSE Photovoltaic Manufacturing and Technology Development Facility (CNSE MDF) in Rochester, the solar industry’s first full-service collaborative facility dedicated to crystalline silicon, support CNSE’s leadership of the U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium (PVMC). CNSE’s Smart System Technology and Commercialization Center of Excellence (STC) in Rochester offers state-of-the-art capabilities for MEMS fabrication and packaging. CNSE also co-founded and manages operations for the Computer Chip Commercialization Center (Quad-C) at SUNYIT and is lead developer of the Marcy Nanocenter site as part of the ‘Nano Utica’ initiative, and is partnering with AMRI and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus to develop the Medical Innovation and Commercialization Hub in Buffalo. For information, visit www.sunycnse.com.
About Albany Law School. Albany Law School is a small, independent private school located in the heart of New York state’s capital since 1851. As the oldest law school in New York and the oldest independent law school in the nation, the institution offers students an innovative, rigorous curriculum taught by a committed faculty. Several nationally recognized programs—including the Government Law Center and the Albany Law Clinic & Justice Center—provide opportunities for students to apply classroom learning to real situations. Students have access to New York's highest court, federal courts, the executive branch and the state legislature. With more than 10,000 alumni practicing in every state in the country, and several continents, Albany Law’s graduates serve as a vital community and resource for the law school and its students. Visit www.albanylaw.edu.With the emerging ecosystem of connected devices – often dubbed the “Internet of Things” – consumers are rightly worried about the security and privacy implications associated with always-on hardware in their homes that listen, watch, observe and then store data in the cloud. Today, a company called Silk Labs, co-founded by former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal, is launching a device that aims to address those concerns with its smart home sensor dubbed “Sense” that interoperates with your home’s connected devices, and automatically adapts to your needs over time by learning from your behavior and patterns.
At launch, Sense, now live on Kickstarter, will function as something of a digital brain for the connected home, in order to do things like turn on or off the lights, adjust the music or thermostat, and more. But what’s different about how this device operates, versus other smart home hubs on the market today, is that it acts on your behalf by developing an understanding of the people in the home, and their specific needs.
It learns.
To some extent, these interactions will be programmed explicitly via a companion app, but the bigger idea is to have Sense observe its users’ behavior then act accordingly.
For example, it can use facial recognition to identify who’s entering the house, then turn on the lights for you, set the thermostat to your desired temperature, and even start playing your favorite tracks on your Sonos speaker system.
By understanding who it’s looking at, Sense can also better detect when to alert you when something is wrong. Unlike security cameras that automatically record whenever there’s movement in the frame, requiring users to review footage that was merely of their cat toying with the living room curtains, Sense will be able to tell when there’s truly a concern warranting an alert.
Out of the box, Sense will work with smart home devices including lights from Philips Hue and LIFX, thermostats like Nest, and Sonos, with more integrations to come. The device uses computer vision for facial recognition and Bluetooth LE for proximity. Users, meanwhile, can interact with Sense through voice, gestures, and its app.
The hardware itself is not what’s interesting about Sense, however.
Effectively, explains CEO Andreas Gal, the company has just packaged existing smartphone technology into a new housing – in Sense’s case, a wooden stand with a sliding piece of curved glass on the front that hides Sense’s always-on camera.
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Gal, along with an ex-Mozilla team who previously developed the Firefox OS for smartphones, is instead focused on Sense’s software.
A Developer Platform, Not Just A Device
The team’s co-founders include Chris Jones and Michael Vines, and others on the team have worked at Qualcomm, Kyocera, GE, Microsoft, Yahoo, HTC, and elsewhere.
The device itself is more of demonstration of that software’s potential – the longer-term goal is to license it to other hardware makers and OEMs for use in their own products.
“I think that the ‘internet of things’ space is in a similar space as phones were some 15 years ago,” he explains. “The hardware part is done – thousands of companies can build the hardware. It’s the software that’s complex. We want to build an intelligent device.”
Today, IOT devices are still very simplistic.
A Dropcam, for example, can detect motion but it doesn’t actually understand what’s happening. People, on the other hand, just want to know if their house is safe. Dropcam alone can’t tell you that.
Sense, however, can. The device doesn’t just record, it recognizes things.
It knows the different people in the home, trained through a process where the app will ask you, over time, ‘who is this?’ while sending photos of those it sees. It also can tell the difference between a person and a pet. And it can recognize your patterns – when you leave, which lights are switched off; it will know who is home and when; it knows when strangers arrive, etc.
Security
Most importantly, perhaps, is how it stores this information. All the machine learning, computation and data processing takes place on the device itself – not the cloud. The results of that processing – for instance, a video clip of an intruder – is sent to the cloud service in an encrypted format. The keys to decrypt the content are only on the device, meaning even if Sense’s servers were hacked, the attacker wouldn’t gain access to your personal data.
“In the Internet of Things’ world, data is just generated and flows out of your home,” Gal says. “We’re trying to change that.” His team wants to build a version of the IOT world where consumers have a much better understanding of what happens to their data.
The device is launching an awareness campaign on Kickstarter today, where early birds can pre-order Sense for $225 – basically, at cost. It will ship later this year.
Silk Labs’ 13-person team is based in San Mateo, and is backed by $2.5 million led by Harrison Metal, with additional funding from 500 Startups, Qihoo/Lab 360, Sparkland Capital, Ming Li, Timothy Lee, and Joshua Schachter. Silk Lab’s advisors include Brendan Eich, Mozilla co-founder, and Bob Ishida, former Deputy CEO of Sony Mobile.Last week I had a discussion with two Christian women on another blog about my criticism of the movie Fireproof in my post The endless courtship fantasy. The women took issue with my characterizing the wife in the movie as whorish. They felt that since the husband had viewed porn on the internet this was grounds for the woman to divorce him. They didn’t see the wife’s pursuit of a doctor she worked with while still married as a real problem, because she had already decided to divorce and it was really the husband’s fault after all. They were also adamant that the wife planned on waiting until she had divorced the first man and married the second one before consummating the affair with sex, even though I could find no mention of this in the movie.
I should acknowledge that I run the risk of creating a straw man of their argument, but these points were made by them. I’ve decided to not link directly to the blog, and directly quoting them would with the help of google create a de-facto link*. I don’t want to send an angry mob their way, but I do want to address what I see as glaring problems with the movie. Since I will ask them to read the post, I will also ask as a courtesy to me that you avoid any personal attacks on them in the discussion. However, feel free to take issue with their arguments as I have presented them, the Christian fawning over this movie in general, and the incredibly weak Christian support for the concept of marriage vows.
The women challenged me to actually watch the movie, so I took their challenge and added it to our netflix queue. We watched it last night in fast forward with subtitles turned on, and I stopped it periodically to repeat the dialog so I could take what ended up being 7 pages of notes. Since I’m dissecting the movie it should go without saying that it will pretty much spoil the whole plot. If you want to watch the movie without it being spoiled first, stop reading now. For those of you who are like my wife and I and would rather snack on broken glass than watch a gussied up chick flick, read on and I’ll spare you the need.
The movie starts 25 years ago when the wife (Catherine) is a young girl. She wants to marry her daddy when she gets older (we see in a picture that he is a fireman). Her mother says that she can’t marry her daddy, and has to find her own husband. The girl asks Will we live happily ever after?, and the mother replies:
If you marry someone who really, really loves you.
Fast forward 25 years, and the little girl turned wife of a fire captain isn’t haaaaapy. Whenever her husband Caleb comes home, he is walking on eggshells for fear of setting her off. She has a laundry list of standard issue complaints. He doesn’t do the housework, and she is too busy to do it now that she has a high status job as head of PR for the local hospital. She has a list of needs which he isn’t spending money on, which he points out are actually wants. He is very clear that his primary complaint is that he is respected everywhere but in his own house. In the marital fight which stages the fundamental conflict for the movie, we learn that she has been denying him sex because he isn’t doing what she wants, and that he has been viewing online pornography (direct quote from the subtitles):
Catherine: If looking at that trash is how you get fulfilled, then that is fine. But I will not compete with it. Caleb: Well, I sure don’t get it from you! Catherine: And you won’t. Because you care more about saving for your stupid boat and pleasing yourself than you ever did about me.
When she taunts him with her manipulation of him through withheld sex, he flies into a rage and calls her a “disrespectful, ungrateful, and selfish woman”:
Catherine: I’m not selfish. How dare you say that! Caleb: If you can’t give me the respect I deserve, then what is the point of this marriage? Catherine (bursts into tears): I want out. I just want out.
Caleb replies that if that is what she wants, then it is fine with him. Immediately after the fight she takes off her wedding ring, and begins actively flirting with a doctor at the hospital which other women have already noted seems interested in her.
Her objection to him saving for the boat is that she has other plans for the money. Her mother had a stroke a year prior, and Catherine has gone to a medical supply store and picked out a sort of stroke bridal registry of things she wants to give her mother. She specifically mentions a new wheelchair and a “hospital bed”. By pure coincidence, this totals to the exact twenty four thousand dollars the husband has set aside to buy a boat. Interestingly the movie authors clearly expect us to see this as a “need”, but we never hear this from a medical professional. Her mother has already moved back home, and is sitting up fine in a normal chair when we see her. There is never a discussion about why top of the line equipment is the only way to help her parents, or how any of this will help her mother be able to speak again. The flimsy nature of this is important, because it sets the tone for the movie. Even if the wife’s demands are suspect, the right choice for the husband is to give her whatever she demands.
Money is fundamental to the plot, and the movie makes repeated reference to the husband’s need to spend money on his wife. Him spending money on her is so important it is one of the first parts of the Love Dare. Caleb makes the mistake of sending her flowers which aren’t expensive enough, and the movie grinds in the point that this makes him a bad husband. When the flowers arrive, they are actually fairly nice (but nothing extravagant). His unhaaaapy wife rolls her eyes and walks away. Later a more expensive bouquet of red roses arrives with a note which says “I love you more”. She appears to think this is from the doctor at the hospital she is trying to start an affair with, and instead of rolling her eyes lights up. Her very next move is to put an envelope marked “Caleb” on the table, which turns out to have divorce papers in it.
But none of this deters our husbandly hero in his pursuit of ever greater feats of betatized groveling. After she gives him the divorce papers, the Love Dare tells him he needs to give her an all out romantic dinner. He learns his lesson from the flowers incident and it is made clear that he spared no effort or expense. Catherine comes home and sees the dinner he prepared for her, candles and all. She treats him with her standard contempt, and asks what this is all about. He answers pleadingly “Maybe I want to have dinner with my wife”. She goes into her bedroom for a minute to get what she came for, and before she walks out the door tells him:
Let me be real clear with you about something. I do not love you.
But our hero is still undeterred. He knows from his wise father (who sent him the love dare), that he needs to love his wife unconditionally. Even when she is starting an affair with another man and tells him she doesn’t love him and gives him divorce papers, it is his job to try harder to please her.
Around day 20 Caleb is trapped in a burning house while trying to rescue a young girl. He uses his axe to chop through the floor of the house and pulls the unconscious girl into the crawl space. Here he very nearly ends up trapped again, and is forced to remove some of his protective gear. The scene ends with other firefighters dragging both Caleb and the girl out of the crawl space, and both appear to be unconscious.
This puts Caleb in the very hospital Catherine works at, being treated by the doctor she is starting an affair with. Catherine briefly stops by to check on him, but is extremely cold and walks away after the nurse tells her she is welcome to stay with her “hero” husband. Her specific words to him are “You look terrible. You gonna be ok?” This scene contrasts with a later scene where Catherine is in bed with a fever. Caleb runs out and buys her food from Chick-fil-A to nurse her back to health. It turns out that men who were nearly killed with first degree burns don’t deserve the same level of caring a woman who has a fever does.
Later in the movie Caleb finds a greeting card/love letter from the doctor who treated him which Catherine is keeping on her dresser (he finds this while doing the housework he has taken over). This sets up the ultimate frivolous divorcée fantasy, where two alphas (in status at least) compete directly for her heart. Caleb tells the doctor that he will “compete for her heart”. As Caleb leaves the Dr. opens a drawer with his own wedding ring in it, but we aren’t told whether he is divorced or currently married.
The concept of two high status men fighting over the would be divorcée’s heart is at the core of the movie. Even the plot device, the Love Dare, is all about him convincing her to love him. It isn’t about him convincing her to honor her wedding vows. This is standard issue divorce porn, and tells women that divorce gives them power to get what they want. No woman who watched the movie would fail to get this overriding message. If you aren’t haaaapy, threaten divorce and let high status men compete for your heart!
The core reason the Christian women thought the wife’s actions were morally justified is the husband’s ostensible addiction to pornography. Interestingly the first time we hear the word addiction in this context is from the instructions from his father. His wife never uses this term, and we aren’t shown him being obsessed with it. At one point he is on the web looking at something else, and he gets a popup for porn. With his new faith in God and his desire to prove himself to his wife he resists the urge to click on the popup. From here he smashes the PC with a sledgehammer and says “no more addictions”.
The conflict is finally resolved when Catherine is talking to the woman who runs the medical supply store. She wants to pick out some more odds and ends for her mother. She mentions the Dr. and when she does she lights up and starts playing with her hair the same way she has been doing while flirting with him (the whole hospital knows she is after him). The woman corrects her, explaining that the Dr. only gave $300, and her husband gave $24,000. Suddenly Catherine realizes she misunderstood who was the winner of the bidding war for her heart. She races home and puts her ring on and tarts |
busy year of cricket, I am pleased to have managed some consistency over both formats.
"The awards are always nice but the most important thing for me is to make sure I am performing consistently and helping put the team in a position to win more games.
"For the past one-and-a-half years, our team has been performing very well and lots of different players have stood up and performed under pressure. It is heartening to see that the team is doing very well going into the ICC Women's World Cup 2017 which will be held in England and Wales."
New Zealand automatically qualified for next year's World Cup by finishing third in the Women's Championship under Bates' captaincy. They won 13 of their 21 matches that counted towards the championship. New Zealand had also reached the semi-finals of the World T20 earlier this year.
Bates was also named in the Women's Team of the Year 2016, announced by the ICC for the first time, with West Indies' Stafanie Taylor as the captain. The side was selected by a panel chaired by Clare Connor and took into account performances during the same 12-month period from September 2015 to September 2016.
Women's Team of the Year (in batting order): Suzie Bates (New Zealand), Rachel Priest (New Zealand) (wk), Smriti Mandhana (India), Stafanie Taylor (West Indies) (capt), Meg Lanning (Australia), Ellyse Perry (Australia), Heather Knight (England), Deandra Dottin (West Indies), Sune Luus (South Africa), Anya Shrubsole (England), Leigh Kasperek (New Zealand), Kim Garth (12th) (Ireland)A young B.C. woman says an oversight by tellers at Canada's largest credit union helped scammers steal $5,000 from her.
Amanda Peacock, 20, was fresh out of college this summer and looking for a job when she fell victim to a widespread hoax, known as the "secret shopper scam."
"I lost all of my money … to some scam artist that's probably spending it on bad things," said Peacock. "It is the worst feeling to be robbed like that."
Peacock responded to a job ad on Craigslist and was "hired" by a company calling itself Canpro Market Development, which claimed to be a market research company from St. John's, N.L. The RCMP calls the company "bogus."
Peacock said her new "employer" sent her two "CIBC" bank drafts, each for close to $2,500. She was told to keep $200 and use the rest of the money to "test" various businesses on their customer service — including Western Union — where she was to wire several thousand dollars back to her "employer."
"I was told it was my job to see if [Western Union] was checking for ID — and [the amount wired] had to be over a thousand dollars," Peacock said.
'Money up front'
"They gave you the money up front, instead of spending your own and sending receipts, so it sounded perfect," she said.
The letter sent to her with the bank drafts said, "In order for your placement to become a permanent full/part-time position, all tasks should be performed in a professional and expeditious manner."
Vancity took more than $3000 out of Peacock's savings account to cover the overdraft incurred when the scammer's bank drafts turned out to be counterfeit. (CBC) Her mother said they checked the company name with the Better Business Bureau, but found no complaints.
"My husband and I were both a little bit skeptical, but then I know there [are] secret shoppers and mystery shoppers," said Kathy Peacock.
Her daughter then went to her branch of the Vancouver City Savings Credit Union — twice — to deposit the bank drafts. She said they were accepted by tellers without question and immediately credited to her account.
Peacock said she then wired most of the money back to her "employers" through Western Union, as instructed by a woman named Rachel.
"I was actually on the phone with her the whole time," said Peacock. "She had given me all the information to fill out on there and then I had to do two transfers.
"She seemed so nice. And she was telling me things about my life and about my schooling and — she seemed like a really nice person. She was very talented in what she did. The only purpose was to steal my money."
Counterfeit bank drafts
Several days later, Peacock said Vancity put a freeze on her account after the bank drafts were returned as counterfeit. Records show the credit union took $3,165 from her savings account to cover part of the cost of the drafts.
"I didn't believe it. I thought there had to be some way that there had to be some mistake," said Peacock. "I contacted the police. I gave them all the information I could, but they said there isn't much they could do because everything was fake. Fake phone number. Fake address.
The victim's mother Kathy Peacock, left, blames Vancity more than the scammers for not detecting the fake bank drafts or putting a hold on them. (CBC) "I thought because they were money orders that it was guaranteed money," said her mother. "We feel very violated. I mean, I feel violated for my daughter."
Peacock said she had been planning to use the money she lost to pay her student loan.
"I really wanted to start paying that off and I could have done so many great things with that money — and now that it's all gone, all I can do is work my butt off a little bit harder … and make it back."
Widespread scam
RCMP spokesperson Tim Kreiter said the "secret shopper" scam is widespread and has moved across Canada, often popping up during hard economic times. Ten complaints have been filed since June in B.C.'s Lower Mainland alone, he said.
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Kreiter said the scammers use false names and untraceable, pay-as-you-go cellphones purchased in the U.S.
CBC News tried calling the number on the letter sent to Peacock, but got voice mail and no return call. The address listed — 484 Water St., St. John's, N.L. — is a vacant building.
Carol Penstock, an employment counsellor at the B.C. Institute of Technology, said she often hears from students who are targeted or taken in by scammers.
Peacock sent the scammers almost $5000 via Western Union after they told her to test their customer service with a wire transfer. (CBC) "Especially when the economy gets low, or it gets a little harder to get a job, these people seem to crawl out of the woodwork," said Penstock. "[The students] really need a job. They really need to start earning some money. This seems like a really quick way of doing it. Why not?"
She said she advises students if anyone is giving money for a job upfront, it is probably too good to be true.
"[The scammers] are bottom feeders. What else can I say?"
Peacock and her mother are upset with Vancity for not catching the fake bank drafts or putting a hold on them until they cleared.
"They're the ones that initially accepted them … and took no responsibility whatsoever for checking them to make sure that they were legitimate. And they didn't hold them," said Kathy Peacock. "They have the blue lights. They check money if it's fake or not, so I don't understand why they don't check these."
Caught by other tellers
Kreiter said in some similar cases, tellers at other institutions have identified the bank drafts as counterfeit, and they haven't been processed. He said it helps police to get the bank draft as evidence, but sometimes the paper is shredded after being sent for clearing.
As a result of CBC News inquires, Vancity has now apologized to Peacock and offered her an interest free loan for the amount of money she lost. (CBC) "There is a very high chance it will be detected if presented at a teller," said Kreiter. "If they do catch it, then we have the original document."
Peacock said Vancity expressed no concern over what happened in her case and now puts holds on every cheque she attempts to cash.
"When I went back to deposit a cheque that was just over $100, they told me they had to hold it for two weeks until they got to know the company," said Peacock. "I said why didn't you do that before? And he said 'I'm sorry, that's what we have to do now.'
"I've been through a lot lately, and they show no compassion for me whatsoever."
Vancity declined to be interviewed and refused to provide any information about Peacock's case. However, as a result of CBC News inquiries, Peacock was called into her branch and said she was offered an apology and an interest-free loan for the amount she lost.
"The two that talked to me said that they were on vacation when it happened to me and that they were sorry that I wasn't treated with the right respect from their bank," said Peacock.
When Vancity was asked by CBC News if it would be warning its tellers about the "secret shopper" scam, it did not reply.
Instead, the credit union sent a statement, which said, "New and sophisticated scams are invented every day and we have robust policies, training and procedures to help detect and prevent fraud."
The address the scammers gave Peacock for Canpro Market Development is an empty building in St. John's, Nfld. (CBC) When we do become aware of new fraud scams we work together with other financial institutions and the authorities to shut it down as quickly as we can and educate our members and employees about it. We also work together to share best practices, monitor trends, contribute to investigations and discuss strategies to detect and illuminate fraud," the statement said.
"They apologized to me and they were very nice," said Peacock. "But do I think that would have happened if [CBC News] didn't contact them? No."Nov 12, 2014; New Orleans, LA, USA; New Orleans Pelicans forward Anthony Davis (23) shoots over Los Angeles Lakers center Jordan Hill (27) during the second quarter of a game at the Smoothie King Center. Mandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports
Let’s face it, the Los Angeles Lakers are capable of fixing any offensive inefficiency and Wednesday night was no different for the Pelicans. Entering Wednesday night’s game, Los Angeles ranked dead last in the league at opponent’s points per game (111.5) and opponent’s field goal percentage (49.8 percent!!!!!).
Anthony Davis and the New Orleans Pelicans were able to take advantage of the Lakers defensive shortcomings by taking a page out of the Cavaliers playbook. They utilized motion principles that forced the ball to move crisply and opened up driving lanes to attack the likes of Jordan Hill at the rim.
After having a stagnant offense just last week against the Memphis Grizzlies, seeing this kind of improvement (albeit against the lowly Lakers) is encouraging.
Notice the beautiful set up and continuity of the players during the initial possession of the game for New Orleans:
Jrue Holiday trots his way to the top of the arc before dumping it down low to Anthony Davis at the left elbow (one of his most lethal places of operation). From there, Davis sizes up Jordan Hill before darting to the left to execute a dribble handoff/pick with Eric Gordon.
While this is happening, Jrue Holiday cuts through the lane and gets just enough of Carlos Boozer to allow Omer Asik to freely lumber himself over to Gordon and set a second screen for Kobe Bryant to fight through. Gordon then makes the proper pocket pass to the rolling Asik, but it somehow gets tipped by the usually defensively challenged Boozer.
The possession results in a turnover, but holy hell was this a beautiful way to open up a game.
In the recent past, I have marveled at the way that Rick Carlisle and his staff creatively find ways to get Dirk Nowitzki open shots and was hoping that Monty Williams would be able to do the same for Anthony Davis at some point.
Although there is still a long way to go on that front, there was a sequence last night that got me all giddy.
While again using the dribble handoff method, Omer Asik is able to facilitate the offense and propel Davis into the painted area. Around the two second mark of the video, you will notice Luke Babbitt (that’s right, LUKE BABBITT!) screening two Lakers at once, giving Davis optimal room to operate.
Getting Davis a running start is simply not fair to opposing big men that already have a challenge keeping up with him. Carlos Boozer has no chance as he is a step slow for the accelerating Davis.
Jeremy Lin is the last line of defense for the Lakers because of Asik’s presence in the short corner, and he chooses to stand out in no man’s land rather than attempt to either help Boozer or make a play on the ball. Lin’s aloof nature naturally leaves a wide open passing lane for Davis to hit Holiday for the lay up.
All game long, New Orleans was able to hit big men rolling towards the basket by executing plays similar to the ones above. In the third quarter, they saved a special little piece of basketball poetry for Los Angeles and unleashed it when they were least expecting it.
I had to re-watch this play a solid five times to really appreciate all that was happening in such a short period of time.
Omer Asik again does his best Andrew Bogut impression and sizes up his defender at the top of the key before gingerly dribbling left and handing the ball off to Tyreke Evans, who started the play underneath the basket as a screener for Jrue Holiday.
As Evans receives the ball, Holiday (after wheeling around the court) is there to take yet another dribble handoff and set up the same type of scenario as the aforementioned first play of the game that resulted in a turnover.
Having seen this kind of action all night, Lakers forward Wesley Johnson aggressively cuts off Asik’s roll towards the basket, but leaves Tyreke Evans alone for a wide open three in the process. Holiday wants to make the pass to Asik (which explains the little hitch in his passing motion), but is heady enough to recognize Johnson’s presence and zips the ball over to Evans.
Plays like this really get the basketball nerd juices flowing.
Again, I am aware that the Lakers are a dreadful bunch on defense so we all should take each of these plays with a grain of salt. Having said that, it is still nice to see this kind of offense being put into action by the Pellies and something that I hope continues going forward.
Getting away from relying on awkward isolation packages and incorporating more ball movement will be a solid recipe for staking claim to a playoff spot in the bloodbath Western Conference.Ramsey takes the long walk, but the root cause of the problems remains - Column
Thursday, 5th Nov 2015 22:48 by Clive Whittingham
Chris Ramsey, predictably, was sacked as head coach of the QPR first team on Wednesday evening. But those rejoicing in his demise are placing too much faith in a board that has shown no ability to turn the club around.
The news that Chris Ramsey is being “relieved of the first team duties” at QPR is the least surprising development since Sandro cried off for another few weeks with the sort of ankle bruise infant school pupils pick up on the playground all the time and think nothing of. Since Neil Warnock arrived with “no interest in returning to management” in an advisory capacity a fortnight back it’s been a case of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.
A good portion of the fan base will have reacted to this news, slipped out last night after most papers' early deadlines and at the same time as the Champions League results were rolling in, simply with “good” or stronger words to that effect. Another section will treat it as the worst news they’ve ever heard, another nail in the coffin of the entire club, another excuse for self-flagellation and exaggerated grief.
Football supporting has always been about opinions. Two people go to the same game and come away with entirely different impressions of it, and when one voices their opinion to the other the indignant rage builds up inside and an argument ensues. In a Derby curry house late on Tuesday night a discussion around our table about how Grant Hall had done a good job of keeping Chris Martin quiet was interrupted by a Phil and Grant Mitchell tribute act, who’d overheard/eavesdropped on the conversation from the other side of the dining room and decided they absolutely had to walk over and interrupt the meal of three perfect strangers to tell us how wrong we were, how brilliant Martin had been and “shit” Hall was.
These conversations used to be the mainstay of pubs and radio phone ins but they’ve grown into something more now. Everybody has a dozen ways of putting them forward – message boards, Twitter feeds, blogs, websites, message boards, podcasts. You venture your point of view, and somebody disagrees with it, so you argue back for days on end. You become entrenched in your view, it becomes extreme. Soon, in your own mind, you cannot possibly fathom why QPR haven’t sacked Chris Ramsey yet and it makes you angry, or you cannot stand that everybody seems so desperate for him to be sacked and that makes you angry. Before you know it you’re starting a petition to have everybody’s favourite mentally-sound Ostrich enthusiast Nigel Pearson installed or proclaiming in all seriousness that what’s happening at QPR at the moment is the “biggest sporting failure ever witnessed”. You become pro-Ramsey, or anti-Ramsey, with no middle ground - rather than just pro-QPR.
It’s nonsense, but it builds momentum. You end up with scenes such as the ones we saw at MK Dons last week, and Brentford on Friday, where fans are leaping out of their seats to abuse their own player and manager, faces contorted with rage. Supporters admit publicly they’d quite like QPR to lose the next game so as to bring the manager closer to the sack. It’s ugly. By the time the manager does get the sack it feels like a mercy killing of a man without a victory in months, when in fact QPR are only thirteenth in the Championship with the league’s third best attack.
It won’t get clicks or hits or retweets, but the simple truth is Chris Ramsey wasn’t that good, or that bad.
Playing the game
One of Ramsey’s big failings, with that in mind, was his failure to ‘play the game’. The incessant selection of Karl Henry was possibly through stubbornness, possibly to try and assert authority or probably because he thought he could do a good job for the team. Whatever the reason, there were times, and games, when he could easily have picked Michael Doughty instead and not damaged the team’s chances at all – even if you do believe Doughty’s inclusion weakens the team, which I don’t as we won away from home in his only start so far. Ramsey could have 'played the game' there, and bought himself some more rope.
At the end of last season Ramsey twice called upon Shaun Wright-Phillips. Most unforgivably, he sent him on with seconds remaining at Manchester City when 6-0 down. The City fans, who remember Wright-Phillips fondly, gave him a standing ovation. For the QPR fans, who despise him as a symbol of everything bad QPR have become, it was a very public kick in the bollocks having already been thrashed in a televised fixture. Whether Chris Ramsey wanted to reward Wright-Phillips for his diligence and professionalism in training or not, he should have realised or been told that this was a bad idea and played the game. Failing to do so undermined Ramsey’s position – many QPR fans still bring up that fleeting appearances against him now, six months later.
At Crystal Palace, ten minutes before the end, Ramsey asked Eduardo Vargas to prepare to come on and the Chilean refused. Reece Grego-Cox, a teenage boy, was sent on instead. When Jose Bosingwa had done the same thing to Ramsey’s predecessor, Harry Redknapp threw the player under the bus in front of the press the next week. That backfired on Redknapp when he subsequently tried to use Bosingwa again, and basically rendered a club asset that it had spent a good deal of money on absolutely worthless, but it deflected criticism away from Redknapp entirely - “What can he do? Look what he’s got to work with,” people said. Ramsey kept the Vargas incident in-house until after relegation was confirmed, and even then didn’t name any names. In the meantime he was branded an idiot for leaving a Chilean World Cup attacker out of a team struggling to score goals.
Ramsey, and Les Ferdinand, also made a rod for their own backs with the early involvement of Grego-Cox, Darnell Furlong and others. The lack of any opportunities whatsoever for the club’s youngsters was a stick Harry Redknapp was beaten with regularly and sensing an opportunity for early popularity points – which is all it could have been given what’s happened this season – the PR line after his departure was all about pathways from youth to first team.
Now the QPR youth set up, we well know, isn’t fit for purpose - no more capable of producing a Premier League player than a fucking astronaut. But Grego-Cox and Furlong both did ok last season and could easily have had minutes this year. Doughty, too, hasn’t looked that out of place at Championship level. Ramsey has clearly decided they’re not good enough for his first team and left them out but by not picking them at all, despite the senior players ahead of them playing consistently badly – Henry in the case of Doughty, James Perch in the cases of Furlong and Michael Harriman – he’s also burned off a lot of support.
Critics who may have stuck with him longer had they seen some sort of long term focus and plan in action have, quite justifiably, asked what long term goal we’re accomplishing by having a 34-year-old left back on loan from Leicester getting picked every week and playing poorly. Surely even Cole Kpekawa playing badly and making mistakes, but gaining the experience, is better than the Konchesky situation. No doubt if Ramsey had picked them, and the results had been bad, he’d have been widely abused as being on some sort of crusade to pick kids even though they’re not good enough and told in no uncertain terms to get the senior pros back in. But, again, he could have played the game – we’d still have beaten MK Dons with Kpekawa in the team for example and even if we hadn't, wasn't that what Ramsey was brought in for? I’ve been told that several young players feel they were made promises about game time this season that have not been kept.
Then there’s the substitutions, which have become a bone of contention. Firstly because Ramsey never made any, and then latterly because, in the eyes of the crowd, he made the wrong ones. There have been occasions – Wolves away, Huddersfield away – when not making changes and sticking to the original plan has worked for him. QPR have recovered seven points from losing positions this season, including two wins from two nil down. There is something to be said for sticking to the plan. Towards the end of his time it felt like whatever he did, he’d be abused for as that momentum I spoke about in the first section built. Seb Polter came on as a sub at Birmingham and was roundly abused, mostly for his nationality in the case of one group at the back of the away end. Three days later Ramsey was then criticised for not having Polter on the bench when he put Leroy Fer on upfront.
Even a staunch Ramsey supporter, however, would have to say his changes made during games, and his management of games as they progress, has been odd at best. Against Brentford and Derby in the last two fixture the initial plan worked well, only for the team to concede a goal in the inevitable ten minutes of intense pressure every team has in a game. There was nothing from Rangers thereafter to recover the situation. It felt like Ramsey knew what to do to play against teams from the start, having watched and studied them, but couldn’t deal with changes in the situation or match once it deviated away from that through circumstance.
Moving goalposts
But whether you’re pro or anti Chris Ramsey, whether you think he should have got the job in the first place or not, whether you lost faith with him because of what happened in the Premier League last season under his watch or not, it is undeniable that his remit was changed midway through his 15 games (and that’s all it is) this season.
Keeping hold of Matt Phillips, Charlie Austin, Sandro, Leroy Fer and Rob Green when they were all expected to leave during the summer raised expectations after the club had spent the entire close-season preaching the need to consolidate, trim the wage bill, get some solid foundations in place, avoid going into a Wolves-style free fall and so on. As I think I wrote at the time, if Middlesbrough or Derby signed those five players on deadline day you’d immediately have them down as runaway title contenders.
But that ignores a few things. Firstly, some of these players are nowhere near as good as QPR believe them to be. Rob Green has been a good Championship keeper who is regularly found out in the Premier League his whole career and at the start of this season he’s made several basic, fundamental errors that have led to important goals being conceded – the first at Fulham and the penalty against Forest in particular. Under Redknapp in the Championship he was brilliant - Ramsey wasn’t afforded the bonus of an in-form keeper despite persistently showing the utmost faith in Green, to the point where Alex McCarthy looked elsewhere for his football.
Sandro hasn’t been fit to play, which is entirely predictable as he hasn’t been fit to play since he got here - more tart than “Beast”. Leroy Fer, also mostly absent, hit and miss on his occasional outings just as he was last season. Matt Phillips has been inconsistent, just as he has for his entire spell here but for a three month purple patch last season. Austin has been excellent, but having prepared to play 4-2-3-1 without him, Rangers have been forced to try and turn him into what Heidar Helguson was for us in 2010/11 – which Austin isn’t. Austin’s the main man, he’s not there to pull the ball down and feed it to somebody else.
All of these players were here when QPR finished last in the Premier League last season. Of them, only Charlie Austin can be said to have shown he was worthy of the top division. Why do we suddenly expect them to tear this division apart? Because we’re paying Premier League money for them? That’s our fault for overpaying.
Secondly, the challenge of re-integrating big-name players back into a Championship squad they thought they were going to be leaving is tough. Again, it’s the QPR attitude of individuals over team coming to the fore – we’ve got the best individuals, we’re spending the most money, therefore we should have the best team. Teams take time to build and cultivate. The Championship is being won consistently at the moment by teams built over time who come from the pack and overtake the big spenders – Brighton, Bournemouth, Warnock’s QPR.
Mentally, these players had probably already gone – Fer failed a medical at Sunderland for instance. Austin and Phillips have given it their best can you say the same of Fer and Sandro? When Kenny Jackett took over at Wolves in League One he stuck the club’s biggest earners and supposed best players – Kevin Doyle, Karl Henry, Roger Johnson – who either wanted to leave, or thought they would, in the reserves and left them there whether they left or not because of the difficulties the uncertainty around their future may cause.
That re-integration, an issue in itself, has caused the third problem: a number of players who were brought in to replace these players haven’t played at all. Alex Smithies, in the case of Green, didn’t come that cheap and has moved his very young family away from his home town and his boyhood club to sit on the bench at QPR – how is he feeling now? Ben Gladwin loaned straight back to Swindon without being given a fair shot. Seb Polter made his feelings clear on social media after being left out against Sheffield Wednesday. Tjaronn Chery is being forced to play out of position wide left. So as well as the youth players who thought they’d get game time but aren’t, there’s now another bunch of new signings not getting what they saw in the brochure when they signed here.
The big names, and more important the big earners, staying at the club caused as many problems as it solved and it added a whole new one – people looked at the team on paper, looked at how much it was costing and decided it should win promotion. From looking to consolidate and build, Ramsey was told he had to win promotion. Neither he, nor his players, are good enough for that, whatever they’re paid.
Root of the problem
There’s a scene in The Four Year Plan where Flavio Briatore is sitting with Alejandro Agag lamenting, in Italian, about how every manager they’d employed was an idiot. “One got drunk, one attacked the players, every idiot we found, not an idiot left in turn,” they say.
It shows a preposterous lack of self-awareness, that they could possibly believe that managers as diverse in experience and ability as Luigi De Canio, Paolo Sousa, Iain Dowie, Jim Magilton, Paul Hart and Mick Harford could all fail at QPR because of their own faults, and not because of the one megalomaniac constant that oversaw them all. Neil Warnock deserves huge credit for the job he subsequently did, but don’t forget it only happened when Briatore withdrew and left control of the team to the manager with Amit Bhatia and the underrated, much-missed Ishan Saksena overseeing the club.
You can make a decent case that the failings at QPR over the past few years have all been down to the managers of the team at the time. Mark Hughes, arrogantly walking away from Fulham because they couldn’t “match his ambition”, gleefully playing fast and loose with the QPR cheque book, signing big-name toads from Kia Joorabchian’s client log so he could prove just what a brilliant manager of big egos and big clubs he was only to fall flat on his face. His subsequent success with Stoke a result of the lessons he learnt at Loftus Road.
Harry Redknapp, the chancer’s chancer, taking a job his heart wasn’t really in after missing out on the England post he dreamed of, doing a half-arsed number on an almost part-time basis while tired old Bondy and Joe Jordan milled around deferring to whichever out of work manager Harry had asked to come in to help out – the team peaking and troughing based on whether Steve McClaren was leading the sessions or Steve Cotterill.
Chris Ramsey, the inexperienced youth-coach promoted above his ability level because he’s Les Ferdinand’s mate, out of his depth and found out.
It is still possible that Tony Fernandes and the Tune Group are the best football club owners fans could ever wish for, and have simply been let down by two experienced managers who did an awful job and one who was too naïve.
It’s increasingly unlikely though isn’t it? Mark Hughes is the big clue. Blackburn, Fulham, Stoke – as far as Premier League clubs go they’re as close as you can get to QPR and he’s had them all in the top half of the league and often going deep into cup competitions either side of his time at Loftus Road. He couldn’t win a single bloody game here in 15 attempts at the start of his second season.
That’s why it’s hard to get excited about any of the alternatives being mentioned, because does it really matter who the manager is when the manager isn’t the problem?
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink has been backed into the favourite position, as he looks set to lead Burton Albion to a second successive promotion from League One. But Hasselbaink took over a solid team from Gary Rowett, with one of the best training grounds in the country at his disposal, zero expectations among the fan base, no debt and an experienced and canny chairman. He’d find none of that here, and he’d bring Chelsea connections which would erode the amount of time he was given by the supporters.
Kenny Jackett is exactly the sort of steadying influence the club needs right now. He also builds teams that the QPR fans like to see, with a big, mobile front two serviced by two out and out wingers – James Henry in his current Wolves team, a QPR player in waiting, like a right-footed Lee Cook. But he’s never shown any ability to go beyond the middle of the Championship once it’s stabilised and solidified, and we don’t want stability and solidity, we want promotion right now.
Neil Warnock is obviously in prime position. As I said a fortnight ago, bringing him in as an experienced hand to help isn’t like Tony Pulis does with Gerry Francis or Dougie Freedman does with Lennie Lawrence because he was a Premier League manager less than a year ago and clearly still fancies himself. As a long-serving ex-player at QPR told me a few weeks before Warnock re-appeared, do you think Neil Warnock flew up from Exeter one summer’s evening to appear on a live QPR Podcast from The Ship in Kilburn for want of something better to do with his time? Or because the QPR Podcast pays big appearance fees and he’s short of cash?
The inference being he’s been angling after this, and in doing so fits in with how Hughes got the job after Joorabchian got into Fernandes’ ear and undermined Warnock, and how Ramsey got the job after Ferdinand did likewise with Redknapp. This is not only snide and unpleasant – Ramsey’s dead man walking situation for the last fortnight reflects poorly on the club - it’s also no kind of recruitment process and it’s not working.
It’s always a quick appointment from a shortlist of one. I suspect it’ll be Warnock in the Ferdinand role with Shaun Derry in the Ramsey role this time – it would at least improve the atmosphere, but those who criticised Ramsey for lacking experience would struggle to make a case for Derry however legendary he is round these parts. Just as those who say Ramsey’s football is boring are presumably sweating that Paul Lambert’s odds are so short.
The problem here isn’t the manager, and any temporary improvements made by a new appointment will likely be just that. Tony Fernandes seems to have taken a back seat while the, mercifully, less public facing Ruben Gnanalingam runs the show, but collectively this board remain the issue at QPR.
Their remarkably steadfast support among the fans seems to be based around the money they’ve been putting in. But, according to Reuters, that near £200m debt is borrowed against the Air Asia share price which is now dropping below that value. Common practice in the Far East, the report says, but big trouble when it goes like this. With that, and the ongoing FFP negotiations, it feels like we’re heading for a major situation here. No wonder Fernandes’ brief re-appearance at Harlington a fortnight ago brought a “promotion is everything to me” message.
Let’s not forget three things. Firstly, the team we have now finished last in the Premier League last season and even if it does go back there this season it’s likely to go without its best player who is out of contract in the summer. Secondly, this huge debt we’re saddled with has been accrued while earning the Premier League television money we’re so keen to get back to in order to keep the wolf from the door. If we were planning to go back and use the £100m to pay down some debt I could see the point, but it’s our previous spells up there that have been so ruinous.
And thirdly, that television money the club was paid in three of the last four seasons was the club’s. It was reward for what Neil Warnock, Amit Bhatia and Ishan Saksena achieved before Tony Fernandes got here. It could have secured the club’s future, left us totally debt free, built a training ground, improved infrastructure. Instead it went in the pockets of wanker footballers and their agents, in the name of turning QPR into a promotional vehicle for the Tune Group and an Asian airline.
In the end Chris Ramsey’s failings set out above made it difficult to support him too much, but it became a case of better the devil you know for me. There’s absolutely no indication this board will get it right at the fourth attempt and the only reason they’re trying seems to be an attempt to chase losses they’re entirely responsible for by rushing back to the place where they occurred. That’s not even a good strategy for the bloke on the fixed odds terminal in the local Bill Hill’s, never mind international businessmen in charge of a football club.
The Twitter @loftforwords
Pictures – Action Images
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NottsQPR added 23:22 - Nov 5
Superb piece Clive. I'm still not convinced on Mark Hughes though!
Despite all the crap, during the Fernandes reign and by hook or crook, most QPR fans of my generation (40 sadly) have had possibly their best day supporting Rangers with a last minute winner scored with just 10 men at Wembley. Many fans go through their whole lives without something like that happening, but now is the time for a recruitment process that, with Warnock deputising for a month or two as manager, can afford to have a thorough interview process to find the right man.
Let's hope Hoos can pick as well as he has previously? 2
sevenhoop added 23:32 - Nov 5
That's brilliant as usual Clive. Everything you say is bang on, but the fact is that Ramsey was always the wrong choice,, proved it last season, |
Launcher and Google app.
What do you think?Nine years ago, Alex Rogers, co-owner of Marijuana Politics, was released from a German prison, where he had finished serving a six-month sentence for cannabis related offenses. He was 35 years old and completely broke. He had been living in Europe for seven years and upon his release from prison, decided to move back to the United States, to, as he puts it, “get my shit together”. And, get his shit together he did. A year and a half after returning to the states, Rogers graduated magna cum laude in Political Science from Southern Oregon University.
Not long after graduating college, he started one of Oregon’s most successful medical marijuana clinic businesses. “Though my degree was not in business, because of the politically charged cannabis industry, my degree has helped me with my business endeavors more than I could have ever imagined”.
After building his clinic business, Rogers started the Oregon Medical Marijuana Business Conference (OMMBC) and the International Cannabis Business Conference (ICBC), two of the preeminent cannabis business conferences in the country. One of his proudest achievements is the OMMBC because he has gotten such positive feedback from attendees and colleagues that are now thriving in the burgeoning Oregon marijuana market.
Rogers stated that, “The OMMBC was our first conference, our baby, and we have worked diligently to build the OMMBC brand and improve upon previous events.” Rogers is not just a businessman, he is also one of Oregon’s top cannabis activists, organizing thousands of emails and phone calls to Oregon legislators last spring.
Rogers attributes much of his success to his activist ideology. “I have a tremendous amount of encouragement and help from many good people. Being a good business person starts with being a good member of the community at large.” Rogers describes the current cannabis industry landscape in Oregon as “Booming”. “I have lived in California, Amsterdam, and Switzerland (1999 when weed was virtually legal in the country), and I have never seen anything like what is currently happening in Oregon. It is inspiring”.
Currently, Rogers is starting up two new cannabis businesses, and with his Midas touch, I for one, am not betting against him. Rogers is also currently in negotiations with a venue in Berlin to produce the first European ICBC next summer. Rags to riches stories, like Rogers, are becoming less uncommon in the cannabis industry, as many newbie canna-millionaires had the misfortune of spending time in prison for activities they now conduct legally.
If you are interested in learning more about the Oregon cannabis industry from Alex and other industry experts by attending the upcoming Oregon Medical Marijuana Business Conference on September 12-13 in Portland, please visit www.ommbc.com.Farmers Market
Vancouver's newest farmers market will open Saturday, May 2, near the south entrance of the mall.
(Anna Marum/The Oregonian)
The Westfield Vancouver mall is adding a farmers market to its mix of shops and restaurants.
The market, sponsored by Portland-Vancouver Events, will open Saturday, May 2, near the south entrance of the mall.
The market will feature more than 30 vendors offering produce and wares, plus food carts and local musicians like Jacob Weber, Smooth Highway, DJ Sparks and American Idol contestant Jeff True Jones.
Mall general manager J.B. Schutte said in a statement that he believes shoppers will be excited at the prospect of having a farmers market in the area, and he hopes the new market will give more people access to locally grown food and locally made products.
This move by the Vancouver mall mirrors those at other shopping centers, which are fighting to stay relevant as department stores struggle to stay open. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out recently, the mall of tomorrow will serve as a "fully functional lifestyle center" with spas, gyms and places to buy food in addition to clothing shops.
Westfield Vancouver seems to be working to get ahead of that curve, and its tenant mix already includes a Gold's Gym location, several salons and a movie theater.
In Portland, where the aging Lloyd Center is in the midst of a $50-million remodel, the real estate brokers in charge of finding new tenants have said they're less interested in bringing in traditional tenants and more interested in pubs, yoga studios and restaurants.
The Vancouver mall will likely continue to evolve. In the meantime, the new addition will mark the area's sixth farmers market (according to the Clark County website), after markets in downtown Vancouver, Salmon Creek, Ridgefield, Battle Ground and Camas.
The Market at Vancouver Mall will be open from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Sept. 27.
-- Anna Marum
amarum@oregonian.com
503-294-5911
@annamarumBUDAPEST (Reuters) - Heineken beer’s trademark red star may be about to fall foul of Hungary’s attempts to purge itself of totalitarian symbols related to the years of Nazi occupation and, in this case, the 40 years of communist rule.
FILE PHOTO: A plastic container with empty bottles of Heineken beers are pictured among beer kegs outside a restaurant in Singapore August 29, 2012. REUTERS/Tim Chong/File Photo
The rightist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which faces an election in April 2018, says it is a “moral obligation” to ban the commercial use of symbols such as the swastika, arrow cross, hammer and sickle, and the red star.
Parliament began discussing the proposed ban on Monday. The measure would fit with Orban’s style of unorthodox policy making, which has seen specific, mostly foreign-owned business sectors, targeted with special taxes and regulation.
Heineken has had a star logo on its beer for most of the years since it was first brewed in the second half of the 19th century, changing to a red one in the 1930s. The star is thought to represent a brewers symbol or the various stages of the brewing process.
But the red star was also a major symbol of Soviet communism and used to appear on the crest of communist-era Hungary.
Under the new law, businesses using these symbols could be fined up to 2 billion forints ($6.97 million) and jail sentence.
A Heineken spokeswoman declined comment on the draft bill.
Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs also declined comment, but did not rule out the possibility that based on the law, Heineken beer with its current logo could be banned.
Last week Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen, who jointly submitted the bill with Orban’s chief of staff Janos Lazar, was quoted as saying that the red star in Heineken’s logo was “obvious political content”.
At the same time, Semjen did not deny that the ban was linked to Heineken’s legal battle with a small, partly locally-owned beer maker in Romania’s Transylvania — home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians — over the use of a popular brand name there.
After the World War Two Heineken changed its star from red to white with only a small red border. Over the years the red border of the star of all export labels gradually became more prominent, until 1991, when it became completely red again.
Unlike Nazi symbols, communist symbols are not banned in the Czech Republic or in Romania. In Poland, there was a discussion regarding communist symbols, but the Constitutional Tribunal ruled the symbols could be used.
The red star also features in badges of famous soccer teams like French club Red Star FC or the famous Red Star Belgrade club.When was the last time you called 311 to report a pothole? Have you ever Tweeted the location of a pothole, to see what would happen? The occasional person calling or Tweeting might be more effective than doing nothing at all, but one BRO reader has turned us on to a completely different approach to solving the city’s pothole problem. It’s a self-Tweeting pothole.
It all started when a Panamanian news station got so fed up with the problem that the crew decided to install small hockey puck-looking Twitter-friendly devices in some of the most notorious potholes throughout the city. Every time a car would run over the auto-Tweeter, a message was sent to the Department of Public Works (DPW). The tweet included the exact location, and a message generated directly from the mouth of the pothole.
It didn’t take long for the DPW to get cracking on fixing the problems, as the tweets just kept rolling in.
There was no indication whether The Tweeting Pothole is also triggered by bikes. Regardless, if enough cars take the brunt of the Tweeting, then everyone wins.
It would be interested to know what the DPW does with the devices once they repair the potholes…But the Republican wave stopped at the Rockies this year. Republicans only won one seat in the Pacific West - a contrast to 1994, when the party picked up 10 seats in California, Oregon and Washington.
That year, one of the most dramatic flips came in Washington State, where Republicans gained six seats, including four districts touching Puget Sound or the coast. This year, only the seat left open by retiring Rep. Brian Baird (D) flipped to the Republicans. The state was a late-breaking opportunity for Republicans in the Senate, but incumbent Democrat Patty Murray narrowly held her seat in the end.
"There's definitely been a hardening of Democratic support along the coasts since 1994," said James Gimpel, a political scientist at the University of Maryland.
Part of the reason for Democrats' success in the West could be an increasing share of Latino voters, one of the fastest-growing segments of the population, and one that strategists from both parties have said is crucial to their future electoral success.
Only 12 of the 63 Republican pickups this year were in districts where the Latino population is above the national average. Republicans hold only one-quarter of the 55 congressional districts across the country where Latinos represent over one-third of the population.
"Latinos are not swing voters," Gimpel said. "When Republicans do well with Latinos, it's because very few Latinos have turned out."
Exit polls showed that 60 percent of Latino voters favored Democratic House candidates - a relatively steady proportion with the 69 percent the party took in 2006, the year it captured 31 seats.
"The challenge for Republicans is to present a more multi-ethnic image to the country at large," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. That's already happening in 2010 with the victories of Republican gubernatorial candidates such as Brian Sandoval in Nevada, Susana Martinez in New Mexico and Nikki Haley in South Carolina, and Marco Rubio in the Florida Senate race
"Those were huge symbolic wins," Ayres said.Confederate Currency: The Color of Money investigates the importance of slavery in the economy of the South. Artist John W. Jones has researched and documented over 126 images of slavery that were depicted on Confederate and Southern States money. The juxtaposition of the framed Confederate Currencies with the acrylic paintings inspired by the slave images on the currencies makes a very powerful statement on the contribution of enslaved Africans to the American economy. In these paintings, as John says, “history informs art, which in turn artfully reveals more history”.
After a very successful and extended showing at the Avery Research Center Museum at the College of Charleston in Charleston (South Carolina), the work is now available as a traveling exhibition. The exhibition has been featured in several publications, including Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe and Cable News Network (CNN). The exhibition, which broke attendance records at the Avery Museum, has been well received by both black and white museumgoers. People are intrigued and enchanted. Over 95 percent of those attending said that they never knew there were images of African Americans on any American money. Its not something found in any history books.
The artist made the discovery when he worked in a print shop seven years ago and a customer asked for an enlargement of one of his Confederate bills. After making the enlargement, a shocked Jones found himself looking at a picture of slaves picking cotton.
The paintings followed. As he explains,
I am partial to the narrative content of art. I like to use my art to tell a story. In this collection, the paintings innocuously draw you in and free you up to confront the difficult subject of slavery without the fear of censorship.
Confederate Currency: The Color of Money was organized by the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston. Booking and traveling arrangements are handled by Exhibitions Plus, Incorporated.
Educational and Programming materials include, an exhibition catalog with scholarly essays by Dr. Richard Doty of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Dr. Wilmot Fraser, and a comprehensive Teacher and Docent Guide prepared by Gretchen Barbatisis, PhD, Professor of Telecommunication at Michigan State University.
Confederate Currency: The Color of Money has been used as a medium to engender educational and scholarly discussion. In addition to its value as an art exhibit, it is a poignant, provocative and compelling centerpiece for engaging such issues as slavery, reparations, racial profiling, racial healing, institutional racism and discrimination. Institutions scheduling the exhibition have incorporated it with symposiums, conferences and lectures and have extended it to children and youth through school and community education projects.
Contents:
40 original acrylic on canvas paintings
24 each – 26” X 30” paintings
20 each – 24” X 30” paintings
2 each – 21” X 36” paintings
3 each – 30” X 36” paintings
1 each – 30” X 42” painting
42 framed copies of Confederate and Southern States currency (12” X 16” each)PRISONERS at HMP Belmarsh are being trained up as baristas to make hot chocolates and smoothies.
GETTY PRISONERS: Inmates will be trained up as baristas
Prison chiefs have been inundated with requests from prisoners to sign up for the six-week course which has already seen a number of inmates trained up as baristas. Lags at the 900-capacity south London prison, which is home to volatile prisoners including around 100 Islamic militants, are being trained to make morning staples such as cappuccinos and frothy lattes. A number of prisons around the UK have started barista courses after the explosion of coffee shops around the country last year.
Getty COFFEE: Prisoners will be trained to make cappuccinos and lattes
The six-week course will teach them how to serve up gourmet coffees as well as smoothies and hot chocolate. A report released by the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) confirmed the classes had started. It stated: “The Board is pleased that the training in Barista skills has recently started." The south London prison has been home to hate preachers Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada as well as Lee Rigby’s murderer Michael Adebolajo.
Getty INMATES: HMP Belmarsh is home to around 100 Islamic militants
Belmarsh was likened to a “Jihadi training” camp by a former inmate. A Muslim graduate in the jail for bank fraud said prisoners were “brainwashed” to “spread the terror message” and that the jail was run by a group of jihadists who call themselves "the Akhi" or “the brothers”. The classes are part of the prison’s Offenders’ Learning and Skills Service (OLASS) programme, which aims to help prisoners gain work opportunities when they are released. The VTCT Level 2 Award in Barista Skills (QCF), teaches students to taste the difference between coffees and make other specialist drinks.
The most dangerous prisons in the world Take a look through the most dangerous prisons in the world. Prisons across the world battle with overcrowding, rioting and intense rivalry between gangs who are forced to sleep side by side. 1 / 20 REUTERS Inmates line up for food provided by the prison in Pavilion No.2 in La Joya prison on the outskirts of Panama City
“Prison should help offenders get the skills and qualifications to make a success of life on the outside” Spokesperson for the Prison Service It states: “You will develop the skills to make various types of coffee and tea that are regulary prepared for customers in coffee shops, cafes, hotels and restaurants. “You will learn about coffee, where it is grown, how it is processed and how it arrives ready for you to grind and brew.” It also states students need to learn about “the importance of good customer service” and how to solve problems that arise on a daily basis when working as a barista.”
Getty PRISONERS: HMP Belmarsh is home to volatile prisoners
A prison worker, who has worked in jails around the UK for the past 10 years, said the courses were the “next big thing” and would take over from traditional trades. “Most of the courses in jail cover the basic trades, like painting and decorating and bricklaying – or in women’s jails hairdressing and sewing," he said. “Barista training is the next new thing, it’s no surprise with the number of coffee shops around these days.”
Prisoners at HMP Holloway, a 590-capacity jail in north London, were set to be trained up as baristas by Pret a Manger staff. The scheme was scrapped when it was announced the jail was to be closed later this year. A spokesperson for Pret A Manger confirmed the scheme at HMP Holloway had been cancelled, but said it was committed to working with prisoners to help offenders get jobs through its Pret Foundation Trust.
Amazing coffee art Coffee drinkers are getting creative with their morning drink - by creating famous faces in espresso foam 1 / 7 Probably the best of the lot [WENN]Several years ago, I created a map of scientific collaborations. The attention this map obtained surpassed my wildest expectations; it got published in the scientific and popular press all around the world! I had mainly forgotten about it until I received an email that rekindled my interest in this visualization and I thought it was high time to revisit this visualization.
Unfortunately, scientific papers (and associated data) are closely guarded and only a handful of firms have full access to them. I now work in a very different field, so I lost access to this dataset. But while perusing my Twitter feed, I came across the very active feed of Scimago Lab. Their social media presence and their incredible interactive visualizations convinced me that they might be interested in collaborating. I sent off an email to their founder, Félix de Moya and, lo and behold, he was interested in collaborating. Cool!
Read on for more maps and an overview of the methodology >>
After a bit of back and forth, I spent a weekend programming a tool to draw large geographical graphs. The tool I used a couple of years ago was riddled by projection bugs and was terribly inefficient (and the source was lost when I reformatted an old hard disk), so a rewrite was in order. The idea behind the tool is really simple. It loads up a graph in memory and then goes through the graph edge by edge to draw every edge following the curvature of the earth and projecting each line using the Plate Carré (overlappable on Google Maps) or Eckert III (which I find beautiful).
Click here to open this map in a new windowAlthough the effects of beta-blockers on improving cardiac function and preventing or slowing heart failure have been well established, little is known about how the drugs affect cardiac gene expression.
To explore this, researchers studied gene expression in cardiac tissue samples taken from a mouse model of heart failure before and after four weeks of beta-blocker treatment compared with that of controls without drug treatment.
They identified 32 genes that showed a different pattern of expression between heart failure mice and healthy mice that was reversed when the mice were treated with beta-blockers. In particular, there were four genes associated with heart failure whose expression was suppressed by atenolol treatment.
Writing in Scientific Reports[1] (online, 30 June 2017), the researchers say the findings shed light on the molecular changes induced by beta-blockers, which could lead to new therapeutic targets in future; the next steps will be to see if these changes are mirrored in human heart disease.He says the party has a'very deep problem' with a culture that promotes negativity. Gingrich: No GOP health care plan
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Wednesday told party chairs and operatives at the Republican National Committee summer meeting that the GOP has “zero” ideas for replacing Obamacare.
“I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, ‘What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?’ They will have zero answer,” Gingrich told the Boston crowd, said a report from CNN.
Story Continued Below
Gingrich said the party has a “very deep problem” with a culture that promotes negativity.
( PHOTOS: Newt Gingrich’s career)
“We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything. And so we don’t,” Gingrich said, according to video of the event from MSNBC.
Gingrich was addressing the Boston meeting with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, during an afternoon workshop titled, “Becoming the Party of Breakout.”
The new host of the upcoming CNN reincarnation of “Crossfire” said Republicans need to focus more on being “a party of hope”, and less on being against President Barack Obama.
( PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes)
“I think part of what we have to do in the era of Obama’s disaster, is we have to get beyond being anti-Obama, and we have to reconvince people you can have hope in America, that we can have a better future,” Gingrich said, according to video of his remarks.
Priebus told CNN he did “not completely” agree with Gingrich’s remarks on Obamacare and brought up health care proposals on Republican leaders’ websites.
Gingrich has said he supports prominent newer members of the party, like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), telling radio host Laura Ingraham earlier this month that the pair makes the establishment of the party “hysterical” because it has “no answers.”
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ObamacareThe search began before dawn; the train had just crossed the border of Tajikistan into Uzbekistan. We were only three hours into the four-day train ride between Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, and Moscow. An Uzbek border guard, clad in brown fatigues, boarded the train — a Soviet-replica, green, with a silver roof — and began yelling. He moved through the car, searching passenger after passenger, ripping apart belongings, interrogating everyone about terrorism and narcotics, and scanning flip phones and cheap Nokias for “sex photos” (pornography is banned in Uzbekistan). The passengers endured this, unfazed. Almost all of them were migrants traveling to Russia for work. They’d seen this routine before. It was March. Across Tajikistan, thousands of people — mostly young men — were departing for or preparing to leave for Russia. The long Russian winter was nearing its end; construction projects in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg were slowly coming back to life. Listen to this story and other feature stories from FP and other magazines: Listen to this story and other feature stories fromand other magazines: Download the Audm app for your iPhone Tajikistan, the poorest Central Asian state, is among the most labor migration-dependent countries in the world. In 2015, it received the equivalent of 37 percent of its GDP in the form of remittances. Two years before, migrants had sent home the equivalent of 50 percent; by comparison, in 2016, El Salvador and Honduras, two countries with large emigrant populations working in the United States, received 16 and 18 percent, respectively, of their GDP from workers abroad sending money home. Tajikistan’s population recently eclipsed 8 million; at any given time, well over a million of those 8 million people live and work in Russia. For Tajiks, the train used to be the primary means of reaching Russia. Demand was once so high that desperate crowds formed at the train station in Dushanbe to buy tickets. Now, regular flights between Dushanbe and many Russian cities have become the preferred mode of travel, even though plane tickets can be a few hundred dollars more expensive. “People only ride the train once,” a conductor on a train back to Tajikistan told me later. “Passengers want a relaxed four-day ride. But then they get on and see that it is a hellhole.” “People only ride the train once,” a conductor on a train back to Tajikistan told me later. “They get on and see that it is a hellhole.” Some passengers told me that they chose the train out of a sense of adventure — to see, if only through a window, a wide swath of Central Asia. But, for the most part, those who ride the train now do so either out of necessity or out of a sharp sense of just how far a few hundred dollars saved — the equivalent of a month or two of remittances — can go. Our car — third class, car four — held 54 passengers: 52 men, one woman, and her infant daughter. A narrow, paisley-carpeted passage ran the length of the open car; exposed, too-short beds were stacked on either side, and feet splayed out into the aisle. The train’s tracks are a relic of the Soviet Union and cover some 2,000 miles, crossing five borders. The route runs from Tajikistan into Uzbekistan, then into Turkmenistan, back into Uzbekistan, up into Kazakhstan, and then into Russia. Since Tajikistan is a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose affiliation of former Soviet republics, citizens of Tajikistan are allowed to enter Russia without visas. A transit agreement allows visa-free travel through the other countries, so long as the migrants do not leave the train. But that does not prevent border guards from boarding and conducting their own searches, which they do — our train was searched at least once at each border it crossed. Between the Tajik and Uzbek borders, we sat for two hours as an Uzbek guard slowly made his way, passenger by passenger, through the car. After a lengthy process, including the dramatic unveiling of the contents of the bag of the man sitting across from me — two bottles of peach soda and a well-wrapped piece of meat — the guard found something that he deemed contraband: a few pounds of the dark chewing tobacco that is popular in Tajikistan and that almost everyone chewed on the train, spitting green wads into trash bags that have been taped, for this purpose, at every row of beds. From the window, I watched as a second guard emptied the bag, dumping enough tobacco to last one man perhaps for a year, or which may have been intended for friends waiting in Russia, onto the tracks. Two hours later, another set of Uzbek guards boarded for yet another passport check, even though none of the migrants would be allowed on or off the train — not even to stretch their legs — until we reached Kazakhstan, a full day later.
Early spring in Tajikistan means conversations about plans for life in Russia: whether it would be better to operate a fruit stand in Moscow, for instance, or in Samara, a Russian city near the border with Kazakhstan. There are quick calculations of cost — how much for tickets, visas, housing, bribes — and lengthy discussions of work conditions at various construction sites. Tajikistan has long been tightly yoked to Russia. In the middle of the 19th century, tsarist forces conquered much of Central Asia — including much of what is now Tajikistan — for its cotton. Later, in the 1920s, Soviet administrators in Moscow carved the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic from what is now Uzbekistan, as a means of establishing greater control over the region. Under the Soviets, the flow of people and goods went both ways. Tajikistan remained the poorest of the Soviet republics, but, in exchange for its cotton, the production of which Soviet agriculturalists assiduously expanded, Soviet engineers erected dams and factories. Soviet planners converted what had been a dusty village town, Dushanbe, into the capital of the fledging republic; sprawling, brown concrete apartment complexes and pastel-colored, surprisingly graceful schools and universities turned the village into a city. Russian citizens came, too, sent mostly to serve as an upper-class management elite. By 1979, Soviet census data show that more than 10 percent of the population was ethnic Russian. Mirzo Tursunzoda, perhaps the greatest Tajik poet from the Soviet era, enthused of the kinship between Russia and Tajikistan in a poem: “And my Tajik people are now forever / Joined with you.” Mirzo Tursunzoda, perhaps the greatest Tajik poet from the Soviet era, enthused of the kinship between Russia and Tajikistan in a poem: “And my Tajik people are now forever / Joined with you.” The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, prematurely severed relations — at least as Tursunzoda had imagined them. Civil war in Tajikistan between neo-communists and an opposition composed of a medley of democratic and Islamist factions followed almost immediately and ravaged the country. Nearly 50,000 people were killed in a country of just over 5 million, and another 1.2 million were displaced. Between 1992 and 1997, when the war finally ended — after sustained Russian intervention and mediation — GDP per capita fell by nearly 66 percent. All forms of employment vanished. “People started looking for opportunities elsewhere,” said Zuhra Halimova, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who, until August, was the executive director of the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation-Tajikistan, a local arm of the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. “What they knew more about was about Russia. About the former Soviet Union.” In Russia, she said, “they didn’t feel like strangers.” At the time, Tajik workers — almost all of whom already spoke Russian because of Soviet schools or had even spent time in Russia while serving in the Soviet military — were allowed to enter Russia using only a local identification card. At first, Halimova explained, those who went believed migration would only be a short-term source of funds: “They all thought they would be [in Russia] temporarily, probably for a year or for a few months. They would send money. They would make sure their living is better. And they would return back.” But Tajikistan’s economy never really recovered from war. Today, it exports a small amount of aluminum and cotton; a country of high mountains and fast-flowing rivers, it has long held onto the elusive prospect that it may be able to develop its hydroelectric potential for export. It remains the poorest of the post-Soviet republics. Over time, seasonal migration to Russia became a set pattern. “As with the phenomenon of labor migration globally,” Halimova added, “it’s not a few months’ or a few years’ phenomenon.” Men kept going back to Russia for work, and others began to follow. They felt, Halimova said, that “Russia is a place of opportunity. That it’s so big that you can find a job easily. They started exploring Russia for themselves.” The remittances these workers sent back, in addition to the slow recovery from war, have helped cut poverty dramatically: According to the World Bank, the poverty rate has declined from 72 percent in 2003 to just above 30 percent today. The Sunday before our train departed, we joined a group of Tajik men having an afternoon barbeque on the wide bank of a river outside Somoniyon, a small village in Tajikistan’s rural Rasht Valley, which stretches up toward the country’s northern border with Kyrgyzstan. A drooping, solitary willow tree provided shade on a surprisingly sunny and warm spring day. The windows and doors of an old, secondhand German-made station wagon were open, and Tajik pop music played from the speakers. The bank of the river boasted a series of impressive Soviet ruins. Behind us sat a long factory, built in the 1970s, which once produced concrete and raw construction materials. The factory had long since been shuttered, but its mud-colored shell loomed grandly above everything that had been built since. In front of us, small concrete shacks dotted the landscape, the remains of the factory’s outbuildings. Cattle grazed in the wide square basins that used to hold water catchments. Farther away stood the rusted carcass of an enormous machine that once made asphalt; children played on the conveyor belt. The men, all of whom are now in their early 20s, grew up together amid these ruins. Except, that is, for the years that six out of the 11 of them spent in Russia.
Of those who had gone, Abdullo had returned from Moscow most recently, in January, after a six-month stay. He’d missed the birth of his first child, a daughter, who was born in late July, a few weeks after he left to start work installing electrical wiring in cheap, fast-rising apartment blocks. He spent the first months of her life calling home frequently, eager just to listen to whatever sounds his daughter might make over the phone. His friends in Moscow teased him for wasting his money. Abdullo was born in 1993, near the start of Tajikistan’s civil war. Just after he was born, his father was killed by a bomb that exploded not far from where we were barbecuing. Abdullo made his first trip to Russia when he was 14, when he sold fruit in a market in Moscow; this last time was his third trip. All three of Abdullo’s older brothers have also spent time working in Russia. One, who works as the de facto head of a small Tajik construction crew in Moscow, has not been back to Tajikistan in years. His wife and children live, along with Abdullo and his family, in Abdullo’s mother’s house. Abdullo’s most recent trip was so short because it was not a success. Sanctions and falling oil prices have battered the Russian economy. There are fewer jobs for migrants. And the value of the ruble has fallen, eroding the value of the remittances they send home. Through a friend, Abdullo found work as the third man on a team of three that worked to rig some of the basic electrical wiring in a large, new apartment block in Moscow’s suburbs. The first months were OK, but then his employers stopped paying him. They told him that he would be paid after the new year. By the middle of January, when he still had not been paid, he decided to return to Tajikistan, even though he was broke and hadn’t sent any money home. “It’s a crisis now in Russia,” Abdullo said. “The dollar went up, and the ruble fell down. There isn’t any work, there isn’t any money.” Compared with some of his friends, however, Abdullo’s situation is not so bad — he can still return to Russia. “It’s a crisis now in Russia,” Abdullo said. “The dollar went up, and the ruble fell down. There isn’t any work, there isn’t any money.” At the start of 2015, Russian authorities introduced more complicated and expensive immigration requirements. Where Tajik migrants used to be able to enter on a domestic passport, they must now travel with a standard biometric passport, which can cost more than $300. The 2015 reforms also made it more difficult to get a work permit that allows Tajik migrants, who can enter the country without a visa, to hold a job legally: These permit fees can now cost between the equivalent of $200 and $500. And the process of getting a permit, too, became more convoluted — since 2012, migrants have had to pass a Russian-language test; now, they must also pass a Russian history test — and more rushed, as migrants now only have a month to register upon arrival. In Tajikistan, many prospective migrants said they thought they would have to pay a bribe to get a permit; others said they would risk working without one. According to Tajik media, deportations have spiked. So has the number of people banned from re-entering Russia for up to 10 years. Migrants can be added to the banned list for administrative violations — not registering for a work permit, for example — or for infractions that can reportedly be as minor as jaywalking. The list now has more than 300,000 Tajik names on it. Daler, who manned the grill at the barbeque, was deported and banned. He was working in a café in Moscow, which, as he put it, “was good work.” After he was deported, he bought a car with some of the money he’d made in Russia and began working as a local taxi driver, charging passengers a few somoni, the Tajik currency, to go back and forth between Somoniyon, his village, and a bigger town and local college a few kilometers away. He is waiting for his re-entry ban to lift sometime this year. He had a girlfriend in Russia, he said; he would like to see her again.
There isn’t much those who are forced to return to Tajikistan can do. According to Halimova, around 47 percent of migrants have never worked before they go to Russia. They are unskilled and largely uneducated. Some, like Daler, try to earn a living as taxi drivers. In a city like Dushanbe, many returned migrants try to work as day laborers. Given the fine line between Russia’s economy and Tajikistan’s, it is not surprising that, as prospects have dimmed in Russia, there has been a countrywide, collective tightening of belts in Tajikistan. “The crisis came over from Russia,” Abdullo declared simply. In May 2015, concerned over the combined effects of the downturn in the Russian economy and the new immigration regulations, the World Bank initiated a survey, Listening2Tajikistan, which included monthly phone interviews. According to William Seitz, a World Bank economist affiliated with the project, “In early 2015, there was substantial uncertainty about how severe the downturn in remittances would be and what impacts we could expect in Tajikistan.” In 2015, the World Bank found that remittances dropped by 24 percent compared with 2014. In 2016, conditions only worsened: Tajikistan’s National Bank reported that, in the first half of 2016, rem |
game stands now, there are 192 cards, 36 small wood tokens, and 1 large wood token. Worry not, neat freaks - the packaging will support an additional expansion in the box. The expansion will include up to 56 cards and will come in a standard playing card tuck box. Like our previous game, we will continue to use the best materials available. For Ravine, we'll be using 310 gsm card stock, which is casino-quality and very durable. The packaging will be sturdy and of a quality worthy of display in your current game collection.
Card Backs - Wreckage, Forage, Night, & Madness Cards
Forage Cards (103) - You risk your health to uncover these
Night Cards (40) - Each of these serve as a single event during the Night
Madness Cards (20) - Let your health fall too low, and you'll go mad
Wreckage Cards (9) - Provided at the start of the game to help you along the way.
Craft Cards (20) - Things you can build with your supplies you find foraging
The Art
At its core, Ravine is an adventure story. For inspiration, we looked to the illustrations that prefaced the chapters of classic adventure novels from our childhood. Once we chose the most common elements someone might discover if marooned in a Ravine environment, we started sketching. Our sketches helped us imagine the world Ravine would live in - a dark and dangerous world tinged with fear and madness. We finalized our illustrations with a few simple textures and natural, muted colors.
The Origin
Ravine started as a university project in a CU Boulder game mechanics course. As a final project, students were challenged to develop a basic game prototype in a two-week sprint. The game was a hit, and became a staple at a weekly "Gaming Lunch" held between friends at a pub in downtown Boulder (it's not as nerdy as it sounds; we drink beer, play games, and occasionally talk game mechanics). A few months and many beers later, the project grew into a passion and a plan to take this game to the masses.
Rewards
Stretch Goals(HealthiNation)
(Fuat Kose/iStockphoto)
A soda a day? That's not so bad—a 150-calorie blip, burned off with a brisk half-hour walk. But it's not only your waistline that's at stake. A study released today in the journal Diabetes Care found that people with a daily habit of just one or two sugar-sweetened beverages—anything from sodas and energy drinks to sweetened teas and vitamin water—were more than 25 percent likelier to develop type 2 diabetes than were similar individuals who had no more than one sugary drink per month. Since the overall rate of diabetes is roughly 1 in 10, an increase of 25 percent raises the risk to about 1 in 8. One-a-day guzzlers in the study also had a 20 percent higher rate of metabolic syndrome, a collection of indicators such as high triglyceride levels suggesting that diabetes is not far off.
"Previous studies have shown that sugar-sweetened beverages are strongly associated with weight gain," says lead author Vasanti Malik, a research fellow in the Harvard School of Public Health Department of Nutrition, who says the decision to examine the relationship between sugar-sweetened beverages and risk of diabetes was "the logical next step."
The researchers conducted a study of studies—a meta-analysis—to reach their conclusions. They identified eight studies with enough data to let them check for a link between sugary drinks and type 2 diabetes and three similar studies of metabolic syndrome. The largest diabetes study, which followed more than 91,000 American women ages 24 to 44 for eight years, made the strongest case for a relationship, and it wasn't just because higher consumption of sweetened drinks added excess calories that turned into pounds. While weight gain is a known diabetes risk factor, the diabetes-beverage link persisted even after adjusting for that. "Other factors independently put you at risk for developing diabetes," says Malik.
The main one is spikes in blood glucose and insulin because sweetened drinks are often consumed quickly and in large quantities and their sugar content is rapidly absorbed. Frequent spiking can lead to insulin resistance, inflammation, and hypertension—often precursors to diabetes. High-fructose corn syrup, the sugar in many sweetened drinks, is emerging as possibly riskier than other sugars because it seems to produce more belly fat. Fat that accumulates around the middle is closely tied to high blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems.
Americans love sweetened drinks. Consumption climbed to an average of 142 calories a day, or nearly one 12-ounce can of soda, in 2006, from 65 in the late 1970s. And many people down far more than that, notes Frank Hu, a senior author of the study and a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard, which puts them at a much greater risk of diabetes. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released earlier this week projects that by 2050, 1 in 3 Americans will develop the disease. "Soft drink consumption has significant public health implications in terms of the diabetes epidemic," says Hu.
Earlier this year the American Heart Association issued a recommendation advising consumers to set a limit on sweetened drinks of 450 calories a week, or three 12-ounce sodas, in a 2,000-calorie diet. Calorie-counting is a convenient way to keep track, but it can be misleading. "Consumers are overly focused on calories," says Constance Brown-Riggs, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, who would like people also to understand that a 12-ounce can of soda contains the equivalent of 15 teaspoons of sugar. "They think it's not that bad, without taking into consideration the other components that are putting them at risk."
Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome aren't the only risks of a one-a-day habit. In a 2004 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association of 88,000 women followed for 24 years, those who guzzled two or more sugary drinks a day had a risk of coronary artery disease 35 percent higher than non-guzzlers, even after adjusting for other unhealthy lifestyle factors. "You receive no benefits out of drinking these beverages," says Malik, who lists additional hazards from dental cavities to gout. "It's a wake-up call for the American public."The two components of an obsolete British military flak vest. On the left, the nylon vest. On the right, the several layers of ballistic nylon that provide the actual protection
A flak jacket or flak vest is a form of body armor. A flak jacket is designed to provide protection from case fragments ("frag") from high explosive weaponry, such as anti-aircraft artillery ("flak" is a German contraction for Fliegerabwehrkanone, "aircraft-defense gun"), grenades, some pellets used in shotguns and anti-personnel mines, and other lower-velocity projectiles. It is not designed to protect against bullets fired from small arms such as rifles or handguns. However, certain flak jackets are able to sustain certain gunshots, depending on the armor, the projectile, the angle at which the shot was fired (an oblique angle for example), and the range from which the shot was fired.
The term "flak jacket" is often colloquially applied to newer body armor featuring protection against small arms projectiles, but the original usage predated the existence of functional bulletproof vests and the two are not interchangeable in performance.
History [ edit ]
Anecdotes describing garments designed to protect the wearer from penetrating weapons can be found far back into recorded history. Two types of protective garment from the American Civil War in the 1860s had a basic design similar to the flak jacket or ballistic armor of modern times in that solid plates were used as the main ballistic protection. The "Soldiers' Bullet Proof Vest" was manufactured by the G. & D. Cook & Company of New Haven, Connecticut. It consisted of two pieces of steel inserted into the pockets of a regular black military vest. Versions for infantry weighed 3 ½ pounds while a version for cavalry and artillery weighed 7 pounds. They sold for $5-$7. A more medieval-looking type of armor was made by the Atwater Armor Company, also of New Haven. It consisted of four large plates of steel held on the body by broad metal hooks over the shoulders and a belt around the waist. The Atwater vest was heavier than the Cook models and cost about twice as much.[1]
During World War I, a number of British and American officers recognized that many casualties could be avoided if effective armor were available. Isolated efforts at developing armor were made, and soldiers could make individual purchases or efforts, but there was no armor issued to the troops. As it is today, issues of weight, cost, availability of materials and/or environmental stability complicated the issue of developing armor that would also be effective. For example, soft armor made of silk was tried on a small scale based on Japanese designs, but this material did not last well under harsh environmental conditions.[1]
The first usage of the term "flak jacket" refers to the armour originally developed by the Wilkinson Sword company during World War II to help protect Royal Air Force (RAF) aircrew from the flying debris and shell fragments thrown by German anti-aircraft guns' high-explosive shells (flak itself is an abbreviation for the German word "Fliegerabwehrkanone" (aircraft-defense gun)).[2] The idea for the flak jacket came from Col. Malcolm C. Grow, Surgeon of the US Eighth Air Force in Britain. He thought that many wounds he was treating could have been prevented by some kind of light armor. In 1943 he was awarded the Legion of Merit for developing the flak vest.
Unfortunately, flak jackets proved to be too bulky for wear within the confines of the RAF's standard bomber aircraft, the Avro Lancaster. The Royal Air Force subsequently offered the jackets to the United States Army Air Forces, which adopted them as a Defense Standard.[3] The UK subsequently supplied the USAAF with 9,600 flak jackets under reverse lend-lease.[4]
During World War II, flak jackets and steel helmets were worn by US Navy personnel on aircraft carriers during battle, since the ships and especially their flight decks offered little protection for their crew. The jackets were supposed to protect against shell fragments and heat.
Ballistic protection [ edit ]
Col. Grow’s request to the Wilkinson Sword company was to develop a vest that could stop a.45 caliber round fired at close range.[2] Although flak jackets offered some basic protection against small caliber bullets and shell fragments (which was valued by their users),[5] ultimately they proved to be less effective than hoped. Flak jackets are now generally considered to be inferior to ballistic vests.
It was claimed that the M-1951 field jacket could stop a 90 grain 7.62×25mm Tokarev pistol round at the muzzle of the gun. However, even the Vietnam era revised flak jacket was not really designed to stop an AK-47 round (7.62×39mm) fired at close range. Nevertheless, it did a good job of stopping shell blasts, rocket fragments, and slow speed bullets fired at a moderate range.[3]
It was not until 1970 that the U.S. National Institute of Justice, which now publishes test and performance standards for body armor, began a deliberate program to develop body armor for law enforcement personnel that would be effective against specific threats that were common causes of officer injury and death. At the time that included.38 Special and.22 Long Rifle bullets, in particular, and also bullets from 9mm,.45, and.32 caliber firearms.[6]
Materials [ edit ]
The first flak jackets consisted of manganese steel plates sewn into a waistcoat made of ballistic nylon (a material engineered by the DuPont company); therefore, flak jackets functioned as an evolved form of plate armour or brigandine. The first flak jacket weighed 22 pounds.[2]
During the Korean and Vietnam wars, the flak jacket was changed and the manganese steel plates were replaced by other materials.[5] The U.S. Army's vests (Body Armor, Fragmentation Protective, Vest M69) weighed under eight pounds and were made of several layers of ballistic nylon. The vests used by the U.S. Marines (Vest, Armored M-1955) weighed more than ten pounds and were a combination of ballistic nylon layers and fiberglass plates known as Doron.[3] Doron was made of fiberglass fibers placed in an ethyl cellulose resin under high pressure. It was named after then-Colonel Georges F. Doriot, then director of the Military Planning Division, Office of the Quartermaster General.[2]
The generation of armor developed in the 1970s through the National Institute of Justice incorporated layers of soft armor in the form of DuPont’s Kevlar fabric, which has since become synonymous with ballistic protection and a general term used for several similar (aramid-based) materials.[6]
See also [ edit ]
Buff coat an early form of ballistic vest, suitable for use against pistol balls, but not musket balls
Hauberk, an earlier form of body armor, used to defend against swords, knives, etc.
Mail (armour), an ancient form of personal armour consisting of linked metal rings which has also been used to provide protection against blast and shrapnel injuryMANILA, Philippines - After a ban on buying hammers, shoppers will now be told not to wear caps in malls to prevent robberies, a police official said yesterday.
“From now on, the wearing of caps would be banned in malls. Those wearing it would be advised to take it off and place or keep them inside their bags or in their pockets,†National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) chief Director Carmelo Valmoria said in an interview.
Mall owners will display signs against the wearing of caps at entrances while security guards will strictly enforce the ban in a polite manner, he added.
The decision was arrived at during a series of meetings with mall operators and security managers in Metro Manila, he said.
Valmoria sought the meetings to come up with ideas how to enhance security in malls and prevent robberies like the one committed at SM North EDSA two Sundays ago.
In the meetings, the participants observed that robbers wear caps to prevent closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras from capturing their images.
In the SM North EDSA robbery, the robbers used hammers to smash the glass display cases and take around P5 million worth of jewelry while at the MOA, the robber took P50,000 and three cell phones, but not before beating up and hogtying the store’s employee.
In the two heists, the CCTV cameras got clear shots of the robbers – with caps shielding their faces, Valmoria said.
Because of the SM North-EDSA robbery, Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas II banned the purchase of hammers in malls.
Valmoria said it was also agreed in the meeting with mall operators and security managers that the purchase of hammers would be allowed but the buyers can claim them at designated claim corners near the malls’ exits.The Pennsylvania has been postponed and rescheduled
Here is what you need to know!
Race Rescheduled Date: Monday, August 1 Time: 12:30 p.m. ET
Parking Lots and Gate Openings 7 a.m. ET – Parking Lots Open 8 a.m. ET – Gates, Fan Fair, Clubs and Skybox Open A valid ticket for Sunday, July 31, 2016 at Pocono Raceway will be honored and scanned for entry. Tickets available for purchase at Gate 8 Ticket Booth starting at 8 a.m.
Terrace Club, Victory Circle Club, Club Pocono and Skybox All areas open at 8 a.m. ET Valid ticket required. There will be NO food service on Monday, August 1. Coolers, no larger than 12″ x 12″ and containing no glass, WILL be allowed in these areas on Monday, August 1, 2016, and subject to search. Visit poconroaceway.com/faninfo for cooler restrictions and guidelines
One-Day Infield Valid tickets required. Entry at Gate 1 Tunnel starting at 8 a.m. ET Tickets may be purchased at Gate 1 Tunnel starting at 8 a.m. ET
Pit/Paddock Pass Paddock and Pits will open at 8 a.m. ET. There will be no sales for Pit/Paddock Passes on Monday, August 1
Parking Lots and One-Day Infield Parking Lots must be cleared by midnight tonight or subject to being towed off property. Vehicles will not be permitted to stay overnight in any location, with exception to current Camping and RV Guests.
Camping and RV Guests Permitted to stay during the race, but will not not be allowed to stay overnight on Monday, August 1.
For tickets the Pennsylvania 400, visit our Gate 8 Box Office located behind the Grandstand and next to Fan Fair.There’s was a moment in Steve Bannon’s recent 60 Minutes interview when the former presidential advisor was asked what he’s done to drain “the swamp,” the Trumpists’ favorite metaphor for everything they hate about Washington DC. Here was Bannon’s reply: “The swamp is 50 years in the making. Let’s talk about the swamp. The swamp is a business model. It’s a successful business model. It’s a donor, consultant, K Street lobbyist, politician... 7 of the 9 wealthiest counties in America ring Washington, DC.”
With a shock of recognition I knew immediately what Bannon meant, because what he was talking about was the subject matter of my 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew – the interconnected eco-system of corruption that makes Washington, DC so rich.
The first chapter of my book had been a description of those wealthy counties that ring Washington, DC: the fine cars, the billowing homes, the expense-account restaurants. The rest of the book was my attempt to explain the system that made possible the earthly paradise of Washington and – just like Steve Bannon – I did it by referring to a business model: the political donors and the K Street lobbyists, who act in combination with politicians of the Tom DeLay variety.
My critique of Washington was distinctly from the left, and it astonished me to hear something very close to my argument coming from the mouth of one of the nation’s most prominent conservatives. But in fact, Bannon has a long history of reaching out to the left – you might say, of swiping its populist language and hijacking its causes.
In this space back in February, for example, I described Bannon’s bizarre 2010 pseudo-documentary about the financial crisis, which superficially resembles actual documentaries, but which swerves to blame this failure of the deregulated financial system on the counterculture of the 1960s.
Bannon’s once-famous denunciation of Wall Street banks for their role in the financial crisis is another example. His fondness for the author Christopher Lasch is also revealing. As was his admiring phone call with Robert Kuttner, a well-known liberal editor, which happened just before Bannon left his high-ranking White House job in August.
Mimicry is supposed to be a form of flattery, right
Dig a little deeper, and it sometimes seems like the history of the populist right – with its calls to “organize discontent” and its endless war against “the establishment” and the “elites” – is nothing but a history of reformatting left-wing ideas to fit the needs of the billionaire class. Think of Ronald Reagan’s (and Mike Pence’s) deliberate reprise of Franklin Roosevelt. Or the constant echoes of Depression-era themes and imagery that one heard from the Tea Party movement.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign took this cynical strategy farther than any of his Republican predecessors, openly reaching out to alienated working-class voters, the backbone of so many left-wing protest movements.
Trump told us he was going to do something about Nafta, a left-wing bête noir since the 1990s. He promised to revive Glass Steagall. He claimed to care so very, very much about the people of the deindustrialized zones whose sufferings have been so thoroughly documented by left-wing authors.
So many fine, militant words. So many clarion calls rousing the people against corrupt elites. And now comes Steve Bannon, the terror of the Republican establishment, hectoring us about “the swamp” with ideas so strikingly similar to my own.
Look at deeds rather than words, however, and it seems as though Trump and his gang have been using The Wrecking Crew more as a how-to guide than anything else.
In that book, for example, I pointed out that one of the hallmarks of modern conservative governance is the placement of people who are hostile to the mission of federal agencies in positions of authority in those very agencies.
This is an essential component of the Washington corruption Bannon loves to deplore – and yet this is precisely what Bannon’s man Trump has done. Betsy DeVos, a foe of public schools, is running the Department of Education. Scott Pruitt, a veteran antagonist of the EPA, has been put in charge of the EPA. Rick Perry now runs the Department of Energy, an agency he once proposed to abolish.
Another characteristic of the DC wrecking crew is a war on competence within the Federal bureaucracy – and that, too, is back on, courtesy of the folks who rallied you against corruption so movingly last year.
Lobbying? The industry appears to be gearing up for a return of its Reagan-era golden age. In the early days of the administration, lobbyists were appointed en masse to team Trump and a brigade of brash new K Street personalities is rising up to replace the old guard.
Privatization? The people in DC are trying it again, and this time on a gigantic scale. Trump’s ultra-populist infrastructure promise now seems to be little more than a vast scheme for encouraging investment firms to take over the country’s highways and bridges. Even the dreams of privatized war are back, brought to you courtesy of the enterprising Erik Prince, a familiar face from the worst days of the Iraq war.
Above it all towers the traditional Republican ideal of business-in-government. “The government should be run like a great American company,” is how Jared Kushner puts it this time around; and with his private-jet-set cabinet Donald Trump is going to show the nation exactly what that philosophy looks like.
All the elements are here. The conclusion is unquestionable. The wrecking crew is back.
And why is it back? Because, among other things, Republicans are better at fulminating against the wrecking crew than are Democrats. Maybe that’s because Democratic leaders feel it’s inappropriate to use such blunt and crude language.
Maybe that’s because, for 40 years or so, the leadership faction of the Democratic Party has been at war with its own left wing, defining us out of the conversation, turning a deaf ear to our demands, denouncing populism even as the right grabbed for it with both hands. Either way, the Democrats seem to have no intention of changing their approach now.
Maybe we on the left should take consolation in the things Steve Bannon says. Our own team may not listen to us, but at least there’s someone out there in a position of power who apparently does. And mimicry is supposed to be a form of flattery, right?
No. All this is happening for one reason only: to steal the traditional base of the Democratic Party out from under us. That it will also enrich countless contractors and lobbyists and bunglers and wreckers is just a bonus.Ottawa is facing a $3-billion hit to its bottom line over the coming year due to the recent drop in oil prices, according to a new analysis by BMO Capital Markets.
A change of that size would have the impact of wiping out the cushion that the federal government builds into its forecasts to cover the cost of unforeseen events.
The brief research report by BMO economists Doug Porter and Robert Kavcic – titled "Petroleum Plunge: Crude Calculations for Canada" – notes that the price of oil has dropped 22 per cent in less than four months, a development that will have broad and varying consequences for the Canadian economy.
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The bad news for the bottom line comes as federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver is preparing a fall fiscal update that is expected to shed light on how Ottawa will use projected future surpluses to cut taxes ahead of the 2015 election.
Mr. Porter, BMO's chief economist, said most of the recent drop in oil prices and the recent stock market turbulence came after economists submitted their economic projections to Mr. Oliver in early September. Finance Canada bases its forecasts on an average of private sector projections.
"My advice would be to go slow and to take into account the possibility that revenues could be significantly weaker than what the consensus forecast would have projected as recently as a month or two ago," Mr. Porter said in an interview.
He said the estimate of a $3-billion increase to the federal deficit is based on a 12-month period starting last month. However the federal government's fiscal year starts April 1. By that measure, Mr. Porter said Ottawa should expect the deficit to be $1.5-billion larger for the remainder of the current, 2014-15 fiscal year and $3-billion lower for the 2015-16 fiscal year. Ottawa includes a $3-billion "adjustment for risk" in its annual forecasts in order to cover unforeseen events. That adjustment is normally cut in half for the fall fiscal update to mark the half-way point of the fiscal year.
Should recent prices stay at current levels, BMO expects that would trim Canadian Gross Domestic Product by less than 0.2 per cent. Lower growth generally leads to lower government revenue from business and personal taxes.
Lower oil prices will cool the Alberta economy, but could prove to be a boost for central Canada when combined with a lower Canadian dollar. A majority of Canada's manufacturing jobs are in Ontario and Quebec and the sector is sensitive to the price of the loonie and to the strength of the U.S. economy.
Lower energy prices can stimulate the economy in a similar way to cutting taxes for consumers and the economists note that the current strength of the U.S. economy could combine to be a "net positive" for Central Canada.
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The energy-producing provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador will face the most "direct hit" to their finances, given that their budget plans are based on oil prices of about $97 a barrel for West Texas Intermediate crude rather than the current prices, which traded around $83 a barrel on Friday.
Mr. Oliver and Prime Minister Stephen Harper have both said recently that they are expecting a small deficit in the current 2014-15 fiscal year before returning to surplus the following year. Speaking with reporters earlier this week in Toronto, Mr. Oliver said the government's forecasts take into account the potential for negative economic developments.
"We always, in our projections, take into account downside risks," he said. "Taking that into account, we're very comfortable in achieving a budgetary surplus next year."
For small businesses that are not tied to the energy sector, there is good news in lower oil prices. The BMO economists say some of the benefits include lower costs for machinery and vehicles and lower heating, packaging and other energy costs.
"As well, retailers that rely on customers by care may see firmer volumes, while businesses that rely on discretionary spending, such as travel destinations, could see more visitors," the report states.The Jammu and Kashmir government on Saturday announced to promote all students studying in Classes I to IX and also Class XI to the next classes.
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The decision on mass promotion was taken after annual examinations of these students could not be conducted because of floods and the Assembly elections.
The state government had announced that the examinations would be conducted in March. However, the swine flu scare and inclement weather forced the government to extend the winter vacations. Now, to avoid further wastage of students’ time, the government decided for mass promotion.
[related-post]
“The students shall be elevated to the next level with immediate effect,” said an order issued by Commissioner Secretary (Education) Shaleen Kabra.
The academic session of schools in the Valley starts from November, but last year, the examinations for the various classes could not be conducted because of the September floods. The exams were also delayed because of the Assembly elections.
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The government, however, have decided to conduct the exams for Classes X and XII. The annual examinations of Class XII have already started from Saturday.by JAKE NUTTING and DANIEL ENDONINO
The Tampa Bay Rowdies enter the 2016 season seeking a return to the upper echelon of the North American Soccer League after two years of hanging out in the middle of the pack.
The organization has seen tremendous growth under owner Bill Edwards since he took control in late 2013. He’s invested heavily in nearly every area a supporter could hope for, but none of it has amounted to positive results on the field. The Rowdies have missed out on the league’s postseason three straight years while also going winless in the last two U.S. Open Cups.
To rectify this situation they’ve tapped Stuart Campbell, who played an integral role as a midfield general in the club’s run to the 2012 Soccer Bowl. He’ll be eager to return the club to glory as this year is his first shot at a full season at the helm after serving as an interim coach twice before.
Campbell has gone all out in retooling a Rowdies side that finished tied for second fewest goals (33) scored in the league last year. Their first step in solving those scoring woes was outbidding a number of teams to sign one of the league’s top forwards in 2015 Tom Heinemann (8 goals, 4 assists).
In order for Heinemann to have as many chances at putting the ball into the back of net as possible, the Rowdies have also gone about assembling what could be the best midfield they’ve ever fielded in the modern era. This year’s group, featuring players like Freddy Adu, Michael Nanchoff, Junior Burgos, Eric Avila and Kalif Alhassan has already shown a level of flair and technical ability that have not been since in Tampa Bay’s midfield since Luke Mulholland departed after 2013.
One source of pride for the Rowdies last year was a defensive unit that kept the team alive in the playoff hunt until the very final day of the regular season while the attack continued to flounder. They’ve kept that core unit of Matt Pickens, Tamika Mkandawire, Darnell King, Stefan Antonijevic and Ben Sweat intact this year, while also bringing in veterans like Frankie Sanfilippo, Jeremy Hall and Neil Collins to spur competition for minutes. In addition, promising defender Zac Portillos has recovered from his unfortunate Achilles injury and is already giving Sweat a run for his money at left back.
2015 Finish:
2nd (Spring), 8th (Fall), 5th (Combined)
Incoming Players
Keepers: Michael Langer
Defenders: Frankie Sanfilippo, Jeremy Hall, Neil Collins
Midfielders: Kalif Alhassan, Eric Avila, Junior Burgos, Michael Nanchoff, Walter Ramirez
Forwards: Tommy Heinemann, Danny Mwanga
Outgoing Players
Keepers: Kamil Čontofalský
Defenders: Rich Balchan, Gale Agbossoumonde
Midfielders: Richard Menjivar, Martin Nunez, Marcelo Saragosa, Marquez Fernandez
Forwards: Corey Hertzog, Brian Shriver, Robert Hernandez, Maicon Santos, Zak Boggs
The Schedule
Having three other NASL teams in Florida has gifted the Rowdies with a scheduling advantage in the Spring Season. They only have to play two of their 10 games in the spring outside of the Sunshine state, which will free them from them rigorous air travel that comes with the territory in North America. If they can exploit this advantage and take the Spring Season title, they’ll be able to get the playoff qualification monkey off their back early and have more freedom to focus on a potential U.S. Open Cup run.
The schedule becomes more congested and challenging when the Rowdies are slated to bookend the Fall Season with six matches in July and seven matches in October. Even if they Rowdies fall short of winning the spring, they’d do well to get as many points as possible when the schedule favors them.
A New Look for the New Season
Along with new faces and new secondary kits, fans should expect to see something new tactically from the Rowdies. Throughout the offseason we thought Campbell would stick to the 4-4-2 he deployed through the Fall Season last year. It was a system that relied heavily on the wings attempting to open up the defense, but it failed as a result of the team not having true wingers.
If the preseason friendlies are a sign of things to come, it appears Stuart has shifted to favoring a 4-2-3-1. There also seems to be a lot more freedom for the midfielders in that system as well. The three behind the striker have license to roam, and either of the two holding midfielders — likely Juan Guerra and Michael Nanchoff — are able to push forward to support when the team is in possession. All indications from the players coming out of preseason camp are that, compared to last year, Campbell has done a better job installing a system and instructing them of their roles.
Players to Watch
Tommy Heinemann: With a shallow pool of true strikers at the start of the season, it looks as if much of the burden of banging in goals will fall on Heinemann. Surprisingly nimble for a 6-foot-4 forward, he’ll be asked to work hard up top as a target man and to set up his teammates when they crash forward. He had some terrific early returns in the preseason (3 goals, 3 assists), which will hopefully translate to success in the season.
Darwin Espinal: In a season devoid of much excitement in the attack, Espinal brought the goods in many of his appearances last year as a rookie. He’s shown no signs of regression in the preseason and looks hungry to solidify his spot as a starter under Campbell. The downside to his obvious talents is that it could tear him away from the Rowdies if he’s called away to the Honduran U-23 team for the Rio Olympics in August.
Freddy Adu: This one seems pretty self explanatory. Adu has shown he still has plenty left to give, now it’s just a matter of him finally putting in the work to establish himself as a regular contributor for the first time in many years. Besides than the obvious fact that any player performing well is a plus for the team, another benefit of Adu’s success would likely be drawing more people to Al Lang and significantly more media interest.
Michael Nanchoff: A big issue for the Rowdies last season was inconsistency at the holding midfield position. Juan Guerra held his own many times, but struggled with the constant circulation of different midfield partners every other week. Michael Nanchoff’s output in the preseason has given hope that the Rowdies have found their man who can act as a partner in the two-man pivot of the 4-2-3-1 and show well going forward.
Predictions
Under Stuart Campbell, the revamped Rowdies attack and returning defensive core will clinch their first playoff spot since 2012 and notch a victory when they enter the U.S. Open Cup on June 1.
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PrintA muezzin has performed an Islamic call to prayer for the first time in 81 years in one of Istanbul’s iconic monuments, Hagia Sophia, famous for its grandiose dome.
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The traditional call to prayer, the adhan, has been played from Hagia Sophia’s minarets for the last four years. However, the muezzin had chanted it from a prayer room, not from inside the historic landmark, which began as a church in 537. The cathedral was converted into a mosque in 1453, when the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, and ending up as a museum in 1935.
Hagia Sophia was the world’s largest cathedral for almost ten centuries until Seville Cathedral, a Roman Catholic cathedral in Spain, was completed in 1520.
Last month, Ankara allowed Hagia Sophia to be used for Islamic Ramadan prayers. The move came under fire from Athens, however, where Greece’s New Democracy opposition party called the prayers “provocative and incomprehensible.”
“The decision of Turkish authorities to schedule the Koran reading in Hagia Sophia for the next month, has virtually transformed it into a mosque for the first time in 80 years. It is a provocative and incomprehensible act and shows disrespect against Orthodox Christians across the world and is not in line with Turkey’s European course,” the coordinator of Foreign Affairs and Defence of New Democracy, Dora Bakoyannis, and head of the party’s Foreign sector Ioannis Kefalogiannis, said in a joint statement.Java applications will get faster startup times thanks to a formal proposal to include ahead-of-time compilation in the platform.
The draft Java Development Kit proposal, authored by Vladimir Kozlov, principal technical staff member at Oracle, is targeted for inclusion in Java 9, which is expected to be available next summer.
[ The big 4 Java IDEs reviewed: See how Eclipse, NetBeans, JDeveloper, and IntelliJ IDEA stack up. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ]
"We would love to see this make it into JDK 9, but that will of course depend on the outcome of the OpenJDK process for this JEP (JDK Enhancement Proposal)," said Georges Saab, vice president of software development in the Java platform group at Oracle, on Thursday. Ahead-of-time compilation has been a stated goal for Java 9 to address the issue of slow startup.
"JIT compilers are fast, but Java programs can become so large that it takes a long time for the JIT to warm up completely," Kozlov's proposal states. "Infrequently used Java methods might never be compiled at all, potentially incurring a performance penalty due to repeated interpreted invocations."
The proposal summary notes that Java classes would be compiled to native code prior to launching the virtual machine. The ultimate goal is to improve the startup time of small or large Java applications while having "at most" a limited impact on peak performance and minimizing changes to the user workflow.
Ahead-of-time compilation would be accomplished via a new tool, jaotc, while Graal technology, which make it feasible to write a dynamic compiler and language runtime interpreter in Java, is used as a code-generating back end. Usage of AOT-compiled code is transparent to users, but JVM options to control access to and storage of the code are provided, according to the proposal.
The plan |
8th November 2017
Roger Ward Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 8, 2017
Business
As you’d expect, this is a very busy time as HelloGold looks to build the business following the completion of the token sale.
On the critical path is expanding the team so that there is more capacity to deliver on the roadmap promised. Consequently HelloGold have been recruiting heavily for the tech, marketing, product and support teams. This Monday there were 6 new employees inducted in one go — the team is now 24 strong and we are continuing to recruit. The joiners are:
Deepan — UX/UI
Adrian — copywriter
Tawana — token team
Xing Zheng — social media (you’ll be hearing more from him!)
Izzy — HR manager
Dan — product development
The team then took the (relatively) short drive up to the Smokehouse in Cameron Highlands for a short offsite. Given the amount of work and number of new people, it is important to ensure that everybody in the team has a clear understanding of our priorities over the next 12 months. Robin shared his original pitch document for HelloGold from 2014. It is amazing how little has changed and how much has actually been implemented. The key difference was the use of a smartphone app rather than text messages as the customer touch point for accessing gold. The team went through the Roadmap (page 23 here) and agreed prioritisation and delivery responsibilities including for tech, marketing and business development. The key takeaway: there are lots of amazing opportunities and the team needs to ensure they stay focused to deliver for customers and supporters alike. There is a lot of work to do!
(most) of the current HelloGold team
On the marketing side HelloGold has made some changes to the advertising approach following input from 500 Startups, one of HelloGold’s VC investors. A/B testing of all advertising elements have been ramped up and the impact can already be seen, with the number of app downloads increasing by 78% and approved users (those who have cleared KYC) by 106%. Although it has only been one week since the start of this new approach, the model is now in place (along with the data tracking — see tech update below) for further expansion. It is very exciting to see this acceleration in customer numbers and there is a lot more to come from the new in-house creative team (design, copywriting and video).Coconut octopuses are among the most intelligent invertebrates around: They use tools, carry their shelters around for when they need them, and, fittingly, adopt an underwater walking motion that's very similar to humans.
A diver stumbles across a whale shark trapped in a commercial fishing line. Sensing the diver is there to help, the goliath lies still while the rope is cut.
A Whale Shark Cooperates With a Diver Saving Him (1:28)
The bust of Nefertiti contains one of the most beautiful faces in the world. So beautiful, a mathematical formula was used to sculpt it.
How to Achieve Flawless Beauty (2:54)
It's commonly known that a single asteroid set off the dinosaurs' extinction. Even more destructive than its impact was the chain of events it set into motion.
How a Single Asteroid Wiped Dinosaurs Off This Planet (1:14)
In 1828, John Jacob Astor built a trading post on the Missouri River. Business was so profitable that it only took four decades for Astor to become America's first multimillionaire.RAGEMOAR The Pope Profile Joined February 2011 United States 213 Posts Last Edited: 2011-10-03 19:34:45 #1 For those long, lonely nights while playing alone on ladder
Mirror Matchup - take a drink
No response to "gl hf" - take a drink
Lose your scouting worker - take a drink
Get supply blocked - take a drink
Forget to constantly make workers - take a drink
Forget detection - take a drink
Every warp in / inject / mule - take a drink
Miss a warp in / inject / mule - take 2
Lose a drop / warp prism - take a drink
Lose a mineral line - take three
Lose a worker to a cloaked unit - take a drink
Find a running hidden expansion - take three
No gg - take a drink
BM / imbalance whining - take three
Hit a player more than once - one drink for each meeting (2 drinks the second time you meet, three the third, 4 the 4th, etc.)
If you or opponent are slightly favored - take a drink
If you or opponent are favored - take three
Win a game - take a drink
Lose a game - take three drinks
Promotion - finish your drink
For those with beer hats:
Waterfall while getting marine SCV all inned
Waterfall while supply blocked
Waterfall while remaxing
Edit: Added another condition, emphasized personal laddering, not watching a stream.
MethodSC Profile Joined December 2010 United States 922 Posts #2 this game would not last long lol....
R0YAL Profile Blog Joined September 2009 United States 1767 Posts Last Edited: 2011-10-03 19:14:21 #3 On October 04 2011 04:10 RAGEMOAR The Pope wrote:
For those long, lonely nights alone on ladder.
Mirror Matchup - take a drink
No response to "gl hf" - take a drink
Lose your scouting worker - take a drink
Get supply blocked - take a drink
Forget to constantly make workers - take a drink
Forget detection - take a drink
Every warp in / inject / mule - take a drink
Lose a drop / warp prism - take a drink
Lose a mineral line - take three
Lose a worker to a cloaked unit - take a drink
Find a running hidden expansion - take three
No gg - take a drink
BM / imbalance whining - take three
Hit a player more than once - one drink for each meeting (2 drinks the second time you meet, three the third, 4 the 4th, etc.)
If you or opponent are slightly favored - take a drink
If you or opponent are favored - take three
Win a game - take a drink
Lose a game - take three drinks
Promotion - finish your drink
For those with beer hats:
Waterfall while getting marine SCV all inned
Waterfall while supply blocked
Waterfall while remaxing
So cheese or die from alcohol poisoning o_O So cheese or die from alcohol poisoning o_O Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
101toss Profile Blog Joined April 2010 2395 Posts #4 This can't be safe... Math doesn't kill champions and neither do wards
peekn Profile Blog Joined June 2010 United States 1149 Posts #5 I think that I would die very quickly from this game, I'd be wasted after the 10 min mark for sure.
HackBenjamin Profile Blog Joined January 2011 Canada 1094 Posts #6 I don't think I'd have to worry about promotions lol
-y0shi- Profile Joined July 2011 Germany 965 Posts #7
ewww Take a drink everytime a commentator says "beautiful emps"ewww
ishboh Profile Joined October 2010 United States 882 Posts #8 this is harsh. i would play even worse because of having to drink so often...lol
Sqorpion Profile Joined October 2011 Denmark 384 Posts #9 On October 04 2011 04:10 RAGEMOAR The Pope wrote:
For those long, lonely nights alone on ladder.
Mirror Matchup - take a drink
No response to "gl hf" - take a drink
Lose your scouting worker - take a drink
Get supply blocked - take a drink
Forget to constantly make workers - take a drink
Forget detection - take a drink
Every warp in / inject / mule - take a drink
Lose a drop / warp prism - take a drink
Lose a mineral line - take three
Lose a worker to a cloaked unit - take a drink
Find a running hidden expansion - take three
No gg - take a drink
BM / imbalance whining - take three
Hit a player more than once - one drink for each meeting (2 drinks the second time you meet, three the third, 4 the 4th, etc.)
If you or opponent are slightly favored - take a drink
If you or opponent are favored - take three
Win a game - take a drink
Lose a game - take three drinks
Promotion - finish your drink
For those with beer hats:
Waterfall while getting marine SCV all inned
Waterfall while supply blocked
Waterfall while remaxing
Better not play vs toss and terran with DT/Banshee harass! Better not play vs toss and terran with DT/Banshee harass! "Until the very, very top, in almost anything all that matters, is how much work you put in. The only problem is that most people can't work hard even at things they do enjoy, much less things they don't have a real passion for." - Greg "IdrA" Fields
RAGEMOAR The Pope Profile Joined February 2011 United States 213 Posts #10 On October 04 2011 04:18 -y0shi- wrote:
Take a drink everytime a commentator says "beautiful emps"
ewww Take a drink everytime a commentator says "beautiful emps"ewww
Sure, but only if you have your own personal commentator for your ladder games. Sure, but only if you have your own personal commentator for your ladder games.
zVooky Profile Joined February 2011 United States 151 Posts #11 On October 04 2011 04:14 R0YAL wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 04 2011 04:10 RAGEMOAR The Pope wrote:
For those long, lonely nights alone on ladder.
Mirror Matchup - take a drink
No response to "gl hf" - take a drink
Lose your scouting worker - take a drink
Get supply blocked - take a drink
Forget to constantly make workers - take a drink
Forget detection - take a drink
Every warp in / inject / mule - take a drink
Lose a drop / warp prism - take a drink
Lose a mineral line - take three
Lose a worker to a cloaked unit - take a drink
Find a running hidden expansion - take three
No gg - take a drink
BM / imbalance whining - take three
Hit a player more than once - one drink for each meeting (2 drinks the second time you meet, three the third, 4 the 4th, etc.)
If you or opponent are slightly favored - take a drink
If you or opponent are favored - take three
Win a game - take a drink
Lose a game - take three drinks
Promotion - finish your drink
For those with beer hats:
Waterfall while getting marine SCV all inned
Waterfall while supply blocked
Waterfall while remaxing
So cheese or die from alcohol poisoning o_O So cheese or die from alcohol poisoning o_O
hahaha man i actually laughed out loud at this. So true.. so true
hahaha man i actually laughed out loud at this. So true.. so true
DertoQq Profile Joined October 2010 France 906 Posts #12 lol, this is impossible, I would be dead after 2 games xD "i've made some empty promises in my life, but hands down that was the most generous" - Michael Scott
Moosey Profile Blog Joined June 2010 United States 183 Posts #13 I think the only way to do this without death is to make taking a drink = a sip of beer.
Coal Profile Joined July 2011 Sweden 1520 Posts #14 A more appropriate drinking game would be listening to commentators say the following things:
That's very uncharacteristic-take a drink
I suspect GG any second-take a drink
Beautiful storms/emp-take a drink
HERE WE GOOOO(tastosis only)- take a drink
SAAAAAAAAAAGE!!!!(artosis only)- take three drinks
etc etc, doing that while at a BarCraft= win :D
As people mentioned earlier this would get out of hand really quicklyA more appropriate drinking game would be listening to commentators say the following things:That's very uncharacteristic-take a drinkI suspect GG any second-take a drinkBeautiful storms/emp-take a drinkHERE WE GOOOO(tastosis only)- take a drinkSAAAAAAAAAAGE!!!!(artosis only)- take three drinksetc etc, doing that while at a BarCraft= win :D In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.
Saltydizzle Profile Joined July 2011 United States 123 Posts #15 Too many to remember, every mistake take a drink. nice idea tho
Gamegene Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United States 8300 Posts #16 For every worker you lose to a hellion take a shot. Throw on your favorite jacket and you're good to roll. Stroll through the trees and let your miseries go.
DertoQq Profile Joined October 2010 France 906 Posts #17 This would actually be a good way to get better, after a few games, no way a would get supply blocked if I had to drink every time "i've made some empty promises in my life, but hands down that was the most generous" - Michael Scott
Sqorpion Profile Joined October 2011 Denmark 384 Posts #18 Let's up the stakes
If you play zerg: For every zergling lost, take a shot. :> "Until the very, very top, in almost anything all that matters, is how much work you put in. The only problem is that most people can't work hard even at things they do enjoy, much less things they don't have a real passion for." - Greg "IdrA" Fields
Dawski Profile Joined September 2010 Canada 435 Posts #19 On October 04 2011 04:31 Sqorpion wrote:
Let's up the stakes
If you play zerg: For every zergling lost, take a shot. :>
blue flame hellions would literally be the death of me blue flame hellions would literally be the death of me do you REALLY want additional pylons?
Stijx Profile Blog Joined February 2011 United States 800 Posts #20 This game would mean a swift death...
1 2 Next AllA new poll finds that 43 percent of Republicans believe President Obama is a Muslim, and 20 percent of all adults believe he was born outside the United States.
A CNN/ORC poll out Sunday finds that while the vast majority of Americans believe, correctly, the Obama was born in the United States, there remains a solid subset of people who still believe he is foreign-born.
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That poll also found that 29 percent of Americans, and 43 percent of Republicans, believe Obama is a Muslim. The president is a Christian.
Nine percent of those polled believe there is solid evidence Obama was born elsewhere, while 11 percent just say they suspect he was not born in America. The president was born in Hawaii.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll in 2010 found similar numbers when asking about the president’s birthplace, with 20 percent saying then he was born outside the country.
Since then, the president has produced a birth certificate proving definitively he was born in Hawaii.
A plurality of Americans were able to correctly identify Obama’s religion, with 39 percent saying they believe he is Protestant or Christian. Another 11 percent say the president is not religious, while 14 percent had no opinion on the president’s faith.
Another poll out at the beginning of the month from the left-leaning Public Policy Polling found 54 percent of Republican voters believe the president is a Muslim.
A total of 1,012 adults were interviewed by phone for the CNN/ORC poll, with 27 percent describing themselves as Democrats, 24 percent as Republicans and 49 percent as Independents or members of another party. The poll was conducted from Sept. 4 through Sept. 8.With millions of Canadians watching, the Tragically Hip are set to play the final show on their farewell tour. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has arrived in Kingston with plans to sing along with the rest of the crowd.
It’s not news that the 44-year-old Prime Minister is a big fan of the Hip. In June, he told the Canadian Press that he’s been lucky to meet Downie several times, and that the rocker was an “extraordinary Canadian creative force” and a “great guy.” It’s not the first time he’s been to a Hip show, he said, but it will be the first time with the title of prime minister.
More: How we will miss Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip
Gord Downie is a true original who has been writing Canada’s soundtrack for more than 30 years. #Courage — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) May 24, 2016
When the Hip disclosed the shocking news back in May, Canada’s party leaders shared their thoughts via Twitter. The Conservative Party’s interim leader, Rona Ambrose, shared her favourite song: Ahead by a Century.
Every Canadian has a favourite Tragically Hip song. This is mine. https://t.co/OF2UKkn2ux — Rona Ambrose (@RonaAmbrose) May 24, 2016
Luckily, Ambrose’s favourite song was on the set list Aug. 3, the night she and her partner, JP, went to see the Hip in Calgary. “It was incredibly moving,” Ambrose told Maclean’s. “Everyone stood up for the entire show. People couldn’t stop cheering … So many of us have been touched by cancer and seeing him go through this makes our rock star idols feel even closer to us.”
It’s a very heavy day for lovers of Canadian music. Sending #courage to Gord Downie, his family, friends and bandmates @thehipdotcom. — Tom Mulcair (@ThomasMulcair) May 24, 2016
A spokesperson from the NDP says while leader Tom Mulcair is a fan, he didn’t have the chance to see the Hip live tour. Rookie NDP MP, Gord Johns (Courteney-Alberni), did however. The 46-year-old is a devoted fan—”I’m from that generation of die-hard Hip fans”—and took in the July 24 show in Vancouver with his college buddies.
“I couldn’t be more proud to be Canadian hearing the Hip play,” he said, comparing Downie to the courageous Canadian icons Terry Fox and Jack Layton. “They’ve connected with people across Canada, bringing people together even more closely on this tour. It’s been very special. It crosses political lines.”
Green Party leader Elizabeth May is on holidays and couldn’t be reached for comment, though a spokesperson from her office told Maclean’s the party’s lone MP tried to make it to the July 22 show in Victoria, but it didn’t work out.
Had not heard. So very sad. "@RogersShelagh: Heartbroken to wake to news that Gord Downie has terminal cancer. Courage.
Love and prayers." — Elizabeth May (@ElizabethMay) May 24, 2016
During his reign, Stephen Harper never made mention of the beloved Canadian rock band. However, the former PM is a rock’n’roller. While country leader, Harper played keyboard and sang lead vocals in his band the Van Cats, a play on the number 24 in French from 24 Sussex Dr.
Related photosWATCH: Video from the Castle Rock prairie dog removal
State wildlife agents and police officers seized about 100 prairie dogs from a Castle Rock woman’s garage Tuesday morning, weeks after they were trapped at a controversial shopping mall development site.
Wildlife officials said they were exploring options to relocate the rodents but said it was possible the prairie dogs would be killed or fed to endangered ferrets.
The animals had been trapped for relocation after arbitration by a New Mexico-based environmental firm, Bold Visions Conservation, and were being held in cages awaiting transfer. Two women offered the garage as a respite for the emigrants.
Authorities in New Mexico, however, never received an application for a relocation permit and the New Mexico ranch where the animals were slated to be placed backed out, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials.
“We just care about the prairie dogs,” said Malia Reeves, one of the two women who volunteered to watch over the animals.
Reeves filmed the early-morning seizure in a grainy video showing uniformed officers loading heavy cages onto trailers. Sobs can be heard in the background as the rodents are hauled away.
The prairie dogs were trapped in mid-March at the Promenade at Castle Rock construction site near Interstate 25 and Meadows Parkway, Reeves said. The development, which is near a large prairie dog colony, had been the subject of intense debate about expansion and preservation.
The seizure is the latest in the long saga for prairie dogs that CPW officials say has become so heated that officers have been threatened during operations to manage them.
“I’ve never heard of us taking (prairie dogs) out of the ground, them getting seized and then being exterminated,” said Trent Botkin, an independent contractor who captured the rodents and is a 12-year veteran of the field. “Once you take them back out, you don’t put them back in.”
The $177 million Promenade project, a joint venture of Greenwood Village-based Alberta Development Partners and Denver’s Forum Real Estate Group, is expected to yield a 1 million-square-foot mall where shops plan to open this year.
The construction drew criticism from residents, especially a faction that feared the destruction of prairie dogs on the 200-acre property. Prairie dog supporters started a Facebook page with thousands of followers, a crowdfunding site and a Change.com petition.
“This is personal for those of us who viscerally love this landscape and the animals who depend on it,” Linda Vannostrand, a prairie dog supporter, said at a Town Council meeting last month. “These animals and those that live interdependently with them will suffer. Council needs to put this ordinance to referendum.”
After the council meeting, developers and CPW officials began working with Bold Visions Conservation to plan the relocation of the rodents.
“We did let them trap the prairie dogs,” said Jennifer Churchill, a CPW spokeswoman. “We were going to allow the relocation. The habitat was sufficient.”
Wildlife officials in New Mexico said they never received an application to relocate prairie dogs.
Stephen Capra, executive director of Bold Visions Conservation, said CPW officials threatened to revoke operating licenses of those involved in the relocation. He said his organization suggested relocation spots in Colorado and was turned down repeatedly.
“Is that really the best use of an agency like this?” Capra said, adding that he was told the animals would be euthanized after being seized. “Let’s find a common-sense solution to this.”
Justin Olson, a CPW district wildlife manager, refuted Capra’s allegations. Olson said Capra’s group was told several times that the ranch in New Mexico and a lack of permits blocked the transfer.
The prairie dogs are healthy and have been moved to a CPW facility, where they are safe and secure, officials said.
According to Churchill, CPW is examining an “11th hour” relocation site and is exploring other options before, as a last resort, considering euthanization. They are also weighing feeding the prairie dogs to endangered black-footed ferrets.
Residents say about a dozen other prairie dogs trapped for relocation and held by a Castle Rock woman have not yet been seized by CPW. The rodents were trapped with permission from developers.
Messages left for the mall’s developers were not immediately returned.
Dr. Greg Florant, a biology professor at Colorado State University, said
laws allow prairie dogs to be killed or relocated when development begins but that he feels it’s best to try to save them. “It’s unfortunate usually for the prairie dogs because they were there first,” he said.
Jesse Paul: 303-954-1733 or jpaul@denverpost.comRepublican Gov. Larry Hogan, center, reflected on his first legislative session with the Democratic-led Legislature on Tuesday, April 14, 2015, in Annapolis, a day after Maryland’s legislative session ended. The governor is sitting between Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, left, and House Speaker Michael Busch, both Democrats. (Brian Witte/AP)
The just-completed legislative session in Annapolis was dominated by the debate over whether to fully fund schools, shore up the pension fund or pay for other priorities. But budget negotiations were not all that happened over the past 90 days in the General Assembly.
Lawmakers passed 652 bills, including legislation to protect abused children, help criminals turn their lives around and improve the state’s business climate. Here are some of the bills awaiting the signature of Gov. Larry Hogan (R).
“Anayah’s Bill” — Named for Anayah Williams, a Frederick toddler who died after Child Protective Services returned her to her parents’ home even though there was suspicion of abuse. The bill gives authorities more power to keep children out of potentially dangerous homes by expanding the instances in which social workers would not be required to try to reunite parent and child.
Artificial insemination — Gives female couples the same health benefits for artificial insemination as heterosexual couples.
Augustine Commission — Five bills designed to improve the state’s business climate. Among them are measures to review new state regulations and assess their impact on small businesses; require some state employees to take customer-service training and examine how public universities might make money by selling the findings of their researchers; restructure the state’s economic development efforts and expand apprenticeship programs.
The package of legislation is referred to by the name of a commission, led by retired Lockheed Martin chief executive Norman R. Augustine, that studied what is holding the state back economically.
Body cameras — Exempts the wiretap rule to allow police departments across the state to wear body cameras. Legislation lays out the policy for counties and cities.
Charter schools — Hogan wanted a massive reform of charter school laws. He got small changes that allow charters to have a say on who attends the schools and permits some charters to be exempt from specific requirements about scheduling, curriculum and professional development.
Voting rights for ex-felons — Provides voting rights for an estimated 40,000 ex-felons who are on probation or parole. Maryland will join the District and 13 states, including Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, where former felons can vote after they are released from prison.
Film tax credit — TV shows, such as “House of Cards,” could continue to receive a tax credit for filming in Maryland under a bill that allows the state to fund the film tax credit. The bill establishes a reserve fund that could be used for the credits. The governor decides how much the production companies would get.
Hotel tax — Online travel services that offer discounted hotel-room prices — like Expedia, Orbitz and others — will have to pay the same amount of state sales tax — 6 percent — hotels do when they charge rooms directly to consumers.
Hydraulic fracking — Imposes what amounts to a 21/ 2- year ban on natural-gas drilling in the western part of the state. The practice could provide jobs but raises questions about environmental and health impacts.
Mandatory minimum sentences — The bill repeals mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders who have committed their second offense.
Marijuana paraphernalia — Last year, Maryland decriminalized the possession of less than 10 grams of marijuana. This year, lawmakers said it should no longer be a crime to have such paraphernalia as bongs.
Primary date — This bill changes the primary date for the 2016 elections from the first to the last Tuesday in April to avoid the launch of early voting on Easter weekend.
Second Chance Act — People with certain nonviolent misdemeanor criminal records will be able to have their records blocked from public view after three years, under specific conditions. The bill is designed to help those with criminal pasts get jobs. Hogan said he supports the measure.
Speed limit — Drivers may soon be able to drive 70 mph on some interstate highways and expressways. The bill gives state transportation officials the authority to raise the limit from 65 mph to 70 mph.
Standardized tests — A bill creates a commission to study how many tests students take and how often they take them.
Storm-water management — The bill removes the requirement that the state’s largest jurisdictions charge a storm-water remediation fee, which critics call a “rain tax.”
Tort liability — Increases the maximum payouts to those who have successfully sued a local government, raising the top award from $200,000 to $300,000 per individual claim and from $500,000 to $600,000 per total claims.
Transgender birth certificates — This bill requires the state’s health officials to issue new birth certificates for transgender and intersex individuals after a documented sex change. It simplifies the process for individuals who undergo a sex change but may not have had sexual reassignment surgery. Citizens need a doctor’s note or court order testifying to the change. The new certificate cannot have any markings indicating any change in the requestor’s identity.
Uber — The bill makes Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing booking services legal in Maryland, shortly after the District and Virginia approved frameworks for the app-based car services. The legislation also sets rules related to insurance coverage and requires the companies to conduct criminal background checks on drivers.Hello Realmeye forums and Reddit!
Introduction,
My name is QuyntLP I’m a
4 year+ RotMG player (still not that good) And pretty new to reddit
although i have been checking it everyday for a few weeks now I have
been on the Kabam forums for a long time (i don’t ever make much posts
on anything really) And also been on the wild shadows forums a bit
A thing that I have seen a lot of on the wild shadows and Kabam forums are '‘rebuilding blogs’’ I always enjoyed them quite a bit and thought why wouldn’t i make one myself! After all I do have to rebuild my account a lot (sad face).
So starting out my ‘‘schedule’’ for playing and posting will be explained and listed down below each time i am gonna play for a long period of time i will be making a comment on this post After my play session for that time i will make a post telling every thing i did from dungeons items i got, items i merched pots i drank,etc I will most probably be playing today for almost the whole day (my time zone CEST) Playing with me is very welcome.
I play mainly on EUWEST2, feel free to message me! my IGN is QuyntLP
Today
Sep 1st 2016, After losing my 6/8 Mystic with
Astral, EP, T5orb, Elder, Expo and a backpack, my 6/8 Necro with
Astral, t5orb, Gsorc, Expo, Ring pop and my 5/8 Rogue with Icicle, T5
Cloack, Plane, Griff, ring switched a lot
I only have 1 mana 1 crystal staff and 1 astral
in my vault i also have a Dbow and a CC in my vault but im not gonna
use those anytime soon I have 2 char slots and 4 vaults so for now I’m
thinking about storing as much as possible I leveled up a wizard
currently wielding a T6 staff, a T1 spell and wearing a T7 robe and a para def With a roll of +4HP, +6MP, +2, +5ATT, +3SPD, +3, +5DEX, -1, 5VIT, +3WIS which I like the look of I looted 1 spd on him got the para def from a guy in a cem
so for now i will decide I’m gonna use the crystal staff on this wizard
for today i am hoping to get close to 2/8 on the wizard That’s it for
now.As we pass the quarter point of the 2013-14 NHL season, there have been some pleasant surprises along the way.
(There have also been some crushing disappointments, but that’s tomorrow’s post.)
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Here are 13 most pleasant surprise players, teams, decisions and trends in the NHL this season:
St. Louis Blues’ Top Line
Alexander Steen is getting all the accolades, and rightfully so given his astounding 17 goals in 20 games (with a 23.3 shooting percentage). But the Blues’ entire top line of Steen, David Backes (8 goals, 12 assists) and T.J. Oshie (3 goals, 15 assists) has been their offensive engine, scoring goals in 14 of the Blues’ first 20 games.
And yet no widely known nickname. How is this not the S.O.B. Line, again?
Josh Harding
As we wrote earlier this month, Harding’s roll for the Minnesota Wild has been one of the most inspiring stories of the NHL season, as the goalie went from a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis last season to an incredible 13-3-2 start with a 1.48 GAA and a.939 save percentage. Best of all: 19 appearances, without so much as a whisper about his health.
The Penguins Defense
After last season’s playoff disappointment, the Pittsburgh Penguins brought on Jacques Martin as an assistant coach, and his impact on the team’s defense has been instantaneous. The Pens are sixth in the NHL at 2.18 GA/G, with great organization on the defensive end, solid puck possession and smart passes out of their own zone.
Marc-Andre Fleury has a GAA of 1.90, people. That says it all.
Goaltending Surprises
Besides Harding and Fleury, others goalies have opened some eyes this season. Ben Bishop (2.29 GAA) has back-stopped the Tampa Bay Lightning to the top of the Atlantic Division, and put his name in U.S. Olympic roster contention.
Story continues
Ben Scrivens sparked “Scrivensmania” for the Los Angeles Kings, going 5-1-1 with a 1.35 GAA overall and winning four starts after Jonathan Quick was injured.
Jonathan Bernier, who backed up Quick last season, has been stellar for the Toronto Maple Leafs with a 2.05 GAA and a.939 save percentage.
More stunners? How about Steve Mason of the Philadelphia Flyers, who somehow has a 2.12 GAA and a.932 save percentage despite that team’s putrid start?
Oh, and after Martin Brodeur handed his crease over to Cory Schneider, he took it back with a 7-3-2 record and a 2.06 GAA. Wait, an incumbent start goalie retaking his job after Cory Schneider couldn’t keep it? What sort of sorcery is this?!
Tyler Seguin Is Born
One hoped that a change in scenery and a prominent role on the Dallas Stars’ top line would reignite Tyler Seguin’s young career. No one could have anticipated 23 points in 20 games, a 21.8 shooting percentage and a renewed focus that he seemed to lack with the Boston Bruins.
The EGG Line
The young trio of Lars Eller, Brendan Gallagher and Alex Galchenyuk has combined for 43 points, and has been the team’s top offensive weapon not named P.K. Subban for most of the season. They hate the name “EGG Line.” Oh well … different yolks for different folks.
Patrick Roy’s Avalanche
From his insane glass-shaking debut again Bruce Boudreau through the 20-game mark, Patrick Roy’s Colorado Avalanche have been anything but unremarkable. Matt Duchene’s 12 goals were a surprise. The goaltending of Semyon Varlamov and J.S. Giguere has been a surprise. Jan Hejda’s plus-14 was a surprise.
Their 15-5-0 record is an amazing accomplishment for a team that many had outside the postseason picture. And a team whose coach is nuttier than a bag of cashews.
The Olympic Roster Party Crashers
The Olympics can be a hell of a motivator for some players. Jamie Benn was left out of Team Canada camp; he responded with 23 points in 20 games. Jason Pominville was left of the U.S. camp roster; he has 13 goals in 23 games. Ryan Getzlaf (25 points in 21 games) is making an Olympic statement. Patrick Marleau (10 goals) is stating his case. And did anyone expect Tim Thomas (2.76 GAA with the Florida Panthers) to play his way back into the Olympic conversation for the U.S.?
The Freshmen Stars
Tomas Hertl had, perhaps, the greatest debut for a rookie in recent memory with his controversial 4-goal performance. Since then, he’s scored 12 goals overall for the San Jose Sharks, with 18 points in 21 games to lead all rookie scorers.
But it’s the blue line that’s really been impressive for the rookie class. Torey Krug of the Boston Bruins has 12 points in 21 games, six of them on the power play. Hampus Lindholm has been an outstanding defensive stopper for the Anaheim Ducks. Seth Jones, meanwhile, has been the total package for the Nashville Predators in playing a rookies-best 23:59 per game. He’s also on the Olympic radar, which obviously helps when your GM is also the U.S. GM.
Pat LaFontaine Lands In Buffalo
While the pleasant surprise for many was when the Buffalo Sabres finally cut the cord on Darcy Regier and Ron Rolston, the real pleasant development was when they brought back fan favorite LaFontaine as the franchise’s first director of hockey operations. He brought on Ted Nolan as interim head coach in another crowd-pleasing move. Blissful nostalgia is a hell of a narcotic and Sabres fans are high on the new regime so far.
Frans Nielsen
The New York Islanders forward is one of the most under-appreciated players in the NHL. By all accounts, dude should have a Selke by now. So maybe he realized the best way to get the voters’ attention is to have the offensive numbers to go with the defensive prowess, so Nielsen has 22 points in 22 games as the Islanders’ second-line center. The Great Dane has been just that.
Phoenix Coyotes, Scoring Machine
Who would have figured the Coyotes for an offensive juggernaut? Phoenix is fourth in the NHL in scoring at 3.29 goals per game, as Shane Doan (10 goals) and Martin Hanzal (18 points in 18 games |
said of him. With luck, Labour’s current leftwing phase will produce a new Mullin or two before it is snuffed out.
• Hinterland is published by Profile. To order a copy for £16.40 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.Coach Tom Herman invited me to join him in the locker room after the first football game of the season, University of Houston against Tennessee Tech.
“Locker room? Me? Are you sure?” I had never been inside a locker room so I was surprised, but also curious at the same time. I paused at the door until the voices of alert, “Stay dressed! The president is here,” subsided. I walked in behind the coach.
This was not the locker room scene that I had seen in the movies. There were no high fives, no victory chants, and no hearty embraces. Even though they had just played their hearts out and had won their very first game of the season, all the young student-athletes were crouched calmly on their knees.
Coach walked to the front and stood before the players. His voice was still hoarse from coaching the first game of his head coaching career. I was sure he would start out by saying, “We did it! …yeah! …we won! …now, go out and celebrate!”
Instead everyone bowed their heads as one of the student athletes led a prayer of thanks. Then Coach Herman began, “I am proud of you…you did well today, but now, I want you to think about how blessed you are to be in Houston, a city that supports you. I want you to think how blessed you are to be at the University of Houston, a university that gives you the opportunity to be educated…” Silence settled over the room, and everyone was tuned into the coach.
“…Think how blessed you are to have a brother playing next to you and giving you everything he has got… for you…so that you could do what you need to do…so that you could win,” Coach continued and then paused for few seconds. There were just the murmurs of “Yes sir, yes sir!”
Coach then called out his assistants who, in turn, called out the best performers of the game. Each player stood and received rousing cheers and applause as he walked to the front of the room. Then each one expressed his gratitude for his football brothers who helped him and the coaches who guided him. Many thanked God, and many thanked their families. Everyone seemed to be competing to give credit to others, and there was no “me and my win” attitude in the room.
During the next 15 minutes, I witnessed what is often rare from anyone, let alone from younger people: the courage to show gratitude! Gratitude is a virtue that only the strong can have. A weak person is busy basking in the glory of his success because doing so makes him feel stronger than he is. But a strong person does not have the need to feel strong because he knows the depth of his inner strength. The source of his strength is not external validation, but his own belief. Because he has no need for the credit himself, his natural reaction is to share it liberally with others.
I had heard that a coach is more than a skills instructor; he is a father figure, a leader, a guide and a role model. I witnessed it first hand in the locker room that night.
To my surprise, Coach also called out my name, handed me a football and expressed his gratitude for my support. I was overwhelmed and fumbled for words – but not the football! – though I do recall telling the team that with this kind of attitude, they can take on any Power Five team and even beat them on their home field. Seven days later, they did exactly that in Louisville.
Coach concluded the session by congratulating the team again and said, “Now, go and enjoy with your family, but remember that tomorrow is a work day. We all need to be here, working!”
I cringed slightly at this order because I had planned to take the day off and do nothing. I thought I deserved it after nearly five hours of walking, shaking hands, cheering, and screaming during the game.
The next morning when I woke up, I saw the football resting proudly on my dining table, and it reminded me of a night full of blessings, brotherhood and gratitude. But most of all, it reminded me of the potential that was being unlocked in that locker room. These student athletes will win games on the field, but more importantly, they will win the game of life.Even though the Redskins came out in shoulder pads on days 3 and 4, it wasn’t until today on day 5 that they wore the full set of game day pads. When Coach Jay Gruden was asked about the impact of wearing full pads and what he hoped the players would get out of it, he responded by saying;
It’s important for them to get used to what they’re going to wear on game day so the first time they wear it, it’s not on game day. So we’ll get them acclimated to the full pads and see how they react and run if it slows down the fast guys if it doesn’t inhibit them at all. The main thing is getting them comfortable in the outfit so they know what they like to wear and what they don’t like to wear.
With the players in full pads, and the sun sending the on-field thermometer to 104 degrees, today seemed like as good a day as any to take a more in-depth look at the Offensive Line.
Offensive Line
When a team selects an Offensive Line player with the 5th overall pick of the draft and makes it a priority to poach one of the absolute best Offensive Line coaches in the game, it acknowledges that there have been serious inadequacies with the front-line protection in previous years. With that in mind, today Redskins Capital Connection focused on how the new-look unit is looking so far at Training Camp.
The Starters
Trent Williams is, unsurprisingly, a stone-cold lock to be the Redskins anchor at Left Tackle for as long as he remains healthy. All throughout camp, whether it be during 1-on-1 drills or during full 11-on-11 team scrimmages, Trent Williams elite talent skill set continues to be evident. Even with Defensive Coordinator Joe Barry giving the Offense a wide variety of different looks, including rotating stud pass rusher Ryan Kerrigan to the Right Outside Linebacker position in certain packages, Williams confidently and competently handles whatever is thrown his way.
On passing downs, Williams is a solid brick wall. For such a big guy, he is incredibly light on his feet, which allows him to push defenders in a wide circle around the pocket, giving the Quarterback time to release the ball. On rushing downs, Williams versatility shines. Whether it be simply holding his opponent in a vice-like block, or releasing and getting through to the next-level to lay out a huge open-field block, he demonstrates a reliability and talent that firmly puts him in the class as one of the leagues true elite Left Tackles.
At Left Guard, Shawn Lauvao is still battling the emanating perception that remains from his first half of 2014, where he struggled. What many seem to have not seen -perhaps because they had simply tuned out after another disappointing Redskins season- was that Lauvao’s second half of 2014 was a lot stronger than his first half. It wasn’t until after the bye week that something seemed to click in to place for Lauvao, and he became a much improved player. He certainly has the physical attributes to succeed as his position, and at 6-3 and 315 lbs he knows how to use his strengths to not allow defenders to bull-rush him.
What Lauvao needs to keep working on is his technique for not letting defenders bend around and underneath him, and so far the work he has been doing with Coach Bill Callahan seems to be returning immediate dividends in this regard. At Left Guard, Lauvao is consistently matching up against very solid defenders such as Jason Hatcher, or even at times Terrance Knighton, and for the most part Lauvao is holding his own.
Kory Lichtensteiger again returns as the starting Center in 2015, and his job going into camp this year is significantly more difficult given the vast improvements made to the interior of the Defensive Line. The aforementioned Knighton is an absolute mountain of a man, and Lichtensteiger is the poor soul on the Offensive Line who matches up against him more often than not.
There have definitely been plays so far in camp where Knighton has gotten the best of Lichtensteiger, but when you consider that Lichtensteiger is listed at 296 lbs and Knighton at 357 lbs, it’s understandable why. Coach Callahan was working with Lichtensteiger early in camp about implementing fundamentals and techniques to try and avoid letting Knighton getting underneath his pads, which is where he is capable of doing the most disruptive damage. A common theme throughout camp so far has been Callahan tailoring techniques to be implemented for each Offensive Linesman, and for Lichtensteiger it is an important lesson to be learned.
With Chris Chester no longer with the team, second year player Spencer Long has been plugged in as the starter at Right Guard. Numerous plays during camp so far have seen Long pulling from the Right Guard position and getting into space, and this is where he has looked his best. When asked to maintain a traditional pocket, Long has done okay but there is still improvements to be had in this regard, especially when it comes to defenders shifting around on the line. When the defense moves guys around, Long can sometimes be a half-second slow at picking up his assignment. To be fair to Long though, this is his first camp working with the first teams, so there will be some things that will simply come to him over time, and this is one of them.
Brandon Scherff is the brand new toy that the Redskins have on the Offensive Line, and he seems to be absolutely relishing his first NFL training camp. As Shawn Lauvao said on the Redskins Capital Connection podcast earlier this week, the Offensive Line is very much a “learned position”, meaning that it is immensely difficult for players to simply start playing the position and hit the ground running. Whilst this is true, and there have been times where Scherff has certainly looked like a rookie, there have also been times where Scherff looks like a seasoned veteran at the Right Tackle position.
That is going to be the key thing for Scherff to work on during camp and preseason; consistency. His best is absolutely sublime, picking up blitzes, moving guys around the pocket, and not getting over-powered. However each day he has a couple of plays where he’ll get pushed around by a player like Kerrigan or Murphy a bit too much, and the pocket starts collapsing. Coach Callahan will surely be liking what he sees out of Scherff so far, and could be seen working with the rookie on day 5 on his footwork and how to make sure that he is moving rushers around the pocket, rather than letting rushers move him into the pocket.
The Backups
We are predicting that the Redskins will carry four backups on the Offensive Line on the final 53 man roster.
Arie Kouandjio, the rookie Guard from Alabama with the surname that sends spell-check crazy, has demonstrated a lot of raw potential throughout the first five days of camp. Earlier in the week Coach Gruden said that he felt Kouandjio was pushing the starters well, but I think this is simply a case of ‘coach speak’, as both Lauvao and Long have looked a class above Kouandjio so far. Kouandjio’s strength is, no pun intended, his strength. At 6-5 and 310 lbs, the 23 year old has a huge wealth of raw strength he uses to his advantage. To continue developing, he’ll need to work on his blitz pickups and footwork.
Tom Compton, the Redskins Right Tackle from last year, has impressed the coaches with his versatility in camp this year. For both the second and third string units he has had stints at Right Tackle and Right Guard, and strangely enough has looked better at Guard. His experience will mean that should a starter on the Offensive Line go down injured, Compton can plug in to the line and know his role.
Both Morgan Moses and Josh LeRibius have had reasonably strong camps so far, and got a chance to run with the first team when both Williams and Lichtensteiger were given a rest day on Day 4. Rather than me telling you how I feel they have gone, I asked Jay Gruden during his Monday press conference how he felt they were coming on. Here is his answer:
Moses is really doing well. He’s coming off that injury and he’s gained a few pounds of muscle. I really like where Morgan is and where he’s going. I think he’s got a lot of upside obviously, and we felt that – that’s why we drafted him last year. He’s coming along at a good clip and as long as he just keeps studying and keeps working, he’s going to be in good shape. And LeRibeus, this is really the first time he’s played full-time center. He’s going with the twos, yesterday he got a chance to go with the ones. He’s progressing well. It’s a tough position, man. There’s a lot of calls and a lot of things a center has to take care of pre-snap. It’s brand new to him, let alone the snaps and the shotgun snaps have been efficient. We’re happy with his progress also.
The Two Minute Drill
Even though my intention was for my day five Training Camp report to focus solely on the Offensive Line, something happened at the end of practice that I couldn’t resist mentioning.
Coach Gruden put the first teams on the field, shouting out “Two minute drill! Two timeouts! Down 5! Gotta go! Gotta go!”.
The ball was placed at the Redskins own 20 yard line, meaning they were 80 yards away from pay dirt. What follows here is my live tweet coverage of that drill, with Robert Griffin III under center.
First teams now. 2 min drill, two TOs.
First snap RGIII empty backfield, quick pass to DJax 8 yards, but inbounds. No huddle. — Chad Ryan (@ChadwikoRCC) August 3, 2015
Second snap dumpoff to Thompson for first down. Next snap 8 yards to Reed inbounds.#Redskins — Chad Ryan (@ChadwikoRCC) August 3, 2015
Third down Ryan Grant gets the 1st down and gets out of bounds — Chad Ryan (@ChadwikoRCC) August 3, 2015
First down 48 yd line, RGIII finds Paul, but again inbounds.
Next snap connects with Paul again for a huge gain, out of bounds, FG range — Chad Ryan (@ChadwikoRCC) August 3, 2015
First and 10 at the 10 yard line. RGIII stands tall, checks down after progressions show no one open. 4 yard gain. — Chad Ryan (@ChadwikoRCC) August 3, 2015
With 20 seconds left on the clock, RGIII connects with Ryan Grant on an inside slant for the TD. Great 2 min drive from RGIII. #Redskins — Chad Ryan (@ChadwikoRCC) August 3, 2015
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Powered by Facebook Comments“Gimme Shelter?” Gimme a break. A patently ridiculous “news” story claiming the Rolling Stones are to play two concerts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to mark Israel’s 65th Independence Day in mid-April is gradually spreading across the Internet as fact.
It is featuring in numerous blogs, sparking debates between pro- and anti-Israel advocates, and even graduating to certain mainstream sites that ought to know better, and that will probably rush to take down their embarrassing, copy-cat articles when they read this.
The story was penned by Yori Yanover for the Jewish Press on Sunday, February 24, which should have been enough for most readers to realize that it was a hoax: Sunday was Purim, the festival marked, among other celebratory aspects, as a kind of kosher April 1, when Jewish publications traditionally carry fabricated items, easily recognized, in the irreverent spirit of the day.
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Even for the not-Jewishly aware, however, the fact that the article was illustrated with a blatantly photo-shopped image, “showing” the Stones “holding” a large plaque bearing Israel’s state symbol, ought to have given the game away.
That, plus the most cursory read of the article, with its cheerfully silly content — such as the assertion that the band will meet President Shimon Peres “who says he’s been a stoner for ages,” and that “David Ben-Gurion’s wife, Paula, was a Kinks fan.” It quotes Peres saying that when the Stones hit “Get Off of My Cloud” came out, “[Moshe] Dayan brought me the single from London… We played it for hours in the office until Paula Ben-Gurion threatened to throw us out.”
Oh, and the writer added one more minor clue. The piece concluded with the following caution: “This has been a Purim prank…”
Nonetheless, the piece has been rewritten, quoted, and reposted on innumerable blogs and websites. On freerepublic.com, it has sparked a bitter debate between talkbackers about the Stones’ liberal credentials that somehow descended, via arguments about Judaism and Zionism, to discussion of the devil tempting Jesus.
On Friday, the wonderful “news” turned up on Algemeiner.com from the “jns.org news service,” which had the decency to attribute the story to the Jewish Press even though the writer obviously hadn’t read it terribly carefully. (Don’t be surprised if these links don’t work for too long.)
Excitedly headlined “Rolling Stones tell Jew-haters to kiss their……. adds another date to Israel tour on Israel Independence Day,” the item also appeared on the highly appropriately titled blog, “Before it’s news.”
Better yet, it turned up on “Impeach Obama Today,” a blog that sneers in its title, “If newspapers and other media were doing their job, this blog would not exist.”Poor Dan Harmon. This is not the first time that weird conditions have been imposed on Community. But we’re keeping October 19th in our hearts in a number of ways, with or without Danny Donald Glover.
We still don’t actually know what, if anything, is going to happen with Community. But the exclusive deal with Hulu (the reason why the show isn’t on Netflix in the US) makes that the most likely place for a revival. And indeed, there have been talks about reviving the show there. Granted, “talks” means basically bupkis; just that someone at Hulu might conceivably be open to the idea. But hey, “talks” are better than “no talks,” right?
Which is, of course, all a roundabout way of saying “SIX SEASONS AND A MOVIE!”A 52-year-old man was arrested in the killing of an Upper Fells Point man over Labor Day weekend, Baltimore Police said Sunday.
Eric Jones was taken into custody Saturday by warrant apprehension detectives, K-9 officers and members of the SWAT team, police said. He was transported to Central Booking and charged with first-degree murder in the killing of 52-year-old George Yurek.
Yurek, of the 1900 block of E. Pratt St., was found bleeding from the head in an alley in the 1000 block of Brentwood Ave. on Sept. 3. He told police he had been beaten by an unknown man the night before. He later died at the hospital, and the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by blunt-force trauma.
Baltimore Police sought help from the public in identifying a man in reference to the homicide, and the information they obtained led to an arrest warrant. Jones, who is waiting to see a court commissioner, also has open warrants for first-degree assault and failure to register as a sex offender, according to police.
trichman@baltsun.com
twitter.com/TaliRichmanFor ages there has been speculation, scholarly and otherwise, about the place of prostitution in the Bible. The world’s oldest profession shows up in both the Old and New Testaments, and enough ambiguity surrounds its treatment that many see the issue as more complicated than the way Christian churches describe it today.
One of these questioners is Chester Brown, a veteran cartoonist who has used scholarly research to come up with “Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus: Prostitution and religious obedience in the Bible.” The book, published by Drawn & Quarterly, it not a work of scholarship, but an interpretation, both serious and funny. It includes stories about Ruth, Bathsheba, Tamar, Job, and, of course, Mary of Bethany. Brown doesn’t tell these stories to demean the women involved: he advocates for the legalization of sex work and respect for its practitioners. (He describes the roots of his thinking at length in notes for the book.) “Mary Wept” is in some ways an extension of Brown’s last book, “Paying For it,” about his many adventures as a john.
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We spoke to Brown – whom Jonathan Lethem has called “one of our greatest cartoonists ever” – from his home in Toronto. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Where did you first get a sense of prostitution in the Bible and how widespread it was?
It’s no secret -- there are quite a few Biblical characters who are prostitutes. The significant thing for me was when I first had that sense that perhaps the Virgin Mary was a prostitute. The book that prompted that thinking was called “The Illegitimacy of Jesus,” by a Biblical scholar named Jane Schaberg. Her theory was that Mary – the mother of Jesus – was a rape victim, and she pointed to the existence of these women in the genealogy for Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew – the odd fact that Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba and Ruth are all mentioned in there even though women are nearly never mentioned in ancient genealogies. There are several other women who could have been mentioned, but Matthew, or whoever wrote that gospel, seemed to be focusing on women who were involved in some kind of sexual impropriety. And that indicated to me, once I rethought the theory, not that Mary had been raped, but that she had been involved in some sexual impropriety.
Since at least two of those women, Rahab and Tamar, had been prostitutes, I think that’s what Matthew is saying – that the Virgin Mary was actually a prostitute. That’s what got me thinking in a different way about prostitution in the Bible.
How is prostitution typically depicted in the Bible? In a disapproving and moralistic way?
It’s disapproved of in a sense that we get the sense that women aren’t supposed to engage in it. But men who pay for sex are not necessarily disapproved of. I have the story of Judah and Tamar in there, and you don’t really get a sense that Judah is doing anything wrong.
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There’s a later story involving the famous strong man Sampson, who visits a prostitute, and you don’t get a sense that he’s breaking the rules here and should be punished. I don’t recall a Biblical law against paying for sex. But it’s not like prostitution is viewed as a good thing. It’s frowned upon in the Bible.
How long have you been interested in the Bible and ancient civilizations?
I guess I’ve always had a general interest in history. I grew up in a Christian household. In my early 20s, I started to have my doubts, and wasn’t going to church regularly. And then I met a young woman who was interested in me romantically.
And early on she told me she was a Christian, and asked me if I was a Christian too, and I said, “Oh yes, of course I’m a Christian.” But despite growing up in a go-to-church-every-Sunday-family, I didn’t have much sense of what it meant. So I decided to read a few books on the subject. I read one book of Biblical scholarship, and found myself completely fascinated… And that fascination really has never waned…
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Your previous book, “Paying for It,” is also about sex work and your own relationship to it. Can you describe the book a little bit for people who’ve not read it?
In the late ‘90s, when I would have been in my late 30s, I was involved with another woman, and she broke up with me, and I decided, “I don’t think I like being in boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. I don’t think I want to look for another girlfriend.” But of course I still wanted sex. So I decided to start paying for it. That started in the late ‘90s and continues until today. I still pay for sex on a regular basis, Although in 2003 I met a particular sex worker and started seeing her regularly. I guess it’s been 13 years now, I’m actually going to seeing her tonight.
I’m very happy paying for sex. I don’t know: I seem to like this better than being in romantic relationships.
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How do you want people to come away from your latest book? Do you want them to look back at the history of sex work in a different way?
Mostly, the book is Biblical interpretation, and I’m pushing certain ideas. My contention is that Jesus had a different relationship with prostitution than we think he did. I think his mother was a prostitute, and I think he had women around him who were also prostitutes. And that there was some sort of religious association there, involved with religious prostitution and goddess worship and that sort of thing. So yeah, I guess I’m trying to stimulate a debate about the subject and get people thinking that it was perhaps a possibility.
Have you discussed your ideas with mainstream Christians and gotten a sense of how it strikes them? Have people gotten angry as you’ve talked about it?
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I’ve really only talked about it with friends of mine, and most of my friends are not that religious. I do have one very good friend who is a Christian, who is obsessed with the subject, as I am too… When I told her about the idea of the book, she was very offended, which is not surprising. When I was done the book, before it was published, I gave it to her… She was very offended, and found it blasphemous. But for some reason we’re still friends anyway.
That was an extreme reaction, but I would expect that from a lot of Christians. A lot of Christians are not gonna be happy with this book.This post originally appeared in our weekly newsletter. Sign up here.
Remember Gamergate?
Or when the identity of that dentist who killed Cecil the Lion was posted?
Or that man who was wrongly identified as the Boston Marathon bomber?
These were all examples of how making someone’s personal, and sometimes private, information public on the internet led to intense harassment.
Today, each of the cases could easily be termed a form of doxxing — short for “dropping documents.” In the last few years, doxxing has increasingly been used as an online weapon to attack people. People’s “documents” — records of their addresses, relatives, finances — get posted online with the implicit or explicit invitation for others to shame or hector them.
But while doxxing may seem both creepy and dangerous, there is no single federal law against the practice. Such behavior has to be part of a wider campaign of harassment or stalking for it to be against the law.
This week I wrote about “doxxing” among the more extreme elements of the country’s political left and right, a world of zealotry and paranoia and anger and worry. Over the course of my reporting, the subject of my article got doxxed herself.
It was all fascinating and disturbing, and I think leaves people, myself included, with a lot to think about concerning doxxing, its effectiveness and appropriateness both. Reporters, after all, have been doing a form of doxxing for decades.
Read More Info Wars: Inside the Left’s Online Efforts to Out White Supremacists An anonymous group of vigilantes works to identify racists, a legally gray tactic known as doxxing that comes with plenty of risk for all.
But to hope of thinking clearly about doxxing, it always helps to better understand it and its practitioners.
So, how do doxxers dox? They use public records, like property records, tax documents, voter registration databases; they scour social media, real estate websites and even do real-life surveillance to gather information. Then, they publish the information online.
For some, doxxing is morally troubling. Law professor Danielle Citron is one. “It provides a permission structure to go outside the law and punish each other,” she says. “It’s like shaming in cyber-mobs.”
Then, there is the matter of doxxing the wrong person.
Here’s an example: After the infamous “Unite the Right” protest in Charlottesville, an attendee wearing an “Arkansas engineering” shirt was identified as Kyle Quinn, a professor at the University of Arkansas. Except Kyle Quinn wasn’t in Charlottesville. That didn’t stop the internet, and so when “Kyle Quinn” was doxxed as one of those torch — bearing protesters in Charlottesville, Quinn spent a weekend in hiding due to the amount of online abuse he subsequently received. The real protester, a former engineering student named Andrew M. Dodson, later apologized.
In some cases, people doxxed after taking part in white supremacist marches have been arrested, lost their jobs or allegedly been disowned by their families.
Other experts question whether doxxing white supremacists is a useful tactic. “Is this an effective means of challenging racist views?” ask Ajay Sandhu and Daniel Marciniak, researchers at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. They argue that doxxing simply isolates people, forcing them into smaller parts of the internet. “You don’t really challenge them, you allow them to exist in those isolated spaces,” Sandhu says.
Some tips on how to protect yourself from doxxing
The short answer is: You probably can’t fully. But we have a few tips that will help make the information you want kept private more secure.
Two-factor authentication
Two-factor authentication adds another level of security for online accounts. You should set this up for your social media, online banking, and any account connected to your credit cards (Venmo, PayPal, Amazon), and things with recurring payments that have credit card info like Netflix. For social media, here’s a how-to from Facebook on enabling two-factor authentication for your Facebook account, and here’s one from Twitter.
Increase privacy on your social media accounts
There may be, and probably is, personal information that is viewable by the public on your social media accounts. Or your social media accounts are completely public. It’s worth looking at the privacy of those. Here are a few things to do to button those up:
For Facebook, you can adjust your privacy settings here. Some boxes to check:
Set your profile so it can’t be searched.
Set your friends list to private.
Set any older content to private, which you can do in bulk.
Set all past profile pictures to private.
Also helpful to reduce personal information in your public profile:
Remove your header image.
Remove any featured photos.
Consider removing your profile picture, or making sure it’s something professional/benign in case it gets copied and pasted elsewhere.
For the other accounts — Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, etc. — here are some basic measures to take:
Check profile pictures and remove or update these images to make sure it’s something professional/benign in case it gets copied and pasted elsewhere.
Check who can follow you and/or see your posts.
Check account security settings; like Facebook, each platform has privacy/security settings.
Consider making Instagram feeds private, as even un-geotagged photos can provide a lot of useful location information.
How strong are your passwords?
Computer-generated passwords are best. Services like 1Password can help you create strong passwords. Some accounts will show you if your password is strong or weak. If it’s “weak,” don’t use it. Here are some more detailed practices for creating strong passwords.
Protect your email accounts
Where is your email address located out on the internet? Do you want it there? If not, remove your personal email address from personal websites, social media accounts or wherever else it might be.
Remove yourself from people search sites
Here’s how to remove yourself from many popular people search sites. These sites can reveal relatives, phone numbers, addresses (old and new), etc., that can be used by angry internet trolls to harass you and your family. Some of these sites are more obnoxious than others to opt out of, but if you go through all of them, it will take you out of most of the common online search services. Also, never provide sensitive information like your credit card number or Social Security number while opting out. Each of the links below will take you to the current opt-out page or instructions on how to opt out:
PeopleFinders : Search yourself in any states you’ve lived in and click “This is me” to have it removed.
: Search yourself in any states you’ve lived in and click “This is me” to have it removed. Intelius : You need to scan your ID and scratch out your photo and DL number. Within a few days, they should remove you.
: You need to scan your ID and scratch out your photo and DL number. Within a few days, they should remove you. Whitepages (non-Premium): Search your name on whitepages.com and copy the URL. Then go to the address linked here and paste it in. You’ll need to give them a phone number and then they call and read you a code.
(non-Premium): Search your name on whitepages.com and copy the URL. Then go to the address linked here and paste it in. You’ll need to give them a phone number and then they call and read you a code. Whitepages Premium : Frustratingly, Whitepages Premium results will still show up for you if you remove yourself from whitepages.com. You’ll need to file a ticket with their support staff, but in our experience they’re pretty quick to remove you. Just search for your name in Whitepages Premium, copy the link, and fill out this form.
: Frustratingly, Whitepages Premium results will still show up for you if you remove yourself from whitepages.com. You’ll need to file a ticket with their support staff, but in our experience they’re pretty quick to remove you. Just search for your name in Whitepages Premium, copy the link, and fill out this form. Spokeo : Much like whitepages.com, search yourself on Spokeo and copy the profile URL. Then paste it into the opt-out form here.
: Much like whitepages.com, search yourself on Spokeo and copy the profile URL. Then paste it into the opt-out form here. BeenVerified : This site is very particular about the spelling and form of names. For example, a search result came up for Kenneth Schwencke but not Ken Schwencke. But once you’ve located your name, or versions of your name, opt out here.
: This site is very particular about the spelling and form of names. For example, a search result came up for Kenneth Schwencke but not Ken Schwencke. But once you’ve located your name, or versions of your name, opt out here. Other sites: Once you've scrubbed the above listings, it's a good idea to Google your name and the words “address” or “phone number” and see what comes up. If something does, find a way to manually opt out of each one of those sites.
Worth remembering here: Due to the nature of these services, your name might pop back up on them again. It’s worth it to re-check every few months to see if you’re still listed.
A step further: Data brokers
The sites above often get your information from data brokers. To ensure that your data doesn’t pop back up in other types of “PeopleFinders,” you have to go directly to the data brokers. This, however, can take time and sometimes be complicated. Here’s a list of some of the biggest data brokers and their opt-out pages:
A note on voter files
Voter files are public records in nearly every state, but some states block the release of information for certain people. For example, Florida conceals voter registration information for individuals participating in the state’s Address Confidentiality Program for victims of domestic violence and stalking. It’s worth checking with your local or state election authority to see how your state operates.
If you want more, here are some guides we are particularly fond of:Please enable Javascript to watch this video
TAYLOR -- It's not quite the time of year for graduation, but a man in Lackawanna County finally got his high school diploma more than 70 years after he left school.
A World War II veteran received that diploma at his old high school in Taylor Tuesday night.
Clearly emotional, George Fricovsky can now add high school graduate to the list of his lifetime accomplishments. It’s an achievement that's taken 72 years to become a reality.
The 90-year-old received his diploma at Riverside High School during Riverside's school board meeting.
Making matters even more emotional, giving George his diploma was Riverside's Vice Principal David Walsh, who happens to be George's grandson.
“To be an administrator of this school district where he went and be able to give him this is huge,” said Walsh.
George left the then-Taylor High his junior year in 1944 to fight in World War II.
Stationed in France, he was injured by a German hand grenade and was honorably discharged with a Purple Heart.
Back stateside, he joined the work force and raised a family.
“He's always talked about his one thing he wishes he was able to do was to graduate high school,” said Walsh.
This was all a surprise for George, planned by his family. George only thought he was going to lead the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the board meeting.
“I was really surprised, never expected this,” said George.
“We wanted to surprise him and David did a great job, so we're happy. We're happy he got it,” said George’s daughter, Diane Nagy.
“It was great. I know my mom was watching down from heaven and she's definitely proud of him,” said George’s daughter Karen Walsh. “He always felt unaccomplished |
we have Hillary Clinton complaining about Donald Trump's groping women and Trump complaining that Clinton trashed women assaulted by her husband, both with some basis in fact.
In the meantime, royalist politics are taking us further from Fukuyama's Denmark. Government has been growing less competent. Look at Obamacare, veterans hospitals and immigration authorities failing to deport some 100,000 immigrants here illegally, including some who committed other crimes.
The rule of law is under continued attack. Hillary Clinton was not indicted for violating criminal laws by setting up her private email system and repeatedly lying about it, and the Justice Department has hampered the FBI investigation into the pay-to-play operations of the Clinton Foundation.
Trump repeatedly criticized a federal judge and has called for changing libel law -- i.e., for revising a 50-year-old Supreme Court interpretation of the First Amendment -- so he can sue reporters who write stories he doesn't like.
Each candidate has argued, persuasively, that the other should be disqualified from the presidency. Under a proper republican standard of accountability, both candidates would be. Unfortunately, elections are a zero-sum game; all but one candidate must lose, but one must win.
At the end of the Constitutional Convention, a bystander asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government it would produce. "A republic, if you can keep it," he said. We're not doing a very good job of that this year.Four pro-independence writers and activists look at the view of Yanis Varoufakis, the new Greek Finance Minister, on Scotland and currency
A REPORT last week by economists at the University of Glasgow argued that it was currency, not 'the vow', which swayed undecided voters towards a no vote in September's independence referendum. The evidence for this is contested, but what no one contests is that the question of currency was an important, and much talked about, part of the independence debate.
The SNP's support for a 'currency union' - shared sovereignty over monetary policy with the Bank of England - was a point Better Together sought to expose: what if the rest of UK said 'no' to Salmond's deal?
Salmond refused to outline a plan B even after all of the UK establishment parties ruled out a currency union, but after severe pressure from the audience in his first TV debate with Alistair Darling, in the second debate he fired back with "three for the price of one", outlining how the pound sterling could be used without the UK state's permission and also saying a Scottish currency was an option.
Salmond was widely considered to have won that debate, and with that the currency union faded from the media's focus in the final two weeks as polls tightened and attention instead turned to which powers Gordon Brown had begun promising.
Now, six months on, the surging popularity of Greek anti-austerity party Syriza and its election as government has prompted fresh debate in Scotland about the future.
Yanis Varoufakis, the new Greek finance minister, offers much to talk about. Varoufakis has risen to global stardom in the space of a few weeks in his transformation from obscure, left-field economist to finance minister, playing a high stakes game which could be pivotal in determining the future of the European Union.
Aside from his media-friendly good looks and sharp dress sense, he's a character who has managed to capture the attention of commentators the world over. US magazine The Week ran a column simply titled: "Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis is the most interesting man in the world."
And the most interesting man in the world has a connection to Scotland. Varoufakis spent time lecturing at Glasgow University in the late 1990s, and was singled out for thanks by the university's current principal, Anton Muscatelli, in a paper on interest rates.
During the referendum on Scottish independence, Varoufakis had interesting things to say on the currency question.
In a blog in March 2014, Varoufakis wrote: "Scotland should state its intention to decouple from sterling, once independent, rather than petitioning for a continuation of its subservient role in an asymmetrical sterling union."
Varoufakis argues that a shared currency with the Bank of England would tie the Scottish economy to a system built to work to the advantage of the City of London, hinder Scottish growth and risk insolvency.
Further, Varoufakis says Scotland has several advantages in pursuing its own currency: already existing Scottish banknotes, meaning the transition to the Scottish pound is straightforward and limits the possibility of a run on Scottish banks, and a relatively low public debt, meaning the currency would be underwritten by financial security.
Varoufakis is scathing in his assessment of the political consequences of not supporting an independent Scottish currency: "The SNP has undermined the referendum's capacity to denounce the denigration of the Scottish nation's integrity by clinging onto a sterling union that, according to Mrs Thatcher's logic, surrenders Scottish sovereignty back to London even before it has been won.
"I can think of no better'strategy' than the SNP's commitment to sterling if its aim is to lose the referendum and to alienate those Scots who want to vote with pride for an independent Scotland that seeks a path radically different to the one England embarked upon in 1979."
Varoufakis' case for a Scottish currency is made in a curious context: arguing against the same thing for Greece. He says that the factors which would make an independent currency the right move in Edinburgh do not pertain in Athens: Scotland having its own banknotes and having a relatively stable financial regime would give it the strength to survive and thrive a currency transition, whereas the impact on Greece would be "undeniably, shattering".
CommonSpace asked four leading pro-independence writers and activists who were sceptical about the SNP's position on currency and all had something to say about the economics of independence what they thought about Varoufakis' view. Here's what they said.
Jim Sillars, Former SNP MP and author of 'In Place of Fear II'
As Syriza is learning, a common currency has more than one player. In my view the only way out for Greece is default, out of the euro, and back to a single currency. Default is not something new in the world, and I don't think Greece, on the road back to growth as it would be with its own currency, will find institutions willing to lend.
I suspect that if Greece does break free, China may step in to help as it, and others have stated their unhappiness with western dominated institutions like the IMF and World Bank.
As for Scotland, the problem with a currency union, although with not so many members as the eurozone, is that it takes two to agree. All Osborne needed to do was say No, and we had permanent uncertainty in a vital area of policy. He was given the initiative and the upper hand.
Our Scottish notes are an advantage. I put it to the Standard Life CEO that if we had our own separate currency, pegged one-to-one to sterling, given that his company must already use our notes for various purposes, that such a currency would pose no problems for him. He replied that he did not go into hypothetical matters, although he was quite happy to do so on the hypothetical common currency.
James Foley, co-author of 'Yes: the Radical Case for Independence'
According to orthodox economists, currency unions should stabilise our economies and reduce international inequalities. But in reality, they heighten instability and uneven development, and may even lead to the suspension of parliamentary democracy, as we have seen in Italy, Spain, and Greece.
Currency unions allow powerful nations or regions to impose their terms on weaker, often defenceless, economies and social groups. German big business has literally no concern for the democracies of Southern Europe, just as the UK Treasury and the Bank of England have been blissfully unaware of Scotland's economic problems.
The SNP knows this. Mike Russell said, as late as 2006: "A country without its own currency is a country not only without a steering wheel, but also without brakes and an accelerator."
Russell even said that Scotland should try to get its own currency before full-blown independence, and that independence would mean very little without an autonomous currency. This is an exaggeration of course, but with a grain of truth.
The SNP decided to back a currency union for political and ideological reasons, believing that many Scots had unconditional faith in certain British institutions. In other words, they backed the pound for the same reason they backed the monarchy: because they were unwilling to face down sentimentalism with a rational argument.
Syriza is rightly conscious of the risks of a drastic Euro exit. It would be irresponsible to dismiss these problems. But Greece's democratic will might not be enough alone to face down Germany, which is essentially an occupying power.
Syriza's hopes will then rest on a broader European alliance, as Varoufakis admits. The question is, do the forces exist for this alliance? The problem is that Greece stands as the only country with a viable anti-austerity government. It would need a very dramatic leftward shift in European parliaments, coupled with resistance on the streets, to make this possible. If not, Greece will face a choice between two options: either capitulate to a slightly milder austerity, or break from the Eurozone with all the risks that implies.
Duncan McCabe, Radical Independence Dundee activist and organiser of an upcoming conference on alternative economic approaches to independence
That the currency issue was the fatal flaw in the Yes campaign is now almost universally accepted. It failed politically, as Varoukis points out in his article, because Scotland could never achieve sovereignty within the sterling zone when monetary policy was to be decided in London and resultingly, in the interests of the City of London.
It also failed tactically, as it gave the unionists the power of veto causing uncertainty and finally fear amongst sections of the electorate.
An independent Scottish currency was and still is advocated by the radical left and the Greens. There certainly would be the advantages Varoukis mentions in the important transition phase if banknotes were unchanged, but it is not in itself a safeguard against capital flight which is the biggest threat to new or radical states.
Whether we like it or not, a new Scottish currency would need to secure the confidence of the international markets at least in the short term with a clear, credible monetary plan.
However, with at least five years until a second referendum, we have an opportunity not only to discuss a better currency plan but to actually build an alternative Scottish complementary currency now. Is it necessary to choose between single currencies such as Sterling, Scots pounds or euros? A multi-currency eco-system is also possible and the creation of a national currency running parallel to sterling could make a post-indy transition that much easier.
It's an idea which will be discussed in detail at #RIC2015 with experts from the New Economics Foundation outlining their ideas for a debt-free, permanently circulating, complementary currency which could help refocus our economy pre-independence.
Robin McAlpine, Director of the Common Weal campaign group and think-tank:
When the independence referendum campaign started, quite a lot of people believed that it was strategically wise to promise a sterling union. While that position was understandable it meant that we never really had a proper discussion of a Scottish currency. From where we stand now I suspect that few people still believe that the approach taken to currency in the referendum helped the case.
There is a period of time now before we face another referendum and this is the time in which we should properly have the debate we didn't have before. I now firmly believe that any case to be made for an independent Scotland in the future will have to be based on a solid proposal for a properly planned independent Scottish currency.
Do you have a different view to offer on currency and independence? CommonSpace would like to hear it. Get in touch with the editor at angela@common.scot
Picture courtesy of Day DonaldsonGoogle is Adding Dual SIM Features to its Dialer App Despite Lack of Dual SIM on the Pixel
Dual SIM smartphones are popular in many parts of the world. A Dual SIM phone has two SIM slots, which means that users can use SIM cards of two different carriers in a single device. At one time, few Android smartphones had support for Dual SIM. However, the feature has exploded in popularity in the last few years, to the point where phones with dual SIM slots are common in many regions such as India, the Middle East and Africa, etc.
This has resulted in smartphone manufacturers releasing Dual SIM variants of their phones for specific markets. Other OEMs then went a step further and equipped all their smartphones with dual SIM slots. In some countries such as India, users these days are hard-pressed to find smartphones which only have a single SIM slot, as all the popular phones now have two SIM slots. Users, too, have embraced this feature to benefit from flexibility, cheaper prices (for example, by using the calling services of one carrier and mobile data from another carrier), and carrying one device instead of two separate ‘Work’ and ‘Personal’ devices.
The feature never became popular in the West, though. This was because of multiple reasons, but the primary reason is that in markets such as the US, phones are primarily sold by carriers – which have no interest in selling phones with two SIM slots in order to keep the consumer locked-in to their services. OEMs such as OnePlus do sell Dual SIM phones unlocked in the US, but overall, the feature continues to be a niche one in the Western market.
This is why Google still does not have Dual SIM support in its Pixel phones. Nexus devices did not support dual SIMs either. The company also did not release a separate Dual SIM variant of the Pixel and Pixel 2 for regions where Dual SIM support is the norm, making flagships from other OEMs like Samsung all the more appealing.
Now, though, we have seen three commits that have been accepted into AOSP. These commits confirm that Google is adding Dual SIM features to its Dialer app, despite the lack of Dual SIM on the Pixel devices. It should be noted that there are multiple Dual SIM smartphones which use relatively stock Android, so even if Google does not implement two SIM slots in the next-generation Pixel, other phones will benefit as the OEMs won’t have to add in the functionality themselves.
Commit number 541646 is titled: ‘Implement preferred SIM‘. The description states:
“Before prompting the user to select the SIM, CallingAccountSelector will lookup the fallback preferred SIM database to see if a preferred SIM is already set and bypass the selection. If the number is in contacts the user will also have the option to store the selected SIM as preferred.“
It means that Google is implementing a preferred SIM database, which will mean users won’t have to select their preferred SIM all the time. The CallingAccountSelector will see if a preferred SIM is already set, and if so, it will then bypass the selection. It should be noted that this feature has already been added by multiple OEMs in their ROMs.
The second commit is numbered 541790 and is titled: ‘Implement suggested SIM‘. The description states:
“This CL adds a module that can query providers to aid users choosing which SIM to call with.“
The commit implements suggested SIM functionality, in which the Dialer will suggest users which SIM to use for any function by querying providers.
Finally, commit number 541802 is titled: ‘Add preferred SIM meta-data to dialer manifest‘. Its description states:
“Contacts need to check the meta-data to decide if the preferred SIM UI should be shown.“
The contacts app will check the preferred SIM meta-data to decide if the user will be shown the preferred SIM UI or not. Related to the first commit, this means that the UI will not be shown if the meta-data shows that users have already selected their preferred SIM card.
These features have now been merged in the AOSP Dialer. They are a welcome addition, considering that the popularity of Dual SIM Android smartphones is not going to die anytime soon. Google may even have a plan to equip future Pixel series with two SIM slots, at least for specific regions.Google data analysis suggests that “porn” and “suicide” searches dominate late night online inquiries, while searches for free video games and other anonymous searches flow throughout the day.
A New York Times analysis of Google’s “very sharp” data for New York state pinpointed some rather precise searches throughout the day and night.
“Unblocked games,” or those not blocked by school administrators, peaks at 8:04 a.m., and stays high throughout the day until 1:30 p.m. Searches for “weather,” “prayer” and “news” peak before 5:30 a.m., suggesting Americans wake up early across their respective time zones.
Bizarre questions and those pursuing “anxiety” and “suicide” answers are rampant throughout late night hours. Google’s released data doesn’t show the total number of searches, but rather, the search rate for a word and at what time it’s highest – meaning an unusually large amount of searches went out at that respective hour.
The term “symptoms” is highest late at night, with worrisome Google searches seeking information on heart attacks, cancers, tumor and H.I.V. symptoms.
The query of “why is my poop green?” is asked of Google most between 5 and 6 a.m. and then again between 6 and 7 p.m.
In the U.K., searches for “Tinder” peak at 12:30 a.m., searches for porn peak at 1:30 a.m., and almost exactly one hour later, the search term “lonely” hits its peak at 2:30 a.m. In the U.S., searches between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. are key times for humans’ most vast inquiries: “What is the meaning of consciousness? Does free will exist? Is there life on other planets? The popularity of these questions late at night may be a result, in part, of cannabis use. Search rates for ‘how to roll a joint’” reports The Times.
“Porn” is three times more popular among men than women, with midnight to 2 a.m. being the key time period. “Literotica” appeals primary to women, with a similarly early-morning presence from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m.
And search terms get sloppier as the day progresses, the Times reports of the Google data.
“Between 2 and 3 a.m., search rates for ‘forgot password’ are 60 percent higher than average. They are lowest around 9 a.m. Between 2 and 3 a.m., we are more than twice as likely to misspell ‘facebook’ as ‘facbook’ and nearly twice as likely to misspell ‘weather’ as ‘wether.’”by
When I first saw the teaser trailer for Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (which will from here on be referred to as SHIELD), I wasn’t impressed. While the internet was going crazy over it, I was sitting in my own little bubble of dislike, hoping what I saw as dreadful clunky dialogue wouldn’t be an indication of the entire script.
Despite my misgivings, I was excited for SHIELD. I was hopeful that the trailer was simply a ploy to get those who enjoy Joss Whedon’s trademark pop culture saturated dialogue, delivered by a mismatched team of Whedon box-tickers, to tune in. That in the actual pilot, the clichés would be kept to a minimum, and instead the show would be a taught, tense, action-drama.
Suffice to say, SHIELD lived up to the wrong expectations. Not only is the entire pilot an endless string of [supposedly clever] one-liners, barely managing to hold together the melodrama and paper thin plot, the acting is sub-par, and it doesn’t work as an introduction for those not already well versed on the Marvel Cinematic Universe – believe it or not, the entire world hasn’t seen every instalment of the cinematic behemoth. Viewing this show without favour is tough, but if you ignore the good faith of the MCU, and don’t let the Whedon fans sway your opinion, the writing is on the wall. SHIELD Isn’t great. I’m not even sure I can stretch to call it mediocre.
What I wanted from SHIELD was something like Burn Notice or Covert Affairs, with a bit of Breaking Bad grittiness, but this is network TV, so I would have been more than thrilled with an Alias vibe (the TV show, rather than the comic). What we got, was NCIS crossed with Eureka (thanks to @myleftkidney for this analogy). There was also an underlying sensation that this show could have been a failed nineties attempt to compete with Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
SHIELD opens with narration, which is common for a pilot episode. The narration is also an indication of the quality of acting throughout. I’m not sure how to describe Skye’s (Chloe Bennet) opening monologue, other than dire. Not only is it badly written, it’s overacted, and doesn’t at all have the tone you would expect of underground journalism, which is what this is supposed to read as. It does however, inform us that SHIELD has been made. There are people who know about the organisation, even if they aren’t aware of their exact operating capacity, and that conspiracy theorists are keen to get their claws into any leads they can dig up.
We’re introduced to the pilot’s main plot point straight away, just like any other procedural. The plot point is Michael – a juiced up black dude who isn’t Luke Cage, played by J. August Richards.
No seriously, that’s all this guy is. A inner city black guy cliché with little to no personality other than he’s an angry factory worker single father, who got fired and is now enhanced by something called Project Centipede. He’s also the only character in the whole pilot that doesn’t look like they stepped straight out of a fashion catalogue – clothes, makeup and all. He’s basically the worst kind of vaguely racist black guy trope there is, and this continues right to the end of the episode.
Everyone else is impossibly pretty, and well put together. Even Skye who is supposed to be living out of a van, exposing the conspiracies of the world, has perfect hair, and even more perfectly pressed clothes. Agent Ward (Brett Dalton) has the personality of a brick, and the scientific team of Fitz and Simmons (Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge), are clearly a product of Whedon’s fandom awareness – a pre-loaded ship complete with it’s own portmanteau (FitzSimmons), and brain-twin style dialogue. The only shining light of the team is Ming-Na Wen as Melinda May, who doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, despite the large hints of an interesting, if cliché, back story.
Considering Whedon’s championing of strong female characters, I find it surprising that he has apparently chosen Agent Ward as the secondary main character after Coulson (Clark Gregg), rather than Melinda May. I can’t help but feel they’re keeping things open for Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill to come to the show full time once How I Met Your Mother has finished.
Joss has taken an idea right out of about fifty percent of MCU fanfic, and explained Phil Coulson’s survival (after he was callously stabbed in the chest by Loki) as a way to motivate the Avengers. Yawn. If I wanted that explanation I’d just head on over to AO3 and read any one of a few thousand stories with this same idea. They’d probably be better written and more interesting, too.
Continuing with Coulson, I couldn’t help but feel that he was out of character during the whole show. We know him as a man with a singular expression, occasionally making a wry observation, or coming out with a memorably clever quote. A man with a slightly sick sense of humour, that delivers his lines with a benign, bland, almost vacant look. In SHIELD, he cracks wise every second line, smiles often, gets a bit shouty, and talks down bad guys without a megaphone in hand. Overall, temporary death seems to have changed Phil into an entirely different person. Even if he is an LMD, it’s still a bit weird.
So character wise, it’s a misfire. I can only hope the actors grow more into their roles over coming episodes, but thus far, even their accents feel fake. It’s not all bad – there are some moments where Skye is genuinely charming and a bit goofy, and Fitz and Simmons are pretty funny with their cute brand of talking over each other humour, but the good moments are unfortunately outweighed by the not so great. Is it too much to ask to have one single character that gets through an episode without snark?
Most of what I’m presuming was a huge budget, has clearly been spent on Joss Whedon’s creative input, with what was left over used to create Lola and her groan inducing reveal at the end of the episode. The visual effects are on par with, or below what we were seeing in TV shows like 24, Alias, and Dark Angel, back in the early 2000s (shows that SHIELD should be looking to for more than just visual cues).
While I have issues with the acting and visual effects, my main gripe is the writing. Like most of Whedon’s shows, SHIELD is trying very hard to be self aware. So hard, that it manages to come full circle, and lose itself in what it’s trying to be. The episode felt like little more than a bunch of snarky dialogue and in-universe name drops, strung together with various instances of lampshade hanging to get through forty-three minutes, in the hopes of snagging viewers with references to various parts of the Marvel Multiverse. There is little here to grab the interest of someone completely new to both Marvel, and Joss Whedon’s style of storytelling. I feel like the team of Whedon/Whedon/Tancharoen have forgotten that a shows success isn’t just about generating approval from an existing fanbase. It’s about gaining new viewers, introducing them to this universe, and keeping everyone interested.
The one liners not only become tiresome, but some are downright offensive. One in particular, which I think may have been aimed at taking a dig at how we treat celebrity here in the real world, instead came across as derogatory towards female cosplayers, a problem that could have been easily rectified by having Skye call out Agent Ward’s attitude. Instead, she shrunk away and admitted in a small voice, that she was one of the fangirls he was referring to. Considering the prevalence of negativity towards women involved in geekdom, this is not at all a good message to send.
Over all, ABC has missed a golden opportunity to deliver a gritty, interesting spy drama, and has instead given us something that would have worked just as well as a cartoon. Part of the MCUs appeal, is the way it has managed to ground itself in the real world, instead of being a direct adaptation of the comics. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. feels like it has forgotten this in its very first episode, but it’s not until the final scene that the ability to suspend your disbelief goes from wavering to shattered.
Despite these misgivings, I am going to continue watching, if only to keep up with MCU continuity. I sincerely hope the show improves, and with the showrunning being handled by Whedon’s younger brother Jed, and his wife Maurissa Tancharoen, there may be scope for something new and compelling to come from a pilot that had more failures than successes.
Rating: 3/10
Like this: Like Loading...We have plenty to celebrate for Bike Month in May, and here’s one more thing to add: The Bay Bridge People Path will be open seven days a week with a brand new vista point to welcome you onto Yerba Buena Island.
For people enjoying the Bay Bridge People Path, the SF County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) is nearing completion of a new vista point at the landing on Yerba Buena Island. Here, you’ll be able to fill up on water, use a restroom, rest up and take in gorgeous views from this unique vantage point.
We were thrilled when the East Span path finally opened on weekends in October. Caltrans has completed demolition of the old span well ahead of schedule, allowing access to the path on weekdays beginning on Tuesday, May 2.
There will be additional information regarding the development on both Yerba Buena Island and Treasure Island. Noting that these areas are both under heavy construction, we recommend only those who are confident and experienced at biking to continue onto local roads.
Now our sights turn to the West Span, where we look to extend the People Path all the way to downtown San Francisco. With an estimated 10,000 people biking here every day, the design team will reveal preferred concepts later this year, and we will need your help to get us there.
Join Our Bay Bridge Mailing List
Being able to bike across the Bay would be the ultimate symbol of our region’s sustainable, environmentally-friendly values. The opening of this path is timely, as we celebrate how far we’ve come and how much we still have to go during the following week for Bike to Work Day on May 11.
Many thanks go to both Caltrans and SFCTA for their efforts getting us to this point. Our friends at Bike East Bay have also pushed to make this celebration possible, and we continue to work together on planning for a Bay Bridge People Path that spans the entire width of the Bay.WNBA star Glory Johnson (@MISSVOL25) and her fianceé @BrittneyGriner
My apologies. I meant, this is what two feminists look like:
WNBA superstar Brittney Griner — and her WNBA star fiancee Glory Johnson — were both arrested for allegedly attacking each other in Phoenix yesterday … TMZ Sports has learned.
Law enforcement sources tell us cops were called to Griner’s home around 4:30 PM on Wednesday...
Both women were arrested and booked by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for assault and disorderly conduct. Griner and Johnson were released around 4 AM on Thursday.
Griner plays for the Phoenix Mercury.
The two got engaged last August and had been planning to get married next month in Phoenix. No word if the wedding is still on....
According to the police report, obtained by TMZ Sports, Brittney told cops the two had been fighting for days and were having serious “relationship issues.”
As for the specific incident, cops say there were several people at the home when Brit and Glory began to argue — and the fight turned physical.
Cops say Brittney admitted to throwing a dog bowl at the wall — and then the two began fighting.
Glory’s sister eventually called police because people “couldn’t get them pulled apart” and she didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
When cops arrived, officers say Brittney had several cuts — and a bite wound. Glory was bleeding from the lip.
Celebrity lesbian damage control:
WNBA superstar Brittney Griner says her engagement to Glory Johnson is STILL ON … despite their domestic violence arrests this morning … TMZ Sports has learned.
Griner’s attorney Michael Cantor tells us … “The last few months have been an extremely stressful time for Brittney and Glory. They will continue to work through these hardships together.”
As we previously reported, both Griner and Johnson — who’s also in the WNBA — were arrested for assault in Arizona this week after cops say they attacked each other during a heated argument.
The couple has been engaged since last year and are scheduled to get married on May 8th.
Griner’s attorney did not say if the two will be pushing back the wedding date in light of the arrests — but says the two are determined to “handle this family matter.”
Cantor adds, “Glory and Brittney sincerely apologize for the distraction this has caused their families, respective teams, the WNBA, sponsors and fans.”
You will notice that the word “lesbian” does not appear anywhere in TMZ’s reporting about this (alleged) crime, for the same reason that news coverage does not include the word “lesbian” when female teachers molest their female students. That is to say, “lesbian” and “gay” are words that are only ever used by the media in a positive context, or in stories about gays and lesbians being victims of homophobia.
According to the liberal media, all homosexuals are virtuous and innocent and thus, when they commit crimes, the magic words “gay” or “lesbian” are never to be used. This rule was stretched to the limit last year, when Walter Lee Williams, a Ph.D. in anthropology who was “an eminent professor of gender and sexuality studies” at the University of Southern California, pleaded guilty in federal court to traveling the world to pursue sex with boys as young as 9. You see, Professor Williams was co-editor of a 1997 book, Overcoming Heterosexism and Homophobia, and also co-edited the 2003 book Gay and Lesbian Rights in the United States: A Documentary History.
Common sense says: “Hey, there’s a dot here and a dot there and over here’s another dot, so maybe they’re... connected?”
In 2015, however, common sense is a hate crime, so feminists — who demand stringent enforcement of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) as a way to punish men — are notably silent about violence against women when this involves two celebrity lesbians. We are not supposed to notice this, just like we are not supposed to notice how prevalent lesbianism is in the world of female athletics. (Really, are there any heterosexual women playing NCAA Division I sports?) Meanwhile, the reality of lesbian domestic violence has some lesbians straining to claim that this isn’t like, y’know, the bad kind of domestic violence that men do. No, what happened with Griner and Johnson “is fairly common and much less likely to include sexual or emotional violence and is not about controlling a partner.”
Also, while male violence against women requires its own federal law with special punitive authority, “Communities, Not Police, Are Our Best Bet for Ending LGBTQ Domestic Violence.” In other words, don’t call the cops when a lesbian is beating up her girlfriend, because that might make the “community” look bad. Remember this 2012 headline?
A Victim of Racism, Sexism, Homophobia
and Her Violent Lesbian Ex-Girlfriend
WNBA star Jennifer Lacy was the victim of a frightening attack by her former teammate and ex-girlfriend Chamique Holdsclaw.
Well, how dare you notice that they are both black, female and gay? In terms of feminist “intersectionality,” these women are both oppressed victims, and therefore neither of them can be responsible. Blame the white racist heteropatriarchy!
Nobody has suggested banning crazy lesbians from the WNBA because that would pretty much be the end of the WNBA. Finally, a few inspirational words from Toni Morrison:
“I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager
in the back. And I want to see a white man
convicted for raping a black woman.”
That’s some Nobel Prize-winning feminist inspiration, my friends!
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CommentsOn Jan. 7, Carey Price was named to the Canadian Olympic team. At the time of the announcement, he was 20-11-4 with a.927 save percentage and the odds on favourite to be the starter in Sochi. I had recently endorsed him for the starting job based on his impressive work since the beginning of the 2011-12 season. But since Jan. 7, Price has been a statistical disaster registering an.886 save percentage while winning only three of eight starts.
At times over that span he has appeared spectacular, but the eye test has always been unreliable. Could the blame possibly lie elsewhere? Like, say, with the coaching system?
A goaltender’s performance relies on the amount of shots they face with the ability to set. When forced into transition or dealing with a change in puck-direction, save percentage drops.
With that in mind, I studied 15,000 shots and separated them based on individual-game performances—save percentages above and below the league average. I then calculated the different game situations and charted the shots. The results are similar to my previous findings.
A performance below league average also coincides with a tougher workload—more transition shots, deflections and chances from the home plate area. This does not excuse poor performance, but in some instances a poor save percentage is the direct result of team performance, not poor netminding. Goaltenders suffer from wild fluctuations during any given season. Why varies depending on situation. It can be attributed to poor performance, randomness or shoddy defensive coverage. James Reimer is currently in a 10-game slump where he has put up an.870 save percentage after the most dominant run of his short career. Is it bad play or lack of support on a Leafs team that surrenders a ton of shots?
The King of consistency, Henrik Lundqvist recently went through the worst stretch of his career. A seven-game span where he produced an.857 save percentage.
I looked to see if Lundqvist’s December struggles were performance based, or if the Rangers coverage had contributed to his plummeting save percentage. I found that the defensive scheme they employed was very similar to the previous 80 games I tracked for Lundqvist. Considering that in conjunction with his comments about equipment adjustments, I am comfortable labeling his performance a statistical anomaly based either on randomness or technical struggles. He has begun to normalize in the new year, returning to his typical elite level with a.932 save percentage.
So Lundqvist’s statistical-dip looks to have been a merely a slump, but the same can not be said for Price. The Canadiens have been in a possession free fall since December. Andrew Berkshire at eyesontheprize.com identified Michel Therrien as the main culprit. Questionable player usage and the negative effects of the Canadiens’ change from puck-possession to dump-and-chase have resulted in the largest recorded season-over-season decline in puck-possession history. The trend eerily mimics Therrien’s misuse of Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in 2009, which ended with him being fired. The Pens under Dan Bylsma have been an elite possession team since.
The Canadiens haven’t been a strong defensive team since the departure of Jacques Martin, but early in the season they provided Price with enough support to produce elite numbers. I expected his statistics to normalize when his sky-high clean save-percentage dropped, but because of the 60-game sample of strong possession, I thought the Habs may be able to maintain the defensive improvements. I was wrong. That support has disappeared in January and the Habs have cratered.
After the Olympic announcement, Price played a fantastic game against the Stanley Cup champion Blackhawks. His statistical nosedive began against the Devils. The Canadiens began bleeding high-quality chances and exposing Price to transition shots, deflections and numerous slot opportunities. He played one of the best games of his career against the Senators and only managed to register a.909 save percentage. Double the transition opportunities and more shots from |
Lerato Moloi of the Institute of Race Relations said last week: “If data for all violent assaults, rapes, and other sexual assaults against women are taken into account, then approximately 200,000 adult women are reported as being attacked in South Africa every year.” She added: “The real figure is in all probability considerably higher.”
The grim truth is that violence against women in South Africa is so prevalent that individual cases are often not even particularly newsworthy. They are just a part of daily life. DM
*Sapa (the South African Press Association) provided the information on the majority of cases listed in this article.
Are You A South AfriCAN or a South AfriCAN'T?
Maverick Insider is more than a reader revenue scheme. While not quite a "state of mind", it is a mindset: it's about believing that independent journalism makes a genuine difference to our country and it's about having the will to support that endeavour.
From the #GuptaLeaks into State Capture to the Scorpio exposés into SARS, Daily Maverick investigations have made an enormous impact on South Africa and it's political landscape. As we enter an election year, our mission to Defend Truth has never been more important. A free press is one of the essential lines of defence against election fraud; without it, national polls can turn very nasty, very quickly as we have seen recently in the Congo.
If you would like a practical, tangible way to make a difference in South Africa consider signing up to become a Maverick Insider. You choose how much to contribute and how often (monthly or annually) and in exchange, you will receive a host of awesome benefits. The greatest benefit of all (besides inner peace)? Making a real difference to a country that needs your support.
Rebecca Davis Follow Save More
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Please or create an account to view the comments. To join the conversation, sign up as a Maverick Insider.A crime spree that appeared to span three counties came to a violent end on Wednesday when a police officer shot a bank robbery suspect in Northeast Portland, law enforcement officials said.
A Portland cop wounded the suspect after he took police on a wild chase and crashed a stolen car in the North Tabor neighborhood, a bureau spokesman said.
The suspect, who has not been identified, was later rushed to a hospital and is expected to survive.
Sgt. Chris Burley, a police spokesman, said officers near Southeast Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard and Southeast Clinton Street first spotted a blue 1987 Chevrolet Blazer around 12:40 p.m. Authorities believed the vehicle had been stolen and was later involved with a Washington County bank robbery earlier in the day.
When the cops attempted to stop the driver he stepped on the gas and sped away, Burley said. Officers pursued the Blazer for more than two dozen blocks before the suspect plowed into a parked car along 100 block of Southeast 55th Avenue, between Couch and Davis streets.
Police shoot suspect in North Tabor 2 Gallery: Police shoot suspect in North Tabor
Burley said officers gave orders for the suspect to exit the Blazer and surrender. One of the cops then opened fire on the suspect after he refused to comply.
Officers provided first aid on the wounded man until emergency responders arrived, Burley said. One of the cops suffered a minor injury and was treated at the scene.
Burley said authorities believe the Blazer had been boosted during a burglary in Yamhill County shortly after 7 a.m. Wednesday. They also believe it was later used as a getaway vehicle in the robbery of the U.S. Bank branch, 18485 S.W. Farmington Road, around 9:30 a.m.
Officials said an armed suspect robbed the bank of an undisclosed amount of cash. Witnesses said the man left in a turquoise Blazer.
Two witnesses in Portland's North Tabor neighborhood told The Oregonian/OregonLive they heard numerous sirens converge on the area of the shooting. They then heard shouts followed by three shots.
Bill Bixenstein, 39, of Landis & Landis Construction was working road and sewer maintenance on Northeast 53rd Avenue near Couch when law enforcement swarmed the area.
He said he saw police surround the Blazer and tell a suspect to get out. But the suspect refused at first.
"He wasn't showing his hands," Bixenstein said.
Then came the shots.
About 15 to 20 seconds passed, Bixenstein said, before the suspect finally surrendered and police pulled him out of the SUV.
"It looked like he had been shot in the shoulder," Bixenstein said, adding that he could see a red blot and ripped clothing near that area of the man's body.
Bixenstein said he was shocked by the suspect's refusal to get out of the car. "You're hit, dude. You're done. You're boxed in. You may as well call it quits," he said.
David York, 63, who lives near Northeast 56th Avenue and Davis Street, also described hearing sirens, yelling then three shots.
"I heard three, four, five sirens. But they didn't pass by. I was starting to wonder what was going on," he said
Then he heard the shots.
"Three pops," York said.
-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
skavanaugh@oregonian.com
503-294-7632 II @shanedkavanaughThe right-wing media is so eager to find evidence that Central American child migrants are bringing diseases into the U.S. that they have now found an outbreak to blame on the kids. The only problem? There is absolutely no evidence of a connection.
WorldNetDaily breathlessly reports today on speculation by right-wing radio host Michael Savage that an increase in patients with a severe respiratory illness in two hospitals in Kansas City and Chicago is linked to Central American children:
On his show, Savage also excoriated the government agency, stating, “The CDC is claiming they don’t know why this rhinovirus is suddenly breaking out in your area. … Don’t you think it would be rational to say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s look at these clusters to see if these kids are in schools where Obama dumped illegal aliens? You know that the government will not release the schools or the districts when they move these kids from Guatemala into this country? They won’t even disclose where they are?”
Rush Limbaugh also speculated about a connection:
Limbaugh asked, “Are the two stories related or are they not? Does this sweeping, mysterious virus that’s multiplying across the Midwest, does it have anything to do with it or not? We don’t know. That’s the answer. We just don’t know. But some people think there may be some kind of a connection.”
WND even provided this helpful map, which when you look at it doesn’t actually appear to show any pattern at all:
And, when you get further into WND’s story, you learn that the actual experts they contacted were quick to dismiss the idea of a connection between child migrants and the disease. A CDC spokesman told WND that there was “no connection”:
Benjamin N. Haynes, CDC senior spokesman for the infectious disease team, told WND there’s “no connection” between the virus outbreak and the Obama administration’s relocation of illegal aliens across America who have come across the U.S.-Mexico border.
And a spokesman for one of the hospitals said that the cases they were dealing with came from their “usual demographic”:
A spokesman for the University of Chicago Medical Center told WND, “At the University of Chicago Medicine, these cases we have seen have been typical of our usual demographic, from all walks of life.”
As it happens, this is the second time in two weeks that we’ve seen a right-wing news outlet accidentally debunk its own story on child migrants and disease.New Delhi: In a major setback to the Aam Aadmi Party ahead of the Delhi Assembly Elections, Major Dr Surendra Poonia on Tuesday quit AAP accusing the party of steering away from its original ethos and objectives.
In a letter addressed to AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal, Vishisht Seva Medal awardee Poonia mentioned that AAP leader from Okhla, Amanatullah Khan, was supporting Zia-Ur-Rehman, an alleged Indian Mujahideen operative accused of blasts in Delhi and Ahmedabad.
He further claimed that he was sure that AAP gave ticket to Amanutullah despite knowing about his past record.
“As an Army man, I can't support a person, ideology or party that is compromising with country's security,” added Poonia, who fought Lok Sabha elections on AAP ticket from Sikar, Rajasthan.
Raking up the allegation of fraud funding levelled by NGO AVAM, Poonia asked how Kejriwal, as an income tax officer, did not know about this fraud.
Poonia concluded by saying that he could no more remain a part of the movement which is compromising with national security.
Here's the copy of the letter:CollectionDX, Onell Design and Incubot proudly present:
Super Robots Giant Monsters
A FREE one-day event celebrating the mechanical and the monstrous!
Saturday, March 29, 2014 at Mill No. 5, Lowell Massachusetts
For 10 years we've done the CollectionDX East Coast Summit - a giant cookout for toy nerds. We'd get together, eat food and talk toys. We'd buy, sell, and trade and have a generally good time. 2013 was the Summit’s biggest year yet and it’s simply gotten too big to be held in some dude's backyard. So now, we've taken the idea of a summit and turned it into a full-fledged event.
At the FREE Super Robots Giant Monsters (SRGM) event, we'll showcase the past, present and future of our favorite toys!
Art Exhibit
Many toy collectors have other talents – some of us are artists, designers, and even toy makers ourselves. At SRGM we’ll have a whole gallery dedicated to original art by a variety of local and national artists. Custom toys, 3D-printed art and traditional 2D art will be on display, some of it available for purchase. If you’re interested in participating in this gallery show, please see our Call for Entries.
Toy Exhibit
Curated by Sanjeev Selvaraj of Brownnoize Productions, this exhibit will showcase both modern and vintage Robot and Monster toys. There's more to this world than just Transformers and Godzilla!
Vendors!
Our vendor area will feature a variety of retailers, collectors, artisans and craftspeople. We aim to have a mix of brick and mortar stores, private collectors, local artists and DIY toy makers. Come spend the day and go home with lots of goodies. Please visit our vendors page for a list of vendors and vendor application.
Special Events
We're working with local businesses to set up some cool events during the day. Stay tuned for details.
The Venue
The great spiral staircase at Mill No.5
Mill No.5 is a renovated textile mill with spaces for technology start-ups, artists, and independent retail. They've been salvaging historic buildings for years, and have recreated a street with New England houses and storefronts from the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s inside an amazing building. It makes for an amazing event space with an incredibly creative vibe.
Photo by Mikeal St. Ayre
Why Lowell?
Only 40 minutes from Boston by commuter rail or car, Lowell has been a hub for ingenuity and art for years, going back to the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Inspired by Lowell natives such as Jack Kerouac and James McNeil Whistler, Lowell boasts a proud and thriving arts community. There's also a surprisingly dense collection of nerd-related businesses in the area, making Lowell worth the trip not just for this event, but for other cool things. For more info, check out our "other cool things in the Lowell area" page.Mayor-elect Rob Ford faces a divided council and a stiff fight to get through some of his most contentious proposals, according to a Toronto Star survey of the new council. The Star surveyed all 44 councillors elected Monday with five questions based on Ford's key campaign pledges: making the Toronto Transit Commission an essential service, contracting out city garbage service, cutting funding to parades such as Pride, reducing council by half and eliminating the fair wage policy.
Toronto Mayor-elect Rob Ford speaks on the John Oakley show on AM 640, October 27, 2010.
On two of the five — cutting parade funding and the size of city council — the mayor-elect appears to have very little support, according to the survey. And Ford's pledge to eliminate the fair-wage policy has only six councillors prepared to back him now. Thirty-two of 44 councillors agreed to fill out the survey. The remainder either declined or did not respond to numerous phone calls or emails over several days.
Article Continued Below
Monday's municipal election appeared to shift council to the right as voters turfed out half a dozen incumbents — including Miller loyalists Sandra Bussin and Adrian Heaps — replacing them with right-leaning candidates, such as Mary-Margaret McMahon and Michelle Berardinetti. But while Ford has potential to win enough councillors over to his plan to contract out residential garbage service and make the TTC an essential service, cutting the size of council appears to be a non-starter. “There is a serious disconnect between City Hall and the residents it serves. Cutting elected officials in a growing urban centre will exacerbate this problem,” said James Pasternak, a newly elected centrist York Centre councillor. “Moreover, there is little hope such an effort will save money. The remaining councillors will add more high-paid staff to cover the doubling of calls from constituents.” “I believe it will be less democratic with little savings to be had,” said Gloria Lindsay Luby, an Etobicoke Centre councillor.
In total, 17 councillors said they would not support Ford's plan to halve council, seven said they would and eight said they wanted to learn more. The cutting of funding for parades such as Pride has even less support.
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In June, Ford seconded a motion at council brought forward by Giorgio Mammoliti to end future funding for Pride Toronto. Ford believes events such as the Gay Pride parade — “no matter what parade it is” — should be sponsored through the private sector. Only two councillors are in favour of cutting all funding; 17 are against while 13 need to hear more. “It's a tough question. We have to look at both sides. All these parades: what's the economic effect? If we bring tens of thousands of tourists and it brings up the economy of Toronto, we have to look at it from the positive side. But if the parade doesn't bring all the tourism — I'd have to look at it,” said Scarborough Councillor Raymond Cho, who puts himself in the undecided category. Maria Augimeri, who by the slimmest of margins held on to her seat against Ford-backed rival Gus Cusimano, thinks the money question is settled. “Gay Pride and Caribana bring in millions of dollars to the city. Why would we wish to hamper economic development initiatives?” Ford will also have a tough fight to eliminate the fair wage policy, which means contractors doing business with the city must pay roughly the same wage as city employees doing comparable work. Just six declared they want to scrap it against 14 respondents who want to keep it. Twelve need to hear more and many of those were open to at least reforming the policy. “We need to work to achieve wage parity with the private sector through the fair wage policy and also union contracts,” said Scarborough Councillor Paul Ainslie. Kyle Rae's successor, Kristyn Wong-Tam, is staunchly opposed. “The fair wage policy was created to raise the employment standards and the city should be a ‘model employer.' If we start to remove policies and laws that were created to protect workers, what's next? Pay equity?” she said. Ford has more support on making the TTC an essential service and contracting out private garbage collection. On the TTC, votes are split relatively evenly between yes (10), no (13) and those who want to wait to hear the debate at council (nine). Premier Dalton McGuinty has said Toronto should designate TTC an essential service, which would prevent workers from striking. However, opponents have said essential service leads to mandatory arbitration, which results in higher contract settlements. Two years ago, shortly after a strike, the old city council narrowly voted against putting the transit commission in the same category as police and fire, which are classed an essential service. Only on the question of contracting out garbage is there more support for Ford than opposition. Eleven are in favour, 10 against and 11 undecided. Downtown Councillor Adam Vaughan is someone who needs to hear more. “We have a blended system now and that blended system provides a competitive price. It's got to make sense economically, it can't just be an ideological yes or no. Are we privatizing garbage to avoid strikes or are we privatizing to save money?” With files from Chloe Fedio, Cynthia Vukets and Kate AllenMitt Romney speaks to Tea Party supporters in Michigan in February.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
The day after the election, FreedomWorks and its key state-to-state organizers dialed into a one-of-a-kind conference call. For the first time ever, they would be discussing a crushing defeat. Their “Take the Senate” campaign had ended with Democrats in greater control of the upper house. Their turnout game, powered by a new web-based canvassing app, was swatted aside by labor and the Democrats. Richard Mourdock, the Indiana politician who’d been with Tea Partiers since the 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington, had lost one of the party’s safest seats.
And now John Boehner was selling them out. The speaker of the House had just jimmied open the door to “new revenue,” which conservatives hear—correctly, typically—as “new taxes.”
“People were upset,” remembers Brendan Steinhauser, FreedomWorks’ director of state campaigns. “Does Boehner cave in to what Obama and Reid want to do, or does he at least stay relatively strong on these issues? He’s probably going to a lot of these Republican, Tea Party folks, and say: OK, guys, here’s what we need to do to stay in power. That’s the fear.”
How does the Tea Party stop it? Good question. What else does the Tea Party want to halt? Better, more complicated question. The movement, which starts its second four-year term in February, was built on opposition to the president’s stimulus and health care law. There’s no real chance of a new stimulus bill, and the health care law is safe until at least 2017. In the foxhole, when the only goal was defeating Obama, there were no real disagreements among Tea Partiers and the rest of the conservative base. That’s over, too.
Over the last few days, as they’ve processed data from the election, the right’s Obama-era grass-roots groups are divided over what went wrong and what to do next. FreedomWorks’ get-out-the-vote app was called Political Gravity. It had been developed by American Majority, a grass-roots group run by Ned Ryun, which had its own offices in swing states and its own literature telling voters to save their children from the rampaging national debt. On Thursday, Ryun was downright dismissive of how the software had been used. Teams of Tea Partiers went to homes and tried to talk to residents about their terrific Senate candidates. If no one was home, they put information at the door.
“When you knock at a door, you’ve got to talk to people,” asked Ryun. “You dropped off 50,000 door-hangers? Great. All you did was waste trees.”
After an election where nothing seemed to work, you can hear the case made against almost everything. Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom coalition made it to the New York Times, because Reed talked a good game about mobilizing the sort of white evangelical voters who’d been pushed back into politics by the Tea Party. But the mobilization didn’t outmatch the Democrats. “Ralph Reed says he made 12 million robocalls?” asked Ryan. “Great. Who gives a rip?”
Americans for Prosperity, David Koch’s group, spent tens of millions of dollars on a flashy ground game. I observed it in action, twice. Like the Romney campaign, it flopped in every swing state. “We’re looking closely at our own program, and we’re analyzing how the left ran their operation, as we often have in the past,” said Americans for Prosperity spokesman Levi Russell. “I can tell you that one major goal of the field program was to identify and recruit new activists/volunteers. That was very successful. Our membership grew by around 400,000 members, largely due to the personal contact of our people on the ground.”
And that’s where the uncertainty comes in. If there are new Tea Party ground troops, how do they differ from Ralph Reed’s ground troops? How do they differ from generic Republicans? In 2010, the Tea Party became an interest group inside the GOP. The party blamed them for spoiling some primaries by nominating loser candidates, but even then, they were working inside the party.
FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity are going to keep working for a Congress with fewer Democrats and more Republicans. But they disagree with the other elements of the GOP’s base about what kinds of Republicans they want. All of the Tea Partiers I talked to this week led with one piece of post-election spin: That Republicans could not win without cracking into the Latino vote.
“We’ve been working with a group of Spanish-speaking Tea Party people in Florida,” said Jenny Beth Martin, chairwoman of the coalition group Tea Party Patriots. “In Wisconsin, people were putting material out in Spanish, reaching the Spanish-speaking community. Our idea of freedom resonates across party lines and across the party divide.”
That’s one take on the problem. The other take: Republicans will need to resist some elements in their base and pass immigration legislation that wins over Hispanics.
“If the Republicans were smart, in January, maybe they’d come out with that bill and win some of that support in exchange for some of the Tancredo-style support,” said FreedomWorks’s Steinhauser. “The left saw the future and built a demographic coalition among people who don’t maybe necessarily agree. You lose some of your hard-core supporters and you pick up new ones.”
For the first time, there’s an issue that could pit the GOP’s best-organized and best-funded grass-roots against other parts of the party base. Talk radio helped kill immigration legislation in 2007. Some of the Tea Party’s leaders wanted that legislation to survive. Dick Armey, the former GOP majority leader who now chairs FreedomWorks, was warning Republicans to “get off this goofiness,” stop talking about a border fence, and pass the bill.
David and Charles Koch, and other businessmen who’ve discovered politics in the Tea Party area, are far more simpatico to immigration reform than, say Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin. In 2007, Iowa Rep. Steve King fought reform so hard that he brought a small model of a border fence to the floor of the House, to show how ready-made it could be. In 2009, King was linking arms with Dick Armey. King will be in D.C. come January. So will FreedomWorks. And for the first time, they completely disagree about how they can win the country.HRC vice president Shuhei Nakamoto has explained Honda's continued opposition to a control ECU being made compulsory in MotoGP.
New rules mean that Magneti Marelli-built ECU hardware will be used throughout the MotoGP grid in 2014.
However the Factory class will continue to use its own bespoke software, in return for less fuel, engine changes and a freeze on engine development relative to the Open category.
The current format is set to continue until at least 2016, although many believe the control ECU hardware and software will eventually be made mandatory for all, with Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta among its supporters. Controlling ECU software would allow for restrictions on electronic rider aids.
But Honda, reigning world champions with Marc Marquez, has repeatedly warned that removing the chance to develop its software would cause them to leave the sport. Speaking at last week's opening 2014 test session at Sepang in Malaysia, Nakamoto explained:
"If MotoGP was all Open class machines? This is Carmelo's idea. Honda's position is clear. Honda is here [because] we are interested to develop the machine. If we cannot develop the machine here, we lose our opportunity to continue racing.
"This is the Honda board members' opinion. Not myself. If all the regulations say, 'You cannot develop software, everything is fixed'. Immediately Honda stop racing."
But in order to reduce costs and limit machine performance, MotoGP has already tightened technical regulations in areas such as engine durability - only five engines per season are allowed for the Factory class - and fuel limits.
Nakamoto insisted that agreeing to such regulations was very different to a potential ban on ECU software, since Honda could still achieve valuable R&D for its road machines.
"Years ago, racing engine designers just concentrated to make a big [powerful] engine. Now the engineer has to keep performance whilst making a long life engine. We found some interesting technology and technical material from this. This is quite useful for the future.
"We will find more with the change from 21 to 20 litres of race fuel for this year. With 24 litres [the Open class limit] we cannot find anything. But 20 litres, five engines and software [development] are all important areas for the motorcycles of the future."
While Yamaha has supported Honda's opinion, albeit without the threat to leave, Ducati is pondering a'rebellion' in the form of a switch from the Factory to Open class - in order to avoid the new engine development freeze.
The freeze means all five engines used by each rider during the season must be of an identical specification, which would hurt Ducati's ability to make sweeping changes to the struggling Desmosedici.
Asked if he thought the engine freeze clashed with the philosophy of machine development, Nakamoto insisted: "We can still develop the engine for [the] next year."
One technical challenge Nakamoto hasn't been impressed by was the need to transfer and adapt Honda's previous ECU software from its own in-house electronics system, to the new standard ECU hardware.
"It's like changing from a Mac to Windows computer. We change from Honda ECU to Magneti Marelli. The total cost is huge. We also had to buy the data analysis system from Magneti Marelli. The cost is unbelievable.
"Last year's Honda [ECU] was smaller, cheaper, more capacity! The Magneti Marelli hardware is 50 percent more expensive than Honda's one. So expensive. Hardware, data analysis, software. Unbelievable."
Technical issues aside, 2014 marks the end of rider contracts for all of the official manufacturer riders, barring Ducati's Cal Crutchlow.
Repsol Honda would doubtless like to keep record-breaking rookie champion Marquez, with team manager Livio Suppo also speaking highly of team-mate Dani Pedrosa.
But Honda will also once again talk with leading rival Jorge Lorenzo.
"Honda never have a number one and number two rider. Both equal. Of course we are interested in Jorge because he is one of the top riders. This is normal," said Nakamoto. "At least we like to talk."
Suppo added: "Of course we understand Marc's value. He is very young and of course will hopefully remain with Honda in the future because he is a very strong rider. But don't forget about Dani.
"Dani as well was very close to the championship, almost every year since 2006. Many people forget about Dani. All top riders are ending their contract and it is normal to speak to everybody. At the moment it too early to speak about it but I can say Honda is happy with both our riders."
Marquez was fastest throughout all three days of the opening Sepang test. The return visit takes place from February 26-28.London (CNN) British Prime Minister Theresa May has stunned the UK political world by calling for an early general election, seeking a stronger mandate in talks over leaving the European Union.
In an unexpected statement at Downing Street, May said she was seeking a vote on June 8, less than halfway through the government's five-year term.
Opposition parties said they would not block the move, sending Westminster into full-throttle election mode.
The European Union brushed off May's announcement, saying it would not affect the negotiations on Britain's departure. But May's decision means that Europe's three most powerful nations -- France, Germany and Britain -- will be convulsed by internal election campaigns as the clock ticks on the two-year deadline to complete Brexit negotiations.
Key developments
MPs must approve decision to dissolve Parliament part-way through full term.
Vote will be held in Parliament on Wednesday.
May had full support of Cabinet and had spoken to the Queen.
Opposition parties say they will not block move to hold election on June 8.
Theresa May likely to substantially increase her slim majority.
JUST WATCHED UK PM calls for general election: Full speech Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH UK PM calls for general election: Full speech 06:53
May, who commands only a slim majority in parliament's lower House of Commons, said that a new mandate would strengthen her hand in Brexit talks.
A general election would end the attempts of opposition parties and members of the House of Lords to thwart her Brexit plans, she said. "If we do not hold a general election now, their political game playing will continue," she told reporters at Downing Street.
"At this moment of enormous national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster, but instead there is division. The country is coming together, but Westminster is not," she added. "We need a general election and we need one now."
Her decision is a sharp reversal of policy -- since taking over as Prime Minister, May had repeatedly ruled out an early election. May said she changed her mind on a recent walking holiday with her husband in Wales.
JUST WATCHED Theresa May's U-turn on calling an election Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Theresa May's U-turn on calling an election 01:18
It is also a risky roll of the political dice. A fractious election campaign will reopen wounds barely healed after last year's EU referendum and give voice to those who oppose her strategy of pursuing a clean break from Europe.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, left, greets European Council President Donald Tusk outside 10 Downing street in central London on April 6.
May's Conservative Party currently holds 330 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. She is expected to win an increased number -- opinion polls show support for the opposition Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, at record low levels.
Corbyn said he would not oppose the call for an election. "I welcome the Prime Minister's decision to give the British people the chance to vote for a government that will put the interests of the majority first," he said.
Under legislation introduced by the coalition government led her predecessor, David Cameron, an early election requires the support of two-thirds of MPs in the House of Commons. May said she would place a motion on Wednesday in the House of Commons calling for a vote on June 8.
A Downing Street spokesman said that May had the full backing of her Cabinet on calling the election and that the Prime Minister had spoken with Queen Elizabeth II on Monday.
Campaign begins
May called on voters to throw their support behind her Conservative Party, adding that "every vote for the Conservatives will make me stronger" in Brexit talks.
Corbyn said he welcomed the decision to call for an election, even though his party is fractured over his leadership, widely regarded as lackluster.
An employee from a betting company writes odds on a blackboard outside the Houses of Parliament.
Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats -- which was battered in the 2015 election and now holds just nine seats in the House of Commons -- said the election was Britain's chance to change direction.
The Liberal Democrats oppose Brexit, and Farron said he would push for as strong an association with Europe as possible -- a so-called "soft" Brexit -- including membership of the EU's free-trade zone, the single market.
The party said it had gained 1,000 new members in the hour after May's announcement. Labour also said it had gained 1,000 members Tuesday.
In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is likely to use the campaign to pursue her demand for a fresh independence referendum, after Scotland overwhelmingly voted to stay in the European Union.
"This announcement is one of the most extraordinary U-turns in recent political history, and it shows that Theresa May is once again putting the interests of her party ahead of those of the country," Sturgeon said.
Brexit talks loom
Britain voted in July last year to leave the union after 44 years of membership in a divisive and hotly contested referendum.
May officially began the Brexit process on March 29 by triggering Article 50, the legal mechanism needed to begin the divorce process and officially start talks with the EU.
The negotiations are expected to be tough and will likely take place over two years, though the more complex aspects of Britain's future relationship with the EU, such as trade, could take even longer.
May has struggled with not only the opposition, but with members within her own Conservative Party, who have been at loggerheads over what kind of Brexit the country should have.
The Prime Minister laid out her vision for Brexit in January and more formally later with a White Paper. But even that basic framework -- which spelled out that Britain would leave the EU's single market -- caused divisions in her party and involved several rounds of deliberations before a coherent plan could be presented.
The European Union appeared unwavered by the announcement. Preben Aaman, a spokesman for the European Council president Donald Tusk, said the EU would continue with its plans to adopt guidelines on April 29 for the Brexit talks.Rick Yaeger: Hello everyone. It’s Rick Yaeger with onequestioninterviews.com. Today’s guest is Brea Grant, who you will remember from “Heroes” on NBC. Back in the day, she played the speedster, Daphne Millbrook. Well, since those days, she’s gone and made herself a movie. She sat down with me today to talk about it. Check it out.
Rick: I have James Kyson to thank for introducing me to my guest today. TV audiences first got to know her as the speedster, Daphne Millbrook on TV’s “Heroes,” but she’s a woman of many talents. Ladies and gentlemen, Brea Grant. Welcome.
Brea Grant: Thank you. Sorry, I’m eating.
Rick: What have you got there? That’s not the question, sorry.
[laughter]
Brea: I just have an English muffin, nothing fun.
Rick: Tell folks what you have been up to.
Brea: I directed a movie in the last year, so it’s pretty much all I work on. I’ve been working on it for the past two years. I’ve been working on it for two years, but I directed it about a year ago. I’ve been working on that. We have distribution now for it, so I’m working on it less, which is cool.
Other than that, I have another movie called “Detour” that’s out on VOD March 29. But this is going to air after that, so people can go and buy it right now on VOD.
It’s also in theaters, but we’ll miss that. I don’t know. I’m just writing and staying busy and auditioning. At some point, you think that hustle goes away. You’re like, “I’m not going to have to audition anymore. I’m not going to have to do all this crap.” You do have to do all that crap still. So that’s what I do pretty much.
Rick: You recently got back from SXSW.
Brea: I got back from Austin. It wasn’t SXSW.
Rick: OK.
Brea: We had a little screening in Austin of the movie, because we shot a lot of it there. I think we’re going to do another one, because it was a very last-minute kind of thing. There is a festival that goes…essentially we screened our movie originally at Slamdance, which is the indie filmmakers’ answer to Sundance.
At Sundance, although people consider it an indie movie film festival, not many indie movies actually get in. The majority are big stars with big budgets and that kind of thing.
Slamdance is a festival, where, in the competition, you have to be a first-time director. The movies have to be under a certain budget. It’s a very small indie film festival. They do at the same time as Sundance. There’s a new festival in Austin that’s trying to do a similar counterpart thing to SXSW, called the RxSM Festival.
It was actually great. It was a big screening room and a ton of people came. I was super excited, because I had no idea. I didn’t know anything about the Festival. They’ve only been going a couple of years.
Rick: Very cool. This is “Detour” that you were screening?
Brea: No, this is a movie I directed, called “Best Friends Forever.” It was shot on a shoestring budget. I have yet to pay anyone hardly.
Rick: [laughs]
Brea: We shot it about a year ago in Texas. It should be released on VOD this summer.
Rick: Very cool. I told you in the email that I consider you the first celebrity to have joined Twitter.
Brea: That’s funny. [laughs]
Rick: I looked into it. You joined in June, 2008.
Brea: That sounds about right.
Rick: You were Twitter user number 15,111,389.
Brea: That doesn’t seem like the first. That seems late. That seems not like an early adopter at all. It’s crazy. Yeah. My friend, Laura Roeder, essentially helps businesses get their name out there and she owns a company that does that. She was like, “You have to join this thing called Twitter.” I was on “Heroes” at the time.
Was I on “Heroes”? I had just started shooting “Heroes,” but I don’t think the episodes had aired yet, so it was pretty early on and I had just joined.
I was tweeting about being on the show and stuff. Yeah, it was fun. I know. It was funny, because it was like the New York Post did a little article and it was like, “Celebrities that do Twitter.” At the time, I had been on two episodes of “Heroes” or something.
Rick: Close enough. [laughs]
Brea: I was like, “I’m not a celebrity.” It was just their imagination. But yeah, I feel like I got a bunch of the “Heroes” people to be on there and I got all my friends to be on there. Now everyone is on, so it doesn’t matter. No one cares. |
payable in only 30 years.
The proper chain of causality is that a weak economy produces deficits and more debt, while a strong economy creates surpluses and reduced borrowing.
In a stagnating economy like today, the vision for government should be more spending and investment to create employment for young people and the unemployed.
With interest rates at rock-bottom lows, larger deficits to fund job creation are what is needed, not promises to pay down existing debt.
Fiscal austerity makes economic performance worse. Despite this result, conservative economics favours spending restraint because asset holders like lower levels of government borrowing and debt. The power of the wealthy explains the adoption of conservative economics, not its scientific value.
Trying to balance the budget in three years and restrict new borrowing right away as the Liberals intend to do means the Trudeau government has adopted a conservative vision that limits, voluntarily, the ability of government to help out, when what is needed is bold policies that create good jobs.
Though it does not say it, the government is hoping that the 75 cent dollar will do what it is not willing to: produce more jobs in Canada, by replacing imports with Canadian products.
The great liberal John Maynard Keynes fought the conventional wisdom of his day, the "treasury view" which, like the Liberal mandate letter, focuses on calming messages for financial markets.
According to this view, familiar today as austerity, governments should restrict spending, and allow financial markets to revive the economy.
Keynes taught that economies were not self-correcting. Consumer and business spending could stagnate; new government spending funded by borrowing would kickstart a weak economy.
In a federal state such as Canada, government borrowing and debt levels need to be integrated, not viewed separately. What matters for the Canadian economy is how much all public sector borrowing and public sector debt are supporting job creation. Isolating the federal borrowing from provincial and municipal borrowing gives a false picture of economic reality.
With the exception of Alberta, provincial governments across Canada are pursuing austerity. Municipalities are starved for funds.
Years of federal government manipulation of fiscal transfers have reduced provincial job-creation capacity. Instead of pursuing balanced economic development, workers have been forced to move to look for jobs.
Toronto, and Vancouver especially, have become over-crowded, pushing up the cost of living, and making city housing unaffordable for many workers.
The Canadian jobs picture was analyzed by Matthew C. Klein for the conservative Financial Times of London, and it should set off the alarm bells in Ottawa.
In recent years, Canadian full-time jobs have been created disproportionately in Alberta. With the collapse of oil prices, and the suspension of bitumen sands spending, those jobs are disappearing and not being replaced elsewhere.
Working Canadians have been poorly served by the economic performance of the last 40 years. A new direction is needed now.
Politics and leadership are about vision. Governments can inspire people but they need to do more than raise the general comfort level.
The Liberal party of Canada abandoned economic liberalism some decades ago amidst a worldwide inflationary crisis. Redefining liberal to mean conservative economics is unlikely to produce a better future.
In the 1960s Canadians were inspired by a vision of government co-operation between rich and poor nations building a more equitable world. What Canadians expected to see at home, they wanted to see elsewhere.
With expectations high, the new Liberal government needs to provide more than conservative economics.
Duncan Cameron is the president of rabble.ca and writes a weekly column on politics and current affairs.
Photo: Ryan/flickr
rabble is expanding our Parliamentary Bureau and we need your help! Support us on Patreon today!Recently, Harvard researchers reported that children with autism have a wide range of genetic defects, making it nearly impossible to develop a simple genetic test to identify the disorder.
Now, University of Missouri researchers are studying 3-D imaging to reveal correlations in the facial features and brain structures of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which will enable them to develop a formula for earlier detection of the disorder. The researchers anticipate their work also will reveal genetic clues that can direct additional research. Autism is a brain disorder characterized by a complex of social, communication and behavioral difficulties.
“When you compare the faces and head shapes of children with specific types of autism to other children, it is obvious there are variations. Currently, autism diagnosis is purely behavior based and doctors use tape measurements to check for facial and brain dissimilarities. We are developing a quantitative method that will accurately measure these differences and allow for earlier, more precise detection of specific types of the disorder,” said Ye Duan, assistant computer science professor in the MU College of Engineering. “Once we have created a formula, we can pre-screen children by performing a quick, non-invasive scan of each child’s face and brain to check for abnormalities. Early detection is crucial in treating children and preparing families.”
“Instead of looking at brain structures slice-by-slice in an MRI (magnetic resonance image), we developed tools to create 3-D representations of the structures in order to visualize and make comparisons,” said Kevin Karsch, a research assistant in Duan’s computer graphics lab, MU senior and Goldwater Scholar. “Using the 3-D representations, we are comparing the brain structures of autistic children to those of non-autistic children; no one has ever done that.”
Duan’s facial and brain imaging work will focus on two ASD subgroups hypothetically identified by Judith Miles, the William and Nancy Thompson Endowed Chair in Child Health at the Thompson Center. She has observed and distinguished children with a tendency toward more physical and brain abnormalities and smaller heads as having complex autism. Only about 20 percent of affected children fit this subset. The other 80 percent are classified as having essential autism. Miles also has identified physical similarities in facial structure and increased cranium size among those in the essential group and has speculated that the traits may be related to brain abnormalities.
To address the pressing questions about brain development and function in autism, a dozen University of Missouri researchers from a variety of disciplines formed The Autism Neuroscience Research Group (ANRG).
“Our research group is exploiting a tremendous overlap of knowledge from many disciplines. Ye’s work will be a pivotal part of ANRG’s grand scheme,” Miles said. “To solve these problems, it takes an entire community of specialists working together.”
The U.S. Department of Defense awarded Duan, in collaboration with researchers at the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, a $110,000 grant to create a facial imaging system that will make identical measurements of the faces of children with ASD. Additionally, the NARSAD Foundation, the world’s leading charity dedicated to mental health research, awarded Duan the Young Investigator Award and $60,000 to fund 3-D imaging of various segments of the brain in children with ASD. The projects also are supported by a $100,000 contribution from other MU sources and $30,000 in Research Scholar Funds.American foreign policy is a wreck. The presumption that Washington controls events around the globe has been exposed to all as an embarrassing illusion.
Egypt teeters on the brink, again. Syria worsens by the day. Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are dead, with another intifada in the wind. North Korea threatens to nuke the world. Violence grows in Nigeria. The Europeans have gone from disillusioned to angry with President Barack Obama. Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela reject U.S. leadership in Latin America. Even Iranian reformers support Iran’s nuclear program. Zimbabwe’s vicious Robert Mugabe is likely to retain power in upcoming elections. Iraq is friendly with Iran and supporting Bashar al-Assad. The Afghan government remains corrupt, incompetent, and without legitimacy. Bahrain cracks down on democracy supporters with Washington’s acquiescence. China and Russia resist U.S. priorities in Syria and elsewhere. Venezuela without Chavez looks like Venezuela with Chavez.
Instead of embracing the illusion of Washington’s omniscience, officials should acknowledge the limitations on their power and influence.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. America was the unipower, the hyperpower, the sole superpower, the essential nation. Washington was the benevolent hegemon. Only members of the axis of evil had something to fear from the United States. All the U.S. government had to do was exercise “leadership” and all would be well.
Oops.
That U.S. pride swelled with the end of the Cold War is hardly a surprise. But what unfortunately emerged was a rabid arrogance, the view that “what we say goes.” It was the very hubris about which the ancient Greeks warned.
Washington policymakers looked around the world and saw unformed lumps of clay, ready to mold into America’s image. And the U.S. government knew better than everyone else how the rest of the world should be organized and run. American leaders simply saw further, explained Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who understood, even if Islamic activists did not, that the mass death of Iraqi babies due to economic sanctions “was worth it.” So it was when it came to achieving Washington’s other foreign-policy objectives as well.
Indeed, the United States was entitled to intervene at will, coercing, bombing, invading and occupying other nations for whatever reason Washington saw fit. American officials could order about ally and adversary alike, in full expectation that its dictates would be followed. Filled with rightness and possessed of power, the United States could expect to suffer no consequence from its actions.
Alas, this all proved to be a world of illusion, filled with smoke and mirrors. On 9/11 a score of angry young Muslims brought war to America, destroying the World Trade Center and damaging the Pentagon. A bunch of ill-equipped and ignorant Afghan fundamentalists refused to admit that they were defeated, and more than a decade later still resist the United States backed by a multitude of allies and a covey of local elites. The invasion of Iraq was met by IEDs instead of flowers, and created an ally in name only, with Baghdad ready to thwart U.S. military objectives when it saw fit.
Israeli governments, sure in their political backing from America, saw no reason to implement any of the endless peace plans, surrounded by blissful rhetoric, emanating from Washington. The United States talked democracy while supporting autocracy in Central Asia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
U.S. officials insisted on elections in the Palestinian territories, only to be shocked when Palestinians voted for candidates other than those endorsed by Washington.
American pleading, threats, promises and sanctions had no effect on the course of events in North Korea. Civil and military conflicts ebbed and flowed and political contests waxed and waned in Congo, Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe with Washington but an ineffective bystander. Russia’s Vladimir Putin ignored U.S. priorities both before and after the fabled “reset” in relations. China protected North Korea and bullied its other neighbors, despite diplomatic pleadings and military pivots.
Then came the Arab Spring. The United States sought to buttress and then defenestrate Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Washington tagged Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as a reformer before deciding he was an oppressor. U.S. officials politely suggested that Bahrain’s dictatorial Sunni monarchy be nicer to the Shia majority before shutting up, lest further criticism interfere with operations at America’s premier Persian Gulf naval base in Manama. Reform in totalitarian Saudi Arabia went unmentioned. Increasingly unfriendly U.S. ally Turkey has been unsettled by a population divided in half by the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Yet true believers insist that all of these failures resulted because the U.S. government did too little. Promiscuous intervention failed because it was too restrained. Constant political meddling, endless economic impositions and frequent military forays were not enough. Washington had not attempted to micromanage every conflict in every nation.
So as Syria daily descends further into civil war, an interventionist Greek Chorus is pressing Washington to act. Those determined to involve America in yet another war of choice in the Muslim world say only U.S. military action can save the situation. Indeed, they blame the present crisis on the United States. If only the administration had intervened earlier, it could have forced out al-Assad, imposed a secular democratic regime, fatally weakened Iran’s Islamic regime, encouraged the march of democracy and caused flowers to bloom across Arabian deserts.
Left unmentioned is Washington’s actual experience in similar endeavors: America’s great success in resolving civil wars in Lebanon and Somalia. Turning war into a cakewalk in Iraq. Establishing Western liberal democracy in Afghanistan. Ensuring a peaceful and stable Middle East through more than three decades of military involvement.
No matter. Now Egypt has experienced a coup. And the usual suspects argue that the administration is at fault. It should have saved Mubarak. It should have supported Mohamed Morsi’s opponent in the presidential election. It should have forced President Morsi to share power. It should have told the Egyptian military to do something. Or not to do something.
Left unmentioned is the lack of any evidence that the U.S. had any influence over events in Egypt. Washington subsidized, backed, endorsed and embraced Mubarak for three decades. If that was not enough to save him, then what more could have been done? The problem was incompetent, corrupt, unsavory dictatorship. In the end, the Egyptian people had enough and, absent U.S. military intervention on behalf of the vicious autocrat-thankfully unthinkable-Washington could not have saved him. Just like the equally vile Shah of Iran who fell under similar circumstances in 1979.
As for succeeding events, where is the evidence that Morsi, Egypt’s generals and the Egyptian people sat around awaiting the opinion of U.S. policymakers? Washington’s support for the odious Mubarak left it with little credibility. Maybe the generals can be bought with the promise of more military aid, but even they know that the U.S. cannot protect them if their soldiers refuse their orders. Morsi’s fate was decided in Cairo, not Washington.
Americans understandably pine for a simpler world in which Washington is the center of the world and the U.S. orchestrates international events. Alas, that world never really existed. It certainly does not exist today.
Instead of embracing the illusion of Washington’s omniscience, Washington officials should acknowledge the limitations on their power and influence. They should reflect on events spinning out of control in Egypt. It’s time for the more “humble” foreign policy that candidate George W. Bush promised in what seems to be a lifetime ago.This article is about the historic county of England. For other uses, see Middlesex (disambiguation)
Middlesex (; abbreviation: Middx) is an ancient county in southeast England. It is now entirely within the wider urbanised area of London. Its area is now also mostly within the ceremonial county of Greater London, with small sections in other neighbouring ceremonial counties. It was established in the Anglo-Saxon system from the territory of the Middle Saxons, and existed as an official unit until 1965. The historic county includes land stretching north of the River Thames from 17 miles (27 km) west to 3 miles (5 km) east of the City of London with the rivers Colne and Lea and a ridge of hills as the other boundaries. The largely low-lying county, dominated by clay in its north and alluvium on gravel in its south, was the second smallest county by area in 1831.[3]
The City of London was a county in its own right from the 12th century and was able to exert political control over Middlesex. Westminster Abbey dominated most of the early financial, judicial and ecclesiastical aspects of the county.[4] As London grew into Middlesex, the Corporation of London resisted attempts to expand the city boundaries into the county, which posed problems for the administration of local government and justice. In the 18th and 19th centuries the population density was especially high in the southeast of the county, including the East End and West End of London. From 1855 the southeast was administered, with sections of Kent and Surrey, as part of the area of the Metropolitan Board of Works.[5] When county councils were introduced in England in 1889 about 20% of the area of Middlesex, along with a third of its population, was transferred to the new County of London and the remainder became an administrative county governed by the Middlesex County Council[6] that met regularly at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster, in the County of London. The City of London, and Middlesex, became separate counties for other purposes and Middlesex regained the right to appoint its own sheriff, lost in 1199.
In the interwar years suburban London expanded further, with improvement and expansion of public transport,[7] and the setting up of new industries. After the Second World War, the population of the County of London[8] and inner Middlesex was in steady decline, with high population growth continuing in the outer parts.[9] After a Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London, almost all of the original area was incorporated into an enlarged Greater London in 1965, with the rest transferred to neighbouring counties.[10] Since 1965 various areas called Middlesex have been used for cricket and other sports. Middlesex was the former postal county of 25 post towns.
The County of Middlesex
History [ edit ]
Map of Middlesex, drawn by Thomas Kitchin, geographer, engraver to H.R.H. the Duke of York, 1769.
Toponymy [ edit ]
The name means territory of the middle Saxons and refers to the tribal origin of its inhabitants. The word is formed from the Old English,'middel' and 'Seaxe'[11] ( cf. Essex, Sussex and Wessex). In 704, it is recorded as Middleseaxon in an Anglo-Saxon chronicle, written in Latin, about land at Twickenham. The Latin text reads: "in prouincia quæ nuncupatur Middelseaxan Haec".[12]
Etymology [ edit ]
The Saxons derived their name from seax, a kind of knife for which they were known. The seax has a lasting symbolic impact in the English counties of Essex and Middlesex, both of which feature three seaxes in their ceremonial emblem. Their names, along with those of Sussex and Wessex, contain a remnant of the word "Saxon".
Early settlement [ edit ]
There were settlements in the area of Middlesex that can be traced back thousands of years before the creation of a county.[13] Middlesex was formerly part of the Kingdom of Essex[14][15] It was recorded in the Domesday Book as being divided into the six hundreds of Edmonton, Elthorne, Gore, Hounslow (Isleworth in all later records),[16] Ossulstone and Spelthorne. The City of London has been self-governing since the thirteenth century and became a county in its own right, a county corporate.[notes 3] Middlesex also included Westminster, which also had a high degree of autonomy. Of the six hundreds, Ossulstone contained the districts closest to the City of London. During the 17th century it was divided into four divisions, which, along with the Liberty of Westminster, largely took over the administrative functions of the hundred. The divisions were named Finsbury, Holborn, Kensington and Tower.[17] The county had parliamentary representation from the 13th century. The title Earl of Middlesex was created twice, in 1622 and 1677, but became extinct in 1843.[18]
Economic development [ edit ]
The economy of the county was dependent on the City of London from early times and was primarily agricultural.[4] A variety of goods were provided for the City, including crops such as grain and hay, livestock and building materials. Recreation at day trip destinations such as Hackney, Islington, Highgate and Twickenham, as well as coaching, inn-keeping and sale of goods and services at daily[clarification needed] shops and stalls to the considerable passing trade provided much local employment[19] and also formed part of the early economy. However, during the 18th century the inner parishes of Middlesex became suburbs of the City and were increasingly urbanised.[4] The Middlesex volume of John Norden's Speculum Britanniae (a chorography) of 1593 summarises:
This is plentifully stored, as it seemeth beautiful, with many fair and comely buildings, especially of the merchants of London, who have planted their houses of recreation not in the meanest places, which also they have cunningly contrived, curiously beautified with divers[e] devices, neatly decked with rare inventions, environed with orchards of sundry, delicate fruits, gardens with delectable walks, arbours, alleys and a great variety of pleasing dainties: all of which seem to be beautiful ornaments unto this country.[20]
Similarly Thomas Cox wrote in 1794:
We may call it almost all London, being chiefly inhabited by the citizens, who fill the towns in it with their country houses, to which they often resort that they may breathe a little sweet air, free from the fogs and smoke of the City.[21]
In 1803 Sir John Sinclair, president of the Board of Agriculture, spoke of the need to cultivate the substantial Finchley Common and Hounslow Heath (perhaps prophetic of the Dig for Victory campaign of World War II) and fellow Board member Middleton estimated that one tenth of the county, 17,000 acres (6,900 ha), was uncultivated common, capable of improvement.[22] However William Cobbett, in casual travel writing in 1822, said that "A more ugly country between Egham (Surrey) and Kensington would with great difficulty be found in England. Flat as a pancake, and until you come to Hammersmith, the soil is a nasty, stony dirt upon a bed of gravel. Hounslow Heath which is only a little worse than the general run, is a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in look. Yet this is now enclosed, and what they call 'cultivated'. Here is a fresh robbery of villages, hamlets, and farm and labourers' buildings and abodes."[23] Thomas Babington wrote in 1843, "An acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia"[24] which contrasts neatly with its agricultural description.
The building of radial railway lines from 1839 caused a fundamental shift away from agricultural supply for London towards large scale house building.[25] Tottenham, Edmonton and Enfield in the north developed first as working-class residential suburbs with easy access to central London. The line to Windsor through Middlesex was completed in 1848, and the railway to Potters Bar in 1850; and the Metropolitan and District Railways started a series of extensions into the county in 1878. Closer to London, the districts of Acton, Willesden, Ealing and Hornsey came within reach of the tram and bus networks, providing cheap transport to central London.[25]
After World War I, the availability of labour and proximity to London made areas such as Hayes and Park Royal ideal locations for the developing new industries.[25] New jobs attracted more people to the county and the population continued to rise, reaching a peak in 1951.
Governance [ edit ]
Map of Middlesex, 1824. Note: west is at the top.
The Metropolis [ edit ]
By the 19th century, the East End of London had expanded to the eastern boundary with Essex, and the Tower division had reached a population of over a million.[1] When the railways were built, the north western suburbs of London steadily spread over large parts of the county.[7] The areas closest to London were served by the Metropolitan Police from 1829, and from 1840 the entire county was included in the Metropolitan Police District.[26] Local government in the county was unaffected by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, and civic works continued to be the responsibility of the individual parish vestries or ad hoc improvement commissioners.[27][28] In 1855, the parishes of the densely populated area in the south east, but excluding the City of London, came within the responsibility of the Metropolitan Board of Works.[5] Despite this innovation, the system was described by commentators at the time as one "in chaos".[6] In 1889, under the Local Government Act 1888, the metropolitan area of approximately 30,000 acres (120 km2) became part of the County of London.[18] The Act also provided that the part of Middlesex in the administrative county of London should be "severed from [Middlesex], and form a separate county for all non-administrative purposes".
Map showing boundaries of Middlesex in 1851 and 1911. Aside from minor realignments, the small yellow area in the north is Monken Hadley, transferred to Hertfordshire and larger southeastern area transferred to the County of London in 1889.
Map in 1882 shows complete urbanisation of the East End
The part of the County of London that had been transferred from Middlesex was divided in 1900 into 18 metropolitan boroughs,[29] which were merged in 1965 to form seven of the present-day inner London boroughs:
Extra-metropolitan area [ edit ]
Middlesex outside the metropolitan area remained largely rural until the middle of the 19th century and so the special boards of local government for various metropolitan areas were late in developing. Other than the Cities of London and Westminster, there were no ancient boroughs.[30] The importance of the hundred courts declined, and such local administration as there was divided between "county business" conducted by the justices of the peace meeting in quarter sessions, and the local matters dealt with by parish vestries. As the suburbs of London spread into the area, unplanned development and outbreaks of cholera forced the creation of local boards and poor law unions to help govern most areas; in a few cases parishes appointed improvement commissioners.[31] In rural areas, parishes began to be grouped for different administrative purposes. From 1875 these local bodies were designated as urban or rural sanitary districts.[32]
Following the Local Government Act 1888, the remaining county came under the control of Middlesex County Council except for the parish of Monken Hadley, which became part of Hertfordshire.[33] The area of responsibility of the Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex was reduced accordingly. Middlesex did not contain any county boroughs, so the county and administrative county (the area of county council control) were identical.
The Local Government Act 1894 divided the administrative county into four rural districts and thirty-one urban districts, based on existing sanitary districts. One urban district, South Hornsey, was an exclave of Middlesex within the County of London until 1900, when it was transferred to the latter county.[34] The rural districts were Hendon, South Mimms, Staines and Uxbridge. Because of increasing urbanisation these had all been abolished by 1934.[10] Urban districts had been created, merged, and many had gained the status of municipal borough by 1965. The districts as at the 1961 census were:[9]
After 1889 the growth of London continued, and the county became almost entirely filled by suburbs of London, with a big rise in population density. This process was accelerated by the Metro-land developments, which covered a large part of the county.[35] The expanding urbanisation had, however, been foretold in 1771 by Tobias Smollett in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, in which it is said:
Pimlico and Knightsbridge are almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington, and, if this infatuation continues for half a century, then, I suppose, the whole county of Middlesex will be covered in brick.[36]
Public transport in the county, including the extensive network of trams,[37] buses and the London Underground came under control of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933[38] and a New Works Programme was developed to further enhance services during the 1930s.[7] Partly because of its proximity to the capital, the county had a major role during the Second World War. The county was subject to aerial bombardment and contained various military establishments, such as RAF Uxbridge and RAF Heston, which were involved in the Battle of Britain.[39]
County town [ edit ]
Middlesex arguably never, and certainly not since 1789, had a single, established county town. The City of London could be regarded as its county town for most purposes[25] and provided different locations for the various, mostly judicial, county purposes. The County Assizes for Middlesex were held at the Old Bailey in the City of London.[4] Until 1889, the High Sheriff of Middlesex was chosen by the City of London Corporation. The sessions house for the Middlesex Quarter Sessions was at Clerkenwell Green from the early 18th century. The quarter sessions at the former Middlesex Sessions House performed most of the limited administration on a county level until the creation of the Middlesex County Council in 1889. New Brentford was first promulgated as the county town in 1789, on the basis that it was where elections of Knights of the Shire (or Members of Parliament) were held from 1701.[18][40] Thus a traveller's and historian's London regional summary of 1795 states that (New) Brentford was "considered as the county-town; but there is no town-hall or other public building".[41] Middlesex County Council took over at the Guildhall in Westminster, which became the Middlesex Guildhall. In the same year, this location was placed into the new County of London, and was thus outside the council's area of jurisdiction.
Arms of Middlesex County Council [ edit ]
Coats of arms of Middlesex (left) and Buckinghamshire (right) in stained glass at the exit from Uxbridge tube station
County of Middlesex sign in 2014, on the border between the London Boroughs of Barnet and Enfield. sign in 2014, on the border between the London Boroughs of Barnet and Enfield.
Coats of arms were attributed by the mediaeval heralds to the Kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. That assigned to the Kingdom of the Middle and East Saxons depicted three "seaxes" or short notched swords on a red background. The seaxe was a weapon carried by Anglo-Saxon warriors, and the term "Saxon" may be derived from the word.[42][43] These arms became associated with the two counties that approximated to the kingdom: Middlesex and Essex. County authorities, militia and volunteer regiments associated with both counties used the attributed arms.
In 1910, it was noted that the county councils of Essex and Middlesex and the Sheriff's Office of the County of London were all using the same arms. Middlesex County Council decided to apply for a formal grant of arms from the College of Arms, with the addition of an heraldic "difference" to the attributed arms. Colonel Otley Parry, a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex and author of a book on military badges, was asked to devise an addition to the shield. The chosen addition was a "Saxon Crown", derived from the portrait of King Athelstan on a silver penny of his reign, stated to be the earliest form of crown associated with any English sovereign. The grant of arms was made by letters patent dated 7 November 1910.[44][45][46]
The arms of the Middlesex County Council were blazoned:
Gules, three seaxes fessewise points to the sinister proper, pomels and hilts and in the centre chief point a Saxon crown or.
The undifferenced arms of the Kingdom were eventually granted to Essex County Council in 1932.[47] Seaxes were also used in the insignia of many of the boroughs and urban districts in the county, while the Saxon crown came to be a common heraldic charge in English civic arms.[48][49] On the creation of the Greater London Council in 1965 a Saxon crown was introduced in its coat of arms.[50] Seaxes appear in the arms of several London borough councils and of Spelthorne Borough Council, whose area was in Middlesex.[51][52]
Creation of Greater London [ edit ]
The population of inner London (then the County of London) had been in decline as more residents moved into the outer suburbs since its creation in 1889, and this continued after the Second World War.[8] In contrast, the population of Middlesex had increased steadily during that period.[53] From 1951 to 1961 the population of the inner districts of the county started to fall, and the population grew only in eight of the suburban outer districts.[9] According to the 1961 census, Ealing, Enfield, Harrow, Hendon, Heston & Isleworth, Tottenham, Wembley, Willesden and Twickenham had each reached a population greater than 100,000, which would normally have entitled each of them to seek county borough status. If this status were to be granted to all those boroughs it would mean that the population of the administrative county of Middlesex would be reduced by over half, to just under one million.
Evidence submitted to the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London included a recommendation to divide Middlesex into two counties of North Middlesex and West Middlesex.[25] However, the commission instead proposed abolition of the county and merging of the boroughs and districts. This was enacted by Parliament as the London Government Act 1963, which came into force on 1 April 1965.
The Act abolished the administrative counties of Middlesex and London.[54] The Administration of Justice Act 1964 abolished the Middlesex magistracy and lieutenancy, and altered the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court. In April 1965, nearly all of Middlesex became part of Greater London, under the control of the Greater London Council, and formed the new outer London boroughs of Barnet (part only), Brent, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow and Richmond upon Thames (part only).[55] The remaining areas were Potters Bar Urban District, which became part of Hertfordshire, and Sunbury-on-Thames Urban District and Staines Urban District, which became part of Surrey.[10] Following the changes, local acts of Parliament relating to Middlesex were henceforth to apply to the entirety of the nine "North West London Boroughs".[56] In 1974, the three urban districts that had been transferred to Hertfordshire and Surrey were abolished and became the districts of Hertsmere (part only) and Spelthorne respectively.[57] In 1995 the village of Poyle was transferred from Spelthorne to the Berkshire borough of Slough.[58] Additionally, since 1965 the Greater London boundary to the west and north has been subject to several small changes.[59][60]
Geography [ edit ]
The county lay within the London Basin[61] and the most significant feature was the River Thames, which formed the southern boundary. The River Lea and the River Colne formed natural boundaries to the east and west. The entire south west boundary of Middlesex followed a gently descending meander of the Thames without hills. In many places "Middlesex bank" is more accurate than "north bank" — for instance at Teddington the river flows north-westward, so the left (Middlesex) bank is the south-west bank.[notes 4] In the north, the boundary ran along a WSW/ENE aligned ridge of hills broken by Barnet or 'Dollis' valleys. (South of the boundary, these feed into the Welsh Harp Lake or Brent Reservoir which becomes the River Brent).[notes 5] This formed a long protrusion of Hertfordshire into the county.[62] The county was thickly wooded,[61] with much of it covered by the ancient Forest of Middlesex. The highest point was the High Road by Bushey Heath at 502 feet (153 m),[63] which is now one of the highest points in London.[64]
Legacy [ edit ]
"Middlesex" is used in the names of organisations based in the area such as Middlesex County Cricket Club,[65] Middlesex Cricket Board and Middlesex University.[66] The last two were formed after the administrative county was abolished. Middlesex County Football Association has many teams including two in Surrey: Staines Town and Ashford Town (Middlesex) and Potters Bar Town in Hertfordshire,[67] awarding the Middlesex County Cup.[68] Sir John Betjeman, a native of North London and Poet Laureate, published several poems about Middlesex and suburban life. Many were featured in the televised readings Metroland.[69]
“ Dear Middlesex, dear vanished country friend, Your neighbour, London, killed you in the end. ” — Contrasts: Marble Arch to Edgware – A Lament, John Betjeman (1968)[70]
As part of a 2002 marketing campaign, the plant conservation charity Plantlife chose the wood anemone as the county flower. In 2003, an early day motion with two signatures noted the 16 May as the 192nd anniversary of the Battle of Albuera asserting in recent years its celebration as "Middlesex Day", to commemorate valiant efforts of the Middlesex Regiment (the "Die-hards"). Its idea was to celebrate all things connected to the county.[71] On its creation in 1965, Greater London was divided into five Commission Areas for justice; that named "Middlesex" consisted of the boroughs of Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Harrow, Hillingdon and Hounslow,[72] which was abolished on 1 July 2003.[73] For genealogical research it is assigned Chapman code MDX, except for the City of London ("square mile") assigned LND. The Royal Mail since 1996 has its databases the four post towns in Spelthorne as Middlesex and/or Surrey so that a letter addressed to an alike address in Ashford, Surrey or Ashford, Middlesex (to avoid confusion with Ashford, Kent) such as without writing the postcode will be directed correctly.
Former postal county [ edit ]
Middlesex (abbreviated Middx) was a former postal county.[74] Counties were an element of postal addressing in routine use until 1996, intended to avoid confusion between post towns, and no longer required for the routing of the mail.[75] The postal county did not match the last boundaries of Middlesex because of the presence of the London postal district, which stretched into the county to include Tottenham, Willesden, Hornsey and Chiswick.[76] Addresses in this area included "LONDON" which is the post town but any overlap with the then County of London was coincidental. In 1965 Royal Mail retained the postal county because it would have been too costly to amend addresses covering the bulk of Outer London.[77] Exceptionally, the Potters Bar post town was transferred to Hertfordshire. Geographically |
by the SC were against permitting liquor vends/shops within certain distance of the highways…The direction also suggests that what is prohibited is visibility of a shop for sale of liquor.’’Senior advocate Lalit Bhasin also said that the March 31 order does not apply to hotels, restaurant or bars. “In the main judgement there is not a whisper about any prohibition on service of alcoholic beverages by hotels, restaurants and bars located close to the highways,” he said. These, he added, were “different and distinct” from shops and vends, and the two could not be “clubbed together”.Disney could face major lawsuits over Weinstein’s behavior
Prison Planet.com
Oct. 11, 2017
Not long after the Walt Disney Company bought Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s company Miramax in 1993, convicted child molester Victor Salva was pegged to direct Disney’s film Powder.
This is important to note because Disney now faces potential lawsuits for doing nothing about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged predatory behavior if Disney knew or had reason to know, and Weinstein stayed on with Disney to helm Miramax until 2005.
Salva was convicted in 1988 of sexually molesting a 12-year-old actor who was starring in one of his films – and for possessing child pornography.
The conviction didn’t stop Disney from placing Salva in a director’s chair with access to young actors.
“As controversy swirled around filmmaker Victor Salva, who pleaded guilty in 1988 to molesting a boy on the set of his low-budget picture ‘Clownhouse,’ Salva’s agent said that a good showing at the box office may salvage the 37-year-old director’s career,” the LA Times reported on Oct. 31, 1995. “’At least three studios are meeting with him. One has already given Victor scripts to read,’ said his agent, David Gersh, who declined to name the studios.”
Reread that again. THREE studios had no problem hiring a convicted child molester as long as he produced “a good showing at the box office.”
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Is it any surprise then how Weinstein was able to get away with his reported behavior for decades?
And Disney’s past relationship with Salva won’t help the studio defend itself from corporate liability lawsuits that may accuse Disney of not protecting its stars from Weinstein during his 12-year stint at Disney-owned Miramax.
“If, sometime between the years 1993 and 2005, when it owned Miramax, Disney was aware of Weinstein’s behavior, Disney was obligated to protect its employees, including young actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow and Rose McGowan, who claim to have been harassed, including Asia Argento who claims Weinstein raped her in 1997,” Breitbart’s John Nolte reported. “Outside of the ‘open secret,’ another issue that makes one wonder about Disney’s moral, ethical, and legal liability, is the settlements.”
“Unless Weinstein settled using his own money, which is unlikely, how could Disney not know about corporate money spent for sexual harassment settlements?”
On another note, it’s plausible – although speculatory – that Weinstein is now being burned by Hollywood to keep focus away from pedophile rings operating in the entertainment industry, especially as the Trump administration works behind the scenes to tackle child trafficking.
Given Hollywood’s allure to child predators, is it really surprising then that so many former child actors come crashing down as adults?
This article was posted: Wednesday, October 11, 2017 at 2:42 pm
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Comment on this articlePolitics: Leaders in the Democratic Party probably should have thought twice before deciding to mount a scorched-earth campaign against President Trump. So far, they've failed to stop any of Trump's picks, or gain public support for their cause. They have, however, succeeded in making themselves look unhinged.
As we write this, not a single Trump Cabinet pick has withdrawn or failed to secure confirmation, which puts him well ahead of President Obama, who was forced to withdraw several of his initial appointments due to scandals. That included Tom Daschle, Obama's pick for Health and Human Services, who'd failed to pay taxes, and his Commerce pick, Bill Richardson, who was being investigated for allegedly doling out government contracts in exchange for campaign contributions while governor of New Mexico.
The best Democrats have been able to accomplish was to force Vice President Pence to cast the tiebreaking vote to confirm Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
They've also failed to convince a majority — or even a plurality — of the public to oppose any of Trump's executive orders, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll, which asked about 11 of his most controversial ones.
In fact, the orders Democrats invested the most time and energy in attacking get the strongest public support.
Fully 55% approve of Trump's executive order putting a temporary hold on visas and refugees from terror-prone countries. Only 38% disapprove it. (The IBD/TIPP poll found that 51% support Trump's order on refugees.) The same share approves of Trump's order to revoke funding for sanctuary cities. A majority (54%) also back Trump's call to freeze all federal regulations.
This is a stunning failure on the part of Democrats to sway public opinion, despite having the full support of sign-wielding activists, several corporate executives, most celebrities and the entire mainstream press.
As for the press, their unrelenting campaign against Trump — and their determination to label just about everything he says as a lie — has backfired as well. An Emerson College poll found that the public views the Trump administration as more truthful than the news media, with 48% saying Trump is truthful, compared with only 39% who say the media are being truthful.
The IBD/TIPP poll came to a similar conclusion. Just 43% say they are confident that the news media will cover the Trump presidency fairly, while 55% said they're not confident.
These polls show something else that should worry Democrats: Their antics are appealing only to their hard-core base, but are turning off political independents. On Trump's travel ban, for example, 54% of independents approve of his executive order, according to the Morning Consult poll. The IBD/TIPP poll found that 55% of independents back his refugee pause.
Among independents, 62% say they're not confident that the media will cover Trump fairly in the IBD/TIPP poll, and fewer than 19% describe the news media as truthful in the Emerson poll.
What's more, 59% of independents — and 57% of those who are ideologically moderate — say Democrats should find ways to work with Trump rather than try to obstruct him, the Morning Consult poll found. The only group that strongly supports the "resist" tactics are liberals.
Even some prominent Democrats — most notably Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, are worried about the national party's total war. "Not every pitch has to be swung at," Emanuel said. "We don't have the power to swing at everything. So you have to pick what is essential."
Yes, Trump's approval ratings are low in most polls. But Trump has always been a polarizing figure, and his approval ratings were just as low when he was running for office as they are now. If the economy starts to noticeably improve, so will Trump's approval numbers.
What will Democrats do then?
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Are We Going To Freak Out Every Time Trump Does What He Promised?Image copyright Thinkstock
A five-year-old Australian child born genetically male will grow up as a sterilised female after a court agreed to her having surgery.
The child, known only as Carla, identifies as a girl but has no female reproductive organs, Family Court documents show.
The court approved a request by Carla's parents to surgically remove male gonads inside her body.
People with a combination of sex characteristics are called intersex.
'Stereotypically female' behaviour
When Carla turned five, her parents wanted to clarify if they needed court permission for the complex and irreversible surgery.
The Family Court heard Carla was born with female-appearing genitalia and exhibited "stereotypically female" behaviour, which included never wanting to be referred to as a male and a preference for "female toys, clothes and activities".
Court documents seen by the BBC show medical experts testified that surgery would remove the risk of Carla developing tumours and that she had no certainty of future fertility. The surgery should happen before puberty, they said.
What is intersex?
If you are born with a mix of male and female sexual characteristics, this means you have a disorder or difference of sex development (DSD), also known as being intersex.
There are numerous different conditions which come under this umbrella term. Taken together, they are more common than you might think - experts say perhaps one in 2,000 babies are born with some kind of sex development difference.
These conditions occur when the reproductive organs and genitals do not develop as expected.
As a result, you might have female sex chromosomes but your reproductive organs and genitals are male - or the opposite way round. Or you may have a mixture of male and female organs and genitals, or some that are neither clearly male nor female.
This occurs because of how your particular genes respond to the sex hormones in your body.
DSDs can be treated with hormone therapy, psychological support and - sometimes - surgery.
'At 12 I grew a beard and had a period'
The court ruled the parents did not need permission to arrange surgery. The ruling was made in January but it was not immediately made available to the public, The Australian newspaper said.
"I consider the proposed medical treatment 'therapeutic' as being necessary to appropriately and proportionately treat a genetic bodily malfunction that, untreated, poses real and not insubstantial risks to the child's physical and emotional health," Family Court Judge Colin Forrest said in making his ruling.
Campaigners question surgery
Some intersex campaigners have challenged the ethical basis of irreversible surgery, arguing that gender identity is complex.
One advocate, Morgan Carpenter, told the BBC that children should decide their identity for themselves when they are older.
"Gender assignment is always appropriate," he said. "What is not appropriate is surgically enforced gender assignment."
Mr Carpenter said he believed medical and legal professionals often wrongly approached variations in sex development as disorders in need of correction.
"We need clinicians to consult the community to develop non-surgical options," he said.
Some terms used to discuss gender identity
Intersex : Applies to a person with a combination of sex characteristics - chromosomes, genitals or reproductive organs - neither solely male nor female.
: Applies to a person with a combination of sex characteristics - chromosomes, genitals or reproductive organs - neither solely male nor female. Non-binary : Applies to a person who does not identify as "male" or "female".
: Applies to a person who does not identify as "male" or "female". Genderqueer : Similar to non-binary, sometimes shortened to "queer", an ambiguous word that can also be used to describe a person's sexual orientation, eg lesbian, gay or bisexual.
: Similar to non-binary, sometimes shortened to "queer", an ambiguous word that can also be used to describe a person's sexual orientation, eg lesbian, gay or bisexual. Transgender: Applies to a person whose gender is different from their "assigned" sex at birth, often shortened to "trans".
See more: A guide to transgender termsA new poll released this week points to troubling public perception surrounding the rainbow flag, historically understood as a symbol of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement.
Public Policy Polling found that the Americans polled were more offended by the rainbow flag than the confederate flag, the latter of which has remained a controversial image since the American Civil War and for many holds oppressive and racist symbolism.
The results stem from two questions presented to 649 American voters: "Do you think high school students should be allowed to wear confederate flags to school, or not?" and "Do you think high school students should be allowed to wear gay pride flags to school, or not?"
42 percent of the voters polled defined themselves as "somewhat conservative" and 34 percent said they were "very conservative," while only 3 percent stated they were "somewhat liberal" and 20 percent identified as "moderate."
43 percent of people feel high school students should be allowed to wear confederate flags to school, while only 28 percent felt students should be able to sport the Pride flag. A whopping 57 percent of those polled felt that high schoolers shouldn’t be allowed to wear gay flags to school.
Washington Post Blogger Jonathan Capehart found the results shocking. "Folks, the confederate flag is no better than a Swastika," he wrote. "It is a symbol of white supremacy, hate and oppression that has no place in American political discourse."Former Congress leader Natwar Singh has said the fact that Sonia Gandhi has reacted to his book shows that it's touched a raw nerve. Calling Sonia a prima donna, Mr Singh who had to resign from UPA-1 after allegations of corruption said no Indian would have treated him this way.He speaks to NDTV's Nidhi Razdan. Here's the full transcript:He was the ultimate insider, confidant, adviser and a senior minister in the Congress government, Natwar Singh, now 83 years old, has created a sensation with his autobiography particularly what he has said about the Gandhi family and Sonia Gandhi in particular, Mr Singh joins us today on NDTV. Mr Singh, I'm sure you are quite pleased that even before the book's formal release which is taking place today, the book has created so many headlines.Well, I'm surprised at the response.Why were you surprised, because there's a lot of interest particularly in what you have got to say about the Gandhi family.No I want to say this book is not Sonia Gandhi centric or even the Gandhi family although they are a prominent part of my life. As you go on I'll tell you what all I owe to this family.But you know some would see your book as hitting back or as revenge for the way that you were treated by Sonia Gandhi and when you were forced to resign from the Cabinet. How do you respond to that criticism, that this is your way of getting back at them?No you see bitterness and revenge are not part of my character. Life's too short to spend time on bitterness and revenge. I'm very deeply hurt, but the idea I'll take revenge or I'm bitter doesn't occur to me. I mean what happened is unfortunate and we passed through a very difficult time seven or eight years ago, but bitterness, revenge, meanness are out of my character.But you have used some very strong words about Sonia Gandhi, many of them unflattering. You've described her particularly at the time of Volcker Report as vicious and venomous, you have described her as obsessively suspicious, a prima donna, who over the years evolved from being a diffident, shy woman to ambitious, authoritarian, stern leader. You say under her, dissent is smothered. You also say no Indian could have behaved with me in this way which is obviously against her Italian origin. You do sound very angry and bitter if you don't mind my saying this.First and foremost, Sonia Gandhi is a historic figure, a place in history assured, what history's verdict will be we have to wait. But public figures of this eminence must accept that there will be a very close scrutiny of their lives and their activities and their work and so it was imperative for me to put across what I have said in the book. It is true, Rajiv Gandhi would not have done to me what she has done.Because he is Indian.Indiraji wouldn't do it, Jawaharlal wouldn't do it, we have a tradition that people who are older than you, you show them regard and look at the totality of their lives and the loyalty for over forty years, now this anybody born Indian would not do.That's a pretty strong comment you make about her Italian originI'm not taking the word Italian at all, I'm just saying...But that is the obvious referenceThat's your conclusion, not mine.But you know what you say about her character, about her authoritarian character as you put it, the fact that she is a stern leader, is that something you discovered only during the Volcker crisis, you've been in the Congress for so long, you've worked with her so closely, you didn't see that side of her when things were happy.No, no, I did see but I didn't... you see what hurt me was that I have had come from Moscow after talks with Putin and my opposite number, the Foreign Minister, and I had to spend the night in Frankfurt. Then early morning I'm woken up by our ambassador in New York saying that Volcker Report has come out and it names you, Congress party and corporate houses as non-contextual beneficiaries. I was stunned. First I thought I'll go back to New York and meet Volcker. I mean what for? There's nothing in it. I'll go to Delhi and explain. In the meanwhile on email came the Congress spokesperson that the Congress is clean, Natwar Singh can look after himself. Now this statement couldn't have been made without Sonia Gandhi's approval, as simple as that.You are saying that you never got a fair hearing, did you get any hearing at all? Did you get any hearing at all from her or the Prime Minister, your version?When I came back, I didn't go to see her because I was very, very hurt. Because I expected her to say, of course Natwar Singh could never do a thing like this, as well as the Congress party. But she didn't send for me to ask me what happened. At least you could have given me a hearing so I could have put my point across. And from then it started in the newspapers, this and that. I mean India Today conclave, Vir Sanghvi asked her - the subject of the Conclave was not Natwar Singh, Sonia Gandhi - what do you think about Natwar Singh and Volcker, and she said I'm very angry and I have a work relationship with him.But then what explains the turnaround, because you were her closest confidant?You know she said so.So what explains, why the sudden volteface by her vis a vis you?Nobody in the Congress party has ever defied her, the expectation was that I'll prostate and say'maaf kar dijiye'. Now this is just not on, when my integrity is involved, question of bowing my head to anybody doesn't arise. Dr Manmohan Singh asked me to go and see her, so I said I'm not seeing her, I said Manmohan Singh ji, in my veins the blood of my ancestors flows, I don't know whose blood flows in yours. We fought the Mughals, we fought the British, I'm now fighting you. I will not bow down.But why not give you that hearing, I don't understand that? Having been so close to her what do you think motivated her to do this turnaround on you?This is what appalled me, even say the people around her, I mean they were resentful that I was so close to her, I could see her any day, you sit down and talk and there's a non-political side which is very attractive. I mean she relaxes, she jokes and talks about things, she's interested in music, she reads a great deal. I mean I first heard of Marquez's book, 'Hundred Years of Solitude' from her. She listens to music, she knows a lot about art, because when I went with her to Hermitage, St Petersburg, so she pointed out to me this was this, about furniture, about decoration, she was very, very up-to-date on this. That side people don't know. That's a very attractive side of her.So you are saying you don't understand why, you don't understand, is it a mystery for you?Two things as I told you. One the people around her told her that Natwar Singh is so close to you that everybody will say you got the money, and Pathak said in that report that I was clean. So this was one. Second was why didn't he come to see me?I come back to this question, as you said you actually said she was always like this in terms of her, as you said, her authoritarian behaviour and so on, but you never spoke about that befor. I mean you've only spoken about it after your exit from the government and the party.I've said that only in my autobiography, which I started writing in 2011. People say why didn't you come out earlier?But were you okay with the way she was when you were the insider, the confidant? Were you okay with that style of functioning, that lack of dissent and...There were many, many occasions when, for example, she would refuse to see Arjun Singh, would not meet thecGovernor, Chief Minister. So Arjun Singh came to see me, Natwarji I don't know why Soniaji doesn't see me. So I went to Soniaji, I said you know he's very upset, he's very sorry and really down in the mouth, 'bula lijiye'. No, I'll take a few days. So she called him, straight from there, she came to my house, Natwar Singhji at this level in politics nobody speaks about anybody. I'm most grateful to you and will be always my whole life.But my point is that Sir, you didn't seem to have a problem with that style of functioning that you are accusing Sonia Gandhi of having when you were in the party, that problem really seems to emerge when you've left, which is why we come back to the charge that is this an angry Natwar Singh getting back at her?You can ask anybody, I don't get angry, it's not that I'm a soft chap, but I just don't get angry, because there are certain things I don't do, because I will go down in my own esteem. Ultimately I'm answerable to her. When this was happening I didn't know her as much as I came to know her gradually. From '91 to '96 I only saw her in the capacity as Vice Chairman of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust and she was the Chairperson and she was Chairperson of Nehru Memorial as Secretary. So when Narsimha Rao incident took place, I told him I don't talk to Sonia Gandhi.But you do sound pretty angry when you call her a prima donna.Prima donna, it's not an offensive phrase, it's not abuse, because she's been treated from the day she entered...like royaltyYou are married to a wonderful human being, handsome, generous, largehearted, witty, the most important political family. You come from an Italian home, you are 19-years old, the cultural shock, then fifteen years, mother-in-law as Prime Minister, then your husband is Prime Minister, then when he passes away you are a deity in the Congress party. It takes a hell of a lot not to think you are an heir.But she has of course now reacted yesterday to your book and whatever has come out until now, and said she will write a book of her own, and that will have the truth in it. So she's basically hinting your version of events is not the truth, how would you react to her?This is the first time she has reacted, she never does. she didn't react to Baru's book, never, I'm pleasantly surprised. And I look forward to her book and I hope she writes it sooner than later. I think she's entitled to her views and I look forward to reading her book. It doesn't bother me one bit, I'm glad that she said so and she should write, I mean I tried very many times, I think it's in the book. I said I'm going to write your biography, she said no, Priyanka is doing it, I said, no, I'll join Priyanka.You think it's significant she reacted, the very fact that she reacted?It absolutely is.Why, because it touched a raw nerve?Obviously that something has upset her so much that she came out. If I was advising her I would have said, don't say anything.You have mentioned in the book that on the May 7th this year she actually came to see you, along with her daughter Priyanka Gandhi, and Priyanka even asked you if you were going to write about events leading up to the swearing of the UPA government? If you can reveal a little more about that meeting. Why do you think Sonia Gandhi came to see you? I mean what was she really worried about? Was that just that bit about on what Rahul had said to her before, on the issue of the PM's post, what was she worried about in particular?On the 20th of April, Suman Dubey, who is a wonderful human being, spoke to me about the autobiography. So I said you know I'm not going to write anything cheap or which is not true, but nobody can edit my autobiography. Then on the 20th of April my interview in the Economic Times appeared, quite a long interview, in which I think Mr Manoj was interviewing me, and he asked, will you be writing about the incidents in which all these things happened, are you bitter about it? I said I'm not bitter, not part of my character, but I will write the truth. So that very morning Suman Dubey rang me up, please go and see Mrs Gandhi at 5 and 6, I said, I can't. And Priyanka rang me up, I said I'm very sorry, I'm busy for a week, I'll see you.? So on the 6th of May she telephoned could she come and see me? I said, please do come. She came and we chatted a lot about children, about growing up. I said, how are things in UP? She said in Rai Bareli, in Amethi it's fine, but the rest of it is not so easy. Then she said we'll not gain any seat in Delhi. Then she came to the point, my mother has asked me to see you, are you going to refer to certain events that happened in May 2004? I said nobody will edit my book and neither am I going to do hitting anybody below the belt, facts are not sacred, but truth is. And then I told her what has been done to me in last eight years, the whole thing I had gone through, which is given in the book, bank accounts, house, bugged, people sent all over to see if I have any property in London, I mean bizarre things.Then Sonia Gandhi also showed up?Then she was very friendly, very effusive, overwhelmingly so.Your first meeting in more than eight years?I'm a life member of the Nehru Memorial Fund, so when the meetings take place she's there, but we don't interact. Once I did, she asked me to say something, but nothing was talked about after thatSo this was your first real interaction? So it was about events leading up to the swearing-in and what Rahul told her?I told her I have given Priyanka all the details, what really happened. Then she said, I didn't know. So I said you know nobody is going to buy that.Priyanka said she didn't know.No, no Soniaji said, I said nobody is going to buy that you didn't know, because nothing happens in Congress without your knowledge or approval. Nothing happens in the government without your knowledge, not even a leaf turns in the Congress party. And then I said Manmohan or any other minister wouldn't have touched me if they didn't have your approval.But you are saying she did that more to protect herself, rather than anything else. You were forced to resign, was her direction to the Prime Minister, because she was advised that this would hurt her personally, that is the motivation you are seeing?Yes.Of course the most sensational claim in your book is that it wasn't her innermost voice, her son Rahul who prevailed on her not to accept the Prime Minister's post. Now one question is, even if that was what Rahul did, because he was worried she may be killed when she became Prime Minister, like his father and grandmother, it was still quite a big thing for her to give up, what do you say?I give Rahul full marks for doing what he did as a son for his mother. My father has been killed, my grandmother killed, you will be killed if you become. As a son I can't let you do that, and I think it was very noble of him to do. And she accepted what he said. You know it was an agonising decision, on thecother side, as I told you, as a son Rahul did something really remarkable.You understand where he was coming from?No I understand that he genuinely, as a son, said, no, you will be killed in six months and I agree with him. If she had become Prime Minister, she would have been killed.But you actually go on to say that Rahul Gandhi was going to take any step to stop, that it was no ordinary threat. My question is what kind of a threat did he make? You said that he also gave her a 24-hour ultimatum.No, he said I won't let you do it.What was the threat, what was the ultimatum?The threat was, that if you do this, I will take some action which I don't want to take, I will implore you, you can't do it and I will not retreat on this.He didn't specify what that action would be?He wasn't there at the meeting when Priyanka was there and when Manmohan was.But you didn't know what that threat was?I don't know, but obviously it was so serious. The difficulty was after this she had called a meeting, in which she was sitting at the head table, and Pranab Mukherjee sahab, Dr Manmohan Singh, Arjun Singhji, Shivraj Patil, I think Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad sahab and myself and one or two others, she said I have requested Dr Manmohan Singh to accept Prime Ministership. And so Manmohan said, no, I don't have the mandate. So I spoke and said, you know the person who has the mandate has given it to you, no business to say no to her, we all will help you. The difficulty was how to convince the UPA partners.But on the point of Rahul, again you say to you it wasn't an ordinary threat, it wasn't in Rahul's nature to give ultimatums, but you don't know what that ultimatum was? Do you think that then Sonia Gandhi should not have told that it was her inner voice that told her not to accept this post? Or do you understand why she did that publicly or do you feel that she was dishonest?I'm not sure, when did she say this?Apparently at a meeting of Congress MPs when she told them she's not going to take up that position and she's been widely quoted from thereBut I don't remember she said about her inner voice, I don't remember. Even if she did, what is wrong with it?You don't see that as a point of criticism?No, I mean she was under stress, it was a major decision she had to take, as I told you the problem was with UPA partners.But can I ask you Sir, on Rahul Gandhi then, the fact that he had this fear, as you say, of his mother being possibly killed, the fact that his father and grandmother had been through these very violent death. Do you think that is something which has stopped him from taking up a leadership role, because he is seen as a very reluctant leader in the Congress party? So do you think this is the reason why he is not willing to take up more responsibility?This hasn't occurred till you asked me because, you know he's a very strong-willed person, he's not a push-over. He may not be a brilliant politician, but as a human being he is very tough and I don't think he would care about his own life.Then why do you think he's such a reluctant leader?Politics is not a part time job, it's a full-time job. Two, for politics you should have fire in your belly, I don't think he had a fire. Now when he became Vice President of the Congress expectations were very high that he will take the Congress to victory, but the consequences were reverse. The Congress party came down to 44. Now the Congress culture is that you can't criticise Rahul or his mother, but the fact is they were leaders of the campaign and the campaign resulted in 44 seats to you. After the Emergency Indira Gandhi got 158 in Lok Sabha, so if there was free debate in the Working Committee then they should have said; they did offer to resign and the CWC said no. What else could it say, that you please resign? If they do that then Congress will have only two members. She has held the Congress together for 15 years.But then you feel Rahul lacks that fire in the belly, as you put it?Yes he does.And therefore is there any alternative the Congress has?No.they still have to stick to the Gandhis?After 67 years, the Congress party has ruled for 50, BJP is not a national party. They have only ruled for 6 years. This thing is wrong, that this is a dynastic thing, but this is an elected dynasty, Jawaharlal was elected, Indira was elected, Rajiv was elected, Sonia elected, Sanjay elected and Rahul elected.So you don't think dynasty is a problem?No it's not. But people don't understand, but they have all been elected, nobody has imposed them on the Congress party. They are elected.So you believe that for Congress to survive, the key still lies with the Gandhis?Absolutely they can't think of anybody else.Why the Congress has a lot of young leaders who are bright?Natwar Singh: No you please tell me, who?Do they get the kind of opportunities that Rahul does? Well you have Jyotiraditya Scindia, you have Sachin Pilot, you have other leaders as well, Jitin Prasada, young people who were ministers as well?You please ask them, Rahul is not going to be, reaction of these will be, are you out of your mind? Who's going to vote for you?So you believe they are still the vote catchers, for whatever worth it is?As I told you if Rahul and Sonia said, we are retiring, first of all the Congress would be divided into five factions without them, there will be five leaders, they will not agree on one person, nobody will.As you know Manmohan Singh rarely speaks, but yesterday he spoke on your book. He said that your claims are a marketing gimmick, he also denied that any files of the government were sent to Sonia Gandhi and said that private conversations should not be made public for capital gains. Pretty strong wordsThree things, would he have said yes, I sent files to Sonia?So is he lying?No let me, I'll come to that, Sanjaya Baru has said so in his book, did Mr Manmohan Singh contradict him?He's contradicted you.I'm telling you, his secretary Pulok Chatterjee, you think had gone to have tea with Sonia Gandhi when he went everyday or every other day. No, no she had invited him for dinner. What is all this and I'll tell you. I think sometime in early 2005 she said you are not dabbling in defence deals, I said what do you mean? She said there's a file with you which is about a deal with an African delegate who's here.Yes, you write about a mole being there in your ministryI said listen, is my signature on the file and how do you know? Yes I have written, I said how do you know? She said you talked to Pranab? I said yes I did talk to him, this delegation has come and I'm sending them to you.But are you saying Pulok Chatterjee was taking official files to Sonia Gandhi and showing them to her?I didn't work in the PMO but Sanjaya Baru did for six years, he says it and Manmohan Singh didn'tBut you have a former PM saying on record that no official files were ever sent to her, so who do we believe?That's up to you but the facts are that Sanjaya Baru has said what I'm saying, many other people are saying it. Do you know how many Congressmen have telephoned me to say, good for you, you brought this out? More than fifty.More than fifty Congressmen have called you to say you did the right thing?Yes and they are from various parts of India.What about Manmohan Singh's statement that private conversation should not be made public for private gain?I'm not short of money.You are selling a book? This is all part of your book for which you'll gainPublic figures have no private lives. You read about Kennedy's life, what is not written about it, you read the books about, at one time his NSA, JN Dixit, every conversation on Sri Lanka has been reported, his book 'Assignment Colombo' is full of private conversations which he had with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, they are all there in the book. Read Kissinger's book, you are a public figure, you are a historic figure, you have no private life. Your private life comes under great scrutiny, and for Manmohan Singh to say that there are no conversations, he may remain reticent, that's what has harmed him. He hasn't got the guts to come out and say what the facts of life are.You've called him spineless in your book.What would you call him?It's not for me to say, you tell me.No, I'm asking you.Well perhaps he didn't stand up to a lot of things that were happening in his Cabinet.Exactly the same thing I have said in other words.Finally Mr Singh your critics will also say that your political leanings have also changed over the last few years, your son is now a BJP MLA, you yourself are full of praise for Mr Modi's leadership and his foreign policy, and the accusation is that that has motivated you as well to speak out against the Gandhis nowI saw Mr Modi in Ahmedabad on the 4th of February, this is three months before the elections, and I told him I have not come to ask you for anything. I have noticed that in the last five months you have not spoken a word about foreign policy, the Prime Minister is also ultimately Foreign Minister, you should begin with the neighbours because we have neglected our neighbours. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not been to Pakistan, he has not been to Nepal, not been to Bhutan |
could exceed 10 percent.
All in all, it is going to be quite a stretch for Obamacare opponents to turn this data into bad news. Increased competition among insurers means better prices and better policies. An increase in the number of policies one can choose from also means improvements in policy quality and premium costs.
And with a median increase of somewhere between 4 and 6 percent, it seems we have very little to complain about.
For the more suspicious among you, I will add that the study done by PriceWaterhouse Coopers also anticipates that the median premium increases for 2015 will come in at about 6 percent.
Writes Alex Wayne in Bloomberg:
“Obamacare premiums, once predicted to skyrocket in the second year under the government’s marketplace, have risen about 6 percent for 2015, according to an analysis of preliminary state filings. While foes of the Affordable Care Act warned of double-digit rate increases, the costs of premiums seen so far is more modest for the new year. One reason may be that insurers who came in high in 2014 found themselves beaten out for enrollments. At the same time, 77 new insurance plans will be competing for customers in 2015, U.S. officials say.”
So, if you are all about the politics of being anti-Obamacare, you’ll want to simply pretend you never read this article as any rational individual will find it hard to continue to terrify the nation with predictions of fewer policies, smaller competition, and double-digit increases in premium rates.
However, even if you are committed to bashing the ACA at all costs, do yourself a favor and go check out the policies available to you come November 15th. You are likely to find something to your liking at either a lower price or at a very small increase.
Should you find such a policy, buy it and be secure in the knowledge that the next time you trash Obamacare nobody will have to know that you benefited personally from the program.
It will be our little secret.
Contact Rick at thepolicypage@gmail.com and follow me on Facebook and Twitter.
UPDATE: In response to any comments and emails suggesting that the data provided omits to deal with the question of increased deductibles, please note that, according to the McKinsey study, in the 19 states where the final data is in, 81 percent of all 2014 products were re-filed. This means that the same deductibles as 2014 will be the deductibles in 2015 at least for 81 percent of the policies that are the same as previously offered. That would certainly seem to bode well for the remainder of the country and quell the rumors that deductibles are going way up for 2015 policies.If there is one thing that facilitates communication between international Pirates it is the English language. Love it or hate it and despite the fact that the majority Pirate languages are German and Swedish, most collaborative activities are conducted in English. As the growing world-wide Pirate Movement expands into new countries and involves more people from diverse cultures we need as many means of communication as possible. The Pirate Times is, of course one such medium, as are the international conferences and workshops organised by our parent organisation Pirate Parties International.
However most of us do not have the time, funds or opportunity to jet across the world. Mumble is our solution to this problem. Mumble is an open source, low-latency, high quality voice chat software primarily intended for use while gaming. The Pirate has adopted if for its own purposes and it is being used to connect pirates on a continuous basis around the planet.
Mumble uses a system of rooms and most are dedicated to uses for specific groups with specific purposes but now PPI has seen a need for Pirates just to be able to hang out together, chat, get to know each other and share ideas and experiences. Thus, at the request of PPBE, it has created the “English speaking salon”, located in the international section of the server run by the North Rhine Westphalia branch of the German Pirate Party.
If you are familiar with Mumble and have the server details then you can go there and chat. It has just been started so be patient and we are sure that it will be humming soon. If there are too many people there already, temporary extra rooms can be added by registered users. If you wish you can give some background information about yourself in the comment box and a picture if you so desire.
If you do not have Mumble yet then read on.
Downloading and Installing Mumble
The Mumble client can be downloaded from the source forge page.
Once you have done that follow these instructions to connect to the NRW server.
Open the Mumble client
In the top left corner click on “Server” then “Connect – a new window opens
Under “Servername” click on the arrow opening “Public Internet” then “Europe” then “Germany”
Find “Piratenpartie NRW” and click on it – a button “Connect” at the bottom will become active. Click on this button.
A small input window will open labeled “Enter Username” – here you can enter your name or a nickname for your mumble session.
When the connection is complete you will see a list of rooms Find “International” and double click on “English speaking salon”
Personalize Mumble
To personalize your Mumble presence click on the “C” button or the toolbar item “Self” You can add a small bio of your self with an avatar and links.
Configuring Mumble
To make sure that your chat is most comfortable for you and your friends it is best to use the “push to talk”feature:
Click the “Configure” button in the tool bar and select “Settings”. It should open at “Audio Input”.
In the section “Transmission” and item “Transmit” select “Push-to- Talk” from the drop-down list you will find under “Function”.
On the same line click under “Shortcut” and key in the key combination you want to use when you wish the microphone to be live. CTR-Shift is a good choice as it is almost never used when typing normally.
Registration
The next thing you should do is register. This means you can keep a permanent nickname that no one else can use. It also means other users can trust you are who you say you are and you get certain privileges like being able to create temporary rooms. This is found under the tool bar item “Self”.
You are now ready to Mumble with English speaking Pirates from around the world. See you there.
Featured image: Public DomainWhen Quincy, Washington, farmer Mel Calloway got the news that Donald Trump had been elected President of the United States, she was halfway around the world, in an airport terminal in Yangon, Myanmar. She and two others representing Washington potato growers were midway through a trade mission to Southeast Asia, waiting for a Wednesday morning flight from Myanmar to Vietnam.
As televisions turned to the election analysis on CNN International, she and her colleagues watched in disbelief, she says. Nearby, a couple from Las Vegas was on the phone with someone from home. Thirteen hours apart, they talked through the results pouring in from the West Coast. A group of Australians just laughed.
“No one expected the outcome that was happening,” Calloway says.
Calloway, like many Washington farmers, had supported Trump, but she says she thought it was a long shot. They voted for him, hoping that despite his caustic rhetoric on issues such as international trade and immigration, Trump would act in their best interests. So without much thought about what the election of an isolationist could mean for her mission to expand her state’s potato markets, Calloway continued on to Ho Chi Minh City.
The Washington State Potato Commission had spent two years and two trade missions trying to build an appetite for their product in Myanmar, where the population is young and those with some wealth have an appetite for iPhones and Ruffles. The chips produced in the country are small and cheap, which leaves room for a new tier, using higher quality potatoes from the states.
“We’re always looking for ways to increase our export potential, if we can,” Calloway says. She and her husband, Rex, who chairs the potato commission, farm 750 acres of potatoes on a 2,500-acre farm in Quincy, about 50 miles northeast of Ellensburg. She estimates 80 percent of those potatoes are sold abroad.
Washington is second to Idaho in U.S. potato production. Of the 4.8 million tons of potatoes harvested in Washington each year, the potato commission estimates that 90 percent will leave the state, and half of that will leave the country altogether. In 2016, Washington potato growers exported more than $782 million worth of frozen potato products, up from about $720 million the previous year. That includes $200 million in frozen French fries to Japan.
“From our perspective, having access to Latin America and the Pacific Rim is critical to the health of our family farms,” says Matt Harris, the potato commission’s director of government affairs. That’s why the commission, which operates on a $3 million annual budget, spends time and money keeping up relationships and exploring new markets abroad. (Calloway’s trip to Southeast Asia in November was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.)
On a policy level, the commission advocates for trade deals that break down barriers. U.S. potato growers have benefited greatly from the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, which eliminated nearly all tariffs on products bought and sold between Canada, Mexico and the United States. And they supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal that, like NAFTA, would have reduced tariffs to encourage trade.
As a candidate, Trump railed against the TPP, calling it “a rape of our country.” In January, he fulfilled his campaign promise to abandon the agreement. And while he hasn’t yet followed through on his promises to scrap NAFTA, the potato commission takes the threats very seriously.
“He has the authority to unilaterally withdraw from the trade agreement,” Harris says. “If the U.S. were to pull away from that trade agreement with Mexico, you’d see tariffs on our exports.”
Of the $120 million worth of frozen potato products the U.S. exports to Mexico each year, almost a quarter comes from Washington. Without NAFTA, frozen products would likely see a 20 percent tariff at the border, Harris says. The tax on fresh potatoes would be closer to 50 percent.
Washington’s growing conditions — a long growing season, rich soil, plenty of water — and proximity to ports gives it “an edge on global competition,” says Derek Davenport, who grows chipping potatoes on 3,000 acres in Pasco. But high tariffs and increased production in Canada, Australia and Europe have made it a tough business lately.
“Trade is a big, big part of what we do. That’s a big concern of ours,” Davenport says. “Trump’s (administration) says they have plans in place to make trade beneficial. We’re still waiting to hear what that is. We haven’t heard any details.”
Davenport, who supported Trump in the election, has already seen a downside to the administration’s stance on trade. In January, a buyer in Mexico canceled a contract with Davenport, citing worries about what could happen with NAFTA. He says the exchange rate between the two countries also factored into the decision.
“Hopefully cooler heads will prevail,” Harris says. “At this point, we look at it as rhetoric. We’re not seeing any cues that would indicate anything but that. It’s something we have to monitor, but that’s where we’re at.”
During the third week in February, members of the potato commission made an annual trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with the state’s Congressional delegation. They reiterated the industry’s sensitivity to disruptions in trade, warning against withdrawing from NAFTA, and grasping for a silver lining in talks of bilateral trade agreements in place of the TPP.
“The new administration has said, ‘Alright I’m willing to do bilateral agreements,’ and to work on things that, for me, would affect the potato industry,” says Rex Calloway. “That’s what he’s promised. But I want you to follow through on that promise. Go do those bilaterals if that’s the direction you want to take — get them done. Now. Soon.”
In the meantime, the commission continues its own outreach to trade partners. In March, a group from Mexico, which favors frozen French fries over potato chips, visited Washington fields and processing plants as part of a reverse trade mission.
And Mel Calloway’s trip to Myanmar with representatives from WSDA and the potato commission led to an agreement to send a shipment of fresh chipping potatoes for manufacturers to test while the two countries’ regulators work out the details of future relations.
Calloway, for her part, seems to be willing to give Trump a chance to get it right. And no matter how extreme Trump’s views are on trade, she says, the President is just one man in a three-branch system of government. “I’ve been to Washington, D.C., and Olympia enough to know things do not change overnight,” Calloway says.Imagine talking to a tiger, chatting to a cheetah, as Dr Doolittle once sang – what a neat achievement that would be. Well, Amazon has revealed that the animal-loving doctor’s ambition might not be entirely fantasy.
Pet translators that can turn woofs into words and make sense of miaows, might really be on the horizon, according to a report backed by the internet retailer.
Futurologist William Higham of Next Big Thing, who co-authored the report for Amazon, says he believes devices that can talk dog could be less than 10 years away.
“Innovative products that succeed are based around a genuine and major consumer needs. The amount of money now spent on pets – they are becoming fur babies to so many people – means there is huge consumer demand for this. Somebody is going to put this together,” he says.
Higham pointed to the work being done by Con Slobodchikoff, professor emeritus at the department of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University, who has spent 30 years studying the behaviour of prairie dogs, which are actually not dogs at all but north American rodents.
The author of Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals used AI software to help analyse prairie dog calls, finding they had “a sophisticated communication system that has all the aspects of language”.
“They have words for different species of predator and can describe the colour of clothes of a human, or the coat of coyotes or dogs.,” Slobodchikoff says.
He is now so convinced that other animals use similarly decipherable language that he is attempting to raise money to develop a cat and dog translation device.
Slobodchikoff says: “So many people would dearly love to talk to their dog or cat or at least find out what they are trying to communicate. A lot of people talk to their dogs and share their innermost secrets. With cats I’m not sure what they’d have to say. A lot of times it might just be “you idiot, just feed me and leave me alone”.
During the past few years, advances in the field of machine learning have led to dramatic improvements in automatic speech recognition and translation. Algorithms learn to interpret language by training on huge datasets rather than being pre-programmed with a set of inflexible rules.
But Juliane Kaminski, a psychologist at Portsmouth University who works on interactions between humans and dogs, is less optimistic that we will soon be able to decipher barks and bow-wows – mainly because she does not think that the way a dog woofs can be viewed as a language. “We would not describe dogs’ forms of communication as language in the scientific sense,” she says. But: “They do give out rudimentary signals of what they want and how they’re feeling.”
For instance, she says, a right-sided tail wag is positive while a wag to the left not so positive. “That’s something humans might not so easily pick up on,” said Kaminski – although a translation device might have difficulty spotting that, too.
Dogs’ barks, she says, are also context specific. They give out different yaps and yowls during play, aggression, when they are missing their owner and so on, but even people who have never owned a dog are fairly good at decoding these utterances.
Kaminski says a translation device might make things easier for people who lack intuition or young children who misinterpret signals “sometimes quite significantly.”.
One study, for instance, found that when young children were shown a picture of a dog with menacingly bared teeth, they concluded that the dog was “happy” and “smiling” and that they would like to hug it. An interpretation device might be able to warn of danger.
Amazon already sells one device that transfers a human voice into miaows using samples from 25 cats (One review says “the cat seems puzzled”). And the Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery, a small Scandinavian research lab led by artists and marketeers, attempted to develop a dog translation device called No More Woof a few years ago. The project was put “on pause” according to co-founder Per Cromwell when they realised the scale of the challenge.
The gadget, which looked like a Madonna-style headset, supposedly measured brain activity to help communicate what the dog was thinking via a speaker on their collar. “It needed more research,” admits Cromwell who has gone on to instead develop bicycle-powered mobile coffee stalls.
Tomas Mazetti, who was also involved in the project, said: “It was extremely limited. It could tell you the dog was tired or angry. But you can kind of see that anyway.”Everyone knows someone in their workplace who spectacularly underperforms. And it’s not like the person is new and he’s still learning the ropes. He’s been underperforming for a decade. Yeah, he fell into some inexplicable surprise success late in 2007. And, sure, he had a good year in 2009. But we’re years down the road.
There wouldn’t be one person in your office who’d say, “Let’s stick with this guy.” Right?
Except at the offices of the Colorado Rockies.
This must be the end of Dan O’Dowd’s power reign with the Colorado Rockies. Owner Dick Monfort is married to mediocrity. From O’Dowd’s first full season of 2000 to now, the Rockies have averaged 75.9 wins.
But Monfort won’t fire O’Dowd. Monfort was gracious enough to sit down with a group of Denver Post sportswriters this week and we peppered him with questions about his management team. Rockies fans may want O’Dowd gone, but the one super fan who can actually fire the guy insists the team is better off with him.
“Continuity here is very important, and I really don’t believe that either one of them has done a poor job,” Monfort said of O’Dowd, who oversees all baseball operations, and Bill Geivett, who oversees major-league operations.
So you’re telling me that if they had to reapply for their jobs, and you also looked at dozens of brilliant, forward- and outside-the-box-thinking baseball people, that these two guys would be the ones you’d choose?
O’Dowd and Geivett are smart baseball men, but the last-place Rockies clearly don’t have the right smart baseball men running the franchise.
So, Dick, if you’re not going to fire them and start fresh (how many chances do they get?), I implore you to step outside your comfort zone, and approach this offseason as well as next season with a skeptical eye. Ask them to prove why they should remain in power. Replace their seat cushions with hot charcoal.
If the Rockies aren’t playing meaningful games next August, take “Groundhog Day” out of the DVD player and spare the fans.
It’s now October, and as we watch these fine-tuned, deep, dynamic teams make the playoffs — be it small-market Tampa Bay and Oakland or big-city powers Detroit and Boston — it makes you realize how hopelessly far Colorado is from another “Rocktober.” At least give us “Rock-gust.”
Sure, there are many ways for the Rockies to make things sound hopeful. Budding talent. Willingness to spend on a big bat. Stud pitching phenom Jonathan Gray. Three all-stars. Whatever. You know how many teams are currently playing the “if only this happens” game? Many. They are all on the outside looking in at the playoffs.
Yes, it’s super tough to win at altitude without having a payroll like the Dodgers. Yes, the Rockies have never had a season in which Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez both played 150 games or more. And, yes, there are promising players on the roster. So does that mean O’Dowd and Geivett should be in charge for life? That no one else could come in and provide a fresh perspective and turn this franchise around? The Rockies must think holistically about run prevention with that ridiculously large outfield, about the bullpen, about having experienced players coming off the bench.
Asked about accountability, Monfort said, “There are just so many areas where we’re not failing. We do some really remarkable things. At the end of the day, it’s the players who have to win. So, I guess, if you continue to have three all-stars and two potential all-stars, and you can’t win, then you have got to look at if maybe they aren’t the right players.”
Who brought in the players, Dick?
Other teams, Oakland and Pittsburgh to name two, might only have one superstar, but they win because they have few glaring weaknesses.
And then there are teams with a few great players, but that doesn’t make them a great team. Just ask Rockies fans.
Benjamin Hochman: bhochman@denverpost.com or twitter.com/hochman
Visit denverpost.com each weekday near quittin’ time for a heavy pour of sports commentary from Denver Post columnist Benjamin Hochman. Care for another round? Find previous Happy Hour installments at denverpost.com/hochman.Katy Wolfe sometimes gets quizzical looks from friends and classmates when she talks about her athletic pursuits. When people think of sports, they tend to imagine soccer, football, basketball and lacrosse.
But this Ellicott City teenager is a competitive climber.
"It's hard to explain," said Wolfe, a 15-year-old student at Marriotts Ridge High School. "They think it's about getting to the top the fastest. But it's more than that. It's all about technique."
Rock-climbing is just one of the options for athletic kids thinking outside conventional activities. In recent years, youth enrollment has fallen in traditionally popular sports like basketball, football and soccer, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. For some kids, traditional sports are too competitive or require athletic skills they don't possess. Others have parents are looking for alternatives to injury-prone contact sports. Dodgeball, disc golf, archery, karate — myriad options and teams give local kids the opportunity to stay active, build character and develop confidence when popular sports aren't the right fit.
"We have traditional athletes and non-athletes," said Mark Simons, director of the Youth Ultimate Disc League in Howard County. Some are simply looking for activities in between seasons of more common sports. "Kids today spend a lot of time in front of computers. This gives them a chance to be outside."
It also teaches offense and defensive play, field strategy, agility, running stamina and other skills transferable to other sports, he said.
Beyond the physical benefits, parents seek out alternative sports because they want their children to learn good sportsmanship — how to compete on the field and then shake hands at the end of the game — when they've tried traditional sports to no avail. Teams also offer camaraderie and a chance to cheer on peers in ways that aren't always available in classrooms and other social settings.
"You should see their confidence pick up," Simons said.
Rachel Calamba's 14-year-old son, Caleb Dole, wasn't interested in sports, but she wanted him to exercise.
"I told him: 'You pick,'"when they joined a gym, she said.
He chose climbing, quickly becoming so good that they sought out the additional expertise at Earth Treks, even commuting from Reston twice a week to Columbia.
"His personality really came out," said Calamba. "People talk to him. … It's been really fun to watch."
And Calamba found she enjoyed climbing, too. "You're always testing yourself," she said. "Eighty percent of it is mental. … Now, it's something we can do together."
Matt Medicus, adventure and outdoor supervisor for the Howard County Department of Recreation and Parks, said archery is a sport worth considering for similar reasons. "They're learning focus and mental concentration. … It teaches them the basics of organized sports. They work with partners, scoring each other. And they learn to self-critique. They perfect their technique from watching their teammates. They learn from each other."
There are even parent-child classes.
Non-traditional sports can carry other perks. Many of them, including badminton, are not expensive, which allows children to try them with little investment. For badminton, no special shoes or fancy fields are required — just a racket and shuttlecock, said Sigen Chen, coach for the Catonsville Badminton Club. A net isn't even necessary, especially for practice.
"You can play with two or four," Chen said. "It's flexible. … There's no physical contact, which is one of the reasons it's popular."
As research emerges linking sports to brain injuries, some parents hesitate to enroll their children in high-risk sports like football, opting instead for low-contact sports. Those sorts of sports, where the size of a player isn't such an important factor, can also open opportunities to play on teams that span different age groups.
"Younger kids can play with older ones," Chen says of badminton. "It really can be a family sport."
That's not to say it and other alternative sports can't be competitive.
At Earth Treks, there are three levels of climbers, ages 9 to 18. The most advanced will compete at the national level.
"It's a lot like tennis, with singles matches that accrue points for the team," said coach Matt Jones.
Still, most of the climbers are not also playing tennis, he said.
"They're not usually your typical athletes, the kids you'll see on the soccer or baseball fields," Jones said. "They're often a little spacier, a little artsier. Sometimes, they'll have been here for a birthday party. Or sometimes their parents are saying they've tried everything else, and 'I just wanted them to do something' besides play video games."
It helps, he said, that "sometimes the best climbers are the least coordinated. It makes no sense, but it's often true."
Amelia Cannon, a 10-year-old from Silver Spring, played tennis, soccer and basketball, and tried ballet and gymnastics. But, she said, "I got bored with the rest. I like climbing the best. There are so many holds and moves."
Although Katy Wolfe once played softball, after a birthday party at the rock-climbing gym in Columbia she quickly became into climbing. Now, her sister and her parents all climb. "I love the feeling get when you make it to the top."STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- When Tropical Storm Irene hit last August, siblings Charlotte Breuers and David Hagley stayed put in their rear bungalow in Midland Beach, because they didn’t want to leave their pets.
The water only covered two of their front steps, they told their landlord, so they decided to stay for Sandy as well.
That choice proved fatal for both – police discovered both Ms. Breuers and Hagley, 77 and 65, dead inside their 1025 Olympia Blvd. home Friday and first publicly reported their deaths that day, without identifying them by name. Police publicly released their names Sunday night.
The borough’s death toll has remained steady at 23 victims since Friday – 22 were found on Staten Island, while a 23rd died in Lower Manhattan. That number includes Ms. Breuers and Hagley.
ISLANDERS LOST TO SANDY:
Beatrice Spagnuolo, 79,
164 Grimsby Ave.
Anastasia Rispoli, 73,
158 Grimsby Ave.
John Filipowicz, 51,
72 Fox Beach Ave.
John Filipowicz Jr., 20,
72 Fox Beach Ave.
Leonard Montalto, 53,
176 Fox Beach Ave.
Ella Norris, 89,
728 Buel Ave.
Artur Kasprzak, 28,
20 Doty Ave.
Angela Dresch, 13,
687 Yetman Ave.
Andrew Semarco, 61,
146 Mills Ave.
James Rossi, 85,
575 Quincy Ave.
Jack Paterno, 65,
787 Nugent Ave.
Patricia Bevan, 59,
638 Hunter Ave.
Anna Gesso, 62,
299 Naughton Ave.
Eugene Contrubis, 62,
162 Kiswick St.
Connor Moore, 4,
end of McLaughlin St.
Brandon Moore, 2,
end of McLaughlin St.
Walter Colborne, 89,
23 Harbour Court.
Marie Colborne, 66,
23 Harbour Court.
George Dresch, 55,
Brighton St.
George P. O’Regan, 79,
70 New Lane
Frank Suber, 55,
90 Broad St., Manhattan
David Hagley, 65,
1025 Olympia Blvd.
Charlotte Breuers, 77,
1025 Olympia Blvd.
“She was an animal lover. She had two or three dogs in the house. Maybe three cats. Rabbits, birds,” said landlord Dave Troise Sr., who lives in the front bungalow at the same address. “All the pets are gone, as far as I know... I just saw the wing of the parrot in the middle window.”
Ms. Breuers, a retired home health aide, would regularly walk her black pug, Lucky, throughout the neighborhood, and used to work at Aunt Phyllis’ Dog Grooming Plus Pet Shop, where she’d groom the animals, Troise said.
Hagley was “semi-retired,” Troise said – he had once lived in Texas, where he installed sprinkler systems.
When Irene hit last year, Troise said, Ms. Breuers was adamant about seeing her pets through the storm – “She would not leave the animals. She said, ‘I’m staying with them. I’m not going anywhere.’”
Irene fizzled out, Troise said, and based on her first-person account of the 2011 storm, he decided to ride out Sandy as well. “They said this storm is a little worse than that one. How high could it go, then? I never thought it was going to be a wall of water.”
So Troise, 58, and his girlfriend, Loretta DeSio, 57, stayed behind as well, at one point giving three others – a father, an adult son and his girlfriend – shelter. The storm waters started rising, though, and their three guests made it across the street to a neighbor’s two-story house.
But by then, the waters were too high to cross – “By then, the cars were drifting down the street. There was debris.”
With water rising through the floor, Troise said he went into the bedroom, “and I just punched out the drop ceiling there.”
He had a ladder nearby, and he sent his girlfriend up, then threw up his go bag, then followed.
“When I got up there, I had to punch out the attic window,” he said, in case they needed a fast escape to the roof. They shone a flashlight across the street to let their houseguests know where they were, and they shone a flashlight back.
And the waters kept rising, up to within a foot of the attic entrance, he said.
He saw one man and his child up on a nearby roof – he speculates they stayed up there through the night before getting rescued, and he worried about a fire he could see from down the street. But the two remained safe in the attic until a helicopter could get them out in the morning.
He found out about Ms. Breuers and Hagley days later, he said, when he spotted Ms. Breuers’ head through her living room window.
“Mine was up higher, we had a little more time,” he said of the two bungalows.
And despite what they had said about staying, Troise said he was never quite sure on Monday if they had stuck around. “We thought they might have left,” Troise said, noting that Ms. Breuers didn’t greet his girlfriend when she came out during the day Monday.
“That afternoon, it was funny because they weren’t around,” he said. “Usually they’ll come out. We assumed they must have left.”Lead Pastor Jim Burgen wants initiative pursued 'right away'
Senior Pastor Jim Burgen practices his sermon during a dress rehearsal for the weekend's service at Flatirons Community Church in Lafayette in June 2016. ( Daily Camera file photo )
In an impassioned weekend message to his sizable congregation, Senior Pastor Jim Burgen of Lafayette's Flatirons Community Church announced plans for two new campuses serving north Longmont-Loveland and the Highlands Ranch-Parker areas.
In a message running more than 53 minutes and titled " Strategic Maneuvers," Burgen expressed an urgency to that mission.
"We've gone and we've done a bunch of research. We need to start two campuses, like right away," said Burgen, sporting a T-shirt featuring the words "me too."
"Well, how soon is that? As soon as possible."
Urging those who know of a vacant church property, or perhaps a school gymnasium that could be utilized for a kids' ministry in either of those areas, Burgen urged his congregation members to let church officials know, giving them the name of Executive Pastor Paul Brunner.
"My finance guy is right down here and he's going to kill me later," Burgen joked. "But you know what? You know why we can do this? Because you guys have grown so much and you are so faithful with your money, we could start those tomorrow, if we had the space and we had the people to do it. We really, really could."
In an interview Tuesday, Burgen affirmed the plans he unveiled in his weekly message.
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"All three of our facilities are pretty much at capacity," Burgen said. "We have a critical mass of people making long drives from those parts of the city, and it makes it really difficult to get more involved in the life of the church and the life of the community, because of distance."
In addition to its flagship campus on South Boulder Road in Lafayette, Flatirons also has facilities in Genesee and its most recent addition, a vacant Denver church purchased at 2700 S. Downing St., for about $1.2 million, after Flatirons' lease at Denver's Paramount Theater ran out.
Flatirons Community Church was listed No. 15 on Outreach magazine's 2016 list of "largest participating churches," with an average weekend attendance of 17,601. On Tuesday, Burgen put the current weekend average now at "around 18,000."
Flatirons created headlines in 2016 with announced plans for a new campus in the Interstate 25 corridor between Lafayette and Longmont that would ultimately also house future schools it plans to launch. On Tuesday, Burgen said the new campuses he called for in the past weekend's announcement do not mean the hoped-for I-25 corridor location has been shelved.
"This would not be instead of that. This would be in addition," he said, adding that a potential I-25 corridor property is still being explored.
He explained the message title of "Strategic Maneuvers" was inspired by the biblical message of Matthew 28:18-20, which in part speaks of Jesus's mandate to "go and make disciples of all nations."
Referring to the crush of churchgoers expected over the approaching Easter weekend, the increasing need for those who can lead kids' ministries and even the constant issue of parking demands, Burgen said Tuesday, "How do we get the number of people we expect through the doors?... That's not going to happen on accident."
In the weekend's message to his congregation — which is typically either streamed or recorded for broadcast to other Flatirons campuses — Burgen emphasized that while he has always envisioned "more and more and more campuses all over Colorado," the two latest locations he is calling for do not represent a distant, long-term goal.
"We're going to get on it right away," Burgen preached. "I want to start those campuses this year."
Charlie Brennan: 303-473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennanAbout an hour's drive east of San Francisco, steady winds blow about half the year through a stretch of terrain dotted with thousands of electricity-generating turbines.
Since the 1960s, Altamont Pass has been a proving ground for wind power. Now it's a test bed for solutions to one of the industry's biggest downsides: Turbines kill thousands of birds and bats annually.
The question of how to protect winged wildlife is becoming more pressing as deaths rise with the growth of wind power. Wind generation in the United States, for example, is up dramatically, but so are deaths of birds such as the federally protected golden eagle. (See related: "Federal Study Highlights Spike in Eagle Deaths at Wind Farms.")
Over the past several years, wind companies operating at Altamont Pass have made strides in reducing bird deaths across the wind resource area's 58 square miles (150 square kilometers). Part of the progress has come from shutting down in the winter months when the winds are low, and also from removing particularly hazardous turbines. (See related: "Notorious Altamont Wind Area Becomes Safer for Birds.")
Now a larger effort, overseen by the wind operators and the counties spanned by Altamont Pass, is under way to "repower" the area, or decommission old turbines and replace them with new ones that, ideally, will kill fewer birds. Alameda County is close to approving a one-year trial at Altamont of lower, "shrouded" turbines made by the Massachusetts-based company Ogin, according to county planning official Sandra Rivera. The new turbines have bonnet-like flaps that ring the perimeter of the turbine. The compact design is meant to boost efficiency, sit below a typical bird flight path, and deter a bird's flight into the rotors.
Trade-Offs With Newer Turbines
Thousands of older turbines at Altamont Pass have been fast-spinning and low to the ground, while also featuring cage-like lattice towers that were attractive places for birds to land and perch: a bad mix.
Most of these are being replaced by "monopole" towers, some as high as 500 feet (152 meters). The new towers are meant to be safer |
paint a more comprehensive picture of their achievements, see activity trends over time, auto-track runs and long walks, sleep smarter, and enforce healthy habits with insights and encouragement.
However, IDC finds that eyewear is where the market is headed.
Eyewear, which constituted just 0.2% of the wearables market in 2015, is expected to reach nearly 9% marketshare by 2020 with shipments of 18.8 million units.
The report found this would be driven largely by specialized applications and devices aimed at transforming mobile computing in select industries and job functions.
[Read more about how the wearables market is developing.]
However, some hardware providers will also offer consumer-friendly options. More importantly, connected eyewear is expected to account for more than 40% of the total revenue of the wearables market, thanks to the high prices paid for specialized commercial devices.
However the market develops, IDC believes the time is ripe for developers to be creating all types of applications that can take advantage of the data these devices are collecting, which could also mean a boon for the big data and analytics industries.
"The trajectory of the wearables market signals a strong opportunity for developers," Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC's wearables program, wrote in the report. "Imagine what that means when tracking steps, analyzing patient activity, or shopping: The information can be shared immediately with a second or third party, and the user can, in turn, receive context-appropriate information back."
IDC also singled out the nascent connecting clothing space, which in 2015 represented a paltry 0.6% of the market in 2015, as a sector to watch, especially as Samsung, Lenovo, and others begin to invest in prototypes of smart shoes and other clothing items that can help athletes better track their fitness and performance.
The research firm predicted shipments of smart clothing articles stands to capture 7.3% of the market by 2020 as athletes and consumers integrate fashion-tech into their daily lives.
Overall, lesser known form factors like clip-on devices, smart hearing devices, helmets, and other creative new devices are expected to account for 6.1% of the market in 2016 and 3.3% in 2020.
Nathan Eddy is a freelance writer for InformationWeek. He has written for Popular Mechanics, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, FierceMarkets, and CRN, among others. In 2012 he made his first documentary film, The Absent Column. He currently lives in Berlin. View Full Bio
We welcome your comments on this topic on our social media channels, or [contact us directly] with questions about the site.The administration expects to accept “a good number” of the advisory group recommendations, the official said, and will “perhaps reject others.”
While few in the White House want to admit as much in public, none of this would have happened without the revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor now in asylum in Russia. While Mr. Obama has said he welcomes the debate about the proper limits on the N.S.A., it is not one he engaged in publicly until the Snowden revelations began. Now the president has little choice — this week alone a constellation of forces is pushing for change: A federal judge called the bulk-collection program “almost Orwellian,” while some in Congress, many of his allies and Silicon Valley executives demanded change.
Those represent very different pressures. Mr. Obama has already said that bulk collection of telephone records should continue. The unresolved question is whether he agrees with the advisory committee that the records should remain in private hands — either the telecommunications companies or a private consortium — and that individual court authorizations should be required for every use of metadata.
While Mr. Obama can deal with some of those issues by executive order, others would doubtless require congressional action — and even his own party is deeply divided about how much leeway the N.S.A. should have.
Mr. Obama has already acted on another recommendation, albeit quietly: The N.S.A. and the director of national intelligence are no longer able to monitor the cellphones and emails of leaders of other nations without White House approval. That does not mean no national leaders will be tapped; as Zbigniew Brzezinski said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “They are the ones we should be listening to.”
But now that one such operation has blown up in the N.S.A.’s hands — the monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — Mr. Obama has begun to weigh their potential benefits against the huge diplomatic and economic costs if they are exposed. “The president has made it clear he never wants to be blindsided by one of these again,” one of his aides said. Under the advisory group’s proposal he would not be: He would have to approve such operations.
The president is also the one who must approve the use of cyberweapons. Gen. Keith Alexander, who leads both the N.S.A. and Cyber Command, said there were only “a handful or less” such attacks conducted by the United States. But designing the stealthiest cyberweapons occupies thousands of specialists and costs billions of dollars.
The pressure to rein them in is coming from industry, which fears that the N.S.A.’s abilities to crack data encryption and bore into foreign computer systems and the cloud will scare away business across Europe and Asia. Mr. Obama must now make a choice: to keep building the world’s most sophisticated cyberarsenal, or pare back for fear of harming American competitiveness.The young British woman murdered on Friday in a terror attack in Jerusalem was named as Hannah Bladon, 21, an exchange student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Bladon started her studies in January at the university and was set to complete the program in September. She took courses on Bible Studies, archaeology and religion at the university’s Rothberg International School. She was also studying Hebrew. She had been studying religion at the University of Birmingham since 2015.
The Hebrew University sent its condolences to the family, saying in a statement that it “condemns such acts of terror that harm innocent people, and especially a student who came to Jerusalem to study and widen her academic horizons.”
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In a Facebook post in January, Bladon wrote that she was doing okay in response to some concerns for her safety amid an ongoing wave of terror attacks that had largely subsided since beginning in October 2015. “Thanks guys. I’m ok thanks!” she posted. “Security is really tight on campus so no worries at mo[ment]! Managed to see a lot of sites before starting my classes today so defo (definitely) having a great time! Xx”. The comment accompanied a picture of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Bladon died of her wounds after being stabbed multiple times with a kitchen knife by a Palestinian terrorist while riding on Jerusalem’s light rail.
An off-duty police officer and a passerby wrestled the terrorist, a Palestinian man from East Jerusalem, to the ground before he could harm anyone else. Two other people were lightly injured when the tram made an emergency stop.
Footage from inside the tram shows the suspect being subdued as armed police stand by. Personal belongings including a suitcase and a children’s double stroller can be seen next to the scene.
Medics from the Magen David Adom ambulance service carried out CPR on Bladon at the scene before taking her to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus for treatment. She was brought to the hospital in critical condition, with multiple stab wounds to the upper body, a medic said.
She died of her wounds shortly after arriving to the hospital, a Hadassah spokesperson said.
The terror attack was condemned by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, who also offered their condolences to Bladon’s family.
Ira Kirschner, the Director of the Rothberg School’s Office of Student Life, told Channel 10 News that Bladon was “very polite,” which created the impression that she was shy, when she first arrived at the university. “But she wasn’t like that. She was adventurous and had come here to have experiences, to meet people, and to get to know the history of the state.”
Israeli ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev, wrote on Twitter: “My thoughts are with the family and friends of UK student Hannah Bladon, who was murdered in a senseless act of terror in Jerusalem today.”
My thoughts are with the family and friends of UK student Hannah Bladon, who was murdered in a senseless act of terror in Jerusalem today. — Mark Regev (@MarkRegev) April 14, 2017
Parademics also treated a pregnant woman who suffered an injury to her stomach when the light rail came to a sudden halt because of the attack, as well as a man in his 50s who hurt his leg when he tried to run from the scene, MDA said.
Both were lightly injured and taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center for treatment, MDA said.
The terrorist was identified as Jamil Tamimi, 57, from the Ras al-Amoud neighborhood of East Jerusalem, by the Shin Bet security service.
“According to an initial investigation, it seems he suffers from mental problems,” a police spokesperson said.
Police said he was on his way home from a mental hospital in northern Israel when he carried out the attack.
As the train approached IDF Square, outside the Old City, shortly before 1:00 p.m., Tamimi “noticed the young woman standing next to him, crouched, took out a knife from his bag and stabbed her a number of times,” police said.
Earlier this year, Tamimi tried to commit suicide by swallowing a razor blade, according to the Shin Bet. He was also found guilty of sexually abusing his daughter in 2011.
“This is another case, out of many, where a Palestinian who is suffering from personal, mental or moral issues chooses to carry out a terror attack in order to find a way out of their problems,” the Shin Bet said in a statement.
Security forces have been on high alert over the Passover and Easter holidays when hundreds of thousands of people visit Jerusalem. The army imposed a closure on the West Bank for the duration of the holidays.
Video footage from the scene showed a group of police officers and civilians grabbing the attacker by each limb and forcing him to the ground as frightened commuters tried and get off the carriage.
תיעוד: מעצר המחבל שניות לאחר שביצע את פיגוע הדקירה בתוך קרון הרכבת הקלה pic.twitter.com/sD9kFMUC6e — רועי ינובסקי (@Roi_Yanovsky) April 14, 2017
The attack occurred near IDF Square in the capital, along Jaffa Road, right near the walls of the Old City which was packed with Good Friday pilgrims and Jews celebrating Passover
Following the attack, the Border Police shut down the nearby Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City. The area has been a frequent site of attacks. Rail service resumed shortly after the attack.
The terrorist’s knife was recovered from the scene by police.
Though a marked drop has been recorded by security officials in recent months, 41 Israelis, two Americans, a Palestinian and an Eritrean national have been killed in the spate of stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks that began a year and a half ago.
Israeli officials have said that many of the attackers have done so due to personal problems, with some hoping to commit suicide by cop or soldier.
According to AFP figures, some 250 Palestinians, a Jordanian and a Sudanese migrant have also been killed, most of them in the course of carrying out attacks, Israel says, and many of the others in clashes with troops in the West Bank and at the Gaza border, as well as in Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip in response to rocket attacks.
The spate of Palestinian attacks that began in October 2015 was dubbed the “lone wolf” intifada, as many of the attacks were carried out by individuals who were not connected to any terror group.General surveys of skeletal collections from Arizona for evidence of trauma and pathology led to the identification of polydactyly in two subadults. Polydactyly is a congenital condition characterised by the presence of extra digits on the hands or feet. Both affected subadults exhibit a sixth digit in the form of a branching fifth metatarsal. One of the affected individuals is an infant from the Tapia del Cerrito site exhibiting Y‐shaped fifth metatarsals indicative of postaxial type A polydactyly. The second individual is a juvenile from the Nuvakwewtaqa (Chavez Pass Ruin) site exhibiting a left fifth metatarsal with a lateral branch, also diagnosed as postaxial type A polydactyly. These two cases appear to be the first examples of polydactyly from archaeological contexts identified among subadults, and bring the total number of known cases from the American Southwest to six. Discovery of so many examples of this relatively rare condition amongst the Puebloan people of the Southwest adds to the evidence that, rather than simply being an artistic motif, rock art depictions featuring hands and feet with six digits were probably inspired by observation of the condition amongst living people. Furthermore, burial treatment of the Tapia del Cerrito infant suggests that polydactyly may have conferred a special status on the bearer. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, displays a newspaper ad showing the type of assault style rifle that his proposed legislation would ban in California during a hearing of the Senate Public Safety Committee in Sacramento, Calif., Tuesday, April 16, 2013. Steinberg's measure, SB374, which would outlaw rifles with detachable magazines, is one of seven bills that Senate Democrats have proposed to tighten California's already strict gun control laws.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- California lawmakers took their first step toward moving a package of gun control bills Tuesday, following tough firearm and ammunition restrictions enacted in several other states in the wake of recent shooting rampages.
As dozens of supporters and opponents packed the committee room, Democrats in the state Senate began to use their majority to advance a group of seven bills that would further tighten California's strict gun laws. Final votes were not expected until late Tuesday, sending the measures to a second Senate committee.
One of the proposals would prohibit the sale of any semi-automatic rifle that accepts detachable ammunition magazines, prompting activists on both sides of the debate to say the plan goes beyond bans in other states.
"We simply can't wait until the next tragedy before taking action," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the Senate Public Safety Committee.
The proposals come in the aftermath of mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo. Some of the measures, including a ban on possessing ammunition magazines holding more than 10 bullets, would apply to current gun owners as well as those who buy weapons in the future.
Also, bills in the package would:
— Make it more difficult to rapidly reload weapons with high-capacity magazines.
— Add a combination shotgun-rifle to the state's list of prohibited weapons.
— Require background checks for all gun owners.
— Require ammunition buyers to undergo a background check and get a permit.
— Require more training for gun buyers.
— And add new crimes to those that disqualify California residents from owning weapons.
New York, Connecticut and Colorado have passed restrictions on firearms in response to the recent mass shootings.
The new bills in California are among at least 30 gun control measures introduced in the state this year, and they come as state Assembly members also debate the topic.
The Assembly Public Safety Committee advanced a bill Tuesday that would make it a crime to negligently store a loaded firearm or leave it in a place where a child is likely to access it. Current law makes it a crime only if the child uses the weapon.
The same committee also rejected a pair of gun owners' rights bills — one that would have made it easier to get a concealed weapons permit and another allowing the open carry of firearms.
Given the makeup of the California Legislature, the Senate gun control package stands a fair chance of becoming law. Democrats hold two-thirds majorities in both houses of the Legislature. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown's office, however, declined comment on the pending legislation.
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, author of the bill to outlaw rifles with detachable magazines, said the proposal would close "loopholes and gaps that the manufacturers have exploited" to sell military-style assault weapons in the state.
The Sacramento Democrat estimated that about 355 California residents and 3,300 people nationwide have died from gun violence since the Connecticut elementary school shooting in December.
However, gun rights advocate Jake McGuigan told the committee that few assault weapons are used in homicides in California, citing state Department of Justice statistics.
"We don't look for the loopholes," said McGuigan, a National Shooting Sports Foundation spokesman. "We only look to comply with the legislation."
Steinberg and other supporters acknowledged that California laws can be skirted by those who travel to other states to buy weapons, underscoring their desire for federal gun control legislation. However, Steinberg said, California lawmakers should not wait to take action.
Gun control activist Rick Jacobs echoed the notion at a Capitol news conference before the hearing, saying that California lawmakers are acting, "while unfortunately those folks in Washington are watching."
Jacobs, chairman of the Courage Campaign, said his group helped collect more than 31,000 signatures backing the gun restrictions.
Meanwhile, opponents testified that the ban on future sales of rifles with detachable magazines would outlaw firearms that don't generally qualify as assault weapons and would sweep up Californians who would inadvertently be breaking the law.
"Filling our jails with normal, everyday law abiding citizens," said Sen. Joel Anderson, R-Alpine, as he voted against Steinberg's bill, "makes absolutely no sense to me."Social media is awash with it. In a certain kind of company, conversation inevitably turns to it. Now, even senior broadcast journalists hint that it might be possible, triggering great surges of online excitement. Barely a year after the EU referendum and only three months since the Daily Mail’s triumphal “Crush the saboteurs” front page, you can almost smell it: a rising expectation that the nightmare of leaving the EU might somehow be averted, allowing the country to return to some kind of normal.
Scottish and Welsh leaders call repeal bill a 'naked power grab' Read more
“Brexit may never happen,” says Vince Cable.
“I know in my heart that Brexit can be stopped,” offers Alastair Campbell.
“We’ll stop Brexit,” insists the venerable AC Grayling, who seems to break off from chewing over the great mysteries of existence to tweet such things several times a day.
On Tuesday Manuel Cortes, the general secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association and an enthusiastic supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, wrote an eloquent article for the LabourList website encouraging the party to bow to the supposedly inevitable. “The folly of the Brexit vote is becoming clearer and its economic consequences look dire,” he said. “Staying put won’t even cost us a penny.”
Fair play to these people: with ministers evidently making it up as they go along, dire economic forecasts, and big EU figures warning that negotiations might quickly break down, there is clearly a prima facie case for what they suggest. And calling time on Brexit fits the guarded optimism embraced by thousands of people since the start of June. A combination of Labour’s election surge, Theresa May’s crumpling, and the joys of a half-decent summer seem to have embedded one belief above all others: that if enough of us make sufficient noise, we can somehow pretend 23 June 2016 never happened.
The problem is that it did. Moreover, as far as I can tell from the many conversations I had with leave voters during the election campaign, the vast majority of people who voted to leave the EU are still convinced that it is the right thing to do. In whole swaths of the country, the bitterly anti-establishment mood that boiled over last summer is still there, so a coalition of political insiders, left-liberal newspaper columnists and business voices telling people they were wrong is not terribly likely to succeed. In places long since laid waste by the malign effects of globalisation, predictions of economic doom do not cut much ice. And as well as holding fast to their beliefs about free movement and the necessity of Britain taking power back from Brussels, some now express an opinion that irate remainers might not even understand: that if leaving the EU is turning out to be so difficult, this only underlines how much of an offence to sovereignty and democracy it probably is.
For pro-EU people who support Labour, all this highlights some very uncomfortable tensions. Though it is hardly his fault, it is part of Jeremy Corbyn’s transformation into the Princess Diana de nos jours that he has in some way become the sentimentalised focus of many remainers’ hopes while actually tilting in precisely the opposite direction: reverting to his lifelong Euroscepticism and embracing Brexit (albeit with the strong caveats highlighted by Labour’s stance on the “great repeal bill”), and thereby ensuring that leave supporters are an equally important part of Labour’s delicate electoral coalition. This was the key reason why Labour held on to many pro-Brexit seats they were predicted to lose – something plenty of non-Corbynite, instinctively pro-European Labour MPs well understand.
Yet still the predictions of Brexit interrupted pile up. Thanks to the kind of long transition arrangement proposed by the Confederation of British Industry, some think the process might fizzle out. Perhaps a second referendum will kill it. This week, a talented Tweeter wrote an imagined speech for May, conceding “the Brexit process would inflict much unsalvageable damage on our country”, and announcing the U-turn to end all U-turns.
But there is always something missing: any sense of the backlash that would be sparked, the myth of betrayal that would sit at the heart of our politics, and the great gift likely to be handed to ugly and opportunistic forces that are still out there, waiting for their chance. Ukip is in abeyance partly because its current leadership could not run a bath, but also because the process of Brexit is under way. Immigration did not much figure in the general election because the prospect of ending free movement was in sight. Nix those things – which, in the latter case, applies as much to staying in the single market – and the grim politics of the pre-referendum period could well come roaring back.
Government could end Brexit talks without a deal, says Damian Green Read more
At which point, a few simple facts. To understand why people support Brexit is not to agree with them. Clearly, leaving the EU remains a terrible idea. It will almost certainly be economically calamitous, and it sends out a terrible signal about the kind of country Britain has become. The negotiations will likely shred most Brexiteers’ claims about the country’s strong hand: whether we crash out or swallow whatever we are offered, the outcome is not likely to be pretty.
The big question, though, centres on where Brexit came from, and what sustains it. A large part of the answer is about an ingrained English exceptionalism, partly traceable to geography but equally bound up with a puffed-up interpretation of our national past, which has bubbled away in our politics and culture for decades. The likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have used it for their own ideological ends; in the kind of post-industrial places long ignored by Westminster politicians it turned out to be the one bit of pride and identity many people had left. It runs deep: even if the economy takes a vertiginous plunge, it will take a lot longer than two years to shift it.
The only way such delusions will fade is if they are finally tested in the real world and found wanting, whereupon this country may at last be ready to humbly engage with modernity. And in that sense, to paraphrase a faded politician, Brexit probably has to mean Brexit. That may result in a long spell of relative penury, and an atmosphere of recrimination and resentment. By the time everything is resolved a lot of us will either be very old or dead. But that may be the price we have to pay to belatedly put all our imperial baggage in the glass case where it belongs, and to edge our way back into the European family, if they will have us.
In the meantime, this messiest of national dramas grinds on, and not for the first time the story suggests the priceless words of the American writer and satirist HL Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”Did You Know?
Noun
William Butler Yeats opens his 1920 poem, "The Second Coming," with the following lines: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…." Often found in poetic or literary contexts as an alternative to the more familiar "circle" or "spiral," "gyre" comes via the Latin gyrus from the Greek gyros, meaning "ring" or "circle." Today, "gyre" is most frequently encountered as an oceanographic term that refers to vast circular systems of ocean currents, such as the North Atlantic Gyre, a system of currents circling clockwise between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. "Gyre" is also sometimes used of more localized vortices such as those produced by whirlpools or tornados.Serbia's tactics for today's World Cup opener was unwittingly left on the Hampden pitch
The visitors trained at the national stadium yesterday and, in a bizarre blunder, left their grand masterplan – a diagram with accompanying instructions – lying on the pitch!
It suggests boss Sinisa Mihajlovic will try to expose rookie left-back Paul Dixon and left-sided central defender Christophe Berra.
Serbia will play a 4-3-3 formation designed to put pressure on Huddersfield’s Dixon and Wolves defender Berra, who they clearly see as weaknesses.
The plan, with instructions in Italian, suggests the Serbians will “exert numeric superiority” on the right of their attack.
And it outlines three options to pressurise Dixon and Berra if they play.
Serbia hope to get in behind the left-back, draw Scots out to the touchline or cut inside and put pressure on the left-sided central defender as a result of the space that will open up.Flat Design Has Evolved
Ryan Allen Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 3, 2014
With more artists adding ornamentation to their flat design work, the style has gradually evolved to something I like to call flat design 2.0 or just Flat 2.0
Flat 2.0 is an evolution, not a revolution. Where flat design was a radical departure from the rampant skeuomorphism of days gone by, flat 2.0 is a playful branch off the flat tree. Flat design is the Christmas tree, Flat 2.0 is the ornaments and candy canes. And presents. No tinsel though, that stuff is a mess to clean up.
Flat Design works very well in a world where users own many devices, and use those devices to access and consume the content we passionately craft for them.
Flat design can be built to dynamically scale to a content-appropriate size much simpler than a pixel-perfect design. Content wants to work on a phone held in landscape mode, a tablet with 2 apps open and snapped on both sides of the screen, a 5K retina monitor, and a thousand other possibilities. Give the content what it wants by breaking out of static based units of measurement. She will love you more for it once the pain of change has passed.
Quietly Introducing Flat 2.0
Flat 2.0 is still flat, he just wants to have a little fun. This isn’t a serious black-tie event after all, it’s the digital universe! Home to such wonderous creates as Mr. Information Super Highway and Dr. World Wide Web
Flat on the left. Flat2.0 on the right.
Let’s play Spot The Diferences! How many different gradient shadows, highlights, drop shadows and other embelishes can you find? Where is the man with the red and white striped hat?
Flat 2.0 is about subtle changes, a natural evolution to the design. It is not about rebelling against the current trends but about enhancing those trends with simple shapes and gradients.
What Are the Rules?
“Art has no rules” -Someone Pretentious
There have to be rules, otherwise we would have chaos! Other than following basic design rules (color theory, composition, KISS) try to keep everything simple enough to render in an SVG without including bitmaps. By keeping everything simple enough to be rendered as an svg, we open up many scaling and animation options. It makes my brain spin in anticipation of what the future holds.
Otherwise, as every managing director I’ve ever worked under said:
“Make it POP.”
Inspiration
There are many talented artists out there already doing this. Here are some amazing pieces I used for inspiration for the upcoming redesign of our main page and for this article. If you have some examples let me know and I’ll add them to the board.
Tell me your thoughts on twitter or dribbble!As expected, the Padres began the international signing period on Saturday with a bang.
The organization was the most active in baseball, with signings completed or imminent for 16 players — including eight of the top 50 prospects ranked by Baseball America — in the early hours of the opening day of the signing period.
It is an unprecedented period of spending for the franchise. The Padres are expected to spend some $60 million (including penalties for overages) during the international signing period, which runs into next year. Combined with a bonus pool approaching $13 million for last month's MLB Draft, the organization is expected to commit nearly $75 million to player acquisition.
"It really just shows the commitment from our ownership," Padres General Manager A.J. Preller said. "To build a championship program and a championship organization, it starts with having championship-level players, talented players — and a lot of them."
Most of the players signed were 16-year-olds from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Padres International Scouting Director Chris Kemp spoke excitedly on the phone when reached Saturday morning in the Dominican, enthused about a pure hitter, five-tool outfielder, promising starting pitchers, and on and on.
But, in a society accustomed these days to instant gratification, Kemp emphasized that this is a process that requires several years before an impact is made at the major league level.
"You've got to be patient," Kemp said. "The immediate gratification is knowing that we are literally building the farm, and when you're farming, it takes some time.
"This is a five-to-eight-year plan.... We're looking a decade into the future because that's the plan. We're going to be here forever. We're trying to build a perennial winner in San Diego. This isn't going to be an overnight thing where these guys are going to be in the big leagues in a year or two. We're going to build this thing forever, and that's what this is about."
Kemp used Dominican outfielder Nomar Mazara as an example. He was signed as a 16-year-old five years ago by Texas and has emerged just this year for the Rangers, batting.285 with 11 homers and 35 RBIs in 72 games.
"He's, obviously, a Rookie of the Year candidate," Kemp said. "It took him every bit of five years just to get to this point where he is now. And that is the best-case scenario when you sign a 16-year-old player, that in five years he could be an impact guy at 21 years.
The Padres' 16 signings (at this point) were twice as many as those by the next most active team. The St. Louis Cardinals had eight players in a Baseball America list tracking international signings, followed by the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros with seven apiece.
In the process, the Padres smashed their club records for overall and individual spending on signings.
The most they ever spent on the international draft in one year was $5 million in 2008. They spent nearly that much Saturday on one player alone.
Luis Almanzar, a 16-year-old Dominican shortstop rated No. 2 by Baseball America received a $4 million bonus.
"He's the best hitter in the the whole world market," Kemp said. "Just pure hittability in a game."
The largest bonus the team had previously given to an international amateur was $2 million to right-hander Adys Portillo, a 2008 signee who never made it past Double-A with the organization.
Other Dominican players signed Saturday included outfielder Jeison Rosario (No. 6, $1.85 million), right-hander Michael Miliano (No. 48, $450,000) and shortstop Yordy Barley (No. 50, $1 million), right-hander Jose Manuel Guzman ($40,000), outfielder Carlos Batista ($400,000), catcher Juan Vasquez ($100,000) and shortstop Carlos Luis ($200,000).
Venezuelan signed were shortstop Gabriel Arias (No. 4, $1.9 million), catcher Alison Quintero (No. 22, $830,000), shortstop Justin Lopez (No. 28, $1.2 million) and shortstop Tucupipa Marcano ($320,000). Also signed were Mexican outfielders Tirso Ornelas (No. 34, $1.5 million) and Augustin Ruiz and right-hander Martin Carrasco and Colombian right-hander Luis Patinio.
The Padres also are rumored to be interested in a couple of Cuban players — left-hander Adrian Morejon and outfielder Jorge Ona — who would be top-3 three prospects but haven't been cleared yet by MLB as free agents. It has been reported that signing Morejon likely will cost $14-16 million. That would push the Padres' spending to beyond $30 million on foreign talent.
"There continues to be speculation in the media about other players," Preller said. "The biggest thing for us in the Cuban market and with other July 2 players for us is that July 2 is the start of a period. There's going to be plenty of players here in the next year that we're going to have interest in, and we're going to hopefully be in play for."
The Padres have a bonus pool of $3,347,600 for the 2016-17 signing period. By spending in excess of that amount, they are subject to a 100 percent penalty for any overages, which is where the $60 million figure comes from for signings.
Exceeding their bonus pool by more than 15 percent this year means the Padres will be restricted to signing players for no more than $300,000 each in the next two signing periods.
There was news during the week that MLB is barring the Boston Red Sox from participating in the 2016-17 international signing period for improprieties last year while signing some Venezuelan players. Penalties included removing five players from the Red Sox organization and making them available this year to sign with other teams.PHOENIX (Reuters) - A Mexican man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to first-degree murder in the 2010 death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, a killing linked to a controversial U.S. attempt to track gunrunning to Mexico drug cartels.
Manuel Osorio-Arellanes made a deal with prosecutors and entered the plea in U.S. District Court in Tucson in the shooting death of agent Brian Terry in the Arizona borderlands, federal officials said. He could face life in prison, but prosecutors will not seek the death penalty.
Osorio-Arellanes, 36, was one of five Mexican suspects charged in Terry's murder. His death was linked to a U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigation that allowed weapons to slip across the border into Mexico.
Two guns found at the remote area north of Nogales where Terry was killed in a shoot-out were traced to the sting operation, dubbed "Fast and Furious."
It remained unclear if the weapons were used in the murder and it is not known which of the five suspects killed the Border Patrol agent in the nighttime gunfight.
Laura Duffy, U.S. attorney for the southern district of California, said the deal represented "an important step in seeking justice on behalf of Agent Terry."
"Agent Terry was killed in the line of duty courageously safeguarding our border," Duffy, who is handling the case, said in a statement. "Our country owes him and his family a great debt of gratitude for his ultimate sacrifice in service to our country."
Osorio-Arellanes is scheduled to be sentenced on January 11. His attorney declined to comment on the plea agreement.
Arizona is a busy corridor for Mexican smugglers hauling marijuana and other drugs north to consumers in the United States.
According to the plea, Osorio-Arellanes admitted to entering Arizona in December 2010 with the others to rob traffickers of their drugs. Then on the evening of December 14, members of the group exchanged fire with agents in the area.
Osorio-Arellanes was wounded in the firefight and was arrested on the night of the shooting, federal prosecutors said.
Authorities offered a reward of up to $1 million in July for information leading to the arrest of the four other men believed to be involved in Terry's killing. Mexican police detained one of those men, Lionel Portillo-Meza, in September. He is awaiting extradition to the United States, prosecutors said.
The border killing sparked an election year firestorm between the administration of President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans, who slammed the government for allowing the program and called on Attorney General Eric Holder to resign.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives found Holder, the nation's top law enforcement official, in contempt for withholding documents related to the gun-running probe.
Terry's family has filed a $25 million wrongful-death claim against the U.S. government, saying he was killed because federal investigators allowed guns to fall into the hands of violent criminals.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the family said it was "extremely pleased" with the development, but noted that "three other... fugitives are believed to be on the loose in Mexico and have thus far avoided capture" despite the bounty on their heads.
(Editing by Tim Gaynor, Cynthia Johnston and Mohammad Zargham)Image copyright Washington University Image caption Researchers prepare the vaccine for patients
Tailor-made cancer vaccines that target unique genetic errors in a patient's tumour have been developed in |
vehicle to have “over 310 miles of range” (500 km) on a single charge, but being based in Germany, Porsche is likely talking about the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC), which is much more forgiving than the EPA rating and doesn’t really reflect real-world range. It’s should still have a more than decent range around 250 miles.
If that’s the top range, the smaller battery pack version for the base price of “around $86,000” is likely going to feature a shorter range.
We will likely know more next year when Porsche is expected to launch the production version, which should hit the market in 2019.
In preparation for the launch, the automaker recently started deploying its new ultra-fast charging stations to support the new vehicle and its 800-volt charging system.Another out-of-control cop was caught on video viciously attacking a jubilant teenager celebrating a high school football victory Friday in Alabama.The incident took place during the final minutes of the Pratville High School playoff victory over Central-Phenix City High.The video shows a group of students celebrating in the stands until just before the :40 mark when a Phenix City cop comes into the frame shoving the student back against the railing, pepper spraying him at close range, even though the student was not fighting back.The cop appears to be wearing a ski mask as if his actions weren’t thuggish as it is.The cop apparently was reacting to being inadvertently touched by the student.Local News Report.....Cameron Rader, a 17-year-old senior at PHS, said the officer claimed that Rader had pushed him. Rader said when he denied touching the officer, the man shoved him backward into a walkway. “I had my back to this officer talking to a girl who was standing behind me,” Rader said. “The cop yells at me — ‘Hey son’ — and tells me, ‘Push me one more time.’ I told him I didn’t push him, and he like freaked out.”A video of the incident, filmed by another student standing behind Rader in the stands, was sent to Rader — and shared among several Prattville students — and provided to the Montgomery Advertiser by Rader’s attorney. That video picks up just as Rader is being shoved back through the crowd. Rader can be seen briefly trying to get out of the officer’s grasp — he says he pushed the officer to get him away from his throat and to defend himself.After a brief pause in which the two are separated, the officer comes back at Rader, shoves him back through a crowd of students to a railing, and as the teen is standing with his hands by his sides, the officer sprays something into his face.“I was telling him to get his hands off me, to stop touching me, and then I asked what I did,” Rader said. “You can see that on the video. I have my hands by my side. I’m being compliant and he keeps pushing me. That’s when he maces me. I couldn’t breathe. It was in my throat and nose and the fumes were burning my eyes. And it hurt for a long time.”Several attempts to reach the Phoenix City Police Department’s public relations officer on Tuesday were unsuccessful. A message left after hours wasn’t returned.Ruby vs Python, the Definitive FAQ
Hillel Wayne Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 19, 2016
“Python or Ruby” is the one of the most hotly debated topics in the programming world, ranking just behind “emacs or vim” and “pro-skub or anti-skub” in importance and complexity. This FAQ will showcase their differences, answer some common questions about both, and provide an objective, definitive answer to which is better.
What is Python?
Python is a type of large snake found across the southeast semihemisphere. They are nonvenomous and hunt primarily through constriction. Many extant species are endangered.
What is Ruby?
Ruby is a bright red gem. It is considered one of the four precious gemstones, along with emeralds, diamonds, and sapphires. There is controversy on whether rubies are red sapphires or sapphires are blue rubies.
How are they similar?
To an outsider, ruby and python can look almost identical:
Dynamically Typed: What type of thing the word means dynamically depends on context. Python can either be a type of family (pythonidae), genus (python), or species (P. reticulatus). Similarly, Ruby can be either a specific mineral (corundum with chromium impurities) or the general category of red-colored stones.
What type of thing the word means dynamically depends on context. Python can either be a type of family (pythonidae), genus (python), or species (P. reticulatus). Similarly, Ruby can be either a specific mineral (corundum with chromium impurities) or the general category of red-colored stones. Interpreted: Pythons and rubies are often used as symbols and metaphors, especially in poetry and mythology.
Pythons and rubies are often used as symbols and metaphors, especially in poetry and mythology. Object Oriented: They are both objects. Ruby is considered more object-oriented, though, because some people are uncomfortable thinking of animals as objects.
They are both objects. Ruby is considered more object-oriented, though, because some people are uncomfortable thinking of animals as objects. High Level: I studied physics in college and anything bigger than a hydrogen atom is considered “high level”. I’m not kidding. We don’t even have a closed-form solution for a helium atom yet and it’s just a hydrogen atom with an extra fiddly bit.
How are they different?
While they may seem extremely similar, there are also some key differences between the two:
Ruby has blocks, in that you can put rubies into blocks. If you put pythons into blocks, they’ll slither away.
, in that you can put rubies into blocks. If you put pythons into blocks, they’ll slither away. Python has comprehensions. Rubies are inanimate objects and do not comprehend things.
. Rubies are inanimate objects and do not comprehend things. Python is generally considered more readable (you can sharpie bigger words on a snake), while Ruby is considered more elegant (obvious).
What are some other important examples?
Rails: You can put ruby on rails, and it will stay on the rails, unless it rolls off.
You can put ruby on rails, and it will stay on the rails, unless it rolls off. Pandas: A python could probably eat a panda if it tried really hard.
A python could probably eat a panda if it tried really hard. Chef: You think this would be a python thing, but most chefs avoid reptiles and will sometimes accept rubies as currency.
You think this would be a python thing, but most chefs avoid reptiles and will sometimes accept rubies as currency. Django: A guitarist who presumably liked snakes.
So which is better?
It depends!!!
You promised an objective, definitive answer.
I’m serious. It depends. What are you trying to do?
Play scrabble: Ruby is worth 9 points, python is worth 14 and pluralizes to a bingo. Advantage: Python
Ruby is worth 9 points, python is worth 14 and pluralizes to a bingo. Shot put: Don’t throw snakes. Advantage: Ruby
Don’t throw snakes. Model a solenoid electromagnet when you have a cylinder but forgot your string and wire at home: You’ll have to be pretty strong but otherwise this is a great use case for python. Advantage: Python
You’ll have to be pretty strong but otherwise this is a great use case for python. Wear as jewelry: On one hand, rubies are pretty popular in jewelry. On the other, a sneklace would be hella sweet. Advantage: Tie
On one hand, rubies are pretty popular in jewelry. On the other, a sneklace would be hella sweet. Run a kissing booth: People vastly prefer to kiss rubies than pythons, perhaps due to a reduced risk of getting salmonella. Advantage: Ruby
As you can see, for the majority of uses half of the time you’ll want to use ruby and half the time you’ll want to use Python. There are probably some other minor cases that push the ratio above 1:1 but they’re niche and esoteric at best.
What programming language should I use for my startup?
PHP.
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If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our latest tech stories and trending tech stories. Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted!Image copyright Reuters Image caption KFC has over 4,000 restaurants in China
The fast food chain KFC is to sue three Chinese firms it accuses of using social media to spread false rumours about its food, including that it used eight-legged chickens.
KFC is seeking compensation of 1.5m yuan ($242,000, £159,000) and an apology.
One of the posts said chickens used by the company were genetically modified to have six wings and eight legs.
A case has now been filed before a court in Shanghai.
KFC says the rumours appeared in posts on the WeChat app.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Owner Yum Brands warned of a profit drop after a meat scandal hit its Chinese outlets
In a statement, the fast food giant said (in Chinese) that the rumours had spread through at least 4,000 subsequent posts.
"This not only seriously misled consumers, but also hurt our brand," said Qu Cuirong, KFC China's president.
The company named the original posters as Shanxi Weilukuang Technology Company Ltd, Taiyuan Zero Point Technology Company and Yingchenanzhi Success and Culture Communication Ltd.
Those firms have not commented on the court complaint.
By the end of 2014, KFC had 4,828 branches in China, and has been opening hundreds of new outlets every year.
The company's owner, Yum Brands, warned of a drop in profits for 2014 after one of the suppliers to its Chinese stores was accused of selling old meat.
KFC, along with fast food giant McDonald's, stopped using meat from the supplier after its operations were suspended last July.LUCKNOW: Leading by example, Yogi cabinet’s lone Muslim minister Mohsin Raza and his wife Fauzia registered their marriage at the Lucknow collectorate here on Thursday morning, a day after Uttar Pradesh government made it mandatory.The move assumes importance, considering the resistance among Muslim clerics over making marriage registration compulsory for all religions. Clerics, including those at the Islamic seminary Darululoom Deoband, have termed it unnecessary “since nikahnama is a valid form of marriage registration”.Talking to TOI, Mufti Abul Qasim Naumani said, “We are not against marriage registration, but making it mandatory is like imposing an order. A mandatory order of this nature interferes with religious freedom.”Clerics in Lucknow stated that poor and uneducated Muslims will suffer because they will not be able to fulfil the formalities for registration. All India Muslim Personal Law Board member Zafaryab Jeelani said that the board has never opposed registration of marriage. “Marriage registration certificate as a proof of marriage is fine. But failure to register marriage should not amount to non-recognition of a marriage or lead to deprivation of state benefits.”Other sections of the community, on the other hand, welcomed the move. Social scientist Nadeem Hasnain said that the clergy’s opposition of registration of marriage was a farce. “Opposing marriage registration on the grounds that nikahnama is a valid marriage certificate is a flimsy ground,” he said, citing Prof Tahir Mehmood, dean faculty of law, university of Delhi and an authority on Quran and Muslim law.Adding that clerics were mixing religion with rule of law, he added, “The move should not be associated with Yogi because marriage registration for all has been proposed by previous governments too. None could, however, take it further, following opposition from clerics.”Hasnain pointed out that the clerics are probably fearing losing their importance in the community. “It is obvious that registration will check the rate of divorce and in turn minimise their role and challenge their dominance in the community. The clerics are wrong to be speaking on this issue because the government is not interfering in the procedure of marriage.”“This is a welcome move. There are different marriage registration procedures and certificates for different Islamic schools of thought (like Shias, Sunnis, Wahabis, etc). The common certificate will bring the much-needed uniformity,” said Royal family descendent, Masoom Raza.All India Women’s Muslim Personal Law Board also welcomed the move. “Registration is the first step towards checking arbitrary divorce,” said founder president Shaista Ambar, who wants the rule to be followed across India. “This will help check fake NRI marriages as well,” she added.Mohsin Raza and his wife called up on the community to come forward and follow the rule which is set to make their lives simpler. “Voter and Adhaar cards were also greeted with similar scepticism but today no one questions it. We have to change with the times,” he stated.Caltrain tracks reopened after pedestrian death in Redwood City
In this file photo, people wait on the platform as a Caltrain pulls into the University Ave. stop in Palo Alto.
In this file photo, people wait on the platform as a Caltrain pulls into the University Ave. stop in Palo Alto. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Caltrain tracks reopened after pedestrian death in Redwood City 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
A pedestrian was struck and killed by a Caltrain early Wednesday morning in Redwood City, causing major delays as the agency responded.
At about 8 a.m., Caltrain officials reported that both tracks had been reopened in the area, allowing the system to recover.
The incident, involving an adult female trespasser on the tracks, occurred at 6:15 a.m. on the northbound 305 train at Whipple Avenue in Redwood City and prompted delays up to 90 minutes, Caltrain said.
The incident appeared to be a suicide, officials said.
Trains were single-tracking in the area for more than an hour, first at maximum speeds of 10 mph and later at maximum speeds of 50 mph, before both tracks reopened.
Kevin Schultz is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kschultz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: KevinEdSchultz100,000,000. That’s Twitter’s magic user number, apparently.
Twitter has finally revealed how many people actively use its microblogging service worldwide, and it’s significantly higher than the 21 million estimated by Business Insider earlier this year. According to CEO Dick Costolo, Twitter has 100 million active users currently, though not all of them are saying anything.
(MORE: How Many People Actually Use Twitter? Good Question)
Costolo’s presentation in fact provides all sorts of fascinating details about who’s using the micro-blogging service as well as how. For example, the 100 million active number is only half the number of registered accounts with the service, and of that 100 million, almost 40% log in merely to see what other people are saying. More than 50 million users log in each day, and the daily average number of tweets is in the realm of 230 million—up 110% since January.
What’s more, over 55% of Twitter’s active users access the service via mobile devices, though direct traffic to Twitter.com is up 70% since January, topping 400 million monthly unique visitors.
Sadly not revealed: what percentage of the 100 million active users were actually spambots with names made up of random letters who just want to tell you how to win an iPhone (or who knows what else). Perhaps we’ll get that from the next major info-dump, Twitter?
MORE: Report: 92% of Newt Gingrich’s Twitter Followers Aren’t Real
Graeme McMillan is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @Graemem or on Facebook at Facebook/Graeme.McMillan. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.Vinyl sales have passed a million for the first time since 1997 – but all that tells us is that record labels have realised there are people who want to shell out for deluxe editions
The other night, outside one of those preposterous city-centre places that is both a grocer and a restaurant, I noticed a remarkable deal on offer in the boxes of produce stacked up outside. A bunch of half a dozen or so carrots, green stalks attached at the top, soil clinging to the orange roots, was on sale for a bargain £2.50. You can stick your £1 for a bag bursting with the things from Morrison’s or Iceland, because those are the carrots I want, oh yes. And given that the stupidly priced bunch of carrots with green tops and soil is cropping up in farmers’ markets and chi-chi grocers all across Britain, then I’m calling it now. Never mind that the vast majority of people are still buying their carrots from supermarkets at a much cheaper price, and that there’s no sign of that ever changing, because I’m willing to say there’s a stupidly priced bunch of carrots comeback!
That, more or less, is what the much trumpeted “vinyl comeback” amounts to. The BPI today announced that vinyl sales has exceeded 1m copies for the first time since 1997, with a possible end of of year total of 1.2m. Imagine! The total vinyl sales this year in the UK – that’s all the records available by everybody from the entire span of music history – have gone triple platinum! Just like Ed Sheeran’s album X has. That’s right: the combined sales of all vinyl in the UK have matched the sales of the second Ed Sheeran album.
There is no vinyl comeback, as the BPI sort-of-admits later on its press release (after several excitable paragraphs), when it notes: “Vinyl still remains a niche product, accounting for just 2% of the UK’s recorded music market.” I don’t know how that compares with the overpriced bunch’s share of the carrot market, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the comparison is unfavourable.
The boasting about vinyl’s “comeback” is a music industry con trick: find some piece of good news, however minuscule, and then claim some sort of revolution is under way. There’s no comeback, not least because vinyl never went away – there were always people who wanted to buy vinyl and felt they weren’t being catered for, and now record companies are making a bit more of an effort to meet their desires. A big reason for that is because they’ve realised a lot of those vinyl buyers are pretty well off and are willing to shell out quite substantial sums for deluxe and limited editions, so they’re putting a lot more of them out. You can see that in the albums that make up the year’s top 10: three Led Zeppelin albums, old albums by Pink Floyd, the Stone Roses and Oasis, plus a top four made up of Arctic Monkeys, Jack White, Pink Floyd and Royal Blood. Vinyl is the only area where rock – the preserve, largely, of the older, wealthier buyer – is king.
You can look at the year-on-year figures and see the how the vinyl market has changed. Vinyl sales reached an all-time low in 2007, with 205,000 sales. The following three years were much the same, then there was a dramatic jump to 337,000 in 2011, 388,000 in 2012, 780,000 last year, and now the magic million. In percentage terms, that’s a massive increase over five years, but it’s just a drop in the ocean of music consumption, and it speaks simply to increased availability rather than substantially increased demand.
The vinyl market is composed largely of fetishists and superfans. I have no problem with that – I could be accused of being both (I’m still wedded to the notion of music ownership, and when my very favourite bands release limited vinyl editions I do make special efforts to get hold of them) – but let’s not pretend this group of people can in any way be taken to represent the wider music market. The ultra-fetishism of Record Store Day feeds into this, too. Limited edition represses of records that are, almost always available in other formats; coloured vinyl; different covers. These records aren’t intended to be listened to; they’re intended to lure in collectors and completists.
Vinyl is sold as a signifier, the perfect complement to the exquisite taste of your furniture or the pictures on your wall. That’s why it costs so much (even Amazon is charging £28.99 for the vinyl edition of Pink Floyd’s The Endless River, which recorded the highest first week sales of any vinyl album since 1997 with – count ’em, because you probably could – 6,000 copies shifted). That’s why so many vinyl records include a download code, so you can listen to the music without actually depreciating the value of your vinyl.
That also has an effect on those who aren’t even that bothered about the music: once vinyl is a signifier, it gains cool points – that’s why my 14-year-old daughter wants to have my portable turntable in her room, along with a selection of my records: because it looks good.
I love vinyl. I love the big covers, the feeling of sliding the record out of its inner sleeve, the thwump sound as the needle hits the record, scanning run-off grooves for messages. I adore it. But let’s not keep pretending that one tiny segment of a dying industry is making a comeback. So sales have risen fivefold in seven years? Five times very little doesn’t make a lot.The teenagers restrain him before punching and kicking him (Picture: SWNS)
Two teenage girls were filmed repeatedly kicking a boy in the head after he stepped in to question why they were allegedly bullying his autistic friend.
Jake Andrews, 14, said he saw them picking on his friend and got involved.
His friend, who filmed the encounter, captured how they reacted by grabbing an arm each before one shouts, ‘f***ing hit him’. Then they kick him in the face with shocking force.
Despite his attempts to shrug the girls off, they continue to land punches on his face and stomach.
The video, which was filmed in Emersons Green, Bristol, then shows one of the bullies delving into the boy’s pockets and apparently trying to grab his phone.
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‘Why are you touching my phone?, he asks, and one of the girls responds: ‘Because you’re f***ing videoing me. Move it from my face.’
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She then drags him to one side and throws him over a hedge, throwing her fists at him before shouting: ”F**ing hit me again and watch me get you killed.’
The boy, who only has one shoe on, backs away and says: ‘Yeah, cause I definitely hit you, didn’t I?’
The 18 second video, filmed on June 7, cuts out shortly after this. It been watched more than 600,000 times since it was posted online by Jake on Thursday.
He was left with marks on his forehead, scratches, lumps and a sore jaw and headache, and the police are involved.
Picture: SWNS Picture: SWNS Picture: SWNS Picture: SWNS Picture: SWNS Picture: SWNS Picture: SWNS Picture: SWNS
MORE: Man gets a job after hustling with his CV at a train station
But his proud mum Clare, 49, from Yate, praised her son for defending his friend and not retaliating.
Clare, a mum of four, said: ‘I think he put it on Facebook because he wanted to get the message out there that violent behaviour was just not acceptable.
‘We brought him up not to hit girls and the footage really shows that. As I mum I just could not watch it. I saw the first kick and I haven’t been able to see the rest of it.
‘It has been a very stressful time for us all and we are proud of him.’
It is understood the girls, aged 14 and 15, have been expelled from school.
Police are investigating A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Constabulary said: ‘We’re investigating an assault on a 14-year-old boy in Emersons Green on the evening of Tuesday 7 June. ‘We’re aware of a video on social media and this will form part of our ongoing investigation. ‘We’re taking steps to ensure this video is removed from social media and would ask users to refrain from leaving abusive comments, as any messages considered to be of a threatening nature will be investigated. ‘The full circumstances surrounding this assault will be examined and safeguarding measures are in place for all those involved.’Enlarge By Kathy Chu, USA TODAY "Dieting is a lifelong career for women," says Agatha Yau, 22, of Hong Kong. Yau says she's 5-foot-2 and weighs 100 pounds, but she says she could stand to lose a few more pounds. Enlarge By Jae-Hyun Kim, Getty Images for USA TODAY Hyun-Jung Lee, 25, a senior at Duksung Women's University says she would like to lose 22 more pounds. Enlarge By Jonathan Wall Dieting ads are ubiquitous in Hong Kong, seen everywhere from subway terminals to drugstores. HEALTH UPDATES ON TWITTER HEALTH UPDATES ON TWITTER HONG KONG This glamorous Asian city is known for its mouth-watering dim sum. Its high fashion. And its 100-pound-and-under women. Agatha Yau, a marketing executive, is one of these women. She has done many things over the years to stay trim: taken diet pills, eaten meals of boiled vegetables and practiced delaying gratification. BODY IMAGE: Tween girls convene for learning, support Q&A: Danielle Steel writes of weight, body image in 'Big Girl' CHINA: 1 in 10 has diabetes as obesity increases "Sometimes, I'll look at the food and just smell it," Yau, 22, says one morning as she has her breakfast — a skim caramel macchiato from Starbucks. "I think to myself that once I get married and have kids, I'll be able to eat it" because there'll be less pressure to diet. "Guys here are so small and skinny," she adds. "They need to feel masculine, and they don't if you're bigger than them." In most developed parts of the world, women feel pressure to be thin. But such pressure is especially intense in Asia — in places like Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo — where scores of skinny women seem always to be looking for ways to get even skinnier. Experts say dieting in Asia tends to be more extreme than in the West because of cultural perceptions of beauty. "The magic number is to be below 100 pounds, no matter your height or your weight," says Philippa Yu, a clinical psychologist at the Hong Kong Eating Disorders Association. In Asia, women want to stay skinny without exercising because muscles aren't considered a feminine feature, says Sing Lee, director of the Hong Kong Eating Disorders Center at Chinese University. That's why, "when they want to control their body weight, they eat less or take pills" instead of exerting themselves, Lee says. Hong Kong dieters also flock to slimming centers throughout the city for ultrasound, electrical stimulation and infrared radiation treatments that promise to whittle away inches of fat. (The Hong Kong Consumer Council has called some of the slimming centers' weight-loss claims "dubious.") The newest dieting fad in Hong Kong? Swallowing parasites. This radical form of weight loss has become popular enough that the Hong Kong Health Department issued a warning in February that these worms — which are sold on Chinese websites — can cause abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea and even death. Eating disorders on rise As extreme weight-loss methods take hold in Asia, eating disorders are also increasing. In Beijing, at Peking University's Institute of Mental Health, more than 100 patients were hospitalized last year for eating disorders, says Darong Zhang, director of the institute's treatment center. That compares with about 20 patients hospitalized 10 years ago. In Hong Kong, the number of patients treated for eating disorders at one clinic has nearly doubled — to 128 — from 1998 to 2007 when compared with the prior 10-year period, Lee's research shows. Eating disorders also are becoming more common in Korea, but many women don't want to admit they have a problem, says Mirihae Kim, a psychology professor at Duksung Women's University in Seoul. "The last time I tried to run an eating disorder group, only one person showed up," Kim says. "So I changed the group's name to Overeaters Group Therapy." The reality is that in Korea, being thin is the "main standard of beauty," Kim says. "People say that if you are overweight, you can't study, you will fail the exam. That's the attitude here." Koreans also say weight plays an important role in whether someone can find employment and how good a job he or she can get. Duksung Women's University senior Hyun-Jung Lee, 25, says she's dieting because she wants to land a job as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company. "If I am in good shape, other people will judge me as diligent and successful in life," says Lee, who is 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighs 150 pounds. "But on the other hand, if I am fat and out of shape, people will think: 'She's lazy. Maybe she doesn't care about herself.' " Unlike others, Lee says she's choosing the "healthy" way to lose weight. She eats low-fat food and exercises five times a week, two hours each time. She has lost about 10 pounds and hopes to lose an additional 22 pounds. "The better you look, the more opportunity you have," she says. As Asian societies become wealthier — and people have more options about what to eat — it's only natural that some will struggle with their weight, experts say. A new kind of competition With the shift from an agrarian to an urbanized society, "there are definitely more opportunities to overeat," says David Schlundt, an associate psychology professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who researches eating habits. In Asia, obesity is becoming more common among adolescents, although it's less of a problem than in the USA. For now, in cities such as Hong Kong, health professionals say their biggest challenge is dealing with young women who don't eat enough, not those who eat too much. "You can see how pervasive slimming is in this culture," says Yu, of the Hong Kong Eating Disorders Association. In the old days, Asian women competed with one another to see how many children they could have, but now they compete to be the most successful, and the thinnest, she adds. Slimming centers have cropped up all over Asia to cater to such desires. In Shanghai, at Chuanye Slimming Center — a popular Chinese chain — women buy packages of 10 sessions. They can choose from treatments such as "ultrasonic liposuction," which claims to vibrate your fat away, or one in which they're covered with Chinese herbs and bandages, then encased in an Austin Powers-esque, heat-emitting machine that's said to draw out toxins while toning the body. During the treatments, "we don't recommend exercise because it'll turn into muscle," says manager Xu Wenli, whose clients include brides-to-be who are eager to fit into their wedding dresses. "After you lose a certain amount of weight, then you can exercise." Another slimming center, Marie France Bodyline, which has locations throughout Asia, promises results with "no vigorous exercise." One treatment applies heat and a pulsating suction to remove 2 inches of body fat after just one treatment, the company's brochure says. Wing Yim, a customer service manager at a Marie France slimming center in Hong Kong, says that women want to be thin, but they already work long hours, so they "don't want to sweat" to achieve their goal. Yau, the Hong Kong marketing executive, says slimming centers are too expensive (a package of treatments can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars) and she's not sure they work. So she loses weight the inexpensive way, she says: via portion control. For dinner sometimes, she'll have two spoonfuls of rice with vegetables and soup. "Dieting is a life-long career for women," Yau says. "It's true for women everywhere, but especially in Hong Kong." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreEarlier this month, Apple released iOS 9.3.4, which put a focus on security and was expected to be the last release of iOS 9.3 until iOS 10‘s arrival.
But it turns out Apple has at least one more release ready to go. The company officially released iOS 9.3.5 today, which is another update focused on security. It’s available right now to all devices that are running iOS 9.3 as an over-the-air (OTA) update.
With September right around the corner, and the expected release month for iOS 10, it’s possible that this is the last release of iOS 9.3. With it, Apple is focusing on behind-the-scenes improvements, security patches, and overall refinement of the system ahead of another major upgrade on the horizon.
Update: In two separate reports, both the New York Times and VICE have put together why the iOS 9.3.5 update is so critical for security reasons. iOS 9.3.5 patches an exploit that has apparently been around since iOS 7, and allowed for external sources to obtain and expose a variety of content, including contacts, emails, text messages, and more.
Like this post? Share it!WASHINGTON — Federal investigators have obtained a warrant to begin searching a large cache of emails belonging to a top aide to Hillary Clinton, federal law enforcement officials said Sunday, as prosecutors and F.B.I. agents scrambled to review as much of the information as possible before Election Day.
It remains unclear, though, whether they can finish their work by then. “The process has begun,” a federal law enforcement official said.
Earlier this month, agents in an unrelated investigation of the disgraced congressman Anthony D. Weiner discovered emails belonging to his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, the aide to Mrs. Clinton. That prompted a renewed interest among F.B.I. agents who had investigated Mrs. Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary state and had concluded their case without charges in July.
A federal law enforcement official said agents had discovered hundreds of thousands of Ms. Abedin’s emails on her husband’s computer, but investigators expected to seize only a portion of the total. Agents will have probable cause to search only the messages related to the Clinton investigation.
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Some of Ms. Abedin’s emails passed through Mrs. Clinton’s private server, officials said, which means there is a high likelihood that the F.B.I. has already read them.
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Since the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, revealed the existence of the emails in a letter to Congress on Friday, senior Justice Department and F.B.I. officials have been under tremendous pressure to review the messages quickly. Both Mrs. Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald J. Trump, have called for the F.B.I. to say publicly what it knows before Election Day.
Over the weekend, senior Justice Department officials said they would make all resources available to conduct the investigation as quickly as possible, saying Mr. Comey’s letter — just days before the election — gave the matter an unprecedented urgency.
The Justice Department efforts were described by three federal law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
Late Friday and early Saturday, law enforcement officials said there was no chance the email review could be completed before Election Day.This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Thousands of people who believe Georgia is about to execute an innocent man are rallying behind the high-profile death row inmate, Troy Davis. Davis was convicted of the 1989 killing of a Savannah police officer but has always maintained he did not commit the murder. His case has become a focal point for anti-death penalty activists in the U.S. and abroad, attracting supporters such as Pope Benedict, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The Georgia Superior Court has scheduled Davis’s execution for next Wednesday, September 21st. Yesterday, supporters delivered a petition containing more than half a million signatures to a state parole board in support of clemency for Davis.
AMY GOODMAN: Troy Davis’s older sister, Martina Correia, is one of the staunchest defenders of Troy. Speaking on WSAV-TV in Savannah, she reacted to the news of Troy’s impending execution.
MARTINA CORREIA: I’m very disappointed in Georgia, because there’s still doubt. But I’m holding the parole board to their standard, that when there is doubt, that they won’t execute.
AMY GOODMAN: Troy Davis was convicted in 1989 of killing off-duty |
. Mr. Cumpston, who possessed a speech impediment, could barely talk due to his distraught state. Fortunately, a telegram had been sent to a Mr. Butt, presumably at the Cumpstons' request. Mr. Butt appeared at the hearing and "in reply to the Bench said the parties occupied a very good position in Leeds. He offered to take proper charge of them if they were handed over to him, which was ultimately done, the defendants being discharged from custody." (The Times article)
Legend: Nothing like this seems to have ever happened to the Cumpstons or the Victoria Hotel before.
Explanation: The prosaic London Times concludes: "No explanation can be given of this strange affair, and the belief is that it was an hallucination." The Bristol Mercury concurs: "There is little doubt that the whole was an hallucination." The Bristol Daily Post of December 10 mentions that police scoured the hotel room and found nothing out of the ordinary, so they echoed the general sentiment. In the century and a half since, others have speculated that the Cumpstons barely escaped falling into some sort of opening into another dimension.
Comments: Some writers have wondered why Mr. Cumpston carried a revolver and three knives with him on this excursion. The fact is that Victorian England was not all that safe a place. British author Rodney Davies explains that it was still legal in Great Britain to buy handguns over the counter in 1873.
Davies, with a little help from Elizabeth Shaw of the Bristol Central Library, uncovered a few facts about the Cumpston case. The Victoria Hotel (Josiah Brown, proprietor) was located at 140 Thomas Street and became the Bute Arms in 1876. It was torn down in the 1920s. The railway station across the street is now called Temple Meads.
Charles Fort, in Chapter 18 of LO!, calls the Cumpstons "an elderly couple." Thomas Cumpston, however, was only twenty-five at the time of the incident. He and his wife lived at Number 35, Virginia Road, Leeds. According to the 1881 census Thomas was a "linen manufacturer employing about 90 persons" -- the "very good position" alluded to by Mr. Butt. Ann Cumpston gave birth to two boys and a girl in the years between 1876 and 1879.
Davies, Rodney. Supernatural Vanishings (New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 1996).
"Extraordinary Hallucination." London Times, December 11, 1873, p. 11.
"Extraordinary Occurrence at a Bristol Hotel." Bristol Mercury, December 13, 1873.
Hallucination or Void?
D. J. West's "A Pilot Census of Hallucinations" (from Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research Vol. 57, Part 215, April 1990), carries the following account, entitled, prosaically, "Case 0878":
A female student nurse aged 21 wrote (anonymously): "It was roughly 8.0 a.m. I was sat [sic] in my room having a cup of tea. (I'd been awake for about an hour and had had a bath and dressed.) Suddenly a large hole appeared in the floor -- it took up most of the floor and the edges looked as if it were a rocky formation. Although I couldn't see to the bottom of the hole I knew it was very deep. A voice [said] to me to 'jump in'. The hole and the voice disappeared. I've not had this experience again."
Like the Cumpstons a century earlier, the young nurse heard a mysterious voice from the opening; and, as the English couple's experience was dismissed as a hallucination, so too did the woman send her account to the Census of Hallucinations. What if these events were not illusions? Suppose Mr. Cumpston or the nurse jumped or fell into their respective openings? What would have happened? One can only wonder.
The Hole in the Path
University professor and folklorist Theo Brown spent most of her life in Devonshire, where she spent a great deal of time collecting tales of ghosts, fairies, and psychic events. In 1982 she published Devon Ghosts, a book of stories both legendary and true.
In her Introduction Ms. Brown informs us that most people of Devon will not speak of strange events, for the fear of ridicule is strong in the southwest of England. One of the delightful aspects of Devon Ghosts, however, is reading of Ms. Brown's ability not only to convince her informants to speak, but to get them to write out sizable personal accounts for her. One such account came from the Reverend Dr. A. T. P. Byles, who told her in 1974 of a strange event that occurred years earlier.
In 1946 Dr. Byles became the vicar of St. Bartholomew's Church in Yealmpton, "a rather remote village to the south of the A38, on a road between Totnes and Plymouth," in southern Devonshire. Yealmpton's main claim to fame was that "Old Mother Hubbard" once lived there. She was the housekeeper for a local family who inspired Miss Sarah Martin to write a poem about an old woman whose cupboard was bare.
Anyway, there was a door in the south side of St. Bartholomew's that opened onto a path that led straight south to a wider lane that ran around the property. One Saturday afternoon near sunset, Dr. Byles walked up the path to meet his wife, who was arranging flowers within the church. He writes:
In the middle of the path I saw a hole, of irregular shape, about a yard in width. I thought it was a subsidence, and went into the church and told my wife about it. Coming out shortly afterwards, I found that the hole was very much larger, and asked my wife to come out and see it. We both looked into it, and I suggested lowering myself into it. However, it was of uncertain depth, and when I threw a stone it bumped against stonework which we could see, and which looked like part of a wall.
The hole had grown to about nine feet in diameter, and the vicar worried that someone might fall in. He headed into the village to look for planks to cover it. While there he ran into Mr. Knight, "the local builder and undertaker," and invited him to the church to see the opening.
Upon returning to the path, Dr. Byles was astonished to see no sign of the hole -- the narrow lane and the grassy turf to either side were exactly as they had been before. After listening to the vicar voice his confusion, Mr. Knight simply said "That's all right, sir" and never mentioned the "Hole" again.
The Byles moved to London in 1950. Dr. Byles admitted to telling a few people about the Hole over the years. After receiving his manuscript, Theo Brown visited Yealmpton personally. The story of the "Hole" was well known to the villagers, but no one had ever seen such a thing themselves, before or after Byles' experience. They frowned upon her suggestion that the grounds around the church be excavated to search for underground cavities or structures. Ms. Brown concludes: "It may have been quite a unique event with a significance that must for the present remain obscure."
Here again, one can only wonder what would have happened if the vicar actually had descended into the opening. And what was the "stonework" the Byles saw, which looked like part of a wall?
Brown, Theo. Devon Ghosts (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons Ltd., 1982), pp. 24-26
ODDS AND ENDS
It seems like I can hardly open a book without finding a 411-like story. I bought William Syer's Off the Beaten Trail just because I liked another Syer's book, Ghost Stories of Texas. Cracking it open at last, I found a tale that would have held no significance to me a year ago, but which I will now try to frame in Paulides' fashion:
Frances Ellen Spraggins
Missing 10/8/1879 - Morning - Brushy Gap, south of Comanche, Comanche County, Texas
Age at Disappearance: 22 months
The William Spraggins cabin stood hard by the edge of a thick forest on a hillside in what is now southwest Comanche County, Texas. The family represented some of the earliest settlers in the area, which the local people named Harmony Community.
Wednesday, October 8, 1879, began as an ordinary morning. Mrs. Spraggins and her older children started in on their chores. Frances Ellen, too young at twenty-two months to help, played inside with her doll. She wore little more than a plain linsey dress, no shoes or socks.
Mrs. Spraggins carried two buckets to a spring about a quarter mile down the hill. On her return, she entered the house and found Frances' doll alone on a bed. After searching by herself for a while, she and her oldest daughter Ellen alerted their neighbors. Fifty searchers grew into three hundred. The frontiersmen rode throughout the night, carrying torches, lighting bonfires, and calling the child's name. On Friday a piece of Frances' dress was found snagged on a briar bush at Mercer Creek, five miles east. Footprints and other traces indicated the toddler had followed the creek south in an amazing odyssey. As Texas historian Ed Syers writes:
"Can she have struggled all the way to the Leon [river]? A dozen miles; more, the way she'd have to round those gullies! A baby not just circling, close by? Going on and on resolutely?" [p. 462]
Upon reaching the second stream, the 22-month-old apparently followed it back west, making a rough twenty-mile circle. She came within two miles of her starting point - and kept on going. Finally, on Saturday morning, October 11, men marching in a mile-wide line, each no more than six feet from his neighbor, found Frances on a hill on the J. B. Hilley ranch. She had apparently just lain down and died, sucking her thumb. The frontiersmen carved a stone monument in the girl's honor and set it up where her body was discovered. After time and the element wore it away, it was replaced by a modern monument:
Frances Spraggins marker
As David Paulides might say, is it possible for a child less than two years old to march off through a rugged, semi-arid landscape, with no food and no footwear, for three and a half days?
Syers, William Edward. Off the Beaten Trail (Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1971), pp. 460-464.
Waring, Margaret, "Little Child Lost," The Comanche Chief, July 14, 1967, p. 14.
* * * *
Paranormal investigator Joshua P. Warren collects stories from people all over the world, stories that are a) short, b) true, and c) creepy. The following account sounds like it almost became a Missing 411 story as well.
While growing up in Smithfield, Utah, Jonathan K. Marshall heard legends of a "human/ape-type animal that lived in the foothills" called the Hill Side Growler. In the spring of 1989, when he was twelve, Jonathan and a friend visited Smithfield Golf Course, hoping to find lost golf balls (which the golf course would buy back). In a gully near one of the fairways the boys found a dead deer, its neck broken and twisted strangely. Intrigued, Jonathan approached the carcass, his friend trailing close behind.
Jonathan turned to speak to his friend. The other boy suddenly turned pale, spun, and ran away screaming. Jonathan chased after, finally catching up when they climbed back to the rim of the ravine. Through sobs and tears the friend said that: "when I turned around to talk to him, a big, hairy arm reached out from the bushes that were nearest to me and tried to grab me." Thinking it was a joke, Jonathan laughed, only to hear a "loud, screaming roar" echo out of the trees in the gully. This was followed by thudding footsteps somewhere below, and a glimpse of a brown, ill-defined "something" running away on the opposite side of the gulch. The thing's departure heartened them enough that they climbed back down -- only to find the deer gone.
If young Mr. Marshall had gone on his ball-seeking excursion by himself, he may well have become simply another statistic. One thinks again of David Paulides' warnings not to hike alone.
Marshall, Jonathan K., "He Thought it Had Gotten Me," in Joshua P. Warren, It Was a Dark and Creepy Night (Pompton Plains, NJ: Career Press, Inc., 2014), pp. 159-160.
TIME SLIPS?
Perhaps some disappearances are caused by distortions and warps in time itself. The "Versailles Adventure" is one of the most famous "time slip" stories ever, but not that many have heard of its aftermath:
Another Versailles Adventure
Category: Retrocognition/Time Slips?
From: Ellwood, pp. 103-105; MacKenzie, pp. 48-49
Where: The Trianon Gardens, Versailles, France
When: 1907-09
Who: John Crooke, his wife Kate, and their son Stephen
How close to source: The Crookes sent an account of their experiences to the Society for Psychical Research
Phenomena: On August 10, 1901, two English women, Miss Anne Moberly, head of St. Hugh's Hall, Oxford, and Eleanor Jourdain, headmistress of the Corran School for Girls at Watford, visited the Trianon Gardens in Versailles, an expanse of parklands, gardens, and living quarters commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress, Madame du Barry. As they wandered over the grounds, the two women encountered a number of strange people dressed in 18th century clothing, while the usual crowds of contemporary tourists were nowhere to be seen. They saw stands of forest that did not exist; they walked over a bridge that had collapsed fifty years earlier and apparently passed through a wall that did exist in 1901 (but not in the 1700s).
Sometime later they compared notes, did extensive research on the Trianon area, and came to the conclusion that they had passed through a ghostly re-creation of the environs as they had been in 1789 -- or had traveled back in time to the 18th century. They published their story under the simple title, An Adventure, in 1911, and thereafter weathered the harsh criticisms of book reviewers, skeptics, and even members of the Society of Psychical Research itself. To this day much controversy surrounds the claims of these two English ladies...
... So let's forget about them and concentrate on Mr. John Crooke, his wife Kate, and their son Stephen. In 1907 the Crookes rented an apartment on the Rue Maurepas overlooking the Trianon parklands. They took a dislike to the gardens immediately; there seemed to be "no air" there, so they took walks elsewhere. The trees in the distance looked flat and lifeless, almost like a painted backdrop. Though they saw busloads of tourists pull up and disembark, when they looked across the parklands they never seemed to see any of them.
Mr. Crooke was particularly disturbed by a cottage on the Trianon grounds. Sometimes it was there, and sometimes it wasn't, and "he had seen people in old-fashioned clothes looking through the windows." (Ellwood, p. 103) Flights of steps, expanses of grass, and trees also seemed to come and go. He once saw a man in 18th century clothing, with a tricorner hat, and he and his wife both watched a woman in an old-fashioned dress pick up sticks. Once John Crooke heard music played on stringed instruments, wafting over one of the small lakes, for about fifteen minutes -- on a day when, as he later ascertained, no band had been playing.
All three Crookes saw the "Sketching Lady," the figure who dominates the book An Adventure, and whom authors Moberly and Jourdain believed to be none other than Marie Antoinette. Being artists themselves, the Crookes tried to get a look at what the Sketching Lady was sketching. On one occasion the mysterious woman kept turning so as to keep herself between the Crookes and her work; on another, she quite pointedly took her sketch pad and seat and left the area.
Oddities: "The Crooke family mentioned a curious hissing sound that sometimes came when things were about to appear... they also spoke of the vibration in the air which sometimes accompanied [a] vision." (MacKenzie, p. 49)
Ending: The strange atmosphere of the Trianon parklands -- to say nothing of the appearing and disappearing people and objects -- got on the Crookes' nerves. They moved away in 1909. They revisited the gardens on occasion, and to their surprise everything seemed perfectly normal.
Legend: The main legend of the Versailles adventures was that promoted by Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain themselves. They were certain that the date in the past they observed was October 5, 1789, the last day Marie Antoinette spent at the Trianon estate. On that day a messenger arrived to warn her that an angry mob of peasants was approaching. She and her retinue returned to Paris, where she stayed, essentially a prisoner, until she and King Louis XVI were executed four years later. Moberly and Jourdain's insistence on this date may have undermined their own efforts to prove the reality of their adventure. Later researchers (and witnesses to further visions) have suggested that a date between 1770 and 1774 would fit the observed people, uniforms, buildings, and grounds much better.
Explanation: It was suggested early on that Moberly and Jourdain stumbled onto a piece of "performance art" being staged by people in period clothing. Such an explanation would hardly fit the two years' worth of oddities seen by the Crooke family. There have been other witnesses to time-slips at Versailles as well, as outlined in Ellwood's and MacKenzie's books.
Comments: In his earlier works Andrew MacKenzie, a careful and conservative psychic researcher, was perfectly willing to accept the Versailles experiences as examples of retrocognition, i.e., visions of the past somehow "re-played" in the present like DVD recordings. As such, the people of the past had to be mere images, so he dismissed the claim that the two English ladies exchanged remarks with the people of the 18th century (in his view the 18th century folk were speaking to people of their time who just happened to be standing about where Moberly and Jourdain were walking). This suggestion, too, stands at odds with later percipients' reports -- the Sketching Lady, for instance, was certainly aware of the Crooke family.
In his 1997 book, after years of studying similar cases, MacKenzie admits that it does seem that the people of the past are sometimes aware of modern witnesses. "This accords with Stephen Hawking's statement, quoted in the Preface, that the laws of science did not distinguish between the forward and backward directions of time." (p. 67)
Which seems to be a roundabout way of saying that time travel is possible!
Ellwood, Gracia Fay. Psychic Visits to the Past: An Exploration of Retrocognition (New York, NY: Signet Books, 1971).
MacKenzie, Andrew. Adventures in Time: Encounters with the Past (London: The Athlone Press, 1997).
"Missing 411 Annotations" is intended for informational and speculative uses only. It is not affiliated with David Paulides or the Can Am Missing Project, and any opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author.
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Missing Annotations
Back to our Home Page, the Fantasy World ProjectI know it's premature, since I predicted (and I stand by it) that Donald Trump would win reelection handily in 2020, but more and more I am convinced that Nikki Haley should be our first woman president.
And this is not just a reaction to the recent publication of Hillary Clinton's new book What Happened in which Mrs. Clinton apparently details precisely the opposite, blaming everyone and everything for her defeat from Bernie Sanders to the "late eclipses of the sun and moon," except for herself. I say "apparently" because I am less likely actually to read her book -- or even to purchase it as a doorstop -- than the 1938 Farmer's Almanac translated into Serbian. (You never know where the royalties are going and Putin already has enough uranium.)
No, this is all about Mrs. Haley who, as our UN ambassador, has looked and acted more like a future president than anyone I can think of in current politics. Anyone who can wrangle those clowns in the Security Council can do just about anything. She has also given "what for" to one of the more hypocritical organizations on the planet -- the UN Human Rights Council,
Just the other day, she maneuvered Russia and China into the most serious sanctions yet against North Korea with a unanimous vote of the Security Council. As President Trump said today, that may not mean much in the end and more serious options are probably necessary, but still it's an accomplishment. Nothing ventured, as they say...
Indeed, Haley has worked remarkably well with Trump, though they were at loggerheads during the election. It speaks well of both of them that they could put that so easily aside. In the UN, Trump, the wild man threatening Kim Jung-un with "fury," makes a great foil for Haley, just as Nixon was a foil for Kissinger during the original China negotiations with Mao and Chou. Who knows what will transpire now, but it's obvious the old way of handling the China-North Korea duopoly did not work. To repeat what has failed again and again would be, as the old saying goes, the definition of insanity.
In further praise of Haley, she seems like an old-fashioned (genuine equality) feminist as opposed to the modern faux feminist of the rancid Linda Sarsour/Madonna sort, looking for sexism in every possible venue while complaining of inequality everywhere when more and more women have come to outnumber men on almost every college campus. Haley does things and shuts up about it, winning the respect of both sexes. She also handles controversy well.
Whether you always agree with her on everything or even on just a few things, or on none at all, these traits are valuable in a president. In the end we usually vote on character for the presidency, more than on the issues -- the economy being the obvious exception. I know certain people's head will explode when they read this, but it is largely on character that I chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. He seemed more genuine -- far more, in fact, since Clinton was, and apparently still is, particularly hollow and dishonest.By George Friedman
Israel has expressed serious concerns over the preliminary U.S.-Iranian agreement, which in theory will lift sanctions levied against Tehran and end its nuclear program. That was to be expected. Less obvious is why the Israeli government is concerned and how it will change Israel's strategic position.
Israel's current strategic position is excellent. After two years of stress, its peace treaty with Egypt remains in place. Syria is in a state of civil war that remains insoluble. Some sort of terrorist threat might originate there, but no strategic threat is possible. In Lebanon, Hezbollah does not seem inclined to wage another war with Israel, and while the group's missile capacity has grown, Israel appears able to contain the threat they pose without creating a strategic threat to Israeli national interests. The Jordanian regime, which is aligned with Israel, probably will withstand the pressure put on it by its political opponents.
In other words, the situation that has existed since the Camp David Accords were signed remains in place. Israel's frontiers are secure from conventional military attack. In addition, the Palestinians are divided among themselves, and while ineffective, intermittent rocket attacks from Gaza are likely, there is no Intifada underway in the West Bank.
Therefore, Israel faces no existential threats, save one: the possibility that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and a delivery system and use it to destroy Israel before it or the United States can prevent it from doing so. Clearly, a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv would be catastrophic for Israel. Its ability to tolerate that threat, regardless of how improbable it may be, is a pressing concern for Israel.
In this context, Iran's nuclear program supersedes all of Israel's other security priorities. Israeli officials believe their allies, particularly those in the United States, should share this view. As a strategic principle, this is understandable. But it is unclear how Israel intends to apply it. It is also unclear how its application will affect relations with the United States, without which it cannot cope with the Iranian threat.
Israel understands that however satisfactory its current circumstances are, those circumstances are mercurial and to some extent unpredictable. Israel may not rely heavily on the United States under these circumstances, but these circumstances may not be permanent. There are plenty of scenarios in which Israel would not be able to manage security threats without American assistance. Thus, Israel has an overriding interest in maintaining its relationship with the United States and in ensuring Iran never becomes a nuclear state. So any sense that the United States is moving away from its commitment to Israel, or that it is moving in a direction where it might permit an Iranian nuclear weapon, is a crisis. Israel's response to the Iran talks -- profound unhappiness without outright condemnation -- has to be understood in this context, and the assumptions behind it have to be examined.
More than Uranium
Iran does not appear to have a deliverable nuclear weapon at this point. Refining uranium is a necessary but completely insufficient step in developing a weapon. A nuclear weapon is much more than uranium. It is a set of complex technologies, not the least of which are advanced electrical systems and sensors that, given the amount of time the Iranians have needed just to develop not-quite-enough enriched uranium, seems beyond them. Iran simply does not have sufficient fuel to produce a device.
Nor it does not have a demonstrated ability to turn that device into a functioning weapon. A weapon needs to be engineered to extreme tolerances, become rugged enough to function on delivery and be compact enough to be delivered. To be delivered, its must be mounted on a very reliable missile or aircraft. Iran has neither reliable missiles nor aircraft with the necessary range to attack Israel. The idea that the Iranians will use the next six months for a secret rush to complete the weapon simply isn't the way it works.
Before there is a weapon there must be a test. Nations do not even think of deploying nuclear weapons without extensive underground tests -- not to see if they have uranium but to test that the more complex systems work. That is why they can't secretly develop a weapon: They themselves won't know they have a workable weapon without a test. In all likelihood, the first test would fail, as such things do. Attempting their first test in an operational attack would result not only in failure but also in retaliation.
Of course, there are other strategies for delivering a weapon if it were built. One is the use of a ship to deliver it to the Israeli coast. Though this is possible, the Israelis operate an extremely efficient maritime interdiction system, and the United States monitors Iranian ports. The probability is low that a ship would go unnoticed. Having a nuclear weapon captured or detonated elsewhere would infuriate everyone in the eastern Mediterranean, invite an Israeli counterstrike and waste a weapon
Otherwise, Iran theoretically could drive a nuclear weapon into Israel by road. But these weapons are not small. There is such a thing as a suitcase bomb, but that is a misleading name; it is substantially larger than a suitcase, and it is also the most difficult sort of device to build. Because of its size, it is not particularly rugged. You don't just toss it into the trunk, drive 1,500 miles across customs checkpoints and set it off. There are many ways you can be captured -- particularly crossing into Israel -- and many ways to break the bomb, which require heavy maintenance. Lastly, even assuming Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon, its use against Israel would kill as many Muslims -- among them Shia -- as Israelis, an action tantamount to geopolitical suicide for Tehran.
A Tempered Response
One of the reasons Israel has not attempted an airstrike, and one of the reasons the United States has refused to consider it, is that Iran's prospects for developing a nuclear weapon are still remote. Another reason is difficulty. Israel's air force is too far removed and too small to carry out simultaneous strikes on multiple facilities. If the Israelis forward-deployed to other countries, the Iranians would spot them. The Israelis can't be certain which sites are real and which are decoys. The Iranians have had years to harden their facilities, so normal ordnance likely would be inadequate. Even more serious is the fact that battle damage assessment -- judging whether the site has been destroyed -- would be prohibitively difficult.
For these reasons, the attack could not simply be carried out from the air. It would require special operations forces on the ground to try to determine the effects. That could result in casualties and prisoners, if it could be done at all. And at that the Israelis can only be certain that they have destroyed all the sites they knew about, not the ones that their intelligence didn't know about. Some will dismiss this as overestimating Iranian capabilities. This frequently comes from those most afraid that Tehran can build a nuclear weapon and a delivery system. If it could do the latter, it could harden sites and throw off intelligence gathering. The United States would be able to mount a much more robust attack than the Israelis, but it is unclear whether it would be robust enough. And in any case, all the other problems -- the reliability of intelligence, determining whether the site were destroyed -- would still apply.
But ultimately, the real reason Israel has not attacked Iran's nuclear sites is that the Iranians are so far from having a weapon. If they were closer, the Israelis would have attacked regardless of the difficulty. The Americans, on the other hand, saw an opportunity in the fact that there are no weapons yet and that the sanctions were hurting the Iranians. Knowing that they were not in a hurry to complete and knowing that they were hurting economically, the Iranians likewise saw an opportunity to better their position.
From the American point of view, the nuclear program was not the most pressing issue, even though Washington knew it had to be stopped. What the Americans wanted was an understanding with the Iranians, whereby their role in the region would be balanced against those of other countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, the Arabian emirates and to some extent Israel. As I've argued, the United States is still interested in what happens in the region, but it does not want to continue to use force there. Washington wants to have multiple relations with regional actors, not just Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Israel's response to the U.S.-Iran talks should be understood in this way. The Israelis tempered their response initially because they knew the status of Iran's nuclear program. Even though a weapon is still a grave concern, it is a much longer-term problem than the Israelis admit publicly. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried hard to convince the United States otherwise, the United States isn't biting.) Since an attack has every chance of failing, the Israelis recognize that these negotiations are the most likely way to eliminate the weapons, and that if the negotiations fail, no one will be in a more dangerous position for trying. Six months won't make a difference.
The Israelis could not simply applaud the process because there is, in fact, a strategic threat to Israel embedded in the talks. Israel has a strategic dependency on the United States. Israel has never been comfortable with Washington's relationship with Saudi Arabia, but there was nothing the Israelis could do about it, so they accommodated it. But they understand that the outcome of these talks, if successful, means more than the exchange of a nuclear program for eased sanctions; it means the beginning of a strategic alignment with Iran.
In fact, the United States was aligned with Iran until 1979. As Richard Nixon's China initiative shows, ideology can relent to geopolitical reality. On the simplest level, Iran needs investment, and American companies want to invest. On the more complex level, Iran needs to be certain that Iraq is friendly to its interests and that neither Russia nor Turkey can threaten it in the long run. Only the United States can ensure that. For their part, the Americans want a stronger Iran to contain Saudi support for Sunni insurgents, compel Turkey to shape its policy more narrowly, and remind Russia that the Caucasus, and particularly Azerbaijan, have no threat from the south and can concentrate on the north. The United States is trying to create a multipolar region to facilitate a balance-of-power strategy in place of American power.
Israel in 10 Years
I began by pointing out how secure Israel is currently. Looking down the road 10 years, Israel cannot assume that this strategic configuration will remain in place. Egypt's future is uncertain. The emergence of a hostile Egyptian government is not inconceivable. Syria, like Lebanon, appears to be fragmented. What will come of this is unclear. And whether in 10 years the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan will remain Hashemite or become a Palestinian state is worthy of contemplation. None have military power now, but then Egypt went from disaster in 1967 to a very capable force in 1973. They had a Soviet patron. They might have another patron in 10 years.
Right now, Israel does not need the United States, nor American aid, which means much less to them now than it did in 1973. They need it as a symbol of American commitment and will continue to need it. But the real Israeli fear is that the United States is moving away from direct intervention to a more subtle form of manipulation. That represents a threat to Israel if Israel ever needs direct intervention rather than manipulation. But more immediately, it threatens Israel because the more relationships the United States has in the region, the less significant Israel is to Washington's strategy. If the United States maintains this relationship with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others, Israel becomes not the anchor of U.S. policy but one of many considerations. This is Israel's real fear in these negotiations.
In the end, Israel is a small and weak power. Its power has been magnified by the weakness of its neighbors. That weakness is not permanent, and the American relationship has changed in many ways since 1948. Another shift seems to be underway. The Israelis used to be able to depend on massive wellsprings of support in the U.S. public and Congress. In recent years, this support has become less passionate, though it has not dried up completely. What Israel has lost is twofold. First, it has lost control of America's regional strategy. Second, it has lost control of America's political process. Netanyahu hates the U.S.-Iran talks not because of nuclear weapons but because of the strategic shift of the United States. But his response must remain measured because Israel has less influence in the United States than it once did.
Read more: Israel's New Strategic Position | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on FacebookDear 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.
Booms were heard following an air raid siren in Tel Aviv Thursday evening, just an hour after a rocket from the Gaza Strip exploded in an open field outside of Rishon Lezion. There were no reports of injuries in either strike.
The attacks mark the first time the center of the country was hit in the renewed violence from the Gaza Strip and the first time that a real siren was sounded in Tel Aviv since the Gulf War in the early 1990s. Palestinian Islamic Jihad took responsibility for the rocket on Tel Aviv.
A separate IDF spokesman confirmed that a ll Palestinian terror factions took part in rocket fire overnight Wednesday, with Hamas trying to take the lead.
He added that the IDF "believes the rocket fire will intensify." Tank fire also was directed at terror targets, he said.
Since beginning its operation, the IDF has struck nearly 250 Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza, including several terrorist cells preparing to fire rockets at Israel and medium-range rocket launchers located across the Strip.
The spokesman concluded by describing the Hamas-ruled Strip as "a forward Iranian base," and urged the populace to remain steadfast, as "home front resilience is vital for the continuing operation."
Tovah Lazaroff and Reuters contributed to this report
The rockets, among over 420 fired from Gaza into the South since the IDF launched Operation Pillar of Defense Wednesday to root out the terror infrastructure in the coastal territory, landed less than 15 km south of Tel Aviv. The operation began with the Wednesday afternoon targeted killing of Ahmed Jabari, the chief of Hamas's military wing.The first rocket fired toward the Center hit in an open area near Rishon Lezion. The second rocket fired toward the greater Tel Aviv area "did not hit the ground," the IDF Spokesman said.Earlier Thursday, three people were killed and two others injured in a direct hit on a Kiryat Malachi apartment building. Hours later, a rocket fired into the Eshkol region injured three IDF soldiers, two moderately.MDA paramedics treated five wounded people at the site of the Kiryat Malachi attack, in which a rocket hit a four-story building. Three people were pronounced dead on the scene and two others were suffering moderate injuries, including a baby.A house in Ashdod and a school in Ofakim near Beersheba also sustained damage from rockets on Thursday morning. Rockets also landed in the Eshkol Regional Council area, Gan Yavne and Ashkelon.The IDF Spokesman's Office stated the Iron Dome rocket defense system has successfully intercepted more than 85 rockets since the operation began.Palestinian sources said that 15 people were killed in Gaza as a result of the IAF strikes, with more than a hundred suffering injuries.Schools within 40 km. of the Gaza Strip were declared closed Thursday, and residents were urged to follow directives from the IDF Home Front Command. Magen |
solidity, detail resolution, macrodynamics, and bass extension of the more expensive Nagaoka MP-500, said MF. (Vol.34 No.2)
Ortofon 2M Red: $99 $$$
The least expensive of Ortofon's 2M moving-magnet cartridges (the series name is shorthand for MM), the Red offers a 5.5mV output, a replaceable elliptical stylus, highish compliance, a recommended tracking force of 1.8gm, and a square-front body with threaded mounting holes, for ease of installation. SM declared the 2M Red's dynamic range "vastly wider" than that of the less expensive Ortofon OM 5E, and praised the new cartridge's clean, fast, grainless sound. SM's verdict: "If you're looking for a high-value cartridge... the 2M Red is an excellent place to start." Borderline Class C. (Vol.37 No.5, Vol.38 No.2 WWW)
K
Ortofon A95 and Cadenza Red, Audio-Technica AT150ANV, & AT7V, Grado Gold 1, Nagaoka MP-300, Sumiko Blue Point EVO III.
Phono Accessories & Record Cleaners
AcousTech The Big Record Brush: $36.95 ✩
This large-handled brush has soft bristles of both natural hairs and conductive synthetic fibers, and makes dusting LPs nearly foolproof. The 5.5"-wide bristle area easily spans the width of any LP's grooved area. Version with ground wire ($52.95) does "a pretty effective job of dissipating static electricity," Mikey said. (Vol.31 No.9)
Acoustical Systems SMARTractor: $650
The SMARTractor is a semicircle of mirrored plastic with five single-point alignment grids: Löfgren A/Baerwald IEC, Löfgren A/Baerwald DIN, Löfgren B/IEC, Löfgren B/DIN, and UNI-DIN. A sixth position, labeled UNI-P2S, specifies pivot-to-spindle distance. Each alignment option has its own tiny dimple into which the stylus must fit for the alignment to be perfect. Three pop-in adapters (7.1, 7.15, and 7.2mm thick) ensure a secure fit with a variety of spindles. A sophisticated sighting and magnification system allow the user to precisely set parallax and zenith angle. Though very expensive, the SMARTractor was "the easiest and most accurate alignment device I've used," said Mikey. (Vol.37 No.2)
Aesthetix MC Demagnetizer: $199 ✩
Battery-powered, reasonably priced, seems to do the job as well as any of them, decided MF. (Vol.25 No.7)
Allnic Audio SpeedNic: $399
The SpeedNic is a strobing platter-speed checker for 33.33, 45, and 78rpm discs. It uses a gooseneck LED lamp powered by three C batteries and a metal disc that doubles as a record weight. Expensive, but works as advertised, said MF. (Vol.34 No.12)
Audio Additives digital stylus-force gauge: $79.99
The Audio Additives comes in a nice black box and includes two AAA batteries and a 5gm calibration weight. It has an easy-to-read touchscreen display, a nonmagnetic case, and accurately measures a cartridge's vertical tracking force down to 0.001gm. Precise and a pleasure to use, said SM. (Vol.35 No.11 WWW)
Audio Desk System Vinyl Cleaner: $3995
(The fully-automatic Audio Desk uses ultrasound and cavitation to clean records, much as an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner does for jewels. The entire cleaning and drying process is completely silent and takes about six minutes. A 20ml bottle of Audio Desk's alcohol-free, biodegradable concentrate ($19.95) will clean at least 50 records, and the microfiber cleaning barrels ($99.95 each) are good for 500 to 1000 cleaning cycles. "The Audio Desk Systeme was the most effective, easy-to-use record-cleaning machine I've ever tried," said MF. He bought the review sample. FK was stunned. The Audio Desk not only thoroughly cleaned his LPs, it significantly improved their sound, revealing nuances long locked in the grooves. "If your stereo system cost tens of thousands of dollars and you play a lot of vinyl, you need to check this thing out," he said.AD squinted at the lack of adjustable feetthe Vinyl Cleaner must be kept level during operationbut was otherwise gobsmacked: "If there exists a more effective, easy, reliable, and utterly transformative way of cleaning LPs, I have yet to hear it." He added: "I regret that I can't afford a Vinyl Cleaner, but I do not consider Audiodesksysteme's price of $4450 regrettable in and of itself. [The] Vinyl Cleaner's build quality, like its effectiveness, is beyond reproach." (Vol.35 No.6, Vol.36 No.9, Vol.38 No.3 WWW)
Audio Intelligent record-cleaning fluids ✩
MF: "The AI fluids are reasonably priced, easy to apply and (especially) to spread, clean extremely well, and leave no audible residue." "Simple, effective, and distributed by kind people," said SM. Prices are for 16-oz bottles: Enzymatic Formula, $25; alcohol-free Premium Archivist Formula, $25; Super Cleaning Formula with research-grade isopropanol, $25; Ultra-Pure Water (claimed to be 50 times purer than distilled water), $16. Distributed by Missouri-based Osage Audio Products, LLC. (Vol.30 No.12, Vol.35 No.4 WWW)
Clearaudio Outer Limit Turntable Ring: $1350 ✩
Heavy, stainless-steel ring acts as a speed-stabilizing flywheel, damps the record, and flattens outer-groove warps. However, MF cautioned, its weight means that you can use it only with turntables with massive platters and/or very powerful motors. MF also noted that a centering template would be a happy addition to the package. The Outer Limit was "a pain to center." Nonetheless, it "blackened backgrounds, solidified images, and made them 'pop' in three dimensions." (Vol.24 No.10)
DB Systems DBP-10 protractor: $49 ✩
Fiddly but accurate guide for setting cartridge tangency. JA's preferred alignment protractor. The DBP-10 can be used to gauge alignment accuracy at any point or points between 44 and 153mm from the record spindle. "A hell of a bargain," said AD. (Vol.33 No.6 WWW)
DB Systems DBP-6MC resistive loading kit: $49 ✩
This resistive loading kit is based on a pair of flexible Y-adapters, each having two phono sockets at one end and a single phono plug at the other. It comes with five pairs of color-coded resistive plugs (10, 20, 50, 100, and 200 ohms), as well as a pair of empty plugs into which an alternate resistor value can be soldered. "An ancient but eminently useful thing to have," said AD. (Vol.32 No.8 WWW)
Furutech DeMag record demagnetizer: $2715 ✩
Who knew?!?" Like the Acoustic Revive RL-30 Mk.3, the DeMag removed glare and enriched the midband of edgy-sounding LPs. Users should make sure the Furutech's uncovered surface is clean before putting freshly scrubbed vinyl on it, warned MF. (Vol.29 No.10)
K-A-B SpeedStrobe Digital Phonograph Speed Readout: $109.95 ✩
Easy-to-use strobe disc simplifies precision adjustment of turntable speeds from 33 1/3 to all of the variations on "78." "It's just fantastic," effused J-10. "It looks cool, and it's a snap to perfectly set the speed." (Vol.19 No.2)
Keith Monks Audio Works Mk.VII Omni record-cleaning machine: $5995 ✩
The late Keith Monks's son, Jonathan, has taken over production of this venerable classic, moving manufacturing to a dedicated facility on the Isle of Wight and expanding the line to include new models, new platter mats, new cleaning brushes, and specially formulated cleaning fluids. With its solid idler-driven platter, refined cabinetry, and improved internal wiring, the new machine outclasses the old. After cleaning a record, AD noted clearer instrumental voices and greater low-level detail. The Omni was "so easy to useso pleasant to usethat the prospect of cleaning LPs became a happy one." Price is for white finish; English oak adds $300. (Vol.32 No.5 WWW)
Keith Monks DiscOvery One record cleaning machine: $2495 $$$
The discOveryOne is both the newest and the least expensive record-cleaning machine from the company that created the genre. The new machine has at its core an off-the-shelf direct-drive record player, the tonearm of which is modified to accommodate both a fluid-evacuation system and a means of delivering and refreshing the nylon thread used to cushion the vacuum nozzle. Money is also saved by eliminating the automated fluid-dispensing system of older, more expensive Keith Monks machines, though that can be retrofitted to a discOveryOne for $700. AD observed that the new machine's vacuum-drying function was slower than that of its predecessors, but no less effectiveand surprisingly quiet. He quibbled with some construction details and was puzzled that the stripped-down machine was actually larger than its stablemates, but nonetheless declared the discOveryOne "an accessory of notably high valueand notable worth." (Vol.37 No.4 WWW)
Kerry Audio Design F2 Titanium tonearm counterweight: $129 ✩
Titanium replacement counterweight for Rega tonearms. Machined with three sets of thin contact rails that ride on the Rega arm's counterweight stub. The sonic improvement was "amazing," thought MF; he found the F2 gave better bass response, greater low-frequency extension and control, and an improved sense of overall weight and tonal richness. (Vol.26 No.5)
LAST Power Cleaner for LPs: $44/3/4-oz bottle, with applicators ✩
This small bottle of Freon-free cleaner is enough to treat 75 LPs. JE found just three drops sufficient to remove dirt, dust, and grime from garage-sale records, though he discovered that a subsequent wash with his VPI HW-17 was still required to reduce groove noise to acceptable levels. "A worthwhile companion to LAST's wonderful Record Preservative." (Vol.17 No.5)
LAST Record Preservative, with applicators: $50/2-oz bottle ✩
Significantly improves the sound of even new records, and is claimed to make them last longer. "I unhesitatingly recommend LAST Record Preservative," said Mikey, whose records sound as quiet now as they did when he first started using the treatment, over 25 years ago. AD is not a fan, however, though he does admit that LAST, if used correctly, does no harm. $185/8oz, $350/16oz. (Vol.5 No.3, Vol.30 No.10)
LAST STYLAST Stylus Treatment: $36/1/4-oz bottle ✩
Stylus treatment designed to reduce friction between groove and phono cartridge. Some manufacturers caution against it, claiming it migrates up the cantilever and attracts dust, thus clogging the armature. One reader suggests applying treatment to brush rather than stylus, which would reduce the possibility of over-applying. MF has found STYLAST effective, but expresses concern over possible cartridge damage. (Vol.18 No.12)
Lyra SPT: $50/5ml bottle ✩
Includes a small, wedge-shaped applicator with which MF brushed a drop of this fluid carefully, back to front, along the stylus. Don't get any on the cantilever, he warned, and wait 10 seconds before playing a record. Pricey fluid said to lubricate the stylus, to improve S/N ratio and trackability, and to last for one side's playing time. Mikey thinks he noted a slight sound-softening effect, but wouldn't bet the farm on it. (Vol.23 No.11)
Merrill G.E.M. Dandy Hydraulic Record Cleaner: $149 ✩
Designed to sit in a sink, the "rudimentary but ingenious" G.E.M. Dandy is an inexpensive manual record-cleaning rig that uses a proprietary cleaning solution comprising a degreasing detergent and an alcohol-based carrier, followed by a tap-water rinse. Made mostly of PVC tubing, the Dandy has a vertically mounted clamping mechanism that permits easy rotation of the secured LP. Also included are a faucet-coupling adaptor, a protractor, and a length of clear plastic tubing with a pressurized water nozzle. "Until you get the hang of it," Mikey warned, "the G.E.M. Dandy can make a mess." Despite his best efforts, water invariably seeped into the Dandy's protective cups to wet the outside edges of record labels. However, the Dandy proved "terrific" for cleaning water-damaged and crudded-up records, MF concluded. (Vol.31 No.9)
Milty Zerostat 3: $100 ✩
The gold standard of static-discharge devices," the ZeroStat is a gun-shaped gadget with two heavy-duty piezo-electric crystals and a patented compression trigger. Slowly squeezing and releasing the trigger produces a neutral static condition, thus removing static cling from record surfaces. Said to be good for at least 10,000 squeeze cycles. SM uses the Zerostat religiously: "Wouldn't want to live without it," he declares. (Vol.30 No.10, Vol.35 No.5 WWW)
Mobile Fidelity Geo-Disc alignment tool: $49.99
The size and shape of an LP, with a spindle hole at its center and clear instructions printed right on its surface, MoFi's Geo-Disc is a simple and affordable cartridge-alignment tool. Using the Geo-Disc to install cartridges on the VPI Traveler and various Rega 'tables, SM easily and consistently achieved accurate alignment. Diehard analog hobbyists will still want the versatility of more complex tools, such as the DB Systems DBP-10, but "the Geo-Disc is the only alignment protractor most vinyl enthusiasts will ever need," said SM. (Vol.35 No.11 WWW)
Musical Surroundings Fozgometer: $300
The Fozgometer allows its user to easily check phono cartridge channel separation and crosstalk. (It uses a log-ratio detector developed by Jim Fosgate for the steering-logic circuits of surround processors.) Housed in an aluminum case, it runs on a 9V alkaline battery and has an On/Off switch, left and right RCA input jacks, an analog signal meter, and three LEDs labeled Left, Center, and Right. "Well made, really easy to use, and accurate," said Mikey. "The Fozgometer gets my highest recommendation!" However, while the Fozgometer provides useful measurements for cartridges with similar channel-separation numbers, it can lead to unusual and undesirable results with cartridges that have high levels of interchannel crosstalk disparity, cautioned MF. (Vol.33 Nos.5 & 11)
Nitty Gritty 2.5Fi-XP LP cleaning machine: $1115
Nitty Gritty's latest record-cleaning machine adds the convenience of two separate fluid chambers and hand pumps for quicker, easier cleaning sessions, and has a new venting system that allows the machine's motor to run cooler for longer periods of time. Like other Nitty Gritty machines, the 2.5Fi-XP forgoes a platter in favor of a round, label-sized disc, making the Nitty Gritty more compact than most other record-cleaning machines. The 2.5Fi-XP managed to quickly and thoroughly clean and dry very dirty LPs. "Two wet thumbs up!" said Mikey. (Vol.34 No.5)
Nitty Gritty Mini Pro 2 record-cleaning machine: $1459 ✩
Nitty Gritty 2.5Fi Vacuum record-cleaning machine: $1015 ✩
Nitty Gritty 1.5Fi record-cleaning machine: $935 ✩
The Mini Pro is a semiautomatic machine that cleans both disc sides simultaneously. The 1.5 is identical to the 2.5 but substitutes black-vinyl woodgrain for the latter's genuine oak side panels. Instead of a vacuuming "tonearm," as on the professional Keith Monks machine, the NG cleaner uses a vacuum slot, with the record cleaned by fixed, chassis-mounted "lips." Gunk-laden fluid is vacuumed off. Cleaning is efficient and as good as Nitty Gritty's Pro, at a significantly lower price, though it takes twice as long, cleaning each side of an LP in turn. Don't smear the schmutz from one record to another, MF warned; he suggests manual pre-cleaning of records for best results. While the vacuum-cleaning Nitty Gritty does a job on dusty albums nearly equivalent to that of the similarly priced VPI HW-16.5, CG felt that the VPI's hard-bristled brush did better with really dirty LPs than did NG's velvet one. He found the effect of both was to produce a less colored, more detailed midband sound from LPs, as well as provide the expected reduction in surface noise. (Vol.8 No.1, Mini Pro; Vol.7 No.5, Vol.8 No.1, Vol.23 No.6, 2.5Fi; Vol.17 No.5, 1.5Fi)
Octave Audio/Schopper modifications for Thorens TD 124 ✩
Replacement parts for vintage Thorens TD 124 turntables are manufactured in Switzerland by Schopper A.G. and sold in the US by Octave Audio. A new drive belt ($35), new rubber "mushrooms" for isolating the player from its plinth ($60/set of four), and a fresh bottle of Thorens oil ($25) got AD's turntable up and running. However, the biggest improvements to the 124's performance came from new rubber grommets for isolating the motor from its surroundings ($50/set of six) and Schopper's platter-bearing rebuild kit ($90), complete with new gasket, thrust plate, and bolts. The Schopper mods "created a record player that could compete with virtually anything I've heard in terms of treble openness and clarity, midrange detail, and bass extension," said Art. (Vol.31 No.5 WWW)
Onzow Zero Dust: $69 ✩
A circular mound of semi-gelatinous goop in a box, onto which you gently lower your stylus," said MF. Use is simple: "After a few seconds, you lift the stylus, and it's as clean and residue-free as the proverbial whistle....Upside: no potentially dangerous brushing, and no fluids. Downside: if you like to leave your platter spinning, you'll have to stop it each time, or find another steady surface upon which to perform the operation." (Vol.25 No.3)
ORB phono accessories: $350$480 ✩
The Sakura handheld static-discharge eliminator ($350) is a variant of the Furutech deStat SNH-2, and the SFM-2 stylus-force gauge ($480) and CRE-2 Cartridge Exciter ($399) are variants of similar products from Air Tight. While pricey, the ORB Phono Accessoriesare beautifully made and work well, said Mikey. Available directly from www.twinaudiovideo.com. (Vol.33 No.12)
Rega R808 2mm spacer: $39
This simple stainless-steel spacer allows owners of Rega tonearms to adjust the height of their arms to accommodate non-Rega cartridges. Fidgety but worth the hassle, says SM. With the spacer in place and Dynavector's DV 10X5 moving-coil cartridge mounted on his Rega P3-24, SM heard improved clarity, impact, immediacy, and soundstage depth. (Vol.35 No.11 WWW)
Rek-O-Kut Stylus Force Gauge: $24 ✩
The Rek-O-Kut Stylus Force Gauge is a big, easy-to-use balance beam that comes with a total of 5.75gm in plastic weights, for use in various combinations. For cartridges designed to play at downforces of 3.5gm or more, the Rek-O-Kut is "a good, cheap solution," said AD. (Vol.32 No.2 WWW)
Shure SFG-2 stylus-force gauge: $40
Shure's classic balance-beam stylus-force gauge is simple to use and accurately measures a cartridge's vertical tracking force between 0.5 and 3.0gm. At less than half the price of the Audio Additives, the Shure is a great little tool, but the AA is easier to use, more precise, and provides an extra measure of comfort, said SM. (Vol.35 No.11 WWW)
Soundsmith EZ-Mount screws: $39.95 ✩
Soundsmith's sets of knurled screws, designed to fit most brands of tapped cartridge, made installing cartridges much easier, said Mikey. Each set includes pairs of 10mm-long screws made of four different materialsnylon (1.04gm/pair), aluminum (2.06gm/pair), stainless steel (5.80gm/pair), and brass (6.24gm/pair)so that users can easily match a tonearm's effective mass to a cartridge's compliance. (Vol.33 No.12)
Spin Clean Record Washing System: $79.95 $$$ ✩
Package includes a plastic vat, two brushes, two rollers, a 4-oz bottle of concentrated cleaning fluid, and washable drying cloths. Three sets of slots allow cleaning of 7", 10", and 12" records. Two velvet-like brushes clean both sides of a record simultaneously as the user rotates the record within the appropriate slot. Though "not nearly as convenient or as efficacious as a vacuum cleaning system," the Spin Clean Record Washing System "got the job done," said Mikey. Spin Clean claims a single vat of fluid can clean up to 50 records, but MF suggests refreshing the vat more often. A 16-oz bottle of fluid costs $20; a package of five drying cloths costs $14.99. (Vol.33 No.2)
Sutherland Timeline: $400 ✩
The Timeline is a device for testing a turntable's accuracy of speed. Housed in a solid disc of aluminum and Delrin that fits over the platter spindle, the Timeline uses eight laser-projected timing marks with a claimed accuracy within two parts per million. "Unless your wall has hash marks, there's a bit of subjectivity involved, and at $400 the Timeline isn't cheap," said MF. "Indispensable," said BD, who used the Timeline to measure, set, and monitor the speeds of his Spiral Groove SG-2 and VPI HR-X turntables. (Vol.33 Nos.3 & 12 WWW)
Synergistic Research PHT: $199/two
As MF described it, the PHT is "a very tiny, tweezer-ready HFT designed to be placed atop a phono cartridge." In MF's system, the PHT "produced an ear-popping, Cinerama-like, wraparound soundstage, and an overall sound even less tethered to the speaker positions." (Vol.38 No.2)
The Disc Doctor's Miracle Record Cleaner: $27.00/pint plus $7.15 S&H ✩
The Disc Doctor's Stylus Cleaner: $28.00/17ml plus $3.80 S&H
Chemist Duane Goldman, the Disc Doctor, claims that his Stylus Cleanera mixture of sub-micron filtered water and separately sub-micron filtered +99.5% 1-propanol alcoholleaves no residue on the stylus or cantilever. Comes with a stiff brush for the first wet cleaning of the stylus. After that, the good Doctor recommends a natural-bristle artist's brush that's been cut down at an angle or been given a crew cut, as Mikey put it. Quart of fluid, $40.75/$8.65 S&H; half gallon, $64.75/$10.00 S&H; size A for LP brushes, $44.95/pair/$4.55 S&H; size B for 45s, $31.95/pair; replacement pads for brushes, $16.50/4; QuickWash solution, quart, $27; half gallon, $44.25. (Vol.20 No.3, Vol.23 No.11, Vol.24 No.7)
Vinyl Flat LP Flattener: $119.95
Made in the US, the Vinyl Flat uses pressure, heat, and time to repair warped and dished LPs. The basic package contains two Groovy Rings (LP-sized sheets of black plastic), two heavy metal plates, a few pieces of hardware, a nice storage case, and a table of heating times and cooling cycles. The optional Groovy Pouch ($79.95) is a soft, specially made enclosure that uses carbon-fiber heating elements to surround the Vinyl Flat with gentle, even heat. Using his oven or the Groovy Pouch, SM was able to successfully flatten even severely warped and dished LPs, but cautions: "Be sure that your oven's temperature is properly calibrated before baking your precious LPs." (Vol.35 Nos.4 & 5 WWW)
VPI HW-27 Typhoon record-cleaning machine: $2500 ✩
The Typhoon is smaller, quieter, and more attractive than earlier VPI record-cleaning machines, "with the look and feel of a turntable." Its vacuum pump, twice as powerful as that used in the HW-17, proved capable of drying an LP in a single rapid revWelcome to the Synth DIY wiki
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Use this link to email the SDIY wiki administrator.The 23-year-old Las Vegas man was found dead on a sidewalk about 9:15 p.m. on May 23 on the 1900 block of Euclid Avenue, near St. Louis and Eastern avenues. Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal Follow @csstevensphoto
Las Vegas homicide detectives believe a rivalry between two tagging crews led to the fatal shooting of Adan Gavilanes in May near downtown Las Vegas.
The 23-year-old Las Vegas man was found dead on a sidewalk about 9:15 p.m. on May 23 on the 1900 block of Euclid Avenue, near St. Louis and Eastern avenues. It’s unclear how many times he was shot, but police said at least nine shell casings were found at the scene.
On June 6, the Metropolitan Police Department identified Estevan Lemus, 24, as a suspect in the homicide and issued a warrant for his arrest. On Oct. 15 — more than four months after the shooting — Lemus was taken into custody and booked into the Clark County Detention Center.
At the time of the killing, homicide Lt. Dan McGrath said the shooting was “more than likely” the result of a fight between gang members.
Police determined in their investigation that Gavilanes was part of a crew called PBSK that painted gang-related graffiti to mark their turf, while Lemus is a member of a FPK, a rival crew. In the road near where Gavilanes’ body was found, according to Lemus’ arrest report, a tag reading “PBSK” had been spray-painted over with “FP.”
In an interview with police, Gavilanes’ fiancee said they had heard rumors that Lemus “was coming after him” days before the shooting, leading detectives to conduct a search of the suspect’s Facebook account.
In the search, the arrest report detailed, detectives found that Lemus had messaged another member of FPK in the days leading up to the killing. In the conversation, Lemus said he wanted to locate members of PBSK and make them “eat his bullets.”
The same electronic search revealed that in the days following the shooting, Lemus was actively trying to sell a 9mm handgun, which police said was the same caliber as the weapon used to kill Gavilanes.
Lemus is being held at the county jail without bail on an open murder charge.
Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter.Motiongate 10th January 2017
Dubai Parks & Resorts is a brand new integrated facility comprising a Polynesian-themed hotel, a shopping and dining area (Riverland) similar to Universal Citywalk, and three theme parks with a fourth (Six Flags) due to be added to the line-up in three years time. It has been built close to the western border of Dubai, placing it within an easy three quarter hour drive of the parks in neighbouring Abu Dhabi and by extension within easy range of the three major international airports in the country. The site is also adjacent to that selected for Expo 2020, and it seems likely that there will be a considerable boost to footfall in a few years as a result. Foreign tourists (and certain members of coaster clubs!) will likely appreciate the fact that the resort has an alcohol license in a part of the world where such things are not widely available, and good use has been made of it with The Irish Village, an authentic bar with a good range of imported brews.
Motiongate is the largest and most ambitious of the three extant parks, bringing together a variety of different properties from different movie studios including Columbia Pictures, DreamWorks, and Lionsgate. While it formally opened on December 15th, some two months later than planned, readers should be aware that much of the park is currently in what can be thought of as a soft opening and/or technical rehearsal phase. Today the unavailable list included Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: River Expedition, Kung Fu Panda: Unstoppable Awesomeness, Shrek's Merry Fairy Tale Journey, and two whole themed areas: DreamWorks: How to Train your Dragon (which should open in March) and Lionsgate (which is officially labelled as "Phase Two"). Despite the closures, however, there were more than enough operational attractions to fill a day, and indeed we were present from open to close despite the fact that we had the place virtually to ourselves.
There were at least a dozen members of staff on duty in the enormous car park (which is actually somewhat larger than Motiongate) to marshall the twenty or so cars into spaces near the designated bus stop, albeit not those fitted with sun shades which today were left empty for some reason. We left our windows slightly open in a brave but fundamentally unsuccessful attempt to protect the inside of the car from the baking sun, and boarded a free air conditioned coach which drove us perhaps seven hundred metres to the park entrance. We did see a pedestrian route available for those who are not terminally lazy, though few people would want to expend unnecessary effort during peak months when the weather becomes brain-meltingly hot.
We began our day with Smurf Village Express (#2313), a custom family coaster from Gerstlauer that opened just one day prior to our visit. Today all guests were being given two laps of the course, though I'm given to understand that the computer allows this to switched to either one or three on demand, depending on the length of the queue. I was expecting a fairly run of the mill family coaster, but was pleasantly surprised by an experience that was well above average, with smooth tracking and a fun layout from start to finish. There was no perceptible difference between front and back, though it's worth noting that there were only a few people in the train; one imagines that the back would become a bit more forceful with additional weight on board.
Our second stop was at Green Hornet: High Speed Chase (#2314), a Gerstlauer Bobsled Coaster and a development of the hardware platform that premiered almost two decades ago with the much-loved G'sengte Sau. The experience started out very well with a themed queue and station building, but unfortunately things went downhill rapidly (pun absolutely intended) from there. The main part of the ride was eminently forgettable, and while we did do a second lap this was only to validate that we hadn't missed something blindingly obvious the first time round. On-board experience aside, however, the ride can only be described as an eyesore, as unpainted metal surrounded by concrete and fencing sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise beautiful park. We noticed that the track in the station building was painted green; as simple as it sounds I think I'd have been more impressed with the overall package if the rest of the track had been given the same hue.
We decided that we'd tick off the final operational credit before exploring the rest of the park, and with that in mind we made our way into the DreamWorks building for Madagascar Mad Pursuit (#2315), a Gerstlauer Infinity Coaster with eight-seat cars developed from those found on the Eurofighter family. Passengers are held in place by a simple pull down lap bar, which is comfortable without being obtrusive, though some operators were applying more pressure than others in their checks, which on two of my laps made things a bit tighter than I'd have preferred. Readers should be aware that the ride is operated with a strict loose article policy, but I can't fault that given a high top speed and the possibility of multiple cars being on track at the same time. The nearby bank of lockers is free for the first hour.
The experience begins with a gentle turn to the left and a small section of dark ride with the expected animals from the movie lined up on both sides of the track. There is an audible warning to keep your head back, and a series of lights illuminate a launch tunnel ahead. After a brief pause the car accelerates rapidly, and as it reaches full speed it makes a dramatic turn to the left followed in short order by an airtime element that feels like a top hat. The rest of the layout was a blur for me despite repeated circuits, a testament to the quality of the overall experience. A number of effects were still under development today, resulting in a few oddities such as an explosion sound with no matching visual, but those minor niggles will likely have been resolved by the time these words are read.
After a number of laps we concluded that the most comfortable seats in the train were the middle pair in the front row. I didn't get a chance to try an outside seat, but The War Department told me that some of the transitions along the course were not as smooth as they might have been in those locations, and I can report the same thing for the middle seats in the back row. Despite the minor comfort issues however I think it important to note that the ride quality on the whole was very good and markedly better than that of other recent coasters from the same product line, such as Smiler. The real question will probably be what the ride quality is after a few years of regular operation; I personally look forward to finding out.
The park has a beautiful custom carousel located right next to the coaster. Melman Go-Round features dramatic poses by the various animals from Madagascar, though we were disappointed to learn that there is a strict forty kilo weight limit for the moving creatures; adults are only able to sit in a small number of static vehicles on the outside ring. On the plus side, there is an artfully concealed speaker system on board that is essentially indistinguishable from a real barrel organ, and the music made the surprisingly long cycle particularly enjoyable. When the ride came to a halt we were instructed to move it move it towards the exit, a nice touch if one that promptly planted that dreadful song in the back of my brain where it remained for the balance of the day.
We spent a good twenty minutes exploring the rest of the DreamWorks building, which right now comprises Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, and Shrek. All three areas are themed to an incredibly high standard, and the overall presentation, even in its unfinished state, arguably raises the bar over the nearby IMG Worlds of Adventure, which itself sets new standards for indoor parks worldwide. I was particularly taken with the enormous and spectacular Fountain of Dreams in the building entrance, which the photograph above scarcely does justice to.
After a while we headed back outside for Ghostbusters: Battle for New York, a target shooter with video screens along the lines of Toy Story Midway Mania or, for preference, Maus au Chocolat. This installation wasn't as well themed as the two benchmarks, but the overall quality was broadly comparable to the Amazing Adventures of Gumball ride yesterday. We noticed a trackless vehicle system, albeit one that really wasn't needed as the vehicles followed a standard switchback pattern around the course. We also noticed quite a few gremlins at |
kn ko ku lo lt mk mr ms mynb nl nn pa pl pt ro ru si sk sl sr sv sw ta tg th tk tr uk vi wa xh zuen_GB en_US pt_BR zh_CN zh_TW ast nds (bsc#933411).- Updated languages: af am ar be bg bn bs ca cs cy da de el eo es et eufa fi fr gl gu he hi hr hu id it ja jv ka km kn ko ku lo lt mk mr ms mynb nl nn pa pl pt ro ru si sk sl sr sv sw ta tg th tk tr uk vi wa xh zuen_GB en_US pt_BR zh_CN zh_TW ast nds (bsc#933411).- Updated languages: de.First drop for SLE 12 SP2 (bsc#933411).==== yast2-users ====Version update (3.1.60 -> 3.1.61)- Checking all possible /home mount points (/mnt/home and /home).(bnc#995299)- 3.1.61==== zypper ====Version update (1.13.10 -> 1.13.11)Subpackages: zypper-aptitude zypper-log- aptitude: handle --version (fixes #99)- version 1.13.11--To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxTo contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxAccording to Tencent Technology–Haopu Technology, a blockchain startup in Beijing, recently announced that it has completed 28 million CNY in Pre-A round funding. Investors includes Huachuang Capital-IDG Angel Fund), DraperDragon Fund, WeXFin,Taoshi Capital, Danhua Capital and Albatross Venture.
Funds will be used for team building and the permissionless blockchain- Grid. Haopu, founded in June 2016, is a blockchain solution supplier ranging from infrastructure to industrial-specific solution. Haopu had previously provided service to Lifangtong, a third-party payment processor under the HNA Eco-Technology Group and Lianjia. The Company also worked with Suzhou Tongji Financial Technology Research Institute on building the blockchain automatic assessment center.
Haopu’s mission is to lower the mutual trust costs by integrating blockchain technology into customers’ business scenarios. The existing IT network of customer could be integrated into the blockchain network through design of network collaboration, incentive rules and blockchain features like real-time data, reliability and authenticity. The links between the organization, the enterprise, and the end user could be connected through blockchain network.
Mao Haobo, Founder and CEO of Haopu Technology
Mao Haobo, founder and CEO of Haopu:
“Although blockchain technology is entrusted by the market and developers as the new generation of technology that could revolutionize the Internet, the blockchain network of Bitcoin or Ethereum could not entertain commercial demands on scale in terms of performance, security and compatibility.”
The huge gap between current blockchain products and real commercial application is where Haopu flourish as a bottom-layer technology provider.NEW ORLEANS — Witnesses told police a University of Southern Mississippi student who fell to his death early Saturday repeatedly rammed a window in a New Orleans hotel before breaking through it.
The witness accounts of the death of 20-year-old Cole D. Whaley are in a police report detailed by New Orleans news outlets Wednesday.
One witness said Whaley was yelling and screaming in the hotel room before his fall. Another said he yelled “Let’s go swimming” and rammed the window three times before it broke. He fell from the 11th story to a fourth-floor pool deck.
Authorities say the results of toxicology tests are not in yet.
New Orleans’ coroner, Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, classified the preliminary cause of death as “blunt-force injuries.” A final cause will be announced following an investigation and toxicology results, Rouse said in a statement earlier this week.
Whaley’s obituary said he was from Spanish Fort, Alabama, which is near Mobile. His funeral was set for Wednesday afternoon.
He was in New Orleans for a Pi Kappa Phi fraternity function.
Officers responding to a call about the incident arrived at the DoubleTree Hotel at 12:52 a.m. Saturday. Whaley was pronounced dead at the scene at 1:07 a.m.Image copyright MIKE CLARKE Image caption The fridge was one of 100,000 devices used as part of the spam attack
A fridge has been discovered sending out spam after a web attack managed to compromise smart gadgets.
The fridge was one of more than 100,000 devices used to take part in the spam campaign.
Uncovered by security firm Proofpoint the attack compromised computers, home routers, media PCs and smart TV sets.
The attack is believed to be one of the first to exploit the lax security on devices that are part of the "internet of things".
Poor protection
The spam attack took place between 23 December 2013 and 6 January this year, said Proofpoint in a statement. In total, it said, about 750,000 messages were sent as part of the junk mail campaign. The emails were routed through the compromised gadgets.
About 25% of the messages seen by Proofpoint researchers did not pass through laptops, desktops or smartphones, it said.
Instead, the malware managed to get itself installed on other smart devices such as kitchen appliances, the home media systems on which people store copied DVDs and web-connected televisions.
Many of these gadgets have computer processors onboard and act as a self-contained web server to handle communication and other sophisticated functions.
Investigation by Proofpoint into the internet addresses involved in the attack revealed the presence of the smart gadgets, said David Knight, general manager of Proofpoint's information security division.
"The results spoke for themselves when the addresses responded with explicit identification, including well-known, often graphically branded interfaces, file structures, and content," he told the BBC.
Mr Knight speculated that the malware that allowed spam to be sent from these devices was able to install itself because many of the gadgets were poorly configured or used default passwords that left them exposed.
He said attacks such as this would become much more routine as homes and furnishings got smarter and were put online.
"Many of these devices are poorly protected at best and consumers have virtually no way to detect or fix infections when they do occur," he added.Russia has accused Washington of concealing crimes committed by the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the Iraqi city of Mosul, where a US airstrike last month killed hundreds of civilians.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov made the accusation on Sunday, days after US military spokesman Joseph Scrocca said there was a video showing Daesh trying to bait US into killing civilians in Mosul. However, the footage is yet to be released.
"What motives is the US command driven by when they hide the war crimes of terrorists from the international community behind the veil of secrecy?" Konashenkov said.
"Why does the US-led … coalition, with this information, using their'smart bombs' still carry out airstrikes on buildings with civilians?" he added.
Iraqi civilians and rescue workers inspect the damage in Mosul's al-Jadida district on March 26, 2017, following a US airstrike days before. (Photo by AFP)
On March 17, the US bombarded a building in Mosul’s western al-Jadida district, where Iraqi forces are fighting against Takfiri elements. Over 200 civilians, including women and children, are believed to have been killed in the aerial assault which caused the building to collapse.
The Pentagon acknowledged in a statement that the US had carried out the fatal attack. However, the US military is said to be conducting an investigation into whether it was US munitions, Daesh explosives or both that caused the building to collapse.
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Elsewhere in his comments, Konashenkov said Washington was seeking to justify mass civilian casualties of its bombing campaign.
“The Pentagon’s absurd statements justifying mass civilian casualties of US bombing in Iraq tell more words about the real level of planning operations and alleged superiority of the US ‘smart bombs,’” he said.
Konashenkov highlighted a crucial difference between US attacks in Mosul and Moscow’s counter-terrorism mission in Aleppo, saying Russia did not use its air force in the liberation of the Syrian city.
“The Russian Aerospace Forces were not used in Aleppo at all. The attention was focused on the work of humanitarian corridors as well as delivering and providing humanitarian aid for local residents," he said.
"In Mosul, according to … Scrocca, despite civilian casualties, the coalition is not going to retreat even when fighting becomes heavy,” Konashenkov added.
The US campaign against purported terrorist targets inside Syria and Iraq, which began in 2014, has led to the death of many civilians without any meaningful achievement.
Earlier this week, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov cast doubt on the sincerity of the US coalition’s anti-terror campaign in Syria.
“One year into the creation of this coalition [in 2014], it was very sporadically using the air force to hit some ISIL (Daesh) positions. They never touched the caravans who were smuggling oil from Syria to Turkey and, in general, they were not really very active,” he said.
“This suspicion is still very much alive these days, when Jabhat al-Nusra already twice changed its name, but it never changed its sponsors who continue to pump money and whatever is necessary for fighting into this structure,” he added.OH MY GOD. Fuck. This. Chapter. I started this shit like 5-6 weeks ago and was thinking I'd have it done in a week. First chapters suck. More at the bottom.
"Cyruuus." Came the excited whisper alongside a soft pat on the shoulder; shifting slightly on the bench, Cyrus groggily opened his eyes, taking in his surroundings. The sleek white walls and grey accents typical of Atlesian design lined the room, illuminated by the soft teal glow of the light bars embedded in the room's ceiling. Turning his head lazily, he faced the other bench and saw Nicky perched on the window sill, gazing out of the glass panel with a wide and excited grin on her face. "Cyrus, wake up!" She said, a bit louder this time, and looked at him.
"I'm up, I'm… I'm up." Cyrus yawned, slowly pushing himself up into a sitting position and resting his back against the wall at the side of the bench; stretching his arms up, he looked at Nicky again. "What… what time is it?"
"Middle of the morning. We've just arrived at Vale, look!" Nicky replied, a joyful tone in her voice as she gazed out the window in wonder, taking in the picturesque sight of the kingdom's suburbs. The outer reaches of the city were filled with quaint stone and wood buildings, rustic designs that contrasted with the metropolitan inner-city. "It's… so different."
"How so?" Leaning over the sill like his sister, Cyrus watched the scattered structure among the greenery drift by underneath them, thin wisps of butt passing by the window occasionally.
"There's colour."
"There's colour at home too."
"You know what I mean, idiot." Nicky sighed, slumping back into her seat and resting her arms behind her head. "I dunno, it just looks more alive down there. Everything in Atlas is so… clean."
"That's fair." Cyrus responded, sitting back down and reaching for his scroll; sliding open one of the side tabs and pressing an icon showing food. "You hungry?" He asked, absent-mindedly picking out his order from the options available.
"I'll be good with a sandwich or something. You know what I like." Reaching under the bench, she pulled out her bag and unclipped the sheathed greatsword slung on it's side. Bringing the large blade onto her lap, she opened the latches holding the sword in and ran her fingers over the shining metal.
"Alrighty then." Tapping the confirm button, the scroll buzzed in his hand before returning to it's home screen, a small timer in the top-right indicating when the food would be ready. Looking over to Nicky, Cyrus saw her sword out and swept his eyes over it; the blade was easily four feet long, not counting the handle, and thick enough to hide the mechanical components within. Much like his own weapon it followed a fairly simple design in the Atlesian fashion, favouring function over the flamboyancy prominent in other kingdoms.
The mulled mood within the room persisted for a while, a timid silence created by the fact that both siblings were still sleepy and hadn't eaten in hours. After what felt like an eternity, a small light on the panel next to the door lit up, indicating somebody waiting outside; after pressing the button, the simple metal panels slid aside to reveal a young-adult mouse faunus dressed in the airship's staff attire, her brown hair tied in a neat bun. "Good morning, ma'am, sir; your food has arrived!" Turning around to grab one of the plates from the tray beside her, she offered it to Nicky with a beaming smile before turning to serve Cyrus. Once the food was dispensed, she looked down at her scroll and tapped several options, the receipt appearing on his screen. "Sir?"
Snapped out of a temporary stupor Cyrus looked at her and turned away, a clearly flustered expression on his face as he gained his bearings again. "Oh, uh… yeah. Of course, sorry." He stammered, picking up his scroll and entering the necessary credentials to fulfill the transaction. Giving the two of them another smile, the woman turned and exited the room, the door sliding shut behind her.
No sooner after she had left did Nicky give Cyrus a sharp kick in the shin to get his attention, a devilish grin on her face. "Look at yooou, getting all worked up." She teased, the smile growing in intensity. "Never knew faunus girls were your thing."
"I-I… wha?" The sharp stutters matching a wide-eyed look of surprise on his face, cheeks glowing red with embarrassment.
"Oh my…. Oh my word." Nicky laughed, crossing her arms and pulling herself into a ball on her seat as she giggled. "They actually are!"
"I… I don't know what you're talking about!" Cyrus held his chin up and looked to the side, feigning confidence to save face from her teasing.
"Ahh, I was just messing with you Cy." Calming herself down, she leant forward and gave his knee a little nudge. "If it's any consolation, I thought she was pretty cute too." Peeking out the window, she saw the cliffs of Beacon growing closer, the green light of the tower glowing as it reflected the morning sun's light. "Hey, eat up. We're going to be there pretty soon."
Stretching her legs for the first time in hours, Lily slowly picked herself up from her comfortable seat onboard the Vacuan airship, unlike the Atlesian design it favoured larger common rooms as opposed to individual rooms, and the warmer colours of the wood tones and the sandstone accents clearly showed its homeland's influence.
Like the other new students on board she began to make her way off of the vessel, stepping out onto the large landing dock of Beacon academy, the picturesque castle of the school and the iconic emerald CCT tower looming over the wide stone plazas and gardens wrapped around the building.
"So this is Beacon… prettier than the pictures." Gazing at the rich green light from the tower, she slowly began to walk forward with the Vacuan group; like many of them, this was her first time in Vale. Stopping with the group, she turned to look ahead, where a handful of third-year students had stopped them.
One of these students, a tall blonde girl with red-pink highlights, waved her hand up to get the group's attention. "Hi guys! Over here!" Getting down from her tiptoes with an exasperated look on her face, she looked over to one of the other students; a shorter boy dressed in a loose tan shirt and breeches, he lifted the brow of his pith helmet up and coughed harshly in another attempt to gain their attention. Failing that, he unslung the rifle from his back and fired it into the sky, the loud crack of the powerful dust shot silencing the group.
"That's better, thanks Iv." The taller girl said, met with a sharp nod by the boy. Turning once again to face the group, she raised up on her tiptoes and spoke again; "So guys, I know you're all excited to be here, but I just need you to listen up for a minute. Alright?" Sensing she had the attention of the group, she continued on. "My name is Rose and this is Ivory, we're here to show you around and get you to orientation on time! So if you have any questions, feel free to come and ask!" Looking over the group, she then began walking towards Beacon itself. "Come on guys, we're wasting sunlight!"
Walking on with her fellow students, Lily tried to slowly press her way to the front of the group; reaching the two third years, they noticed her and turned around. "Oh hey, can I help?" Rose asked, holding out her hand. "I'm Rose, and you?"
"Lily." Accepting the handshake, Lily slowed down to keep pace with them. "I was just wondering, when do we get our rooms?" Her question was met by raised eyebrows from the both of them.
"'course." Ivory chuckled.
"Er… but, yeah. The airship was too shaky and I was out with friends the night before. So… kind of… yeah, I'm pretty tired." Lily moaned, rubbing her eyes.
"Fair enough." Rose replied, smirking at Ivory. "You're not assigned dorms until tomorrow, once you've formed your team." Lily's response was merely a groan of exhaustion. "Don't worry, you'll have a chance for plenty of sleep before initiation tomorrow. Just hold up until tonight and you should be okay."
The Vacuo group continued on, reaching the first junction of the long central path; turning around, Rose motioned for the group to turn towards the school's cafeteria hall for the start of the orientation. Still in her tired daze, Lily lumbered along with them as she just managed to keep pace.
Overlooking the Vacuo group from one of the grassy knolls was Azura, the silver-haired fox faunus rested on a small blanket place over the grass, using her soft tail to cushion her head from the hard ground. Her loose-fitting robes lightly rippled as the wind brushed them, the light blue fabric embroidered with simple silver patterns that danced as the material moved.
Due to her special circumstances, she had arrived in Vale and gone through the orientation process a while before the other new students, meaning the last couple days had mostly given her time to explore the city and the school. With little to do on the first day of school, she had taken to merely enjoying the summer weather and the buzz as Beacon came to life with the new school year.
Her tranquil rest lasted for a while, until she heard the soft thudding of footsteps on the earthy ground behind her. Opening her eyes and sitting up, she turned to face the pair that had approached her; looking over the both of them, the girl sported a modest tunic dyed in a rich blue and simple brown shorts matching her dirty-blonde hair, the other was a shorter boy wearing a cream-coloured hoody with orange accents alongside a pair of tan cargo pants.
"Hey, do you mind if we joined you?" The boy asked, offering a warm smile at Azura and motioning to his partner at the same time.
Having zoned-out slightly, Azura snapped back to attention and looked around her panickedly; realising they were asking her, she checked the blanket underneath her. "Uhm… sure. I don't really have any space on here though…"
"Don't worry about it, we brought our own. Just wanted some company." The girl laughed, smiling awkwardly before reaching for the backpack she had on; putting it down and pulling out a warm felt sheet, she shook it to it's full size and laid it down next to Azuras. Sitting down on it, the pair turned to Azura and the girl continued. "What's your name?"
"Oh, Azura. Azura Platanam." Azura replied hesitantly, giving a nervous smile and scratching the back of her head. "Y-you?"
Smiling again, a bit more comfortably this time, the girl in blue addressed Azura again. "My name's Skye Kobalt, and my friend here is Patrick Landier." Finishing her sentence, Skye looked slightly taken aback as she noticed him staring daggers at her.
Clearing his throat, he continued to glare at Skye as he spoke. "Yeah, but nobody calls me that. Returning to his more cheerful, warm demeanour, he looked back at Azura and held his hand out. "I go by Jacko, after my middle name."
Azura accepted the handshake timidly, retreating her hand back as quickly as it was extended. "Did you two arrive early as well, then?"
"Yup, got our tour and everything yesterday, so we figured we'd go and see the sights." Jacko started.
"Buuut… this sun is not something to go walking all day in." Skye interjected, looking towards the back end of the Vacuo group in the distance she winced slightly. "I'd hate to be them, having to do orientation in this heat."
"They're from Vacuo… I think." Azura said, quietly. Squinting slightly to see the group better, a benefit of her faunus eyes. "Yeah. They're probably more used to this than we are." She added, softly exhaling in amusement with the notion.
"Sounds about right. We're used to mountains and fog and rain, so this is kinda freaky for us." Jacko laughed, laying down on his side and resting his head on his arm. "Speaking of which, where you from?"
Glancing to Jacko in surprise, she turned her head up and thought for a moment. "Mistral… the outskirts of the kingdom though. It's nice, quieter than Vale though."
Nodding in understanding, Skye nodded her head towards Jacko as she spoke. "Nice. We're from Greenbriar." Noticing the clueless look on Azura's face, Skye furrowed her brow as she thought about it. "Small village, in the mountainy bit at the edge of Vale." Reaching for the massive leather sheath she had put down next to her rucksack, Skype pulled out her colossal sword and rested it on the blanket in front of her. "You have any idea what initiation's gonna be?"
"No." Shaking her head softly, Azura reached for her own bag and pulled out a small packaged roll, taking a quick bite out of it. Before their conversation could continue, the scrolls of all three buzzed as the screens came to life; Skye and Jacko fumbled with the unfamiliar technology, while Azura calmly pulled out the device and flicked it open. On the screen, a formally-dressed blonde woman appeared, looking at the camera.
"Would all first year students make their way to the main plaza, the opening ceremony will be taking place in 30 minutes." Delivering the succinct message, the face on the screen disappeared and the scroll returned to its sleep mode. Standing up, the three of them folded back their blankets and packed their bags again, before beginning to make their way to the plaza.
The large student body piled into Beacon's main hall, the large and circular room lined with ornate decoration all illuminated by the sun's light, dying everything a subtle green tone as it passed through the large emerald panels of Beacon tower. The four main groups mixed between each other, Valian, Vacuan, Mistralian and Atlesian students intermixed partially by active attempts of intergration and partly by the cramped nature of the crowd.
The constant chatter of the crowd drew to a slight mumble and an eventual silence as the same blonde woman from before stepped to the front of the stage, clearing her throat against the microphone before speaking. "Excuse me. If we could have your sole attention, the headmaster would like to say a few words." Stepping back, she opened up the space for another man striding towards the microphone.
Adjusting the microphone to his height and stature, the man rested his pale hand on the cane; with the other, readjusting his small and wirey glasses. Looking over the crowd, he began his speech.
"I… will make this brief." The short statement resonated through the hall, partially by the power of the audio system but more in virtue of his unique and powerful tone.
"Before me stands the future of our world. Or, to be more precise, the security of humanity. The world of Remnant is one shrouded in danger, and horror, and darkness; indeed, it is a harsh and unforgiving place, forever reminding us from the sidelines, beyond the protected borders of our kingdoms, that we are not safe. That we may easily return to the darkness from which we once came."
"That is why we turn to you. Once again, before me stands the future of our world; and you are exactly that, our future. For when you become Huntresses, and Huntsmen, you do not merely become vanquishers of monsters or heroes of justice, but much, much more. You become humanity's guardians, a light against the darkness that seeks to swallow us once more."
"Understand that this is no easy burden, when I look out among you I see nobody who is ready to accept it on their shoulders. Rather, I see eagerness and courage, hope and determination… but I also see recklessness, and foolhardiness. Until you understand the weight of that burden, and all that it entails, then I continue to see nothing but wasted talent."
"In your time here, you will aggregate knowledge and skill, and that will take you far. Yet, it is only with the resolve of that understanding will you be able to meet your true potential. To gain that understanding, you must take your first step towards the meaning of that burden."
Stepping back from the microphone, the man in green turned and walked from the stage, disappearing behind one of the room's many doors. In his place, the young woman stepped up again and spoke.
"You will gather in the ballroom tonight, tomorrow, your initiation will begin. Your time until then is free, but be ready for the challenges tomorrow will pose." Looking over the crowd, she pushed up her glasses once more before concluding. "You are dismissed."
A short time after the speech, many of the students had gathered at one of the school's large plazas; between groups of people talking, socialising, resting and even sparring, the lively body of students was buzzing with anticipation for what the next day would bring. One of the smaller groups was a body of six Atlesian students, the Stahl siblings among them; sitting on a couple of the plaza's benches, the group was making small talk to pass the time, conversation otherwise dried up by the sheer amount of time there was to kill.
"So Eisen, how's things going to work with Is? You gonna try and do the long distance thing, or what?" Nicky asked, directing the question at one of the other members of the group, a muscle-bound and dark-skinned boy toying with the stave of his large halberd.
"Yeah, we're gonna try, but we'll see how it goes and if it isn't working, we'll call things off." He replied, accentuating what he said with a resigned shrug.
"Sounds good. I'm holdin' out for you, bud." She replied, giving him a thumbs-up. The short exchange gave way to another uncomfortable silence as nobody really knew what to say, conversation choices mostly exhausted with the slowly dropping sun. Eventually the silence was broken, however not by one of the members of the group but by a third year, the bubbly blonde who had been with the Vacuan group earlier.
"Hey guys! I've just gotten word from the Professor Goodwitch, the sparring courts are open if you want to get some practice before tomorrow." Turning and standing on her tip toes, she looked over towards one of the buildings lining the plaza and pointed at it. "It's in that building over there, the big circular one."
"What do you say?" Nudging Nicky's shoulder, Cyrus stood up and grabbed his folded rifle before slinging it over his back.
"A spar? Between me and you?" Nicky replied, raising her eyebrow.
"Nah, I'd be biting the dust before I knew what hit me." Laughing hesitantly, he smiled and held his hand against the back of his head. "Just thought it'd be a good change of pace."
Nicky pondered the proposal for a moment, before hooking the underside of her claymore with her foot. "Sure, let's go." Kicking the blade up into her hand, she stood up and looked over the group. "Any of you want to come too?" A series of shaking heads provided her answer.
Walking along the neat stone path between the plaza and the sparring courts, Cyrus and Nicky, along with a handful of students made their way to the practice arenas. Side by side, the two siblings walked at a slightly slower pace as their peers, partially because Nicky was focused more on stretching her arms and back while she walked. Using the outstretched arms to block the light of the late afternoon sun shining at them, she looked at Cyrus.
"Hey, you don't really want to fight, do you?" She asked, lowering her arms and returning to her normal pace.
"Was it that obvious?" He replied, giving a half-hearted smile before resting his hands in his pockets. "Nah, just needed to get away for a bit."
"Fair enough, I know you're feeling out of place with those guys, but give 'em time." She gave him a soft punch to the shoulder, and gave him an empathetic smile.
"I've got nothing against them, but they're your friends. Just feels… weird." Sighed Cyrus, looking up at the colossal Beacon tower, the emerald-topped point looming over them from the centre of the school campus.
"Yeaaah, well, you're weird like that." Chuckled Nicky, cracking her fingers and pulling the sheathed great sword from her back, holding it with her hand and resting it under her arm. Reaching the large set of doors between them and the courts, she turned her head to look at him. "You'll just get to watch me kick some ass then." She said, winking and pushing open the door.
The collection of students that had come to join the spars began to spread out within the building's large hall, with seating stands around a number of stages raised off the floor and layered in markings indicating boundaries and positions. Intermingling, the students began to pair off as they found partners. Many of the matches had already been found while Nicky looked for somebody to fight, drying up the pool of potential opponents rather quickly; one of the few left was a tall, slender blonde dressed in worn leather armour emblazoned with gold.
"Should I?" Nicky asked Cyrus, glancing at him to see his response, a brief nod coming in return. "Alright then. Stay here for a minute." Walking over to the resting blonde, Nicky smiled and held out her hand. "Hey, you looking for a spar?"
Snapping out of a slight stupor, the girl looked to face her before hesitantly smiling and accepting the hand. Giving it a firm shake, she sat up. "Marie."
"Nicole." Nicky smiled, stretching and looking over at the courts; noticing a spare one, she motioned Marie to follow and for Cyrus to join them. Once they reached the segregated platform, the two began to take out their weapons and prepare for combat while Cyrus opened his scroll to the referee program, linking with the other two scrolls and bringing their aura values up.
Standing at either side of the court, Marie and Nicky took their stances with their weapons as they began to count down the fight. Tapping the option to begin on his scroll, Cyrus offered a count down. "Five… Four…" They both tensed their muscles. "Three… Two…" Deep breaths came from the combatants. "One… Fight!"
As soon as the word came, Nicky darted off her starting circle in a full sprint, rushing towards Marie and holding her claymore over her shoulder, moving as if the blade was weightless. Marie immediately sprang into action, turning off the safety on her submachine gun and firing short but rapid bursts at the oncoming fighter, stepping back carefully. Reaching her with relatively few hits taken, Nicky twisted her hands like a lever, sending the mighty blade crashing down at Marie, who managed to barely block it with the body of her gun. Regaining her footing, Marie barely had time to recover before having to dodge another wide arch from the blade.
Cyrus jumped in surprise as a hand pressed into his shoulder, looking at the new arrival he found himself face-to-face with the third year from earlier, who he found trying to get a glimpse of the screen on his scroll.
"Who's my sister fighting?" She asked, nodding to the two fighting combatants.
"Uh… yeah? Sorry." He stammered, holding up the thin panel so she could see, the bars sitting roughly equal in depletion.
"My bad, surpised ya." Beaming, the girl held out her hand. "Rose Aurum. You?"
"Oh, uh.. Cyrus. Stahl. Cyrus Stahl." He smiled nervously, tentatively accepting the gesture.
"So that's your sister there too?" Crossing her arms and turning towards the fight. "Bet you my sister will beat the hell outta yours."
"Wouldn't count on it." He answered, also looking back at the fight.
Nicky continued her fairly basic assault; swinging long arcs with her claymore paired with the occasional bash and stab. Marie on the other hand remained on the back-step, slowly retreating back to more easily avoid the hits coming at her; with one particularly wide swing, she found her opening. A jolt ran through her hand as, mid dodge, the submachine gun whirred and transformed into a long hand cannon, before the outer plates extended outwards into arms tipped with lights on all four of the points. Ducking down at Nicky's flank, she swung around and fired the powerful shot at close range, the glowing yellow blast pounding into her abdomen and exploding into small yellow petals.
"See, told ya." Rose laughed, looking at the intense duel with glee.
"Nicky's tired, it's been a long day." Cyrus mumbled, looking perfectly calm despite the hard hit his sister took.
Reeling from the hit, Nicky readied herself again before making another charge at Marie; suddenly, the blonde's eyes glowed yellow and Nicky felt the petals from her shot, now adhered to the side she had been hit on, start to glow white hot. Wincing, she felt the phantom sensation of her skin searing beneath her clothes as the semblance grew hotter and hotter; gritting her teeth, she pushed pass the pain and kept up her charge, ending it with a large thrust that barely grazed Marie's side.
"She's fast." Cyrus said, nodding at Marie.
"Yup, damn right she is." Rose replied, smirking. "Takes after her big sister." She continued, pointing her thumb at her chest boastfully.
Cyrus could only chuckle at the exaggerated self-pride. "Maybe so." Calming himself down though, he spoke again. "…but Nicky's faster."
"You think so? She's fighting like the sword's half her weight."
"Just watch." Cyrus answered, nodding towards the two fighters.
Marie, immediately after Nicky's lunge, dodged and turned to fire another heavy shot at the swordswoman; it would have been a sure hit… if she wasn't now perched on top of her perfectly balanced blade. Nicky grinned down at her as she tipped her balance, the sword springing from its position onto the ground to flatten out mid-air. As she fell, Nicky kicked the handle towards Marie, the blade catching the bewildered blonde's leg and giving enough time for Nicky to slide back into her position.
Knocking herself out of the daze, Marie set the gun in her hand into motion, the gun segments expanding into a hilt as the crossbow arms formed into a short blade, the bastard sword coming to rest in her hand. She was barely finished taking a deep breath before she had to raise the sword to block an incoming strike from Nicky; once again, she had no time to recover before the next one. The swordswoman barraged her with strikes in much tighter motions than before, easily meaning she had two or three many times as many attacks to avoid as before.
On one of the many blocks, instead of a follow-up strike, Nicky's boot crashed into her upper leg and knocked her off balance. Tumbling to the floor, the blonde barely managed to roll and dodge as the long metal spear, a transformation of Nicky's claymore, stabbed down at her. Doing her best to just evade the attacks, Marie tried to use her semblance to at least slow her opponent down; despite the searing pain in her side, however, Nicky kept her onslaught coming.
Transforming to the submachine gun once more, taking the opportunity while Nicky was in a position, mid swing, that she couldn't realistically dodge, she pressed the trigger and hammered shots into the swordswoman's armoured forearms. Dropping the blade, Nicky fell to her knees wincing at the intense pain on her arms; using the moment to regain her composure, Marie hoisted herself up, transforming into the crossbow, and she readied the charged shot at her vulnerable opponent.
"Yeah! Go Marie!" Rose shouted excitedly, holding her arms up in the air.
"Wait for it…" Cyrus whispered, nodding calmly at his sister, still bent over but positioned to be looking at the two spectators. Nicky's eyes widened, almost as if she was questioning him; his reply was wordless, just another nod.
"It's alright, y'know. To admit she lost. Marie was one of the best fighters in her year." Placing a hand on Cyrus' shoulder, she gave him a reassuring look. "She still did well, can't fault her on that."
"…when… did you?" Nicky muttered, vaguely in Cyrus' direction, a quizzical look on her face; much to her annoyance, Cyrus just shrugged. Despite her state, she moved in the blink of an eye, |
.03% CPU 107,322,869,655 processor cycles 186,256 bytes consed Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 v3 @ 3.30GHz
62展開
time dotimes ( i 100 ) ( fib 40 ) Evaluation took: 29.277 seconds of real time 29.284000 seconds of total run time (29.284000 user, 0.000000 system) 100.02% CPU 96,391,129,167 processor cycles 226,496 bytes consed Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 v3 @ 3.30GHz
gcc -O2
time./fib-O2./fib-O2 34.20s user 0.00s system 99% cpu 34.211 total Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 v3 @ 3.30GHz
(参考) stalin -O2
define ( fib n ) if ( < n 2 ) n + - n 1 fib - n 2 fib (fib 40)
$ chicken-stalin -copt -O2 -On fib.scm t% time./fib./fib 0.34s user 0.00s system 98% cpu 0.344 total
ということで、最適な展開回数だと、Cより15%位速くなりました。
なお、Cはこんな感じに書いて、 gcc -O2 でコンパイルしています。
int fib ( int n ) { if ( n < 2 ) return n; return fib ( n - 1 ) + fib ( n - 2 ) ; } fib int main(int argc, char **argv) { int i; for (i=0;i<100;++i) { fib(40); } return 0; }
ちなみに、stalinだとこの程度の単純な問題だと最適化の余地がないようでgccまかせという感じです。
まとめ
fib だけ速くてもしょうがないのですが、こういうこともあるんだなーというところでした。
ディスアセンブルしてみると分かりますが、 fib は単純なので、Common LispもCもこれ以上最適化のしようがないようで、大体似た感じになっています。
ちなみに、インライン展開されたバイナリのサイズが何にどう効いてきているのかは、全く理解できていません。
キャッシュに乗る乗らない等、色々考えられるかと思いますが、何かあれば是非とも教えてください。
■Mallory Pugh’s decision to leave UCLA and pursue professional soccer opportunities qualifies as a shocker on the surface, but it isn’t, in reality. For now, it’s a path that remains the exception rather than the rule.
We’d been here before, just over a year ago, and under bizarre circumstances. The National Women’s Soccer League announced minutes before the start of its 2016 college draft the creation of a new rule for priority of acquiring subsidized players. Portland Thorns FC promptly moved up in that order in a trade with the Boston Breakers, and reports swirled that Portland, the league’s true rich-keep-getting-richer team, was about to acquire then 17-year-old Pugh.
That never happened. Following an extensive wait for her final decision, Pugh chose to play for UCLA, except for a few exhibition games, she never did. Pugh deferred enrollment to the spring in order to play in this past fall’s U-20 Women’s World Cup, where she carried a team on her back to a fourth-place finish.
Now Pugh is set to become the second American woman to forgo college soccer and play professionally, joining Lindsey Horan. It’s a move that always made sense for Pugh. Even upon announcing last year that she would play at UCLA, there was an inevitable feeling that Pugh wouldn’t be on campus the full four years. That was predictable.
And really, the timing should have been, too. The U.S. women’s national team just ratified a new collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Soccer which will see significant increases to player salaries, rights and perks. The best-paid women’s national team on the planet just got a collective raise. Surely, the timing is no coincidence, but Pugh’s decision goes beyond money. Playing professionally – in the right environment – puts her in a place that will challenge her daily and further accelerate her development.
Embedded video for Pugh skipping college may forecast the future of U.S. women's soccer
UCLA appeared to have a college dynasty in the making, with Canadian wunderkind Jessie Fleming already on board, Pugh expected and fellow U.S. whiz kid Ashley Sanchez coming to campus next fall. But Pugh’s talent is clear. We plays well beyond her years. She is already one of the better American talents right now, and undisputedly the star of the future. There are direct parallels to Christian Pulisic, though the latter is subject to far more attention.
Pugh’s decision to turn pro cracks the door open just a little bit more into what the future could hold for women’s soccer in the United States. Listen to U.S. women’s technical director April Heinrichs speak, and you hear her laud Europe for its professional setups. Top players are in professional training environments beginning in their teens.
That isn’t the case in the United States, which still stands as a leader in most things women’s soccer. Horan was previously the only American to make the jump, passing on a full scholarship to North Carolina to sign with PSG in 2013. Pugh, after some delay, will join her in bypassing college soccer. Could Sanchez follow? Will Fleming, one of the world’s best teenage talents, stay the full four years at UCLA?
This pathway remains an anomaly, but one which requires significant attention moving forward. Money in the women’s game continues to grow, not just to a slightly more respectable NWSL maximum salary of $41,700, but to the point where a player like Canadian Kadeisha Buchanan, named the top young player at the 2015 World Cup, can make six figures at Lyon and be one of the best-paid players in Europe. Fleming could surely spark a bidding war, too.
Canada coach John Herdman (below) has been at the forefront of discussion surrounding the need for players to be in professional training environments, and it’s only a matter of time before select Canadian internationals choose the professional route over college, which has traditionally developed talent for the program.
Thomas B. Shea-USA TODAY Sports
That’s still a path only for the select few, though. Salaries in women’s soccer are notoriously low outside of the elite players, making the very proposition silly for most. Who would pass up a free ride to college, worth several hundred thousand dollars, to be paid less than minimum wage and not even have a guaranteed roster spot?
Horan’s situation was different. She left for a reported six-figure deal with PSG and the opportunity to develop at one of the rising powers in Europe.
Pugh is certainly different, too. She will have a six-figure income whether she plays in Europe or the NWSL, once you consider endorsements. Such pay days are still for the women’s soccer aristocracy, but the top level of the sport is finally reaching the point where being a professional player is an economically viable dream, no longer just a labor of love and financial insecurity.
Others will join Pugh in the coming years, and for the first time, there’s a structure within the United States that hints at a future of homegrown players in the NWSL. The ECNL is now 10 years old, and 30 of the 40 players selected in the 2017 NWSL Draft are alumni of the country’s current top-level national girls’ league. U.S. Soccer’s Development Academy begins in the fall with nine of 10 NWSL teams fielding teams.
For Pugh, the decision is ultimately hers. Teenagers change their minds. A 2015 study cited that about one in every three undergraduate students transfers colleges at least once. Pugh just happens to be moving into a brand new, professional world.
For women’s soccer, the move is a small but significant milestone that hints at a slowly evolving professional landscape.
More features from FourFourTwo USA
Jeff Kassouf is the editor of FourFourTwo USA. Follow him on Twitter @JeffKassouf.Derby County’s Under 18s concluded their Premier League Merit Group 2 campaign with a 3-3 draw against Tottenham Hotspur.
In a game full of chances, the fixture saw the goals split evenly into each half and Jayden Bogle got the first after rising highest to head home in the 13th minute.Towards the end of the first half, Jayden Mitchell-Lawson added to the Rams’ tally but just before the break, Spurs hit back through Jack Roles to reduce the deficit.Almost immediately after the interval, Cameron Cresswell restored the Rams’ two-goal lead but goals courtesy of Paris Maghoma and Kazaiah Sterling late on forced Derby to settle for a point.The result was maybe harsh given Justin Walker’s and Rory Delap’s men dominated larger spells of proceedings.They started brightly too. Connor Dixon attempted to break deadlock first on six minutes but was denied at point-blank range by Spurs ‘keeper Jonathan De Bie.The goal came shortly after following strong attacking play from the Rams and Bogle managed to put his side ahead after rising highest at the back post to head home Jack Haywood’s superb corner kick delivery.In total control, Derby continued to go about their business with purpose and on 22 minutes, goalscorer Bogle almost turned provider after his ball over the top to Cresswell resulted in another spectacular point-blank save from De Bie.Little happened after that, up until the 41st minute where Derby extended their lead to two after an initial shot from Dixon inside the box was only pushed as far as Mitchell-Lawson, who struck the ball with his first shot to find the back of the net.It looked set to be the perfect first half performance for Walker’s and Delap’s side, but on 44 minutes against the run of play, Roles struck from 20-yards to half the deficit ahead of the second-half.But on 51 minutes, Cresswell responded in the perfect way on behalf of his team after he made it onto the end of intelligent through ball to poke the pass through De Bie’s legs inside the area.It was never going to be that easy for Derby, though, and the final half-an-hour of play saw a Spurs side who had won four of their last five games hit back with a vengeance.And their comeback began on 65 minutes, when substitute Maghoma converted an emphatic 20-yard strike from a free-kick situation.The game was blown wide open, once again, and Tottenham needed no further motivation as they nearly found an equaliser through a succession of chances just four minutes after reducing the deficit to one.Spurs’ leading man Sterling took aim first, but a clearance off the line from Bogle saw Derby hang on. The ball then fell to the previous goalscorer Maghoma, but he could only direct it onto the post and out of play.Looking to relieve the intense pressure, Derby sought to get the ball forward and their game management almost prevailed.However, on 83 minutes, Sterling found himself through on goal again and this time, he needed no second invitation to slot the ball past Matt Yates and salvage a point for his travelling side.Yates, Bogle, Taylor, Haywood, Bateman (C), Rashid, Mitchell-Lawson, Dixon, Creswell, Thomas, WhittakerDavie, Fryatt, Jibodu, Carter-Thompson, WiseDe Bie, Lock, Tsaroulla, Marsh (C), Omolabi, Tanganga, Bowden, Roles, Sterling, Reynolds, BennettsLyons-Foster, Freeman, Maghoma, ClarkeTweets by @ dcfcofficialThere are confusing transactions, and then there’s this one. The Giants have six games left. It’s not ideal that Eduardo Nuñez is dinged up and unlikely to contribute to them, but we’re talking about six games. Ehire Adrianza, Conor Gillaspie, and Kelby Tomlinson are still on the roster. There isn’t a great option to replace Nuñez, but any of them should be fine for six games.
Hearing from league source the #sfgiants are very close to acquiring #braves infielder Gordon Beckham. If so, must be to replace Nuñez. — Henry Schulman (@hankschulman) September 27, 2016
Huh. That’s the only possible way to respond. Beckham wouldn’t be eligible for a postseason roster, so huh.
Huh.
Beckham isn’t very good, for one. His.655 OPS (76 OPS+) is bad even by Giants bench standards, and he’s not anything more than an average fielder, at best. There’s a reason why no one tried to recreate the 2013 White Sox piece by piece before this.
As generic depth for six games? Okay, fine. Maybe there’s something we don’t know about Gillaspie, Tomlinson, or Adrianza, if not all three. But if you’re going to go to the trouble to make a 40-man roster move, why not give the gig to someone already in the system? Grant Green, for example.
Dunno. The trade itself isn’t going to hurt, as it’s likely just for cash, but the Giants either have to designate someone for assignment or place someone on the 60-day DL to make room on the roster. If it’s the former, that seems absurd, regardless of the career prospects of the player exposed to waivers. That risk, any risk at all, can’t be worth six games.
If it’s the latter, well, huh.
Huh.
There’s a chance that the Giants make the postseason on the last day of the season, and that Beckham is the one who hits a grand slam to get them there, so don’t equate "ineligible for the postseason roster" with "exempt from even-year shenanigans." There’s a chance we’ll say more than "huh" before the end of the season.
Until then, well...
Huh.
Edit: Huh.
Beckham and Sanchez will be here tonight. Reynolds DFAd. Williamson (quad) to 60-day DL. — Alex Pavlovic (@AlexPavlovic) September 27, 2016
And here you thought the Giants didn't have a first-round pick this summer. Now they add two top-10 draft picks in the same afternoon! From several years ago, but still.
That would be Tony Sanchez, former Pirates prospect, joining Gordon Beckham on the 25-man roster. It was always a longshot for Reynolds to leapfrog Josh Osich and Steven Okert on the left-handed depth chart, and the Giants did give him a couple chances to prove he deserved to. Williamson on the 60-day DL makes the Giants worse for the rest of the season, considering he was one of the five-best outfielders in the organization.
Still, the cost of six days of Gordon Beckham is Matt Reynolds and whatever cash the Giants gave up. Unless there's an injury we don't know about -- several of them, perhaps -- this is still a bizarre move.Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News
A captive albino axolotl displays its larval gills
The amphibian that never grew up is on the verge of going extinct in the wild. New survey work suggests that fewer than 1,200 Mexican axolotls remain in its last stronghold, the Xochimilco area of central Mexico. The axolotl is a type of salamander that uniquely spends its whole life in its larval form. Its odd lifestyle, features and ability to regenerate body parts make it a popular animal kept in labs, schools and as pets. But in the wild, the future is bleak for this "Peter Pan" of animals. Reintroduction is not a good idea because it reduces the genetic variability and increases the chances of disease
Biologist Dr Luis Zambrano Recent surveys suggest that between 700 and 1,200 axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum) survive in six reduced and scattered areas within the Xochimilco area of the Mexican Central Valley. One of these surveys found just a single axolotl in the whole study region. The long-term survival of the axolotl in the wild has now become critical, and demands urgent action to restore the animal's number and habitat, say scientists monitoring the population. Forever young The Mexican axolotl is highly unusual. Altogether, there are around seven species of salamander belonging to the genus Ambystoma. A captive dark colour morph All are quite similar and may be called axolotls. Most are capable of retaining their larval forms throughout their whole lives. But they usually do so in response to their environment, for example, if temperatures are too cold to emerge onto land as an adult salamander, the tadpole larvae may just keep growing underwater instead. But the Mexican axolotl is the only species that never undergoes metamorphosis. Instead each generation lives underwater as outsized larvae. Males and females mate underwater and the females lay eggs on nearby structures such as plants. The Mexican axolotl's odd looks and unusual life history have also made it a favourite pet, and the subject of extensive biological research into its physiology. Population crash Though accurate information about the population of wild Mexican axolotls is hard to come by, recent evidence suggests that the population has declined alarmingly in recent decades. For example, in 1998 there were thought to be around 6,000 axolotls per square kilometre of the Xochimilco. Eggs of the endangered axolotl By 2004 just 1,000 lived in the equivalent area, and by 2008 around 100 animals survived per square kilometre, Dr Luis Zambrano and colleagues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, based in Mexico City report in the journal Biological Conservation. That is a ten-fold reduction in four years and a 60-fold reduction in ten years, leading the International Union for Conservation of Nature to classify the species as endangered on its annual Red List of threatened species. Now "our best estimates using unpublished data, but with two different techniques, sampling and genetic, suggests that the total amount of axolotls in the wild is between 700 and 1,200 animals," says Dr Zambrano. "We are still analysing the data, so it may change a little bit. But we don't think it will change by an order of magnitude." The axolotl's range is also highly restricted. An axolotl in its larval, but much younger form Dr Zambrano's team has surveyed the Xochimilco, a complex water system of artificial channels, small lakes and temporary wetlands that help supply Mexico City, a nearby city of some 18 million people. As the city has increased in size, it has dramatically reduced the axolotl's natural habitat. Zambrano's team calculate that the salamander now exists in just six isolated parts of the water system, often near to some of the few remaining natural springs supplying clear, fresh water. Their most recent work shows that the reduction in water quality is one of the main factors driving the axolotl to extinction in the wild. Another is the presence of large numbers of introduced carp and tilapia fish, which both compete ecologically with axolotls for food and resource, and also eat axolotl eggs. Little refuge While captive colonies of axolotls exist across Mexico, the US, Canada, Germany, the UK and Japan, reintroducing these animals would be a bad idea, say the scientists. Prime axolotl habitat "Reintroduction is not a good idea because it reduces the genetic variability and increases the chances of chytrdiomicosis disease," says Dr Zambrano. Chytrdiomicosis is an often fatal condition caused by the chytrid fungus, which is decimating amphibian populations around the world. Dr Zambrano's team are now embarking on a programme to create wild refuges for the Mexican axolotl, in a bid to arrest the decline in its numbers and prevent it going extinct in the wild.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionHUESCA
Juan Camilo Hernández, conocido futbolísticamente como "el Cucho", es un delantero colombiano de 18 años que está sorprendiendo en la Sociedad Deportiva Huesca a propios y extraños a base de goles y con unos fundamentos ofensivos que apuntan a "crack". La perla cafetera fue fichada por los ojeadores que tiene en Sudamérica la familia Pozzo (propietarios del Watford, Udinese y en su momento Granada), en concreto por el español Rafa Monfort, del Deportivo Pereira de la Segunda División de Colombia, cuando apenas tenía 17 años y cuatro meses, tras haber marcado 21 goles en 34 partidos y convertirse en el máximo goleador de la categoría.
La contratación llegó tras dejar al Deportivo Pereira a las puertas del ascenso, y la familia Pozzo por medio del Granada se hizo con los servicios del futbolista por 1´8 millones de Dólares (1´5 M de Euros). El goleador se fue cedido posteriormete al América de Cali, de la Primera División cafetera y allí no disfrutó de la confianza del cuerpo técnico de los diablos rojos por su insultante juventud. Sin embargo, con la selección sub 20 de Colombia si que ofreció su mejor versión en el Sudamericano de Ecuador y eso le abrió los ojos a varios equipos europeos.
Con la salida de la familia Pozzo del Granada, el futbolista pasó a formar parte del Watford y desde el club británico le buscaron destino en el viejo continente. El club más interesado por el Cucho Hernández fue la Sociedad Deportiva Huesca. Emilio Vega, el Director Deportivo del Huesca, había seguido la progresión del punta colombiano y lo quería para su nuevo proyecto en el club azulgrana. A pesar de ocupar plaza de extracomunitario y de su corta edad, la entidad aragonesa apostó fuerte por el Cucho y convenció al Watford y al futbolista de que el Huesca era un sitio propicio para crecer. Un fichaje que está ayudando al equipo de Rubi a ocupar un histórico liderato y gracias al que el futbolista está eclosionadno como una de las estrellas del futuro, pero que pisa con mucha fuerza en Segunda.
El Watford está ancantado de su progresión
El Watford de la Premier League inglesa es el propietario del jugador revelación de la Segunda División española. El equipo británico está encantado de la evolución que está siguiendo en el Huesca y solo espera que el futbolista mantenga su crecimiento en el club aragonés hasta final de temporada. El jugador por su lado, está centrado en hacer historia con el Huesca y no escucha los cantos de sirena que le llegan tras sus espectaculares números en el primer tercio de la competición.© Reuters. A Bitcoin (virtual currency) paper wallet with QR codes and coins are seen in an illustration picture taken at La Maison du Bitcoin in Paris
By Huw Jones
LONDON (Reuters) - Global regulators have moved closer to regulating the fledgling fintech sector, which includes blockchain technology that supports bitcoin, to ensure the industry's rapid growth does not pose any risks to the financial system.
The Financial Stability Board (FSB), which met in Tokyo on Thursday, has agreed on a framework for categorizing different components of fintech and assessing their potential risks.
The FSB, made up of central bankers, regulators and finance ministry officials from the Group of 20 economies, is looking at fintech partly in response to uncertainty over whether it will "disrupt" traditional banking.
Some big investment banks, including Goldman Sachs (NYSE: ), are already investing heavily in fintech to avoid missing out. Analysts at Citi said this month that investment in fintech had grown from $1.8 billion in 2010 to $19 billion last year, mostly in payments systems.
Citi said the "tipping point" for disruption (for banks) was not far away in the United States and Europe, and had already been reached in China where fintech companies have as many, if not more customers than the major banks.
FSB Chairman and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney told a news conference broadcast from Tokyo on Thursday that the FSB did not have fundamental concerns about fintech and members wanted to look for opportunities to apply it.
"The important thing for us as members of the FSB is to be moving in parallel with these developments and not be stifling innovation, but being able to apply them in a way that improves the resilience of the system," Carney said.
He said policy intervention by other authorities such as in competition, conduct and consumer protection, would need come before any financial stability considerations.
Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, is used to underpin the web-based currency bitcoin but could have a wide range of other uses, including settling securities transactions, where legal ownership is exchanged for cash.
Carney said there was potential to free up some capital requirements for institutions because settlement would be in real time as opposed to delayed.
"That has to be weighed against potential operational risk," he said.
Michael Bodson, president and chief executive of DTCC, the U.S. securities clearing and settlement company, said on Tuesday that regulators needed to have a strong voice in how blockchain is developed in markets to ensure financial stability is protected.(Adds details, background)
MOSCOW, Dec 17 (Reuters) - Gazprom Neft, the oil wing of Russian state gas firm Gazprom, and China’s CNPC have signed a three-year memorandum of understanding in the oil sector, Gazprom said on Thursday.
Russia is turning eastwards, after facing Western sanctions over its role in the Ukraine crisis which saw some of its largest firms, including Gazprom Neft, blocked from Western financing and some of technology.
Gazprom Neft, which is running the country’s sole operating Arctic offshore field, Prirazlomnoye, agreed with CNPC on possible cooperation in exploration and production in Russia, including Arctic offshore, as well as in China and other countries.
Gazprom Neft declined to comment on the agreement, which also calls for cooperation in oil refining and marketing of oil and oil products.
Russian Energy Minister, Alexander Novak, was quoted by RIA news agency as saying after the agreement that it was possible for Chinese firms to join Russian Arctic projects but there were no specific negotiations at this point. (Reporting by Katya Golubkova; editing by Polina Devitt)Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Oct. 1, 2016, 6:50 PM GMT / Updated Oct. 2, 2016, 5:20 AM GMT By Adam Howard
It's become a scene we're all-too-familiar with when we go to the movies.
Our hero tries to do something brave but a wet-blanket bureaucrat gets in the way — think "Ghostbusters."
Or it's the climax and we learn that a corrupt government agency is behind the nefarious plot threatening the protagonists — think most modern espionage thrillers.
Sometimes the feds simply drop the ball, and it's up to our main character to clean up the mess they made —that's in just about every '80s action movie ever.
In movie after movie, Hollywood — a supposed bastion of liberal ideology — has urged us to question the motives and methods of government agencies and officials.
It has often been a talking point, particularly on the right, that Hollywood is out of step with mainstream American culture, but when it comes to perceptions of the government, it appears that the content has been consistent with the public's mood. With the exception of a brief spike in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, trust in our elected officials has been largely on a steady decline since the late 1960s and early '70s, when fallout from the Vietnam War and Watergate left a nasty taste with voters. Some would argue that negativity has never gone away.
Even when the president occupying the White House is personally popular, the bureaucracy of government has become a familiar audience-pleasing punching bag for decades.
"Isn't it a lovely contradiction? The entertainment industry that is noted to be sort of domain of liberals and a progressive agenda is also perpetuating as archaic, problematic brand of American conservatism," said Dr. Stephane Dunn, associate professor of film and English at Morehouse College. "It's almost ironically absurd."
Jonathan Kirshner, a professor of international political economy at Cornell University and the author of "Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America," believes that the government will likely always be a reliable antagonist because the story line of lone, underdog individuals triumphing over the odds is uniquely American.
Related: 'Southside With You' Provides Fresh Insight Into the Obamas
"The government is very powerful, and so opposition to power is always a good trope," he said. "We also have things that are walled behind us in secrecy and so we are allowed to let our imaginations run wild."
In other words, because so much of what our national security apparatus does day-to-day is unknowable, it is inherently easier for creative people to project over-the-top conspiracies onto them. In our anxious, post-9/11 era of surveillance these conspiracies can take on different forms — both left wing and right wing — and they can be comforting to viewers who want clear and concise explanations for villainy, even in fiction.
In just the past year alone, we've seen the attack in Benghazi re-imagined as a soldiers-versus-strategists action film by Michael Bay, where a repeatedly debunked "stand down" order delivered by the State Department sets the stage for disaster. And this weekend "Deepwater Horizon" will resurrect one of the most trying episodes of the Obama administration — the BP oil spill.
Related: Has 'Ghostbusters' Always Been Politicized?
Recently, "Sully," the Clint Eastwood film about Chelsey Sullenberger, the real-life former US Airways pilot who successfully landed an imperiled plane in the Hudson River seven years ago, has suggested that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was a perpetual thorn in the side of a man who saved hundreds of lives.
The NTSB has pushed back hard against the hit film's narrative, lamenting in a statement that they were "not asked to contribute to or participate in the production of ‘Sully.’" But the film's box office success may eclipse concerns about its accuracy.
Similar questions are already being raised about Oliver Stone's "Snowden," which casts the controversial NSA whistle-blower of the title as an idealistic hero.
One blogger determined five years ago that "American military/government/law enforcement" figures were the most frequent go-to bad guys in the action genre.
Kirshner believes audiences are the ones driving these narratives, not the filmmakers.
"The industry is desperate to reflect social trends, not to lead them," he said. "They are a very pure embodiment of capitalistic impulses, they want to make massive entertainment for the largest audiences possible."
Related: Former Benghazi CIA Chief Slams '13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi'
This wasn't always the case. In the golden age of Hollywood, the industry colluded with the government to produce unabashedly flattering projects like "G-Men" and "The FBI Story." In the run-up to the World War II, the movies frequently trafficked in pro-war propaganda to rally the American public in favor of the anti-Nazi effort.
Today, there are still instances when the government tries to make sure their perspective is accurately reflected in art. For instance, CIA and Pentagon officials consulted on Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," a polarizing portrait of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
And not all depictions of rank-and-file civil servants are uniformly negative, for instance the Jack Ryan films and the 2012 Oscar best picture winner "Argo" have all presented a fairly positive portrait of American national security operations. Still, even those films usually prize an individual's actions over the state's.
Such simplicity can be problematic, and even dangerous, when it comes to young people who may be watching a film about a distant or recent historical event without comprehending that what they see is just one interpretation, instead of a definitive account.
"The contemporary generation that lives in a digital universe and reality — they get information not through books or school, but instead getting their knowledge from the media they consume — and film is one of them," said Dunn. "The films enjoy a level of liberal freedom to represent fiction and non-fiction based on the interpretation of the writer, director and the research and even the research is a subjective rendering of reality."
Case in point, Eastwood has said about "Sully" that “until I read the script, I didn’t know the investigative board was trying to paint the picture that he had done the wrong thing.”
However, the NTSB has maintained that the script was inaccurate, and Malcolm Brenner, a retired NTSB specialist in human behavior who was among those to first interview Sullenberger after the Hudson landing recently told Bloomberg there was "no effort to crucify him or embarrass" the pilot.
The question remains: which narrative will stand the test of time: Eastwood's or the NTSB's?
"Younger generations will hopefully be motivated and want to learn more about this particular situation on their own," said Dunn. "Unfortunately a lot of people will take films as their truth, the reality as they know it of that history."The Trump administration has put a halt on the Obamacare outreach ads, Politico reported Thursday night, five days before the law’s open enrollment period ends.
According to the report, the administration will also be “halting all media outreach designed to spur enrollment in the days leading up to the Jan. 31 deadline. Emails are no longer being sent out to individuals who visited HealthCare.gov, the enrollment website, to encourage them to finish signing up.”
These five days are a really bad time to have no outreach for the health law — and there’s a simple graph that helps explain why.
For Obamacare to work, it needs a lot of young people to sign up. Young adults typically have lower health care costs, so they can help balance out the hefty medical bills of older enrollees.
In previous open enrollments, we’ve seen young people wait until the end of the sign-up period to purchase coverage. And that makes sense: When you’re healthy, you’re not as worried about making sure you have insurance.
You can see it in this graph, which shows young people as a percentage of Obamacare enrollees in the last open enrollment period.
When open enrollment started in 2015, young adults were less than a quarter of enrollees. By the January 31 deadline, they were up to 37 percent.
Young people are critical to making the Obamacare marketplaces work. Any health insurance pool needs relatively healthy people to jump in, to balance out the higher medical bills that older enrollees tend to have.
With less outreach at the very end of the open enrollment period, former Obamacare officials expect they’ll have fewer sign-ups from young adults. This is what Lori Lodes, who helped run Obamacare outreach for a few years, had to say about it on Twitter:
There have been many Republican claims that Obamacare is “collapsing” lately — despite forecasts from independent agencies like the Congressional Budget Office that estimate the law’s marketplaces are small but stable.
A move like this, however, could cause disruption by making it harder for the health care law to reach the exact people the marketplaces need the most.Clubbers who were trying to get into an ambulance stopped the CPR on a student who died after a Northampton nightclub crush, an inquest heard today.
The jury at the inquest into the deaths of Northampton student Nabila Nanfuka and Dani Jackson heard police officers and paramedics described a badly-behaved crowd at Lava & Ignite, some of whom they said hindered efforts to treat injured young clubbers following a huge crush on the stairs.
One officer said a man asked him where his lost iPhone was while he was doing chest compressions on Dani outside the St Peter’s Way club.
Other officers said they struggled to get through crowds, some of whom refused to move even though the police were carrying casualties. And some officers said they were jostled and kicked by people as they tried to give CPR to injured girls.
One paramedic said in a statement read out to the jury by the coroner that she was treating Nabila but was impeded by some clubbers.
She said: “A crowd of people claiming to be friends of Nabila were opening the doors [of the ambulance] and looking through the windows.
“It was making it difficult for us and was interrupting the CPR.
“At one point I had to stop the CPR to get them off the ambulance.”
Other emergency services staff described being hindered by clubbers on the night of the tragedy - which was October 18 / 19 2011 - who were gathering round trying to see who the casualties were.
PC John Campbell, who was helping give CPR to Dani after she was carried outside, said: “I could not believe people were stooping over me while I did CPR. I remember being asked by one man if I’d seen his iPhone as I was giving chest compressions.
“Some people had to be physically moved out of the way. I was being knocked off balance while I was on the ground with people crowding round.”
He added: “I’m disgusted at the behaviour of some members of the crowd.
“There was utterly selfish behaviour as they stepped over us and the casualty and asked where their property was.
“I was saddened to read afterwards that some people blamed the police for not doing enough.”
The inquest continues.0 Loophole closed in Oklahoma sodomy law
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. - Quick facts:
A new law closes the loophole allowing people who commit forcible sodomy on unconscious victims to receive acquittal.
The law comes |
of it as a way to supercharge evolution, forcing a genetic modification to spread through an entire population in just a few generations. Scientists see it as a powerful tool that could finally vanquish diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika. But US defense agencies see something else: a national security issue.
Last year, former director of national intelligence James Clapper added gene editing to a list of threats posed by “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.” In July, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded $65 million in four-year contracts to seven teams of scientists, including Akbari, to study gene-editing technologies. The commitment officially made Darpa the world’s largest government funder of gene drive research. Most of that money is going toward designing safer systems and developing tools to counter rogue gene drives that might get into the environment either by accident, or with malicious intent.
That danger may be more real than scientists first thought. Four years ago, when Harvard biologist Kevin Esvelt first suggested the idea of building gene drives with the newly discovered Crispr gene editing system, he was thinking about extinction. Specifically, preventing endangered wildlife from disappearing by spreading a fertility-reducing gene through the invasive animals competing with them for resources. Conservation biologists took the idea and ran with it; they're now considering gene drives to save native birds in Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Farallones. But now, Esvelt is saying they should slow down.
That's based on the results of a new mathematical model he and his colleagues published on Thursday on the bioRxiv preprint server. Taking into account things like how often Crispr screws up and the likelihood of protective mutations arising, their work shows how gene drives could be ruthlessly aggressive. Just a few engineered organisms could irrevocably alter an ecosystem. While Esvelt doesn't view the technology as inherently threatening, he is now preaching that it deserves a bold new caution in how it's applied.
"The primary risk posed by gene drive technology is social," he says. "Unethical closed-door research, unwarranted fears, or unauthorized releases of gene drives will damage public trust in science and governance." He still thinks gene drives have potential to save threatened species and battle public health threats. But researchers will have to invent safer forms of the technology first. That's where the Darpa money comes in. Until very recently, gene drives have been largely theoretical—safe ones even more so. But with the new funds, scientists like Esvelt and Akbari are starting to put together the pieces to test them in real life. That starts with bugs that have a gene editor baked into their DNA from the moment of conception. In a paper published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Akbari did that for the first time in Aedes aegypti, creating mosquitoes encoded with the bacterial Cas9 enzyme.
These mosquitoes were born with white eyes instead of black ones, after Crispr/Cas9 cut out genes associated with eye pigment. Michelle Bui/UC Riverside
Cas9 is the DNA-chopping half of the Crispr gene editing system. So Akbari’s team just had to inject the other half—a bit of guide RNA—into the embryos, for Cas9 to automatically execute its patented snipping action. When they deleted a cuticle pigment gene, the mosquitoes turned from black to yellow. How about a wing development gene? Welcome to the world, flightless blood sucker. Good luck crawling your way to a human meal.
These modifications were just for show. But the skeeters with built-in Cas9 will be an important tool as we learn how to best disrupt mosquito populations. Scientists estimate they’ve only probed about 5 percent of the Aedes aegpyti genome. Which means no one knows what the vast majority of mosquito genes actually do. Now they’ll be able to more easily screen knockouts gene by gene. Maybe they’ll find one that makes the mosquito mouth a hospitable home for malaria. Or one that turns off their taste for human blood. The goal is to disrupt the animal—and the ecosystems they’re a part of—as little as possible while still eradicating disease. If you’re going to play God, the idea goes, use a light hand.
In addition to advancing a new way to study mosquito physiology, these strains represent an important building block for efficient gene drives. Normally, the technology would require expressing both Cas9 and the guide RNA together in the same location. But that could make the drive system invasive and uncontrollable. One way to control them is to keep the components separated in the genome. And that’s what Akbari is working on: a less virulent version called a split-gene drive.
His team has already started the process by breeding these Cas9 strains with mosquitoes encoded with guide RNAs. “The only way to keep the drive spreading is to continuously release Cas9 into the population,” Akbari says. “That makes it confinable to a laboratory setting or self-limiting in the wild as the drive will depend on the presence of Cas9 which gets inherited in a Mendelain fashion.”
Another way to do that is a “daisy drive,” which is what Esvelt is developing in nematodes on the DoD’s dime. It works by equipping the worms with a self-exhausting supply of genetic fuel. By splitting into three or more parts and then daisy-chaining them together, the desired modification disperses quickly right when you introduce it, but fizzles out after a while. The result is temporary, controlled gene editing of a local species. That’s the idea anyway. Other Darpa-backed groups are working on having a backstop should systems like these go awry, or worse, be released as part of a biological attack.
Teams at the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical school are screening and compiling a suite of chemical off-switches to block gene editors like Crispr/Cas9 and Talens. At UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna’s group is hoping to find anti-Crispr proteins to inhibit unwanted gene-editing activity, which would help design resistance-proof gene drives. While the military’s involvement has some in the public concerned about weaponized, Crispr-ized superskeeters, Esvelt sees defense department support as the only way to advance gene drive technologies safely, at least for the time being.
The Darpa program explicitly prevents the release of gene-drive organisms and requires participants to work under stringent biosafety conditions—hence Akbari’s six-door entrance and exit routine. Perhaps one day he’ll have the molecular tools to come and go without concern. But for now, they’re still the safest thing between his gene-drives and the world outside.Journal Friends Archive Profile Memories Dishonest Programming - Chalain Oct. 31st, 2006 06:07 pm Dishonest Programming There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion. — Hal Abelson
I tend to view things differently than most people. This causes me grief in unusual places: today at the grocery store I recited my 11-digit "Fresh Values" card number to the cashier from memory, then stared right at the PIN pad, which was asking me to swipe my card, and attempted to hand my card to the cashier. A friend who was with me laughed at my simultaneous display of brilliance and stupidity. I nodded and said, "I face a... unique set of challenges in life."
But sometimes my different views are really beneficial. My greatest strength, I think, is being able to give a team of really brilliant programmers a completely different way of thinking about a problem. Hal's comment triggered a return to a pattern of thinking I started having about a year ago, about how religion and morality are two different things... and about whether we can apply the notion of morality to programming.
I first surprised myself with this thought one day as I was pair programming with a brilliant but inexperienced developer. He was very clever and could think through extremely complicated designs and, while holding them firmly in his head, go implement them. As we were coding, he had a brilliant but deceptive idea. There is a well-known design pattern that has an obvious purpose and an implicit side effect; Ross wanted the reverse of the implicit side effect so he started writing the design pattern backwards. It was neat, it was clever, and I was certain that Ross could implement the code and get it working without bugs.
I also knew that anybody maintaining the code would never notice that the design pattern was implemented backwards until they modified it and it suddenly stopped working. I thought hard for a moment, and then quietly asked, "Ross, are we being dishonest here? Anybody reading this code will think you're doing this, but what you're really doing is that." I remembered this because it's the only argument I ever won with Ross without a fight. He stopped, leaned his head to one side and said, "Umm... yeah, you're right. Okay, how should we do this?" We went on to write some much better code that afternoon, some much more honest code.
How do you teach honesty in coding? I'm not really sure. Yesterday I reviewed some code that was dishonest from top to bottom. In our application's accounting subsystem, you can create subaccounts and then link inventory to those accounts instead of the default general accounts they start with. For example, there is a general account called "Revenue". For each service in your catalog, you can put its revenue into a different subaccount if you wish, so you could put all your Grand Canyon trips in a subaccount called "Grand Canyon Revenue". At the end of the year you can examine your revenue accounts and see which areas of your company are the most profitable.
So, there's a bug in our code. It turns out you can assign a trip to more than one subaccount at a time. You could accidentally put your Grand Canyon trips into "Grand Canyon Revenue" and "Hummer Safari Revenue", and while the accounting system would put all the revenue into only one of those accounts, you don't know which account the system will pick. So I asked two of my coders to fix this bug.
In my mind, this logic is really clear: before linking a charge item to a subaccount, you need to check to see if that charge item already has a link to a subaccount of the same base account. (Every trip touches Accounts Receivable, Sales Tax Liability, and Revenue; you can override all three of these if you wish, so long as you don't try to override the same base account twice.) So the pseudocode for this is straight up:
// in event handler for onCreateLink: if ( hasOverride(chargeItem, baseAccount) ) { // already overridden. Warn user and ask if they want to replace override } else { createOverride(chargeItem, baseAccount); }
The code for hasOverride() would be maybe 10 lines long; createOverride() is 1 probably line of code wrapped in 4 lines of error handling.
What was submitted for review was about 30 lines long. Not terrible, but far enough off to warrant further inspection. The REAL warning sign was that the code didn't work and one of the developers who wrote it was really having trouble thinking through it to debug it. His partner had left for the day, so I sat and we began to review.
Problem number one, the event handler, which I would call onCreateLink, was called createLink. It's a simple difference, just one word. Is it important? You tell me: this function can exit normally, without throwing an exception or raising an error, without creating a link. The method doesn't create a link; the method creates a link IF it thinks it should. This is not createLink(). This is createLinkMaybe(), or perhaps createLinkIfYouFeelLikeIt().
Honesty Tip #1: Name functions for what they really do. You've been taught to write foo munging code by drawing a box on the paper and labeling it fooMunger() and then writing the code. Okay, but when you're done, go back and read your code. Is it really fooMunging code, or does it also do something else? If you're spending 80% of your method checking error conditions, your method is clearly less concerned with munging foos than determining whether it should munge foos. Congratulations--you've written an event handler. Rename it to onMungeFoo() or handleFooMungeRequest() or whatever, and extract the code that ONLY munges foos to mungeFoo(). Name functions for what they really do. You've been taught to write foo munging code by drawing a box on the paper and labeling it fooMunger() and then writing the code. Okay, but when you're done, go back and read your code. Is it really fooMunging code, or does it also do something else? If you're spending 80% of your method checking error conditions, your method is clearly less concerned with munging foos than determining whether itmunge foos. Congratulations--you've written an event handler. Rename it to onMungeFoo() or handleFooMungeRequest() or whatever, and extract the code that ONLY munges foos to mungeFoo().
Number two. There was no hasOverride() method, but rather a function called containsSimilar() that took the list of account overrides already loaded in the UI. What the heck does "similar" mean? Looking at the code is a pile of compare methods, none of which actually check the charge item or base account. The author had determined that if you created the new account override without checking it, you could compare it to the already created overrides. If you found a similar one already created, you knew that the override was illegal.
Honesty Tip #2: Let your yea mean yea and your nil mean nil. Don't set up code to cleverly create side effects. EVERY effect is a side effect! Name your code for the intended side effect and document any other side effects. Don't name your code for the unintended effect, especially if you think you're cleverly creating an abstraction. (If the abstraction is really good AND other code will use it unchanged, you may create an abstracted method but you should still not use the abstraction in your other code. Write a wrapper method that explains your intended effect, like: bool isLegalOverride(Foo a, Bar b) { return!areSimilar(a, b); } Let your yea mean yea and your nil mean nil. Don't set up code to cleverly create side effects. EVERY effect is a side effect! Name your code for theside effect and document any other side effects. Don't name your code for the unintended effect, especially if you think you're cleverly creating an abstraction. (If the abstraction is really good AND other code will use it unchanged, you may create an abstracted method but you should still not use the abstraction in your other code. Write a wrapper method that explains your intended effect, like:
Number three. Once containsSimilar() had approved the accountOverride, the override was added to the list by violating the Law of Demeter:
setupModel.getOverrides().add(accountOverride);
setupModel was a systemwide object, and getOverrides() was a list that was publicly accessible. Do you know what that makes SetupModel.accountOverrides? A global variable. Now, there are exceptions to the rule "never use globals", but this is exactly the kind of global they were talking about when they made the rule in the first place.
Honesty Tip #3: Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining, and don't write a public accessor to a private member and tell me that member is still private. If an object is completely and utterly accessible from anywhere in the application, it's a global variable. Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining, and don't write a public accessor to a private member and tell me that member is still private. If an object is completely and utterly accessible from anywhere in the application, it's a global variable.
I finally rejected the entirety of the code submitted by these developers, because once we cleared up the dishonesty in the code, it became clear that the timing and placement of the code was such that it was too late to stop and ask the user to confirm or abort the override sequence. In other words, they had been so cleverly writing code to construct side effects, that they had spent four hours writing code that did not do what the original objective requested.
I see programmers get rolling and they act like they're trying to carefully sneak up on the problem without letting the compiler know what's going on. Don't do that! Start by writing down what you want to accomplish. Now write high-level methods to state that purpose. As you move forward writing the code, always write code that clearly shows what it is you're trying to do. Don't make me decode your side effects to attempt to infer your purpose.
Honesty Tip #4: Don't try to trick the compiler into giving you what you want. You'll only trick your coworkers (and probably yourself). Tell the compiler what you want and write code that makes it give it to you. Don't try to trick the compiler into giving you what you want. You'll only trick your coworkers (and probably yourself). Tell the compiler what you want and write code that makes it give it to you.
Deceptive code is immoral code. You CAN write moral code--it means simply being honest with yourself, with the compiler, and with your coworkers.
Any time you feel yourself being clever, ask yourself a key question: are you being deceptively simple, or simply deceptive? Current Music: 171 BPM Playing to your Strength - DJ Steveboy
19 comments - Leave a comment From: howardtayler Date: October 31st, 2006 09:39 pm (UTC) (Link) I don't write code, and I get this.
I believe this means it is brilliant, and should be more widely published. Reply ) ( Thread From: darthparadox Date: October 31st, 2006 09:51 pm (UTC) (Link) And I write code for a living, and I get this too, and understand its implications for the work I do daily.
So, I'd have to agree. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread (no subject) - the_raif From: davebennett Date: November 1st, 2006 04:43 am (UTC) (Link) I too must say this is a fine bit of writing, as well as good coding advice.
Now, if I only had an accounting system that was properly designed... unlike the one I deal with daily.
Why are all mid-market accounting/ERP systems huge kludge glops? Reply ) ( Thread From: reaverta Date: November 1st, 2006 07:44 am (UTC) (Link)...Not only is it a fine bit of writing, and a fine bit of advice, but one I think I need to take to heart.
I keep thinking on the micro level, and frequently thinking sideways at that. This results in occasionally clever code, or code that, once it's explained, turns out to be highly cunning, and yet...
...Yeah, probably as dishonest as a politian on campaign. *cough* Reply ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: November 2nd, 2006 10:06 pm (UTC) (Link) I'm flattered and a little embarrassed that everybody is saying this is such good writing. I feel like it could use a lot of work, but... thank you. Reply ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: November 3rd, 2006 07:19 pm (UTC) Pingback from The Audio Fool (Link) http://blogs.msdn.com/audiofool/archive/2006/11/02/honesty-as-a-code-metric.aspx Reply ) ( Thread From: ksader Date: January 11th, 2008 03:29 pm (UTC) (Link) Awesome, I've del.icio.us linked it and shared it with my friends! Reply ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: January 11th, 2008 05:11 pm (UTC) (Link) Awesome, ksader! Thanks! Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: January 11th, 2008 06:56 pm (UTC) Nothing new here (Link) Agreed, your principles are right (supporting the value of 'communication'), but an old hat (only the names are 'new' and a bit of self marketing to me, maybe in order to make your post more interesting).
Your first two tips are known as the PIE principle - Program Intently and Expressively
Your third tip adresses the TDA principle - Tell Don't Ask
Your last tip is just about the KISS principle - Keep it simple, stupid (or sometimes known as Keep it simple and straightforward)
oh - and there's just another fine principle - it's called the DRY-principle: don't repeat yourself... ;o) Reply ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: January 11th, 2008 07:41 pm (UTC) Re: Nothing new here (Link) I'm glad you can relate to distinct cognates from the points; I would argue that the integrity/honesty/morality angle is a single viewpoint that collects the four otherwise distinct principles.
More importantly, the viewpoint changes their perception. Your cognates are interesting to me, because all four of them are different ones than I was intending when I wrote the article. In other words, although you aren't wrong in what you have said, you have completely missed my point.
I agree that if you remove the integrity/honesty/morality angle, there is nothing new here. I will say, however, that not only do you miss the point by doing this, but you then misunderstand the specific details. For example, KISS and design by intent are quite unrelated, at least in my mind.
Maybe I communicated poorly. *shrug*; Either way, I am sorry we didn't connect. Thanks for taking the time to tell me I wasted your time. :-) Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: January 12th, 2008 12:42 pm (UTC) I don't get this (Link) >> don't write a public accessor to a private member and tell me that member is still private
So if you need to add an object to a list what is your proposal? Because I can see less problems in:
a.getList().add(obj)
than in creating a new method for every operation in the list interface (for each private collection in the class!). Like:
a.addObjectToList(obj)
The accessors are meant to wrap the field so logic can be attached to the operation but in the end they are making private fields public.
Am I missing something here? Reply ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: January 13th, 2008 01:37 am (UTC) Re: I don't get this (Link) I ended up writing a HUGE reply to this. It is here: http://chalain.livejournal.com/63878.html Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: January 13th, 2008 08:28 am (UTC) Poor naming is the most common offense (Link) We agree on naming -- poor choices for classes, methods, variables, you name it, is the most common design error I see.
On comments:
A well-respected colleague once said "comments are bad. The get out of date and mislead readers", or words to that effect. I had to chew on that for a couple of weeks before I decided that bad comments are bad. A good comment will describe the intended purpose of the commented code, and facilitate in determining if the code is a correct implementation or not. A good use for comments is to explain why something is done in what may appear to be a peculiar manner, or why a seemingly unnecessary piece of work is being done (e.g. to provide backward compatibility with legacy software). Reply ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: January 13th, 2008 08:57 pm (UTC) Re: Poor naming is the most common offense (Link)
I briefly held the belief that all comments were bad, but that doesn't hold up to careful scrutiny. I finally settled on "Comments are a sign that the code is bad."
A very good tool someone taught me for getting rid of comments near bad code is to convert the comment into a function. Consider:
// is ball out of bounds? if ( p.x < 0 || p.x > SCREEN_MAX_X || p.y < 0 || p.y > SCREEN_MAX_Y ) {...} versus
if (p.outOfBounds()) {... } I'm not talking about documentation comments, here--things that explain what a -1 means to this function, or what the general algorithm is going to be, etc. But most of the comments I see are things saying "hold this magic value for later" or "these four methods initialize the subsystem", etc. I agree with most of your "a good use for comments" cases, with the possible exception of the unnecessary piece of work for legacy software. I would look hard at those on a case-by-case basis to see if I couldn't make that vanish into a function or object that handled the legacification for me. I would leave those commented only if I couldn't clean up the legacy entrails. Agreed.I briefly held the belief that all comments were bad, but that doesn't hold up to careful scrutiny. I finally settled on "Comments are a sign that the code is bad."good tool someone taught me for getting rid of comments near bad code is to convert the comment into a function. Consider:versusI'm not talking about documentation comments, here--things that explain what a -1to this function, or what the general algorithm is going to be, etc. But most of the comments I see are things saying "hold this magic value for later" or "these four methods initialize the subsystem", etc. I agree with most of your "a good use for comments" cases, with the possible exception of the unnecessary piece of work for legacy software. I would look hard at those on a case-by-case basis to see if I couldn't make that vanish into a function or object that handled the legacification for me. I would leave those commented only if I couldn't clean up the legacy entrails. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: January 15th, 2008 10:56 am (UTC) (Link) What you describe is a good analogue for Rhetrorical Ethos. And I completely agree. Reply ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: January 16th, 2008 01:52 pm (UTC) Bullshit is a bigger problem than lying (Link) As Harry Frankfurt famously detailed in "On Bullshit" ( www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfur t/dp/0691122946 ), a much bigger problem than lies is bullshit, and I find that is definitely the case with computer software development today.
I.E. a programmer has to know his/her stuff well enough to know that they are being dishonest. The problem is that most people being paid to manage/design/program/test/etc DON'T their stuff and are just making it up as they go along, sprinkling in a liberal dose of buzzwords. Oh, if we only all DID have C.S. degrees, understood them, and only needed to police our self exuberance!
www.polyglotinc.com Reply ) ( Thread From: chalain Date: January 16th, 2008 02:03 pm (UTC) Re: Bullshit is a bigger problem than lying (Link) A very good point! Interesting; I like your use of the term "bullshit" here and I feel like it applies exactly to what I am calling dishonesty here. Your term is a bit less pejorative, perhaps, for both good and ill. Bullshit may invoke less offense. In the context I first coined the term, dishonesty was a much more motivating term for the programmers involved.
Most of the time I speak of dishonesty, I am speaking of it in terms of being dishonest with oneself first, and the key dishonesty is when we do something that causes pain in our design, code, or project as a whole yet persist in saying that it is good.
"Self exuberance" is an even better term. HAY LOOKIT MEEEEEEeeee~~~! Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: paulto Date: July 19th, 2008 02:39 am (UTC) Disrespectful may be a better term (Link) Great writing! I have been having similar experience and thoughts since very long ago and I re-read this piece several times and enjoyed it.
A little comment though: I has always thought of the code obscuring its purpose as "disrespectful" rather than "dishonest". After reading this article I had a chance to think it over again and I still feel that "disrespectful" fits better: to me, dishonesty assumes intent and, IMO, people who write the code like that simply do not bother having a second thought about its ultimate purpose, which is to be read and maintained. That is, they may be disrespectful to the future readers (including themselves) and lazy or poorly trained or, at worst, unwilling to think -- but not really malevolent or deceitful. Reply ) ( ThreadThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Ava DuVernay’s new documentary, called 13th, is being released by Netflix on Friday. It premiered at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center here in New York. Part of the documentary looks at how ALEC, the America Legislative Exchange Council, has played a central role in the expansion of the U.S. prison system—ALEC’s work with states to write legislation promoting the privatization of prisons, in addition to pushing for harsher, longer sentences.
Joining us now is Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, who is also featured in 13th.
Talk about the thesis of the film 13th. It’s not just about the 13th Amendment, but the clause within the 13th Amendment that goes from slavery in the amendment of 1865 to mass incarceration today, and then how private corporations play a role in this.
LISA GRAVES: Well, this film is a magnificent, incredible meditation about race and crime in America, and it really tells new stories. One of the stories it tells is about how that amendment, where it says that you can’t be enslaved or you can’t be put in involuntary servitude unless you’re convicted of a crime, except as punishment, has really manifested in the 21st century and the 20th century through a lot of criminal justice policies.
And one of the things that Ava DuVernay brilliantly shows is the role of corporations in joining in this effort, this very racialized criminal justice system, how corporations, through ALEC, have helped advance their own bottom line. And one of the things that she helps document is the role of the Corrections Corporation of America within ALEC. It was a member of ALEC for a number of years, as we’ve written about. It was the chair of ALEC’s crime task force for a number of years, and ultimately it left ALEC after it was disclosed that CCA was in the room when corporations were voting on the SB 1070 legislation in Arizona that would have put—that was designed to put more immigrants in detention facilities and jails for immigrants. And CCA is just one of the many corporations that has been part of ALEC as it has pushed forward both for privatization of prisons, as well as measures to make people go to jail for longer—longer sentences.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain how ALEC works. You’ve got the private corporations, like CCA, and then you’ve got the legislators, who introduce the legislation written by the—or co-written by the corporations.
LISA GRAVES: Well, that’s right. One of the things we discovered when we launched ALEC Exposed was that it wasn’t just that corporations were lobbying these members, they were actually voting as equals with politicians at these ALEC task force meetings. So, what happens is, corporations help fund scholarships for legislators to go on these fancy trips. Then they’re wined and dined on these trips. And then, at ALEC task force meetings, like on criminal justice, the corporations actually vote as equals with politicians on these bills. These bills are written by corporate lobbyists. They’re designed to advance the corporate interests. And in the criminal justice arena, we can certainly see the effect of that.
Now, CCA claims it never voted on those bills. You know, it was certainly there when those bills moved forward that helped it privatize prisons, helped make it easier for people to be put into employment circumstances in prisons—that Ava documents, as well—and also, a number of bills—three strikes, you’re out; truth in sentencing; mandatory minimums—numerous bills to put more people in jail, put them in jail for longer, which all increase the profits of corporations that fund ALEC, like CCA.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you go from CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, to ABC, the American Bail Coalition. Explain.
LISA GRAVES: So, the American Bail Coalition is a trade group that basically has documented itself—it has praised ALEC to its members, saying that it really helped put ABC on the map. What ABC has done has—is work for the privatization of bail in this country, which has increased profits for bail bondsmen, bail bondswomen, bail bond services, and it’s done so for people who are accused of crimes, not yet convicted.
One of the things that happened after we connected the dots on the Stand Your Ground law in Florida and how it was pushed by ALEC into law in states after—state after state, after a bunch of corporations left ALEC, but one of the ones that remained was this trade group, ABC. That’s because they want a piece of the pie for people who are released from jail. This is ALEC’s effort to basically profitize every element of the criminal justice system. And ABC stands to benefit from that.
AMY GOODMAN: Where do the Koch brothers fit into this story?
LISA GRAVES: Well, the Kochs are really one of the largest funders of ALEC. Koch Industries is a major funder of ALEC. Koch Industries has had a seat on ALEC’s board as it moved forward with all these bills to privatize prisons, as it moved forward bills to put people in jail and put them in jail—more people in jail, more people in jail for longer. But also, ALEC and the Kochs have been working together on their so-called Right on Crime initiative, which is part of this criminal justice reform. But what people don’t realize is that within that reform package are measures to make it easier for corporations to get away, get out of jail free. So it would change the criminal intent standards, if they’re successful, to make it easier for corporations to commit crimes and get away with it.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to a guest we had on Democracy Now!, when Democracy Now! interviewed Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel for Koch Industries, on why the Koch brothers were getting involved with a coalition to reform the criminal justice system.
MARK HOLDEN: Charles Koch and David Koch are classical liberals who believe in expansive individual liberties in the Bill of Rights and limited government. And so, if your goals are to honor the Bill of Rights and to remove obstacles to opportunity, especially for the poor and the disadvantaged, you have to be in the criminal justice arena.
And to answer your question, you know, as Van pointed out, what worked 20 or 30 years ago doesn’t work today. And we have to have the intellectual honesty and courage and humility to correct that. In our businesses, we do that all the time when things aren’t working. And I think, to Van’s point, what we’re seeing happen in the states is really a template for what should happen at the federal level, and making sure that everything we do enhances public safety and that it honors the Bill of Rights and treats everybody in the system as individuals with dignity and respect, particularly victims, law enforcement, the incarcerated, the accused and their families.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel for Koch Industries. He appeared on Democracy Now! with Van Jones, the co-founder of #cut50, a national bipartisan initiative to reduce the U.S.’s incarcerated population by 50 percent over the next 10 years. Lisa Graves?
LISA GRAVES: Well, it’s certainly good that they’re embracing that now. But what they have not done—what they have not done is acknowledge their role. Koch Industries has been a leader of ALEC. It was the board—it was the board chair for ALEC’s corporate board. Koch Industries presided over the whole expansion of the criminal justice system at the state level through ALEC. And now it wants to pretend, in essence, that it wasn’t part of that effort, that it wasn’t a leader of ALEC during those measures. And so, where there is consensus for reform, I think that should move forward, but where Koch is trying to change the law to make it easier to limit accountability for financial crimes, for environmental crimes and other crimes that corporations might commit, I think those provisions should be dropped. They haven’t been honest about that. And the Kochs are engaged in a massive PR campaign to try to burnish their reputation in the face of rightful and proper criticism from people about their undue influence on our entire democracy.An explosion at a Bartow County power plant was strong enough to rattle windows miles away Thursday afternoon. But all of the employees at Plant Bowen were accounted for and none were seriously injured, Georgia Power said.
Because the plant is fueled by coal and is not nuclear-powered, there is no danger to residents in the area, Bartow County fire Chief Craig Millsap, also the county’s EMA director, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Through social media, news of the explosion spread quickly just before 4 p.m. Thursday as emergency responders were dispatched to the plant, located just outside of Euharlee, about 50 miles northwest of downtown Atlanta.
Georgia Power confirmed at 6 p.m. that all employees were accounted for and one person, a 60-year-old man, sustained a minor injury to his leg and was transported to Cartersville Medical Center. Three other people were treated at the scene for minor injuries, the power company said.
The plant’s coal unit 2 was being brought down for a maintenance outage when the explosion took place, Georgia Power said.
Some roads in the area, including Covered Bridge Road where the plant is located, were temporarily closed during the investigation, the Bartow County Sheriff’s Office said.
Plant Bowen is Georgia Power’s second-largest coal-fueled plant in the state and employs more than |
affecting, at the most, the outcome of 14 plate appearances on the whole season. Catchers, meanwhile, are receiving thousands of pitches a year, with the league’s most prolific one or two catchers getting around 10,000 pitches caught (that is: pitches that actually make it into the catcher’s glove). Martin is already at 2,264 pitches caught this season: by losing two points of his stolen strikes, that means he’s already lost 45 strikes that he usually secures for his pitchers. Hey, that’s a few good innings of nothing but balls that Martin has typically converted into nothing but strikes! If Martin gets around his full-season average of 8,000 pitches received, that’s a difference of 160 pitches — more than a whole game of could-be strikes that are going down as balls. Expressed in terms of total pitch count like this, it’s a lot clearer (at least for me) how framing really does add up to full wins and losses.
So what’s Martin’s deal? A few days before the season started, FanGraphs alumnus August Fagerstrom wrote on how the Blue Jays were going to experiment by having Martin catch knuckleballer R.A. Dickey. Well, that experiment lasted three whole Dickey starts, with Dickey’s personal hombre Josh Thole catching his last four starts.
Did these three starts do in Martin’s numbers? Using Baseball Savant’s PitchF/X tool, one finds that Dickey threw exactly 300 pitches over those three starts, with 203 of them making their way to Martin’s glove. Martin successfully stole 15 strikes, or 7.3% of the eligible pitches — above his season average.
So it wasn’t even catching the only active knuckleballer that threw Martin off-course. What about the other Blue Jays pitchers? The following table is not totally precise, as many of the relievers have pitched a small handful of innings to Navarro and/or Thole. These are all numbers for the full 2015 season except in the case of Mark Buehrle, whose two season-opening starts pitching to Navarro have been excluded:
The correlation isn’t perfect, but I think it’s pretty strong: the Blue Jays have a lot of pretty wild pitchers, and Martin & Co. are having a hard time stealing strikes for them. As a staff, the Blue Jays were projected for the highest BB/9 in the preseason, and they’re at third in the league so far, trailing only the Colorado Rockies and Philadelphia Phillies. As Zachary Levine wrote at Just a Bit Outside in mid-April, the Blue Jays have a phenomenally young pitching staff, which makes the wildness understandable.
So here’s my theory: Martin has not, suddenly, lost his considerable gifts as a pitch-framer. Rather, when he sets up the target on the edge of the strike zone, hoping to steal a pitch on the fuzzy edge of the strike zone, this young staff is unable to hit the target, making it difficult to establish a convincing frame. You could almost blame the whole decline just on Sanchez. Usually we only talk about catchers when we talk about framing, but perhaps there’s a bit more teamwork at play when it comes to stealing strikes."I can't breathe."I held my breath as I watched Eric Garner's pleas for mercy. I didn't make it to the part where he suffocated--hands behind his back, face down--on the sidewalk. The familiarity stings. I knew the ending. Images of murdered black men haunt my thoughts.When looking at Eric Garner's lifeless body, I don't have to imagine that he is my brother or my father to recognize the injustice of his suffering. My heart aches for the family he will never return to. And if the justice we speak of routinely is more than a figment of our imaginations, I pray it comes swiftly to Mr. Garner's family.But if the NYPD or the City of New York fail to act, I will not march for Eric Garner. I will not rally for him because I am reserving my mental and emotional energy for the women, the Black women, no one will speak for.While the effectiveness of social media in spreading Garner's story heartens me. I could not refrain from comparing the empathy shown him, particularly by Black men, to that which is heartbreakingly absent when Black women attempt to discuss the everyday terrors we experience both in the world and at their hands.Watching black men show up for Garner after seeing so many derail conversations about Black women's well-being leaves me with little more than a sinking feeling of despair upon recognition that the understanding so many of us crave will not come.In recent weeks, Black women have launched campaigns to ensure that we can exist in public without experiencing harassment and have presidential endorsement of policy that addresses our specific needs. And though these petitions seem common sense to me, Black women's mere desire to take up space is met with push back. And then we are caught in a cycle of perpetually asserting our humanity.These conversations do not only happen online. I, myself, have spent hours trying to explain to otherwise thoughtful, intelligent men why wearing a tight dress is not sending an invitation to harassment. I resign the conversations only when I know that no amount of emphatic gestures or desperate articulations will bridge the gap to comprehension.I've found the will to dominate to be impenetrable to appeals for compassion--as was painfully clear in the widely circulated video of Eric Garner's death.Too many fail to recognize that the violence, psychological verbal and physical, that we direct toward each other in communal spaces reflects the violence enacted upon our bodies and minds by larger dominating structures; thus there's an inability by many Black men to acknowledge that Black women, too, have a right to move through the world without fear--that a woman should not have to avert her eyes and quicken her pace when she encounters men in public spaces.But we are told that unless we are murdered or raped, we are not truly in distress because Black women's bodies are instruments upon which black men can play out their fantasies of domination without reprisal. But the illusion of power crumbles when black men face the police state.Black people, both men and women, experience coercive, violent and often deadly interactions with law enforcement. Abuses of the badge draw immediate outrage. In these tragedies, even the men who regularly assault or excuse the assault of Black women, can see themselves, and their fear is most legitimate.We have been conditioned to believe the exploitation of Black women's work to be a normal, expected part of our womanhood. Fear of being deemed selfish compels us to act against self-interest. But that which is good for women is good for all of us.I'm not settling for anything less than reciprocity. If you refuse to hear our calls for help, then I cannot respond to yours. I have no desire, as a Black woman, to be placed on a pedestal, but I will not allow myself to become a footstool. Do not ask me for empathy if you are content to deny it in return.Many women continue to believe that offering unconditional support to the men who dismiss their calls for help will result one day in a return of care--as though they are watering a seed. But I have yet to see the fruit from that tree of hope, and I'm tired of waiting.So I will mourn Eric Garner and I will cry bitter, broken tears for him, but that is all that I can do.Kimberly Foster is the founder and editor of For Harriet. Email or Follow @KimberlyNFoster[bitcoin-dev] on rough consensus
Bitcoin's participants can improve their ability to stay on a valuable and censorship resistant blockchain by individually and informally absorbing cultural wisdom regarding "rough consensus". This does not require writing any formal rules about what rough consensus is. It is a matter of participation with an understanding. https://www.ietf.org/tao.html#rfc.section.2 In many ways, the IETF runs on the beliefs of its participants. One of the "founding beliefs" is embodied in an early quote about the IETF from David Clark: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code". A June 2015 bitcoin-dev thread, arguing about consensus, included the usual range of responses; ranging from claims that any objection must block consensus to a definition based on US Justice Stewart's "I'll know it when I see it". (It's funny because it's true. We can explain it better, though.) "Concerns Regarding Threats by a Developer to Remove Commit Access from Other Developers" http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/008772.html An August 2015 cryptography-list thread presents the idea that rough consensus can be used as a tool for hindering progress. The specific threat was that two protocol options could be made to seem equally good. To solve this example, identify that as the problem, then engage a judgement to pick one solution "good enough" (but that does not lead to a dead-end for other goals of the project), and go with it. There is room, within "rough consensus", for such action to defend against the attack; as you can see from other excerpts in this message. "[Cryptography] asymmetric attacks on crypto-protocols - the rough consensus attack" http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2015-August/026151.html To learn about forming a useful "rough consensus", see the very readable "Tao of the IETF", and RFC 7282. "The Tao of the IETF" https://www.ietf.org/tao.html (previously RFC 4677) RFC 7282 "On Consensus and Humming in the IETF" https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 Strong objections don't block rough consensus: https://www.ietf.org/tao.html#getting.things.done Rough consensus has been defined in many ways; a simple version is that it means that strongly held objections must be debated until most people are satisfied that these objections are wrong. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 Having full consensus, or unanimity, would be ideal, but we don't require it: Requiring full consensus allows a single intransigent person who simply keeps saying "No!" to stop the process cold. We only require rough consensus: If the chair of a working group determines that a technical issue brought forward by an objector has been truly considered by the working group, and the working group has made an informed decision that the objection has been answered or is not enough of a technical problem to prevent moving forward, the chair can declare that there is rough consensus to go forward, the objection notwithstanding. The working group chair's responsibility is different from that of either a vote counter or a benign dictator: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2418 Note that 51% of the working group does not qualify as "rough consensus" and 99% is better than rough. It is up to the Chair to determine if rough consensus has been reached. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 3. Rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated [...] If the chair finds, in their technical judgement, that the issue has truly been considered, and that the vast majority of the working group has come to the conclusion that the tradeoff is worth making, even in the face of continued objection from the person(s) who raised the issue, the chair can declare that the group has come to rough consensus. (And even though this is framed in terms of a "vast majority", even that is not necessarily true. This point is discussed in more detail in Sections 6 and 7.) [...] The chair of a working group who is about to find that there is only rough consensus is going to have to decide that not only has the working group taken the objection seriously, but that it has **fully examined the ramifications** of not making a change to accommodate it, and that the outcome does not constitute a failure to meet the technical requirements of the work. [...] 6. One hundred people for and five people against might not be rough consensus [...] one of the great strengths of using consensus over voting: It isn't possible to use "vote stuffing" (simply recruiting a large number of people to support a particular side, even people who have never participated in a working group or the IETF at all) to change the outcome of a consensus call. As long as the chair is looking for outstanding technical objections and not counting heads, vote stuffing shouldn't affect the outcome of the consensus call. 7. Five people for and one hundred people against might still be rough consensus [...Sybil attack] it is within bounds for the chair to say, "We have objections, but the objections have been sufficiently answered, and the objectors seem uninterested in participating in the discussion. Albeit rough in the extreme, there is rough consensus to go with the current solution." [...] it is likely that if a working group got this dysfunctional, it would put the whole concept of coming to rough consensus at risk. But still, the correct outcome in this case is to look at the very weak signal against the huge background noise in order to find the rough consensus. Working group chairs can help direct discussion: https://www.ietf.org/tao.html#rfc.section.4.1 Sometimes discussions get stuck on contentious points and the chair may need to steer people toward productive interaction and then declare when rough consensus has been met and the discussion is over. Some working groups segregate the role of forming a consensus from communicating the consensus: https://www.ietf.org/tao.html#rfc.section.4.2 Another method that some Working Groups adopt is to have a Working Group "secretary" to handle the juggling of the documents and the changes. The secretary can run the issue tracker if there is one, or can simply be in charge of watching that all of the decisions that are made on the mailing list are reflected in newer versions of the documents. Bitcoin Core is neither an IETF working group, nor should it aim to curate its network protocol ruleset as one. The IETF uses a steering group, formal variance procedures, an appeals board, and a director (to send even higher appeals to). All of those positions could become points of attack, if Bitcoin were to attempt to use or copy them. That said, most IETF appeal routes are merely authorized to undo a prior ruling of consensus, opening for reconsideration prior dismissed points of argument (on their technical merits). In Bitcoin, if developers know what to work on, and can speak clearly enough to the economic majority, then the system is working; regardless of whether any role exists taking all the responsibility that an IETF working group chair would take. It is absolutely the case that resolving excessive roughness in shared consensus takes more work than either votes or dictatorship. It is also the case that rough consensus is a good defense against committing to decisions with subtle undesirable long-term effects. That is why the IETF cares about it, and that same long-term threat is important in Bitcoin's ecosystem as well. /// References and Selected IETF Excerpts /// "The Tao of the IETF" https://www.ietf.org/tao.html A 2012 continuation of 2006's RFC 4677, itself first published in 1994. BCP 25 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2418 (1998) 3.3. Session management Working groups make decisions through a "rough consensus" process. IETF consensus does not require that all participants agree although this is, of course, preferred. In general, the dominant view of the working group shall prevail. (However, it must be noted that "dominance" is not to be determined on the basis of volume or persistence, but rather a more general sense of agreement.) Consensus can be determined by a show of hands, humming, or any other means on which the WG agrees (by rough consensus, of course). Note that 51% of the working group does not qualify as "rough consensus" and 99% is better than rough. It is up to the Chair to determine if rough consensus has been reached. In the case where a consensus, which has been reached during a face-to-face meeting, is being **verified on a mailing list**, the people who were in the meeting and expressed agreement must be taken into account. If there were 100 people in a meeting and only a few people on the mailing list disagree with the consensus of the meeting then the consensus should be seen as being verified. Note that enough time should be given to the verification process for the mailing list readers to understand and consider any objections that may be raised on the list. The normal two week last-call period should be sufficient for this. [...] To facilitate making forward progress, a Working Group Chair may wish to decide to reject or defer the input from a member, based upon the following criteria: - Old The input pertains to a topic that already has been resolved and is redundant with information previously available; - Minor The input is new and pertains to a topic that has already been resolved, but it is felt to be of minor import to the existing decision; - Timing The input pertains to a topic that the working group has not yet opened for discussion; or - Scope The input is outside of the scope of the working group charter. [...] RFC 2026 "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3" http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2026#section-6.5 6.5 Conflict Resolution and Appeals [...] RFC 7282 "On Consensus and Humming in the IETF" https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 1. Introduction [...] our credo is that we don't let a single individual dictate decisions (a king or president), nor should decisions be made by a vote, nor do we want decisions to be made in a vacuum without practical experience. Instead, we strive to make our decisions by the consent of all participants, though allowing for some dissent (rough consensus), and to have the actual products of engineering (running code) trump theoretical designs. Having full consensus, or unanimity, would be ideal, but we don't require it: Requiring full consensus allows a single intransigent person who simply keeps saying "No!" to stop the process cold. We only require rough consensus: If the chair of a working group determines that a technical issue brought forward by an objector has been truly considered by the working group, and the working group has made an informed decision that the objection has been answered or is not enough of a technical problem to prevent moving forward, the chair can declare that there is rough consensus to go forward, the objection notwithstanding. 2. Lack of disagreement is more important than agreement [...] **determining** consensus and **coming to** consensus are different things than **having** consensus [emphasis in original]. [...]If at the end of the discussion some people have not gotten the choice that they prefer, but they have become convinced that the chosen solution is acceptable, albeit less appealing, they have still come to consensus. Consensus doesn't require that everyone is happy and agrees that the chosen solution is the best one. Consensus is when everyone is sufficiently satisfied with the chosen solution, such that they **no longer have specific objections** to it. [...] "Can anyone not live with choice A?" is more likely to only hear from folks who think that choice A is impossible to engineer given some constraints. Following up with, "What are the reasons you object to choice A?" is also essential. [...] There is also an important point to be made about reaching consensus and "compromising": Unfortunately, the word "compromise" gets used in two different ways, and though one sort of compromising to come to consensus is good (and important), the other sort of compromising in order to achieve consensus can actually be harmful. As mentioned earlier, engineering always involves balancing tradeoffs, and figuring out whether one engineering decision makes more sense on balance compared to another involves making engineering "compromises": We might have to compromise processor speed for lower power consumption, or compromise throughput for congestion resistance. Those sorts of compromises are among **engineering choices**, and they are **expected and essential**. We always want to be weighing tradeoffs and collectively choosing the set that best meets the full set of requirements. However, there is another sense of "compromise" that involves compromising between people, not engineering principles. For example, a minority of a group might object to a particular proposal, and even after discussion still think the proposal is deeply problematic, but decide that they don't have the energy to argue against it and say, "Forget it, do what you want". That surely can be called a compromise, but a chair might mistakenly take this to mean that they agree, and have therefore come to consensus. But really all that they've done is capitulated; they've simply given up by trying to appease the others. That's not coming to consensus; there still exists an outstanding unaddressed objection. Again, if the objection is only that the choice is not ideal but is otherwise acceptable, such a compromise is fine. But **conceding** when there is a real outstanding technical objection **is not coming to consensus**. [...] Coming to consensus is when everyone (including the person making the objection) comes to the conclusion that either the objections are valid, and therefore make a change to address the objection, or that the objection was not really a matter of importance, but **merely a matter of taste**. Of course, coming to full consensus like that does not always happen. That's why in the IETF, we talk about "rough consensus". 3. Rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated [...] If the chair finds, in their technical judgement, that the issue has truly been considered, and that the vast majority of the working group has come to the conclusion that the tradeoff is worth making, even in the face of continued objection from the person(s) who raised the issue, the chair can declare that the group has come to rough consensus. (And even though this is framed in terms of a "vast majority", even that is not necessarily true. This point is discussed in more detail in Sections 6 and 7.) [...] The chair of a working group who is about to find that there is only rough consensus is going to have to decide that not only has the working group taken the objection seriously, but that it has **fully examined the ramifications** of not making a change to accommodate it, and that the outcome does not constitute a failure to meet the technical requirements of the work. In order to do this, the chair will need to have a good idea of the purpose and architecture of the work being done, perhaps referring to the charter of the working group or a previously published requirements document, or even consulting with other experts on the topic, and then the chair will use **their own technical judgement** to make sure that the solution meets those requirements. It is possible that the chair can come to the wrong conclusion, and the chair's conclusion is always appealable should that occur, but the chair must use their judgement in these cases. What can't happen is that the chair bases their decision solely on hearing a large number of voices simply saying, "The objection isn't valid." That would simply be to take a vote. A **valid justification needs to me made**. [...] Indeed, RFC 2418 adds on to [old talk of balloting] by stating, "Note that 51% of the working group does not qualify as 'rough consensus' and 99% is better than rough." This document actually disagrees with the idea that simply balloting or otherwise looking at percentages can "determine" consensus. While counting heads might give a good guess as to what the rough consensus will be, doing so can allow important minority views to get lost in the noise. One of the strengths of a consensus model is that minority views are addressed, and using a rough consensus model should not take away from that. That is why this document talks a great deal about looking at open issues rather than just counting the number of people who do or do not support any given issue. Doing so has some interesting and surprising implications that are discussed in subsequent sections. Any finding of rough consensus needs, at some level, to provide a **reasoned explanation** to the person(s) raising the issue of why their concern is not going to be accommodated. A good outcome is for the objector to **understand the decision taken and accept the outcome**, even though their particular issue is not being accommodated in the final product. Remember, if the objector feels that the issue is so essential that it must be attended to, they always have the option to file an appeal. A technical error is always a valid basis for an appeal. [...] 4. Humming should be the start of a conversation, not the end [...] a show of hands might leave the impression that the number of people matters in some formal way. 5. Consensus is the path, not the destination We don't try to reach consensus in the IETF as an end in itself. We use consensus-building as a tool to get to the best technical (and sometimes procedural) outcome when we make decisions. Experience has shown us that traditional voting leads to gaming of the system, "compromises" of the wrong sort as described earlier, important minority views being ignored, and, in the end, worse technical outcomes. 6. One hundred people for and five people against might not be rough consensus [...] one of the great strengths of using consensus over voting: It isn't possible to use "vote stuffing" (simply recruiting a large number of people to support a particular side, even people who have never participated in a working group or the IETF at all) to change the outcome of a consensus call. As long as the chair is looking for outstanding technical objections and not counting heads, vote stuffing shouldn't affect the outcome of the consensus call. [...] Even if no particular person is still standing up for an issue, that doesn't mean an issue can be ignored. As discussed earlier, simple capitulation on an issue is not coming to consensus. But even in a case where someone who is not an active participant, who might not care much about the fate of the work, raises a substantive issue and subsequently disappears, the issue needs to be addressed before the chair can claim that rough consensus exists. 7. Five people for and one hundred people against might still be rough consensus [...Sybil attack] it is within bounds for the chair to say, "We have objections, but the objections have been sufficiently answered, and the objectors seem uninterested in participating in the discussion. Albeit rough in the extreme, there is rough consensus to go with the current solution." [...] it is likely that if a working group got this dysfunctional, it would put the whole concept of coming to rough consensus at risk. But still, the correct outcome in this case is to look at the very weak signal against the huge background noise in order to find the rough consensus. 9. Security Considerations "He who defends with love will be secure." -- Lao TzuThomas Rawls can be the Seahawks' next Marshawn Lynch
By Sam Monson • Dec 5, 2016
Thomas Rawls can be Seattle’s next Marshawn Lynch, and carry the team to the Super Bowl.
If you need evidence of the kind of playmaker the second-year running back can be, look no further than the touchdown he scored in the second quarter of Sunday’s night’s blowout win over the Panthers. The intended point of attack is being shut down by the combination of Panthers DT Vernon Butler and LB Thomas Davis each beating their blockers to the gap, and Rawls is somehow able to make a hard cut and take it through traffic all the way to the end zone for a touchdown.
Seattle’s offensive line is truly horrid — the Seahawks rank last in pass-blocking grades and third-from-last in run-blocking — and for just about any other team it would be a deal-breaker as far as them achieving any kind of success. Even for the Seahawks, it’s flirting with that kind of level, and this is a team that has lived with that kind of dynamic for years now.
The team claims it’s not a deliberate attempt to short-change the line — rather a series of individual personnel decisions that just happen to have resulted in them spending less on their line than any other team in football — but conscious or otherwise, this is a team that has eschewed investment on the line in favor of dedicating resources elsewhere.
In the past the combination of quarterback Russell Wilson and running back Marshawn Lynch was enough to off-set the poor line play, and together with the defense, keep them solidly as Super Bowl contenders each year. This season, though, the line is worse, and there is no Marshawn Lynch.
When Seattle lost the Super Bowl on their final offensive play two seasons ago, what made that decision to pass rather than hand the ball off to Lynch so incredible was that Lynch that season had averaged 3.1 yards per carry after contact. He had broken 117 tackles that season, including the playoffs, by far the most we have seen over PFF’s 10 years of grading. Lynch was able to drag this team forward regardless of the blocking in front of him, which was buying him an average of just 1.6 yards per carry before contact.
This season the Seahawks backfield has been beset by injury — even moreso if you count Wilson’s nagging ankle — and they have had 13 different players carry the ball for them (nine different running backs). At one point things were so bad that they were handing the ball off to backup rookie QB Trevone Boykin at the end of the game to try and salt the win away.
The most significant injuries among the backs were those suffered to Rawls, because in his short NFL career he has shown the ability to replicate what Lynch brought to this offense, and have the same transformative effect on it — turning them from pretenders to contenders.
Injury to Lynch last season thrust then-rookie Rawls into action, and his performance was remarkable. He averaged 5.6 yards per carry while Lynch managed just 3.8. He averaged 3.1 yards per carry after contact (the same as Lynch’s incredible 2014 season) while Lynch averaged just 2.6, and Rawls broke 26 tackles on 147 carries. Only Doug Martin, Jonathan Stewart and Lynch had a higher rushing grade than Rawls last season, and two of those three were handed the ball far more often to get those grades.
The injury Rawls suffered caused the Seahawks to invest heavily in the running back position in the draft, and so far this season he has played just 155 snaps, but this week’s performance against Carolina, and to a lesser extent the week previous against Tampa Bay, showed the kind of impact he can have for the team. Sunday night, he gained 106 rushing yards and averaged 7.1 yards per carry, breaking three tackles and scoring two touchdowns.
Rawls has the kind of quick-cut ability to quickly avoid blown blocks and ad-lib on the fly — exactly the same kind of trait Lynch had before him. He doesn’t get it done in quite the same style as Lynch, who was more physically difficult to simply get to the ground, able to just break through contact and drag players for extra yardage, but he does have the same ability to avoid that initial tackle and keep on trucking.
Wilson, for the second game in a row, didn’t have his best performance on Sunday, and yet the team still hung 40 points on the Carolina Panthers in large part because Rawls was so effective on the ground.
The Seahawks still have an elite defense, and Wilson for much of this season has been exceptional, but on his own the prospect of carrying this team all the way to the Super Bowl always seemed an impossible task given the offensive line in front of him. If he gets reinforcements in the form of Rawls down the stretch — someone who can also perform despite bad blocking — then we have a different story entirely. With this defense, and both a running back and quarterback who can function independent of quality blockers, the Seahawks are very real contenders in the NFC once again.James Madison once sounded a warning about how liberty might one day be stolen away from the American people: “I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
Madison was right. Today, Democrats have made a habit of attempting “gradual and silent encroachments” on free speech. The most recent example came just last week when it was revealed that Democrats on the Federal Election Commission voted in May to punish Fox News for hosting the GOP presidential “undercard” debates last fall. This was the first time in the commission’s 41-year history that its members voted to punish a news outlet’s presidential debate sponsorship.
All three democrats on the FEC claimed the news network’s sponsorship of the debates ran afoul of an obscure federal law regulating campaign finance, and held that it constituted an illegal corporate contribution to the candidates.
This strange legal theory came from Mark Everson, a former IRS commissioner who was at one point a 2016 GOP candidate. He barely registered in the polls and therefore wasn’t invited to Fox’s undercard debate. Likely in a fit of pique, he filed a complaint with the FEC. Thankfully, the commission’s three Republicans voted against their Democratic colleagues, resulting in a 3-3 tie and therefore no punishment for Fox News.
But the vote represents a troubling precedent. If Democrats on the FEC had gotten their way, the commission could in theory regulate—that is, suppress—almost any editorial coverage of presidential candidates under an expansive interpretation of federal campaign finance law. And they could pick and choose which new outlets to punish. It’s not surprising that the targeted network in this case was Fox. Recall that CNN and CNBC also held undercard debates, but they faced no complaints and thus no action from the FEC.
Democrats’ Forever War Against Citizens United
The FEC dustup is just Democrats’ latest attempt to undermine free speech under the guise of “campaign finance reform.” Back in September 2014, when Democrats still controlled the Senate, then-Majority Leader Harry Reid led an effort to pass a constitutional amendment that would have given Congress and state legislatures the power to determine what does and does not count as political speech.
The measure, which failed on a 54-42 vote, would have “fixed” the First Amendment by overturning Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case protecting free speech that liberals can’t seem to wrap their heads around. At the time, Senate Democrats claimed their self-styled amendment to the First Amendment would get “dark money” out of politics by limiting individuals’ ability to combine resources and advocate for or against a candidate or policy.
Put another way, Democrats were trying to limit combinations of what people can say and when. Put in even more blunt terms, they were trying to suppress political speech.
Recall that the Citizens United case concerned a documentary film about Hillary Clinton, of all people. A non-profit group, Citizens United, wanted to air their documentary, Hillary: The Movie, ahead of the January 2008 Democratic primaries. Federal law barred this as “electioneering communication,” and the nonprofit sought a declaration from a federal judge to allow them to show and promote their film.
The case went to the Supreme Court, which correctly reasoned that if the FEC could prohibit Citizens United from showing their film during primary season, they could also prevent book publishers from coming out with election-year titles about candidates, or newspapers from printing editorials about candidates, or pretty much any speech anywhere that had anything to do with politics. The FEC, in other words, could more or less shut down the First Amendment on the pretext that a film—or a book or an article—violates campaign finance law.
The dissenting justices argued that corporations aren’t individuals, and thus don’t enjoy First Amendment protection of free speech. Liberals have since taken up this argument with fervor, as seen in the campaign rhetoric of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Co. Ironically, no small number of elite media types subscribes to this line. It apparently hasn’t occurred to them that if the FEC can tell a conservative nonprofit it’s not allowed to air a film because it might make Hillary Clinton look bad going into the primaries, then there’s nothing to stop the FEC from telling The New York Times not to run a story or HarperCollins not to publish a book.
Liberals: Americans Too Stupid to Think for Themselves
The case led to a change in federal campaign finance law that has since allowed for Super PACs, those menacing combinations that liberals loath and fear—even though this election season has shown how weak and ineffectual they are. Jeb Bush’s Super PAC, for example, spent a whopping $130 million, but Bush got less than 300,000 primary votes before he dropped out after failing to make double digits in South Carolina.
Liberals fear big money drowns out competition, hence their asinine rallying cry to “get money out of politics.” But exercising free speech in a way that will influence others almost always requires the corporate action of individuals and spending at least some money. That’s true whether you’re shooting a documentary or publishing a magazine—or, in the case of Fox News, hosting a presidential primary debate.
Liberals also accuse conservatives of twisting the meaning of free speech by maintaining that corporations do, by definition, have free speech rights because corporations are, after all, made of individuals acting together with common purpose. In fact, liberals are the ones guilty of twisting language. They would flag any “speech” they don’t like, call it a “campaign contribution,” and deploy the FEC to shut it down.
Justice Antonin Scalia, addressing concerns about the rise of Super PACs in the wake of Citizens United, summed up the entire issue as only he could: “I don’t care who is doing the speech—the more the merrier. People are not stupid. If they don’t like it, they’ll shut it off.”
Democrats take the opposite view. They think Americans are stupid—and that it’s up to the FEC, or Senate Democrats, to decide when it should be shut off.(Image: Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann)
“Oh yes, darling, it’s fabulous!” Art appreciation classes might help you enthuse over other people’s creative efforts, but zapping your brain might work just as well.
Zaira Cattaneo at the University of Milan Bicocca in Italy and her colleagues showed paintings to 12 people. Each rated the images before and after receiving either transcranial direct current stimulation, which uses electrodes to deliver a small current to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) – a brain area involved in processing emotion – or a mock treatment in which no current was used.
Volunteers rated images containing real-world scenes more highly after stimulation. There was no difference in rating after the mock treatment or for abstract art, possibly because it is processed by brain areas other than the DLPFC.
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“The effect of stimulation was subtle, but still pretty remarkable considering the participants were basically just putting a battery on their head,” says Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Explaining why we find something beautiful remains elusive. “Stimulating the DLPFC may improve your mood – like looking through rose-coloured glasses,” says Chatterjee.
Neuroaesthetics – the interplay between brain |
next few seasons, swapping Lucroy in for Jason Castro would likely be the kind of deal that would force them to the table. Same deal with the Pirates, who wanted to keep Martin but had to settle for Francisco Cervelli due to payroll restrictions. While teams like the Red Sox and Dodgers would almost certainly be interested if Lucroy became available, the Brewers wouldn’t face the same kind of limited market that exists for more expensive trade chips, and could leverage the higher demand to extract a premium price.
Blake Swihart is not on the table for Cole Hamels, but you have to believe the Red Sox would part with him (and a lot more) in order to land Lucroy. The Astros and Carlos Correa? The Dodgers and Corey Seager? These guys might be untouchable for expensive aging pitchers, but put a 29 year old star catcher being paid like a middle reliever on the trade block, and I’d imagine those guys suddenly aren’t so off limits anymore. Lucroy is the kind of chip that gets you a premium talent in return, and probably some other stuff too.
Of course, all these guys come with a lot of risk, and prospects bust all the time, even the really good ones. It’s understandable that the Brewers wouldn’t want to trade their franchise player for some guy who probably won’t ever be as good as Lucroy already is, and certainly won’t sign a deal that pays him so little through is prime years. Why trade a low-risk commodity for a guy who you hope might become what you’re trading away?
Because, unfortunately for the Brewers, their near-term reality is bleak. This isn’t a situation where they just need to swap out some parts and come roaring back next year. 2015 is the decline into a hole, not the climb out of it. Things are probably not going to get significantly better in Milwaukee during the remainder of Lucroy’s contract.
The Brewers just don’t really have a good young core they can point to and hope for a near-term resurgence. You’re not going to challenge the Cardinals, Cubs, and Pirates with a team built around Jean Segura, Wily Peralta, Jimmy Nelson, and Ryan Braun’s decline years. Orlando Arcia looks like a nifty prospect who could play one of the two middle infield spots as early as next year, and maybe Clint Coulter can make an impact in a couple of years, but the rest of their best prospects are in A-ball (or lower), and there just isn’t enough here to build a credible case that Milwaukee will be able to stack up enough talent to compete with the three very good teams in their own division.
Once you admit the 2015 season is over, then retaining star center fielder Carlos Gomez — who is under contract through 2016, but will lose significant trade value if a team is only acquiring his walk year — doesn’t make much sense anymore. And once you trade him, the odds of contending in 2017 aren’t very good either. Maybe if the front office made some extremely shrewd free agent signings they could get back to being a decent team with an outside shot at a Wild Card spot, but even that would take a lot of good fortune. The Brewers don’t have enough talent in-house to be good any time soon, and while you can always hope to hit on every acquisition you make, it’s an unrealistic expectation.
By the time the Brewers have a chance to compete in the NL Central again, Jonathan Lucroy will be a 31 or 32 year old catcher, either in the final year of his current contract or the first year of his new deal, and assuming he remains a valuable contributor, he’s going to demand a significant chunk of change, since it will be his first and only shot at a big payday. While the Brewers are understandably attached to their star catcher, they should probably take a look at the Twins regretful decision to pay Joe Mauer market price for his decline years, and keep in mind the risks that a team with a mid-level payroll runs betting on an aging catcher.
The Brewers most likely aren’t going to be able to turn Lucroy’s short-term value into a playoff run, and they probably shouldn’t be planning on re-signing him to a big expensive deal that would turn him into an albatross at the end of his career. For a team facing a several year rebuilding project, a 29 year old catcher who is unlikely to sign another below-market deal is just not the kind of piece you want to build around. If Lucroy was 25, okay, yeah, keep him. But he’s not 25, and the Brewers have worked him very hard over the years, so he’s already racked up nearly 5,000 innings behind the plate in his career. Maybe he has 5,000 more in his knees, but this isn’t a guy who is easily going to transition his skills to another position and remain an impact player, and the bet on his long-term value is a bet on him staying productive while catching regularly into his mid-30s.
And so while Lucroy is a star now, keeping him as a building block for the future may very well be a riskier bet than trading him for a package of minor leaguers. There’s risk in either decision, so it’s not exchanging a sure thing for not-a-sure thing, and there’s very likely going to be more long-term potential in the players the team would get back for Lucroy than he will offer himself.
If this was just a one year setback, keeping Lucroy would be a viable strategy. If he was a few years younger, you could still see him as a cornerstone for the next good Brewers team. But he’s a nearly 30 year old catcher who will demand a huge raise before the Brewers get good again, and he’s the kind of asset now that would allow them to bring back a player who could be their next franchise cornerstone.
The Brewers got where they are now by regularly shooting for the middle. It’s time to stop worrying about making it to 75 wins and focus on getting to 90 wins again. Jonathan Lucroy is probably not still going to be a star when the Brewers can put another 90 win team on the field, but the pieces that he could bring back in a mid-season trade certainly could be. While the Brewers shouldn’t be giving him away, telling interested parties that they don’t want to move their most valuable trade chip is the same kind of half-in/half-out strategy that got them in this mess in the first place.The existence of Marvel’s latest short film has been stirring speculation for weeks, though no one knew for sure exactly what it was, who stars in it, or what the title means.
What is Item 47? Now, finally, some answers.
The film is the latest in the company’s series of shorts dubbed “One-Shots,” a comic book term for stories that wrap up in one issue. Lizzy Caplan (Party Down, pictured) and Jesse Bradford (Flags of Our Fathers) star as a down-on-their-luck couple who find one of the discarded alien guns from the finale to The Avengers — and proceed to make some incredibly bad decisions.
Marvel’s One-Shots have been used as bonus features on home-video releases for Thor and Captain America, and this one will be available Sept. 25 on The Avengers Blu-ray, with a special screening planned for San Diego next week during Comic-Con.
This is the longest, most elaborate of the Marvel shorts so far, and could be a first step toward using short-subject films to dive deeper into the Marvel universe and introduce beloved but less-familiar superheroes to the mainstream.
Item 47 refers to the gun itself, which S.H.I.E.L.D. would like very much to retrieve from the hapless young troublemakers. “The world is topsy-turvy now. There’s been an alien invasion, and things are crazy,” explains Marvel Studios co-president Louis D’Esposito, who directed the film himself. “So when this gun literally fell into their lap, this is a sign: We’re going to rob a few banks, we’re going to buy a boat, we’re going to the Caribbean, and all our problems will be solved.”
Two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents (Maximiliano Hernández, returning from Thor and The Avengers, and Lost’s Man in Black Titus Welliver, making his Marvel debut) are given the job of cleaning up the mess and stopping this modern Bonnie and Clyde (not coincidentally named Benny and Claire.)
The goal was to show some non-superpowered people reacting to the aftermath of The Avengers. “Anything that expands the world and shows you the more human elements of it, that just makes the world more colorful and fun for the average viewer,” says Eric Pearson, who wrote the screenplay for Item 47, as well as the previous two One-Shots: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer and The Consultant.
Each starred Clark Gregg as S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Coulson, but those films were much shorter — no more than 4 minutes, compared to Item 47‘s 12 minute run-time — and they were single scenes with few visual effects or action. Item 47, in contrast, goes on a much bigger ride.
Marvel is exploring whether short films like this could now go even further. The goal is to have a short accompany the home-video for each feature film, and they’re currently devising scripts for companion pieces to Iron Man 3, Thor 2, and Captain America 2.
The question is whether the One-Shots can expand to not just tell not just inconsequential side-stories, but also experiment with longtime heroes who may not yet be ready to carry their own features. A short could be a good test for a Black Panther or Iron Fist or Wasp, for example — characters who are beloved by die-hard fans but less known in the broader culture.
D’Esposito says the company “wrestles” with that idea. “There’s always a potential to introduce a character. We have 8,000 of them, and they can’t all be at the same level. So maybe there are some that are not so popular, and we introduce them [with a short] – and they take off. I could see that happening.”
The risk is establishing the potential movie too much, and then trying to retroactively recruit a feature filmmaker with those creative elements already in place. “Let’s say we wanted to introduce Ant-Man [in a short], and that would mean we have to cast him prior to having a filmmaker. That’s difficult and something we wouldn’t want to do,” D’Esposito says.
But in that case, Marvel’s Ant-Man project has had a filmmaker on board for a long time – co-writer and director Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World). Sources say he recently did shoot test footage for an Ant-Man film.
That’s not quite the same thing as a stand-alone short, but previewing those scenes publicly – say, at Comic-Con next week, or before any of the Marvel features heading to theaters in the next two years – could still be a way to pump up enthusiasm among fans.
Last year at Comic-Con, producer Joe Roth had 6,000 people cheering for a test reel of Snow White and the Huntsman, which featured samples of trippy visual effects and set pieces director Rupert Sanders intended to create – although it featured none of the actual stars. Still, it led to heightened anticipation for the final product, well before a single frame of the movie was shot.
A Marvel superhero short that stands on its own two legs (or more) would undoubtedly have an even greater impact.
Even if Marvel chooses not to show any Ant-Man teases (no one from the studio will confirm what’s in their showcase), they will be at a theater in San Diego next week to show off Item 47 in its entirety.
A real-life scavenger hunt starts with The Avengers Second Screen app, which will become available as a free download at the iTunes store this Friday. Those who can’t go to San Diego can still use the app to gain access to a clip, but for Comic-Con attendees, it will offer the first clue to finding the trail through the city that ends with a screening on the evening of July 12.
Be sure to grab some shawarma to go, in case you get hungry. Item 47 may be short, but the hunt may take a while.
Follow @breznican
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New ‘Iron Man 3′ behind-the-scenes photoI was listening to the interview on Jeremy Vine's BBC Radio 2 programme, with Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins and Catholic journalist Joanna Bogle.
As part of his anti-religion (Christianity in particular) crusade, he has raised enough money for another 'bus' campaign. The new ad will show a child with the words "Don't label me". He came out with that old chestnut that children should be left to make up their own minds.
Question: How can you choose what you don't know? Presumably, it is also brainwashing to show a child how to use a knife and fork?
I watched a TV programme with Prof Dawkins. What came across is how he is trying to resurrect an old, redundant quarrel, the conflict between evolution and faith.
Since Victorian times, science has moved on apace, what with Quantum physics and dark matter, both of which point to claims that we perhaps do not live in a purely material universe.
Prof Dawkins, in his headstrong way, is determind to prove he is right. Oxford academics hold a huge amount of sway in this country (including politicans) and the one thing they are adept in is the fine art of 'clevering'. Prof Dawkins loves to mess around with semanitcs to bamboozle his opposition. Little wonder that this country is now on it knees.
He wishes to stop the indoctrination of children. My 11-year-old nephew was recently confirmed into the Anglican church. He was as happy as a sandboy to do this, unlike the quarrelsome, egotiscital Prof Dawkins. If he calls that indoctrination, it is of a very benign and gentle form!
He conveniently chooses to ignore the media-fuelled brainwashing (advertising, peer pressure) that so many young children and teenagers are subjected to today.
Prof Dawkins is playing a game. He knows the prevailing attitudes and prejudice about religious belief (the churches are corrupt and wicked etc) and he is playing that card for all it is worth. The Dawkins delusion indeed.
J Roberts, St Johns, WakefieldFor too long, UP politics has been trapped in a time warp. This verdict shows that it feels left behind.
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The results of the 2014 national elections, particularly for UP, are a complete reversal of the 2009 mandate. The tectonic shift in UP is significant as it was the battleground from where three major contenders — Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal — fought the election. Moreover, it is not a victory for the BJP as much as it is for Modi in UP and elsewhere. In 2009, the Congress party won 21 seats in UP, which was one of the 12 states that powered the UPA to victory. This led observers to comment that the party was on the path to recovery in the state. But in 2014, it has only won the two family seats of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi.
The BSP and SP — which obtained 20 and 23 seats, respectively, in 2009 — have been wiped out. The former won zero seats and the latter five, all of which have gone to Mulayam Singh Yadav and his family members. The BSP, whose vote share has been rising since the 1989 national election, gained 4.2 per cent of the votes but did not get a single seat. In UP, it lost all 17 reserved seats to the BJP, and even strongholds like Sitapur, Misrikh and Ambedkar Nagar. In constituencies where the BSP and SP fielded Muslim candidates, the latter’s nominees reportedly gained more votes. While it could be argued that the results would have been different in an assembly election, the BJP, which had won 10 seats in 2009, has obtained 71 out of the 80 seats in UP this time round. It mopped up the Hindu vote, effectively decimating the Congress and penetrating the backward and Dalit base of the BSP and SP.
While a detailed analysis of the results is required, three preliminary explanations can be proffered. First, the Muzaffarnagar riots and communal mobilisation that followed polarised voters, which helped the BJP. The BJP, following its decline in the state after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, did not have a well-established organisation in UP. However, the appointment of Amit Shah as strategist and campaign manager and the support of the RSS changed that. Together, these well-planned decisions revived the Hindutva agenda, revamped the organisation by setting the old guard aside and by bringing in younger candidates, and took the campaign deep into the countryside. Also, while Modi initially spoke mainly on development issues in his UP rallies, during the last phase of polling, there was a definite communal appeal.
Second, the anger against the government for failing to prevent the riots and its inept handling of them and for poor governance was also a factor that went against the SP. The victory of the SP in the assembly elections in March 2012 and the appointment of Akhilesh Yadav as chief minister had raised expectations. People thought that a young, educated chief minister would be able to improve UP’s economy. By 2014, the public was disappointed with the CM because he had failed to maintain law and order, provide clean governance or development or establish his authority over a family-controlled party. Time was spent distributing laptops and renaming welfare policies started by the previous government. No new or innovative programme was implemented. This was reinforced by the disappointment with the Congress-led UPA 2 for its failure to prevent corruption, low growth rates and high unemployment.
However, while much has been written on the above, a third significant factor merits consideration. Since the late 1990s, the two main national parties — the Congress and BJP — have been in decline in UP. The SP and BSP were the main players in the state, between which there was a constant turnover of power. During this period, neither party attempted to address issues of underdevelopment, backwardness or poverty. Rather, both parties were more concerned with pursuing narrow, sectarian agendas through which they could strengthen their identity-based vote banks and keep the other party out of power. Consequently, despite the attempt by the SP to use Mandal to unite backward castes, it has shrunk to become a party mainly of the Yadavs led by a single family. Mayawati’s efforts to capture state power through the strategy of sarvjan made Dalits insecure and diluted the party’s bahujan identity, as this went against the original goal of the BSP-led movement of removing social hierarchies and discrimination.
At Independence, UP was one of the best-governed states in the country. But during the first three decades of Congress rule, its socio-economic progress was slow. In the 1980s, for the first time, there was a structural shift from agriculture towards industry and a drop in poverty rates. But during the 1990s, due to destabilising identity-based politics, the state witnessed a steep decline. With the weakening of identity politics in the early 2000s, it was hoped that the SP or BSP would introduce a development-oriented agenda. But in contrast with other states, where leaders such as Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh and J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu have tried to move away from purely identity-based politics towards issues of development and governance, this did not happen in UP. UP remains trapped in traditional politics and has not been able to make use of the new opportunities provided by liberalisation. The fate of UP is well illustrated by Craig Jeffrey’s book, Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India, which shows how farmers in western UP, who benefited from the Green Revolution, gave their sons college/ university educations in the hope that they would obtain professional jobs. But the boys are still “waiting” for such opportunities, indulging in “purposeless timepass”, hanging around street corners and teashops, doing small jobs. This is leading to immense frustration and participation in petty politics. An aspirational younger generation is disturbed and the middle class is angry as the promised benefits of higher economic growth have proved elusive. The discussion on TV channels on the “Gujarat model” has made them feel left behind.
The situation in UP is perhaps reflective of such feelings in many parts of the country. It is hoped that the Narendra Modi government will set aside divisive agendas that could cleave the country, and focus its energies on understanding and addressing the needs and aspirations that have been roused in the Hindi heartland.
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The writer is professor at the Centre for Political Studies and rector, Jawaharlal Nehru University, DelhiHere is a poll to brighten your day. Bill Cassidy leads Mary Landrieu by 16 points, according to a survey by Magellan Strategies.
The poll was taken for the Cassidy campaign, but the results don’t seem far-fetched. If you add Cassidy’s share of the vote on November 4 (41 percent) to the 14 percent share received by the other Republican in the race (Rob Maness), you get a landslide of almost the magntitude projected by Magellan.
Things usually don’t work out quite so simply, and we shouldn’t expect every vote for Maness to tranlate into a vote for Cassidy. On the other hand, post-election day momentum is with the Republicans. Approval of the GOP has increased, and approval of the Dems has cratered, in the aftermath of the election, as America rallies behind its electoral verdict. We saw the same kind of spike in Obama’s approval rating after America decided to re-elect him.
Moreover, a 16 point Cassidy win would be very much in line with Tom Cotton’s rout of Mark Pryor in neighboring Arkansas. That result surprsied nearly everyone. A comparable rout in Louisiana wouldn’t.
That said, I’m expecting a somewhat closer race. But clearly it’s going to take far more than a vote on the Keystone Pipeline to keep Mary Landrieu in the Senate.Senator Elizabeth Warren accused Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan of trying to cover up the bank's creation of millions of phony accounts and said he deserves to get fired.
"You enabled this fake-account scandal. You got rich off it, and then you tried to cover it up," Warren said during a fiery exchange Tuesday at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee.
Wells Fargo has uncovered at least 3.5 million potentially fake accounts, which the bank has blamed on a corrupt culture hungry for sales. Sloan was installed a year ago after CEO John Stumpf was ousted over the scandal.
The bank has since admitted to forcing hundreds of thousands of customers into car insurance they didn't need. At the hearing, lawmakers from both parties condemned Wells Fargo for repeatedly ripping off customers.
Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said she has no faith that Sloan, a 30-year veteran of the bank, is the right person to fix things.
"At best, you were incompetent, and at worst, you were complicit," Warren told him. "Either way, you should be fired."
Sloan acknowledged to Congress that bank management failed to take decisive action to head off the scandal that has rocked the bank for the past year.
"We recognized too late the full scope and seriousness of the problems," Sloan told lawmakers. He called it "a year of disappointment and transition at Wells Fargo," and insisted he's forced fundamental changes to fix the bank's rotten culture.
But he was slammed by Republicans, too. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said to Sloan: "What in God's name were you thinking?"
Kennedy emphasized he's not anti-business. "I'm not against big. With all due respect, I'm against dumb."
Senator Sherrod Brown, the top Democrat on the committee, accused Wells Fargo of going to "great lengths to bury -- to bury -- this scandal" by using forced arbitration clauses to prevent customers from suing.
And Senator Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, suggested that regulators should consider revoking the bank's charter and shutting it down entirely.
Sloan emphasized that Wells Fargo provides services to one in three American households and employs 271,000 workers.
"So you're too big?" Schatz asked.
Sloan insisted Wells Fargo "isn't too big at all" and has tried to fix its mistakes. Earlier in the hearing, he seemed to place some blame on his predecessor, Stumpf.
"The bank's leaders acted too slowly and too incrementally. That was unacceptable," Sloan said.
Wells Fargo (WFC) is being hauled back before Congress almost exactly a year after the bank's first hearing on the fake account scandal. Since then, Wells Fargo has admitted to even deeper problems.
Wells Fargo hoped Tuesday's hearing would go better than last year's. During that hearing, Stumpf was berated by lawmakers, most memorably during a fiery exchange with Warren. He stepped down three weeks later.
"We came to Congress without a good plan and all of you were right to criticize us," Sloan said. He explained that when Stumpf testified last year, Wells Fargo "had not fully grappled with the damage" the scandal did to its customers and employees.
Related: Should Wells Fargo be shut down entirely?
Wells Fargo is trying to put out the firestorm by detailing the many steps the bank has taken to fix its broken sales culture.
Sloan emphasized that Wells Fargo has held its former leaders accountable, revamped unrealistic sales goals, reached a $142 million class action settlement with customers and agreed to dig deeper into its problems.
A company-wide review of Wells Fargo's sales tactics and interactions with customers has resulted in more bad news. Wells Fargo recently uncovered up to 1.4 million more potentially unauthorized accounts. The bank also admitted to forcing up to 570,000 borrowers into unneeded auto insurance, including thousands whose cars were wrongly repossessed.
"I am deeply sorry for letting down our customers and team members. I apologize for the damage done to all the people who work and bank at this important American institution," Sloan said.
Wells Fargo has also been accused of firing whistleblowers who spoke up about the fake account problem. Sloan said Wells Fargo has improved its ethics protections to encourage employees to "speak up without any fear of retaliation."
Related: Scandal 101: Equifax repeated Wells Fargo's mistakes
Still, some lawmakers are fed up. Warren has urged the Federal Reserve to remove most of Wells Fargo's board for failing to provide adequate oversight.
And the bank is still under investigation, including by the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Labor Department.
"The past year has been humbling and challenging," Sloan said. "We are resolving past problems even as we make changes to ensure nothing like this happens again at Wells Fargo."Image copyright Reuters Image caption Thirty-eight per cent of Switzerland's energy currently comes from nuclear power
People in Switzerland voting in a referendum have rejected a proposal to introduce a strict timetable for phasing out nuclear power.
A projection for SRF public television showed the initiative failing by 55% to 45%.
A majority of cantons (Swiss states) voted against the initiative.
The plan, backed by the Green Party, would have meant closing three of Switzerland's five nuclear plants next year, with the last shutting in 2029.
The five plants currently generate almost 40% of Switzerland's electricity.
After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the Swiss government said it would gradually move the country towards renewable energy by 2050.
It said nuclear plants should continue to operate as long as they are deemed safe, but did not set a precise timetable.
Environmentalists have said no nuclear reactors should be allowed to operate for longer than 45 years - meaning that at least two would have had to close almost immediately.
But business leaders and the government said shutting them down too quickly could lead to power shortages and raise reliance on fossil fuels.
Why the Swiss voted no - By the BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva
Swiss voters regularly follow the advice of their government and of business leaders: the vote to hang on to nuclear power was no exception.
Although many Swiss do worry about the safety of their elderly nuclear plants, fears that a rapid shut down could cause energy shortages and even blackouts proved stronger.
Over a third of Swiss energy comes from nuclear power. Switzerland is currently ranked as the world's most competitive economy, and voters don't want to do anything to undermine that.
What's more, the Swiss government does have a long-term plan to shift energy production towards renewable sources, and to gradually reduce and finally end the country's reliance on nuclear power.Recommended Video Drink 'Game of Thrones' Bar
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The Brave Anvil Bar & Refuge Address and Info Montrose The bar that forever changed how Houstonian’s drink keeps things fresh with seasonal menus and their alluring “100 list.” But you haven’t lived, or more accurately, flirted with death, until you’ve had Bobby Heugel’s 2009 classic, “The Brave.” Made with Heugel-approved mezcal and blanco tequila -- plus amaro, spiced liqueur, bitters, and a flaming orange peel -- the daring and stiff-as-hell cocktail is not for the timid.
Jalapeño margarita El Big Bad Address and Info Downtown Mind-numbingly good house-infused tequilas and fresh juice margaritas are the standouts at this spunky gastro-cantina. And when you add fiery jalapeños to the mix, the drinks also become mouth-numbingly good. Get yours on the rocks or mixed with blueberry, strawberry, cucumber, and cilantro infusions. Whichever way you go, the strong drinks mean fun times will be had by all.
Mint julep Julep Address and Info Washington Drinking your way through the decadent history of the South through a meticulously crafted lineup of cocktails is only half the fun at Alba Huerta’s temple of tinctures. The other half is eating your way through classy snacks like oysters, lobster rolls, and smoked fish deviled eggs. Start your lap of luxury tour off with the bar’s chipped iced, powdered sugar-dusted Julep, splashed with Four Roses and Bonded JW Dant bourbons, turbinado sugar and mint. Then move on to the spiced varietal, cocktails like the Cherry Bounce, or screw it, a healthy pour of Pappy.
House old fashioned Moving Sidewalk Address and Info Downtown Hand-carved ice, liquid nitrogen-chilled glassware, and homemade bitters & syrups are just a few of the delicious things at sexy cocktailery helmed by beverage director Alex Gregg. The program is constantly evolving with freak-out-worthy cocktails like the late Anna Nicole Smith, a cocktail that morphs from a classic White Lady into Corpse Reviver #2 as absinthe melts in it). But you must start with the reliably great and perfectly poised house old fashioned, complete with a hand-chiseled, crystal clear cube of ice that adds just the right amount of chill.
related The Most Underrated Barbecue Joints in Texas
Mai Tai Lei Low Bar Address and Info Heights Okole Maluna! Get yourself to this tastefully cheesy island-style drinkery to suck down fancified tiki drinks housed in showy drinking vessels complete with hula girls, naked mermaids, and FIRE. Not to mention the ceramic cup that’s fashioned into a open-mouthed, bloody shark. But the best way to soak up the vacation vibe is through Lei Low’s collection of seriously excellent Mai Tais (including the most classic version on tap).
Boiler maker Johnny’s Gold Brick Address and Info Heights The guys behind Grand Prize Bar and Moving Sidewalk teamed up with powerhouse restaurant group Treadsack (of stars like Down House, D&T Drive Inn, Kipper Club) to open this vintage joint that serve classics from Tom Collins and Gimlets to Cuba Libres. But perhaps most intriguing is their cocktail-in-a-shot-glass, the boiler maker. The mini whiskey and maraschino cherry cocktail comes with a sugar-rim, Angostura-dipped orange, and Lone Star chaser for good measure.
Frozen shandy D&T Drive Inn Address and Info Heights Sure, this is a beer cocktail from a beer garden, but whoever said beer cocktails weren’t worthy? Seriously, who said it!?! Since the majority of this lovely city’s weather is so hot your nipples still haven’t stopped sweating, this frozen fan favorite -- a mix of housemade lemonade, PBR, and bitters -- is the only way to get through a Houston summer.
A classic frozen or overproof margarita The Pastry War Address and Info Downtown Take the traditional cóctele up a notch at this totally cool mezcaleria from heavy-hitters Bobby Heugel and Alba Huerta. The bar pays serious attention to the small-batch agave spirits they house, only selecting those from family-owned distilleries the duo has personally visited. The frozen marg is picture perfect. As is the no-joke strong, 55% proof Tapatio margarita. Both are made with Persian and key limes and your choice of mix-ins like habanero and serrano or grilled spiced beet.
related A Comprehensive Guide to Houston Steak Nights
Coal Miner’s Daughter Honeymoon Cafe & Bar Address and Info Downtown The guys behind Boomtown Coffee teamed up with the dudes behind Lei Low, Bad News, and Grand Prize Bar (among others) to bring us this Big Easy-inspired hangout that’s part coffee house, part cocktail bar, and part amazing. That being said, your drink should be part coffee, part cocktail, and part amazing, too. Enter the Coal Miner’s Daughter, made with toddy cold brew, Four Roses bourbon, lemon, and honey. Simple, stiff, and refreshing AF on a humid Houston day.
Something frozen Grand Prize Bar Address and Info Museum District Because when you can get one of the city’s most fully loaded, crazy good frozen cocktails in a grungy, two-story bar complete with a rooftop, pool table, and kick-ass jukebox, you do that. Go for whatever sneakily strong drink is churning in the frozen machine at the moment, whether it be a gin and prickly pear number created for a special pop up dinner or a knock-you-off-your-stool strong mango marg that you smash through a tamarindo straw.If I have a guilty-pleasure-trash-food-first-love-can’t-believe-I’m-admitting-this food, it’s tater tots. I own a deep fryer that has produced more tater tots than all other foods combined. I even created a Tater Tot Cone Holder for use at parties for my Tater Tot Bar with Accompanying Sauces.
We all have Ore-ida, the inventor of tater tots, to thank for the best of all bad foods. And although they make a fabulous version (it is the original after all) I tend to favor the Trader Tots from Trader Joe’s. Either way, turning them into The Best Veggie Patty Of All Times is a great idea. No meat eater on the planet will complain about this meatless burger.
Print Tater Tot Burger with Sriracha Sour Cream Yield: 4 burgers Ingredients 2 cups tater tots (thawed if frozen)
2 eggs
1 tsp onion powder
¼ cup Italian style breadcrumbs
2 tbs olive oil
sliced cheddar cheese
4 hamburger buns
1 cup sour cream
2 tsp sriracha Instructions In a large bowl add the tater tots, eggs, onion powder, and breadcrumbs. Using a potato masher, mash and stir until well combined. Form into 4 well compacted patties. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Gently place the patties in the skillet, allowing to brown before gently flipping. Add the cheddar cheese and cook until melted. Transfer to buns. Mix together the sour cream and sriracha. Top burgers with sriracha sour cream prior to serving. 3.1 http://domesticfits.com/2013/09/02/tater-tot-burger-with-sriracha-sour-cream/ Copyright DomesticFits.com
Sriracha Sour Cream adapted from The Sriracha Cookbook. Buy it. Right now. For real.Believed to be world's oldest, woman in France dies at 122
Jeanne Calment died Monday of natural causes at a retirement home in Arles, France, where she had lived for 12 years. She was just 120 when this photo was taken in 1995.
PARIS -- Jeanne Calment, born a year before Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone and 14 years before Alexandre Gustave Eiffel built his tower, died Monday in a nursing home in Arles. At 122, she was the oldest person whose age had been verified by official documents.
Officials at the nursing home where she moved when she was 110 gave no specific cause of death. Calment, who had been confined to a wheelchair after a fall nine years ago, was nearly blind and very hard of hearing. She gave up a two-cigarette-a-day habit a few years ago -- not for health reasons, a doctor said, but because she could no longer see well enough to light up and hated asking others to do it for her.
In her last decade Calment became a French institution, regularly described in the news media as the "doyenne of humanity." Every year on her birthday, Feb. 21, she regaled reporters with quips about her secret of longevity -- the list changed every year and included laughter, activity and "a stomach like an ostrich's." Her most memorable explanation was that "God must have forgotten me."
Despite her faltering physical condition, Calment continued to show impressive mental acuity and high spirits. "I've only ever had one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it," she said when she turned 110.
For her 121st birthday last year, a record company released Mistress of Time, a four-track CD of her spoken reminiscences over a background of rap and other tunes. The retirement-home supervisor who brokered the recording contract was removed from her post after charges that Calment had not fully understood what was involved.
The French had their own theories about why she lived so long, noting that she used to eat more than two pounds of chocolate a week, treat her skin with olive oil, drank port wine and rode a bicycle until she was 100.
Longevity ran in the family. Calment's mother lived until she was 86 and her father until he was 93. But Jean-Marie Robine, a public health researcher who is one of the authors of a book about Calment, said |
are, what colors they might been seen wearing, because they have a childhood nickname or because they are seen congregating on a street corner with friends. Once an individual is placed in a gang database or has a set of FI cards, there’s no way out. His friends are also likely to find themselves in the database because of their association with a “known” gang member. A house of gang cards with a foundation built upon baseless stereotyping.
Thereafter, every crime these young minority males allegedly commit is deemed to be gang related. Prosecutors, whenever possible, attach heavy handed gang enhancements to charges against these perceived gang members, thereby subjecting the accused to severe terms of incarceration and/or penal supervision.
For example, in a current case of mine, my client, a young Latino male in his early 20s, is accused of participating in and committing several robberies with four other Latino men. Based on nothing more than their shared race, where they all grew up, who they spend time and communicate with and what tattoos they have, they are all branded by law enforcement as gang members. The prosecution, in turn, has accused these co-defendants, my client included, of not only committing the robberies, but also of doing so for the benefit of a criminal street gang, even though nothing about the crimes themselves had any gang markings. The robbers weren’t wearing gang colors, didn’t yell gang slogans and there was no evidence that the stolen money went to a gang organization or members. The gang accusation, which exposes my client to a dramatically lengthier sentence than if the crime wasn’t allegedly gang related, is rooted in stereotypes, that because a Latino male may commit a crime with other Latino males that the crime must be gang motivated.
Surely, there are some crimes that are gang motivated and should be prosecuted accordingly. However, for every one of those, there are countless other prosecutions that are not based on actual gang related evidence and instead grounded in assumptions and prejudice. Black and Latino young men are not all gang members, nor is every crime they commit gang related. If clients accused of baseless gang crimes are willing to forego plea bargains in those cases, juries will be exposed to the disgraceful realities of the racial and demographic profiling that are at the root of these prosecutions. Public defenders and defense attorneys must be at the forefront of ending this government endorsed racism and bigotry. We must demand that juries, and in turn, our communities, stand up against the stereotyping that is sanctioned daily in our country and courthouses in the form of gang prosecutions.
Editor’s Note: Sajid A. Khan is a Public Defender in San Jose, CA. He has a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley and a law degree from UC Hastings. When not advocating for justice, Sajid enjoys playing basketball, football and baseball, and is a huge fan of Cal football and A’s baseball. He lives in San Jose, Ca with his wife and son. The views expressed here are his own.There are few things that help one’s efficiency more than being good with his preferred shell. Many know of the! option within bash that allows one to retrieve and run commands from history automatically.
You simply start with a! and add the first few letters of a command you’ve recently run, and Bash will run that command for you. I don’t suggest doing this with rm commands, by the way. 🙂
thor ~ $!net
executes for me…
thor ~ $ netstat -ntu | awk '{print $5}' | grep -e ^[0-9]
So, yeah…pretty standard.
What’s even cooler, though, and far fewer people know about, is the ability to search through your history rather than having to guess with the! option.
Just type ctrl-r from the bash prompt and you’ll get this:
(reverse-i-search)`’:
Now start typing something you’ve run recently and Bash will intelligently search your history and autocomplete your commands for you, based on how recently you ran them. Just press enter to run it, or press escape to edit it first. ::Gwar guitarist Cory Smoot (aka Flattus Maximus) is dead. His band members found him deceased this morning as they prepared to cross the Canadian border. MetalSucks just received the following statement by Gwar mastermind Dave Brockie directly from the band’s camp:
It is with a sense of profound loss and tragedy that the members of GWAR must announce the passing of their long time guitarist and beloved friend Cory Smoot, also known to thousands of metal fans worldwide as Flattus Maximus. Cory was found deceased this morning as the band prepared for a border crossing. There is no word as to the cause of death and the members of GWAR are completely shocked and devastated that this has occurred. At this point there is no word on arrangements and the disposition of the remainder of GWAR’s current North American tour, nor are there any details regarding long term plans. At this point we are just dealing with the loss of our dear friend and brother, one of the most talented guitar players in metal today. We ask that our fans and the media be respectful of our request for privacy for those that have suffered this terrible loss. A full statement will be coming in the next day or so, in the meantime please give your thoughts and your prayers to Cory, his family, and all the people that love him. -Dave Brockie-
This sucks more than words can possibly express. Our thoughts and condolences go out to Cory’s friends, his family, and of course his bandmates.
– Everyone at MetalSucksFor many Minnesotans, no trip to Grand Marais would be complete without a visit to Sven & Ole’s, the North Shore pizzeria that offers memorable pie despite a pedigree that is Scandinavian, not Sicilian.
Now the Star Tribune reports the landmark lakeside restaurant will begin selling frozen pizzas; they're already available a few locations up north and will soon get wider distribution in grocery freezer cases.
The Cook County News Herald reported that the first frozen Sven & Ole’s pizzas went on sale in three locations in Lake County earlier this year and even the pizza makers were surprised by the enthusiastic response.
“We sold over 700 pizza in two weeks. I would have thought we would have done really, really well if we would have done half of that," Sven and Ole owner Sid Backlund Jr. told his hometown newspaper. "I was absolutely shocked by the response from the public.”
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Locals, tourists and hikers coming off of the Gunflint Trail have enjoyed the well-reviewed pizzas since 1981, but until recently they had to visit downtown Grand Marais to dive into the Sven and Ole pies. Soon, the small town brand will show up throughout the region, with plans to eventually make them available in Minnesota, parts of Iowa and the Dakotas, Wisconsin and possibly parts of Michigan.
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The Sven and Ole's Pizza Facebook page asked fans to name stores where they would like to find the frozen pies.
The brand will retain its North Shore cachet, but the pizzas won't be turned out in ovens in Grand Marais. North Shore Food Specialties, a subsidiary of Sven & Ole’s, has been created to sell and market the frozen line. The dough is produced in bulk in Burnsville, the sauce is made in Red Wing and the frozen pizzas are manufactured in Siren, Wis.
“I needed to find someone who could make a large quantity, but more importantly, keep up the high quality. The last thing I wanted to do was put out a pizza with my label on it but then it didn’t taste like a Sven & Ole’s pizza," said Backlund.
Customers will find five varieties of pizzas in the freezers: Mozzarella Cheese, Pepperoni, Italian Sausage, Sausage & Pepperoni Combo and the Uffdah Zah. Labels will feature the signature Sven & Ole characters and the crust will continue to be made with the dough recipe that Sid’s mother Betty gave to him years ago.
People who buy pizza on site in Grand Marais have long been given a free Sven & Ole bumper sticker, which has spread awareness of the small town shop.
In other pizza expansion news from the region, the Fargo Forum reports that the Wisconsin-based Toppers Pizza chain is planning an expansion in the Fargo-Moorhead area. The newspaper said the chain would like to open three stores in Fargo-Moorhead, with the first opening as soon as the end of this year or early next. Toppers has a dozen outlets in Minnesota but this would be its first foray into North Dakota.The 49ers return to training camp means that we start to get more pictures in our story editor. As many of you know, we have been stuck with a lot of the same pictures this offseason, with Eric Reid being the most notable example. We finally have some new pictures which is nice.
It took a few days, but yesterday, US Press Wire had a photographer at 49ers camp. In reviewing Twitter yesterday, it seemed like several national media were in attendance at practice, including SI's Peter King, and CBS Sports Clark Judge.
Although we don't see a ton of things going on, I figured I would put together a little photo gallery of some of the interesting pictures. Among other things, we see Jim Harbaugh doing some work defending a receiver, and also catching passes. According to the 49ers. practice report yesterday, Coach Harbaugh ran some routes on the day. The picture that intro'd this post on the front page was Coach Harbaugh defending Kassim Osgood.
There are two Frank Gore pictures mixed in there. They show Gore running a drill in pads and sweatpants. It's not much, but something about it just looks great. This tweet has me excited:
Frank Gore looks to be playing at a different speed than most guy- looks ready for week 1. Most under appreciated RB in the #NFL? — John Middlekauff (@JohnMiddlekauff) July 28, 2013
We'll hopefully have some more pictures in the coming days, but with the team getting today off from practice, enjoy these pictures. Speaking of which, 49ers.com has daily galleries of photos from practice. They do great work compiling their own photos, and I recommend checking it out when you get a minute.Woeful healthcare standards have prompted the release of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians’ first position statement on asylum-seeker health
The inhumane treatment of refugees and asylum seekers by successive Australian governments must end, and doctors should not feel afraid to speak out about their treatment, the president of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) has said.
Nicholas Talley said woeful healthcare standards for asylum seekers had prompted the release of the college’s first position statement on refugee and asylum–seeker health.
“Our fellows have been inside the detention facilities,” Talley told the RACP’s congress in Cairns on Monday. “We have treated refugees and asylum seekers during their detention and after their release into the community. These people are not numbers, they are our patients.
“As physicians, we are duty bound to speak on behalf of our patients – especially since their human rights are increasingly seen as optional.”
For almost two decades, the college had argued Australia’s policies for asylum seekers, such as mandatory and indefinite detention, breached human rights and caused significant harm, Talley said.
He told Guardian Australia detention had to end, and he hoped by releasing official policy recommendations targeted at both sides of politics, the government would act.
“Their policies are simply inhumane,” Talley said.
“Despite our advocacy to date we haven’t had the impact we feel we need and based on our fellows’ involvement in the management of children in particular, we are still deeply concerned that the changes we have advocated for haven’t been put in place.”
Guardian Australia has contacted the offices of the minister for immigration, Peter Dutton, and the assistant minister for immigration, Michaelia Cash, for their response to the policy recommendations.
Among many things, the policy document calls for the government to take urgent action to provide more rigorous health assessments for asylum seekers on arrival; better access to healthcare for asylum seekers and refugees in the community; increase support services for refugees; and to immediately end mandatory detention, which they say is particularly harmful to children.
My colleague and I who went to Nauru had nightmares for a week or two afterwards Professor David Isaacs
Professor David Isaacs, a consultant paediatrician who heads the Refugee Clinic at the Children’s hospital at Westmead, told Guardian Australia he had nightmares after treating children and their parents detained at Nauru.
Doctors were being left mentally scarred by what they were seeing, he said.
“The people there are in such distress and we saw children as young as six self-harming – I’d never seen that before in my entire life,” he said.
“Their parents were in such a state, they felt they had tried to run away to make their family safer and instead, they had made their situation worse.
“My colleague and I who went had nightmares for a week or two afterwards and we only went there for five days... we felt like we were party to some kind of torture, because we couldn’t take them away. All paediatricians who work with asylum–seeker children recognise that they are deeply traumatised by what has happened to them and we should do everything in our power not to make that trauma worse.”
He said putting children in detention increased the risk of psychological trauma and if the period of detention was uncertain, it created an “impossible” situation for families.
“We wouldn’t even do that to criminals, and it’s not right that Australia is doing this to these people,” he said.
Speaking to Guardian Australia from an infectious diseases conference in London, Isaacs said his peers overseas had been questioning him about Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers.
“Doctors overseas are just appalled at Australia’s inequality, internationally, our policy towards asylum seekers is seen like apartheid.”
Earlier this month, Isaacs told a Senate inquiry into allegations of sexual assault and conditions on Nauru, asylum–seekers’ living quarters were crammed, mouldy and provided no privacy; that women had insufficient sanitary towels and used clothes and material to soak up the blood; and that he spoke with one asylum seeker who alleged she had been sexually assaulted by a cleaner.
To coincide with the release of its policy recommendations, the college also released a video featuring Dr Karen Zwi, paediatric adviser to the Australian Human Rights Commission national inquiry into children in immigration detention.
“The evidence is in, the evidence is irrefutable, detention is harmful,” she said.
“The first time I went to Christmas Island [detention centre] I was deeply shocked. I was not expecting that children in an Australian environment would be detained in such conditions.
“If they feel safe and comfortable and the healthcare system allows them to trust doctors and nurses, the relief is evident.”MAJOR UPDATE: POZ Exclusive: A Day To Remember Win Ruling Against Victory Records
Update: A Day To Remember, Victory Records Court Case Postponed
Today is the day. A Day To Remember and Victory Records are meeting in a courthouse in Illinois later today in anticipation of a long-awaited court ruling on whether or not the band owes the label two more albums by contractual obligation, or if the court is satisfied in the band’s belief that they have fulfilled their contractual responsibilities.
A Day To Remember is “set” to release Common Courtesy on October 8, which is just one week away. The band is attempting to self-release the album on their own free of Victory, and the label is attempting to block the band’s release out of contractual disagreement. If Common Courtesy does not come out on Tuesday, October 8, it is very unclear when the album will see a release date considering the already lengthy lifespan of the ongoing court case between two parties.
Below we have an interview with Victory Records’ lawyer via Alternative Press’ most recent magazine issue, the original statements both the band and label issued upon the public discovery of a lawsuit, our original rundown of the lawsuit, and much more. Stay up to date on everything, and let us know whether or not you think Common Courtesy will come out next week!
A Day To Remember’s original statement on lawsuit:
A Day To Remember would like to make it clear that they did not announce nor seek any attention regarding their ongoing suit with Victory Records. This information has been public record since May of 2011 and they have no intention of speaking publicly or disparagingly regarding their disagreement with Victory. A Day To Remember will continue to release music for their fans and are looking forward to touring in 2012.
Victory Records’ original statement on lawsuit:
Recent reports of claims filed by the Victory artist A Day to Remember (ADTR) in litigation presently pending in US District Court in the Northern District of Illinois (a case that was just transferred from Nashville upon Victory’s successful motion based upon improper venue) have misleadingly stated that the principal issue in the case concerns the payment of royalties. The lawsuit, filed shortly after the band hired new management, is really about the band’s refusal to fulfill their 5-album contractual commitment to Victory and their newfound desire to move to a major label. Recycled and often apocryphal stories of misguided and unsuccessful attempts by a few Victory bands to jump ship from the label that put them on the map have one common truthful thread; they always end badly for the band. In those cases, the bands eventually seek reconciliation and often ask to return to the Victory fold after having been disappointed by their post-Victory experiences. Victory is confident that this dispute will be resolved to the satisfaction of both the band and Victory, and that ADTR will continue to deliver great music to Victory in the coming years. Victory continues to honor its commitment to ADTR by placing its significant resources behind the band’s current album, What Separates Me From You, which continues to climb the charts and meet or exceed Victory’s expectations. The band, in the meantime, has enjoyed the benefits of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in record royalties generated from their album sales, which Victory accounts for in full compliance with its contract. Victory’s job remains the same- work hard, sell records and abide by our agreements.
Original POZ rundown of the lawsuit:Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr
President Trump's top telecom regulator, Republican Ajit Pai, is preparing an assault on US rules protecting net neutrality, the principle that all internet content should be treated equally, setting the stage for what's likely to be a fierce battle with public interest advocates over the future of internet freedom.
Pai, who was chosen by Trump to lead the Federal Communications Commission in January, is expected to lay out his strategy to dismantle the agency's landmark 2015 net neutrality policy on Wednesday, according to multiple reports. A former Verizon lawyer, Pai vehemently opposes the FCC's rules, which he regards as a "mistake."
If Pai succeeds, he will deliver yet another major gift to broadband companies like AT&T and Verizon. These billion-dollar corporate giants vehemently oppose the FCC's policy, in part because it ensures that they can't prioritize their own online services, discriminate against rival offerings, or sell internet "fast lanes" to the highest bidder. The broadband industry has spent millions of dollars fighting the rules at the FCC, in federal court, and in the halls of Congress.
Open internet advocates argue that the FCC's net neutrality policy is essential for US economic growth, online innovation, civic empowerment, and digital free speech. And they're preparing to mobilize a grassroots movement to resist any effort by Pai or Republican lawmakers to dismantle net neutrality protections.
"If Ajit Pai thinks that destroying net neutrality is going to be easy, he has another thing coming," Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit digital rights group, told Motherboard. "Internet users will fight tooth and nail to defend our basic right to connect, create, learn, and share."
Activists predict that the expected surge of popular opposition to Pai's plan, which could face a vote at the Republican-controlled FCC as early as next month, will dwarf the 2014 uprising in which four million people filed comments with the FCC, most demanding that the agency approve strong net neutrality protections, which it ultimately did.
"People will see right through Chairman Pai's dishonest plan."
Many tech policy experts believe that Pai will propose allowing internet service providers to make voluntary, non-binding open internet commitments, a move that would effectively end the FCC's role as the nation's net neutrality enforcer. In other words, Pai may ask the American people to simply trust that companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon will keep the internet free and open for innovation and free speech.
Such a scenario would be like "asking the fox to behave as you let him into the hen house," former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, a longtime net neutrality champion, recently observed. The public outcry that would likely follow such a proposal could pressure Republican lawmakers in Congress to step in with a supposed "compromise" legislative solution, but they're likely to face strong resistance from Democrats, many of whom view such a "voluntary" industry approach as a non-starter.
"The only way to protect a free and open internet is with strong net neutrality rules of the road—not voluntary guidelines—that ensure businesses, innovators and families can use the world's greatest platform for commerce and communications," Sen. Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat, said in a recent statement. "Chairman Pai's proposal would put the future of an open and free internet in the hands of big corporations and the powerful few at the expense of consumers."
Pai's forthcoming assault on the FCC's net neutrality policy is consistent with the Republican "drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub" ideology, which has led to the elimination of consumer protections across broad swaths of the economy under the Trump regime. Earlier this month, Trump signed a bill championed by Republicans that gives broadband companies the green light to sell consumer data to the highest bidder, a move that infuriated privacy watchdogs.
Pai's Wednesday speech will reportedly be sponsored by FreedomWorks, a DC-based right-wing activist group perhaps best known for helping to launch the conservative Tea Party movement. (And also for producing a video depicting Hillary Clinton having sex with a giant panda. Seriously.) FreedomWorks, which has received funding from AT&T and Verizon, has long opposed the FCC's net neutrality policy, which the group claims, in true Orwellian fashion, is a threat to "internet freedom."
"People will see right through Chairman Pai's dishonest plan," said Craig Aaron, CEO of DC-based public interest group Free Press. "As they have before, they will fight back in Congress, at the FCC and in their communities. They will use the internet to save the internet—and they will remember where their leaders in Washington stood when the future of net neutrality was in jeopardy."
A FCC spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment about Pai's speech.
Subscribe to Science Solved It, Motherboard's new show about the greatest mysteries that were solved by science.Kena Betancur via Getty Images A federal judge dismissed four charges in the corruption case involving Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and his donor Salomon Melgen, but let stand bribery charges related to the senator's solicitation of super PAC cash.
WASHINGTON -- A district court judge on Monday dismissed four corruption charges against Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and his donor Salomon Melgen, but denied motions to toss out other charges including, notably, the senator’s solicitation of contributions for a super PAC.
Lawyers for the senator had asked the court to dismiss charges related to the $700,000 in contributions from Melgen to Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC run by former aides to Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that made independent expenditures to support Menendez’s 2012 reelection, which prosecutors allege were made in exchange for official acts.
The basis for dismissal offered by Menendez’s lawyers were the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United and 2013 McCutcheon decisions. Those two cases redefined corruption as only explicit bribery, excluding influence and access. The senator’s lawyers argued that this redefinition of corruption and Citizens United’s declaration that independent expenditures “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” provided freedom of speech protections for all “efforts to influence and obtain access to elected officials,” including any campaign contribution.
Judge William Walls disagreed, ruling that the charges related to the super PAC contributions made by a corporation run by Melgen and solicited by Menendez would stand. In his opinion, Walls writes that “the Constitution does not protect an attempt to influence a public official’s acts through improper means.” (Read Walls' decision here.)
While Citizens United may state that independent expenditures cannot lead to corruption, bribery statutes view the super PAC contributions made and their value in different, subjective terms.
“Notwithstanding the statement in Citizens United that independent expenditures have no actual value to candidates, a jury could find that Defendant Menendez placed value, albeit subjective, on the earmarked donations given to Majority PAC by Melgen,” Walls writes.
He goes to write, “Even if contributions to Majority PAC had no objective value to Menendez, they unquestionably had value to Majority PAC as an entity, and [the federal bribery statute] criminalizes corruptly seeking anything of value, even for another person or entity, in return for being influenced in the performance of an official act.”
So, does a judge ruling that corporate contributions to a supposedly independent group can be a corrupting bribe undermine the Supreme Court’s assertion in Citizens United that independent expenditures cannot corrupt?
Rick Hasen, election law professor at University of California, Irvine and proprietor of the Election Law Blog, said the “super PAC issue in this context is a red herring.”
Hasen raises the question of “whether it was possible to reconcile the idea from Citizens United that independent spending cannot corrupt with the concept that an agreement with a candidate to make a contribution to a super PAC can be a bribe.”
“They are reconcilable,” he said. “One can believe both things without contradiction.”
As Walls notes in his ruling, prior cases involving former Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) and former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D) held that a bribe can be solicited for a third party -- in Menendez’s case, a super PAC. Citizens United did not change this aspect of the court’s interpretation of bribery.
However, Walls' decision in the Menendez case may very well reveal that the Supreme Court was “either naive or disingenuous” in its Citizens United ruling, according to Paul Ryan, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that supports campaign finance reform.
“Judge Walls stated the obvious,” Ryan said. “This is something we’ve all known for years. It was predictable that when super PACs were created in 2010 that contributions could lead to corruption.”
Ryan sees a “silver lining” in the Menendez case and other possible future corruption cases involving contributions to super PACs and other supposedly independent groups: that they could lead the court to reassess its decision.
In its Citizens United decision, the court majority notably dismissed the evidentiary record of corruption and the appearance of corruption fostered by the “soft money” system of unlimited contributions to political parties because it did not provide examples of the quid pro quo bribery that the court now views as the only definition of corruption.
But the decision did state, “If elected officials succumb to improper influences from independent expenditures; if they surrender their best judgment; and if they put expediency before principle, then surely there is cause for concern.”
“Perhaps with an evidentiary record in a case down the road the court could decide that elected officials could succumb to independent expenditures,” Ryan said.
In this view, cases like Menendez’s could provide the legal building blocks for any potential reversal of the Citizens United decision from a future Supreme Court.New Zealand is in danger of another mass shooting, like the 1990 Aramoana massacre that left fourteen dead and the country stunned, according to an expert on illegal firearms.
Warnings of mass-shootings have been raised at a parliamentary inquiry about illegal guns following a spate of attacks on police, like the incident in Kawerau in March this year when four officers were wounded.
Waikato University professor Alexander Gillespie told the inquiry that 95 per cent of guns in new Zealand are untraceable.
"At the moment I have to register my car. I have to register my dog. But my neighbour doesn't have to register his firearm," says Dr Gillespie.
"There is great risk of terrorism and there is a great risk of lone wolf attacks," he says.
There's also an online market where people can buy guns in separate pieces.
"The problem is when it is sent over in bits Customs can't often identify the parts as a complete firearm," says Dr Gillespie.
ONE News has discovered that guns are recorded when they come into the country, when they go to a gun dealer, but there's no central register of where they're sold after that.
Also, police aren't keeping accurate records of every illegally seized weapon, says New Zealand Police Association president Greg O'Connor.
"Yes, there is a considerably higher number of firearms that were seized than were ever reported to the public," Mr O'connor told ONE News.
But gun shop owner David Tipple says its people who are the problems, not guns.In Sheriff Clarence Dupnik’s press conference tonight, he said that law enforcement are “actively in pursuit” of a second suspect in the shooting of 19 people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tuscon Arizona today. Six people were killed, including Judge John Roll, Rep. Giffords’ Community Outreach Director Gabe Zimmerman, and a 9 year old girl.
Dupnik would not name the key suspect in the case, but other outlets have identified him as Jared Loughner, a 22 year-old Tuscon resident who had been a student at Pima Community College. But Dupnik did say that the man had been the “subject of police interest” recently, when he had threatened “to kill” someone — though not Rep. Giffords.
The Sheriff’s office believes the second suspect arrived at the location of the shooting with Loughner, and Dupnik indicated that they have pictures of him. Dupnik confirmed in the press conference that the second suspect is a white male, in his 50s, and they do not believe he took part in the shooting.
“We have an individual that we are actively in pursuit of, but I can’t tell you who he is at this point,” said Dupnik. “Don’t know where he’s headed, don’t know who he is.”
Dupnik was asked whether there was footage of the shooting taken by the mall, but he refused to answer. If so, it would explain how law enforcement officials had images of a second suspect.Adek Berry, AFP | This general view shows the outside of the Constitutional Court in Jakarta on August 20, 2014
A bid to make all sex outside marriage illegal was rejected by a top Indonesian court Thursday, in a ruling that surprised many as concerns grow about rising intolerance in the world's biggest Muslim-majority country.
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Five out of nine judges on the Constitutional Court in the capital Jakarta narrowly rejected the push to criminalise extramarital relations, including gay sex.
The unsuccessful petition would have affected both unmarried heterosexuals and gay people, who cannot marry in Indonesia.
It comes several months after the arrests of a group of men accused of holding a "gay party" and a wave of anti-LGBT rhetoric.
"This is a victory not only for LGBT communities, it's a victory for common sense," said gay rights activist Hartoyo, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
"We live together as a nation and we must respect our differences," he added.
The court had been hearing a judicial review filed by Islamic activist group the Family Love Alliance that sought to alter the criminal code.
It argued that the influence of the gay community has been spreading, particularly since the United States legalised same-sex marriage, resulting in what it called "moral degradation".
Activists believe the US decision triggered a backlash in Indonesia, including government ministers publicly making anti-gay statements.
"Of course I'm sad... We know exactly the magnitude of this problem -- extramarital affairs and same-sex relationships," said a weeping Euis Sunarti, who was one of the applicants behind the criminalisation bid.
"Many people will be disappointed with this ruling."
'Seemingly impossible'
In its decision, the court said it had no authority on the matter since passing new laws was the job of Indonesia's parliament.
"The Constitutional Court cannot intervene in the politics of the penal code," it added.
But last month, the same court ruled that Indonesia's native faiths should be recognised by the government.
That ruling challenged a law requiring millions of followers of religions other than six officially recognised faiths to leave the line for religion blank on their national identity cards, limiting their access to public services, including education and medical care, as well as employment opportunities.
Still, some observers were surprised by the court's decision on Thursday.
"Just when you think this country is rotten, it pulled (off) the seemingly impossible. Hope is here," writer Alexander Thian said on Twitter.
Indonesia's justice system is notoriously corrupt and has been criticised for favouring religious-based arguments over legal reasoning in the past.
Gay sex vigilantes
Sex is only illegal in Indonesia for both homosexual and heterosexual people if it involves a minor.
However, gay sex is a crime in the conservative province of Aceh, which upholds sharia law, with those caught facing up to 100 strokes of a cane.
Aceh, on Sumatra island, began implementing Islamic law after being granted special autonomy in 2001, an attempt by the central government to quell a long-running separatist insurgency.
This year, two men having sex were caught by a group of vigilantes who raided a boarding house in Aceh.
In May, police arrested a group of men holding a party in two hotel rooms in Surabaya, Indonesia's second-biggest city.
Some of the men were watching gay porn and performing "deviant sexual acts", police said, charging some under Indonesia's tough anti-pornography law, which can result in long jail sentences.
Outside Aceh, Indonesia's current laws on homosexuality are more liberal than some of its neighbours, however.
In Singapore sex between men remains illegal, a holdover from colonial rule that is not strictly enforced. In Malaysia sodomy is a criminal offence and can result in imprisonment, corporal punishment, and fines.
Indonesia has often been praised for its moderate inclusive brand of Islam.
Still, the diverse archipelago's sizeable religious minorities -- mainly Christians and Muslim minority Shiites and Ahmadis -- have been increasingly targeted in recent years.
(AFP)poster="https://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201605/1094/1155968404_4877827170001_4877796009001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Reince Priebus: Trump's win ‘probably good for our party’ Reince Priebus: Trump's win ‘probably good for our party’
Looking back to when the Republican presidential primary kicked off in earnest last year, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said that he never expected Donald Trump to become the presumptive nominee but suggested that the billionaire businessman’s success is probably good for the party.
“You know what, I think something different and something new is probably good for our party,” Priebus said Wednesday on CNN, a day after he tweeted that Trump will be the presumptive nominee and called for unity against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. “Look, I don’t think anyone predicted what happened. So, look, we’re here. We’re going to get behind the presumptive nominee.”
Trump’s decisive victory in Indiana on Tuesday effectively ended Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, knocking out the candidate best positioned to stop him from claiming the nomination at a contested convention if he fell short of accruing a majority of delegates before July.
Cruz’s decision to bow out of the race was “very gracious,” Priebus said. “I was surprised, and it’s a hard thing to do. I mean, he ran a very, very serious operation. Just an incredible ground game. His delegate operation was unbelievable, and I was surprised. But now, you know, you’d have to say that it’s pretty obvious that Donald Trump is going to get to 1,237. But he’s got to do it, though.”Unemployment in the United States remains high, with the jobless rate hovering at around 7.9 percent.
In an interview with a local radio host this morning, Republican congressman Randy Neugebauer (TX) had his own theory for why Americans are unable to find work — he suggested that we give them too much in government benefits so they are too lazy to simply take jobs:
NEUGEBAUER: Well unfortunately Tom we’ve gotten to the point in this country where we’ve incentivized people not to work instead of incentivized them to work. With unemployment benefits going for as long as 99 weeks, we’ve seen food stamps in this country increase 40 percent in the last 40 years, so basically unfortunately, there’s not a lot of incentive for a lot of people to work.
Listen to the congressman’s full explanation here (the relevant section starts at around 4:50).
Let’s get something clear. The average unemployment benefits in the third quarter of 2010 was $295 weekly — about a third of the average weekly salary at that point of $865.
Neugebauer is basically suggesting that Americans are too lazy to seek work because they are living too comfortably on $295 a week.
Let’s also keep in mind that there are about four jobless Americans for every job opening, the main problem in the economy is a lack of demand that would create good-paying jobs. We need government investment in the economy to stir that job creation. We don’t need ill-informed Members of Congress running down the unemployed.All photos courtesy of the National Media Museum and Flickr
All photos courtesy of the National Media Museum and Flickr.
In the early 20th century, a British guy named William Hope rose to prominence in Spiritualist circles because of his ability to allegedly capture images of paranormal spirits in his photographs. Eventually, Hope founded a group of spirit photographers called the Crewe Circle. He and his cohorts went on to prey on grieving families who lost loved ones in WWI and desperately wanted photographic proof that their relatives were still hovering around in spectral form. By 1922, Hope was making good money in London taking spirit photos and working as a professional medium—even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame was a staunch supporter.
A string of skeptics exposed Hope's spirit photos as fakes instead of honest-to-god proof of the supernatural, and a 1922 feature in Scientific American mapped out the photo tricks and double exposures Hope and other spirit photographers used to make their images. Despite the naysayers, Conan Doyle stood by Hope's side. He even penned an entire book to make a case for the legitimacy of Hope and spirit photography and named it, naturally, The Case for Spirit Photography. Even after being unmasked as a fraud, Hope continued taking spirit photos until his death in 1933. Conan Doyle supported him until the bitter end.
Hope's surviving spirit photographs are now part of a |
bent out of shape; keep calm and keep maintaining the integrity of the middle.
Protect the Vulnerable
Christlike headship doesn’t cause abuse; on the contrary, it’s a powerful catalyst against abuse. It should go without saying that complementarians ought not be guilty of abuse personally. Spousal abuse runs against the grain of everything we hold dear. It is, to put it bluntly, the most un-Christlike thing a husband could do.
I’m not denying the fact that some wives abuse their husbands. Such abuse is sinful and should be equally opposed. But I’m speaking out against domestic abuse in which the husband harms the wife from a posture of abusive authoritarianism. We ask women in complementarian marriages to take the most vulnerable position in the relationship, which can quickly become a dangerous position when our views get distorted. The flourishing of the wife requires the husband to love her in a servant-hearted way. Therefore, we must be vigilant to call for husbands to love their actual wives, not just the idea of a wife. Husband, do you see your wife as someone to serve you or as someone to serve? Because we teach that husbands have God-given authority as leaders, we must maintain an extra vigilance against its distortion and abuse.
Raising the Bar
If we set our sights on avoiding abuse, we’re setting the bar far too low. Complementarians ought to be the most outspoken people against abuse. And we ought to keep watch most closely over our own churches to prevent it. Those in leadership must protect the vulnerable and go after the abuser with the full force of legal action and biblical zeal.
Egalitarians and complementarians have many differences to debate. Domestic abuse shouldn’t be one of them.A POPULAR Wirral farm will NOT be closing this month despite rumours suggesting it will.
Staff at Tam O’Shanter Farm have responded to rumours which claim the farm will close to the public at the end of August and move elsewhere.
Ranger Mark Robertson told the Globe he has been inundated with calls from people who have heard the news but he says it is a simple misunderstanding.
“We have a group on the farm Monday to Friday called Woodworkout Ltd – they are leaving the farm to set up at Carr Farm Garden Centre but it’s been interpreted that it’s Tam O’Shanter that’s closing and moving but that’s not the case.
“I am being inundated with calls and people coming in asking if we are closing as they have heard we are – we had the same thing last year when the council were withdrawing funding due to cuts.
“It took us a long time to get back to normal and we don’t want it happening again.”
Woodworkout Ltd provides supervised and supported work placements for adults with learning difficulties.
Mark added: “The farm will still be here and open as normal and run by a new group of volunteers. Woodworkout leaving the farm will have no impact on the farm and we wish them all the best in their venture at Carr Farm.
“In the meantime, every effort will be made to ensure that the handover of Monday to Friday animal care on the farm is as smooth as possible. We would like to reassure people that the welfare of the animals is our top priority through this process.”
The Tam O' Shanter Urban Farm is open every day from 9.30am to 4.30pm at Boundary Road, Bidston and is home to horses, goats, chicken, sheep, bees, turkeys, guinea fowl, geese, pigs, rabbits, ducks and cattle.by Rich Herschlag
We have never known more about others and less about ourselves.
How bad did this decade suck? Well, let’s put it this way. The damn thing never even got a name. Not one that stuck. The aughts never did it for me, nor did the ‘00s do it for anyone else, which is really saying something for a nothing decade.
But it’s worse than that. There is almost no mention of this sorry decade’s impending end. Saddam Hussein’s funeral was better attended. This decade is headed for a burial in the Potter’s Field of cultural history. You might argue that we’re still hung over from all the VH1 top one hundred lists at the close of the last millennium, but ten years was certainly enough time to string together a few clips of a doped up Paula Abdul stammering on American Idol and call it a retrospective.
This was a decade during which the Dow opened around 11,600 and closed around 10,500. Meanwhile, the national debt began around $5.6 trillion and reached around $12.9 trillion. Don’t worry, though. Lots of people got rich. Just not us.
This was a decade in which we all feigned surprise when the banks collapsed and feigned more surprise when they were rescued like Miss USA drowning in a lake. It was business as usual edited for television. What Bernie Madoff did was standard practice. He just did too much of it to too many powerful people. Somewhere, somehow, Bernie deserves a medal for distracting public attention from the fact that we sent in renegade U.S. corporations like Blackwater to occupy sovereign nations and act with utter impunity.
This was the decade of the reality show that bore no similarity whatsoever to reality. This was a decade that began with Kelly Osbourne popping Vicodin and ended with Jon and Kate Gosselin’s agents pursuing spinoffs. This was the decade in which the dramatic plot died and in its place was put an HD camera recording every inebriated trailer park spat, catfight, liposuction procedure, girl-on-girl hookup, and crystal meth factory raid cable producers could dredge up on Craigslist. We faded in on Monica Lewinsky and faded out on Tiger Woods.
The Internet wasn’t invented or even popularized during the decade. It just got better at selling porn. Sure, some of the other technological advances were impressive. You can call anyone anytime from anywhere in the world for next to nothing. God is on our friends and family plan, but we have nothing to say.
This decade our children answered billions of standardized statewide multiple choice questions without ever learning much. That same time might have been better spent going to class, but in the New World Order every right answer is worth half a school lunch. Quick—who is the vice president of the United States?
This was a decade during which a man with the equivalent of a sixth grade education appeared to run the Western World. This was a decade in which the political hacks who actually did took the “free” out of “free market” while pirating U.S. coffers like crack-addicted sexaholics in a Tijuana whorehouse. This was a decade in which the methodical thinker who replaced the Three Stooges in the White House was given eight weeks to recreate the Garden of Eden.
This was a decade in which Americans gained billions of pounds while Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, and Slim-Fast made billions of dollars. More athletes than ever had to pee into a cup, and only twenty-three men over the age of forty-five were able to get it up without a pill. Fifty is the new twenty. Unfortunately, twenty is the new fifty. We have never known more about others and less about ourselves. Money still can’t buy love, but it’s coming so close why split hairs? Vacant-minded opportunist shills are given five million dollars to put their name to books no one reads. We treat stem cells better than kids.
We defend our marriages against non-existent threats before destroying our marriages all by ourselves. Politicians make it in bathroom stalls and we get screwed. We take our GPS everywhere but have no idea where we’re going. We text, blog, and twitter other texters, bloggers, and twitterers, guaranteeing that when we perish in a Ford Explorer tumbling down an embankment, the virtual community will know exactly what we were feeling.
We are no longer world leaders in manufacturing, medicine, research, education, civil rights, quality of life, or life expectancy. What we are world leaders in is telling the world what awesome world leaders we are.
We are the world capital of disillusioned delusional drugged-out desperados opening fire on innocent people in schools, offices, malls, post offices, and public squares. We don’t call this terrorism. Therefore, we are safe from terrorists.
Of course, a decade is just an arbitrary designation of an entity we call time marked by a number of revolutions of the Earth around the sun equaling the number of fingers on two hands and neither beginning nor ending coincident with a natural periodic phenomenon such as a solstice or equinox. And it is, of course, not the decade itself that is to blame but rather the folks who acted poorly during it.
In spite of all the negatives, then, there is hope because we are in control. That’s great, because frankly I don’t think I can take too many more decades like this one.
________________
Rich Herschlag is the author of Before the Glory: 20 Baseball Heroes Talk About Growing Up and Turning Hard Times Into Home Runs (HCI, 2007). His other books include Lay Low and Don’t Make the Big Mistake (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and Women Are From Manhattan, Men Are From Brooklyn (Black Maverick, 2002).How we learned that Stripe alone was costing us customers
Like most of the tech world, we love Stripe for processing payments. The API? Great. The integration? Painless. Unfortunately, we discovered that going with an all-Stripe solution was costing Blurity customers.
People just wanted to fix their blurry photos — and pay us money! — but we were turning them away. Unknowingly.
We first got the inkling that something was amiss when we looked at the map of Blurity customers. Although there were many international customers — mostly in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — there were some big names missing. Germany, in particular.
We could see that many Germans were finding the Blurity web site and trying the Blurity demo, but nobody from that large, prosperous, technologically advanced country was buying. We chalked it up to a language difference, and wrote off as a fluke the fact that we had many customers from Spain.
The problem escalated when German users started emailing to ask about possibly paying with PayPal. Were they simply reluctant to use their credit cards? Did they have an aversion to buying anything on the internet except via PayPal, perhaps reinforced by too much time on eBay?
No. The real reason: they didn’t have credit cards.
Unlike people in the United States, where seemingly everybody has at least one credit card or Visa/MasterCard-branded debit card, that is not the case throughout the rest of the world. It turns out that credit card penetration is remarkably low in some surprisingly large countries. For example, according to payments company Adyen, only 26% of Germans have credit cards.
Users from those countries were practically begging to buy Blurity, and because Blurity supported only Stripe, they were getting the door slammed in their faces. That’s not good business.
After getting a dozen such emails, we decided that something needed to be done, and that something was PayPal. Though it’s clunky, expensive (1% higher for international with PayPal versus Stripe), and sometimes irritating, PayPal does have one, huge, colossal advantage: you can use it to take just about any form of payment, from just about anywhere. Also, its name recognition is hard to beat.
So, begrudgingly, we opened a PayPal account and spent 10 minutes adding a “buy with PayPal” button on a child page of the main Blurity purchase page. It went live on September 20th, and the results were amazing. Since we added the option to pay with PayPal, 26% of the purchases have been made using PayPal.
It’s hard to say how many of those users would have purchased anyway using Stripe, but based on their email addresses, IP addresses, and the prevalence of credit cards in their associated countries, my wild guess is that somewhere around half would have been lost sales without PayPal.
Though it seems to be popular in tech circles to hate PayPal, it has its place. For us, that place is alongside Stripe.Physical therapy student Curtis Demarce, 27 (left), spars with retired MMA fighter and coach Cody Krahn, 31, at a UFC gym under the watchful eye of referee Victor Valimaki.
Mixed martial arts has a reputation for being one of the most brutal and bloody of all contact sports, but the reality is boxing poses a greater risk of serious injury, according to new research from the University of Alberta.
Researchers at the U of A’s Glen Sather Sports Medicine Clinic reviewed a decade’s worth of data from medical examinations following mixed martial arts and boxing matches and found that MMA fighters face a slightly higher risk of minor injuries. Boxers, however, are more likely to experience serious harm from concussions and other head trauma, loss of consciousness, eye injuries, smashed noses and broken bones.
“Yes, you’re more likely to get injured if you’re participating in mixed martial arts, but the injury severity is less overall than boxing,” explained lead author Shelby Karpman, a sports medicine physician at the Glen Sather clinic. “Most of the blood you see in mixed martial arts is from bloody noses or facial cuts; it doesn’t tend to be as severe but looks a lot worse than it actually is.”
Research from ringside
The research offers a first-of-its-kind glimpse into the dangers of the two combative sports in Canada, and is the direct result of Karpman’s quarter-century of experience as a ringside physician conducting post-fight exams, which are mandatory in both sports.
In this study, Karpman and U of A Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine colleagues Leah Phillips, Ziling Qin and Doug Gross, and Patrick Reid of the Edmonton Combative Sports Commission, reviewed post-fight records from 1,181 MMA fighters and 550 boxers who fought matches in Edmonton between 2003 and 2013.
They found that 59.4 per cent of MMA fighters suffered some form of injury in their bouts—significantly higher than the injury rate of 49.8 per cent for boxers. Most of these injuries were bruises and contusions. But boxers were more likely to experience loss of consciousness during the bout (7.1 per cent compared with 4.2 per cent for MMA fighters) or serious eye injuries.
Boxers were also significantly more likely to receive medical suspensions due to injuries suffered during bouts.
Karpman said there is risk in any contact sport but that MMA, more than any other, faces a stigma from the medical community from physicians who see the sport as ultra-bloody and violent. As a result, fighters have become “an undertreated athletic population,” and these research results should help them understand the risks of climbing into the ring, he said.
“These guys do not get the respect they deserve for what they’re doing—or the medical treatment—because the medical community doesn’t want to deal with such a bloody sport with head injuries and concussions,” Karpman said.
Most fighters understand the risks they face before they get into the ring, but the research results do line up with the real-life experience of 14-year MMA veteran Victor Valimaki.
“There are definitely risks. I’ve been pretty messed up,” said Valimaki, who says he’s suffered just about every injury imaginable: broken bones—both feet and arms, an ankle, collar bone—a busted orbital bone, and numerous knee and shoulder joint issues.
“Most injuries happen during training. Injuries during an actual fight are superficial—typically black eyes, cuts and the odd broken hand,” he said.
Banning combative sports not the answer
Karpman says it’s puzzling that in a sport like hockey, catastrophic blows to the head can land former NHL players like Scott Stevens and Chris Pronger in the hall of fame, whereas MMA and boxing are vilified with frequent calls to ban the sport with little understanding of the true risks.
“I always say if you’re going to ban a sport, you need statistics. Just watching mixed martial arts twice on TV does not cut it. And even if you ban a sport, you’re not going to stop it. You’re just going to take it underground where they’re not going to receive medical care.”
The research was published this month in the peer-reviewed Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine.On the 50th anniversary of India’s 22-day war with Pakistan, we examine Russia’s role in the peace agreement, Shastri’s mysterious death, and why India agreed to end the war when it was close to a decisive victory.
In May 1964, Indian Defence Minister Yashwantrao Chavan made a visit to the Pentagon, the HQ of the American defence department. Chavan, who was trying to rapidly modernise the Indian military, requested the Americans to sell India the F-104 Starfighter – the most advanced jet fighter of that era.
Although the US had supplied the F-104 and the F-86 Sabres in large numbers – virtually free of cost – to Pakistan, India’s request was rebuffed in an extremely crude manner.
In his brilliant little book, ‘1965 War: The Inside Story’, former Maharashtra chief secretary R.D. Pradhan narrates what US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara told Chavan: “Mr Minister, your air force is like a museum. I wonder whether you are aware of the variety of aircraft in your air force. You are still operating with Hunters, Spitfires, Vampires, Liberators, Harvards – exotic names of World War II vintage. All these aircraft are only worthy of finding a place in a museum.”
McNamara suggested that until India disbanded that fleet, it was no use acquiring any sophisticated aircraft.
What the American secretary said was offensive – and true. Although the US did not offer any help, what India did with its antiquated planes and vintage tanks remains the stuff of legend. Pradhan says, “With that background, it was an exhilarating moment when some of those junk planes, such as the Mysteres, Vampires and Hunters performed brilliantly against Pakistan’s sophisticated F-86s. In fact, the indigenously built Gnat, a small beaver-like fighter, brought down several F-86s.”
The 1965 War remains memorable for two things. One was a monumental miscalculation by Pakistan. President Ayub Khan, egged on by his scheming and feckless Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, sent a top-secret order to his army chief General Mohammed Musa: “As a general rule, Hindu morale would not stand for more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and the right place. Such opportunities should therefore be sought and exploited.”
Secondly, India’s leadership – as it has done consistently over the past 2500 years – frittered away on the negotiating table what the soldiers won on the battlefield. Pradhan writes: “In a way, India’s leadership, out of its sense of restraint, fair play and endeavour to seek enduring peace and goodwill with the neighbour, seems to have missed opportunities to solve the problem.”
At the end of a bruising 22-day war, India held 1920 square kilometres of Pakistani territory while Pakistan only held 550 square kilometres of Indian land. The Haji Pir pass was also captured by Indian soldiers after an epic battle. And yet India surrendered everything at the Tashkent Declaration in January 1966.
Western ways
The US, which was embroiled in a bloody war of its own in Vietnam, acted mostly through the United Nations. However, the defining western aim was to see their satellite Pakistan get through the war without getting battered. This view is amply summed by Chavan, who wrote about British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s ceasefire proposal at a time when India had the upper hand: “I insisted on military advantages being maintained. The UK proposals look like a trap.”
As three divisions of the Indian Army were slicing across Pakistani defences and thundering across the Ichhogil canal to Lahore, Wilson sent a message to Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Ayub Khan: “Both governments bear responsibility for the steady escalation which has subsequently occurred, and today’s attack in the Lahore area presents us with a completely new situation.”
Wilson’s message implied that India was as much to blame for the war on the subcontinent as Pakistan. “Shastri more or less brushed aside that message,” says Pradhan. “Bias on the part of Britain would rule out the UK from playing any effective role in events after the ceasefire.”
Russian role
Russia, which was following the events with deep interest, maintained its traditional stand that Kashmir was part of India. Pradhan writes Moscow accepted the disturbances in Kashmir had been created by infiltrators from Pakistan.
Russia also backed India at the United Nations. K. Vijaykrishnan writes in ‘The Soviet Union and the India-Pakistan War, 1965’, “Support was available for India on some important technical points and objections India had raised,” he says. Russia supported the Indian position that the Security Council should only deal with "questions directly connected with the settlement of the armed conflict” and not drag in the Kashmir issue.
Fending off China was a trickier affair. Russia did not want an open confrontation with Beijing, but Moscow decided it would not remain a passive spectator if India had to battle on two fronts. According to Vijaykrishnan, during the thick of the conflict, India received a reassuring message from Russian Premier Alexei Kosygin indicating support in the event of a Chinese attack.
Sisir Gupta writes in ‘India and the International System’ that India was aware Russia would never like to see India humbled or weakened. “A strong and friendly India occupying a pre-eminent position in South Asia was very much a Soviet foreign policy interest. Notwithstanding the fluctuations in the Soviet attitude and the zig-zag nature of the course it pursued, there was throughout a broad assumption underlying Soviet policies towards South Asia, that India was the key factor in the region and that any policy which created distrust and dissension between the two countries was to be avoided.”
China got the message and backed off despite Pakistani appeals for help. Chinese strongman Mao Tse-Tung was reported to have told Ayub Khan that "if there is a nuclear war, it is Peking and not Rawalpindi that will be the target", writes G.W. Chaudhury in ‘India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Major Powers: Politics of a Divided Subcontinent’.
Road to Tashkent
With the US disinterested in the conflict and the UK showing its true anti-India and pro-Pakistan colours, it was left to Russia to play honest broker.
It was after some initial hesitation that both India and Pakistan accepted the Russian offer. Ayub Khan later said that Pakistan went to Tashkent as it did not want to risk a veto by Moscow.
There was another reason for Pakistan’s eagerness for talks. According to Pradhan, “The continued presence of Indian troops on the east side of the Ichhogil canal, facing Lahore city, was hurting Pakistan’s pride.” The heat was clearly on Islamabad.
Before leaving for Tashkent, Shastri – who was hero-worshiped by Indian soldiers – had promised his victorious troops that he would not return the land captured from the enemy after so many sacrifices. But after six days of talks, Shastri proved once again that Indians are bad negotiators. He gave away everything.
Was Shastri feeling the pressure from the international community? Most likely not, but perhaps he felt – like his successor Indira Gandhi after the 1971 war – that showing leniency towards Pakistan would buy its goodwill.
Mystery of Shastri’s death
If you were Shastri, you would dread having to face the Indian soldier back home. Hundreds of them had died while capturing the strategic Haji Pir pass, which if India had kept, would have forever nullified Pakistan’s advantage in Kashmir.
On the night of January 10, 1966, the diminutive Prime Minister but a giant among men died of a heart attack. It was his fourth cardiac seizure and was likely triggered by his anxiety at having to face an irate public and having to look into the eyes of his jawans – soldiers – whose hopes he had dashed.
There have been all sorts of conspiracy theories but the reality is that none of the major countries benefitted from his death. Russia had scored a spectacular diplomatic coup, America fully supported the Tashkent Agreement, and Pakistan was happy to get its land back.
That the Indian Prime Minister died of a heart attack comes from a most unlikely source. Shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalisation policies in 1991, Soviet Land magazine in India published an account by an ex-KGB officer.
According to the former intelligence agent, the KGB was spying on both the Indian and Pakistani delegations in order to find out how much each country was willing to yield during the negotiations. When Shastri started getting a seizure, the KGB was listening but decided not to alert his aides because that would give away their game and lead to a diplomatic showdown with India.
Prelude to Tashkent
Having dissected what transpired at the negotiating table, we need to discuss the prelude to Tashkent.
Although Pakistan was on the verge of being trounced – unlike in 1971 and 1999 when it really got hammered – India generously agreed to a ceasefire after repeated pleas from the major powers.
Why did India stop fighting when it had Pakistan reeling? Why did Chavan and Shastri, who swatted away western pressure and gave a free hand to the Indian military, cave in?
The problem was army chief Jayanto Nath Chaudhuri. The Kolkata-born general came from an affluent background and had become army chief purely on the back of family connections and pure luck. He was elevated following the resignation of another Sandhurst-educated general, Pran Nath Thapar, the army chief of the 1962 War.
Chaudhuri’s mentors were the Sandhurst educated British generals – who had utterly failed before the Germans and Japanese during World War II – and predictably he also lacked war fighting qualities. “He was so good on paper that Chavan often wondered how good he would be in warfare,” writes Pradhan.
Chavan mentions in his war diary that Chaudhuri would frequently lapse into depression. Each time the Indian army suffered a setback, the general would walk into the Defence Minister’s room, and Chavan had to give him a pep talk. Chaudhuri so completely lacked courage that Chavan often forced him to visit the front and personally take stock.
Pradhan writes, “On September 20 when the Prime Minister asked Chaudhuri whether India could expect to gain if the war continued for a few days more, he informed the PM that the army was coming to an end of its ammunition holdings and could not sustain fighting for much longer. Chaudhuri advised acceptance of the ceasefire proposal. It was later discovered in overall terms only 14-20 per cent of the Indian Army’s ammunition stock had been used up. At the moment of our greatest advantage the army chief’s non-comprehension of the intricacies of the long-range logistics deprived India of a decisive victory.”
In contrast, Pakistan had expended 80 per cent of its ammo. It had also lost 250 of its latest US-supplied tanks.
Chaudhuri was also criticised for his lack of daring. When the Pakistani cities of Sialkot and Lahore could have been easily taken after the dash and bravery shown by Indian troops, Chaudhuri told Shastri: “We must move with the caution and wisdom of an elephant. We will take them in God’s good time.”
In fact, when the Pakistan Army attacked in the Khem Kharan sector in Punjab, Chaudhuri ordered the Army Commander Harbaksh Singh to withdraw to a safer position. The commander refused, and what followed was the Battle of Assal Uttar – the greatest tank battle since Kursk in 1943. The Indian counter attack on the night of September 10 was so ferocious that by the morning they had knocked out 70 Pakistani tanks.
But what the Battle of Assal Uttar will be memorable for are the 25 enemy tanks found abandoned with their engines running and wireless sets on. It was the perfect metaphor for the plight of the Pakistan Army.
Had India kept its head, today we’d have a lot more to celebrate.
All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.In the year since the shooting down of Flight MH17 in Ukraine on July 17th 2014 there have been many different theories about who was responsible and the exact circumstances under which MH17 was shot down. For much of that time those theories have fallen into two broad categories, that either a separatists controlled Buk shot down MH17, or a Ukrainian military aircraft. Since the official criminal and Dutch Safety Board investigations have begun governments have generally avoided making any specific claims about who was responsible, but in the days after MH17 was shot down governments were making various claims. The US and Ukrainian governments both claimed a Buk missile was responsible, while on July 21st the Russian Ministry of Defence gave an hour long press conference where they presented their evidence of who could have been responsible for the attack.
The press conference covered four main claims:
That a video published by the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior showing a Buk in separatist controlled Luhansk was in fact filmed in government controlled territory in another town.
MH17 significantly changed course just before being shot down.
Radar imagery shows an aircraft close to MH17 shortly after it was shot down.
Satellite imagery shows Ukrainian Buk missile launchers operating on July 17th.
Since the July 21st press conference it has been possible to establish that all four claims were false, and in some cases involved the Russian Ministry of Defence producing faked evidence to support their claims.
The Luhansk Video
Following the downing of Flight MH17 the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior published a video that was filmed in the separatist controlled city of Luhansk, close to the Russian border with Ukraine, which they claimed showed a Buk, carrying three missiles instead of the usual four, heading towards the Russian border on the morning of July 18th.
In the Russian Ministry of Defence’s July 21st press conference they claimed that the video had in fact been filmed in a government controlled area:
For example, media circulated a video supposedly showing a Buk system being moved from Ukraine to Russia. This is clearly a fabrication. This video was made in the town of Krasnoarmeisk, as evidenced by the billboard you see in the background, advertising a car dealership at 34 Dnepropetrovsk Street. Krasnoarmeysk has been controlled by the Ukrainian military since May 11
To support this claim they provided an image of the billboard visible in the video, along with what they claimed the line of text read.
Unfortunately for the Russian Ministry of Defence it was possible to establish the true location the video was filmed using open source investigation techniques, which confirmed the exact location in separatist controlled Luhansk. This location was visited by a Luhansk local who took photographs of the area which both helped confirm the location, and what was written on the billboard.
Here it can be clearly seen that the text on the billboard is completely different from what the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed. This location was confirmed as being correct by journalists who visited the same location, including 60 Minutes Australia and Correctiv, who photographed a very specific piece of vandalism on the billboard.
MH17’s Significant Course Change
The Russian Ministry of Defence presented the following image during the press conference, claiming that Flight MH17 had been significantly diverted from its course:
The Russian Ministry of Defence stated that:
On the scheme you can see the international airway. The Boeing-777 was supposed to fly on this airway. Draw your attention to the fact that the aircraft followed inside the specified air-corridor to Donetsk, then it deviated from the route to north. Meanwhile the maximum distance from the left border of the air-corridor was 14 kilometers. Then we can see that the Boeing-777 turned back to the borders of the specified air-corridor. Nevertheless Malaysian aircrew didn’t succeed the maneuver. At 17.20 we entered the event of the aircraft rate reduction, at 17.23 the aircraft’s point blinked off on the radar. Why did the aircraft cross the border of the air-corridor? Was it the navigation mistake, or the aircrew followed the Dnepropetrovsk ground control orders? We will find the answers after “black boxes” and communication decoding
The preliminary Dutch Safety Board report did in fact answer the questions the Russian Ministry of Defence asked “after “black boxes” and communication decoding”. The Dutch Safety Board preliminary report in fact showed that MH17 had been on an entirely different course than the Russian Ministry of Defence had claimed, and had not changed course in the way described in the Russian Ministry of Defence imagery. A comparison of the Dutch Safety Board’s flight path and the Russian Ministry of Defence flight path can be seen below.
Again, we can clearly see that the Russian Ministry of Defence is making a claim that is simply untrue, and this is provable using publically available information.
Russia’s Radar Data
The Russian Ministry of Defence also presented radar data that showing Flight MH17, claiming “Russian system of air control detected the Ukrainian Air Force aircraft, purposed Su-25, moving upwards toward to the Malaysian Boeing-777. The distance between aircrafts was 3-5 kilometers.” Chief of Staff of the Air Force Lieutenant-General Igor Makushev was then invited to comment on the radar data.
“At 17.20 P.M. at the distance of 51 kilometers from the Russian Federation state boundary and the azimuth of 300 degrees the aircraft started to lose its speed obstructively which is quite distinctively to be seen on the table of the aircraft characteristics. At 17.21 35 seconds P.M. with the aircraft speed of 200 km/h at the point of the Boeing crash there is a new mark of the aircraft to be seen. The aircraft was steadily monitored by radar stations of Ust-Donetsk and Butirinskoe during 4 minutes period. Air control officer having enquired the characteristics of newly appeared aircraft couldn’t possibly get them because it is in all likelihood that the aircraft had no secondary deduction system amounted on it, which is put typically for military aircraft. The early detection of this aircraft appeared to be quite impossible because the air situation control is usually performed by radars working in a standby mode which detection possibilities at the given distance are over 5000 m altitude.
The detection of the aircraft turned out to be possible as the aircraft ascend it.”
However, radar experts were interviewed by a number of news organisations who gave a different opinion, with Dutch NOS news asking four experts to give their opinions. Comments included “it is really impossible for [it to be] a fighter”, “no aircraft was in the vicinity of flight MH17”, “it seems likely that the signals are the wreckage of MH17”, and “falling debris are the most likely explanation”. Again, another Russian claim that doesn’t stand up.
Russian Satellite Imagery
Russia also presented sets of satellite imagery showing three different locations, including two military bases and a field outside the town of Zaroshchens’ke. At one military base, the 1428, it was claimed images from July 14th and July 17th showed that a Buk missile launcher had moved from the base on July 17th.
However, it was possible for Bellingcat to purchase an image from the satellite company Digital Globe of the same location on July 17th, and compare that image to the images presented by the Russian Ministry of Defence. For example, large areas of vegetation visible in the July 14th Ministry of Defence images were absent from the July 17th Digital Globe image.
It was also possible to find historical satellite imagery of the same location from July 2nd and 21st of the same area on Google Earth, which confirms the vegetation had be cleared weeks before July 17th.
Patches of worn away grass visible in the Russian Ministry of Defence imagery were also absent in the Digital Globe July 17th imagery.
But, as with other discrepancies between the images, the patches of missing grass were visible in earlier historical imagery on Google Earth, clearly showing the Russian Ministry of Defence images were from weeks before MH17 was shot down.
More differences are detailed here, and images of the other areas also showed the dates provided by the Russian Ministry of Defence just didn’t match with publically available satellite imagery of the same areas around the same dates. In addition to that, the Zaroshchens’ke site, where the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed they detected two Ukrainian Buks, was under separatists control on July 17th and locals interviewed by Russian media stated no Buk missile launchers were in the area on that date, and no missiles were launched from the area.
It’s clear that not only did the Russian Ministry of Defence lie about evidence it presented on July 21st, but also presented fake evidence in attempt to place blame on Ukraine for the shooting down of Flight MH17. The July 21st press conference represents nearly all the information the Russian government has presented on MH17 to the public, and it’s clear that the Russian governments reaction to the murder of 298 people was to lie, produced fake evidence, and attempt to deceive the public, the global community, and the families of the 298 people murdered on July 17th 2014. The one big question that remains is whether the Russian government presented this information to the criminal investigation into the downing of Flight MH17.Release notes for Clozure CL 1.10
It has been a long time (something like a year and a half) since the 1.9 release. This release includes the typical assortment of improvements and bug fixes. We'll also try to mention a few of the major changes here.
Supported Platforms
Clozure CL 1.10 runs on the following platforms:
Mac OS X 10.6 and later (x86, x86-64)
Linux (x86, x86-64, ppc32, ppc64, armv7l/armv6)
FreeBSD (x86, x86-64)
Solaris (x86, x86-64)
Microsoft Windows XP and later (x86, x86-64)
Please refer to http://ccl.clozure.com/download.html for instructions on how to obtain a copy of CCL.
New in Release 1.10
Specialized types for (complex single-float) and (complex double-float), and arrays of these types, were added.
The bundled ASDF is version 3.1.3.
CCL IDE: Window > Wrap Lines to Window is now available on a per-window basis. (setf gui::*default-line-break-mode* :word) [before opening a window] if you want line breaks to be between words rather than characters.
CCL IDE: Option-click in close box of a window closes all windows of that class.
Platform Notes
On the Macintosh, we now require at least Mac OS X 10.6.
The ARM port now expects to use the hard-float ABI, and the lisp kernel will complain that support for the soft-float ABI is deprecated. (A CCL |
and systemic corruption, we propose the democracy of the proletariat. We uphold the right to open debate, factions and accountable collective decision-making within revolutionary organizations, especially our own. This means opposing bureaucratic centralism and working against the development of unaccountable caste-like layers of leadership. All disputes among fraternal and comradely groups and individuals are to be aired publicly and to be conducted in a manner befitting organizational discipline. Threatening splits to assert minoritarian vetoes over rank and file majorities, personalistic politics, lack of transparency — all of these are roads to degeneration for any organization. We reject secretive and authoritarian models of organization that are based on an unchallenged dictatorship of the central leadership over the rank-and-file. Proletarian organizations will either function according to norms of internal democracy or fail.
Communists support reforms that benefit the working class, while rejecting reformism.
We support fights for reforms that increase the living standards of the working class as well as reforms that expand our democratic rights under capitalism. This is not because we have an illusion that capitalism can be reformed, but rather an understanding of how the fight for reforms is part of the process through which proletarians better position themselves to become the ruling class. This means not having illusions about what a given struggle can realistically win while also promoting tactics that aren’t straightjacketed by the rule of law.
We support industrial unionism.
Against narrow corporatist trade unionism, we promote unionism that unites workers at the greatest possible level that do not seek to maintain a “peace” with employers. We encourage workers to join unions and struggle against the bureaucracy when it is necessary, also promoting forms of unionism that empower the rank and file. Unions themselves are a location of class struggle, where the tendency to accommodate to capitalism in the bureaucracy needs to be challenged by communists. We also encourage unions to become politicized and support socialism as an end goal. On their own unions are necessary but not sufficient.
We oppose bureaucratic and authoritarian models of socialism.
This means rejecting that the USSR and its various offshoots such as the People’s Republic of China and Cuba are examples of socialist societies or functioning proletarian dictatorships which serve as models for us to use. While no functioning communist society has existed, we point to the Paris Commune, the early days of the Russian Revolution, the German revolution, the Shanghai Commune and aspects of the Spanish Civil War as historical moments where the working class grappled with the task of forming a new society. While this isn’t to say past bureaucratic attempts at socialism had no progressive gains, the lessons to learn from them are mostly negative.
Organizing rather than activism.
Much left wing activism today is not about actually building working class power but rather hoping to “raise consciousness” through symbolic public demonstrations. Rather than chasing activist causes whenever they pop up, we believe communists need to put their energy into organizing institutions of class struggle and educating class conscious workers, building a base that can fight for revolution. Organizing builds class power while activism tends to simply be a way of publicly expressing one’s disapproval about a given issue.
Communism must address the ecological question.
With the growing reality of global climate change leading to increased disasters, addressing the ecological question is a necessity for the survival of humanity. Communism aims for a harmonious relationship between humanity and its ecosystem, as much as it aims for harmonious relation between humans. To address this global crisis, humanity will need to use scientific planning rather than be dominated by the irrationality of the market
AdvertisementsHave had the concept for this artwork planned for about half a year now and finally took some time off to work on it. The initial camera angle was quite different but I found that staging the image with three main objects allowing the viewer to view each on their own in relation to the others was an interesting way to go. In that sense the image can be split up into multiple sub images so to say with each giving a different focus and interpretation. That was my goal at least but I am not sure how well it comes across in the final. I'm going to leave interpretations open for the most part but my driving points were blind faith and the cycle of life. I'll leave the rest up to you.
Created in Blender 2.79 and composited in Adobe Photoshop CC 2017.This article is about forests in cities. For the general use of trees in cities, see Urban forestry
An urban forest is a forest or a collection of trees that grow within a city, town or a suburb. In a wider sense it may include any kind of woody plant vegetation growing in and around human settlements. In a narrower sense (also called forest park) it describes areas whose ecosystems are inherited from wilderness leftovers or remnants. Care and management of urban forests is called urban forestry. Urban forests may be publicly-owned municipal forests, but the latter may also be located outside of the town or city to which they belong[1].
Urban forests play an important role in ecology of human habitats in many ways: they filter air, water, sunlight, provide shelter to animals and recreational area for people. They moderate local climate, slowing wind and stormwater, and shading homes and businesses to conserve energy. [2] They are critical in cooling the urban heat island effect, thus potentially reducing the number of unhealthful ozone days that plague major cities in peak summer months.
In many countries there is a growing understanding of the importance of the natural ecology in urban forests. There are numerous projects underway aimed at restoration and preservation of ecosystems, ranging from simple elimination of leaf-raking and elimination of invasive plants to full-blown reintroduction of original species and riparian ecosystems.
Some sources claim that the largest man-made urban forest in the world is located in Johannesburg in South Africa.[3][4][5]But others claim that this could be a myth.[6] Tijuca Forest, in Rio de Janeiro, has also been considered to be the largest one.[7][8]
Benefits [ edit ]
Forest has grown around an abandoned rail line in the city of Yonkers
The benefits of urban trees and shrubs are many, including beautification, reduction of the urban heat island effect, reduction of stormwater runoff, reduction of air pollution, reduction of energy costs through increased shade over buildings, enhancement of property values, improved wildlife habitat, and mitigation of overall urban environmental impact.[9]
Social, psychological, recreational, wildlife [ edit ]
The presence of trees reduces stress, and trees have long been seen to benefit the health of urban dwellers.[10] The shade of trees and other urban green spaces make place for people to meet and socialize and play. The Biophilia hypothesis argues that people are instinctively drawn to nature, while Attention Restoration Theory goes on to demonstrate tangible improvements in medical, academic and other outcomes, from access to nature. Proper planning and community involvement are important for the positive results to be realized.
Trees and shrubs provide nesting sites and food for birds and other animals. People appreciate watching, feeding, photographing, and painting urban wildlife and the environment they live in. Urban trees, shrubs and wildlife help people maintain their connection with nature.
Economic benefits [ edit ]
The economic benefits of trees and various other plants have been understood for a long time. Recently, more of these benefits are becoming quantified. Quantification of the economic benefits of trees helps justify public and private expenditures to maintain them. One of the most obvious examples of economic utility is the example of the deciduous tree planted on the south and west of a building (in the Northern Hemisphere), or north and east (in the Southern Hemisphere). The shade shelters and cools the building during the summer, but allows the sun to warm it in the winter after the leaves fall.
The USDA Guide[11] notes on page 17 that "Businesses flourish, people linger and shop longer, apartments and office space rent quicker, tenants stay longer, property values increase, new business and industry is attracted" by trees. The physical effects of trees—the shade (solar regulation), humidity control, wind control, erosion control, evaporative cooling, sound and visual screening, traffic control, pollution absorption and precipitation—all have economic benefits.
Air pollution reduction [ edit ]
As cities struggle to comply with air quality standards, trees can help to clean the air. The most serious pollutants in the urban atmosphere are ozone, nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfuric oxides (SOx) and particulate pollution. Ground-level ozone, or smog, is created by chemical reactions between NOx and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the presence of sunlight. High temperatures increase the rate of this reaction. Vehicle emissions (especially diesel), and emissions from industrial facilities are the major sources of NOx. Vehicle emissions, industrial emissions, gasoline vapors, chemical solvents, trees and other plants are the major sources of VOCs. Particulate pollution, or particulate matter (PM10 and PM25), is made up of microscopic solids or liquid droplets that can be inhaled and retained in lung tissue causing serious health problems. Most particulate pollution begins as smoke or diesel soot and can cause serious health risk to people with heart and lung diseases and irritation to healthy citizens. Trees are an important, cost-effective solution to reducing pollution and improving air quality.
Trees reduce temperatures and smog
With an extensive and healthy urban forest air quality can be drastically improved. Trees help to lower air temperatures and the urban heat island effect in urban areas (see: 'Trees are energy savers' for more information on this process). This reduction of temperature not only lowers energy use, it also improves air quality, as the formation of ozone is dependent on temperature. Trees reduce temperature not only by directly shading: when there is a large number of trees it create a difference in temperatures between the area when they are located and the neighbor area. This creates a difference in atmospheric pressure between the two areas, which creates wind. This phenomenon is called urban breeze cycle if the forest is near the city and park breeze cycle if the forest is in the city. That wind helps to lower temperature in the city.[12]
As temperatures climb, the formation of ozone increases.
Healthy urban forests decrease temperatures, and reduce the formation of ozone.
Large shade trees can reduce local ambient temperatures by 3 to 5 °C
Maximum mid-day temperature reductions due to trees range from 0.04 °C to 0.2 °C per 1% canopy cover increase.
In Sacramento County, California, it was estimated that doubling the canopy cover to five million trees would reduce summer temperatures by 3 degrees[ vague ]. This reduction in temperature would reduce peak ozone levels by as much as 7% and smoggy days by 50%.
Lower temperatures reduce emissions in parking lots[13]
Temperature reduction from shade trees in parking lots lowers the amount of evaporative emissions from parked cars. Unshaded parking lots can be viewed as miniature heat islands, where temperatures can be even higher than surrounding areas. Tree canopies will reduce air temperatures significantly. Although the bulk of hydrocarbon emissions come from tailpipe exhaust, 16% of hydrocarbon emissions are from evaporative emissions that occur when the fuel delivery systems of parked vehicles are heated. These evaporative emissions and the exhaust emissions of the first few minutes of engine operation are sensitive to local microclimate. If cars are shaded in parking lots, evaporative emissions from fuel and volatilized plastics will be greatly reduced.
Cars parked in parking lots with 50% canopy cover emit 8% less through evaporative emissions than cars parked in parking lots with only 8% canopy cover.
Due to the positive effects trees have on reducing temperatures and evaporative emissions in parking lots, cities like Davis, California, have established parking lot ordinances that mandate 50% canopy cover over paved areas.
"Cold Start" emissions
The volatile components of asphalt pavement evaporate more slowly in shaded parking lots and streets. The shade not only reduces emissions, but reduces shrinking and cracking so that maintenance intervals can be lengthened. Less maintenance means less hot asphalt (fumes) and less heavy equipment (exhaust). The same principle applies to asphalt-based roofing.
Active pollutant removal
Trees also reduce pollution by actively removing it from the atmosphere. Leaf stomata, the pores on the leaf surface, take in polluting gases which are then absorbed by water inside the leaf. Some species of trees are more susceptible to the uptake of pollution, which can negatively affect plant growth. Ideally, trees should be selected that take in higher quantities of polluting gases and are resistant to the negative effects they can cause.
A study across the Chicago region determined that trees removed approximately 17 tonnes of carbon monoxide (CO), 93 tonnes of sulfur dioxide (SO2), 98 tonnes of nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), and 210 tonnes of ozone (O 3 ) in 1991.
Carbon sequestration
Urban forest managers are sometimes interested in the amount of carbon removed from the air and stored in their forest as wood in relation to the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere while running tree maintenance equipment powered by fossil fuels.
Interception of particulate matter
In addition to the uptake of harmful gases, trees act as filters intercepting airborne particles and reducing the amount of harmful particulate matter. The particles are captured by the surface area of the tree and its foliage. These particles temporarily rest on the surface of the tree, as they can be washed off by rainwater, blown off by high winds, or fall to the ground with a dropped leaf. Although trees are only a temporary host to particulate matter, if they did not exist, the temporarily housed particulate matter would remain airborne and harmful to humans. Increased tree cover will increase the amount of particulate matter intercepted from the air.
Large evergreen trees with dense foliage collect the most particulate matter.
The Chicago study determined that trees removed approximately 234 tonnes of particulate matter less than 10 micrometres (PM10) in 1991.
Large healthy trees greater than 75 cm in trunk diameter remove approximately 70 times more air pollution annually (1.4 kg/yr) than small healthy trees less than 10 cm in diameter (0.02 kg/yr).
Biogenic volatile organic compounds [ edit ]
One important thing to consider when assessing the urban forest's effect on air quality is that trees emit some biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs). These are the chemicals (primarily isoprene and monoterpenes) that make up the essential oils, resins, and other organic compounds that plants use to attract pollinators and repel predators. As mentioned above, VOCs react with nitrogen oxides (NOx) to form ozone. BVOCs account for less than 10% of the total amount of BVOCs emitted in urban areas. This means that BVOC emissions from trees can contribute to the formation of ozone. Although their contribution may be small compared with other sources, BVOC emissions could exacerbate a smog problem.
Not all species of trees, however, emit high quantities of BVOCs. The tree species with the highest isoprene emission rates should be planted with caution:
Casuarina (Beefwood) [Casuarinaceae]
(Beefwood) [Casuarinaceae] Eucalyptus [Myrtaceae]
[Myrtaceae] Liquidambar (Sweetgum) [Altingiaceae]
(Sweetgum) [Altingiaceae] Nyssa (Tupelo or Black gum) [Cornaceae]
(Tupelo or Black gum) [Cornaceae] Platanus (Plane) [Platanaceae]
(Plane) [Platanaceae] Populus (Poplar) [Salicaceae]
(Poplar) [Salicaceae] Quercus (Oak) [Fagaceae]
(Oak) [Fagaceae] Robinia (Black locust) [Fabaceae]
(Black locust) [Fabaceae] Salix (Willow) [Salicaceae]
Trees that are well adapted to and thrive in certain environments should not be replaced just because they may be high BVOC emitters. The amount of emissions spent on maintaining a tree that may emit low amounts of BVOCs, but is not well suited to an area, could be considerable and outweigh any possible benefits of low BVOC emission rates.
Trees should not be labeled as polluters because their total benefits on air quality and emissions reduction far outweigh the possible consequences of BVOC emissions on ozone concentrations. Emission of BVOCs increase exponentially with temperature. Therefore, higher emissions will occur at higher temperatures. In desert climates, locally native trees adapted to drought conditions emit significantly less BVOCs than plants native to wet regions. As discussed above, the formation of ozone is also temperature dependent. Thus, the best way to slow the production of ozone and emission of BVOCs is to reduce urban temperatures and the effect of the urban heat island. As suggested earlier, the most effective way to lower temperatures is with an increased canopy cover.
These effects of the urban forest on ozone production have only recently been discovered by the scientific community, so extensive and conclusive research has not yet been conducted. There have been some studies quantifying the effect of BVOC emissions on the formation of ozone, but none have conclusively measured the effect of the urban forest. Important questions remain unanswered. For instance, it is unknown if there are enough chemical reactions between BVOC emissions and NOx to produce harmful amounts of ozone in urban environments. It is therefore, important for cities to be aware that this research is still continuing and conclusions should not be drawn before proper evidence has been collected. New research may resolve these issues.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]Geoffrey Ingersoll I'll never forget that sound.
Afghanistan.
We had set up in line on this ridge when all hell broke loose. I mean mortars, rockets, small arms. The yelling and the dust.
There were the zips and pops, I won't forget those either, the sound of rounds flying over and beside you. I could see the impacts in front of us.
I'll never forget Cpl. Sedrick Hay off to my left, shouting himself hoarse, directing two machine guns, laying it down thick on enemy positions. Just a few feet to my right was then-2nd Lt. Mike Rhoads, a trained forward observer, ranging enemy positions with sophisticated binoculars.
Then suddenly, "zzzzzzthhhwp!" That's what the bullet sounded like as it entered right above his collar bone. Rhoads turned toward me, coughed, barked, "I'm hit!"
Hay jumped clear over me and a machine gunner toward Rhoads.
The "Golden Hour" had begun.Reassurances for workers caught up in botched nuclear power station deal BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Workers at nuclear power stations at the heart of a botched decommissioning deal will not be under threat, Energy Secretary Greg Clark has said. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/reassurances-for-workers-caught-up-in-botched-nuclear-power-station-deal-35568586.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/news/article35568585.ece/d8db5/AUTOCROP/h342/PANews%20BT_P-45f19fbc-0210-478a-891b-426b635ca855_I1.jpg
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Workers at nuclear power stations at the heart of a botched decommissioning deal will not be under threat, Energy Secretary Greg Clark has said.
Mr Clark offered reassurances over the future of the workforce after he announced that a £6 billion contract to dismantle 12 redundant Magnox nuclear power sites had been scrapped and a Government inquiry would be held into its "flawed" tendering process.
Shadow energy secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey said the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency (NDA) - which handled the deal - had "fudged" the contract, as the Government was forced to pay out £100 million in compensation over the bungled deal.
Asking an urgent question in the Commons, Ms Long-Bailey said the future of the NDA had been "called into question" as a result of this case and urged the Government to offer assurances to workers.
Mr Clark acknowledged that it was a "defective" deal with "significant financial consequences" but promised that lessons would be learned from the failings.
He told Ms Long-Bailey: "You quite rightly raise the question of the Magnox workforce, for whom this will be a difficult day.
"I am happy to confirm to the House that there is no question of the good performance operation of the contract, it was a question of the terms of letting the contract. Good progress has been made.
"The workforce that has been employed in the decommissioning contract will continue as planned and when the report is made available, lessons will be learned about the structure of the NDA as well as any particular procedural aspects."
The 14-year contract was awarded to Cavendish Fluor Partnership (CFP) in 2014 for the management and decommissioning of the UK's first fleet of nuclear power stations, including Sizewell, in Suffolk, and Hinkley Point, in Somerset.
However, Mr Clark said there was a "significant mismatch" between the work specified when it went out to tender in 2012 and the work that actually needed to be done.
The scale of additional work was so great that the NDA considered it would amount to a material change to what bidders were invited to tender, said the minister in a written statement.
It was also revealed that the NDA has agreed to pay more than £100 million to settle outstanding litigation claims by EnergySolutions and Bechtel over the original contract award.
Earlier, union leaders raised grave concerns over what the blunder could mean for the UK nuclear industry.
Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect union, said: "This is an extraordinary situation given the scale and importance of the Magnox contract to the UK nuclear industry.
"The public, and our members, will want reassurance that the termination process and uncertainty over the future of decommissioning will not lead to standards deteriorating or the loss of UK expertise."
Unite national officer Kevin Coyne said: "The whole contract process has been deeply flawed from the very start. This was highlighted by the High Court case which ruled that the NDA had failed to treat all bidders the same when it awarded the 2014 contract to clean up the Magnox reactors
"As a result, failed bidders EnergySolutions and Bechtel now stand to be awarded almost £100 million in compensation - a bill that the long-suffering taxpayer will have to pick up.
"The other big losers will be the workforce which faces a reduction in their pension entitlements. "
Engineering services firm Babcock, which holds a 65% stake in CFP, has said it will take an £800 million hit after terminating the contract
The contract will end nine years early in August 2019, knocking its order book and resulting in a £100 million drop in annual revenues for eight consecutive financial years from 2020/21.
Shares in Babcock slipped more than 3.4% following the news.For many years I put on a great show for the people in my life. Who I was at the moment depended on who was in front of me at that time. I was a chameleon.
To be honest with you, there wasn’t much that I liked about myself. So I was certain that if you knew the “real me”, you wouldn’t like me either. My need for acceptance and love would kick in and I became whoever you needed me to be. Actually, whoever I thought you’d like.
It was mentally exhausting, and being that way encouraged an extremely unhealthy lifestyle. I desperately sought to achieve happiness, but the end result was usually misery. On the outside I was smiling, however on the inside I wasn’t happy at all. I was a walking contradiction.
Have you ever experienced this, or something similar to this?
Have you ever felt uncomfortable in your own skin, or behaved in a way that was out of character for you in order to seek the approval, acceptance, even love of others? If so, this article can be very useful to you.
First of all, this has nothing to do with the people in your life, and everything to do with you. This is incredible news, since the only person you can change in this world is you. A very good starting point for change, in this area of your life, is to do a personal inventory of your character. Here’s a list of character defects and assets that may be helpful. Be open-minded and completely honest with yourself while making this list. Close-mindedness and dishonesty will only hinder the process of change.
After identifying what you believe is your true character, the second step is to decide what it is exactly you would like to change about it. Be specific. And remember, change is limitless. The possibilities are endless. You can do anything you choose to do.
And last, but certainly not least, the final step is to take action. Your character won’t simply correct itself. You must be open to suggestion, willing to do the footwork, and practice. Any persistent practice will undoubtedly create habit. The goal is to be in the habit of quality character.
What does “quality character” look like to you? This will be something that you individualize. What type of person would you like to be? Choose to be that person. Don’t become discouraged when you fall short. You’re human, we all fall short and make mistakes from time to time. Some more frequently than others.
The point is to learn from your mistakes in order to do better next time, if even just a little bit. Holding yourself accountable is a constructive tool. However, being too critical, or hard on yourself can be counterproductive. Self criticism can very easily become a web of negativity. Don’t allow yourself to be caught up in that web.
Once you have achieved a quality of character that you are comfortable with, you will ultimately feel comfortable with sharing every aspect of your character with others. You will attain a strong sense of pride, and grow to love the person that you are, as well as the person that you are becoming. The quality of your relationships will begin to improve and you will be comfortable in your own skin. You can achieve inner peace and true happiness by applying these positive tools of change to your life. I know this to be true because I did it. I am a walking example of this truth.
You too can have your “inside” match your “outside”. There will be a smile on your face. But more importantly, you will be smiling from within.
Photo by tash:)NEW YORK — Human rights defenders from Russia to Sri Lanka were themselves targets of vicious abuses in 2009, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday in its annual world report.
HRW’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, introduced the 624-page report by saying abuses against defenders of human rights represented a backlash by governments feeling the pressure.
“Attacks on rights defenders might be seen as a perverse tribute to the human rights movement, but that doesn?t mitigate the danger,” Roth said. “Under various pretexts, abusive governments are attacking the very foundations of the human rights movement.”
The report highlights the daylight kidnapping and murder of Natalia Estemirova, who investigated abductions, torture and illegal executions in Chechnya — most of them by Russian and Russian-installed Chechen forces.
Her murder came after a prominent human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, was shot dead in central Moscow, and was followed by the murder of two charity workers in Chechnya and the gunning down of an opposition and civic activist in neighboring Ingushetia.
Other countries where human rights monitors were murdered included Afghanistan, Burundi, Kenya and Sri Lanka, HRW said.
Authoritarian countries such as Mynamar and China also saw repression, while Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan were so abusive that “no domestic human rights movement can function,” HRW said in a statement launching the report.
In addition to violent attacks, countries including China and Iran used the disbarment of lawyers, faked criminal charges, or — as in Russia and Azerbaijan — libel laws to silence dissent, HRW said.
Sudan and China in particular regularly close human rights groups, while Iran and Uzbekistan “openly harass and arbitrarily detain” rights defenders.
Another government singled out is Israel where human rights defenders “have experienced a more hostile climate than ever before after documenting abuses committed by Israel, as well as Hamas.”
HRW also criticized the United States, saying that despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to close Guantanamo Bay and end torture, Washington is maintaining military commissions for some terrorist suspects.
That and “continuing to hold suspects indefinitely without charge or trial… (risk) perpetuating the spirit of Guantanamo,” Roth said.
He called for prosecution of all “those who have ordered, facilitated, or carried out torture and other ill-treatment,” he said.
Roth said the only hope for human rights defenders in dangerous countries is international support.
“Governments that support human rights need to speak out, to make respecting human rights the bedrock of their diplomacy — and of their own practices,” Roth said.
HRW also decried what it called a concerted attack on the International Criminal Court (ICC) following the issuing of a war crimes arrest warrant against Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, whose forces are accused of atrocities in Darfur.
“Instead of applauding the ICC for taking action to redress the mass murder and forced displacement…, the African Union resolved in July not to cooperate in executing the arrest warrant,” HRW said.
Human Rights Watch also highlighted:
— China’s “harsh crackdown” on ethnic violence in the Uighur-majority Xinjiang province.
— Cuba, where the switch from Fidel Castro to his brother Raul in 2006 “has had little effect on Cuba?s dismal human rights record. Cuba remains the one country in Latin America that represses virtually all forms of political dissent.”
— The Democratic Republic of Congo where the government and rebel forces were responsible for a “dramatic increase in violence against civilians.” The report said “at least 2,500 civilians were slaughtered, over 7,000 women and girls were raped, and more than one million people were forced to flee.”
— Iran’s crackdown following the June 2009 presidential election where “ordinary protestors and prominent opposition figures faced detention without trial, harsh treatment including sexual violence and denial of due process.”
— Iraq where “conditions in Iraq remain extremely poor, especially for displaced persons, religious and ethnic minorities, and vulnerable groups such as women and girls, and men suspected of homosexual conduct.”
— Israel and Gaza where civilians were the targets of military assaults, particularly in the intense Israeli assault on Gaza a year ago.Folks, I wish I could have the pleasure of telling you that what you're about to see is available now or even that it will be available in the next couple of years. Unfortunately, at this stage, this Seabird mobile phone concept, designed by Billy May for Mozilla, is just a dream. A dream, so beautifully projected in this video that it made me feel both sadness and happiness, inspiration and despair, awe and... well, you'll know what I mean after you watch it.
Without further ado, allow me to introduce Seabird:
If you happen to have 3D glasses, Billy May put together a 3D version of this video, available here.
What can I say? The amount of brilliance in this video is so abundant that I lost my words.
What do you, our readers, think?
When are we going to have the first phone to incorporate most of these features? 5 years? 10 years?
Who will be the first to deliver it to the mass market?
What was your favorite feature? (Mine was the detachable bluetooth/IR dongle)
Source: Mozilla SeabirdDiscovery of Quantum Vibrations Inside Brain Neurons Supports Controversial Theory of Consciousness
Is your brain connected to the universe at a quantum level?
The recent discovery of quantum vibrations inside neurons in the brain supports a controversial theory of consciousness.
If correct, it might lead to new treatments for many different conditions, it is claimed in a new review of the evidence by Hameroff and Penrose (2013).
The theory–which implies the brain is connected to the universe at a quantum level–was first proposed in the 1990s, but it suffered extensive criticism.
One major point against it was that the brain was thought to be too “warm, wet and noisy” for coherent quantum processes.
Recent evidence, though, from researchers led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay has found the proposed quantum vibrations inside microtubules within brain neurons.
These microtubules are components of cell scaffolding–they help provide our cells with their structure–that are around 25µm in length.
Other research has also found evidence of quantum coherence in living cells. It has been found in our sense of smell, in the parts of bird’s brains responsible for navigation and in plant photosynthesis.
Hameroff and Penrose explain that their theory suggests…
“…consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, ‘proto-conscious’ quantum structure of reality.”
They claim that their theory is…
“…the most rigorous, comprehensive and successfully-tested theory of consciousness ever put forth. From a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.”
They also think that the electrical ‘brain waves’ which can be detected by an EEG machine could be a result of these deeper level microtubule vibrations.
The restatement of the theory has produced a flurry of criticism in the journal where it was published, Physics of Life Reviews, but the authors maintain that their theory suggests…
“…conscious experience is intrinsically connected to the fine-scale structure of space–time geometry, and that consciousness could be deeply related to the operation of the laws of the universe.”
Image credit: MR McGillAfter President Trump signed the massive Republican Party tax cut, which includes the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to buy health insurance, he boasted that he had finally achieved one of his longstanding, revenge-fueled policy goals. “We have essentially repealed Obamacare and will come up with something that will be much better,” he said on Wednesday.
But Americans’ enthusiasm for the law tells a different story.
As the Trump administration grudgingly admitted the next day, 8.8 million people signed up for Obamacare’s individual marketplaces through the federally run Healthcare.gov website during this year’s open-enrollment period, almost matching last year’s total of 9.2 million – in half the time. (Another 2.5 million people signed up through 11 state exchanges, a number that will rise in the coming weeks, since the states allow people to sign up for weeks longer than than the federal government.)
That number counts as a remarkable achievement for the Affordable Care Act, considering the Trump administration’s multifront battle to undermine it throughout the year.
Not only did the Trump administration cut the open-enrollment sign-up period in half, from 90 to 45 days, it slashed outreach programs by 90 percent, and all but stopped advertising the law on television. The Trump appointees filling offices that normally push for signups were silent. And in October, President Trump cut off key cost-sharing payments to insurers, a decision that has helped contribute to sharply higher premiums for many customers in the coming year.
All the while, congressional Republicans were trying to repeal the law — though their efforts ended in ignominious failure each time — as the president and prominent voices like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan continued to insist, falsely, that Obamacare was collapsing, and the government used money it could have spent promoting the law advancing anti-Obamacare propaganda.
And yet, somehow, 2.4 million new customers flocked to Healthcare.gov, one million of them in the final six days of eligibility. Republicans’ continued efforts to take away Americans’ health care have made the law popular for the first time since it was enacted, and it now seems to have served as its own advertising campaign for coverage, too. (A concerted effort by prominent Obamacare boosters probably helped.)
Or maybe Americans are just sensitive to good deals. The vast majority of people who signed up on the federal marketplace receive subsidies — and in a perverse piece of irony, Trump’s efforts to damage the law actually made health care more affordable for some of them.
There was another significant Obamacare success story in 2017: Medicaid expansion. In the first instance of a state expanding the program via referendum, Maine voters overwhelmingly defied their anti-Obamacare governor to give health care to a swath of lower-income individuals and to open the door for more states to join in.
But despite the fact that public opinion is finally on Obamacare’s side, the near future looks no less dicey for the law than the turbulent present. For one thing, there’s the individual-mandate repeal, which may or may not throw a monkey wrench into the entire system. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that, without the threat of a penalty for going without insurance, premiums will rise for those who need health care the most, and millions will eventually be left uninsured. (The mandate will still be in effect for 2018.)
The Trump administration is also attempting to further dent the law by relaxing regulations for certain plans, the effect of which would likely mean fewer people with insurance. And the full-repeal effort isn’t over, either. After evincing little enthusiasm for returning to health care this year, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell quickly changed his tune, and some lawmakers are eager for another crack at killing Obamacare altogether.
Still, at this point, it may be foolish to bet against the law’s survival. The Affordable Care Act has faced two Supreme Court near-death experiences, eight years of Republican misinformation, multiple repeal efforts, and now a year of the Trump administration’s sustained sabotage. After all that, Obamacare has taken more than its share of blows. But it is very much still standing.Google vice president Megan Smith gave a wide-ranging talk this morning at the Women 2.0 conference in Las Vegas in which she discussed “moonshot” ideas and connected them to the work she’s doing at Google’s “skunkworks” lab Google[x]. She also suggested that we’re entering a third wave” of women’s rights.
Third-wave feminism isn’t a new concept, but it sounded like Smith is thinking about something more recent — this year, she said, feels like “the beginning of the third wave to me.” She suggested that there’s more discussion about the role of women and girls, whether it’s a conversation at the United Nations about developing countries or (as in Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, which Smith cited as an example) a discussion about getting more women involved in senior roles at major companies.
One of the keys to improving things, Smith suggested, is “visibility” — not just for women now, but also those in the past. She pointed to a new exhibition on female pioneers in science quoting The New York Times description: “Some of the women are famous, many not.”
“There’s been a lost history,” Smith said.
She offered her own overview of some of those pioneers, including Grace Hopper (who was instrumental in the development of the COBOL programming language), Ada Lovelace |
25 passes were with either the first or second touch, showing the Rowdies’ emphasis on playing quickly.
Nine different Rowdies had a touch on the ball during the build-up to the goal, with only Damion Lowe and Akira Fitzgerald watching as spectators. Neill Collins served as the primary switcher of play at the back, receiving the ball from one wing and quickly passing it to the other wing.
The play begins when Joe Cole intercepts a lazy pass from Toronto’s Jason Hernandez near the left touchline. Cole immediately gives the ball to Leo Fernandes and the Rowdies don’t concede possession until Hristov’s goal more than a minute later.
Of the 25 passes in the sequence, Cole completed five, while Marcel Schäfer, Darnell King and Collins had four each. Michael Nanchoff had three, including the key assist on a well-spotted opening to Hristov, who’s only involvement in the play was slipping between defenders and scoring.
Fernandes had two passes in the sequence, but perhaps his most important contribution was dummying Nanchoff’s assist and letting it run cleanly to Hristov, catching TFC II off guard and allowing Georgi to score his second goal of the season.If you missed the “Thinman” at Vapor DNA before it sold out, then go for the authentic, non-branded IPV3 Mod from Pioneer4You. This bad boy packs up to 150W of power and utilizes the Yihi SX330 V3 150W chip. Known for it’s reliability and strong performance, it handles resistances as low as.1 ohm, perfect for cloud chasers who want to sub-ohm with a regulated device.
Reasonably priced and enormously powerful, the Pioneer4You IPV3 150W Mod is top seller that’s offered by many vaping suppliers. Retailing for $150+, EcigAvenue has one of the best deals on the IPV3 for just $129.99. Apply coupon “ecig2014” for an additional 10% OFF. Vapor Beast also has a competitive price of just $138.99, and if you apply coupon code “HOT” you can take an extra 5% OFF. Purchase at EcigAvenue for $116.99 or get it at Vapor Beast for just $132.04 →
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IPV3 150W Mod features:
150W SX330 V3S module chip
Firmware is upgradeable via USB port, up to 180 watts
Variable wattage: 7W to 150W
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Output current of 40 amps
LED screen with white OLED.69″ display
Auto ohm resistance meter finds ideal voltage for any tank or RDA
Adjustable 510 pin (no gap between atomizer and mod)
Requires two 18650 Batteries
Pioneer4You recommends high 30A 18650 batteries for this mod
Aluminum body
Dimensions: 4-1/8″ x 2-1/4″ x 15/16″
IPV 3 Video Review by RiP Trippers:Top 10 Unlikely Celebrity Gamers You Might Have Played With
01. Robin Williams (Xbox)
Yes, THAT Robin Williams - Mork Robin Williams - is a gamer. And if you happen to like Call of Duty there is only a small chance that you have played with him, because, as he explained in a Reddit Ask Me Anything Session: 'Getting my ass kicked by an 11 year old is very humbling!'
While his Xbox is the go-to console these days, he used to be a major Nintendo nerd... He named his daughter Zelda and it wasn't a family name thing, he really named her after a video game character.
Describing himself as a gamer with a full-blown addiction, the funny man has been gaming for well over 30-years and has no plans to stop now.
'It's like cyber-cocaine; especially if you're online playing against other people. It's totally addictive, you get lost in the world,' he told Australia's Daily Telegraph.
These days if you are hoping to cross paths with Robin Williams online via console that's likely to happen in Need for Speed: Rivals or another sports title - though we hear he still gets in a little Viva Pinata every now and then...
Now if you are a PC gamer that's a horse of a different color. Mr. Williams is mondo-serious about his World of Warcraft characters - in fact he is well known for being an extreme PC builder who prefers to build his own overclocked and super-cooled systems.
He jokes about his WoW addiction but also about the reactions he gets from other gamers when he admits he plays the game. It seems that their first reaction is 'What? No, really?' Of course the answer is 'What me again! I dare you!'In 1993 Peter Steiner summed the entire Internet up in a single cartoon, that is as relevant today as it was 19 years ago: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
As an homage to Steiner, I've updated his iconic cartoon for the 21st century:
Michael Brutsch, the recently unmasked Reddit Community Moderator known as Violentacrez, has learned this truth the hard way: from a Gawker editor. I was totally prepared to revile Brutsch and his unimaginative, pathetic alter ego as a troll. I can't think of anything more wretched than a middle-aged man exploiting freedom of speech, exploiting young women, and exploiting the easily overheated and youthful Reddit community.
However, the more I think about this mess, the more I realize that Brutsch and his friends do not realize he is troll. Brutsch, and many men like him, are caught up in a misguided world where it's ok to hurt women, as long as you don't know them personally and as long as they do not find out that they are being hurt.
Here is one obvious fact that was lost on Brutsch, even though he is a computer programmer who should have known better: The Internet knows you are dog, a cat, or a creep. I'm guessing that many other men like Brutsch hiding behind so-called anonymous user names and fake online profiles might need to be reminded of this fact.
Even if you turn off your cookies and use Chrome's Incognito mode we, the people you are trolling, can find out who you are IRL (in real life). It's generally not worth the effort to "out" you unless you really get the right victims angry but it can be done. If you are political rights activist in a hostile environment you need to take extra measures. If you are just a man bullying women you should cancel your accounts and get a life.
Reddit is one of my favorite places on the Internet. I respect and depend on its community of posters, voters, and moderators for news and entertainment. I love Reddiquette (Reddit's code of conduct) and I read it over every now and then to keep up on one the most important expression of freedom of speech since the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence. Reddiquette should be required reading for every school kid on the planet. You should read it for insight in how to craft a free and open community without hurting people. (Like the HuffPost community.)
But I don't hang out in the parts of Reddit where guys like Brutsch hangout. In the back of my mind I realize that the massive audience that Reddit enjoys isn't driven just by enthusiastic supporters of Free Online Courses in Minnesota or Microsoft's refusal to install spyware on phones. It's very unfortunate that sometimes, what a large majority of men seem interested in is the most ugly part of the Internet. That's not my Reddit and yet men like Brutsch have taken over parts of Reddit and are twisting it's community into a boys-only club under the fig-leaf of free speech.
Reddit was not designed to be a hurtful place to women or any gender, ethnicity, culture, or persuasion. The community is in charge, not the Republicans or Democrats, not the principal's office, and not the HR department. The community uses tools like posting, upvoting, downvoting, commenting, and creating subreddits to bootstrap itself. Reddit was designed with the idea that most people, men included, are basically ok, and will do the "right thing" when all the votes are counted.
The online behavior of Brutsch and men like him violates Reddit's own community guidelines as expressed in Reddiquette. It's men like Brutsch who continue to transform Reddit's pages into an island of women-haters hiding behind it's community. If Redditers would use their powerful democratic tools to downvote guys like Brutsch who violate Reddit's principles the Internet would be a safer place for women.
Here is a list of Reddiquette "Don'ts" that Brutsch, and other manly users of Reddit like him, break on a daily basis:
Don't post someone's personal information. A woman's image can be used to identify her and therefore the image is her personal information. Even blurry images or below the neck images contain recognizable elements that can be associated with a particular person. At least get the woman's permission before you post.
Don't editorialize or sensationalize your submission title. It should be clear to anyone that a subreddit entitled "jailbait" is both editorialized and sensationalized. A more factual title would be "technically legal images of scantily clad female minors posted without their or their parents' permission."
Don't ask people to troll others on reddit. Posting images that exploit women is an invitation to men to troll these women. Whether the images are of real women, or photorealistic synthetic images that could be real women, the trolling is always real.
Don't insult others. Posting images of women without their permission or knowledge just so men can ogle them is an insult, or worse, to women. If you don't believe me: Ask a woman what she is going to do about this kind of thing.
Don't troll. Creating subreddits to "enrage redditers" as Brutsch admits to doing (as in "I'm not a racist, I'm just doing it for'reddit karma'") is a great definition of trolling.October 10th edit: Obviously I was 100% right and we have full confirmation that everyone who ever claimed Sarah’s logs were ‘hacked’ is a liar. More info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3lnxd7/twitter_staff_side_with_izzy_who_lied_about/
Proof of Sarah Nyberg pedophilia goes far beyond the supposedly “””hacked”””/””fake””” chat logs
https://twitter.com/jefrouner/status/643148032133873665 A Cracked writer just sent a picture of his child to Sarah Nyberg to “make her feel better” in the face of the Gamergate “harassment”. The tweet is not ironic or a joke; these people are real and they truly are this horrible. I’ve fucking had enough; mainstream journalists, comedians and a whole slew of other people are covering up some of the creepiest fucking shit I’ve ever seen.
“BUT I DON’T BELIEVE THE CHAT LOGS!!! THEY WERE HACKED AND EDITED!!!!”
I’m going to make this as simple as possible so that even the dumbest motherfuckers can understand it.
First, Sarah’s Something Awful avatar is of a little girl:
Reverse image searching it, we find other places where that image is found on. Oh my, are those… pedophile forums?
But hey, it only gets better from here. Here is a thread Sarah posted on the transgender advice subforum of a webcomic:
We know that this thread is not newer than 2007, because that was when Sarah last visited the Venus Envy forums. Click the name and, as of now, you get this: https://archive.is/AzRdk
Someone called Sarah out on pedophilia, citing things she typed, ***by her own admission as seen in the above post***, “in the #venusenvy chat”:
“[03:11] <retrogradesnowcone> I’m attracted to (usually) about 6 to 12. been attracted to as low as 4 but that’s atypical”
“[01:57] <retrogradesnowcone> ;-;; this is making me miss my lgf
[01:57] <deaincaelo> lgf?
[01:57] <retrogradesnowcone> little girl friend.”
Remember the “lgf” acronym, as it will prove important later. Also, note that she did not even try to deny the validity of the quotes.
“BUT HOW DO WE KNOW SARAH NYBERG FROM FFSHRINE IS SARAH BUTTS???????”
Because Sarah admitted it, you fucking idiot:
https://tweetsave.com/srhbutts/status/566154926728814592
https://tweetsave.com/srhbutts/status/562847584512126976
“BUT I STILL DON’T BELIEVE IT! What if someone tried to frame her with pedophilia???”
Okay, check this shit out:
Another line from Sarah, in the same post:
“couldn’t it be that children that had a positive, fulfilling, non-abusive sexual relationship with an adult as a child are more likely to realize such relationships are not inherently abusive, and be more likely to admit they’re attracted to kids (either to themselves or others)?”
“N…NO!!! IT’S ALL A LIE!!!!! A CONSPIRACY DATING BACK TO 2006! I’m literally, LITERALLY SHAKING AT YOUR BIGOTRY!!!!!!!!!!”
Oh what’s that? An archive of the FFshrine Galbadia Hotel front page, Butts’ site, STRAIGHT FROM 2006?
Hmm, is that a chat snapshot at the bottom? I wonder what it says…
“ [00:18] <firion> I’m in heaven
[00:19] <Apollo> heaven is a lovely place!
[00:20] <firion> lol
[00:20] <Sarah> thank heaven for little girls
[00:20] <Myra> lol sarah
[00:20] <firion> I can finally complete my collection of FF music
[00:20] <firion> :D
[00:20] Action: firion dances
[00:20] <Apollo> :o
[00:20] <Myra> you sure have a lot to thank for
[00:20] <firion> where has this room been all my life
[00:20] <Sarah> I only see my lgf like a few times a year ;(
[00:20] <firion> lol
[00:21] <Magere> Sarah, figured out when you are visiting her yet?
[00:21] <Sarah> at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I’d tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly!”
Is that… the “lgf” abbreviation, AGAIN?
First, read this, as this person explained it better than me. https://archive.is/7oxnd
Second: Sarah has over a thousand fucking posts on these goddamn forums. A GODDAMN THOUSAND. Why would someone go so far to frame a complete nobody as early as 2006, stop caring for nearly a decade, then come back to it out of the fucking blue? And if that were the case, why is Sarah NOT saying that it’s one big conspiracy, and that the forum posts and all that are fake? Why is she, instead, favoriting tweets that link to articles written by her Twitter friends that willfully LIE about the chats to defend her and try to fabricate “proof” that the accusers are lying, as proven here? https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3krhu0/sarah_favorites_tweets_linking_to_idledillettante/?
What’s more likely? That supporting Izzy and @idledillettante’s suspicious, scummy, lying behavior is all a coincidence? That someone, back in 2006, made over 1000 thousand posts on a forum so they could frame someone for pedophilia in one post? That this conspiracy lasted for NINE YEARS, and also involved people writing pages upon pages of pedo chat logs to then hack and insert into the FFshrine logs? Or that maybe, just MAYBE, you should not send pictures of your fucking children to Sarah?
“BUT… SARAH WAS JUST A LITTLE BABY BACK IN 2005–06! A WEE LIL BABY! It wasn’t pedophilia if a child wanted to fuck a child… surely???”
Yes, Butts WAS a teen when she made those 2005 pedo posts. I won’t deny this. HOWEVER, she was NINEteen. A legal adult. How do we know this?
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/how-much-traffic-do-i-need-for-adsense.922/page-2 Sarah posting about her website, FFshrine, in 2006
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/whos-the-youngest-on-dp.50299/page-15 Sarah saying she’s 20 in 2006
“BUT WHAT IF ‘disgust’ IS NOT SARAH??? What if it’s another FFshrine admin???”
http://www.last.fm/user/disgust “Sarah Nyberg”
“BUT WHAT IF A BIGOT TROLL EDITED THEIR LASTFM ACCOUNT??????? YOU’RE LYING!!!!!!!!”
https://web.archive.org/web/20070527022137/http://www.last.fm/user/disgust/
“ffshrine.org”
“Female, 21”
QED, bitch.At least seven of the Obama campaign’s 35 co-chairs are Jewish, including Alan Solow, a leading figure in the organized community.
Solow is identified on the list released early Wednesday morning as both a partner at the DLA Piper law firm and as a past president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
“My appointment is a reflection of the importance he places on reaching out to Americans of all types,” Solow told JTA from Israel, where he is on a Presidents Conference tour. “The Jewish constituency is an important part of the American community. It is important in electoral politics and has been a mainstay of the Democratic Party.”
Solow said his role will be to make Obama’s case to the Jewish community on domestic and foreign issues; Solow will accompany the president when he speaks at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual policy conference on March 4.
The speech comes as the White House and the Obama campaign have intensified outreach to the pro-Israel community. The early years of Obama’s relationship with Israel and pro-Israel groups were marked by tensions over his pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze settlement building, although more recently there has been close cooperation on defense strategies, particularly on confronting and isolating Iran.
Solow said he would also relay concerns back to the campaign.
“It’s always important for the president to have a good sense of what’s going on on behalf of voters of all different types,” he said. “We’ll advocate for the president, and we will listen and share that.”
Other prominent Jews on the list include:
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com who has been listed on the Forbes 400 richest Americans;
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), whose mother is a Holocaust survivor and who identifies himself as of Jewish descent;
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff who acted as a liaison in that post to the Jewish community;
Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), a prominent civil rights liberal who likely will be tapped to make Obama’s case to a Democratic Party constituency disappointed by Obama’s retention of anti-terrorism practices introduced by his predecessor;
Penny Pritzker, the hotel heiress and Forbes listee who has backed Obama since the launch of his political career in the 1990s;
U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who represents a Chicago-area constituency with a substantial Jewish population and a backer of Obama for nearly a decade.
The list represents the campaign’s efforts to reflect the Democrats’ natural constituencies, including Hispanic, Asian-American and African-American political leaders and celebrities, as well as clergy, military, former Republicans and labor figures. Many of the co-chairs are from swing states.
This story "Many Jews Serve as Obama Campaign Chairs" was written by JTA.WALDO, Maine — A cord and a half of firewood destined to warm the homes of needy Waldo County residents was stolen Monday, according to Bob MacGregor of the Waldo County Woodshed.
The $400 or so worth of clean, split ash was going to be divided among more than eight families to get them through the week, he said Monday evening.
“We’ve raised $2,500. Gone through the whole process of incorporating as a nonprofit. We’ve bought 15 cords of wood to hand out. Now, we’re back to square one,” MacGregor said. “Anybody who would go in and take two pickup truck loads of work was not working with us. They’re working against us.”
He said he discovered the theft at 3:30 p.m. Monday. He had brought the wood on Saturday to the private land in Waldo where the landowner is allowing the nonprofit to store its firewood, and it was covered with more than 8 inches of snow from the snowstorm that night.
MacGregor said the landowner saw a bearded man and a woman come by Monday in a beat-up black GMC pickup truck, making two trips to load the vehicle with firewood. The landowner assumed the duo was there legitimately and did not suspect they were stealing the firewood.
“It had to be someone who knew the wood was there,” MacGregor wrote on the nonprofit’s Facebook page. “It isn’t visible from the road and it was under eight inches of new snow … Words cannot express my disgust and disappointment tonight. Who does something this low?”
He reported the theft of what he described as the “prettiest firewood in Waldo County” to the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office.
To reach a police official regarding the firewood theft, call 338-2040. For information about the Waldo County Woodshed, visit www.waldocountywoodshed.org or call 338-4377.Jacques Demarthon, AFP | French right-wing Les Republicains (LR) party newly-elected President, Laurent Wauquiez reacts after the results' announcement on December 10, 2017 at le Tripot Regnier bar in Paris.
Demoralised and divided, France's traditional centre-right party is expected to move closer to the far-right on Sunday after picking a tough-talking devout Catholic as its new leader to take on centrist President Emmanuel Macron.
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The Republicans party, which represents the dominant conservative force in post-war French politics, turned to Laurent Wauquiez as it looks to recover from a disastrous year.
The 42-year-old gained 74.6 percent of the Sunday's vote, outstripping his two rivals as widely expected.
"This evening is the start of a new era for the right," Wauquiez said after the results were announced.
"We will reinvent, we will rebuild everything," he said. "The message is unambiguous. Yes, we can say the right has returned."
The emergence of Wauquiez is the latest act in the redrawing of France's political map sparked by Macron's victory this year at the head of his new centrist Republic on the Move party.
Wauquiez holds hardline positions on French identity, security and immigration which are close to the far-right, leading the National Front (FN) and its leader Marine Le Pen to offer an alliance last month.
"He had the chance to put an end to this right wing which doesn't defend the French people. He refused our outstretched hand. It's a shame," FN vice-president Nicolas Bay said on Sunday.
Wauquiez, leader of the southeastern Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region and a former mayor, MP and minister, has also pledged to fight the "waste of public funds."
Some 230,000 Republicans were eligible to vote for their choice to take over from ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy.
'Truly rightwing'
The Republicans -- one of the two traditional parties of government in France along with the Socialists -- were widely tipped to win the presidency and parliament at the start of the year before being eclipsed by Macron.
The 39-year-old leader ran as an independent in the presidential election in April and May and was given a clear path to victory by a major scandal over fake jobs that engulfed the Republicans candidate, former premier Francois Fillon.
Macron also gambled that angry voters wanted fresh faces and saw an opportunity to restructure political life with his Republic on the Move party in the centre, which would then push the left and right into more hardline positions.
Wauquiez's victory will see his prophecy come true to a large extent, with the Republicans clearly shifting their political positioning, while the Socialists have been outshone by a new hard-left party, France Unbowed.
The Republicans remain the biggest opposition in parliament with 100 lawmakers, but they have splintered into two groups: one which backs Macron's pro-business and pro-European agenda, and the other which is broadly behind Wauquiez.
"By running after the National Front, we will end up giving the far-right power," Franck Riester, a former Republicans lawmaker who has broken away from the party, said recently.
The boyish but grey-haired Wauquiez who is from the eastern city of Lyon was elected an MP for the first time aged 29 and became a junior minister in his early thirties under Sarkozy's rightwing presidency from 2007-2012.
He has promised to bring the party together but he sees the solution as making the Republicans "truly rightwing" on immigration, security and sovereignty.
(AFP)Congress was supposed to extend the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) by Oct. 1. As regular readers know, that was the day current funding for the program, which has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support, expired. That was exactly two months ago. As things stand, there is no solution and Republicans don’t appear to be working on one.
Last night, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), an ardent CHIP proponent, urged Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who helped write the original CHIP legislation before moving sharply to the right, to restore funding for the program before families get hurt. Daily Kos flagged this striking clip from the Senate floor.
For those who can’t watch clips online, this was the case from the Utah Republican:
“[L]et me tell you something: we’re going to do CHIP. There’s no question about it in my mind. It’s got to be done the right way. But we, the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore.”
Hatch went on to condemn the idea of “more and more spending.” After praising the “terrific job” CHIP has done for families who need help, he immediately added, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves – won’t lift a finger – and expect the federal government to do everything.”
The context for the exchange between Hatch and Brown was quite extraordinary: this happened on the Senate floor during a debate over the Republican tax plan.
In other words, Orrin Hatch was trying to pass a massive series of tax cuts, the vast majority of which will benefit large corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthy. What’s more, as the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell recently explained, The Republican tax bill is often described as being weighted toward ‘the rich.’ But that’s not the full story. It’s actually weighted toward the loafer, the freeloader, the heir, the passive investor who spends his time yachting and charity-balling. In short: the idle rich.”
The price tag for the GOP tax plan is roughly $1.5 trillion.
Meanwhile, there’s the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which needs $15 billion. In other words, CHIP costs literally 1% of the overall cost of the Republican tax package.
And yet, there was Orrin Hatch, a supporter of his party’s tax cuts, making the case on the Senate floor that CHIP’s “having trouble” because “we don’t have money anymore.”
I feel like I’m stuck in a Dickensian nightmare.President Obama will call for all new federal vehicles—the government owns 600,000 of them—to run on alternative fuels after 2015, according to a preview of a major energy speech he will deliver today at Georgetown University.
"We have already doubled the number of hybrid vehicles in the federal fleet," according to a White House fact sheet released this morning. "Today, the President is calling for administrative action directing agencies to ensure that by 2015, all new vehicles they purchase will be alternative-fuel vehicles, including hybrid and electric vehicles."
Obama will announce $7,500 tax cuts for consumers who purchase electric vehicles, in pursuit of White House plans to put one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. There will also be grants for communities to purchase electric vehicles and more research and development funding for battery research.
The federal fleet burned more than 414 million gallons of fuel in 2010, according to the General Services Administration. The total included about 322 million gallons of gasoline, more than 75 million gallons of diesel, 8.2 gallons each of biodiesel and ethanol.
The government saved the equivalent of a half million gallons by using vehicles that burn natural gas and the equivalent of 36,000 gallons thanks to its small but growing fleet of electric vehicles.
In the midday speech, Obama will attempt to counter Republican demands for domestic oil development—including more offshore oil drilling—that have resonated with voters finding higher prices at the gas pump in the wake of unrest in the Middle East.
The president will counter with a two pronged-approach: reducing oil imports and developing markets for cleaner energy.
Obama will softpedal the two industries that have suffered unprecedented disasters during his term—offshore oil drilling and nuclear power.
He will call for the implementation of "critical safety reforms"—which the Administration has already devised—to permit further development of domestic oil. At the same time, he'll announce incentives to encourage rapid development of offshore oil leases, emphasizing the Administration's controversial claim that oil companies are allowing resources to idle.
He wil describe "a new international framework for nuclear energy" and emphasize, again, existing Administration programs for energy efficiency, clean-energy technology, and developing markets for biofuels and natural gas.Possible Flight Path for MH370 Ending North of the Current Search Zone
Victor Iannello, ScD,
June 25, 2016
(See also the addendum at the end of this post.)
Introduction
The underwater search for debris from MH370 has been unsuccessful so far. The current search zone in the Southern Indian Ocean (SIO) consists of a total of 120,000 square kilometers of seabed, of which 105,000 square kilometers (88%) have been searched to date. There have been no announcements from Malaysian, Australian, or Chinese officials indicating that the search will continue after the scanning of the current search area is completed.
The definition of the current search zone, shown in Figure 1, is based on reconstructed flight paths that are derived from available radar data combined with an analytical interpretation of satellite communications data. In December 2015, a comprehensive study of reconstructed flight paths was completed by Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) [1]. The satellite data suggest that the aircraft continued to fly for nearly six hours after the last radar capture. As the satellite data are insufficient to determine the precise flight path of MH370, other constraints are imposed on possible flight paths that result in the definition of a more manageable search area. These constraints relate to performance of the B777-200ER aircraft as well as pilot inputs to flight controls. The ability to accurately define the search area is therefore limited by the accuracy of these constraints, and in particular, the accuracy of assumptions related to how the aircraft was flown by the pilots, including whether or not there were pilot inputs during the final hours of the flight.
In the past year, debris from MH370 that has drifted west across the Indian Ocean has been recovered from the shores of La Reunion, Mozambique, South Africa, Mauritius, and possibly Tanzania. Godfrey [2] and others have investigated the drift patterns of floating debris from various possible crash sites, and conclude that the crash site might have occurred outside and to the northeast of the current search zone shown in Figure 1. This could explain why no debris on the seabed has yet been found in the current search zone.
In this paper, we re-visit some of the assumptions that were used to define the current search zone and propose a possible flight path that ends northeast of the current search zone and is consistent with drift studies performed by Godfrey [2].
Definition of Current Search Zone
After the last primary radar capture of MH370 at 18:22 UTC, the only data we have to reconstruct the flight path are the satellite data “pings”. The log-on sequences at 18:25 and 00:19 along with the handshakes at 19:41, 20:41, 21:41, 22:41, and 00:11 provide Burst Timing Offset (BTO) data and Burst Frequency Offset (BFO) data, while the failed telephone calls at 18:40 and 23:14 provide us with only BFO data.
We can use the BTO data to determine the distance between the aircraft and Inmarsat’s I3F1 satellite, which relayed two-way communications between the ground earth station (GES) in Perth, Australia, and the aircraft. This information can in turn be used to determine a “ping arc” of possible positions of the aircraft for each BTO data point. The BFO data, on the other hand, can be used to determine the approximate direction of the aircraft to discriminate, for example, between northerly and southerly trajectories. The details of these calculations have been presented elsewhere, such as Ashton et al. [3]. The last BTO value at 00:19 provides us with the best-estimate of possible locations for the crash, and this ping arc is known as the “7th arc” because it is the seventh BTO burst in the sequence of bursts starting at 18:25.
In addition to the speed and track, the value of the BFO is strongly influenced by the vertical speed of the aircraft, i.e., a climb and a northerly velocity for the aircraft both influence the BFO in a positive sense. If the vertical speed is not known, it becomes difficult to use the BFO to determine the direction of the aircraft. For instance, a particular value of BFO may indicate a trajectory to the south and level flight, or a trajectory to the north and descending flight. This ambiguity is removed if the flight is known to be level, for instance, at a particular time.
In an attempt to help define the search area, a detailed analysis of possible reconstructed flight paths was performed by the DSTG [1] using probabilistic methods. By assuming that random manoeuvers which change the speed and direction of the aircraft occur at randomly distributed intervals, and using previous commercial flight data to calibrate the stochastic model, a distribution of possible end points in the SIO was generated. Using the BFO data at 18:28 and 18:40, and assuming level flight, the DSTG analysis predicts that a turn to the south occurred at some time between 18:28 and 18:40. The probability distribution of the location of MH370 from this analysis is shown in Figure 1, which shows the highest probability at a position on the 7th arc near 38S latitude.
Figure 1. Probability distribution for location of MH370
from DSTG study [1].
Unfortunately, the search for debris on the seabed in the area defined by the DSTG analysis has been unsuccessful to date. Additionally, the timing and location of recovered debris from MH370 that has drifted across the Indian Ocean and landed in La Reunion, Mozambique, Mauritius, and South Africa suggest that MH370 might have crashed to the north of the current search area. For instance, Godfrey [2] performed drift studies of recently recovered debris which suggest a location along the 7th arc that is near 30S latitude. The failure to find the debris in the current search area combined with results from the drift studies provides a motivation to revisit the assumptions that were used in reconstructing possible flight paths.
Here, a possible flight path is proposed that terminates to the north of the current search area. The main differences in assumptions between the DSTG study and the present work are:
In the DSTG study, the aircraft was assumed to be flying nearly level at 18:40 and on a southerly course. In the current study, the aircraft was assumed to be descending at 18:40 and following a northerly course until about 18:58. The later turn to the south produces an end point to the north of the current search area. At some time before 19:41, the aircraft began traveling along a path of constant magnetic heading and was slowly descending. There were no pilot inputs after 19:41, i.e., the aircraft was on a path of constant magnetic heading, scheduled speed, and constant (negative) vertical speed.
Methodology to Reconstruct Flight Paths
The methodology to reconstruct the flight paths is similar to what has been presented by others, including the published work of Ashton et al. [3]. A BTO value defines an arc on the surface of the earth, and paths can be reconstructed that cross these arcs at the appropriate time by matching the satellite-aircraft range. (The exact position of the arc depends on the altitude of the aircraft. At higher altitudes, the arc is located further from the subsatellite position.) The paths were reconstructed by forward integrating in time and matching within a tolerance of 10 km the satellite-aircraft range at handshake times as derived from the BTO values and the satellite position. The model includes an accurate parameterization of the satellite position and velocity, meteorological data, and the earth’s ellipsoid geometry. The satellite position and velocity vectors are estimated using the PAR5 parameterization of Rydberg [4], which agrees well with the position and velocity vectors presented by Ashton [3]. The earth is modeled as an oblate spheroid using WGS84.
Meteorological data were included in the analysis |
on the phone that he had “nothing to say in addition to Mr. Kalın, who represents the state” and that he “could not give any details.”According to high-ranking diplomatic and security sources who asked not to be named, the secret diplomacy ending the Turkish-Russian crisis unfolded as follows:Late April, Akar told Erdoğan that there might be a channel that could be used to solve the crisis. He told Erdoğan that Cavit Çağlar, a textile investor, had business in the Russian Federal Republic of Dagestan. Çağlar used to be in politics in the 1990s, serving as a minister of state in Süleyman Demirel’s cabinets and knew the Dagestani president, Ramazan Abdulatipov, well from those times. Abdulatipov had access to Putin through his chief adviser, Yuri Ushakov. When Çağlar was a minister, Akar was the chief of the cabinet for the then-chief of General Staff, and they had known each other well since then. Çağlar had been beneficial to the state as a minister and then as a businessman before, Akar told Erdoğan. He was the channel between Ankara and Heydar Aliyev of Azerbaijan in Nakhchevan and in Baku in the mid-1990s and it was he who gave his private jet to the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) team to fly to Kenya in 1999 to arrest PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in a joint operation with the CIA. Akar told Erdoğan in a meeting where Kalın was present that Çağlar had financial problems in 2000s and faced court for that but was reliable in state operations. After meeting with Çağlar and Akar in Istanbul on April 30, Erdoğan gave the green light for the operation.Appointed by Erdoğan as the contact person for Turkey in relations with Ushakov for Russia, Kalın started to pen the draft of the letter from Erdoğan to Putin. Through Çağlar and Abdulatipov, shuttle diplomacy started between Ankara and Moscow, where the content and form of the letter was edited by the two parties a number of times during May and early June.On June 22, Kazakhstan Ambassador to Ankara Zhanseit Tuimebayev called up Kalın with an “urgent” note. Nazarbayev had met with Putin in St. Petersburg and said that if Erdoğan was ready to send the letter, Putin was ready to accept it. Erdoğan wanted the normalization but not was ready to send a letter with the words “apology” and “compensation” in it. Would he apologize for defending the borders of the country?On June 23, again before an iftar dinner, Tuimebayev called Kalın again with an “urgent” note. Nazarbayev had landed in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, for the Shanghai Cooperation Summit and would meet with Putin the next morning before the end of the summit by 1 p.m. If the letter could get there by then, even with slight editing, that might help end the crisis. Kalın immediately informed Erdoğan, who called Gen. Akar to the Presidency at around 11 p.m. on June 23.In the meantime, Kalın made another draft and working together with Russian translators and diplomats from the Kazakh Embassy in Ankara, they managed to find the Russian word of “izvinite” – which is stronger than saying “sorry,” but not as strong as “apology.”Erdoğan signed the letter and asked Kalın to take off immediately. Kalın’s jet took off from Ankara at 3 a.m. on the morning of June 24. The first stop was Istanbul to take Çağlar, his adviser and a Russian translator from there. The plane took off from Istanbul at around 4:30 a.m. but was faced with the risk of no flight permission over Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The Foreign Ministry started to call up those capitals. Messaging via WhatsApp thanks to the WiFi on board the presidential plane, they were able to get permission from Georgia just 20 minutes before entering its air space. The permission from Azerbaijan came while flying over Georgia, from Turkmenistan while over Azerbaijan, but there was nothing from Uzbekistan. Its airspace had been closed for security reasons regarding the Shanghai Summit. Nazarbayev offered a Kazakh presidential helicopter waiting in Chimkent near the Uzbek border to take them to Tashkent, but the plane circling over Turkmenistan was about to run out of fuel. So Nazarbayev applied to Uzbek President Islam Karimov and asked for permission for “his visitors from Turkey;” Karimov approved it.The plane carrying Kalın and Çağlar landed at Tashkent at around 12:15. Nazarbayev was waiting for them and took them to a meeting room upstairs. Nazarbayev asked for the Russian copy of the letter, read it carefully and said, “This is good.” The Turks only then learned that Putin and his delegation was in the next room. Nazarbayev asked if Ushakov could join them, told Ushakov that the letter was acceptable and told everyone in the room that “was it” from him and that they should sort out the rest.After taking the letter to Putin, Ushakov returned to the Turkish delegation soon and said Putin approved it despite finding it “a tad closer to the Turkish position” because of the new word found to replace apology.Kalın and Ushakov agreed that the statement was to be made on June 27 in Moscow after Ankara saw the message in advance. The Russians kept their promise. The statement was made on time. It was right after a statement made on June 26 to say that the final talks in Rome for the normalization of relations with Israel were successfully finalized by Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu.Two important steps were taken in two consecutive days to normalize Turkey’s relations with its neighborhood.Little did Turkey know that there was going to be a military coup attempt in just two weeks’ time on July 15.— Rutgers University’s board of governors discussed public business behind closed doors and created an atmosphere that kept the public largely in the dark during a meeting in 2008 about the school’s athletic department, a state appellate court ruled Friday. In a decision that puts public entities on greater notice about what information they must provide at public meetings, the three-member panel said Rutgers ran "afoul" of the state’s Open Public Meetings Act, dubbed the "Sunshine Law" because of the light it is supposed to shine on governmental bodies. The court also criticized the board’s practice of "sequencing" — holding long closed-door sessions between public sessions — saying it "subverts the very purposes the ‘Sunshine Law’ was designed to achieve." "So clear is the right of access to public meetings that ‘strict adherence to the letter of the law is required,’" Judge Linda Baxter wrote, partially quoting a previous court ruling. Friday’s unanimous decision focused on a Sept. 10, 2008, meeting on the New Brunswick campus. The Rutgers board — which includes 11 voting members and the university president — held the session to review the school’s athletic department after questions were raised about spending on the football program. During that time,
The Star-Ledger
threatened legal action against the school to gain access to documents related to the university’s $102 million stadium expansion. The paper’s request was one of the subjects of the closed-door discussions.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE:
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•
•
•
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Without citing specific topics, the board said it was holding the meeting to discuss "contract negotiations" and "attorney-client privilege." Rutgers alumnus Francis McGovern Jr., an attorney and regular attendee of the board gatherings, challenged the legality of that meeting, saying the notice wasn’t specific enough and that the board discussed matters in closed session that should have been handled publicly. McGovern also challenged the structure of the board’s meetings. Under the "sequencing" practice, board members regularly convene a public meeting, then immediately go into closed session. The public is left waiting, often for an hour or more, for board members to return and continue the public portion of the meeting. In October 2009, Superior Court Judge James Hurley, who has since retired, sided with Rutgers and dismissed McGovern’s complaint. But the judge cautioned the board to be more specific in describing the purpose of its closed-door sessions. The appellate panel said two of the three discussions McGovern insisted should have been in public — naming rights for the stadium and the construction contract — were rightfully conducted in executive session. However, the court said discussions about new policies for the athletic department should have been held in public. McGovern had also asked for a full copy of the minutes of the closed meeting, but the appeals judges declined to rule on that because he didn’t ask Hurley for the documents in his original complaint. The judges also refused McGovern’s request to require the board of governors to devote a portion of all meetings to public comment. The appellate panel sent the case back to Superior Court to handle remedies for the violations. The court could require Rutgers to stop its sequencing practice. Rutgers spokesman E.J. Miranda said the university is reviewing the decision. McGovern said he was pleased with the ruling. "It’s a victory for openness in government. The more openness in government, the better, as far as I’m concerned," McGovern said. Bruce Rosen, a Florham Park-based media attorney, said the decision is a clear victory for the public. "The message here is make sure what’s public is public and what’s private is private," he said. "Don’t try to mix the two. These boards have to be sensitive to the public."
Staff writer Kelly Heyboer contributed to this report.It may be melodramatic to ascribe a somewhat suicidal quality to the synthetic red lakes, but they did self-destruct, which reverberates with van Gogh’s death by his own hand barely three months later, and it’s worth noting that he could have chosen more lasting reds.
The show’s juiciness is also a matter of science, spurred by the latest technology. The reunion occasioned research into van Gogh’s use of color, specifically his choice of a bright but unstable orange-scarlet version of red lake.
Not surprisingly digital technology is also used by the organizers, Susan Alyson Stein, a curator in the Met’s European painting department, and Charlotte Hale, one of the museum’s painting conservators, to present their findings via two short sleek slide shows. Appearing on monitors facing the paintings, the digital images take us beneath the works’ surfaces, magnifying molecules of color, and into their pasts.
Moving back and forth between the images and the real thing helps us see more deeply still.May 4, 2019 Early Registration Pricing Ends March 3rd!
Rock The Ridge is a 50-mile endurance challenge and environmental fundraiser set in the natural beauty of Mohonk Preserve, a Hudson Valley, New York nonprofit nature preserve described as “one of Earth’s last great places.” The goal is to run, walk, or hike a 50-mile course within 24 hours. The course winds along well-maintained carriage roads, through lush forests and over ridgelines with magnificent vistas.
Covering 50 miles in one stretch is a major achievement, but you don’t have to be a marathon runner!
The 24-hour time limit accommodates people with a wide range of abilities, including walkers and hikers, as well as joggers, runners, and ultramarathoners. We’ve hosted elite athletes alongside first-time 50-milers and relay teams that walked the entire distance. Whether you walk, run, or do some of each, Rock The Ridge will be an accomplishment that you’ll remember with pride.
Rock The Ridge is a fundraiser.
Rock The Ridge supports a great cause: preserving over 8,000 acres of the Shawangunk Mountains region. We salute all Ridge Rockers, who since 2013 have collectively raised over $1,200,000 to support Mohonk Preserve and our award-winning conservation science, environmental education, and land protection and stewardship programs.
Thanks to our 2019 Sponsors:
Banner Photo by John AylwardSINGAPORE (BLOOMBERG) - An Indonesian media tycoon who has partnered with US President Donald Trump's family said he'll back President Joko Widodo for a second term in 2019.
Mr Hary Tanoesoedibjo, 52, said in an interview on Tuesday (Nov 28) that he decided not to run for the presidency. The founder of media and real estate conglomerate MNC Group chairs the Indonesian Unity Party, and has previously said he felt inspired by Mr Trump to run for president in Indonesia.
"If you look at the situation today, Jokowi is the strongest candidate," Mr Hary said in Singapore, referring to the president by his nickname.
He left open the possibility of running as vice-president, saying: "About myself, I just let it flow."
With the presidential election in South-east Asia's largest economy due in April 2019, parties are already gearing up for what will be a lengthy campaign. It will be the first time that elections for the presidency, national Parliament, state legislatures and local government offices will be held on the same day.
Mr Joko remains popular, presiding over an economy that regained an investment grade sovereign debt rating even as growth has been slower than expected. He has focused on improving infrastructure in the world's largest archipelago.
Among those considering a run against Mr Joko are Mr Prabowo Subianto, runner-up in the 2014 presidential election, and Indonesian National Armed Forces chief Gatot Nurmantyo.
Mr Hary, an ethnic Chinese Christian, has had a longstanding relationship with the Trump Organisation. He currently has deals with the group to upgrade and operate a 700ha resort and golf course in Lido, West Java, and a 100ha complex in Bali.
He was on the guest list for Mr Trump's inauguration, and has often touted his friendship with Mr Trump's children.
Police questioned Mr Hary earlier this year over allegations he sent threatening text messages to a Deputy Attorney-General. He has maintained his innocence.What's new on CPAN - March 2017
Welcome to “What’s new on CPAN”, a curated look at last month’s new CPAN uploads for your reading and programming pleasure. Enjoy!
APIs & Apps
CPAN::Upload::Tiny a tiny CPAN uploader
Fetch streamable URLs from radio-station websites using IHeartRadio::Streams
kritika.io is a code quality service for Perl, use its API with App::Kritika
Access the Megaport API with Megaport
Use the Money Over IP v2 API (Brazilian) with Net::Moip::V2
Net::Zendesk is a thin and lightweight interface for Zendesk’s API
WebService::Braintree is a fork of Net::Braintree for the Braintree Payment Services Gateway API
Config & Devops
Install the C libxml2 library on your system with Alien::Libxml2
Checkout Module::Build::FFI and Alien::Base::ModuleBuild if you want to distribute Alien modules with Build.PL
Glib::FindMinVersion find the minimum version of GLib needed to compile C source
Manage LXC containers with Linux::LXC
Net::SSH::Putty execute SSH sessions with Putty in batch mode
Data
Bytes::Random::XS generate random bytes in C!
Convert::Color::HSLuv convert between RGB, CIEXYZ, CIELUV, CIELCh, HSLuv, HPLuv color spaces
DBIx::Class::ResultSet::SetControl provides convenient looping over DBIC resultsets
Protocol::FIX a Financial Information eXchange (FIX) parser/serializer
Starch::Plugin::SecureStateID use cryptographically secure random when making state IDs for Starch
Development & Version Control
Support line-oriented command interpreters with Cmd::Interpreter
Forks::Queue a queue that can be shared across processes - neat!
IO::SigGuard provides signal protection for sysread/syswrite EINTR errors
Get a minimal mailing list manager with Sietima
Sort::HashKeys provides a faster hash key sort using XS
X::Tiny is a lightweight exception framework
Declare constants and export them automatically using exported::constants
Hardware
RPi::ADC::MCP3008 is an interface to the MCP3008 analog to digital converter (ADC) on Raspberry Pi
Language & International
Describe time duration in Spanish using Time::Duration::es
Science & Mathematics
NanoB2B::NER - turns labeled text lines into ARFF files, as part of an effort to “automatically extract and synthesize knowledge and trends in nanotechnology research” - cool!
WebSummer Zervos, right, listens alongside her attorney Gloria Allred during a news conference in Los Angeles in October 2016. (Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)
President Trump's lawyers argued in a new court filing late Tuesday that he was expressing a political opinion last year when he called accusations of sexual misconduct against him as false and the accusers "liars," seeking to dismiss a defamation complaint by a woman who said he groped her.
Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump's reality television show "The Apprentice" and now a California restaurant owner, filed her lawsuit against Trump in January, three days before his inauguration.
In October 2016, Zervos accused Trump of aggressively kissing her and groping her breasts during a 2007 meeting that took place when she was seeking a job at his company. Her lawsuit claims that he made defamatory statements by describing as liars women who came forward last year to accuse him of misconduct.
Marc Kasowitz, an attorney for Trump, said in a statement that there is "no merit" to her case, adding that it "is based on allegations of events that never occurred." He described it as "nothing more than a politically-motivated lawsuit" stemming from accusations made in a news conference weeks before the presidential election.
[Trump says sex harassment claims are ‘fake news,’ but there are corroborators]
In the new 36-page legal filing, Trump's attorneys argue that previous legal cases have established "wide latitude" for political speech, and that Trump's comments were effectively campaign rhetoric, coming in the context of the heated 2016 presidential campaign.
"All of the Statements occurred on political forums — a campaign website, on Mr. Trump's Twitter account, in a presidential debate, and at campaign rallies — where the listeners expect to hear public debate, taken as political opinion rather than a defamatory statement," they argued.
A New York State Supreme Court judge is considering Trump's motion to have the case thrown out.
Zervos is one of 11 women who spoke out during the 2016 campaign and accused Trump, then a Republican presidential candidate, of unwanted touching or kissing.
Trump denied the allegations, calling them "pure fiction" and labeling the women "horrible, horrible liars." He vowed to sue his accusers and promised evidence that would refute their claims, although nearly a year later, neither the lawsuits nor such evidence has materialized.
[‘My pain is everyday’: After Weinstein’s fall, Trump accusers wonder: Why not him?]
Trump, asked about the Zervos case last month, called it "made-up stuff" and "disgraceful." White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said last week that the Trump administration's official position is that all of Trump's accusers are lying.
Through her attorney Gloria Allred, Zervos has declined interview requests; Allred said Zervos does not plan to give media interviews during the litigation process.
As part of the case, Zervos's attorneys have sought to subpoena documents from Trump's campaign related to any of the women who have accused him of inappropriate sexual contact. The subpoena remains on hold while Trump's lawyers seek to have the case dismissed.
His attorneys previously argued that a sitting U.S. president cannot be sued in state court.
[In ‘Apprentice’ defamation case, Trump will argue he is immune from lawsuits in state courts until he leaves office]
In their new filing, Trump's lawyers cited a New York State Supreme Court judge's ruling in January dismissing a defamation complaint by Cheryl Jacobus, a political strategist and television commentator who claimed that Trump defamed her by insulting her on Twitter. That judge found that his statements were not defamatory.
The president's lawyers argued that Trump had a First Amendment right to call the claims by Zervos and other women false. They said that by accusing him of sexual misconduct to the media, Zervos was "explicitly soliciting" Trump to engage in the debate in an effort to affect the election.
"This is a politically-driven action, brought against a sitting President for exercising his First Amendment right to speak on political and public matters concerning, among other things, his own qualifications for President, the media's role in the election process, and the tactics of his opponent, Hillary Clinton," his attorneys argued.
Trump's attorneys also said that he did not specifically call Zervos a liar.
"Here, Mr. Trump was merely defending his character and qualifications for office from the false attacks Ms. Zervos leveled against him just a few weeks before the Presidential election," they argued.
Trump's attorneys again asked for the dismissal of Zervos's suit, or a stay in the case while Trump is president, saying the claim is a civil action unrelated to his official duties as president.
The closely watched lawsuit is unfolding amid heightened public scrutiny of allegations of sexual misconduct by powerful men.
Trump's accusers' complaints were made public during the 2016 campaign following the emergence of an "Access Hollywood" video that captured Trump bragging in graphic terms about kissing women and grabbing them by the genitals.
Jenna Johnson contributed to this report.Hi, I'm Tiffany McCauley. Cookbook author, recipe developer and work-at-home-mom based in northern California.The Gracious Pantry is an ever-growing collection of real food recipes and cooking information. My focus is to further support the real food movement and inspire people to store, prep and cook with real food. Read more about Tiffany...
Search By Category Search By Category Select Category Challenges Clean Eating 101 Clean Eating Meal Plans Meal Plans Sample Meal Plans Clean Eating Travel Clean Living Competing Ingredients 101 Shopping Lists Giveaways GUIDES Cooking Guides Food Guides Kitchen Tool Guides Journal No Sugar Challenge Quick Meals Reader Favorites RECIPES 5 Ingredients Recipes Adults Only Recipes Air Fryer Recipes Allergy Friendly Recipes Dairy Free Egg Free Gluten Free Recipes Nut Free Recipes Appetizers Barbecue Base Recipes Beans and Legumes Black Beans Garbanzo Beans (Chickpeas) Great Northern Beans Kidney Beans Lentils Pinto Beans Refried Beans Beverages Alcoholic Drink Mixes Coffee Drinks Creamers Juicing Non-Dairy Milks Smoothies Summer Drinks Winter Drinks Breads Sweet Breads Camping Clean Eating Breakfast Recipes Cereal & Granola Crepes Eggs & Omelettes French Toast Oatmeal Recipes Quiche Waffles & Pancakes Clean Eating Casserole Recipes Clean Eating Condiments Clean Eating Freezer Meals Clean Eating Kids After School Snacks Back To School Dorm Room Cooking Kid Friendly Dinners Kids Can Cook Clean School Lunches Clean Eating Slow Cooker Recipes Dessert Bars & Brownies Cake Candy Cookies Cupcakes Frosting Ice Cream Muffins Pie Syrups Yonana’s Recipes Dips and Spreads Hummus Dry Mixes Dude Food Game Day eMeals Recipes Food Gifts Fruits Fruit Butters, Jams & Compotes Grains Barley Corn Cream Of Wheat Farro Millet Oats Quinoa Rice Wild Rice Grownup Lunch Ideas Holidays 4th of July Canada Day Christmas Cinco De Mayo Easter Recipes Father’s Day Halloween Recipes Mother’s Day New Years St. Patrick’s Day Thanksgiving Recipes Leftover Turkey Recipes Valentine’s Day Marinades Meals for 1 or 2 No Sugar Challenge Breads Breakfasts Desserts Dressings, Dips and Sauces No Sugar Challenge Lunch or Dinner Recipes No Sugar Challenge Smoothie Recipes Snacks Soups and Stews Pasta Bow Tie Couscous Fetuccini Gnocchi Lasagna Macaroni Orzo Pasta Salads Pasta Sauce Penne Rotini Soba Spaghetti Vegetable Pasta Ziti Pizza Pressure Cooker Recipes Product Reviews Protein Beef, Bison & Buffalo Chicken & Turkey Cornish Game Hens Pork Seafood Venison Recipe Roundups Regional and Ethnic Foods American Asian Canadian Food German Greek Hawaiian Indian Irish Italian Mexican Food Moroccan Southern Food SouthWestern Thai The Gracious Pantry Goes To Ireland Rubs and Seasoning Blends Salads Bean Salads Fruit Salads Grain Salads Green Salads Meat Salads Pasta Salad Salad Dressing Seafood Salads Side Salads Salsa Sandwiches and Burgers Sauce, Gravy and Condiments Seasonal Recipes Autumn Recipes Spring Recipes Summer Recipes Winter Recipes Sheet Pan Dinners Side Dishes Simple Meals Snacks Grab-N-Go Protein & Granola Bars Soups, Stews and Chili Special Diets Low Carb Low Sodium Paleo Recipes Vegan Vegetarian Weight Watchers Whole30 Squash Vegetables Videos Vitamix Recipes Wraps Sponsored Posts Weekend Prep MealsAn unidentified team has filed a formal complaint with NFL against the New York Jets, claiming an eight-player "Jets West Camp" organized in July by quarterback Mark Sanchez violated the league's offseason training rules because coach Rex Ryan and offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer attended a couple of sessions.
The Jets learned of the complaint two weeks ago, a team source said. A league spokesman had no comment but a source said the matter is still under review. The Jets had no official comment.
Ryan and Schottenheimer, who were in town for the Major League Baseball's All-Star Game in nearby Anaheim, did show up at Sanchez's former California high school, Mission Viejo, to observe a couple of skill-position workouts, which is a violation of guidelines for organized team activities, even though neither coach offered any instruction.
However, the NFL Players Association did not file any complaint -- which is the norm in offseason cases. Jets fullback Tony Richardson, a player representative and a member of the union's executive committee, was among those who participated in the workouts.
There was nothing secretive about the practices. In fact, the team-owned "Jets TV" documented some of the workouts, as did ESPN and the New York Post, without restrictions.
Sanchez picked up the majority of the expenses for Richardson, Santonio Holmes, Jerricho Cotchery, Larry Taylor, David Clowney, Dustin Keller and Kevin O'Connell.
Clowney's first-person written account of his summer included prominent mention of the "Jets West" camp. He named all the players who attended and added, "and our offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer also came out."
The camp, and the appearance of Ryan and Schottenheimer, was further documented by various Twitter accounts that included photos.
If the league decides to take action, penalties could include a fine, the forfeiture of a draft pick or picks, or the loss of organized team practices next year, though the 2011 offseason may be subject to a lockout or work stoppage.
The league also may determine that there was no serious breach and simply issue a warning to the Jets.
Chris Mortensen is ESPN's senior NFL analyst.Abstract
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Due to the increasing prevalence of childhood obesity, the association between classroom furniture and energy expenditure as well as physical activity was examined using a standing-desk intervention in three central-Texas elementary schools. Of the 480 students in the 24 classrooms randomly assigned to either a seated or stand-biased desk equipped classroom, 374 agreed to participate in a week-long data collection during the fall and spring semesters. Each participant’s data was collected using Senseweararmbands and was comprised of measures of energy expenditure (EE) and step count. A hierarchical linear mixed effects model showed that children in seated desk classrooms had significantly lower (EE) and fewer steps during the standardized lecture time than children in stand-biased classrooms after adjusting for grade, race, and gender. The use of a standing desk showed a significant higher mean energy expenditure by 0.16 kcal/min (0.0001) in the fall semester, and a higher EE by 0.08 kcal/min (= 0.0092) in the spring semester. View Full-TextImage copyright Getty Images
Germany's Volkswagen became the world's biggest-selling vehicle maker in the first half of the year, overtaking Toyota for the first time.
VW sold 5.04 million cars between January and June - slightly more than the 5.02 million sold by Toyota.
The Japanese company said on Tuesday its sales fell 1.5% compared with 2014, as growth in emerging markets slowed.
VW has long aimed to beat Toyota and has done so three years ahead of its 2018 target.
Toyota will announce first-half results on Tuesday next week, while VW releases its figures for the period on Wednesday.
Stefan Bratzel, head of Germany's Center of Automotive Management, said: "VW is snatching the sales crown in difficult times with major car markets in decline. They will need to withstand the slowdown in China if they want to keep the top spot."
VW's success has been propelled by soaring sales in China, a market that now accounts for a third of its total, as well as a recovery in Europe.
The company, which also owns Audi and Porsche, this year aims to "moderately" exceed the 10.1 million cars it sold in 2014.
Toyota sold 10.23 million vehicles in 2014, but expects the total to slip to 10.15 million this year.
General Motors held the global sales crown for more than seven decades until being surpassed by Toyota in 2008.
GM regained the top spot in 2011, when Toyota's production was hurt by the earthquake and tsunami in north-eastern Japan.
Toyota became number one again the following year and has held the title since.
Ford profits jump
In another development, Ford has announced that it sold 3.26 million vehicles globally in the first half of the year.
The US company reported a 10% rise in pre-tax profit to $2.9bn for the three months to 30 June, with revenue coming in about $2bn higher than expected at $37.3bn.
Image copyright Ford Image caption The Ford GT won the 2015 Production Preview Concept of the Year award this week
Wholesale sales in North America rose by 56,000 to 816,000 vehicles, where Ford generated the bulk - $2.6bn - of its profits. In Europe, losses were halved to $14m as sales rose by 13,000 to 389,000.
Mark Fields, Ford's chief executive, said: "We delivered an outstanding second quarter, a great first half of 2015, and we are confident the second half of the year will be even stronger."Barcelona Sculpture of Blaugrana star vandalised
In Paseo de las Glorias in Buenos Aires there is a statue of Argentina captain Lionel Messi, and on Sunday night it became the victim of a vandalism attack, with both legs being removed.
This the second time the statue has been vandalised, following its unveiling on June 28, 2016 - suffering damage in January 2017.
The sculpture, which was created by Carlos Benavides, will now be transferred to the Department of Monuments and Works of Art in the Argentine capital.
La estatua de Lionel Messi fue víctima de un ataque de vandalismo al aparecer este domingo con sus piernas cortadas https://t.co/PEK4ymBVn5pic.twitter.com/TforcpEJUU? 24 HORAS (@diario24horas) 4 de diciembre de 2017
Paseo de las Glorias displays a number of statues of famous Argentinian sporting figures, including basketball player Manu Ginobili, former rugby star Hugo Porta, Luciana Aymar who made their name in field hockey, and Roberto de Vincenzo, Pascual Perez and Juan Manuel Fangio from golf, boxing and Formula 1 respectively.
Th area has undergone significant redevelopment as Buenos Aires prepares to host the Youth Olympic Games in 2018.Napoleon, Scientist
Joseph Fourrier from Louis Reybaud, Histoire de lexpédition française en Égypte (Paris 1830-36) v. 8. Deodat de Dolomieu, from Louis Reybaud, Histoire de lexpédition française en Égypte (Paris 1830-36) v. 7.
View of the harbor at Alexandria, from Description de lÉgypte État moderne
(Click on the images to enlarge) Napoleon is not remembered as a scientist, but he thought of himself as one. He was trained as a military engineer and had considerable mathematical skills. In 1797, he was elected to membership in the National Institute, the foremost scientific society in post-Revolutionary France.When the directive to invade Egypt came down, Napoleon saw it as an opportunity to make the founding country of western culture a province of the greatest country in modern Europe. And he wanted to bring a gift — the gift of modern science — to help the Egyptians map their country, manage the Nile, raise their agricultural and industrial output, improve the standard of living, and invigorate the intellectual climate. Accordingly, he decided to take with him a corps of scholars, trained in engineering, astronomy, natural history, topography, manufacturing, and linguistics.The scholars were to be constituted as the Commission of Sciences and Arts. He delegated responsibility for choosing this Commission to three close colleagues: Gaspard Monge, a mathematician; Claude-Louis Berthollet, a chemist, and Joseph Fourier, a younger mathematician. Together, they carefully selected 151 savants to invite along. Several, such as Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Deodat de Dolomieu, were established scientists; but many of the engineers were quite young and came out of the newly established engineering schools, the École Polytechnique, the École des Ponts et Chaussées, and the École des Mines. The mission was kept a secret until the last moment—the ostensible goal was to invade England, not Egypt — and so these young men blindly streamed by coach and foot to southern France, where they boarded ships for a destination unknown.The ships, 400 strong, set sail on May 19, 1798. Napoleon and the senior scientists were comfortably installed on the flagship, l'Orient, but the junior scientists were lumped in with the soldiers and sailors, who did not welcome their presence. After stopping to annex Malta, and somehow avoiding Lord Nelson's fleet in the Mediterranean, the armada landed at Alexandria on July 1, 1798.One of the ships, the Patriote, had a hold full of carefully selected scientific equipment. It ran aground and sank in the harbor, an ominous beginning to the scientific enterprise. But the savants survived, and after biding their time in Alexandria and Rosetta while Napoleon and his army established their military presence, they eventually made it to Cairo, and their work could now begin.As fear of the Ebola virus escalates, Eric Topol thinks that we’re missing an important weapon. And you just need to reach into your pocket to find it. “Most communicable diseases can be diagnosed with a smartphone,” he says. “Rather than putting people into quarantine for three weeks – how about seeing if they harbour it in their blood?” A quicker response could also help prevent mistakes, such as the patient in Dallas who was sent home from hospital with a high fever, only to later die from the infection.
It’s a provocative claim, but Topol is not shy about calling for a revolution in the way we deal with Ebola – or any other health issue for that matter. A professor of genomics at the Scripps Research Institute in California, his last book heralded “the creative destruction of medicine” through new technology. Smartphones are already helping to do away with many of the least pleasant aspects of sickness – including the long hospital visits and agonising wait for treatment. An easier way to diagnose Ebola is just one example of these sweeping changes.
Many of these transformations hinge on the insights a phone can give into someone’s life. At the moment, most doctors need to rely on a blinkered view of their patient’s lifestyle, based on face-to-face interviews. Our phones, however, give a warts-and-all account of our behaviour. “The smartphone travels around with us everywhere,” says Deborah Estrin at Cornell University. Estrin co-founded Open mHealth – a non-profit that aims to transform the way that personal and digital data is used in medicine – and will be presenting at BBC Future’s World-Changing Ideas Summit in New York on 21 October. “From it you can know when they are getting out of the house, how ambulatory they are, the speed they are moving through the world. And it’s often the last thing you touch when you go to sleep and first thing you touch when you are awake – so it tells you about sleep patterns.” That’s not to mention simple plug-ins that could measure your blood pressure, blood sugar level or even analyse your urine.
So far, however, few doctors have embraced these possibilities. “The medical cocoon has not allowed a digital invasion,” says Topol, “while the rest of the world has already assimilated the digital revolution into its day-to-day life.” That’s not due to lack of demand: many patients are already monitoring their health through their phone, with apps that check your skin for cancer from a selfie, for example. These programs are not always designed with the accuracy most doctors would require, however – and some fear that by missing a diagnosis and offering a false sense of security, they could cost lives. “The slower the healthcare system is in exploring these things, the more people are at risk by doing the exploration on their own,” says Estrin.
For the time being, Estrin and Topol suggest that the apps should be used to monitor and enhance existing treatments. Topol, for instance, points out that a patient suffering from heart disease can use a smartphone app and attachment to monitor their blood pressure throughout the week. “Then they know the context – that it’s only abnormal when they go back to work on Monday, or when the medicine wears off by evening. Those are things I would never be in touch with if they only visit me in my office.” Estrin, meanwhile, suggests that tracking a rheumatoid arthritis patient’s movements could pinpoint the times at which their pain flares up – helping the doctor to design a treatment plan that pre-empts the moments of intense agony and prevents further damage to the joints.
But this is just the beginning. Combine this information with personal genetics data and screens of the body’s unique ecology of bacteria – both of which can influence the progression of the disease – and you begin to pick apart the complex tapestry of influences shaping someone’s health. Problems that currently evade explanation – be it recurring migraines, insomnia, an irritable gut or something more mysterious – could then be solved without calling Dr House. “Our ability to unravel medical mysteries is now unprecedented,” says Topol.
As these kinds of developments gain momentum, Topol thinks |
door in the study right near that pantry. Romney has slyly used the word “intern” at least twice talking about Hillary, saying he had more business experience than she did and the White House was “not a place for a president to be an intern.” But slick Mitt slid away from Russert, replying, “I just think that we want to have a president, not a whole — a team of husband and wife thinking that they’re going to run the country.”
Photo
Previewing a Republican race in the fall, he went on: “She is Washington to the core. She’s been there too long. Bill Clinton’s been there too long. The last thing America needs is sending the Clintons back to Washington.” Then he stole an Obama line, to go along with the Obama change mantra he snitched and put on posters, adding, “Look, sending the same people back to Washington expecting a different result is not going to get America on track.”
Facing possible catastrophe last week, Rudy stolidly stuck with peddling a plan for a national catastrophe fund that would make property owners’ insurance more affordable to Floridians whose rates have been driven up by hurricanes. (Doesn’t the man who attacks Hillary for socialized medicine worry that this is socialized homeowners’ insurance?)
His deep investment in one state and a one-dimensional message do not seem to have paid dividends. He needs to quit talking about 9/11 and dial 911. His numbers have dropped by half in the year he has campaigned here. The more he has wooed, the less he has won. His campaign may have always been doomed, given that he was unacceptable to so many other Republicans. But the final act seems sad — sputtering, stalling and dying like a bad engine on an old car.
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Could it be over before the fat lady sings? If early-bird voters don’t save him and he comes in third here, will he get out of the race so he doesn’t suffer the indignity of losing New York, a scene so melodramatically implausible that even Verdi wouldn’t try to pull it off?
One top Democrat, shocked that Rudy had run a race so minimalist that it would make a front-porch campaign look expansive, wondered if it was really some ploy to pump up his business. And perhaps his low-energy windup was meant to maintain dignity for Giuliani Partners.
At a Rudy rally in Boca on Thursday, there were snowbirds and transplanted New Yorkers. Some, naturally, loved Rudy and some, naturally, loathed him.
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Ed Wenger, 65, a retired aerospace executive who used to live in Long Island, hailed the former mayor as “fantastic.” “He turned Times Square from a hooker’s paradise to Disneyland,” he said.
Nearby, Norman Korowitz, 66, a snowbird, retired guidance counselor and Billary fan from Suffolk County, called Rudy “an optical illusion.”
“He’s Bernie Kerik’s partner,” he said. “And family values? He makes Bill Clinton look like a young upstart.”This year's 2013 Great American Beer Festival was an overall success for all who attended. But there were unprecedented hiccups from the beginning, mainly due to an increased demand for participation by the continuously growing number of breweries in America. 2,347 craft breweries were operating in 2012, up from 1,970 in 2011 according to brewersassociation.org.
Initially, for brewers looking to submit beer for judgment and to pour at the festival, the sign-up was a nightmare. The window for registration was a matter of minutes for some -- not unlike tickets to the public, which sold out in 20 minutes -- and many breweries, even those who had earned medals last year, were waitlisted. In the end, most issues were resolved but there were breweries so miffed by tangles of red tape and logistical concerns that they didn't attend -- local favorite Eagle Rock Brewery among them.
Ticket Holders on the Floor of the GABF
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In response to this year's problems and changes for 2014 we turned to Barbara Fusco, Sales & Marketing Director at the Brewers Association. "The rapidly growing number of breweries in the country, along with increasing interest in the competition and festival, mean that a change to the registration system is in order," says Fusco. "Since registration closed for the 2013 competition, we have been devising a plan for 2014 that eliminates the need for breweries to register all at once and increases the number of breweries that can participate."
Breweries pursuing entry for medal competition in 2014 will experience a new registration method. The revised system will:
- Eliminate a time crunch to enter before all slots fill up (you will have two weeks to apply)
- Increase the number of breweries that can enter the competition
- Increase the total number of beer entries, up to 5,000
In 2012, 4,338 beers were entered, in 2013 there were 4,809. 2014 will accommodate up to 5,000 beers for competition. To allow an open number of breweries to enter, the number of beers from each brewery will be limited. The pre-determined number of beers for judging (5,000) will be divided by the number of breweries that apply, resulting in the maximum number of beers each brewery can enter. Meaning that if 1,000 breweries apply, the first five beers submitted from each brewery will be entered in competition.
As for the 49,000 person maximum capacity of public ticket holders, brewers, media, volunteers and staff (which has met capacity for at least the last five years), changes are in store for 2015. The Brewers Association is said to be in talks with the Colorado Convention Center for increasing the layout and accommodating more people. In other words, the world's largest commercial beer competition is only getting bigger.
The most significant increases in number of medals in California, by county, were :
- Los Angeles -- 7 in 2013 up from 2 (2012)
- Alameda -- 3 in 2013 up from 0
Counties that saw significant losses in number of medals :
- Orange -- 2 in 2013 down from 7
- San Diego-- 11 in 2013 down from 15
Counties that remained consistent:
- Santa Barbara -- 6 in 2013 down from 7
- San Luis Obispo -- 4 in 2013 and 2012
- Sonoma -- 4 in 2013 up from 3
While there are any number of factors that contribute to a region's winnings, from increased competition in a particular style (American-style IPA had 252 beers submitted) to a brewery's interpretation of a style, you don't have to be Nate Silver to draw one absolute conclusion from this year's report -- Los Angeles beer is finally stepping up.
See also: Beachwood and Kinetic Breweries Win Major Prizes at Great American Beer Fest
Erika writes at erikabolden.com and @erikabolden. Want more Squid Ink? Follow us on Twitter or like us on FacebookIt appears that the Play Store team is testing another new feature in the Android app, though you may like this one more than the new tab bar that's been rolling out to more and more devices. In the side menu of the Play Store, some users are seeing a new Notifications section, right below My Apps & games.
Tapping on it opens a dedicated Notifications screen, where both of our tipsters have only seen the below "You're all caught up" graphic. It appears that the screen will be used to show you "notifications about your favorite apps and games," though what that exactly means, I'm not sure. The Settings cog takes you to the pre-existing Notifications settings in the Play Store where you can enable notifications on app/game updates and auto-updates, as well as pre-registration and deals/promos.
If that's the same thing you'll see in the Notifications screen then I find it quite repetitive and not very useful, unless there were more details on the changelogs or a history of notifications so you could see dismissed notifications for deals or pre-registration titles. But that doesn't appear to be the case.
Either way, this new section is only starting to show up for a few users, so we'll keep an eye on it and see how it gets populated and whether more interesting info is surfaced through it. Let us know if you're seeing it too, and if so, whether you've spotted some notifications inside it.Tesla Motors (TSLA) and SolarCity (SCTY) set Nov. 17 as the date for shareholders to vote on whether to approve the merger of both companies, according to a joint SEC filing.
Both companies are asking shareholders to approve Tesla's $2.6 billion bid to acquire SolarCity, which has been widely criticized.
Tesla and SolarCity also set Oct. 28 as the date of an event to introduce a solar roof product that will be integrated with the new version of Tesla's at-home battery, the Powerwall 2.0, and Tesla's charger. Over the next few weeks, Tesla said it will provide updates regarding its plan for the combined company. And on Nov. 1, Tesla said it will provide additional financial information relating to its plans for the combined company.
IBD'S TAKE: Tesla's stock has not been great in 2016. For a top-rated, high-growth auto-related stock, check under the hood. Nvidia released a new AI chip for self-driving cars.
"If shareholders approve the transaction, a combined Tesla and SolarCity will be able to provide the first ever opportunity to generate, store and consume energy entirely sustainably, through a suite of integrated products that add aesthetics and function while reducing cost," Tesla said in a blog post.
Last month, Tesla revealed that four shareholder lawsuits have been filed that could slow the electric-car company's bid for SolarCity. Many analysts said the deal would signal a fundamental change to Tesla's business model that could thwart its aggressive efforts to expand production of its all-electric vehicles. Some said it amounted to a bailout for heavily indebted SolarCity.
Last week, Goldman Sachs said it sees incremental risk to the business related to Tesla's deployment of capital for mergers and acquisitions. Goldman also expects a slower production ramp for the Model 3 than what Tesla is guiding, and says that any delay in the Model 3 launch will be detrimental to shares.
Tesla stock rose a fraction, to 201.51, in the stock market today. SolarCity stock rose 3.2%, to 19.99.
The meeting for Tesla shareholders will occur at Tesla's facility in Fremont, Calif., and in Foster City, Calif., for SolarCity shareholders. Tesla said that a review of the deal by independent SolarCity directors had unanimously determined the terms and conditions of the merger were in the best interest of SolarCity shareholders.
Tesla is set to report third-quarter earnings after the market close on Oct. 26.
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Survey Suggests Tesla Will Lose Competitive Edge In Premium MarketNissan rolling out spiffed-up food trucks
“It’s definitely smaller – lower height, shorter, more compact,” said CoolHaus CEO Natasha Case, “and in the food truck industry, this space compression really helps being able to park and participate in smaller venues. Say a venue has space for 10 trucks plus a half, we can now be that half.”
“Nissan approached us with this sponsored vehicle, and we think it’s a fantastic idea,” said Michelle Grant, CEO of the Grilled Cheese Truck. “Right now we use the standard taco truck. With a more compact vehicle, we’ll be able to reach new spaces.”
The Grilled Cheese Truck and CoolHaus gave out samples in sleek Nissan NV vans, showcasing a design fresh from the more vintage look of most L.A. food trucks.
Joining the showroom this year, filled with sports vehicles and decorated concept cars, are none other than…
With a larger manufacturer now offering vans, Case noted the benefits of having a new vehicle with better power and mileage. “Also, if you have a problem, it means you can now take it to the dealer.”
The Nissan NV, released in the U.S. this summer, is its first commercial vehicle in the U.S. market. The three models (NV1500, 2500 and 3500) offer a standard or high-top roof and a V-6 or V-8 engine. Features include chrome bumpers, cargo area worklights, eight-way power driver’s seat, Bluetooth system and upgraded audio systems. Base prices range from $24,950 for a standard-roof NV1500 to $30,150 for a high-roof NV3500
“It’s a unique product for us,” said Mark Perry, Nissan’s director of product planning. “This is really all about innovation, to have a little fun, because there’s been really nothing for this industry.”
Perry noted that in this category, contractors have had a few choices, like GM, Ford, Dodge: “All well-established,” he said, “but older technology.”
The NV also provides an outfitting service—building and installing up to 60 square feet of graphics, designed by the buyer, on the vehicle.
"It’s cool, futuristic-looking. Right now, our trucks are more a nod to the past – vintage," said Case. “It really shows that the food truck industry is here to stay and expand."
The food truck craze has been taking off in recent years, revived by the gourmet trend. The L.A. Times reported in May that Americans are expected to spend $630 million on food this year from mobile vendors, according to the National Restaurant Assn. That's up from $608 million in 2010.
“We’re currently in four cities, but having a larger manufacturer like this really would enable us to have consistency across the country,” Case said. “Rather than hoping for the best with a local purchase."
“It brings a legitimacy to the food truck industry that we’re starving for.”
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--Rosanna XiaGiven the ton of interest in the design of the new Start screen we wanted to dive deeper into the topic of search. There's a clear focus on efficiency and overall professional productivity in the comments. For professional scenarios, every keystroke matters. One new aspect of the Windows 8 platform is the ability for Metro style apps to deliver a customized search "contract." For this post we'll focus on the built-in search capabilities for files, settings, and apps, which update the Windows 7 search features. You can learn more from our //build/ session on search, which provides a detailed look at the topic of this post. With that lens, Brian Uphoff, a program manager on our Search, View, and Command user experience team, authored this post.
--Steven
In our previous related posts (Evolving the Start menu, Designing the Start screen, and Reflecting on your comments on the Start screen) we discussed the evolution of the Start menu and the reasoning behind the design. We also discussed how organizational mechanisms and search are powerful tools that make it easier to find and launch apps. As you install more and more apps, these tools become increasingly important. For the past several releases, searching from the Start menu has been established as the quickest way to find and launch apps, particularly for keyboard users.
When planning Windows 8, we wanted to make sure the efficiency and dexterity of the Windows 7 Start menu search was carried forward into the new Start screen. Before we dive into the details of the new experience, let’s take a quick look at the evolution of search from the Start menu, and how people are using it today.
Evolution of searching from Start
The search box in the Start menu as we know it today first made its appearance in Windows Vista. It became easy for users to search for programs or apps, settings, and files on the desktop and in personal folders like Documents, Pictures, Music, and Videos. The search experience aggregated different types of results in one view with programs and settings combined in a single group. The results of a query displayed a small set of items in heuristically sized groups. You needed to click “See all results” to see the rest in Windows Explorer, which aggregated everything into one ungrouped and unsorted view.
Figure 1: Start menu search in Windows Vista
In Windows 7, we expanded results to include detailed Control Panel tasks in addition to the main Control Panel pages. We also separated out Control Panel items from programs into a unique group that allowed you to more easily focus on the type of result you were looking for.
The overall experience aggregated different types of items and had a fixed limit on the number of results that could appear. This was because the result set was limited to the size of the Start menu. Clicking a group header took you to Windows Explorer for programs and files or to Control Panel for settings. Each experience had a type-specific view, though the search results order diverged from what was shown in the Start menu. Showing an aggregated view in the Start menu required compromising on performance in addition to space because we would search all programs, Control Panel items, and files, even if you were looking for only one of these data types.
Figure 2: Start menu search in Windows 7
When we look at the usage data of how people are using the Start menu to search in Windows 7, it’s clear that searching to launch programs is the most frequent and important activity users engage in with Start search.
Our telemetry data shows that 67% of all searches in Windows 7 are used to find and launch programs. Searching for files accounts for 22% of all Windows 7 Start menu searches, and searching for Control Panel items about 9%. Searching for email messages via Start Menu is very rare (less than 0.05%). The remaining 2% are searches executing the “Run” functionality.
Figure 3: Windows 7 Start menu search usage data
Searching from Start in Windows 8
Searching via the Start menu has continued to evolve with each release. The Windows 8 Start search experience builds on top of search features available in Windows 7 and provides a unique view for each of the three system groups - Apps, Settings and Files. These search result views are a natural progression from the Windows 7 groups and are easily accessible from anywhere in the operating system via the Search charm or keyboard shortcuts. Separating the search results into views means we can tailor the experience for each data type. For example, the File search view provides you with filters and search suggestions while typing to quickly complete your query.
In Windows 8, we expect people will be acquiring and installing more apps than ever before. Had we continued using the Windows 7 Start menu search interface to search for a Control Panel item, you would always see app or program results before Control Panel results, displacing many Control Panel items from being the first match. This and other constraints on the existing design required us to develop a new approach—this is especially true as we consider the increasing use of larger monitors or higher DPI screens where longer menus become even more difficult to use and navigate. In Windows 7, the total number of results that could be shown in the Start menu was limited. Depending on the number of groups with matching results, an average of 3-4 results were shown per group. Very rarely did all results for a group show up, and the organization of the results was pretty unpredictable.
With Windows 8, on the other hand, we’re following an app-first model, where each app developer understands their data and users best, and knows the best way to present the information to them. Using the same model for search, we believe that always having a quick and consistent way to get directly to settings or file search results gives you precision and control over the type of results you’re looking for. In Windows 8, each view is tailored for the type of content you’re searching for, and shows all the results, instead of limiting them due to screen real-estate.
One change a few of you will notice is that file search results no longer include email messages and contacts. The inclusion of email search never got the generalized support from mail clients that we had hoped for, though at least one mail client did support it (one reason why email searches are rare in the Start menu <0.05% of total searches). With the app-first approach in Windows 8, Metro style email apps will use the search contract to provide a rich set of filtered search results in a view customized for email. In comparison, email clients and other apps in Windows 7 have no control over how their search results are presented.
We paid special attention to ensuring the number of keystrokes required to find and launch apps, settings, or files is at parity with or better than in Windows 7. We’ve introduce a set of keyboard shortcuts to help users quickly and efficiently get to settings search results (WIN key + W) or file search results (WIN key + F), thus reducing the total number of keystrokes needed to find and launch settings or files. We’ll cover how we maintained and increased keyboard efficiency across these views in more detail later in the post.
Searching apps
App search results show the full set of apps (both their “friendly” names and executable names) for which the search term matches the name. As the number of installed apps increases, it becomes difficult to browse through a large list to find an infrequently used app. Search helps quickly filter and reduce a large list of apps down in just a few key strokes. We wanted to make sure we preserved the same keyboard usage patterns as Windows 7. You don’t have to first click on the Search charm to begin searching – simply start typing in the Start screen and you’ll see your list of apps filter down to the one you are looking for.
Figure 4: Full-screen app search results
Also note that the Most Frequently Used (MFU)-based ranking of app search results from Windows 7 is preserved in Windows 8. For example, if you type “paint” in the developer preview you get 2 apps back as search results – PaintPlay and Paint. If you predominantly just use Paint, it will be ranked higher than PaintPlay as you use it more often. So, launching Paint (or other apps you frequently use) becomes more efficient the more you use app search.
Some of you have pointed out that many users won’t discover that they can simply type to start searching in the Start screen. Search is closely associated with typing— the most common pattern to search in the Start menu is to bring up the Start menu by using the Windows key or by clicking the Start button and typing. That exact and efficient behavior is preserved in Windows 8 as we have observed and found that pattern is what users care about most. Our experience in user tests, and even when people at //build/ tried the Develop Preview for the first time, shows that people tend to serendipitously discover this feature early in using Windows 8, and so we're confident it will not be a hindrance to usability. Nevertheless the Search charm is highly visible, and selecting it shows the Search box.
The Windows 7 Start menu also included “Run” functionality for commanding and navigating Windows. This has been carried over to Windows 8 as well—tasks like running scripts and.exes in the user’s PATH are still possible and supported in App search. Search continues to support launching folders in Windows Explorer by typing in full paths. For example, typing “C:\” in Start search results in the set of folders in the C: drive appearing below the search box. Pressing the Down Arrow key moves selection through the list and autocompletes the folder name in the search box, allowing users to continue typing to further refine the path. You can do the same with UNC (\\foo\example) paths as well. And of course WIN key + R will switch to the desktop and bring up the classic Run dialog, just as you would expect.
Figure 5: Typing a path into Start search
Searching settings
The settings search experience brings together all settings and Control Panel items across the system in one view. Settings search results are matched not only to the name of the Control Panel applet or task, but also to the various keywords that may describe it. We have also heard your frustration that shutdown is not available as a search result, and we will address this along with improvements to the Start user interface for shutdown (as a reminder, you can also just use the power button or close the lid).
Figure 6: Full-screen settings search results
Searching files
The number of files on PCs keeps increasing over time as users continue to acquire and create more documents, music, photos, and videos. Our goal, while redesigning the file search experience, was to make it seamless and complete so you can achieve your task of quickly finding a file without having to transition to Windows Explorer.
In File search, you’ll also see search suggestions as you type to help you quickly and efficiently complete the search. The indexer provides these search suggestions based on the content and properties of files it knows about. Search suggestions are a very powerful concept made popular and used extensively on the web—they help you to pinpoint relevant search terms with just a few keystrokes. In Windows 8 we built search suggestions into the file search experience and also made this feature available in the platform for all Metro style apps to use. Note, this feature also accounts for typos or spelling errors, and suggests the auto-corrected search term as you type. Using the arrow keys to choose suggestions autocompletes the term in the box. This makes it easy to add more terms to the query and quickly narrow down the set of results to find the one you want.
You can also still search using AQS (Advanced Query Syntax) from Windows 7. AQS allows for greater precision and control when constructing the query to get targeted results. Here are some sample searches and their advanced query syntax:
Query AQS Syntax Find all files authored by Brian or David author: (Brian OR David) Find all photos with an F-stop of 2.8 where no flash was fired f-stop:2.8 flashmode:no flash Find all files where the file name contains a word starting with Metro and the file size is greater than 1MB filename:$<Metro* size:>1mb
Figure 7: Search suggestions based on the content and properties of files
Figure 8: Full-screen file search showing results
Separating searches for apps, settings, and files into their own views allows room for each of them to evolve and breathe— this way they can each provide their own ideal display format—unlike the single list of results in previous versions, which required conformity to achieve aggregation in the limited space. For example, the file search view also provides filters to easily refine the results based on the type of file you’re searching for. Filtering by type is a powerful way to efficiently reduce the results set, irrespective of where the file is saved.
More relevant and contextual information for each file is also now displayed to make the search experience complete. This helps differentiate between similar results and also makes it clear to you why a given result was returned, by highlighting the property that matched the search term—something not possible in the Start menu before. For example, when searching for the term “performance,” the results now highlight where “performance” matched. In one result, it matched on the Title property, and is clearly indicated that way in the result. The results also show file type and size to help further disambiguate between results.
Figure 9 File search results highlight the property that matches the search term
Using a mouse, hovering over a result reveals a rich tooltip with some additional details. For example, for the video result shown below, the rich tooltip shows the duration of the video, frame height, frame width, date modified, and the full path to the file. Using touch, pressing and holding on an item reveals the tooltip.
Figure 10: Rich tooltip reveals additional details in file search
Designing Start search for dexterity
Designing for efficiency and dexterity is a core goal of the Start search feature team. As such, using the keyboard to launch apps, settings, and files from search is a very important part of the Start search experience. We also put a lot of thought into preserving existing keyboard patterns, which both average and advanced users have come to rely on, and have built muscle memory around.
Our telemetry data shows that many users leverage the Start menu as a means of commanding Windows. They use specific key-combinations to efficiently launch apps. For example, pressing the WIN key, typing “calc”, and pressing ENTER launches Calculator. Many advanced users know that typing “cmd” and then CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER opens an elevated command, and that typing “notepad c:\mynotes” creates or opens a.txt file. If you watch the keyboard demonstration from the //build/ keynote, you will see many of these used.
These keyboard patterns continue to work in Windows 8 just as well as in previous versions. Pressing the WIN key takes you to the Start screen. Simply start typing in the Start screen and the Search pane automatically opens with the search term in the search box, and the view filtered to show apps that match the term.
The fastest way to search settings and files from anywhere in the system is to use a set of keyboard shortcuts introduced to increase efficiency. These Windows 8 shortcuts reduce the number of keystrokes needed to launch a setting or file to a number equal to (or less than in many cases) what was required in Windows 7. Alternatively, you can also use the Search pane, which indicates the number of results matching the search in each view, to switch between apps, settings, and file searches.
and type Apps search +W Settings search +F Files search
Figure 11: Windows 8 Start search keyboard shortcuts
Based in part on the feedback here, we are working on a change that we hope to have available in our beta release, which will take you directly to app search results when you select the Search charm in the desktop.
The efficiency of using the keyboard doesn’t stop at just typing to start a search. Sometimes the app, setting, or file that you want to launch is not the first result shown. You can use the arrow keys to quickly move down to the desired app in the results list, and then press ENTER to launch it. The white box that shows keyboard focus tells you which app will be launched on ENTER. This enables you to efficiently launch any app, setting, or file matching a search. In Windows 7, you could only launch one of the top 3-4 results with this kind of efficiency.
When we looked at some of the common Control Panel items people were searching for (for example, searching for power options using the term “power”), it quickly became clear that because we favored app results first in our Windows 7 design, “Power options” was the fourth result, below all the power shell app results. If you installed Office and frequently used PowerPoint, you saw PowerPoint along with Power shell (32 bit, 64 bit, and the Help file) ahead of ”Power options.” Extending a similar design in Windows 8 would have meant that the position of the “Power options” result would continue to fluctuate as you installed more apps on your system. This forces you to scan through increasingly large result-sets every time you search for a particular app or setting or file.
In Windows 8, we also provide the count of results per system view, so you immediately know how many apps or settings or files match the search term. Switching search views is also designed so you can easily switch views without taking your hands off of the keyboard. In the example shown below, to switch to settings search, press the Down Arrow key and the focus shifts to settings in the search list. Press ENTER and you will see settings search results. As mentioned before, you can continue to use the arrow keys to choose the desired item and press ENTER to launch it. Pressing TAB allows you to quickly switch between the search results list and the Search pane.
Figure 12: No results for apps – but use the arrow keys to switch to settings view, which shows 17 results
Figure 13: Use the arrow keys to choose a settings search result
To add to our earlier point on preserving search efficiency, here are some comparisons of the number of keystrokes for launching frequently used apps via search. In Windows 7, you would press the WIN key, start typing in your search term, and then press ENTER to launch the program. We count all the keystrokes end to end. In Windows 8, you can apply the same pattern for searching for apps (WIN key, type in the search term, press ENTER to launch). Launching Word, Calculator, Paint, or Media Player by pressing the WIN key and typing "word", "calc", "calculator", "paint", "player", or "media" in the search box takes precisely the same number of keystrokes in Windows 8 as it does in Windows 7.
To launch settings in Windows 7, you would press the WIN key, type in the query, arrow down to the result you wanted, and press ENTER to launch it. In Windows 8, you can use WIN key + W to launch settings search, type in a query, and press ENTER to launch. Typing WIN key + W and typing "uninstall", "device manager", or "defender" gives you the same results with precisely the same number of keystrokes in Windows 8 as in Windows 7. In some cases, it takes even fewer keystrokes than in Windows 7 (for example, pressing WIN key + W, typing “power” and then pressing ENTER to launch power options).
This dexterity-focused design isn’t all we have done to make search more efficient. We have also made key performance investments across the system. In current testing of Windows 8, our search performance improvements have cut app search time in half for desktops and laptops. The improvements are even larger on netbooks.
Figure 14: Performance comparison showing % decrease in execution time of app search
Designed for touch, too
We discussed the details of designing search for dexterity while using the keyboard, but this design works equally well for touch. To begin searching in Start, simply swipe the edge and tap on the Search charm. This opens the full list of installed apps. You can use the touch keyboard to search for a program to launch, but you can also use semantic zoom to zoom out, and then tap on the section that contains your app. Start search is lightweight, fast, fluid, and quickly gets out of the way as you pan through your list of apps, settings, or files.
The Search pane makes it easy to continue searching for the same term in other system views or Metro style apps with just one tap. Touch-friendly search suggestions minimize typing on a touch screen, and the search contract provides a framework for search suggestions that developers can use for their own Metro style apps as well. In addition, we designed touch-friendly filters with result counts in the file search view to help users quickly refine the search results set.
The new Start search experience makes it easier than ever to search for content in your PC or in apps from anywhere in the system. It’s been designed to work seamlessly and efficiently across the range of devices that Windows will run on, and across different input mechanisms such as the mouse, keyboard, and touch. Start search brings apps, settings, and files together with other Metro style apps that implement the Search contract, creating a unified and consistent search experience. We will talk more about the search experience and the search contract in a future post. In the meantime, you can get more information from our talk at //build/ on the Search contract.
Here’s a video showing how easy and efficient it is to quickly launch apps, settings, and files from anywhere in the system using the keyboard:
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We look forward to your continued feedback as you try out the Windows 8 Start search experience!
Thanks,
BrianA senior White House official on Monday left the door open for U.S. troops deploying to Syria to conduct raids.
Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, said at the Defense One Summit 2015 that raids would not be the troops' "principle" function.
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"The norm is not going out in raids," he said, but added, "I'm obviously not going to rule anything out."
Rhodes repeated several times that the U.S. troops deploying to Syria will not have a combat "mission."
"Their mission is not one of combat where they're going into the fight," he said. "What they're sent to do is not to go out and be engaged in combat.... Their mission is not one of combat."
The White House announced on Friday that several-dozen U.S. troops would be deployed to Syria to coordinate with local Syrian groups opposed to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as part of an effort to ramp up its military campaign.
A senior defense official on Friday said the deploying troops would not be participating in any raids, but instead would stay at the groups' "quasi-headquarters."
The official said although U.S. troops would continue to conduct unilateral raids in Syria, they would be carried out by other U.S. forces.
The official, however, did not rule out more troop deployments and raids with partners in the future, but said for now "they will not be accompanying on any operations that these [Syrian] forces partake in."
Having U.S. troops on Syrian soil conducting combat raids would go against the president's pledge in 2013.
"I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria," President Obama said on Sept. 10, 2013. "I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan."
Rhodes said the deployment is designed to strengthen local partners on the ground, and provide them with advice. Last month, the White House announced it was scrapping a Pentagon program to train Syrian rebels, and instead equip local forces to fight ISIS.
However, Rhodes acknowledged U.S. troops could find themselves in combat, as with a raid conducted last month to assist Kurdish Peshmerga in northern Iraq where one U.S. commando died.
"These are dangerous places," he said.
The U.S. troop deployment follows a Russian airstrike campaign in Syria that began in late September. Moscow has been helping the President Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria regain territory from opposition groups — in some cases, the same ones the U.S. has supported.
The U.S. had warned Russia not to get militarily involved in Syria and |
the catch.”
Ramone won the record of the year Grammy for Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” from the album (after removing a “cha-cha-cha” background from the song), captured album of the year for the follow-up 52nd Street and was named producer of the year in 1980 after guiding the rock-infused Glass Houses, which featured Joel's first chart-topping single, "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me."
On Oct. 1, 1982, 52nd Street became the first commercially released compact disc, and Ramone later received a Technical Grammy for his lifetime of innovative contributions to the industry.
In 1993, Ramone produced Duets, a comeback album for Sinatra. The legendary singer never sang in the same studio with his duet partners, who included Streisand, Natalie Cole, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, Bono and Kenny G. Ramone used an EDNet fiber-optic system to record the artists in different locations in real time.
The first of two Sinatra Duets albums sold more than 3 million copies in the U.S. and made it to No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart.
STORY: Why Music Biopics Are a Nightmare to Make
For Genius Loves Company, Ramone and fellow producer John Burk provided a clean, retro setting for the pop classics sung by Charles with James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, Norah Jones and others. The album, recorded over a period of nine months and released in August 2004 -- two months after Charles’ death -- earned triple-platinum status, made it to No. 1 and raked in eight Grammys.
“If Ray is looking upon us now, he’s just made his career last another 50 years,” Ramone said as he accepted the Grammy for Album of the Year.
Ramone also produced Bennett’s Duets II, the 2011 release famous for the crooner’s collaboration with Amy Winehouse. With that album, Bennett became the oldest living artist to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Other Ramone-produced albums include Lesley Gore’s I’ll Cry If I Want To (1963), Julian Lennon’s debut Valotte (1984), the Broadway cast album for Passion (1994), Liza Minnelli’s live Liza’s Back (2002), Rod Stewart’s It Had to Be You: The Great American Songbook (2002) and recent works from George Michael, Dionne Warwick and Glee star Matthew Morrison.
Ramone recorded Streisand and Kris Kristofferson live during filming for A Star Is Born (1976) and co-wrote “Imagination,” sung by Laura Branigan in Flashdance (1983), good for another Grammy. He also contributed to the films Midnight Cowboy (1969), Ghostbusters (1984) and Beyond the Sea (2004), with Kevin Spacey acting and singing as Bobby Darin.
Ramone also recorded Marilyn Monroe’s boozy rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” sung to President John F. Kennedy in 1962 and received an Emmy in 1973 for his work as an audio designer on the NBC special Liza With a Z.
In a Recording Academy statement confirming his passing, the Grammy organization also credited Ramone as "a pioneer of audio technological developments -- creating new innovations for the compact disc and surround sound technologies."
In an interview with Music Radar in November, Ramone credited his ability to seize upon spontaneity as one reason he became such a prolific hitmaker.
“You have to be able to run as fast as the artist, capture the magic early on,” he said. “After a few takes, people start intellectualizing what they’re doing, and it loses something. What’s special happens right away -- so you have to be ready for it.”
In addition to his son Matt, Ramone is survived by wife Karen and sons BJ and Simon.
UPDATE: A previous version of this story incorrectly listed Ramone's age as 72.
Twitter: @THRMusicStar Trek has never been short of cowardice. Picard’s assimilation by the Borg in Next Generation is one example of how fear can influence your subsequent decisions, notably, when trying to maintain a reputation of bravery. Saru, a Kelpien that is a new species to the Star Trek universe, has also been noted for his pusillanimity in Star Trek: Discovery. Whilst the story follows Sonequa Martin’s portrayal of Michael Burnham, the mutineer blamed for being the cause of the war with the Klingons, it is perhaps the tragedy of Saru and the Kelpiens where the focal of the series lies.
Only five episodes into Discovery, little is still known about the Kelpiens other than their evolution as a ‘prey species’. It is this small piece of information that lays the foundations of what Saru is, and likely what he will become. The Kelpien homeworld does not have food chains but is binary between predator and prey. Kelpiens were the livestock, evolving an acute sense of danger, prudently avoiding risk and threatening situations, giving them the reputation of cowardice.
The introduction of the Klingons as the antagonists was no coincidence. Their culture as a warrior species with honor ethos would put them as a typical ‘predator’. Indeed, Klingons are known to respond better to an act of aggression rather than the delectable acts of diplomacy. Indeed, in the episode ‘The Vulcan Hello’, Michael Burnham suggested a preemptive strike on the Klingon vessel, as a previous encounter by the Vulcans had had promising results. The conflict of fight or flee, one which would usually have a Kelpien to flee. The impending battle certainly had Saru’s threat ganglia extend from the back of his head, sensing a predator was approaching.
Interestingly, the idea that the Kelpien homeworld was binary from the outset would be illogical. Undoubtedly more answers will be revealed as the series progresses, however, it wouldn’t be too far-flung to imagine the predator on their homeworld wasn’t from their homeworld at all, but a predatory alien species taking advantage of an ‘inferior’ species. A livestock species wouldn’t likely develop the intellect that Saru possesses, at least, not in the abundance needed to join Starfleet. The Kelpiens are a highly developed species, one that would have likely outcompeted competition it had evolved with, much like modern humans today. The mystery of the predators is one of curious whimsy, one that will change as the series develops, although, the Klingons shouldn’t be dismissed and it would bring the series into a delightful full-circle.
Saru’s evolution is a prey species is what puts him as the focal point of the series. The comparisons with Spock are weak at best, with the only similarity bearing from their original assignment as First Officer. Indeed, it is Burnham who has most in common with Spock, notably the conflict between human nature and Vulcan logic. Saru is much more at the mercy of his emotions than he would like to believe. In the episode ‘Choose Your Path’, Saru admits his jealousy of the opportunities given to Burnham, likely the cause of some of the fear he had towards her. In the same episode, when he takes command of the USS Discovery to rescue Captain Lorca from the Klingons, there was clearly a sense of fear of being undermined, resulting in a much more aggressive tone than we had seen previously. The threat ganglia doesn’t just respond to physical dangers but also a perceived threat of status.
Saru represents a hesitancy amongst the assertive forces. The Klingons are a predatory race seeking to rebuild their empire. Captain Lorca appears to want as much war as possible for unknown reasons as of yet, and Burnham has all the credentials to be captain of her own ship. This leaves Saru as a mouse surrounded a group of cats, all wanting the biggest bite. This sets out a journey that will undoubtedly result in conflict between Lorca and Saru, becoming a choice between fight or flee. The biology of this struggle has already been seen with the tardigrade arc, a species nicknamed ‘the Ripper’ for its ability to eliminate anything it saw as a threat. The truth of the tardigrade was one of a sentient beast that was merely becoming weaponized by Starfleet, resorting in its aggressive defense mechanism.
And here’s the awkward truth about Star Trek: Discovery, Starfleet aren’t the saints they’ve been regarded as previously. The use of the tardigrade amounts to biological weaponry and the full picture of the cause of the Klingon war hasn’t been painted yet. Saru is at the center of a game of risk and his natural instincts will send him into some unfortunate situations. The only hope is they don’t take the cloy route and make him perform an act of bravery that results in his loss of life, there are too many underdog stories these days and it would be too obvious for a series that has already shown much creativity.
Saru is perhaps the most unique element of Star Trek: Discovery, introducing a species that could have one of the most complex pasts yet. With an aggressive start to the series, it is likely that the climax will involve the Kelpiens to a large degree. The tale of the Kelpiens is an element in the series that shouldn’t be avoided, and if avoided, would diminish Discovery to a far more linear saga than it deserves to be. Saru, as First Officer, is in a position to go from prey to predator, how his character develops will influence the direction of the series as a whole.Transformers’ most intelligent combiner gets the body of a linebacker!
Out of the box, these come in robot mode. The personality in these designs really bleeds through and gives you that, “Should I buy a second set?” thought as soon as you look at them. The variety of sizes, and even their accessories shows that not one of these was “left behind” when it came to the design and thought process behind them. Metal Storm particularly has become one of my favorite Fansproject or MakeToys figures in general, let alone just this set!
While Blindfire and Metal Storm remain very faithful to their G1 counterparts, the rest take a more updated approach to their vehicle modes. Overheat in particular stands out with it’s Tron-cycle styling. I’m not a person to display my Transformers in vehicle mode, but these are definitely once worth keeping in them for a while just to check out. Extremely well done.
Admittedly, I like the individual robot modes best because they all have so much character that I’d buy them as standalone figures, but when you get this thing into combined mode you can’t deny that this is where they money’s at. Aesthetically, he’s a fantastic update to Computron while really taking in that anime twist that MakeToys has become renowned for. I just looked up at my shelf even before typing this sentence and thought about how I’m still in awe that they were able to faithfully mimic Computron’s chest plate so incredibly well without it being a separate piece. The multiple uses for MetalStorm’s back kibble are ingenious, and who would have thought that Computron would fit the role of “bodybuilding archer” so well?
The creativity and engineering on this really make you remember why MakeToys are where they are on the Third-Party food chain: great work!
Overall Score: 8.5/10
And don’t forget to pick up yours as well as other MakeToys products by clicking HERE!
Enjoy a few more pictures of this figure below! Remember to click the pictures to view larger resolutions:CLEVELAND, Tenn. (AP) -- An eastern Tennessee sheriff's Facebook post celebrating Easter has made a group of atheists $15,000 richer.
News organizations report that Bradley County reached a settlement Thursday with the American Atheists organization over Sheriff Eric Watson's post on the department's Facebook page over Easter.
The atheist group and an unidentified resident said Watson violated their First Amendment rights by posting, in reference to Jesus, the message "He is risen" and deleting detractors' comments.
The American Atheists said in a news release that Bradley County will pay $15,000 in damages and $26,000 in legal fees. The group also says the sheriff's office has agreed to not promote any religious belief.
In a statement, Watson denied violating the plaintiffs' rights. He says the settlement was a business decision made by the county.Last week, I asked the city to share with me a comprehensive report on San Antonio’s long-term water security that was completed in draft form six months ago. City officials refused to release it.
Now I know why.
On Monday, I got my hands on the 235-page report through alternative channels. Co-authored by researchers at Texas A&M University, it bashes the Vista Ridge water project, a pending $3.4 billion initiative by the city-owned San Antonio Water System.
The report “is designed to review and assess the many factors important in implementing effective water policies,” the executive summary states. “The timing of the analysis for the City of San Antonio (COSA) allows it to be considered as part of the discussion to complete a new comprehensive plan.”
Timing is critical. Next month, the City Council will vote on a new SAWS rate structure, and the pricey Vista Ridge project, a 142-mile pipeline to deliver water from Burleson County, could raise the utility’s rates by as much as 16 percent.
Yet two months after the completion of the most recent draft of the report, city staff still has not provided it to all council members, nor offered even a briefing. Mayor Ivy Taylor’s office, however, has been briefed on the report.
This does not sit well with Councilman Ray Lopez, chairman of the city’s Utilities, Technology and Transportation Committee.
The mayor “wanted to slow the process down by sending it to our committee for review,” Lopez told me Monday. “My concern is: How quickly will it come here, and is there anything that we’re doing that that report would recommend against? We don’t know that because we haven’t seen the report.”
Requested more than a year ago by Councilman Ron Nirenberg, the report describes and assigns risk ratings to 12 water sources for the city.
When it comes to the Vista Ridge project, it takes a decidedly dim — some might even say biased — view.
“Claims by Vista Ridge advocates that both aggressive water conservation goals and the Vista Ridge water project can and will be funded simultaneously are going to be hard to justify to ratepayers,” the report states.
In another section: “For critics of the project and even project supporters, it seems hard to imagine SAWS ratepayers will understand a 16 percent-plus rate increase if the ‘plus’ relates to unsold water from the Vista Ridge project due to conservation efforts by SAWS ratepayers, especially when continuation of the conservation efforts requires funding.
“Critics have also questioned whether the Vista Ridge project is another example of SAWS and the City of San Antonio reverting to an insensitive mode with regard to their roles in the region,” the report continues. “The Vista Ridge project could well be perceived as San Antonio ignoring the interests of its rural neighbors to obtain more water for its own growth, and stifling the future of the Burleson/Lee County area so there is water for new San Antonians to water their lawns.”
One would be forgiven for confusing “critics of the project” with the report’s own co-authors.
The lead writer, Calvin Finch, is the former director of the SAWS Water Conservation Department. Even more damning than his opinions are the ratings he assigns to facets of Vista Ridge, designated in the report as a “high-risk” project.
Finch designates the “distance of (water) source from San Antonio” as an exceptionally risky facet of the project, expected to begin transporting up to 16.3 billion gallons annually by 2020 from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer.
Overall, the independent analysis puts the city at odds with its own utility. But that’s no reason for city officials to suppress it.
“I think what we need to do is wrap our arms around what we mean when we say we want a transparent government,” said Lopez, who has requested a copy of the report and a briefing by city staff. “Transparent means sharing even when it’s not flattering.
“People want to see (the report),” he added. “How do we make these incredibly hard decisions, especially about SAWS and rate structure, without seeing it? … Are there things there that are outside of the scope of the report? That’s fine, but let us make that determination. We’re big boys. Not having the report in hand is not a transparent approach. The decisions on policy belong to the elected officials, not city staff.”
bchasnoff@express-news.netST. PAUL, Minnesota — Fifty-one years after the Voting Rights Act, illegitimacy follows the 2016 primaries like a tail. Roll purges by the NY Board of Elections, who stripped 126,000 Kings County and 60,000 Brooklyn voters of their voting rights; poll closures imposed by the AZ Maricopa County Recorder who opened 1 polling station for every 21,000 voters – made the headlines, but the story is repeating in state after state.
Voting is the heart of democracy. Why are the American people giving it up without a fight?
Blatantly anti-Democratic “Semi”, “Modified” and “Closed” primaries are announced months in advance, yet last-second legal filings, post-primary lawsuits and petitions remain the electorate’s failing defensive playbook. That “The People” decry an effort intended to silence them by tweeting about it would be touching if it weren’t stupid.
In 2012 in California, tens of thousands of post-incarceration activists organized and sued then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen for their right to vote, and won. If their intent was to reclaim voting rights in time to participate in the 2012 Open California Primary, then alas… their vote was restored just in time for suppression in the 2016 Modified Closed Primary.
Denial of voting rights is an old and effective method of domination. From ancient Rome to 17th century Europe, “Civil Death” was used to nullify voices of dissent. What was “killed” were an individual’s rights to marry, own property, protection under the law, and vote.
In election 2016, we are witnessing civil death by carpet bomb.
Are “The People” to blame for failing to fight for their right, or even to see their manipulation?
In the 2012 primary, only voters registered “No Party Preference (NPP)” received an “all-inclusive” ballot which listed every candidate. For 2016, the State has decreed:
NPP ballots will list NO presidential candidates.
NPP voters may, on the day, request one of the following “ qualified ” Party ballots: Democrat, American Independent, or Libertarian.
NPP voters may complete a “vote by mail” application for one of the above.
NPP voters may re-register to the party of their preferred candidate by May 23.
Everyone registered with a party will get a ballot listing only the candidate(s) of that party.
On Feb. 22, Secretary of State Padilla issued a press release urging new voters, new citizens, those who had moved, and those who had changed their names to register before May 23, or risk being “sidelined.” He also released a registration report for the “six qualified political parties.” NPP registrations were listed at over 4 million people, or 25 percent of all registered voters. No mention was made of the fact that their ballots would omit any options for president.
Much has been made of the plight of several hundred thousand Californians registered as American Independent since the story broke on April 17. Their suppression is merely the smoke. What’s burning are the rights of 17 million voters: the State Constitution is on fire.
Gore Vidal said, “We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.” I give you California voters.
Due to its number of pledged delegates/power in the election, the Democratic Party has repeatedly closed the primary by various means, including deception.
But who IS the California Democratic Party?
The simple answer is that the Executive Branch of State Government — Gov. Jerry Brown and 10 other elected officers — are all executives of the California Democratic Party. It’s convenient, particularly in light of the governor’s ability to allocate funds “In the Name of The People” as he did April 29 with AB120, spending $16 million taxpayer dollars (without addressing the voting rights of those taxpayers) to fund the primary.
At least we know where some of the funding for this sham primary came from.
In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama famously refused to use the Presidential Election Campaign Fund (PCEF), instead courting banks to finance his candidacy. Active since 1974, PCEF was created to ensure that merit, not money, would determine the outcome of elections. Funded by voluntary individual contributions, the last available figures state its value as $301,734,271. In 2014 President Obama dissolved the PCEF, disbursing hundreds of millions of accrued taxpayer dollars collected to protect the election process from fraud to other purpose(s).
What will become of America’s elections in absence of the PCEF remains to be seen, but it is clear that the class warfare of “individual small money” versus “big dark money” campaign financing is only beginning.
What can be done about any of this? When in doubt, go to the source. Not the LA Times or CNN. Not a reprehensible snarl of red tape/Senate bills/amendments all designed to miscarry justice and mortally wound democracy. Not the Secretary of State or anyone or anything which would obscure or undermine the foundational document of state law. Here is the site used by Officers of the California Court to access the document they refer to daily:
The California Constitution Article 2 Section 5 Paragraph C states:
“The Legislature shall provide… an open presidential primary…”
Article 1 Section 3 Paragraph A states:
“The people have the right to instruct their representatives …”
When elected, state legislators swear to uphold and defend the constitution of both the nation and their state. The fact that national media have abdicated all responsibility to research and report is old news. That “The People” fail to unite to defend voting rights, a generation after the sacrifices which birthed The Voting Rights Act, is tragic.
California’s Primary is June 7. A non-partisan website has been put up for anyone interested in asking California’s elected employees what “open” means, or what in the hell they are doing to earn the public trust. One wonders if any will.Historic Boise: Warm Springs Historic District and the East End
Intro:
Here are a few photos I took today from a nice relaxing bike ride along Warm Springs Avenue, the East End and I also have included a few blocks of East downtown. I missed the Preservation Idaho tour yesterday of Warm Springs because I was at Pine Flats hot springs, so this morning I made up for it on my own, just me and my camera and my mountain bike.
In some of the photos it was a bit difficult to get a perfect photo of the house because of the jungle of foilage and trees.
Here is a little history about the historic district I found at the Preservation Idaho website:
http://www.preservationidaho.org/pro...ehomes05.shtml
Warm Springs Avenue began as a dirt wagon track to Kelly’s Hot Springs East of Boise. In 1890, the first hot water well was drilled just west of the Idaho State Penitentiary. The geothermal well was the beginning of Warm Springs Avenue and part of the pioneer exploration into geothermal water resources. A full-scale development using the hot water springs opened for business in 1892 – the Natatorium. Options for travelers included a streetcar line that tied Warm Springs Avenue with the growing City of Boise. The upscale fashion of residences on Warm Springs came into full swing by 1891, taking the spotlight from the popular Grove Street neighborhood. With the development of the geothermal water resources, many of the homes were originally heated by the well and pipe system put into place. This system is still operating today both along Warm Springs Avenue and in downtown Boise. The development of the natural geothermal system was the first of its kind, and was used during the industrial revolution in the United States as a new commodity.
And more interesting info:
http://www.energy.idaho.gov/renewabl..._heating.shtml
Boise Warm Springs Water District
The Boise area is unique with respect to geothermal district heating. The Boise Warm Springs Water District was the first district heating system in the United States. It has been in operation since 1892. Currently, the system is used to heat over 200 homes along Warm Springs Avenue. The average annual production between 1997 and 2000 was 209 million gallons. The supply temperature of the water is about 175 degrees Fahrenheit. The spent water either goes to the Boise River, or infiltrates into the ground through leaking ditches.
A little bit of the East End
East Downtown area
The Alexander Mansion. Moses Alexander served two terms as Boise mayor, elected in 1897 and was the nations first elected Jewish state governor and served two terms as governor of Idaho elected in 1914.
Fall usually takes her sweet time to put on the show of colors in the Boise Valley so watch out for a city photo thread towards the end of October. Intro:Here are a few photos I took today from a nice relaxing bike ride along Warm Springs Avenue, the East End and I also have included a few blocks of East downtown. I missed the Preservation Idaho tour yesterday of Warm Springs because I was at Pine Flats hot springs, so this morning I made up for it on my own, just me and my camera and my mountain bike.In some of the photos it was a bit difficult to get a perfect photo of the house because of the jungle of foilage and trees.Here is a little history about the historic district I found at the Preservation Idaho website:And more interesting info:The Alexander Mansion. Moses Alexander served two terms as Boise mayor, elected in 1897 and was the nations first elected Jewish state governor and served two terms as governor of Idaho elected in 1914.Fall usually takes her sweet time to put on the show of colors in the Boise Valley so watch out for a city photo thread towards the end of October. __________________
🌲 Keep Idaho Green 🌲
👌 Don't kill the Vibe 🤙 Last edited by Sawtooth; Oct 13, 2009 at 2:47 AM.Toronto officially broke the February record for the warmest temperature on record on Thursday.
The high of 16.5 C, and climbing, reached at noon at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport surpassed the previous record of 16 C set on Feb. 3 of last year.
“Records go back to the 1930s and we are the warmest ever by about two degrees so it was something else today,” Global News Chief Meteorologist said Thursday.
“Back-to-back Februaries have seen that warmest temperature.”
WATCH: Thursday marked the warmest February temperature in Toronto on record. Ashley Carter caught up with Toronto residents who were out and about enjoying the day.
The temperature exceeded the Environment Canada prediction of 16 C and also broke the all-time high temperature for the day of Feb. 23 of 14.9 C set in 1984.
The temperature is expected to drop to a night time low of 2 C with showers beginning in the morning and a risk of a thunderstorm.
Environment Canada meteorologist Mark Schuster told Global News significantly colder air will make its way into Southern Ontario by Sunday.
BREAKING: Warmest February temperature on record just set at #YYZ Pearson. Currently +16.5C breaking old record of 16.0C set just last Feb. — Anthony Farnell (@AnthonyFarnell) February 23, 2017
“It’s not going to last. We have another surge of warmth coming in Friday night, thunderstorms expected as well and then it’s going to slowly get back to typical weather as we move towards March,” Farnell said.
“Even next week there’s a rainstorm coming in on Wednesday so it will be mild throughout next week and then I think the week after it will be more snow than rain.”
Want your weather on the go? Download Global News’ Skytracker weather apps for iPhone, iPad and Android
Some Ontario cities breaking record highs today including all time February records in #LdnOnt, Toronto, #HamOnt. pic.twitter.com/yJwamMw535 — Anthony Farnell (@AnthonyFarnell) February 23, 2017
What a difference two years makes. February Extremes!!! pic.twitter.com/rPIqEVMfDu — Anthony Farnell (@AnthonyFarnell) February 23, 2017
Another day of February beach volleyball weather. pic.twitter.com/GbWUCTojf3 — Anthony Farnell (@AnthonyFarnell) February 23, 2017WASHINGTON — There is a bull’s-eye on the back of Rick Nash’s sweater. Everyone but everyone can see that. And in Wednesday night’s third period of the Rangers’ series-equalizing Game 4, 4-3 victory at the Garden, everyone could see his No. 61 on the bench.
No goals in the first four games of the playoffs isn’t the shock. The shock is that the Big Easy, who has been less and less of a factor as the series has progressed—eight shots on 16 attempts in Game 1, two shots and three attempts in Game 4—got less ice time in Wednesday’s third period than every Rangers forward other than Taylor Pyatt and Arron Asham.
It was 2:51 in the third for No. 61, which has to be the least amount of ice time a healthy Nash has received in crunch time since he learned the alphabet. He sat while Brian Boyle chewed up 8:48 and the Caps. He sat while coach John Tortorella allotted more ice to Ryane Clowe and Derek Dorsett than to the club’s marquee forward.
There is no second-guessing the coach on this one. The other guys were getting the job done. Nash, not so much. No. 61 has been a power forward operating without his powers; more often than not on the outside, unable to get to the net to snipe against Braden Holtby, the goaltender who has become more vulnerable by the period.
The Capitals are collapsing on Nash, taking away his time and space; showing him no respect. If there’s one asset missing from No. 61’s repertoire, it’s a mean streak. He has been hacked at and “mauled,” all year, as Derek Stepan said yesterday, but he never has snapped back, and he’s yet to bare his teeth in this increasingly nasty series.
Let’s be clear. No one is drawing broad conclusions about Nash’s ability to put a team on his broad shoulders after these four games in which he has appeared disjointed, hesitant and caught in between.
RANGERS PLAYOFF SCHEDULE
It can take time to become acclimated to the postseason. I have made this reference before, but Bryan Trottier scored five goals in his first 42 playoff games. And then he scored 37 goals in his next 75 matches.
Nash knows the job description. He signed up for it. He wanted the Big Stage. He might have been a difference-maker in February and March for the Rangers, but he was hired to make the difference now.
“I don’t think I’m putting more pressure on myself after four games without a goal, but I know what my job is,” Nash told The Post. “I know what I’m expected to do and I know what I expect myself to do.
“Other guys are stepping up, and that’s huge for us. But it’s my responsibility to figure out the way to contribute the way I know I can.”
Tortorella, who also reduced the ice time of the struggling Brad Richards as Game 4 evolved, said yesterday he has no concerns that Nash will be become unduly burdened by his burden.
“There’s no chance of that happening with him,” the coach said. “I can’t see that ever happening; he’s too much of a pro.”
The Rangers beat Washington twice at the Garden because they did get step-up performances from so many support players. They are a threat in this series because they have been the far more disciplined team, earning twice as many power plays as the Capitals (16-8) since the 6:26 mark of the second period of Game 1.
But eventually, a team requires its top scorers to score and its best players to play that way. That’s a roadmap to the Stanley Cup as old as the one the Kenora Thistles took to the chalice in 1907.
It’s on Nash to figure it out. It’s on Nash to shake free. It’s on Nash to do the job he was brought here to do after last year’s 20-game run when people decided Marian Gaborik couldn’t do it.
Now is the time for the bull’s-eye to be visible on the ice in crunch time and not on the bench.A freelance photographer in Edmonton is fielding death threats after a disagreement at the Women's March in front of Alberta's legislature building last weekend.
Jason Franson, who has won national awards for his work, was covering the Jan. 21 event for Canadian Press.
He was photographing a small group of counter-protesters when he stepped in front of Rebel Media contributor Sheila Gunn Reid.
Reid, who runs the Rebel's Alberta bureau, was video-recording the same group. She later posted footage on the Rebel website in which the two can be heard arguing about Franson crowding her.
In her video and on social media, Reid identifies Franson by name and the Rebel website posted this:
"Even more incredible, a photographer from the Canadian Press named Jason Franson was right there, taking pictures the whole time. But he didn't publish any of those pictures; he didn't support his fellow journalist. He actually pushed Sheila, too — and verbally disparaged her."
A CP spokesman said later the pictures Franson took at that particular time were not deemed newsworthy and the photographer said there was "no physical contact between them."
'You are a dead man'
Jason Franson says he has received death threats after staff at the Rebel Media identified him online. (Supplied/Jason Franson)
But since then, Franson said his email, voicemail and social media accounts have become clogged with threats.
"You are a dead man," one man commented on Franson's Instagram account.
"Better watch your back... I know where you live Jason. Expect a little surprise. Id (sic) be looking over your should if i were you. Pushing women around. You are finished," another wrote in an email.
Franson said he is filing a statement with police and has been keeping a record of the threats against him. He has also tightened privacy settings on his social media accounts.
"Expect a little surprise," one person wrote in an email to freelance Edmonton photographer Jason Franson. (Supplied/Jason Franson) One person accused photographer Jason Franson of being a coward and wrote "a baseball bat could fix that problem." (Supplied/Jason Franson)
"On a personal level, the harassment affects you because there are all these people publicly accusing you of being this terrible person that you aren't and you can't defend yourself," he said. "Logically, I know that the threats are most likely not serious but it makes me wonder if one of them might try and take a cheap shot sometime while I'm working."
Compared to Edmonton guitar-maker Dion Bews, Franson received a fraction of the online vitriol over events at last weekend's march.
Police arrested Bews after Sheila Gunn Reid alleged he hit her in the face. Bews, 34, has been charged with assault and uttering threats.
"I'm glad the police are taking the incident seriously because it was serious," Reid wrote in an email to CBC Edmonton.
Bews declined an interview with CBC.
'I asked the public for help'
Sheila Gunn Reid says she constantly receives threats for her work with Rebel Media. (Facebook)
Before the arrest, Rebel "commander" Ezra Levant started a webpage called FindTheThug.com on which he offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could identify the man who assaulted Reid.
Reid promoted the campaign online.
"I asked the public for help identifying him," she wrote in her email to CBC Edmonton. "Police do it all the time. People do it all the time on social media. The courts will handle the matter and again, I reiterate endlessly, I don't want anyone solving their problems with threats and fists."
Reid said she does not endorse violence or threats towards anyone, and she should not be held accountable for other people's actions. She receives threats for her work with Rebel Media almost daily, she added.
"I routinely get threats," Reid wrote, noting there have been more threats than usual since the Women's March. "It's a constant barrage of rape threats, threats of violence to myself and my children."
Online anonymity a myth
Police can intervene when online threats are criminal or harassing. A message becomes criminal when it involves threats of grievous bodily harm, said Const. Derek Onysko.
In those cases, police can start a file about the sender. Officers can also give a $250 fine or charge the offender with uttering threats.
They work closely with security branches at phone service providers and social media companies to track down offenders. Online anonymity is a myth, Onysko said.
"It makes our job as investigators a little bit more tricky. That being said, there are ways around it and we do have a lot of different investigative means to assist people who are having difficulties with either one person or a group."
Onysko recommended that people who experience online threats and harassment should contact the police non-emergency line for advice.The Baseball Tonight crew previews the matchup between Noah Syndergaard and the Mets against Jake Arrieta and the Cubs on Tuesday Night Baseball. (1:07)
CHICAGO -- New York Mets right-hander Noah Syndergaard insists he is in the clear after requiring an escort off the mound from the team's trainer in his final first-half start. Whether that is actually the case will be more firmly established once Syndergaard takes the mound on Tuesday night in a matchup opposite fellow All-Star Jake Arrieta at Wrigley Field.
Syndergaard's fastball velocity, which averages 98.1 mph, the highest of any starting pitcher in the majors, precipitously dropped to as low as 91 mph in his final inning of first-half work on July 8.
Syndergaard said his arm felt like it had a parachute attached in that final frame against the Washington Nationals.
So the Mets scratched Syndergaard from the All-Star Game, which he otherwise might have started. Manager Terry Collins then placed Syndergaard at the back of the rotation coming out of the break to maximize his rest. That turn comes up Tuesday against the Chicago Cubs.
"My arm feels really good |
example of an exclusive subscription. There is one active consumer A-0 with subscription A. Messages m0 through m4 are delivered in order and consumed by A-0. If another consumer A-1 wants to attach to subscription A, it will not be allowed to do so.
Figure 1. Exclusive subscription
Failover subscriptions (streaming)
With failover subscriptions, multiple consumers can attach to the same subscription. For a given topic partition, however, one consumer will be elected as the master consumer for that topic partition. Other consumers will be designated failover consumers. When the master consumer disconnects, the partition will be reassigned to one of the failover consumers to consume while the newly assigned consumer will become the new master consumer. When this happens, all non-acked messages will be delivered to the new master consumer. This is similar to consumer partition rebalancing in Apache Kafka. Figure 2 illustrate a failover subscription. Consumers B-0 and B-1 are subscribed to consume messages via subscription B. B-0 is the master consumer and receives all messages. B-1 is the failover consumer and will take over consumption in case of failure in consumer B-0.
Figure 2. Failover subscription
Shared subscriptions (queuing)
With shared subscriptions, you can have as many consumers as you want attach to the same subscription. Messages are delivered in a round-robin distribution across multiple consumers and any given message is delivered to only one consumer. When a consumer disconnects, all the messages that were delivered to it and not acknowledged will be rescheduled to be sent to the remaining consumers alive on that subscription. Figure 3 illustrates a shared subscription. Consumers C-1, C-2, and C-3 all consume messages on the same topic partition. Each consumer receives around ⅓ of the messages. If you want to increase the consumption rate, you can simply more consumers to the same subscription (as many as you want) without increasing the number of partitions.
Figure 3. Shared subscription
What should you use?
Exclusive and failover subscriptions allow only one consumer per topic partition per subscription. They consume messages in partition order. They are best applied to streaming use cases where strict ordering is required. Shared subscriptions, on the other hand, allow multiple consumers per topic partition. Each consumer in same subscription only receives a portion of the messages published to a topic partition. Shared subscriptions are best for queuing use cases where ordering is not required and can scale the number of consumers beyond the number of partitions.
A subscription in Pulsar is effectively the same as a consumer group in Apache Kafka. Creating subscriptions is highly scalable and very cheap. You can create as many subscriptions as you need. Different subscriptions on the same topic don’t have to be of the same subscription type. This means that you can have one failover subscription with 10 consumers and one shared subscription with 20 consumers on the same topic. If the shared subscription is slow in processing events, you can add more consumers to the shared subscription without changing the number of partitions. Figure 4 depicts a topic that has 3 subscriptions, A, B, and C, and illustrates how messages flow through the system from producers to consumers.
Figure 4. Unified streaming and queuing in Apache Pulsar
Besides the unified messaging API, since a Pulsar topic partition is effectively a distributed log stored in Apache BookKeeper, it also provides a reader API (similar to the consumer API but without cursor management) for users to fully control how to consume messages themselves.
Message Acknowledgment
When using a messaging system distributed across machines, failures can occur. In the case of consumers consuming messages from a topic in a messaging system, both the consumers consuming the messages and the message brokers serving the topic partition can fail. When such failure occurs, it is useful to be able to resume consumption from where consumers have left off once everything recovers, both so that you don’t miss messages and also so that you don’t have to process messages that have already been acknowledged. The resume point is often known as offset in Apache Kafka, the process of updating resume point is called message acknowledgment, or committing offset.
In Apache Pulsar, cursors are used for tracking the message acknowledgment for each subscription. The cursor is updated any time the consumers ack messages on the topic partitions. Updating the cursors ensures that the consumers will not receive the message again. However cursors are not simple offsets as in Apache Kafka. Cursors are much more.
There are two ways in Apache Pulsar on how messages can be acknowledged, ack individually or ack cumulatively. With cumulative acknowledgment, the consumer only needs to acknowledge the last message it receives. All the messages in the topic partition up to (and including) the provide message id will be marked as acknowledged and will not be re-delivered to the consumer again. Cumulative acknowledgment is effectively same as offset update in Apache Kafka.
The differentiating feature of Apache Pulsar is the ability to ack individually, aka selective acking. Consumers are able to acknowledge messages individually. Acked messages will not be redelivered. Figure 5 illustrates the difference between ack individual and ack cumulative (messages in gray box are acknowledged and will not be redelivered). At the top of the diagram, it shows an example of ack cumulative, messages before (and include) M12 are marked as acked. At the bottom of the diagram, it shows an example of acking individually. Only message M7 and M12 are acknowledged - in the case of consumer failures, all the messages will be redelivered except M7 and M12.
Consumers in an exclusive or failover subscription are able to ack messages individually or cumulatively; while consumers in a shared subscription are only allowed to ack messages individually. The ability to ack messages individually provides better experiences on handling consumer failures. It is extremely important for some applications to prevent redeliver already acknowledged messages, because for those applications processing messages can take long time or are very expensive.
The flexibility on choosing subscription type and acknowledge method allow Pulsar to support various messaging and streaming use cases in a simple unified API.
Figure 5. Individual vs. cumulative ack
Cursors are managed by brokers and stored in BookKeeper ledgers. You can check out our Cursors in Apache Pulsar for more details.
Message Retention
In contrast with traditional messaging systems, messages are not removed immediately after they are acknowledged. Pulsar brokers only update the cursor when receiving message acknowledgments. Messages can only be deleted after all the subscriptions have already consumed it (the messages are marked as acknowledged in their cursors). However, Pulsar also allows you to keep messages for a longer time even after all subscriptions have already consumed them. This is done by configuring a message retention period. Figure 6 illustrates how message retention looks like in a topic partition with 2 subscriptions. Subscription A already consumed all the messages before M6 and Subscription B already consumed all the messages before M10. That means all the messages before M6 (in gray boxes) are safe to remove. The messages between M6 and M9 are still not consumed by subscription A, they can not be removed.
If a topic partition is configured with a message retention period, the messages M0 to M5 will be kept around for the configured time period, even A and B already consumed them.
Figure 6. Message retention
Time-to-Live (TTL)
Beside message retention, Pulsar also supports message time-to-live (TTL).A message will automatically be marked as acknowledged if it is not consumed by any consumers within the configured TTL time period. The difference between message retention and message TTL is that message retention applies to messages that are marked as acknowledged and set to be deleted. Retention is a time limit applied on a topic whereas TTL applies to messages that are not consumed. TTL is thus a time limit on consumption with a subscription. Figure 6 above illustrates TTL in Pulsar. If there is no consumer alive for subscription B, for example, message M10 will automatically be marked as acknowledged after the configured TTL time period has elapsed, even if no consumers have actually read the message.
Pulsar Comparison with Apache Kafka
The table below lists the similarities and differences between Apache Pulsar and Apache Kafka.
Kafka Pulsar Concepts Producer-topic-consumer group-consumer Producer-topic-subscription-consumer Consumption More focused on streaming, exclusive messaging on partitions. No shared consumption. Unified messaging model and API.
Streaming via exclusive, failover subscription
Queuing via shared subscription Acking Simple offset management
Prior to Kafka 0.8, offsets are stored in ZooKeeper
After Kafka 0.8, offsets are stored on offset topics Unified messaging model and API.
Streaming via exclusive, failover subscription
Queuing via shared subscription Retention Messages are deleted based on retention. If a consumer doesn’t read messages before retention period, it will lose data. Messages are only deleted after all subscriptions consumed them. No data loss even the consumers of a subscription are down for a long time.
Messages are allowed to keep for a configured retention period time even after all subscriptions consume them. TTL No TTL support Supports message TTL
If you would like to hear a short sentence about how Apache Pulsar differs from Apache Kafka in their respective messaging models, here is mine:
Apache Pulsar combines high-performance streaming (which Apache Kafka pursues) and flexible traditional queuing (which RabbitMQ pursues) into a unified messaging model and API. Pulsar gives you one system for both streaming and queuing, with the same high performance, using a unified API.
Conclusion
In this blog post, I walked you through Apache Pulsar’s messaging model, which unifies queuing and streaming into a single API. Applications can use this single API for both high-performance queuing and streaming without the overhead of setting up, say, RabbitMQ for queuing and Kafka for streaming. I hope that this post gives you an idea of how message consumption, removal, and retention work in Apache Pulsar and that you’ve learned the difference between the Pulsar and Kafka messaging models. In upcoming blog posts, I will walk you through architectural details of Apache Pulsar and the differences that Pulsar presents in comparison to Apache Kafka with respect to data distribution, replication, availability, and durability.
If you are interested in this topic, and want to learn more about Apache Pulsar, please visit the official website at https://pulsar.apache.org. You can also participate in the Pulsar community via:
The Pulsar slack channel. You can self-register at https://apache-pulsar.herokuapp.com/
The Pulsar email list.
To get the latest updates about Pulsar, you can follow the project on Twitter @apache_pulsar.Hard to believe but true a large number of Muslim women, accompanied by men and children, offered prayers at Sri Lakshmi Venkateswara Swamy temple at Devunikadapa here on Ugadi festival on Saturday and offered the special prayers for the well being of their daughters. Vedic pundits say that this practice was being followed for decades In fact, Muslims look forward to the festival day. They start making a beeline to the place of worship right from 5 am and present offerings irrespective of their social status. Some fulfil their wows by breaking coconuts.
Hard to believe but true a large number of Muslim women, accompanied by men and children, offered prayers at Sri Lakshmi Venkateswara Swamy temple at Devunikadapa here on Ugadi festival on Saturday and offered the special prayers for the well being of their daughters. Vedic pundits say that this practice was being followed for decades
In fact, Muslims look forward to the festival day. They start making a beeline to the place of worship right from 5 am and present offerings irrespective of their social status. Some fulfil their wows by breaking coconuts.
When asked many Muslims say they visit the temple and perform pooja because of that relationship, the Legend has it that Lord Venkateswara had married one of his consorts, Bibi Nanchari, in an inter-religious event, leading to establishment of close relations between the Hindus and Muslims.
Mohd Khaleel from Anantapur said that “my grandfather had an immense faith in Devunikadapa Lord”. “We offer prayers at Pedda dargah in Kapapa town and later come here to worship Lord Balaji,” he added.
Muslims are understanding the importance of education but seems still have not let the illiteracy to go, even the educated men and women follow the old legendsA British woman and Pakistani man have been sentenced to one-year in prison for having an affair while on a trip to Dubai.
The pair had met on Facebook and became acquainted with one another for three years before she flew to stay with him for a week in Dubai in 2016, when they had consensual sex.
Having sex outside of marriage is strictly prohibited in the UAE, and those who take part in extramarital relationships face prison sentences and deportation.
The British woman, who is set to marry another man in London, and the Pakistani man are filing appeals in hopes of getting out of the one-year prison sentence.
A British woman and a Pakistani man were sentenced to a year in prison in Dubai for having sex while not married in Dubai
The man claimed that when the woman visited in 2016, he picked her up from Dubai International airport and drove to a flat in Sharjah, according to Gulf News.
He said that a Pakistani religious scholar married the couple verbally, though the woman denied that this ever happened.
In her court statement, the woman said that she was calling off her three-year-relationship with the man because she was getting married to man in London.
The Pakistani man then threatened to shame her, post photos of them together on Facebook and reveal to her family that she was already married to him, the woman said.
The woman also claimed that the man threatened to kill her if she married someone else.
The pair had met on Facebook and became acquainted with one another for three years before she flew to stay with him for a week in Dubai (pictured) in 2016, when they had consensual sex
Following the threatening messages, the woman and her father flew to Dubai to file a complaint against the man, who was then arrested by Dubai Police.
During an interrogation, he denied the threatening messages, telling police that she told him her family was pressuring her to stay away from him.
During the investigation, police found out that the couple had consensual sex while unmarried during their stay in Dubai in 2016.
The Dubai Misdemeanours Court sentenced the man and woman to a year in prison each for their crimes followed by deportation.
The man and woman pleaded not guilty and have appealed the ruling seeking leniency.The rest of the structure – including the front and rear subframes, front bulkhead, suspension components and much of the skin – is made from aluminium. The carbonfibre moulding is both glued and riveted to the aluminum that makes up the rest of the structure.
Audi technical chief Ulrich Hackenburg told Autocar that the new structure makes the Huracán over 50 per cent stiffer than the outgoing aluminum-spaceframe Gallardo, and around 10 per cent lighter.
Hackenburg also said that the real advantage of using carbonfibre in vehicle construction was to use it in "monolithic" structures such as the bulkhead and centre tunnel. He described this construction as the "backbone" of the car and the part of the structure that had the biggest influence on overall body stiffness.
Because the bulkhead and centre tunnel are moulded in one piece the construction costs are competitive with using conventional steel and aluminum stamped panels. Manufacturing the Huracán's backbone structure takes around 30 minutes, Hackenburg said.
Despite an increase in the use of lightweight materials in its construction, the dry weight of the Huracán has actually increased slightly over that of the Gallardo, from 1410kg to 1422kg. This is most likely down to the amount of interior and dynamic technology that has been added to give the Huracán what Lamborghini claims is a combination of “absolute performance with easy-to-drive road behaviour” and a “luxurious and sports-orientated finish”.
The design of the Huracán has been deliberately softened in comparison to the Aventador, said Fillipo Perini, head of styling at the sportscar maker.
One of the aims of the Huracán project was to make it “easy for the road…but very capable on the track”. To that end there will not be a manual option with the car. Just two per cent of Gallardos were ordered with manual ‘boxes and every order "went up to the board for approval" according to Lamborghini sources.
Other features include a configurable TFT instrument panel (which allows the whole screen to be dominated by a sat-nav map) and a steering wheel which houses finger-tip controls for the wipers, washers, high beam and indicators, while removing the traditional stalks on the column has allowed the fitment of bigger gearshift paddles.
The high-quality interior of the Huracán is a big step forward from the Gallardo. It features Nappa leather and Alcantara trim and upholstery. A full suite of customisable options will be offered.
A three-stage switch to alter the chassis’ characteristics – called the Anima – is fitted to the lower part of the steering wheel and will be an option. It offers variable ratio steering, which changes the amount of wheel movement depending on the chassis setting and speed of the car.
The Huracán's 4x4 drivetrain is electronically controlled, and in a steady state, divides the engine’s torque 30/70 in favour of the rear wheels. In extreme conditions, 100 per cent of the torque can go to the rear or 50 per cent to the front.
Carbon-ceramic brakes feature as standard specification, while a variable steering system, called Lamborghini Dynamic Steering, and a magnetorheological adjustable damping set-up can be found on the options list.
The model had been widely tipped to be called Cabrera, but Lamborghini has chosen Huracán — or Huracán LP610-4, to give it its full title — for the name. It continues Lamborghini’s convention of naming its cars after famous fighting bulls, Huracán being a legendary animal that fought in Alicante, Spain, in 1879.Image caption Mona studied at the underground Bahai university 10 years after Shirin
The largest non-Muslim minority in Iran, the Bahais, are persecuted in many ways - one being that they are forbidden from attending university. Some study in secret, but for those who want to do a postgraduate degree the only solution is to leave their country and study abroad.
"I remember my father showing me the scars he had on his head from when he used to be beaten up by the children of his town on his way to school," says Shirin. "So, of course, I didn't tell my father that I was experiencing the same when I was growing up in Iran in the 1980s. I knew he prayed and hoped that the world would get better."
In fact, persecution of the Bahais only increased following the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
And when Shirin's son, Khosru, started going to school, she had to hide more bad news from her father.
The kids wouldn't touch me, and if I were to touch them they'd go and take a shower Khosru, Bahai man on his school days
"I did not tell him that the children of the children of the children who left him scarred, are now calling my son untouchable," she says.
When, in the eighth grade, Khosru told the other children he was Bahai they dropped him like a stone.
"The kids wouldn't touch me," he says, "and if I were to touch them, they'd go and take a shower."
Since the creation of the Bahai faith in the mid-19th Century, the Iranian Shia establishment has called them "a deviant sect", principally because they reject the Muslim belief that Mohammed was the last prophet.
On official websites they are described as apostates, and as "unclean".
But it is when a student has finished school that the problems really begin.
As a Bahai, Shirin was told she could not enter university. Her only option was to secretly attend the Bahais' own clandestine university - the Bahai Institute for Higher Education (BIHE), set up in the mid-1980s by Bahai teachers and students who had been thrown out of Iranian universities after the revolution.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Universities are open to young women in Iran, but not if they are Bahai
Shirin enrolled in 1994. At that time, only two BA courses were available -in Science or Religious Studies - so she decided to study comparative religion.
Lectures took place in improvised classrooms in private homes all around Tehran. It took six years to complete her course, and it was then that she hit an impenetrable wall. There was no scope to do an MA or a PhD, and there was no scope for employment where her skills could be used.
I wrote that, I was not Muslim... They said, 'Good luck, you can't enter university' Mona, Gradate of the clandestine university
Soon afterwards, a wave of crackdowns on the Bahai intelligentsia began, with raids on clandestine classrooms and the arrest of many BIHE teachers. Shirin saw her world was closing in on her. So when she heard about a domestic worker's visa scheme in the UK, she jumped at it.
"I applied straight away without wasting time, it didn't matter what the visa was called. I had to leave," she says.
Shirin arrived in the UK in 2003 and combined her domestic work with an evening job at an Italian restaurant in Scarborough. But she never forgot what she came to do, what she must achieve.
On a dark and smoggy English morning, she boldly walked through the doors of Birmingham University, and announced that she had a degree in religion from an underground university in Tehran.
To her great surprise, a week later, she was summoned back and was offered a place.
Find out more
Listen to Lipika Pelham's report on the Bahai, The World's Faith, for Heart and Soul on the BBC World Service
"It was more than a miracle - it was beyond expectation, beyond my wildest dream," she says. "Till today, I feel it was the best reward I received for never compromising my faith."
Shirin finished her degree in 2006 and left the UK to join her brother in the US, where many of her family, friends and co-religionists have, over the years, found sanctuary from persecution.
Image caption Shirin (right) and a friend in New York
But soon another crackdown against the Bahais began, at home in Iran.
In 2008, seven members of the Bahai administrative body, Yaran, were arrested and charged with among other things, spying for Israel. After a trial in a Revolutionary Court in 2010, they were sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.
At this time another young Bahai woman, Mona, was applying to university in Tehran.
The motivation for the students is like a person in the desert without water Prof Thane Terril, Trainer of Bahai teachers
"I took an entrance exam at the University of Tehran - they were supposed to send a card saying how and where you should register if you were accepted, and you must write your religion on the card," she says.
"I wrote that I was not Muslim. There was an option that said 'other', and I ticked that box. There was no option for Bahai.
"When they sent back the card, they said, 'OK, you may register,' and in the place of religion, they wrote, Islam."
"In my belief, you're not supposed to lie about your faith even when facing death. So I wrote back, I was not Muslim. They said, 'Good luck, you can't enter university.'"
Like Shirin, Mona had only one option - the clandestine university, and it was an unforgettable experience.
"I remember the faces of all my friends who were coming from other cities in Iran, from far away," she says. "It took them maybe 16 - 20 hours to get to Tehran. Their faces looked so tired.
"It was really hard. We had one class from 08:00 to 12:00 in the east of Tehran, and the second class from 14:00 to 18:00 on the west side - it was exhausting! Sometimes we didn't have physical teachers, we had them over Skype, who were teaching us from the US, Canada."
After she graduated, she faced the same difficulties Shirin had experienced a decade earlier - and opted for a similar solution.
In 2009, she escaped to New York, via Austria, under an international religious refugee repatriation programme.
When I met her recently in Joe's Coffee, a lively meeting place for students and teachers at Columbia University, she had just completed her MA in Psychology. She was over the moon.
"It feels amazing, I can't believe it's all done and I'll even have a graduation! When I graduated from the BIHE, they arrested all my teachers, Bahai teachers. And we never had a graduation day."
The US is home to one of the largest Bahai populations in the world, their presence dating back at least to 1912, when Abdul Baha, the son of the faith's founder, Baha'u'llah, spent 11 months in the country, promoting the religion.
The BIHE degrees are accepted by most US universities - as Mona's was at Columbia University - and many BIHE volunteers are based in the US.
"Students and instructors in Iran can end up in jail just for being students and instructors. So they are not only doing something that is hard for them to do, but dangerous to do," says Prof Thane Terril, a convert to the Bahai faith who now runs online teacher training courses for post-graduate students.
"The motivation for the students is like a person in the desert without water."
Sipping coffee in the café of the former hotel, Ansonia, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Abdul Baha once stayed, Shirin says that she could never understand what the regime has against the Bahais.
"Abdul Baha emphasised that the East and West must meet," she says. "I think the collective approach to life is what we think of as being the oriental or Eastern culture, and the individualist approach to life is considered to be Western. And when the two merge, you have a very beautiful culture."
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.I’m wrapping up a bug right now that has to do with translating python exceptions into C++ exceptions. The translation occurrs as follows:
Catch boost::python::error_already_set
Import python modules which contain the exception types that I want to compare against
Compare the thrown exception with the imported types using PyErr_ExceptionMatches
Take appropriate actions (e.g. throw a C++ exception) based on the match
This technique looks something like this:
using namespace boost::python; void main() { Py_Initialize(); try { do_something(); } catch (const error_already_set&) { object exc = import("my_module").attr("MyException"); if (PyErr_ExceptionMatches(exc.ptr())) throw MyException(); throw; }... }
In the real code the import calls were only made the first time any translation was requested, but that that’s a minor detail.
Do you see the bug? If you do, I imagine that either this has happened to you before or you know a lot about the CPython’s implementation of module imports.
The import() call eventually calls PyImport_Import(), the recommended method for importing module programatically. This calls PyEval_GetGlobals() to get the global dict for the current execution frame. In my case, there apparently is no current execution frame, and this fact sends PyImport_Import down a branch where it calls…*drumroll*…PyErr_Clear().
What this means is that by the time I call PyErr_ExceptionMatches(), there is no active python exception. It has been silently erased. The simple (and, I think, correct) fix for this is to stash the exceptions before importing, import, and then restore the exceptions:
using namespace boost::python; void main() { Py_Initialize(); try { do_something(); } catch (const error_already_set&) { PyObject *e, *v, *t; PyErr_Fetch(&e, &v, &t); object exc = import("my_module").attr("MyException"); PyErr_Restore(e,v,t); if (PyErr_ExceptionMatches(exc.ptr())) throw MyException(); throw; }... }
In the absence of any commentary in the python source, this behavior is a bit puzzling. There may well be a good reason for it, but there is no indication anywhere that I’ve read that PyImport_Import() might clear your error variables. This bears some looking into.
It took me quite a while to track this bug down for two reasons. First, I made the assumption that the bug must exist in my code. I spent all sorts of time looking at things like destructors triggered by unwinding, implicit conversions, and any other crazy thing I could think of that might somehow be triggering clearing of the errors. The one basic fact I had was that a) an error_already_set was reaching my catch and b) when it arrived, there was no active python exception. Based on what I knew of boost::python and CPython, plus my faith in the two, it seemed wise to look for bugs in my code first.
Second, and more egregiously, I was debugging with release versions of boost and python. In hindsight, this fact cost me more time than anything else. I say this because, as soon as I got debugging versions (unoptimized and with symbols), the bug had no place to hide and was easily found. A few well-placed breakpoints plus some stepping through the translation code almost immediately shined a light on boost::python::import(). After that, it was only a few more steps to PyImport_Import() and, ultimately, PyErr_Clear().
So, lesson learned.
AdvertisementsIt appears that first confirmed gaming benchmarks of RX 480 have surfaced.
AMD Radeon RX 480 gaming benchmarks
Polish magazine called CD-Action shares some information about RX 480 performance in three games, Metro Light Light Redux, Witcher 3 and World of Tanks.
Średnie detale = Medium details
Bardzo wysokie detale = Very high details
According to the review, 5% overclocking causes severe artifacts in 3DMark, while 7% overclock causes system to freeze. Not a word about drivers uses though.
It’s interesting to see reference RX 480 review sample being compared to to highly customized ZOTAC AMP! Omega (clocked at 1304 MHz).
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.On a tour last summer of the University of Texas at Austin campus, no one mentioned to my teenagers that it would be easier for them to get admitted if a well-connected Texan made a phone call or wrote a letter of recommendation to the university president. It’s certainly not in the literature and not on BeALonghorn.com
“Relationships matter.” That’s the finding of Kroll Associates, an investigative firm brought in last August to delve into the admissions process after a member of the university’s Board of Regents raised concerns about favoritism and set off a political storm. The 104-page report found that those relationships “can often provide particular applicants a slight boost in the highly competitive environment of university admissions.”
This study, which also explores admissions at the law and business schools, lands just as high school seniors around the country are anxiously awaiting those acceptances and dreading the denials. Former admissions officers sometimes write behind-the-scenes looks into the business, but it’s rare to have a top university lay bare the inner-workings of that department. The report, released this month, details the “hold” and “watch list” system that let UT President Bill Powers and the deans get a final say before a “no” letter went out. The report finds that applicants with personal or political connections might get a “second look” after a rejection or “special consideration outside of normal admission channels.”
It wasn’t hordes of kids who got in that way, but there were a handful accepted every year who were “truly unqualified,” according to an admissions official. A few had SATs as low as the 800s (out of 1600) and GPAs hovering around 2.0, well below last year’s average of 1312 and 3.4. “It is readily apparent that certain applicants are admitted at the instigation of the President over the assessment of the Admissions Office,” Kroll reported. Over a six-year period, 72% of applicants put on the “hold” list were admitted, compared with 40% of the general pool.
The president’s office did acknowledge to Kroll that “legislative letters and calls” carry the most weight because the university is beholden to the legislature. The State Capitol dome, as the student tour guides point out, is visible from the campus.
Powers said those students who squeaked through at the end of the process were added to the total number admitted; no one lost a seat because of his decision. “Looking out for the best interests of the university is the proper role of the president,” Powers said in the report. “And I am the only one who is in the best position to make some of these ultimate determinations.”
Powers, who took over as president in 2006, told Kroll that if it were against university rules, he wouldn’t have done it. He added that he has talked to many of his fellow college heads and what he did is the norm. “I do not know of any college or university where, to some limited extent, these sorts of considerations are not taken into account.”
That’s painful to hear if you’re waiting on a "thick envelope," but not wholly unexpected. Does anyone really think that friends in high places–or low places–don’t matter? UT has become one of the hottest colleges. Last year, FORBES ranked UT the 13th best public college in the country. And with a sticker price of about $10,000 a year for in-state students, it’s no wonder there were 38,785 applications for 7,287 spots in the freshman class that entered last September.
Of course, it’s not just politicians, donors and alumni who lend a hand to friends as well as friends of friends. An admissions official in the report says “we are bombarded all the time with people who want to influence the admissions system.” A typical call goes like this: “I am the pastor of XX Lutheran Church. There is this great kid. You have to take him.’ ” But the bottom line is “we cannot admit everybody.”
As a way to bring in black and Hispanic students, Texas law guarantees that 75% of admitted students must come from the top ranks of each and every high school in the state. The freshmen entering next September have to be in the top 7% of their high school class. The other seats--1,500 to 1,800 a year--are handed out after a “holistic” review to the remaining applicants from Texas as well as non-residents and international students. Many of the Texas applicants who aren’t in the top 7% at their high schools still have higher test scores, a tougher schedule of classes and more impressive credentials than some who are admitted automatically.
(Update: The Supreme Court voted 4-3 on June 23, 2016, to allow UT to continue to use affirmative action as part of its "holistic" review.)
UT has a staff of 145 in its admissions department and files are read between mid-October and the third week in February. Students get an Academic Index number based on their test scores, class rank and weighted strength of courses. They also get a Personal Achievement Index based on factors including their extra-curricular activities, awards and work experience as well as the race and socioeconomic issues of their family and school. The 60 file readers are taught to spot the difference between a student who’s committed to an extra-curricular activity and one who’s merely padding the resume by listing a lot of activities with no leadership or commitment.
For applicants who anguish over the “lifetime goals” and “exceptional achievements” on their essays, the inside scoop is that the university no longer scores the essays on a scale of 1 to 6. Now you get either 1 for not proficient or a 2 for proficient.
In the report, admission officials say file readers never saw the “holds” from the president and deans and that they don’t consider whether applicants have ties to politicians, officials, donors or alumni. They say they look for the same thing every year: “What does the student bring to campus?”Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Anna Friel will appear as Max's mum Vicky
ITV is to make a three-part drama about a schoolboy who identifies as a girl.
The mini-series, titled Butterfly, will tell the story of 11-year-old Max, who chooses to live as a girl at home and decides he doesn't want to hide it from others.
Broken and Marcella actress Anna Friel will play his mother Vicky.
ITV's head of drama Polly Hill said it was a "heartwarming and emotional script" about "one boy's search to be recognised for who he really is".
Butterfly will be written by Tony Marchant, who has previously tackled family issues like ADHD (Kid in the Corner), adoption (Bad Blood) and fertility (The Family Man).
In its announcement, ITV described Butterfly as "a powerful family drama about this life changing decision in a boy so young".
Polly Hill said: "Butterfly is a beautiful story about a young boy on the cusp of puberty who doesn't feel comfortable in his own body."
The announcement comes at a time when gender identity among children is a hotly-debated topic.
Recently, the parents of a six-year-old boy made the news after removing him from his school in a row over whether another pupil should be allowed to wear a dress.
And a secondary school in East Sussex has announced it is making its uniform "gender neutral" by prohibiting new joiners from wearing skirts, with all new pupils wearing trousers.
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.Kids Drinking Low-Fat Milk Gain More Weight – Again!
Is low-fat milk good for you and your family? Yet another study says no.
The start of the low-fat craze back in the 1980’s perfectly matches up with the start of the obesity epidemic. A coincidence? Probably not.
Low-fat products usually contain more sugar and more starches. If not you’ll probably end up eating more carbs anyway as you’ll be hungrier |
of gender recognition.
What should be a simple administrative matter is made incredibly complex and the victims are trans people and all those who’re misgendered by the state, either due to a change in circumstances or because the state got it wrong to begin with. If people are able to simply register their gender, as is the case in other states, it’s unfathomable women would end up in male prisons.
While yesterday was a day to pause to remember the victims of transphobic violence, we do no justice to anyone unless we challenge the system which allows this to keep happening. The fact that a trans woman is dead, having been deliberately misgendered, not by a playground bully or an online bigot, but by the state, suggests we have a responsibility far beyond remembrance; we need to change the system which is failing trans people.
Sadly, Transgender Day of Remembrance is a day acknowledging the present and not remembering the past. While that’s the case, I have nothing but disdain for a Government which tries to take credit for its record of support, as we mourn the death of a woman whose right to exist was undermined so unforgivably.
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The new Guinness ad featuring superbly dressed Congolese men has been getting a lot of attention since its release earlier this week, writes Tanvi Misra. But how closely do the sashaying and stout-swigging characters in the ad match reality?
The ad follows the men as they shed their working clothes and transform themselves into polished, hat-wearing, cane-wielding style moguls - because, as the narrator says, "in life, you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are."
Costume designer Mr Gammon took 28 suitcases of elegant kit to the shoot with members of the Congolese Society of Ambianceurs and Elegant Persons (SAPE) - sapeurs, as they are known. The main idea was to be true to the sapeur look, but also, "kind of, heighten it a bit," Gammon says. "I wasn't redesigning them."
Photographer Per-Anders Pettersson who spent five days with sapeurs in Kinshasa in 2012 says the picture portrayed in the ad is pretty accurate.
Image copyright Per-Anders Pettersson/Eyevine
Image copyright Per-Anders Pettersson/Eyevine
The opening frame of the ad locates the action in Congo Brazzaville. Sapeurs exist both there and in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo - but the ad was actually shot in South Africa.
Hassan Salvador, seen in the ad sporting jaunty Lennon-style dark glasses, says he earns $1,000 (£610) a month working as a warehouse manager, and about 20% of that goes on clothes. Feron Ngouabi - who can be glimpsed wearing a kilt and tam-o-shanter - spends all of his earnings as a fireman on clothes, he says. Fortunately he owns two taxis, which bring in extra cash.
In the ad they wore a mixture of their own wardrobe, and Mr Gammon's.
Image copyright Per-Anders Pettersson/Eyevine
Image copyright Per-Anders Pettersson/Eyevine
During Pettersson's shoot, the sapeurs held a funeral for one of the movement's pioneers. The red carpet leading to the reception inevitably became something of a catwalk, with sapeurs "performing" - showing off the moves that show off their threads - just as they do in the ad.
Image copyright Per-Anders Pettersson/Eyevine
Image copyright Per-Anders Pettersson/Eyevine
Sapeurs never wear more than three colours at once (or four, including white). In the Guinness ad, featuring men from Brazzaville, Gammon kept black and grey clothes to a minimum. But Pettersson encountered plenty of monochrome outfits in Kinshasa, capital of DR Congo.
Image copyright Per-Anders Pettersson/Eyevine
Image copyright Per-Anders Pettersson/Eyevine
Mr Gammon says he was "blown away" by the experience of working with these men and celebrating their look. "They may not be wealthy," he says, "but they are wealthy in spirit."
Hector Mediavilla, who directed a mini-documentary for Guinness, also released this week, says the ad is cinema - it's not intended to be 100% accurate. "But the spirit of the people? Yeah it's in the ad."
Additional reporting by Sasha Gankin, Brazzaville.
Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on FacebookIs there anything this guy hasn't been involved in? What's next for Joe, "Dancing with the Stars?" I was watching H&C last night and made this clip after I almost couldn't stop laughing at this guy. Joe "the Plumber" Wurtzelbacher is the perfect definition of what a wingnut is if you never understood the term before. You see, he survived in our country using welfare, a program designed to help the needy, but now says Obama is not loyal to our country because he wants to take our money and give it to other people. Does he drive a Cadillac too? I guess if it wasn't for welfare he wouldn't be littering our air waves. His 15 minutes are almost up.
Colmes: Do you really doubt that Barack Obama's loyalty to the United States? Plumber: Ah...to a Democracy "yes," I mean, right back to the, as far as the Socialism issues, spreading the wealth around. I mean, Alan that is right out of Karl Marx.....Webster dictionary...government health care... Colmes: You don't think he's loyal to our country? Plumber Joe: To democracy? He's proposing a lot of changes that could change the core of America, don't you think? Plumber Joe: Was it patriotic for Joe Biden to say "take my money and give it to other people? That's patriotism? Colmes: Well, let me ask, you were on welfare once, was that taking somebodies else's money and giving it to you? Plumber Joe: Paid into welfare. It something to be used, not to be abused like it often is.
Spoken like a true wingnut. He's perfect for FOX News. Colmes nailed him pretty good. He talks about his principles at the end of the clip, but really they are no principles at all, just the principle of a wingnut.
Jed has more:After a plethora of rumors and leaks that followed our reveal of the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite, Samsung has officially announced the tablet as a slimmer and more portable addition to the Galaxy Tab 3 series. The specs are the same as were leaked yesterday: the tablet will come in both Wi-Fi and 3G variants and is built around a 7-inch WSVGA (1024 X 600) screen and powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, accompanied by 1 GB of RAM.
There’s a 2-megapixel rear camera on the back which offers features such as smile detection, Share and Shoot, Panorama, and more, 8GB of internal storage and a microSD slot, connectivity options of Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ (2.4GHz), Wi-Fi Direct, BT4.0, USB2.0, GPS + GLONASS, and HSPA+ 21mbps, and a 3,600 mAh battery that is rated for up to 8 hours of video playback. The tablet runs on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, and Samsung doesn’t mention whether an update to newer versions of Android is coming or not.
Samsung hasn’t provided availability or pricing details, though we expect the Galaxy Tab 3 Lite to launch in markets around the end of January / early February, at a price starting at as low as 100 Euro ($129) for the Wi-Fi-only model, though as usual, these details can change as the days go by.
SourceIn this 2010 picture, Elizabeth Laird, aka Fort Hood’s ‘”Hug Lady” greets Sgt. Michael Flanders coming home from Iraq. (Photo by Ralph Barrera/AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
Since the first months of the Iraq War in 2003, soldiers deployed from Fort Hood knew they’d always be sent off and welcomed home with a hug.
She’s known to them as the “Hug Lady,” and for the last 12 years she’s been a calming, constant presence for men and women for which little else is certain. Not quite five-feet tall she’d wrap her arms around the ones leaving for overseas, and offer words of faith and encouragement. When they came home, she was there waiting to hug them again.
Elizabeth Laird has given hundreds of thousands of hugs. Now she needs them herself.
Laird, 83, has quietly battled breast cancer for the last decade, something most of her soldier family didn’t know. Her cancer has spread and she’s been in the hospital since last week. Her son, Richard Dewees, said dozens of soldiers have filtered through her hospital room to return her words of faith and encouragement, and of course, her hugs.
[This 93-year-old veteran reconnected with his wartime love after 71 years apart]
What’s more, Dewees set up a GoFundMe page to help with the medical costs. He asked for $10,000. It has raised $72,316 from more than 2,000 people in just three days. Dewees, 64, knew his mother was beloved –he’s shared her with her military sons and daughters for years now — but he said “he’s stunned.”
“They just want to thank her, for encouraging them, for giving them something to look for … they knew when they went over there, when they came back, someone would be waiting,” he said. “A lot of them say they don’t have families, but they have her.”
It’s reflected in their comments on the fundraising page:
“What a true blessing you are sweet Lady. You hugged me on the way out in November 2011 and you were my first hug home August 2012. Praying for God’s healing angels to surround and comfort you. Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do for us…”
“Ms. Elizabeth, you gave us just an ounce of humanity before we spent the next year of our lives in a place that was tantamount to hell and devoid of humanity… The gift you gave us upon departure is immeasurable.”
“I love her, I deployed teary eyed and scared, (secretly) worried my almost two year old daughter would forget me [sic] she whispered in my ear that everything would be ok [and] meant the world to me. I wish I had millions to give her.”
“Deployment is never easy, but you helped us all smile when we met you there at the airport. That final goodbye hug from the sweetest woman has stuck with me over the years and I hope more than anything you’ll be better soon. Thank you for everything and I hope we can all help.”
In 2010, the Austin-Statesman profiled Laird. She’d been volunteering at the airfield through the Salvation Army. One day a soldier asked for a hug. Since then, she never stopped.
Her husband died suddenly from a blood clot in 2008. After his funeral she drove straight to the Fort Hood airfield to greet soldiers coming home, according to the article.
“They come back and are smiling from ear to ear because she said she would be there and she was,” Dewees said. And the parents of the ones who don’t make it back have shared that they were comforted knowing their child had a warm hug before going off to war.
Her condition now is tenuous, and Dewees has spoken to Fort Hood about using one of its chapels for her funeral. If she’s able to leave the hospital, she’ll have to go into an extended care facility. She wants to get back to the airfield, but if she can’t, he hopes to at least connect her there via Skype so that the soldiers will still be able to see her there.
“She won’t be able to hug them,” he said, “but she’ll still be there with them.
Want more inspiring news and ideas to improve your life? Sign up for the Saturday Inspired Life newsletter.
If you liked this story on Inspired Life, you may also enjoy:
Watch this former stockbroker stun a homeless father with $1,000 and a hotel stay
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Dying Star Wars’ fan wish is granted with early viewing of movieAutoplay next video
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.
Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.
I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...
When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.
You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler's wife. Smell me.A security researcher has discovered that it's possible to show the URL of one site while loading another in Mobile Safari, which could trick users into visiting a malicious website. The vulnerability has been reported to Apple, but until the company issues a patch for iOS, users should be extra cautious when clicking unknown links.
According to David Vieira-Kurz from infosec firm MajorSecurity, Mobile Safari under iOS 5.0, 5.0.1, and the current 5.1 has a vulnerability in the way it handles JavaScript's window.open() function.
"This can be exploited to potentially trick users into supplying sensitive information to a malicious web site," Vieira-Kurz explained, "because information displayed in the address bar can be constructed in a certain way, which may lead users to believe that they're visiting another web site than the displayed web site."
Vieira-Kurz developed a proof of concept that causes a new window or tab to open when clicking a specially crafted link. That new window looks as though it is loading Apple's website at apple.com, but it actually loads in an iframe within a page on MajorSecurity's website. The proof of concept doesn't do anything malicious, but the same technique could be used to scrape your AppleID, for instance, or possibly even grab credit card info if you buy something from the Apple Store.
MajorSecurity says that users should upgrade to a newer version of iOS as soon as Apple has a patch ready. Until then there's no 100 percent guaranteed method to ensure safety other than steering clear of any unfamiliar sites.(CNN) -- Women were dismissed from the military for being gay at a greater rate than men last year, according to new statistics obtained by a California research group.
Women were dismissed from the military for being gay at a greater rate than men last year.
All the services kicked out a disproportionate number of women under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, according to Department of Defense data obtained by the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The center studies gender and sexuality in the military.
The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, implemented in 1994, bans troops who are openly gay from serving in the military.
In the Air Force, a majority of those removed were women, the first time a service has had such a record since the implementation of the controversial law in 1994, according to Palm Center senior research fellow Nathaniel Frank. Watch CNN's Randi Kaye report on Obama's promises »
In fiscal year 2008, the Air Force dismissed 56 women and 34 men.
In addition, the Army removed more women under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy at a greater rate than men when compared with the ratio of women to men in each service.
Of those discharged under the policy, 36 percent were women, although women make up only 14 percent of troops in the Army, the data showed.
All About GLBT Issues • Armed ForcesCustomers, Partners, Investors, Marketers and fellow Vidyardians:
Today, January 14th, 2015, I’m very proud to officially announce the closing of Vidyard’s Series B financing.
On one hand this post represents an exciting achievement; on the other, it’s my final breath in the calm before the storm. Undoubtedly, this is a very happy milestone for the Vidyard family – but what does it really mean for us, for our future? The most honest answer is that I don’t entirely know. This milestone is a single point in our company’s evolution — it’s not the close of an old or beginning of a new chapter — it marks an exciting inflection point in a story that is currently unfolding.
So while I don’t have all the what next answers — I do have some, and it’s these that I share with you today.
$18,000,000 is a lot of money, but I’m going to stop right there. The amount that was most recently invested into Vidyard isn’t something worth celebrating in and of itself. To help explain: the chef doesn’t pop a bottle of champagne when s/he buys the ingredients (no matter how rare) to an ambitious meal. No, s/he pops the bottle in celebration when lips are smacking, bellies are full, and patrons are astonished by what they’ve been served.
Celebration follows the meal and at Vidyard, we’re a very long way from finishing dinner.
So what can we celebrate with this milestone, if it isn’t the delicious after-meal dom we’ve been hoping for? We can celebrate 2 things: validation; and what it will enable us to do next.
The first: validation. Throughout this journey we’ve developed customer experiences that matter. This has been proven by our incredible month-over-month growth of exciting new customers, floods of referrals, and a continuous inbound ramp of both technology and service partners.
We’ve proven that our noble quest of growing by helping our customers grow is consistent with our network of customers and partners and that makes new investors excited.
Vidyard has succeeded in defining the Video Marketing Platform category and this funding represents the fact that we have grown that category into something the rest of the world cares about too.
The second: what we’re going to do next. This isn’t survival money, it’s growth money. That means that we’re going to keep doing exactly what we’ve been doing, but better.
better customer service
better products
better experiences with the brand
and of course, more innovative technologies that are going to help our customers and partners drive revenue through the use of online video
Now that we have validation and the means to be better, you may wonder how we’re going to execute.
Simply put, we’re going to continue building a company on modern SaaS foundations that exceeds the expectations of our customers through innovative technologies. We’re going to hire the best possible people in the world to deliver on that promise, and we’re going to offer the best customer experience of any technology company anywhere in the world.
Underlying these pillars is our vision of the future and to us, the future of the Internet is television. Consumer behaviors consistently predict enterprise trends. Mass consumption and creation of online video assets is leading to the enterprise’s need to provision video experiences for future purchasing and selling demographics.
Before I close out this note I must say thank you. While a significant investment round has served to validate Vidyard in the eyes of the market, there are countless partner and customer heroes that validated our message well before. Even more simply put, without you, I would not be sitting here writing this post.
I’d also like to extend a special thanks to Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners, our newest investor, partner and member of our board of directors.
To learn more about our latest financing round and how we’ve gotten here, please refer to the following additional resources:Mike Ivey has been a reporter with The Capital Times for more than 25 years, covering business, the environment and politics. He was named the state's top business reporter in 2011 by the Wisconsin Newspaper Association.
* I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.
Mike,
I am responding to your query to Tosmai Puenpatom about our coincident and leading indexes. I head up our team of economic analysts, including Tosmai who is currently our lead researcher on the indexes. We have prepared the following explanation regarding the use of state rankings based on our indexes.
We do not consider state rankings based on the coincident and leading indexes to be valid.
· The size and maturity of state economies influence the relative size of economic change within a state; an older, mature economy, such as New York, tends to experience smaller percentage changes in its trend than a smaller, younger economy, such as North Dakota. Comparisons between the two are not very meaningful.
· As a proxy for state GDP, the coincident index measures some states better than others. For example, the index components are heavily influenced by employment rather than output measures. Agricultural activity is largely excluded from the employment statistics and mining activity is heavily influenced by prices. In Pennsylvania, shale gas production has continued to grow, while mining employment has been edging down since January 2011. Some of the unique characteristics of each state’s economy are missing from this approach.
· Our research suggests that annual benchmark revisions of nonfarm payroll employment and the unemployment rate contribute to revisions in the coincident index. Benchmark revisions may be random across states but may also be positively or negatively correlated. One group of states may be revised upward for a common reason, while other states may be revised downward so that the national aggregate remains the same. Indexes based on data since the last benchmark base month must be used with caution.
· There is significant volatility in components underlying the indexes, especially for nonfarm payroll employment. This monthly volatility generates substantial volatility of the indexes for each state. Since the volatility of the percent change in these indexes is relatively large compared to the average change, an individual state’s ranking based on the percent change can jump wildly from one end of a relatively narrow range to the other. Rank order is not persistent, thus state rankings are misleading.
However, the state coincident indexes track an individual state’s GDP quite well, and in that sense, they are a useful proxy for state GDP. Their principal advantages include being more timely and more frequent than state GDP estimates.
Regards,
Paul
Paul R. Flora, Senior Economic Analyst,
Research and Policy Support Manager
Research Department
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Ten Independence Mall
Philadelphia, PA 19106-1574
215-574-6649
215-574-4303 FAX[email protected]
Roberto Karam, presidente de la Junta de Custodios de la Central Mexicana de Servicios Generales de Alcohólicos Anónimos, dio a conocer que en la Encuesta Nacional de Uso de Drogas en Estudiantes levantada en 2014 se revela que 19.6% de los niños de quinto y sexto de primaria consumen alcohol y de ellos 3% ya tienen excesos, es decir, que beben más de cinco copas por ocasión.
Al participar en el Foro Retos de la Atención del Alcoholismo en Menores de Edad en la Cámara de Diputados, Karam dijo que el alcohol es la principal droga en México y en el mundo, y es de la que más se abusa, además de que es el antecedente para acceder a todas las otras adicciones.
“En la Encuesta Nacional de Uso de Drogas en Estudiantes podemos ver datos escalofriantes, terribles, de cómo se ha encontrado consumo de alcohol entre niñas y niños de quinto y sexto de primaria, aproximadamente 19.6% de los alumnos de quinto y sexto de primaria consume alcohol, que tienen entre ocho y 10 años; y de ellos 3% tienen excesos, eso significa que beben más de cinco copas por ocasión y eso es terrible”, dijo Karam.
En tanto, Rosario Tapia, directora general del Instituto para la Atención y Prevención de las Adicciones de la Ciudad de México, expresó que las mujeres igualaron a los hombres en el consumo de alcohol.
Informó que “los últimos datos de la encuesta de estudiantes nos refleja que ha disminuido la edad de inicio, penosamente tenemos que el promedio es de 12 años y medio, y esto implica que hay chicos y chicas que consumen un poco más grandes, pero también de los que están consumiendo antes, esto es alumnos de quinto o sexto año, de 10 u 11 años están ingiriendo y están abusando del consumo de alcohol.
“Nos enfrentamos a un problema en el que también las mujeres estamos en una incorrecta valoración de la defensa de nuestros derechos y del feminismo de querer alcanzar a los hombres en el consumo de las sustancias y lo logramos”, declaró.
Solicitó a las autoridades exigir mayor control en las normatividades de la comercialización de las bebidas, ya que la disponibilidad de estos productos ha permitido que la edad del inicio en su consumo sea más temprana.
Ven interés de la industria. Raúl Martín del Campo, miembro de la Junta Internacional de Fiscalización de Estupefacientes de la ONU, indicó que el consumo de alcohol entre menores de edad en el país, como en casi todo el mundo, ya está casi a la par en su prevalencia e intensidad.
Destacó que existe una industria interesada en que la población consuma alcohol y se le vea como un producto deseable para los menores. Por lo que uno de los temas que hace falta legislar, dijo, tiene que ver con cómo se promociona el alcohol en diferentes eventos. “No podemos permitir que aunque sea cerveza sea el principal patrocinador de los eventos deportivos, pues los ven los infantes”.TL;DW: The highest quality Airwindows analog tape emulation.
ToTape5
ToTape5 is the best Airwindows analog tape emulation. It builds upon the previous four versions (which have been some of my best sellers) and incorporates everything learned from the Purest series of plugins, to produce a tape emulation that does what analog does. (Analog tape does really good things for mixes, and it’s very difficult to get it right without sinking into a morass of overprocessing and digital blandness)
It’s better than Iron Oxide, always was. Iron Oxide is for ‘slamming tape for effect’, for putting on individual tracks, not realism. ToTape is for realism and quality: for ‘mixing to tape’, in the box. I don’t think there is anything else that can stand as much scrutiny as ToTape will: it’s developed on mastering-grade gear and when used in its most optimized state, it’s not a toy. It should be more transparent and musical than most plugins (never mind ‘tape emulation’ plugins, which are generally not even as transparent and musical as a good digital EQ plugin).
It has six controls: four if you don’t count Output and Dry/Wet, which are pretty obvious.
Louder defaults to 0.25 because the tape emulation soaks up some level. You can set it to 0 for added purity (it removes a gain trim stage if you do) and if you do that, you can plainly hear that the emulated tape ‘soaks up’ some of the audio, noticeably dropping the level while not seeming to alter the tone at all. There are no gain adjustments making that happen, it’s entirely tape saturation which is very transparent. (There is no compression, either.)
Softer is the treble softening. Defaults to 0, which is still on but very hi-fi and subtle. You can turn it up to get a more ‘old’ tape machine tone, and like the other controls if you need to finetune the effect by ear, your adjustments will probably be around 0.1 to 0.2 if you mean to retain the full fidelity of the mix.
Fatter is the head bump. Defaults to 0, which is still on, but subtle. It can be cranked up to silly/stupid levels if you like. Again, if you want to emphasize the extra roundness and fullness of tape, you might be tweaking this to 0.1 or 0.2. If you don’t have fantastic subwoofers or monitoring that can handle deep bass, leave this at 0! Boosting it will introduce deep lows very cleanly and you might not hear them unless your monitoring is up to scratch. You will also have to turn down Output if you boost this a lot.
Flutter is the tape flutter. Defaults to 0 which is OFF, see comment on ‘dry/wet’. The most amazingly awesome tape recorders did NOT have loads of flutter, but if you want a little ‘spaciness’ or ‘atmosphere’ you can put in small amounts of this, like 0.1 or so. Go by feel, if you can hear it fluttering it’s kind of too much. If you’re using this, please don’t use Dry/Wet to combine the result with dry: you’ll create a flangey effect and it’ll be more obvious than it should be. By design, Flutter is made so you can increase it until it’s too much, so please remember that realistic levels are more like 0.1: too subtle to immediately hear. Go by feel, or pretend you have a really terrific tape machine and leave it off entirely, set Flutter to 0. (For instance, anyone who’s mastering and intentionally adds flutter ought to think hard about whether that’s really helping.)
It’s yours, now, because the Patreon I started last year has been working. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have got to this stage. There’s more to come, and the more people who get involved with the Patreon, the more I can do. ToTape5 is free AU and Mac/PC VST because of the people who’ve got involved and given as little as $1 a month ($12 a year, obviously), and because of the people who gave a lot more (we wouldn’t be at this stage without both kinds).
Let ToTape5 be one of many thank-yous I sincerely offer, for staying with me on this journey. As you can see in the video, there’s a lot more in store for us all! Also, a side note because it seems necessary: public opinion is awesome, and talking about Airwindows usually helps me (which in turn helps you, because I do more). But if you have to crow in post after post about how something I did that’s free TOTALLY wipes the floor with some other company’s product that’s very expensive… even or especially if it’s true… PLEASE take it to my own threads and stick to just mentioning that I also have a product that can be auditioned, if you have to mention it in other people’s threads at all.
I understand people get excited, and yeah I’ve devoted decades of my life to being able to do just that: make the best sounding stuff, openly and for free. I realize that’s good news. You just have to be cool about it, especially when I manage to hit one out of the park and it’s free and will end up being open source. We are doing something awesome, and knocking other people’s work is not part of what I want to do with my time. I’d rather celebrate the other folks out there whom I think are doing wonderful things :)
(This plugin has been updated to fix an excessive-CPU bug. If you need the original version as it was first released, you can download it at ToTape5Original. Don’t try to use both at the same time, apart from the CPU fix they are identical and will retain all settings etc. without any change in sound or behavior.)Sitting at work has got a pretty bad rap recently, with proclamations that it is worse for our health than smoking. It has helped to underpin the rise of things such as standing and treadmill desks.
Alas, new research from the University of Exeter and University College London suggests that sitting for long periods isn’t quite as bad for our health as previously thought.
Relaxing at work
The study tracked over 5,000 people over a 16 year period, and found that sitting, whether at home or at work, was not actually associated with a greater risk of dying.
The findings contrast with studies from earlier this year that proposed a number of severe health implications of sitting for prolonged periods of time.
What’s more, they also contradict official guidelines from bodies such as the National Health Service, which largely echo the ‘sitting is bad for you’ mantra, even if you do significant exercise too.
“Policy makers should be cautious in recommending a reduction in the time spent sitting without also promoting increased physical activity,” the authors say.
“Our study overturns current thinking on the health risks of sitting and indicates that the problem lies in the absence of movement rather than the time spent sitting itself. Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing.
“The results cast doubt on the benefits of sit-stand work stations, which employers are increasingly providing to promote healthy working environments,” they continue.
Encouraging activity
So it would appear that encouraging activity should be the course to take rather than necessarily discouraging prolonged sitting.
Earlier this year, I wrote about an interesting project that is attempting to do just that by applying game technology to encourage participation.
A game, called Step Ahead: Zombies, the game encompasses a walking challenge whereby players have to escape from the zombie invasion by walking (in the real world).
Organizations can enroll onto the program and encourage employees to participate, either with a smartphone, tablet or desktop.
Employees are divided into teams who are charged with getting to the safe house as quickly as possible, with progress measured by the average step count across the team. So having a slacker on your team can severely harm your chances of success.
If you fail to get to the safe house, you’re eaten alive by the zombies, and thus are enrolled onto the zombie team.
If players have the right equipment, they can use a range of wearable devices to input their steps into the game, whilst a healthy diet can also help to boost resistance to zombie attack.
Initial results seem very positive, with one organization charting a rise in employee engagement of 20 percent among participating employees.
It would seem that this kind of scheme is perhaps better than investing in expensive treadmill or standing desks.ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
A shocking video showing a coach load of tourists surrounded by UK-bound migrants breaking into a lorry has emerged in Calais.
Filmed in broad daylight, and without a policeman in sight, it shows the horrifying extent of a problem which has seen the French Channel port reduced to ‘a warzone’.
The video, which is widely available on YouTube, was filmed last Sunday week, after a de-mining operation in Calais.
A coach driver is heard to say to his passengers: ‘Don’t panic, guys – we’ve locked all the doors’.
Dozens of young men from countries including Eritrea and Sudan can be seen breaking into an HGV in front, as they try to get to England to claim asylum.
A woman tourist is head to say: ‘Oh my God, we’ve seen this stuff on TV’, while a man stands by the coach door saying: ‘Do they police this stuff?’
A tour guide meanwhile says into the coach microphone: ‘They are not allowed into the country’.
In fact, many of them do get through, in a scandal which has led to thousands flooded towards Calais from all over the world.
There are currently up to 3000 migrants sleeping rough in the area, as they attempt to get on board lorries heading to Dover.
Britain’s Freight Transport Association (FTA) is pressing the French government to take action, after some members described the town as ‘like a warzone’.
The FTA estimates migrant numbers have swelled to around 3,000, and that there are regular violent confrontations.
Sunday June 7th saw a team of French army specialists diffusing two Second World War RAF bombs, which were both booby-trapped.
When Calais port was re-opened in the afternoon, there were numerous efforts by migrants sleeping rough in the town to get on to lorries.
A Calais police spokesman said: ‘Everything is being done to deter them. We attend the scene of disturbances as soon as they are reported.’
Calais mayor Natasha Bouchart said the reason so many migrants wanted to join the UK was because of its attractive benefits system.
'They want to go to England because they can expect better conditions on arrival there than anywhere else in Europe or even internationally,’ she said, adding: 'Calais is a hostage to the British. The migrants come here to get to Britain.’Subscribe to our email list to receive timely Texas Hurricane Harvey recovery updates, information and resources.
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Returning home after a flood can be the most trying time. There is a lot to be aware of when getting back into your home, to ensure you are mitigating all potentional issues. You can use the resources on this page to help you get back to normal.
Contact your insurance agent to file a claim. Your insurance agent can walk you through your options. Make sure to photograph the flood damage for |
It takes much longer to make the beer this way, because it has to be aged much longer. We think the complexity and contrasting of the flavors is the key to Silva Stout.
Mike Hinkley
Founder
Green FlashA Kuwaiti man considered to be a senior adviser to former Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found guilty by jury Wednesday morning in New York City of conspiring to kill Americans.
The man, 48-year-old cleric Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Federal prosecutors for the United States government argued at trial that Ghaith worked within the top ranks of the terror group and assumed the role of a spokesman of sorts, appearing in propaganda videotapes released in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks orchestrated by Al-Qaeda.
Ghaith admitted on trial to being summoned personally by bin Laden in June of 2011, and later took the Al-Qaeda leader’s daughter as an additional wife several years after 9/11. In the interim he appeared in videos released by the organization, including one where he warned Americans that “the storm of airplanes will not abate.”
‘‘The defendant committed himself to Al-Qaeda’s conspiracy to kill Americans, and he worked to drive other people to that conspiracy,” Assistant US Attorney John Cronan said during closing arguments on Monday, the Boston Globe reported.
Ghaith “literally sat at Osama bin Laden’s right hand,” Cronan said, according to the New York Times.
After five hours of deliberating that began a day earlier, on Wednesday morning the jury found Ghaith guilty of all three counts presented by the prosecution: conspiring to kill Americans, providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to provide that support. The two lesser of the accounts carried only a maximum of 15 years in prison each, but a conviction with regards to conspiring to kill Americans now opens the possibility for Ghaith to spend the rest of his life in confinement. He has not yet been sentenced.
Ghaith was turned over to US authorities a year ago this month after being arrested by officials in Amman, Jordan.
Last week, Ghaith unexpectedly took the stand in his own case and testified about his relationship with the former Al-Qaeda leader.
“I want to deliver a message to the world. — I want you to deliver the message,” Ghaith quoted bin Laden as telling him on the night of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“He admitted to certain things that we all knew the government would seize upon to support its case,” defense attorney Stanley Cohen said of his client’s testimony during a recent interview with the Jewish Daily Forward. “Abu Ghaith could have just as easily said I don’t know or lied, but he didn’t.”
Ghaith was no more than a “deer in the headlights,” who happened to be “in the wrong place in the wrong time,” Cohen said he believed.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the Al-Qaeda operative and alleged 9/11 mastermind who is currently being held by the US at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp — released a statement during the trial in which he claimed that Ghaith “did not play any military role, and to the best of my knowledge, he did not receive any military training at any of the training camps for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.” The government refused to have KSM’s testimony heard by the court.RICHMOND has rediscovered its finals roar after a 16-year silence, mauling Geelong with an unrelenting brand of pressure that carried them to a 51-point win in the second qualifying final at the MCG on Friday night.
Before Friday night's game, the Tigers hadn't won a final since 2001, nor a game in the first week of the finals since 1982, but Damien Hardwick's men looked at home on the big stage from the opening bounce, dominating the match with their frenzied attack on the ball and the man.
Full match coverage and stats
The only thing that kept Geelong in the game was Richmond's failure to convert its dominance of general play on to the scoreboard, and it looked like the Tigers might pay a heavy price for its 3.7 return in the first half when the Cats levelled the scores midway through the third term after a rare dominant burst.
If Richmond carried any finals scars, this is when they would have surfaced. But the Tigers class of 2017 proved it's made of the right stuff and, with superstar Dustin Martin leading the way yet again, they piled on 10 of the last 12 goals to notch what in time will become a famous 13.13 (91) to 5.10 (40) win.
Every Tiger rated from the second qualifying final
If there were any doubts, Martin underlined how his mix of brute force and class is tailor-made for September. The Brownlow Medal favourite finished with 28 possessions, nine inside 50s, seven tackles and six clearances, but it was his game-high six score assists – double that of any other player – that best reflected his influence.
Five things we learned from Geelong v Richmond
Martin set up goals on either side of three-quarter time – the first to Shane Edwards after he shook off Tom Stewart at half-back and the second to Shaun Grigg after he broke two tackles and hit his teammate with a pin-point 50m pass – that put Richmond 20 points up and broke any last remnants of Geelong resistance.
Richmond captain Trent Cotchin (20 possessions, nine tackles, seven clearances and one goal) was also outstanding and set a ferocious standard with five clearances and five tackles in the first term.
Alex Rance avenged his poor round 21 performance on Harry Taylor with a classy performance in defence, Dion Prestia was an able sidekick for Martin and Cotchin in the midfield, while Kane Lambert and Josh Caddy were dangerous in attack and Nick Vlastuin was impassable across half-back.
Richmond coach Damien Hardwick said he was proud of the way his players responded when they were challenged in the third quarter.
"They started to get on top in and around the clearances and we just couldn't get our hands on the ball in that period," Hardwick said.
"But credit to Trent, Dustin, Alex and Jack, our leaders stood up and started to get the momentum back our way.
"It's a sign of the growing maturity of those players and our footy club overall. I'm really happy for the players. They've worked incredibly hard this season so it's a big pat on the back to them."
In winning just its third final since 1982, Richmond also broke a 13-game losing streak against Geelong that had begun with its 157-point loss in round six, 2007, at Etihad Stadium.
WATCH: Tigers feast on Cats with ferocious pressure
Although Richmond's 2017 playing group might not be as burdened by the club's sorry recent finals history as long-suffering Tigers fans, most of the group were part of three elimination finals losses under Hardwick from 2013-15.
GAMEBREAKER: Dusty dominates on the big stage
After slumping to 13th last season, Richmond is through to its first preliminary final since its 2001 loss to the Brisbane Lions and its diehard fans can start to realistically dream of a Grand Final appearance and perhaps even the club's first flag since 1980.
Geelong's loss continued its poor finals record since claiming the 2011 Grand Final, the Cats having now lost seven of their past nine finals.
Constantly tackled, chased and harassed, the Cats looked ragged and flustered. Unable to find space or generate fluent passages of play, they went goalless in the first quarter for the first time in 2017.
It then looked like Geelong would be held goalless in a first half for the first time since round 12, 1977, before Steve Motlop goaled at the 26-minute mark of the second term.
Geelong coach Chris Scott said his team just didn't have enough good performers to win.
Every Cat rated from the second qualifying final
"We were on the back foot early in the game and were probably just hanging in there, the couple of goals close to half-time gave us a bit of hope. But even then we just didn't really have many players playing well, if you want to simplify it," he said.
"And their late goal in the third quarter gave them a little bit of hope, but still (we were) 13 points down at three-quarter time.
"Sometimes when you have a big percentage of your players not playing well and you're still in the game at three-quarter time, things can change really quickly. Unfortunately, it just really changed for them and then the dam wall burst.
"We tried to open it up and score and that just made it worse."
Mitch Duncan (29 possessions, 11 tackles and seven clearances) was the Cats' best player, while Zach Tuohy (27 possessions and six rebound 50s) generated rare run from half-back.
Patrick Dangerfield (31 possessions and one goal) and Scott Selwood (27 possessions, eight inside 50s and seven clearances) battled all night, but Joel Selwood (19 possessions) understandably looked underdone after returning from a month off with an ankle injury.
MEDICAL ROOM
Geelong: Cameron Guthrie went into the Cats' rooms early in the third term with a right calf injury and did not take any further part in the game. Jake Kolodjashnij also emerged from the game with a calf injury. Geelong coach Chris Scott said after the game Guthrie's injury was "significant", with the Cats optimistic Kolodjashnij's was not as severe. However, Scott conceded both players might not play again in the finals.
Richmond: Alex Rance came from the ground midway through the first term with a head cut after ducking into a tackle from Harry Taylor. The key defender returned soon after being cleaned up on the interchange bench.
NEXT UP
The Tigers are through to a preliminary final in two weeks' time at the MCG, where they will play one of Greater Western Sydney, Port Adelaide or West Coast. The Cats will host the winner of the Sydney-Essendon elimination final at the MCG on Friday night.
GEELONG 0.4 2.4 4.9 5.10 (40)
RICHMOND 2.4 3.7 6.10 13.13 (91)
GOALS
Geelong: Motlop, Dangerfield, Parsons, Hawkins, Taylor
Richmond: Townsend 2, Caddy 2, Butler, Vlastuin, Edwards, Prestia, Grigg, Lambert, Castagna, Cotchin, Riewoldt
BEST
Geelong: Duncan, Tuohy, Dangerfield, S.Selwood, Lonergan, Smith
Richmond: Martin, Prestia, Rance, Cotchin, Vlastuin, Lambert
INJURIES
Geelong: C.Guthrie (calf), Kolodjashnij (calf)
Richmond: Nil
Reports: Nil
Umpires: Stevic, Nicholls, McInerney
Official crowd: 95,028 at the MCGView Caption Hide Caption Perhaps the Canes will make a return to the Sun Bowl. (Getty Images)
Each week during the season, we’ll collect the latest bowl projections from national prognosticators and leave them here for your perusal.
Why? Because it’s fun, that’s why.
Here’s the list after the games of Sept. 12 (and Miami’s 44-20 win at Florida Atlantic the night before):
CBS Sports (Jerry Palm): no bowl College Sports Madness: Pinstripe Bowl vs. Penn State, Dec. 26 at Yankee Stadium, Bronx, N.Y. ESPN (David Hale): St. Petersburg Bowl vs. AAC, Dec. 26 at Tropicana Field ESPN (Mark Schlabach): Sun Bowl vs. Stanford, Dec. 26 in El Paso ESPN (Brett McMurphy): Sun Bowl vs. Utah, Dec. 26 in El Paso SB Nation (Jason Kirk): Heart of Dallas Bowl vs. Marshall, Dec. 26 at Cotton Bowl
Other projections not recently updated:
*Campus Insiders (Pete Fiutak): Poinsettia Bowl vs. San Diego State, Dec. 23 at Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego, Calif.
**Football.com (Dan Harralson) – Sun Bowl vs. Oregon State, Dec. 26 in El Paso
**Phil Steele – TaxSlayer Bowl vs. Texas A&M, Jan. 2 at EverBank Field, Jacksonville
**Sports Illustrated: Quick Lane Bowl vs. Kentucky, Dec. 28 at Ford Field, Detroit
**Sporting News (Bill Bender): Military Bowl vs. Navy, Dec. 28 at Navy Marine Corps Stadium, Annapolis, Md.
* not updated since Week 1
** not updated since preseasonWhen it comes to computing, the "cloud" may rain efficiency benefits.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Northwestern University unveiled a modeling tool yesterday that estimates the energy savings of moving local network software and computing into the server farms that make up the cloud.
The tool, available to the public online, is called the Cloud Energy and Emissions Research Model (CLEER). It aims to give scientists a better understanding of how energy use changes as the world moves away from storing and processing information in local networks and moves toward outsourcing these tasks to centralized facilities.
Though the word "cloud" evokes images of a clean, simple and environmentally friendly process, the systems that support it are massive industrial facilities, densely packed with processors and hard drives, that devour energy by the megawatt. Data centers use between 1 and 2 percent of the world's electricity and, with dead trees that make paper giving way to magnetic disks, energy use and consequently emissions from the Internet is poised to surge further (ClimateWire, Jan. 9).
Nonetheless, moving to the cloud could still save huge amounts of energy.
In a case study using the CLEER simulation, researchers found that if all American businesses moved their email programs, spreadsheet applications, customer management software and the like to centralized off-site servers, companies would shrink their computing energy footprints by 87 percent, enough to satiate the 23 billion kilowatt-hour annual appetite for the city of Los Angeles.
"The main gains in cloud computing come from consolidation," explained Lavanya Ramakrishnan, a scientist at Berkeley Lab who co-authored the study. Many businesses have servers and computing hardware on-site, which are often inefficient and underused, soaking up electricity while sitting idle.
Pooling these resources in a central location means companies can effectively buy computing power in bulk and servers can spend more time doing actual work per processing unit, reducing the overall need for more computers.
A counterintuitive finding
It seems to make intuitive sense, but researchers said they had some difficulty confirming their suspicions that the cloud saves energy. "There is a gap here where there is not enough data," Ramakrishnan said.
Another issue is that there are so many variables at play. "The savings are really going to vary depending on the system you're studying and what your baseline is," said Eric Masanet, another co-author and professor at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering.
Whether watching a video uses less energy when it is streamed compared to a DVD depends on your computer, how you use it, the quality of your Internet connection and server loads, along with a host of other factors.
"The analyses that we need for understanding the net implications of these new technologies can be quite complex," Masanet said. "There are a lot of moving parts that determine whether it's a good or bad thing."
The CLEER Model starts to chip away at this problem, aggregating available models of how data moves through the Internet. It then calculates the energy used to deliver the ones and zeros as well as the carbon intensity behind it, since not all electrons are created equal; electricity from dirty fuels like coal or from renewable sources, like solar and wind power, changes the overall environmental impact from the cloud.
There are also some limitations to CLEER. "We didn't include things like cost and latency and other things that come into play when you're making a business decision," Masanet said. However, researchers can rebuild and reconfigure the model from the bottom up as better data come in.
Eventually, Internet companies could tell you just how efficient their data centers are using tools like CLEER, increasing energy transparency and letting consumers shop for the most efficient option.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500A woman who has been renting garages and single rooms to entire families in South Auckland is kicking her tenants out.
The Salvation Army says it believes up to 150 people who have been living in Debbie Iskandar's properties now face homelessness.
Photo: RNZ / Claire Eastham-Farrelly
Ms Iskandar was charging her tenants hundreds of dollars a week to live in garages and cram into single bedrooms.
She got at least some of her business from Work and Income, which loaned clients money for bonds. The agency said last week it had not referred anyone to her for more than six months.
Checkpoint with John Campbell has now learned Ms Iskandar has been serving tenants 90-day eviction notices.
She had been running a housing trust of sorts, dubbed Sanctuary Homes.
She would meet people by bus stops in South Auckland then give them forms to take to Work and Income, which would pay the bond, and often the rent, straight into Ms Iskandar's account.
Some families were living five to a room; others were paying up to $400 a week for garages.
Salvation Army policy advisor Alan Johnson said Ms Iskandar was kicking out her remaining tenants.
"It's feasible that there was perhaps 45, or maybe 50, separate tenancies.
"From what I've seen most of those were single people, but there were some families with children, so I would estimate there would be somewhere around 150 people involved in this."
Mr Johnson said those people had nowhere to go. Many would have to go back to living in cars, or makeshift shelters on the street, he said.
That was where many tenants had been living before moving into Ms Iskandar's properties.
"It's our view that the government has, to a huge extent, created this problem both by not recognising the extent of unmet housing need, and secondly, facilitating the sorts of outcomes where people were paying $400 per week for a garage," Mr Johnson said.
Checkpoint understands Ms Iskandar took tenancies out in her own name and then sublet out the individual rooms.
One woman, who lived with her three children in a property Ms Iskandar herself owned, and paid $460 a week, was being allowed to stay.
"I know for sure that she actually owns this house, and wasn't renting or subletting this house, so we should be safe.
"She charges sky-high rent... but at the end of the day, people are willing to pay that just to get into a house."
The evictions raise a thorny issue.
Ms Iskandar was charging well above market rent for her properties - hundreds of dollars for a room in a house, with shared bathrooms and kitchens.
Social agencies and some former tenants seem to agree that she was running a scam and ripping vulnerable people off.
But, on the other hand, the alternative for many was the street.
Mr Johnson said many of her tenants had defended her work but her operation still needed to be shut down.
"If we do not to draw a line somewhere and say, 'that's not adequate, that's not appropriate, and needs to stop', and if there is then some sort of fall-out from that, then that's for the government to have to address.
He said it was not enough for the government to deny responsibility for poor housing situations.
"That has been the hand-washing that MSD [Ministry of Social Development] senior staff have done over this issue, and I think they should be called to account for it."
Checkpoint has been told Ms Iskandar feels "used and abused" by her tenants.
She has not yet responded to RNZ's requests for an interview.Biography Edit
Political career Edit
Ha'avara agreement Edit
At this point, Haim Arlosoroff visited Nazi Germany to negotiate the controversial Ha'avara Agreement with the Nazi government, an agreement which allowed for the emigration of Jews to Palestine along with most of their property. The Nazis were happy to get rid of Jews, but unwilling to allow them to take their property with them. Via this agreement, the Jews had to put their money into a special bank account. This money was then used to purchase German goods for export to Palestine (and other countries). The proceeds of the sale of these goods were given to the Jews on their arrival in Palestine. For the Nazis, this helped them get rid of Jews, while overcoming any attempts at a boycott of Nazi exports (especially from a moral point of view - it was the Jews themselves importing the goods). For the Zionist settlement, this influx of capital gave a much-needed economic boom in the midst of worldwide depression. Approximately a year after Arlosoroff and Reich officials formalized the Ha'avara Agreement, a substantial economic reaction began to take place in Eretz Israel. As a result, many new Jewish immigrants came to dwell in the Holy Land. Prior to the Ha'avara Agreement, only several thousand Jewish workers had been immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine on a yearly basis. After the agreement was signed, however, over 50,000 new Jewish workers made the British Mandate of Palestine their home within a two-year period. The Ha'avara Agreement's initial impact on Jewish immigration would be widespread, as an approximate 20% of the first 50,000 new Jewish immigrants in Eretz Israel came from Germany. By the year 1936, just three years after the Ha'avara Agreement became effective, the population of Jewish people within the British Mandate of Palestine had doubled in size. Over a period of time, some of Hitler's elite Nazi entourage, including Adolf Eichmann, began to deeply regret Germany's participation in the Ha'avara Agreement. Ultimately, over 60,000 German Jews escaped persecution by the Nazis directly or indirectly through the Ha'avara Agreement. In addition, the Ha'avara Agreement transferred an approximate $100 million to the British Mandate of Palestine, which helped establish an industrial infrastructure for the soon to be Jewish nation. Ha'avara Agreement funds were also utilized for purchasing land and developing many new Jewish settlements, which now help define the current boundaries of Israel.
Assassination Edit
Legacy and commemoration Edit
References EditManuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
Ron Paul may have little chance of capturing the GOP presidential nomination, but that hasn’t stopped his political opponents from going after a tax plan he recently introduced that would slice $1 trillion from the federal budget.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Paul’s 2012 Republican rival, labeled the plan “a non-starter.”
“If you come to me and tell me I need to lose 30 pounds and you’re going to amputate my right leg, I think it’s a non-starter, ” Gingrich told the Quad City Times.
Herman Cain, the latest Republican presidential candidate to see a surge in the polls, hinted that Paul’s drastic approach to budget cutting won’t work.
“If you listen to his positions on a lot of things, it’s always, ‘Let’s throw out the baby with the bathwater,’” Cain told CNN.
Paul’s campaign staff argues that the attacks from established candidates reinforce the idea that Paul is having a greater impact on the race by raising fiscal issues the others won’t touch.
And his tax plan is getting support from some of the loudest voices in the GOP.
Talk show host and conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that genuine, big spending cuts are the only things that are going to bring the U.S. economy back into balance.
“But nobody on our side’s ever really seriously proposed it, and Ron Paul’s going to,” said Limbaugh.
Paul’s economic plan involves $1 trillion in spending cuts, the bulk coming from the elimination of five Cabinet-level departments, including Energy, Interior, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Education.
Paul would wring out additional savings by eliminating all foreign aid and wars, and dialing back spending to 2006 levels.
In the latest ABC News poll, only 8 percent of likely Republican voters mentioned Paul as best to handle the economy — compared with Romney and Perry, who both topped the poll at 22 percent.
At a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, ABC News asked Paul what he planned to do to change those numbers.
“I’m not changing a thing,” said Paul.Baseball is the most poetic of games. From the mad genius of Yogi Berra, to the innumerable platitudes that teach us the happenings on the diamond are a metaphor for life itself, there is no sport with quite as rich a history, or such a wealth of memorable characters and anecdotes. There is one saying, though, that never became gospel in the annals of America’s pastime, or at least in the minds of the Washington Nationals:
If you score 7 runs at home against Matt Harvey in a crucial, season-defining game, you’d better pull out a win.
Yes, folks, disappointment wore a big curly “W” in 2015 and at no point was that more painfully obvious than the night of September 8. On that fateful evening, I endeavored to attend my first Nationals game of the year, deciding that the magnitude of the contest was worth more than the pain I would endure waking up at 5 a.m. for work the next morning. This remarkable miscalculation yielded a Mourning After, and no amount of sleep would have repaired my shattered soul.
If you pay an inkling of attention to the enormously disappointing baseball team occupying southeast D.C., you are no doubt aware of the late-night massacre that took place that Tuesday night. The Nationals, in a pivotal game with the season quite literally in the balance, jumped to a 7-1 lead against the upstart New York Mets and their superlative star pitcher, Matt Harvey. A win would pull the Nats to within five games of the division lead—a large deficit, to be sure, but wholly surmountable given how many games were left in the season. A loss would all but cancel the postseason parade that so many predicted would march down South Capitol street.
Over a grueling final three innings, the Nats imploded in a way that is difficult to fully appreciate had you not been in the stands.
On stadiums, having the air sucked out of
I’ve seen my share of train wrecks on TV. I watched helplessly as Michael Vick turned into Dan Marino with wheels and torched the Redskins for 59 points on national television. I cringed as Damon Jones sunk the Wizards with a corner three in Game 6, and I fell to my knees in dismay when Jaroslav Halak impersonated a brick wall and singlehandedly eliminated the Capitals from the playoffs. More recently, I stood silently in the aftermath of an 18-inning assisted suicide attempt as the San Francisco Giants danced on the ghosts of Matt Williams’ decisions on the Nats home field.
But never in my 23 years have I experienced a feeling such as the malaise that settled over Nationals Park that warm September evening. Presence is exponentially more affecting than viewing, as this night proved. And when Williams lifted Jordan Zimermann with two outs in the sixth inning and a 3-1 lead, you could already feel a wave of unease wash over those in attendance. The Nationals had to have this game, and visions of Pete Kozma began dancing in my head. I presciently formed a picture in my mind of Drew Storen flailing on the mound in the deciding game of the 2012 playoffs. These fears were well-founded.
Blake Treinen, Felipe Rivero, and Storen combined to end the Nationals’ season, tossing up an inning that saw six walks, six earned runs, and 70 consecutive pitches without a swinging strike. The inning ended with the game tied 7-7, and the Mets golfed one out of the park against Jonathan Papelbon in the next inning to seal the deal.
Back to that seventh inning. Words escaped me that night. I’m generally stolid when watching sports, even when I’m at a live event, but I was getting excited for this. I was on my feet. It was a big game! And then there was a ball. And another. And another. And another. On and on, self-destruction the likes of which I had never seen in a professional setting. There were more groans in the park that evening than a Canadian comedy club. You know when announcers on TV proclaim that the home fans are starting to seem “restless?” Restless is underselling what I felt. Almost 40,000 people were collectively heartbroken, having been punched in the gut for an excruciating near-hour of incompetence.
Every time I attend a baseball game, I look to fulfill that old adage, “You never know what you’ll see when you come to the ballpark.” Michael Taylor’s little league grand slam early in the game should have been that moment; instead, it was a mere footnote. I witnessed, as I later surmised, the single worst regular season game in the history of the Washington Nationals.
What a time to be alive.
No regrets
Moments matter to me. I value experiences over material possessions, so I will forever cherish what happened on September 8, 2015. The following morning, the Mourning After, I decided that I was lucky to have been there.
Why, David? Why were you lucky to have been at such a cataclysmic affair?
Because I will remember it. Forever.
I didn’t go to a game the Nationals won 7-3. I didn’t go to a game they lost 4-2. I attended the Worst Regular Season Loss in franchise history. And as a D.C. sports fan, that’s something special. It’s another piece of heartbreak I can file away in my ever-expanding junkyard of depressing memories. I’m not being sarcastic here, this is the complete and unvarnished truth: I’m happy I went to that game.
It put a cap on what is officially the most disappointing year of any sports team I have ever followed. The 2013 Nationals were a massive failure and the 2006 Redskins lived up to approximately zero expectations, but the 2015 Nationals were different brand of misery. Never have the stakes been so high, and the fall so great.
It’s years like this, folks, that make us proclaim to the heavens, “Next year, D.C.!”
AdvertisementsTens of thousands of emails hacked from campaign chairman John Podesta’s account have provided an unprecedented window into a presidential run
Anyone who has seen the documentary Weiner may not have been entirely surprised that it was former congressman Anthony Weiner who threw a late spanner in the works of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The film charts in excruciating detail the collapse of a political career and, ultimately, of a marriage.
Weiner’s laptop is now reportedly under scrutiny by the FBI lest it contain emails pertinent to Clinton’s private server. But if there is a movie sequel to be made, it might be called Podesta. An avalanche of tens of thousands of other messages, hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s gmail account and released by WikiLeaks in regular bursts over the past month, has provided an unprecedented window on the inner workings of a presidential run.
There, laid bare with all the brutal candour of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, are the office politics, the egos, the cliques, the evolving attempts to package a candidate who admits she is not a natural political performer like her husband or Barack Obama. The hoard offers insights that would not normally see the light of day until memoirs published years or decades hence.
The Clinton campaign has blamed the Russian government for breaking into Podesta’s account and passing on the material to WikiLeaks in an attempt to help Donald Trump win next week’s election. It has generally declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the emails, but Podesta, a veteran of nearly half a century of US politics, says he has spoken to the FBI “as a victim” of hacking.
Trump adviser reveals how Assange ally warned him about leaked Clinton emails Read more
Clinton’s handling of classified information as secretary of state – which flared up again last week thanks to Weiner – has cast a shadow over her entire campaign and been a source of much angst at her headquarters. When the issue first reached public attention in March last year, Podesta wrote of three fellow Clinton aides: “Speaking of transparency, our friends [David] Kendall, Cheryl [Mills] and Philippe [Reines] sure weren’t forthcoming on the facts here.”
The message was sent to Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington, who has a regular cameo in the emails. She wrote back: “This is a Cheryl special. Know you love her, but this stuff is like her Achilles heal [sic]. Or kryptonite … Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy.”
Podesta replied: “Unbelievable.”
Tanden added: “I guess I know the answer. They wanted to get away with it.”
Both Tanden and Podesta are unswervingly loyal to Clinton, but could be described as critical friends. In another exchange in September 2015, Podesta warned that the campaign has “taken on a lot of water that won’t be easy to pump out of the boat. Most of that has to do with terrible decisions made pre-campaign, but a lot has to do with her instincts. She’s nervous so prepping more and performing better. Got to do something to pump up excitement but not certain how to do that.”
Tanden assented: “Almost no one knows better [than] me that her instincts can be terrible.”
When the seemingly innocuous leftwing senator Bernie Sanders came out of nowhere to challenge Clinton in the Democratic primary, there were fears of a repeat of her shock defeat by Obama in 2008. Tanden warned Podesta against attacking Sanders too aggressively.
“Just game out what that does to Hillary,” she wrote in August last year. “When we went after Obama, she got killed for it. Reaffirmed all her negatives, strengthened him. We had no idea it was kryptonite for us to do that, but it was. I don’t know if it was Obama or Hillary (I suspected Hillary), but it’s really something to focus group beforehand.”
In December, when Tanden wrote in praise of the Paris climate deal, Podesta responded: “Can you believe that doofus Bernie attacked it?”
Then, in March this year, Clinton strategist Minyon Moore opined: “I think Sanders is a rule breaker and has no institutional loyalty to the Democratic Party; we should expect him to ignore the rules and persist in his quest to flip superdelegates despite overwhelming evidence that reflects his considerable weaknesses with the Democratic base and no doubt in the general.”
Tanden, meanwhile, pulled no punches when Clinton’s campaign hesitated over whether to condemn Democratic activist David Brock for demanding Sanders’ medical records. She wrote: “Hillary. God. Her instincts are suboptimal.”
A stout defender of Clinton in public, in private Tanden injects some bracing honesty that suggests the candidate is not surrounded by sycophants. After the former first lady described herself as a moderate, Tanden asked of Podesta: “Why did she call herself a moderate?”
He wrote back: “I pushed her on this on Sunday night. She claims she didn’t remember saying it. Not sure I believe her.”
Tanden replied: “I mean it makes my life more difficult after telling every reporter I know she’s actually progressive but that is really the smallest of issues. It worries me more that she doesn’t seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment.”
The daily dump of stolen emails has uncovered Clinton’s lucrative Wall Street speeches, lists of 39 potential vice-presidents and 84 potential campaign slogans, fresh questions over a conflict of interest with the Clinton Foundation and alleged advance warnings of debate questions. But there have been few revelations likely to alter the course of the race for the White House.
In fact, just as WikiLeaks’ release of US embassy cables often showed diplomats’ judgment in a flattering light, so the Podesta emails have illuminated a micromanaged campaign operation with a laser-like focus and little by way of ill-discipline or even foul language. The nerve centre is, however, all too aware of its candidate’s weaknesses and sensitive to media criticism, and as prone as any other office to personality clashes, terse exchanges and mutual exasperation.
The email treasure trove also lifts the lid on the complications of celebrity endorsements. In August 2015, Betsy Jones, assistant to the hip-hop star Q-Tip, wrote to Podesta to propose a meeting with Clinton “to discuss ways he can be used as bridge to the hip-hop generation during the 2016 presidential campaign”. Q-Tip “even served as DJ for Chelsea Clinton’s 25th birthday party in 2005”, she noted.
Podesta forwarded the email to colleagues, one of whom was Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin. “Q-Tip? Seriously?” she wrote. “I am so old.”
Another, Kristina Schake, weighed in: “I’ve actually seen Q-tip in concert and if this meeting happens I would like to staff her.” She elaborated: “With both the Beastie Boys and the Chemical Brothers!”
But then the conversation took a darker turn when another member of Clinton staff, presumably responsible for background checks, raised concerns over Q-Tip: “There are a couple of altercations he pleaded guilty to, but they were from a while back. However, more recently shouted ‘pigs’ at NYPD officers while protesting the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson.”
It took a while, but the meeting did go ahead.
Then there are campaign surrogates who go rogue. Lanny Davis, a lawyer and former special counsel to Bill Clinton during his presidency, put his foot in it when talking about Clinton’s email server on TV. Later that day Robby Mook, now the campaign manager, emailed Podesta: “We gotta zap Lanny out of our universe. Can’t believe he committed her to a private review of her hard drive on TV.”
In May last year, Podesta wrote of longtime Clinton family friend Sidney Blumenthal: “It always amazes me that people like Sid either completely lack self awareness or self respect. Maybe both. Will you promise to shoot me if I ever end up like that?”
Podesta, 67, runs a tight ship and has an unenviable job. Countless people want to give him advice or meet him for dinner. In September last year, columnist Brent Budowsky wrote a long, panicked email about visiting a university campus where Sanders had a booth but Clinton did not. “This is happening at every major campus in America,” he warned darkly.
Referring to a Politico story about attacks on |
for Gumiho is that he comes in off a dominating Code S performance, gong 4 - 0 over Rain and HyuN. If he can play at that level for the entire tournament, he's surely one of the favorites to win it all.
#2: SK_MC
At the last big international LAN, the MLG Winter Championship, MC cruised past his Protoss brothers into fourth place, mostly on the back of a style of revolutionary stargate PvT that had previously never been seen. At this tournament, he claimed that he was the only one playing HotS while all his contemporaries were still in the mindset of WoL. Since then, MC has developed into something he has always feared becoming: predictable. In his recent GSTL match against Axiom-Acer, Ryung blind countered MC's stargate style with preemptive turrets, turning this BO advantage into a solid win.
MC has also had blows dealt to him in the other two match-ups as first lost to Flying in the GSL, showing a poor understanding of late game PvP, and then to an out-of-form DRG. With these two loses, MC's hopes of winning the first HotS GSL end and so he turns to Europe. Still, with all his flaws, MC has always played off the beaten path and will be sure to bring innovative new styles to the tournament. His experience at these types of events will also play a big role, giving him an advantage over perhaps more in-form players such as Gumiho. MC may not be the favorite to win this tournament, but he's consistently solid enough to deserve this placement.
#1: CMStorm_Polt
In the history of Starcraft 2, there has not been a single player who has changed his public perception more than Polt. If you have just got into the scene or have only been following SC2 for the past year and a half or so, you know Polt as one of the most likable, loved and respected players in the entire community. Working towards becoming one of the first Korean players to become bilingual, his stream draws massive numbers whenever he plays and is always a fan favorite in whatever tournament he enters.
However, Polt was actually one of the most despised players in the early days of the GSL. Known for only beating players with cheese and never going beyond a second base, Polt was a player that most thought of as a one trick pony and someone who would fall off the face of the earth when players started getting better at the game. The fans completely turned on Polt during the opening rounds of a GSL in early 2011, when Polt called Jinro - the best foreigner at the time - someone who got through with luck and wasn't deserving to have gotten to the semifinals the season prior. To the fans glee, Jinro made Polt look foolish by beating up on him in the two games they played.
Shortly after that incident, Polt took a hiatus from university and became a full-time progamer. This proved to be a turning point, as his results skyrocketed, and he beat players like MC as he made deeper runs into Code S tournaments. He went on to win the Super Tournament, Assembly and other notable tournaments, proving he was not a one-trick pony after all by expanding his play and becoming a much better macro player. He started to stream, interacted with his audience, and quickly changed from a villain of the community to being seen as one of the nicest and most engaging Korean players.
Now, in another twist to his story, Polt has left Korea and gone to America to study English, continuing his efforts to bridge the gap between Korea and the foreigner world. To everyone's surprise, leaving Korea doesn't seem to have affected the level of his play at all. Polt has been excellent in Heart of the Swarm so far, crushing every Protoss he's met in tournament play, with his only major series loss so far being to Life, in a close 2 - 3 defeat at MLG Dallas. Life would go on to win the tournament, but Polt was the person who might have pushed the prodigy to his highest limits, only a few key moves away from taking the series.
With no Life in sight and most of the top Koreans entering the tournament being of the Protoss variety, Polt comes in as a strong favorite to continue his European dominance. In the two European tournaments he's entered, he has either won (Assembly) or come in second (last year's DH: Stockholm) with only Thorzain's Swedish magic being able to thwart him in a final. As a Korean player going to college in America and who plays his best Starcraft in Europe, Polt is a rare breed that is breaking down walls and defying the odds every time he plays.
Is it too early for a HotS Power Rank? Yes! Are we doing one anyway? Yes!The TL Power Rank returns just in time for DreamHack: Stockholm, in its first Heart of the Swarm edition. In all honesty, there haven't been enough games played yet – especially not between Korean and non-Korean gamers – for us to get a real clear picture of where everyone stands. However, it's still way more fun to have speculative power rank than nothing at all. Also, we've really missed all of your arguing, so we just couldn't wait any longer.That crossed our minds. So did "Who had the best tournament results in the past X months?" Those, and many other questions factored in as we attempted to figure out the answer to a contentious question: "Who's better?" Through a complex and entirely unscientific process that even we don't understand, we arrived at some kind of ranking.Alright, let's get on with it!All left out to offend YOU, specifically.Maybe it's because we feel bad about mistreating the French all these years... Instead of relegating Dayshi to honorable mentions, we just expanded the rankings so we could give him a nod.When Dayshi lost to Stephano at the finals of WCS France last year, “second best in France” wasn't all that meaningful a title. However, Dayshi has continued to improve since then, racking up a truly impressive string of online results in HotS, including qualification into the EU Premier League. DH:S will be his first real test in a live setting with Koreans present, where he can show that there's more to France in SC2 than just one player.This part of the list we could generate in random order, and it would probably come out looking more or less reasonable. Here, we have players who we're giving the benefit of the doubt because they were too accomplished in WoL not to be listed ( Bly ), a player who was excellent right after HotS release but we haven't seen much of since ( Ret ), and a player who had a pretty decent WoL career and impressed lately by breaking through the grueling WCS EU qualifiers ( Feast ). Weighing past results vs. more recent results is pretty confusing, and we admit that our player assessment was pretty messy. Still, it's not like we could have done a worse job than WCS.Yes, SortOf has only played one official HotS tournament game, that being a loss to Ganzi in the GSTL. But we'll put it this way: If NS HoSeo decided that SortOf was good enough to be their GSTL starter after just one month of practicing with them in Korea, then he's probably better than most of the foreigners at this tournament.Not only is WCS a giant mess organizationally, but it's also giving us a headache trying to figure out how much weight it carries in the scene. In Korea, the GSL was a surefire way to rate a player, but just because WCS AM and EU emulate the GSL system doesn't mean it works the exact same way. In any case, Happy deserves a lot of kudos for his recent WCS accomplishments, being the very first player to break through the qualifiers, and then going on to progress through his Ro16 group with wins over HasuObs and Bly.Zenio has been relatively quiet as of late, appearing largely as a ZvZ specialist in the Proleague and making occasional appearances for Liquid in the Acer Teamstory Cup. He also made an attempt to qualify for WCS NA’s Premier Division, but lost in the early rounds to Alicia and Center. Just by virtue of being a Korean player practicing in a Korean team house, Zenio has to be rated higher than most of the competition. However, he's definitely one of the weaker Koreans coming to this tournament, and he will have to really up his play to avoid getting eliminated by his own countrymen.The former TSL player Center has spent the last few months stuck on the verge of breaking out. He showed potential in WoL by narrowly missing out on Code S on two occasions, even defeating players like Seed and ByuN before getting narrowly eliminated in the Up/Downs. Sadly for Center, his decision to region switch to NA couldn't get him over the hump, as he was knocked out of the Premier League qualifier by Jaedong. While Center is outmatched by better Koreans at DreamHack, it could still be the tournament where he finally make a deep run and breaks out from underneath the shroud of anonymity.Sase's performances have always been very erratic compared to his Swedish rivals, but as the date of Dreamhack Stockholm approaches, it looks like he is finding his form just in time leave his mark. He just advanced from his WCS EU Premier group in first place with impressive wins over ForGG and Slivko, who both have been strong players in the EU scene. DreamHack Stockholm could be SaSe's chance to outdo ThorZaIN, NaNiwa, and all his other countrymen to make his claim for the crown of the north.The transition to Heart of the Swarm seems to have gone well for the defending DH: Stockholm champ Thorzain, as it allows him to play his slow and methodical "spoon"-style with greater efficiency than ever before. Thorzain has shown that he can fight evenly with the top Koreans when he has a truly great day, and he seems to play even better on Swedish soil. However, he will have to be truly extraordinary this weekend if he is to challenge the strongest Korean contingent to ever invade his homeland.Is this rank too high for a couple of guys who took an eight month break from StarCraft II to try their hand at professional League of Legends? Maybe. But no matter how much time they took off, we have to recognize that while they were still active, both CoCa and Puzzle were highly accomplished and very talented StarCraft II progamers. FXOsC, another progamer who returned to SC2 from a foray into LoL, didn't take long to bring his skill level back up as he recently all-killed Axiom-Acer in the GSTL. Seeing as Puzzle was a Code S regular in the past, and CoCa even reached the finals of an MLG, they definitely have the raw talent to match the other title contenders at this tournament.The key factor here is that while sC had the benefit of intensive practice at the FXO house, Puzzle and CoCa have been left to rehabilitate themselves on their own. While they can surely be great HotS progamers with enough time, there's no telling how ready they are for the tournament immediately in front of them.Snute had the worst HotS debut possible, going 0 - 5 at the IEM World Championship. However, he's recovered very well since then, wrecking opponents in both online cups and in live competition at the ESET UK Masters where he took home the £4,000 first place prize. While Snute has great credentials against his fellow Europeans and even against Korean players in ZvZ, he has yet to overcome a tough Korean Protoss or Terran player (Sting? We said tough) in an important elimination match (he did come close against Bomber at IPL5). Snute may be in a very nice situation now as one of the best European Zergs, but he'll need to show that he can defeat Koreans in non-mirrors to take it to the next level.One could argue that Naniwa is one of few foreigners with the experience, work ethic and raw talent necessary to take the fight to the Koreans this weekend. One could argue that despite a nearly empty match record in HotS, we should put our faith in NaNiwa, and believe that he has been practicing hard (even being sighted in Korea) to put the dispute over the Swedish throne to rest once and for all. Whatever the case, we're taking a leap of faith by putting NaNiwa up here as the highest ranked Swede of the tournament. With names like Gumiho, Polt, Leenock and Oz in attendance, the former GSL quarterfinalist has his work cut out for him. This is his time, more than ever before, to prove to everyone that he, and he alone, is the greatest Swedish Starcraft II player of all time, and we believe that he realizes this as well.Speaking of leaps of faith, what are we to make of Stephano? Since he was eviscerated by Last at MLG Dallas, the only thing we've heard from him is his foretelling of his own retirement. Well, that and a string of tweets suggesting that he's been partying in LA for the last ten days. If Stephano has truly lost his passion and is in the midst of a pre-retirement tour of merry-making, then even his incredible natural talent won't save him. On the other hand, Stephano's skill level throughout his career has seemed more correlated with his mental state than the number of hours he puts into practice. We're ready to expect anything and everything from Stephano at Stockholm.The Tyrant is making his way to Sweden for the very first non-exhibition, international StarCraft II tournament of his career. Needless to say, he’ll be looking to make a splash. Though Jaedong has been very sharp in ZvZ, in WoL as well as the new expansion, he has a glaring weakness in his ZvP. He's 1-4 in Proleague this round and only 8 - 14 on the season. To make matters worse, Protoss is the most well represented race at DH: Stockholm, and Jaedong has even been placed alongside the Swedish terror, Sase, in his group. Jaedong will have to improve his game rapidly if he wants to withstand his worst match-up, the exhausting schedule, and the endless opponents at Stockholm.Creator, DRG, and Seed: these are all players who have struggled in the transition to HotS. None, however, have had as steep a drop from glory than the once GSL finalist, Hyun. At his peak, the Quantic Zerg looked Hyun-stoppable, especially in the IPL fight club, where he was reigning champion for over three months. No one could defeat him in the bo9 format and as he showed with his multiple Zotac cup trophies, tournament gauntlets weren't an issue for him either. Shortly afterwards, Hyun reached the finals of the last GSL in 2012, establishing himself not only as just an online hero, but as one of the top players in the world. He proceeded to lose in a nail-biting 3-4 series and then suddenly, everything changed.HotS came abruptly came, an especially harsh reality for Zerg players as Zerg was revamped entirely and in most peoples' eyes, nerfed from their dominance in WoL. Hyun's team, TSL, previously a fortress of Zerg collaboration, disbanded, leaving Hyun in an unfamiliar position on foreign team Quantic. Finally, even IPL, Hyun's weekly paycheck, is but no more. With all these changes, Hyun's results were sure to suffer. With a <50% win rate in European based ATC and a 0-4 loss in his GSL Ro32 group, Hyun's stock has all but plummeted... all the way down to 13th.Parting might have compared MaNa to Creator in terms of gameplay, but he might actually be closer to PartinG, or even MC. While MaNa's certainly a good player, you'd never think from watching one of his games that he'd be one to rack upan impressive tournament resume. Even if he doesn't have the superlative micro of those two illustrious Koreans, MaNa just has the same knack for making the right decisions, choosing the right builds, and simply being the better player (if not necessarily elevating his play) when the stakes grow higher.While MaNa did get the socks knocked off him by viOLet and MVP at the IEM World Championship, he's gone on an impressive Korea-killing spree in the TeamStory Cup since then. Of course, live is a different story from online, but MaNa is a player who knows how to make the best case scenario happen.There's no doubt about it. YuGiOh is a fighter. On the last day of Slayers, the rest of the team was getting ready to move-on and content to put on a good show. Yugioh was busy trying to all-kill MVP.When Yugioh was knocked out of Code A, he was given the same choice as the rest of the Koreans. Stay in Korea to fight the best players in the world or play in WCS NA. Unlike many of the other Koreans, going to NA was actually a valid option for him due to being on a foreign team. No one would have blamed him for taking that path. All of the greats had left for easier waters: MVP, Nestea, and MMA. But Yugioh is a king, and Code A was a kingdom worth fighting for. YuGiOh decided to stay, and he easily crushed through his Code A qualifier. Some might say DreamHack Stockholm – boasting its strongest player pool ever – is too big of a challenge for YuGiOh to take on, but we're sure he's looking forward to it.While Sage is not a household name like some of the other contenders, his performances online over the last few weeks have definitely turned a lot of heads. He has amassed one of the best records in Acer's Teamstory Cup (a league that includes top players from teams like Axiom and MVP), taking out strong players like Nerchio, Hyun, MMA, HerO, Ret and ForGG with all-around solid play across match-ups. He's still unbeaten against Zerg in the ATC, and has done pretty much all the work for ROOT in the league. But despite his very impressive online performances, Sage is still looking for that one tournament run that throws him into the public eye for good. He came close in Code A October of 2011, but was defeated by Oz in the semi-finals. Sage spent the following year and a half stuck in anonymity, so more than anyone at this tournament, he knows he can't squander this rare opportunity.There are a lot of thrones ripe for the taking in HotS, and few as enticing as the one for dominion over all of Europe. With Stephano no longer being leaps and bounds above everyone else in Europe (or at least, he has laid low so far...), there is a line of players, both old and new, ready to declare themselves the new ruler of the old world. At the head of that line is Lucifron. While there have been no major live events since MLG, Lucifron has been destroying the online scene with his incredible performances in both ATC and WCS EU.However, online results and prize money won can only take you so far in the quest for the throne, and if there was one slight against Lucifron, it's that he doesn't have an actual championship at a big, international tournament (no, beating your brother at WCS Spain doesn't count). While winning a tournament like The Gathering and taking 3rd at WCS EU is certainly impressive, there's nothing compared to cutting through a horde of Koreans and taking the gold. With Dreamhack gathering players from all around the world, the stage is set. For Lucifron, there has never been a better time than now.We've already given out a ton of past credit on this list, but Oz really takes the cake in terms of how much we're letting past performances dictate our assessment of a player in the present. Though the wonderful wizard never won a championship, he had the strangest ability to come into tournaments almost unnoticed and then magic his way into a top four finish. After leaving Fnatic he began upon a steep decline that saw him eliminated from the GSL as well as most international competitions, until he was fortuitously rescued by Evil Geniuses. His performances so far have been a mixed bag, and he has a 2 - 3 record at present in the Proleague. But at moments he's shown glimpses of that good sense, that intelligence for the game that once made him one of the most interesting players to watch. Maybe this is a few rungs too high, but we have hope for Oz is HotS.Oh ForGG, why must you tease us so. Sometimes he looks like the best Terran in Europe, and sometimes he just looks like a ladder monster who can't cut it in real competition. It seems at the moment he is somewhere in-between. Although he recently advanced from his WCS EU group and went on a hot streak in the Acer TeamStory Cup, his form in the months prior did not live up to expectations, as dropped a surprising number of games and tournaments to top Europeans. For a player who was initially expected to dominate European competition, ForGG has been disappointing since his move to France.Nevertheless this is Dreamhack, a grueling tournament format that does help ForGG's ladder-grinding builds and strategies. 2012's DreamHack Valencia was where ForGG came closest to winning his first major championship in StarCraft II, coming just one game away from defeating TaeJa at the height of his power. Replicating that kind of run is going to be a lot harder given the number of Koreans coming to the tournament, but don't underestimate the one-time MSL champion if things start clicking for him.It's amazing how JYP has managed tohis way back into relevance. Never a notable player in international play, he was even knocked into Code B and into utter darkness without international or domestic competition to look forward to. Just as things became grim for JYP, Proleague and EG-TL came along out of nowhere, giving him a much needed chance to redeem himself.While we can't say JYP experienced an incredible rebirth in Proleague, at the very least he's earned everyone's grudging respect by 'carrying' the team with his 10 - 10 record. For a team where every match is a struggle, having a consistent performer like JYP has been a godsend. JYP may not be the most glamorous player or the biggest name at the tournament, but his consistent and solid play over the last few months commands a good deal of respect.As with many of the other players on this ranking, HerO's rank up here in fifth was at least partially a matter of faith. While he's proven himself to be quite a good PvP player in HotS, the fact remains that we've seen very few games of him in non-mirror match-ups. And when he has, he hasn't looked all that good, not having won a single non-mirror match-up since the HotS expansion came out.Still, this is HerO, one of the most traveled and consistent competitors on the international circuit. Of the players in this entire tournament, only MC, Stephano, and Leenock can claim to have had more success and experience in the weekend tournament environment. DreamHack, in particular, is a tournament he has excelled in, with two champions won at the tour's grand finale at DreamHack Winter. Now that he's even becoming a clutch competitor in team tournaments under EG-Liquid's head coach Park, you have to think that many of the intangibles are going HerO's way, even if his gameplay is still somewhat in doubt.With two MLG championships, an IPL champion, and an MLG runner-up trophy to his name, Leenock is one the best players in the world at the marathon-style tournaments favored outside Korea. If this were WoL, Leenock would easily take the #1 spot on this power rank.Unfortunately for Leenock, he's stumbled noticeably since the release of Heart of the Swarm, with only a 6 - 9 record thus far (with three wins coming against BabyKnight). Most recently, he was knocked out of the Code Ro32 and down to the Challenger League. Granted, he was in this season's group of death, and most of his losses have come at the hands of top class opponents like Life, PartinG, and Innovation. Still, the Leenock of old would have been able to hold his own against such players.Considering the fact that Leenock was one of the most successful players in WoL, and one capable of mastering multiple styles, we're willing to believe that his early troubles in HotS are just temporary and that he'll soon be able to hit his stride. However, if Leenock suffers an early elimination at Stockholm as well, we may have to seriously reevaluate Leenock in HotS.Finally, one of the most exciting players in all of StarCraft II gets his chance to show his skills to a huge international audience. Gumiho has long been known as a master of chaos in GomTV competition, using multi-prong attacks and mass drop tactics long before Blizzard tweaked Terran to encourage that sort of play. His aggressive tactics frequently produce highly entertaining games, and he was even one half of our best game of 2012 While Gumiho is consistently great to watch, his skill level has been very inconsistent. After a Code S semi-final run in early 2012, he's had a lot of trouble getting over the Ro16 hump, even leading ST_Curious to pass him the title of Code S gatekeeper. However, there IS one setting where Gumiho has never failed to take it to another level: the GSTL finals. With a 5 – 0 performance against EG-SlayerS and 3 – 0 against team MVP, Gumiho was the single biggest contributor to team FXO's back to back GSTL championships.The problem is that this is Gumiho's first international appearance, and there's no telling how such a mercurial player will adjust to a new environment. The good news for Gumiho is that he comes in off a dominating Code S performance, gong 4 - 0 over Rain and HyuN. If he can play at that level for the entire tournament, he's surely one of the favorites to win it all.At the last big international LAN, the MLG Winter Championship, MC cruised past his Protoss brothers into fourth place, mostly on the back of a style of revolutionary stargate PvT that had previously never been seen. At this tournament, he claimed that he was the only one playing HotS while all his contemporaries were still in the mindset of WoL. Since then, MC has developed into something he has always feared becoming: predictable. In his recent GSTL match against Axiom-Acer, Ryung blind countered MC's stargate style with preemptive turrets, turning this BO advantage into a solid win.MC has also had blows dealt to him in the other two match-ups as first lost to Flying in the GSL, showing a poor understanding of late game PvP, and then to an out-of-form DRG. With these two loses, MC's hopes of winning the first HotS GSL end and so he turns to Europe. Still, with all his flaws, MC has always played off the beaten path and will be sure to bring innovative new styles to the tournament. His experience at these types of events will also play a big role, giving him an advantage over perhaps more in-form players such as Gumiho. MC may not be the favorite to win this tournament, but he's consistently solid enough to deserve this placement.In the history of Starcraft 2, there has not been a single player who has changed his public perception more than Polt. If you have just got into the scene or have only been following SC2 for the past year and a half or so, you know Polt as one of the most likable, loved and respected players in the entire community. Working towards becoming one of the first Korean players to become bilingual, his stream draws massive numbers whenever he plays and is always a fan favorite in whatever tournament he enters.However, Polt was actually one of the most despised players in the early days of the GSL. Known for only beating players with cheese and never going beyond a second base, Polt was a player that most thought of as a one trick pony and someone who would fall off the face of the earth when players started getting better at the game. The fans completely turned on Polt during the opening rounds of a GSL in early 2011, when Polt called Jinro - the best foreigner at the time - someone who got through with luck and wasn't deserving to have gotten to the semifinals the season prior. To the fans glee, Jinro made Polt look foolish by beating up on him in the two games they played.Shortly after that incident, Polt took a hiatus from university and became a full-time progamer. This proved to be a turning point, as his results skyrocketed, and he beat players like MC as he made deeper runs into Code S tournaments. He went on to win the Super Tournament, Assembly and other notable tournaments, proving he was not a one-trick pony after all by expanding his play and becoming a much better macro player. He started to stream, interacted with his audience, and quickly changed from a villain of the community to being seen as one of the nicest and most engaging Korean players.Now, in another twist to his story, Polt has left Korea and gone to America to study English, continuing his efforts to bridge the gap between Korea and the foreigner world. To everyone's surprise, leaving Korea doesn't seem to have affected the level of his play at all. Polt has been excellent in Heart of the Swarm so far, crushing every Protoss he's met in tournament play, with his only major series loss so far being to Life, in a close 2 - 3 defeat at MLG Dallas. Life would go on to win the tournament, but Polt was the person who might have pushed the prodigy to his highest limits, only a few key moves away from taking the series.With no Life in sight and most of the top Koreans entering the tournament being of the Protoss variety, Polt comes in as a strong favorite to continue his European dominance. In the two European tournaments he's entered, he has either won (Assembly) or come in second (last year's DH: Stockholm) with only Thorzain's Swedish magic being able to thwart him in a final. As a Korean player going to college in America and who plays his best Starcraft in Europe, Polt is a rare breed that is breaking down walls and defying the odds every time he plays.It’s about 5 a.m. and about 15 degrees. Volunteers walk over snow, onto the railroad tracks near Dixie Highway to assist with Louisville’s annual homeless count. Volunteers shout toward a dark spot underneath an I-264 overpass.
“Anybody up there?” asks Natalie Reteneller, development director at YMCA Safe Place services.
In two hours the group—just one of many spread across the city—find five people who agree to answer several questions.
“In the past three years how many times have you been housed and then homeless again?” asks volunteer Molly Permenter, who also works for Safe Place during the day.
“I can’t tell exactly how many. It’s been quite a bit,” says Jeffrey, who stands in the cold, without shoes.
This winter has proven to be especially cold—schools closed because of the below-zero wind chills, travel has been complicated because of icy roads. But Louisville’s homeless have shelter from the life-threatening cold through the federally funded White Flag program.
But White Flag’s increased usage has come at a time of decreased funding.
Most homeless people are seeking shelter, which is one reason why last week’s homeless count is done in winter. On cold nights like these shelters are supposed to get an extra $5 per person through the White Flag program, which allows anyone to seek shelter when the temperature dips below 35 degrees or above 95.
In the last three months of 2013 (the program data is available in quarters), that happened about 3,400 times. The previous year it happened just 720 times. Now, the money for White Flag fund has run out but shelters are still helping anyone who comes through their doors on these cold nights.
In January, with the temperatures unusually low, almost every night was a White Flag night, says Johanna Wint, director of the Salvation Army’s Center of Hope.
Shelters received their last checks for White Flag nights last month and will not get any extra money for the program until new funds are allocated this summer.
“It’s more bathrooms, it’s more water, it’s more toilet paper. The everyday things that just add up,” Wint says,.
While the extra White Flag funds are a help, they don’t cover the extra costs of operating the shelter and serving more bodies, she says.
For example, Wint estimates food costs alone are an additional $100 per day on White Flag nights.
“We had been serving about 90 people for breakfast every morning,” she says. “We’re up to 140 every [White Flag] morning.”
This fiscal year, about $19,000 was allocated to Louisville’s White Flag program—compared to $34,000 the year before, says Natalie Harris, executive director of Louisville’s Coalition for the Homeless.
The cut was partly because of the federal sequester, she says.
At Wayside Christian Mission, the shelter may serve up to 550 each night. On White Flag nights, that number could increase to 650, says chief operating officer Nina Mosely.
“We can’t dwell on those negatives. We can’t control the weather. All we can do is control how we respond to it and continue to make these services available to the most vulnerable people in our community,” she says.
Shelters say they’ll continue serving anyone who needs help, and will ask for more money when Metro Louisville begins its allocation process this year, but that may be a difficult sell with other agencies also competing for cash, Harris says.
Meanwhile, some homeless people, including Jeffrey, choose to brave the cold during these cold nights instead of seeking warmth in a shelter.
Last week, 166 volunteers helped count 70 homeless people on the street for the annual count, Harris says. In 2013, the on-the-street count was 63 people. In 2012, the number was 152.
Final results of the total Louisville homeless count will be released later this year.A Boeing 737 heading to Simferopol, takes off at Sheremetyevo International Airport outside Moscow, June 10. (REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin)
Russia might have invaded Crimea but the International Civil Aviation Organization has deemed that Crimean airspace still belongs to Ukraine.
Makysm Burbak, Ukraine’s infrastructure Minister, made the announcement in Kiev on Monday.
“Today we received a letter from the ICAO, which denies all of the statements in the Russian mass media that any negotiations between ICAO and Russia on the Crimean airspace are being held. The ICAO again confirmed that Crimea is the territory of Ukraine,” Burbak said.
In early April the European Aviation Safety Agency issued a bulletin after the Russian government and subsequently Moscow’s air traffic control system took control of the region’s flights.
Russian troops seized the Crimean peninsula in late February and on March 18th Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the territory a part of Russia.
The seizure of Crimea has not gone uncontested by the Ukrainian government and on June 26th newly elected President Petro Poroshenko told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that Ukraine’s government would continue to be at odds with Russia over control of Crimea.
“Our relations cannot be normalized [with Russia] without the return of Crimea,” Poroshenko said.CLEVELAND -- Thousands of people gathered on the Hope Memorial Bridge on the eve of Republican National Convention to start the week with a positive message: Love can bring peace and justice to the city.
People from across the city and state and a few from farther away joined hands in the 85-degree heat and stood in silence for 30 minutes on the bridge that joins the city's East and West sides.
Sister Rita Petruziello of the Congregation of Saint Joseph, who came up with the idea for the largely grassroots event, had hoped for a peaceful event demonstrating the power of love and showing visitors who Clevelanders are. Organizers sold t-shirts that read, "Stand for Love."
Caroline Kovac, 64, came from Chardon and made new friends, standing on the bridge.
"I wanted to do something to address the violence and anger in the world," Kovac said. "It has to stop. It has to end. I don't know how to do it, but these are the people who can do something."
The event drew a diverse crowd -- men and women, black and white, young and old and everyone in between. People applauded and shook the hands of police officers monitoring the event and a few even joined the circle.
Clevelander Hanif Phelps, 31, got a lot of attention for his sign that read: "U Matter 2 Me."
Who is "u"?
"It doesn't matter what demographic's out here, someone in every demographic wants to know they matter -- black, white, old, Republican, Democratic," Hanif said. "I've had more hugs today than I've had in my entire life, even with the love from my parents."
Several groups planning demonstrations later in the week also participated in Sunday's event. Monica Moran, 35, of Stand Together Against Trump, a group of physicians and young professionals, said the event was a great idea to show a positive image of Cleveland to RNC attendees.
"Thirty minutes felt like it was going to be a long time but when it came down to it, having that time to be quiet, calm, reflected and united was exactly what the city needed," Moran said.When you hear that a show has hit a milestone of entertaining 10 million guests, it’s an impressive eye-opening accomplishment. But when it’s Cirque du Soleil, it should come as no surprise. Just recently the long running contemporary circus performance ‘La Nouba’ hit that number as the show celebrates a reinvigoration with new acts hitting the stage and skies above.
When the show first debuted at The West Side of Disney Springs (formerly Downtown Disney) in late 1998, it was built as a permanent installation. The theater was state of the art and the performers were cast from all points around the globe, and the emotions felt throughout the audience were inspiring and heartwarming. It’s a show that evokes wonder and awe, with heart-stopping feats of acrobatic mastery. You’ll even experience a few tense moments where a hush falls over the theater; the audience holding their breath as they becomes entranced with the unbelievable performance unfolding before their very eyes |
for a difference of opinion between credible Hall of Fame candidates. But when one votes for whom there is no credible Hall of Fame case — and when that player himself readily admits that — he’s showing that he has no special expertise or insight in the analysis of baseball careers. In that case criticism is quite warranted. Both of the voter (who is clearly letting homerism and his relationship to the player influence him) and the body which gives him the imprimatur of an expert (which does not seem to care that things like homerism and a voter’s relationship to a player influences him).
As for the second point, nowhere in the column does Alexander say that Troy Percival is a Hall of Famer, despite the fact that the reason he is given a balllot is to, you know, select Hall of Famers. Twice, however, Alexander says that he just wants to “keep him in the conversation.” A conversation that only Alexander himself seems interested in having.
And you know what one decent definition of “attention-seeking” is? An attempt at changing the subject to one which no one else but the speaker wishes to discuss.SAN FRANCISCO — In a spacious loft across the street from the Bay Bridge, Steve Perlman did something last week that would ordinarily bring a cellular network to its knees.
Around him was a collection of eight iPhones, a pair of television sets with superhigh-resolution 4K displays and an arsenal of other devices. Mr. Perlman played high-definition movies from Netflix on a half-dozen or so devices at once, wirelessly transmitting all the video to them. Instead of stumbling under the strain of so much data jamming the airwaves at once, the video played on all the screens with nary a stutter.
The demonstration showed off a technology that Mr. Perlman, a serial entrepreneur and inventor who sold WebTV to Microsoft for more than $500 million in the late 1990s, contends will give mobile users far faster cellular network speeds, with fewer dropped phone calls and other annoyances, even in stadiums and other places where thousands of people use mobile phones at the same time.
“This is as big a change to wireless as tubes-to-transistor was to electronics,” Mr. Perlman said recently.On January 7th, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan signed a law that sentences LGBTQ individuals to 14 years in prison if convicted of same-sex relations. This law also bans same-sex marriage as well as encourages imprisonment of any who support LGBTQ organizations — whether the suspected ally actually identifies as queer or not.
The Same-Sex Prohibition Act explicitly states, “Any person who registers, operates or participates in gay clubs, societies and organizations or directly or indirectly makes public show of same-sex amorous relationship in Nigeria commits an offense and shall each be liable on conviction to a term of 10 years in prison.”
Although President Johnson just signed the anti-LGBTQ bill into law earlier this month, ordinances with provisions similar to this law have been brought unsuccessfully before the Parliament since 2006. In 2011, the Senate adopted the original anti-gay act that eventually would give rise to the current Same-Sex Prohibition Act, and the lower house of parliament passed it in May of 2013.
Unsurprisingly, various Western nations have jumped at the opportunity to respond to Nigeria’s ruling. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke about the United States’ “deep concern” by asserting that “no one should face violence or discrimination for who they love” (because that does not happen in the U.S.). Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the European Union, commented in a released statement, “I am… particularly concerned that some provisions of the [Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition] Act appear to be in contradiction with… fundamental [human] rights.” Some media outlets even go as far as to compare Nigeria’s new law to legislation passed in other Western countries, like France’s marriage equality ruling.
It is important to defend human rights and to speak out against human rights violations around the world. However, the West, in its attempts to endorse freedom across the globe, has invoked — once again — the White Savior trope that ignores and erases any Western culpability in anti-LGBTQ policies that occur in other parts of the world, especially in the Afro-Diaspora. To talk about anti-gay legislation internationally, we need to talk about a history of white supremacy that brought homophobia and anti-LGBTQ legislation to various countries.
Well, let’s start with a little country called England. You may have heard of it! Recently, the U.K made a lot of queer folks happy by agreeing to legalize same-sex marriage, a ruling that will go into affect for only England and Wales in March 2014. Before England decided to do right by same-sex couples who want to get married, it tried to take over the whole damn world (with the exception of 22 countries) and colonized more than a handful.
England was not playing around with its colonies, so after a lot of fuss about how to rule all of their territories, it came up with the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865, also known as “An Act to remove Doubts as to the Validity of Colonial Laws”. Basically, it set the standard for British laws applying to any territory claimed by the Monarch unless someone gave a really good reason why it shouldn’t.
What kind of laws then applied to English colonies? One law crucial to queer politics today is the Buggery Act of 1533, first passed under the reign of King Henry VIII. King Henry VIII was that upstanding fellow who split the Church of England’s ties to the Roman Catholic Church so that he could get it on with Anne Boleyn and her four successors, and who also got two of six wives out of the picture by chopping their heads off. Our boy Henry was so outstanding in the bedroom that he must have figured he should make laws about what kind of sex other people were allowed to have.
Buggery, in the 1533 Act, originally condemned anyone found guilty of an “unnatural sex act” to death and loss of property. By 1885, although the law replaced the punishment of death and loss of property with imprisonment, the Courts specified that anal sex between men, whether in public or in private, was a crime. As determined by the aforementioned Colonial Laws Validity Act, the Buggery Act carried over to all British territories throughout the world.
When England gave up most of its colonies and dependent territories by 1997 (they still have several dependent territories in the Caribbean), it did not take all of its laws with it. So even though England and Wales got rid of the sodomy laws in 1967, the “Motherland” didn’t try too hard to repeal the sodomy laws it consequently had established practically everywhere else in the world. Oops!
With this brief history lesson in mind, let’s take a look at some of the countries with the most discussed anti-LGBTQ policies today. There’s Uganda, with its proposed anti-gay bill that also punishes LGBTQ people with life imprisonment (even though President Yoweri Museveni has chosen not to sign the bill into law); Nigeria, as mentioned earlier, now has imposed the Same-Sex Prohibition Act in full force, already making several arrests; LGBTQ individuals are facing an increasing amount of persecution in English-speaking Caribbean islands like Jamaica and Barbados; President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, even suggested last year that gay men should be beheaded. What do all of these countries have in common? They were all subject to England’s colonial influence.
However, nineteenth century historical records demonstrate that homosexuality existed in many African societies, and that members of royal families often took same-sex lovers. Even with British colonial laws in place, there is not much evidence that governments in colonial territories actively prosecuted individuals for homosexual behavior. So how did these countries go from relatively tolerant views to oppressive legal measures concerning LGBTQ communities? This is where modern Western culture, specifically Christianity, comes into play. The legacy of toxic Western influences on Afro-Diasporic cultural practices is long and convoluted.
The American evangelical right spends about as much money and dedicates as many resources advocating for religious African groups to denounce queer rights efforts as pro-LGBTQ organizations working in Africa. Groups like the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer and leaders like Lou Engle, and Scott Lively, visit religious communities in African countries and endorse their harmful views about homosexuality. For example, in 2009, three American Christians, presented as experts on homosexuality, informed Ugandans about the dangers of the “gay agenda” in a three-day conference. One month after the conference, a Ugandan politician with alleged connections to American evangelicals proposed the now infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. Even as recently as this past December, MassResistance founder Brian Camenker encouraged Jamaicans to defend the nation’s sodomy laws and not to indulge LGBTQ rights. These “activists” act as White Saviors, spreading the gospel against the “gay agenda” and truly embody a modern form of colonialism. We in the West, especially in the U.S., cannot dissociate ourselves from this poisonous, white supremacist, imperialist tradition that sanctions some Western “prerogative” to barge into other countries and impose our views. With these factors in mind, we certainly don’t have the right to turn around and call those same nations we continually colonize “backwards”. Karl T. Muth explains the Western position perfectly:
“Fascinating is Americans’ enduring ignorance about their country’s relationship with Africa and their unshakable belief that things being imported to Africa from America include democracy, goodwill, and happiness… Meanwhile, the actual imports from America (political and religious extremism, messages of white supremacy, people and organizations encouraging homophobia, quasi-government agents peddling weapons, etc.) go either unnoticed or purposefully ignored.”
Queers in the West may not be in favor of anti-LGBTQ evangelicals invading Afro-Diasporic countries with horrible belief systems, but we cannot ignore the religious right’s actions. Before Westerners criticize policy makers and government systems in the Diaspora, how about we challenge our government’s imperialist relationships with other nations. Before Westerners decide that Afro-Diasporic nations are so “backwards,” how about we take a look at our own histories, how after centuries of unjust laws we are merely beginning to move towards equal rights legislation, and the way that oppression often begins with us. Before Western countries talk about cutting off aid to states with homophobic legal policies, how about we talk about how much harm Western “aid” has done in the past.
For those of us queer people in the West, we must support human rights everywhere in the world; however, standing up for our LGBTQ siblings’ rights also means acknowledging how we are culpable. We must stop pretending that we are ahead of the world when we talk about LGBTQ rights and democracy. If being “ahead” of other nations means that we export our hate instead of confronting it, we are not only backwards, but we are also hypocrites. We cannot call attention to other LGBTQ people’s voices if we only want to hear half of the story. Our struggles are not all the same, but they are definitely connected.The NFL has been clear with its views on marijuana use within the professional football league: nope.
Last year, a player was suspended for using weed to cope with Crohn's disease all because marijuana falls under the league's controlled substance policy, with no exceptions for medical use.
But that could be changing soon.
SEE ALSO: NFL players get one step closer to pot as a pain treatment
The Washington Post reported late Monday that the NFL has offered to work with the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) to study the effects of marijuana use for pain management. The union has been working on its own marijuana study.
The news about a potential collaborative study comes shortly after a massive study from Boston University on the chances of suffering brain damage in the form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, from playing the sport.
According to the WaPo, the NFL wrote a letter to the players association and offered to work together. Joe Lockhart, NFL executive vice president of communication, told the news outlet, "We look forward to working with the Players Association on all issues involving the health and safety of our players."
We reached out to the NFLPA for additional comment.
This isn't an official change in policy or anything close to it. But this is a first step toward the NFL opening up to the possibility of using marijuana for chronic and acute pain management.
Related: See the best-selling NFL jerseys this week:
10 PHOTOS Best-selling NFL jerseys this week See Gallery Best-selling NFL jerseys this week 10. Matthew Stafford, Detroit Lions (Photo by Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images) 9. Odell Beckham Jr., New York Giants (Photo by Andy Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) 8. Marshawn Lynch, Oakland Raiders (Photo by Samuel Stringer/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) 7. Carson Wentz, Philadelphia Eagles (Max Faulkner/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/TNS via Getty Images) 6. Von Miller, Denver Broncos (Photo by Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images) 5. Antonio Brown, Pittsburgh Steelers (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images) 4. Ezekiel Elliott, Dallas Cowboys (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images) 3. Dak Prescott, Dallas Cowboys (Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images) 2. Tom Brady, New England Patriots (Photo by Focus on Sport/Getty Images) 1. James Conner, Pittsburgh Steelers (Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images) Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE
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Tom Brady has Rob Gronkowski on a food and alcohol diet and is even cooking him daily meals
Dallas Cowboys players lead the NFL in games suspended and it is not even close
NFL Power Rankings: Where all 32 teams stand going into training campRussian investigators said Tuesday that they were dropping their investigation into the 2009 death of whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. His family and former employer say he was beaten to death in jail after uncovering a fraud scheme.
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Russian investigators on Tuesday dropped their investigation into the 2009 death in jail of a whistleblowing attorney whose case led to a crisis in relations between Russia and the United States.
The investigators said in a statement they had no evidence that Sergei Magnitsky died from custodians' beatings at the age of 37 as his family and former US-born employer Bill Browder claim.
"Based on the preliminary investigation's results, a decision was taken to end the criminal case due to a lack of evidence of a crime," the Investigative Committee said.
Magnitsky is currently facing a posthumous trial -- Russia's first -- along with Browder into alleged tax evasion.
The Russian lawyer was jailed shortly after disclosing an alleged $230-million fraud scheme being run by senior tax and law enforcement authorities.
An attorney for Magnitsky's mother said he intended to appeal the decision in court.
(AFP)The East won a wild NBA All-Star game Sunday 163-155 in a game that featured even less defense than usual for an All-Star showcase where record point totals were put up. Sunday’s matchup featured six first-timers, who helped fill the void of perennial All-Stars like Derrick Rose and Kobe Bryant, who have been plagued by injuries this season. Kyrie Irving and Paul George were making their first All-Star starts and helped the East break a three game losing streak. George and Irving are not endorsement stars or household names for non-NBA fans, but prolonged success in the NBA on the national stage can produce endorsement riches unmatched by any other U.S. team sport.
The top of the NBA endorsement food chain is led by LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Both are global superstars who made $42 million and $34 million, respectively, last year from endorsement partners. James has been one of the NBA’s top endorsers since he was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2003. His current partners include Nike, McDonald’s, Coca Cola, Samsung Electronics, Upper Deck, Audemars Piguet and Dunkin’ Donuts.
Five championships and 18 years of All-Star play transformed Bryant into the most popular player in China with a little help from his main backer, Nike. Bryant also has deals with Turkish Air, Lenovo, Hublot and Panini for merchandise.
The NBA’s top 10 endorsers pulled down $155 million last year by our count. It dwarfs the totals in baseball and football. MLB’ s 10 biggest endorsers earned less than $30 million off the field last year with only Derek Jeter and Ichiro Suzuki (all in Japan) making more than $3 million from sponsors and merchandise. The NFL’s top 10 made $55 million from endorsements, led by Peyton Manning at $12 million in 2013. The NHL lags even further behind with the 10 biggest stars making $15 million cumulatively.
“It’s gotta be the shoes,” Spike Lee told us 25 years ago, as his alter ego Mars Blackmon in a series of Nike commercials. And the gap between NBA players and others in team sports all starts with the shoes. The NBA’s biggest stars can command more than $10 million annually from Nike and Adidas. Nike represents almost half James’ off-court income, and James was the NBA’s leading shoe salesman in 2013 with $300 million in retail sales in the U.S. of his Nike signature shoes, according to research firm SportsOneSource. Rose signed a 13-year, $185 million contract with Adidas in 2012. A $1 million a year shoe deal is extremely rare for an NFL or MLB star. Basketball players move product unlike their counterparts in other sports.
Basketball players can also take advantage of the global nature of the sport. Bryant has made trips to China the past eight years for Nike and he is one of the brand's main chips in its battle against Adidas in China. Bryant partnered with Turkish Airlines in 2010 and has been featured in commercials with global soccer star Lionel Messi. James’ Dunkin' Donuts deal is for Asia only, and he entered into a new partnership with Chinese Internet services firm Tencent last year. These deals are not available to football and baseball players.
Soccer players are the only team sport athletes that can compete with NBA players. The top 10 endorsers earned $120 million last year led by David Beckham, Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who all made more than $20 million from their partners off the pitch. It also starts with the shoe deal for soccer’s biggest stars. Nike and Adidas pay high seven figures for the players above in their global competition. Messi and Ronaldo are stars in every part of the world and are not limited by geography when cutting endorsement deals. They also have bigger followings than any U.S. athlete. Ronaldo, Messi and Beckham have a combined 161 million Facebook fans. The top U.S. athlete is Bryant at 18 million.
Player/total endorsement income/shoe sponsor
LeBron James: $42 million (Nike)
Kobe Bryant: $34 million (Nike)
Derrick Rose: $21 million (Adidas)
Kevin Durant: $14 million (Nike)
Dwyane Wade: $12 million (Li Ning)
Carmelo Anthony: $9 million (Jordan/Nike)
Amar’e Stoudemire: $6.5 million (Nike)
Dwight Howard: $6 million (Adidas)
Blake Griffin: $6 million (Jordan/Nike)
Chris Paul: $4 million (Jordan/Nike)
Source: Forbes
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You can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my Facebook profile. Read my Forbes’ stories here.TOKYO (AFP) - A Japanese taxi driver who got a sexual thrill out of watching women desperate to urinate has been arrested for allegedly feeding passengers snacks laced with diuretics, police said on Thursday.
Toshihiko Nishi, 41, lured women into long rides in his cab, in at least one case by offering a half-price fare, and then plied them with crackers covered in a substance that would make them want to go to the toilet.
Police who raided the man's home told AFP they found videos that Nishi said were from a security camera inside the cab and showed around 50 women wetting themselves on his back seat.
One alleged victim told police she had got into Nishi's taxi in Osaka, western Japan, in October last year, and been given a small paper cup containing water biscuits.
A short time after eating the snack, she began to need the toilet. But when she told the driver to let her out of the car so she could relieve herself, he refused and instead passed back an absorbent sheet on which he encouraged her to urinate.
"I got excited by watching women trying to withstand the urge to urinate," the driver told investigators, adding he had "bought diuretics through the Internet, and crushed them to mix with crackers."
Nishi has been arrested on suspicion of committing a violent act, a police officer said.Indian Public’s Attitude to Science?
The UK public values science and is interested in finding out about it, with two-thirds agreeing that knowing about science is important to them personally. The society is more at ease with science than a decade ago and sees science as leading to more benefits than harmful effects.
The UK government has recently released a study titled Public Attitudes to Science 2011. (See summary below). A foreword by the current Science Minister, David Willets, points to the fact this is the fourth in a series. The others were published in 2000, 2005 and 2008. I was glad to see that such initiatives have been taken at a governmental level. I’ll discuss some of the findings.
Many people feel their attitudes to science, both positive and negative, were formed at school. Most also see careers in science as desirable, although there is less enthusiasm for working in science among 16- to 24-year olds.
The most interesting point in the UK report was the fact that. It makes me wonder how important it is to have a good science teacher given the impact he/she can have on a person’s life. It must make schools worry about how uninterested the youth seem to be about science.
The data suggest that recent media controversies such as “climategate” have had little impact on how much people feel they trust scientists, with a clear majority saying they trust scientists “about the same as they did five years ago” Most support Government funding of science even for projects that bring no immediate benefits, even in the current context of reduced Government spending generally.
But it was pleasantly surprising to know that people still trust scientists especially after all the climate change skeptics have been rallying around the country to put to shame the scientists involved in the ‘climategate’. That trust is well demonstrated by the fact the public are ready to support blue skies research.
While searching for similar studies done in India, I found that the Indian National Science Academy had published a report back in 2005 which covers a wider a range of topics. The questions asked in both the two surveys have some common points but not many. I really like how well the executive summary of the UK report has been compiled compared to cluttered one in the Indian report.
The Indian Science Report looks at Science Education, Human Resources and Public Attitude towards Science and Technology. For this post I will focus on the findings related to the Public Attitude towards Science and Technology.
India’s attitude to science is hard to understand (probably because the surveyors did not ask the right questions?). I found the executive summary difficult to read. It was more facts thrown out at the reader where as it should have somewhat of a storyline.
Over three-fourths of the public feel S&T is are important for education. The perception is that the benefits of S&T are slightly higher (1.1 times) than its deleterious effects.
Less than 12% of the illiterates feel computers and factory automation create more jobs than they destroy while over half of the graduates and postgraduates feel this way. Just a fourth of all Indians are in favour of mechanisation.
Indians consider science to be an important part of our education but don’t think that it does much good. And, by the way, most Indians seem to be Luddites (!).
Television remains the primary source (57%) of information in the country, and is almost five times as popular as newspapers.
Weather news is the most popular S&T show watched on TV.
Most of the information Indians get about science is from watching TV and the weather report is the most popular science and technology show (!).
The most disappointing bit of the report for me was how little Indians read about science. Of course, it is not just the public to blame but the lack of science in the newspapers and the dearth of science magazines.
95% of graduates feel S&T makes life healthier, easier and more comfortable as compared to 56% of the illiterates. 80% of graduates think S&T will create better opportunities for the next generations as compared to 30% of illiterates.
The blame of the skewed results here also goes to show that the lack of education can make it very hard to understand and appreciate science. But the most annoying thing about the report was that comparisons mentioned were made between graduates and illiterates. What happened to those who are literates but not graduates?
A little over half of those in the lowest income quantile feel that new technology makes work more interesting way as compared to 80% in the top-most income quantile.
The difference in the few of the poor v/s the rich toward science is also expected. Do have a look at the full report for more ‘insights’.
Given that it is India’s first report, there is nothing to compare the current results with. Hopefully, there will be another report published in a few years that will give us more insights in to how the education policies affect India’s attitude to science.version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"? image/svg+xml Hostile Takeover Asset Recovery Executive Deathmatch Executive Search Sightseer Piracy Prevention Auto Buyout Due Diligence Most Wanted Point To Point Courier Service Market Manipulation Sentinal XS Blue $17,420 22:00-04:00 Free Mode Events V.I.P. Cooldown Los Santos Customs Timer 1 M.E.T (Mission Elapsed Time) Local Time Next Event Start Timer 2 Timer 3 VIP Companion APP 1.0 by Thrillhows /u/ErregungHaus/ Custom Timers Show Configuration VIP Work VIP Challenges Click any Timer to RESET Select map icon to see details. Select map icon to see details. 48:00:00 00:12:00 00:04:00 48:00:00 8:19:15 PM 12:00:00 FRI 22:30 00:04:00 00:04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 04:00 - - - -
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Instructions Rare Vehicle Spawning location are now indicated.
San Andreas Current Time - should be what is displayed on the protagonist's phone.
Los Santos Customs - A count down timer that counts from 48 minutes. Click [Sell A Car] each time you sell.
Local Time - Your local time.
MET - Mission Elapsed Time. Click [Start Mission] to start the stopwatch. ( Note: Never use this for evil. )
) Current Gang Attacks - Highlights which gang attacks are available for the Current San Andreas Time. This will update in real time.
After the last server downtime at R* the Day Of Week for the SACurrent time was off by a day. Added a Day Of Week Offset input to allow dynamic change.
Freemode Events Timer - Free Mode Events happen 12 minutes after the end of the previous event. So when an event ends click "Event End" to start the countdown.
VIP - After either disbanding or 4 hours freemode time VIP mode has a 12 hour cooldown. Hit Start Cooldown to time this.
Custom Timers - See the boxes below to change these times. If a count up (stopwatch) is needed set the value to 0 and ignore the "-" sign.
Visit GITHub for Current Version of source code.
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Type,Name,Start Time,End Time,X,Y,Notes GANG,01 - Pier Gang Attack,20,4,-1650,-1045,Gang Attack at Del Perro Pier GANG,02 - Canal Gang Attack,12,20,-1071,-1045,Gang Attack at Canals GANG,03 - South Beach Gang Attack,20,4,-1100,-1616,Gang Attack at South Beach GANG,04 -.,12,20,-459,-1696,Gang Attack at GANG,05 -.,4,12,-130,-1612,Gang Attack at GANG,06 -.,0,0,935,-1586,Gang Attack at GANG,07 - Airport Gang Attack,20,4,-718,-2551,Gang Attack at Airport GANG,08 -Gang Attack,12,20,-11,-2677,Gang Attack at GANG,09 -Gang Attack,4,12,174,-3200,Gang Attack at GANG,10 -Gang Attack,20,4,477,-3164,Gang Attack at GANG,11 -Gang Attack,4,12,990,-3272,Gang Attack at GANG,12 -Gang Attack,12,20,1249,-2982,Gang Attack at GANG,13 -Gang Attack,12,20,827,-2361,Gang Attack at GANG,14 -Gang Attack,20,4,1500,-2138,Gang Attack at GANG,15 -Gang Attack,0,0,1678,-1635,Gang Attack at GANG,16 -Gang Attack,4,12,1038,1985,Gang Attack at GANG,17 -Gang Attack,12,20,740,-1642,Gang Attack at GANG,18 -Gang Attack,20,4,-23,-1203,Gang Attack at GANG,19 -Gang Attack,12,20,-146,-1045,Gang Attack at GANG,20 -Gang Attack,4,12,-481,-1026,Gang Attack at GANG,21 -Gang Attack,20,4,441,-620,Gang Attack at GANG,22 -Gang Attack,0,0,616,-455,Gang Attack at GANG,23 -Gang Attack Underground,20,4,122,-582,Underground Gang Attack GANG,24 -Gang Attack,4,12,57,-393,Gang Attack at GANG,25 -Gang Attack,12,20,-1915,400,Gang Attack at GANG,26 -Gang Attack,12,20,-915,386,Gang Attack at GANG,27 -Gang Attack,4,12,-86,1887,Gang Attack at GANG,28 -Gang Attack,0,0,552,2614,Gang Attack at GANG,29 -Gang Attack,12,20,796,2149,Gang Attack at GANG,30 -Gang Attack,4,12,1234,1854,Gang Attack at GANG,31 -Gang Attack,20,4,2723,1457,Gang Attack at GANG,32 -Gang Attack,12,20,2330,2546,Gang Attack at GANG,33 -Gang Attack,20,4,2632,2800,Gang Attack at GANG,34 -Gang Attack,4,12,2378,3059,Gang Attack at GANG,35 -Gang Attack,20,4,2023,3145,Gang Attack at GANG,36 -Gang Attack,12,20,2176,3372,Gang Attack at GANG,37 -Gang Attack,12,20,1649,3284,Gang Attack at GANG,38 -Gang Attack,20,4,1530,3548,Gang Attack at GANG,39 -Gang Attack,12,20,1527,3773,Gang Attack at GANG,40 -Gang Attack,12,20,50,3670,Gang Attack at GANG,41 -Gang Attack,0,0,745,4143,Gang Attack at GANG,42 -Gang Attack,20,4,1340,4330,Gang Attack at GANG,43 -Gang Attack,0,0,1898,4574,Gang Attack at GANG,44 -Gang Attack,12,20,2070,4778,Gang Attack at GANG,45 -Gang Attack,20,4,3721,4454,Gang Attack at GANG,46 -Gang Attack,0,0,2193,5536,Gang Attack at GANG,47 -Gang Attack,20,4,1460,6262,Gang Attack at GANG,48 -Gang Attack,20,4,-119,4581,Gang Attack at GANG,49 -Gang Attack,0,0,-1108,4852,Gang Attack at GANG,50 -Gang Attack,4,12,-1566,3065,Gang Attack at GANG,51 -Gang Attack,4,12,1139,-2288,Gang Attack at GANG,52 -Gang Attack,12,20,2712,-776,Gang Attack at GANG,53 -Gang Attack,0,0,-3058,3256,Gang Attack at GANG,54 -Gang Attack,20,4,322,-2081,Gang Attack at GANG,55 -Gang Attack,0,0,2794,-1454,Gang Attack at GANG,56 -Gang Attack,12,20,3302,5137,Gang Attack at GANG,57 -Gang Attack,4,12,-3078,322,Gang Attack at GANG,58 -Gang Attack,12,20,762,-271,Gang Attack at GANG,59 -Gang Attack,20,4,1410,-712,Gang Attack at MISSION,Pot Shot,4,12,2575,5200,Non-Contact mission Pot Shot. MISSION,CCO2,15,23,1550,3100,Non-Contact mission Crystal Clear Out 2. MISSION,CCO3,7,15,2050,3400,Non-Contact mission Crystal Clear Out 3. MISSION,Close Action,7,15,2410,3750,Non-Contact mission Close Action MISSION,Coasting,20,06,2400,-710,Non-Contact mission Coasting MISSION,Coveted,00,08,2800,2050,Non-Contact mission Coveted MISSION,Dirt Road,14,22,-2350,4200,Non-Contact mission Dirt Road MISSION,Factory Closure,07,17,850,-890,Non-Contact mission Coveted RARECAR,Sentinel XS,22,4.5,-601.412,261.859,Blue variant sells for $17420 Yellow for $15960 RARECAR,Gang Peyote,12,22,-150,-1650,"Comes in Purple, Green or Yellow $12950" RARECAR,Dubsta2,09,21,-1250,-2200,Dubsta2 $23250 RARECAR,SandkingXL,09,17,1250,2720,$18495 blue variant $17,525 yellow variant NORARECAR,SandkingXL,09,17,-300,6050,$18495 blue variant $17,525 yellow variant NORARECAR,BF Surfer,23,04,-2300,4900,Chrome and Yellow $4525 RARECAR,Mariachi Tornado,19,20,-1000,4900,Mariachi Tornado Easter Egg NORARECAR,Burrito,10,12,2300,2950,Worn White Burrito NORARECAR,Dunebuggy,00,23,2400,4500,Dunebuggy VIPWORK,Altruist,-1,-1,,,Hostile takeover at the Altruist Camp. VIPWORK,LSIA,-1,-1,,,Hostile takeover at LSIA **currently there is a slight bug if you set the custom timers > 25 minutes. Day Of Week OffsetCustom Timer 1:minutesCustom Timer 2:minutesCustom Timer 3:minutes**currently there is a slight bug if you set the custom timers > 25 minutes.On the morning of August 5, 2012, Sikh community members in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, gathered at their local gurdwara for regular Sunday services. As worshippers arrived, a gunman — later discovered to have white supremacist ties — opened fire in the Sikh temple.
Paramjit Kaur, Suveg Singh Khattra, Satwant Singh Kaleka, Prakash Singh, Ranjit Singh, and Sita Singh were murdered that day. Three other people were seriously injured, one of whom, Baba Punjab Singh, remains in long-term care at an inpatient rehabilitation center due to the seriousness of his injuries.
The horror of the shooting shook Sikh communities around the country and faith-based communities and advocacy organizations planned vigils in solidarity, proclaiming “We are all Sikhs.” The refrain recognized that when one faith community is targeted for violence or harassment, it is an attack on religious freedom for all.
Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the Oak Creek tragedy. As we join Sikh communities and allies in remembering the victims, we also recognize that much work remains to ensure that Sikh communities, and all faith communities, enjoy full religious liberty, free from fear of violence and harm.
Unfortunately, the Oak Creek shooting was not the first or last attack on Sikhs or others targeted because of their faith. In May, for example, two men were sentenced for stabbing and beating Maan Singh Khalsa in California. They ripped off his turban and cut his hair while yelling profanities. In March, Deep Rai was shot in the arm near Seattle after his attacker told him to “go back to [his] own country.”
These incidents are not anomalies.
South Asian, Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim communities have long experienced harassment, discrimination, and attacks based on what they wear, what they look like, or where they come from. Most recently, these attacks have escalated, with incidents targeting Muslims seeming to surpass the number of incidents in the aftermath of 9/11. The new administration contributes to this climate of xenophobia, introducing policies that paint these communities as threats to society and emboldening such attacks by creating an environment in which they are neither condemned nor acknowledged.
The rise in attacks in this current toxic environment paints a bleak picture of violence and harassment that jeopardizes the safety of our local communities. But the resilience of Sikh communities, especially in Oak Creek, is inspirational to say the least.
Every year, the community organizes a memorial 6K along with other events to honor the |
groups get together on their own to mimic the high-collar, ultra-serious, photos of 19th century cadets,” she explained of the tradition.
Fulton knows some of the women personally.
“When I spent time with these cadets and heard them tell their stories and laugh and joke with each other, there’s no doubt in my mind how much they love West Point, they love the Army and they support each other.”
But would Fulton, a former Army captain and long-time diversity advocate for the military, have tweeted the raised-fist photo?
“I would not have re-tweeted the raised-fist photo because I am well aware that our culture views a black fist very differently from a white fist,” she said. “I knew it was their expression of pride and unity, but I am old enough to know that it would be interpreted negatively by many white observers. Unfortunately, in their youth and exuberance, it appears they didn’t stop to think that it might have any political context, or any meaning other than their own feeling of triumph.”
Will the women face repercussions?
The women may have run run afoul of West Point's Honor Code, or Department of Defense Directive 1344.10, Political Activities by Members of the Armed Forces, said Greg Greiner, a military law expert and partner at the Tully Rinckey law firm.
Even if the intent was not to make a political statement — for example, if "group think" set in or the cadets were just "messing around" — they could still be in trouble, Greiner explained.
"My experience with military justice and the way discipline is handled, is that intent doesn’t always matter 100%," he said. "Sometimes the actions themselves are enough to bring discredit."
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, cadets could face charges of conduct unbecoming an officer, Greiner said. It depends on how much leadership felt "good order and discipline" had been violated, if at all.
"Leaders have a duty to say to themselves, do we want to create a problem for these young female officers that they're going to have for the rest of their careers?" he said.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2773aEEWhen Miami SWAT Officer George Diaz fired eight shots into a moving car outside Club Space in 2011, his case should have been clear-cut for internal affairs investigators: Miami cops aren't allowed to shoot into moving cars because they could cause an accident or hit innocent people inside the vehicle.
But according to documents New Times obtained this week, Diaz wasn't reprimanded for his actions until this past August — more than six years after he lit up a silver Mercedes-Benz E350 with his department-issued MP5 submachine gun. The department has now suspended the cop for 16 days, though he's appealing the ruling.
So why did it take so long to suspend him for breaking departmental policies? Police Chief Rodolfo Llanes said the gap is due to the actions of local prosecutors; he says his internal affairs department was hamstrung until State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle decided whether to charge Diaz with a crime.
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"We received declination of prosecution from the State Attorney on 9/12/2016," Llanes tells New Times in a text message. He says MPD moved relatively quickly after that. By March, internal affairs finished its investigation and presented its case before MPD's Firearms Review Board, which judges whether cops fired their guns legally.
"Discipline was issued after that based on board findings," Llanes says. (A spokesperson for Rundle's office didn't immediately respond to a message about the case.)
This case is actually Diaz's second controversial shooting incident. Prosecutors declined to charge him with a crime when he and a team of fellow cops fired 27 bullets into a man holding a box cutter, killing him in November 2009. Diaz and another cop, Omar Ayala, refused to speak to state investigators in that case.
That killing came amid a wave of intense scrutiny for MPD after its cops fatally shot seven black men in just eight months, later causing the U.S. Department of Justice to open an investigation into the department in April 2011. Diaz's second shooting — when he fired into the moving car — occurred three months later, but he was not suspended for the incident until this year.
The latest case illustrates how the ongoing police-shooting backlog at Rundle's office gums up the Miami criminal justice system. This past June, New Times reported that Rundle's office regularly lets shooting-by-cop cases remain open for years — until witnesses vanish, leads go cold, and statutes of limitations for various crimes expire. As of June 15, the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office had 59 open police-shooting cases, and 24 of those incidents were older than two years.
Local defense attorneys, justice advocates, and even police chiefs have complained about the backlog, which has existed for the majority of this decade. As long as a case remains open, prosecutors typically prevent lawyers or IA investigators from speaking to witnesses or obtaining evidence from the case file.
Slightly more than a month after New Times published its story, Rundle's office closed a shooting case that had hung open since 2009 and announced it would become more transparent and publish investigation information online. But Diaz's case is another example of a police-shooting probe stretching on for years.
According to police disciplinary documents, the trouble began July 18, 2011, when Miami-Dade County Police located what they said was a stolen Mercedes sitting outside Club Space. MDPD asked City of Miami cops for help, and Diaz, along with two other MPD officers, arrived. At roughly 3 a.m., "three male subjects" approached the vehicle. One of the officers immediately arrested a suspect, but the other two jumped into the car and sped off.
Police documents claim the drivers pointed the Mercedes "in the direction of" the cops "at a high rate of speed." But bullet markings suggest Diaz didn't fire until the car had passed him. Police documents say his shots hit the "side and rear" of the "fleeing vehicle." An unarmed suspect in the passenger seat was shot in the leg.
According to news reports at the time, the car ended up crashing head-on into a wall.
"The front of a silver-gray Mercedes-Benz E350 was buried halfway inside a vacant building at Northwest Seventh Avenue and 20th Street — back tires off the ground as it went airborne, straight in," the Miami Herald wrote the following day. "The impact cracked the pavement along the curb and left a gaping hole in the building’s side."
It's unclear whether the car crashed because Diaz shot at the driver, but the outcome is exactly why MPD bars its cops from firing at moving vehicles.
At the time, MPD declined to tell reporters why Diaz had fired his gun or whether the "non-life-threatening injury" one of the suspects sustained was the result of a police shooting. The documents now make it clear that it was.
For reasons currently unknown, the case then hung open at Rundle's office for the next five years, until September 2016. Chief Llanes says his IA officers couldn't take the case until Rundle's office wrapped up its investigation.
On March 6 — after Rundle finally decided not to charge Diaz — the Firearms Review Board came down on the cop, ruling that his shooting violated clearly written departmental policy.
"Officer George Diaz had a reasonable amount of time to remove himself from the moving vehicle's path," disciplinary documents state. MPD issued Diaz a formal reprimand in May. Llanes then ordered him suspended without pay for 16 nonconsecutive days beginning August 6.
Llanes says he "believes" Diaz is in the process of appealing the ruling.NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oscar-winning film star Angelina Jolie revealed on Tuesday that she underwent a double mastectomy after learning she had inherited a high risk of breast cancer and said she hoped her story would inspire other women fighting the life-threatening disease.
Jolie, an actress who has long embodied Hollywood glamour and has in recent years drawn nearly as much attention for her globe-trotting work on behalf of refugees as for her role as a celebrity mom, disclosed her choice in an op-ed column in the New York Times.
The 37-year-old performer, raising a family with fellow film star and fiance Brad Pitt, wrote that she went through with the operation in part to reassure her six children that she would not die young from cancer, as her own mother did at age 56.
“We often speak of ‘Mommy’s mommy,’ and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me,” wrote Jolie.
“I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a ‘faulty’ gene.”
The actress, who won an Oscar as best supporting actress for her 1999 role in the film “Girl, Interrupted,” said she opted for the surgery after her doctors had estimated she had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, due to an inherited genetic mutation.
“Once I knew this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much as I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy,” she said. She said her breast cancer risk had dropped to under 5 percent as a result.
Celebrities, cancer survivors and doctors expressed admiration for her openness, saying she was an inspiration for other women.
“I commend Angelina Jolie for her courage and thoughtfulness in sharing her story today regarding her mastectomy. So brave!” tweeted singer Sheryl Crow, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006.
Singer Kylie Minogue, another cancer survivor, thanked Jolie for helping women, as did television host Giuliana Rancic, who also had surgery after being diagnosed with the disease.
“Angelina Jolie reveals double mastectomy. Proud of her for using her incredible platform to educate women,” Rancic said on Twitter.
PITT AT HER SIDE
Pitt was by Jolie’s side through three months of treatment that ended late in April, she said. The two became engaged last year.
“Having witnessed this decision firsthand, I find Angie’s choice, as well as so many others like her, absolutely heroic,” Pitt told London’s Evening Standard newspaper.
“All I want is for her to have a long and healthy life, with myself and our children. This is a happy day for our family.”
Jolie opted for reconstruction with implants. Breast tissue was removed during surgery and temporary fillers were inserted in their place. Nine weeks later the surgery was completed with the implants.
“On a personal note, I do not feel any less of a woman,” she wrote. “I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.”
The actress decided to be open about her surgery after finishing treatment to help women who might be living under the shadow of cancer.
“It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested,” she said.
Breast cancer kills about 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization. It is estimated that one in 300 to one in 500 women carry a BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 gene mutation, as Jolie does.
CNN anchor Zoraida Sambolin announced on Tuesday that she had breast cancer and was also getting a double mastectomy.
Sambolin, who anchors CNN’s “Early Start” morning show, discussed her condition on the show while talking about Jolie’s procedure.
“I struggled for weeks trying to figure out how to tell you that I had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was leaving to have surgery,” Sambolin, 47, said on Facebook. “Then... Angelina Jolie shares her story of a double mastectomy and gives me strength and an opening.”
Dr Chet Nastala, a breast surgeon at PRMA Plastic Surgery in San Antonio, Texas, said Jolie’s fame and openness about her treatment will have a big impact on women faced with the same decision.
“It is difficult to go public,” he said in an interview. “It shows a lot of courage.”
In past 10 years the PRMA practice has done about 5,000 reconstructive breast surgeries and about 20-30 percent have been for preventative mastectomies.
Dr. Kristi Funk, director of the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills where Jolie was treated, also applauded her choice.
“We hope that the awareness she is raising around the world will save countless lives,” said Funk at a brief news conference outside the clinic.
Richard Francis, head of research at the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity in Britain, said it demonstrated the importance of educating women with the gene fault.
“For women like Angelina it’s important that they are made fully aware of all the options that are available, including risk-reducing surgery and extra breast screening,” Francis told Reuters.
Actress Angelina Jolie (R) and her mother Marcheline Bertrand pose together at the premiere of Jolie's film "Original Sin" in Hollywood in this July 31, 2001 file photo. REUTERS/Fred Prouser/Files
Jolie also lends her star power to a range of humanitarian causes, including serving more than 10 years as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
In April, she urged governments to step up efforts to bring wartime sex offenders to justice.Guests: Joi Gilliam Joi Gilliam
The album: Betty Davis: They Say I'm Different (Just Sunshine, 1974)
This was one the pilot episodes we recorded in the spring and when we left the taping, we turned to one another and knew this show had potential.
The pairing of artist and album came from Morgan and it was inspired: the undersung Betty Davis, one of the most original and fascinating figures of the 1970s, being feted by future soul artist and Dungeon Family-affiliate Joi, an artist very much cut from Betty's cloth but a generation later. We had a fantastic conversation about the importance and uniqueness of Betty and what she's meant, especially, to waves of Black women artists who've followed in her path in the 40+ years since.
On a personal note, this also meant a lot to Oliver because he's written three sets of liner notes on Betty Davis albums (including They Say I'm Different) and interviewed her extensively as part of that. He forever holds a torch for her.
More on Betty Davis:
More on Joi:
Tracklisting:What a difference a couple of weeks make! You saw in my last Scream! update that much of this track at Six Flags Magic Mountain had been painted, but they were just starting on the support columns. Most of the coaster has now been painted and it definitely “screams” for your attention. These photos were taken on Sunday, March 1st.
The new colors are so bright and vibrant that you can see them from quite a distance. It doesn’t matter if it’s sunny or cloudy, you can easily see it from not only the parking lot, but also from the nearby freeway. It looks like a brand new coaster:
Most of the work on the lift hill and first drop is done:
The orange looks great against the ominous rain clouds behind:
As you can see, not everything has been finished yet:
This looks so much better than the old, fading paint that was on there before:
It’s hard to tell in this lower quality posted photo, but in the original you can clearly see the difference between the high gloss orange paint on the top half of this column versus the peachy colored primer coat on the lower half:
Here’s a shot of the new paint job as seen from the far side of the parking lot:
Nothing has been touched inside the station yet, including the track:
There are still lots of small areas that still need to be finished. The heavy rains that we’ve had lately have not helped matters. This is the very top of a support column underneath the top of the lift hill:
You may not have noticed in the above photos, but most of the screening material on the chain link fence has been replaced all the way around the coaster:
Here’s one final shot of the coaster from inside the screened fencing:
That’s it! If the rains stop, I suspect that this project will be completed in the next couple of weeks, not counting the station. We’ll have to wait and see what they do there.
If you like this site, please use the social media buttons below to help me spread the word with your friends. You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram.Lewis Hamilton is chasing his fourth Formula 1 title, after losing out to Nico Rosberg in 2016
Three-time champion Lewis Hamilton has decided to race in Formula 1 this year without a personal trainer.
It is usual for grand prix drivers to employ a trainer to ensure they are in peak physical fitness.
But the Briton said he chose to take over his own programme this year as "a kind of challenge" he has set himself.
"Can you have the motivation to do it yourself and get ready and tone up, not having a trainer and be ready? I have," the Mercedes driver said.
The 32-year-old added that he had upped his physical preparations to match the greater demands of this year's faster cars.
"Every year you try to improve, but I would say I have taken a good step," Hamilton said after the Australian Grand Prix at the weekend.
"My discipline has definitely gone up in terms of my training and how specific I am with my diet."
Hamilton finished second behind Sebastian Vettel in the 2017 opener in Melbourne
But he denied he had significantly changed his approach to F1 in terms of the amount of commitment he put in over the winter after losing out on the title to former team-mate Nico Rosberg last year.
"I don't think so," he said after finishing second to Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel in Melbourne on Sunday, adding that his hectic lifestyle of global travel was not a hindrance to his job.
"I work hard every year and I have been touring. I have not been home much. I have been enjoying myself.
"It appears people judge off things they see and in previous years I arrived at the first race just as fit. I always arrive fit and ready. None of those things I do are a distraction. I have done just as much this year; it is just I have a job to do. I have made sure the fitness levels are higher than before so for sure I have applied myself better."
And he said his desire to win the title was even bigger this season.
"I had fantastic fight the past few years and last year was the closest I've had," he said. "But of course I want to win the world championship more than ever before.
"The hunger… while last year [I felt] the hunger couldn't be any more, it has freakin' doubled. So I am fit and ready.
"I am going home, for example, after this. Usually I stay out in Asia [before the next race in China] but I am going home to get my head down, rest and make sure I come back fighting for the next race because I believe I can win."Lighthouses are centuries-old symbols of our relationship with coastal hazards. Now the roughly 700 lighthouses that span the entire U.S. coastline — some of our oldest coastal structures — serve as markers to track shoreline erosion and sea level rise.
Some islands, like Seahorse Key, are slowing running out of time.
Most current sea rise prediction models suggest that the Gulf will not creep threateningly close to the Seahorse Key lighthouse until around year 2100. But, by that time, much of the lower-elevated parts of the island it towers over will be under water.
Woven into the cultural fabric of the Cedar Key area, the lighthouse at Seahorse has persevered through everything from Civil War occupation to record-breaking hurricanes. But sea level rise isn’t sentimental. It does not spare our historic monuments.
The Seahorse Key lighthouse
The sea around the cluster of islands is rising at a rate of 1.87 millimeters per year. That doesn't seem like much, but Mark Clark, a UF wetland ecologist, said it adds up.
"It’s one of those really hard things to see," Clark said.
Clark stood near Cedar Key's Joe Raines Beach as he pointed to Seahorse Key in the distance. The beach, named for a local man who opened it to the public, is full of muddy gravel instead of the white sand you’d expect. Over the past two decades, the shoreline in front of Joe Raines Beach down to the nearby Tyree Canal has been eroding.
Cedar Key's Joe Raines Beach in fall of 2016.
Clark and colleagues are in the middle of a new project designed to halt the erosion and reverse it by restoring the beach in an engineered way. A living shoreline, as the project is called, adapts to natural processes and changes more readily than a seawall.
But the living shoreline is no long-term fix for sea rise.
“Any effort you’re doing right now is a temporary measure,” Clark said. “You’re buying time.”
Walking along the beach at Seahorse Key, fiddler and horseshoe crabs scurry where sand and water meet. Small nurse sharks curiously stalk the shore. Loggerhead sea turtles and sting rays are regularly spotted in the foggy water, as are manatees making their way south to Crystal River for the winter. Raccoons, rats and reptiles inhabit the island. And an invasive trees frog lives there, with its ingenious way of reproducing on a freshwaterless island: it skips the tadpole stage, developing completely inside eggs laid in rainwater collected on leaves.At best, Kamaal R Khan is a certified, rich and infamous troll. I wouldn't regard him worthy of having a civil, rational conversation and he has, time and again, proved he doesn't deserve it either. His tweets are proof enough.
KRK's immense confidence in himself stems from the realisation that others, celebrities or commoners, cannot stoop as low as he is capable of. The self-proclaimed cinema critic, who reiterates he is the "best" in the business, not only insulted cinema by making one but also tortured Indians with his terrible acting skills and scanty directorial vision.
Whatever I have said above may resonate with millions of Indians, including the 3.68 million followers KRK has on Twitter, but not with Malayalis, and I'll tell you why. We have a similar, in-house specimen in Kerala - Mr Santosh Pandit - and to be fair, he is worse. Not just that, being a Malayali, I know there are many Malayalis who could actually stoop lower than KRK on public platforms.
Kamaal R Khan is a certified, rich and infamous troll.
KRK has, in the past, waged verbal wars against many biggies from the industry he assumes he is a part of, and outside. Only a few have been spared from the filth that comes from KRK. He has attacked politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has not spared actors, directors and producers.
KRK made the biggest mistake of his life yesterday when he thought he could get away after mocking Kerala’s most-celebrated actor, the three-time National Award winner, Mohanlal. KRK overestimated his hippopotamus-like skin and underestimated the fan-base Mohanlal enjoys.
At a time when Malayalis are basking in the glory of the fact that Mohanlal made history — by being the first Malayalam actor who had a 100-crore-club movie, became the first Indian actor to deliver three blockbuster movies in two months, and is making national headlines for being the main lead in the first Rs 1,000-crore movie of India, all set to immortalise the mythological character of Bheema on silver screen, — KRK made the grave mistake of mocking the star with this tweet.
Sir @Mohanlal you look like Chota Bheem so then how will u play role of Bheem in Mahabharata? Why do you want to waste money of B R shetty? — KRK (@kamaalrkhan) April 18, 2017
KRK said Mohanlal looked like Chota Bheem and asked how he’d play Bheem in the Rs 1,000-crore movie funded by a UAE billionaire BR Shetty.
Mohanlal fans have gone to the extent of hacking websites of Pakistan’s People’s Party, Pakistan Electric Power Company, and National University of Modern Languages, Lahore campus (NUML) and put up their idol’s photos there after news spread that Mohanlal’s website — The Complete Actor — was hacked by Pakistanis.
A warning posted on the NUML website then, by a group that called itself “Mallu soldiers”, read: “Feel the power of Indian mad hunter, don’t dare to mess with us, otherwise Kashmir toh hoga lakin Pakistan nahi hoga”.
For such ardent fans, tackling a KRK is child’s play.
KRK’s social media timelines have been filled with abuses in Malayalam with Mohanlal fans, and as much I understand them, this is not going to end any time soon unless KRK apologises.
For the first time, KRK will regret letting his tongue loose. Since the time media houses have picked up the news of KRK being showered with abuses, Malayalis have gotten a new high and they have doubled their effort. As of now, KRK has come to the state of tagging Mohanlal on Twitter and telling him what his fans are doing is not fair.
Can't understand why Malayali ppl r abusing me since morning? M I wrong abut Mohanlal who is not equal 2Hathiyar of Bheem n wants 2play him? — KRK (@kamaalrkhan) April 19, 2017
Sir @Mohanlal I have seen you in few films of @RGVzoomin n this is why I know you, n believe me u were looking like a joker in those films. — KRK (@kamaalrkhan) April 19, 2017
KRK, though, is still trying to act as if he is not affected by all this. He's balancing his plea to Mohanlal to intervene and calm his fans, and, at the same time, repeatedly mocking the superstar by saying he looked like a joker in his Hindi outings with Ram Gopal Varma.
KRK doesn’t know that Malayalis are rather (in)famous for filling social media with abuses - the ones KRK would have never even imagined or known existed. KRK may have forgotten how Malayalis ridiculed themselves by drowning Maria Sharapova in abuses on her Facebook page after she asked who Sachin Tendulkar was. If they could do that to defend Sachin, they could kill for Mohanlal, who they call “ettan”, meaning “elder brother”.
I am, in no way, justifying the act of hurling abuses at any one, be it KRK, or actors or journalists, but I cannot not help but wonder how KRK will be pushed to a level where either he’ll have to make a public apology or shut his social media accounts.
Dear KRK, get this straight and get this clear: You can diss any one — PM Narendra Modi, Shah Rukh Khan, Aranb Goswami, Donald Trump, Rajinikanth — and you may be spared, but know that if you go even a mile near Mohanlal, you have gone too far.
Also read: Comparing Mammootty and Mohanlal, and why fans must not mind arrogance
Watch:We can not thank you enough for your support. It is so amazing to see so many people come together to help with Sandy Relief. This is a critical time to help as the media moves to cover other events there will be a danger that the ongoing emergency will fade. We saw this after Katrina. Please consider becoming a long term Food Not Bombs volunteer helping with our groups on Staten Island, Brooklyn, Long Island and Manhattan. Our volunteers are preparing huge amounts of food but the need is so great we could use more donations and help. There will be many hungry and cold people struggling for many more months so your help is urgently needed.
We will be moving our Brooklyn kitchen to the YWCA at 30 Third Avenue at Atlantic this Saturday and Sunday. Please meet at 9:00 AM. We need volunteers to do many tasks including cooking, driving and providing help with the clean up.
We still need spices, snacks, rice, pasta, spices peanut butter, bread, plasticware, plates, trays and baby items. We could use drivers to help collect and deliver food in every area.
If you do not live in the New York area it is best to organize benefit concerts or other fundraising events to raise money. The cost of seeking housing and driving food into the city from far away is not very efficient. It is also not easy to house people since there are already over 40,000 additional homeless people as a result of Sandy. Everyone is so touched by your willingness to leave home to help but as you can see that would not be wise at this time.
If you do not live near the area ravaged by Sandy you may want to contact your local Food Not Bombs group to find out how they are organizing in your community. Many times so much aid is diverted to major disasters like Sandy that it has a huge impact on local programs where hundreds of people are already struggling to survive. If you have trouble finding your local Food Not Bombs chapter you can email us at menu@foodnotbombs.net or call 1-800-884-1136. You are also welcome to start a Food Not Bombs chapter in your community. We have materials on line to help you start.
SEVEN STEPS TO STARTING A FOOD NOT BOMBS GROUP
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/seven.html
VOLUNTEER LOCATIONS FOR THE SANDY RELIEF EFFORT
BROOKLYN SANDY RELIEF STAGING AREAS
Monday through Friday
Park Slope Community Church 251 12th St, 11215-3919 Brooklyn, NY
Saturday and Sunday
YWCA – 30 Third Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11217 at the intersection of Atlantic and Third Avenue.
Bed-Stuy Food Not Bombs
We share food every Saturday at 3pm at Von King (Tompkins) Park at the corner of Marcy Avenue and Lafayette Avenue.
www.bedstuyfnb.org
bedstuyfnb-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
bsfnb@etaoin.com
Bushwick Food Not Bombs
We serve every Wednesday at 3:00 pm at Bushwick Park which is located at Knickerbocker & Starr St in Brooklyn. Email us for details on the cooking location and times.
inourhearts@gmail.com
MANHATTAN
Manhattan Food Not Bombs is one of our longest active groups starting in 1989 cooking out of ABC No Rio for years. We now cook Sundays at the Catholic Worker at 36 East 1st Street, between First and Second avenues at 1 p.m. and share food in Tompkins Square Park from 4-6 p.m. on Sunday afternoons.
www.abcnorio.org/affiliated/fnb
Please email CunderscoreG@gmail.com
STATEN ISLAND
The Staten Island Food Not Bombs chapter is seeking local volunteers to help in the years after the Sandy Relief Effort so this is a great time to get involved.
The distribution location is located at:
Tompkinsville Park – Bay Street, near Victory Blvd.
Please call 646-474-4713 for exact location.
http://m.facebook.com/FoodNotBombsStatenIslandChapter?id=432329736825592&_rdr
ROCKAWAY
Daltons Seaside Grill
108-02 Rockaway Beach Boulevard
Rockaway Park, NY 11694
516-512-1916
LONG ISLAND
Long Island Food Not Bombs really needs you support.
veganarchafeminist@gmail.com or phone 516-668-2116
For more information visit http://www.lifnb.com/
Long Island Food Not Bombs is not only helping with the relief effort but the hope to continue organizing their annual World’s largest vegan Thanksgiving so your help is really needed. Here is the current schedule. Please visit their website for updates.
Long Island FNB meal schedule
Hempstead Food Share
When: Every Sunday @ 2:00pm
Where: Hempstead Train Station
W. Columbia St. & Station Plaza.
Hempstead NY 11550
Coram Food Share
When: Every Monday @ 5:30pm
Where: Coram Plaza
Mill Rd.
Coram NY 11727
Huntington Food Share
When: Every Tuesday @ 7pm
Where: E. 6th St. & Fairground Ave.
Huntington NY 11743
Farmingville Food Share
When: Every Thursday @ 7pm
Where: Horseblock Rd & Woodycrest Dr
Farmingville NY 11738
Wyandanch Food Share
When: Every Saturday @ Noon
Where: MLK Medical Center
Straight Path just south of LIRR station
Wyandanch, NY 11798
Bedstuy Food Share
When: Every Saturday @ 3pm
Where: Von King Park
Lafayette & Marcy Ave
Brooklyn NY 11216
veganarchafeminist@gmail.com
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Sandy Emergency Relief
1-800-884-1136
menu@foodnotbombs.net
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/relief.html
You can also make a financial donation to:
Food Not Bombs
P.O. Box 424
Arroyo Seco, NM 87514
USA
www.foodnotbombs.net
575-770-3377
EIN 45-4549583
http://www.foodnotbombs.net/dollar_for_peace.html
please forwardWilliam Butler Yeats died 75 years ago today at 2.30pm in a small upstairs room at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune Cap Martin. The room had a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, his final vista. Yeats’s wife, George, and his last mistress, Edith Shackleton Heald, were at his bedside. They took turns holding vigil over his body that night.
In 1937, Yeats’s Irish friends had collected money to make his old age more comfortable. At the dinner where it was presented, Yeats said it would enable him and George to winter in the south of France, where the climate would be more kind to his angina-stricken heart. “My glory was I had such friends,” he wrote in The Municipal Gallery Revisited, the poem he penned for the occasion.
Yeats and his wife spent his last two winters at the Idéal Séjour. “It was a simple place,” says Oxford professor Roy Foster, author of the two-volume WB Yeats: A Life. “They were watching their pennies.”
George handled the train tickets and logistics, after which Heald showed up to keep the ageing poet company. Lady Dorothy Wellesley, to whom Yeats also had a romantic attachment, invited them to dine at her nearby villa, La Bastide.
The winter of 1938-1939 was exceptionally cold, even on the French Riviera, and the freezing temperatures aggravated Yeats’s heart condition. “He disappeared in the dead of winter... / What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day,” WH Auden wrote in tribute.
Today, the Idéal Séjour has been rechristened the Résidence le Louisiane, and refurbished with ugly verandas and a swimming pool. For €700-€900, one can rent a two-bedroom apartment there for a week. A simple plaque, placed by the Princess Grace Irish Library in 1995, reads: “William Butler Yeats, Nobel Prize winner, lived and died here, 1938-1939.”
On the night of January 28th-29th, George Yeats gave Heald the manuscript of Are You Content? and The Spirit Medium, poems written on either side of a sheet of paper in the last days of Yeats’s life. George also gave Yeats’s fountain pen and small Oxford dictionary to Heald.
To Wellesley, George gave the manuscript of Yeats’s last play, The Death of Cuchulain, which Yeats completed just before New Year’s Day. A week before his death, Wellesley wrote that she “had never seen [Yeats] in better health, wits, charm or vitality”. But he took a turn for the worse, and on January 27th George asked Wellesley to “come back and light the flame”.
Surrounded by women
Like his alter ego Cuchulain in the play he had just written, Yeats was dying surrounded by women. “These interesting women rallied around him, trying to keep him alive, trying to keep him inspired,” recounts Joseph Hassett, author of WB Yeats and the Muses.
Hassett’s book recounts Yeats’s romances with nine women, “and there were others,” he says. “What were these relationships? They were passionate. They had an erotic element. What more does the reader need to know? In them he found creative stimulus.”
“If I die, bury me up there [in the churchyard at Roquebrune],” Yeats told George. “And then in a year’s time, when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.”
Yeats was buried in Roquebrune. But it’s not clear whether George mistakenly committed his body to a pauper’s grave, a five- or a 10-year plot, as she maintained.
Yeats had predicted the second World War years earlier, in The Second Coming. It started the following September, trapping his remains in Roquebrune. According to a 1988 book by Diana Souhami, the section of the cemetery where he was buried was cleared out in 1946, and the bodies dumped in a mass grave. Another version says Italian soldiers disinterred bodies to bury their comrades.
Mistaken identity
Yeats wore a leather truss for a hernia. Alfred Hollis, an Englishman who died in Roquebrune two weeks after Yeats, suffered from tuberculosis of the spine and wore a surgical steel corset. A body wearing some kind of device was exhumed in 1948, on the orders of the French foreign minister. Whether the gravediggers and French officials involved distinguished between a truss and a corset is uncertain, and some believe that Hollis, not Yeats, was sent for burial in Sligo.
A French military guard of honour accompanied the body to Villefranche harbour, where it was loaded on to the Irish naval corvette Macha. George, the Yeats children Michael and Anne |
Gap, a Chipotle, a Nine West, a Ross, a CVS, a Restoration Hardware, a Banana Republic, and loads of other stores you can find in just about every other part of the country. Parts of it are like a strip mall now, albeit one outfitted in Virginia red brick and quaint colonial architecture.
Several years ago, a waterfront Old Town watering hole called the George Washington Tavern had to close its doors for good. The little pub was a replica of the one where George Washington would stop for a pint when visiting from his Mt. Vernon estate, about 25 miles down the road. The building is now home to a Starbucks.
People who decry the Wal-Mart-ification and Gap-ificaiton of America need to realize that regulation often does more harm to local businesses than predatory pricing, loss-leader business models, or some other imagined corporate evil.
I've lived in or near Old Town for most of the last 10 years. It's not at all common to see an independently-owned antique shop or art gallery get boarded over, only to be replaced in ensuing months by a franchise. It's not difficult to see why. Franchise operators can tap the resources of the parent company, particularly when it comes to accessing legal help with experience navigating through and working with local zoning laws and business regulations.
Local officials who simultaneously decry big box stores and national chains while doling out burdensome regulatory structures and complicated permit processes should understand that regulatory burdens hit the smaller, independent places hardest, because they're the places that have the smallest amount of discretionary cash to hire legal aid (or, if you're really cynical, to make the appropriate campaign contributions). They're on a tighter budget and, therefore, have a smaller margin of error when it comes to hassles like delaying an opening because some bureaucrat determined their signage is a couple of inches out of compliance.
There's a larger lesson in all of this, too. Those who push for federal regulations to rein in "big business" often don't realize that the biggest of big businesses don't mind heavy federal regulation at all. They have the resources to comply with them, not to mention the clout in Washington to get the regulations written in a way that most hurts upstarts and competitors.
Big businesses know that a heavy regulatory burden is the best way to make sure small- and medium-sized businesses never rise up to challenge them.
Radley Balko is a senior editor for reason.Lara Croft as she appears in 'Rise of the Tomb Raider'
To really understand Lara Croft, you have to get under her skin. Which, considering she's a computer-generated character controllable in a hugely popular video game series, means speaking to the very real humans who bring her to life.
Californian studio Crystal Dynamics' second title in its reimaging of the Tomb Raider franchise, Rise of the Tomb Raider, is out now, exclusive to Xbox consoles. The game sees Lara travel from Syria to Siberia in search of the Divine Source, a mystical object said to grant people eternal life. Naturally, the game's story isn't a straightforward tale of leaving airport A to arrive at destination B, picking up the treasure in question and then jetting back to London for last orders. There's plenty of treachery afoot, wickedly devious challenges to overcome, and a sinister organization by the name of Trinity for Lara to face off against. And that's all before she encounters some of the Divine Source's more, shall we say, veteran guardians.
The Lara Croft of Rise of the Tomb Raider is played by English actress Camilla Luddington, known to many for her television roles in Grey's Anatomy, Californication, and True Blood. It's her second time playing Lara, after 2013's Tomb Raider, and she not only contributes her voice to the game but also performed motion capture for the character. The story she finds herself a part of is primarily penned by acclaimed games writer Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of the late Discworld series author Terry Pratchett, whose past credits include the previous Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge, and BioShock Infinite. We spoke to both of them about what it's like to be the lifeblood that flows through the digital veins of today's Lara Croft.
Camilla Luddington
VICE: What were your first thoughts when you landed the role of Lara, for the 2013 game? Obviously you must have been excited, but those are some intimidating boots you're slipping into.
Camilla Luddington: Of course I was excited, and then I felt really intimidated, because she's such an iconic character. All of the Laras that came before me were so loved by fans, so I wasn't sure if my Lara would be embraced. But the reboot, and the direction the character was being taken in, seemed exciting to me. I thought this Lara seemed a lot more fleshed out and grounded. But that weight of taking on someone so iconic was definitely there.
Did you study what previous voice actors in the role had achieved, or was your approach to pretty much start Lara from scratch?
I did look up what people had done before me, not in a way that would influence me, but because I felt I needed to respect my predecessors and look at what journey they'd taken the character on. This was a role that I knew I could take some artistic license with. It wasn't like stepping into someone else's shoes because it's a reboot. Crystal Dynamics really helped to inform me about the direction the character was going in, so I did acknowledge previous Laras, but that didn't affect how I approached the role, how I created my own character.
Rhianna, writing for a character like Lara Croft poses some fairly unique challenges: the need to progress the character, to find new facets to her, while also remaining "true" to some extent to her legacy. When you first approached the project for the 2013 reboot, how many "versions" of this Lara did you go through before landing at what we saw then, and now in Rise...?
Rhianna Pratchett: By the time I joined the team, the look of reboot Lara had already been established. In fact it was one of the things that attracted me to the project in the first place. Crystal Dynamics and I both had ideas of where we wanted to go with Lara and how we wanted to depict her. Luckily they gelled really well. There was definitely a shared desire to reveal the more human side of Lara, and show her at a time when she didn't have the guns, gadgets, and witty one-liners to deal with anything that life throws at her. We wanted to delve deeper than the Teflon-style Lara of previous incarnations, as fun as she was. We wanted to keep some of the traits that had made her a great character in the first place such as her resourcefulness, bravery, and tenacity, but also rewind them to a point where they would be truly tested, and really start bubbling to the surface.
And did you have any hesitation in getting involved with a character like Lara, and a franchise like Tomb Raider, given its high profile?
I had absolutely no hesitation. I'd already worked on two female protagonists—Nariko from Heavenly Sword and Faith from Mirror's Edge—so I felt well prepared for the challenge. Ultimately, I had to stop thinking of her as an icon and just think of her as a character.
Camilla, what were your own experiences of Lara, prior to 2013? Did you play the original Tomb Raider, from 1996?
Luddington: I did. My older brother had the original games, when I was younger, and he played them, and I was allowed on them once in a while, which felt like never, basically. But I watched him play a lot. I'm fairly terrible at video games—so my introduction was the first game, on the PlayStation. Then I saw the movies, with Angelina Jolie, so I got to know her better through those. But I know her first and foremost as a video game character—that was my introduction to Lara. It's funny, because I can clearly remember what that first game was like, and seeing the difference in the game of then compared to the one we've made now, it's just absolutely mind blowing. It's so strange.
What sort of feedback have you had, personally, from fans of the Tomb Raider series?
The feedback that I love the most is what I get when I actually meet the fans at places like Comic-Con. People really seem to have embraced and fallen in love with new Lara. They can relate to her more than they could any previous version. I meet a lot of young girls who tell me that the mantras that Lara has, on pushing forward and on keeping going, throughout dire situations, have really spoken to them, and they've taken that on board and it's helped them in their own lives. So that's really touching feedback.
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Rhianna, this Lara is pretty savvy with guns, and seems to enjoy getting stuck into combat.
Pratchett: Lara's more confident and proactive now. She's really throwing herself in at the deep end. Rise... is about more than just survival. Although Lara doesn't openly admit it to herself, she's definitely getting a taste for adventure.
Camilla, you do the motion capture as well as the voice acting. Just what kind of shape does that require you to be in? Because both Rise of the Tomb Raider and its predecessor are pretty physical games.
Luddington: Physically, I have to say that I really wasn't aware, ahead of doing it, just how much work would go into the first game. We would be filming around nine hours of motion capture work every day, and I remember coming away from the first day, on the first game, just aching all over. It was obvious that I needed to be a bit more prepared. For some reason in my head I thought she'd just be killing the bad guys and that'd be it; I didn't realize just how much I'd also get beaten up! And whenever it gets tough on Lara, that means it has to be tough on me. So I did circuit training, and lots of running, and I did this thing in Los Angeles called SoulCycle, and they really helped keep me in shape, just in terms of pure stamina and endurance. Emotionally, I think you're going on a journey with the character, so you have to be present for each and every scene, and for me one thing I like to do is step away between takes, away from everyone else, listen to some music and just get into that place, to help me perform.
What sort of music were you listening to while shooting Rise of the Tomb Raider, then?
I listened to a lot of Muse, actually. I think, for me, the music can't be a love song, or a nice ballad—and everything on a Muse album sounds kind of apocalyptic, almost. So that tone of music, that helped me get into character.
Were there any funny things you had to do in the studio, during the mo-cap work?
The only thing that makes me laugh, sometimes, is when I describe myself as feeling like a fridge, with a bunch of fridge magnets stuck all over me, because all of the weapons have Velcro on them. People will come up to me while we're filming and just cover me in weapons. That was really funny. But the mo-cap suit is just like you see people use on TV, or in pictures; you have a camera attached to your head. It's definitely different to traditional acting, and the hardest thing, initially, is to get used to this camera being so close to your face. It's in your eye-line, and it takes a while to get used to that. But everything else, you quickly come to learn them.
Rhianna Pratchett
Rhianna, as your career in games writing has progressed, have you felt an industry shift towards the medium actively attempting to tell stories on a par with those found in the written word, films, and television? As console generations pass, it seems that designers are slowly but surely embracing this sweet spot between action and adventure and compelling narratives, that can sometimes go beyond Hollywood cliche or predictable character stereotypes.
Pratchett: Yes, stories are improving, especially in the rise of episodic games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Life Is Strange. I still think there's a lot we can do in utilizing the unique interactive power of this medium to tell stories that only games can. We've come a long way over the last decade, but I think we're still only scratching the surface of what's possible. There are going to be some exciting times ahead.
Speaking of stereotypes, how important was it, at the very start of writing for Rise..., that this Lara again avoided any of gaming's somewhat-standard "roles" for its female leads. Sure, there are moments in the new game, brief though they are, when Lara seems helpless, but for the most part she's the driving force in her own fate.
I don't think there have been enough female protagonist in games for there to be a stereotypical female lead role yet. What was important for us was shaping the journey around Lara's character and her growth. The whole team treat her with respect and consideration. She's not an afterthought, or just a pretty avatar—she's central to the whole experience.
In general, what are the challenges of writing for a medium where your own script is, at points, a passenger with the player's own actions in the driving seat? A medium where the player could miss aspects of the story entirely? Is it fun, kind of, to hide facets of the fiction within collectibles?
What works for a fun, active gaming experience doesn't always flow well for narrative, which often needs to move at a different pace to the breakneck speed of action-orientated gameplay. The idea is to get gameplay and narrative synced up, rather than add odds with one another. There are similar challenges for big blockbuster movies.
As a writer on a big games like the Tomb Raider titles, you tend to write different levels of story for different types of players to discover. So there's the core golden path story, which every player will experience, then there's the off-the-beaten-path story that usually covers things like environmental storytelling and secondary narrative such as journals and letters, and then there's the story that the completionist players will experience from searching ever corner of the world. That will usually help flesh out a lot of detail about the characters, the background and add loads of extra color and detail.
Camilla, now that Rise of the Tomb Raider is out, what does the future hold for you and Lara Croft?
Luddington: I'm hoping that this game is a puzzle piece in a much bigger journey for Lara, so I want to complete that journey with her. I don't know if we'll ever manage that, but I'd like to have this sense of peace with the character, and feel proud of what she's accomplished. I don't know if she'll ever get that, because she has a personality that's constantly making her push herself, so she might not ever reach a place of peace. But I'd like to continue the journey. But who knows? I'm still very much attached to the character. I've played her for so long now—the first game took three years to make, and this one took two, so it's the character I've played for the longest time, and I feel there's a part of me in her, and her in me.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is out now for Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Camilla Luddington interview conducted by Joe Goodman. Rhianna Pratchett interview by Mike Diver. Photographs supplied by the game's UK PR company.
Follow VICE Gaming on Twitter.Will Greg Hardy suit up for the Dallas Cowboys in 2016?
That's a question the Cowboys have until March to answer, but the front office reportedly is already leaning one way. According to Bleacher Report's Jason Cole, the Cowboys are not expected to re-sign the soon-to-be free agent who apparently partied too much during the season.
Via Cole:
"In talking to sources close to Dallas defensive end Greg Hardy, the expectation from their side is that the Cowboys are not going to bring Hardy back after a tumultuous first season with the team and a tumultuous season after his return to the league after a one-year suspension. The problem for the Cowboys is that Hardy partied a lot during the season and was not in great physical shape as the season wore on and on and on. That was part of the reason he was tardy to several meetings during the season and part of the reason why the team felt so distracted by his presence."
Hardy came to Dallas in 2015 on a one-year, incentive-based deal. The Cowboys were aware of Hardy's off-field issues and wanted to make sure his contract reflected a certain level of trust. The pass rusher did in fact miss multiple team meetings which apparently did not sit well with teammates.
COO Stephen Jones was asked about Hardy on Tuesday:
Stephen Jones on bringing back Greg Hardy: "We're not gonna address that yet. Still a work in progress. We'll continue to have discussions." — Jon Machota (@jonmachota) January 27, 2016
Related: Does Greg Hardy have a future with the Dallas Cowboys?
Free agency does not begin until March, but if the latest report from Cole pans out, Hardy will not be welcomed back by the Cowboys next season. Hardy finished 2015 with 35 combined tackles and six sacks.Aizhai is the world’s highest tunnel to tunnel bridge and the fourth suspension bridge in China to cross a valley so wide it seems to be connecting two mountain ranges. The first three were the Siduhe, Balinghe and Beipanjiang 2009 bridges. Of the world’s 400 or so highest bridges, none has a main span as long as Aizhai with a tower to tower distance of 3,858 feet (1,176 mtrs). Located deep in the heart of China’s Hunan Province near the city of Jishou, the suspension bridge is the largest structure on the Jishou to Chadong expressway with a deck 1,102 feet (336 mtrs) above the DeHang Canyon.
The two tunnels on either side of the Aizhai bridge allowed the engineers to use the mountain top for the location of one of the towers, reducing its height to just 165 feet (50 mtrs) – unusually short for a bridge with a span nearly as long as the Golden Gate bridge at 3,858 feet (1176 mtrs). In addition to cost savings, the stubby support also allows the bridge to blend more naturally into its surroundings. The taller bridge tower is no less unique with side span cables that soar down the backside of a mountain, making first time visitors quizzical as to what exactly lies ahead. With most of the structure hidden from view, the bridge will come as a jaw-dropping surprise whether you enter the canyon from either tunnel. Due to a gap of approximately 328 feet (100 mtrs) between the last truss suspenders and the tops of the bridge towers, the engineers added some additional ground anchored suspenders to stabilize the two massive suspension cables and reduce any oscillations that could damage other components of the bridge. An overlook and visitors center will offer additional views of the broad valley.The death of transgender teen Leelah Alcorn has sparked outrage and sadness as her friends talk about some of the difficulties the teen faced.
Alcorn, born Josh Alcorn, was killed Sunday after being hit by a semi-truck. The death of the 17-year-old is being investigated as a possible suicide by the Ohio Highway Patrol.
The police are aware of the note and considering that in their investigation.
In a Tumblr post, reported to be Alcorn’s page by both ABC News affiliate WCPO-TV in Cincinnati and Cincinnati City Council member Chris Seelbach, the teenager wrote a long suicide note detailing her difficulties growing up transgender.
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“After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was,” Alcorn wrote in her note. “I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong.”
Chris Davis, a childhood friend, told WCPO-TV that Alcorn was not as supported at home as she was among friends.
“One day he finally posted on Facebook, ‘Hey, I’m coming out. This is me. This is who I am,'" Davis told WCPO-TV. "Everybody was like, 'Yeah man, this is great.' He came to school and everyone gave him massive support.”
In Alcorn’s suicide note, she said her parents were not supportive after she said she was gay and took her out of school.
“I hate the fact he lived in a home that didn’t support him,” Davis told WCPO-TV.
Davis said that Alcorn never directly talked about being transgender with him. Another friend said the note gave what he thought was a clear view at her feelings.
“I think he said what he needed to say in his note, how he really felt,” Jimmy Bustetter told WCPO-TV.
Alcorn wrote that she hoped her death would “mean something” to the transgender rights movement.
“The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights,” reportedly wrote Alcorn. “My death needs to mean something.”
Alcorn's family could not be reached by phone. Alcorn's mother Carla Alcorn, told WCPO-TV she did not want to talk about the story but confirmed that Alcorn was her child.
Alcorn's death and her detailed suicide note lead to quick reaction from people and supporters in the transgender community. After Alcorn’s note went viral, a Twitter hashtag #RealLiveTransAdult started with transgender people describing their lives in the hope to inspire others like Alcorn.
An online petition asking that Alcorn’s chosen name “Leelah” be used on her headstone instead of her birth name “Joshua.”
The petition has gained nearly 26,000 supporters in just 24 hours.
In Alcorn’s hometown, friends and supporters of Alcorn are holding a candlelight vigil at a nearby high school Jan. 3 at 5:30.
Seelbach helped Alcorn’s note go viral by posting it on his Facebook page. He said he hopes to help with transgender issues in the coming year.
“Her suicide letter is so clear—she wanted this to mean something,” said Seelbach of Alcorn’s death. “That’s what we’re responsible in doing.”Looking for news you can trust?
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Paul Krugman notes today that Mike Huckabee is opposed to comparative effectiveness reviews. This is old news, of course. CER wasn’t the basis for the whole death panel flap back in 2009 (end-of-life planning was), but it became the poster child for it pretty quickly anyway. After all, CER is just a multi-syllabic way of saying that we should compare various disease treatments to see which ones are most effective. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that a government should do if it’s watching out for taxpayer money, but of course it means that some treatments will end up being found ineffective and thus not worth paying for. According to Huckabee, this plants “the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.”
To follow up on my post from Wednesday, this is what makes it hard to figure out which conservatives are worth reading and engaging with. The intelligent right doesn’t buy the “poisonous tree” argument, of course, and has a considerably more nuanced view of what a conservative healthcare system would look like. That nuanced view includes the obvious point that we should try to figure out what works and what doesn’t. That view, however, is not shared at all by the mainstream right, which long since abandoned reason to take Huckabee’s side that CER is a liberal plot to kill old people and babies. Thus the liberal problem: it’s not really worth arguing with the mainstream right about this, since their view isn’t amenable to reason, and it’s not really worth arguing with the moderate right about this since their views have no support in the real world. So what’s the answer?Following their walk-off loss to the Toronto Blue Jays late Tuesday night, the Orioles were left to digest a bitter end to their season, but one thing in particular left a sour taste as they prepared to head home to Baltimore.
A raucous sellout crowd of 49,934 filled Rogers Centre, and several Orioles players have said the fans in Toronto are relentless in their heckling of visiting players.
But that reached another level in the seventh inning Tuesday, when a fan in the left-field stands threw a beer can toward left fielder Hyun Soo Kim as he was in the process of catching Melvin Upton Jr.’s fly ball.
The can landed extremely close to Kim, jarring him as he made the catch anyway.
“I was trying to catch the ball and I thought that was actually a ball, so I thought I missed the ball,” Kim said through interpreter Danny Lee. “And then I found out it was a beer can, which was thrown [right at] me. It never happened to me before so it was surprising. I was kind of shocked.”
Center fielder Adam Jones was enraged by the act, yelling and pointing into the left-field stands. Orioles manager Buck Showalter ran into the outfield to talk to umpires to make sure the fan who threw the can was identified and ejected. It’s not clear whether any fan was ejected for the incident.
“Someone threw a beer down at my player,” Jones said. “First and foremost, that was about as pathetic as it gets between the lines. You don’t do that, I don’t care how passionate you are, how you think you’re passionate. You don’t do that. Yell, cuss, scream, we suck, we’re sacks of [crap]. We know, we’re horrible. We get it. We’re the opponent. We completely understand that, but to throw something at a player, that’s just as pathetic as it gets, and I hope they find the guy, and I hope they press charges.
“[Kim’s] not looking. You could hit him in the back of the head; you never know what could happen. That’s a full beer that’s been thrown. … I hope they find the person, and I hope they [prosecute] him.”
The incident revealed how far some fans at Rogers Centre have taken their allegiance, even directing racial and ethnic slurs at players, according to club sources.
“You hear everything,” Jones said. “We can hear everything, man, cussing you, flipping you off. That’s fine, but to go out of character, but to put us in harm’s way, we’re here to play baseball, nothing more, nothing less. Puts us in harm’s way, it’s not part of the game, it’s not part of any sport.”
Asked if he was the target of any slurs, Kim said, “I’m not too sure, probably. But something like today should never happen again. It was the first time for me and hopefully it’s the last time.”
It’s not the first time there’s been an incident involving fans at the Rogers Centre throwing items onto the field, and not the first time against the Orioles.
During a regular-season game in 2013, a beer can was thrown behind Nate McLouth after he made a diving catch in foul ground.
And during the Blue Jays' American League Division Series Game 5 win over the Texas Rangers last season, fans threw water bottles, cans, rally towels and paper containers onto the field after a call was reversed.
“[It’s] disappointing,” Showalter said. “People have a different way of handling their emotions. I don’t like it. Nobody likes it. I’m sure the Toronto Blue Jays don’t like it. It’s tough when you have that many people in the ballpark and one person does something that reflects poorly on all of them. It can happen in any ballpark. I don’t like anything that puts our guys in harm’s way, just like [Toronto manager John Gibbons] wouldn’t at our place.”
“That’s not just part of the sport, man,” Jones said. “Call us what you want. I’ve been hearing that for the past year, but to put us in harm’s way when all we’re doing is focusing on the game, that’s not part of the game.... Throw an octopus. Throw hats.”
eencina@baltsun.com
twitter.com/EddieInTheYardLou Noble, dear friend of Flickr and one of the inaugural judges in our Flickr 20under20 celebration, took the time recently to share his Flickr Faves with us. As a connoisseur of the luscious, we weren’t surprised when he sent us the following seven images from seven of his favorite photographers. They are rich and candid. They capture exquisite moments of tenderness, vulnerability, human connection, sexuality.
You can catch up with Lou at the excellent online magazine, The Photographic Journal, or read excerpts every Thursday from his interviews on the Flickr Blog.
Thanks for sharing your current Faves with us, Lou!
This photo strikes at my very core. It’s gorgeous, lighting and color and composition all in perfect harmony. But even more than that, Aftel utterly captures her subject (Edie, part of Chloe’s Genderqueer series). It is almost unnervingly intimate, and I am moved every time I look at it.
Everything about this photo delights me. But as much as I’m drawn to breaking it down into individual components — the light, the color, the subjects — it’s the image as a whole that draws me in, the perfect synthesis of the composite elements involved. When I think of fashion photography, this is what I hope for, this excellent display of clothing that doesn’t ignore the person wearing it, that suggests a story as well as highlighting couture.
There’s an elegance here, the shot is very evocative of classic Hollywood; from Hattie’s profile and hairstyle, to the use of lighting and smoke, it’s both simple and cinematic. And the imperfections of the print only add to that vintage feel, but not in a blandly nostalgic way, but rather to bring home the tangibility of the image, the feeling that you can reach out and actually touch it, feel the scratches, dab your finger and pull away a bit of the emulsion. Makes the image appear more Real, more than a series of ones and zeroes.
A shot perfectly created to evoke a moment captured. A romantic shot, two lovers so caught up with each other they’re forced to stop in the middle of the street, the story is all laid out by the details of the image, and every aspect of the image serves the story, from the angle of the car in the road, to the two subjects half in/half out of the seat. A quiet passion to the photo, lovingly embraced by the day’s fog.
A photo so exquisite it takes my breath away, each time I look at it. The perfect sunset, the lush colors that bring out the forest, the mysterious woman in the image’s center. A grand landscape that practically begs to be looked at more closely, to better appreciate the detail in the trees, the reflection in the water, the subtle rays of the sun playing across the scene. Tremendous.
A simple, beautiful portrait, whose name, unsurprisingly, is Adonis. Exquisite lighting, with just enough detail in the background to suggest the portrait is taken out in the street, that this moment is not one crafted, but captured. And that this moment of stillness, of strength that exists alongside beauty, isn’t one that had to be made, but one that exists freely in the world.
Despite being a fan of Traci’s since my earliest days on Flickr, her work continues to astound me. The way she plays with composition, the lack of artifice in her photographs, her continued experimentation with double exposures. This shot, in particular, exudes a warmth, subverts the expectations of composition in a shot of this kind, and like so much of her work, speaks of a communion with her subject, two people being in tune, creating something.Search Gallery Chat Icons The FAN - Five Nights at Freddys 1 - GIF chat Icon GEEKsomniac 287 BALLORA - FNAF Sister Location - GIF - Pixel art GEEKsomniac 304 BABY - FNAF Sister Location - Icon GIF - Pixel art GEEKsomniac 561 Advertisement Advertisement Adventure Nightmare Freddy - FNAF World - GIF Icon GEEKsomniac 199 FNAF Sister Location Character - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 394 The CAT - Five Nights at Candy's - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 209 Markiplier Animatronic - Five Nights at Candys GIF GEEKsomniac 251 Adventure Nightmare Chica - FNAF World - GIF Icon GEEKsomniac 246 Lolbit - FNAF World - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 606 Adventure Endo-02 - FNAF World - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 169 Shadow Candy - Five Nights at Candy's - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 271 Adventure Crying Child - FNAF World - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 459 Adventure Nightmare Cupcake - FNAF World -GIF Icon GEEKsomniac 260 RAT - Five Nights at Candy's - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 320 Flowey Omega - UNDERTALE - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 435 Flowey Omega (avatar size) - UNDERTALE - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 345 Chester the Chimp - Five Nights at Candy's - Icon GEEKsomniac 153 Adventure Nightmare - FNAF World - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 319 Adventure Nightmare Fredbear - FNAF World - Icon GEEKsomniac 298 DEADPOOL - Happy Valentines Day! - Icon GIF GEEKsomniac 237 Adventure Golden Freddy - FNAF World - GIF Icon GEEKsomniac 284 Adventure Shadow Freddy - FNAF World - GIF Icon GEEKsomniac 288 Blank Animatronic - Five Nights at Candy's - Icon GEEKsomniac 304 Adventure Puppet - FNAF World - GIF Icon GEEKsomniac 306The Patterns Method of Plant Identification
An Easier Way to Identify Plants
by Thomas J. Elpel, author of Botany in a Day
The study of botany is the study of patterns in plants. Related plants have similar characteristics, and botanists have placed them in groups according to these patterns of similarity. In essence, botanists have created a filing system where all plants with one pattern are placed in one file folder, all the plants with another pattern are placed in another folder, and so forth. The better you can recognize these patterns, the better you will be able to identify plants.
Unfortunately, very few people know about these patterns when they start identifying plants. Most people pick up a book of color photos and flip through hundreds of pages of pictures hoping to find a match. When they finally find a possible match, then they may not know the specific parts well enough to determine if they have the correct answer or something totally unrelated that looks superficially similar.
On the other hand, many people take college courses and learn to use a flora with a key. This method can require hundreds of hours of training to memorize all the botanical terms. The tedium of the process can stifle the enthusiasm of even the most enthusiastic nature-lovers. Ironically, to become proficient with a botanical key ultimately requires at least some knowledge of plant families, and therefore plant patterns. Yet, these patterns are often presented almost as an after-thought, if at all.
Want to learn to identify 45,000 plants today?
Read the online tutorial:
Learning to Identify Plants by Families
A Holistic Approach
Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification presents a more holistic approach to learning about plants that starts with an overview of the botanical filing system. Learn how and why the filing system is organized the way it is, and learn to recognize the patterns among related plants. Botany in a Day shows how related plants have similar characteristics for identification and often similar uses. It takes you from the top down through the plant kingdom to plant families, but it does not include a key below the family level.
When you know these basic patterns, then you will recognize something about a new plant, even before you know its individual name. In many cases, you will only need to identify the family pattern to know the edible and medicinal properties of your plant specimen.
See also
Shanleya's Quest: A Botany Adventure for Kids ages 9 to 99 Start by learning the patterns for the eight of the world's most common plant families: the Mint, Parsley, Mustard, Pea, Lily, Grass, Rose, and Aster families. These are the same plant families I usually cover when leading a plant walk for budding botanists. The names of the plants are irrelevant at this stage in the process. More important is being able to recognize family patterns. When we come to a new plant, I don't tell my students what the plant is. I ask them. With minimal instruction, students can correctly identify the family for a great number of the plants we encounter. And the more I teach, the less I instruct, since most of us don't remember a whole lot of talk anyway.
Instead, I incorporated the same eight core families into a metaphorical story for my children's book, Shanleya's Quest: A Botany Adventure for Kids ages 9 to 99, which I often use in adult classes. In addition, I created the Patterns in Plants Card Game, which also covers these same families. In its briefest form, I can introduce all eight family patterns to adults and kids in about five minutes, as shown in the video at the top of this page. Then we start playing card games such as Memory, Slap Flower, Crazy Flowers, Wildflower Rummy, and Shanleya's Harvest, a game based on the story in the book. Interestingly, kids who miss the introduction can watch the game and quickly grasp the family patterns and game rules without any instruction whatsoever. Our species naturaly excels at pattern recognition!
Most of these eight core family patterns are included in the free online tutorial, or go ahead and order Shanleya's Quest book and card game. The book and card game are especially recommended if your prefer a more intuitive, body-level approach to learning.
Keying out Unknown Plants
Family patterns are amazing tools for plant identification-right up until you encounter a plant that doesn't match any of the patterns you already know. If you are comfortable with the core family patterns discussed above, then you may proceed to the next step and identify new |
alternate antibiotic marker for merodiploid selection (Box 4).
Box 3: Preparation of electrocompetent E. coli • TIMING ∼ 1 d
Box 4: Transferring mutant alleles between gateway vectors • TIMING 4 d
PCR identification and sequencing of insertions in allelic exchange vectors (Steps 20–35).
Colony PCR is used to quickly and directly screen E. coli colonies to identify those clones bearing allelic exchange vectors in which the mutant allele has been inserted. If any approach other than Gateway cloning has been used, then this process may be guided by standard practices for blue-white selection19,20. By contrast, blue-white selection is not applicable to Gateway cloning, and instead this approach uses ccdB counter-selection to select for clones with inserts. CcdB is a gyrase-subunit A–modifying enzyme that poisons DNA gyrase in E. coli cells and blocks bacterial growth87. Gateway donor and destination vectors encode ccdB on the interior of their att sites, and therefore these plasmids cannot be propagated in E. coli DH5α (these plasmids are maintained in strains, such as DB3.1 or ccdB Survival 2 cells from Invitrogen, that have mutations in gyrA that confer resistance to CcdB). However, a successful recombination event causes the ccdB gene to be lost from Gateway vectors, providing positive selection for recombinants in the DH5α strain. Thus, >75% of the Gateway clones typically have the insert at this stage without the need for further selection. All pEX18- and pEX19-based vectors contain M13F and M13R primer-binding sites, and thus all clones may be screened by PCR for inserts, and even sequenced, using the M13 universal primers (Supplementary Table 1). PCR occasionally introduces unwanted mutations into the synthesized alleles, and therefore two independent clones that test positive for the insert by PCR are streaked for isolation. Next, plasmid DNA is purified from each clone and confirmed via Sanger sequencing. Gateway vectors are difficult templates for Sanger sequencing, and therefore it is crucial to inform your service provider about the nature of the template so that the sequencing protocol can be modified accordingly.
Introduction of the mutant allele into a P. aeruginosa recipient and merodiploid selection (Step 36).
Although allelic exchange vectors can be transformed into P. aeruginosa cells by electroporation37, we have found that the average number of merodiploids recovered from biparental mating is at least 10–100-fold greater: electroporation produces on the order of 101–102 merodiploids37, whereas biparental mating produces on the order of 102–104 merodiploids (see ANTICIPATED RESULTS). Therefore, this protocol uses conjugation to transfer suicide plasmids from an E. coli donor to the P. aeruginosa recipient, and we direct the reader to a description of electroporation elsewhere37. A useful tool for biparental mating is a reusable syringe filter apparatus (see Equipment Setup), which presumably brings donor and recipient cells into close physical proximity to one another (Fig. 4). In our hands, this'mating' filter is a quick, reliable and alternative means of recovering merodiploids that is comparable in efficiency to carefully executed 'puddle' mating (see ANTICIPATED RESULTS). We provide options for biparental 'filter' and 'puddle' mating techniques, and either may be used at the preference of the reader.
Figure 4: How to build and use a mating filter apparatus. Full size image
Here we advocate the use of nutritional counter-selection as opposed to antibiotics to prevent the growth of the E. coli donor strain during the isolation of P. aeruginosa merodiploids after mating. Vogel-Bonner minimal medium (VBMM) agar, which contains 10 mM citrate as a carbon source, can be used to select against E. coli88. Because E. coli does not express a citrate transporter during aerobic culture89, it cannot use citrate as a carbon source, and therefore E. coli will not grow on VBMM in an aerated incubator. The recovery of P. aeruginosa merodiploids on VBMM agar may require up to 48 h of incubation at 37 °C. By contrast, this recovery process may take <24 h at 37 °C on nutrient-rich lysogeny broth (LB) agar containing Irgasan (also called triclosan) and/or chloramphenicol. However, we have observed that the use of VBMM results in the recovery of ≥10-fold more merodiploids than LB agar with either Irgasan- or chloramphenicol-based counter-selection (Supplementary Fig. 1). This discrepancy in recovery rate is not understood. However, because this phenomenon occasionally leads to protocol failure (Supplementary Fig. 1), we recommend the use of VBMM agar for the isolation of merodiploids. Alternatively, we also recommend the use of auxotrophic E. coli donor strains, such as ST18 (ref. 90) or RHO3 (ref. 66), which require the addition of 5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) or diaminopimelic acid (DAPA) to the LB agar medium, respectively, in order to grow. In the case of this latter substitution, biparental mating with ST18 or RHO3 is carried out on LB agar containing ALA or DAPA, respectively. Subsequently, merodiploids can be selected directly on LB agar containing only antibiotic selection for the P. aeruginosa recipient.
Counterselection, PCR identification and sequencing of mutations in P. aeruginosa cells (Steps 37–49).
The final stage of allelic exchange is to select against merodiploids and to identify the desired mutants. This is accomplished by streaking isolated merodiploids on no-salt LB agar that contains 15% (wt/vol) sucrose. In the case of large deletions or insertions, single colonies isolated on sucrose agar are screened for the desired mutation by PCR using 'Seq-F' and 'Seq-R' primers (Fig. 3). These individual colonies are spotted onto selective media. PCR products, which correspond to the size of the mutant allele and that were generated from sucrose resistant and antibiotic sensitive colonies, are subsequently sent for Sanger sequencing to confirm the mutation. In the case of small deletions and insertion mutations, as well as SNPs, PCR products from 8–16 of the sucrose-resistant and antibiotic-sensitive colonies are sent for Sanger sequencing. Subsequently, the desired mutant is identified by sequence analysis.
Procedural controls
In general, positive and negative controls for routine PCR, cloning reactions or transformations—such as those that contain control templates, no DNA or no enzyme—are noninformative for most steps, and moreover they may be redundant because all constructs and strains are sequence verified as part of this protocol. In addition, positive controls involving the use of control plasmids to verify Gateway Clonase reactions (as recommended by the manufacturer) may add considerable expense to the protocol while yielding no additional value. Thus, readers must exercise judgment with procedural controls, and we recommend applying these specifically when repeating failed steps (see TROUBLESHOOTING). However, users may find it highly beneficial to test selective media either when fresh batches are made or by including appropriate antibiotic-resistant and antibiotic-sensitive strains at key selection steps (for example, Step 39; Supplementary Tutorial). We also recommend including a control with no template (i.e., boiled colony) when using PCR to identify newly generated strains with an unmarked mutation (Steps 38–45).
Comparison with Flp-dependent protocols for marked mutant generation
We compared the present protocol with an established method for generating marked mutations that requires subsequent excision of a gentamicin (Gm) resistance marker (aacC1) by Flp-FRT recombination27. To begin, we used the present protocol to engineer precise, unmarked deletions at 25 gene loci encoding components of the P. aeruginosa type IV pilus (see ANTICIPATED RESULTS). Next, we used the allelic exchange vector pDONRPEX18Ap (Table 1, encodes β-lactamase) to engineer marked ΔpilC::aacC1, ΔpilR::aacC1 and ΔpilN::aacC1 mutant strains (Fig. 5). For the sake of comparison, deletion alleles marked with aacC1 were created with homology regions identical to those used to generate ΔpilC, ΔpilR and ΔpilN alleles. Not surprisingly, merodiploids were recovered at a frequency equivalent to that of unmarked mutants (Fig. 6a). Similar to this protocol (Fig. 6b), counter-selection on no-salt LB (NSLB) + 15% (wt/vol) sucrose + 60 μg/ml Gm yielded double-crossover mutants at a frequency of <10−5. However, 100% of the carbenicillin (Cb)-sensitive, Gm-resistant colonies contained the desired aacC1-marked mutation (compared with 46% for the present protocol; see ANTICIPATED RESULTS). Although this is a beneficial aspect of generating marked mutations, subsequent excision of the aacC1 gene by established methods27 required an additional 6 d of work and resulted in a scarred mutation. By contrast, the 'Flp-free' technique presented in this protocol is at an advantage because this last step is not required. This saved nearly 1 week of work and resulted in mutations that were seamless.
Figure 5: Systematic disruption of type IV pilus gene loci in P. aeruginosa PAO1. (a) Organization of T4P genes in the P. aeruginosa PAO1 chromosome. (b) Effect of gene deletion on twitching motility. A total of 25 precise, unscarred, unmarked mutations were constructed using the present protocol. By contrast, three marked mutations were generated using the established method of Choi and Schweizer27. This latter method requires an additional Flp-FRT recombination step to excise the aminoglycoside acetyltransferase (aacC1) antibiotic resistance cassette, leaving a scarred mutation. In both panels, blue represents a gene deletion that was loss-of-function, vermillion represents a gene deletion that had no effect on the diameter of the twitching motility zone and white represents a gene that was not subject to mutation. This genetic analysis produced motility phenotypes that were consistent with previous reports95, which includes no change in motility zone diameter for ΔfimT, ΔpilY2, ΔpilH and ΔchpB strains95,96. Because pilY2, pilH and chpB occur within operons, this analysis illustrates the precision of the allelic exchange technique. Moreover, the two methods of mutation construction gave similar results. Full size imageWhat are Medical-Alert Service Dogs and their special rights?
Medical-Alert Service Dogs support their handler’s condition or disability. D4D dogs are scent-trained to identify changes in blood sugar to support our clients in managing their Type 1 Diabetes (T1D).
These dogs and their handlers have public access rights under three major laws: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), The Fair Housing Act, and The Air Carrier Access Act.
What’s the difference between a D4D Medical-Alert Service Dog and a Diabetes Buddy Dog?
First off, the similarity– all of our dogs are scent-trained to detect changes in your blood sugar, both high and low. And they have met our standard of 80% accuracy.
So the difference? Our Medical-Alert Service Dogs have full public access under ADA, while our Diabetes Buddy Dogs do not have public access and work mainly in your homes and wherever pets are allowed.
Can our experts at D4D retrain your dog?
Unfortunately, no. It breaks our hearts to hear from people who have paid for a fraudulent service dog, who has not been formally and properly trained to assist you with your diabetes management. But we must stick to our own high standards for our dogs, who are carefully selected and placed with a client after comprehensive training.
D4D would like nothing more than to see an end to fraudulent service dogs. To help those looking for a Medical-Alert Service Dog, we’ve compiled a list of questions (based on our standards and ethics) that you can ask a prospective trainer or organization.
Can our experts train your pet dog?
No, we do not train your pets under any circumstances. Our training of dogs begins at their birth, and we have trusted partners and scientific processes in place to ensure that our trained dogs perform accurately and reliably in their life-saving partnerships.
How does D4D receive dogs for their training?
We have the best partners! Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB) has been with us from the beginning. They gave us our first dog, Armstrong, and we receive dogs from GDB who are making a career-change from helping the blind to alerting diabetics.
Why the career change, you might ask? A little quirk might disqualify a dog from guide work. Armstrong, for example, liked to play by rearranging the shoes of his blind handler. So Armstrong was reassigned and happily worked with our founder his entire life.
In 2017, we also started a pilot partnership with ARF, Tony La Russa’s Animal Rescue Foundation. We’ve received dogs from ARF who are being trained to become life-saving partners for our clients! As you can see, D4D has a “green philosophy” for our dogs. We do not breed dogs but train the ones who are suited for service work and love it!
I have T1D and don’t have or want a service dog, but I’m interested in D4D programs– am I welcome?
Absolutely! We’re here to serve the diabetic community as a whole. We have programs that are open to all and will help you manage your disease in community.
What are some things my dog can’t do for me?
While our dogs can alert on low and high blood sugar and help with your insulin therapy, you’re responsible for the changes in diet, lifestyle, and activity that will most impact your health. Our most successful teams are made up of clients who are proactively managing their disease and also caring for the emotional and physical well-being of their life-saving dogs.
How can I help?
Thank you for asking! D4D runs on the generosity and goodwill of our donors and volunteers! They make it possible for us to provide our dogs and services at no cost. There are many ways you can support us.The Merseysiders have interviewed Jim Fraser, the academy No.2 at Stamford Bridge, for the vacant post of academy director at Anfield following the sacking of Frank McParland
By Wayne Veysey | Chief Correspondent Liverpool have held talks with Chelsea youth chief Jim Fraser about taking charge of the club’s academy,can reveal.Anfield manager Brendan Rodgers, who knows Fraser from his own time in the Stamford Bridge youth set-up, recommended his former colleague for the vacant post on Merseyside.
Frank McParland was surprisingly sacked as Liverpool’s academy director in November, with the club stating they wanted to move in a new direction.
Goal understands that Fraser has been interviewed by Liverpool chiefs about succeeding McParland but he has not yet been offered the job.
Fraser has risen through the ranks at Stamford Bridge since joining from Swindon Town in 2004, and is currently academy director Neil Bath’s No.2 in the Chelsea academy.
Fraser oversees the age-group coaches from Under-9s to Under-16s level and is head of recruitment for Under-15s to Under-19s.
There is currently a void at Liverpool’s academy base in Kirby following the double-sacking of McParland and former academy technical director Rodolfo Borrell in November.
The pair had been credited with helping to kick-start the conveyor belt of talent from Kirby to the first-team squad at Melwood in recent years.
Raheem Sterling, Jon Flanagan and Martin Kelly established themselves in the senior set-up during McParland’s reign, while Jordan Ibe, Jack Robinson, Suso, Andre Wisdom, Adam Morgan, Conor Coady and Jerome Sinclair also made the leap from the Academy to the Liverpool first team.
McParland was appointed the new director of football at League One side Brentford two weeks after leaving Anfield.SOME call it Europe’s Galapagos. Lake Ohrid is home to more than 350 species found nowhere else. It is also Europe’s oldest lake, having survived for more than a million years.
But the lake’s 75-hectare marsh – a critical ecosystem – is set to be concreted over to make space for apartments and a marina in the lakeside town of Ohrid in Macedonia.
“These development plans will irreversibly destroy this crucial ecosystem,” says Christian Albrecht of the University of Giessen in Germany. “I am seriously concerned about the future of its endemic species.”
The majority of the lake’s fish and snails are found only in this lake, as are many of its sponges and worms.
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In a letter sent to the Macedonian president in October, Daniel Jablonski of the University of Bratislava in Slovakia called the plan “totally unacceptable”. So far, the city authorities haven’t responded.
(Image: Danita Delimont/Alamy Stock Photo)
This article appeared in print under the headline “Concrete threatens unique lake”MP's tweet on racial tensions 'disgraceful and callous'
Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Police keep lid on simmering tensions in Woodridge (The Midday Report)
Federal Opposition Indigenous health spokesman Andrew Laming has been accused of posting inflammatory remarks on social media about racial tensions south of Brisbane.
Dozens of police are monitoring a street in Woodridge in Logan after weekend clashes between Indigenous and Pacific islander groups.
The situation deteriorated last night and the riot squad was called in to control the crowd.
Mr Laming tweeted: "Mobs tearing up Logan tonight. Did any of them do a day's work today, or was it business as usual and welfare on tap?"
He repeated the comment on Twitter four hours after the original post.
Federal Trade Minister Craig Emerson condemned Mr Laming's remark, describing it as "disgraceful and inflammatory".
"Why would you seek political gain out of what is a very tense situation?" he told Sky News.
"People of goodwill through Logan city are trying to calm the situation and you have Mr Laming - a parliamentary secretary for Indigenous health - seeking to inflame it."
Finance Minister Penny Wong was also critical of Mr Laming's language.
"I think when you have these sorts of problems, social and community problems - and I want to say obviously violence is always unacceptable - it is incumbent upon Members of Parliament to behave responsibility and to act in ways that don't inflame the situation," she told ABC News 24.
Twelve hours after posting the original comment, Mr Laming this morning sought to "clarify" his statement.
"To clarify: Working together to resolve these riots the priority. Training and a chance for jobs are key," he wrote.
Mr Laming has not responded to the ABC's request for an interview.
His comments have sparked anger from local resident Paul Butterworth, who has described the views as insulting.
"He may as well come over here. We'll all lay down on the ground. He may as well kick us in the guts and tell us we're a lost cause," Mr Butterworth said.
Liberal frontbencher Greg Hunt says his advice is for everyone to be cautious until the full facts of what happened are clear, adding there needed to be adequate police and community resources put into dealing with the situation.
Asked whether he thought Mr Laming should apologise or be reprimanded, Mr Hunt said: "Look, I will phrase it this way: we all need to be extremely cautious as to how we approach these issues."
Acting Opposition Leader Warren Truss says the Coalition wants to see the issues in Logan resolved, adding that it was appropriate for Mr Laming to "clarify" his comment.
"Well, he has got to take responsibility for his own actions. He's done that by correcting the tweet," Mr Truss told reporters in northern New South Wales.
When asked how Mr Laming had corrected it, Mr Truss said: "Well, he's issued a clarifying tweet".
Mr Truss says the emphasis needs to be on creating employment opportunities in the region so people can work together, pointing to the Coalition's commitment to create one million new jobs nationally.
Former ALP election candidate in Victoria Francis Ventura has launched an online petition calling for Mr Laming to apologise for the comment.
Mr Laming responded on Twitter, describing it as a "petty-ition".
The biography on his personal website says he is "Australia's most innovative user of social media in politics".
Tensions simmering
Police met with community leaders today as they try to calm residents after violent clashes on Saturday and Sunday in which a house and cars were damaged.
Local leaders say tensions have been simmering since the death of Richard Saunders, the uncle of NRL star Jonathan Thurston.
He died after being bashed with a hammer in a brawl at Ewing Park at Woodridge in 2008.
Premier Campbell Newman says the State Government will consider relocating some residents to defuse racial tensions.
Logan Mayor Pam Parker, meanwhile, says she is going to organise a summit to tackle the underlying issues.
"I've been in contact with different [government] ministers today and I want to coordinate that down in Logan," Cr Parker said.
"We can have the Minister for Police, the Department of Housing, Communities, Multiculturalism and Employment coming together to look at existing issues and long term issues that may need to be addressed."
Mr Butterworth says the heavy police presence has helped.
"It causes a bit of calm for the people here - at least the people up in the house can rest a bit easier," he said.
Queensland Police Commissioner Ian Stewart says the situation in Woodridge is not just a police problem.
"Other people need to take responsibility and by that I mean the elders of both communities," Mr Stewart said.
"I know the church gets very involved down there because they have very large followings of cultural groups.
"I ask them to take as much action as necessary to get a peaceful resolution to the current tensions."
Superintendent Noel Powers from Logan Police says officers will encourage both sides to talk today.
"Try and get some rational talking and decision making going on and then see if we can bring them together and mediate out a successful conclusion," Supt Power said.
"Today's aim is just to put a lid on it and let this area, let this community get back to their normal life."
Local resident Abraham Sailor says he wants the violence to end after his family's home was damaged in the clashes.
"I'm just praying to God that this war is over because I don't want to see anyone get hurt," Mr Sailor said.
"We are a humble people, we are not terrorists our Aboriginal people - but we have been terrorised."
Aboriginal spokesman Tiga Bayles says he is hopeful a resolution can be reached.
"I think it's achievable - it's not going to happen tomorrow but the discussion has started," Mr Bayles said.
Topics: community-and-society, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, government-and-politics, liberals, woodridge-4114, qld
First postedEarlier this season, the LA Galaxy put out a hilarious video roasting the Portland Timbers and a couple of diving players:
The Timbers’ initial response was lackluster:
if you can only put fans in 60% of your seats a cute meme is one way to get attention. We have video guys, too. Stay tuned... — Portland Timbers (@TimbersFC) March 13, 2017
Ok, sure. Portland appeared to “self-own” on that, which made the video even funnier.
But five months later (which, yeah), the Timbers made a response, after beating the Galaxy 3-1 on Sunday.
Portland went far more subtle, but got a fair few digs in on the Galaxy in their “Science is fun” response:
We all know about the upcoming solar eclipse, but have you heard of the fading star phenomenon? Let us explain. #ScienceIsFun #RCTID pic.twitter.com/aB4ZAsO2LA — Portland Timbers (@TimbersFC) August 7, 2017
Of particular note to this site, which of course covers Los Angeles Football Club:
LAFC is called “The Megastar”
They’re called the “Carson Galaxy,” a favorite dig for LAFC partisans.
And you’ll note LAFC’s twitter account was fairly chummy with the Timbers’ account during Sunday’s win over the Galaxy:
Wonder what the next entry will be in this friendly feud? Will LAFC get involved the video warz in the future? Stay tuned for the next entry of “As the Meme Turns.”
What do you think? Leave a comment below!“This was of epic proportion,” he said. “No one has ever seen anything like this.” He added: “This recovery is going to be frustrating. We're going to be here to navigate you through it.”
Other presidential comments were headscratchers, like saying of Harvey: “It sounds like such an innocent name, Ben, right, but it’s not innocent.”
Hurricanes are, of course, major media events, and if there’s one thing that fascinates Trump, it’s television spectacles and ratings. Trump called out FEMA Administrator Brock Long, who “really has become very famous on television in the last couple of days.”
Something strange happened during Trump’s visit by a fire department in Corpus Christi. According to pool reporter David McSwane of the The Dallas Morning News, “Trump did an impromptu rally type speech in front of a few hundred Trump supporters who somehow managed to know exactly where the president was doing the briefing.” Trump reveled in the audience—“What a crowd, what a turnout”—and he again struck a tone of supportiveness: “I love you, you are special, we're here to take care of you. It's going well.”
What Trump didn’t do much of was mourning the dead, from the ordinary civilians killed in the storm to Houston Police Sergeant Steve Perez, who drowned on the job. Nor did the president spend a lot of time hugging waterlogged homeowners. Trump loves the rah-rah cheerleading that comes with disaster duty, but displays of sympathy and empathy just don’t seem to come naturally to him, at least in public settings. Like many presidents, Trump has a clear mean streak; unlike most presidents, he’s been happy to show it publicly. He loves to attack, he loves to joust, and he loves to lecture, but he doesn’t seem to feel as comfortable talking about the softer emotions.
One notable exception comes to mind. Trump often speaks sympathetically when recalling Kate Steinle, a woman shot and killed in San Francisco in 2015 by an unauthorized immigrant, and other people killed or injured by unauthorized immigrants. During the campaign, his discussion of these people were often among the most emotional moments of his rallies. A cynic might argue that this was disingenuous, and that he was simply speaking about these people in the service of bashing immigrants, but for the purposes of this discussion, that’s irrelevant: The point is that when he wishes to do so, Trump is able to perform sympathy on the public stage.
But in the case of Harvey, Trump has thus far not decided to do so. Speaking to the press, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that he had seen “genuine compassion” from Trump as they reviewed the damage. “The president was heartbroken about what he saw,” Abbott said. In the absence of any public display, Abbott’s testimony would have to suffice.The 2019 NBA Playoffs TV schedule on ESPN, ABC, TNT and NBA TV.
This year’s NBA Playoffs TV schedule includes more primetime games on ABC, which is scheduled to carry at least two primetime games in the first round. The postseason gets underway April 13 and the NBA Finals May 30, the earliest start for that event since 1986.
Dates and times for the later rounds will be added when available. Games on TNT and NBA TV will be added when announced.
2019 NBA Playoffs TV Schedule (All Times Eastern)
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NBA Playoffs first round schedule
Time Game Net Saturday, April 13 12:30p Round 1, Game 1 ESPN 3:00p Round 1, Game 1 ESPN 5:30p Round 1, Game 1 ESPN 8:30p Round 1, Game 1 ABC Sunday, April 14 3:00p Round 1, Game 1 ABC Friday, April 19 7:00p Round 1, Game 3 ESPN 8:30p Round 1, Game 3 ABC 9:30p Round 1, Game 3 ESPN Saturday, April 20 8:00p Round 1, Game 3 or 4 ESPN 10:30p Round 1, Game 3 or 4 ESPN Sunday, April 21 1:00p Round 1, Game 4 ABC 3:30p Round 1, Game 4 ABC Friday, April 26 7:00p Round 1, Game 6* ESPNEWS 8:00p Round 1, Game 6* ESPN 9:30p Round 1, Game 6* ESPNEWS 10:30p Round 1, Game 6* ESPN Sunday, April 28 1:00p Round 1, Game 7* ABC 3:30p Round 1, Game 7* ABC
NBA Playoffs second round schedule
Second round of the playoffs begins April 29, with a possible move-up to April 27-28. Game windows will be added when available.
NBA conference finals TV schedule
The NBA conference finals begin May 14, with a possible move-up to May 12-13. TNT will televise the Eastern Conference Finals and ESPN the Western Conference Finals.
2019 NBA Finals TV Schedule
Time Game Net Thursday, May 30 tbd NBA Finals, Game 1 ABC Sunday, June 16 tbd NBA Finals, Game 7* ABC
Games 2-6 will be added when those windows are announced.
How to stream the NBA Playoffs TV schedule
If you do not have cable, you can stream every game of the playoffs via Playstation Vue, Sling and DirecTV Now. Each of those platforms has ESPN, TNT and NBA TV. Hulu has ESPN and TNT but not NBA TV. YouTube TV only has ESPN.
If you receive ESPN or TNT via a cable or streaming provider, you can watch playoff games through the WatchESPN app (ESPN and ABC) or the WatchTNT app (TNT). If you do not, you can still stream most all playoff games on TNT through the TNT Overtime app (available online and on NBA League Pass). NBA TV does not have a streaming app, so you can only stream those games through your provider (e.g. through the PS Vue app).
For reference, last year’s NBA Playoffs TV schedule is on page two, the 2017 schedule is on page three, and the 2016 schedule is on page four.School hearing tests cannot effectively detect adolescent high-frequency hearing loss, which is typically caused by loud noise exposure, according to researchers at Penn State College of Medicine.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health mandates school-administered hearing screens for children in kindergarten to third, seventh and 11th grades. The school screenings primarily focus on low-frequency hearing loss. This is logical for young children, who are more likely to develop low-frequency hearing loss due to fluid in the ear after a bad cold or an ear infection. Adolescents, however, are more susceptible to high-frequency hearing loss, usually brought on by exposure to loud noises, but the same tests are used on adolescents and young children.
Deepa Sekhar, assistant professor of pediatrics, compared the results of a special hearing screening designed to detect noise-related high-frequency hearing loss with the results of the standard Pennsylvania school hearing test. The researchers reported their findings in the Journal of Medical Screening.
Both screenings test the ability to hear a tone at a specific loudness. The tone is played at different frequencies, or pitches. The screening for noise-related hearing loss tests the ability to hear higher pitches, up to twice the frequency of the Pennsylvania school screen.
Screening participants were 11th grade students at Hershey High School. Researchers administered both the statewide school screening and a high-frequency screening. Of the 282 participants, five failed the Pennsylvania school test and 85 failed the noise-related test. Of the group of 48 students returned for testing by an audiologist in a soundproof booth, nine were diagnosed with hearing loss.
"More participants failed the initial screening than we predicted," said Sekhar. "Even with the effort and care put in by school nurses across the state, the current Pennsylvania school screen just isn't designed to detect high-frequency hearing loss in adolescents."
One in five adolescents experiences hearing loss, and most of this is high-frequency hearing loss related to continued exposure to noise hazards. Early detection and avoidance of loud noises can prevent hearing loss from progressing. To efficiently detect adolescent hearing loss, schools across the U.S. may need to consider alternate tests that are better designed to detect noise-related high-frequency hearing loss.
"The results of this study have the potential to reach schools across the nation, as many use screens similar to those used in Pennsylvania schools," said Sekhar. "We are currently working on a follow-up study at Lebanon High School in partnership with Penn State Nursing to further improve the high-frequency school hearing screen for use in the school setting."Sally looks dead, but instead of a morgue the artist lays rigid, chained away, in a white-walled room concealed behind a shop selling houseplants and botanicals in southeast London.
With a mummified head, modesty obscured by Hanes briefs, Sally looks like a cadaver prepared for a post mortem, or burial following a torture, for which the sterility of the room magnifies in the imagination.
But on a Wednesday night in East Dulwich, shortly before 6pm, the pain is yet to begin – and it’s all Sally’s idea.
Welcome to Out Of Body, a boundary-busting piece of performance art by a tattooist who is not so much living up to their moniker, Sally RIP, but embodying it.
The maiden show sees the 26-year-old invite the public to tattoo their body “without restriction” – no experience is necessary and there’s no stylistic or placement parameters – though Sally’s head is covered in a pillowcase, “that could potentially get a little too crazy for now”, and so is their crotch.
However, the latter concealment is not a cotton border not to be crossed: “If someone is really inclined to remove them, that is available to them.”
“I’m not looking to know who gives me what tattoo because I feel like that will create biases as well, based on my relationship, prior, to those people,” Sally explains to Parloir before Out Of Body begins.
“I would like to make sure I have an objective point of view on each tattoo I’m given.”
The Canadian’s lust for leaving permanent marks is not driven by subjugation to the trade’s much lauded traditions, or delusions of artistic immortality, but a love for the most pure of pursuits, that of making human connections. Sally has always been more interested in the “intimacy” shared between artist and client than the inked-outcome and the wider-culture.
“That is what I am most excited about. I think the outcome or the product of those experiences is secondary. What it is about for me is having this interaction with this person and giving them the opportunity to, like reify and dedicate themselves to their identity on their skin. I’m just a conduit of that.”
In a professional capacity, Sally never tries to sway clients’ design decisions, something the artist is taking a step further with Out Of Body – a reverse of roles, done blindly, with complete passivity, in the hope of subconsciously unlocking a higher plane of understanding about the exchange of blood and ink.
“I’m always interested in performance art and interactions and I think that over the course of my experience tattooing, it is what I have been most interested in this entire time and what has been most striking to me… the things that happen outside the actual tattoo, or the finished result… I often think in alternatives or opposites. So when I think of tattooing I think of what is everything, but the tattoo, and I think that’s what has eventually led me to this place now.”
Sally has an eclectic collection of tattoos so anti-aesthetic they’re cool in a way that could never be contrived – comic book-like doodlings collide with fine-line praying hands on the face and a noose on the neck. So, the tattooist isn’t worried about what the public will add: “I don’t exactly have what most people would refer to as a lovely set of tattoos, so I’m not exactly worried and I’m more excited about shifting my understanding of the aesthetic of tattoos as well. I’m very excited about what I’m going to get this evening.”
Supervised by Sally’s friend Ross Hell, whose head the artist recently branded with a skull and bulldog, some 18 viewers of Out Of Body stepped over the chain divider, picked up a pink tattoo machine, and for a good number of them, made their first permanent mark.
“So who is going to go first,” Hell announced, gazing at the then crowd of half-a-dozen hipsters, including his good-mate Dylan Proudfoot who was too occupied with swilling down a 500ml can of Stella Artois, to step-up.
The first participant told Parloir, “it was hard without a line (to go by),” as the Pearspring shop door chimed, signalling another guest to the hidden Marie Blythe Gallery behind, which was obscured behind rows of hanging baskets.
The next participant wrote her name on Sally, as though scrawling on a bathroom stall, “I couldn’t think of what else to do”.
“That was really cool,” she told her friends, animated as a child at Christmas, as Sally lay silent, hands at sides, feet upright, awaiting the next desecrator and their crude design with slow, shallow breaths.
Behind Sally a chain noose was displayed and at the opposite end a veiny cock with an inquisitive knob, curved as though its attention had been aroused by a scent. But the crowd that swelled to around 50-odd barely took their eyes off the performance, stepping outside only briefly to smoke, or open free Asahi.
Sam Radcliffe travelled 351km from Liverpool, to see Sally, though concedes “ |
PBOC) probably burned through $57bn of foreign reserves that month defending the yuan peg.
A study by the Reserve Bank of Australia calculates that capital outflows reached $300bn in the third quarter, an annual pace of 10pc of GDP. The PBOC had to liquidate $200bn of foreign assets.
Defending the currency on this scale is costly. Reserve depletion entails monetary tightening, neutralizing the stimulus from cuts in the reserve requirement ratio (RRR). It makes a "soft landing" that much harder to pull off.
The RBA said Chinese exporters are trying to keep their foreign earnings in dollars and large discrepancies are building up under "errors and omissions". There has been a "reduction in the willingness of China’s foreign suppliers to receive payment in RMB (yuan)," it said.
It also revealed - as long suspected - that the vast holdings of US bonds registered to investors in Belgium are actually PBOC assets held in Euroclear. These have halved.
This week's tweak to the "yuan fix" comes after trade data showed that Chinese exports stalled in November following a tentative rebound over recent months. Shipments fell 6.8pc year-on-year, but what is most ominous is that the export tally included re-exports sales of refined oil products and a 22pc rise in steel sales.
It comes just as Beijing sends a terrible trade signal by cutting the export tariff on steel billets and pig iron. "Put simply, China is exporting its excess output onto a saturated global market, and there is certainly far more where that came from," said Neil Mellor from BNY Mellon.
Whether China has an over-valued currency is a hotly debated question. It also has a current account surplus that may soon reach $800bn, a sign of calamitous imbalances.
What is clear is that China has suffered a major currency shock. The yuan has been strapped to the rocketing dollar through its peg at a time when it needed a weaker exchange rate, and this has been made worse by Japan's devaluation game next door and by crumbling currencies in Russia and East Asia.
China's real effective exchange rate has risen by 30pc since mid 2012. Wages have been rising at near double-digit rates as the country crosses the "Lewis Point" and runs out of cheap labour from the villages.
The twin-effect is a relentless squeeze on Chinese corporate margins. Profits have fallen for the past five months, dropping by 4.6pc in October. The carnage in the shipbuilding industry is gruesome. East Heavy Industry and Mingde Heavy Industry have gone bust. Rongsheng Heavy Industries Group has stopped production. Fujian Crown Ocean has stopped paying its workers.
It is the same story in the Chinese steel industry, now responsible for half the world's production, and sitting on 300m tonnes of excess capacity. The state giant Sinosteel has already defaulted - to state banks.
Xi Jinping is chiefly concerned with restoring the hegemony of the party - and party control is ultimately incompatible with the free market
Premier Li Keqiang has so far resisted devaluation, knowing that this would draw out the agony, would lead to Japanese-style "zombie" companies on life-support, and would play into the hands of vested interests and party dinosaurs he aims to defeat. As he has repeatedly warned, China is heading straight into the middle income trap unless it can reinvent itself in time.
A beggar-thy-neighbour policy would be hard to square with China's ambition to be a stabilizing pillar of the world's economic order, newly annointed as a member of the International Monetary Fund's currency basket (SDR).
Mr Li has vowed to keep the yuan "basically stable". Chinese officials say the PBOC is targeting a trade-weighted index. So far this has stayed level. There has been no devaluation yet.
China bulls argue - and on this I agree - that the "new economy" is doing fine as the country ditches its obsolete development model and shifts up the technology and service ladder. The trade share of GDP has dropped to 41.5pc from 64.5pc in 2006.
The flip side of this is that services have jumped from 44pc of GDP to 51pc over the past four years. Healthcare is booming now that hospitals have been opened up to market forces.
Bears rely on the Li Keqiang index to discern economic collapse - usually from a safe distance, without straying into Chinese territory. It is based on Mr Li's Wikileaks comment in 2007 where he admitted relying on electricity use, rail freight and credit growth for the truth on GDP.
That was seven years ago, The index fails to capture the deliberate switch away from heavy industry, or the galloping gains in energy efficiency. It dwells on a 16pc fall in rail freight, ignoring a 6.5pc growth in road freight, which is 10 times larger. It relies on an old measure of credit that does not include bond issuance by local governments. It is useless.
Craig Botham from Schroders said acidly in a "postcard from Beijing" that if China is really collapsing, "the country is hiding it well". The best estimates are that China's growth has slowed to around 5pc, but the labour market is still tight and employers are crying out for workers.
Yet there are winners and losers in this traumatic shift from one economic model to another, and the old guard of the Communist Party still controls much of the Central Committee. The patronage system of the party bosses depends on keeping the giant state companies (SOEs) alive.
President Xi Jinping is chiefly concerned with harnessing "reforms" to smash rivals, centralize all power in his own hands, and restore the hegemony of the party - and party control is ultimately incompatible with the free market.
His military and strategic expansion in the South China Sea show that he would not have slightest hesitation in dumping yet more of China's excess capacity on everybody else if he thought it to be in his political interest.
Li Keqiang commands the economy on sufferance only. Rumours constantly surface that he has been isolated in the Standing Committee.
The real danger for the world is that he is simply shoved aside. The stability of the yuan and the world currency system rests on thin political ice.Squadron 42, or simply S42, is the legendary volunteer unit assigned to the UEE's Paul Steed (CV 023) of the 2nd Fleet of the United Empire of Earth Navy. It can be found in many warzones and even took part in the Second Tevarin War's infamous Battle of Centauri in 2610. Aria Reilly was a legendary member of Squadron 42 who favored the F7A Hornet. The F7C Hornet Wildfire was built as a member of the Masters of Flight series in conjunction with Arena Commander to pay tribute to Aria Reilly, equipped with her preferred loadout and a custom special edition livery.[1] Those who enlist with the 42nd Squadron may earn UEE Citizenship.[2][3][4]
The game won't enter beta until at least 2020.[5]
Behind the scenes
Squadron 42 is a single player campaign that takes place within the Star Citizen universe. It can be played off-line.[2] Squadron 42 will be released in 3 episodes or stand alone games[6], the first of which will become available in the near future. The first episode will have 70 missions which will total up to 20 hours of gameplay.[6]
As stated in the CitizenCon 2016 presentation[7] by Chris Roberts, the ambition and scope grew since first pitched in 2012:
28 chapters equivalent to 60+ missions A-list cast to match any event movie 340 speaking roles with state of the art facial scanning and mocap Over 20 hours of performance capture Story arc with 1255 pages of dialogue 40 distinct ships from fighters to dreadnoughts Hand-crafted environments enhanced with procedural tech Systemic space and FPS gameplay - from stealth to brute force Dogfighting in both space and planetary atmosphere Subsumption AI - fully systemic, 24-hr schedules, 1000+ subroutines, simultaneous secondary objectives
There is an official trailer and information page about the game featuring Gary Oldman as Admiral Bishop, listing Mark Hamill, John Rhys Davies, Gillian Anderson, and others.[8]
Squadron 42 Bishop Senate Speech
Development started with the announcement of Erin Roberts joining the project with the Studio Foundry 42 in Manchester at the CitizenCon 2013.Oya first appeared in Uncanny X-Men as newly manifested mutant who is deeply conflicted about her powers. Following her introduction, she, along with Hope Summers, Velocidad, Transonic, Zero, and Primal, began to feature in the series Generation Hope. [2] She made appearances in Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine and the X-Men, and is currently featured in All-New X-Men.
The Third Light Edit
Idie is a fourteen-year-old girl from Delta State, Nigeria when her powers manifest. The first manifestation of her powers causes her village to burn down, and when she starts to freeze things as well, she is considered by the locals to be a witch.[3] By the time Storm and Hope arrive, Idie's family and friends have been killed. Hope stabilizes Idie's powers, and Idie uses her new abilities to drive away the paramilitary group that was attempting to kill her.[3]
From her introduction, Idie is shown to have deep religious reservations with respect to her status as a mutant. She has viewed herself as a "monster" and has wished her mutation was as obvious as Laurie's, so that her "sin" would be just as obvious.[4] When deciding not to be called "The Girl Who Wouldn't Burn," Idie describes herself as "a witch child," "a blasphemy," and "a heretic." She states that if she cannot burn in this world, she will burn in the next.[5] She later tells Wolverine that she has made peace with the fact that she is a monster.[6]
Schism Edit
As he returns from an obviously tiring mission, Wolverine encounters Hope and the Lights, including Oya, awaiting his return so they can start Combat Training class. Wolverine cancels the class he had no knowledge of, and instead asks them if they should not be doing something more age appropriate; specifically, he asks Oya if she had a doll or something to go play with. Oya states that she had a doll, but it was destroyed when her village people came to kill her. Later, Wolverine solicits Shadowcat to retrieve a new doll for Oya, which he gives while they share some ice cream.[7]
Oya is one of the X-Men to attend the opening of a Mutant History Museum, a group that includes several adult and younger mutants. When the Museum is attacked by the new Hellfire Club, most of the X-Men are quickly defeated as Oya hides. Both Wolverine and Cyclops rush towards the museum, but the Hellfire grunts begin setting up a bomb within the museum. To Wolverine's protest, Cyclops gives Oya the go ahead to do anything she thinks necessary, and Oya "murders" most of the Hellfire grunts. Outside the museum, she is comforted by Hope and the other Lights, but Oya simply wants to return to Utopia to get some sleep.[8]
Oya doesn't have any remorse for killing the Hellfire grunts. She tells Wolverine, that once you accept being a monster, being a murderer isn't so bad. Laurie is furious at Hope for letting her be part of the Sentinel battle on Utopia. She went as far as to point a gun at Hope. Hope realizes that she didn't do a good job taking care of her. She tells Wolverine to take Oya with her to the new school which will be The Jean Grey Academy, and take better care of her than she could. Oya and Hope share a heart-felt good bye. When Wolverine and his new crew of teachers and students land in Westchester, Oya asks Wolverine if she is responsible for breaking up the X-Men, Wolverine replies: "No, darlin'. You led us home."[9]
Regenesis Edit
Oya is no longer part of Generation Hope and she is now part of the Wolverine and the X-Men. During a visit from Deathlok to the Jean Grey School of Higher Learning, it is suggested that Idie has a high probability of eventually becoming leader of the X-Men.[10]Guide to DiLaTiNg 1. Dilators: Get to know them 2. Transition to Dilators 3. Choice of Dilators 4. Lubricants 5. Privacy: where to dilate 6. Best Positions to dilate 7. Relaxation Techniques 7b. How to control the PC muscles & Kegels 8. Find the elusive opening 9. Find the right angle 10. How to move the dilators 11. How long to keep it in 12. Pulling the dilator out 13. Common problems 14. Make it fun! 15. When to move up a size 16. Frequency: how often to dilate 17. Fingers as dilators 18. Partner's involvement 19. Finding the motivation 20.The Golden Rule
Home For Women For Practitioners For Partners Sex and Vaginismus Vag. Central Contact Us
Free GUIDE to DILATING
to help you Self-Treat Vaginismus! Detailed Tips and Information by women who've been through it
Click here to download the printer-friendly PDF version.
If you cannot read the PDF, you can for free.
D-GUIDE: INTRO
Welcome to the D-Guide, the most practical section of the Vaginismus-Awareness-Network website.
Congratulations for being ready to set out on this wonderful journey that will get you to own your body and love your body and yourself in ways you probably found impossible before.
Here you will find very detailed tips and information to help you on your way. We can't be there to hold your hand physically but imagine these tips coming from the heart of a mother to her daughter, because they were written with that spirit.
This guide took a few months to put together from the knowledge of a few years of experience researching and studying vaginismus plus our own experience with it and advice we gathered from over 100 women with vaginismus we have had conversations with in the past few years.
Hard work but nothing major, and yet nobody has so far published such a detailed guide for free, despite maybe saying they care for women's health.
Some of us found that extremely disheartening and it also fired us up, so we decided it was time to share this basic information and good tips because the Art of Dilating isn't rocket science and shouldn't remain a secretive treatment that some clinics make women pay thousands of dollars for.
On-line Guides to Dilators
Thankfully you can find some short guides online too. They are not super-detailed but they are still very helpful and have tips we can all learn from so they are worth checking out too:
* Information for the Use of Vaginal Dilators A leaflet for women who attend the Middlesex Clinic hospital (USA)
*Amielle Dilators producers put a short but helpful "how to use" guide for their dilators.
(The PDF link is at the bottom of the page so scroll down)
* Laurel Prescriptions Guidlines using Venus Vaginal Inserts for the Management of Vaginismus
* Instructions on the Use of Vaginal Dilators for the Treatment of Vaginal Agenesis
Before you begin this journey Now, before you begin reading our guide and try dilating to cure vaginismus, you hopefully will have first read in the section "Treatments: Pros and Cons" how systematic desensitisation (a.k.a. Dilating) is one of the most used, gentlest, most effective and cheapest method that you could try to solve vaginismus; its positives outweighing the negatives by far.
But in order to get the best out of it and have a smooth journey, make sure you know your vagina and your hymen well before you begin. They can be your best allies, so if you still haven't, check out our graphic-free section: Vulvar Anatomy.
Also, make sure you are aware of the many misconceptions about vaginismus and what it is NOT.
Before you begin, it's best if you are clear about the expectations (or sexpectations) you or your partner may have about the final outcome of this process. Being able to finally have intercourse can be a great bonus in a relationship BUT it won't fix an insensitive partner, it won't fill gaps created by lack of understanding and lack of love and it will unlikely turn you into a sex Goddess overnight.
Basically, the fewer expectations you two have about sex and less stress and deadlines you place upon yourself in regards to getting to the finishing line, the quicker and smoother this journey will be.
Overall, the best starting point for you before trying to treat vaginismus and commit yourself to dilating, would be that of feeling that whether or not you managed to treat it, should NOT make a big difference in your life and that you can be happy, loving and loved even WITH it, no big deal.
Before starting, you and your partner should be very aware that you are already a fully lovable woman, independently from your ability to have something inserted in your vagina, and that truly loving relationships are not at all based on intercourse, that men don't NEED sex nor do you owe it to them, even as a wife, that your vagina is your friend and shocking as it may sound, that it is likely that vaginismus may after all be a blessing in disguise...
I know it may take some time or some insights to see it this way, but that is what happened to me and to other women, we became aware of the direct and indirect pressure we were put under to treat vaginismus or to be fully sexual, and we started questioning things. And it was powerful...
If you are not in that frame of mind and you are pretty 'desperate' to treat it, then it could be harder to go through the process and stay motivated if things shouldn't go right the first time around, or if your partner started stressing you out and be impatient, but if you want to give dilating a try anyway, hopefully you'll see through this journey that your vagina IS quite cool in fact and that she has some valid points to make...
Either way, best of luck...
The Guide to Dilating:
INSTRUCTIONS This guide is divided into 20 sections. You don't necessarily have to follow steps in the same order. To go straight to the one you want information about, please use this drop-down menu.
Guide to DiLaTiNg 1. Dilators: Get to know them 2. Transition to Dilators 3. Choice of Dilators 4. Lubricants 5. Privacy: where to dilate 6. Best Positions to dilate 7. Relaxation Techniques 8. How to control the PC muscles & Kegels 9. Find the elusive opening 10. Find the right angle 11. How to move the dilators 12. How long to keep it in 13. Pulling the dilator out 14. Common problems 15. Make it fun! 16. When to move up a size 17. Frequency: how often to dilate 18. Fingers as dilators 19. Partner's involvement 20. Finding the motivation
PREFACE: THE GOLDEN RULE
1. DILATORS: GET TO KNOW THEM
2. TRANSITION TO DILATORS
3. CHOICE OF DILATORS
4. LUBRICANTS
5. PRIVACY AND WHERE TO DILATE
6. BEST POSITIONS FOR DILATING
7. RELAXATION TECHNIQUES
8. HOW TO CONTROL THE PC MUSCLES & KEGELS
9. FINDING THE ELUSIVE OPENING
10. FINDING THE RIGHT ANGLE
11. HOW TO MOVE THE DILATORS
12. HOW LONG TO KEEP A DILATOR INSIDE
13. PULLING DILATORS OUT or REVERSED VAGINISMUS
14. COMMON PROBLEM: THE BURNING SENSATION
15. MAKE IT FUN
16. WHEN TO MOVE ON TO A BIGGER SIZE
17. FREQUENCY: HOW OFTEN TO DILATE
18. USING FINGERS AS DILATORS
19. PARTNER'S INVOLVEMENT IN DILATING
20. FINDING THE MOTIVATION
PREFACE:
THE GOLDEN RULE
Do you know the Greek story of Orpheus who wanted to rescue his wife Eurydice from the Underworld where she had been kept prisoner? After risking his life to descend there and playing his sweet melody in front of the Gods of the Hades?, they agreed that he could have his wife back, but only on the condition that he did not look back towards her until they had reached the land of the living.
Unfortunately curiousity again killed the cat, and Orpheus turned just before reaching the end of the steep path, because he started doubting that Eurydice was in fact following behind him.
This story can be a wonderful metaphor for couples trying to treat vaginismus together and rushing the last steps..
As you probably already realized by reading the tips on dilating, there is no strict set of rules to follow to treat vaginismus except for following your vagina’s pace and nobody else’s, and being very gentle and loving.
But there is one rule to observe religiously, and it’s a very simple one, yet one that the wish to see if the treatment is working, will actually risk causing a setback.
NEVER ever let yourself experience pain. If you have intercourse or penetration with something that hurts you and you feel pain, you will reinforce that idea in your head and body that insertions will be painful and things will get worse!
So if you are having painful intercourse now, stop it immediately. Tell your partner why you need not to risk causing your vagina any pain and how trying before its time could be counterproductive. Tell him the Orpheus story… The world of the living IS very close, do not fear.
Trust Eurydice… she is climbing the steps…
Back to TopAmazon squashes Trump trolls' attacks on Megyn Kelly book
CLOSE Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly went one-on-one with USA TODAY and talked about a whole range of issues, including Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential election. USA TODAY
Amazon appeared to remove several politically motivated negative reviews of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly's memoir Settle for More after a flood of one-star ratings drew media attention.
As of early Wednesday, 17% of the reviewers on Amazon gave the book one star. At one point, as many as 76% of the reviews were one-star, Slate reported.
The Los Angeles Times reported that many of the reviews were linked to a pro-Trump Reddit forum called "The_Donald."
Some commenters picked up on the removal of the negative reviews. "Tim from MD.," for example, wrote a post titled "Over 120 1 star reviews have been deleted. Are we living in a free country anymore?"
"Trump is president, but she wrote the book certain Clinton would win," Tim from MD. wrote. "Now the book and her shows advertisers are getting boycotted. So apparently her attorneys have called to get negative reviews deleted. And they succeeded. I'm shocked."
Brianna wrote, "I have written many thoughtful reviews as to why this book is horrible! They have all been removed even though I am a reputable Amazon customer/reviewer which is why originally Megyn had the true rating of one and a half stars and now four and a half FIXED STARS!"
Amazon did not remove all the reviews that seem to focus more on the recent presidential campaign than the contents of the book. One reviewer who gave the book a single star wrote nothing more than "Anti-Trump." Another wrote that she is still upset "over trump calling her out," and one reviewer said, "As unpopular and uninteresting as her show. MAGA," using the acronym for "Make America Great Again."
Kelly's publisher, Harper Collins told the L.A. Times that the onslaught of negative reviews had "the hallmarks of an orchestrated effort to discredit the book and our author Megyn Kelly,” adding that “We have brought it to the attention of Amazon.”
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2gj23NJA cobwebbed window in a ramshackle store located in a nondescript Buenos Aires suburb. Adidas expert Gary Aspden animatedly recounts the moment a friend emailed him this photograph. “The shop window was stacked floor to ceiling with old blue Adidas boxes. Stuff from the ’78 Argentina World Cup and before. I started having palpitations.”
His cardiac arrhythmia is understandable: the photograph was a treasure map. Since trainers became a collectable commodity in the 1990s, finding rare original styles has become harder and harder. Independent sports stores in Europe have long been cleaned out by vigilant trainerphiles for whom dead stock (styles no longer in production) equals vintage gold. Original Adidas are particularly hard to find, as the brand has resonated across underground and popular culture for decades, sought by everyone from old-school Bronx rappers to catwalk models. Not to mention the music gods of Manchester.
Aspden knew he was getting on a plane immediately with fellow collectors and Adidas collaborators Mike Chetcuti and Robert Brooks, but when friend and former Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown heard about the bounty, he declared he was coming too.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ian Brown of the Stone Roses – a massive ‘sneakerhead’ – smiles in front of the undisturbed stock Neil Bedford Photograph: Neil Bedford
They knew there might be trouble ahead. “We were told the shop owner was a little… moody,” Aspden says, alluding to 75-year-old Carlos Ruiz, a local legend who is, by all accounts, unpredictable. He sits in his sportswear shop every day but not in order to sell anything. One Ruiz tale concerns the director of a big budget Maradona movie who wanted to use the store as a location – when he pulled out a chequebook, Carlos threw him out. Getting into Aladdin’s cave was not going to be easy.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The closed front of Carlos Ruiz’s Aladdin’s cave Neil Bedford Photograph: Neil Bedford
With this in mind, the group didn’t mention they had a British rock star among them (“We didn’t want to rattle Carlos”). But it was Brown, who speaks a little Spanish, who unearthed the tragic facts behind Ruiz’s eccentric facade. A decade earlier, two youths had shot and robbed Ruiz in the shop. It took him two years to walk again. Widowed and returning to work, he discovered the licence had changed hands, meaning all stockists needed to reapply for an account. “They sent a lot of forms to fill in,” he told Brown. “I’m 65, I’ve lost my wife, I can barely walk.” He ripped the forms up.
Bobby Gillespie wears SPZL half-zip knit, £205 Photograph: Kevin Cummins
Since that tragic homecoming, Ruiz has kept hold of his old shoes, describing them as “a noble product”. He sits in the shop every day, amid the dust and cobwebs and columns of old stock, an obscure duty he sees as therapeutic. Aspden’s assessment is more literary: “He’s the Miss Havisham of the sportswear world.”
Unexpectedly he let them in, giving them two days with his priceless cache. Wading through the haphazard boxes in 45C heat, the pilgrims found treasure after treasure: 30-year-old Handballs, untouched Silver Winds. Some of the polyurethane soles crumbled to ash upon contact, adding to their grail-like aura. Ruiz even let them buy a few pairs.
The 1970s rarities sourced from Ruiz’s time capsule led to a new collection: the premium Adidas Spezials – 12 pieces of clothing, four pairs of shoes. It’s not a straight vintage reissue, but simply draws on Adidas’s own history. Aspden challenged himself to recreate an Adidas aesthetic without relying on the signature three stripes. The classic Beckenbauer track jacket is reimagined in luxury wool, with lined pockets. The Touring shoe has cup soles, as seen on Adidas Trimm Trabs. Quintessential contours are adhered to, branding reduced to pin badges and undercollar tape.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Soles of shoes which have perished over time Photograph: Neil Bedford
The sneakerheads who stumbled across a South American time warp guarded by a suspicious gatekeeper is a hell of a story. But isn’t it somewhat self-mythologising for Adidas to turn to Adidas for inspiration?
“Bowie’s last album sleeve was Heroes reappropriated. The last James Bond film has him driving around in an Aston Martin,” Aspden muses. “If everybody else is referencing you, why not reference yourself? There are so many classics in the catalogue that I’m playing with the crown jewels of design.”FARNBOROUGH, England -- Much like the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the United Kingdom's Civil Aviation Authority is not too keen on the idea of drones flying next to civilian airliners.
And much like their U.S. counterparts, U.K. aviation and defense companies are sinking plenty of resources into studies to quell the public's and the regulators' fears.
It seems, though, Europe is lagging behind the U.S. in its pursuit of opening civilian airspace to unmanned aerial vehicles. The head of a European aviation consortium said Thursday here at Farnborough International Airshow he doesn't expect UAVs to get the green light until the end of this decade. U.S. aviation officials hope to open airspace by 2015.
Seven European aviation companies aligned under the Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessments (ASTRAEA) program in 2006 to tackle the challenges associated with UAVs flying in civilian airspace such as how to sense and avoid jet liners and pick out emergency landings without a pilot onboard.
ASTRAEA has mounted a host of sensors typically found on UAVs to a manned turbo prop to test these challenges. Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, ASTRAEA's director, said their engineers have collected a great deal of data and made serious progress in figuring out how UAVs would handle airspace littered with civilian jets and airliners.
ASTRAEA engineers tested how a UAV would use an infrared camera to make sure a field didn't have people nearby in the event the UAV needed to autonomously find an emergency landing zone. Dopping-Hepenstal said that using this technology made the UAV more capable at ensuring the landing strip was safe versus a human pilot. The question, then, is what level of IR sensor would the CAA mandate a UAV carry to be certified to fly in civilian airspace?
Sense and avoid technologies to avoid mid-air collisions have also been studied. This is a major hang up in the U.S. and one of the biggest fears for those who oppose allowing UAVs into civilian airspace. Opponents worry if a UAV goes rogue and loses its downlink to a human pilot it could cause an airliner carrying hundreds of people to crash. The case for UAVs was not helped when a U.S. Navy drone lost touch with its pilot this year at Patuxent River Naval Air Station and crashed in Maryland.
Pilots and data collectors with ASTRAEA will fly 20 test flights in 2012 over the Irish Sea. Each flight will cover about 750 miles at 15,000 feet. The pilots onboard only fly the plane during take offs and landings. Dopping-Hepenstal said he expects CAA to first open portions of civilian airspace over bodies of water to "gradually make the public feel more comfortable."
ASTRAEA will finish its work in 2013, but there's not exactly a clear next step forward toward opening airspace. CAA regulators spoke with ASTRAEA, but the studies and tests were not funded or sponsored by CAA. Dopping-Hepenstal told reporters that more work will need to be done after 2013, but the data collected by ASTRAEA will help regulators see the potential of introducing UAVs into new swaths of previously restricted airspace.
"This isn't a revolution; it's an iteration from manned vehicles," Dopping-Hepenstal said.By the CNN Belief Blog staff
(CNN) - Americans love kitsch, and the holidays bring out the best in our love/hate relationship with products that are so bad they just might be great. Each December you can find some terror-stricken parents ambling through toy stores like zombies in search of the perfect gift for their children.
But if no perfect gift can be found, you can always turn to kitsch. That awful holiday faithy kind. It's so bad it just might work.
Hanukkah is no exception.
Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, begins on Saturday. Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabean Revolt and the menorah (candelabrum) that stayed aglow for eight days, despite a lack of oil.
The holiday gift giving burden can be doubly worse for Jewish parents who have to scramble to find gifts for their children for each of the eight nights. But does your kid really need another dreidel, another bag of chocolate coins?
The clock is ticking, but there's still time for the perfect faithy kitsch gift for children and the young at heart. With that in mind we humbly present the Belief Blog 2012 Guide to Hanukkah Kitsch.
Hanukkah menorah rubber ducky
Now your children can really test the miracle of the menorah by bringing this rubber ducky into the tub. Nothing says candles like a bath.
Ketzel the Cat menorah
Cats played no central role in the Maccabean Revolt story, but why should cat lovers suffer for that?
Geltdigger Hanukkah sweater
This horrible holiday sweater comes complete with Stars of David and the menorah in golden chocolate coin motif. It's the article of clothing that makes your kids want to stay in the car because they refuse to be seen with you wearing it.
Nice Jewish guys calendar
From the product description, "Firemen and Chippendales have had their spotlight long enough! The 2013 Nice Jewish Guys Calendar turns the spotlight on the underrated characteristic that pecs and tight buns can't deliver...niceness."
Star of David toaster
In a move of interfaith outreach, the folks who brought us Jesus toasters have created this Star of David toaster, just in time for the holiday.
The Count's Hanukkah Countdown (Shalom Sesame)
The Count counts down the eight nights. Get it?
‘Twas the night before Hanukkah – 2 disk set
While all the other kids on the block are reading that other version of this story, now you and your family can finally enjoy the Hanukkah version.
No limit Texas dreidel game
Spinning the dreidel is a classic Hanukkah game where children bet for chocolate coins. Finally a version adults can enjoy by taking the gambling to the next logical step.
Mama Doni – Chanukah Fever Press
We've long documented the plight of Hanukkah music on the Belief Blog (see also the Maccabeats). Here's yet another entry into the holiday song canon.
Chanukah House decorating kit – vanilla cookie
It's like a ginger bread house but Hanukkah. Comes complete with blue and white frosting.
And don't forget to tune in next week for a very kitschy Belief Blog Christmas gift guide.In Brussels, NATO said it was trying to confirm the reports, but it warned that it would strike any forces threatening civilians. Rebels and civilians began to flee Ajdabiya soon after NATO hit their armoured unit near the key oil town of Brega, fearing Kadhafi forces were moving on the town. The strike came as the US general who led the first stage of the coalition air campaign in Libya maintained it was unlikely the rebel forces could oust Kadhafi, saying the conflict appeared to be turning into a stalemate. General Carter Ham said the international bombing raids had succeeded in protecting civilians for the most part but that Kadhafi's regime probably would not be removed by military means. Asked at a Senate hearing about the chances that the opposition could "fight their way" to Tripoli and replace Kadhafi, Ham said: "Sir, I would assess that as a low likelihood."
And when pressed by Senator John McCain whether the situation was essentially a stalemate or an "emerging stalemate," Ham said: "Senator, I would agree with that at present on the ground." Under tough questioning, the general said a stalemate is "not the preferred solution" in Libya but that outcome appeared "more likely" now than at the outset of the air campaign launched March 19. But Ham said removing Kadhafi was not part of the UN-mandated mission to protect civilians, and that the US administration wanted to rely on diplomatic and other means to force him to step down. His comments underscored growing concern in Washington and European capitals that the fight in Libya could be deadlocked, with Kadhafi firmly in control in Tripoli and badly-organized rebels unable to turn the tide even under the cover of NATO-led air power. France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, however, took a more optimistic view, saying Kadhafi's regime would inevitably fall.
In Washington, McCain and some other members of the Senate Armed Services Committee slammed the Obama administration for taking what they called a half-hearted approach to the war, saying removing Kadhafi should be part of the military mission. But Ham warned that the United States had tried "regime change" elsewhere before. "We have some history in trying to apply military force to regime change where we have been less than successful," he said, alluding to Iraq. The general said it was possible an international ground force might be deployed if and when Kadhafi leaves, but warned that an American presence might trigger a backlash in the region. "I suspect there might be some consideration of that. My personal view at this point would be that that's probably not the ideal circumstance, again, for the regional reactions that having American boots on the ground would entail."
Amid calls by some senators to arm and train the rebels before it was too late, Ham said that he had "some indication that some Arab nations are in fact starting to do that at present." But the general expressed caution, saying any effort to supply arms had to be carried out carefully to avoid weapons getting into the hands of extremists. As an example, he cited the danger that militants could seize some of the estimated 20,000 shoulder-launched missiles in Libya, calling it "a regional and an international concern." After edging to within 60 kilometres of Kadhafi's hometown of Sirte on March 28, the Libyan rebels have been steadily |
a dozen other children, learning to recite her ABCs in English.
It was Wednesday morning, just weeks from a commencement ceremony for the group of young, Hispanic mothers and children in an acclaimed early education program called Avance, which aims to help “at risk” families — including new immigrants — break cycles of poverty and illiteracy.
The Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday honored the Avance program in El Paso for being one of four “exceptional immigrant integration initiatives” in the U.S. — netting the organization $50,000.
Margie McHugh, co-director of MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, said there is a pressing need to bolster local immigrant integration programs. With the growth of immigrant communities across the U.S., she said, assimilation “cannot be overlooked anymore.” About 12.5 percent of the U.S. population is foreign born, according to 2007 Census data.
In recent years, the assimilation issue has been largely overshadowed by a heated debate over border control and immigration enforcement. Some anti-illegal immigration activists have seized on the matter, pointing to examples like phone systems that say “Press 1 for Spanish,” as evidence that many immigrants do not wish to assimilate.
McHugh said many communities are trying to strike a balance between recognizing the positive aspects of immigration, while still acknowledging that new immigrants often need some help learning English and joining the mainstream U.S. society.
McHugh said many communities are trying to strike a balance between recognizing the positive aspects of immigration, while still acknowledging that new immigrants often need some help learning English and joining the mainstream U.S. society.
Michael White, a Brown University sociology professor and co-author of the book Achieving Anew, which focuses on assimilation in America, researched first- and second-generation immigrants’ achievement, using Census data and periodicsurveys.
White, a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation, found that being a new immigrant, or the child of immigrants, is not what determines success in the U.S. Rather, the key is overcoming socioeconomic challenges, which may be offset by education and intervention programs, White said. He said 2004 Census data found second-generation immigrants got college degrees at a higher rate than their peers.
“The immigration process is bringing in people in large part who succeedin American society,” White said. “They are not falling off the ladder of success or becoming an underclass. That doesn’t mean they don’t face challenges or obstacles. They fit into America like others of similar background and socioeconomic standing.”
Parental involvement key
Houston Avance, a non-profit, is an affiliate of the El Paso program. The parenting education and early childhood development classes are the centerpieces of the program.The Houston organization also offers a wide range of support, such as English as a second language, adult education and healthy marriage classes. The programs, funded by grants and donors, are free for participants, said Jose Villarreal, executive director of the Houston program.
“One of the main concepts is that we want to teach the parent that they are the child’s main teacher, and that the home is the most important classroom,” he said.
Guerra, 23, said she’s seen Melanie make progress since they started with the classes nearly nine months ago.
“Her language is what amazes me most,” said Guerra, a Mexico native who has lived in Houston since she was 9 years old and speaks primarily Spanish at home. “When she gets started talking now, it’s hard to keep her quiet.”
Guerra attended the University of Houston until 2005, when she became pregnant with Melanie. This summer, she plans to take classes at Houston Community College toward a degree in mechanical engineering.
Melanie’s first graduation, from Avance, will be June 6. Her mother said she already has high hopes for her.
“It’s not going to be a question of whether she wants to go to college,” Guerra said. “She has to go.”
susan.carroll@chron.com
What is Avance?
Avancecomes from the Spanish word “advance” or “progress.”
• CLASSES: The parenting education and child development classes are taught in Spanish and serve predominatly low-income families from across Houston. All classes are free.
• CONTACT: Call 713-812-0033 or go here.The former All-Star reliever Ugueth Urbina was released from a Venezuelan prison Saturday after serving five and half years of a 14-year sentence for the attempted murder of several workers at his family’s ranch in October 2005, according to several reports from Venezuela.
Urbina, 38, had been accused of pouring gasoline on the workers and then attacking them with a machete. He was sentenced to state prison in Guarico, in the northern part of Venezuela, in 2007. Venezuelan newspapers said Urbina was released early because of good behavior. During his time in prison, Urbina started three charitable organizations in an effort to rehabilitate his image.
“Finally with my father,” Urbina’s 19-year-old son, Juan, wrote on Twitter. Juan Urbina, a minor league pitcher in the Mets organization, also posted several photos of him and his father.
Urbina has not spoken publicly since his release.
Several Venezuelan newspapers speculated that Urbina, who had said in interviews from prison that he was still in playing shape, could attempt a comeback with the Leones del Caracas, his hometown winter league team, where he began his professional career. Urbina was part of a Leones bullpen in 1994-95 that recorded 40.2 consecutive scoreless innings, a record that still stands.
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The Leones spokesman Jose Manuel Fernandez said in a phone interview that he expected Urbina to soon visit several friends and former teammates, including the former Yankee Bobby Abreu, at the team’s stadium. Fernandez said he thought Urbina had been spending the past several days with family.There was a time -– a time fewer and fewer people remember -– when the Kansas City Royals represented the cutting edge of baseball thinking. People often ask why Kansas City seems to have an inordinate number of advanced baseball thinkers and writers among its fan base (Bill James, Rob Neyer, Rany Jazayerli, Paul Rudd etc.). It’s easy to forget that, for a time anyway, Kansas City was the Athens of American baseball.
This may sound like an exaggeration to anyone who is younger than, say, 40 or 45 years old, but much in the same way that Oakland and Tampa Bay and St. Louis now seem to be the mecca of baseball thinking, well, that was Kansas City back in the 1970s. Before we get to the exciting Royals stuff of today, it is worth remembering.
In 1968, Charlie Finley moved the Kansas City Athletics to Oakland – this after many years of unrelenting Finley-inspired bleakness. Finley wanted to move the team, more or less, the day he bought it and so every day the newspapers were filled with threats of varying foreboding. Today it was Louisville. Yesterday it was Seattle. Tomorrow it would be Miami. By 1968, people in Kansas City were so sick of Finley’s moaning that they were happy to pack him sandwiches for the long trip to wherever.
Weariness wasn’t the only Kansas City reaction. Some people in Kansas City – led by my old friend and legendary local sportswriter Joe McGuff –- began laying the groundwork for a new team before Finley had even finished packing the trucks. Joe and company made a simple but irrefutable argument to the men who ran baseball: “You owe us. You stuck us with this nutjob owner and terrible baseball teams for a long, long time. You owe us a real baseball team now.”
The argument was persuasive. After one idle season, Kansas City was given an expansion team – the Royals. They would be owned by a level-headed man named Ewing Kauffman, who had started a pharmaceutical business in his basement and turned it into a billion-dollar industry.
The differences between the flamboyant and half-crazy Finley and the staid and utterly reasonable Kauffman are too lengthy to list, but they were apparent immediately. Finley famously loved gimmicks and promotions and schemes. He installed a mechanical rabbit in the stadium to bring new baseballs to umpires. He paid the Beatles some exorbitant fee to play after a game and then tried to pay them even more to play a little longer. He had a live mule at games, and he kept trying to move in the fences, and he designed gaudy multi-colored uniforms, and he fired any baseball announcer who did not sufficiently cover for the team’s awfulness, and he brought Satchel Paige out of retirement for one game at age 58 so he could pitch three innings.*
*This promotion should have been more fun than it was –- Paige was led to believe that he was being given a real chance to pitch again. When Paige threw three scoreless innings and allowed just one hit (to Carl Yastrzemski), his great competitive fire burned again. Satchel Paige was a showman –- that part Finley understood –- but Paige was also a proud athlete and that part Finley didn’t and couldn’t get. Finley just wanted the publicity and the photograph of Ol’ Satch in a rocking chair. Only nine thousand people attended the game.
Ewing Kauffman loathed gimmicks. He was a moderate baseball fan at most, and he watched Finley’s antics with detached disapproval. If THAT was what owning a baseball team was all about, he wanted no part of it. But people in Kansas City (again, with Joe McGuff taking the lead) convinced Kauffman that he could run the team his own way, based on his own ideals and principles. He had built his business on hard work and persistent innovation. He would build the Royals the same way.
When he hired baseball people, he made it very clear: “The Royals are NOT an expansion team.” He meant he did not want any excuses. He intended to win quickly, both on the field and in the box office. And it happened that way. The Royals had a winning record in their third season of existence, which was considered pretty miraculous at the time. They drew a million people in their fifth season which, considering Kansas City’s small market and the baseball attendances of the time, might have been even more remarkable.
Every move was inspired by Kauffman’s energy and his refusal to just do things the way others did. He created a group called the “Royal Lancers” –- this was a collection of prominent citizens who wore blue jackets and sold season tickets at every Optimists, Kiwanis and Chamber of Commerce meeting in town. He funded the Royals Academy, a program designed to find good athletes with limited baseball experience and teach them how to become ballplayers. He was the driving force behind what was then called Royals Stadium (now Kauffman Stadium) –- a whole new kind of baseball stadium, without girders blocking the view, with a seemingly endless supply of parking and with fountains dancing beyond the outfield.
More, he engaged his baseball people –- led first by Cedric Tallis, then Joe Burke, then John Schuerholz –- to aggressively improve the ballclub. This mission led Tallis in particular to make a series of mind-blowing moves -– in a short span, Tallis traded for Amos Otis, Fred Patek, John Mayberry and Hal McRae. His baseball people drafted Al Cowens, George Brett and Dennis Leonard. The Baseball Academy produced Frank White. One year after Tallis was let go, the Royals drafted Willie Wilson, who might have been the fastest player ever in Major League Baseball. That was the core for a truly great baseball team that reached the postseason seven times, won two pennants and took one World Series.
Kansas City baseball was a phenomenon then. The Royals would routinely draw two million fans for the season when that was a big deal. People came from six states around, and it helped that the Royals rarely rained out (the artificial turf would just absorb rainwater) and that the Royals rarely lost at home. From 1976 to 1980, the Royals played.630 baseball at Kauffman Stadium; Earl Weaver used to talk about the nightmares he would have watching balls catapult off that springy artificial turf and seeing those Royals players sprint around the bases like 4 x 100 meter relay runners.
[RELATED: Home run hitters? They haven’t played in Kansas City]
Well, the team was built for that ballpark –- fast line-drive hitters, aggressive base-running, terrific infield defense, outfielders who could run down anything, pitchers who battled. Just about everything the Royals did in those days made sense. They unapologetically played a brand of slashing, attacking baseball — steal bases, take extra bases, break up the double play, catch everything. They gave Whitey Herzog his first real chance to express himself as a manager. They developed players; boy, did they develop players. Frank White came out of the Academy and evolved into an eight-time Gold Glove second baseman and offensive threat -– his number is retired now. Willie Wilson was a raw high school running back with impossible speed -– he hit just.268 in the minors. He hit.320 his first four full seasons with the Royals and won a batting title. Dan Quisenberry had no stuff at all –- he became the best reliever in the American League. Dennis Leonard became a 20-game winner. George Brett became a Hall of Famer. Players they acquired –- Darrell Porter, John Mayberry, Freddie Patek, Cookie Rojas, Larry Gura –- all had their best years while in Kansas City.
And here’s the larger point: Those Royals teams commanded faith. See, fans feel emotional extremes. It’s just what we do. We second-guess, we predict doom, we blame officials, we are blindly and absurdly optimistic. That, in a way, is what it means to be a fan. In our jobs, in our lives, we often must face reality. Yep, that job is going to take two months longer than we thought. Nope, the jury is not going to be sympathetic to your client. Sorry, next quarter is going to be rough for everybody. Life is a series of challenges, and to overcome them you generally have to see clearly.
But one of the joys of fanhood is not seeing clearly. You don’t have to be right. You don’t have to understand all the nuances. You don’t have to study. It’s like Dan Quisenberry said: “The best thing about baseball is there’s no homework.” The games are there for you to enjoy, and if you want to get mad at the manager for not intentionally walking someone or if you want to believe the backup quarterback is way better than the starter –- go ahead. True, the manager may have percentages on his side, and the coach might know a lot more about the quarterback situation than you do … but that’s THEIR problem. They are paid to do what they do. And you are not. You are in it for the fun.
Fans second-guessed those 1970s Royals too. They were ticked off when the Royals traded Roger Nelson for Hal McRae –- Roger Nelson was GOOD! They were not too happy when the Royals traded Joe Foy for some backup named Amos Otis –- Foy had power AND speed! They didn’t like it when the Royals hired Whitey Herzog –- that guy was a disaster with the Rangers!
But this is a final beautiful thing about being a fan –- it doesn’t matter how wrong you are (or right, for that matter) as long as the people actually running the team are right. And the Royals in the 1970s were right a lot. One of the best feelings in sports is knowing that the people running your team are going to be right. I imagine that’s how New England Patriots fans feel these days.
Those 1970s Royals did not fully cash in on their rightness -– they were a lot like Billy Beane’s A’s. They were really good in 1976, probably the best team in baseball in 1977, close to it in 1978, but they kept losing to the Yankees in the playoffs. The Royals finally beat the Yankees in 1980, but even then they lost to Philadelphia in the World Series.
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And, really, that was the beginning of the end. It’s a funny thing, Kansas City’s greatest moment –- the 1985 World Series –- came after, but I’ve always believed that the era when the Royals just did things better than other teams ended after the 1980 season. The team went through all sorts of turmoil in the early 1980s. There was a drug scandal. Kauffman began losing interest and sold half the team to Avron Fogelman (he eventually bought the team back after Fogelman had money troubles). There was some disillusionment, good players aged and faded and so on.
The 1985 Royals were not a great team, and they were certainly not like the great Royals teams. Otis and Patek were gone, guys like McRae, Wilson and White were very much in the homestretch of their careers. That Royals team won the World Series because:
(1) A remarkable group of young pitchers, led by Bret Saberhagen, came together.
(2) George Brett had a fantastic season.
(3) Their division stunk.
(4) They pulled off a crazy comeback when down three games to one against Toronto in the ALCS.
(5) They pulled off an even crazier comeback when down three games to win against St. Louis in the World Series.
I could put a Don Denkinger comment here to entertain Cardinals fans, but I wouldn’t. As I’ve written before: You have to catch foul pop-ups before you can complain about bad calls.
Anyway, that was the last time the Royals made the postseason. The Royals soon became known as the team with Bo Jackson –- that was a fun time, but the winning slowed. The fun began fading after 1989. The winning stopped completely after 1994.
So what does any of this have to do with the Royals’ resurgence? Well, after the 1994 strike -– 20 years and counting –- the Royals’ entire character has shifted. In the 1970s, they were the team that did everything right. In the 1980s, they were mercurial –- some spectacular years and moments and some very bad ones. After 1994, they played the fool. This has been chronicled in excruciating detail on my blog. The attitude around the Royals through these years ranged from earnest to hopeless but more than anything you could count on them to make the wrong decision. Always.
The wrongness grew so repetitive that after a while it seemed like the Royals were incapable of making anything BUT wrong decisions. This, by definition, means that any decision the Royals made was wrong just because they made it. Put another way: You will sometimes hear baseball people talk about the wonder of a winning streak -– everything seems better, the sun feels warmer, the days look brighter, the food tastes better, the music sounds happier. For two decades, everything about the Royals was the opposite of a winning streak. Sure, they did many dumb things. But, it went far beyond that. Good baseball people lost their way. Reasonable chances backfired horrendously. Solid decisions went flying off of cliffs. It was like the Royals bought all their products from Acme. Two decades of that will batter the hope out of most people.
That, I think, is part of what has made this year’s fantastic run into first place so memorable and wonderful for Kansas City fans. When Dayton Moore was hired as the Royals general manager in 2006, he made a conscious effort to not only change the Royals team on the field but to change their very character. He wanted Royals baseball people to wear ties to work. He demanded that the team improve countless small and seemingly unimportant things, such as how they treat visiting scouts. More than anything, perhaps, he impressed upon David and Dan Glass the necessity to invest real money -– in scouting, in development, in good people, in infrastructure, in Latin America. The previous GM, Allard Baird, was and is a superb baseball man, but he was never able to get those things across to the Glass family.
And so, more or less from the start, the Royals became a more professional operation under Moore. He hired some excellent people to work with him. He dazzled people inside baseball with the team’s commitment to building a farm system. And, in short order, the Royals were not the joke of baseball. The Royals lost 100 games four times between 2002 and 2006. They have not lost 100 since.
That, though, is not exactly something you brag about on your resume, and while Moore made the Royals slightly more respectable, he and his staff could not do much more. They continued to make horrendous blunders on the Major League roster. Moore hired Trey Hillman to be the manager. He signed Jose Guillen and Gil Meche to team-record contracts. The Royals talked a better game but continued to feature an allotment of aging Jason Kendalls and Ross Gloads and Miguel Olivos and Scott Podsedniks, while mixing in relatively-young versions of Yuniesky Betancourt and Kyle Davies and Luke Hochevar. The results were, in their own way, as depressing as ever.
“We have to be patient,” Moore said.
“Trust the process,” Moore said.
“We are going to do this the right way, and it’s going to work,” Moore said.
In 2011, there were signs that Moore’s work was having an impact. That was the year I wrote my Sports Illustrated story about the Royals’ future dynasty, and the year various people around the sport began gushing about their minor league system. Then, last season, the Royals won 86 games, their most since the strike -– a season so promising that even Moore’s ill-advised “In a small way, I feel like we’ve won the World Series” quote at the end did not tarnish the optimism.
And then, yep, Royals style, Moore started acquiring old guys like Omar Infante and Nori Aoki. That didn’t seem too great. Then the Royals’ season began, and it was somewhat blah. Manager Ned Yost said something. Third baseman Mike Moustakas wasn’t hitting. The season offered more blah. Manager Ned Yost said something else. Moore offered words of encouragement. More blah. Eric Hosmer couldn’t buy a home run. More blah. The Royals talked about doing a lot at the trade deadline but they did nothing. More blah. The Royals were 48-50 on July 21 and a full eight games out of first place.
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Everyone knew where this was going.
Only, no, it went a whole other way. They started winning. It was imperceptible at first. The Royals did not seem to be playing any better. They squeaked out a 2-1 win in Chicago after the White Sox catcher dropped a throw. The next day, they beat Cleveland 2-1 in 14 innings. Against Minnesota, they got out of a ninth-inning jam to win by a run, and in Oakland they beat Sonny Gray 1-0. Then they went into Arizona and beat the diamonds out of the Diamondbacks and came home to take five of six from the two Bay Area teams. After all that the Royals had won 18 of 22 games. And they were in first place. They have won six of eight since then and are now in first by two full games.
The surprise is the wonderful part. It’s not only the surprise of the team winning baseball games … it’s the surprise of Royals’ decisions actually working. It is notable that the Royals, for the most part, are NOT winning because of those talented young prospects I wrote about in 2011. Moustakas still isn’t hitting. Hosmer’s power disappeared, and he’s hurt. Wil Myers is gone. John Lamb is on the comeback trail in Omaha.
No, they are winning because they made a series of quiet decisions that did not necessarily seem great at the time but are working. When they made the much-discussed Wil Myers trade, Moore said the key was acquiring pitcher Wade Davis, who they intended to make a starter. That idea flopped, but then they put him back in the bullpen where he has been a revelation -– the league is slugging.156 against him. Again, that’s their SLUGGING PERCENTAGE. He has given up two extra-base hits all year –- both of them doubles.
Then, it was the Royals’ plan to build an overpowering bullpen, and so they loaded it up with power arms and now they have a power bullpen. In their hot streak, they are 13-1 in games decided by two runs or less. That bullpen has been fantastic.
It was the Royals plan to have James Shields lead a solid five-man rotation that would give the Royals a chance to win every night. That may seem like an obvious thing, but in the bad years it was almost impossible for the Royals to find even one good starter, much less five. The Royals kept drafting pitchers and drafting pitchers and, other than Zack Greinke, it just didn’t work out. When the Royals traded Myers for Shields, Moore knew that he was potentially trading a future All-Star for a couple of years of good starting pitching. He believed that it would be worth it.
And … it is working. Shields has been the good pitcher the Royals expected. And the Royals’ rotation has been altered. Last year, the Royals led the American League in ERA. This year, they have five pitchers who are on pace to throw 170 innings and win 10-plus games. I’m no fan of the pitcher-win statistic, but it is telling that the last time the Royals had five pitchers with 10 wins was, yep, 1985.
It was also the Royals’ plan to build the best defensive team in the American League. People say that sort of thing all the time, just like basketball coaches like to say that they are going to play up-tempo. In the early years of the Moore regime, the talk about defense did not seem to match any of the actual moves the team made. But you know what? The Royals are now one of the best defensive teams in the American League. John Dewan’s Runs Saved statistic -– my favorite defensive team statistic –- has them third in the league with 24 runs saved behind Baltimore (43) and Oakland (28). But if you look even closer you see that the Royals outfield is by far the best in the league with MVP candidate Alex Gordon in left field and a couple of excellent fielding center fielders. Kauffman Stadium has one of the biggest outfields in baseball. The Royals’ defensive excellence out there matters.
So, yes, this too was part of the plan –- building a team to take advantage of the ballpark.
And what makes all of this so satisfying for Royals fans because most never saw it coming. They were the same old Royals until, suddenly, they weren’t. They were defined by their blunders until, suddenly, some of their plans actually worked.
There is a lot of baseball left in the 2014 season –- more than enough games left for the Royals to not only fall out of first place but fall far enough that nobody even remembers that they were there. But that’s old Royals pessimism. This is a team playing great baseball, and their confidence grows. Fans confidence grows too. It has been a long time since anyone thought this: The Royals might actually know what they’re doing.
READ MORE JOE POSNANSKI PIECES ON HBT© Cooper Neill for The New York Times Workers removed the bodies of two Islamic State supporters who opened fire outside a community center in May in Garland, Tex., a Dallas suburb.
WASHINGTON — At least three dozen people in the United States suspected of ties to the Islamic State were under heavy electronic or physical surveillance even before the Paris attacks, senior American officials say. But unlike the attackers in France, the officials say, the majority of those under investigation here never traveled to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State or receive training from it.
In many ways, the officials say, that makes the American investigations even harder. Those under investigation typically have little terrorism expertise or support from a cell, which makes thwarting an Islamic State-inspired attack in the United States less like stopping a traditional terrorist plot and more like trying to prevent a school shooting.
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Stopping a potential attack has taken on new urgency after Paris, which served as a reminder that even people who have already caught the eye of intelligence services can spring attacks on short notice. Although at this point American officials say there is no credible threat from the Islamic State inside the United States, they worry that Paris could provide the spark to inspire angry, troubled people to finally do something violent.
This year, American counterterrorism officials began focusing their resources on these Americans — known as homegrown violent extremists — after the Islamic State altered its tactics. After months of trying to persuade Americans to travel to join it in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, began using social media to urge its sympathizers in the United States to stay put and plot violence here.
“They’re targeting the school-shooter types, the mentally ill, people with dysfunctional families and those struggling to cope with different issues,” said one senior law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to reporters. “We have been pretty successful in disrupting these cases because they are not very sophisticated or smart.”
Despite the Islamic State’s urging of its followers to stay here, senior counterterrorism officials have so far identified roughly four dozen Americans who have evaded the authorities and traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State since the conflict began there in 2011, about twice the number that officials have said previously. Some of them are known to have died on the battlefield. A small number have returned to the United States but have lost interest in the cause, the officials say.
In many instances, the F.B.I. and other federal authorities have learned that the Americans made it to the Middle East only after they posted about their travels on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
For F.B.I. agents, watching an Islamic State suspect in the United States is a study in anxiety. Being an Islamic State sympathizer is not against the law. Neither is expressing hatred for the United States on Twitter. Buying guns is also legal, and investigators have watched nervously as terrorism suspects passed background checks and purchased guns more than 2,000 times in the past decade, according to government data.
The threat from the Islamic State has put a unique demand on American counterterrorism officials. Nobody expects the F.B.I. to discover the angry, violence-obsessed young man and arrest him before he shoots his classmates. But the same person, inspired by the Islamic State, is a priority. Missing him is considered an intelligence failure.
So agents watch and wait, looking for some sign that yesterday’s angry man with a gun is about to become today’s terrorist. That is why investigators have moved to arrest people early, well before a plot is fully realized. And it is why agents so often use undercover stings: They generate controversy but give the F.B.I. a measure of control.
The F.B.I. does not have explicit requirements to determine who should be monitored because of suspected ties to the Islamic State. But the bureau — whose agents constantly monitor chat rooms, the Islamic State’s Twitter accounts and other online traffic — concentrates on people who have tried to directly contact the Islamic State through social media or have said they want to travel to Syria to join the group. The bureau also relies on information it receives from relatives, friends, teachers, clergy members or others in the community about people suspected of ties to the Islamic State.
Attacks can come suddenly. In May, a young man in Syria put an ominous warning on Twitter: “The knives have been sharpened, soon we will come to your streets with death and slaughter!” Hours later, half a world away, two Islamic State supporters opened fire outside a community center in the Dallas suburb of Garland, Tex. Both were killed by officers. After the attack, the Islamic State declared them “soldiers of the caliphate.” It was the first time that the terrorist group had claimed credit for an operation carried out on American soil.
As the Islamic State has changed its approach to encourage followers here, the authorities have detected a trend that they believe shows the impact of the group’s new message: There has been a significant drop in the number of Americans trying to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the group. Counterterrorism officials say that since July an average of two Americans a month have tried to travel or successfully traveled to the Islamic State, compared with nine a month over the previous year.
“There’s some reason to believe ISIL’s social media is urging people to stay home to kill,” the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said in an interview in October. He said that the decline could be for many other reasons, including additional law enforcement efforts and the realization by many that living in the Islamic State is “hell.”
Mr. Comey has said that the bureau has 900 open inquiries related to the Islamic State. While that number might sound high, most of them have not become wide-ranging investigations because they were generated by tips that were not substantiated. According to law enforcement officials, the F.B.I. typically has about 10,000 open counterterrorism inquiries.
It is not possible for the F.B.I. to conduct round-the-clock surveillance on all its Islamic State suspects since one day of surveillance on a single target might involve 30 agents and analysts or more. If the F.B.I. has to expand that surveillance to even a few dozen targets, officials say, the staffing requirements become overwhelming. This spring, the number of people under investigation for ties to the Islamic State was so high that surveillance agents had to be taken away from criminal investigations.
Michael B. Steinbach, the F.B.I.’s assistant director for counterterrorism, said that this summer “the pace of investigations rapidly increased.’’
The attacks in Paris on Friday, which killed 129 people, were carried out by a team of at least nine terrorists, including five who investigators believe traveled to join the Islamic State. That type of plot was a major concern to American counterterrorism officials when the Islamic State rose to power in 2014 and dozens of the group’s American supporters headed to Syria and Iraq.
To more closely monitor them, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security used sophisticated algorithms to track Americans’ travel to the Middle East, and the State Department put pressure on Turkey to close its porous border with Syria.
Officials say those methods deterred some.
Follow the New York Times’s politics and Washington coverage on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the First Draft politics newsletter.By Ryan Lau | USA
Anyone who has watched or read the news sometime this month is most likely aware of the fact that once again, congressional Democrats and Republicans are unable to agree on a budget. Democrats are consistently pushing for some form of protection for Dreamers, which has since sparked backlash from President Trump. Republicans, on the other hand, seek an increase in defense spending, which has been vehemently opposed and countered by Democrats. Both parties wish to avoid a government shutdown, with a deadline of Friday at midnight to reach an agreement. Ironically, though, the one area in which both Democrats and Republicans generally agree is the one area in which both are wrong. In fact, a government shutdown, contrary to popular belief, would be incredibly beneficial to both the American people and government.
In the event of a government shutdown, all funding for federal programs would come to an immediate halt. An obvious exception exists for branches such as the Post Office, which are self-reliant upon their own revenue from stamps and postage fees for operation. However, the vast majority of government agencies would immediately lose their funding, and this is not a bad thing, as the government will save a considerable amount of money during this process by halting the funding of useless or overpaid agencies.
As a clear example of this, I first examined the expenditures of the United States National Guard, which has an alleged purpose of protecting our citizens in case of a foreign threat or emergency. The thing is, we don’t have any current foreign threats that require an acting home army. Most of these individuals are already trained for an event that has not occurred in our nation since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Despite the clear lack of need for such a large force, the federal government allocates no small amount of funding for their archaic and currently obsolete services.
The average monthly wage of a guards-person ranges from $184 for a private enlisting in one weekend of basic drill training, all the way up to $18,936 for an active duty general. For the sake of simplification, I have conservatively estimated the average figure to be roughly $1,000 a month, though the true average is likely far higher. In the event that only half of the 348,156 currently enlisted National Guard members were told not to report to work (it would likely be a considerably higher number than this), the federal government would be saving 174 million dollars in a single month, but each guards-person would still be entirely capable of reporting to his or her full-time job.
Though admittedly a small figure, the National Guard is a tiny fragment of our overall spending. As an example of a larger agency, I will now examine the U.S. Department of Labor. The agency dumps out an exorbitant annual budget of 12.8 billion dollars for services that frankly, are none of the government’s business. If an employer and employee come to a voluntary agreement regarding the terms of the employee’s labor, it is not the place of any third party entity, regardless of their claim to power, to prevent this transaction from occurring, provided of course that it does not infringe upon the Natural Rights of any individual. On the other hand, if an able-bodied adult cannot find labor, it is not the business of the government to support him by forcibly taking money from the more successful. In both scenarios, a voluntarily funded market-driven solution would prove to be adequate and would do so without grand-scale theft.
Now, this aforementioned figure of 12.8 billion dollars also does not include the funding of over 17,000 full-time employees. Thus, not including the employees, a one-month long government shutdown would save over one billion dollars. Factoring in their salaries, this number would, of course, be significantly higher. That’s one billion at least, with nine zeroes, no longer being forcibly taken from the taxpayers in order to fund an inefficient organization, or one billion dollars used to shrink the staggeringly high national debt.
Ultimately, our federal government has a budget of approximately 3.8 trillion dollars for the fiscal year of 2017. When all is said and done, even a one month long partial shutdown, cutting the expenditures of the state by 50%, would save the American people 158 billion |
the faces in the crowd as he spoke, rapt by his words, despite the fact that, in their words, he is not a “charismatic” public speaker. True enough, that night over a thousand people crammed into a room and hung on every word of a largely unremarkable speech.
But there is also clearly a personal aspect to his appeal, and one which is well exploited by his campaign: the “Straight talking, honest politics” slogan has become ubiquitous at his events, and highlights part of the specific attraction about him.
Throughout my interview with him, he ponders questions, wonders aloud, and generally fails to deliver prepared lines, as one would expect a politician to do. At one point, I ask him whether he thinks the success of the SNP is more down to anti-austerity or pro-independence feeling. “Not sure,” he replies, “I think it’s a probably a bit of both.”
Without prompting, he expands on the problems facing the Scottish Nationalists, telling me that “their support is such a broad spectrum” and “quite amorphous” that they will, eventually, be at loggerheads. They have a “strong left” but also a “strong business element”, meaning that their future economic direction is “unclear”. It is a warning that looks uncannily familiar to the current travails the Labour Party faces, but such is the way Corbyn brings it up, I find it difficult to believe he was making a pointed remark at all.
While he would happily talk all day about the problems the Conservatives are causing for the country, he is slightly vaguer (with, admittedly, five years before the next election) on the electoral strategy needed to beat them. I ask him about the Fabian Society research that shows four of every five new voters Labour needs in 2020 must come from the Tories. “I think their approach to the research is from the wrong end of the telescope,” he tells me.
There is a pause while he briefly answer his phone. He gets back to London after midnight, he tells the caller. I’m a little taken aback; I’m shattered and will be spending the night in south Wales. Jeremy has done 75 events so far, I’m told, and he’s still bombing around the country. As he comes off the phone, I’m ready to prompt him with my question again – but he doesn’t miss a beat, and he’s straight back into answer.
“Young people who didn’t register, who didn’t vote. Those that did vote were overwhelmingly Labour, so I think there’s a whole area there, and this campaign is demonstrating that. Young people, who are very political, but are not interested in party politics, coming forward. Secondly, the numbers of reliable Labour voters who disappeared into the arms of UKIP or non-voting because they didn’t feel the Labour Party represented anything they wanted to hear, do or say. I think we can grow our support that way. Do we have to win back people who voted for other parties? Yeah, but we have to say to people, in a very clear way, what we’re offering.”
That means trying to change the conversation (a favourite phrase of Corbynites) on issues such as welfare. “If all that your average voter hears is politicians saying they’re going to be tough on welfare, newspapers calling everyone who legitimately claims benefits a scrounger and programmes like Benefits Street demonising those that claim benefits, is it surprising that that is then reflected in polls?”
But how will policy be made? Corbyn wants to give Labour’s annual conference “more authority” in policy making. I put it to him that that could lead to big decisions just being made by people who like going to lots of political meetings, which arguably doesn’t open up politics very much at all. “At the moment it’s made by people who don’t go to political meetings and are just experts,” he shrugs, “Surely people going to meetings is an improvement on those who don’t go to meetings?”
It’s not just conference, though. “Economic policy, environmental policy, constitutional issues” should be approached with “open conventions”, while the annual leadership elections he has spoken of at hustings would be all-member ballots. That would be expensive, I say, potentially bankrupting the party. “Yeah, but there is a democratic issue involved,” he replies. “You can do it lots of ways.”
While he isn’t precise about this, something he would put down to the fact he wouldn’t “have the last word on this”, he cites the system Tony Benn and Eric Heffer used to challenge the leadership in 1988 as a potential model. This would allow the chance for, but not necessitate, the leadership to be challenged once a year.
He is light-hearted about the reporting of the previous weekend’s Clause IV controversy, and says he prefers the old Clause IV to the current one: “I supported the old Clause IV against the Blair reforms in ’94, so if you ask me which one I prefer it’s fairly obvious.” However, if it were to be changed again, he would like something that does not just include “common ownership”, but also “recognises issues of equality, social justice, gender equality, diversity in Britain”.
Despite the fact that Corbyn was “never in favour of the registered supporter system”, his campaign has used the system deftly; their ability to sign up supporters is unmatched by other candidates. In part, this is down to some superb political communication, such as the ‘Welcome home’ images that did the rounds on social media. While he is excited about the prospect of the “wider franchise”, he is very clear that he thinks these supporters “should convert into membership” and take part in the new policy processes he wants to implement.
When I attended the rally that evening, I was left in no doubt how real Corbynmania is, and why the other candidates struggle to lay a finger on the veteran leftie. It is not just that there is no singular identifiable demographic driving the surge, but more that there are no shared political assumptions between his supporters and others.
In one of the warm-up speeches, a trade unionist tells the crowd that the 1983 manifesto was about “workers’ rights, nationalisation and abolishing nuclear weapons”. He asks the heaving crowd “What was wrong with that?” and a huge roar goes up. Nebulous demands for ‘credibility’ won’t quite cut it for them. That’s why he’s winning.Ever since the sharp left turn that was Vice, which transformed the spy outfit formerly known as ISIS into a wacky, cocaine-munching drug cartel, FX’s animated spy-comedy Archer always keeps its fans on edge. The creative nimbleness is thanks to Adam Reed, the breezy Southerner at the helm of one of television’s funniest shows. And Season 7, which premieres March 31, is like nothing Archer adherents have seen before.
Whereas Vice was a tribute to Miami Vice, uprooting Sterling Archer and Co. from their workplace/case of the week confines, the latest iteration was inspired by ’80s detective series’ like Magnum P.I. and The Rockford Files, as well as Hollywood noirs in the vein of Sunset Boulevard. All the usual suspects are back, and this time, after being blacklisted by the CIA, they’ve relocated to sunny Los Angeles and set up a private detective agency dubbed The Figgis Agency.
“I’ve probably only been to L.A. five times!” says Reed. “[EP] Matt Thompson and I spent a couple of days driving around Los Angeles with a map of the stars’ homes. FX has a private eye on retainer—as a TV consultant, not as an actual private eye—but it’s this grizzled guy who was a private eye in the ’80s. They tried to set it up so we could do a ride-along with him, but it never ended up happening! We were so ready, had our bags packed and everything.”
The series opens in media res, with a body lying face down in a pool (see: Sunset Boulevard), before backtracking to the genesis of The Figgis Agency, which sees Cyril at the helm since he’s the only one with a license to P.I. They’re soon embroiled in a wild plot involving a glamorous A-list film actress, Veronica Dean; a creepy, gun-toting manager, voiced by Patton Oswalt; and a missing disk containing some very sensitive files.
“They get pretty deeply tied up in the big-money, Hollywood studio film world. They discover corruption left and right. Archer and Lana don’t have a great season together, too,” says a chuckling Reed. “Archer develops slightly more than a crush on a movie star, Veronica Dean, which doesn’t do his relationship with Lana any favors.
“The back half of the season they spend a lot of time on a film shoot, and the film being done is a film noir/detective movie set in the late-’40s,” he adds. “On Moonlighting, they each had dream sequences about the 1940s and it was all in black-and-white. We’re not doing quite that, but we spend a lot of time on movie sets.”
Archer is famous for its fun celebrity cameos, from Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston to Mr. Danger Zone himself, Kenny Loggins. And while Season 7 is set in Hollywood, Reed says we won’t be seeing the return of Burt Reynolds. We will, however, be treated to the return of CIA Agent Slater (aka Christian Slater), who recruits the gang for “a top secret, off-the-books mission,” along with cameos by J.K. Simmons and Keegan-Michael Key as a pair of cops hot on The Figgis Agency’s tail.
“Keegan and J.K. pop up throughout the season,” says Reed. “They’re homicide detectives, but there’s a hostage situation halfway through the season and Lana runs afoul of the law at one point, so they come and go.”
As for Sterling Archer, well, Reed says he’s at a similar stage as Daniel Craig’s Bond at the beginning of Skyfall. The age and injuries have started to catch up with him, and he’s lost a step.
“Archer gets clobbered a bunch. It might be [penance] for treating Lana badly, although I don’t know if that was a conscious thing,” jokes Reed. “As this season’s progressed, I hate to say this, but Archer starts noticing that he doesn’t necessarily bounce up from, say, falling off a cliff as he once did. All the years of unspeakable physical abuse to his body are starting to take its toll, and he’s starting to wonder if he’s actually capable of aging. Archer is grappling with the inevitable.”
The rest of The Figgis Agency is in slightly better shape. Cyril relishes the fact that he’s nominally in charge; Pam and Cheryl enjoy dealing with the less glamorous side of the gumshoe biz, e.g., going on stakeouts; Krieger has become the group’s Q, and designs “a big-ass invention” that plays a big role in the latter half of the season; Lana is juggling trying to get baby AJ into a nice pre-school and the spy biz; and Malory is as Malory as ever.
Reed says that, although he only turned in the Season 7 finale script a few weeks ago, he’s already started brainstorming where Archer will go in Season 8. “We’re gonna explore what happened to Woodhouse. He’ll be a key catalyst moving forward,” says Reed, adding, “and we don’t talk a lot about Archer’s father this time. Next season it might come up…”Travis County District Attorney's Office says it will appeal decision that acquits man who was once one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.
Former House majority leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. (Photo11: Jack Plunkett, AP) Story Highlights Appeals court in 2-1 decision says evidence against DeLay was 'legally insufficient'
A jury in 2010 found DeLay guilty of funneling $190,000 in corporate money to help GOP candidates
DeLay decried 'outrageous criminalization of politics' after ruling
WASHINGTON -- A Texas court threw out the money-laundering conviction of former House majority leader Tom DeLay, saying prosecutors failed to prove that he broke the law in a fundraising scandal from the 2002 elections.
The Texas Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion released Thursday by Justice Melissa Goodwin, said instead that "the evidence shows that the defendants were attempting to comply with the election code limitations on corporate contributions."
"The evidence was legally insufficient to sustain DeLay's convictions," the court said in its 2-1 ruling. The judges said they "reverse the judgments of the trial court" and acquit DeLay, once one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, of all charges.
The Travis County District Attorney's Office said it would appeal the decision before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
"We are concerned and disappointed that two judges substituted their assessment of the facts for that of 12 jurors who personally heard the testimony of over 40 witnesses over the course of several weeks and found that the evidence was sufficient and proved DeLay's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg's office said in a statement.
DeLay, now 66, was at a Washington prayer meeting when he learned of the decision.
"We were all basically on our knees praying and our lawyer calls and says, 'You're a free man,' " he said at the Capitol, where he was attending the weekly Texas congressional delegation lunch. DeLay said he was "very happy" about the decision.
"This was an outrageous criminalization of politics, and I'm so glad that they wrote the ruling that they did," he said.
DeLay, who first came to Congress in 1985, left the House voluntarily in 2006 as he was facing a tough re-election fight. He served as majority leader, the House's No. 2 job
A Texas jury convicted DeLay in November 2010 for illegally funneling $190,000 in corporate money, via the Republican National Committee, to help elect GOP candidates to the Texas Legislature in 2002. The RNC then in turn sent checks to Texas House candidates.
State law prohibits corporations from giving directly to political candidates and their campaigns.
Prosecutors argued that the money to state candidates helped the GOP take control of the Texas Legislature, which then adopted DeLay's redistricting plan that resulted in more Republicans being elected to Congress in 2004.
DeLay was sentenced to three years in prison and remained free while he was appealing his case.
For the past two days, he has been in Washington meeting with evangelicals -- including Ken Wilde, founder of the National Prayer Center -- to discuss forming a new national prayer organization. DeLay said he would "probably not" seek a return to elected office. "There's too much other things that the Lord wants me to do."
But he conceded some nostalgia at being inside the Capitol and visiting the chapel. "It just brought back a lot of great memories," he said.
Contributing: Brad Heath
Follow @ccamia and @DaviSusan on Twitter.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1eUBev3Decayed performance at high altitude, insufficient thrust, excessive weight. Some of the problems the DRDO has reported on its Kaveri turbofan engine, a project in development for nearly three decades. It has now emerged that an unexpected ‘noise’ during high power trials has all but stalled the programme in what the team believes is its last mile. Detailed analyses over the last two years have failed to narrow down the nature of cause of the noise, and scientists are also unable to tell if the noise is an influence aerodynamic performance. What Livefist can confirm is that the phenomenon is only the latest in a series of complications that have bedeviled the Kaveri. The noise the five engines specimens make in high throttle regimes is a key issue being placed before France’s Snecma for the remaining path to certification. Apart from the noise in the high throttle spectrum, scientists have also been grappling with a flicker, indicating inconsistent combustion or fuel transmission, when the afterburners is engaged.
On Jan 3 this year, the Safran Group created and advertised for the new position of Director for the Kaveri engine programme.
The good news for the programme is that the DRDO has been given a virtual carte blanche to channelise offsets from the Indian Rafale deal to resurrect the Kaveri. Snecma, a partner in the Rafale programme, builds the Rafale’s twin M88 turbofan engines. Under the terms of the partnership finalised late last year, Snecma is working to modify, certify and integrate the Kaveri on a Light Combat Aircraft airframe before 2020. A later phase in the partnership will involve modifications on the Kaveri for a twin configuration on India’s AMCA fifth generation fighter concept and an altered non-reheat version for the Ghatak UCAV. It is not clear if the Snecma partnership will stretch to the concept Manik mini-turbofan being developed for UAVs and cruise missiles. One of the Kaveri specimens was on display at the recent Aero India show.
VIDEO: India's @DRDO_India Kaveri jet engine at #AeroIndia2017. Now in revival mode with a tech infusion from @SAFRAN Snecma. pic.twitter.com/PR6TzlxN3r — Livefist (@livefist) February 15, 2017
There are important implications of the Snecma-DRDO partnership on the Kaveri engine. A Kaveri engine sporting potential commonality with the Snecma M88 could be compelling factor in how India chooses its next fighter jets, both for the Indian Air Force and Indian Navy. Those implications, at any rate, would be clearer only once the Kaveri proves itself at every level of performance and envelope. It’s useful to break down the state of play with the new Kaveri in the projected mix.
LCA Mk.1/1A: Currently powered by GE 404. Intended to be powered by modified DRDO/Snecma Kaveri, with first integration aimed for by 2020.
Rafale: Powered by twin Snecma M88 turbofans.
LCA Mk.2: Two of eight GE F414-INS6 turbofan engines were delivered last month to keep the programme rolling. The future of the Mk.2, though, remains uncertain. If the modified DRDO/Snecma Kaveri can be uprated enough to meet Mk.2 demands, it could change things. For the moment, this doesn’t appear to be on the cards.
IAF Single-Engine Fighter: Either the GE F414 (on the Gripen E) or the GE F110/Pratt&Whitney F100 (on the F-16).
Indian Navy Multirole Carrier Fighter: A toss-up, effectively, between the Snecma M88 and GE F414.
AMCA: Intended to be powered by modified DRDO/Snecma Kaveri in twin engine configuration. But this remains in the air for the moment. There are other suitors, notably Boeing’s aggressive pitch that pushes the enhanced GE F414 supercruise capable engine for the AMCA, an engine family that Boeing’s Super Hornet shares with the Saab Gripen E.
GHATAK UCAV: DRDO/Snecma Kaveri modified for non-reheat stealth operations. The Government is clear at this stage that it doesn’t want a foreign powerplant on the sensitive programme.China power sector reform: The challenges ahead
A report that China will soon unveil a plan to restructure the state-run power sector led to a surge in related shares Wednesday.
Beijing intends to create three energy giants through mergers of eight companies, Bloomberg News reported. The restructuring is expected to involve five coal-fired power producers and three nuclear power firms.
The move is part of China’s broad reform in energy sector to reduce the share of power generated by coal from currently over 70 percent to below 40 percent by 2030, and raise the portion of nuclear power as well as renewable energy.
Three major energy groups will be formed, according to the report.
China Huadian and China Guodian Corp., two of the biggest coal-fired power generators, may merge with China National Nuclear Corp.
China Datang and Shenhua Group may merge with China General Nuclear Power Corp.
Meanwhile, China Huaneng may merge with State Power Investment Corp.
Mergers are proposed for the unlisted parent companies, but since their Hong Kong-listed units will almost certainly be involved in the exercise, investors rushed in to buy those stocks.
Datang International Power Generation Co. (00991.HK), the listed unit of China Datang Corp., soared 15.6 percent.
China Huadian’s listed unit, Huadian Power International Corp. (01071.HK), jumped 7.3 percent, while China Huaneng Group’s Huaneng Power International Inc. (00902.HK) rose 6.7 percent. CGN Power Co. (01816.HK), the listed unit of China General Nuclear Power Group, gained 2.6 percent.
Under the government’s master plan to reduce the reliance on heavily polluting coal-fired power plants and replace it largely with nuclear power, traditional power firms are expected to see contraction. To cushion against the financial and social impact (such as unemployment), merging coal-fired power firms with nuclear power firms seem to be a good idea.
Nevertheless, implementation could be difficult. For instance, setting the prices for mergers is one of the daunting tasks.
Dimmed prospects of traditional power firms have kept their shares under pressure, resulting in them trade at around 0.6 times the book value, compared with more than two times in the case of nuclear plays.
A restructure based on the current market pricing may upset shareholders of traditional power firms. But if nuclear firms are asked to pay higher prices to acquire coal-powered plants, they wouldn’t easily agree either, given the overcapacity and expected profit decline.
This article appeared in the Hong Kong Economic Journal on May 10
Translation by Julie Zhu
[Chinese version 中文版]
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RCOf course you develop using the latest technologies and frameworks. You’ve written 2.5 frameworks yourself, your code is PSR-2 compliant, fully unit-tested, has an accompanying PHPMD and PHPCS config, and may even ship with proper documentation (really, that exists!). When a new version of your favorite framework is released, you’ve already used it in your own toy project and submitted a couple of bug reports, maybe even accompanied with a unit test to prove the bug and a patch that fixes it. If that describes you, or at least the developer you want to be: reconsider the relationship your code has with the framework.
The Framework and You
Most code written today at a professional level is dependent upon some framework in one way or another. This is a good thing as it means developers are aware they’re not alone in the world and are reusing the work of others to save loads of time in the long run. There’s plenty of arguments to be found online on why you should use frameworks, and in this article I’m taking it as a proven best practice. But exactly how dependent is your code on the framework?
In my off-hours I like to hang out in the IRC channel #zftalk on irc.freenode.net and help others. When Zend Framework 2 (ZF2) was in the works, a notable trend in the channel was people asking when it would be released. Not because they were eager to use it, but because they didn’t want to start a new ZF1 project when ZF2 was about to hit. A decent project could easily take up to 3 months and if they had to start over by the end of the development process to be able to ship code that depends on “the latest and greatest” then developing it now for ZF1 would be a huge waste of time. The thought is totally understandable. Nobody likes to put time, effort and/or money into something only to find out it’s outdated and has lost half its value. If you spend 3 months coding, you want it to be the best thing released to date with no apparent flaws.
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So, use Symfony (or any other framework) instead? A lot of people went this route, or even completely switched languages (Python and Ruby being popular), so they wouldn’t have to delay their projects. Others completely put their projects off, pushing them back until after the ZF2 release date! Delaying a project should never be an option, so that leaves switching frameworks to not have to suffer the version bump. But let me tell you this right now: you should develop with ZF1, even if ZF2 could hit tomorrow. Rephrase that with ZF2 and ZF3 if you want to, or insert your favorite framework and the current and future version.
Urban Solitude
For the sake of argument, let’s pretend it’s 2011 and work on ZF2 is in progress but there’s no defined timeline yet; it’s going to be done when it’s done.
While it is awesome that you re-use as much code as your favorite framework has to offer, your code has to be able to switch frameworks within a matter of days. Are you are a master of ZF1? Then write your new project in ZF1, even though ZF2 might hit next month. If you design it right, that will not be a setback even if the project stakeholders decide the project has to ship with ZF2 support. Depending on the amount of framework components you use, this change can easily be done within a week. And with the same amount of effort, you can completely switch framework vendors, and use Symfony, CakePHP, Yii, or whichever framework instead. If you write your code without coupling dependencies, and instead write small wrappers that interface with the framework, your real logic is shielded from the harsh outside world where frameworks might be upgraded or replaced. Your code lives happily in it’s own little world where everything it’s dependent on stays the same.
This all sounds very nice in theory, but I understand it can be difficult to wrap your head around without having some code examples. So, we’re still in 2011, still waiting for ZF2, and we have this awesome idea for a component that will answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Given that it will take a little bit of time to compute the answer, we decide to store the result so that if the question if ever asked again then we can fetch it from the datastore instead of waiting another 7.5 million years to recalculate it. I’d love to show the code that actually computes the answer, but since I don’t know the ultimate question either, I’ll instead focus on the data storage part.
<?php $solver = new MyUltimateQuestionSolver(); $answer = $solver->compute(); // now that we have the answer, let's cache it $db = Zend_Db::Factory('PDO_MYSQL', $config['db']); $record = array('answer' => $answer); $db->insert('cache', $record);
Plain, simple, works as designed. But this will break when we swap out ZF1 for ZF2, Symfony, etc.
Notice that we used the decoupled vendor mechanism of Zend_Db. This same code will work just fine for another data storage if we just swap PDO_MYSQL for another wrapper. The insert() and factory() calls will still work, even if we switch to, say, SQLite. So why not do the same thing for the framework itself?
Let’s move the code into a small wrapper:
<?php class MyWrapperDb { protected $db; public function __construct() { $this->db = Zend_Db::Factory('PDO_MYSQL', $config['db']); } public function insert($table, $data) { $this->db->insert($table, $data); } } // Business Logic $solver = new MyUltimateQuestionSolver(); $answer = $solver->compute(); // now that we have the answer, let's cache it $db = new MyWrapperDb(); $db->insert('cache', array('answer' => $answer));
We’ve taken the framework-specific details out of the business logic and can now swap frameworks at any time by only modifying the wrapper.
Staying in 2011, now let’s say our stakeholders decide we need to release with MongoDB support because it’s the hottest buzzword right now. ZF1 doesn’t support MongoDB natively, so we drop the framework here and use the PHP extension instead:
<?php class MyWrapperDb { protected $db; public function __construct() { $mongo = new Mongo($config['mongoDSN']); $this->db = $mongo->{$config['mongoDB']}; } public function insert($table, $data) { $this->db->{$table}->insert($data); } } // Business Logic $solver = new MyUltimateQuestionSolver(); $answer = $solver->compute(); // now that we have the answer, let's cache it $db = new MyWrapperDb(); $db->insert('cache', array('answer' => $answer));
Abstraction Refined
If you paid attention, you’ll notice that none of the business logic has changed when we switched to MongoDB. That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make: by writing your business logic decoupled from the framework (be it ZF1 in the first example or MongoDB in the second example), your business logic stays the same. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how you can adapt the wrappers to every possible framework for data storage out there without having to change anything in the business logic. So, whenever ZF2 drops, your code stays exactly the same. You don’t have to go through each and every line of your application to see if it uses anything from ZF1 and then refactor it to use ZF2; all you have to update is your wrappers and you’re done.
If you use this together with Dependency Injection/Service Locator or a similar design pattern, you can very easily swap wrappers around. You make one interface, a design contract that all wrappers of that type must adhere to, per solution and the wrappers can be swapped around at will. You can even write a simple mockup wrapper adhering to the same interface and unit testing will be a breeze.
Let’s add an interface and a mockup wrapper, and since ZF2 has already been released, let’s add a wrapper for that too:
<?php Interface MyWrapperDb { public function insert($table, $data); } class MyWrapperDbMongo implements MyWrapperDb { protected $db; public function __construct() { $mongo = new Mongo($config['mongoDSN']); $this->db = $mongo->{$config['mongoDB']}; } public function insert($table, $data) { $this->db->{$table}->insert($data); } } class MyWrapperDbZf1 implements MyWrapperDb { protected $db; public function __construct() { $this->db = Zend_Db::Factory('PDO_MYSQL', $config['db']); } public function insert($table, $data) { $this->db->insert($table, $data); } } class MyWrapperDbZf2 implements MyWrapperDb { protected $db; public function __construct() { $this->db = new ZendDbAdapterAdapter($config['db']); } public function insert($table, $data) { $sql = new ZendDbSqlSql($this->db); $insert = $sql->insert(); $insert->into($table); $insert->columns(array_keys($data)); $insert->values(array_values($data)); $this->db->query( $sql->getSqlStringForSqlObject($insert), $this->db::QUERY_MODE_EXECUTE); } } class MyWrapperDbTest implements MyWrapperDb { public function __construct() { } public function insert($table, $data) { return ($table === 'cache' && $data['answer'] == 42); } } // -- snip -- public function compute(MyWrapperDb $db) { // Business Logic $solver = new MyUltimateQuestionSolver(); $answer = $solver->compute(); // now that we have the answer, let's cache it $db->insert('cache', array('answer' => $answer)); }
Using the interface at the dependency injection point has imposed a rule on the wrappers: they must adhere to the interface or the code will raise an error. That means they must implement the insert() method, else they won’t satisfy the contract. Our business logic can rely on that method being present by type-hinting the interface, and really doesn’t have to care about the implementation details. Whether it’s ZF1 or ZF2 storing the data for us, the MongoDB extension, a WebDAV module uploading it to a remote server: the business logic doesn’t care. And as you see in the last example, we can even write a small mockup wrapper, implementing the same interface. If we make the Dependency Injection/Service Locator use the mockup during unit testing then we can reliably test the business logic without needing any form of data storage present. All we really need is the interface.
Conclusion
Even though your code probably isn’t so complex that it takes 7.5 million years to run, you still should design it to be portable in case the earth does get destroyed by Vogons and you have to redeploy it on a different planet (or framework). You cannot assume your favorite framework will stay backwards compatible forever or will even be around forever. Frameworks, even backed by big companies, are an implementation detail and should be decoupled as such. That way, your cool genius application can always support the latest and greatest. The real logic will live happily in the little bubble created by wrappers, shielded from all the evil implementation details and angry dependencies. So when ZF3/ Symfony3/whichever-else-big-thing gets announced: don’t stop writing code, don’t learn new frameworks because you have to (you should because you want to learn more, though), be productive inside the bubble and write the wrappers for the next big thing as soon as the next big thing gets released.
Image via FotoliaEPSN fired Hank Williams Jr. on Thursday for his comments about President Barack Obama.
Or did Hank Williams quit?
ESPN announced it had "decided to part ways" with the country music star in the wake of his comments that appeared to compare President Obama to Adolf Hitler.
ESPN had already pulled Williams' musical intro from "Monday Night Football" on the back of his controversial appearance on FOX News Channel's "FOX & Friends" on Monday morning.
Despite Williams issuing an apology for his remarks, the network confirmed Thursday it was severing all ties with the 62 year old.
"We have decided to part ways with Hank Williams, Jr. We appreciate his contributions over the past years," ESPN announced in a statement. "The success of 'Monday Night Football' has always been about the games and that will continue."
But Williams had his own take.
“After reading hundreds of e-mails, I have made MY decision. By pulling my opening Oct 3rd, You (ESPN) stepped on the Toes of The First Amendment Freedom of Speech, so therefore Me, My Song, and All My Rowdy Friends are OUT OF HERE. It’s been a great run," he said in a statement to FoxNews.com.
Williams landed himself in trouble during a "FOX & Friends" discussion on the June "Golf Summit" -- in which President Obama teed off with Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Ohio's Republican Governor John Kasich.
Describing it as "one of the biggest political mistakes ever," Williams added, "Come on. Come on. It would be like Hitler playing golf with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu."
Williams released a statement on his website Monday night saying his comments were "misunderstood," before offering an apology Tuesday.
"I have always been very passionate about Politics and Sports and this time it got the Best or Worst of me," Williams said.
"The thought of the Leaders of both Parties Jukin and High Fiven on a Golf course, while so many Families are Struggling to get by simply made me Boil over and make a Dumb statement and I am very Sorry if it Offended anyone," he added. "I would like to Thank all my supporters. This was Not written by some Publicist."
Williams' famous intro, which parodies the country star's hit "All My Rowdy Friends," was part of the "Monday Night Football" franchise for 20 years.Oct 4, 2015; Glendale, AZ, USA; St. Louis Rams defensive end Robert Quinn (94) looks on prior to the game against the Arizona Cardinals at University of Phoenix Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports
Los Angeles Rams defensive end Robert Quinn is reportedly in stable condition after he was admitted to a hospital.
Scary news came down on Monday afternoon when it was discovered Los Angeles Rams defensive end Robert Quinn was admitted to a hospital with a non-football illness.
Quinn’s brother James posted a message on Facebook wishing his brother the best, which was picked up by a Rams fan and shared on Twitter:
The post has since been taken down.
If you look further down in the comments, it appears Quinn had multiple seizures on Sunday night, which led to his admission into the hospital.
#Rams Again- Quinn admitted himself in hospital on non football illness- Rams say he’s stable. Fisher will update at 5. — Liz Habib (@LizHabib) November 14, 2016
Then there was this tweet from Quinn’s account on Monday afternoon:
Lllppppp — Robert Quinn (@RQuinn94) November 14, 2016
Quinn had a medical issue in college when he had a benign tumor removed, but he was able to make a full recovery. Quinn also lives with a tumor at the base of his brain to this day:
#Rams Robert Quinn has some serious health issues- a tumour at the base of his brain that he’s been living with since high school. — Liz Habib (@LizHabib) November 14, 2016
The Rams released a brief statement on the matter:
Los Angeles Rams DE Robert Quinn admitted himself to the hospital this morning with a non-football related illness. He is in stable condition. Rams Head Coach Jeff Fisher will provide an update during his weekly news conference today at 5 p.m. PT.
Quinn was on the field for the Rams during the team’s 9-6 win over the Jets in Week 10. Obviously his presence between the white lines showed no indication anything was wrong, so this does come as a surprise to those of us watching.
We wish him the best, as this has been a rough week for the Rams nation.Why I love these sugar daisy mini cakes
I can't believe I made sugar flowers |
Sotones is a Southampton record label that started in 2004. The label is run as a collective by the artists themselves, so they have always had complete creative control and a more honest and close relationship with their fans. The artists support each other in all kinds of ways, be it design and artwork, promotion, production and recording or simply collaborating on their records.
Although it is based in Southampton, the label works with musicians from across the UK and Europe, and it's artists have toured all over the world.
The Spring Social gets under way at 2pm.
The full line up is
Indoor Stage:
The Diamond Age, Beat Easton, Young Adventurers, Sam & The Stone Circle, Calico Cat, AND (The AND Sect)
Outdoor Stage:
Grant Sharkey, Avital Raz, Eliza Jaye, Dave Miatt, Robynne CalvertWhether by habit, or tradition, the US presidential transition is the ideal time to deal with unfinished business. The handover from one administration to its successor offers tempting opportunities to create new facts on the ground in the Middle East.
Israel used the transition between George Bush and Barack Obama to launch Operation Cast Lead on Gaza which stopped two days before Obama’s inauguration on 20 January 2009. Russia is now using the transition from Obama to Trump to do the same in Aleppo.
Both sides in the Syrian civil war understand the significance of timing. The rebels foolishly depended on Hillary Clinton’s assurances to hang on until she came into power. They had no plan B for a Clinton defeat.
Conversely, the Russians understand that they have to finish off east Aleppo by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated. With the Old City fallen, the task is almost complete.
Vladimir Putin does not simply think he has just won back Aleppo. He also thinks he has won the argument with America. This much was clear from the tenor of Sergei Lavrov’s speech last week in Rome. He thinks the incoming administration has finally got the message that “terrorists” - however Russia happens to define them - pose a greater threat to US national security than Assad does.
His argument is one that few would now disagree: from Afghanistan to Libya, America used Salafi jihadis as levers for regime change only to find these weapons turned on them. Russia, Lavrov continued, was not married to Assad. But it was wedded to the Syrian state.
A fear of victory
Russia’s actions, as opposed to Lavrov’s words, tell a different story. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, just over 10,000 people in Syria were killed by Russian airstrikes between 30 September 2015 and 30 October this year, of whom 2,861 were members of the Islamic State (IS) group, 3,079 fighters from rebel and Islamic factions, 2,565 males over the age of 18,1,013 children under the age of eighteen and 584 women.
Displaced children walk through the streets of Aleppo (MEE/ Zuheir al-Shimale)
Like all colonial powers, the Russian Federation has arrogated on itself the choice of deciding which Syrians live and which die
From these figures alone, and there are others, it is clear that Russia has waged total war on an unprotected population in rebel-held areas. War on its people, its hospitals, and its markets, just like it did in Grozny 16 years ago. Its actions differ little from those of the Syrian army. Like all colonial powers, the Russian Federation has arrogated on itself the choice of deciding which Syrians live and which die. And if they are in rebel-held areas, they all die together.
But that is not what worries Lavrov. Privately, Lavrov, like Pyrrhus before him, fears what victory looks like. What does “inhabited Syria”, the phrase I used earlier, actually mean, when victory has been declared? A pile of rubble, one ruined city after another, whose citizens will be totally dependent on aid for years to come?
To support the areas their bombers have destroyed, Russia will have to start putting hospitals and doctors on the ground, which they have already started doing in east Aleppo. These, in turn, will require protection, Russian boots on the ground who will then become targets for rebel attacks. Air power is no use in a guerilla urban war.
Think of how long the Taliban have survived the might of US and allied air power. For, with the fall of Aleppo, the tables will turn once again, as they did when Russia entered the war. Rebel forces will no longer be protecting areas from the assault of pro-Assad militias. They will instead mount classic guerilla hit-and-run attacks on areas under government control. Assad does not have the capacity to provide the physical protection conquered areas need.
The fictional Syrian state
More shattered than the physical infrastructure of Syria is its political one. After five years of murderous civil war, the Syrian state is a fiction, in which sectarian and foreign militias are free to roam. The main function of the Central Bank, to take just one example, is to manage Rami Makhlouf’s portfolio. A state which commands the loyalty and trust of each Syrian denomination does not exist.
Buildings in east Aleppo on verge of collapse after months of heavy bombardment (MEE/ Zuheir al-Shimale)
In the Stalingrad analogy that right-wing nationalist Russian commentators are so fond of using, the ruins of Aleppo are unlikely to be the symbol of resurgence of a new Syrian state. More likely, these ruins will become the battleground of resistance to militarily superior foreign invaders, of whom Russia is one, Iran is another, Hezbollah is a third. Russians are not the liberators of Aleppo, they are Friedrich Paulus's 6th Army, and if they stay around, they will meet the same fate.
There are two scenarios after the fall of Aleppo. The first is that the Syrian opposition in all its forms, both FSA and Islamist, will disintegrate and vanish. Assad will be left in power while talks about a transition will continue indefinitely. No elections will take place that include the refugees outside Syria for the same reason that no Palestinian elections include the Palestinian diaspora in the camps. Regime preservation will be key to all the calculations of Assad’s foreign backers, who have paid a heavy price in maintaining him in power.
Man carries dead bodies away in Aleppo (MEE/ Zuheir al-Shimale)
For this reason, when Aleppo falls, Putin and Lavrov will work overtime to declare mission accomplished as Bush did in Iraq and end the war officially. This is wishful thinking. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, was right to warn Lavrov in Rome last week that the fall of Aleppo will not be the end of the war. The degree of destruction and human displacement in this civil war will only fuel more resistance. This is not a repeat of Hama, the scene of a Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in 1982, which was contained when the city was destroyed by Assad’s father, Hafez.
Will rebels learn?
The fall of Aleppo will only increase the crisis of Sunni leadership. A reaction will surely come. The big strategic question is whether it will be irrational, jihadi-led and destructive, or whether the rebels can fashion a rational response.
And this is the second scenario. Will the rebels learn the lessons of their huge strategic and military failure? These are many. They believed the various assurances from America, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar that they were about to get the battlefield weapons they needed to fight this war. They never came.
The political wing of the Syrian opposition which consisted of defected diplomats and academics in the diaspora simply could not cope with the task in hand
Michel Kilo, the exiled Christian Syrian dissident, whom the Russians tried hard to conscript, furiously accused Saudi of “committing a crime against the Syrian people”. He said: “Our brothers in Saudi Arabia are neither capable of drawing a plan nor are they able to lead a comeback against the campaign that is being waged against Arab and Islamic societies. They live just because they have money; they live in the desert. But tomorrow they will see.”
Kilo went on: “I swear on the lives of my own children we shall not leave the Gulf intact and we shall dismantle it stone by stone. You are destroying the best country in the Islamic and Arab worlds; a country whose name is Syria.”
The lesson from this is that the Syrian opposition can rely on no one. But in order to be self-sufficient, they need unity. The political wing of the Syrian opposition which consisted of defected diplomats and academics in the diaspora simply could not cope with the task in hand. They were riven with schisms. They were weak, deluded about the help they would get from America, outmanoeuvred and outgunned.
The Syrian rebels have to recover their multi-confessional face. The war started as a unarmed civilian uprising against a family-run dictatorship. They are forgotten now, but the faces of this revolution were George Sabra, a Greek Orthodox Christian and the first president of the Syrian National Council, Burhan Ghalioun, a Sunni chairman of the Transitional National Council, and Fadwa Soliman, an actress of Alawite descent.
The faces of fighters are today jihadi, sectarian, or in Kilo’s words, “non-democratic”. The original face of this revolution has to be recovered if a united Syria is ever to emerge again from the ashes of Aleppo.
- David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief foreign leader writer of The Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor, European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent and Ireland Correspondent. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: A photo of Aleppo taken on 5 December 2016 (AFP)
This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.Press Release No. 162/2013
8 July 2013
Calcium signal in neuronal cell nuclei initiates the formation of lasting memories
Photo: Jan-Marek Weislogel, Interdisciplinary Center for Neurosciences (IZN), Heidelberg University, and Shamprasad Varija Raghu, Neuroscience Research Partnership, Singapore. With permission of Science Signaling/AAAS. Brain of the “Drosophila melanogaster” fruit fly with its association and learning centres, called mushroom bodies, marked in green. A subgroup of the marked neurons carries out a switching function that creates long-term memory in the flies by controlling the production of "memory proteins" using a nuclear calcium signal.
Neurobiologists at Heidelberg University have identified calcium in the cell nucleus to be a cellular “switch” responsible for the formation of long-term memory. Using the fruit fly “Drosophila melanogaster” as a model, the team led by Prof. Dr. Christoph Schuster and Prof. Dr. Hilmar Bading investigates how the brain learns. The researchers wanted to know which signals in the brain were responsible for building long-term memory and for forming the special proteins involved. The results of the research were published in the journal “Science Signaling”.
The team from the Interdisciplinary Center for Neurosciences (IZN) measured nuclear calcium levels with a fluorescent protein in the association and learning centres of the insect’s brain to investigate any changes that might occur during the learning process. Their work on the fruit fly revealed brief surges in calcium levels in the cell nuclei of certain neurons during learning. It was this calcium signal that researchers identified as the trigger of a genetic programme that controls the production of “memory proteins”. If this nuclear calcium switch is blocked, the flies are unable to form long-term memory.
Prof. Schuster explains that insects and mammals separated evolutionary paths approximately 600 million years ago. In spite of this sizable gap, certain vitally important processes such as memory formation use similar cellular mechanisms in humans, mice and flies, as the researchers’ experiments were able to prove. “These commonalities indicate that the formation of long-term memory is an ancient phenomenon already present in the shared ancestors of insects and vertebrates. Both species probably use similar cellular mechanisms for forming long-term memory, including the nuclear calcium switch”, Schuster continues.
The IZN researchers assume that similar switches based on nuclear calcium signals may have applications in other areas – presumably whenever organisms need to adapt to new conditions over the long term. “Pain memory, for example, or certain protective and survival functions of neurons use this nuclear calcium switch, too”, says Prof. Bading. This cellular switch may no longer work as well in the elderly, which Bading believes may explain the decline in memory typically observed in old age. Thus, the discoveries by the Heidelberg neurobiologists open up new perspectives for the treatment of age- and illness-related changes in brain functions.
Original publication:
Weislogel, J. M., Bengtson, C. P., Müller, M. K., Hörtzsch, J. N., Bujard, M., Schuster, C. M., and Bading, H.: Requirement for Nuclear Calcium Signaling in Drosophila Long-Term Memory. Science Signaling 6 (274), ra33, 07 May 2013, doi: 10.1126/scisignal.2003598An increase in the cash transfer to the household was associated with higher height-for-age z-score and hemoglobin concentration, lower prevalence of stunting, and lower prevalence of overweight. Children in families whose households received a greater quantity of cash also performed better on a scale of motor development (McCarthy Test of Children’s Abilities), three scales of cognitive development (sub-scales of the Woodcock-Muñoz, including working memory), and receptive language (Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes Peabody).
In an intervention that began in 1998 in Mexico, low-income communities (n=506) were randomly assigned to be enrolled in a CCT program (Oportunidades, formerly Progresa) immediately or 18 months later. In 2003, children (n=3793), aged 24–72 months who had been enrolled in the program their entire lives, were assessed for a wide variety of outcomes. The analyses reported here separated out the association of the cash transfer component of Oportunidades with several outcomes in children from the program conditionalities, while controlling for a wide range of covariates including many measures of household socio-economic status.
Many governments around the world have implemented conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs with the goal of improving options for poor families through interventions in health, nutrition and education. Families enrolled in CCT programs receive cash in exchange for complying with “conditionalities” – preventive health requirements and nutrition supplementation, education and monitoring designed to improve health outcomes and promote positive behavior change. A great challenge in evaluating the effectiveness of CCT programs has been disaggregating the effects of the cash transfer component from that of the conditionalities.
All of the households included in the analysis have complied with Oportunidades’s requirements (i.e., were never taken off of the program for non-compliance), but some have received higher cumulative cash transfers because they were living in communities randomized to begin receiving transfers earlier and/or accumulating cash at a faster rate because they had more school aged children at baseline. Our analysis is much more analogous to a “dose-response” analysis rather than a “treatment-control” comparison. We hypothesized that higher cumulative cash transfers to households would be associated with modest improvements across a range of growth and development outcomes in children.
In the analyses reported here, we examine the effect of the cash component of a large scale CCT program, Mexico’s Oportunidades program. This paper does not compare children in treatment and control groups (a difference in program exposure of only 18 months), a design that would answer the question “what is the total impact of the program?” Rather, we ask the question “what is the impact of transferring larger amounts of cash holding the other aspects of the program constant?” To answer this question, we take advantage of the variation in total cumulative amounts of cash received by the families (determined by randomized year of program incorporation and family demographic structure) and explore the relationship between cumulative cash transfers over the course of the program and child growth, health and development outcomes. The variation in cash transfers is the amount of cash that a family received since starting the program, and was determined by the product (interaction) of how long they have been on the program and the rate of accumulation of the cash. How long they have been on the program is determined by the randomization into the early versus late starting group. The rate of accumulation is determined by the number and grade/sex makeup of school age children at baseline.
There is substantial evidence that in the short term, CCTs improve health and nutritional outcomes for children early in life, 12 – 14 and that these outcomes are achieved in part due to increased use of preventive services mandated by program participation. 8 However, no published studies to date have looked at the impact of CCTs on child cognitive, language or motor development. Additionally, no analyses of CCTs thus far have been able to disaggregate the mechanisms by which CCTs could affect outcomes. In other words, investigators have only been able to compare program participation with non-participation and have not been able to separate the effect of the cash transfer on the desired outcome from the effect of other program components. Understanding the pathways by which CCT programs could be operating could guide policy makers who are faced with the challenge of how to design the most effective and cost-effective interventions.
CCTs have the simultaneous goals of 1) immediate poverty reduction – through cash transfers that can be spent without restrictions – and, 2) long term poverty reduction through human capital development, defined as investing in a person’s health, knowledge and skills. 9 Children are often the focus of the human capital investments, with the intention of giving children the tools with which to break the inter-generational transfer of poverty. 4 CCTs use cash transfers as incentives for parents to invest in their children’s health and wellbeing so that their children will have the capabilities to be able to escape poverty when they reach adulthood. 11
The question of how best to intervene to improve child health and well-being is of paramount importance. 6 Many governments in developing countries, particularly in Latin America, have turned to conditional cash transfer programs (CCT) to address the larger issue of poverty alleviation. 7 In traditional cash transfer or welfare programs, families receive cash benefits because the household falls below a certain income cut-off or lives within a geographically targeted region, and these are the only criteria determining eligibility for participation. In CCT programs, however, families receive a cash payment only if they comply with a set of certain requirements. For example, most CCT programs distribute benefits conditional on mandatory attendance at preventative health care services and health and nutrition education sessions designed to promote positive behavioral changes, and some programs also require school attendance for school-age children. 8 In other CCT programs, there is also the distribution of fortified food and/or micronutrient supplements for vulnerable sub-groups in the population (e.g. pregnant women and young children), which is conditional on the same factors as the cash transfer. It is exactly the conditional nature of the benefits that separates CCTs from other cash or in-kind distribution programs. There are several CCT programs already in place in Latin America, including Oportunidades (previously Progresa) in Mexico, Bolsa Alimentação in Brazil, Red de Protección Social in Nicaragua, Programa de Asignación Familial in Honduras, Familias en Acción in Columbia, Subsidio Unico Familiar in Chile, and Program of Advancement through Health and Education in Jamaica. 9 A CCT is also currently being planned for implementation in New York City. 10
The first paper in a recent Child Development series in the Lancet estimated that over 200 million children under 5 years worldwide are not fulfilling their potential for growth, cognition, or socio-emotional development. 1 Infants and toddlers growing up in poverty are exposed to poor sanitation, large family size, lack of psycho-social stimulation and fewer household resources. 2 As they grow up, children living in poverty in the developing world are likely to have substantially lower wages than healthier adults, 3 and are thus less likely to be able to provide increased stimulation and resources for their own children, thereby perpetuating the cycle of the impact of poverty. 4 Early childhood is a period of rapid change and physiological development and thus, is a period critical for intervention. 5
None of the funders had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data, or in the preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript.
The Oportunidades evaluation was approved by the Research, Biosecurity and Ethics Commissions at the National Institute of Public Heath in Mexico and the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects at the University of California at Berkeley. In each round of the evaluation, participants were invited to participate after receiving a detailed explanation of the survey objectives, procedures, risks and benefits and if agreed, were asked to sign an informed consent declaration.
We report primary results as effect size for each outcome associated with a doubling of cash transfers from the median of 7500 to 15000 Mexican pesos (806 to 1612 US dollars) – which represents a move from approximately the 50th to the 75th percentile of total cumulative transfers.
We also controlled directly for the number of household members and proportion of children in each age category at baseline to ensure that the cumulative cash transfer variable was not confounded with family composition effects. In addition, by controlling for length of time the household had been on the program, we adjusted for the possibility that an individual child may have benefited from changes at the household level that could have occurred before the child was born. We also controlled for a wide range of household-level and community-level variables described above. Since the program was implemented at the community level there could have been inter-cluster correlations between villages, so we clustered at the community/village level. Missing values for control variables were replaced with community means in regression analyses. The majority of the control variables required less than 5% replacement, but father’s education and five household SES variables (water, electricity, land owned, draft animals owned and small animals owned) were replaced in 15% of the cases. No missing values were replaced for the outcome variables included in the analyses.
Cumulative cash transfers were our primary independent variable. Using linear and logistic regressions, adjusted for sampling design and clustering, we regressed the outcome measures against cumulative cash transfers and all of the covariates described above. These covariates included: individual child-level characteristics (age/ sex groupings) and maternal characteristics (education, height, and TVIP score). Covariates also included baseline household characteristics (from 1997), including household size, demographic structure (e.g. number of children and adults of various age groupings), characteristics of head of household (ethnicity, education), housing characteristics (whether household had electricity and piped water), and household assets (ownership of animals, land, and other big and small assets).
The aim of the analysis reported here was to test whether receiving more money (higher cumulative transfers) in the Oportunidades program was associated with improvements in child growth, health and development outcomes. We achieved this objective by restricting our sample to children who had been Oportunidades beneficiaries their whole lives. Thus, all families were exposed to the health and nutrition-related benefits of the program over the entire life of the child, with variation only in the length of time on the program and the cumulative amount of the transfers that have been received. The analysis therefore, does not test for impact of the program among beneficiaries compared to non-beneficiaries but rather whether there is an association between greater amounts of cash received and child outcomes; this analytical framework is more analogous to a dose-response analysis rather than to a treatment-control analysis.
The final household-level variable included in the analysis was household time participating in the Oportunidades program, which was included in the statistical models in two month increments. This variable was added to control for the possibility that parental behavior may have been influenced by time participating in Oportunidades before the child assessed in this evaluation had been born.
The following household-level information was obtained at baseline: composition of the household (i.e. age and sex of all family members), father’s education, number of people in the household, whether an indigenous language was spoken in the home, presence of electricity and water in the household and number of small and draft animals owned. A baseline asset index was created using blender, refrigerator, gas heater, hot water heater, radio, stereo, television, video, washer, fan, car, and van. These variables have been shown to provide good estimations of the economic concept of consumption, the gold standard measure of SES. 31, 32 Principal components analysis, a standard data reduction technique, was used to consolidate the asset variables into one measure, 33, 34 and the first principal component was retained. 35
Age and sex were obtained for all children from birth records. In order to allow for non-linear effects, age and sex were included in all analyses as 11 dummy variables in reference to the baseline of boys 24–30 months (i.e. indicator variables were boys 31–36 mo., boys 37–48 mo., etc. and girls 24–30 mo., girls 31–36 mo., etc.).
Cumulative cash transfers were used as the primary independent variable. As described above, the variation in cumulative cash transfers came from the interaction of randomly assigned timing of initial program enrolment, and baseline household demographic structure. The amount of cash accumulated over the entire period of time enrolled in the program was used instead of cash transfers in the last month because cumulative transfers better reflect the exposure of the child to cash during critical periods for growth and development than does cash received in a specific short-term period, such as the previous month. Over the course of the period of Oportunidades program participation described in this paper, a family with three children that had been part of the early intervention would have received the most cumulative amount of cash, whereas a family with only one child that had been part of the late intervention would have received the least ( ).
Language was assessed for children over 36 months using the Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes Peabody (TVIP), the Spanish language version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test 27 which contains 125 items that have been carefully selected through rigorous item analysis for their universality and appropriateness to Spanish-speaking communities. The TVIP has been widely used to evaluate the language development of Spanish-speaking preschool children, and older students. 28, 29 Scores were log-transformed due to positive skew.
Cognitive development was assessed for children older than 36 months using three sub-scales (long-term memory, short-term, or working memory, and visual integration) from the Spanish language version of the Revised Woodcock-Muñoz test. 23 The scales have been used to evaluate effects of early childhood nutritional interventions and early health insults on cognitive development in children, 24 and were selected because they have shown sensitivity to an income intervention in low income families, 25 and to outcomes in children born with low birth weight. 26 Scores were log-transformed due to positive skew. For the cognitive and language development measures, we spent considerable resources piloting and adapting the tests, training the interviewers, and maintaining a high degree of quality and inter-rater reliability.
Gross motor development was assessed for children older than 36 months using a sub-scale of the McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities, a comprehensive battery that offers a broad picture of a child's abilities. 22 The gross motor sub-scale required the child to walk in a straight line, stand on one foot, and walk backwards, among other tasks. The measures were divided into “skill” (e.g. whether the child could stand on one foot) and “endurance” (e.g. how long the child could stand on one foot), and results are reported separately for these measures.
Height and weight were assessed for all children by personnel trained and standardized according to international recommendations using standard techniques and regularly calibrated portable scales and stadiometers. 19, 20 Repeat measurements were taken from approximately 2% of the sample to monitor quality control. Standardized height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) and percentiles were calculated using publicly available software from the World Health Organization. 21 Linear growth faltering, or stunting, was defined as having HAZ less than −2, which indicates that the child’s height is at least 2 standard deviations below the age and sex specific reference median. BMI percentile was calculated in accordance with standard procedures, and children were then classified as overweight if they were above the 85 th percentile. Hemoglobin concentration was assessed on a capillary sample using a portable photometer (β-Hemoglobin, HemoCue Inc, Ängelholm, Sweden). Mothers were asked to report on the number of sick days that the child had experienced in the month previous to the survey.
In 2003 we went back to a sub-set of the original 506 communities (all those with more than 10 children under 5 years old) and conducted a comprehensive survey. We merged these data with the amount of money actually transferred to households based on Oportunidades administrative records, and with pre-intervention household socio-economic and demographic data from the 1997 survey. In the analysis reported here, we only included children who were born after November 1999 when all households had been enrolled in the program; thus all children in the sample were 24–72 months old. All of the families were beneficiaries at that time, but the families in the early treatment group had been beneficiaries of the program for approximately 18 months previously.
This sample of communities is representative of the Oportunidades rural beneficiary communities and was well balanced suggesting that the randomization was effective in generating truly exogenous variation in the two groups. 17 Eligible households in early intervention communities began receiving benefits in April of 1998, and eligible households in later intervention communities were not incorporated until November of 1999. Although recruitment rates were different in these communities, the households within the communities did not differ in terms of any measured characteristics. 18 Thus, in spite of the fact that the recruitment rates were different between the groups, the outcomes should not have been affected by this difference.
Thus, at the inception of the program, the government randomly chose 320 “early intervention” and 186 “late intervention” communities in seven states for a total of 506 experimental communities ( ). Random assignment was generated at the community level without weighting using randomization commands in STATA; thus, each of the communities was given equal chance of being included. None of the sites was told they would be participating in the study, and information regarding timing of roll-out was not made public.
Then, minimum sample sizes were determined based on power calculations to be able to observe a 10 percent difference in outcomes (e.g. height, school enrollment, and change in socio-economic status measured by per capita consumption) accounting for the inter-cluster correlation introduced by the village level randomization. The government then said that they wanted to increase the number of treatment villages in order to obtain better information on operations leading us to approximately double the number of treatment villages. Once the number of villages was agreed upon, a random sample of villages stratified by state in proportion to state size was drawn. The villages were then randomized within each state stratum into control and treatment groups. There was no within village sampling; rather, a census of households of the villages was surveyed.
A randomized evaluation design was originally implemented by the Mexican Government to conduct a rigorous impact evaluation of Oportunidades. Due to budgetary and logistical constraints, the Government was unable to enroll all eligible families simultaneously and needed to phase in enrollment over an 18 month period. The actual cluster randomization used was dictated in part by Government restrictions on the level of randomization. The Government rules of operation written into the legislation authorizing the program in 1997 dictated that the program would first incorporate poor families living in rural communities with a population between 500 and 2500 residents. For cost reasons and concerns about social unrest, the Government decided that the minimum level of intervention would be at the village level and not at the household level, which implied that whole villages would be either treatments or controls. The government agreed to a stepped wedge design in that once it chose which villages were eligible for the next two years, we could randomly decide which ones were incorporated first (treatments, or “early intervention”) and which ones were incorporated later (controls, or “later intervention”).
The analysis reported here took advantage of the variation across a large group of children in the amount of cash given to the households in which they were living. The variation in cumulative transfers was derived from two sources: the randomized phasing in of the program at the community level and the baseline demographic structure of the household. The randomization (described in further detail below) meant that households in early treatment communities had been accumulating transfers for about 18 months longer than households in later treatment communities. In addition, households with more children in school and enrolled in higher grades, or more female children in higher grades, had higher transfer amounts and therefore accumulated transfers faster than similar households with fewer children in school or with more male children in higher grades.
The health and education components of Oportunidades are strongly enforced as these are conditions for continued receipt of benefits. The program has a modern and efficient information system that permits rapid follow-up of individual beneficiaries who are non-compliant with these components. With the multiple controls in place through these systems, any fraud on the part of providers (eg. falsified attendance cards) can be easily detected. That said there is no way in this type of large program evaluation to guarantee that the quality of these components was similar in all communities.
Oportunidades program conditionalities require that children receive regular medical check-ups. In addition, all pregnant and lactating women and children 6 to 23 months of age receive a fortified food supplement as do children from 24 and 60 months with low weight (see ). Before providing cash to the households, Oportunidades that households actually completed the required health care visits and school attendance. About 1 percent of households are denied the cash transfer for non-compliance.
The cash transfer benefit from Oportunidades comes in two forms ( ). The first is a monthly fixed stipend conditional on family members obtaining preventive medical care and is intended for families to spend on more and better food to improve nutrition. The second type of transfer comes in the form of educational scholarships and is given to families of children starting in third grade in primary school conditional on children attending school a minimum of 85% of the time and not repeating a grade more than twice. Beneficiary children also receive money for school supplies once or twice a year. The size of the education stipend is larger at higher grades and is also higher for girls because the government wanted to encourage older girls, in particular, to stay in school. There is an upper limit in the total transfer received per household, equivalent to having three children in early primary school.
Oportunidades established program eligibility in two stages in rural areas. 16 First, the program identified underserved or marginalized communities and then identified low-income households within those communities. Selection criteria for marginalized communities were based on the proportion of households living in very poor conditions, identified by using data from the 1997 census (Conteo de Población y Vivienda). For the selection of eligible households within marginalized communities, Oportunidades a socio-economic census, which was used to classify households as eligible for treatment or ineligible using a proxy means test (PMT). All eligible households living in treatment localities were offered Oportunidades a majority (90%) enrolled in the program. Once enrolled, households received benefits according to their baseline household composition for a minimum of a three-year period conditional on meeting the program requirements, after which they were re-evaluated for eligibility.
Mexico established its CCT program Oportunidades in 1997 with the dual goals of alleviating immediate suffering and breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty by inducing parents to invest in their children’s development. Oportunidades is the largest conditional cash transfer program of its kind, and is a model for programs throughout the world. In part, this is due to the investment made by the Mexican Government in external evaluations of the program and in the extensive dissemination of the results. 15 In 2004, the budget for Oportunidades was $2.2 billion for a total coverage of 4 million families. 9
As for other variables included as controls in the model, mother’s TVIP (vocabulary) score was significantly associated with all measures of physical health and development as was household size (data not shown). Number of years on the program was not associated with any of the outcomes, nor did its exclusion from the multi-variate model modify the relationship between transfers and outcomes. Indigenous language spoken, a proxy measure for ethnicity, was not significant in the analyses, and neither was father presence, mother’s education, father’s education, or any other measure of household socio-economic status (e.g. electricity, land, animals or appliances owned). All models had an R 2 of over 20%.
A doubling of cash transfers was associated with improvements in one of the two measures of motor development (endurance) (β=0.71, 95% CI: 0.63, 1.26, P=0.01), in addition to long term memory (β=0.11, 95% CI: 0.05, 0.17, P<0.0001), short term memory (β=0.10, 95% CI: 0.06, 0.13, P<0.0001), visual integration (β=0.09, 95% CI: 0.05, 0.13, P<0.0001) and language development (β=0.19, 95% CI: 0.12, 0.25, P<0.0001). There was no association between increased cash transfers and sick days or with the skill component of motor development.
In the multi-variate regressions, increased cumulative income transfers were associated with better outcomes in most domains analyzed, including measures of physical size (height-for-age, stunting, and overweight), hemoglobin concentration, long term memory, short term memory, visual integration and language development ( ). Specifically, a doubling of cumulative cash transfers to the household was associated with an increase in 0.16 standard deviations in HAZ (95% CI: 0.08, 0.24, P<0.0001) and a 9% lower prevalence of stunting (P<0.0001). A doubling of transfers was also associated with a 6% lower prevalence of overweight (P=0.001) and a non-significant decrease in BMI for age percentile (β=−1.95, 95% CI: −4.08, 0.17, P=0.07). Greater cash transfers were also associated with higher hemoglobin concentrations (β=0.13, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.24, P=0.03).
In the analysis reported here of follow-up data collected in 2003, n=3793 children ranging in age from 24–72 months (mean age was 53 |
paint to take away drives, then Love buried perimeter shots.
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At times, the Hawks downsized, partially out of necessity with Mike Muscala and Dewayne Dedmon sidelined with injury. When that happened, Love exploited the mismatch inside -- scoring buckets around the rim or terrorizing the Hawks on the offensive glass, pulling down a game-high six offensive boards.
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It's the same formula the Cavs used to overwhelm Miami on Tuesday -- a night Love scored 38 points and helped limit Heat center Hassan Whiteside.
"He's been playing good," Lue said of Love. "He has some tough matchups over the last six games. Two with Dwight Howard, (Joel) Embiid, Whiteside, (Andre) Drummond and he's been great. He's shooting the ball better. I think he's taken a liking to the 5 because he knows he's going to get open shots and if teams put smaller guys on him, we're going to be able to post him. He's been great."
Initially Lue put Love at center to add more spacing and help the Cavs remain an explosive offense despite summer changes. The team needed it, especially with Derrick Rose and Dwyane Wade sharing the same backcourt. After just three games, Lue reversed course, moved Wade to the bench and put Thompson back with the starters to limit Love's minutes against traditional bigs who wore him down in the paint. That led to different issues.
Thompson's injury changed it again, with Love back to center and Jae Crowder in with the starters. Only this time, there's no Wade, giving the Cavs a starting group with five shooters that has spread out helpless defenses during this winning streak.
Over the last 10 games, the Cavs are shooting -- and making -- more 3's than the first month, rising up the ranks each game. They boast the third-most efficient offense. And Love is at the center of it all -- literally.
"It's funny to say I'm playing out of position, but I'm so used to being out there with Tristan and fighting for rebounds with him and knowing the rotations at the 4 spot, playing inside out from the 4 spot," Love said recently. "It's definitely been a change playing the 5 and having to match up and go against guys and maybe giving up two, three, four inches and 20, 30 pounds. As far as guys helping me out on that end, it's not always going to be easy, but we're able to get the job done."
During the winning streak, Love's averaging 20.6 points on 49.6 percent from the field and 36.5 percent from beyond the arc to go with 10.1 rebounds and 2.0 assists in 30.0 minutes.
On Thursday, when LeBron James needed someone else to carry the load on offense after the Hawks made some defensive adjustments to load up on one side, and the Cavs needed James to slow down speedy Atlanta point guard Dennis Schroder, Love stepped up.
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In the third quarter, he scored 12 points on 4-of-6 from the field and 3-of-5 from 3-point range, shredding the Hawks' defensive strategy.
"Kev's been huge for us and we want that to continue," James said. "But when he's not feeling great, like in the Philly game, we've got other guys that can pick it up and that's what we need to have.
"Kev is our All-Star power forward and we expect good things out of him. But if he has a night off, if I have a night off, whatever the case may be, we've got guys who can pick it up, so that's what it's about. It's a collective team effort."
Thompson is set to return in the next week or so. But Love's growing comfort playing center may lead to Lue sticking with his original plan.The rogue hacker group known as Anonymous posted a YouTube video disclosing the cellphone number, email and home address of Lt. John Pike, the University of California Davis police officer who sparked worldwide outrage when he pepper-sprayed a group of student protesters over the weekend.
"Dear Officer John Pike," a computer-generated voice in the video said. "Your information is now public domain."
The video, which was posted on Tuesday, has since been removed because it is "a violation of YouTube's policy prohibiting hate speech."
Anonymous has threatened or claimed credit for attacks on numerous media organizations, including Fox News--but this appears to be the first time the hacking group has targeted an individual.
"We have no problem targeting police and releasing their information even if it puts them at risk," the group said, "because we want them to experience just a taste of the brutality and misery they serve us on an everyday basis."
The voicemail box for Pike's cellphone was full late Tuesday, the Daily News reported.
"Expect our full wrath," the video concludes. "Anonymous seeks to avenge all protesters. We are going to make you squeal like a pig."
Pike and another officer were reportedly placed on administrative leave following the weekend clash with protesters on the UC-Davis campus.
The image of Pike pepper-spraying the students has been seared into the public consciousness. Photoshopped images of Pike pepper-spraying other things--like Mt. Rushmore--have gone viral.
But not everyone is convinced Pike's use of force was excessive. On Monday, Fox News' Megyn Kelly told Bill O'Reilly that pepper spray "is a food product, essentially."
Other popular Yahoo! News stories:
• Megyn Kelly on pepper spray: 'It's a food product, essentially'
• Sparse turnout at Occupy Wall Street park a week after eviction
• Occupy Wall Street finally gets a face—and it's bloody1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Chronic widespread pain (CWP), the cardinal feature of fibromyalgia, is associated with lost work productivity, psychological ill health, and poor quality of life. It is one of the most common reasons for referral to a rheumatologist []. The cost of CWP is high in terms of both individual, societal and health costs: for example, in the United States, mean per-patient costs (including pain and non–pain-related medication, physician consultations, tests and procedures, and emergency department visits) in the 6 months following a new diagnosis of fibromyalgia have been reported as $3481, comparable to patients with rheumatoid arthritis [] but resulting in worse quality of life []. Current guidelines recommend pharmacological, physical, and psychological therapies although the importance attributed to individual therapies is inconsistent []. There is good evidence for musculoskeletal pain conditions generally that the longer the duration of symptoms, the less likely that symptoms are to improve [], including with specific interventions []. This is particularly so for CWP which, once developed, is challenging to manage and effect improvement.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (RCT) of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for patients with fibromyalgia concluded that CBT improves coping with pain, reduces depressed mood and healthcare-seeking behaviour in such patients [9]. The delivery of CBT by telephone has been shown to be effective, acceptable and accessible [10]. The MUSICIAN study, which we have recently concluded, tested telephone-delivered CBT (tCBT) and/or exercise for patients with chronic widespread pain consulting to their GP (using a 2 × 2 factorial design). Three months after the end of therapy, both interventions resulted in significantly better primary outcome measures (patient global health) than treatment as usual (tCBT 33 % of participants with positive outcome, exercise 24 %, treatment as usual 8 %), but there was no significant additional benefit of receiving both interventions (combined 37 %). Recent analyses have demonstrated these benefits are maintained 2 years after the end of therapy (tCBT 35 % with positive outcome, exercise 29 %, combined 31 %, treatment as usual 13 %), and that tCBT is highly cost-effective [11].
We have conducted a comprehensive literature review with the aim of identifying randomised trials which had the aim of preventing the onset either of CWP or fibromyalgia. This review did not identify any such published trials. Further, a search of 11 international clinical trials registers/databases (including US, UK, Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Japan), undertaken in Autumn 2013 did not identify any ongoing trial with the aim of preventing the onset of CWP (or fibromyalgia). There are several reasons why it may be desirable to try to prevent CWP onset, namely that the majority of CWP patients do not have important symptom improvement with current management (even within trials). Prediction models from epidemiological studies have been developed to identify “high-risk” patients, which makes such an approach feasible. Research using the General Practice Research Database has demonstrated that prior to receiving a diagnosis of fibromyalgia in primary care, persons have a long-term prior history of consultation with symptoms [12]. Although this will be the first prevention trial in this area, the concept of prevention using CBT has been addressed in musculoskeletal disorders with respect to intervention in neck pain and low back pain before people become patients [13] and in mental disorders [14].
We have conducted prospective epidemiological studies which have demonstrated that it is possible to identify “high-risk” groups. In the first study, a high risk group for CWP onset was identified on the basis of two factors: somatic awareness (using the Somatic Symptom Scale) and illness behaviour (using the Illness Behaviour Score) [15]. This was replicated in a second study conducted by the applicants [16]. These “aetiological models” excluded pain and therefore we have re-analysed data from the latter study (also considering pain status) to identify the best predictors of onset and which results in a model more suitable for use in prevention studies. The resulting “at risk model” requires regional pain and two of the following: maladaptive behavioural response to illness (Illness Behaviour score > 4), a high number of somatic symptoms (Somatic Symptom Score > 2) and sleep disturbance (Sleep Problem Scale Score > 4). In the second “validation” study, from a population of 2,374 persons without CWP, 653 satisfied the definition of “high-risk of CWP” of whom 139 had developed CWP twelve months later (that is a Positive Predictive value of 21.3 %). Amongst persons not deemed to be at high risk (n = 1721), 77 developed CWP which is a Negative Predictive Value of 95.5 %.
An Arthritis Research UK report on fibromyalgia/CWP, based on a think-tank held in July 2012, identified prevention as a research priority. We have previously shown short and long-term effectiveness of tCBT for CWP (compared to usual care), in an Arthritis Research UK funded study [11, 17]. Specifically this demonstrated sustained improvement in patient global assessment of change, reduced psychological distress, fear of movement and reliance on passive coping styles. Secondly we have developed and refined statistical models which identify persons at high risk for the future development of CWP. We therefore now propose a study to test whether tCBT can reduce the risk of CWP onset amongst those at high risk.
We will test the hypothesis that among patients who report regional pain for which they have already sought a consultation in primary care, and who are identified as high risk of developing chronic widespread pain, a short course of telephone-delivered Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (tCBT) reduces the onset of CWP. We will further determine the cost-effectiveness of such a preventative intervention.LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Tuesday’s election results sent a mixed message on alternative energy, with Republican victories in Congress likely to curb national alternative-energy policy while California results look set to help the sector.
A voter leaves her polling station during midterm elections, in Mason, Ohio November 2, 2010. REUTERS/Matt Sullivan
Shares reflected the confusion, with solar stocks mostly down in the morning but recovering in late afternoon. First Solar finished flat while SunPower Corp rose 1.3 percent, Suntech Power rose 2.5 percent and JA Solar firmed 3.5 percent.
Big Republican wins in the House of Representatives make it unlikely that a bill to curb emissions from fossil fuels or establish renewable-energy goals will make it through Congress.
But in California, clean-energy policies apparently struck a chord with voters, who handed the governorship to Democrat Jerry Brown, a strong proponent of cutting emissions and boosting alternative-energy industries.
California voters also trounced a ballot initiative that would have suspended clean-energy goals until unemployment fell sharply. With 93 percent of precincts reporting, 61 percent of voters had rejected the measure, known as Proposition 23.
The victory in California, the nation’s most populous state and by far its biggest market for renewable energy, helped compensate for disappointments at a national level.
The results ensure “that California and the entire United States will continue to grow the clean industries and reclaim leadership in the world,” said Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
“I would expect in the next two years that you will see the U.S. becoming the largest solar market in the world, surpassing Germany, China and other countries,” he added.
The U.S. renewables sector employs about 93,000 people, a figure that SEIA has predicted would grow by at least 26 percent next year. Resch said the number of jobs could double thanks to growth in California.
SHADOW REMOVED
The threat of California’s Proposition 23 had cast a shadow over the clean-energy sector, throwing into jeopardy a policy that the state’s public utilities draw 33 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020. Passage of the measure could have allowed utilities to slow plans to ink contracts with solar and wind developers.
With the mandate for the 33 percent clean-energy goal now clear, it could trigger more business for solar-power developers as utilities gear up to meet it. The clarity will also help developers win financial backers.
“When you have a clear policy environment, it makes it a lot easier to find investors,” said Arno Harris, chief executive officer of Recurrent Energy, a developer of solar plants that has agreed to be taken over by Sharp Corp.
“What we’ve seen time and time again is that investors and lenders really want to see from a firm policy standard.”
New agreements could be announced in the next few months, industry veterans say.
The wide margin of defeat gives lawmakers and regulators something of a mandate to go further, according to John Cheney, chief executive of Silverado Power LLC, a solar power developer.
“What this does is put immediate pressure on increasing the renewable energy standard,” he said. “It will eventually go much higher than 33 percent.”
A potential hiccup lies in California’s Proposition 26, which was approved by voters and requires a two-thirds majority to pass various fees, levies and charges that would be declared taxes. But it is unclear how big an impact the proposition will have on clean energy.
Critics say the measure could affect the carbon cap-and-trade plan that the state’s Air Resource Board released last week, by forcing the state to set up the trading of carbon permits under the plan in a way that wouldn’t count as a tax under Proposition 26.
But Mary D. Nichols, who heads the board, said in a statement that the proposition doesn’t impair the state’s 2008 plan for reducing greenhouse gases or any regulations developed under the plan. Those regulations include the proposed cap-and-trade plan.
California is part of a group of 11 states and Canadian provinces known as the Western Climate Initiative. Members are supposed to start regional carbon trading in 2012.
Related Coverage Scenarios: Election clouds future of biofuels incentives
New Mexico’s participation in the carbon-trading plan is being thrown into question after the victory of Republican Susana Martinez in the governor’s race. She opposes the cap-and-trade plan.
In California, an area where developers are seeking clarification is on how much renewable energy California utilities will be able to purchase from out-of-state plants, like those planned for just over the border in Arizona and Nevada, where costs are cheaper.
That issue will likely be hammered out by legislators in coming months, industry analysts say.Progressive heavyweights Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are slated to campaign for Hillary Clinton in the final full week before the general election.
Warren, a US Senator from Massachusetts, on Wednesday will campaign for Senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto and Democrats up and down the ticket in Carson City and Reno, Nevada, according to the Clinton campaign.
Warren will speak about Clinton’s plans for the economy and immigration, and will also “urge grassroots supporters and students to volunteer in the final days” before the election, according to a statement from the campaign.
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Sanders, a US Senator from Vermont, will make three campaign stops on Tuesday. He’s slated to speak at Plymouth State University at 12 p.m.; Dartmouth College in Hanover at 2:30 p.m.; and at Deering High School in Portland at 6:30 p.m., according to the campaign.
He’s expected to hit on familiar talking points, such as raising the minimum wage, combating climate change, and making public colleges tuition-free.Everyone in the tech world will agree that JavaScript is one of the biggest game changers when it comes to the development community. This small, lightweight, object-oriented scripting language has proved just how essential it is for the proper functioning of mobile and web apps alike. Offering connections to objects within the environments that it is used, along with a standard library and a set of language elements such as control structures, statements, and operators, JS provides both client-side and server-side extensions. These extensions are what make interactions between different web and app components possible. It is also not as static as similarly developed languages such as Java and is reasonably free-form compared to other programming languages (it is not strict on matters to do with private, public or protected methods or declaration of variables or classes, etc.)
It is evident that we have enough to be grateful for when it comes to JavaScript. However, Google has gone further to develop a JavaScript framework which offers even more dynamic web application development. This framework is Angular JS. Among the many benefits of Angular is the transformation of static HTML to dynamic, which is possible through the addition of built-in attributes as well as the provision of creating new ones using JavaScript. Coders have made proper use of Angular JS, and these apps are proof of just how efficient it has become in the developers’ world.
WEATHER.COM
The web-based application is designed to provide accurate weather reports and forecasts. This application is available for both pcs and mobile devices. It is one of the most popular weather apps in the world, providing up to 90% correct weather predictions across the globe. It uses Angular to define its different web components and give the user more detailed view and navigation of its user interface.
FREELANCER.COM
This web application is among the most preferred freelance portals in the world today. It works by providing an employer and employee interface, where employers post work to be done, and employees can apply for these jobs and negotiate on terms with the employer. It also provides payment options as well as return policies, or termination of contracts in case employers are not satisfied with the results. Angular enables Freelancer.com to configure different elements so that they can be employer or employee-specific.
NETFLIX
Ask any 20-year-old or younger (or older) person, and they will tell you all about Netflix. It has risen to become one of the most popular video streaming applications, both web, and mobile. It provides the latest movies and TV series on request in addition to its component. More than that, it includes DVD delivery for those with no internet connections at home at their doorstep. Netflix uses Angular to constitute animation and different themes to each of its streaming options so that it always has a modern feel and a dynamic user interface to fit different user needs and preferences.
UPWORK
The web application is arguably the most popular freelance portals available today. UPWORK provides online job opportunities for people across the globe. It works through the provision of employer and employee interfaces, with the addition of interviews and online tests to ensure that employees are in fact qualified for the jobs which they apply. It is built with a stylish, green and white user interface which uses Angular to enforce dynamic loading of classes and other attributes when they are needed.
THE GUARDIAN
The Guardian is one of the most popular design and publishing domains worldwide. It provides the latest news on significant technological advancements, political news, and sports worldwide. It sponsors a plethora of awards while earning some of its own. The Guardian uses Angular to run its web-based application.
PAYPAL
PayPal is the world’s leading online payment companies. It has a dynamic build for both web and mobile applications, using a seamless white and blue user interface which covers different user needs across the globe. PayPal uses Angular to generate classes and dynamic HTML components which enable secure monetary transactions through the Internet.
POSSE.COM
Do you wish to go somewhere? Or do you need company? Well, not to worry because posse.com gives you a chance to interact with people who are on the same destination as you. It also gives you an opportunity to explore the different available areas to visit on your journey and destination. Posse.com uses Angular to provide dynamic views of regions and profiles so that it does not have to load unnecessary data to its clients.
MEALSHAKER.COM
It can be quite the dilemma deciding where to eat, and MealShaker knows this all too well. This is why they are specialized in giving appropriate meal destinations for that first date, quick drive-by or celebrations. It is well equipped with hotel information including graphics display and extensive descriptions which will make it easy for you to select a destination. Angular enables MealShaker to create different classes dynamically so that they are available to clients on request, therefore giving it a more robust and navigable interface.
YOUTUBE FOR PLAYSTATION 3
When YouTube decided to incorporate its video streaming services on the PS3, Angular was the platform which they chose to use so that the HTML data used would be utilized efficiently. They applied dynamic coding through Angular to implement its user interface. The decision was a wise one, too, because it allowed streaming of videos on the PS3 seamlessly without compromising the quality or speed.Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform — Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”
An oft-repeated Republican talking point is that close to half of all federal income tax filers have no tax liability. Prominent Republicans often imply that these people ought to be paying federal income taxes — and that they don’t is a major cause of the budget deficit.
Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors. Last year, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, declared that taxes on the rich should not be raised until the poor are taxed. “I think many taxpayers are skeptical that the answer to our fiscal problems is for them to sacrifice more, when almost half of all households are not paying any income taxes,” Mr. Hatch said.
In April, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, said it was “unfair” that 45 percent of people don’t pay any federal income taxes. Asked if he wanted to increase taxes on these people, he replied, “You’ve got to discuss that issue.”
In May, Richard Mourdock, the Republican Senate nominee in Indiana, likened the current split between taxpayers and nontaxpayers to the pre-Civil War division of the nation between slave and free. Consciously using Abraham Lincoln’s famous “house divided” terminology from 1858, Mr. Mourdock said, “When 47 percent are paying no income taxes — they do pay Social Security, but they are not paying income taxes — and 53 percent are carrying the load, we are a house divided.”
In a McClatchy-Marist College poll in early November, 71 percent of Republicans said they believed the poor should not be exempt from income taxes and only 26 percent said they thought the poor should not have to pay them.
This is ironic, because two of the measures most responsible for the rise in the number of nontaxpayers are the earned income tax credit and the child credit — both Republican initiatives. Together they account for 30 percent of the nontaxpaying population, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Once upon a time, Republicans were more concerned about the number of rich people with no income tax liability.
On Jan. 17, 1969, just days before Richard Nixon’s inauguration, the departing treasury secretary, Joseph Barr, disclosed that in 1967, 155 Americans with an income of more than $200,000 had no income tax liability, including 21 with an income above $1 million.
This was considered such a scandal that Nixon sent a tax package drafted by the Johnson administration to Congress with his endorsement. When the Tax Reform Act of 1969 was enacted, including a minimum tax to force rich people to pay something, he praised that provision.
As Nixon said in his signing statement:
A large number of high-income persons who have paid little or no federal income taxes will now bear a fairer share of the tax burden through enactment of a minimum income tax comparable to the proposal that I submitted to the Congress, which closes the loopholes that permitted much of this tax avoidance.
Ronald Reagan defended his tax reform proposal on the grounds that it would reduce the number of nontaxpaying rich people. In a June 6, 1985, speech, he said:
We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that have allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary, and that’s crazy. It’s time we stopped it.
Among the specific measures Reagan supported to increase tax fairness was an increase in the tax on capital gains to 28 percent from 20 percent.
The Nixon and Reagan initiatives were unsuccessful in eliminating nontaxpayers among the well to do, and in recent years the number has risen sharply, especially after enactment of the 2003 tax bill, which sharply lowered taxes on the wealthy by dropping the tax rate on both stock dividends and capital gains to 15 percent, from 35 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
According to newly released data from the Internal Revenue Service, the number of tax filers with no federal income tax liability among those with an income of $200,000 or more has risen to more than 20,000, just over half of 1 percent of all those with an income over $200,000. In 2009, about four million returns listed such an income out of 140 million total returns.
Internal Revenue Service
The data also show that among those with an income over $200,000, many paid relatively low tax rates: 3.3 percent paid less than 10 percent, 10 percent paid 10 to 15 percent, 37.2 percent paid 15 to 20 percent, 30.4 percent paid 20 to 25 percent and 16.7 percent paid 25 to 30 percent. Just 2.4 percent paid more than 30 percent.
Republicans are always quick to attack Democrats for waging “class warfare” whenever they suggest that the wealthy ought to pay more taxes to help reduce the deficit and prevent the decimation of programs to aid the poor.
But Republicans also engage in class warfare when they suggest that the poor are to blame for deficits because so few pay federal income taxes. Those among the wealthy who are paying no income taxes at least deserve equal time.December 13, 2016 Fabien Potencier
Symfony 3.2.1 has just been released. Here is a list of the most important changes:
bug #20891 Add support for REDIS_URL environment variables. (robinvdvleuten)
bug #20724 [WebProfilerBundle] Fix AJAX panel with fetch requests (OnekO)
bug #20883 Don’t compile when Opcache is not enabled on CLI (ruudk)
bug #20877 DateIntervalType: 'invert' should not inherit the'required' option (galeaspablo)
bug #20886 [Form] DateIntervalType: Do not try to translate choices (ogizanagi)
bug #20855 [Yaml] do not trigger deprecations for valid YAML (xabbuh)
bug #20714 [FrameworkBundle] Fix unresolved parameters from default configs in debug:config (chalasr)
bug #20862 Allow simple-phpunit to be used with an HTTP proxy (Cydonia7)
bug #20882 [TwigBridge] fix constructor args check (xabbuh)
bug #20860 [WebProfilerBundle] Fix a web profiler form issue with fields added to the form after the form was built (tgalopin)
bug #20442 [FrameworkBundle] Bundle commands are not available via find() (julienfalque)
bug #20840 [WebProfilerBundle] add dependency on Twig (xabbuh)
bug #20833 [HttpKernel] Fix open_basedir compat in DataCollector (nicolas-grekas)
bug #20828 [Validator] Fix init of YamlFileLoader::$classes for empty files (nicolas-grekas)
bug #20688 [FrameworkBundle] Resolve env params in debug:config command (nicolas-grekas)
bug #20725 [HttpKernel] Fix annotation cache warmer with failing or missing classes (nicolas-grekas)
bug #20830 [FrameworkBundle] Fix validation cache warmer with failing or missing classes (nicolas-grekas)
bug #20760 [FrameworkBundle] [Workflow] Fix service marking store configuration (fduch)
bug #20745 [Validator] add class name to the cache key (Simperfit)
bug #20530 [Serializer] Remove AbstractObjectNormalizer::isAttributeToNormalize (dunglas)
bug #19141 Throw less misleading exception when property access not found (bramtweedegolf)
bug #20539 Cast result to int before adding to it (alcaeus)
bug #20831 [Twig] Fix deprecations with Twig 1.29 (nicolas-grekas)
bug #20701 Ignore missing 'debug.file_link_formatter' service in Debug and Twig bundles (mbabker)
bug #20816 [FrameworkBundle] Removed kernel.debug from the cache pool namespace seed (Sander Toonen)
bug #20769 [BridgeTwig] Trigger deprecation when using FormExtension::$renderer (nicolas-grekas)
bug #20646 Maintain the selected panel when redirecting to another profile (javiereguiluz)
bug #20767 [Cache] Fix dumping SplDoublyLinkedList iter mode (nicolas-grekas)
bug #20690 [Serializer] Fix argument object denormalization (ogizanagi)
bug #20762 [Form] Fix FormDataCollector (nicolas-grekas, Padam87)
bug #20747 [HttpKernel] Fixed RequestDataCollector handling of null header values. (Gabriel Moreira)
bug #20727 [TwigBundle] Inject project root path into twig filesystem loader (4rthem)
bug #20736 [Console] fixed PHP7 Errors when not using Dispatcher (keradus)
bug #20756 [HttpKernel] Regression test for missing controller arguments (iltar)
bug #20755 [HttpKernel] Regression test for missing controller arguments (iltar)
bug #20732 fix the inline level for dumped multi-line strings (xabbuh)
bug #20418 [Form][DX] FileType "multiple" fixes (yceruto)
bug #19902 [DependencyInjection] PhpDumper.php: hasReference() shouldn't search references in lazy service. (antanas-arvasevicius)
bug #20704 [Console] Fix wrong handling of multiline arg/opt descriptions (ogizanagi)
bug #20700 [WebProfilerBundle][Translator] Fix TranslationDataCollector should use cloneVar (ogizanagi)
bug #20712 [TwigBundle] Fix twig loader registered twice (ogizanagi)
bug #20716 [WebProfilerBundle] Fix dump block is unfairly restrained (ogizanagi)
bug #20717 Fix hide button in toolbar (nicolasdewez)
Want to upgrade to this new release? Fortunately, because Symfony protects backwards-compatibility very closely, this should be quite easy. Read our upgrade documentation to learn more.
Want to check the integrity of this new version? Read my blog post about signing releases.
Want to be notified whenever a new Symfony release is published? Or when a version is not maintained anymore? Or only when a security issue is fixed? Consider subscribing to the Symfony Roadmap Notifications.Mike Huckabee has been attacking Beyonce for music he calls "mental poison," and on Monday night's "Daily Show," the former Arkansas governor didn't back down from his assessment of Queen B.
"Beyonce is such a mega-talent. She can do anything," Huckabee told Jon Stewart. "She's got the pipes to sing. She's got the moves to dance. She doesn't have to be vulgar in order to set the trend."
Huckabee, who recently quit his Fox News show to explore another run for president, said Beyonce has become a role model to young girls and that perceived vulgarity is a problem.
"Do you know any parent who has a daughter who says, 'Honey, if you make really good grades, someday when you're 12 or 13 we'll get you your own stripper pole?'" Huckabee asked.
"I think that's diminishing Beyonce in a way that's truly outrageous," Stewart shot back, and then introduced a clip of Huckabee playing bass guitar during a Ted Nugent performance of "Cat Scratch Fever," a song loaded with sexual references.
"You excuse that type of crudeness because you agree with his stance on firearms. You don't approve of Beyonce because she seems alien to you," Stewart said. "Johnny Cash shot a man just to watch him die -- that's some gangsta shit!"
Huckabee claimed Nugent's song is different because "it's an adult song."
But Stewart didn't buy it.
"You can't single out a corrosive culture and ignore the one that you live in because you're used to it," Stewart said.
Huckabee told Stewart to read his new book, "God, Guns, Grits and Gravy."
"Oh, I read it," said Stewart.
"Did you?" Huckabee challenged. "OK."
"It ain't Shakespeare," Stewart said.Lumix DC-GH5 Mirrorless Micro Four Thirds Digital Camera (Body Only) is rated 4.6 out of 5 by 123.
Rated 4 out of 5 by Anderson from Outstanding Color - Great Formfactor The 422 internal color capture at 4k is amazing! It rivals the C300 mk2. The only real challenge is the codec when editing. You really need a MONSTER of a computer to edit these files "as is". That's why I've only given this camera 4 out of 5 stars. I've just been converting the files to ProRes before I edit them. It's a hassle, but worth the color quality. The Image Stabilization is BANANAS!! Love it. Rock solid images with the IS in-body and in the lens. Granted, this is a micro four thirds sensor, but I've gotten some decent shallow depth of field with the 12-35mm f/2.8 Panasonic lens. Seriously thinking about getting a second one.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Koji from Amazingly good MFT camera GH5 levels up with waveforms and scopes, usable 120 fps, amazing 5-axis stabilization (when paired with dual I.S. lenses) and more customization than you could ever need. There's a "tripod mode" stabilization feature called I.S. Lock that no one is talking about that's truly a game changer for in-camera stabilization. Being able to switch on the fly from "handheld" stabilized to "locked down" stabilized is extremely useful shooting weddings without stabilizers or sticks. I haven't had a chance to grade the 10bit just yet but looking forward to saying goodbye to banding issues that plague in-camera recording on virtually every other camera sub 5k.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Chapin from Worth every single penny I am a professional content creator and have used the GH4 metabones to canon EF for the last 2 years. I upgraded to the GH5 and decided to use the Lumix 12-35 2.8 ii instead of the EF lenses. I cannot believe this camera! Even for stills... I no longer run to my canon. I can walk into any situation and produce amazing video and stills all handheld. The low light is still not as good as the current Sony's but the GH5 can hold high ISOs and the noise has a film grain look to it which is awesome. A massive improvement over the GH4 I highly recommend this camera to everyone.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Derek from The Legend Is Back, And Better Than Ever! The GH5 is the stuff of legend. This feature packed camera is capable for both stills and video. The rugged build quality and mostly good ergonomic make this body inspire confidence, regardless of where you may be. The GH5 is a professional tool, priced at a prosumer level. While lowlight is not perfect in movie mode, it is better than most dedicated Cinema cameras. Battery life is good. The back flip out screen is handy for taking creative shots. In the right hands this camera is a serious creative weapon. And being a M43 system camera means you can rig it to be as large or as small as your gig requires. The specs speak for themselves. If you are thinking about it, well just hit add to cart.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Zach S. from The best camera I have ever used! I love this camera, the quality is crisp and clear, the color is clean and organic. I am coming from shooting on the Canon 5D Mark III. I love the accurate focus peaking and zebras, as well as the swivel touchscreen as well as many other features. The 5D just doesn't cut close to a number of features this camera has. The handiness of all these little features allows me to work much faster and more effectively than any other camera I have used in this price range. I am a run-and-gun shooter. I need to have my camera ready at a moments notice. Put a speed booster on the camera and it is pretty good in low light as well.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Dallin C. from Improves on it's ground breaking predecessor the GH4 I have used the GH3, GH4 and now the GH5. They are improved/added almost everything you could have asked for in a video camera. No need to cover the specs, I'm sure you already know them. I will |
even when it’s right under our nose!!! And we are sadly mistaken if we think we are somehow immune to the wrath of the most evil people on earth. They want us dead!
They would love nothing better than to use our own military against us by goading us into revolting. They have really upped the ante lately too. Swat teaming everyday Americans on a regular basis and making sure it’s in the news, and in our face. If we finally snap, then they will have their pretext to kill us off en mass. They love the cover of war for murdering millions. Don’t you think that our trick CIA could have found and destroyed Hussain or Gaddafi without dropping a single bomb? Smedley Butler was right, war is a racket. But I get the distinct feeling that it’s just not quite as much fun for this group of psychopaths if there’s not total Mad Max destruction.
If after pondering and researching these facts and events, you come to any other conclusion; you are in need of a serious wake up call. The Powers That Be (TPTB) have even carved in stone their desire to eliminate 80% plus of the population of the world. They need a much smaller herd if they are going to be able to steer and control everyone for a One World Government, under their control. A theme emerges when you look at the big picture. They find the things that we all need to survive or use, then put their agenda in motion.
If you still want to believe your government loves you, let me count for you the ways they don’t.
1. ASPARTAME (renamed AMINO SWEET or NEOTAME to thwart growing awareness)- Named commercially Equal/Sweet ‘n Low, aspartame has now found its way into 5000-6000 food products. This artificial sweetener was denied approval three times. That is, until Mr. Donald Rumsfeld was hired as the new president of the Searl Co. The company has since been sold to Monsanto. This chemical literally turns into wood alcohol in your body, by-passing the blood brain barrier. Tests show it causes brain tumors and cancer, reduces fertility, can be addictive, and cause many other serious health problems. The incidence of brain tumors and cancer has risen dramatically since it was introduced. The test monkeys were trying to tell us something. A quick read on how they make it and you’ll realize why it’s so toxic. Instead of a “WARNING” on food labels, most products just say ‘sugar free’.
2. GMO CROPS– Since these crops are patented; no one really knows exactly what types of genes are spliced into their DNA. They call them terminator seeds, meaning they do not produce seeds for future planting and must be purchased by farmers every year. The original theory was to blend Monsanto’s herbicide Round-Up into the gene of the plant so the crops could be sprayed with Monsanto’s Round-up without killing the plant. Way back in the 1980’s president G.H.W. Bush declared that if Genetically Modified crops looked like regular foods, then they were foods, and the government would not spend federal money on testing or researching their safety or efficacy.
It has since been a battle royal for independent scientists to show that these foods are indeed questionable as to their safety for human or animal consumption. Obvious evidence from around the world shows that farm animals, as well as mice and hamsters in laboratory tests, have a high incidence of death and deformity in second and third generation offspring, spontaneous abortion and sterility. These plants have infiltrated growing fields around the world and their derivatives are in nearly all our foods. Problems are arising in spite of the hyped ‘improved crop yield’. Complete fields are collapsing, new ‘super weeds’ are growing, and the over spraying of pesticides and Round-up are destroying the biology of growing soil. GMO crops were never tested over the long haul, and now the very worm the farmers wanted to avoid are developing a resistance to the GM corn. Monsanto’s answer? Plant up to 20% of the fields with NON-GMO to lure the worms over there! And, now they’ll try splicing two kinds of pesticides into the corn seed. Last summer Monsanto had to pay GMO farmers to use their competitor’s herbicide, since Round-up was not working anymore.
Organically grown crops are being contaminated by wind and cross pollination, and farmers are being sued for ‘stealing’ Monsanto’s property. If they can’t afford to fight the monster company, they are losing their farms and lifetime investments. Monsanto hires private thugs to secretly inspect organic farms in order to accomplish these take downs. The predatory Big Ag companies have declared war on smaller farmers and us. Scientists believe that once the distorted DNA of these plants go into our bodies, that our own DNA is invaded and that our intestines can literally become pesticide factories. Monsanto has put up vicious attacks on scientists who try to warn about GMO dangers. Recently the USDA ignored an urgent letter from a Purdue scientist about a newly discovered pathogen in GMOs, pleading with them not to approve Monsanto’s new GM alfalfa. The USDA has even defied an appeals court order not to approve it until an environmental impact study was conducted, but they approved it anyway. What ever happened to the truth that “you can’t fool mother nature”? If GMO’s are not stopped now, indigenous seeds, organic foods, age old farming methods, clean and normal healthy foods will be destroyed forever. Since Monsanto lobbied against their ‘Franken Foods’ being labeled, and won, we have become the de facto ‘environmental impact study’. There are already red warning lights flashing, but hell, who cares? Full steam ahead!
3.COREXIT– During the Gulf Oil Disaster, BP defied the EPA’s ‘order’ not to apply this highly toxic deadly poison into the sea water. A ‘no fly zone’ was, and still is in force, so the public will not see that the spraying continues to this day. There has been a news black out imposed on scientists, researchers, doctors who are trying to diagnose and treat the many illnesses that the Gulf residents are sick and dying from. Plants and humans are being affected far, far inland, but no one knows the extent of the damage. The Corexit has produced new and deadly bacteria, one is known as Blue Plague, but that’s where the story dead ends. Has anyone heard the numbers of the premature deaths on the Gulf Coast, compared with the normal death rates? No, I didn’t think so. Somehow the news did leak out though, that the ‘spill’ has blown open and is gushing oil again, although it’s questionable that it ever stopped. Gee, if oil drilling expert Matt Simmons was still here, maybe we could find out. He gave very good reports on TV. He died alone in his hot tub one night from what they said was a ‘heart attack’. I sure miss him.
4. VACCINES– Does it seem to you that every day some new vaccine pops up that we must have? Shingles? HPV? In my 33 years of working with the public on an intimate level, I’ve never known anyone who died of cervical cancer. Hmmm. Each year they guess which flu bug might come around, and we’re all supposed to line up. A couple years ago they said ‘oops, we were wrong, come in for another stab’ of a different brew. Two winters ago they said we were all going to die a quick horrible death if we didn’t get the ‘human, pig, bird’ flu shot. I didn’t even see anyone sick, let alone die, did you? Many got sick and died from the vaccine though. Is it any wonder the drug companies paid off congress some years ago to exempt them from any damage liability for their vaccines? We’ve all heard the horror stories about what these shots can do to people. Squalene, mercury, and lord knows what else is in these formulas, or how they are cultured. Since we aren’t told, I’m not allowed to repeat rumors here. I did read last year that 83% of the people in California who ‘contracted’ whooping cough had been vaccinated for it though. Hmmm
Unfortunately, the government has admitted that ‘some’ vaccines had cancers cells in them, that they infected thousands of children in other countries with polio, and conducted illegal experiments on people with syphilis bacteria in Alabama and Guatemala. What a good way to hurt a lot of people at once; figure out what a whole lot of people think they need or want, then shoot it straight into their veins. But just as people are finally wising up to the dangers of vaccines, Big Pharma pushes harder and harder for vaccines to be mandatory for when they decide to create another fake pandemic or illness.
5. FALSE PANDEMIC PANIC– An investigation into the World Health Organization’s (WHO) proclamation that the world was in a bonafide pandemic (after changing the criteria for that level 6 classification), it was discovered that there were unscrupulous and conflict of interest ties to the pharmaceutical companies. Wow! What a surprise! And yes, what was the payoff going to be? Billions of flu shots sold. Sometimes I think they need to float a trial balloon just to see how many people are still buying their scary propaganda, inflamed and enabled by the corporate owned mainstream media. Pharmaceutical companies, with the governments’ help, have already accomplished blackmailing parents into shooting up their children with a plethora of vaccines if they want to send them to school. The Powers That Be are hell bent on finding some way to force their poisons into all of us. Keep in mind that whatever the TV is trying to sell you, whatever story they go hyperbolic over, it means one of 2 things. It is either to promote TPTB’s agenda, or to divert your attention away from TPTB’s agenda. And when they omit news that’s important to your life, it’s so you don’t think there’s an agenda at all.
6. PHARMACEUTICAL DRUGS– I think the number of deaths caused by prescription drugs each year is up to 200,000 if I’m not mistaken. And that’s not even the mistakes. That’s the number for properly prescribed meds! The drug companies trump up a crisis, like cholesterol numbers that are too high, restless legs, hyperactive kids, whatever, just when they are ready to release their shiny new pill for exactly that problem. They lie and fudge in their testing, hide the flaws in the results, push for fast track approval, and wala! Billions more pour into their coffers, while people start keeling over in droves. By the time the FDA decides to even ‘study’ the issue, thousands have died. Don’t you just love being the real test subjects for them? And you didn’t even get paid to be in a clinical trial! Even if the hungry lawyers get the class action suits going, the award damages are far, far smaller than what the company has already raked in. Oh well, there’s always ‘collateral damage’ with these things, you know? Haven’t I heard those words somewhere before, like when the government is making excuses for killing ‘innocent civilians’ during war?
7. FLUORIDATED CITY WATER– This is a little trick they stole from the Hitler playbook. It’s just so expensive to dispose of the waste from aluminum manufacturing, hmmm, what could we drum up as a good use for it? Never mind that it actually causes brain damage, or makes your teeth mottled and discolored, or corrodes your bones, we’ll just put that skull and crossbones on the 55 gallon drums to warn people. But they’ll still think it’s good for them because we said so, right? Then we’ll pay the dentists to agree. Gee, another thing a whole lot of people need, water! Now, one of President Obama’s czars suggests adding in lithium to keep people calm, along with the other pharmaceuticals that have been found in our water supplies. No matter what we learn after the fact about what’s been done wrong, it just continues on anyway, doesn’t it? Why is that?
8. AEROSOL SPRAYING– Have you noticed all those pretty streams planes make in the sky over your head? I have. They can turn a clear Arizona deep blue sky cloudy, in just about an hour. Sometimes they make puff clouds that have streamers draping off of them. Cool! But maybe in a short time, you find you can’t breath so well, or you find these cobweb like things on your plants, or it can look like it’s snowing when it’s 100 degrees! More cool! But it’s a different story when you read about the testing of what’s been collected in air samples, or in people’s blood and saliva. Micro particles of aluminum, barium, strontium, arsenic, zinc, and too many to list other heavy metals, along with strange bacteria and fibers.
Have you ever heard of Morgellon’s disease? It’s where people develop moving fibers under their skin. It’s one of the most horrible, unimaginable, creepy and disgusting skin ailments I’ve ever seen. Look it up. Dr. Clifford Carnicom has been researching aerosol spraying, otherwise known as chemtrails, for over 12 years and has discovered the Morgellons fibers in the fallen debris and in the saliva of 99% of the people he’s tested. What do you know? One more thing we all like, breathing the air! By the way, it’s not legal for the government to experiment on us without our permission, “UNLESS it’s for medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial purposes, or for research in general, or for protection against, or for law enforcement purposes, including riot control”. (Section 1520a Chapter 32 of U.S. Code Title 50). No wonder our ‘representatives’ scurry like rats when approached about this subject! They must have their own special air to breathe.
9. FDA– How many words are the limit for regular articles? Some doctors have been known to call this the Federal Death Agency. There are countless detrimental to life additives, fillers, chemicals, artificial extenders, dyes, poison in plastic food containers, and even radiation that are just fine with the FDA for us to eat. But don’t you dare consume organic raw milk! Oh no no no. They just won’t have any of that! If you report adverse effects from one of their approved elements, you may not hear back from them for years. You won’t even be noticed if you’re already a statistic! It just depends on what made you sick. If it was something a huge corporation makes, forget it. If you got sick from a peach you bought at a local roadside stand, or some lemonade from your neighbors little girls stand down the street, well its curtains for them. They’ll get 10+ years in the slammer.
Just beware while you’re shopping at your favorite organic fresh food grocer. Those black Suburban cars, swat team ninja cops, and big AK-47 rifles can be quite startling. Oh, I forgot about all the toxic chemicals that are allowed to go into our skin and hair products too. Boys and girls, don’t forget to use your (cancer causing) sunscreen now. Remember to be careful in that bad sun! P.S. Watch out for domestic home grown terrorists like John McCain and Dick Durbin, they’ve been trying to outlaw your vitamin and mineral diet supplements, and they just won’t quit.
10. VITAMIN SUPPLEMENT DEMONIZATION– The Pharmaceutical companies have a jealousy problem. They don’t like all the money you’ve been spending on vitamins to stay healthy. It’s just driving them crazy. So they got our government to sign onto some UN treaty called Codex Alimentarius. This multi country UN gig wants to judge just how little nutrition you actually need in your vitamin pills, something like what wouldn’t be enough for your pet fly. Then they want to give the rights to BigPharma to make the pills, with only slightly more milligrams at one thousand times the cost. What the heck took them so long? And to make it even better, you’ll have to go to your doctor (IF you can find one after ObamaCare kicks in) for a prescription for your vitamin A, B, C, D, Etc. So now, we won’t have to worry at all about maintaining good health, because our loving government will do it all for us, right? So, when all the diseases that are caused by nutritional deficiencies return, all the pharmaceutical companies will be lined up waiting to fix us.
Are you getting the picture yet? Foods that are loaded up with chemicals, pesticides and herbicides, hormones and anti-biotics to counteract e.coli and staff bacteria; severely depleted in nutrients and minerals, and shipped in from all over the world with scant oversight. Yet they want to deny us the only means we have to counteract the industrialization and over processing of our foods. The deal is to keep us very sick, slowly dying, and drain our purses dry, before we die. Speaking of dying, how many people are killed by vitamins each year? None, or one? From the way the FDA is reacting, and Sen. Durbin’s new bill, you might think there was a holocaust in progress. Well, there is….. But it’s not caused by vitamins!!
11. EPA-Natural gas fracking (flaming tap water). 5 year Naval war exercises on all US coasts with every horrible kind of toxin, bomb, or chemical warfare germ you can think of. They even admit this endeavor will “take” (read ‘kill’) up to 11 million sea mammals. Nuclear leakage and fallout. Every imaginable chemical, pesticide, and herbicide. Chemtrails. Oil spills and gushers. Aerosol spraying of deadly toxins on oceans. Ocean trash dumping by corporations. Neglected toxic Superfund sites. Overflowing spent nuclear fuel pools all over the country. Electro Magnetic Frequencies (EMF). Let’s see. What am I forgetting? It doesn’t matter. Anything is OK by the EPA apparently.
12. USDA– Let me give you a clue. All these alphabet soup agencies are head fakes. They were put in place by TPTB to make us think the government was protecting us and our country. And maybe for awhile, to get us believing in them, they were. But folks, the worm has turned. Look out. They are all there to enable the move to consolidate the elites’ plan for total control over our lives!
Here’s a line from a recent article: ‘The USDA lied to farmers and ranchers about federal drought insurance. The government has refused to pay up during the worst drought in US history’. More farmers down the drain. The USDA is an enemy of the country. The FDA is an enemy of people. The SEC is an enemy of investors. The EPA is an enemy of the earth. I could go on if you like. Nothing is logical. Nothing makes sense. What’s love got to do with it? Nothing. TPTB are brutal, evil, and diabolical. They delight in death and destruction, and enjoy watching us suffer.
13. FUKUSHIMA- What is Fukushima? I think I’ve heard of that somewhere before. Was that the name of a country somewhere near Japan or something? Oh that’s right, there was a tsunami, and I think I heard something about a nuclear power plant. Boy, that CNN just jumps from one story to the next. Things are moving so fast these days it’s hard to keep up. But I think somebody from England said something about not going out in the rain, or eating green leafy vegetables. But everything must be OK now, because I haven’t heard any more about it.
Nothing is more despicable than to have our government order a news black-out about what is very possibly a life extinction event of mass proportion.
14. THE FOOD SAFETY AND MODERNIZATION ACT– Better known as ‘The End of Small Farms and Don’t Bother Looking For Roadside Fruit and Vegetable Stands Act’. Those small time farmers are going to be too busy complying with new draconian paperwork and regulations to worry about the safety of their organic crops. While they are busy paying the piper, the crops will die of neglect anyway. But don’t get all huffy and think you’ll just grow some food of your own. The Garden Police will show up with their AK-47s, and God knows what will happen if you don’t have your permit! And don’t even think about sharing your extra tomatoes with the neighbor. That is against the law now. They’ll work best thrown onto the compost pile for next years planting.
Our loyal representatives twisted themselves into pretzels to get this bill passed. The lame duck congress even worked till the wee hours of the morning so no one would see what they were doing on the last day they were in office. Many who may have voted ‘no’ had gone home to bed. They got about 6 million letters, calls, and e-mails from the suckers who voted for them, begging them not to pass this dangerous bill! But they just couldn’t resist giving us a parting gift, because they couldn’t resist the parting gifts they got for passing this disgusting bill. In case you haven’t picked up on it, every new bill in this Orwellian world we live in, has a name the exact opposite of what its underlying purpose is.
15. SMART GRID and SMART METERS– As if electro magnetic frequencies (EMF) from cell phones, cell towers, microwave ovens, HD TVs, wi-fi signals, medical CT scans, X-rays, and airport scanners, aren’t enough to fry us, we now get to have the new and improved electrical grid along with the deadly ‘smart meters’ that go with them. Here’s another gift from TPTB money grabbers who have nothing but their own agenda in mind. Even all the corporations who are going to be bidding for a piece of the action dare not bring up the issue of safety. Not a word! This may finally be the wake-up call for all the people who refused to believe their government has anything but their best interests at heart. Once again, our dependence on electricity will be used to hold us hostage, and to make us comply with something that may very well kill us! Not to mention that ‘smart meters’ are a complete invasion of your privacy and a way for Big Brother to keep track of your every move and even control your appliances remotely if they want. Please read up on this subject before they come to your town and alert your neighbors! The meters will be spewing strong pulses of microwave energy all through the environment, your home and everybody in it, then returning the signal to a receiver up to 2 miles away. Even if you didn’t have one, don’t worry, you’ll be treated to all your neighbors signals as well, right through your walls.
Your utility’s talking point will be that ‘they are no more dangerous than a
cell phone’, or that it only pulses twice a day. Outright lies! Apparently, they haven’t been keeping up on their propaganda scheme. Even the WHO is finally admitting that cell phones do cause cancer tumors! Another case of hiding the health risks for the benefit of big corporations. And, according to Dr. Bill Deagle, who has been testing the smart meter, it’s been putting out 100 times the EMF of a cell phone! I wonder how long it will take to kill people who are unfortunate enough to live in multi-family dwellings, or live with a meter bank containing hundreds of meters a short distance from their home? Don’t think our government knows exactly what they’re doing to us? The military has studied this technology extensively! The meters have not even been approved by UL, and you need a subpoena to get safety rating records from the utility co. How would you like to die? Cooked by microwaves, or fried in a fire? The meters have been catching on fire and may have been the cause of the gas line explosion in San Diego that took 8 lives and 47 homes a few months ago. Federal “investigators” said they were not going to investigate if the meter was the cause “because the meter did not cause the explosion”. They don’t look for things they don’t want to find.
The utility commissions and the utility companies are playing extreme hardball with people who do not want to be microwaved in their homes. If you try to ‘opt out’, you will pay dearly to protect your health, while they are happy to place your life on the black jack table for that first winning hand. Judging by Dr. Deagle’s own testing of his smart meter, it’s obvious that any test results provided by the industry claiming the meters are completely safe are fraudulent! Further, they do admit that there has been no long term testing, but you’ll need a subpoena to see their safety data. So just like cell phones, how can they dare to make any safety claims? “The meters are within the FCC’s guidelines” they say. (Another alphabet agency) I guess cell phones are too, although the radio frequency levels they put out have just been listed as carcinogens. Once again, the people who will get rich off this boondoggle will be sailing away on their yachts, while you lie in a hospital bed dying of cancer. You can bet they won’t have smart meters on their homes!
The government has offered bribe money to the states, utilities and the utility commissions (which came from us in the form of ‘stimulus money’) to institute this program. Then we’ll pay for it again ‘to reimburse the utility along with a ‘fair’ profit’, by paying much higher rates. It is NOT mandated
by law, but if you refuse them permission to install the meter, they will come back and install it anyway and say you have no choice. Or they’ll threaten to turn your power off! They thought they could pass this one off by saying it will save us money, conserve energy, and save the earth! But people are catching on to this one, and the lawsuits are already under way. (Good luck with that. How many judges do you trust these days?) Act now and get your city to ban them, please! And don’t forget to educate your doctor. He’ll need the info to treat your addled brain and confused bodily systems, if the Cabal gets their way. Every cell in our body has an electrical biology, and unless you aren’t human, you will be damaged. It’s the modern day version of a gas chamber. The chamber this time happens to be your own home, If this isn’t our line in the sand, nothing is.
16. UNENDING WARS– Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be soldiers. If they make it back home, they’ll never be the same. Look up Gulf War Syndrome. They are guinea pigs for every imaginable vaccine, and unwitting victims of America’s own weapon of mass destruction called
depleted uranium. You could also become the proud grandparents of a grandchild with 2 heads and 4 legs. It has become very obvious that our government, our military, and our country have been the subjects of a coup ‘d tat. The next time someone says our sons and daughters are defending our freedom, remind them of the black SUVs and swat team raids on the beautiful Amish farmers, or the 630 citizen deaths by cop tasers, or the no warrant, no knock raids on homes of innocent people, or the sexual assault by the airport TSA because people just want to visit their family in another state.
I know our young people sign up out of financial desperation and perceived patriotism. Once they sign they are compelled to follow orders, but
it is now apparent to the entire world that they are not fighting for our country, but for the agenda of the cabal of elites who want to own it all, including you. The military standing down is our only hope for saving the country. We need them to defend us, right here at home, from the enemies within, and the outside enemies who are fomented by our government’s lies. I hate to say it, but right at this moment, our military is aiding and abetting the enemy to destroy our dreams, our freedoms, and our country. Is there not a single commander who has the guts to loudly and publicly just say NO MORE?!
17. OBAMA”CARE”– Written by the insurance companies, it will be the perfect covert plan to eliminate all the ‘useless eaters’ and save the government from paying all of us pesky Baby Boomers our social security. It won’t be hard, since while they are adding 30 million people into the system, 60% of the doctors we have now will be long gone. They want nothing to do with it. Everyone knows that the medical system is in melt down as we speak anyway. One of my favorite parts of this travesty is the rule that if you are ‘not up to date on your vaccines’, you won’t get care. It’s such a fabulous law that the scum who voted for it made themselves and their staff exempt from it! Make your doctor appointments now! It may be a few years wait. Ask him if he makes house calls to jails, since that’s where you’ll be if you can’t afford ObamaCare. By the way…. when your doctor (if he hasn’t left the country) asks, by law, if you have any firearms in your home, tell him ‘absolutely not’! Then ask him why he wants to know.
18. WEATHER MODIFICATION– Scientists say the technology certainly exists. I’m sure the ruling Cabal has unlimited funds to invest in it, and the Navy says they’ll own the weather by 2025. We keep having rare, deadly, ‘once every 100 years’ droughts, floods, earthquakes, temperatures, and snowfalls, so I’m really suspicious about this. I think they own the weather now! It seems to add up to broke farmers, food shortages and sky high prices. Our government signed on to a UN treaty that prohibits all countries from using weather weapons. So, our leaders promptly privatized the U.S. weather bureau, and created numerous front companies that carry out their plans for them anyway. It’s similar to hiring that company Blackwater in Iraq. They did such a good job for the U.S. in Iraq, and they’re so proud that they changed their name to XE, as if that makes them seem any less dark.
19. FINANCIAL COLLAPSE/DEPRESSION– I forget. How many people died during the 1930s depression? One of the most telling discoveries were the thousands of coffins piled up that Jessi Ventura showed on one of his TruTV shows. That show was never aired again, and was removed altogether from the TruTV website and the internet. Are the coffins for the masses of people who will starve during the new great depression? Why did the government order them? If they are there in case of a big natural disaster, wouldn’t the government just say so? Instead they removed the evidence from view. In detective terms, they call that consciousness of guilt.
Will someone please wake me up after I’m dead, and let me know if any of the psychopathic, demonic, control freak maniacs, who have gutted our country and our lives, are ever held accountable and banished from this world? I’d appreciate it. Thank You!
Please print out this article and give it to the people you care about. If they are still sleeping, but have any survival instinct left, maybe this will shake them awake. We are NOT in Kansas anymore my fellow Americans.Norway has announced plans to kill more than two-thirds of its remaining wolves, justifying the action as protection for livestock. The plan has sparked outrage by conservationists.
Three wolf packs, including pups, will be shot by hunters during Norway's annual hunting season, which runs from Oct. 1 to March 31. Last year, 11,571 people applied for licenses to kill just 16 wolves. This season's allotment would mark the largest wolf kill in the country since 1911.
"This is an outright mass slaughter. Something similar we have not seen in nearly 100 years, when the policy was that all large carnivores would be destroyed," Nina Jensen, CEO of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) of Norway, told The Guardian. "To shoot 70 percent of the wolf population is not worthy of an environmental nation."
She goes on to note, "This decision includes a wolf family in Letjenna who have not taken or eaten one sheep since they established themselves there in the winter of 2011/2012."
In Norway, farmers release about 2 million sheep to open grazing lands. Of these, estimates are that 120,000 go missing each year. Those lost include natural accidents, being hit by cars and trains, and predators including wolves and wolverines. Estimates for the numbers lost to wolf predation vary from 380 to 1,800 and may be influenced by Norway's compensation policy. Along with many other European countries, Norway compensates farmers for livestock losses due to wolves, creating an impetus for inflated numbers.
Europe has an estimated population of 13,000 wolves, with about 400 in Scandinavia. Protection for European wolves varies by country. Sweden and Norway have often been at odds in their approach to wolf management, where Norwegian's former government minister in charge of environmental issues, Erik Solheim, said in 2011, "Everyone knows that the wolf doesn't pay attention to borders. Wolves from Sweden can come into Norway and do great damage, and therefore it would help if can cooperate on this." Solheim is currently Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program.
In Western Europe, Spain has a population of 2,000-3,000 wolves, but can be hunted in most areas. Italy's 600-700 wolves are protected and the population is growing at about six percent a year. Countries in Eastern Europe including Poland, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Turkey have populations ranging from 700 to 7,000.
Wolf skins for sale at the Bergen fish market in Norway. Credit: Wikipedia Commons
Conservation biologist Crystal Crown writes, "It does appear that Norwegian farmers have a vendetta against wolves that is not rooted in fact, but rather fear and hate. If anything, the culling program could serve to reinforce these fears by making the farmers feel justified." She notes that Norway maintains its wolf population at around 20 animals, calling it "artificially low numbers."
The wolf hunt in Norway comes as a recent study, published Sept. 1 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, questions the effectiveness of predator control on livestock protection.
"Livestock owners traditionally use various non-lethal and lethal methods to protect their domestic animals from wild predators. However, many of these methods are implemented without first considering experimental evidence of their effectiveness in mitigating predation-related threats or avoiding ecological degradation," states the report.
It remains to be seen whether the protests by the WWF and others will have any impact on Norway's plans.The "Ku Klux Klan", from the greek "kuklos", ("circle" or "wheel"), is, like Masonry, a "fraternal organization". This one grew out of the Civil War in America to protect and preserve the white race and ensure "voluntary separation" of the races, and even extinction of Blacks, Catholics, and Jews.
They are well known the disguised hooded Klansmen, in their white sheets, posing as ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, with their blazing torches burning large wooden crosses in a "circle", to terrorize and kill Blacks, just for the sake of being Blacks...
... "we don't burn crosses, we light them", they claim, "and it is a religious celebration and ceremony, not an act of desecration"... they are really sick!... with a violent history, including lynchings, murders, and bombings.
It was founded in Polaski, Tennessee, in 1866 by 6 Confederate officers. One of them, and the first Imperial Wizard of the KKK, was a former Confederate general and Freemason, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
... Albert Pike held the office of Chief Justice of the KKK while he was simultaneously Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite of Masonry, in the Southern Jurisdiction...
... the KKK was known as the "Invisible Empire of the South"... in 1869 Forrest ordered the Empire to disband because of the extreme violence.
1915 was the rebirth of the KKK,
just after the film "The rebirth of a Nation" where Klansmen were romantically portrayed as heroes who had preserved the moral fiber and character of America... this time another Mason, W.J. Simmons, was the architect. By the mid-1920s they controlled some states such as Indiana from the courthouse to the statehouse. Almost all of the top officials of the revived Klan were also Masons, with a total of 5 million members, most of them Masons and white Protestants, with several Senators and Governors.
- By 1944 the KKK collapsed,
in a storm of corruption, murder, rape, and torture... Today, there are a few thousands left, very divided... each one wants to be be a Grand Wizard of nothing!.
Resource: 101 Cults and Secret SocietiesThe Catholic diocese of Waterford and Lismore has said Amnesty International is not banned from its primary schools, despite a letter it sent out which appeared to imply otherwise.
Catholic primary schools in the diocese received a letter from diocesan advisers that stated that primary schools were "coming under increasing pressure to ban Amnesty International from addressing their pupils, given the organisation's support for the liberation [sic] of Ireland's abortion laws".
It went on to say that "any group campaigning for the legalisation of abortion, which is completely contrary to the Catholic ethos, does not have the right to visit a school and attempt to gain support for their cause".
The letter, which was sent to primary school principals at the start of the last school term, was interpreted by some school principals as an attempt to exclude Amnesty International from those schools.
A number of schools subsequently contacted the diocese looking for clarification.
Read the letter (underlined by the original recipient) here.
The Bishop of Waterford and Lismore is patron of 99 Catholic primary schools in the region.
The letter says the diocese has to ensure that any group invited into its schools reflect the Catholic ethos.
It says the Catholic ethos and the diocese's Religious Education policy are "the most important reference points" for school personnel, pupils and parents, when dealing with "difficult and sensitive situations".
It lists inclusion, diversity, admissions policies and a proposed new programme on religious beliefs and ethics as "controversial issues" that schools are "challenged" to address.
The letter was sent by diocesan Catechetics Director, Sr Antoinette Dilworth.
She told RTÉ News the letter was sent "just to alert schools" to their responsibilities and Amnesty International was mentioned because of its stance on abortion, but there was no ban in place.
Sr Antoinette added that the diocese did not ban any organisation from visiting schools.
Amnesty International has welcomed the clarification.
The organisation runs a variety of human rights |
the galaxy as long as you have targeting coordinates. The few survivors of these eras went completely off the grid, hiding their stars in massive superstructures or constructing spaceships the size of planets and running dark. The reason the Gatekeepers were still around (though they hid the bulk of their people in Dyson Spheres ) was as part of a plan to halt this cycle by restricting galactic travel to a Portal Network instead of receiverless teleportation, in the hopes that this would prevent the rise of the long-gun. It worked for a while, and the current galactic civilization has lasted longer than most previous ones, but eventually the Gatekeeper stranglehold was broken and things continued on the same path as before
Web Original
Western Animation
Real Life and MythologyImage copyright Tanesco Image caption The water levels in dams are far below normal levels
All hydropower plants in Tanzania are being switched off because a lack of rain has led to low water levels in the country's dams.
Hydro-electricity generation has fallen to 20% of capacity, making it difficult for the dams to operate.
It is the first time the East African nation has closed all hydro plants, which generate 35% of its electricity.
The power crisis has been made worse by problems at new natural gas plants, an energy ministry official told the BBC.
The closing of the hydropower dams was beyond the government's control, said Badra Masoud, head of communication at the ministry.
"We cannot do anything because of the changes in environment - we are not getting enough rain."
Ms Masoud said more people farming upstream from the dams was not helping the situation, as this reduced the flow of water.
"We are trying to convince Tanzanians not to farm upstream," she said.
According to Tanzania's private Citizen paper, the state-owned power company, Tanesco, has already shut down its major Mtera hydropower plant, which can generate 80 MW.
The country consumes 870 MW but it only currently generates 105 MW, the paper says.
Only 24% of mainland Tanzania's population is connected to electricity services.
The BBC's Aboubakar Famau in the main city of Dar es Salaam says those who can afford it tend to invest in generators because of chronic shortages.
Tanesco also imports power from Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.
The government wants to increase the number of people connected to the grid by 50% in the next 10 years.
Last month, three new gas power plants in Dar es Salaam were turned on, using gas piped from the south of the country.
But it is these plants are also now not working to full capacity because of technical glitches.
"I cannot predict when this will be sorted out because of the technical issues - we need to be patient so that all these problems and challenges can be sorted out," Ms Masoud said.
Our reporter says the country's long rainy season is expected to start in December.Vince Gilligan changed the complexion of television drama when he came up with the idea of Breaking Bad – a show that depicts the transformation of Walter White from impotent, cancer-ridden high-school chemistry teacher to ruthless and insanely Machiavellian drug lord Heisenberg. With the final batch of eight episodes set to air starting August 11 on AMC, I wanted to highlight one of the many intriguing aspects about the show: the pervasiveness of German names and plot points scattered sporadically on air.
Yes, you read that right. The writers seem to have a strange affinity for all things Deutsche, and by the end of this article I hope you’ll be convinced that these connections are no coincidences. Whether these random threads have any major significance going forward remains to be seen, but if I’ve learned one thing watching Gilligan’s work over the years, it’s this: he is extremely detail-oriented and nitpicky, and doesn’t like loose ends.
(Warning: Full spoilers upto the end of the first half of Season Five follow.)
1. Madrigal Electromotive GmbH
This diverse multinational conglomerate that was the parent company of Gustavo Fring’s fast food chicken (and meth) chain was first introduced in the prologue of ‘Kafkaesque’ back in Season 3. As the name indicates, it is based in Germany, where Peter Schuler (the head of the restaurant division) commits suicide in Season 5 episode ‘Madrigal’. Lydia however, Walt’s business liaison for international marketing and distribution of his famed blue meth, is still alive and figures to play a critical role in these last episodes. Interestingly, “Madrigal” is also a common last name in Hispanic and Latino cultures. Can the cross-references get any more insane that that?
2. German Names
Now I have no idea whether the demographic of the New Mexico area includes a lot of descendants of German-speaking immigrants, but the universe of Breaking Bad is overwhelmingly populated by German-sounding family names.
There is Walt’s brother-in-law DEA agent Hank Schrader (anyone remember his homemade beer appropriately branded “Schraderbrau”?). Retired beat cop and Gus’s henchman/fixer/head-of-corporate-security Mike Ehrmantraut (literally “man of honor” in classical German), first introduced in Season 2 finale ‘ABQ’, was a central character throughout the past two seasons before his untimely demise in ‘Say My Name’.
For that matter, if we switch a couple of letters in Gus’s full name, we get Gustav Fringz, a completely plausible German name. There’s actually more to this apparent coincidence, but more on this later.
Remember the nerdy chemist Gale Boetticher? Well, his last name is the anglicized version of common German last name Bötticher. Then we have Walt’s old friends from grad school: Elliot and Gretchen Schwartz. Schwartz is actually German for “black”, and the combination with Walter’s last name – White – was the inspiration for the name of the startup Walt and Elliot founded: Gray Matter Technologies.
Now the minor characters. Ted, Skyler White’s weaselly boss and illicit lover, sports a surname – Beneke – that’s quite common in Prussian and Polish regions, both of which were the heartland of the erstwhile German Empire. Another one: ASAC George Merkert, Hank’s white-haired, mustachioed DEA boss throughout most of the series until Hank replaces him in ‘Madrigal’. And Dan Wachsberger, the lawyer that Mike hired to manage the hazard payments of Gus’s former employees after Walt stylishly offed Fring in ‘Face-Off’.
Before we forget, what about Walt’s alter-ego Heisenberg? The real Werner Heisenberg was a badass German chemist most famous for discovering the Uncertainty Principle that forms the basis for the contemporary atomic model. Why was he so badass, you ask? Well, Heisenberg worked in secret Nazi labs before and during WWII (remarkably similar to how Walt toiled away underground in Gus’s laundromat-cum-superlab), and – I swear I’m not making this up – died of cancer in 1976.
3. Nazi Germany
Okay, so Nazism has become something of a modern pop culture phenomenon, finding ample use as a convenient metaphor to represent the pinnacle of supervilliany. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone when the odd Hitler (Jesse exclaiming “Well, Heil Hitler bitch!” to Walt back in the episode ‘…And the Bag’s in the River’) or neo-Nazi (Todd’s white supremacist relatives in prison, who come in handy for Walt when he decides to simultaneously murder 10 inmates in ‘Gliding Over All’) reference is dropped.
But there are an unusually high number of them, even for a show this dark and morally ambiguous. Badger, Jesse’s friend and former high-school bandmate in Twaughthammer – also a German-sounding band name, by the way – once explained the real terror behind the absurdity of Nazi Stormtrooper Zombies (“They’re not craving your flesh for the protein, they’re after you because they hate America!”). Even Hank explicitly refers to Nazi Germany in the ‘End Times’ episode.
You’ll find consistent references as far back as the first season, when Walt explained how the massive and seemingly invincible Nazi artillery piece Gustav Gun was destroyed using a bag of thermite. This was just after Walt had conceived the P2P cook method that would yield the famous crystalline blue meth, and (along with Jesse) was planning to steal his first barrel of methylamine from a chemical plant.
4. Gustavo Fring’s Mysterious Past
Gus, the shrewd and intimidating Los Pollos Hermanos owner and meth kingpin of New Mexico was one of the scariest villains on TV, and perhaps the only person who could match Heisenberg move for move and wit for wit. His successful fast food and drug distribution empire is successful not only because he hides in plain sight, but also because he deliberately keeps most of his checkered past secret.
This is what we explicitly know from the show so far: before he immigrated to the U.S. in 1989, he ran a similar chicken restaurant chain in Mexico along with his business (and alleged homosexual) partner Max Arciniega, a chemistry graduate from Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Since the two also dealt in high-quality meth on the side, the Juarez cartel unceremoniously shot Max in front of Gus to teach him a lesson.
However, very little – if anything at all – is known about Gus before he moved to Mexico in 1986. For Fring was a Chilean national, but no record of his childhood exists: something the wily chicken man attributed to General Augusto Pinochet’s government being “notoriously unreliable” with record-keeping.
But we can construct a possible early history for Gus if we indulge in a little speculation. After the Second World War, several prominent intelligence and state security officers sought refuge in Chile along with their families. Once there, they set up a secret mini-colony/pseudo-enclave of German immigrants in Parral of Linares Province, calling it Colonia Dignidad. The colony has a shady history of human rights and child sexual abuses as well as criminal and occult activities, and I’d readily wager that this was where Gus was born and raised.
It makes perfect sense. This is why there are no official records of Gus’s early life: no sensible government would put its international prestige on the line by acknowledging rampant abuse and wrongdoing within its borders. It explains his near-German name, and also provide clues as to the origin of his longstanding relationship with Madrigal Electromotive.
If you have a little extra time on your hands, I seriously recommend checking this out. It’s a chilling description of what must have been a nightmarish childhood for Gus, shaping him into this cold-blooded businessman we became familiar with on the series.
5. Random Tidbits
Like the show, this analysis has turned dark, depressing, and intense very quickly. Let me change the mood before we disappear into a black hole of our collective morally wrong choices. How about Gale Boetticher attempting a hilariously awkward cover of seminal 80s hit Major Tom?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXajUtR56J8?rel=0&w=500&h=281]
Here’s the original, written and performed by German pop star Peter Schilling:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBU95fAxEhY?rel=0&w=500&h=281]
What do you think? Is there a genuine German undercurrent in the imaginarium of Breaking Bad? Have I missed other hints or clues pointing to an unusually significant role of German-derived artifacts in this show? Or am I reading too much into this concept and need to lay off the “blue stuff”?The gold, silver and bronze medals for the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, were unveiled earlier this week. The outer edges are ringed with letters in the Korean alphabet, forming diagonal ridges across the face to resemble a tree trunk. They hang from a teal and pale red ribbon made from the traditional Korean fabric of Gapsa and embroidered with Hangeul patterns.
They’re beautiful and stylish and exquisite, and largely an afterthought right now. Two other elements from the periodic table are on people’s minds as the XXIIIth Winter Games rapidly approach:
Plutonium and hydrogen.
Type “PyeongChang” into Google Earth, and the globe will spin around to Asia and zoom into the Korean peninsula, to a mountainous region east of Seoul in Gangwon Province. Less than 50 miles to the north is the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone bordering North Korea. Just north of that are missile installations. A few weeks ago, Gangwon Province was the site of joint bombing exercises by U.S. and South Korean jets that simulated North Korean targets.
Several events will be held in the coastal city of Gangneung. It was there, 21 years ago, that a North Korean Sang-O class submarine surreptitiously dropped off three soldiers on an espionage mission to scout South Korean military facilities. When the sub returned to retrieve them, it ran aground.
The soldiers destroyed sensitive documents on board and figured the border was close enough to make a run for it, initiating the biggest manhunt in South Korean history. For 49 days, the army searched for the infiltrators and killed or captured all of them, except one. They hauled the sub from the sea and put it on display in Gangneung next to a South Korean warship and fighter jets.
They’re in what's called “Unification Park.”
So that’s what we’re getting into next February, or not getting into as the war of rhetoric between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump escalates like two petulant 5-year-olds on the playground. Sand could start flying any moment.
The French, just two weeks after being awarded the 2024 Summer Games, were the first to say what everyone’s thinking. On Friday, the minister of sports told a radio network that if “our security can’t be assured, the French Olympic team will stay at home.”
The head of Austria’s Olympic committee wasn’t far behind, saying “if the situation worsens and the security of our athletes is no longer guaranteed, we will not go to South Korea.”
And the U.S. Olympic Committee? The timing couldn’t be worse, with its Olympic Media Summit this week in Park City, Utah, a confluence of journalists and American athletes for three days of interviews – or in this case, 350 journalists asking 113 athletes about Rocket Man and mushroom clouds.
The USOC leadership will have scripted, manicured responses to the inevitable questions, and they’ll coach the athletes to politely say they’re not politicians and just want to land triple Salchows.
Then everyone will privately turn on their phones to see if the North Korean “madman” has detonated a hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean yet, or if the “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” has launched a pre-emptive strike, as Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) recently suggested.
It’s not good.
This isn’t new to the Olympics, fear and loathing in the months before Opening Ceremony. People were so afraid of terrorist attacks at Athens in 2004 that Union-Tribune editors had us lug an unwieldy satellite phone there, so we could breathlessly report after the jihadists had knocked out the cell towers with their dirty bombs. Other journalists took gas masks for the chemical attacks.
Nothing happened.
The 2014 Winter Games in Sochi were in a volatile region crawling with militant Islamists, and folks were whipped into a frothing panic when a “black widow” female suicide bomber was reportedly spotted in downtown. “I’ve never seen a greater threat in my lifetime,” Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, told Fox News. “I think there’s a high degree of probability that something will detonate, something will go off.”
My flight from Moscow landed in Sochi, and out the plane window I could see hundreds of soldiers surrounding the runway, machine guns at the ready – part of Vladimir Putin’s vaunted “ring of steel” security perimeter.
Nothing happened.
International Olympic Committee Vice President Anita DeFrantz has called the Olympics since the 1972 terrorist attack in Munich “the safest place in the world to be,” and there’s some truth to that.
The security – both seen and unseen – is at such extraordinary levels that guys living in caves with suicide vests aren’t penetrating it. And if you somehow rain terror on a global event of such sacred standing as an Olympics, you basically have vilified the entire planet with no sympathetic regimes; there’ll be nowhere to hide.
But DeFrantz also understands first-hand how politics and pole vaulters can get entangled. She was a rower on the U.S. team that boycotted the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow, President Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Would Trump boycott PyeongChang? You wouldn’t think so, since it could be viewed as cowering to a man who has called him “a frightened dog.” But sending athletes 50 miles from the DMZ – a nuke would take, oh, about 12 seconds to arrive – might be unnecessarily poking the bear.
The best solution might be a de facto human shield of North Korean lugers and Nordic skiiers, except none has qualified so far for PyeongChang, just as none did for Sochi. The best chance are pairs skaters Ryom Tae-ok and Kim Ju-sik, who are scheduled to compete in a last-chance qualifier in Germany next weekend.
There also has been talk of the IOC granting wild-card spots to North Korean athletes. South Korean president Moon Jae-in, the son of North Korean refugees, has incessantly pushed for a diplomatic solution to the crisis, framing the Olympics as “a very good opportunity for inter-Korea peace and reconciliation.”More studios might also be affected
Motiga, the developer behind free-to-play MOBA-like hero shooter Gigantic, will close its doors soon. Employees have confirmed that the entire studio is shuttering and that nearly all of the staff will be left without jobs.
It's unknown how many former employees are affected, but it seems to be somewhere north of 50. Motiga has had tumultuous staffing issues in the past few years, with mass layoffs becoming semi-regular occurrences.
Motiga's frequent layoffs mirrored the troubled development of Gigantic. Years went by where the game didn't seem any closer to launching. Microsoft was the original publisher, but it eventually pulled out of the project in mid-2016. Perfect World stepped in and assumed publishing duties, and Gigantic finally released in July 2017.
Perfect World's involvement didn't end at publishing Gigantic, however. It had quietly acquired Motiga and framed the investment as a "partnership." We asked Motiga founder and CEO Chris Chung about everything surrounding this situation, and he provided a frank and detailed statement. Here it is, in full:
All of Motiga was acquired by Perfect World last year. Perfect World decided to announce the arrangement as partnership by the directions from corporate for the reason we were not privy to. Yes, [the closure] was the corporate decision. It was a budgetary decision at the highest level. Perfect World as a public company has a profitability goal and they decided to cut parts of the company that were not profitable. In short, Gigantic was not making enough revenue. Unfortunately, Motiga is not the only Perfect World studio being impacted by the decision. Gigantic will be left at the hands of a maintenance team composed of few dedicated folks at Motiga. They are [an] awesome group of people that will be working on the game until some time in the future when it doesn't make sense anymore. Thank you for the kind words. As someone that created Motiga from scratch, it's a sad day for me but I am proud of the team we built and the culture we established at Motiga. I was hugged by everyone today and you don't see that kind of reaction in most companies through an ordeal like this.
[Update: Chung sent a second comment shortly after the original one. Here is that statement, in full:
I made the previous statement at a vulnerable moment believing it was a response to a friendly concern. I may not have had all the facts surrounding what happened and I apologize for any error. Today was a tough day for all of us who have been part of this extraordinary journey. We wish the best for everyone that were impacted and we will do everything we can to help them find a new home.]
While Gigantic will live on for the time being, it's unclear how long Perfect World will keep it afloat. Probably, as Chung says, until "it doesn't make sense anymore."
However, Motiga seemingly isn't the end of this story. More Perfect World properties might suffer a similar fate. There could very well be more closures in the near future.
We've also asked Perfect World for comment, but haven't heard back by time of publication. We'll update this story if/when we receive a response. As always, everyone at Destructoid wishes the best for all the affected Motiga employees and hope that they land on their feet as quickly as possible.
[Update #2: Perfect World has now sent along its statement. Here it is:
Following the news that Motiga has reduced the staff of its studio, Perfect World Entertainment can confirm that as the publisher of Gigantic, the game will continue to be available on our platforms. A core team of developers remains at Motiga, who will work with us to support the game and its players, including moving full steam ahead with the upcoming November update and future content. We cannot thank everyone enough for their contributions in making Gigantic the outstanding experience it is today. Perfect World Entertainment recently closed the Seattle office of Runic Games as part of the company's continued strategy to focus on online games as a service. We’re grateful to the team for all of their hard work bringing incredible experiences like Torchlight, Torchlight II and Hob to life. Runic Games will remain a part of Perfect World Entertainment's portfolio of studios, and its games will continue to be available to players, as we stay committed to supporting and growing Runic Games' beloved franchises. The staff reduction at Motiga and the closure of Runic Games Seattle were unrelated. Perfect World Entertainment stands committed to delivering the best massively multiplayer online gameplay experiences to our players.
You are logged out. Login | Sign upIn an interview with Fox Business News, former US envoy to the UN, John Bolton, told the channel that if Israel wants to prevent Iran from acquiring a working nuclear plant, then a military strike must be launched against the Bushehr nuclear power facility within the next eight days. Specifically, Bolton was envisioning the projected August 21 launch date of the nuclear power plant, which Zero Hedge noted previously. According to Bolton, once the Bushehr facility is operational it will be too late for a military air strike against Iran because such an attack would affect too many Iranian civilians due to the spread radiation.
"Once that uranium, once those fuel rods are very close to the reactor, certainly once they're in the reactor, attacking it means a release of radiation, no question about it. So if Israel is going to do anything against Bushehr it has to move in the next eight days."
Bolton simplistic summary is that should Iran launch the reactor, both Israel and the US would be in trouble.
"Iran will achieve something that no other opponent of Israel, no other enemy of the United States in the Middle East really has and that is a functioning nuclear reactor."
Laslty, Russia was portrayed as evil for daring to go with its own national interest, whatever that may be, over that of the US.
"The Russians are, as they often do, playing both sides against the middle. The idea of being able to stick a thumb in America's eye always figures prominently in Moscow."
Regardless, keep an eye out on news developments from the Middle East over the next few days.Street Race Discipline
Greetings, Petrolheads!
The Crew 2 is all about total freedom to get to the pinnacle of the American Motorsports scene your way. Cars, bikes, boats, planes… whatever the engine, you can become a champion by racing to the top.
In the original The Crew we used Specs to help you conquer all types of terrain. This time, we’re taking things a step further with The Crew 2’s Disciplines. Each one has its own feel, look and style, but more than that, Disciplines are our way to allow you to scratch whichever motor-fueled itch you may have!
Split across our four Families – Street Racing, Pro Racing, Off Road and Freestyle – Disciplines all center around specific types of vehicles and terrain, and offer dedicated events, customization, and more.
Over the coming months, we’d like to start going into more detail on the various Disciplines available. From Rally Raid to Aerobatics, via the choppy waters of Powerboat racing, we’ve got something for everyone.
Without further ado, let’s get the ball rolling with one of the classics: Street Race.
As many of you know, this adrenaline-pumping Discipline takes place on a mixture of narrow downtown lanes and faster, traffic-filled roads. Typically of medium length, Street races focus more on quick reflexes, handling and control than on hitting the highest speed.
The environment is akin to a city maze, with tight turns, traffic avoidance and obstacle dodging. And while navigation can be tricky, the goal of the Street Race Discipline remains simple: to cross the finish line first!
Shortcuts are a Street Racer’s best friend, and can clinch victory from defeat by giving you that extra second’s advantage. They come in many forms, be it narrow back-alleys or ramps and rooftops, and each with different flavors to keep you on your toes!
Scaling from high risk/high reward, to easier and more obvious options, you’ll typically find at least one shortcut in each race. With this in mind, the dev team has studied feedback from the community to ensure that both these and checkpoints are optimally positioned from a balancing perspective.
Speaking of balancing, the AI difficulty has now been reworked to scale with your vehicle performance and progression level. So not only will you have to watch out for varying degrees of traffic density, you’ll also need to keep an eye on the other racers whatever the stakes or setting.
And yes, setting does matter, because you’ll be racing through some of the most iconic locations in the US. Whether you’re tearing through the sinuous backstreets of Chinatown or heading along Vegas’ world-famous Strip, you’ll need your eyes on the prize and not the scenery!
That’s it for this round, Racers! We hope you enjoyed learning more about The Crew 2’s Street Race Discipline, and we’ll see you next time for something a little further off the beaten track.
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The Crew 2 will be available in 2018, for PlayStation®4 system (includes enhanced features on PS4 Pro), Xbox One (includes enhanced features on Xbox One X), and Windows PC. It will be available 3 days early, for Gold Edition owners on all afore-mentioned platforms.
For more information on The Crew 2, watch the official announcement trailer and look for more details here! Join the The Crew community on the forums and Reddit, and sign up for our Beta here to try our new Disciplines out for yourself!The tweet? err? writing is on the wall. The one-time darling of the social media world, Twitter, just cannot catch a break these days, and the last couple of weeks have been particularly rough. Wall Street repeatedly called open season on its stock, shaving off more than half its value last year to an all-time low right now. A slew of high-ranking executives left the company late January, casting further doubt on the future of the social network. Could the end be near for Twitter?
How did what was arguably a near-essential information service, with its unedited, unfiltered view of the world as it happened, translate to one that looks like a second Yahoo - high profile departures, tanking stock prices and all? First, user growth has slumped or flat-lined (depending on the geography). The users on board are not particularly 'active' or 'engaged', remaining passive consumers of news or celebrity updates. As per reports on user engagement, about half of the users have not tweeted even once, while Instagram, WeChat and WhatsApp now have more individual users than Twitter. (Facebook is in a league of its own.)
Advertisement: Replay Ad Ads by ZINC
Part of the problem was that the service itself is complex and somewhat confusing, and recent product changes like Moments, while well-intentioned, have made it only more so. This is not the case for the power users, mind you, - for them, Twitter is rather powerful and full-featured. But for the mainstream user that Twitter needs to win over (or back), the service does not lend itself particularly intuitively to follow conversations and narratives. Having no filter on the service allows misinformation to spread easily, and it takes some degree of effort to curate a compelling list of accounts one should follow.
Equally troubling is the growing wave of abuse and harassment that users have had to contend with. Whether it is troll armies of political supporters in India or misogynistic bile around the GamerGate controversy, incidents of hate speech and threats abound on the network, yet the tools and policies that govern these are inconsistent at best. As a result, instances of people driven off the platform - celebrities included - are not uncommon. The self-policing and constantly evolving etiquette that drove the service in the early days has not scaled up with its growth. Compare this to Facebook, which enforces a'real name' policy and nuanced tools to deal with abuse and intrusion.
So, should you alter your social media strategy when it comes to Twitter? Amidst all this doom and gloom, there are slivers of hope. The fact remains that Twitter is not some start-up that is suddenly going to run dry - ad sales have continued to grow at a healthy clip, and the company has cash reserves of $3.5 billion. It also has a goldmine of data - billions upon billions of tweets. What Twitter should focus on is using natural language processing to understand user interests and target them better in terms of ads and suggesting who they should follow?solving the curation and discovery problem. It should use some of that cash to address the issues of spam and abuse, both via better algorithms to weed out bots and better product features to report and redress. That said, putting all your marketing eggs in the Twitter basket was never a wise idea. It may be prudent to diversify your approach by adding Instagram and Pinterest into your marketing mix, more so if you target millennials who are rarely (if ever) on Facebook or Twitter.
Topdeck Travel report on millennial travel trends
Sample size: 31,819 people in 134 countries
Live Action
Mobile Support
Periscope has teamed up with GoPro to let users live stream directly from the action camera using iPhone. To use the feature, users need to connect their GoPro HERO4 Black or Silver camera to a WiFi service after ensuring it is on video mode. Tapping on the broadcast button on the Periscope app then enables live streaming of the recording. The app also has a new button to lock the phone screen, ensuring nothing is accidentally pressed when the phone is in the pocket. "We've seen people put their phones in some precarious situations. Creativity always fi nds a way, but we wanted to make it a little bit easier," Periscope says in a blog post announcing the integration.Facebook has expanded its advertising network, Audience Network, to include support for mobile web. Now 2.5 million advertisers on the platform can reach more people on mobile devices, the social networking site announced in a blog post. This basically means that Audience Network, launched in October 2014 to help advertisers place their ads in apps besides Facebook, will now help publishers sell their advertising on mobile websites, too. According to Facebook, the product, since its launch, has been delivering real value for publishers and advertisers and the company reached a billion dollar annual run rate for advertising spend through Audience Network in the fourth quarter of 2015, with the bulk of that value being passed to publishers.The last two months of 2017 have proven that Bitcoin is synonymous with volatility, although the resilience of the higher cryptocurrency has also shown. An eight-week bull race peaked at a high of $ 20,000 just over a week ago, before market capitalization quickly corrected up to $ 8,000 on various stock markets around the world. whole Saturday
. Julian Hosp, co-founder of TenTech, predicted that Bitcoin would see even higher peaks and lower declines next year, stating:
"I think we're going to see Bitcoin hit the $ 60,000, but I also think Bitcoin will hit the $ 5,000 mark, but the question is, "Which one will he hit first?"
While some have seen the correction of Bitcoin from historic highs such as a stock market crash or a bubble, bullish investors, including Hosp, believe that recent lows have provided the perfect opportunity to buy more Bitcoin. Hosp said:
"For the experts who have been on the market, it was actually a welcome dip, that hollow for us was very, very healthy, and some of them were not. between us have used to buy a little bit more because suddenly we had 40 -45% discount on the highest historical. "
The Crypto Market Grows
The decline was not just at the price of Bitcoin.At the end of last week, the cryptocurrency market has suffered an overall loss of $ 200 billion in the space of 48 hours – but it quickly rebounded and consolidated.Although the dramatic correction was terrifying to watch, it was certainly not the first time this happened, and some analysts are certain that it will not be the last.
A number of factors come into play: no catalyst can be attributed to the direct decline of value in the week before Christmas.
Hosp may be optimistic at the moment, but he anticipates an even greater correction for the entire cryptocurrency market. invest in those who offer us tangible ns and a real value. Hosp added:For an illuminating glimpse of government power in action, it’s hard to beat the fines the Justice Department threatened to level against Yahoo if it didn’t comply with a secret and sweeping surveillance request in 2008. News coverage of the case, for which documents were unsealed last week, reported the proposed fines as $250,000 a day. But there was also a clause that called for a doubling of the amount each week if Yahoo refused to comply. It was more than enough to bankrupt the company after just a few months.
Yahoo’s longtime outside counsel, Marc Zwillinger, who was lead attorney in the unsuccessful fight against the government’s data demand, calculated the cost of resistance at more than $25 million after the first month and $400 million in the second month. “And practically speaking,” Zwillinger noted in a blog post published Monday afternoon, “coercive civil fines means that the government would seek increased fines, with no ceiling, until Yahoo complied.”
The case was a foundational legal step in the government’s construction of PRISM, the surveillance program that gives NSA extensive access to records of online communications by users of Yahoo and other U.S.-based technology firms. What most bothered Yahoo was the lack of individual search warrants and court review for people outside the United States – something the company argued was required by the Fourth Amendment of the constitution.
Yahoo lost its case before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April 2008 and, as the company prepared to appeal to a higher court, the government requested that the daily fines begin. Rather than pay them, the company began furnishing the requested user data while it continued its legal fight. The company eventually lost the appeal.
The Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence defended its handling of the case in a statement last week, pointing out that the PRISM program included "safeguards" against privacy violations. On Monday afternoon, the Justice Department issued a statement about the threatened Yahoo fine, saying, "Our responsibility is to protect national security by leveraging all lawful processes. The Government’s motion for civil contempt was meant to secure compliance with a lawful court order. The Government only sought penalties after Yahoo litigated its position in court and then refused to comply with the court order rejecting the Company’s legal challenge and requiring the company’s compliance as a matter of law.”
Had Yahoo continued resisting the government’s order while it made the appeal, the company never could have paid its legal bills – or anything else. The equivalent of Yahoo’s total revenue for 2008, a healthy $7.2 billion, would have been gone by end of the twelfth week. If the company could have somehow found the cash, it could have paid off the entire U.S. debt, about $9.5 trillion at the time, in the fifth month.
At the six month mark, the relentlessly doubling fine would have equaled $117 trillion. Depending on the calculation you use, the fine would have exceeded the total dollar value of the entire Earth itself (including economic assets and the physical value of the planet itself) in either the eighth or ninth month. And before the 10th month, the amount would have exceeded the dollar value of steel used in the (fictional) Death Star, as calculated by enterprising economics students at Lehigh University.
At the end of the year: the total would have been $7.9 sextillion. That’s equal to a stack of $100 bills (if that many actually existed) so high that it would go back and forth to the sun 28,769 times.
As a publicly traded company, Yahoo would have been required by federal securities law to report substantial government fines to its shareholders – something that would have been difficult to do given that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court classified the order and the court case.
The government motion requesting the fine called for it to be declassified in 2033 – 25 years later. The controversy sparked by the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden prompted an accelerated effort to de-classify the case, which is what led to last week’s release of more than 1,500 documents from the legal struggle.
One more tidbit from that document: The $250,000 each day, with the doubling each week, was the government’s requested “minimum” fine.Purchased the game and snatched the apk from an internet buddy. Sideloaded it onto the Shield tablet, Shield TV, and Galaxy S4 along with the amazon store. Worked great on all of them. Obviously you will need a controller because there are no touch screen controls. I was able to use an app i'm beta testing to get this game to show up on the android tv leanback launcher with a nice looking banner. I did have to use lucky patcher to patch out the amazon dependencies or it would tell me my modded apk was corrupt. However it worked. There's just no support for cloud saves when you do that. This is a great game and I own it on PC and now android. I hope |
stock market for the internet. However, within this tool and ranking algorithm also exists a set of rich meta and semantic data — including color palette information.
I ran a simple aggregate query in the database over all viral content (tens of thousands of examples) from September 19th through the 24th and it returned some interesting results. The dominant colors in the photographs for the most viral content for this period of time are as follows:
Viral colors for Sept. 19th — 24th, 2013
They seem to get, sharply, less viral after that (these are in order of virality; left to right, right being less viral). I’m also not showing white or black values and while that tan you see is a bit bright, I left it in because it’s actually a very light shade of yellow/orange.
You’ll also notice that some of the colors aren’t that different. That’s because I’m aggregating by hexadecimal value (though I also store HSB, RGB, YIQ, and luminance). If I took the time to be more clever, I could aggregate by color range. For example, all “blues” and “reds” etc.
Already though, without trying to out trick myself, we can see that blues and oranges are the most viral. This is actually pretty interesting because there’s already been quite a bit of research and observations with regard to these colors in particular.
…orange/blue just so happens to be the most common set of complementary colors because blue is “cool” and orange is “enthusiastic” and “energetic.”
In this case, we aren’t dealing with movie posters. These colors come from photographs associated with viral stories across major news outlets (the data set, for the most part). However, it would appear that people may select photographs for editorial use in much the same manner. It would also appear that viewers may respond to, and engage with through sharing, these types of colors on the web.
Are we conditioned for this? Is it advertising psychology? Will this always be the case? Would we see different viral colors based on seasonal factors? I’m not sure at this exact moment, but I’m certainly going to continue my research and answer some of these questions. In the meantime, this certainly makes for one interesting observation.On Monday I laid out the dynamics that would be in play for the court in considering what sentence to give Bradley Manning in light of both the trial evidence and testimony, and that presented during the sentencing phase after the guilty verdict was rendered. Judge Lind has entered her decision, and Bradley Manning has been sentenced to a term of 35 years, had his rank reduced to E-1, had all pay & allowances forfeited, and been ordered dishonorably discharged. This post will describe the parole, appeal and incarceration implications of the sentence just imposed.
Initially, as previously stated, Pvt. Manning was credited with the 112 days of compensatory time awarded due to the finding that he was subjected to inappropriate pre-trial detention conditions while at Quantico. Pvt. Manning was credited with a total 1294 days of pre-trial incarceration credit for the compensatory time and time he has already served since the date of his arrest.
Most importantly at this point, Manning was sentenced today to a prison term of 35 years and the issue of what that sentence means – above and beyond the credit he was given both for compensatory time and time served – is what is critical going forward. The following is a look at the process, step by step, Bradley Manning will face.
The first thing that will happen now that Judge Lind has gaveled her proceedings to a close is the court will start assembling the record, in terms of complete transcript, exhibits and full docket, for transmission to the convening authority for review. It is not an understatement to say that this a huge task, as the Manning record may well be the largest ever produced in a military court martial. It will be a massive undertaking and transmission.
At the same time, the defense will start preparing their path forward in terms of issues they wish to argue. It is my understanding that Pvt. Manning has determined to continue with David Coombs as lead counsel for review and appeal, which makes sense as Coombs is fully up to speed and, at least in my opinion, has done a fantastic job. For both skill and continuity, this is a smart move.
The next step will be designation of issues to raise for review by the “convening authority”. In this case, the convening authority is Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, who heads, as Commanding General, the US Army’s Military District of Washington. This step is quite different than civilian courts, where a defendant proceeds directly to an appellate court.
The accused first has the opportunity to submit matters to the convening authority before the convening authority takes action – it’s not characterized as an “appeal,” but it’s an accused’s first opportunity to seek relief on the findings and/or the sentence. According to the Manual for Courts-Martial, Rule for Court-Martial 1105:
(a) In general. After a sentence is adjudged in any court-martial, the accused may submit matters to the convening authority in accordance with this rule. (b) Matters which may be submitted.
(1) The accused may submit to the convening au thority any matters that may reasonably tend to af fect the convening authority’s decision whether to disapprove any findings of guilty or to approve the sentence. The convening authority is only required to consider written submissions.
(2) Submissions are not subject to the Military Rules of Evidence and may include:
(A) Allegations of errors affecting the legality of the findings or sentence;
(B) Portions or summaries of the record and copies of documentary evidence offered or intro duced at trial;
(C) Matters in mitigation which were not avail able for consideration at the court-martial; and
(D) Clemency recommendations by any member, the military judge, or any other person. The defense may ask any person for such a recommendation.
Once the convening authority has the full record and the defense has designated its matters for review, Buchanan will perform his review and determine whether any adjustments to the sentence are appropriate, and that will be considered the final sentence. At this point, the only further review is by a traditional appeal process.
Generally, the level of appellate review a case receives depends on the sentence as approved by the convening authority. After the approval of the sentence, cases in which the sentence includes death, a punitive discharge (bad conduct, dishonorable discharge, or dismissal), or confinement for one year or greater (and Manning’s sentence certainly fits that criteria) are automatically referred to the service (in this case the Army) Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA) for review. In Bradley Manning’s case, only some counts will be eligible for appeal, the ones for which Judge Lind convicted him of after “deliberation”. Appeal on the counts Manning voluntarily pled guilty to prior to trial was waived.
The ACCA will be responsible for reviewing the entire case and has, pursuant to Article 66, UCMJ, the responsibility to:
…affirm only such findings of guilty and the sentence or such part or amount of the sentence, as it finds correct in law and fact and determines on the basis of the entire record, should be approved.
That statutory requirement to find law and fact “correct” is significant; the ACCA could decide not to sustain a conviction on a particular offense even if not challenged on appeal. The ACCA “may weigh the evidence, judge the credibility of witnesses, and determine controverted questions of fact, recognizing that the court-martial saw and heard the evidence.”
In addition to the ACCA’s review, military appellate counsel, unless waived, are provided to the accused at no cost. Bradley Manning will likely already have David Coombs, but due to the complexity, it can be anticipated there will also be military counsel participating as well. The appellate counsel may raise specific legal issues to the court for resolution.
After the ACCA, the decision may be appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces and thereafter to the United States Supreme Court. Military appellate counsel are continued to be provided at no cost until all the appeals have been exhausted. See generally Subchapter IC, Post-Trial Procedure and Review of Courts-Martial (10 USC §§ 860-876) and Chapter XII of the Rules for Courts-Martial.
The foregoing is the process that will play out in relation to court proceedings for Bradley Manning. But, as such is progressing, Mr. Manning will, of course, be incarcerated, and there will be factors to be considered in that regard as well. Manning will be sentenced to a facility for confinement. The obvious location is Fort Leavenworth where he has been for some time already, although he will likely be moved out of pre-trial population and into general confinement population.
Some military prisoners can be transferred to a Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) facility with the concurrence or direction of the Secretary concerned and agreement with the FBOP. Factors that are considered are: the prisoner’s demonstrated potential for return to duty or rehabilitation, nature and circumstances of offenses, confinement file, status of legal appeals/proceedings, length and nature of sentence, age, and special circumstances (prisoner needs/interests of national security). At least at this point, there is no reason to believe Bradley Manning would be transferred to a civilian prison, although it is at least possible after all appeals are exhausted, which will not be for a very long time.
Once assigned to his facility, Mr. Manning will have a “sentence computation form” generated that will effectively control his confinement and eligibility for release going forward. Here is the template used for such computation. The form can be, and is, commonly updated as the prisoner serves his time, and the document is primarily an internal one as opposed to a public one. There is no set time period for initial production of the form, but it should happen pretty quickly after Manning’s return to the permanent facility. Any number of things can cause adjustments to the form as time goes on, including any sentence relief granted by the convening authority, either initially or after alteration of the conviction status from appellate courts.
So, what about Bradley Manning’s potential release date? This is where there is a HUGE difference in the UCMJ process from civilian process. As many know, the United States government has abolished “parole” for federal prison sentences. Instead, and this is now common in many states too, federal prisoners must serve at least 85% of their imposed sentence, and only then are eligible for supervised release for the remaining time. Under the UCMJ, however, there is still an active and healthy parole system that is far more flexible and favorable to a defendant, especially one like Bradley Manning, who is sentenced to a long term.
Several programs exist within the military corrections process to allow prisoners to be released prior to serving their full sentence. These programs are: clemency, parole, mandatory supervised release (MSR), reenlistment, and restoration to duty. Prisoners do not have any right to clemency, parole, reenlistment, or restoration. These programs are administered by a Clemency and Parole Board (C&PB) on behalf of the Secretary concerned and only apply to military prisoners confined at military corrections facilities. Upon the unlikely event of permanent transfer to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, military prisoners may only be considered for clemency, restoration to duty, and reenlistment, the latter two of which are pretty inconceivable for Bradley Manning.
C&PB considers factors such as the nature and circumstances of the prisoner’s offenses, the military and civilian history, the confinement file, personal characteristics of the prisoner (age, education, marital/family status, psychological profile), impact of prisoner’s offense on victim and attempts at restitution, protection and welfare of society, and the need for good order and discipline in the military when determining whether a prisoner should be granted any of the above programs.
Parole is the conditional release from confinement of a prisoner under the guidance and supervision of a United States Probation Officer. This may be granted prior to the minimum release date and does not require the member to remain on parole until the adjusted maximum release date. Parole considerations begin, upon request of the prisoner, if the sentence is less than 30 years after the member serves one-third of the confinement, but no less than 6 months. If the sentence is greater than 30 years, the prisoner must serve at least 10 years of confinement. The point at which the C&PB begins to consider the prisoner for these programs is dependent upon the sentence received. Specific details on how to calculate when a prisoner, such as Bradley Manning, is eligible for parole or MSR, see Department of Defense Instruction 1325.07, Administration of Military Correctional Facilities and Clemency and Parole Authority as well as the DOD Sentence Computation Manual.
MSR is the conditional release of a prisoner who has served the portion of the sentence to confinement up to the minimum release date from confinement. This type of release continues until the individual reaches the adjusted maximum release date unless the confinement term is altered by the military department through remission, revocation, etc. This is also served under the guidance and supervision of a United States Probation Officer.
Bradley will also be eligible for “good time credits” that will inure to his release favor assuming he is a model prisoner. Good time credit is time that is awarded for faithful observance of all rules and regulations and is subtracted from the prisoner’s adjusted maximum release date. The adjusted maximum release date is computed by adjusting the maximum release date to include administrative credit (pretrial confinement), judicial credit (credit ordered by a judge to a sentence of confinement), inoperative time, and crossing the International Date Line. Good time credit is calculated as 5-10 days per month off the top depending on the length of the approved sentence. In addition, a prisoner may receive up to an additional 8 days per month for work, participation in rehabilitation programs, and/or participation in education programs. If a prisoner performs extraordinary acts, then an additional 2 days per month for 12 months may be credited. The total combined credited time may not
exceed 15 days per month.
There is no interplay between parole and good time credit as good time credit affects the adjusted maximum release date, and parole consideration is annual after a specified time frame as explained above. If a prisoner is not paroled, s/he may be released earlier than initially expected as a result of good time credit.
So, what is the bottom line as to how much time Bradley Manning will likely really serve in confinement given the sentence today by Judge Lind? As you can tell from the above discussion, that is an extremely hard question to answer, and the answer is quite fluid and subject to change as the circumstances dictate. A good rule of thumb, however, is that Bradley could be released after serving one third of his sentence. In light of the fact Judge Lind has imposed a term of 35 years, Mr. Manning, considering the time he has already served, could potentially be eligible for release in as little as 9 years from now. As painful as it is to admit, this sentence, and Bradley Manning’s prospects could have very easily looked far worse. [UPDATE – after pondering what Col. Morris Davis said, I think he is right, and after recalculation, I think the initial eligibility for release – assuming everything goes perfectly for Bradley Manning – will be in 8.3 years.]
One last point – what are the effects of this UCMJ conviction upon Bradley Manning’s civil rights? That is a question not nearly as easy to answer as it is for a civilian felony conviction, where certain rights are simply lost until formally restored. It turns out that for military convictions there is no set authority. The best resource I have found on understanding collateral consequences of a military conviction and sentence is this from the American Bar Association. Some consequences may apply during a period of supervised release while others could be permanent. In general, the consequences that military convicts face is determined by the state law of the person’s residence.Home Glavendrup Stone Ship The Glavendrup Stone Ship setting with The Glavendrup Runic Stone is located a 15 minute drive Northwest of Odense Airport on Funen. The Glavendrup Stone Ship and rune stone are from the early 10th century, the middle of the viking age. The Glavendrup Stone Ship is 60 meters or 67 yards long, and still has a runic stone at its Western end. The stone ship was first rediscovered in 1794 by people digging for sand. In 1808 an archeologist saves the runic stone from being bought by stone masons as had already happened with several of the other stones in the stone ship. The text on the Glavendrup Runic Stone is the longest text on a runic stone in Denmark, 210 characters long. The hill below the runic stone is a later addition made during one of the recreations of the stone ship. The runic stone should be placed several meters or yeards further West and without a mound below it to accurately recreate the stone ship. The text is: Ragnhild placed this stone in memory of Alle, priest of the Soelve, honorable clan chieftain. Alle's sons made these runes after their father and his wife after her husband. And Sote carved these runes in memory of his master. Thor hallow these runes. To a "something you do not want to become" become he who uses violence on this stone or drags it away to stand in memory of somebody else. Alle's wife, Ragnhild, wasn't just married to Alle, Ragnhild also had another runic stone made for another husband named Gunulf, known as the Tryggevaelde Runic Stone, by the same rune carver, Sote. The Tryggevaelde Runic Stone was originally placed near the East coast of Zealand but has been moved to the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. During excavations in the stone ship 9 fire pit graves were found in the Eastern end, all empty. A grave that would hold a man of the importance of a chieftain and prist like Alle hasn't been found. It is possible that the stone ship was created to commemorate Alle, not to bury him. Stone ships were sometimes used to publically demonstrate allegience to the viking religion in a time when Christianity was gaining more and more ground in Viking society. Today the Glavendrup Stone Ship is in a wood planted to protect it, but at the time of erection it was probably visible from far away.I placed headphones on my boyfriend's ears with a sheepish grin, picked the most beat-heavy tune I could find and cranked up the volume. Then I went into the bathroom of our rented Hawaiian cottage and yelled, “Babe! Baby! Can you hear me?” No response. But just for good measure, I turned on the shower. Then I sat down on the toilet and spent the next several minutes staring right at a framed note beseeching me to please conserve water.
There’s nothing like a vacation to bring a relationship to the next level. I’m not talking about novelty, shared adventure or lifelong memories -- although, yes, those things are important. I’m talking about flatulence, y’all. From that point on during the rest of our stay in those tight quarters, we developed a code: “I’m gonna go take a fake shower now,” he would tell me. Or I would ask with a knowing look, “Could you go somewhere far, far away?” The subtext always being: Noises are going to come out of my butt, and I don’t want you to hear them.
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We had managed to admit to each other the fact of our human digestive tracts, and there was no going back -- not even when we returned home to our separate apartments and bathrooms. He quickly adjusted to this free world of farting, but I still clung to gasless -- or at least noiseless -- feminine illusion: “Plug your ears,” I told him, holding my bloated stomach. “Tight!” He humored me by twisting his hands to put his thumbs in his ears while his forefingers pinched his nose closed. I've taken the same slow, tortured path in every relationship of mine: Total fart denial, enforced ear-plugging and then -- boom -- Windy City. They're like Freudian stages of development that I've had to go through anew with each boyfriend.
I'm far from alone in this, thankfully. In a wickedly funny scene in "Love and Other Disasters," a therapist tells her patient that "relationships are best measured by farting." She describes several stages: Stage one "is the conspiracy of silence," she explains. "This is a fantasy period where both parties pretend that they have no bodily waste." Much further along there is "the fart honeymoon, where both parties find each other’s gas just the cutest thing in the world." But, as she warns, "no honeymoon can last forever," and soon comes "the critical fork in the fart": "either the fart loses its power to amuse and embarrass, thereby signifying true love, or else it begins to annoy and disgust, thereby signifying everything that is blocked and rancid in the formerly beloved."
Of course, that isn't a true psychiatric evaluation of the importance of flatulence in relationships, but it certainly rings true. On the most basic level, we refrain from farting around loved ones because we're sensitive little buggers worried about rejection. That fear was substantiated in my friend "Sally's" past relationship, in which her live-in boyfriend told her that she "farted too much and it grossed him out." All we really want is to be loved for our flaws, and our farts -- but fearing we won't be, we come up with absurd solutions like "fake showers" or the very real odor-eliminating Better Marriage Blanket.
That said, I would be remiss in not mentioning the genre of fart-fetishizing porn: So, that exists. Such sexual sentiments are not a modern development, though -- a fact colorfully preserved in a love letter James Joyce sent to his wife Nora, which read, in part:
You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her.
He added, "I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also" and signed off with, "Goodnight, my little farting Nora." Aw, kind of!
I put out a call on Twitter that read, "Let's talk about farting. In relationships. Thoughts, feelings, trauma? Talk to me. #importantworldnews." In response, Aaron Green, a 32-year-old newlywed told me he hasn't farted in front of his wife of two months and he plans to maintain the ruse "as long as possible!" (Exclamation point his.) He explained, "It's akin to staying in shape. I don't want to gain 50 lbs. & get complacent, either. I want her to be turned on by me." Green says he dreads the idea of his wife one day looking at him and thinking, "Oh boy, the paunchy fart machine wants to bone." Another Twitter follower told me, "Married 10 yrs and have never intentionally farted in front of her. It's hard enough to get a BJ, farting wouldn't help." Another man opined that farting is "the second big hurdle in a relationship," right after "I love you."
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My 34-year-old friend Page tells me that she's of two minds on farting in her marriage. Part of her feels "that farting is natural, inevitable and no big deal," but another part of her wants "to be even more polite about farts with my chosen monogamous sexual partner than I am with the general populace, in deference to the fact that we are trying to be monogamous sexual partners as long as we both shall live." Of course, that doesn't mean that her "body and its functions are shrouded in some feminine mystery," she says, as her husband watched her give birth, and they've "commiserated over various intestinal miseries when traveling in southeast Asia and Africa." But she tries to be discreet when possible.
Not all gas-denying is motivated by decorum. Hayley Krischer, a 42-year-old writer from New Jersey, told me, "My husband finds it too funny, which is part of the problem." If she dares let one rip, he and her kids call her "Farticus," which she describes as "hilarious and annoying all at once." Her husband, by the way, is not so shy himself -- in fact, he's quite fond of the ol' "pull my finger trick." She refrains because it's all "too reminiscent of my childhood," she says. In a tweet she explained that "when you [grow up with] a brother, you are scarred for life by farts" and followed up with the hashtag "#dutchoven." Say no more.
I was delighted to find that, contrary to expectations, many of the confident farters that I heard from were women. Kate Harding, formerly of Salon's Broadsheet (R.I.P.), told me of her husband: "I knew he was the one because I had no angst about farting in front of him. I try not to abuse the privilege, though." She elaborated, "I agonized so much about it with guys when I was younger. Not worrying about it made me realize how secure I felt with him." The brilliantly funny Beth Lisick told me in a tweet, "After 15 years, our only real rule is that you can't NOT comment on someone's fart." She added, "If I ever farted and my husband said NOTHING, I would know we were doomed." I begged for details on this post-fart commentary and she offered, "Laughter, disgust, a stab at description ('whoa that sounded like you were opening a cartoon pirate chest')." Another favorite of hers: "That sounded like it came from the '80s."
In my case, I've already belched in front of my boyfriend and become spectacularly lazy about shaving my legs. Farting, without forcing him to plug his ears, is the final frontier. One day soon, I will begin conserving water by ending all the "fake showers." I'll save my intestines some unnecessary agony and, if we can summon anything close to the wit of Lisick and her husband, bring some levity to our relationship. But as the tweeter said above, it's a lot like saying "I love you" -- and I guess I'm waiting for the perfect moment to show him just how much.Bookmarks Organizer is a free browser add-on for the Firefox web browser that checks the status of bookmarks to reveal dead, duplicate or redirecting bookmarks.
If you use bookmarks in your web browser of choice, you will eventually run into issues with bookmarks. Bookmarks may point to sites that are not online anymore, may be redirected to different sites entirely, or may be dupes because you added a bookmark multiple times.
No browser ships with bookmark management options that take these issues into account. Once added, bookmarks are static content that is never changed by the web browser. Users may edit bookmarks, or remove them, but that is a manual process.
While that may work if you have a dozen or so bookmarks in the browser, it won't work if you have hundreds, thousands, or more.
Bookmarks Organizer
Bookmarks Organizer has been created by Sören Hentzschel, a long-standing member of the Firefox community. Ghacks users may know him from this site, as he chimes in regularly when it comes to Firefox topics, and his own German Firefox blog is referenced here regularly as well.
When it comes to add-ons, Sören is best known probably for New Tab Override, an add-on that enables you to modify the new tab page of the web browser.
Bookmarks Organizer fills a gap when it comes to the management of bookmarks in the Firefox web browser. While Firefox users could make use of add-ons in the past that assisted them when it came to checking bookmarks -- Check Places or 404 Bookmarks come to mind -- but they may not work already anymore, may stop working once Mozilla makes the switch to WebExtensions with the release of Firefox 57, or don't offer the functionality that Bookmarks Organizer offers.
Bookmarks Organizer is future proof, it works with all versions of Firefox from 52 on, and will continue to work when Mozilla releases Firefox 57.
The extension adds an icon to the Firefox address bar that you may click on to bring up its interface. If you prefer the keyboard, you can open the interface with Ctrl-Shift-L (Mac OS X Cmd-Shift-L).
You may select one of the available scan options then -- check for broken bookmarks, duplicates or missing bookmark names -- and hit the check bookmarks button afterwards to run the scan.
Note that you can launch the program or run tests directly by entering the following terms in the Firefox address bar:
bookmarks organizer -- opens the main interface
bookmarks duplicates -- runs a scan for duplicate bookmarks
bookmarks empty-names runs a scan for bookmarks with empty names
bookmarks errors -- scans for erroneous bookmarks
bookmarks redirects -- scans for bookmarks that redirect to another URI
Scans are quite fast, and the extension highlights the number of checked bookmarks, total bookmarks, and bookmarks with errors or warnings.
All bookmarks with errors or warnings are listed in the interface. You may use filter options at the top to display only those with errors (more serious) or warnings, or search for specific bookmarks using names or URLs.
Options are listed at the top to correct all redirects or delete all broken bookmarks right away. It is better usually to go through the listing manually once before you hit the process all buttons to make sure there are not any false positives.
The bookmarks listing is divided by folder and location. You find the bookmarks menu and bookmarks toolbar listed there for instance separately. Redirects are highlighted right away, so that you know where a bookmark link is redirect to.
You may edit, delete, or correct redirects individually as well by hovering over an entry.
Sören plans to add support for additional features in the future. This includes whitelist support to exclude bookmarks from scans, bookmark folder features, e.g. scans for empty folders, and more.
Closing Words
Bookmarks Organizer is an excellent add-on for the Firefox web browser that scans for dead and redirecting bookmarks, as well as empty name bookmarks currently. Scans are fast, and users have options to deal with all errors and issues with a single click, or by going through the results manually to verify the findings, and process bookmarks individually.
Now You: How do you manage bookmarks
Summary Author Rating 4.5 based on 12 votes Software Name Bookmarks Organizer Software Category Browser Landing Page https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/bookmarks-organizer/
AdvertisementTuesday on ABC’s “The View,” co-host Joy Behar said President-elect Donald Trump was bringing “mental illness” to the White House.
Whoopi Goldberg said, This new administration is bringing something in we haven’t seen in a long time and that is —
Behar interrupted saying, “Mental illness. Sorry, I couldn’t control myself. Sorry.”
Behar continued saying, “He’s not right in the head. The one thing about the difference between Obama and Trump because I’ve met both of them, and the first time I met President Obama on this show…This is before he was president. I said the one thing you see about this man and his wife is that they’re mentally stable, that they were sane. They were funny and smart. Donald Trump has never appeared stable to me when he has come on the show. I mean — no, he has not.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNENWASHINGTON — The wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has raised her political profile in the last year through her outspoken conservative activism, is rebranding herself as a lobbyist and self-appointed “ambassador to the Tea Party movement.”
Virginia Thomas, the justice’s wife, said on libertyinc.co, a Web site for her new political consulting business, that she saw herself as an advocate for “liberty-loving citizens” who favored limited government, free enterprise and other core conservative issues. She promised to use her “experience and connections” to help clients raise money and increase their political impact.
Ms. Thomas’s effort to take a more operational role on conservative issues could intensify questions about her husband’s ability to remain independent on issues like campaign finance and health care, legal ethicists said.
Justice Thomas “should not be sitting on a case or reviewing a statute that his wife has lobbied for,” said Monroe H. Freedman, a Hofstra Law School professor specializing in legal ethics. “If the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, that creates a perception problem.”
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Ms. Thomas’s founding of her own political consulting shop, Liberty Consulting, was first reported Thursday by Politico, which said she had begun reaching out to freshmen Republicans in Congress.
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The move comes a few months after she gave up the top spot at Liberty Central, a conservative Web site that she founded in 2009 and that has strong links to the Tea Party movement.Jim Boeheim won't coach at Syracuse beyond the next three years. But so long as he does, he will remain at the top of the annual college basketball coaching tenure list.
Plenty has changed since this exercise last year, but Boeheim's presence at No. 1 has not. Also the same: Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski's place at No. 2; both have been on the job for more than 35 years.
In fact, Boeheim and Krzyzewski have piled up a combined 74 seasons at the current jobs, as many as the bottom 97 coaches (out of 351) on the list have totaled in their gigs combined.
With the last of the head coaching openings filled last week (Louisiana Tech's Eric Konkol checks in at No. 351), it seemed an appropriate time to revise the list and update a few tidbits (while adding a few others).
Only 52 Division I coaches have been on the job for 10 years or more, though that number can leap to 55 by the start of next season.
Only 10 Division I coaches have been on the job for 20 years or more, though two others (Michigan State's Tom Izzo and Saint Joseph's Phil Martelli) will celebrate their 20th anniversary in their current positions this summer.
The median hire date is now May 9, 2011, which is when Maryland selected Mark Turgeon to replace the retired Gary Williams. That date is only 47 days later than last year around this time.
The ACC has seven of the 34 longest-tenured coaches in Division I (Boeheim, Krzyzewski, No. 21 Mike Brey, No. 22 Rick Pitino, No. 29 Leonard Hamilton, No. 33 Roy Williams and No. 34 Jamie Dixon). The other four power conferences have a combined four in the top 34 (No. 11 Tom Izzo, No. 17 Kevin Stallings, No. 24 Bo Ryan and No. 30 Lorenzo Romar).
Seven leagues currently do not have a coach in the top 50 in tenure (American, Big Sky, Metro Atlantic, Missouri Valley, Southwestern Athletic, Sun Belt, Western Athletic).
The conference whose longest-tenured coach has been on the job the least amount of time is the WAC; New Mexico State's Marvin Menzies is No. 83 on the list. He was hired just shy of eight years ago.
Of the the 68 teams in the 2015 NCAA tournament, nearly half (32) were led by coaches now in the top 100 of the revised tenure list (two of those, Indiana's Tom Crean and Oklahoma State's Travis Ford, began last season outside the top 100.
On a bit of a tangent, three of last year's first-year coaches got fired (Bowling Green's Chris Jans, Kennesaw State's Jimmy Lallathin and Tennessee's Donnie Tyndall), while two of them made the NCAA tournament (Butler's Chris Holtmann and North Dakota State's David Richman.
Of the 32 Division I conferences, 11 (or roughly a third) did not have a coaching change (yet) this season. Only one league (the Northeast) has not seen a coaching switch in the last two offseasons.
The rundown from No. 1 to No. 351, a list that is still bound to change a few times before the 2015-16 season begins in November.
1976
1. April 3, Jim Boeheim, Syracuse
1980
2. March 18, Mike Krzyzewski, Duke
1984
3. April 1, Greg Kampe, Oakland
1986
4. April, Rick Byrd, Belmont
1989
5. April 26, Gregg Nibert, Presbyterian
6. May 19, Bob McKillop, Davidson
1990
7. July 14, Dave Loos, Austin Peay
8. Oct. 1, Ron Cottrell, Houston Baptist
1995
9. March 13, Fran O'Hanlon, Lafayette
10. May 18, Scott Nagy, South Dakota State
11. July 1, Tom Izzo, Michigan State
12. July 20, Phil Martelli, Saint Joseph's
1996
13. April 17, Howie Dickenman, Central Connecticut
1998
14. March 25, Bob Williams, UC Santa Barbara
1999
15. March 24, Mike McConathy, Northwestern State
16. March 26, Steve Fisher, San Diego State
17. April 1, Kevin Stallings, Vanderbilt
18. April 27, James Jones, Yale
19. April 30, Scott Sutton, Oral Roberts
20. July 26, Mark Few, Gonzaga
2000
21. July 14, Mike Brey, Notre Dame
2001
22. March 21, Rick Pitino, Louisville
23. March 27, Jay Wright, Villanova
24. March 29, Bo Ryan, Wisconsin
25. April 4, Bruiser Flint, Drexel
26. April 10, Randy Bennett, Saint Mary's
27. Dec. 20, Will Brown, Albany
2002
28. Feb. 29, Mike Young, Wofford
29. March 19, Leonard Hamilton, Florida State
30. April 3, Lorenzo Romar, Washington
31. April 4, Eddie Payne, USC Upstate
32. April 12, Kermit Davis, Middle Tennessee
2003 |
to him.
Yugi sees that the Millennium Puzzle box with his piece is in the road and proceeds to collect it just as traffic begins to move. He almost gets hit by a truck, but is saved by Sera, who teleports him to safety. Yugi thanks her and she says it is up to him to complete the Puzzle or not once again. She also requests that Yugi save her elder brother.
Aigami dreams of himself and Sera, back in Egypt, thirsty and begging people, who regard them as a nuisance. He wakes up tied to a chair in a glass prison, with Mokuba on the other side of the glass. Kaiba monitors their interaction externally. Mokuba taunts Aigami, who affirms that Kaiba will never get both pieces. However, Mokuba claims to already know where the other piece is and shows him pictures of Sera. At the Kaiba Land stadium, which boosts a high attendance, Kaiba Summons "Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon" and has it attack Solid Vision fighter jets. He gives a speech to the audience about Dueling and his new Duel Disk. Among those in attendance are Weevil Underwood and Rex Raptor. Yugi and Aigami are introduced and Kaiba announces that he will be Dueling each of them for their pieces of the Millennium Puzzle.
Sera appears before Aigami and apologizes, but maintains that she made the right decision in giving her puzzle piece to Yugi. Aigami is relieved to see that she is okay.
Yugi gets annoyed and demands that he be the one to Duel Aigami. Since Aigami had hurt Yugi's friends and caused Bakura's disappearance, Yugi considers this to be his battle. Kaiba allows it and throws Yugi a new Duel Disk.
Yugi and Aigami begin to Duel. After reducing Yugi to just a few Life Points, Aigami claims he is not doing anything wrong; he just wishes to go the new dimension and leave the current corrupt world behind. He invites Yugi to join him, but Yugi refuses to give up on the current world and its future.
Aigami reflects on his youth, when he was living with an abusive man, who would get children to steal for him. The man would neglect the children and use the stolen money to take care of himself. Shadi appeared before them and immobilized the man. He approached Aigami and pushed against his forehead, causing a gold symbol to momentarily appear. When Sera asked what he did to her brother, Shadi assured her that he was safe. He then proceeded to perform the same action on the other children. Finally, he unfroze the man and used the Quantum Cube to put an end to him.
In the present, Yugi turns the Duel in his favor and defeats Aigami, reiterating that he believes in the future. Aigami disappears after the Duel. While Joey, Téa and Tristan celebrate Yugi's victory, a light appears in the audience, as Bakura is brought back to their world.
Kaiba advances to the field to Duel Yugi for the two pieces. He states that his goal is to bring back "the other Yugi," with whom he has unfinished business. He does not expect the Duel to take long, as he is only Dueling the regular Yugi. Kaiba places the Millennium Puzzle in the center of the field, where it floats in a beam of light. Yugi tries to tell Kaiba that Atem is gone, but he pays no attention and they begin their Duel. A few turns in, Yugi insists that the Duel is pointless and demonstrates by inserting the last two pieces into the Millennium Puzzle. Nothing happens, much to Kaiba's surprise.
Aigami is back in the dimension, where Mani had died, and sees the Millennium Ring again. Sensing his presence, the Ring engulfs him in evil energy. He screams for Sera to save him.
Yugi explains to Kaiba that nothing happened because Atem is no longer inside the Puzzle. Kaiba is furious and accuses Yugi of deceiving him. The two continue to Duel and Yugi eventually attacks Kaiba, who had 2500 Life Points, with "Dark Magician", which had 2500 ATK. Kaiba's Life Points decrease, but he smirks as the counter suddenly stops at 100. The power at the stadium is shut down, prematurely ending the Duel.
People in the audience scream as they suddenly disappear in a wave of darkness. Aigami, now influenced by the evil of the Millennium Ring as Dark Diva, appears and Yugi and Kaiba team up to Duel him.
The Duel is a Shadow Game, where players' bodies fade away as they lose Life Points. Dark Diva reaches a point where he can defeat one of his opponents and chooses Yugi. However, Kaiba redirects the attack to himself and hands Yugi the Millennium Puzzle, before disappearing, demanding that Yugi "call him now". Yugi puts on the puzzle and continues the Duel. Towards the end, Yugi's body reaches its limits and he finds himself incapable of drawing his next card. He apologizes to everyone and begins to black out, but is suddenly engulfed in a beam of golden light. Atem, dressed in the Domino High School uniform, appears. Without speaking, Atem Summons "Palladium Oracle Mahad", who kneels before him. "Mahad" then defeats Diva, whose body reverts to normal, before disappearing.
Gold light moves through the stadium, and other people whose bodies had faded away reappear. Yugi and Atem split into separate bodies and stand facing each other. After a moment of silence, Yugi nods and Atem presses on the Millennium Puzzle, making it and himself disappear. Mani is revived and is now with Aigami, Sera, and the other children. Joey, Téa, Tristan and Bakura congratulate Yugi, who informs them that he saw Atem. Joey mentions seeing him earlier too and the group is approached by Kaiba, who is interested in the fact that they saw Atem. Kaiba acknowledges Yugi as a competent Duelist and Yugi thanks him for believing in him. Kaiba gives him a smile and parts ways.
Aigami wakes up in the Plana realm, where Mani informs him that since the Pharaoh had returned their power was now gone, but comments that it was for the best.
During the graduation ceremony, Yugi reads his speech, causing Téa to tear up and Joey and Tristan to cry uncontrollably. In Egypt, Aigami and Sera part ways with Mani, on good terms. At the airport, Téa boards a plane and her friends all see her off.
On the KaibaCorp space station, Kaiba is in a pod, on a call with Mokuba, who warns him that what he is attempting is dangerous. Mokuba says that the item in question has not been fully tested and the safety precautions have not been ensured. Kaiba says not to worry and despite Mokuba begging him otherwise, continues with his plan and says that Mokuba is in charge. He activates the Quantum Cube, which is next to him, causing the space station to be covered in gold light, as he shoots down the elevator shaft that connects the station to Earth.
Kaiba appears in a desert, presumably having travelled to the afterlife, and walks to the top of a hill, overlooking a city containing Atem's palace. Kaiba advances to the throne room where Atem is sitting, wearing the Millennium Puzzle. Kaiba activates his Duel Disk. Atem stands up, faces him, and confidently smiles.
Featured Duels
Seto Kaiba vs. Virtual Atem
Turn 1: Kaiba
Kaiba's hand contains "Polymerization", three "Blue-White Dragons" and two unspecified cards. Kaiba activates "Polymerization", fusing the three "Blue-Eyes" in his hand to Fusion Summon "Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon" (4500/3800) in Attack Position. Kaiba Sets a card.
Turn 2: Atem
Atem activates "Dark Magic Veil", paying 1000 LP (Atem: 8000 → 7000) to Special Summon "Dark Magician" (2500/2100) from his hand in Attack Position.[16][17] As he controls "Dark Magician", he activates "Thousand Knives" to destroy a monster his opponent controls. He chooses "Neo Blue-Eyes". As his opponent activated a Spell or Trap Card that would destroy a monster on the field, Kaiba activates his face-down "Dark Sacrifice", letting him send a Level 3 or lower DARK monster from his Deck to the Graveyard to negate that destruction. He sends "Saggi the Dark Clown".[18][17] Atem Sets two cards.
Turn 3: Kaiba
"Neo Blue-Eyes" attacks "Dark Magician". As a monster he controls was targeted for an attack, Atem activates his face-down "Time Chain", preventing the destruction of both monsters by battle, then treating them as not being on the field, negating their effects, preventing from them attacking and preventing them from being targeted by effects or attacks until the second Standby Phase of each player (Atem: 7000 → 5000).[18][17] Kaiba Sets a card.
Turn 4: Atem
Atem Normal Summons "Celtic Guard of Noble Arms" (2100/700) in Attack Position. He then activates its effect, letting him Special Summon an "Elf" monster from his hand once per turn. He Special Summons "Celtic Guardian" (1400/1200) in Attack Position.[18][17] Both monsters attack directly (Kaiba: 8000 → 4500). Since it inflicted battle damage to his opponent, Atem activates the effect of "Celtic Guard", drawing two cards as he controls two "Elf" monsters.[18][17]
Turn 5: Kaiba
As he controls no monsters, Kaiba Normal Summons "Kaiser Vorse Raider" (1900/1200) from his hand in Attack Position without Tribute via its own effect.[18][17] "Kaiser Vorse Raider" attacks and destroys "Celtic Guardian" (Atem: 5000 → 4500). Kaiba Sets a card.
Turn 6: Atem
As it is his second Standby Phase after the activation of "Time Chain", "Dark Magician" is now treated as being on the field again. As he controls a face-up Spellcaster-Type monster, Atem activates "Magical Dimension", letting him Tribute a monster he controls, Special Summon a Spellcaster-Type monster from his hand, then destroy a monster on the field. He Tributes "Celtic Guard", Special Summons "Dark Magician Girl" (2000/1700) and destroys "Kaiser Vorse Raider". As a card he controls was destroyed by a Spell effect, Kaiba activates his face-down "Induced Explosion", letting him destroy a card on the field.[19][17] He destroys "Time Chain", so "Neo Blue-Eyes" is now treated as being face-up on the field.
Turn 7: Kaiba
"Neo Blue-Eyes" attacks "Dark Magician". As an opponent's monster declared an attack, Atem activates his face-down "Dimension Reflector", banishing two Spellcaster-Type monsters he controls to target the attacking monster and Special Summon "Dimension Reflector" in Attack Position as a monster with ATK and DEF equal to the attacking monster's ATK, then inflict that value as battle damage to the opponent.[19][17] He banishes "Dark Magician" and "Dark Magician Girl" to Special Summon "Dimension Reflector" (4500/4500) and inflict 4500 damage. As he would take battle damage, Kaiba activates his face-down "Enhanced Counter", negating that damage and increasing the ATK of a monster he controls by that value until the end of the Battle Phase ("Neo Blue-Eyes": 4500 → 9000).[19][17] A replay occurs and "Neo Blue-Eyes" attacks and destroys "Dimension Reflector" (Atem: 4500 → 0).
Seto Kaiba vs. Aigami
This Duel introduces Dimension Summoning. Both Normal Summons and Special Summons may be conducted as Dimension Summons instead, allowing players to Summon any monster without Tribute, by using their own Spirit to determine its ATK and DEF values, though their maximum original values will be the printed values. Neither player receives battle damage from battles involving Dimension Summoned monsters, but will take damage equal to their ATK or DEF when they are destroyed, depending on their battle position.
As every monster Dimension Summoned by both players was Summoned with its maximum values, that will be not be noted below.
Turn 1: Kaiba
Kaiba's opening hand contains "Counter Gate", "Krystal Dragon", "Dragon's Orb", "Blue-Eyes Alternative White Dragon", "High Speed Aria" and "Lord of D.". Kaiba Dimension Summons "Krystal Dragon" (2500/1000) in Attack Position and Sets two cards.
Turn 2: Aigami
Aigami Dimension Summons "Vijam the Cubic Seed" (0/0) in Attack Position and then Sets four cards.
Turn 3: Kaiba
Kaiba Dimension Summons a second "Krystal Dragon" (2500/1000) in Attack Position. The first "Krystal Dragon" attacks "Vijam", but the effect of "Vijam" prevents its destruction by battle. As it was attacked, its effect activates, moving it to the Spell & Trap Card Zone and placing a Cubic Counter on "Krystal Dragon". Monsters with Cubic Counters are unable to attack and have their effects negated.[20][17] The second "Krystal Dragon" attacks directly. As an opponent's monster declared an attack, Aigami activates his face-down "Cubic Ascension", letting him Special Summon another "Vijam" from his Deck and make it the attack target.[21][17] He Special Summons "Vijam" (0/0) in Attack Position and its effect activates, preventing its destruction by battle, placing itself in the Spell & Trap Card Zone and giving "Krystal Dragon" a Cubic Counter.
Kaiba activates his face-down "Dragon's Orb", preventing the effects of Dragon-Type monsters he controls from being negated until the end of the turn.[21][17] As both "Krystal Dragons" attacked this turn, Kaiba activates their effects, letting him add a Dragon-Type monster from his Deck to his hand.[20][17] He adds two "Blue-Eyes White Dragons". As he has a "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" in his hand, Kaiba Dimension Summons "Blue-Eyes Alternative White Dragon" (3000/2500) from his hand in Attack Position via its own effect. Its name is treated as "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" while on the field.[21][17] "Alternative Dragon" attacks directly. As he is being attacked directly, Aigami activates his face-down "Cubic Rebirth", letting him target the attacking monster and force his opponent to Special Summon as many monsters as possible with the same name from their hand, Deck and Graveyard. The targeted monster and each of the Summoned monsters will receive a Cubic Counter and have their ATK reduced to 0. Aigami can also Special Summon a "Cubic" monster from his hand.[21][17] Kaiba Special Summons the two "Blue-Eyes White Dragons" (3000 → 0 each) from his hand in Attack Position, while Aigami Special Summons a third "Vijam" (0/0) in Attack Position. Kaiba Sets a card.
Turn 4: Aigami
Aigami activates the effect of the two "Vijam" in his Spell & Trap Card Zone, moving them back to the field.[20][17] He stacks a "Vijam" to Special Summon "Dark Garnex the Cubic Beast" (0/0) from his hand in Attack Position via its own effect. It gains 1000 original ATK for each monster stacked underneath it (0 → 1000).[21][17] "Dark Garnex" attacks and destroys "Blue-Eyes". Since it destroyed a monster by battle this turn, Aigami activates the effect of "Dark Garnex", returning it to the Deck to Special Summon the "Vijam" that was stacked underneath it, then add "Blade Garoodia the Cubic Beast" from his Deck to his hand.[21][17]
Aigami stacks two of his "Vijam" to Special Summon "Blade Garoodia (0/0) from his hand in Attack Position via its own effect. It gains 1000 original ATK for each monster stacked underneath it (0 → 2000). "Blade Garoodia" can attack twice per Battle Phase, so it attacks and destroys the remaining two "Blue-Eyes". As it destroyed a monster by battle this turn, Aigami activates the effect of "Blade Garoodia", returning it to the Deck to Special Summon the two "Vijam" (0/0 each) stacked underneath it, then add "Buster Gundil the Cubic Behemoth" from his Deck to his hand.[21][17]
Aigami stacks his three "Vijams" to Special Summon "Buster Gundil" (0/0) from his hand in Attack Position. It gains 1000 original ATK for each monster stacked underneath it (0 → 3000). "Buster Gundil" can attack three times per Battle Phase, so it attacks and destroys both of Kaiba's "Krystal Dragons" (Kaiba: 8000 → 3000).[21][17] "Buster Gundil" attacks directly. As an opponent's monster with 1500 or more ATK is attacking directly, Kaiba activates his face-down "Counter Gate" to negate the attack and draw a card. If it is a monster, he can Normal Summon it immediately.[22][17] As he controls a "Cubic" monster, Aigami activates his face-down "Cubic Mandala", letting him Special Summon all monsters in his opponent's Graveyard that were destroyed this turn to the opponent's field with a Cubic Counter and their ATK reduced to 0. As long as these monsters are on the field, all monster effects in his opponent's field, hand and Graveyard are negated.[22][17] He Special Summons two "Blue-Eyes" (3000 → 0), "Alternative Dragon" (3000 → 0) and two "Krystal Dragons" (2500 → 0).
"Counter Gate" resolves and Kaiba draws (from the ground rather than the deck) "Obelisk the Tormentor". He Tributes his two "Blue-Eyes" and one "Alternative Dragon" to Tribute Summon "Obelisk" (4000/4000) in Attack Position. Kaiba activates its effect, Tributing his two "Krystal Dragons" to inflict 4000 damage to Aigami (Aigami: 8000 → 4000). Due to being an Egyptian God, the effects of "Obelisk" cannot be prevented by the effect of "Cubic Mandala". "Obelisk" attacks and destroys "Buster Gundil" (Aigami: 4000 → 1000).
At this point, the security field surrounding the pieces of the Millennium Puzzle deactivates, so Mokuba and Kaiba escape with the pieces. The Duel ends with no conclusion.
Yugi Muto vs. Aigami
This Duel uses Dimension Summoning. Both Normal Summons and Special Summons may be conducted as Dimension Summons instead, allowing players to Summon any monster without Tribute, by using their own Spirit to determine its ATK and DEF values, though their maximum original values will be the printed values. Neither player receives battle damage from battles involving Dimension Summoned monsters, but will take damage equal to their ATK or DEF when they are destroyed, depending on their battle position.
As every monster Dimension Summoned by both players was Summoned with its maximum values, that will be not be noted below.
Turn 1: Yugi
Yugi draws "Dimension Mirage". He Dimension Summons "Sentry Soldier of Stone" (1300/2000) in Defense Position and then Sets two cards.
Turn 2: Aigami
Aigami Dimension Summons "Vijam the Cubic Seed" (0/0) in Attack Position. Aigami stacks his "Vijam" to Dimension Summon "Geira Guile the Cubic King" (0/0) from his hand in Attack Position via its own effect. As it was Special Summoned, its effect activates, inflicting 800 damage to the opponent (Yugi: 8000 → 7200). "Geira Guile" gains 800 original ATK (0 → 800) for each monster stacked underneath it.[23][17] Aigami then activates "Cubic Karma", letting him stack any "Vijam" from his hand underneath a "Cubic" monster he controls. He stacks two more "Vijam" under "Geira Guile" (ATK: 800 → 2400).[23][17] "Geira Guile" attacks and destroys "Sentry Soldier of Stone" (Yugi: 7200 → 5200). As he took 2000 or more battle damage, Yugi activates his face-down "Dig of Destiny", letting him draw a card. Since it battled this turn, Aigami activates the effect of "Geira Guile", returning it to his Deck to Special Summon the three "Vijam" (0/0 each) underneath it and add "Vulcan Dragni the Cubic King" from his Deck to his hand.[23][17]
Aigami stacks two "Vijam" to Dimension Summon "Vulcan Dragni" (0/0) from his hand in Attack Position via its own effect. As it was Special Summoned, its effects activates, inflicting 800 damage to the opponent (Yugi: 5200 → 4400). "Vulcan Dragni" gains 800 original ATK for each monster stacked underneath it (0 → 1600).[24][17] "Vulcan Dragni" attacks directly (Yugi: 4400 → 2800). Since it battled this turn, Aigami activates the effect of "Vulcan Dragni", returning it to the Deck to Special Summon the two "Vijam" (0/0 each) underneath it and add "Indiora Doom Volt the Cubic Emperor" from his Deck to his hand.[23][17] Aigami stacks his three "Vijam" to Dimension Summon "Indiora Doom Volt" (0/0) from his hand in Attack Position via its own effect. As it was Special Summoned, its effect activates, inflicting 800 damage to the opponent (Yugi: 2800 → 2000). "Indiora Doom Volt" gains 800 original ATK for each monster stacked underneath it (0 → 2400). "Indiora Doom Volt" attacks directly. As he is being attacked directly, Yugi activates his face-down "Warrior's Devotion", letting him send a Warrior-Type monster from his hand to the Graveyard to decrease the attacking monster's ATK by the sent monster's ATK.[24][17] He sends "Silent Swordsman LV5" ("Indiora Doom Volt": 2400 → 100). The attack continues (Yugi: 2000 → 1900).
Turn 3: Yugi
Yugi Dimension Summons "Lord Gaia the Fierce Knight" (2300/2100) in Attack Position. "Lord Gaia" attacks and destroys "Indiora Doom Volt" (Aigami: 8000 → 7900). Since "Indiora Doom Volt" was sent to the Graveyard, its effect activates, letting him return it to his hand and Special Summon the three "Vijam" (0/0 each) underneath it.[24][17] As he Special Summoned a "Cubic Seed" monster during his opponent's turn via the effect of a "Cubic" monster, Aigami activates the effect of "Cubic Karma", sending to the Graveyard to halve his opponent's LP (Yugi: 1900 → 950).[23][17] Yugi Sets three cards.
Turn 4: Aigami
Aigami stacks his three "Vijam" to Dimension Summon "Indiora Doom Volt" (0/0) from his hand in Attack Position via its own effect. As it was Special Summoned, its effect activates, inflicting 800 damage to the opponent (Yugi: 950 → 150). "Indiora Doom Volt" gains 800 original ATK for each monster stacked underneath it (0 → 2400). As Aigami Special Summoned a monster with ATK greater than the ATK of "Lord Gaia", the effect of "Lord Gaia" increases its ATK by 700 (2300 → 3000) until the End Phase.[24][17] Aigami then activates "Cubic Wave", letting him target a "Cubic" monster he controls and a monster his opponent controls, increase the ATK of his monster by its original ATK and halve the ATK of his opponent's monster as long as "Cubic Karma" remains on the field ("Indiora Doom Volt": 2400 → 4800, "Lord Gaia": 3000 → 1500).[25][17] "Indiora Doom Volt" attacks "Lord Gaia", but Yugi activates his face-down Continuous Trap Card "Dimension Sphinx", letting him target a face-up Attack Position monster he controls. When it is attacked by an opponent's monster with higher ATK, the difference in ATKs will be inflicted to the opponent as damage. Yugi then activates his face-down Continuous Trap Card "Dimension Guardian", letting him target an Attack Position monster he controls and prevent its destruction by battle as long as it is in Attack Position. Finally, Yugi activates his face-down "Dimension Mirage", letting him target an Attack Position monster his opponent controls. When that monster fails to destroy an Attack Position monster Yugi controls by battle, he may banish a monster from his Graveyard to force that target to attack again in a row.[25][17] The attack continues, "Lord Gaia" is not destroyed and Aigami takes damage (Aigami: 7900 → 4600).
Since "Indiora Doom Volt" failed to destroy "Lord Gaia" by battle, Yugi banishes a monster from his Graveyard with "Dimension Mirage", the effect of "Dimension Mirage" forces "Indiora Doom Volt" to attack "Lord Gaia" again, with the effect of "Dimension Guardian" preventing "Lord Gaia" from being destroyed and the effect of "Dimension Sphinx" inflicting damage to Aigami (Aigami: 4600 → 1300). Thus, Aigami is forced into an Infinite Loop and this repeats one more time, with Yugi banishing the last monster in his Graveyard (Aigami: 1300 → 0).[25][17]
Yugi Muto vs. Seto Kaiba
Turn 1: Yugi
Yugi Normal Summons "Marshmacaron" (200/200) in Defense Position and Sets two cards.
Turn 2: Kaiba
Kaiba Normal Summons "Assault Wyvern" (1800/1000) in Attack Position. "Assault Wyvern" attacks and destroys "Marshmacaron". As it was destroyed, the effect of "Marshmacaron" activates, letting Yugi Special Summon two "Marchmacaron" from his Deck with their effects negated.[26][17] He Special Summons them (200/200 each) in Defense Position. As it destroyed a Defense Position monster by battle, Kaiba activates the effect of "Assault Wyvern", letting him Tribute it to Special Summon a Dragon-Type monster from his hand.[26][17] He Special Summons "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" (3000/2500) in Attack Position. Kaiba activates the Quick-Play Spell Card, "Dragon's Fighting Spirit", allowing a Dragon-Type monster that was Special Summoned to his field this turn to attack an additional number of times equal to the number of monsters Special Summoned to the opponent's field this turn, meaning three.[26][17] "Blue-Eyes" attacks and destroys both "Marshmacarons" and then attacks directly (Yugi: 8000 → 5000). As he took battle damage, Yugi activates his face-down "Dark Horizon", letting him Special Summon a DARK Spellcaster-Type monster from his Deck with ATK equal to or less than the damage he took.[26][17] Yugi Special Summons "Dark Magician" (2500/2100) in Attack Position. Kaiba Sets a card.
Turn 3: Yugi
Yugi Sets a card.
Turn 4: Kaiba
"Blue-Eyes" attacks "Dark Magician". As an opponent's monster attacked, Yugi activates his face-down "Metamorphortress", Special Summoning it as a monster (1000/1000) in Defense Position. Then, Yugi can equip a monster he controls to it to increase its ATK and DEF by the ATK of the equipped monster.[27][17] Yugi equips "Dark Magician" to "Metamorphortress" (1000/1000 → 3500/3500). A replay occurs and Kaiba chooses not to attack.
Turn 5: Yugi
Yugi switches "Metamorphortress" to Attack Position. "Metamorphortress" attacks and destroys "Blue-Eyes" (Kaiba: 8000 → 7500). As it attacked, the effect of "Metamorphortress" activates, switching it to Defense Position.[27][17]
Turn 6: Kaiba
Kaiba's hand contains "Polymerization", "Chaos Form", "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" and "Blue-Eyes Chaos MAX Dragon". Kaiba activates "Chaos Form", letting him Ritual Summon a "Chaos" or "Black Luster Soldier" Ritual Monster from his hand. As he has a "Blue-Eyes" or "Dark Magician" in Graveyard, he can do so without Tribute. He Ritual Summons "Chaos MAX Dragon" (4000/0) in Attack Position.[27][17] "Chaos MAX Dragon" attacks and destroys "Metamorphortess", with the effect of "Chaos MAX Dragon" inflicting double piercing battle damage (Yugi: 5000 → 4000).[27][17]
Turn 7: Yugi
Yugi Normal Summons "Apple Magician Girl" (1200/800) in Attack Position and Sets a card.
Turn 8: Kaiba
"Chaos MAX Dragon" attacks "Apple Magician Girl". As it was attacked, Yugi activates the effect of "Apple Magician Girl", letting him Special Summon a Spellcaster-Type monster from his hand of a lower Level than that of "Apple Magician Girl", or Special Summon a Spellcaster-Type monster from his hand with a higher Level than that of "Apple Magician Girl" with its effects negated. In either case, the Summoned monster will be made the new attack target and the ATK of the attacking monster will be halved.[27][17] He chooses the former effect, Special Summoning "Lemon Magician Girl" (800/600) in Attack Position ("Chaos MAX Dragon": 4000 → 2000). The attack is redirected to "Lemon Magician Girl" and as it was attacked, Yugi activates its effect, which is the same as that of "Apple Magician Girl".[28][17] Yugi chooses the latter effect, Special Summoning "Dark Magician Girl" (2000/1700) in Attack Position ("Chaos MAX Dragon": 2000 → 1000). The attack is redirected to "Dark Magician Girl" and "Chaos MAX Dragon" is destroyed (Kaiba: 7500 → 6500).
As a Level 8 or higher Dragon-Type monster on the field was destroyed, Kaiba Special Summons "Deep-Eyes White Dragon" (0/0) from his hand in Attack Position via its own effect. As it was Normal or Special Summoned, the effect of "Deep-Eyes" activates, inflicting 600 damage to the opponent for each Dragon-Type monster in Kaiba's Graveyard (Yugi: 4000 → 2200). The ATK of "Deep-Eyes" becomes equal to that of 1 Dragon-Type monster in Kaiba's Graveyard.[28][17] He chooses "Chaos MAX Dragon" ("Deep-Eyes": 0 → 4000). "Deep-Eyes" attacks and destroys "Lemon Magician Girl". As a Spellcaster-Type monster he controls was attacked, Yugi activates his face-down "Magicians' Defense", halving the battle damage (Yugi: 2200 → 600) and ending the Battle Phase.[28][17] Kaiba Sets a card.
Turn 9: Yugi
Yugi activates "Magical Contract Door", letting him add a Spell Card in his hand to his opponent's hand to add a monster from his Deck to his hand.[28][17] He adds "Gandora-X the Dragon of Demolition". He Tributes "Apple Magician Girl" and "Dark Magician Girl" to Tribute Summon "Gandora X" (0/0) in Attack Position. Yugi activates the effect of "Gandora-X", letting him destroy all other monsters on the field once per turn and inflict damage to the opponent equal to the ATK of the destroyed monster with the highest ATK, then increasing the ATK of "Gandora-X" by that value.[28][17] "Deep-Eyes" is destroyed (Kaiba: 6500 → 2500). As "Deep-Eyes" was destroyed, its effect activates, destroying all monsters Yugi controls.[28][17] "Gandora-X" is destroyed.
Kaiba activates his face-down "High Speed Aria", letting him send a Normal Spell Card from his hand to the Graveyard to activate the effect of that Spell Card and preventing Kaiba from activating Spell Cards during his next turn.[28][17] He sends the "Monster Reborn" Yugi gave him with "Magical Contract Door", intending to Special Summon "Deep-Eyes" from the Graveyard. As the highest Level monster on the field was sent to the Graveyard this turn from both sides of the field, Yugi activates his face-down "Final Geas", banishing all monsters from both Graveyards, then letting Yugi Special Summon the Spellcaster-Type monster with the highest Level among those banished cards to his field.[28][17] Yugi Special Summons "Dark Magician" (2500/2100) in Attack Position. As Kaiba has no monsters in his Graveyard, "High Speed Aria" resolves with no effect.[28][17] "Dark Magician" attacks directly (Kaiba: 2500 → 100). The Duel is interrupted before Kaiba's LP counter can reach 0.
Yugi Muto & Seto Kaiba vs. Dark Aigami
This Duel uses Dimension Summoning. Both Normal Summons and Special Summons may be conducted as Dimension Summons instead, allowing players to Summon any monster without Tribute, by using their own Spirit to determine its ATK and DEF values, though their maximum original values will be the printed values. Neither player receives battle damage from battles involving Dimension Summoned monsters, but will take damage equal to their ATK or DEF when they are destroyed, depending on their battle position.
As every monster Dimension Summoned by both players was Summoned with its maximum values, that will be not be noted below.
Turn 1: Dark Aigami
Aigami Dimension Summons "Crimson Nova The Dark Cubic Lord" (3000/0) from his hand in Attack Position and Sets two cards. During the End Phase, the effect of "Crimson Nova" activates, inflicting 3000 damage to every player (Aigami, Kaiba, and Yugi: 8000 → 5000).
Turn 2: Seto Kaiba
Kaiba Dimension Summons "Pandemic Dragon" (2500/1000) in Attack Position. He activates its effect, paying 500 LP (Kaiba: 5000 → 4500) to decrease the ATK of Aigami's monster by 500. However, "Crimson Nova the Dark Cubic Lord" is unaffected by the effects of monsters with 3000 or less ATK. Kaiba Sets a card.
Turn 3: Yugi Muto
Yugi Dimension Summons "Silver Gadget" (1500/1000) in Attack Position. As it was Normal or Special Summoned, its effect activates, letting Yugi Special Summon a Level 4 Machine-Type monster from his hand. He Dimension Summons "Gold Gadget (1700/800) in Attack Position. Yugi Sets two cards.
Turn 4: Dark Aigami
"Crimson Nova" attacks, but Yugi activates his face-down "Metalhold the Moving Blockade", letting him target any number of Level 4 Machine-Type monsters he controls and Special Summon "Metalhold" as a monster (0/0) in Attack Position, then equip those monsters to it to increase its ATK by the combined ATK of the equipped monsters. "Silver Gadget" and "Gold Gadget" are equipped to "Metalhold" (0 → 3200). "Metalhold" prevents other monsters from being targeted for attacks, so the attack is redirected to "Metalhold". As a monster he controls would be destroyed by battle, Aigami activates his face-down "Cubic Defense", preventing its destruction and letting him Special Summon two monsters from his hand with the same name. He Special Summons two more "Crimson Novas" (3000/0) in Attack Position. The second "Crimson Nova" attacks and destroys "Pandemic Dragon" (Kaiba: 4500 → 2000). As it was destroyed, the effect of "Pandemic Dragon" activates, reducing the ATK of all monsters on the field by 1000, but the "Crimson Novas" are unaffected as "Pandemic Dragon" had less than 3000 ATK ("Metalhold": 3200 → 2200). The third |
daughter before the court session and she was prepared for a prison sentence. "We tried to comfort her," said Stanislav Samutsevich.
The charges carried a maximum penalty of seven years in prison, although prosecutors had asked for a three-year sentence.
Putin himself had said the band members shouldn't be judged too harshly, creating expectations that they could be sentenced to time served and freed in the courtroom. This, however, would have left the impression that Putin had bowed to public pressure, something he has resisted throughout his 12 years in power.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin couldn't intervene in the judicial process and refused to comment on the sentence.
"Putin has doomed himself to another year and a half of international shame and humiliation," said Boris Akunin, one of Russia's most popular authors, who was among the Pussy Riot supporters outside the courthouse. "The whole thing is bad because it's yet another step toward the escalation of tensions within society. And the government is absolutely to blame."
Defense lawyers said they would appeal the verdict, although they had little hope that it would be overturned. "Under no circumstances will the girls ask for a pardon (from Putin)," said Mark Feygin. "They will not beg and humiliate themselves before such a bastard."
Outside the court, police rounded up a few dozen protesters, including former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who is a leading opposition activist, and leftist opposition group leader Sergei Udaltsov.
When a prison bus drove the three women away, hundreds of supporters cheered their support.
Amnesty International strongly condemned the court's ruling, saying it "shows that the Russian authorities will stop at no end to suppress dissent and stifle civil society." Governments including the United States, Britain, France and Germany denounced the sentences as disproportionate.
President Barack Obama was disappointed by the decision, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. "While we understand the group's behavior was offensive to some, we have serious concerns about the way that these young women have been treated by the Russian judicial system," he said.
The Pussy Riot case has stoked the resentment of opposition partisans who have turned out for a series of huge anti-Putin rallies since last winter.
Alexei Navalny, a key leader behind those protests, condemned the verdict as a "cynical mockery of justice" and said the opposition will step up its protests.
Even some Kremlin loyalists strongly criticized the verdict. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said it has dealt "yet another blow to the court system and citizens' trust in it." "The country's image and its attractiveness in the eyes of investors have suffered an enormous damage," he said.
Mikhail Fedotov, the head of a presidential advisory council on human rights, criticized the verdict and voiced hope that the sentence will be repealed or at least softened.
And Mikhail Barshchevsky, a lawyer who represents the Cabinet in high courts, said that the verdict had no basis in Russian criminal law
The Pussy Riot case has underlined the vast influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Although church and state are formally separate, the church identifies itself as the heart of Russian national identity and critics say its strength effectively makes it a quasi-state entity. Some Orthodox groups and many believers had urged strong punishment for an action they consider blasphemous.
The head of the church, Patriarch Kirill, has made no secret of his strong support for Putin, praising his presidencies as "God's miracle," and he described the performance as part of an assault by "enemy forces" on the church. He avoided talking to the media as he left Warsaw's Royal Castle following a ceremony in which he and the head of Poland's Catholic Church called for mutual forgiveness and reconciliation.
The judge relied extensively on the testimony of church laymen, who said they were offended and shocked by the band's stunt. "The actions of the defendants reflected their hatred of religion," Syrova said in the verdict.
The Orthodox Church said in a statement after the verdict that the band's stunt was a "sacrilege" and a "reflection of rude animosity toward millions of people and their feelings." It also asked the authorities to "show clemency toward the convicted in the hope that they will refrain from new sacrilegious actions."
The case comes in the wake of several recently passed laws cracking down on opposition, including one that raised the fine for taking part in an unauthorized demonstrations by 150 times to 300,000 rubles (about $9,000).
Another measure requires non-government organizations that both engage in vaguely defined political activity and receive funding from abroad to register as "foreign agents."We’ve lived through nearly 100 days of the Trump presidency and we have a thousand more to go. During these first three months we, as a nation, have been compelled to spend a lot of time with Donald Trump. Listening to him. Watching him. Hearing from him as he weighs in—shudder—on global events. During his early days as a politician, we also got to explore the inner Donald—the man beneath the cumulus of hair. We’ve explored his passions (golf), his likes (fast food), and his dislikes (appropriately cooked steaks). It’s a growing corpus of reporting that has allowed readers to dive a little deeper in the baby pool that is our current president.
This week, we got another insight into Trump and the creature comforts that may seem like small things (because they are), but give some insight into a man who does not have much insight of his own. During a round of sit-down interviews with various outlets at the White House, we learned Donald Trump has a Coke button in the Oval Office.
The Financial Times:
Sitting across from Donald Trump in the Oval Office, my eyes are drawn to a little red button on a box that sits on his desk. “This isn’t the nuclear button, is it?” I joke, pointing. “No, no, everyone thinks it is,” Trump says on cue, before leaning over and pressing it to order some Cokes. “Everyone does get a little nervous when I press that button.”
The Associated Press:
A man accustomed to wealth and its trappings, Trump has embraced life in the Executive Mansion, often regaling guests with trivia about the historic decor. With the push of a red button placed on the Resolute Desk that presidents have used for decades, a White House butler soon arrived with a Coke for the president.
Reuters:
Trump, sipping a Coke delivered by an aide after the president ordered it by pressing a button on his desk, appeared to rebuff an overture from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, who told Reuters a direct phone call with Trump could take place again after their first conversation in early December angered Beijing.
I know what you’re thinking: Yes, yes, I’m sure Donald Trump can use the button for doing other things—like ordering Big Macs.I can’t help but feel a bit crestfallen that summer is nearly over. Not too long ago I was making sour cherry baby pies while planning a trip to the Outer Banks and now it’s September. I had so many grand summer projects planned like pickling and preserving but summer just flew by so quickly. Sigh. But what I will certainly miss the most are the the long summer days. I don’t know about you but I feel most productive in the summer when I feel I can pack my day with so many things because of the longer days. I guess they’re not long enough to get all my summer projects done! But don’t you love taking after-dinner walks when it’s still bright outside? Stanford and I surely do.
But I should shake these summer blues off because Fall is here! I always tell family and friends that Fall is the perfect time to visit San Francisco because the weather is perfect. Days are warm and sunny and nights are mild and clear. The city is gorgeous in the Fall even without the changing colors. I think it’s the way the soft, Fall light illuminates the city and how it casts long beautiful shadows. Plus, of course, I look forward to the string of holidays, which is just around the corner.
For me, the bearer of good news that Fall is upon us is the tasty Pimientos de Padrón — the tiny, lush green Padrón peppers. Simply fried in olive oil and sprinkled with salt, these peppers are packed with a delightful sweet and nutty flavor. But let me warn you, one out of about a dozen or so is typically scorching hot. The smaller ones are sweeter while the bigger, more odd-shaped ones are hotter. They are the perfect tapas, the perfect snack to enjoy on a warm Indian summer day.
In San Francisco, Padrón Peppers are available from August through October in Farmers’ Markets. Happy Quail Farms, a small pepper farm in East Palo Alto, sells both sweet and hot varieties in the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market on Thursdays and Saturdays.
Fried Padrón Peppers Recipe
olive oil
Padrón Peppers
coarse sea salt
Cover the bottom of a frying pan or skillet with olive oil and heat. Toss the Padrón peppers in the pan when the olive oil is hot. The peppers are ready when they start having small white blisters. Sprinkle with sea salt before serving. An alternative to frying is grilling but make sure not to burn the peppers.Royal family ignored cousins hidden in asylum BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Nurses who cared for two cousins of Queen Elizabeth who were born with learning difficulties have spoken of how the sisters were never visited by the royal family during decades in an institution. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/uk/royal-family-ignored-cousins-hidden-in-asylum-28680332.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/migration_catalog/article25803749.ece/b5339/AUTOCROP/h342/queens-cousin
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Nurses who cared for two cousins of Queen Elizabeth who were born with learning difficulties have spoken of how the sisters were never visited by the royal family during decades in an institution.
Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, nieces to the British Queen Mother, were sent to the Royal Earlswood Hospital in Redhill, Surrey, in 1941, aged 15 and 22 respectively.
Hospital staff interviewed for a Channel 4 documentary said they were not aware of them ever receiving visits, Christmas cards or birthday cards.
They described how Nerissa, who died in 1986 aged 66, had no members of her family other than her sister at her funeral and was buried in a "pauper's grave".
Former Royal Earlswood nurse Dot Penfold said: "All the time they were there so far as I was concerned I didn't ever see anybody visit them."
Her colleague Bridie Tingley added: "There was no connection with the royalty. At Christmas time they never got a sausage."
Hospital carers described how Nerissa and Katherine would stand up and curtsy or salute when they saw members of the royal family on the television.
Nurse Onelle Braithwaite said staff could not "contain the excitement" of the sisters when the Prince of Wales married Diana, Princess of Wales, in July 1981.
There was public outcry in 1987 when it was revealed that Nerissa and Katherine had been in the Royal Earlswood for more than 40 years.
Burke's Peerage, the guide to aristocratic family trees, had recorded the sisters as having died in 1940 and 1961.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment about the documentary.
' The Queen's Hidden Cousins' will be broadcast on Thursday November 17 at 9pm on Channel 4.
Belfast TelegraphThe history of videogames maps directly onto the history of computation. At least, that’s how speakers cast it at GDC this year. Chelsea Howe, Chris Crawford, Dave Jones, Graeme Devine, Ken Lobb, Lori Cole, Luke Muscat, Palmer Luckey, Phil Harrison, Raph Koster, Seth Killian, and Tim Schafer (phew) each talked about one aspect of videogame history in which they were personally involved. The keynote was both an homage to GDC, the event, and to GDC’s prime mover, that repugnant, beautiful monstrosity known as ‘the videogame industry’.
At the 30th iteration of an event that has become one focal point for videogames writ large, the stakes for writing the history of the field seem almost too high even to attempt. Representing all the people who made the moves, deals, designs, and mistakes that made videogames what they are today isn’t something one does in an hour or two. And perhaps it’s truly impossible to do in a cavernous ballroom in San Francisco. Then again, telling this story right next to where Apple announces the iPhone each year seems queasily right considering the history that the speakers settled on.
a violently optimistic way of doing history
The talk began with what was seemed like a leitmotif, but then became a theme before finally unveiling itself as would-be history. It’s about technology, and the fact that chips that make your computer, well, compute have gotten smaller, faster, cheaper, and better, year after year after year. You’ve probably heard of Moore’s Law. It has been one of the tech industry’s waypoints / self-fulfilling prophesies for most of the consumer computing era.
This idea emerged innocently enough. 30 years ago, we used old computers to make state-of-the-art games; now we use new ones. New Macs have 5,000 times the transistors, 86 times the clock speed, and 2,000 times the memory of that laughable (and people did laugh) 30-year-old Mac that some people in this cavernous room used to use to make games. This account trades on the same winking nostalgia we might feel looking back at that scene from Friends where Chandler tells everyone about his “bad boy” of a laptop by rattling off its now-feeble specs.
Many of the speakers at GDC used this move to turn and return to a narrative of technological empowerment that goes something like this: The present is great because computation is the smallest, fastest, cheapest, and best it’s ever been. And the future looks bright, over there there in the hazy not-now! That’s the place where the chips are even smaller, faster, cheaper, and better than they are today.
It’s a seductive argument, in part because it has the advantage of being simply true. Games look, sound, and feel different today than they did when GDC began in the 80s, and technology affected that. But histories like this that are reliably true also have a certain disingenuous miasma about them. Sure, they might be true, but that often means they’re also merely true.
After all, the argument for reading technology as progress itself it isn’t made persuasive by how amazing the technology of the present seems. Current technology usually seems slightly shitty, even or especially when it’s “amazing.” Instead of focusing on the achievements of the present, the argument for technology-as-progress persuades by the promise of tomorrow and its distance from yesterday. If you fully buy in, today is always already the best of all possible days. (Remember how terrible yesterday was?) And tomorrow will be even better. It’s a violently optimistic way of doing history, but a great way of doing business. The near-future technological promise is the economic ground on which the Bay Area rests. You’ll note the presence of the San Andreas Fault.
I always think about America’s favorite piece of Concord pond scum, Henry David Thoreau, at moments like this. Thoreau emphasizes that nothing in the world of the mid-19th century United States really needed to run at 30 miles per hour. “We do not ride upon the railroad;” he writes in Walden (1854), “it rides upon us.”
So, yes, as technology changes, new things become possible, from living west of the Mississippi to living in The Witcher 3‘s (2015) expansive kingdoms. But our expectations and assumptions catch up with the technology. The railroad rides upon us. And the best of all possible tomorrows never arrives as promised. Google Fiber will seem like Chandler’s 56k modem before long. But is life better with Fiber than it was with 56k? That’s a serious question, and one these histories recklessly, disingenuously didn’t ask.
I find it strange that this is the story—naive, earnest, predicated on a stable notion of progress—that luminaries in the game industry decided to tell about their lives’ work. Saying that the history of videogames is the history of technological improvement is tantamount to saying that the history of literature is the history of writing implements, from cuneiform to Shakespeare’s quill to David Foster Wallace’s Microsoft Word. The quill didn’t write King Lear; Word didn’t write Infinite Jest (even if it helped with the footnotes). Such a history mistakes tools for art.
Check out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.
Header image sourceThe next PlayStation 3 update, which is coming today, will bring the console's system software to version 4.50 and open up automatic downloads to all PlayStation Network users, according to the European PlayStation Blog.
PlayStation Plus, a subscription service atop the free PSN service, launched in June 2010 with exclusive features such as automatic background downloads of PS3 firmware updates and of content from the PlayStation Store. Firmware version 4.50 will remove the PS Plus requirement for those two services.
In addition, the upcoming software will add privacy settings for PSN Trophies, allowing users to choose which of their Trophies are visible to other PSN users. And lastly, the 4.50 update will also let people transfer data wirelessly between a PS3 and a PlayStation Vita.
The most recent PS3 update, version 4.46, was released in late June.“I don’t think any self-respecting place does that,” said John Shields, the executive chef and, with his wife, proprietor of Smyth and The Loyalist, a pair of restaurants they opened this summer.
And yet Mr. Shields’s case illustrates how restaurants have managed to keep salaries in check. Instead of hiring a pastry chef who spent years honing her skills, he chose to hire a pair of sous-chefs in their mid-20s for each restaurant. He pays them about $35,000 a year. Mr. Shields, a longtime savory chef who did a tour at the famed Chicago restaurant Alinea, and his wife and business partner, Karen Urie Shields, a former executive pastry chef at another noted Chicago eatery, Charlie Trotter’s, conceptualize the desserts. The two younger chefs execute them.
Mr. Shields and other restaurateurs say there is a strong economic imperative at work. In a low-margin service business like food, it is difficult to pay high salaries to a worker who is involved in only a limited aspect of the restaurant’s menu. “Paying someone $55,000 per year is a big venture,” he said. (For the Shieldses, the rationale is even more creative than it is economic: Their pastry vision could clash with that of a more experienced chef.)
Although both of Mr. Shields’s young pastry chefs have committed to staying for two years, the pay means that the Shieldses may not be able to keep them for much longer. “Everyone is looking for somebody,” he said. “Someone might say, ‘Why do I want to make $35,000 at this place when I could go make $75,000 working for Whole Foods?’ ” (A Whole Foods spokeswoman said the company generally paid salaries in that range only for those who oversaw desserts across multiple stores.)
Many restaurateurs have adopted some variation of the Shieldses’ strategy, meeting their pastry needs by throwing younger and less experienced people at the job. In an extreme case, they simply pull a cook off the savory line and rechristen him the pastry chef.A former television reporter has come forward publicly for the first time to accuse former President Bill Clinton of sexually assaulting her in 1980.
In a 19-minute video interview with Breitbart, a website that strongly favors Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Leslie Millwee provided her first accounts of the alleged assaults.
Millwee described how Clinton, then-governor of Arkansas, allegedly groped her on several occasions at the now-defunct TV station she worked at in Arkansas.
She alleged Clinton would come into a small, cramped editing room where she was working on putting stories together and fondle her. Millwee claimed the three assaults lasted a few minutes at a time.
See the full Breitbart interview below (Warning: Video contains language that may offend some):
Millwee also alleged that Clinton came to her apartment on one occasion and tried to persuade her to let him inside. She said she did not let him in, and he eventually left. Millwee later quit the station without telling any supervisors about the alleged abuse. She did, however, tell several friends in the 1990s about the alleged assaults, according to Breitbart which reported that it confirmed her story with friends.
"He followed me into an editing room," Millwee told Breitbart. "[I]t was very small. There was a chair. I was sitting in a chair. He came up behind me and started rubbing my shoulders and running his hands down toward my breasts. And I was just stunned. I froze. I asked him to stop. He laughed. That happened on three occasions."
Related: Also see Clinton accusers at the recent presidential debate:
11 PHOTOS Women who have accused Bill Clinton of abuse See Gallery Women who have accused Bill Clinton of abuse Juanita Broaddrick speaks in the spin room after the the town hall debate between Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., October 9, 2016. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick (L-R) sit at the presidential town hall debate between Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., October 9, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathy Shelton (L-R) are seated at the second U.S. presidential debate between Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., October 9, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young Juanita Broaddrick arrives for the second presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri on October 9, 2016. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) Kathleen Willey arrives for the second presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri on October 9, 2016. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) Kathy Shelton speaks in the spin room after the the town hall debate between Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., October 9, 2016. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton Kathy Shelton arrives for the second presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri on October 9, 2016. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) Bill Clinton accuser Juanita Broaddrick (L) chats with rape victim Kathy Shelton as they take their seats for the second presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri on October 9, 2016. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathy Shelton (L-R) are seated at the start of the second U.S. presidential town hall debate between Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., October 9, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: (L-R) Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton, a guest, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's daughters-in-law Lara Trump and Vanessa Trump and daughter Tiffany Trump sit before the town hall debate at Washington University on October 9, 2016 in St Louis, Missouri. This is the second of three presidential debates scheduled prior to the November 8th election. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: (L-R) Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathy Shelton sit before the town hall debate at Washington University on October 9, 2016 in St Louis, Missouri. This is the second of three presidential debates scheduled prior to the November 8th election. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE
Millwee alleged the incidents escalated.
She described a second alleged incident: "He came in behind me. Started hunching me to the point that he had an orgasm. He's trying to touch my breasts. And I'm just sitting there very stiffly, just waiting for him to leave me alone. And I'm asking him the whole time, 'Please do not do this. Do not touch me. Do not hunch me. I do not want this.'"
The third time, she said, she wasn't even aware he was in the building when he came and found her in the editing room.
Millwee said she did not report it to authorities because he was the governor of Arkansas at the time and she worried about what would happen if she came forward with her story.
Millwee said she interviewed Clinton dozens of times for her job at the TV station. She reported under the name Leslie Derrick at the time. Breitbart reported that a former supervisor at the TV station confirmed this.
Clinton's spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Millwee also did not respond to a request for comment.
Breitbart has previously interviewed other women who have accused Clinton of sexual assault. The CEO of the right-wing website, Steve Bannon, is currently on leave while he serves as CEO of the Trump campaign.
Trump has also faced accusations of sexual misconduct from several women who have come forward over the past week.
Clinton's wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is running for president against Trump. The two will square off Wednesday in the final debate of the election cycle.
Related: Protesters wear shirts calling Clinton a rapist:
11 PHOTOS Protesters wear 'Bill Clinton Rapist' shirts See Gallery Protesters wear 'Bill Clinton Rapist' shirts Demonstrators wearing shirts reading 'Bill Clinton Rapist' protest as US President Barack Obama speaks during a Hillary for America campaign event in Greensboro, North Carolina, October 11, 2016. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images) Demonstrators wearing shirts reading 'Bill Clinton Rapist' protest as US President Barack Obama speaks during a Hillary for America campaign event in Greensboro, North Carolina, October 11, 2016. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images) Demonstrators wearing shirts reading 'Bill Clinton Rapist' protest as US President Barack Obama speaks during a Hillary for America campaign event in Greensboro, North Carolina, October 11, 2016. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images) Demonstrators wearing shirts reading 'Bill Clinton Rapist' protest as US President Barack Obama speaks during a Hillary for America campaign event in Greensboro, North Carolina, October 11, 2016. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images) A demonstrator wearing a shirt reading 'Bill Clinton Rapist' is escorted out as she protests while US President Barack Obama speaks during a Hillary for America campaign event in Greensboro, North Carolina, October 11, 2016. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images) DETROIT, MI - OCTOBER 10: A protester wears a shirt with an image of former U.S. president Bill Clinton and the word 'rape' as democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign rally at Wayne State University on October 10, 2016 in Detroit, Michigan. A day after the second presidential debate in St. Louis, Hillary Clinton is campaigning in Michigan and Ohio. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) DETROIT, MI - OCTOBER 10: A protester wears a shirt with an image of former U.S. president Bill Clinton and the word 'rape' as democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign rally at Wayne State University on October 10, 2016 in Detroit, Michigan. A day after the second presidential debate in St. Louis, Hillary Clinton is campaigning in Michigan and Ohio. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) UNITED STATES - OCTOBER 13: Protesters wearing Bill Clinton Rape t-shirts stand across the street from the rally featuring Vice President Joe Biden and Catherine Cortez Masto, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Nevada, at the Culinary Worker's Union Local 226 in Las Vegas on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2016. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) A demonstrator holds up a picture of former US President Bill Clinton that reads 'RAPE' as US President Barack Obama speaks at a Hillary for America campaign event in Cleveland, Ohio, October 14, 2016. Obama warned 'democracy itself' is on the ballot in November's presidential election, as White House concern grows about the lasting impact of Republican Donald Trump's campaign. / AFP / JIM WATSON / (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images) CLEVELAND, OHIO - JULY 21: A man wears a shirt depicting Former President Bill Clinton and the word 'Rape' outside Quicken Loans Arena on the last day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio on Thursday July 21, 2016. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) A demonstrator holds up a picture of former US President Bill Clinton that reads 'RAPE' as US President Barack Obama speaks at a Hillary for America campaign event in Cleveland, Ohio, October 14, 2016. Obama warned 'democracy itself' is on the ballot in November's presidential election, as White House concern grows about the lasting impact of Republican Donald Trump's campaign. / AFP / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images) Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE
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A red maple leaf against a blue sky. A quintessential Canadian symbol, and one recognized throughout the world. Even the least patriotic Canadian can’t help but see it and know it marks the place they call home.
The Canadian flag as we know it is only 50 years old this week. It came into being after intense debate and hundreds of years of, well, not making a decision. For Canada, which became a nation in 1867, simply could not decide what to do about a flag, and for most of its history, pre- and post-Confederation, just let things slide.
The St. George’s Cross was probably the first European flag to fly over what is now Canada, when John Cabot, a Venetian exploring under English colours, reached the Atlantic coast in 1497. The other major flag was the fleur-de-lis from 1534 when Jacques Cartier claimed North America for France. Elements from both these flags still appear on Canadian provincial flags and coats of arms.
After the English and French conflict for the New World and the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the Royal Union Flag of Great Britain (aka the Union Jack), which was a combination of the English St. George’s Cross and the Scottish St. Andrew’s Cross, flew over all British colonies in North America. When the Thirteen Colonies broke away to form the United States, many people who remained loyal to Britain relocated to Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, causing the Union Flag to sometimes be called the Flag of the United Empire Loyalists. In 1801, after the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, the Cross of St. Patrick was added to create the current Union Flag. In Canada, under an act of parliament, it was known as the Royal Union Flag.
Meanwhile, sometime in the late 17\P century, the Red Ensign, a red flag with the Union Jack in the corner, was used by the British navy and later specifically by the British merchant marine. It was widely used on land and sea in Canada, and around the time of Confederation, a coat of arms bearing the symbols of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick was added to the fly. This was officially approved by the British Admiralty in 1892 for Canadian use, but only at sea. This is how it came to be known as the Canadian Red Ensign. On land, it was still only used by custom, not official sanction.
As new provinces joined Confederation, their symbols were added, and the flag changed several times. In 1924, this unofficial version was modified and authorized by an Order in Council of the Canadian government. It used the Royal Arms of Canada granted to this country by King George V of Britain in 1921, and was approved for use on Canadian buildings abroad. A second Order in Council in 1945 authorized the use of the Canadian Red Ensign on federal buildings in Canada, “until a new national flag was adopted.” Yes, that’s right. Canada fought two World Wars without an official flag.
Canadian recruitment poster, 1914-1918
All that time, and still no official flag for the country, passed by the Parliament of Canada and representing all her people. How Canadian, eh? It wasn’t for lack of trying—or argument. According to Conrad Swan, author of Canada: Symbols of Sovereignty, “designing flags became something of a recurrent national pastime.” In 1946, a committee of the House of Commons received 1500 (!) designs from across the country. They failed to decide on one.
But during the Suez Crisis in the Middle East in 1956, then Canadian Minister of External Affairs Lester Pearson was shocked and embarrassed when the Egyptian government refused to allow Canadian troops on their soil, claiming they fought under the flag of Egypt’s enemy, Britain. Pearson, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his solution to the Suez Crisis, believed Canada needed a new symbol to represent its nationhood, and its independent voice. When he became Prime Minister six years later, he vowed to make a new flag a top priority.
In 1964, Pearson announced to the House of Commons that the government wished to adopt a distinctive Canadian flag, as the centenary of Confederation approached. He proposed a flag with three joined maple leaves on a white background, with blue bars at either end. There would be a free, non-partisan vote in Parliament. Debate on the “Pearson pennant” raged through the summer of ’64, in Parliament, in the press, in homes and communities across Canada. Descriptions of the flag design included “monstrosity”, “picayune” and “a nosebleed”. Descriptions of the prime minister included “dictator”, “Mussolini”, and “sawdust Caesar”. (Our current parliament may be no less polite, but the rhetoric is certainly less colourful.)
More than insults, it became a litmus test of racial and national identity. What was the place of the British or French or any other group in a national symbol? Were the symbols of Britain colonial fetters or sustaining bedrock? Was choosing a flag a sign of forward thinking or desecration of tradition? Was the maple leaf a symbol of Canada and all its peoples, or a catchall that could mean anything or nothing?
Pearson speaking at the Canadian Club in September 1964, called the flag debate an example of “this strange, almost psychotic soul-searching we are going through nationally today.”
That month, Pearson formed a multi-party flag committee in an effort to create some spirit of co-operation. By October, the committee had three designs left: a Red Ensign with the fleur-de-lis and the Union Jack, the three red maple leaves and blue borders, and a red and white flag with a stylized red maple leaf. Eventually the committee unanimously recommended the single leaf design.
Then it went to the House of Commons. The debate lasted for 33 days, as Conservative party leader John Diefenbaker staunchly (and in the opinion of some, including members of his own party, insanely) defended the Canadian Red Ensign.
By December 10, Diefenbaker’s Quebec lieutenant Léon Balcer was at odds with his leader—this issue was blocking all other business, and could destroy Conservative support in Quebec—and called for closure to the debate. On a vote, the House, including 31 Opposition members, imposed closure. The final vote was taken in the early morning hours of December 15. Shouts of “flag by closure” and “that pinhead” (referring to the Prime Minister) were hurled. But by 2:15 AM, the decision was made.
That day the Toronto Star headlined: “Howling House gives OK to the new flag”. The National Flag of Canada was a reality, almost a century after Canada became a nation.
The flag was inaugurated on February 15, 1965. In the words of the Honourable Maurice Bourget, Speaker of the Senate:
“The flag is a symbol of the nation’s unity, for it, beyond any doubt, represents all the citizens of Canada without distinction of race, language, belief or opinion.”
And that’s pretty Canadian too, eh?
For more on the Canadian flags:
A Flag for Canada, 2nd ed. by Rick Archbold traces the history of the maple leaf as a Canadian symbol, the selection of the maple leaf flag, and its growing meaning since 1965.
Liberal MP John Matheson's Canada's flag: a search for a country gives a rousing (yes, really) account of the flag debate. A must |
the state. Fritz Von Erich and Lester Surmall came to terms and World Class Championship Wrestling started airing on METV, thus reaching the middle east, especially Lebanon and Israel.Israel who had only one channel back then were permanent viewers of arab networks they were able to receive. One year of broadcasting made the trick, and it wasn`t long before Israel`s first channel purchased the Von Erichs WCCW programming. With Salomon Monir as commentator in arabic, during the Arab-Israeli time slot, it became a family tradition in Israel to watch the Von Erichs every saturday evening. Merchandise followed soon thereafter and the Von Erichs became part of Israeli culture. To this day, every Israeli who lived in the 80s remembers the Von Erichs name. They might say "Kerry Von Errie", "Erick Von Erich", or even "Vanerrie", but they still remember. I talked to Mr. Sabach, who managed the "Galmir" company which handled Von Erich`s tour in 85, and he recalls everybody wanting a peace of the Von Erichs. Every show was jam packed. Not one place left. Icecream (Shtrauss) companies paying Kevin tons of money to get an exclusive deal with him after a long bidding war between the companies. While Hulkamania was running wild in the U.S and where ever McMahon sold WWF TV rights, Von Erichs-Mania was running even wilder in Israel. Although Hulk Hogan almost as popular as the Von Erichs back in mid 80s in Israel, WWF was only shown on the Jordanian channel, and Israelis only had a limited access to it. Pro Wrestling back then was heavily kayfabed (nobody revealed it was staged), and all newspaper treated it like a legitimate sport.
* Before the first Von Erichs tour in august, 1985, the great and legendary Kevin Von Erich arrived in Israel to check the security for the locations and promote their tour. He visited "Yad Eliyahu" statium where their events would take place, he visited "Eithan" gym, in Ramat Gan, where he`d work out, and "Dan" hotels where the WCCW crew would stay, which later on would be swarmed by thousands of Israeli Von Erichs fans. During their 3 days of stay, Kevin walked bravely in the streets of Tel Aviv, something that WWF superstars didn`t do when they toured here, something that WCW stars were affraid to do, and something that today`s WWE stars aren`t willing to do. Kevin visited the Dizingoff Center in Tel Aviv, Carmel Center in Haifa, and spent the night at the "Club Hotel" in the gorgeous Tveria city. From there he continues to Natzrat, where Jesus was born, Kiryan Shmona, and Metulla, where he was interviewed for METV, and Israeli TV, which aired monday during the sports show in arabic. He continued to Acco, Naharia, where he was guest of the icecream "Shtrauss" company, who purchased the rights to use the Vin Erich name to sell their icecream. On his way to Haifa, Kevin stopped to interact with his fans at the "Tzabar" center in Kiryat Bialik. Friday Kevin visited my home town Netanya and from there continued to Tel Aviv. Saturday Kevin returned to the U.S.
*Note: Some matches results may not be accurate.
Saturday, august 3rd, 1985 at 19:00 in Yad Eliyahu Sports Stadium in Tel Aviv:
Buddy Roberts over Johny Mantell
"Gentleman" Chris Adams over Brian Adias
"Iceman" King Parsons over Kenny Kanitzki
Kevin Von Erich over Gino Hernandez
Mike Von Erich over Rip Oliver
Sunday, august 4th, 1985 at 21:00:
Kenny Kanitzki over Brian Adias
Scott Casey over Rip Oliver
"Iceman" King Parsons over Buddy Roberts
Mike Von Erich over Gino Hernandez
Kevin Von Erich over Chris Adams
Monday, august 5th, 1985 at 18:00
Brian Adias over Johny Mantel
Rip Oliver over "Iceman" King Parsons
Buddy Roberts over Scott Casey
Kevin & Mike Von Erich over Gino Hernandez & Chris Adams
Tuesday, august 6th, 1985 at 18:00
Kenny Kanitzky over Johny Mantel
King Parsons & Scott Casey over Rip Oliver & Gino Hernandez
Buddy Roberts over Mike Von Erich
Kevin Von Erich over Chris Adams in an "I Quit" match
Wednesday, august 7th, 1985:
Battle Royal took place between all the featured wrestlers above.
5 2nd round matches. Four 3rd round matches.
Semi Finals:
Kevin Von Erich over Chris Adams
Gino Hernandez over Mike Von Erich (the match where Mike seperated his shoulder)
Finals:
Kevin Von Erich over Gino Hernandez to win the Middle Eastern championship.
This photo was taken by Diker at the "Horses Bay" in Acco. Michael Hayes and the One Man Gang enjoy themselves while fishing. This is from the 1986 tour which I still research.
October 1987 tour dates:
Oct 9 Kfar Saba, Oct 11 Tel Aviv, Oct 12 Haifa, Oct 13 Haifa, Oct 13 Tel Aviv, Oct 15 Tel Aviv, Oct 15 Kfar Saba
The crew was Bruiser Brody, Abdullah the Butcher, Buddy Roberts, Iceman
Parsons, the Fantastics, Jeff Raitz, Steve Casey, Lance von Erich, Jeep
Swenson, Dusty Wolf.
*Many thanks to Dusty Wolf for 87 tour details. Thanks to Percy Pringle III for all his gracious help. Thanks to Lior Elzaam and Oded Sela for the magazines and clippings (which were heavily kayfabed).
Click here for a great bio of the Von Erichs by Steve Slagle
**Any addition and further information to my research would be appreciated.This article was published in November of 2007
With the current volatility in the market, it causes people to begin questioning their investments and wondering where we’re headed. In my profession, I have to work with uneasy clients daily, and it can be difficult to remind them that the stock market is constantly moving and generally goes through cycles. The market can’t go up indefinitely, nor will it go down indefinitely. More often than not, we’ll see periods of growth followed by periods of volatility or sideways movement, and then have a period of falling stocks that is followed by more volatility before the cycle repeats itself.
A Glimpse of Our Future by Looking at the Past?
Some claim that there is a four year cycle that the market follows, and there is some evidence to that. Of course, nothing is certain and the time periods of the cycle can vary, but there is some truth to it all. For this example, I’m going to take a look at the Dow Jones Industrials Average from January 1st of 1996 through today (November 26th, 2007). I’m using the DJIA simply because it is one of the more widely tracked indicies and it doesn’t have a heavy concentration of technology stocks that saw the most exaggerated data during this time period.
1996 – 1999
Ahh, yes. The roaring 90s. It was during the mid-to-late 90s that everyone was a stock trader. With the Internet becoming popular and the easy access to buying and selling stocks for the Average Joe, people were flooding into the market looking for the next company that was going to double or triple in the next three months. Think back to this time–how many people did you know that were afraid of the market or selling everything and moving to cash? Nobody.
Even though in 1996 the upward trend was just a continuation of previous years, the market seemed unstoppable. From 1996 to 1999 the DJIA nearly doubled in value. So, the money continued to pour in during 1999 as well…
1999 – 2002
1999 came and the market was still headed up. People who were naysayers a few years ago are now coming around and finally looking to get in on some of the action. Well, it sucks when you’re late to the party. As the new millennium came, the stock market reached record highs, but suddenly stalled and became very volatile. For the next year there was little direction.
This volatility soon gave way to a sell-off in 2001 as panic began to set in. Those who have been in the market for a few years quickly took their gains, and the selling quickly forced prices lower, which scared many of the people who just recently got into the market. As the media began to talk about how overvalued many stocks have become, especially the internet companies, people continued to unload their shares…
2002 – 2005
This continued throughout 2002 and the DJIA gave back most of the gains it saw during the late 90s. The NASDAQ fared much worse. When the selling subsided, the markets again became very volatile from late 2002 through early 2003. The markets began to pick up steam again in late 2003, but remained almost flat through 2004 as there was little direction…
2005 – Today
Most of 2005 was nothing to write home about as the markets were basically drifting sideways. Once 2006 rolled around, the market again started to rally. For the next two years, the DJIA tacked on over 30% and set new record highs. Again, if you asked most people early this year or last year about their investments, they probably responded very positively. Who wouldn’t? If you look at what has happened since April of 2003 to just a few months ago (almost 4 years), the DJIA has returned over 75%.
The Big Picture
As investors, most of us tend to forget about all of the good years and only focus on the bad. The broad markets have been heading up for about four years, so the thoughts of what happened in 1999-2002 are well behind us. But now that the markets are volatile, there is a lot of talk about the subprime mortgage industry, a weak dollar, and everyone begins to completely forget about how well the past four years have been and only focus on the last few months or weeks complaining how bad it is. Things can certainly continue to get worse, but you have to look at things in context.
Remember, what goes up, must come down. Not only does the stock market cycle, but there is a business cycle as well. We will always have various times that are great, and those that aren’t as great, but you can’t lose sight of the big picture.
Take a look at the following 12 years in a colorized format. Green identifies periods of strong growth. Yellow indicates a period of volatility or no real direction, and red shows a period of a downward trend. Based on this, is it any surprise that markets are becoming volatile and possibly trending downward?
For even more similarities, scroll back up and look at the first chart from 1996-1999. Now, scroll down and look at the 2005-Present image. Notice how similar they are? The markets went up for completely different reasons, yet are behaving almost the same. All you have to do is look at the following few years to see what might be in store for us over the coming year or two. Will history repeat itself? There is no way to tell, and anything could happen to make all of this information worthless, but you do have to at least consider the past trends and understand that there is a chance the market will behave similarly and we’ll enter a period of significant decline.
Keep Doing What You’re Doing
Sure, the market may be a bit unstable right now, and we may certainly be headed for a time where the market falls further, but that shouldn’t be of much concern to you if you’re investing for the next 10, 20, 30 or more years. If you want to try and time the market or predict what the next hot sector is, that’s fine, but the best thing most people can do is to just continuously invest in a diversified portfolio. If you keep buying even as the market falls, you’re just adding more shares at a lower price.
Could you make more money if you only invested at the low points and sold at the high points compared to dollar cost averaging? Sure, but the likelihood of succeeding on a regular basis is low. For most people, the best thing to do is to just continue investing bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly into the same diversified portfolio regardless of market conditions. When markets are choppy or headed down, you’re just buying stocks or funds on sale. All you have to do is look back a few years to see that even though the market might go down, it will eventually come back up again.
Author: Jeremy Vohwinkle My name is Jeremy Vohwinkle, and I’ve spent a number of years working in the finance industry providing financial advice to regular investors and those participating in employer-sponsored retirement plans. Twitter Facebook Google+More than one out of every five registered Ohio voters is probably ineligible to vote.
More than one out of every five registered Ohio voters is probably ineligible to vote.
In two counties, the number of registered voters actually exceeds the voting-age population: Northwestern Ohio�s Wood County shows 109 registered voters for every 100 eligible, while in Lawrence County along the Ohio River it�s a mere 104 registered per 100 eligible.
Another 31 counties show registrations at more than 90 percent of those eligible, a rate regarded as unrealistic by most voting experts. The national average is a little more than 70 percent.
In a close presidential election where every vote might count, which ones to count might become paramount on Election Day � and in possible legal battles afterward.
Of the Buckeye State�s 7.8 million registered voters, nearly 1.6?million are regarded as � inactive.� That generally means either they haven�t voted in at least four years or they apparently have moved.
What can Ohio�s chief elections official, Secretary of State Jon Husted, do to clean up the voter rolls?
Not enough, he says.
In a Feb. 10 letter, he asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for a personal meeting to discuss how to balance seemingly conflicting federal laws so he could pare Ohio�s dirty voter list without removing truly eligible voters.
�Common sense says that the odds of voter fraud increase the longer these ineligible voters are allowed to populate our rolls,� Husted said. �I simply cannot accept that.�
Holder�s office has never replied.
When contacted last week by The Dispatch about Husted�s letter, a U.S. Department of Justice spokesman who did not wish to be identified by name said, �The department declines comment.�
When asked to at least confirm whether anyone from Holder�s agency responded to Husted�s inquiry, the answer was, �No comment.�
�As Ohio�s chief elections official, it is my responsibility to ensure the votes of every eligible voter are counted and ensure the integrity and accuracy of the results,� Husted said when he mailed the letter. �This is a difficult task when federal regulations limit Ohio�s ability to remove ineligible names, thereby increasing the chance for voter fraud.�
Husted�s letter came just four days after he was questioned about Ohio�s bulging voter rolls by Judicial Watch, which calls itself �a conservative, nonpartisan educational foundation (that) promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law.�
Unhappy because Husted has not substantially pared the rolls since that early February contact, Judicial Watch sued the Republican secretary of state in federal court in Ohio on Aug. 30.
�Those (inactive voters) are all potential names that could be used for voter fraud,� said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. �That�s a disaster, potentially. Certainly, it just shows that our lawsuit is right on target.�
He said the group, which also is involved in similar lawsuits against Indiana and Florida, examined all 50 states and Ohio was among those that �bubbled to the top� as having the worst voter-registration records.
�When you have a list that�s so wildly inaccurate, it undermines confidence in elections generally,� Fitton said. �Citizens in Ohio should be asking their elected officials what is going on here.�
Voter-rights groups are often suspicious of efforts to �clean up� voter-registration rolls.
�We have found that purges do disproportionally affect African-Americans,� said Marvin Randolph, a senior vice president with the NAACP.
When the civil-rights group and others conduct voter-registration drives, they often run across people who think that they are still registered but apparently have been purged, he said.
Randolph condemned a �systematic and very well-coordinated attack on voting rights� across the country this year.
Cleveland attorney Subodh Chandra has been involved in several lawsuits against the secretary of state to ensure voter rights, including a current battle over which provisional ballots should be counted.
�What troubles me is that there are public officials, including our current secretary of state, who are willing to play games in an effort to shave off certain percentages of the electorate that might benefit the opposing political party,� said Chandra, a Democrat.
Of the inactive voters identified with a party, 53?percent are Democratic and 45 percent Republican, a Dispatch analysis shows. Roughly 750,000 haven�t voted in Ohio since at least 2007.
But national-elections expert Doug Chapin, director of the Program for Excellence in Election Administration at the University of Minnesota, had kinder words for Husted, noting that many states are struggling with fundamental voting questions this year.
�The fact that you�ve got a large number of people marked as inactive � is not unusual,� Chapin said.
Under current federal law, elections officials cannot remove an inactive voter unless they can present prima facie evidence that he or she is no longer eligible, Chapin explained.
�It�s no longer purely an administrative thing for elections officials for deciding who comes off the roles. It�s more subjective.�
In February, the Pew Center on the States released a study called Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient showing that about 24 million U.S. voter registrations were no longer valid or had significant inaccuracies.
The research found: more than 1.8 million dead people listed as voters; about 2.75?million with voter registrations in more than one state; and about 12 million voter records with incorrect addresses, meaning either the voters moved or errors in the information make it unlikely any mailings can reach them.
The latter category is where you�ll find most of Ohio�s 1.6 million inactive voters.
�For the most part, these are individuals who have already had mail returned to the board of elections or have filed a change of address with the U.S. post office,� said Husted spokeswoman Maggie Ostrowski.
Yet they are still officially registered to vote in Ohio and can cast a ballot if they provide a valid form of identification and their signature matches the one on file. Even the 70,000 registered voters who have told the U.S. Postal Service they are moving out of state cannot be purged, Ostrowski noted. The secretary of state instead is sending each one a letter asking them to voluntarily withdraw their Ohio registration; but if they don�t, they must remain on the rolls.
Postcards are going out to about 330,000 Ohioans who filled out change-of-address forms, suggesting they update their voter registration through an online change-of-address system begun a little more than a month ago. So far, 19,000 people have used it, Ostrowski said.
Removing inactive voters from the rolls is complicated and usually takes several years. A �how to� memo last year from Husted to local elections workers stretched 23 pages.
Since taking office in January 2011, Husted has removed the names of more than 150,000 dead voters as well as hundreds of thousands of duplicate registrations, Ostrowski said. The state now gets access to records for Ohioans who die outside the state; previously, they saw only in-state death records.
He partnered with the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles to improve the state�s voter-registration database so elections workers could cross-check voter identities.
At a cost of $1.4 million, Husted also is mailing absentee-ballot applications statewide � but generally only to those on the active-voter list.
Ostrowski said elections officials figured it would be a waste of money to send them to the inactive voters because they�re likely not there to return them.
Dispatch library director Julie Albert contributed to this story.
drowland@dispatch.comAT&T has confirmed that it will be forcing users to consumer less bandwidth or pay the price. For any user that consumes more than 150 GB in a month, they will be forced to pay an additional $10 for every 50 GB they consume.
This new model will certainly affect users that enjoy streaming movies and video online. It will also put a cramp in Netflix style. Based on different reports from the NY Times and Nielsen, many users will come dangerously close to this cap for just video consumption on PCs (excluding iPads, Blueray, Playstation and other internet connected devices). The growth of HD video could certainly take a performance hit as a result of the new measures.
An additional consideration is that data transfer overhead will account for a significant amount of traffic (consumption).
HD developments may take a backseat with such new bandwidth concerns. Netflix HD video currently streams at 720p, but some companies currently offer 1080p streams. This could be a short-term victory for traditional pay TV over internet TV.Vote For the Best MBTA Map Redesign
The contest for the new look for the T's underground guide begins now.
Get a compelling long read and must-have lifestyle tips in your inbox every Sunday morning — great with coffee!
The MBTA got a lot of people to come up with new designs for their map for free, and now they want riders to pick the best one.
Back in April, the MBTA launched the “New Perspectives MBTA Map Re-design competition,” and received what they called an “overwhelming” response, not only because of the dozens of redesigned maps that they pouring in, but because of the “impressive quality of many of the entries.”
Some looked like trees, others took a new perspective on the lines used to show each route, and others stuck to the classic look, but enhanced the concept to make it easier to navigate.
Once all the entries rolled in, a panel of T employees, urban planners, and mapping experts looked over each proposed redesign and narrowed it down to just six maps that they felt could be the next MBTA guide.
Now, the T wants riders to take to the voting booth and pick which one should win the top spot in the map competition. “With so many new projects opening—new Fairmount Line stations and next year’s opening of Assembly Square Station—and many more in the pipeline, the MBTA will need to modify and redesign our system maps,” according to a statement from the transit agency.
If the winning designer is lucky, their map may be the one that is seen by millions of riders as they try and maneuver their way through both the underground system, and the various bus routes. “The proposed maps are a fresh look at our system. The creativity and skill shown in all the entrants will certainly make their choice a tough one,” said MBTA General Manager Dr. Beverly Scott. “I am looking forward to seeing who our customers choose as the winner.”
Voting will be open until September 20. The MBTA expects to announce the winner by the end of the month. Below are a few of the finalists that they T picked for the top six redesigns to be considered. To see the complete list of finalists, and to vote for a favorite, visit the T’s voting page.
A lengthier list of all the designs that were submitted to the MBTA’s map design contest can be found here.Download PuTTY: release 0.68
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Past releases of PuTTY are versions we thought were reasonably likely to work well, at the time they were released. However, later releases will almost always have fixed bugs and/or added new features. If you have a problem with this release, please try the latest release, to see if the problem has already been fixed.
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This release has known security vulnerabilities. Consider using a later release instead, such as the latest version, 0.70. The known vulnerabilities in this release are: vuln-indirect-dll-hijack-2 (fixed in release 0.69)
vuln-indirect-dll-hijack-3 (fixed in release 0.70)
Package files
Alternative binary files
Documentation
Source code
Supplementary files
Checksum filesUkraine remains perhaps the most important topic in Russian foreign policy. Although the Kremlin has succeeded in preventing Ukraine from signing its association agreement with the European Union, it has not yet achieved its main objective: making Ukraine join the Customs Union. Ukraine is prepared to be Russia’s friend in words only, while obtaining lower gas prices and cheap loans. According to political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, the current truce might prove to be temporary.
The Kremlin’s position on Ukraine’s future is founded on its perception of Ukraine as an inferior state. Many remember that during a private meeting at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April of 2008, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed doubt about Ukraine’s legitimacy as a state. As Kommersant newspaper reported at the time, Moscow feels that NATO poses a real threat to Russia’s interests by approaching Russian borders, and promises to take appropriate countermeasures. Kommersant reported: “When the conversation turned to Ukraine, Putin got angry. When speaking to the American president, he said: ‘Don’t you understand, George—Ukraine is not even a nation! What is Ukraine? Part of her territory is Eastern Europe, and part, a considerable part, was given by us!’” Kommersant’s source added: “Putin hinted that if Ukraine joined NATO after all, this state would just cease to exist. He actually threatened that Russia could begin the annexation of the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.”
Moscow sees Ukraine as a zone of its traditional influence and clearly underestimates the strength of the “European dream” for the majority of Ukrainians. Putin believes that those who are against Russia are just poorly informed. It is worth mentioning that on December 19, 2012, during a seemingly peaceful annual news conference, Putin only once showed emotion, when he talked about the causes of the “Euromaidan.” Speaking to journalists, he argued in his customary manner: “Has anyone actually read that agreement [the EU-Ukraine association agreement]? No. Nobody reads anything! Can you read? Look at what is written in it: open the markets, get no money, introduce European trade and technical regulations. Which means what? That means that the production sector has to be shut down, and agriculture will not develop.” Putin’s logic is quite clear: he thinks that real Ukrainian patriots cannot possibly support an association with the European Union.
While accepting and publicly declaring the impossibility of restoring the Soviet Union, Moscow is nonetheless trying to find artificial ways of integrating with the former Soviet republics. Ukraine is important for Russia as a country that has geopolitically significant access to the Black Sea, where a base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet is still located; as a transit country, through which gas goes to the EU; and as a buffer protecting Russia from NATO. The stakes of Russia preserving its influence over Ukraine are high, yet the variety of instruments it can use to preserve this influence is rather limited.
The creation of some “supranational” union would likely be ideal for Moscow. Another attempt at reaching this objective is being made through forming the Eurasian Union, with the Customs Union being an integrant part of it. In a political sense, the ideal arrangement for the Russian government would involve building relations with members of the Customs Union similar to those that exist in the British Commonwealth. The Kremlin wants Ukraine and Belarus to become, in a way, Russia’s “dominions.” Kazakhstan finds itself in an exclusive position: its participation in Moscow-led integration projects is based on equal terms with Russia. Being independent both economically and in terms of energy, Kazakhstan can afford to behave in this way.
If Ukraine joins the Customs Union, this would not only represent a crucial step toward economic integration with the Kremlin’s geopolitically significant projects in the post-Soviet space; it would also guarantee a barrier to Kiev’s European integration. Moscow intends to use mechanisms of the Customs Union to build a system of economic relations, under which the interdependence of both countries will become crucial to Ukraine’s macroeconomic stability. The latter is supposed to become part of Russia’s economic system. This is why the Kremlin will do anything to reach its objective.
For now, Moscow has achieved only temporary success. By preventing the EU-Ukraine association agreement from being signed during the November Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius, the Russian government is trying to prove that Ukraine’s economy will profit from the country’s membership in the Customs Union. Until the Ukrainian government has made a decision, Moscow is providing a sort of temporary privileged regime, which can be canceled at any moment depending on Kiev’s willingness to cooperate.
Kiev’s tactical objective consists in not paying too much for gas and avoiding signing documents on Customs Union membership. In case Moscow feels that Kiev is playing for time, Ukraine can always turn to the EU.
Two important decisions were made during the December negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. First, it was determined that Russia will buy $15 billion worth of Ukrainian Eurobonds using money from the National Welfare Fund, one of the country’s sovereign funds created to assure Russian citizens’ pension rights. Putin, however, has long since forgotten about this designation of the National Welfare Fund and, under pressure from state oligarchs, has opened it for all sorts of infrastructure projects.
The Russian president’s decision to allocate $15 billion from this fund to Ukraine resulted in a wave of negative reactions. Since the Orange Revolution that gripped Ukraine in 2004–2005, the Russian government has been trying to convince its people that going forward, only market relations will exist between Russia and Ukraine, that the Ukrainian state is falling to pieces, and that the country’s elite is irresponsible and its industry is on the brink of bankruptcy. Putin has repeated dozens of times that nobody would back up Ukraine’s economy just for the sake of it. And suddenly $15 billion of the “people’s pension money” is offered to Kiev with no explanation at all. It is no surprise that during his December news conference, Putin talked about Ukraine for a whole hour, trying to explain his decision. His reasons, however, seemed ill-founded, the main one being that “Ukraine for us is a fraternal country... and in a difficult situation, we are always ready to support a fraternal people.”
“These 15 billion are a loan that will be paid back. I want to remind you once again that we will earn 5 percent, and the bonds will be placed on the Irish Stock Exchange. I think the transaction will be done in line with British law, so it is protected. I do not see it as wasting money on our part,” Putin declared, adding in the end that it was important to “agree on some form of long-term collaboration.”
In practice, this $15 billion is nothing but an advance, designed to mark the beginning of “substantive bargaining” concerning matters of import to both countries, namely the Customs Union for Russia and the gas contracts for Ukraine. It was a sort of “entrance fee” to integration talks—a fee the EU did not want to pay.
Second, the gas price for Ukraine will be reduced from $400 to $268.50 per 1,000 cubic meters. This does not mean that the current gas contracts will be revised, which Kiev keeps pushing for, but only that Ukraine is being offered a discount, which is to be renegotiated every three months. This means that Gazprom can at any moment stop being charitable and decide that Ukraine has to start paying full price again. Ukrainian Minister of Energy and Coal Industry Eduard Stavitsky told Reuters news agency that Kiev would further insist on lower gas prices.
Gazprom’s willingness to negotiate will depend on one factor only: Ukraine’s commitment to joining the Customs Union. The Ukrainian government, however, is not eager to make such a decision. In late December, Yanukovych declared that the possibility of signing a limited number of documents concerning the Customs Union was being discussed. This does not satisfy Moscow—it needs Kiev’s full-fledged membership. In the coming months, the Ukrainian government will do anything it can to engage Moscow in difficult negotiations in order to postpone or avoid altogether its decision about joining the Customs Union, since deciding to join could result in Yanukovych’s resignation. Diplomats will go on a sort of slow-down strike in order to make the road to the Customs Union as long and labyrinthine as possible.
For Ukraine, the principle aim was not to get discounts, but to get the current gas contracts, negotiated by Yulia Tymoshenko in January 2009, revised. These agreements establish a base price that makes Russian gas more expensive for Ukraine than for Western Europe. Discounts temporarily reduce Ukraine’s gas expenses but do not solve the problem of Kiev’s critical dependency on the Russian government’s political will.
The gas transit system (GTS) will now become a focal point for both countries. Moscow faces difficulties connected with building the South Stream gas pipeline. The South Stream is largely a political project directed at reducing Russia’s dependency on Ukraine for transporting gas to the EU. Now that Moscow has entered an active stage of integration talks with Kiev, though, and the Ukrainian president is counting on Moscow’s participation in the modernization of its gas transit system, Russia’s position becomes quite complicated. It might prove too expensive for the Russian government to finance Ukraine’s loyalty through modernizing its pipeline, consequently guaranteeing Ukraine an adequate gas supply for decades to come, while at the same time investing billions in the South Stream, when the Nord Stream remains half-empty.
Kiev suggests that Moscow invest billions in supporting its pipeline. In his interview with the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yuriy Boyko declared, “We are ready for any model of cooperation with Russia, but on a parity basis. In fraternal terms: if a consortium, then fifty-fifty; if ownership of the GTS, then fifty-fifty. Unfortunately, we did not get a clear signal from our Russian colleagues that they are ready for such a model. That’s why the negotiations were so difficult.” Moscow, however, does not need “brotherly” relations; if Russia decides to invest in the Ukrainian gas transit system, it expects to receive at least the controlling stake in it.
Russia is trying to drag Ukraine into the Customs Union by the scruff. Ukraine is responding by bluffing, and by pretending that it will go along with Moscow. Kiev’s tactical objective consists in not paying too much for gas and avoiding signing documents on Customs Union membership. In case Moscow feels that Kiev is playing for time, Ukraine can always turn to the EU and advance the European integration game that has never actually stopped. Interestingly, Ukraine is making considerable efforts to reduce its gas dependency on Russia. How long Moscow will allow Ukraine to draw the wool over its eyes to the tune of $15 billion, and what arsenal will be used against Kiev when Moscow finally runs out of patience, remain to be seen.Schabowski's death on Sunday at the age of 86 in a Berlin care home brought back memories of the sensation he caused in 1989 when he said a Politburo decree to allow travel came "into effect, according to my information immediately, without delay."
As a senior East German Communist official, Schabowski was responding to a question on travel rules at a press conference on the evening of 9 November, 1989, while shuffling through notes in front of him.
It later emerged that the decision was not supposed to be formally released until 4 am the next morning.
Schabowski's reply in German - stammered seemingly as an afterthought - prompted East Germans to rush to border crossings that evening and sealed the rapid demise of the Soviet-backed regime led by the unrepentant Erich Honecker, who had headed the German Democratic Republic since 1971.
"Therefore... um... we have decided today... um... to implement a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic... um... to... um... leave East Germany through any of the border crossings," Schabowski said at the press conference in 1989.
For months pressure had been building among East Germans for free travel.
Crowds cheer on night of the Wall's opening
Schabowski's wife and life
The German agency DPA said Schabowski's wife Irina had reported his death early on Sunday, reportedly after a series of strokes.
The young Schabowski studied journalism after World War Two and rose to become editor of the "Neues Deutschland," a newspaper closely aligned to Honecker's regime.
Schabowski became Politiburo member in 1984 and had been tipped as potential successor to party chief Honecker alongside contemporary Egon Krenz.
Jailed over border shootings
Eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1,400 kilometer-long inner-German border, Schabowski and two other Politburo members were jailed on charges of tolerating the former regime's fatal shootings of escaping East Germans along the border.
Unlike six other accused former Politiburo members, Schabowski said during the trial in 1997 that nothing could justify that "even a single person" had had to pay for trying to flee with his or her life.
He also claimed to have contributed to a process of de-escalation during 1989. Early in 1990, he was excluded from the East German left's successor grouping, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).
Schabowski was freed in 2000 after a pardon issued by the then Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen.
Turncoat?
Schabowski went on to write several books and gave lectures recounting the communist collapse. He rebuffed accusations by communist contemporaries that he had become a "traitor."
"They hate me, the diehards," he reportedly told Germany's political magazine "Cicero" in 2006, saying they did so because he had "grappled with communism and its creation, the GDR."
Schabowski drew a media echo in 2009 when German ARD |
a spray”.
Fans welcomed the gesture and expressed their gratitude online:
“Handshake events often confiscate spray bottles when they check your bags, so having deodorant on hand for fans like this is a big help,” a netizen wrote.
“I got some spray and used it as soon as I arrived at the event,” another fan stated.
“Kao-tan is amazing, She’s got the power to make large corporations spring into action,” an elated fan commented.
“If they’d sold the deodorant in special mango-colored packages, they probably could’ve made a ton of money,” said another fan who thought the sponsor lost a money-making opportunity.
Perhaps Kao-tan’s humble request will set a precedent for press events in the future.Claudio Ranieri is just a little bit nervous.
Leicester City sits top of the Premier League, seven points clear of second-place Tottenham Hotspur with five games to go.
[ MORE: Van Gaal losing locker room ]
Many have already handed Leicester the title and tickets for their final home game are on sale for over $22,000 for a pair as their fans are already anticipating seeing captain Wes Morgan lift the Premier League trophy.
[ VIDEO: Premier League highlights ]
Hold your horses. That’s the message from Ranieri, 64, as he spoke to Italian outlet Gazzetta dello Sport about the run-in.
“The last five matches will be terrible. Nothing is decided yet as far as the title is concerned,” Ranieri said. “We are in the Champions League, the preliminary round as things stand. But the title? Tottenham are not giving in and we have to stay focused. I never look for favours from other teams, just to perform my own job. “This is our mission, to do the best we possibly can – then if Tottenham overtake us we will compliment them. It is the law of sport!”
Ranieri has already been named the Italian Coach of the Year back in his homeland, is sure to be crowned the best manager in England too and although he won’t admit it, his side are on the cusp of clinching the PL title in what would be one of the greatest shocks in sporting history.
Is it just me or is Ranieri letting his emotions out a little?
All season he’s been composed and calm but after Jamie Vardy struck twice to give the Foxes a 2-0 win away at Sunderland last time out, Ranieri seemed to shed a few tears as he celebrated with Leicester’s band of away fans at the Stadium of Light.
If Leicester keep their focus like they have all season then the last five games will be far from terrible. But if Ranieri’s men somehow let their grasp on the PL title slip in the final five games, I think terrible won’t come close to summing up their emotions…
Follow @JPW_NBCSports(CNN) -- Thirty-two: That's the magic number of cameras needed to capture the nuances of a person's facial expressions, according to the developers of a bold new video game, "L.A. Noire."
So that's why "Mad Men" actor Aaron Staton spent several months sitting in a bright, sterile room in a Culver City, California, studio, where 32 cameras were pointed at his head while he read lines from "L.A. Noire's" 2,200-page script.
The game's creators employed this groundbreaking animation technology to capture every nuance of Staton's facial performance and transfer him into a virtual 1940s-era Los Angeles. For Staton, the process was part of the gig's allure.
"My first thought in seeing it -- I just thought it was incredible," said the actor, who plays adman Ken Cosgrove in the AMC hit series. "I was just blown away by the detail, that this was footage from a video game."
Rockstar Games, creator of the "Grand Theft Auto" franchise and publisher of "L.A. Noire," hope gamers are equally impressed. After "L.A. Noire's" coming-out party last month at the Tribeca Film Festival, the detective story arrives Tuesday for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.
The game, which echoes movies like "L.A. Confidential," puts players in the shoes of LAPD Detective Cole Phelps (Staton) as he investigates a string of arson attacks, racketeering conspiracies and murders rocking the city in 1947. Phelps must search for clues, chase down suspects and interrogate witnesses to figure out who is telling the truth and who is lying.
Because eye contact and subtle facial movements are key to the story, the game's creators needed a better way to capture those details.
Seven years of research and development went into "the rig," the crew's affectionate name for the 32-camera setup. At Depth Analysis studio, Hollywood effects merge with the cutting-edge camera system, which was designed to produce the most lifelike digital faces possible.
With spotlights beaming from all sides to eliminate shadows, Staton wore an orange T-shirt -- a necessity for the editing software -- makeup and a slicked-back hairdo, which, in addition to his every grin, wince and lick of the lips, gets fed from the cameras to a bank of computers and eventually into the game.
Depth Analysis owns the elaborate camera-and-server technology, which it calls MotionScan. A fellow Australian company, Team Bondi, developed the "L.A. Noire" game.
Both companies were founded and are run by Brendan McNamara, who penned "Noire's" ambitious script and directed the game's development. Before that, McNamara created "The Getaway," a London crime series for the PlayStation 2 that drew many comparisons to "Grand Theft Auto."
The interconnected camera rig that he dreamed up may find itself embedded in the fabric of game development in this fast-moving industry.
Rather than asking animators to manipulate facial designs in 3-D rendering software as they've done for years, Depth Analysis uses the footage from all of those cameras, situated at various angles, to replicate an actor's face. Servers automatically map the faces, which greatly reduces how long the process takes, McNamara said.
Depth Analysis plans to license the technology to other companies. The studio has given tours to interested parties, including Activision Blizzard staffers potentially scouting for future "Call of Duty" games and Hideo Kojima, the famed Japanese creator of the "Metal Gear" series. (Kojima was "very impressed," McNamara said.)
Rockstar, which waited patiently as McNamara perfected the process, was also taken with the technology.
"It was pretty amazing in the tests that he had," said Jeronimo Barrera, Rockstar's vice president for product development. "It looks like it's been filmed. It doesn't look like it's been animated."
But some developers have expressed concern about ceding control over how a character looks and acts.
"Is it right for every game? No, not at all," said Barrera, adding that Rockstar has no immediate plans to use MotionScan in any of its other games. If you're not happy about a line, you have to bring the actor back in instead of just tweaking the problem in software, he said.
Game makers will have to adapt their processes to work under MotionScan's constraints, McNamara said. That entails hiring professional actors and directing them to do multiple takes -- much like a TV or film production.
"If you get a great performance out of somebody, why do you want to play around with it?" McNamara said. "Some people want to have this control over the character. They say: 'Can I control the actor's eyes?' And my answer was: 'The actor controls his own eyes.' "
Near-blinding lights and 32 cameras aside, the process feels in some ways like a Hollywood set.
Actors must plan on several hours to go through hair and makeup, Barrera said. If a character has taken a beating, black eyes are applied with powder and eyeliner; for especially bad smack downs, the actor chomps on a blood capsule.
"We had burn victims who were in there for 4 hours getting prosthetic stuff," McNamara said.
Once an actor is in the rig, MotionScan requires him or her to stay mostly stationary (how ironic) or else the software loses the full picture.
"You're sort of glued to a chair -- although not literally," said Staton, one of hundreds of actors who worked on "L.A. Noire." "Though, at one point, they did consider putting in seat belts."
McNamara has been working in motion capture for a dozen years. Motion capture places neon-colored balls on an actor's knees, elbows and other body parts to let cameras record movements. When that's adapted to faces, "you're capturing rotations, not an eyelid flutter," he said. "You're kind of using the wrong thing."
"Why can't you just capture the outside of people instead of trying to find an approximation of where the bones are?" McNamara asked himself. "The idea, for me, has been around almost as long as since I started doing motion capture."
MotionScan was born from necessity. McNamara wanted to revive the detective-thriller genre, which has produced such movie hits as "Dick Tracy," "Se7en" and, yes, "L.A. Confidential," but virtually no great games. He figured that if gamers were to become virtual gumshoes, they'd need to be able to read the characters' faces to evaluate when someone is lying.
After many failed experiments, including an attempt at using sonar ("It kind of bounces all over the place," McNamara said), he arrived at the multi-camera concept.
The next iteration of MotionScan is expected to involve many more cameras shooting at even higher resolutions, so that actors can actually walk around instead of shooting motion capture and faces separately. Currently, the system records faces at 1 gigabyte per second, McNamara said. (That's about two high-definition episodes of "Mad Men" every second.) Full-body scans might require 150 gigabytes to 200 gigabytes a second, he said.While top free agents such as Robinson Cano, Jacoby Ellsbury and Shin-Soo Choo have already obtained $100 million deals with new teams, there’s still lots of talent available on the open market.
Teams seeking starting pitching still have most of the same top-tier options that were available when when free agency opened, since the uncertainty surrounding Masahiro Tanaka’s future slowed down the pitching market in the weeks leading up to the news that he’ll indeed be posted. Those questions trickled down to other areas of the market, impacting dozens of free agents.
With the new year less than a week away, here’s a look at the top ten free agents remaining, including Tanaka, who will essentially be a free agent with a $20 million entry fee. Three potential suitors are listed beside each player (based on recent rumours and speculation):
Masahiro Tanaka, SP** – Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers
Ervin Santana, SP* – Los Angeles Angels, Toronto Blue Jays, Seattle Mariners
Ubaldo Jimenez, SP* – Seattle Mariners, Toronto Blue Jays, Cleveland Indians
Matt Garza, SP – Los Angeles Angels, Arizona Diamondbacks, Texas Rangers
Stephen Drew, SS* – New York Mets, Boston Red Sox, Houston Astros
Nelson Cruz, OF* – Texas Rangers, Seattle Mariners, Baltimore Orioles
A.J. Burnett, SP – Baltimore Orioles, Pittsburgh Pirates, retirement
Kendrys Morales, DH* – Baltimore Orioles, Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers
Bronson Arroyo, SP – Cincinnati Reds, New York Mets, Minnesota Twins
Fernando Rodney, RP – Seattle Mariners, Baltimore Orioles, Houston Astros
Yes, there’s still a lot of pitching available. Expect the New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Angels, Arizona Diamondbacks, Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Indians and Minnesota Twins to be among the teams in the mix for starting pitching. There’s not enough for every team to get enough arms, but there’s still plenty of choice — for now. With spring training seven weeks away, the market will surely clear out before long.
*linked to draft pick compensation after declining qualifying offer
**will cost $20 million posting fee on top of free agent contractArduino Team —
On Arduino Day, we announced the latest member of the Arduino MKR family: the MKRFOX1200. This powerful IoT development board offers a practical and cost effective solution for Makers looking to add Sigfox connectivity to their projects with minimal previous networking experience.
The MKRFOX1200 shares several similarities with other MKR products, like the MKR1000 and MKRZero, including a compact form factor (67 x 25mm) and a Microchip SAM D21 32-bit Cortex-M0+ microcontroller at its core. The recently unveiled board also features an ATA8520 module for long-range, low-energy consumption, and is capable of running for over six months on two standard AA 1.5V batteries.
Designed for Makers ready to take their IoT projects into the real world, the MKRFOX1200 comes with a GSM antenna that can be attached to the board and a two-year subscription to the Sigfox network. This provides users with full access to Sigfox’s efficient messaging system (up to 140 messages per day), cloud platform, webhooks, APIs, as well as the new Spot’it geolocation service.
MKRFOX1200 can be used in a wide variety of settings, from agriculture (livestock management, smart irrigation and weather stations), to smart cities (dumpster monitoring, air quality networks, street lighting or parking lot tracking), to utility metering and other industrial applications.
“Sigfox loves Makers,” says Nicolas Lesconnec, Head of Developer Relations at Sigfox. “Sigfox aims to empowers billions of new IoT solutions. We’re proud to partner with Arduino, the leading open-source electronics platform, to offer the simplest way to connect anything.”
Sigfox currently operates in over 30 countries, with more to follow in the next few years. (Use this map to see whether it has been deployed or is rolling out in your area.) The first version of the MKRFOX1200 is compatible with Sigfox Radio Configuration Zone 1 (868MHz, 14dBm), meaning it is only supported in network-covered regions of Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa.
The board is now available on Arduino’s European online store!he booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). Bonnie Allen/National Post / Bonnie Allen/National Post
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) xx / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post) x / x
The booming and controversial used-clothes business in Africa means hockey jerseys can be found sprinkled throughout this war-torn West African nation. Bizarrely, the authentic hockey jersey has become a status symbol among the poor for its “premium-grade” rating and high price tag ($4 CDN). (Bonnie Allen for National Post)g x / xHistorian Tom Holland asks tough questions about the roots of Islamist violence – and breaks all the rules of TV presenting by retching at the site of an Isis atrocity
One of the peculiarities of this week’s Bafta TV awards was the BBC receiving more prizes than Channel 4 by a ratio of 19 to 1. This may have been because of voters punishing the network for poaching The Great British Bake Off. But the results were unrepresentative of the state of television, because there is a sort of programme that only Channel 4, among British broadcasters, would and could make – and Isis: The Origins of Violence is a stark example.
Presenting foreign documentaries is often thought of as a glamorous profession – free air travel and hotel accommodation in hot places in exchange for a few pensive walking-talking shots – but this invitation to historian Tom Holland promised an explosion on his Twitter feed, and possibly one under his feet. While visiting sites of Isis atrocities that have not yet been made safe, he was required to address the philosophical question of whether Islamic doctrine contains a strain of thought that can be used to justify extreme violence and even genocide.
Although Holland rightly emphasised that the “vast majority of Muslims” find the deeds and reasoning of Isis abhorrent – and acknowledged that the west has its own history of bloodily targeting foreign lands in the name of God – this remained a courageous film exploring questions left unspoken in large parts of the media through a combination of liberalism and fear. Many articles have explained the origins of jihad and the Islamic State dream of a global caliphate, as Holland does, but he heads from there into rare depths.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eerie … Tom Holland trudges alone through the rubbled piles of stone and concrete in Sinjar, Iraq. Photograph: Channel 4
As an essay of ideas, the film most resembles the work of Adam Curtis, although, rather than delivering his monologue of quizzical authority out of shot as Curtis does, Holland is constantly on screen, looking brooding on the tube or metro, or walking through ruins.
There is one direct overlap between Isis: The Origins of Violence and Curtis’s trilogy The Power of Nightmares (2004). Both deal with the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian official executed in 1966 for attempting to assassinate President Nasser. Qutb’s rhetoric calling for a fundamentalist enforcement of Islamic laws as a bulwark against western decadence inspired first al-Qaida and then Isis, which – in the closest this topic has to a joke – was formed by terrorists expelled from al-Qaida for having views thought too brutal.
Where Curtis makes oblique connections – from a 1960s pop song via a brand of breakfast cereal to a massacre – Holland is more singular in his approach, focusing on France. He starts and ends in the French capital, the scene of repeated Isis attacks. As he explains in a voiceover with the simple, buttonholing rhythms of Ernest Hemingway: “You come to Paris because Isis comes to Paris. Isis has a thing about Paris.”
While touching on the reasons cited for the French capital’s regularity as a target – reputation for decadence, large and disadvantaged immigrant population – the film also has a deeper thesis: that the Isis obsession with the French is simultaneously a revenge for and a homage to Napoleon. His seizure of Egypt and westernisation of Islamic culture, argues Holland, created long grudges but also gave some extremist Muslims a model of conquest and conversion that has been turned back on Napoleon’s successors at the Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo, the Stade de France and the Champs-Élysées.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yazidi refugees on Mount Sinjar. Photograph: Channel 4
Holland also visits London, Turkey and Iraq, fretting over the issue of how Isis defines a legitimate target. One eerie sequence shows him trudging alone through the rubbled piles of stone and concrete that now mark the town of Sinjar in Iraq, where Isis killed thousands of men and older women and took younger women hostage in August 2014. The victims were targeted because they belonged to the Yazidi faith, regarded as devil-worship by some Muslims.
Slaloming through the debris, Holland becomes breathless, loosening his bulletproof vest and bending double as if about to vomit. Soon he gasps that he “needs to sit down”. These unexplained symptoms seem to be a panic attack induced by either fear (he has just noted that the toppled rocks may hide mines or bombs) or moral horror.
Even before then, he has looked for much of the time as if he might puke, which is against the form-book for TV reporters. But, although the film is going out in a pre-election period when there is much talk about editorial balance, Isis isn’t a subject on which it is possible to make an even-handed documentary, both because only a psychopath would defend the terrorists’ actions and because the organisation’s idea of media liaison is posting beheading videos online.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sickened … Holland in Sinjar. Photograph: Channel 4
Apart from Qutb’s writings, the only voice from the other side is Abu Sayyaf, a leading figure in the Jordan jihadi Salifist movement, and even he suggests that the attempt by Isis to create a caliphate through violence was “wrong and hasty”.
This means that the arguments are largely presented from a western, Christian perspective. Warning chords on the soundtrack throughout are finally resolved as a requiem in a French cathedral for victims of Isis atrocities. At a fourth-century monastery that overlooks an Isis stronghold in Iraq, Holland sees the tiny safe cave, behind the altar, where the last monks left will huddle if their neighbours ever come for them. “This must make you feel very close to the founder of your church,” says Holland.
Is that media bias, or acknowledgement that some stories can’t have two sides? Isis: The Origins of Violence will start many arguments, but we should be grateful for having broadcasters brave and thoughtful enough to make them. Three days after the 2017 TV Baftas, we are surely seeing a frontrunner for the 2018 documentary statuette.
Isis: The Origins of Violence is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.PRESS RELEASE City of Long Beach
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Press Release # CM: 092415 Subject: Metro Awards $23 million for Innovative City, Port and Transit Transportation Projects in Long Beach
The City of Long Beach, Port of Long Beach, and Long Beach Transit were awarded a combined $23 million from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) today for transportation infrastructure improvement projects in all funding categories by Metro. These projects will further cement the City’s reputation as a leader in sustainable transportation.
“I am delighted that the Metro Board recognized the City’s extensive efforts to serve all transportation needs in the City, particularly for pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, and goods movement,” said Mayor Robert Garcia. “Long Beach truly represents the future with our vibrant and diverse urban center that provides bike, pedestrian, and transit friendly amenities.”
The City’s Department of Public Works will receive $12.4 million for five projects that will extend the City’s bicycle network, enhance the pedestrian experience along major streets, reduce congestion, and implement innovative transportation mobile apps. This funding will help the City connect Los Angeles and Orange Counties’ bicycle networks via a bicycle/pedestrian bridge across the San Gabriel River at Atherton Street.
The Port of Long Beach will receive $3.1 million to design and build a coastal bike and pedestrian path crossing the Los Angeles River at Ocean Boulevard. The proposed path would connect the Bixby Memorial Bicycle and Pedestrian Path on the new replacement for the Gerald Desmond Bridge, the City of Long Beach Bicycle Network and the L.A. River Bicycle Path.
“The Port of Long Beach has worked closely with stakeholder and advocacy groups on our Green Port projects, including bicycle and pedestrian facilities,” said Harbor Commission President Lori Ann Guzmán. “We thank our regional, state and federal partners for this funding opportunity to close a critical gap in the bicycle network.”
The Port will also receive another grant for $5.4 million to enhance goods movement. The grant will fund the widening and realignment of Pier B Street in addition to improvements to pedestrian safety. With record breaking cargo volume, the Port’s widening of Pier B Street will allow for the timely transport of cargo to their final destinations.
Long Beach Transit (LBT) continues to lead the industry with adopting environmentally friendly low-to-no emission buses. The agency will receive $2.1 million from Metro to purchase new zero-emission battery electric buses to replace aging hybrid gasoline/electric buses. This will add to its existing green fleet of compressed natural gas and battery electric buses.
“Long Beach Transit is committed to continue seeking out innovative ways to reduce our carbon footprint for the benefit of our community,” said Kenneth McDonald, Long Beach Transit’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “With LBT’s upcoming battery electric buses, we are advancing our industry toward a zero-emission standard and taking an important step toward better air quality in Long Beach and the surrounding cities we serve.”
The award of the Metro grants reflects the commitment of the City of Long Beach, Port of Long Beach, and Long Beach Transit to advance projects that improve the lives of residents, businesses, and visitors in the City by leveraging federal, state, and regional funding.We talk about "Narrative Collapse" and MSM control of "The Narrative", but according to Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal, the Obama Administration thinks that their control of The Narrative can win a physical war with a fanatical Muslim foe:
Oy vey: Josh Earnest (CNN): "We are in a fight with ISIS -- a narrative fight." — Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) September 19, 2016
Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit. He's not really a Trump fan, but he says, linking to Roger Simon's Forget the Economy—It’s the Jihad, Stupid! that
In November, we’ll be asked to make a choice — to elect a president who, whatever his flaws, understands we’re fighting vicious, determined terrorists…or a president who’s a retread from an administration who believes were fighting memes and narratives.
More from Glenn Reynolds here.
What this idea that winning the "narrative fight" will be the same as winning a war reminds me of is the old show business story that might be a metaphor for Affirmative Action, including an Affirmative Action Presidency—the story of the aspiring actress who sleeps with the stage manager, the playwright, the director, and the producer, and gets a major part in a play, with her name in lights;
"The cast eventually found itself in a parlor car bound for the opening in New Haven. Our heroine sat down next to the venerable old character actress and told her she would be only too glad to receive any advice the seasoned trouper could give which might further her career? Laying aside her copy of the National Geographic, the old pro observed, "My dear, the only thing which seems to have escaped you is the fact that you can't f— the audience! "
A moment like that can come to any affirmative action case, and when it's a life and death job like doctor, or flying a plane, or being head of state for a major power, it can be fatal.Toon Talk Weekly - Episode 102 - “Adventure Time”
On episode 102 of Toon Talk Weekly, Brad and Jake are joined by their good friend and fellow animator, Nick Hopkins, to dive into the series “Adventure Time.”
Trouble listening here? Download the MP3 (61.2mb)
It’s finally here, the show that started it all! The idea for Toon Talk Weekly was actually dreamt up after we had seen an episode of Adventure Time in which a group of businessmen come together to try and fix people’s problems; although often they just made things worse. We thought to ourselves, what if we started a podcast about how morals in cartoons could be applied to running a business.
While that idea was scrapped, the idea to watch and discuss cartoons on a show was born into Toon Talk Weekly! We invited our good friend, Nick Hopkins, onto the show to help us dive into an episode as well as the entire series of Adventure Time. With a show this popular, we needed three animators just to discuss it at length.
What can you say about Adventure Time? It’s arguably the influential and popular cartoon on modern television with it’s lovable cast of characters, fantastical settings, and excellent writing that leave you wanting even more. With 6 seasons, 199 total episodes, and a 7th season premiering this fall, Cartoon Network will more than likely want to keep the show on the air as long as it can.
In this show we cover the episode “The Chamber of Frozen Blades” from season 2. Adventure Time does have an large story arc that carries through many seasons, but this one falls more in line with a story that is just two buddies having fun. Brad and I were so excited about watching more Adventure Time that we may do a round 2 with Nick in the future.
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Toon Talk Weekly - Episode 102 - Show NotesVideo screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET
It's good to have hobbies. Some people just have more unusual hobbies than others. Michael Birken says he spent 11 months playing with Post-it notes. He wasn't writing memos or reminders, he was sticking them on the wall to create an elaborate stop-motion video tribute to his favorite classic games. He calls it Post-it Note Arcade.
The video includes footage of both Ms. Pac-Man and Mario. Birken says he recorded actual gameplay footage and then printed the images out, one frame at a time, to replicate on the walls around his office. He spent holidays and weekends posting the little pieces of paper up and filming the results. It's probably just as well his co-workers didn't have to witness this madness.
The resulting video looks good. The vintage video game music is all there and it's all just the right amount of crazy-obsessive. All told, Birken says it took 5,722 still images created out of 4,800 Post-it notes to make the video. He notes that changing background scenery was masked out and replaced with a consistent frame throughout the animation. At the end of the video, Birken confesses to having too much time on his hands.
A controversial project
It's worth noting that this video has stirred up some controversy on both YouTube and Reddit, with some viewers saying they believe it's not a real stop-motion, but that the work was all done on a computer.
I contacted Birken about the issue and he wrote back an epic e-mail describing the origin and process for the video, which is quite involved. I'll save the details for a post he plans to put up on his own Web site, meatfighter.com.
The process did involve a considerable amount of software to compensate for issues with brightness and flickering. He conducted the actual sticky-note filming at night, when he works in an office building and could control the lighting.
How did Birken manage to keep each frame accurate? He used blue masking tape as markers that were left up throughout the project. He wrote a piece of custom software that used those markers to orient the video, even if the camera was in a slightly different position.
"Each night, after setting up the lighting, I dropped a plumb bob from a string pressed against the upper markers. This enabled me to create a column of Post-It notes on each side of the frame," he told Crave. "From there, it was easy to create a rectangle around the frame, each Post-It note acting like a tiny square edge. That rectangular frame served as a kind of grid to orient everything."
The detail level of the e-mail from Birken is enough to convince me that this video is real. He also says, "One more thing, in all that time, I was only caught once by a fellow employee who visited the office on a Saturday to show his friends where he works. He saw the camera and the wall full of Post-it notes. They all told me the wall looked cool and they left shortly afterwards. He never asked me why I took everything down on Monday."
I expect the controversy will continue until Birken unveils all the method to his madness. He sounds to me like a dedicated tinkerer, the kind of person who will see a whimsical project through to the end. I'll let Birken have the last word: "Anyway, long story short, it was 11 months of pointless hell."On an afternoon trawl of cool free projects I came across Cabin [Itch.io link]- a “fleeting experimental game about spending time in a cabin” in which you can “relax”, “drink a beer”, “stare at the moon” and “paint the sky”. I’ll admit that it was the latter which was of most interest as I can do the other three IRL once the sun sets.It’s a small project with a fondness for an aesthetic which is hellbent on meandering back and forth across the line between pretty and vomit-inducingly awful. I both want to stay in it for ages and leave immediately so that the world stops moving and stuttering.
If you fancy an interesting/pretty/nauseous experience this is a good option. Cabin is pay-what-you-want over on Itch.io.
I need to lie down.Ask |
to a third year will receive minimum wage and a grant for future academic studies.
The agreed-upon outline for equal share of the national burden also states that each year some 1,800 "diligent" yeshiva students will be eligible to receive a special grant, but yeshiva students between the ages of 21 and 26 who will discontinue their studies after receiving an exemption from army service will be fined.
Ultra-Orthodox recruits aged 21 and under will have the option of deferring their army service. They will later be divided into three categories: Those who serve in the army; those who will perform national service and those who are classified as "persistent" yeshiva students.
'l'll explain.' Lapid outside his home Thursday morning (Photo: Moti Kimchi)
In recent decades, ultra-Orthodox parties have used their kingmaker status to secure budgets for their minority religious schools and seminaries. Tens of thousands of young ultra-Orthodox males are granted exemptions from military service in order to devote their lives, theoretically at least, to religious study.
The benefits have sparked animosity among the wider Israeli public.
The army will also ask to increase the number of Arab Israelis in the National Service program.
A ministerial committee headed by Habayit Hayehudi is expected to approve the proposal within 45 days.
The coalition agreement further determines that the so-called "core subjects," including math, science and English, will be taught in all Israeli schools within two-and-a-half years. The government will also implement economic measures aimed at encouraging haredim to join the workforce.
The deal also calls for enacting laws that will change the system of government. These laws will state the following:
The 34th government will consist of 18 ministers and four deputy ministers
There will be no ministers-without portfolio
The electoral threshold will be raised from 2% to 4%
Only a majority of 65 MKs will be able to topple the government
MKs who will split from their factions will not be eligible for funds allocated to political parties
Yesh Atid officials said the deal also calls for the resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians and increasing financial support to Holocaust survivors.
On Wednesday the sides reached an agreement on the distribution of ministerial portfolios. It was agreed that Lapid will be receiving the Education Ministry portfolio for MK Shay Piron and will forgo his demands for the role of interior minister. Lapid will serve as finance minister.
According to the proposal, Bennett will receive the Knesset Finance Committee, Likud will receive an additional deputy minister and the agreement with Tzipi Livni's Hatnua party will remain in place.
According to the agreement, Likud will get the defense portfolio, and Likud MK Gideon Sa'ar, the current education minister, will be appointed interior minister.
Yuval Karni, Reuters contributed to the report
Moran Azulay and Yuval Karni are Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth correspondents
Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and TwitterWe are obviously in a college town. The highest-volume times are around 9:40a, well after most of the working population is expected to show up to the office. A lunch rush brings in a crowd for the sandwiches, soups and salads (we're not just looking at drinks anymore), but soon the activity fades and the cafe remains slow through the end of the day. While the shop stays open until 7p, it's mainly for the laptop crowd leeching off of free wi-fi and doing work with the now-lukewarm coffee ordered two hours ago.
What else did we find?
Get lunch early. Volume is 38% higher at 12:10p than it is at 12p.
. Volume is 38% higher at 12:10p than it is at 12p. What's with 9:40a? With the exception of Monday, 9:30-9:40a is one of the biggest hot spots of the day.
With the exception of Monday, 9:30-9:40a is one of the biggest hot spots of the day. The long Monday lunch. Somehow lunch drags out quite a bit on Monday. A lot of activity from 12p to 1p.
Drink and Bakery Pairings
Analyzing co-occurrence of Bakery items with Drinks against average popularity uncovers favorite pairings. There are two directions in this analysis. If you order Drink A, how likely is it you will order Bakery Item B? Conversely, if you order Bakery Item B, how likely is it you will order Drink A? We've highlighted high likelihoods against average as Pink, and low likelihoods as Blue.
With some drinks, like Iced Coffee, buyers are less likely to buy ANY bakery item than the average consumer. All corresponding dots are blue. Other drinks are more indulgent, like the Au Lait or Chai Latte, which see higher-than-average likelihood of ordering 5 of 9 bakery items.Opinion writer
There are few things we in the media love more than a good hypocrisy story, which allows us to replay the oft-told narrative that politicians and those who work for them are fundamentally dishonest. And as hypocrisy stories go, this one’s a doozy:
President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has used a private email account to conduct and discuss official White House business dozens of times, his lawyer confirmed Sunday. Kushner used the private account through his first nine months in government service, even as the president continued to criticize his opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Democrat Hillary Clinton, for her use of a private email account for government business. Kushner several times used his account to exchange news stories and minor reactions or updates with other administration officials. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, set up the private account before Donald Trump moved into the White House and Kushner was named a senior adviser to the president in January. Once in the White House, Kushner used his private account for convenience from time to time — especially when he was traveling or using a personal laptop, according to two people familiar with his practice. A person who has reviewed the emails said many were quickly forwarded to his government account and none appear to contain classified information.
Republicans will not, of course, be chanting “Lock him up! Lock him up!” and launching 14 separate congressional investigations of this unconscionable breach of responsible email practices on the part of the president’s closest adviser. Why, it’s almost as though they were never really all that concerned about IT security!
So yes, Republicans are hypocrites. But the real hypocrisy here, the one with damaging results, isn’t theirs. It belongs to the news media.
The truth is that there are very few things that each party won’t condemn when the other side does it but defend when their own side does it. But it’s the job of the press to sort out what’s meaningful from what isn’t. In the context of a campaign, both sides will toss any criticism of their opponent that’s handy up against the wall to see what sticks. And in that metaphor, the media is the wall. Something sticks when the individuals who make decisions at newspapers, television networks and other media outlets decide that the story in question deserves extended coverage.
Kushner’s emails are probably going to get the appropriate level of attention — which is to say, about 1/1000th of the coverage Clinton’s emails got. The story will be around for a couple of days, it’ll be a little embarrassing for him, and then everyone will move on. Which is exactly what should have happened to the Clinton email story, given everything we know now. It was at worst a misdemeanor, but it was treated by the media like the Crime of the Century.
As studies of the coverage of the campaign confirmed, the Clinton email story got more coverage than any issue — more than the economy, or health care, or immigration, or climate change or anything else. Throughout the general election, as Gallup found, the word Americans were most likely to mention when they were asked what they had heard about Clinton was “email.”
That didn’t just happen. It was the product of decisions made every day by reporters, editors and TV producers. They said, again and again, “This is the story that needs to be covered right now.”
Why did they make those decisions? I’d argue that they had long operated on the assumption that Bill and Hillary Clinton were deeply corrupt, and it was their responsibility to find evidence for that assumption and then disseminate it. If a particular allegation turned out to be baseless and didn’t actually support the assumption of corruption, they would say that it was still worth extended discussion, because it “raised questions.” In the end, the public is essentially unable to distinguish between a thousand stories about something that shows Hillary Clinton being corrupt and a thousand stories about something that “raises questions” about Clinton being corrupt but doesn’t actually demonstrate any corruption.
In hindsight, those editorial decisions look positively deranged. On one side, you had a candidate who had a long history as a con artist — just before assuming the presidency, he was forced to pay $25 million to the victims of one of his schemes — and a career full of shady deals, broken promises and associations with grifters, swindlers and mobsters. On the other side, you had a candidate who used the wrong email. The problem wasn’t so much that the copious examples of Trump’s personal corruption weren’t covered individually. It was that most of the time, each scam, fleeced vendor or questionable real estate deal was covered briefly and then seldom revisited. It didn’t add up to a coherent, sustained media narrative about Trump in the same way that the press created a narrative about Clinton’s supposed corruption.
It’s not enough to say that there were exceptions, like how The Post’s David Fahrenthold doggedly pursued the story of Trump’s phony charitable giving. There are always exceptions. My most longstanding rule of media screwups is that whenever the press as a whole gets a story wrong, you can always find a reporter or two who got it right. The problem is what the bulk of the media did.
Nor can you say that they were only responding to what the Trump campaign was doing. The story broke in March 2015, before Trump was even a candidate. In hammering on her emails, he was responding to the huge amount of coverage the story had already gotten. And yes, other people’s decisions mattered, particularly then-FBI Director James B. Comey’s — first his decision to hold a highly unusual news conference criticizing Clinton even as the FBI decided that no charges would be filed in the case, and then his decision 11 days before the election to announce that the FBI was looking at a laptop belonging to Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner because it had some emails from Clinton on it.
Journalists could have looked at the facts right at that moment — especially the fact that the FBI hadn’t actually read those emails and had zero evidence that there was anything problematic (let alone criminal) about them — and decided that it merited at most a brief story on page A13. Instead, they decided that it was a blockbuster revelation requiring multiple front-page stories and the deployment of teams of reporters to talk about it for days on end.
All of that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use this opportunity to point out that Republicans never cared about the security of government emails. Of course they didn’t. They were laughing the whole time. But the real lesson that the story of Kushner’s emails carries is about the media’s mistakes in 2016. We live with the consequences of those mistakes every day.20th June 2012 – 5.16 pm
The gas is gone again, only to replaced by more gas. Not much more, just a token pocket of gas, to give the impression we're more industrial than we actually are. And we have two wormholes again. I like that, and going with the change of pace I ignore our static connection and jump through the K162 to class 5 w-space. The J-number of this C5 seems familiar, but I don't think one visit two years ago really strikes a chord with me. I'm just seeing patterns, which is about all I'm seeing. I don't think anyone's been this way for hours. I'll take a look around all the same, but apart from a tower on a distant planet there's nothing in the system. I won't scan, just head home and through our static connection after all.
Two canisters are on my directional scanner from the K162 in C3a, which are probably related to the two off-line towers. And as the single planet out of d-scan range doesn't hold an active tower, I launch probes and scan in this desolate system. Two rather obvious wormholes resolve from signatures more than 4 AU from planets, and a couple more subtle connections appear in the middle the of system. For those playing at home, that's four wormholes. I have a K162 from high-sec empire space, a static exit to low-sec, a K162 from null-sec k-space, and—oh, what larks!—a K162 from deadly class 6 w-space. There is one of each security level of space, and the w-space version is a C6.
My options may be limited to leaving w-space or entering the C6, but before I make my choice I am reminded of the option of staying here, when a Heron appears on d-scan and launches probes. I don't see where the Heron starts his adventure, as I am in the system map orientating myself to the various wormholes I've resolved, but I should be able to track him across this C3 now. That is, once he finishes scanning. There may be only seven signatures here, but the Heron is a simple scanning frigate. The ship itself lacks some of the more sophisticated equipment for quicker scanning, and the pilot probably isn't fully trained yet either. I could be waiting a little while. But I'll wait, even for a pop at a Heron.
La la la, the probes come and the probes go until, finally, the Heron decloaks. I spin d-scan around and detect the frigate at the exit to low-sec. I throw my Tengu strategic cruiser in to warp, hoping I can be quick enough, but land by the wormhole with no Heron in sight. I work d-scan again and have the Heron near the C6 connection. Again, I give chase, but now I'm thinking I should have just stayed still. I am one step behind the Heron as it surveys the wormholes its resolved, and I should just stop and sit. The Heron visits the null-sec connection as I wonder which wormhole he's likely to jump through after visiting them all. He perhaps wants more w-space, and as the C6 is more scary than our own C4, he'll probably use our K162 first. I'll wait there.
The Heron drops off d-scan, so either I'm wrong or he's gone to reconnoitre the K162 from high-sec, which is quite distant. Sure enough, a minute later the Heron's back on d-scan and dropping out of warp on our K162. Good choice, sir. Madam, even. She's close to the wormhole and looking to jump, but maybe not quite close enough. Perhaps she bookmarked the cosmic signature from the scan result, not realising it differs from the locus of the wormhole itself. That works to my advantage, so I decloak, lock on to the Heron, and start shooting. She's clearly flustered, as a probe is accidentally pooped out of a launcher, but even a webbed frigate can cover a kilometre or two soon enough. She jumps through the K162 as I'm stripping her armour. That's okay, I can follow.
I jump to the home system and shed my session change cloak immediately, getting all my systems hot and waiting. The Heron bides its time. But she has to decloak eventually. Sensibly, she tries to run here, rather than jump right back and be in the same position but also polarised, and evades my targeting systems by cloaking. But I point my ship towards her last known position, pulse my micro warp drive, and bump in to her. Her cloak de-activates and I start to target as, aligned in preparation, she warps away. I see where she goes, and make a mistake in following her.
Warping to the planet is a fair idea, giving chase to my prey, but the frigate is faster than me. If she thinks I'm following she could feasibly bounce off the planet back to the wormhole and jump through before I'm half-way back myself, and so easily evade me through my own impetuous nature. I kick myself, turn around, and warp back to the wormhole. There's no Heron here, so I jump. There's no Heron here either. I wait for a minute but she's not holding her session change cloak as a bluff. She could be cloaked and pulling away from the wormhole until I can do nothing to her when she decloaks, or, more realistically, she bounced off the planet in our home system to another planet, not the wormhole, and is still in the C4. That makes more sense.
What also makes sense is the Heron being from low-sec, which is where I first placed the frigate when it was warping around the wormholes. Warping to visit the K162 from high-sec would have been unnecessary too had she come from there. So rather than wait on our K162 for the Heron to return I think my best plan is to sit on the U210 and surprise her there. All I have to do is wait a bit longer. And after a bit longer the Heron is back on d-scan. I narrow the beam and point it at our K162, but the Heron disappears. A wider d-scan beam has the Heron still in range, so it is warping somewhere, just not on a direct line to this wormhole. I point d-scan at the C6 K162 and see the Heron appear there. Okay, I'll go there.
The Heron is gone by the time I reach the K162 to C6a, but rather than make another mistake I simply sit C3-side. The Heron didn't see me on our home K162, nor on the C6 K162, so is probably thinking she's shaken my tail. That should work to my advantage. And it's not long before the wormhole in front of me flares. I decloak, get my systems ready, and realise I have decloaked my half-billion ISK cruiser in front of a C6 K162 with no real idea of what's just jumped through. I'm hoping it's the Heron, and thankfully it is. I gain another positive lock and start shooting again, this time with the frigate at half shields and armour, and probably polarised for another minute and unable to escape through the wormhole.
Popping the Heron is the inevitable result of my getting hold of her in this situation. And I catch her pod as it is ejected too, vicious pirate that I am turning her in to a corpse. Maybe I should feel guilty, particularly as there is an astrometric pinpointing skill book in the wreck, and I pitted my strategic cruiser against a frigate, but I don't. That's how I hunt in w-space. I scanned, reconnoitred, made good use of d-scan, and was patient. For my efforts I got an interesting and rewarding hunt, along with a new corpse for my collection. I scoop, loot, and shoot.
And with a bit of time left in the evening decide to see what the Heron found in the C6: two towers with a couple of dreadnoughts, a carrier, and some shuttles floating empty inside the force fields. Also like the Heron, I go back the way I came, but without someone waiting for me on the other side of the wormhole. I head home and bed down for the night, after a satisfying evening.
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Tags: eve online, heron, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, pvp, scanning, tengu, w-spaceNC dad fatally shot during struggle for Taser with Harnett Co. deputy, witness says Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved 33-year-old John Livingston (right) in a photo with family members. Photo supplied by family to WNCN [ + - ] Video
By WNCN Staff - LATEST UPDATE: Vigil planned for NC dad killed by Harnett Co. deputy
SPRING LAKE, N.C. (WNCN) - A dad was shot several times and died in an officer-involved shooting in Spring Lake Sunday morning, witnesses said.
The incident occurred just before 3:40 a.m. at a residence near the intersection of Stage Road and W. Everett Drive when deputies arrived on scene to conduct an assault investigation, the Harnett County Sheriff's Office said.
According to authorities, "a confrontation with an individual resulted in a shooting." The person involved in the confrontation was pronounced dead at the scene, while the deputy received minor injuries.
Clayton Carroll told WNCN that his roommate, 33-year-old John Livingston was shot several times by a Harnett County Sheriff deputy during the incident.
Carroll says sheriff's deputies knocked on their door around 3:30 a.m.
Carroll said they were looking for someone that no longer lived there. When deputies asked Livingston if they could search the trailer, Livingston said "not without a search warrant," according to Carroll.
Livingston then closed the door.
MORE UPDATES:
NC SBI agents interviewing witnesses and the deputies involved
"The cop kicked in the door, got on top of him, started slinging him around beat him…" Carroll said.
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved MORE NEWS: Son of NC man shot by Harnett Co. deputy calls dad his 'best friend'
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved MORE NEWS: Son of NC man shot by Harnett Co. deputy calls dad his 'best friend'
Carroll said sheriff's deputies then started spraying mace on Livingston and using the Taser, according to the roommate.
Witnesses said Livingston was not fighting back and was trying to get the Taser out of the deputy's hands.
The incident eventually continued outside.
"He (Livingston) barely had the Taser in his hand but he had it where it was constantly going off and the officer I guess that spoke to him rolled over there, says he got the Taser and shot him in this position," Carroll said while on the deck outside the home demonstrating what happened.
WNCN saw six bullet holes in the side of the home from the shooting.
Carroll said Livingston was shot six times, while another witness in the home, Bristol Edge, said Livingston was shot at least four times.
Livingston died a short time later. Carroll said Livingston did not have a weapon.
Livingston's friends call him a very kind man and an incredible carpenter, they say he built the front porch deck a month ago for everyone to have a good time on.
The father of three is described as a hard worker and very loving.
"That's the blanket I kept putting on him and telling him to breathe until he was gone because I knew he wasn't breathing anymore," said Bristol Edge, a friend, pointing to a blanket still on the blood-stained front porch on Sunday afternoon.
As per standard procedure, the deputies involved have been placed on administrative leave and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is investigating the shooting.
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved MORE NEWS: Search suspended for SC woman who went overboard from cruise ship (Includes 9 photos)
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved MORE NEWS: Search suspended for SC woman who went overboard from cruise ship (Includes 9 photos)
Authorities have not released the identity of the deputies involved.FOX News, The Soft-Core Porn Network, Complained About Raunchy Street Fair But Promoted Video Of It
As Brave New Film’s videos FOX Attacks Decency and FOX News Porn showed, FOX News loves to find excuses for salacious stories while perched on its high horse of "traditional" conservative values. But FOX outdid itself with a segment on last night’s (12/5/07) Hannity & Colmes. It cast a critical eye on the raunchy, S&M-oriented Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco with a guest who made a video documenting some of the sexual acts that occurred there. As the pièce de résistance, the video was being used to attack Nancy Pelosi. But just as I was anticipating howling with laughter at the irony, Alan Colmes smacked down the guest for his hypocrisy. With video.
The guest, Peter Labarbera, has made a career out of, as he puts it, “exposing the homosexual activist agenda.” As Colmes announced in his scripted introduction, Labarbera’s video includes acts of oral sex and orgies. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the excerpts shown on Hannity & Colmes blurred the x-rated parts.
Colmes got right to the point with Labarbera. “Why’re you putting out gay porn? …You’re spreading the video… If this is such a terrible video, why spread it?”
Labarbera was obviously taken aback and never found a suitable answer to Colmes’ questions. “Alan, we’re exposing a horrible thing,” Labarbera said rather lamely.
“But you’re spreading what you call lewd and lascivious video. You’re giving it wider distribution. You’re gonna create more eyes, possibly more children’s eyes, seeing a video that you’re condemning and you’re showing it at the same time. That seems pretty hypocritical to me,” Colmes pressed.
Labarbera didn’t have much of a response to that either, other than to say he was holding Nancy Pelosi responsible.
Colmes continued, “It’s not Nancy Pelosi’s issue. Why aren’t you holding the governor accountable? It’s happening in Schwarzenegger’s state. You want to hit a Democrat over the head. …Why don’t you go after Schwarzenegger?”
Labarbera said, “It’s her district.”
“It’s his state,” Colmes retorted.
Naturally, Hannity got about a minute more time to both condemn the fair, San Francisco and Pelosi than Colmes got to debate Labarbera. Of course, Hannity’s extra time also allowed further elaboration on just what kinds of acts the video included.In the least surprising move of the off season, the Kansas City Chiefs announced this morning they have conceded the AFC West to the Denver Broncos and will forego playing football during the 2014 season.
“Listen, let’s be honest about this,” Andy Reid said in front of a lone reporter, Perez A. Hilton, at a press conference oddly scheduled for 3:20 a.m. “There’s no way anyone is beating Denver this year. No chance. Why risk the health of Junior Hemingway and Dustin Colquitt when we know Denver is going to win anyway? It is just not a good idea.”
Asked if he had called Denver Broncos general manager and executive vice president to concede the AFC West, Reid said, “No, Steve Weinberg beat us to it.”
Kansas City has been criticized for not being active in free agency and for not re-signing key members of their 2013 playoff squad. Gone are sure to be Hall of Famers, Kendrick Lewis and Tyson Jackson, along with the greatest back-up offensive lineman of all-time, Geoff Schwartz. Finding a player to replace Dexter McCluster and Jon Asamoah may be impossible. Branden Albert is also a football player.
“Everyone knows where this league is going,” John Dorsey said. “If you don’t have a great right guard then you really have nothing. We felt it was in the best interest of the team’s future to be sure we finished 0-16 so that we can get as a high of a pick as possible in order to pick the best offensive guard available.”
There are some who would argue it does not make sense for the Chiefs to give up on the season before the 2014 Draft has even taken place.
“Listen, I understand the argument that maybe we should let the season play out,” Reid said. “See how our young players develop, how our few free agent moves fit with the team, and what another year playing in the same system does to help the overall production the team. But… well, Denver signed Aqib Talib and we just cannot compete with that.”
Dorsey echoed Reid’s statement.
“Last year, everyone expected us to start 9-0 and make the playoffs after finishing 2-14 the year before,” Dorsey said. “Everyone knew we would score 44 points in a road playoff game with Jamaal Charles only playing six snaps; Marcus Cooper would be an up and coming cornerback prospect; Dontari Poe would be an All-Pro level player; Schwartz existed; Quintin Demps would be the NFL’s second best kick return man; McCluster would have his first season where he had more touchdowns than fumbles; and Dwayne Bowe would get arrested for getting high at a Sonic. This was obvious last April.
“This April it is obvious Denver cannot possibly lose the Super Bowl and we will be the worst team in NFL history because we don’t have a good right guard. Why play?”
Clark Hunt released a statement expressing his support for not playing in 2014.
“Baa ram ewe! Baa ram ewe! To your breed, your fleece, your clan be true! Baa ram ewe!”
When asked if the Chiefs would play in 2015, Dorsey and Reid each responded with a shrug. Pressed to clarify their answer, Dorsey said, “It will probably depend on if we can get a good right guard.”
Note: Clearly this post is not true. Happy Opportunity To Drop A “Babe” Reference In A Sarcastic Post And Everyone’s Mildly Okay With It Day! Or April Fools. Whatever.YY Development Group, a partner in Trump's real estate empire, is planning to build a 35-floor office building in central Buenos Aires, sources in the company said (AFP Photo/Juan Mabromata)
Buenos Aires (AFP) - An official in Argentina's government denied Monday that Donald Trump had asked President Mauricio Macri to approve a building project by one of his companies in Buenos Aires.
Macri's government was under pressure to respond to a report that the US president-elect made the request when the two spoke on the telephone after the outspoken magnate's shock election win this month.
The claim was made by prominent Argentine journalist Jorge Lanata in a television show on Sunday.
A close advisor to Macri who asked not to be named told AFP on Monday that Trump did not "in any way" make such a request to the president.
"All they talked about was maintaining relations between their two countries," said the official.
The adviser added that Trump and Macri also "recalled the personal relations they had years earlier" when they met as fellow real estate businessmen in New York in the 1980s.
YY Development Group, a partner in Trump's real estate empire, is planning to build a 35-floor office building in central Buenos Aires, sources in the company said.
Macri said after calling Trump last week that he hoped for a "constructive relationship" with the new US president.
A source in Buenos Aires city hall told AFP it had "nothing to say" about the building project.This article is over 1 year old
Huge hand-painted sign removed from bridge by police ahead of Conservative party’s conference in Manchester
MPs from both the main UK parties have denounced a banner that appeared on a footbridge in Salford prior to the Conservative party conference in Manchester.
One Conservative MP said the party’s conference was being targeted by “fascists” after pictures circulated on social media of a 10-metre wide banner reading: “Hang the Tories.”
Boris Johnson increases pressure on May with fresh Brexit intervention Read more
Greater Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, and local Labour MPs aso criticised the banner, which was strung across a footbridge along with two human effigies dangling by their necks below.
Greater Manchester police issued a statement saying they were made aware of the banner early on Saturday and officers had attended and removed it at 9.10am.
But “the two mannequins were not at the scene” when officers arrived.
“Following removal of the banner, police received a number of calls regarding the banner after people had seen the images which were on social media,” police said.
“We would like to reassure the public that any instances of inappropriate behaviour or material will be dealt with swiftly by our officers.”
Theresa May’s party was facing a weekend of protests in Manchester, with a national anti-austerity demonstration expected to attract thousands on Sunday and a cross-party pro-European rally due to be addressed by the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Vince Cable, and a former Tory minister, Stephen Dorrell.
Delegates arriving at Manchester Piccadilly station on Saturday evening for the conference at the Manchester Central Convention Complex were greeted by an “unwelcome party” protest led by a choir singing anti-Tory songs.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the banner, which was ironically described as “charming” by Conservative MP Michael Fabricant.
“What a charming welcome to Manchester and the Conservative party conference,” said Fabricant. “These aren’t protesters, they’re fascists.”
Burnham and two Labour MPs – Lucy Powell of Manchester Central and Angela Rayner of Ashton-under-Lyne – were quick to distance the party from the “hang the Tories” message.
Burnham said of the banner: “This is just wrong. We will always protect the right to protest but never to threaten, abuse or incite violence. It should come down.”
Most people do not believe the Tories are on their side. My party has to change | Phillip Lee Read more
Powell said: “On behalf of our city and my constituency, we’re sorry about this. We disagree with and are angry with your [the Tories’] policies but we wish you no harm.”
Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said: “This is disgusting and not the Manchester I know and love. Those [who] do this let Manchester down.”
There is no suggestion that the banner was linked to the protest being organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, which is due to include speeches from actor Maxine Peake and musician Brian Eno, as well as a march outside the conference centre.
About 30 members of the Leeds-based leftwing Commoners’ Choir travelled to Manchester to take part in a “flashmob” protest at Piccadilly station.
They waved “Tories out” placards as they sang songs with lyrics including: “People often ask me what it is that makes me tick – it’s Boris Johnson’s head upon a stick” and “You’re nowhere if you believe Theresa May” – a reference to the PM’s attack on “citizens of nowhere”.
The choir’s songwriter, Boff Whalley, said: “It’s meant in fun but we’re trying to get a serious message across with a memorable tune.”
Speaking before Sunday’s pro-European rally, Cable said: “It is vital that we keep up the pressure on the government. The Conservatives are driving Britain over a cliff edge towards a reckless, extreme Brexit.”
Dorrell, a former health secretary and chair of the European Movement UK, said: “Democracy is a process, not an event. A healthy democracy is a dialogue in which all voices should be heard. And it must allow the voters to change their mind.”President Obama is seeking to push Republicans to work with him on a grand deficit bargain by first assuring them he’s willing to cut entitlements, and then attempting to scrape off enough of them who will in turn agree to raise new revenues.
House Republicans emerged from a rare meeting with Obama on Wednesday afternoon saying he assured them he was serious about cutting programs like Social Security and Medicare in order to reduce the long-term deficit.
“It was a really great first step,” said Rep. Reid Ribble (R-WI). “He did express a willingness to give on entitlements.”
“He focused a lot on entitlements,” said Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL).Other Republicans expressed similar sentiments to reporters as they exited the meeting. Some voiced frustration at his insistence that safety net cuts be paired with new tax revenues — that central division remains, as senior Republicans still aren’t willing to go there. Yet others signaled that they did not trust him to follow through.
Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) said they still oppose new revenues but the president’s face-to-face exchange was important.
“We had a very frank and candid exchange of ideas, and frankly I think it was productive,” Boehner told reporters. “I hope that these kinds of discussions can continue. Even though we have very real differences, our job is to find common ground to do the work the American people sent us here to do.”
The two major entitlement reforms Obama has publicly proposed so far include cutting future Social Security benefits — a reform known as Chained CPI — and making higher income Americans pay a bigger share of their Medicare premiums.
“He wanted us to believe he’s serious” about being willing to scale back the safety net, said Ribble. “There was nothing in there to make me believe he wasn’t.”
The meeting comes as progressive advocates and their allies in Congress are increasingly objecting to cuts in safety net benefits under Medicare and Social Security.
Obama, for his part, told reporters that the meeting was useful.
“It was good,” he told reporters as he walked out. “I enjoyed it. It was useful.”Active and retired members of the military have been showing far more support for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton than for her Republican rival, at least as measured by the checks they’ve written to her campaign.
Individuals who listed their employers as the U.S. Department of Defense or major branches of the military, or who say they’re retired from one of those, have contributed a total of $972,709 to both nominees so far this year. Clinton has claimed $771,471 of the contributions, or nearly 80 percent.
All major branches of the armed forces – including the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard – have favored Clinton to a much greater degree than GOP nominee Donald Trump. Members of the Army have contributed more than other branches of the service this cycle, giving a total of $191,712 to the two presidential hopefuls, 72 percent of which went to Clinton.
Meanwhile, it’s the Air Force that has given the largest portion of its contributions to Trump, though it still favors Clinton by a lot. Trump received 39 percent of the $110,711 given to the two candidates by people connected to the Air Force.
(Our analysis includes donors giving more than $200; candidates don’t have to provide identifying information about smaller donors to the public.)
If this |
the little cup. The coffee’s foam must increase threefold before it can be considered ready.
It was here, in “the Armenian,” that the city’s bohemians would gather in the ’70s, ’80s, and part of the ’90s.
The particular flavor of this coffee is held dear by several generations of Lvivians. It was here, in “the Armenian,” that the city’s bohemians would gather in the ’70s, ’80s, and part of the ’90s. In those internetless days it was important to have a meeting point where you could regularly cross paths with key people — every day, if you wanted — and inform them of something, discuss something with them, or just sit and have coffee with them.
Just a little further down on the same street you’ll find Dziga, the first and still the most successful Lviv institution engaging in the business of culture. Every day Dziga hosts concerts, readings, exhibits, or just the regular get-togethers of book clubs and writing groups. It’s all so much more civilized now, deprived of its former wild Soviet charm, today only extant in the reminiscences of old-timers over coffee or a glass of wine.
Back then, too, at “the Armenian,” the little pot was delicately placed in iron filings, and the coffee was stirred with a little wooden stick and poured inside tiny white porcelain cups customers would take outside, setting them on the broad sills of the sturdy medieval buildings as they smoked and talked. Accustomed to this ritual, the waitresses would eventually come out to collect the empty cups and noiselessly ferry them back inside.
The women behind the bar were always very important people here. They’ve been written about in novels, turned into TV shows, and had gigabytes upon gigabytes dedicated to them online. Now “the Armenian” has long since lost its role as social framework, frequented today by pot-bellied sexagenarian granddads who come to drink coffee with cognac, as was the fashion in their youth, and by ladies of the same age who chat over coffee and pieces of highly calorific, and similarly nostalgic, cake — and by tourists and TV crews. The women at the bar don’t allow anyone to take their picture — they’re famous enough as it is among tourists and on Facebook and Twitter. Their contemplative process of brewing coffee, on the other hand, may be filmed ad infinitum — though there always comes a point where the women can’t stand it anymore, breaking up the cameras as though their presence might interfere with their beverage preparation technology, which they will not have damaged for the sake of a pretty picture. “The Armenian” is said to be the last café of this style.
* * *
Ukrainian literature — or Ukrainian culture more broadly — employs the words “last” quite often: last territory, last bastion, the last issue of a magazine, the last books of a bankrupt publisher, the last Ukrainian-speaking readers, writers, translators. There is a well-known contemporary classic, a collection of essays by one of Ukraine’s best-known authors, Yuri Andrukhovych, called My Last Territory; there is an art management agency called Last Bastion. Because Ukrainian literature has been aware of being in a sort of intellectual ghetto at least since the 1920s, for a long time there was a program on local radio called “Music from the Ghetto.” Ukrainian literature had kept pace with all the European trends and traditions, arriving at modernism right on time in the early ’20s, but with the advent of Soviet rule in eastern Ukraine, intellectuals began to be shot and then slaughtered en masse, particularly writers, many of whom actually lived on the same street in a kind of cozy little writers’ colony in what was then the capital city, Kharkiv — a city now located just a few dozen kilometers from the Russian border, so that these days its residents wake up every morning and flip on the news to find out if the Russian invasion is underway yet or not.
With Russification, the Ukrainian language was reduced in the popular imagination to a “dialect” of Russian, unable to function on its own in the cultural sphere.
But in the ’20s, while Ukrainian intellectuals in the east were being murdered outright, Ukrainian intellectuals in Galicia — in western Ukraine, belonging to Poland at that time — were suffering from Polish persecution. Bans on the use of the Ukrainian language — both spoken and written — had been in effect for some time in territories annexed by the Russian Empire. In western Ukraine there had been no such prohibitions, but nor did the Ukrainian language ever have a chance to become a language of education and culture, or politics, or business. It was, nonetheless, the mass exterminations of Ukrainians, first and foremost of Ukrainian artists, that dealt the biggest blow to Ukrainian culture, along with forced Russification throughout the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first. With Russification, the Ukrainian language was reduced in the popular imagination to a “dialect” of Russian, unable to function on its own in the cultural sphere. An impoverished, ignorant, provincial discourse was artificially cultivated in Ukrainian literature, while more contemporary or cosmopolitan topics were condemned or banned. Even today the same false principles determine the selection of which Ukrainian books are to be read in schools. The field of Ukrainian linguistics was totally destroyed in the Soviet era, Ukrainian dictionaries undermined as words that had no direct equivalent in or obvious etymological similarity to Russian were simply discarded, replaced by blatant calques.
Sadly, this suppression of Ukrainian culture is still ongoing. The Soviet tradition of labeling all things Ukrainian as “nationalistic” is deeply rooted, and even now it is employed by Russian propaganda. Any attempt to protect the rights of the Ukrainian-speaking population is automatically seen as an infringement upon the rights of the dominant, Russian-speaking population. Such efforts, then, are dismissed out of hand. This creates a bizarre situation in which on the one hand Ukrainian men are being mobilized to fight a war against Russia, while on the other Ukraine continues to be dominated by Russian and Russophone culture. Russian and Ukrainian are used seemingly interchangeably on television that is officially Ukrainian; the apparently indiscriminate use of Russian without the provision of translations requires that Ukrainian audiences be at least bilingual.
* * *
The first Ukrainian publishing houses came into being right after Ukraine gained independence in 1991, but they mostly published classics of world literature that had been banned in the USSR, and mostly in Russian. Very occasionally they’d do a classic of Ukrainian literature taken from the school curriculum. Contemporary Ukrainian literature was barely published at all during this period. Any volume of new Ukrainian poetry or prose that did get published became a big event — not only because these works were of astonishing quality, but also because of how infrequently even amazing books were getting printed.
Many publishers are going out of business, and those that linger are still unable to permit themselves to publish debut authors…
After the Orange Revolution of 2004 there was a brief thaw, and a fashion for contemporary Ukrainian literature. The publishing industry picked up, and dozens of new names appeared. Aside from the biggest — although let’s face it: the only — Ukrainian book fair in Lviv, other, similar events were established in other cities. But the last few years, unfortunately, have seen a return to the harsh literary realities of the ’90s. Many publishers are going out of business, and those that linger are still unable to permit themselves to publish debut authors, opting instead and exclusively for famous names that can guarantee them sales.
To the above particularities of the Ukrainian book market we should also add the very high rate of piracy. Within a few weeks of its arrival in stores, any even moderately famous Ukrainian author’s book will turn up online, its contents available in their entirety for free. Pirate sites actually claim to support the Ukrainian language, and the vast majority of people who download these books really do believe that they are supporting Ukrainian. The rest do it because they have no other option: bookstores exist only in big cities, and even then, their selection is often considerably more limited than that of pirate sites.
And despite the military operations in eastern Ukraine, it is an essentially Russian cultural product, most often openly anti-Ukrainian, that continues to dominate the Ukrainian cultural market. Thus far, the Ukrainian government has also failed to make any even remotely convincing attempts at defending its own culture, despite the fact that a special Ministry of Information Policy was even created expressly for this purpose.
Ukrainian media outlets — and not only the Russophone ones — are mostly Russian-owned, which results in the domination of their content by Ukrainophobic propaganda. The lion’s share of books sold in Ukraine are produced in Russia and imported into Ukraine duty-free, but most of these are also in Russian, especially commercial titles. The exceptions to this system — few, highly intellectual — merely prove the rule. Yet it is this intellectual niche and its intellectual production that earn recognition outside of Ukraine. This typically occurs without the participation of the state, on the initiative of foreign partners. Ukrainian writers are the people foreign commentators turn to first when Ukrainian politics become bewildering, and Ukrainian writers frequently take place in various roundtables abroad as provisional experts on everything, since, as opposed to Ukrainian officials, these writers are educated, speak foreign languages, and are able to articulate their own ideas and paint an informative picture of the state.
* * *
Writers in Ukraine are usually political — often passionately so. When on November 30 of last year the first battles began on Kiev’s Maidan, I heard about it from the Facebook page of a friend, the writer Svitlana Povalyeva. Her post appeared barely thirty minutes after students were first beaten at 4:00 am. Only later did journalists’ and politicians’ posts begin to flood the internet. Svitlana and her husband and their two sons remained on the Maidan for all three of the ensuing months, from the first to the last day. Her son immediately volunteered for the army; he is now fighting in eastern Ukraine. Svitlana’s is not a unique, or even atypical, story.
Writers collect money for the army, for displaced persons, and for the wounded, organizing charitable reading tours in the eastern territories and in the ATO zone, as well as signing up for the army themselves. Whether they volunteer or are drafted, there are a number of writers in the east now writing very good literature inspired by their experiences, which they often publish in fragments over social media. I would love for them to come home and become the Ukrainian Remarques, Dos Passos, Hemingways.
* * *
Ukrainian literature is not only divided into Ukrainian-language and Russian-language, pro-west and pro-Russian, but also into official and independent. Official literature is produced by a sizeable state-sponsored Writers’ Union, which has central and regional offices with different facilities, staff, their own media channels — even resorts of their own for their summer vacations. But the literature of its members often exists more hypothetically than it does in actual fact. As a rule, its aesthetics are those of socialist realism — a holdover from Soviet times. These writers periodically receive government awards — officially for books that can’t be found in any bookstore, unofficially for being somebody’s relatives, colleagues, friends. They run the regional Writers’ Unions, get together for conventions, even publish the occasional newspaper — every so often, even a book. These papers and books rarely reach any readers: print runs are miniscule, and the books are essentially intended to serve as gifts for the same government officials who give out the awards.
Independent Ukrainian literature, meanwhile, makes do without any state support — no grants, no official organizations, no conferences, no awards, and no subsidized publications. There are no public or private programs to support independent Ukrainian writers and operating according to fair and transparent criteria; there is no program to represent Ukrainian literature abroad (as there is in most European nations); there is no institution for the protection of copyright. If a Ukrainian author is translated into a foreign language, it is usually the result of a happy coincidence, and of the efforts of self-driven, enthusiastic individual translators.
“Professional” writers who live solely off the work they publish in Ukraine simply do not exist.
I am often asked abroad how Ukrainian writers earn a living, given that there are no grants or awards or honorariums for readings or participating in festivals, and that payment for books with print runs in the tens of thousands is a few hundred dollars at best — payment for newspaper columns often comes out to less than fifteen dollars, if they pay at all — and I honestly never really know how to answer this question, except to say that somehow everything always ends up working out. For now, at any rate. Of course there are exceptions, and many people do give up on writing. Many emigrate. “Professional” writers who live solely off the work they publish in Ukraine simply do not exist. The lucky few not forced to earn their living through means other than writing do so thanks to foreign fellowships, residencies, and honorariums.
* * *
Really not having any way out seems to have a strange effect on literature. For the most part, it results in the pessimism you might expect. But sometimes unexpected things occur. For example, the remarkably active participation in literary events by the general public. Especially in the Russophone eastern regions of Ukraine — especially, in other words, in places where Ukrainian books are scarce. There is an unexpectedly high level of interest in Ukrainian culture on the front. Books often show up on army requisitions, and in fact writers often finance the acquisition of books for troops themselves.
I recently heard from one of those few publishers still in business that there is a new “trend” in Ukrainian publishing, namely, the translation into Ukrainian of world literature. This same publisher had previously claimed — like most of his colleagues — that translations into Ukrainian would simply never sell. And even more amazingly, publishers have become interested in contemporary — rather than classic — world literature. Most surprising of all is the fact that these translations appear to be immune to piracy. Although perhaps it’s not that surprising after all when you consider the low level of erudition on the part of the pirates.
Ours is a form of proletarian solidarity, but it is powerful and reliable.
The objective absence of a literary market, and with it the absence of any commercial motives, has had a surprisingly positive impact on Ukraine’s literary scene. For the most part, Ukrainian writers not only know each other, but are also genuinely friends, actively promoting and supporting one another. The infrequent conflicts between them are generally over political differences, unlike in other countries where petty jealousy can sometimes run amok. Ours is a form of proletarian solidarity, but it is powerful and reliable.
The number of women in Ukrainian literature is also steadily on the rise, although I’m not exactly sure why this is the case, whether because there are fewer literary prospects (in the Soviet era, being a writer was not only prestigious, but also lucrative, thanks to the state funding provided to those “loyal” to the regime), or because Ukraine is gradually shedding the vestiges of its old patriarchal system. This is happening very gradually, however: the word “feminist,” for example, is only used as an insult, whether it’s applied to men or to women. Successful women, including writers, are usually afraid of being labeled feminists, so they tend to try not to publicize their own successes. Writing remains incompatible with the personal lives of most women. Successful female authors are expected to be young and unwed: women in general have to choose between writing and having a family, as the equitable distribution of domestic responsibilities remains rare among Ukrainian families (not only literary ones).
* * *
The landscape of Ukrainian literature is changing in unexpected ways. If in the ’90s the critical mass of writers was concentrated in the less Russified western territories of the country, now the majority of writers live in Kiev (though few are from there) or even further east. Ukraine is a country with considerable regional diversity, with a so-called “Kiev school of poetry,” “the Zhytomyr school” after the city in western Ukraine, or the “Stanyslaviv phenomenon,” named for the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, also in western Ukraine, and formerly known as Stanyslaviv. But today when writers (and others) move, it is almost always to Kiev — almost never, that is, from periphery to periphery. Instances of students from Kharkiv, for example, going to school somewhere other than in Kiev (or occasionally Lviv, which is closer to the west) are practically non-existent. Meanwhile, the largest publishers are concentrated in eastern Ukraine, almost at the Russian border — in Kharkiv, in fact, the very city where almost all Ukraine’s most famous writers lived during the 1920s, and the place where they were killed en masse. There is a term in Ukrainian literary criticism for this: “the Executed Renaissance.” The Ukrainians have been waiting for almost a century for a new kind of renaissance, which would encompass literature and more. But until that happens, we seek safety in literature as a kind of last bastion.the people that are against guns never stop at just background checks
if this were true then you wouldn't have countries like Canada that have required all handguns to be registered to owner since the 1930s. this system is still in place more or less exactly the same way after 80+ years, handguns are still legal, people own them without controversy, etc.
btw do you know where the phrase "slippery slope" comes from? it's the name given to an informal fallacy that students learn about in a typical college Logic class. the Slippery Slope argument is logically flawed because it rests on the idea that one action in a particular direction will inevitably touch off runaway acceleration in that direction, but it fails to explain why this would be so. it just says it'll happen cuz i say it'll happen.
another irony here is that just yesterday you yourself explained to an American pro gunner that you're not worried about runaway gun banning in CH because your democratic institutions would prevent this from occurring. i say this is ironic because the American redditor was expressing the American version of the slippery slope gun policy fallacy even tho what's going on in the US right now is that in about 3/4 of the States, and in just enough of our national Congress (eg, >40% of Senators), our elected representatives are not enacting the gun laws that their public is routinely telling them that they strongly prefer, often by margins of 2 or 5 or even 9 to 1.
and so voters in some states with direct democracy options are taking it straight to the ballot and getting these laws passed anyway. which is precisely the process which you say would keep unpopular gun regulation proposals from passing/remaining in CH if they cropped up.
seems to me that this is all just a case of "democracy is a great thing when the majority agrees with me, and it's a terrible thing when they don't." which is what i witness playing out here in GP on a daily basis. all these anti-govt types warning of totalitarian collapse of civilization, when really what they're warning about is just their own preferred policies going out of fashion. which is always a possibility in any democracy. but that in no way means Democracy itself has collapsed. it only means that if you define Democracy as "whatever i think is best". which is pretty much the opposite of democracy, really.Calls to reform the rail industry have intensified after news that fares would rise by 1.9% next year, prompting calls from Labour to take services into public ownership and a warning from the passenger watchdog that millions of commuters are not getting value for money.
In a summer marked by disruption on Southern, one of Britain’s busiest rail franchises, and simmering industrial disputes around the railway, trade unions and campaigners held protests highlighting the growth in fares over the last decade. MPs across parties demanded fare freezes for passengers on the Southern route, while Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn joined a demonstration outside London Bridge station, one of the most disrupted rail hubs for commuters on the Southern network.
Corbyn said a Labour government would “rebuild and transform” the UK’s transport network and insisted public ownership of the railways could raise enough money to cut rail fares by as much as 10%.
Regulated rail fares, which include season tickets and off-peak InterCity tickets, will rise by 1.9% from January, in line with July’s RPI inflation figure published on Tuesday. Last year regulated fares rose by 1%. Regulated fares include season tickets and off-peak InterCity tickets, and are capped by the government.
The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, said: “Rail passengers are paying more and getting even less. Fares go up while trains remain overcrowded, stations are unstaffed, and rail companies cut the guards who ensure journeys run smoothly and safely. Enough is enough. It’s time for rail services to be publicly owned, saving money for passengers and taxpayers alike.”
Jeremy Corbyn to launch transport campaign with rail pledges Read more
The Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association general secretary, Manuel Cortes, said: “Our rail fares are already the highest in Europe and today’s increases will only make that record worse. It’s time that ministers gave rail passengers a break and actually froze fares in real terms.”
Andy McDonald, the shadow transport secretary, said: “Passengers are told that higher fares are necessary to fund investment, but vital projects have been delayed by years and essential maintenance works have been put on hold. Money that could be used to keep fares down or reinvested to improve our services is instead subsidising the profits of private companies and other nation’s railway systems – it’s a scandal.”
But the rail minister, Paul Maynard, said: “Wages are growing faster than train ticket prices thanks to action by the government.”
He added: “Passengers want more reliable journeys in comfort and with better facilities. That is why we are investing record amounts in our railways delivering the biggest rail modernisation programme for over a century, providing more seats, more services, Wi-Fi and air-conditioning.”
Paul Plummer, chief executive at the Rail Delivery Group, representing train operators and Network Rail, said: “Nobody wants to pay more to travel to work and at the moment in some areas people aren’t getting the service they are paying for, and we know how frustrating that is. But increases to season tickets are set by government. For every pound paid in fares, 97p goes back into running and improving services and it’s our job to make sure that money is spent well.
“We need to sustain investment to build a modern railway, and money from fares helps us to do this, which is crucial with rail now more important to our nation’s prosperity than at any time since the Victorian era.”
But Anthony Smith, chief executive of the independent watchdog Transport Focus, said many passengers were not satisfied they were receiving value for their fares, particularly in London and the south east: “Just 23% of peak-time passengers in London and the south east thought their ticket was value for money. Passengers are playing their part by pouring over £9bn into the industry each year: the industry must now deliver on its promises of much more consistent, better performance.”
UK season ticket prices by route UK season ticket prices by route.
Rail campaigners said the use of RPI inflation to set fares was punishing passengers unduly, when the lower CPI measure is used to benchmark public sector pay and benefits.
Bruce Williamson from the independent campaign group Railfuture said: “Fares continue to outstrip real world price rises. Today’s CPI inflation figure is only 0.6%, but next January’s fares will go up by 1.9% because the government insists on using the higher RPI figure. It seems that the government is continuing to price people off the railways, reducing revenue and damaging economic growth. Meanwhile, motorists continue to enjoy a freeze on fuel duty.”
Data compiled by the group showed that rail fares would be almost 10% lower had the price rises imposed by the government since 2005 been based on CPI rather than RPI, saving many commuters hundreds of pounds a year.
At King’s Cross, passengers voiced concern at news of the increase. Sue Ellis, a civil servant, 52, said her company had paid for her travel on Tuesday, but added: “If I was paying I wouldn’t think it was value for money, particularly because some trains are overcrowded; reservations don’t always work properly especially on long journeys down to London. It’s disproportionate to make transport expensive for so many people who are suffering from no pay rises. It puts travel out of reach for many people. Whether we nationalise the rail companies or not, the bottom line is something needs to change.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dennis Palmer: ‘If you have to commute to work it’s a problem.’
Dennis Palmer, 57, who works for a national marketing and media company, said he did not think nationalisation of rail would work, adding: “If you have to commute to work it’s a problem. We should solve the housing crisis so it doesn’t cost people as much to live near to where they work. You could afford rail fare increases if you didn’t have to pay thousands of pounds to rent in London. We’re pricing people out of the city, the people we want to do the jobs we need.”
But Christoph Galle, 33, an academic from Germany, who had booked a ticket to Cambridge, said: “In comparison to prices in Germany it’s quite low. Rail fares shouldn’t rise every year though. It’s unfair that people have to pay more without getting paid more. The prices in Germany are on a high level but the last time they rose was three years ago.”
Flexible ticketing could save some part-time workers hundreds of pounds a year and encourage more people to take the train. Despite the government having committed to the principle several years ago, around 8.5 million people who work part-time or regularly work from home cannot mitigate the cost of their commute in the way that full-time workers can.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Commuter Christoph Galle.
James MacColl, of the Campaign for Better Transport, said: “The current season ticket system still fails to reflect our modern workforce and discriminates against women who make up three-quarters of part-time workers, years after the government committed to roll-out flexible ticketing nationally.”
While one franchise, C2C, introduced potential savings for flexible workers this year through a carnet-style scheme on its smartcard, the Department for Transport has not yet mandated train companies to develop part-time tickets.
MacColl added: “It is not good enough for the government to leave it up to franchisees to develop inadequate compromise offers which don’t provide fair discounts.”
Season tickets can mean full-time workers pay around half to two-thirds of cumulative single fares over a year. Campaigners say an equivalent three or four-day a week season ticket would allow part-time, often lower-paid commuters to also save hundreds of pounds a year. The government announced in September 2013 a programme to introduce smart ticketing across south-east England including piloting part-time season tickets on a commuter route, but it has now abandoned the scheme.What is TRON?
TRON (TRX) is a highly ambitious project created by former Ripple representative, Justin Sun. The Tron Foundation is trying to bring the internet to a decentralized state. As you may or may not know, major corporations receive a majority of views on the internet and have huge control over what happens.
This creates a state of censorship and loss of free thought to a degree. TRX is aiming at creating a web 4.0 that will give you ownership of your data and create a truly decentralized internet. TRON will be run as a non-profit foundation. They want to start doing business differently, which is highly interesting. The TRON Foundation want to focus the control on creation with people and move away from centralized data.
TRX, which started on the Ethereum blockchain and launched its own blockchain in late May, has positioned itself as a competitor to Ethereum.
The TRON 20 token
This TRON coin will let you be an individual content owner. This will be the token that individuals send to each other to buy or sell their digital assets to others. This will create value in the TRON economy.
TRONIX Coin
The TRONIX coin is the basic unit of the blockchain. These TRON coins are going to be used to access and exit the network. These will be the TRX tokens that will be on the actual coin exchanges. This will give you things like voting rights in their super representative elections and higher status in the ecosystem.
6 Different Phases of TRON
Exodus – The first stage which is peer-to-peer storage and distribution. This is where users and creators can publicise and disseminate their data. Odyssey – This stage is content empowerment. Different economic incentives will start to be introduced. Great Voyage – This phase introduces “fan finance” and achieves a significant transformation from the “fan economy”. This is where content creators can introduce their own cryptocoin on the network. Apollo – Content producers will move forward and issue their own tokens. This again will be used to sell and buy digital entertainment on the network. Star Trek (Monetizing) – Building of a decentralized gaming platform. Developers will be able to build games on the network. Eternity (Conversion)– Developers will be able to achieve crowdfunding for game development. Community investors can contribute to the game content creation.
TRON a scam? Probably not
Here is a list of reasons why TRON is probably not a scam.
Investors behind TRON
Bitmain – One of the largest mining pools.
Weixing Chen – Competitor of Uber
Mingshan Yin – Owner of $2 billion dollar motorcycle company
Wei Dai – Chinese bicycle company owner worth $3 billion.
Partnerships
Zag S&W – 3 decade old company focusing on commercial law.
Gifto – $100 million market cap blockchain company producing digital gift system.
Obike – Bike company worth an estimated $3 billion.
Uplive – Everyone around the world can use this to broadcast and view videos in real time using a smartphone.
Baofeng – Chinese software company providing hardware for the platform.
Game.com – Blockchain gaming platform rolling out blockchain dog game with Tron.
TRON Pros
Very solid team with many developers, investors, and advisors (much like Cardano). Apart from their team, the CEO, Justin Sun, is the protegé of Jack Ma, the founder of the Alibaba group. This alone can be a very big thing considering they have the right players and the money.
Partnered with Gifto. This is digital and virtual gifting on the blockchain, which is very hot right now. Also partnered with MLG Blockchain which is trying to introduce TRON to the west to get people familiar with it.
The CEO created a social app called Peiwo in China and has 10 million users currently. They are currently in the process of integrating TRON into the app. Let’s be real here, China is not going to be anti-digital currency. They have been heavily involved as the rest of the world plays catch up.
Data creators, which are the users, will have the fundamental ownership of data. This was proposed by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee when the internet was born. This was the original intention for the creation of the internet.
The users on the TRON network will be entitled to proportional profits according to rules. A value network has the greatest advantage that may digitally capitalize anything in social and media networks. This means users will be paid to use this network.
Users will be paid based on the time they spend and data creation on this network. Basically, participants will earn more for their time invested in the network and content creation.
TRON wants to provide services to the public free of charge. They are operated by a non-profit organization and is designed to serve the masses who enjoy content entertainment throughout the world rather than for the purpose of gaining profits. All participants will benefit from its prosperity.
Contents should come from people rather than capitals. This system will then reward participants for their contributions. They want cultural and creative industries to pursue the quality of art and contents rather than the capitalists.
Their network will also include decentralized infrastructures such as distributed exchange and autonomous gaming.
There are rumors of a TRON coin burn in the next couple of months. This would reduce the total supply (100 billion) and make the token more appealing.
TRON Cons
Market supply of the TRX coin is 100 Billion. Some people do not like the fact that there is a lot of supply here. On the contrary, if you want mass adoption, you are going to need a ton of supply to keep the price low.
Whitepaper plagiarism – TRON’s whitepaper seems to plagiarize from filecoin and IFPS.
No product/overvalued – TRON has grown to an incredible 19B market cap in January 2018. There is currently no product to back this valuation.
Last step scheduled for release in April 2023 – September 2025. This isn’t a really a con, but some impatient people may deem so.
Where to buy TRONIX
If you choose to invest in TRON (TRX), you can find it on Binance. I recommend them because I personally use that exchange. If you need additional help with this, check out my guide on how to buy ALT coins,
*NOTE* If you are looking for a cryptocurrency exchange providing the best crypto-to-crypto rates on the market, check out Changelly. Note that exchange times may vary depending on network congestion.
Conclusion
TRON has amazing potential to be a major disruption in the Asian market. They have been aggressively growing, recently hitting a 2 billion market cap, but this number doesn’t come close to what it can be worth in a few years. I honestly see this value hitting 10b minimum over the next year.
TRX has come a long way from its Ethereum days and is hoping to make major moves in the future with the platform. TRON is aiming for its “independence day,” or in other words, the total departure from Ethereum with the TRON mainnet launch. According to the TRON Foundation, this token migration is scheduled to happen sometime in mid 2018 (at the time of writing).
Update: TRON discontinued their ERC20 services on June 25 as part of their move to the Genesis Block on what is being referred to as TRON Independence Day.
TRON already has an established user base from the app Peiwo that they will be integrating with which is great. They have growth 600% in the past 2 weeks and backed by a professional team and big names and investors in the industry. TRON will definitely make an impact on the Asian market very soon. Let’s just see if this project can expand globally.
If anyone has any recommendations to add, potential problems, or cons about the project, please leave a comment down below.A picture taken on January 11, 2016 shows trenches being dug by Kurdish peshmerga forces in the district of Daquq, south of Kirkuk (AFP Photo/Marwan Ibrahim)
Baghdad (AFP) - Iraqi Turkmen leaders on Monday accused the country's Kurds of exploiting the war on jihadists to dig a trench that would strengthen their grip on expanded territory.
Officials from the Turkmen minority said the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) was digging the trench roughly following conflict lines between the Islamic State group and Kurdish forces across northern Iraq.
Kurdish officials insisted the trench was not a political act but rather a purely defensive measure aimed at preventing attacks by IS suicide car bombers.
"We see this move to dig a trench as suspicious," Arshad al-Salehi, the head of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, told AFP.
"It starts in Rabia... and ends in Khanaqin," he said.
Rabia is a northwestern town on the Syrian border and Khanaqin lies 400 kilometres (250 miles) to the southeast, near the Iranian border.
The Turkmens are one of Iraq's largest ethnic minorities and many of their hubs are in disputed areas, which are just beyond the KRG borders but claimed by the Kurds.
The Kurdish peshmerga took over many of those areas on the back of the June 2014 IS offensive that saw the Iraqi federal security forces collapse completely.
Salehi said he wanted Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to clarify his position on the trench and said he would bring up the issue in parliament.
"We see it as the beginning of the division of Iraq. It gives reality on the ground to a redrawn geopolitical map," he said.
Jassem Mohammed Jaafar, a Turkmen MP, also accused the Kurds of using the war against IS as a pretext to further the expansion, and ultimately the secession, of their region.
- 'Fait accompli' -
"It is against international conventions, it violates the rights of the people who end up on one or the other side of it," he told AFP.
"There is little doubt that this trench is part of a project to divide Iraq," Jaafar said.
The KRG acknowledged it had recently stepped up the fortification of its frontline with IS but it denied any political motive.
"The purpose of the trench is to build a defensive system against vehicles used by Daesh (IS) terrorists who blow up car bombs," peshmerga spokesman Jabar Yawar said.
"It is two metres deep and three wide. It is not everywhere, some areas don't need it. It is the military leadership that makes this decision," he said.
Turkmen officials said their information showed that the planned path of the trench would include the town of Tuz Khurmatu in the Kurdish region and leave that of Amerli out.
The trench has not been dug there yet but work has begun in areas around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and in the Jalawla region near the Iranian border, they said.
Mehdi Saadoun, an activist from the Turkmen Rescue Foundation, said the trench was being used to further Kurdish nationalist ambitions.
"Seventy to 80 percent of the areas to be included on the KRG side are Turkmen areas," he said.
"They will include Tal Afar, Kirkuk (and) Tuz Khurmatu if the government does not enforce the law on preserving the unity of Iraq," Saadoun said.
"Daesh is the excuse the Kurdish forces are using to impose a fait accompli by digging this trench," he said.
The governor of Kirkuk province, Najmeddin Karim, said he supported any measure making the area safer.
"We support the decisions and measures taken by the peshmerga because they guarantee the security and stability of all the people of Kirkuk, without any discrimination," he said.
"They have the right to dig a trench to protect the people and the cities from terrorists and prevent any infiltration by Daesh," the governor told AFP.Like all self-professed armchair philosophers, I spend far too much time badgering people to debate with me on things that matter:
‘Who will be the next leader of the free world?’
‘Which nation will be the next superpower?’
‘Where do I have to go to find some of the world’s sexiest men?’
According to a destination dating website, MissTravel, the question to the latter has been right in front of me all along.
Apparently, our very own Pakistan is host to the world’s |
manga named Akuto - ACT -, and it shows similarities to Kill la Kill as well. ACT involves transforming clothes, in this case bomber jackets, while Kill la Kill focuses more on school uniforms — although its heroine also wears a bomber jackets. ACT also features a protagonist seeking the truth behind his friend's death. Ihara also posted this drawing on his blog of a character from ACT named An Haritsuka, a transvestite boy:
... then compares it to the Kill la Kill character named Nui Harime:
... and says, "If as the Internet says, she turns out to be a he, I wonder if our manga is one of the old manga like Otoko-gumi and Blazing Transfer Student used as reference by the Kill la Kill production team." He goes on to request that no one get angry over it.
Gakuen Noise is now available to read in Japanese on J-Comi, so feel free to click through it and see how much it screams "Kill la Kill" to you!
[Via Manhattan, Rensai and Yaraon!; Images from J-Comi and Sai no Meki Portal]Proposed Gas Tax to Fix Roads
Coachella Valley Region
California drivers already pay some of the highest gas taxes in the nation and the second the highest gas prices next to Hawaii.
So when Fred Norris, who commutes to the valley from Murrieta heard about State Senate Bill 1, that proposes a 12 cents increase per gallon of gasoline, he was not happy, "As a commuter I’m against it because I mean we’re paying too much we’re getting hit in the hind with all this stuff,"
The bill would generate $6 billion per year to pay for road and infrastructure repairs and maintenance.
If passed, car registration would increase by $38 and diesel fuel would go up four percent.
Nelson Yaple from Rancho Mirage says he doesn’t mind paying for the tax if it’s strictly for roads, "If it goes to the roads, then i don’t have a problem if it’s something else then, what is it?"
According to the Department of Transportation 68 percent of the state’s roads are in poor condition and Californians pay $4 billion in car repairs every year because of bad roads, that’s almost $600 per driver.
Don Dixon from Oregon he experienced the bad roads first hand on his drive through the Golden State, "It was just a mess people, truckers were dodging the lanes trying to get around all the ruts in the roads and so forth I think it was one of the reasons i ended up with a blow out."
Caltrans says the money is needed because much of the state’s infrastructure is failing.
"We continue to put a Band-Aid on a sore that’s not healing, we need to be able to rebuild our infrastructure because a lot of it is more than 50 years old and it’s aged beyond its life expectancy," says Terri Kasinga, Caltrans District 8 information officer, adding that recent storms caused over $700 million dollars in damage to the state’s highways.Documentary Description
They feared the temptations of wealth, yet their estate was once described as the kind of place God would have built–if only he had the money. They amassed a fortune that outraged a democratic nation, then gave much of it away. They were the closest thing this country had to a royal family, but they shunned the public eye, retreating behind the walls of their palatial home at Pocantico Hills, New York.
"The Rockefellers" is the saga of four generations of a legendary American family whose name is synonymous with great wealth.
"Mr. Rockefeller, your fortune is rolling up like an avalanche! You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you and your children and your children's children!"
–The Rev. Frederick Gates, hired by John D. Rockefeller to guide his philanthropy
The story begins in the Christian revivalist fervor of the 1830s with a marriage of opposites: Eliza Davison, a pious young woman, and "Devil Bill" Rockefeller, swindler, snake-oil salesman, and eventually, bigamist. Their son, John D. Rockefeller, created an industrial empire–and a personal fortune–on a scale the world had never known. He ruthlessly crushed his competitors in the process, alienating the public and leaving a stain on the family name. His dutiful son, John D. Jr., was a self-sacrificing young man who devoted his life to redeeming his family's reputation. Junior's five sons scaled the heights of the American century. One, Nelson, reached highest, exposing the very private Rockefellers once again to the harsh judgment of public opinion. In the 1960s, a fourth generation of Rockefellers–"the Cousins"–rebelled against their family, which had come to personify what was then known as "the establishment."
With unprecedented access to the Rockefeller family and their archives, producers Elizabeth Deane ("The Kennedys") and Adriana Bosch ("Reagan") have created a complete documentary portrait of this renowned dynasty. "The Rockefellers" features on-camera interviews with Junior's two surviving sons, Laurance and David, and six of the Cousins generation: Steven Rockefeller, Rodman Rockefeller (who died in May 2000), Abby O'Neill, David Rockefeller Jr., Peggy Dulany, and the Honorable John D. Rockefeller IV; revealing home movies; and interviews with historians, biographers, and others close to the family. David Ogden Stiers narrates.
The world's first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller Sr. held 90 percent of the world's oil refineries, 90 percent of the marketing of oil, and a third of all the oil wells. Working methodically and secretly, he did more than transform a single industry. When he formed his feared monopoly, Standard Oil, in 1870 he changed forever the way America did business.
Because of the ruthless war he waged to crush his competitors, Rockefeller was to many Americans the embodiment of an unjust and cruel economic system. Yet he lived a quiet and virtuous life. "I believe the power to make money is a gift of God," Rockefeller once said. "It is my duty to make money and even more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow men." By the end of his life he had given away half his fortune. But Rockefeller's vast philanthropy could not erase the memory of his predatory business practices. In 1902, when McClure's magazine published journalist Ida Tarbell's scathing exposé of Standard Oil, it unleashed a torrent of rage. In 1911, Standard Oil was declared in violation of antitrust laws and dissolved.
John D.'s only son, Junior, faced an almost impossible task, says biographer Ron Chernow: "He had to figure out a way to change the image of this family without openly repudiating the father he loved." The struggle took its toll. Junior suffered from incapacitating headaches and was forced to take rest cures to relieve the strain. In his quest for redemption and respectability, Junior would give away hundreds of millions of dollars, and would demand impeccable behavior from his six children. John D. III became a philanthropist and a valued expert on Asian affairs; Laurance, a leading venture capitalist and conservationist. Nelson was four times governor of New York and vice president of the United States. David, president of The Chase Manhattan Bank, was a leading figure in international finance. Winthrop was elected governor of Arkansas. Abby was deeply involved in cancer research.
The Rockefellers transformed America, helping build many of the institutions that defined the United States in the twentieth century: the United Nations, Spelman College, Acadia National Park, Grand Teton National Park, the United Negro College Fund, Lincoln Center, Chase Manhattan Bank, Riverside Church, Pan American Airlines, Radio City Music Hall, The Cloisters, the University of Chicago, Rockefeller Center, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare–to name just a few. Junior's wife, Abby, a leading patron of the arts, co-founded the Museum of Modern Art, known to the third generation of Rockefellers as "Mother's museum."
When he died at age 86, Junior left his six children and 22 grandchildren an invaluable inheritance: a name which stood not for corporate greed, but for "the well-being of mankind." Junior had lived to see his final vindication–the election of his son, Nelson, as governor of New York in 1958. "It was a sign that the people of the United States had in fact fully accepted the Rockefellers in spite of the early history of the family," says Nelson's son, Steven. "Nelson had done something that no other Rockefeller had ever done," says his biographer, Joseph Persico. "He had won the affirmation of the people."
In 1962, Nelson tried to take the family one step higher: A liberal Republican, he made a bid for the presidency of the United States. But his divorce from Mary Todd Hunter and marriage to Margaretta "Happy" Murphy, together with a rising wave of national conservatism, crushed his aspirations. "His political career started to come to an end at the time of his divorce and remarriage," his brother, David, confirms. Ten years later, while still governor of New York, he was held responsible for the violent putdown of the rebellion at the Attica state prison and was even called a murderer.
It was a time of turmoil for the nation–and for the Rockefellers. John D.'s grandchildren were caught up in the upheaval–civil rights, the women's movement, the war in Vietnam. "The Cousins found that they could no longer accept uncritically the role of being Rockefellers," says Steven. "You had to question the history of the family and your own identity."
Wanting little to do with a fortune they saw as tainted, some of the Cousins joined the assault of the left against the Rockefellers. In 1976 the Cousins collaborated with the editors of the leading radical journal, Ramparts, in a tell-all book that described the Rockefeller family as "having an abundance of everything except feelings."
The book's publication caused a deep rift in the family. "My father's generation was quite understandably very upset that their dirty laundry was being aired in public," says Peggy Dulany, a daughter of David Rockefeller. Abby, Winthrop, John, and Nelson had died by the end of the 1970's –Nelson under scandalous circumstances. Their deaths brought the family back together. "We came to realize that the real problem was the integration of power and goodness," says Steven. "And that if the family was going to continue to work together, philanthropic commitments and values would be at the center." In a society that has more millionaires–even billionaires–than ever, the story of the Rockefellers is both a cautionary tale and an exemplary one.
Source: PBS
TRANSCRIPT
PRIMARY SOURCES
Primary Sources: Rockefeller Family Ties
Until the 1970s, when they became the focus of a controversial book, the family dynamics of the Rockefeller dynasty were one of America's best-kept secrets.
That's exactly how John D. Rockefeller Sr. had always wanted it. Even in his personal letters, he avoided any intimate details or private confessions.
And yet, in all its Victorian restraint, Rockefeller's correspondence with his docile son John D. Jr. and his rebellious daughter Edith is surprisingly eloquent. Between the lines, these letters reveal the strong personalities and the sometimes strained relationships of these three very different Rockefellers.
Below is a sample of the correspondence, spanning the years 1887 to 1922:
Correspondence between John D. Rockefeller Sr. and John D. Rockefeller Jr.
________________________________
26 Broadway
New York
November 28th 1887
Dear John:
Yours, of the 22nd, duly received. Excuse delay in answering. Have also your telegram of today for the cutter [sleigh], and will attend to it tomorrow morning. I assume you want the one to carry two persons. I had a pleasant time in Washington. It is a beautiful city. The weather was mild and lovely. After receiving my testimony they did not wish any other although they had subpoenaed eight of us. We feel very well about the experience over there. The New York World hasn't any further ammunition in this direction, is now going back to its first love, the Buffalo suit, trying to rake up something against us. Had a delightful Sunday at home yesterday. Feeling well and ready for business. Looking forward with pleasure to seeing you the last of this week.
Concur in your decision about painting the storm doors. You and Mother will surely have your own way in all these affairs, what's the use of my saying a word. You are monarch of all you survey.
Your loving,
Father
_________________________________
26 Broadway
January 20th 1888
My Dear Son:
We all welcomed yours of the 15th. Were very pleased to hear of your daily experience, and hope both you and Mother will be much better for this quiet country life. I am glad you know about it. It carries me back to my boyhood days. I am having a pair of shoes made to lace up. I am told they support the ankles better. I will bring them with me. Please tell Mother that everything is being done that can be in reference to the telephone wire to Forest Hill. A new route is desired and the effort to secure it makes a little delay. Aunty and I went to the Harlem River this morning with Flash and Midnight in a new cutter [sleigh] which cost $300. Very extravagant, I know, but the sleighing is so good could not resist the temptation to buy it and hope to get the worth of our money. I drove four times day before yesterday and three times yesterday making an aggregate in the two days of about eighty miles. Don't you think I am an enthusiastic youth? I am looking forward with great pleasure to seeing you next week but may not leave until Friday.
Lovingly,
Your Father
____________________________________
Home
4 West 54th St.
New York
January 26, 1895
My Dear Son:
I enclose check to your order for Twenty-one dollars, for your twenty first birthday, being one for each year.
It would be very pleasant if we could all spend the day together at home, but I think under the circumstances, it is better for you to remain at college as you have been obliged to be away from your work so much of late.
I cannot tell you how much happiness we all have in you. And how much we are looking forward to, and relying on you for in the future.
We are grateful beyond measure for your promise and for the confidence your life inspires in us, not only, but in all your friends and acquaintances and this is of more value than all earthly possessions.
We all join in the hope that this and all the days to come, may bring only good to you, and we rejoice that you know from experience, that good for you, is inseparably connected with the good you bring to others. But this is not a lecture, only a kind word from an affectionate father to a much loved and only son on the occasion of his 21st birthday.
John D. Rockefeller
__________________________________
11 Slater Hall
Prov. R.I.
February 3, 1895
Dear Father,
I want again to thank you for the check which you sent me last week and also for the letter that accompanied it.
I am grateful if my life brings happiness to you; it should bring much more than I have made it. But had I done infinitely better than I have in this particular, I should not even then have made anything like an adequate return for all that you have done for me.
I am glad for the confidence which you say my life inspires in you. I feel that I have but too little confidence in myself; but the very fact of you having faith in me will help me to make the most of my life.
Be assured, dear Father that my greatest happiness will ever be to do my utmost for you and Mother, and not only to keep clean, but be a credit to the honorable and noble record which you have made. People talk about sons being better than their fathers, but if I can be half as generous, half as unselfish, and half as kindly affectionate to my fellow men as you have been, I shall not feel that my life has been in vain.
Affectionately,
John
_____________________________________
4 West 54th Street
New York
November 11, 1899
Dear Father
I want to tell you again of my very deep appreciation of the generous, patient and kindly way in which you have treated me during the anxiety and pressure which has been brought upon you this week largely through me. Most Fathers would have upbraided and stormed, and that too, justly. Because of your forbearance and gentleness you have caused me to feel the more deeply the lesson which this has taught. I would rather have had my right hand cut off than to have caused you this anxiety. My one thought and purpose since I came into the office has been to relieve you in every way possible of the burdens which you have carried so long. To realize now that instead of doing that I have been partially and largely instrumental in adding to your burdens, is bitter and humiliating. My effort has been an honest one although I have failed in its accomplishment. I want fully to acknowledge my mistake and to shoulder the blame which rightfully belongs to me. With your expression of continued confidence which I most truly appreciate, I shall try again in the hope that I can live my appreciation of your magnanimity far better than I can express it in words. This has been a hard lesson but it may help me to avoid harder ones in the future.
Affectionately,
John
___________________________________
Hotel Bon Air
Augusta, Georgia
January 18, 1909
Dear Son:
I thank you a thousand times for the fur coat and cap and mittens. I did not feel that I could afford such luxuries, and am grateful for a son who is able to buy them for me. Be assured that they are much appreciated. Mother unites with me in thanking you.
Affectionately,
Father
_________________________________
26 Broadway
New York
January 11, 1910
Dear Father:
Since you have upon previous occasions expressed an interest in the total amount of money which I spend in a year you will be interested to know that my total expenditures for the year 1909 is $86,288.35. Subtracting from this amount $25,000 which I gave to Brown, leaves a total of $58,238.35. The total last year was $65,918.47. This excess in 1908 is accounted for by the amount which I gave away during that year as compared with the amount given away in 1909 less the $25,000 above referred to.
Affectionately,
John
__________________________________
Golf House
Lakewood, NJ
May 9, 1917
Dear Son:
A brief word only! History is making so rapidly, I can hardly keep up with it, but this fact is being very forcibly impressed upon my mind that my individual ability to do things for others is only a fraction of what it was before the Government took a first mortgage on my possessions and my income, requiring me to pay for governmental purposes many millions of dollars each year. With this in view, we must all reflect very carefully before any further committals are made for gifts of money, especially as I can now see where I shall require to pay in a very few months no less than twenty millions of dollars, not including what I have already paid and for which I am already in debt.
All goes well with us, and we are happy and contented and hope that you and Abby will be rational, restful, retiring, and right minded, and you will look with righteous indignation upon any overtaxing of your time and strength, remembering that you have much work to do in the world and it cannot all be done in a day. Be patient and be moderate. Allow other people to bear some of their share of the burdens of life, and in the end you will accomplish more, live longer and be happier.
Affectionately,
Father
__________________________________
Golf House
Lakewood, NJ
July 30, 1918
Dear Son:
I am this day giving you 18,800 shares of the Common stock of the American Linseed Company and 22,400 shares of the Preferred, and 500 shares of the Lakewood Engineering Company, 4,200 shares of the International Agricultural Corporation Preferred and 12,423 shares of the Atlantic Refining Company and 37,269 shares of the Vacuum Oil Company and 13,000 shares of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and I have requested Mr. Houston to have the same transferred to you.
Affectionately,
Father
_____________________________________
26 Broadway
New York
February 11, 1919
Dear Father:
Once more my breath is taken by the receipt of your letter of February 5th announcing the stupendous gift of New Jersey stock which you are making to me. I need not tell you how deeply I realize the great responsibility which each of these gifts bring, for every day of my life I realize more fully the peculiar obligations which rest upon those of large means. A sense of the burden of the responsibility which, through your great generosity has come so rapidly to me during the passing years, would be almost crushing were it not off-set by the vision of the wonderful opportunity for useful service which comes with responsibility.
I appreciate more and more each day what your wisdom and intelligence and broad vision in giving has meant to the world. I realize increasingly the tremendous value that attaches to your endorsement of an enterprise, business or philanthropic, and I need not assure you that it will be my great pride, as well as my solemn duty, to endeavor, while emulating your unparalleled generosity, to live up to the high standards of intelligent giving which you have set. Whenever I am discouraged because of the littleness and the meanness and the petty jealousy of men I find renewed courage as I contemplate your patience, your bigness of heart, your Christian tolerance. Whenever I am oppressed with the feeling that one man can do so little even when he is doing his utmost, I only have to review the marvelous accomplishments of your extraordinary life in order to be heartened for the task which lies before me.
May the God who has led you so wonderfully during all these years of your life, Whom you have served so faithfully and so untiringly, lead me in the same path of duty and of service, and help me to carry on worthily the works for mankind which with marvelous prevision you have so solidly and wisely established.
I thank you, dear Father, for this great gift, and for the continued confidence in me which it implies. May God bless you and help me to live up to the high ideals which have guided your life.
Lovingly,
John
__________________________________
Kijkuit
Pocantico Hills
New York
October 22, 1920
Dear Son:
I am giving you a check for $500,000. It will be available for use on Monday next.
Affectionately,
Father
_________________________________
Kijkuit
Pocantico Hills
New York
October 23, 1920
Dear Son:
I am giving you a check for $500,000. It will be available for use on Tuesday next.
Affectionately,
Father
__________________________________
Kijkuit
Pocantico Hills
New York
October 28, 1920
Dear Son:
I am today giving you a check for $500,000. It will be available for use at once.
Affectionately,
Father
__________________________________
26 Broadway
New York
October 28, 1920
Dear Father:
hat a delightful habit you are forming! This third gift, of which your letter of October 28th advises me, is as acceptable as was the first.
Again I would express my truest thanks. How can I ever make clear to you how much I appreciate your wonderful generosity!
Affectionately,
John
__________________________________
Ormond Beach
Florida
January 26, 1922
Dear Son:
As to the sums which I have handed you from time to time, it is to be remembered that I have already set aside large amounts in our different trusts, for benevolent purposes, in addition to my regular giving personally, and with the careful and protracted study which I give to each object of any considerable moment, it is evident that I shall not fulfill to the complete extent, my heart's desire to make everything that I can give to the world available, for many years to come.
As you are in touch with the world from a somewhat different angle from mine, and there have been ample means left by a kind Providence. I have hoped that with your constant and careful studies, and wide and broad knowledge of the needs of the world, you would have the fullest enjoyment in personally determining and carrying out plans of your own for helping the world, and I rejoice to afford you this opportunity, in the confident assurance that great good will result therefrom.
I am indeed blessed beyond measure in having a son whom I can trust to do this most particular and most important work. Go carefully/Be conservative. Be sure you are right — and then do not be afraid to give out, as your heart prompts you, and as the Lord inspires you.
With tenderest affection,
Father
Correspondence between John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Edith Rockefeller McCormick
Hôtel Baur au Lac
Zurich
September 4, 1915
Dear Father:
I want to thank you for your birthday cheque which is always welcome.
My thoughts in regard to the early history of yours and Mother's lives together is only for family research. It is the link in our family history which you alone can give now to hand down to your children, as I will hand down to my children dates and events in Harold's and my early lives together. Mother used to tell us about your going to school, about how you were dressed the first time you called, about your wedding and the early days in Cheshire Street. I am sure that you understand what I mean.
We would all like to help in your philanthropies. It is beautiful and developing work and John is privileged in a way which Alta and I as yet have not had the opportunity of being. I am sure that as women we are serious minded and earnest and deeply interested in mankind and that we would only be too glad to shoulder our inherited responsibilities if we were permitted to.
Fowler expects to sail back to school in a few days. We have had a beautiful summer all together.
May each day bring some new beauty into your life, dear Father, and may you feel the love of your children near you.
With repeated thanks and my love.
Your loving daughter,
Edith
__________________________________
Hôtel Bar au Lac
Zurich
October 22, 1915
Dear Father:
Your cheque on the anniversary of Mother's birth linked together the past and the present and showed me that you still hold me in your remembrance. There is warmth and love in your heart when one can get through all the outside barriers which you have thrown up to protect yourself -- your own self -- from the world. This warmth and love draws me, for is it not living?
Thank you, Father.
Affectionately,
Edith
_________________________________
Hôtel Bar au Lac
Zurich
January 31, 1916
Dear Father:
I want to thank you for your Christmas cheque which brings with it to me your thought and remembrance.
Also I want to ask you if you will give me some more stocks in order to increase my income. In 1908 you gave me some S.O. stocks ($10,000.00) in 1909 or 1910 you gave me the Riverside property, and since then my principal and my allowance have remained the same. For myself I spend a sixth or seventh of my allowance and the rest I give away. As a woman of forty three I would like to have more money to help with. There are causes in which I am interested which are uplifting and of vital importance to my development which I cannot help as I should like to because I have not the money. I hope you will see that as a woman of earnestness of purpose and singleness of spirit I am worthy of more confidence on your part.
Hoping that you have entirely recovered from your cold, and with renewed thanks and love.
Affectionately,
Edith
_________________________________
Hôtel Bar au Lac
Zurich
June 22, 1917
Dear Father:
We are thinking of your birthday which is approaching and are happy in the thought that you are well and happy. I wish some times that you would let me get nearer to you -- your real self, so that your heart would feel the warmth of a simple human soul. Perhaps you will let me some day.
For this coming year on which you are just entering I wish you continued health and joy, and I send to you many loving wishes.
Your affectionate daughter,
Edith
P.S. For all the help which you are giving in so many times I am grateful and appreciative.
Edith
__________________________________
July 27, 1917
Dear Daughter:
I thank you for your beautiful letter on the occasion of my seventy-eighth birthday. I can think of nothing which I would more devoutly desire than that we should be constantly drawn closer and closer together, to the end that we may be of the greatest assistance to each other, not only, but to the dear ones so near and so dear to us.
All goes well with us at Forest Hill. It was never so beautiful here before. Our thoughts go out to all the dear ones, the memory of whom makes the place so sweet and sacred to me.
With tenderest love for each and everyone of you, I am,
Affectionately,
Father
_________________________________
April 9, 1921
Dear Edith:
Answering yours of the 10th ult., I cherish no unkindly feelings, but I could not say I did not regret you should not have taken my advice in respect to the use of the funds which I had given you.
However, while we have all suffered in this connection, for such things cannot be hid under a bushel, as perhaps I intimated in some former letter, yet you have had to bear most, and now, as to the future of your financial management I see no other way than that you will have to cut your garment to suit the cloth.
But, Edith dear, the financial question, while important, is not important when compared to the other question —- the great question of your being present with your children. And how sadly they need your presence, and how very solicitous we all are for them! In this connection I may add that you could have been a great comfort and help to your mother and me. But this sinks into insignificance also, when we consider the dear children, and the importance of the constant, jealous, watch-care of the mother, and the untold sorrow that may be entailed upon us all. Edith dear, you know it all, and so much better than I — indeed, I know so little. The responsibility is with you. I hope it is not too late.
This knowledge adds to my burdens, and with increasing years, though I do not complain, I have enough, possibly more than I should undertake to carry.
I am not lecturing. I am not scolding. I love you, Edith dear; and I am still hoping.
Affectionately,
Father
__________________________________
1000 Lake Shore Drive
Chicago
September 9, 1922
Dear Father:
Today is dear Mother's birthday, and as my thoughts turn to her in loving remembrance I am impelled to send you just a word of love.
One of my earliest remembrances is being wakened in the city house in Cleveland by your voice as you talked to Mother from your bathroom where you were dressing, while she coiffed her hair in your bedroom. Alta and I slept in the room next to your bathroom, and your voice which was deep and full, came through to us as you talked on. Then I remember sitting on Mother's lap by the middle front window in the music room, while she cut my nails (I must have been very young). Then I remember your sitting in front of the fire in the music room after luncheon on Sunday, and taking the meat out of a hickory nut for me with a nut picker. And then, one morning while Mother was playing the piano, you came up and rubbed my back which was making me restless on account of the prickly heat. You came up so quietly and you went down again so quietly. These are some of my earliest remembrances.
Mother's love for children and her belief that to mould them was building for the future was an inspiration in her life perhaps even the greatest one.
It is nice to be together again for a while as we were for so many years — you, Mother and I. She lives with us still, and her good works follow her.
As ever,
Your loving daughter,
EdithIntel had been sponsoring the 4Kings, a well-known professional organisations, since they won the Intel Masters Gaming Championship in 2002 and just announced its first season of the globally acclaimed Intel Extreme Masters. Dreamhack, became the largest gaming festival in the world, surpassing 8,500 connected computers in the LAN setting a new Guinness world record. And it was in the year 2006 when Team Dignitas first crossed paths with Intel at the inaugural and only World Series of Video Games tournament held in London.
Team Dignitas is the brain child of Michael “ODEE” O’Dell
Known well in the professional gaming world, Team Dignitas is the brain child of Michael “ODEE” O’Dell who is credited for registering the company back in 2004. He managed to interest Intel with his easy going attitude and his ability to work well with corporate sponsors without alienating their fans. The decision to move sponsorship from 4Kings to Dignitas wasn’t made easily, but by April 2007, Team Dignitas players were seen at tournaments sporting Intel logos on their team jerseys. It was the start of the longest standing relationship for both companies and enabled O’Dell to take on management full time.
“I remember I was at work when I got a call with Intel to come down to Swindon to meet,” recalls O’Dell. At the time Team Dignitas had squads in only a handful of games, totalling roughly 25 players. “I had to take a day off to go, and I remember sitting in there discussing the deal, it was surreal. After that, I told my wife, ‘we picked up Intel, mind if I leave my job?’ and that was that. But it changed everything and gave us the credibility and the finances to do more.”
The role of Twitch in the evolution of eSports
Up until recently, eSports had been happily living in a small but growing community. The internet was a bourgeoning playground that wasn’t for everyone. In 2007, nearly 40% of UK household didn’t have internet connectivity, YouTube was available in nine countries, and Twitch, a live streaming gaming platform, didn’t exist. Live commentators better known as shoutcasters had become a mainstream staple at tournaments, but work was limited and hardly anyone was employed full time. “There were only a handful of shoutcasters back in those days,” says Stuart “TosspoT” Saw, a part time shoutcaster since 2002, now the European Director at Twitch. “Most did it in the form of internet radio at night and on weekends as they were employed or full time students. And that’s really changed over the last 10 years I’ve been involved. Twitch has really enabled eSports you see today, providing a way to bring the content to growing audience and to help monetize and lay a solid foundation for the industry.”
With the rise of live streaming and new ways to connect to the internet, eSports has entered a second golden age over the last few years. Team Dignitas has evolved with the times as well, logging over 800,000 viewer hours of live content per month. Today, with over 500 players that have worn the Dignitas logo since it became an official team, the line-up of stars makes it an organization worth following. “Most of Dignitas’ management are ex-players, many from the original teams,’ says O’Dell. “We want to help new players get to events and show off their talent. It was really hard for us to do that at the beginning. What we are now gives us that ability. And when you got fans that stick with you through the wins and losses, though roster changes, that’s amazing. It’s hard to describe.”
Team Dignitas will bring their Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) squad to Jönköping, Sweden after disappointing results at the Electronic Sports World Cup tournament in Paris. The newly formed Danish team is expected to do well against some of the biggest names in CS:GO. If you’re travelling out to Dreamhack Winter 2014, you can come meet them at the Intel booth in Main Hall D. Those that up to the challenge may find themselves competing against them in the Alien Arena Tournament.Planning a wedding is an undertaking most people only do once, so it’s no wonder there’s a significant amount of sticker shock regarding the cost of many aspects of the event. One of the most surprising expenses is usually the wedding flowers, and for good reason. The average cost of wedding flowers in 2015 – for venue arrangements, bridal and bridesmaid bouquets, boutonnieres, centerpieces, flower petals, etc. – was over $1,850 in the United States, according to The Wedding Report. It is tremendously difficult to find truly "budget" wedding flowers, but there are some ways to make your wedding flower budget stretch!
Kelly L'Esperance - Miss Fleur Floral Design missfleurfloraldesign.co.uk/ photo credit: Photography by Grace Hill
How can you justify spending almost two thousand dollars on flowers that will, in fact, wilt and die in under two weeks? That’s a staggering amount, especially when you’re trying to plan a wedding on a budget. There has to be an affordable way to have wedding flowers you love without breaking the bank; which brings up some important questions. They’re listed here, and the answers follow:
To Buy or DIY Why should you spend money on a florist instead of doing your wedding flowers yourself to save some cash?
Why should you spend money on a florist instead of doing your wedding flowers yourself to save some cash? Find a Fantastic Wedding Florist How do you find a budget-friendly wedding florist?
How do you find a budget-friendly wedding florist? Carry Beautiful and Affordable Blooms How do you find beautiful budget wedding flowers that you can afford?
To Buy or DIY
If your floral needs aren’t complicated, you can consider the DIY |
i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 7740X Core i7 7820X Core i7 8700K Core i9 7900X Core i9 7960X Core i9 7980XE Core i3 8100 60 120 180 240 300 SE +/- 0.40 SE +/- 0.19 SE +/- 0.34 SE +/- 0.24 SE +/- 0.19 SE +/- 0.28 SE +/- 0.22 SE +/- 0.12 SE +/- 0.85 SE +/- 0.06 SE +/- 4.32 SE +/- 0.17 SE +/- 0.09 SE +/- 0.17 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.30 SE +/- 0.81 SE +/- 0.32 SE +/- 0.06 SE +/- 0.12 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.11 SE +/- 0.15 SE +/- 0.54 SE +/- 0.45 SE +/- 0.46 SE +/- 0.58 SE +/- 0.75 SE +/- 0.20 199.67 111.21 120.21 138.18 122.21 76.83 67.41 52.37 252.54 204.94 257.35 256.22 145.66 174.15 141.76 148.01 127.45 112.60 102.13 70.12 78.77 85.95 66.50 66.78 54.24 57.31 48.58 44.33 45.03 100.29 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1 1. (CC) gcc options: -O2 -pedantic -ldl -lz -lm
OpenBenchmarking.org Seconds, Less Is Better C-Ray v1.1 Total Time AMD A10-7850K AMD FX-8350 AMD FX-8370E Ryzen 3 1200 Ryzen 3 1300X Ryzen 7 1700 Ryzen 7 1800X Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Pentium G3258 Pentium G4400 Core i3 2120 Core i3 4130 Core i3 7100 Core i5 2400S Core i5 2500K Core i5 3470 Core i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 7740X Core i7 7820X Core i7 8700K Core i9 7900X Core i9 7960X Core i9 7980XE Core i3 8100 16 32 48 64 80 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.00 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.35 SE +/- 0.05 SE +/- 0.03 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.06 SE +/- 0.16 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.12 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.53 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.28 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.22 SE +/- 0.28 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.02 58.31 28.04 33.83 24.93 21.47 11.60 9.79 5.14 61.58 54.07 71.29 54.21 41.98 51.09 38.96 38.94 29.02 26.98 22.24 15.22 20.91 25.19 18.21 18.29 10.33 13.74 8.14 5.97 5.24 24.09 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1 1. (CC) gcc options: -lm -lpthread -O3
OpenSSL
OpenBenchmarking.org Signs Per Second, More Is Better OpenSSL v1.0.1g RSA 4096-bit Performance AMD A10-7850K AMD FX-8350 AMD FX-8370E Ryzen 3 1200 Ryzen 3 1300X Ryzen 7 1700 Ryzen 7 1800X Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Pentium G3258 Pentium G4400 Core i3 2120 Core i3 4130 Core i3 7100 Core i5 2400S Core i5 2500K Core i5 3470 Core i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 7740X Core i7 7820X Core i7 8700K Core i9 7900X Core i9 7960X Core i9 7980XE Core i3 8100 600 1200 1800 2400 3000 SE +/- 0.07 SE +/- 4.12 SE +/- 2.96 SE +/- 0.12 SE +/- 0.17 SE +/- 1.42 SE +/- 1.22 SE +/- 2.86 SE +/- 0.10 SE +/- 0.72 SE +/- 1.69 SE +/- 0.06 SE +/- 0.07 SE +/- 0.15 SE +/- 0.10 SE +/- 7.24 SE +/- 0.72 SE +/- 0.18 SE +/- 2.42 SE +/- 0.66 SE +/- 0.53 SE +/- 0.32 SE +/- 0.19 SE +/- 0.06 SE +/- 0.03 SE +/- 0.19 SE +/- 0.70 SE +/- 0.57 SE +/- 0.71 SE +/- 3.15 322 701 578 450 522 987 1141 2186 244 282 231 281 368 324 424 429 518 566 682 997 730 658 850 849 1573 1131 1964 2830 3005 627 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1 1. (CC) gcc options: -m64 -O3 -lssl -lcrypto -ldl
Xsbench
OpenBenchmarking.org Lookups/s, More Is Better Xsbench v2017-07-06 AMD FX-8350 AMD FX-8370E Ryzen 3 1200 Ryzen 3 1300X Ryzen 7 1700 Ryzen 7 1800X Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Pentium G3258 Pentium G4400 Core i3 7100 Core i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 7740X Core i7 7820X Core i7 8700K Core i9 7900X Core i9 7960X Core i9 7980XE Core i3 8100 1100000 2200000 3300000 4400000 5500000 SE +/- 639.84 SE +/- 157.40 SE +/- 1399.86 SE +/- 1505.20 SE +/- 2756.62 SE +/- 6495.96 SE +/- 1422.60 SE +/- 5669.15 SE +/- 2415.01 SE +/- 1494.93 SE +/- 6576.00 SE +/- 5241.63 SE +/- 489.80 SE +/- 561.68 SE +/- 6792.96 SE +/- 861.77 SE +/- 2115.39 SE +/- 357.23 SE +/- 448.63 SE +/- 234.09 SE +/- 1060.74 SE +/- 2636.36 SE +/- 14926.11 SE +/- 7410.71 870811 1140673 1105106 1160765 1595523 1642532 2757208 377013 515620 750509 864121 937286 693180 1513606 1242914 1332395 1529516 1506480 2537761 1942108 3508843 4740036 4909904 1082881 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1 1. (CC) gcc options: -std=gnu99 -fopenmp -O3 -lm
FFmpeg
OpenBenchmarking.org Seconds, Less Is Better FFmpeg v3.3.3 H.264 HD To NTSC DV AMD A10-7850K AMD FX-8350 AMD FX-8370E Ryzen 3 1200 Ryzen 3 1300X Ryzen 7 1700 Ryzen 7 1800X Pentium G3258 Pentium G4400 Core i3 2120 Core i3 4130 Core i3 7100 Core i5 2400S Core i5 2500K Core i5 3470 Core i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 8700K Core i3 8100 4 8 12 16 20 SE +/- 0.05 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.03 SE +/- 0.06 SE +/- 0.11 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.06 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.09 SE +/- 0.23 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.07 SE +/- 0.16 SE +/- 0.06 SE +/- 0.07 SE +/- 0.10 SE +/- 0.05 SE +/- 0.05 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.07 SE +/- 0.02 10.83 7.99 8.95 8.86 7.90 9.53 7.72 16.09 13.58 13.86 12.67 9.06 11.06 8.80 8.51 8.77 7.47 6.51 4.67 5.74 6.59 4.88 4.52 6.67 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1 1. (CC) gcc options: -lavdevice -lavfilter -lavformat -lavcodec -lswresample -lswscale -lavutil -ldl -lxcb -lxcb-xfixes -lxcb-render -lxcb-shape -lasound -lm -llzma -pthread -std=c11 -fomit-frame-pointer -fPIC -O3 -fno-math-errno -fno-signed-zeros -fno-tree-vectorize -MMD -MF -MT
Darktable
OpenBenchmarking.org Seconds, Less Is Better Darktable v2.2.5 Test: Masskrug - Acceleration: CPU-only AMD A10-7850K AMD FX-8350 AMD FX-8370E Ryzen 3 1200 Ryzen 3 1300X Ryzen 7 1700 Ryzen 7 1800X Pentium G3258 Pentium G4400 Core i3 2120 Core i3 4130 Core i3 7100 Core i5 2400S Core i5 2500K Core i5 3470 Core i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 8700K Core i3 8100 30 60 90 120 150 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.09 SE +/- 0.07 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.03 SE +/- 0.15 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.20 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.03 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.00 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.01 31.71 18.69 19.10 15.64 13.83 8.29 7.37 116.39 97.41 32.79 34.51 19.26 21.49 17.27 15.90 17.84 13.71 13.27 8.43 10.76 11.57 9.01 7.43 12.18 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1
Darktable
OpenBenchmarking.org Seconds, Less Is Better Darktable v2.2.5 Test: Server Room - Acceleration: CPU-only AMD A10-7850K AMD FX-8350 AMD FX-8370E Ryzen 3 1200 Ryzen 3 1300X Ryzen 7 1700 Ryzen 7 1800X Pentium G3258 Pentium G4400 Core i3 2120 Core i3 4130 Core i3 7100 Core i5 2400S Core i5 2500K Core i5 3470 Core i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 8700K Core i3 8100 20 40 60 80 100 SE +/- 0.26 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.07 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.03 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.12 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.08 SE +/- 0.13 SE +/- 0.03 SE +/- 0.04 SE +/- 0.03 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.02 SE +/- 0.00 SE +/- 0.00 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.00 SE +/- 0.01 SE +/- 0.00 27.05 15.65 15.55 11.22 9.83 6.30 5.65 108.08 90.30 29.56 33.01 15.48 17.69 14.18 12.79 14.89 10.77 11.35 6.87 9.44 9.67 7.66 6.48 9.60 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1
Java JMH
OpenBenchmarking.org Ops/s, More Is Better Java JMH Throughput AMD A10-7850K AMD FX-8350 AMD FX-8370E Ryzen 3 1200 Ryzen 3 1300X Ryzen 7 1700 Ryzen 7 1800X Pentium G3258 Pentium G4400 Core i3 2120 Core i3 4130 Core i3 7100 Core i5 2400S Core i5 2500K Core i5 3470 Core i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 8700K Core i3 8100 5000000000 10000000000 15000000000 20000000000 25000000000 3695824837 8045422266 6671908892 6172908453 7170071116 12779958466 14781308341 6373510390 6579178106 6576558433 6741331401 7792159916 10327335008 13553549501 12690137735 13526570917 13182385662 15985603021 23296146964 17487845089 14378061711 17976936135 23957946054 14717625620 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1
Timed LLVM Compilation
OpenBenchmarking.org Seconds, Less Is Better Timed LLVM Compilation v4.0.1 Time To Compile AMD A10-7850K AMD FX-8350 AMD FX-8370E Ryzen 3 1200 Ryzen 3 1300X Ryzen 7 1700 Ryzen 7 1800X Pentium G4400 Core i3 7100 Core i5 3470 Core i5 4670 Core i5 6500 Core i5 7600K Core i5 8400 Core i7 4790K Core i7 5775C Core i7 7700K Core i7 8700K Core i3 8100 400 800 1200 1600 2000 SE +/- 1.51 SE +/- 0.28 SE +/- 0.47 SE +/- 2.08 SE +/- 0.48 SE +/- 0.32 SE +/- 0.56 SE +/- 1.70 SE +/- 0.52 SE +/- 0.33 SE +/- 0.25 SE +/- 0.23 SE +/- 0.15 SE +/- 0.27 SE +/- 0.24 SE +/- 0.40 1790 928 1034 1243 1098 527 467 1952 1405 1444 1137 1001 898 571 719 784 586 446 888 Phoronix Test Suite 8.6.0m1
7-Zip Compression‘The Phenom’ Vitor Belfort (21-10) looks to be making his return to middleweight after a last minute 205 pound title shot. Set to welcome him back is none other than Michael “The Count” Bisping (23-4) as the UFC has now verified. The match-up is targeted for the UFC’s upcoming Brazil card (presumably Rio), UFC FX or Fuel on Jan. 19th. The event is also rumored to headline a re-scheduled featherweight title fight between Jose Aldo vs. Frankie Edgar.
Belfort may be stepping off a loss to the LHW champ, Jones at UFC 152, but that doesn’t mean his stock drops much. Vitor came within inches of submitting the originally thought invincible Jones in the first – before suffering a submission (keylock) loss in the fourth. Prior to the loss, Belfort carried back-to-back finishes against Anthony Johnson and Yoshihiro Akiyama.
More from Caged Insider
Bisping on the other hand steps off a decision win over Brian Stann on the same 152 card. Overall, the perennial contender has been 5-1 since May 2010. Of those victories, two have came by way of TKO. As Bisping has adamantly said time and time again, he’s knocking on the title door, and with a win over Belfort, Bisping may lock his destiny as next in line for a title shot with middleweight great Anderson Silva. Of course that is if a super-fight between “The Spider” and St-Pierre does not obstruct the match-up.
Here’s the line-up as it stands.
MAIN CARD
Middleweight: Vitor Belfort vs. Michael Bisping
Middleweight: C.B. Dollaway vs. Daniel Sarafian
Heavyweight: Gabriel Gonzaga vs. Ben Rothwell
Lightweight: Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Thiago Tavares
PRELIMINARY CARD
Bantamweight: Yuri Alcantara vs. George Roop
Featherweight: Godofredo Castro vs. Milton Vieira
Middleweight: Andrew Craig vs. Ronny Markes
Featherweight: Nik Lentz vs. Diego Nunes
Lightweight: Edson Barboza vs. Justin Salas
Middleweight: Michael Kuiper vs. Thiago Perpeto
Light Heavyweight: Roger Hollett vs. Wagner Prado
Lightweight: Francisco Trinaldo vs. C.J. KeithHypotensive Patient? You’ve Got 90 Seconds!
You’re running a trauma activation, and everything is going great! Primary survey - passed. Resuscitation - lines in, fluid going. You are well into the exam in the secondary survey.
Then it happens. The automated blood pressure cuff shows a pressure of 72/44. But the patient looks so good!
You recycle the cuff. A minute passes and another low pressure is noted, 80/52. You move the cuff to the other arm. Xray comes in to take some pictures. You roll the patient. 76/50. Well, you say, they were lying on the cuff. Recycle it again.
A minute later, the pressure is 56/40, and the patient looks gray and is very confused and diaphoretic. It’s real! But how long as it been real? An easy 5 minutes have passed since the first bad reading.
Bottom line: Sometimes it’s just hard to believe that your patient is hypotensive. They look so good! But don’t be fooled. If you get a single hypotensive reading, STOP! You have 90 seconds to figure out if it’s real, so don’t do anything else but. Check the pulse rate and character with your fingers. Do a MANUAL blood pressure check. It’s fast and accurate. If you have the slightest doubt, ASSUME IT’S REAL. Remember, your patient is bleeding to death until proven otherwise. And it’s your job to prove it. Fast!Things aren't going as planned for Alfred Morris.
When the Dallas Cowboys signed the veteran running back out of free agency a year ago, it was it with the expectation that he still had fuel left in the tank -- enough so to be a more-than-solid player on their depth chart. Initially thought to challenge veteran Darren McFadden for the starting post, the team opted to draft Ezekiel Elliott with the fourth overall pick instead, leaving question marks surrounding the future of both veterans.
Fast forward to the present and McFadden is a free agent that the team would like to have return, and Morris is reportedly on the trading block -- with one year remaining on his two-year, $3.5M deal.
As reported by Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
The Cowboys will try to trade Morris and his $1.2 million base salary this season as he is not considered a good fit in spot duty behind Elliott, according to a source. Morris, who is not also not a good third-down option, needs carries to be effective and productive.
The Cowboys’ season may be over, but they’re not mailing it in. Don’t miss any breaking offseason news, take a second to sign up for our FREE Cowboys messenger!
It's quite telling for Morris that McFadden, after being absent from football from since May with a fractured elbow, was able to return in December and leapfrog Morris for the RB2 role -- forcing the former Redskins' star onto the inactives list for the remainder of the season.
The bottom line is Morris has more than enough talent to play in the NFL as evidenced in his first four years with the Redskins wherein he actually outran All-Pro Adrian Peterson over the course of his rookie deal.
He is now, however, a shell of his former self and has not delivered on demand as the team requires, and it looks like they're prepared to move on. Morris finished the season with career lows across the board, including rushing for only 243 yards, two touchdowns and 11 total yards receiving.
Whether the Cowboys trade him, or release him (regardless of June 1 designation) -- the numbers won't change against the salary cap.
The team would land a $1.637M savings against the cap while only eating $500K in dead money.KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The camaraderie and chemistry are already back.
The legs? Not quite.
Kei Kamara's training session on Tuesday, his first with Sporting Kansas City since his weekend return from a loan to Premiership side Norwich City, proved a little more taxing than the winger had expected. Still, manager Peter Vermes said, he's likely to suit up when Sporting host Seattle on Wednesday night (8:30 pm ET, watch on MLS Live).
“I think there's a good chance he'll be in the 18,” Vermes said. “But if you're asking if he's starting, I'm telling you no.”
Kamara returned from England on Sunday, after Norwich declined the purchase option on his loan.
When he took the training pitch on Tuesday, he told MLSsoccer.com, “It was like I never left. But it's kind of hot over here, and I was struggling.”
READ: Vermes says Sporting KC the "fortunate ones" in getting Kamara back from Norwich
Still, Kamara – who came off the bench for the Canaries in their 2-1 loss to Aston Villa on Saturday – hopes to be in uniform on Wednesday.
“I want to play, but I don't know what [Vermes] is going to make me do,” he said. “My legs felt a little heavy, so I just have to get some sleep and see how I feel after I'm done.”
When Kamara gets back to full speed, that will give Sporting one more option in an already-crowded forward corps that has yet to reach full strength – even with Dom Dwyer on loan to Orlando City SC and leading USL Pro in scoring.
Center forward Claudio Bieler, the only new member of the group, scored twice in Sunday's 4-0 romp over shorthanded Chivas USA and shares the league lead with six goals this season. Graham Zusi, playing on the right wing, is MLS' co-leader with four assists. C.J. Sapong, who has taken over on the left wing, got his first goal of the season late in the Chivas match.
Jacob Peterson, finally back from offseason shoulder surgery, made his first start of the year on Sunday and should contend for time at several forward spots. Veteran Bobby Convey, who has played sparingly since the early going and is now dealing with calf and Achilles strains, is expected to be available in another week. Soony Saad has been solid and energetic off the bench, also in a winger role.
And while Vermes doesn't expect him to return to game action for another month, center forward Teal Bunbury began training with the rest of the club this week as he continues to come back from a season-ending ACL tear in 2012.
“It's feeling good,” Bunbury said. “I'm still dealing with a little pain here and there, but overall it's feeling good. I'm just trying to take my time and make sure I'm feeling right when I'm out there,”
READ: MLS Disciplinary Committee suspends, fines SKC's Paulo Nagamura
The repaired ligament itself is fine, Bunbury said, but he has a small rough patch on the underside of his kneecap that occasionally cause him some pain.
“That's where I got my patellar tendon graft,” he said. “It's a little area. I'm just trying to get rid of that pain, because it's causing me to not be where I want to be.”
With three levels of competition this season – MLS, their U.S. Open Cup title defense and the group stage of the 2013-14 CONCACAF Champions League – Sporting could certainly use the depth. But with so many candidates, will there be enough minutes to go around even in a loaded schedule?
Vermes thinks so, even if he has to shuffle some players – Zusi in particular – from the front line to the midfield.
“I think everything is up for grabs,” he said. “I don't think anything is out of the decision-making process.”
Steve Brisendine covers Sporting Kansas City for MLSsoccer.com.WASHINGTON (AP) —The White House says President Donald Trump believes Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore “will do the right thing and step aside” if sexual misconduct allegations against him are true.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters traveling with Trump in Asia that the president believes a “mere allegation” — especially one from many years ago — shouldn’t be allowed to destroy a person’s life.
But Sanders says: “The president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”
The Washington Post reported Thursday that an Alabama woman said Moore had sexual contact with her when she was 14 and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney.
The Moore campaign denied the report as “the very definition of fake news and intentional defamation.”
In the Washington Post report, the woman, Leigh Corfman, says Moore met her several times when he was a local prosecutor in his 30s and at one point drove her to his home where he touched her over her underwear and guided her hand to touch him over his. They did not have sexual intercourse, the Post said.
Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by the Post in recent weeks said Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s. None of the other women said that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.
In his fundraising plea Thursday, Moore said “the Obama-Clinton Machine’s liberal media lapdogs just launched the most vicious and nasty round of attacks against me I’ve EVER faced.”
Moore says he refuses to repeat their lies, and he’s counting on the help of “God-fearing conservatives like you to stand with me at this critical moment.”
The Moore campaign says, “Judge Roy Moore has endured the most outlandish attacks on any candidate in the modern political arena, but this story in today’s Washington Post alleging sexual impropriety takes the cake.”
The statement also notes that Moore has been married to the same woman for 33 years and has four children and five grandchildren.
It continues: “After over 40 years of public service, if any of these allegations were true, they would have been made public long before now.”
Several Republican senators, including GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, however, said if the report about Moore and sexual contact with a 14-year-old is true, he should drop out of the race.
In a one-sentence statement Thursday, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says: “If these allegations are true, he must step aside.”
The response was swift from Senate Republicans shortly after the Washington Post story.
Republican Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado says, “The allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore are deeply troubling.” Gardner chairs the Republican senatorial campaign committee. He adds, “If these allegations are found to be true, Roy Moore must drop out of the Alabama special Senate election.”
Sens. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Jeff Flake of Arizona echoed those comments, and No. 2 Senate Republican John Cornyn of Texas calls the report “deeply troubling.”
The election is Dec. 12.Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Ten Americans detained last week while trying to take 33 Haitian children out of the country were charged Thursday with kidnapping children and criminal association, a government official said.
Information Minister Marie Laurence Lassegue's announcement came shortly after the five men and five women left a hearing at the prosecutor's office.
Under Haitian law, anyone accused of kidnapping a child is not eligible for bail, the attorney general's office said.
Conviction on the kidnapping charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison; the criminal association charge carries a penalty of three to nine years, according to a former justice minister.
Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN's "Larry King Live" on Thursday night that the judge in the case has three months to decide whether to prosecute.
"We hope that he will decide long before those three months," he said. "He can release them, he can ask to prosecute them."
If a decision is made to prosecute, the case would be heard before a jury, he said.
Told that the families of the detained Americans had pleaded for him to intervene, Bellerive said he could not.
"Those people are not in the hands of the government; they are in the hands of justice," he said. "We have to respect the law. It is clear that the people violated the law. What we have to understand is if they did it in good faith."
Bellerive said the Haitian government was open to the possibility of the case being transferred to a U.S. court but said the request would have to come from the United States. "Until now, I was not asked," he said.
He expressed gratitude for the work of the vast majority of Americans who have helped in the aftermath of the January 12 earthquake that he said killed at least 212,000 people.
The Americans were turned back Friday as they tried to take the children across the border into the Dominican Republic without proper documentation. They said they were going to house them in a converted hotel in that country and later move them to an orphanage they were building there.
"We can confirm that the 10 American citizens remain in custody in Haiti," said State Department deputy spokesman Gordon Duguid. "We continue to provide appropriate consular assistance and to monitor developments in the legal case."
The Americans have said they were just trying to help the children leave the earthquake-stricken country.
Some of the detained Americans have said they thought they were helping orphans, but their interpreters said Wednesday that they were present when group members spoke with the children's parents. Some parents in a village outside Port-au-Prince said they had willingly given their children over to the Americans, who promised them a better life and who said they could see their children whenever they wanted to.
Government approval is needed for any Haitian child to leave the country, and the group acknowledged that the children had no passports.
Some members of the group belong to the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho. One of the church's ministers asked for privacy and would not discuss the matter.
"I know you have many questions but we don't have answers right now," Drew Ham, assistant pastor, said in a note to reporters.
P.J. Crowley, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, has said that U.S. officials have been given unlimited consular access to the Americans and that U.S. and Haitian authorities are "working to try to ascertain what happened [and] the motive behind these people.
"Clearly, there are questions about procedure as to whether they had the appropriate paperwork to move the children," he said Wednesday.
CNN's Karl Penhaul in Port-au-Prince, Dan Simon in Meridian, Ohio, and Jill Dougherty in Washington contributed to this report.Episode 151 of the Matthew Filipowicz Show is now available to stream and download.
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/matthewf/The_Matthew_Filipowicz_Show_151.mp3]
Coming up on today’s show, we have Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Cheri Honkala back on the show to discuss her campaign with Jill Stein and getting arrested while Occupying Fannie Mae.
We also have journalist and author Greg Palast back on the show to discuss his new book, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: How To Steal An Election In 9 Easy Steps.
We’ll also discuss the Chicago Teachers Strike, how Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan support Rahm Emanuel’s efforts in busting the teacher’s union, where President Obama stands on the strike, and what progressives can learn from the CTU.
Support the show with a click of the mouse! Donate a post on your Twitter or Facebook today!
Remember, you can subscribe and podcast the show for free on iTunes and at www.matthewf.net. You can follow the show on Twitter and Facebook. You call the listener hotline at 617-855-TMFS. You can support the show by becoming a member. We have new shows every Tuesday and Thursday.New water records finally released to the Salt Lake Tribune appear to confirm that the National Security Agency's new data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, may not be fully operational.
On Friday, Tribune reporter Nate Carlisle was sent more than two years of data following a new ruling requiring the city to comply with his request issued earlier this month by the State Records Committee. Carlisle filed a public records request under the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA), and it was originally denied before he won earlier this month on appeal. The Tribune published the records on Monday.
The data shows that since July 2013, the facility used 6.2 million gallons of water in a month, the highest single month in more than two years of data. For that, the NSA paid $28,596 monthly to the City of Bluffdale, the minimum bill amount.
Under the two entities’ water contract, that minimum bill jumped to $31,692 as of 2014. However, since July 2013, the monthly water usage fell, rose, and fell again in 2014, reaching a low point of 2.8 million gallons as of February 2014 (the most recent data point).
In October 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Utah Data Center had experienced “10 [electrical] meltdowns in the past 13 months.” The paper added that the Utah site continuously draws |
or respect!). So, not exactly sure where manliness fits in. But then who cares because oops there's more:
I understand that 99% of veggies are fags. What separates my friends apart from them is the fact that they are 100% continent, chaste.
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Wait...what? Continent? Chaste?...Something's...something's afoot here. I'm not...I can't...I smell something.
Follow the 30 Days of Discipline bootcamp for winners - Discipline is the mark of a man. A man can control himself. A man sets goals and follows through. A man does what he aims to do. A man does not let baloney get in his way of achievement.
Where on earth are these people encountering large enough volumes of baloney to actually hinder their progress in life? GET OUT OF MY WAY, BALONEY. I'M TRYING TO BE A WINNER. (Pro tip: If too much baloney is getting in your way, just eat your way free—for your sperms!!! [See: meat thing.])
Keep a Positive Mental Attitude – Read motivating works and listen to motivating music. Despair art and sad music can easily put us into a depressed mood. Uplilfting art can uplift you and put you in a positive state of mind. Just say no to despair blogs, sad music and whiny bullshit. Say yes to high energy art.
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Like...this part is kind of cute, right? Misguided, but cute. He looks at art to stay in a good mood! I guess if the imagery on his site is any indication, by "art" he means medieval illuminations of monks fighting lions superimposed with inspirational slogans like "DEATH TO BALONEY" and "NO BALONEY BALONEYS AS GOOD AS MUSCLES FEELS." You know, high-energy stuff like that.
Be loyal to blood - The thing about lowlife liberals is that they hate everything about their race and culture and wish to destroy it. They hate the strength and pride of tradition. Nonsense, embrace the traditional and embrace your blood. When push comes to shove all you have is your blood. No one else will ever do for you in times of need. Blood first, everything else a very, very distant second.
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Okay, here's where shit gets rill. HERE IS WHERE THE SHIT IS ABOUT TO BE GETTING RILL, PEOPLE.
Ordinary anti-feminist meatheads are just a little meaty in the head, and maybe a little short-sighted in the getting-women-to-touch-their-penises department, but generally they are human beings who think inside of the box. But THIS special flurry of snowflakes seem to have pooped in the box (meat-poop; fiber is for fags), thrown the box into the garbage, thrown the garbage into the ocean, set the ocean on fire, and then squeezed through a tesseract to another dimension where everyone's absurd paranoias come true. Hold my hand, Calvin:
Stop watching porn - Heavy porn watchers are always Low-T having, light avoiding, pussy repellent boys. It's embarrassing to be a masturbater and it is shameful. No matter what the degenerate liars on tv say, it is nothing to be proud of. If someone walked in on you masturbating you would feel righteous shame. When you give up the porn you have time for more important things, like building a business, having more energy, attracting women, and being a damn man.
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:-|
Line.
Mouth.
This section takes a turn because it's where dude and his followers reveal that they literally believe in witchcraft. Oh, never break bread with a blacksmith's widow on the full moon, or the stag god of the harvest will steal your seed to fertilize his crops moste sinistre! It's pretty darling, actually. You know, life is scary and complicated. Being a man, I have no doubt, is scary and complicated in about as many ways as being a woman is scary and complicated, and these are just young guys searching desperately for a path. A way to feel safe and human and important and worthy of life. Alchemical potions like "meat" and superstitious rituals like "don't touch your pants-dagger or you'll jizz out your soul" are simple, comforting attempts to impose order and stability on a chaotic world. They're shortcuts, of course—fruitless shortcuts—to avoid dealing with the real stuff, the hard stuff. Pretty much all of them could be undertaken without throwing non-whites, non-straights, and non-males under the bus (things like "stay out of debt" and "get some exercise" are fundamentally good advice that transcends politics). But that's what fear gets you. Isolationism.
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They're just little boys looking for a magic spell to solve all their problems.
Never supplicate to women – Men are the rightful leaders. When you give your power over to a woman you are truly a vile little specimen. Women don't deserve undo praise and they certainly do not deserve everything men deserve. You've got to be the leader of your woman. If you aren't the leader of your women you are her follower. A follower is also known as a chump or a cuckold. Don't be a chump, be a champ!
Again, there's something cute about the cheery sloganeering and childlike optimism of this dude's philosophy. I want to not be a chump, but be a champ! I totally want that! The only parts I don't want are literally all of the other parts.
Take cold showers – Cold showers will turn a sissy into a man. Cold showers are the best. Cold showers refresh you. They make you feel alive. Cold showers get your blood pumping and your lungs working. Cold showers are how a man should start his day.
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Again with the magic spells.
Don't talk too much - Talking too much about your future plans fools your mind into thinking you've already accomplished it...Before you accomplish you're just a talker, after you accomplish you're a walker.
Again with the rhyming.
Okay, I can't even bother with the rest. Sorry (not sorry) if I didn't make it to 32.
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I know there's nothing new here, really. But what's so interesting to me about this community is that it's incredibly hateful and violent, but so vulnerable at the same time. It completely lacks self-awareness. It has dorky slogans. And superstitions. It's dripping with obvious anxiety about women and gays and anything foreign. It breaks my heart.
I can't think of anything less masculine (whatever "masculine" even means) than worrying frantically about your masculinity, nor anything more masculine than not being fucking bothered. It's only the people with the most insecurities who spend this much time thinking up ways to pave over those insecurities. If you're this terrified of losing something, you probably don't have it in the first place. And as much as these dudes hate me for being a fat loudmouth liberal feminist whore, I don't want to give them a punch in the mouth. I want to give them a hug. Because life is scary, I know. But it'll all be okay, little bros. It'll be okay.AFTER struggling with the switch several times, Nazim Husain realises there is no light bulb in the 8X10 ft room. The 53-year-old takes out his mobile phone. It’s a basic model and as Nazim fumbles and almost apologetically waves it around, in the dim light of the mobile torch is revealed a room covered in a thick layer of dust. As the light falls upon some fading photographs and a moth-eaten citation of a Padma Vibhushan, awarded to Bismillah Khan, dated March 22, 1980, Nazim finally breaks down. “Wah re mere Abbaji ki kismat (What a fate for my father)!” he cries.
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It was in this room, in a house located in a congested lane of Hadah Sarai area in Varanasi where the late shehnai maestro spent most of his life, that his shehnais were kept. Recently, one of his sons, Kazim, moved them to a new house he had bought. Some days later, five were stolen by Kazim’s son Nazre Hasan. Four of them were silver, and 23-year-old Nazre took them to a goldsmith, who melted them and gave him Rs 17,000.
Only two of Bismillah Khan’s shehnais remain, one silver and one wooden, and are now in the possession of police. In the two-storey house in Hadah Sarai, where at least 35 of Bismillah Khan’s family members live — not all of whom are on talking terms anymore — there is sadness, but no shock.
Of the six rooms in the house, separated by large verandahs, one is kept locked for Bismillah Khan’s belongings. The residents include his and his elder brother’s children and grandchildren. While Bismillah Khan was alive, they say, he took care of around a hundred relatives. Many of them would travel with him as part of the “music party”. After his death, the invitations to concerts, and the money, recognition have dried up.
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The house, constructed in the 1930s, was once the tallest building in the neighbourhood. Dwarfed today by multi-storeyed structures, it struggles to get even a little bit of sunlight. After Bismillah Khan’s death, two of his sons, Mehtab and Naiyar, died. Kazim, the father of Nazre, who has been arrested for stealing the shehnais, is the fourth of Bismillah Khan’s five sons. In his 60s, Kazim, who studied till Class VIII and doesn’t do any work, admits that he and his three sons never had any interest in music.
Kazim invested some of the money that had been left by Bismillah Khan equally among his sons to buy a small house in Varanasi, but his attempts at starting a business failed. Kazim and his family divide their time between their new home and the ancestral house.
“All of us regret what has happened,” Kazim says, “but one has to understand that there were about 80 people dependent on Abba’s income. Unki death ke baad sab bikhar gaya (Everything fell apart after his death).”
Another son of Bismillah Khan, Zamin, who is in his 70s and also a shehnai prayer, lives in another house in Varanasi with his family. The relatives say Zamin, a diabetic and kidney patient, doesn’t keep well, and that none of his six sons and five daughters is married.
Zamin’s son Ashfaq Haider is one of the only three grandsons of Bismillah Khan who chose playing shehnai as a career. He says, “Things were different till dada was there. Now, people do not even call us to programmes and events organised in his name. Some of us have moved to other businesses like opening a cloth shop, or taken up jobs. But many who did not have proper schooling are struggling.”
Of Bismillah Khan’s four daughters, 60-year-old Zareena Khan, also lives in the ancestral house with her children. Zareena was married to the son of Bismillah Khan’s elder brother, who used to play shehnai with him and died after his death.
Sitting in the main room of the house, where seeping moisture is rotting away many old photographs of Bismillah Khan, Zareena laments that others have benefited more from her father’s name than his family members. The flickering yellow bulb suddenly goes out. The family explains it is routine power failure, and someone gets up and opens the door leading to the lane, to let in light from the adjoining shops.
Nazim, the youngest of Bismillah Khan’s children, is a graduate in Arts and the most educated of his siblings. A tabla player and a recent recipient of the Uttar Pradesh government’s Yash Bharti award, he moved out of the house following differences with his elder brothers and lives with a friend in Varanasi. Nazim, who never married, admits he is visiting the house after years, on hearing the news of the theft.
Nazim sighs that with Bismillah Khan gone, the house is not what it was. Blaming the “non-music” background of elder brother Kazim for the theft of the shehnais, he says, “It is a mistake by a young boy, who didn’t think about what he was doing. No one from a musical background could have done it, not even for money. Those goldsmiths melted the shehnais into a mere silver block! Abbaji used to play one of them every Moharram.” Nazim received Rs 11 lakh for the Yash Bharti award. The money is welcome, he adds, as he hardly earns enough playing the tabla.
Both Nazim and Kazim want the government to set up a museum to hold Bismillah Khan’s belongings, including a Bharat Ratna in 2001, Padma Bhushan in 1968, Padma Shri in 1961 and the 1980 Padma Vibhushan, apart from rare photographs of his concerts in India and abroad. Ashfaq hopes for just a petrol pump in the family name, in order to survive.
The younger brother of Nazre though has decided enough is enough. Sitting in the house that still remains well-known in the neighbourhood as “Bismillahji ka ghar”, 10 years after the sitar maestro’s death, 20-year-old Razi Hasan says it’s time to leave.
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A third-year student of B.Tech at Punjab Technical University in Chandigarh, he says, “Nazre made a mistake and each one of us repents it, including him. The place itself suffocates me, and thus I pleaded with my father to let me go. I do not want limelight from music, like my grandfather. I wish to earn a basic living and not plead before the government to take care of me.” His next goal, Razi adds, is to get his younger brother, who is pursuing his graduation, “out of this place”.An unknown Lumia Windows Phone has quietly appeared on Nokia’s servers via Navifirm, suggesting one of those big rumored devices is being tested behind closed doors. Could be that true PureView device for AT&T we’ve heard so much about? Or Verizon’s iteration of the Lumia 920? Or maybe something else entirely?
Known as RM-860, there’s really nothing to take away from this discovery other than there’s a new Lumia device on the way. There’s no mention of carrier or specs—nothing. But an unknown Lumia handset is being tested, and that in of itself is exciting news.
Nokia has scheduled a press event for Feb. 25 at Mobile World Congress, so the timing is coming together quite nicely. I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before pictures and even more information leaks out.“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
As our devoted readers are aware, each month we highlight a Stupid Patent. This month, in the holiday spirit, we’ve decided to highlight a Stupid Patent Application. Our motivation for doing so is that we hope that our post, like Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, encourages a prospective patentee to change its stupid-patent-application-filing-ways. You see, we recently learned that Uber has filed for a patent on something so basic, so fundamental to our economic system, that it should be called out now before it becomes too late for both Uber and the public.
Here is some background: imagine you own a transportation company. You have a limited number of seats and you know that customers are willing to pay different amounts based on their sensitivity to cost. But you don't want seats to go empty, since every empty seat is a missed profit opportunity. So you implement a system where the more demand is up or supply is down, the more you charge. Or conversely, the more demand is down and supply is up, the less you charge. And then you file a patent application for your "invention."
Because Uber did just that, Uber is being forewarned of its risk of receiving the Stupid Patent of the Month award. Specifically, Uber has applied for a patent on a form of dynamic pricing, a practice that (even if it didn’t exist before the study of economics) has been heavily in use by various industries, including most famously by airlines, for over 20 years.
Here is claim 1 from U.S. Patent Application 13/828,481:
1. A method for adjusting prices for services, the method being performed by one or more processors and comprising: making a determination of an amount of requesters for a service at a given time; making a determination of an amount of available service providers for providing the service at the given time; adjusting a price, relative to a default price, for using the service provided by one or more service providers based, at least in part, on the determined amount of requesters and the determined amount of available service providers; and transmitting pricing data corresponding to the adjusted price to one or more requesting devices or one or more provider devices so that the adjusted price can be displayed on at least one of the one or more requesting devices or the one or more provider devices and be indicative of an adjustment in price as compared to the default price.
Essentially, Uber claims to have invented the method of (a) checking how many people are requesting a service; (b) checking how many service providers are currently available; (c) adjusting the price based on these two factors; and (d) then showing the price to the person requesting it. Not only was such dynamic pricing almost surely known before 2012, this is a claim directed to an “abstract idea” of dynamic pricing based on supply and demand. The addition of the “transmitting” clause (i.e. “do it on a computer”) shouldn’t matter to patentability.
In filing its application, Uber acts as a good example of how our patent system has encouraged the filing of applications that should never be filed in the first place. The story here is not about a patent that has been granted, but rather that Uber thinks a patent can be granted. Applications like Uber’s clog up the Patent Office, and oftentimes issue, despite clear flaws. Once issued, they can become fodder for trolls. Or in this case, they could be used to chill investment of time and resources in competitors.
We hope Uber’s application never becomes eligible for the regular prize, because this is a stupid patent application that the Patent Office should quickly reject. We hope Uber realizes the harm patents such as this one cause to the innovation economy as a whole. It is not too late for Uber to change its ways and reject a system of Stupid Patents. We encourage Uber to join our fight against stupid patents before it suffers from “No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.”Alec Baldwin revealed that he gets paid just $1,400 for each appearance he makes as President-elect Donald Trump on "Saturday Night Live."
That's just part of what the New York Times learned when it spent time with Baldwin backstage at the NBC sketch show recently.
The salary would seem low for all the attention Baldwin's Trump impression has brought to the show, including frequent angry mentions by the president-elect himself. But it seems the hard work is behind Baldwin.
Baldwin watched hours of Trump rallies and campaign appearances to perfect the president-elect's physicality, especially his speech patterns, lip pursing, and hand movements ahead of the impersonation's October 1 debut on the show.
According to the article, it takes just seven minutes to transform Baldwin into Trump now:
"A dusting of Clinique Stay-Matte powder in honey. A hand-stitched wig. Eyebrows glued up into tiny peaks. The rest is left to Alec Baldwin: the puckered lips, a studied lumbering gait and a wariness of humanizing a man he reviles."
"SNL" hair designer, Jodi Mancuso, told the New York Times that the wig "helps him transform instantly. The minute it goes on with the makeup, it’s like, 'Oh, I get it.'"
The actor admits that both he and the show underestimated Trump. "SNL," alongside many others, was caught off-guard by his election win. It had planned for at least four more years of Kate McKinnon's spot-on Clinton impersonation. But since the election, McKinnon has seamlessly transitioned to playing Trump's senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway. And Baldwin didn't foresee that Trump would continue to provide material.
Now, the former "30 Rock" actor sees the impersonation going on indefinitely and potentially moving it beyond the weekly NBC sketch show. Future appearances on "SNL," though, may become more infrequent as Baldwin is about to start filming two movies. He also worries that the impersonation may get old with viewers.
NOW WATCH: Trump slams Alec Baldwin: 'His imitation of me is really mean-spirited and not very good'
More From Business Insider— After being sold at auction, one of the notoriously derelict shopping centers in the township is expected to undergo a transformation. New York developer IP Associates LLC in May won the note for debt owed on the Independence Plaza property, a South Broad Street shopping center that has been a shell of its former self over the last decade. The company, headed by Jack Jemal and family, owns numerous shopping centers throughout New Jersey, spokesman Harry Zlokower said. “They’re in the real estate business. They buy and reposition properties,” Zlokower said. “That’s why they bought this property. That’s what they do.” Zlokower declined to state the amount paid for the note, but township economic development director Mike Angarone said the company had bid about $1.4 million more than the other four bidders. The shopping center is about 80 percent vacant — its main tenant is the Sticky Wicket bar and restaurant — and much of the facade around the 252,000-square-foot center shows outlines of signs advertising businesses that long ago left. The 12-screen Destinta movie theater remains shuttered, its parking lot used by summer visitors to a Rita’s Italian ice store. IP Associates LLC is ready and willing to invest in the shopping center, paying for the cleanup and maintenance in addition to redeveloping the center as a whole, Zlokower said. “They’re going to need to remediate and clean up the area once they take over, and then they want to re-tenant and fill up the space,” Zlokower said. Redevelopment has been the name of the game for failing shopping centers throughout the township. This summer, Suburban Plaza, a 90-percent-vacant shopping center on Route 33, is set to be partially demolished to make way for the new Court at Hamilton Center, anchored by a Walmart. On Route 33, both Hamilton Plaza and Mercerville Shopping Center have gone through massive renovations that included expansions, new facades and landscaping, and have seen an uptick in business. Angarone said yesterday that talks between the owners of the Cost Cutters plaza on Whitehorse Mercerville Road and a redeveloper had progressed, with the two sides only needing to “cross their Ts and dot their Is.” Discussions between the township and the buyer, who Angarone declined to discuss, have included talks of a new zoning overlay for the shopping center, allowing something other than retail to be built on the site. But for Independence Plaza, the goal always has been to revitalize the shopping center to its former glory, Angarone said. The township and developer are set to meet within the coming weeks to discuss plans for the property, including the possibility of applying for state grants. “They understand what the issues are and the township will try to do whatever we can to pave the way,” Angarone said.
Contact Mike Davis at (609) 989-5708 or mdavis@njtimes.com.
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on TwitterWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force would ground the Russian-built RD-180 engines that power its Atlas 5 rockets if a U.S. government review determines that several sanctioned Russian individuals have too close a relationship with the engine maker, a top U.S. general said on Friday.
United Launch Alliance launches an Atlas V rocket with an United States Air Force OTV-4 onboard from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, May 20, 2015. REUTERS/Michael Brown
Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, who heads the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center, said the Pentagon was reviewing responses about the sanctions issue and related matters in time to meet a Feb. 22 deadline set by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain.
McCain last week asked the Air Force and Pentagon to explain why the U.S. government is continuing to use engines built by Russia’s NPO Energomash given sanctions in place against Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and other sanctioned individuals, who control the company after a big reorganization.
Congress banned use of the Russian RD-180 rocket engines for military use after 2019, following Russia’s annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014.
But U.S. lawmakers eased the ban late last year, worried that it could drive United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, out of business and leave only privately-held SpaceX, to lift satellites into space.
Greaves said the Air Force would abide by U.S. law.
“These folks are on the sanctions list, and if the Department of the Treasury comes back and says there’s a problem with that relationship, then we have to work with the Congress and others to determine a way ahead,” he said.
Asked to elaborate about possible consequences, he said, “If we’re not supposed to be flying the RD-180s, they’re grounded.”
The Treasury Department declined comment. A spokeswoman for United Launch Alliance also had no immediate comment.
The U.S. Court of Federal Claims had ruled on the issue in response to a lawsuit filed in April 2014 by SpaceX, concluding that the purchases were not in violation of U.S. sanctions.
At the time, senior U.S. officials said that control of Energomash by Rogozin could provide a basis for formally blocking the property and interests of the company.
McCain argues the situation has changed due to a new Russian law that took effect in January, which consolidated the Russian space industry under a single state corporation, Roscosmos. Roscosmos is due to merge with the state-owned parent company of Energomash, making Energomash a direct subsidiary, he said.Sorry, English election debate host hopefuls: the bidding war appears to be over, at least as far as the Conservative Party is concerned.
The party has accepted the Munk Debates' offer of a debate on foreign policy — the fourth, and likely final English-language, debate slot, with the likely prospect of one more in French.
Meanwhile, the broadcast consortium — which includes CBC, Radio-Canada, CTV and Shaw/Global — announced it has reached a deal in principle to hold two nationally televised debates, one in English, one in French, "at the height of the 2015 federal election campaign."
Four of the five major federal political parties — the New Democrats, the Liberals, the Green Party and the Bloc Québécois — have signed on to the proposal, which was finalized during a closed-door meeting in Ottawa Thursday afternoon.
Notably absent from the list, however, is the Conservative Party, at least for the moment.
Kory Teneycke, the party's lead negotiator, made it clear last week he would not take part in further discussions with the broadcasters, who he has publicly urged to to cover the privately-hosted debates "in a manner that ensures all Canadians can watch."
Conservative Party campaign spokesperson Kory Teneycke on federal leader debates and the Conservatives' new approach. 10:37
In a statement released before the consortium deal had been announced, Teneycke suggested the Munk debate would highlight the "stark differences" between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his opponents on topics ranging from "Russian aggression in Eastern Europe" to how best to confront ISIS.
That brings the number of debate invitations accepted by the governing Conservatives to four: an English debate hosted by Maclean's and Rogers and a French-language debate hosted TVA, both of which were announced last week, as well as a proposal for an English debate on the economy hosted by the Globe and Mail and Google.
Tories want 5 debates: Teneycke
Teneycke has said the party would consider up to five debates, which leaves just one spot remaining, which will almost certainly go to to a French-language outlet.
In a release announcing their successful bid, Munk Institute chair Rudyard Griffiths said that both Harper and New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair have accepted the invitation.
And while they are still waiting for a response from Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, he confirmed Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has not been asked to take part, as her party does not meet the requirement of 10 MPs to be an officially recognized party in the House of Commons.
"It was our determination that inviting all the leaders of the federally registered parties recognized by Elections Canada, parties who also have MPs in Parliament, numbering six in total, to our standalone event would unduly limit our ability to hold a substantive debate," Griffiths explained. That means the Quebec federal parties Bloc Quebecois and Forces et Democratie, both of which have two MPs like the Greens, were not invited either.
Liberals back national broadcasts
Shortly before the deal with the consortium was announced, the Liberal Party, which had thus far maintained a non-committal stance by refusing to accept or reject any invitations — issued a statement laying out its "overarching principle" on the issue — namely, that debates "need to reach the largest number of Canadians," an ability they say "only the broadcast group" possesses.
"We believe that a debate hosted by the country's four, national networks is the best way to have as many Canadians as possible engage in the debate process," the statement notes.
They also want to see an "equal number" of debates in both official languages, with the French debates available "for Francophones across the country." The party said it would also like at least one debate in a "town-hall style format, where the bulk of the interactions are audience-based."
Other criteria listed in the Liberal statement:
Establish clear rules around the ownership and uses of debate footage.
Invite all party leaders represented in the House of Commons.
Touch on a variety of themes relevant to the national discourse.
Include a live studio audience and audience participation.
The Liberals are also the first party to explicitly raise the issue of whether "pre-writ debates" — which would include at least one, and possibly more, of the debate proposals accepted by the Conservatives — would include a blackout on party advertising from the date of debate to the "official start of the election."
According to the Liberals, such a rule would ensure fairness in the face of the Conservatives' overwhelming financial advantage.
NDP spokesman George Soule says his party believes more debates are both helpful to Canadians and "good for democracy."
To that end, his leader has accepted "in principle" every invitation extended thus far — and is also open to the proposal put forward by the broadcasters last week.
"You can be sure that [Mulcair] will debate the prime minister anytime, anywhere," he said.
Soule noted the NDP has already stated "Francophones across the country must have access to the leaders' debates."
Process 'flawed': Green Party
Meanwhile, Green Party spokesman Julian Morelli says he agrees with the Liberals that reaching the largest number of Canadians is "key" — and sees Teneycke's recent exhortations to the broadcasters to carry debates hosted by other media outlets as a tacit admission.
"He's admitting that the way he's proposing it is flawed, that it won't reach Canadians," he told CBC News. "Now he's asking the consortium to come to make sure it does."
Morelli also likes the idea of a town hall format.
"If the prime minister… is afraid to debate Elizabeth May, then he doesn't qualify to be prime minister, period."
May has been invited to take part in the Rogers/Maclean's event.Washington: A new study shows that negative advertisements targeting US President Barack Obama in 2008 depicted him with very dark skin, and that these images would have appealed to some viewers' racial biases.
The finding reinforces charges that some Republican politicians seek to win votes by implying support for racist views and ethnic hierarchies, without voicing those prejudices explicitly. The purported tactic is often called "dog-whistle politics" - just as only canines can hear a dog whistle, only prejudiced voters are aware of the racist connotations of a politician's statement, according to the theory.
Research has found that Barack Obama's skin appears to have been darkened in certain Republican attack advertisements screened during the 2008 campaign. Credit:Washington Post
That debate has been prominent in the 2016 campaign, primarily targeting Donald Trump, but it has existed in almost every recent presidential election. To hear their opponents tell it, when Republican politicians say they oppose a generous welfare system, they really mean black beneficiaries are lazy. If they endorse strict immigration enforcement, they really mean that Latinos are criminals, critics say.The New York Times has a powerful, front-page article today on Iraqi chemical weapons from the Saddam Hussein era. It’s an impressive piece of investigative journalism from C.J. Chivers – which the right is unwisely seizing on for reasons that don’t make sense.
The article itself doesn’t need embellishment. As Jessica Schulberg summarized, the Times’ report reveals that “between 2004-2011, American troops fighting in the Iraq War found over 5,000 chemical warheads, shells, and aviation bombs. The discoveries were never publicly disclosed by the military; U.S. soldiers who were exposed to nerve agents like sarin and mustard gas while attempting to remove conventional weapons were denied appropriate medical care and ordered to remain silent about yet another miscalculation of the Iraq War. “
The article deserves to be read and taken seriously. Some on the right, however, see a different kind of opportunity. As Simon Maloy explained
[F]or many conservatives, the real news broken by the Times is that BUSH WAS RIGHT ABOUT IRAQ. It’s incredible that I have to write this sentence in October 2014, but here it goes. No, George W. Bush was not right about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, I know what you’re going say. “But look! The Times says they found WMDs in Iraq! The liberal media was wrong! Bush was right!” No, Bush was still very wrong. Very, very wrong.
Brad Dayspring, a Republican operative and former aide to then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, argued overnight that “those who mocked any statement that there were WMD’s in Iraq … were/are wrong.” Someone at the conservative Media Research Center published a variety of triumphant tweets, including this gem : “Every single thing media told us about Iraq and WMD was wrong.”
I can appreciate why the right is still a little sensitive on this. A Republican president lied the nation into a disastrous war, the consequences of which we’re still struggling to address, based in large part on weapons stockpiles that didn’t exist. That conservatives are still searching for some kind of evidence to justify the catastrophic Bush/Cheney failure isn’t too surprising.
In the years following the misguided U.S. invasion, we’d periodically hear reports about American troops finding chemical weapons. This was usually followed by a variety of Republicans proclaiming, “A ha! We knew it! We were right all along! Take that, liberals!”
I specifically remember when then-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and then-Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) held a press conference to declare, “We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
This generally turned out to be quite embarrassing for Republicans, who routinely failed to recognize the difference between old, inoperable chemical weapons from Iraq’s war with Iran, and the active, imaginary WMD stockpiles Bush used as a rationale for war.
The same is true today. Conservatives may hope to exploit the New York Times report, but the article references pre-1991 weapons. Everything Republicans said in the lead up to the 2003 invasion is still wrong.
Indeed, a little common sense is in order – if U.S. troops had found WMD stockpiles, the Bush/Cheney administration would have said so. Indeed, they were desperate to do exactly that.
But the WMD were never found because they didn’t exist. This is no longer open to debate. Strange figures on the fringes of American politics – including, apparently, Iowa’s Joni Ernst – occasionally suggest the non-existent weapons were secretly there, but these claims were discredited many years ago. Even Bush administration officials itself long ago abandoned this nonsense.
The fact that Republicans still don’t want to come to terms with this really isn’t healthy.
Schulberg added, “The existence of aging chemical weapons in Iraq was never the justification for Bush’s invasion, nor was it a secret. The secret was the harm that they were causing to U.S. troops and the subsequent failure to care for these individuals.”The Pirates are set to host the Cardinals on Sunday, Aug. 20, but the game will be moved to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, per multiple reports (DKPittsburghSports.com was first). This happens to be during the Little League World Series in Williamsport, and the game will reportedly be televised on ESPN, which also has the rights to the LLWS. So there’s going to be plenty of crossover there.
Obviously, they can’t exactly play this game on a Little League field. As noted on stltoday.com, there’s a full-size baseball field: BB&T Ballpark at Historic Bowman Field. It’s 345 feet down the left field line, 405 to center and 350 to right. It only seats 4,200 people, but MLB will surely try to find a way to beef that up before the game. The ballpark is currently home to the Williamsport Crosscutters, the Phillies’ Class A short-season affiliate. Click here to see a picture of the ballpark, via Wikipedia.
The special Sunday night game will be slightly reminiscent of the Braves and |
16.
According to Portzline, Rychel's agent and his father met with the Blue Jackets at development camp this fall to ask why Rychel was so low on Columbus' depth chart. It's assumed that's when the trade request was made. However, the Blue Jackets aren't interested in trading the 21-year-old, Portzline adds.
Rychel's spent most of this season with the American Hockey League's Lake Erie Monsters, where he has five goals and 12 assists in 19 games, along with 43 penalty minutes
Portzline lists a number of teams reportedly interested in acquiring the son of former NHLer Warren Rychel:
Anaheim Ducks
Boston Bruins
Calgary Flames
Detroit Red Wings
Montreal Canadiens
New York Rangers
Toronto Maple Leafs
Rychel has 50 points (17 goals, 33 assists) in 70 career AHL games.Making the press rounds for X-Men: Apocalypse, producer Simon Kinberg took the time to chat about the X-Men spinoff featuring everyone’s favorite Ragin’ Cajun, Gambit (Channing Tatum), and revealed that the wild success of Deadpool is, in part, responsible for the new delay.
The movie was originally slated for an October premiere but has been delayed multiple times since it was officially announced back in 2015. The last hurdle came a little over a month ago, when we learned that the comic book movie was being rewritten by Tatum’s producing partner, Reid Carolin (Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL), and while the script was being hammered away, director Doug Liman would be helming Amazon Studios' first original movie, a psychological thriller titled The Wall.
Speaking to Flickering Myth, Kinberg explained the reasons why they pushed back the date for Gambit and his answer was pretty interesting in that for him, nailing the tone and character voice 100% right comes before the plot itself. Here's what he said:
“We’ve got to get the script right,” admitted Kinberg. “We just didn’t get the script to the place where we all thought the movie deserved. So we’re still working on the script. We’re very close, actually, to being done with the script. And the hope is that Channing [Tatum] has a couple of movies he has to shoot, but that we would shoot at the end of this year, or the beginning of next year.”
“It’s looking really good,” he continued about the project. “I’m not going to say anything about it content-wise. I think one of the things that I’ve learnt on all these movies – and maybe the lesson was best learned for me on Deadpool – is the most important thing is getting the tone and the voice right. That the storytelling, the actual narrative, the plots are sort of interchangeable and disposable, ultimately.”
“If I ask you what your favourite movies are, you’re not going to tell me about the plot. You’re going to tell me you love this character. And so what we’ve really tried to do with Gambit is make sure that we get the voice of that character right and the tone of the comics 100% on the page. It’s a very unique tone. It’s unique from Deadpool, it’s unique from the X-Men. It’s a heist movie that we’ve never done in these kinds of films before. He’s a con-man. And so that’s really where we’ve spent our time.”
“There was a moment when we were going to shoot the movie at the beginning of this year, and then we felt like it just wasn’t ready. Knowing, hoping, that Gambit is like what Deadpool was – the start of a new franchise within the X-Men universe – we want to make sure we get it right.”
There you have it. Based on Simon Kinberg’s comments, are you guys confident Gambit will get the movie the beloved card-throwing kinetic energy-wielding mutant deserves?
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(via Flickering Myth)England finished third in the 2016 SheBelieves Cup
England's women will take on the three top ranked teams in the world in the SheBelieves Cup in the USA in March.
The Lionesses will play world champions the USA, Germany and France - the same line-up that contested the inaugural edition of the competition last year, won by the USA.
England face France in their opener on 1 March in Pennsylvania.
They then face the hosts in New Jersey on 4 March and European champions Germany in Washington on 7 March.
Captain Steph Houghton said the SheBelieves Cup was a "great tournament to play in last year with big crowds and tough opposition".
"It's important we test ourselves against the best teams and players in the world and we'll certainly do so there," she added.
England fixturesBritons benefited from pooled EU resources in the emergency response to the attack in Sousse in Tunisia two years ago, the report said Sami Boukef/AP
Theresa May’s Home Office drew up an unpublished document that revealed how Britons could be more at risk of terrorism and crime after Brexit.
The paper, prepared by officials with help from MI5 and MI6, warned that leaving the EU would make the UK less secure from “terrorism, criminality and illegal migration”.
Senior figures involved in compiling the document, which has been leaked to The Times, maintained that all of its fears were justified. They said it set out the details of the challenge for ministers involved in the Brexit negotiations.
The 49-page paper was produced in the run-up to the referendum last year but then dropped in a row over campaign tactics.
Mrs May oversaw the document, which started in the Home Office, according…Researchers at the MIT are publicizing that they have fixed the incandescent lightbulb with a brilliant improvement. They have wrapped the interior filament in a crystal glass that both bounces light and contains heat. It recycles energy in a way that addresses the main complaint against Edison’s bulb: It burns far too much energy for the light that it produces.
Why is this interesting? About a decade ago, governments around the world developed a fetish for banning incandescents (through an efficiency rule) and replacing them with expensive LED technology and florescent bulbs. It happened in Europe first but eventually came to the United States. The last American factory to produce them closed in 2010, and they are ever harder to find in even the big-box hardware stores. (As with all such bans, there are exceptions for elites who desire specialty bulbs.)
The change has been seriously annoying for many consumers. It has even given rise to hoarding and gray markets (in Germany, such bulbs were repackaged as “heat balls”). It has produced something of a political backlash, too.
On a personal note, my own dear mother replaced all her incandescents with fluorescents several years ago. I was sitting in her house feeling vaguely irritated by the searing lights in the room — cold and dreary — and had to turn them off. Sitting in the dimly lit room, my thought was: this is what the government has done to us. A great invention from the dawn of modernity is being driven out of use. Do I have to bring my own candles next holiday season?
Why should governments be in the position of deciding what technologies can and cannot be used, as if consumers are too stupid to make such decisions for themselves? Who is to decide what is efficient, and what the proper trade off should be between the energy expended and the light produced?
Maybe some people don’t mind the “inefficiency” of incandescent bulbs relative to the warm and wonderful light they produce. Entrepreneurs need to be able to discern and serve their needs.
The bans have given rise to a vast debate about which bulb is best and what kind of light technology governments should and should not permit. But these are really the wrong questions. The real issue should be: Why should governments be in the business of picking right and wrong technologies at all?
As the MIT innovation in lighting suggests, there are possibilities yet undiscovered that regulators have not thought of. If you write detailed regulations about existing technologies, you are forestalling the possibilities that scientists and entrepreneurs will discover new ways of doing things in the future.
A vast regulatory apparatus on cell phone technology in 1990 could never have imagined something like a modern cellphone. Regulations on digital commerce in 2000 might have stopped the rise of peer-to-peer services like Uber. Indeed, one of the reasons that the digital world is so innovative is precisely because the regulators haven’t yet caught up with the pace of innovation.
Regulations on technology freeze the status quo in place and make it permanent. How, for example, will regulations respond to the news that a new and improved form of incandescent bulb is possible? Early tests show it to be more efficient than the replacements which the regulations favor. Will there be a new vote, a rewrite of the law, a governing body that evaluates new lightbulbs, the same way we approach prescription drugs? None of this can possibly match the efficiency of a market process of trial and error, of experimentation, rejection, and adoption.
In government, a ban is a ban, something to be enforced, not tweaked according to new discoveries and approaches.
Herein we see the problems with all attempts by government to tightly manage any technology. Bitcoin is a great example. As soon as the price began to rise and the crypto sector began to appear viable, government agencies got in the business of regulating them as if the sector was already taking a shape that would last forever. And because technology and industry are always on the move, there is never a rational time to intervene with the proclamation “this is how it shall always be.”
Regulatory interventions stop the progress of history by disabling the limitless possibilities of the human imagination.
By the time regulators get around to rethinking the incandescent, the industry will probably have moved on to something new and even better, something no one can imagine could exist today.U.S. homebuilders should be feeling pretty good about their business, given the nation's severe shortage of homes for sale, but a sharp spike in the cost of lumber is weighing heavy on their bottom lines.
A monthly index of homebuilder confidence in the single-family market fell 2 points in July to 64 from a downwardly revised June reading. Economists had expected a reading of 68. Anything above 50 is considered positive, but this is the lowest reading on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index since November — before the presidential election.
"Our members are telling us they are growing increasingly concerned over rising material prices, particularly lumber," said NAHB Chairman Granger MacDonald, a homebuilder and developer from Kerrville, Texas. "This is hurting housing affordability even as consumer interest in the new-home market remains strong."
Builders were initially euphoric following the November election of President Donald Trump, hoping the new administration would lift some of the heavy regulations that now account for about a quarter of the cost of putting up a new home. Builder confidence jumped 6 points from November to December (63 to 69) and then jumped again to 71 in March, following the administration's repeal of certain environmental regulations specifically involving water.
Now, new tariffs on Canadian lumber of up to 24 percent announced by the Trump administration in May, as well as the expectation of additional tariffs on other homebuilding materials imported from overseas, are overtaking the benefits of deregulation. The cost of framing lumber has spiked in recent months and continues to rise today, which only exacerbates already rising prices for land and skilled labor.
"Builders will need to manage some increasing supply-side costs to keep home prices competitive," said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz.
The median price of a newly built home sold in May rose to a record $345,800, according to the U.S. Census. Homebuilders claim they are shifting focus to cheaper, starter homes, as demand by first-time buyers rises, but construction costs are simply too high to profit in that segment of the market.
"We juggle it," said Stephen Paul, vice president of homebuilding operations at Maryland-based Mid-Atlantic Builders. "It's a challenge if you sell homes under contract months in advance, because you're exposed to those price increases."
Of the index's three components, current sales conditions fell 2 points to 70 and sales expectations over the next six months dropped 2 points to 73. Buyer traffic lost 1 point to 48, the only component in negative territory.
Regionally, on a three-month moving average, builder confidence in the Northeast rose 1 point to 47. The West and Midwest each fell 1 point to 75 and 66, respectively. Sentiment in the South dropped 3 points to 67.Who would say that they don’t know who Taylor Swift is? All music lovers should have been familiar with that name. Yes, Taylor Swift can be considered as the biggest and most popular pop star in the whole world. Tickets have always been sold out pretty quickly when it comes to any of her concert. All people are looking forward to her world tour too, especially her latest world tour and latest album, 1989. If you are interested in knowing her upcoming events, we have what you need to know here in Main Event Specials.
The Background
Did you know that she starts her career when she was just teenager? For the sake of breaking into the country music scene, she decided to move to Nashville. 14 year-old Taylor Swift has started working on the hit songs we still often hear nowadays, like “Teardrops on My Guitar”, etc. 16-year old Taylor Swift has begun performing in front of public. After the release of one hit album, she decided to do tours around the world. There are Fearless Tour in 2009-2010, Speak Now World Tour in 2011-2012, the Red Tour in 2013-2014, and the 1989 World Tour in 2015.
Did you know that #taylorswift has been writing songs since she was 5? Click to Tweet
Recommended Artist : One Direction tour details
Taylor Swift in Concert
Taylor Swift’s live shows have always been crowded and full-of-cheering show. Her shows have always been electrifying, wildly entertaining, and dynamic even up until now when she has turned 25. She is a prodigy. This is what people have always thought of her talent as singer and song writer. If you have seen even one performance of her, you will think the same. With her three albums sold over one million sales in the first week, she becomes the first female artist to reach such accomplishment. Let’s see her world tour concerts here. Fearless Tour 2009 - 2010
Taylor Swift’s world tour concert starts with Fearless Tour in 2009-2010. Actually, even before her tour launch, she played several shows and dates in UK and Australia. In this debut tour, she performed up to 122 shows. 7 shows were done in Australia, 1 in Asia, 6 in Europe, and 108 in North America. The cities included are Evansville, London, Seattle, Twin Lakes, Columbus (Ohio), Boston (Massachusetts), Kansas City, NYC, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Sydney, Tampa, Denver, Houston, etc. Various venues were used for this tour. Among them, her concert in Los Angeles (LA) was held at Staples Center. Speak Now World Tour 2011 - 2012
After the success of her debut tour concert, she made another accomplishment in her Speak Now World Tour in 2011-2012 with 110 shows in total done around the world. 7 shows were done in Asia, 11 in Europe, 80 in North America, and 12 in Oceania. Here are some cities to mention. They are Singapore, Tokyo, New York, Indianapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Charlotte NC, Raleigh, Dallas TX, etc. Some cities are the same ones where Fearless Tour was held. It goes the same with the concert venue. In Pittsburgh, USA, this concert was held at the Heinz Field. Red Tour 2013 - 2014
In 2013-2014, there was the Red Tour which was just as amazing as the previous tours. No, it was even greater than the Speak Now during the previous two years. In this concert, Taylor Swift played 86 shows; 7 in Asia, 6 in Europe, 66 in North America, and 7 in Oceania. The cities chosen for her show are Newark, Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Diego, Orlando, Sacramento, Portland, Tacoma, Berlin, Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila, etc. With that much cities the show was held, there is no telling how much are the exact gross earnings obtained. Hot Concert : Luke Bryan Concert Tickets
The 1989 Tour Dates
The latest world tour concert is very highly anticipated by many people nowadays. If the Red Tour is greater, the 1989 World Tour might even be the greatest. It has started since May 5, 2015 and will end later on December 12, 2015. There will be 83 shows in total; 6 in Asia, 8 in Europe, 63 in North America, and 6 in Oceania. If you want us to mention the city, here are some of them. They are Tokyo, concerts in Las Vegas, Baton Rouge, Detroit, Amsterdam, Dublin, Fargo, St. Paul, Des Moines, Brisbane, Louisville KY, Salt Lake City (Utah), etc. Is there any Taylor Swift concert in Phoenix, Arizona then? It seems that Taylor Swift tour this time won’t be held there. Even so, she has announced there that there will still be two tour dates in Arizona. They will be on August 17-18. Those two tour concerts will be held at Gila River Arena in Glendale, Arizona instead. How about the venue? There is not that much change, but they are not always the same either. Taylor Swift concert tour in Detroit might be held in the Palace of Auburn Hills in her first debut concert tour, but this time it will be held in the Ford Field. Read also : Justin Bieber Tour 2016 article
Taylor Swift Tickets & Upcoming EventsAbstraction vs. Physicality: The twin Suns of Homestuck.
For those of you who aren’t up to date, I’m far from the first to argue for a Gnostic reading of Homestuck. Sam herself was describing it as an inherently Gnostic story as early as 2012 (and predicting the “Characters escaped from the narrative” angle to Act 7 that early, too). BetweenGenesisFrogs has been doing great writing from this angle, and yeah, so have I.
The gist is that Gnosticism posits two distinct worlds that exist in parallel:
The world of darkness, the low world ruled by the false God, Yaldabaoth:
The physical world of material reality, that we interact with on a physical basis. This world is described as false, limiting, and the source of suffering.
Then there’s the world of Light, the spiritual worlds of Ideas and true information. The way the creation myth works is that there is a True God who goes by many names, the most modern of which is Abraxas. This God contains all opposites and emanates a series of Aeons — Deities/Ideas that come in pairs, and who are meant to “create reality together”.
If these Aeons sound familiar, well, they should. Besides the various parallels smattered throughout the story with specific pairs of characters, Homestuck has a literal set of pairs of Ideas that together make up all of reality:
The Aspects.
So what we end up with is a work greatly informed by Gnosticism.
And one of the core principles of Gnosticism, the one we’re going to discuss here, is that distinction between the invisible but “Good” World of Ideas and the tangible but “Flawed” World of Matter.
The capacity to perceive ideas is an intrinsic Good in Homestuck’s universe. Hence why the artistic instinct is so championed: Anyone who adds ideas to reality through art is bettering that reality for themselves and all others, according to this philosophy.
This is why Caliborn is marked as a villain by his incredible inability to engage meaningfully with any art, or any Ideas other than the ones he has espoused for himself. What Caliborn creates, he creates poorly — and a lot of his “creation” is tantamount to stealing.
Understanding this gives new meaning to what have, up until now, seemed like somewhat arbitrary symbols:
The two different styles of Sun depicted in Homestuck.
This comic by my pal SamusRidley illustrates the point quite nicely.
On the one hand you have the blank white, Schematic Homestuck sun, which characters can look at with no issue. This sun is a representation of the idea of a sun. It is a depiction of the idea of Light, on a conceptual level, much like the Light aspect itself.
On the other, you have the photorealistic sun. This sun is realistic and presented as physical, literal.
This sun is still a symbol, but the physical sun denotes Material reality, and looks more photographic and well-executed to reflect this. The schematic sun, by contrast, is a representation of a concept — a cartoon, a blank suggestion of Ideas.
Sam herself put it best:
“ Both the schematic, abstract sun and the photorealistic, seemingly “real” sun are symbolic. They both carry meaning within the narrative. But the fact that one is schematic and the other is photorealistic is significant (it signifies).
Because in our culture we have a whole sort of mythology about photographs — that they’re more real, that they’re trustworthy, that they are in essence the simple truth. Whereas a cartoon is “just” a fabricated image.
But Homestuck flips that mythology on its head, turning the schematic, more abstract and notional image, the image closer to language, the image that needs to be read, into the true world of ideas that underlies reality.”
(Don’t worry, I’m not going to write paragraphs for ALL of these. I really need to cut down my word count. Which means I should probably shut up now, wait, shit —
As such, what few symbols the photorealistic Sun DOES contain stress it’s objective reality and raw physicality. In place of Blank #ffffff White, the physical sun looks bright and angry— and it is given a particular photo-realistic pallete, at least by comparison to the rest of the comic.
This sun is not a symbol for the concept of Light. It’s a symbol for little else than all of the literal, physical realities that the Sun represents. The sun conveys heat and intense, unceasing, dangerous light. It is overbearing and browbeating when it appears. And the events it appears during define absolutely everything about the characters it appears TO.
Dave’s strife battle with Bro is the epitome and conclusion of years of abuse for Dave, and the dominating tension of the sun conveys all of Dave’s pent up stress and desperation, mirroring the pressure he puts himself under.
This relationship defines all of Dave’s feelings about himself and interactions with others throughout the story, and the overbearing sense of weight he gives his abuser’s implications for his identity are unquestionably True to him.
The same can be said of Alternia, where the sun is DESCRIBED as overbearing and dementedly forceful. The sun that blinds Terezi is also this colored-in, physical sun. Her viewing of it is also the result of an act of troll violence, an act that carries along the history of karmic acts that reverberates across her people throughout centuries and lifetimes.
Just like all of the feelings of inferiority to heteromasculinity Dave carries with him feel intrinsically True to him, troll ideals of cultural violence and suppression of emotion feels Real to Terezi. But neither thing is truly real. They are both just excellently formed, incredibly bright Lies.
But Terezi also sees her first glimpse of True light through Vriska’s actions, and she grows to cherish the moment for this fact. Awakening on Prospit also guides Terezi further from Troll society’s crude, imposed reality of violence and enslavement and towards Skaia/Sburb’s ideology of self-fulfillment.
Do you see what’s happening? Vriska’s blinding sets Terezi on the path to lift herself out from the confines of Alternia’s crude, material reality and up towards freedom and self-actualization in the Pleroma — the World of Light, the World of Ideas. It’s the Gnostic path to Enlightenment, built into a character arc.
In contrast we have Kanaya, a troll who’s values are pretty much completely untouched by the rest of Troll society and who’s forms of self-identification and expression are informed entirely by Sburb. She’s also the only Troll noted not to be affected by Alternia’s overbearingly powerful Sun — Just as she is unaffected by it’s brutalizing ideology.
Much as material reality is a lie in Gnostic faith, in Homestuck, the physicality of the sun is used to mark the extremely well-consructed ideological Traps that both Humans and Trolls are trapped in by their respective physical realities.
This is much as we in the modern day are encouraged to think in mutually exploitative and dehumanizing patterns by the physical worlds in our lives.You know exactly what I’m talking about, right? I don’t seriously have to give a whole explainer on that, right. Ok let’s move on.
This reaches comically explicit heights with Calliope. Like, how on the nose can it get? Calliope’s entire existence has so little freedom it consists of a single room. Of a silent cage that plays host to an exhausting familial chess game, a death match of mutual disapproval and loathing.
Her only escape from Caliborn’s spiteful, self-aggrandizing moralizing is escaping into fiction and friendships carried out online, and Calliope literally blurs the line between these two so much they don’t exist. Her best friends ARE her favorite characters, and all she wants in life is the opportunity to escape the physical walls around her and be able to Be With Them.
She’s LITERALLY TIED TO THE ROOM WITH A BIG CHAIN, she’s as Homestuck as it gets — Calliope is CHAINED to her material reality,
both literally AND ideologically, as she believes all sorts of things are true about her own nature that hold her back and make her hate herself.
If any of that sounds familiar, well — it should, because in a lot of ways it was literally my childhood. I think in a way it was a LOT of people’s childhoods. Calliope is the millennial nerd fandom experience for those of us growing up in conservative environments or with conservative family with control over our lives, distilled into a metaphysical microcosm.
Like me — like us — Calliope hates herself. Calliope hates her life and the arbitrary, meaningless rules keeping her and her brother connected, and keeping her from living out the life she dreams of — with friends and love and possibility and creative potential.
But she can do nothing to escape her confines except go online and engage with reality on a conceptual level — in the realm of Ideas. You know, just like we do in fandom? This is what Gnosticism is getting at — that the world of Ideas is intrinsically Good, for humanity and for ourselves.
The base, physical reality we live in is a burden, a falsehood, and we are diminished whenever we are bound to it. That’s what Homestuck is getting at.
That’s the lived experience Calliope represents. This dynamic is mirrored and recolored for every single character in the comic, pre-Sburb entry.
If you STILL don’t quite buy that this is intentional, consider that the Gnostic depiction of Yaldabaoth depicts a red, colored sun:After new rules issued last month announced that a comedy would be defined as a series with episodes of 30 minutes or less and drama would be episodes an hour long, the TV Academy has released the first decisions by a panel established to evaluate category eligibility.
The nine-member panel, which includes five industry leaders appointed by the academy chairman and four appointees by the board of governors, ruled that Showtime’s “Shameless,” CW’s “Jane the Virgin” and Fox’s “Glee” can be considered comedies, despite their length. A two-thirds vote of the panel was required to reach each decision.
Each of the series will compete in the comedy category for all other awards, including performer, writer, director, etc.
“This show was always conceived as a comedy; pitched to the network and studio as a comedy; and marketed to viewers as a comedy,” said “Jane the Virgin” showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman. “We are thrilled with the television academy’s decision.”
“Shameless” has competed in both drama and comedy, but made the switch to comedy last year. Series star William H. Macy got his first nomination last year in the comedy category.
The TV Academy did not comment on any other potential petitioners, such as Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” which competed last year as a comedy.
Nominations for the 2015 Emmy Awards will be announced on July 16. The Emmys, which will be hosted by Andy Samberg, will air Sept. 20 on Fox.Mar 29, 2013 (CIDRAP News) – A group of scientists acting under the aegis of a vaccine research advocacy organization has asked President Obama's bioethics committee to evaluate the ethics of experiments designed to increase the transmissibility of H5N1 avian influenza viruses.
The Foundation for Vaccine Research (FVR), a privately funded group that seeks to increase funding for vaccine research, argues that manipulating viruses to make them more deadly than they are in nature is "morally and ethically wrong," and that the ethical questions have been pushed aside in recent debate. Such experiments have been dubbed gain-of-function research.
The foundation made its request yesterday in a letter to Amy Gutmann, PhD, chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (PCSBI). The commission is a White House advisory committee that was set up in 2009. So far it has mostly addressed topics assigned to it by the president or federal agencies, but it can also address topics of interest to its own members, according to information on its Web site.
The FVR letter was signed by the group's chair, Simon Wain-Hobson, PhD; its executive director, Peter Hale, and 15 other scientists. The list includes such prominent names as Paul A. Offit, MD, of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; Marc Lipsitch, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health; Sir Richard Roberts, PhD, of New England Biolabs, a 1993 Nobel laureate; and Michael J. Imperiale, PhD, of the University of Michigan, a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB).
Wain-Hobson authored a Nature commentary this week that called for a halt to research designed to make viruses more transmissible, pending a thorough public discussion and independent risk assessment. The stated aim of such research on H5N1 is to identify which mutations might render the virus capable of spreading readily among humans, so that scientists could tell if the natural virus is starting to evolve in a dangerous direction.
Controversy over H5N1 research erupted in late 2011 when two groups of flu researchers revealed plans to publish studies involving lab-modified H5N1 viruses that could spread by air among ferrets. The NSABB objected to publishing the full details of the studies, but after a series of discussions, clarifications, and revisions, the two papers were published in May and June 2012. The studies were led by Ron Fouchier, PhD, of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, DVM, of the University of Wisconsin.
Amid the controversy, a group of 40 prominent flu researchers announced a moratorium in January 2012 on further H5N1 gain-of-function research. The group called off the moratorium on Jan 23 of this year, saying the pause had allowed time for scientists to explain the potential benefits of the research and for governments and others to review relevant policies.
A spokeswoman for the PCSBI, Hillary Wicai Viers, acknowledged that the commission received the FVR's request but declined to comment on it further.
"Dr. Amy Gutmann, Chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, received the letter from the Foundation for Vaccine Research late Thursday afternoon," Viers told CIDRAP News via e-mail. "The Commission has not yet seen the letter though it looks forward to the opportunity to review the opinions of these distinguished scientists."
The letter calls on the commission to "consider the ethical issues raised by H5N1 gain-of-function research, especially experiments to increase the transmissibility of H5N1 viruses so they can be transmitted between humans as easily as the seasonal flu." H5N1 has a fatality rate of about 60% in confirmed cases, but it does not spread readily from person to person.
The accidental release of a lab-generated, human-transmissible H5N1 virus could "cause a global pandemic of epic proportions that would dwarf the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed over 50 million people," the FVR letter says.
The foundation canvassed "a cross-section of life scientists" and found that most of them believed that manipulating a virus in the lab to make it more lethal is morally and ethically wrong.
Hale said the group has talked with close to 200 scientists, most of them virologists, about the issue since February 2012. "A large majority of them share all of these concerns, excluding the influenza people," he told CIDRAP News.
The letter says that more gain-of-function studies on H5N1 and other viruses are on the way. A Chinese group is working with H5N1, and a Dutch group is expanding its H5N1 studies to include work with the H7N7 avian flu virus and has plans for similar research with the SARS coronavirus. Also, German scientists recently did experiments to see what it would take for canine distemper virus to spread from dogs to humans, the letter states.
Echoing concerns explained in the letter, Hale said, "It's become apparent over the past 15 months that the whole ethics issue has been brushed under the carpet. The talks on ethics have been on the margin."
He said the FVR thought White House officials or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would ask the PCSBI to examine the ethics of the research, "but nobody did, and there was a vacuum there. That's why we did it."
The foundation feels that it's both appropriate and necessary for the commission to review the issue, given that the US government has funded most gain-of-function studies so far, the FVR letter says.
Hale said the steps taken by the federal government so far don't fully address the ethics of gain-of-function research. Among those steps, in February the National Institutes of Health announced a framework to guide decisions on funding for research designed to create H5N1 viruses capable of respiratory transmission in mammals. At the same time, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a draft policy requiring federal agencies to routinely review the risks of funded studies involving 15 high-risk pathogens.
Hale said the FVR has reason to think the commission may be receptive to the request.
"We wouldn't have proceeded unless we knew in advance there was an excellent chance the commission would take up this issue," he said. "We can't think of an ethical issue that's more deserving to be looked at."
He said the foundation understands that most requests to the commission come from the White House or HHS, but one petition came from the National Biodefense Science Board.
According to information on the PCSBI Web site, the group is assigned topics by the president and federal departments, but it also can "choose a topic to study based on issues of interest to the members."
The commission has issued five reports so far. The most recent one, issued Mar 19, deals with the question of anthrax vaccine trials in children.
The FVR wants to see an independent risk assessment of gain-of-function research, Hale said. "It really is astonishing that 12 to 15 months into this debate we still don't have an indepenpent risk assessment." He added that the Government Accountability Office has been getting calls from lawmakers seeking such an assessment.
The FVR is primarily funded privately by its own board members, but it has received support from foundations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for specific events, according to Hale.
See also:
Mar 27 CIDRAP News item about Nature commentary by the chair of the FVR
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/news/mar2713scan.html
Feb 21 CIDRAP News story about federal policies on dual-use H5N1 research
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/news/feb2113framework.html
Jan 23 CIDRAP News story about end of research moratorium
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/news/jan2313moratorium.html
PCSBI site
http://bioethics.gov/A Maine hunter featured on Yes on 1 ads in support of the bear referendum has been accused of using non-fair chase tactics while hunting ruffed grouse.
Joel Gibbs, 56, of Lowell, was charged with shooting a firearm from a motor vehicle on Oct. 17 in Masardis, a small town in Aroostook County, after game wardens allegedly witnessed Gibbs shoot at a ruffed grouse through the open window of a vehicle, according to Lt. Dan Scott of the Maine Warden Service.
Gibbs was recently featured as a “Maine bear hunter” in the pro-ban television and online advertisement entitled “Stop,” funded by Mainers for Fair Bear Hunting, the group leading the Yes on 1 campaign. In the ad, Gibbs states, “I’ve hunted all my life, and this cruelty has no place in Maine.”
In Maine, shooting from a motor vehicle (or even having a loaded firearm in a motor vehicle) is a Class E crime, punishable by up to six months of imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.
Gibbs, however, denies shooting the grouse in an unsportsmanlike way.
“I didn’t shoot anything from my vehicle,” Gibbs said. “I wouldn’t believe a thing they say.”
The concept of “fair chase,” as defined by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, is “the ethical, sportsmanlike, and lawful pursuit and taking of game animals in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such animals.”
It’s a chief ethical concept considered in the creation of hunting rules and regulations throughout the United States.
“It’s something that we generally issue summonses for,” Scott said. “It’s a fair |
the average media induced zombie. The government dependency society is obedient to the dictates of police authority. Fake nationalists, actually are Tory subjects of a pernicious empire. Just the tip of an intrusive iceberg, the concept of an internal police state emerges as the primary real threat that faces the public. Countless examples of repression, documented in the alternative media, provide evidence that draconian measures to achieve phony internal security, is an integral component of central government subjugation. Homeland Security chronicles false threats to justify and guarantee greater state control. This bureaucratic behemoth is in the business of recruiting dredges of perverse and pathological domination that would make the " Brownshirts " proud. Flying squadrons of drones for permanent surveillance does not make a country free. America, founded on dissent, now has a timid and docile population. Two examples from history clarify this point. During the Viet Nam protest movement, flowers of peace inserted into the barrels of National Guard troops were cause for reflection. The internal strife that divided the country, based upon a bogus war, gave rise to the slogan, "Luv it or Leave it"... As the decades passed, even the most "gung ho" Rambo has come to the conclusion that the grunts were ferried in country for the purpose of ingratiating the military-industrial-complex. The net result of the conflict was the advancement of Communism. Not just in Southeast Asia, but more significantly, inside the gilded corridors of authoritarian centers of power in our own government. Do you believe that the dimwitted TSA goons would be receptive to challenges of their S&M dominating practices? An anti internal internment camp protest needs to spread nationwide before the trains start to roll. Where is the outrage from the public? When will the spirit of the 60’s resurrect the moral imperative necessary to save this nation from the fascist elites, who are intent on perfecting our own holocaust? Remember the courage of the lone Chinese dissenter standing in the path of rolling tanks in Tiananmen Square. Just short of two decades after the Kent State shootings, the world watched the Red Chinese disgraced and loss of face. Since those days, the United States proceeds in lock step to adopt the Marxist Capitalist version of the Chinese model that operates slave communities and rewards crony comrades. The international merging of global corporatism into a board of directors designed to abolish any remnants of individual freedom is unassailable. The shredding of the Bill of Rights goes on with little anger. The ACLU of fifty years ago is a gutted shell of a vigorous advocate of liberty. Where are the conservatives and libertarians eager to defend Nobel Peace Prize nominee PFC Bradley Manning? The most silent amendment to the Constitution is the third, Conditions for quarters of soldiers. "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." Today’s application of Amendment III has Homeland Security effectively quartering their domestic spy warriors in the form of technological devices that gather intelligence on ordinary citizens. The physical barrier of a locked door poses little protection when the DHS Stasi invades and violates your inherent autonomy. The recent "prescribed law" called the NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act is an offense against every American. The good news is that there is at least one constitutional federal judge, Katherine Forrest, left on the bench. The video, NDAA declared unconstitutional ; Indefinite detention of Americans blocked by the court, provides a sliver of relief. The Washington Times concludes, " Section 1021 of the NDAA could have set a slippery precedent for indefinite detention of American citizens. This ruling was a milestone in the protection of 900 years of legal precedent, but the fight for due process raises frightening questions about the future of American liberty and the intentions of our representatives.” America desperately needs protection from the Homeland Security Gestapo. Their stated mission is the essence and embodiment of domestic government terrorism. Until Americans acquire the fortitude and will to resist and disobey unlawful edicts, the country will remain in danger of dictatorial despots. Without concerted commitment, the next dictate will include the internment in re-education facilities of Federal Judges that are insistent in upholding the Constitution. The FEMA armored combat vehicles are ready for deployment. Remember Tiananmen Square before yet another Kent State becomes routine. SARTRE – May 20, 2012Conflict diamonds are to be used to fund a new campaign of violence by President Robert Mugabe's regime against his political opponents in Zimbabwe as elections loom.
Environmental experts are blaming the "utter failure" of the Kimberley Process, set up in 2003 to monitor conflict diamonds and stop them reaching mainstream outlets, for allowing Mugabe and his allies to siphon off millions of dollars in profits from Zimbabwean diamonds, which have now gone on sale.
There has been consistent criticism of the Kimberley Process since the decision to lift a ban on the sale of the gems from the newly discovered Marange fields in Zimbabwe, despite evidence of human rights abuses and killings by Mugabe's soldiers. Human Rights Watch claimed the decision "betrayed the trust" of miners, consumers and retailers.
This weekend, Anjin Investments, a Chinese-led venture in Zimbabwe in partnership with Mugabe's government, announced it was now the world's biggest diamond producer, with a stockpile of three million carats to sell. The company, which thanked the Kimberley Process for its backing, is funding a new military college in the country.
Reports from Zimbabwe suggest the feared Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), Mugabe's secret police, is flush with cash, and has bought hundreds of vehicles and weapons from China in recent months. Salaries have been increased and thousands of new officers are being trained, raising concerns that they will be used to intimidate voters in next year's elections.
That is despite the official reduction in the CIO's budgets after the finance minister, a member of the Movement for Democratic Change, blocked extra funding in protest at its political bias towards Mugabe's Zanu-PF party. Campaigners also suspect many tens of millions of dollars from diamond production are bypassing official channels into the pockets of corrupt politicians and businessmen.
Mike Davis, of the campaign group Global Witness, which walked out of the Kimberley Process over its decision on Zimbabwe this month, said no safeguards remain over the jewellery we buy. The "blood diamond" had been allowed to flood back on to the world markets, he said, and in the case of Zimbabwe, would undermine all economic sanctions against Mugabe.
"It takes money to pay for violence and human rights abuses and the tap had been turned off for Mugabe and his allies," he said. "Now the Kimberley Process has turned it back on by allowing them to sell their diamonds despite clear evidence of human rights abuses and killings. The benefits from diamond sales in Zimbabwe are going directly to Mugabe and his allies. The Kimberley Process is now a fig leaf for the diamond industry."
In the strongest attack yet, Global Witness is calling for a new international body to fill the void: "They have dithered around wringing their hands, and now effectively have aided and abetted the return of the blood diamond. They flunked it, dropped the ball and ordinary Zimbabweans will pay the price. It's now a myth that there are any controls over diamonds."
The issue of the profits from diamond mining being used to finance bloody conflicts in the developing world came to prominence in 2000 with the UN-commissioned Fowler Report. It showed that UN sanctions had failed to stop the Angolan civil war being financed by a trade in diamonds that saw the company De Beers openly buy $500m worth of Angolan diamonds, legal and illegal, in 1992 alone.
Davis, who took part in a recent Kimberley Process inspection of Zimbabwe's new diamond fields, said those days had returned, as diamonds from Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe and Venezeula all escape sanctions despite evidence of corrupt and abusive practices involved in their production. The trip to Zimbabwe was marred by constant interference and obstruction, yet the official report made no mention of the obstructive behaviour of the Zimbabweans, he said.
Davis called on the Kimberley Process to "admit once and for all" that it was simply an organisation by which governments and the industry exchange information and has no practical connection with the battle for the ethical production or sale of diamonds.
"It is effectively a forum in which governments get together and swap ideas about how to better control export and import of diamonds and how to collect tax most efficiently. That's what the Kimberley Process does – no more, no less," he said.
Diamonds remain an enormously profitable business for a select few, and the trade is frequently linked to money- laundering and criminal gangs as well as the wholesale resource stripping of countries such as Congo and Angola. There were deep vested interests in keeping the trade as murky as possible, said Davis.
For the ordinary consumer, anxious not to fund a blood-stained trade, it remains all but impossible to find out where diamonds come from.
While one or two large firms operate "closed supply lines" – buying direct from a mine in Canada or other more easily ethically monitored countries and tracing their production all the way into their display cabinets – this is not financially viable for most jewellers.
Jeremy Hoye runs a designer jewellers chain. At its main store in Brighton he said around one in 20 customers asked about the origin of diamonds.
"I'd be happier not using diamonds at all, it's so hard to know where they are coming from," he said.
"You can tell by the shape where they were cut, but nothing more, and without a credible body to certify them it's a lottery. Jewellery should be about design. The issues about what is ethical in jewellery are muddied – people talk about ethical gold but as most gold around now is recycled, it becomes a bit of a nonsense."
• This article was amended on 21 December 2011 to correct Central Information Organisation to Central Intelligence Organisation.This picture illustrates an idea I had for One of Feng’s super moves. This move takes advantage of both birds/Phoenix things, it’ll probably be a level 2 or 3 super and enhances all of her normals and specials for a period of 20-25 seconds (unless that’s too long).
Above is an illustration of how the start up animation could look. I’ll describe what’s happening in each image below.
This is just part of the idle animation (I know it looks very boring) This is near the start of the super animation, she removes the birds from her hair and takes a stance ready to combine them (I didn’t know much about the birds but I’m assuming the have ghost like properties, so forgive me for inaccuracies) The two birds are combined and released from their bird forms (yet again I’m assuming a lot here) The two entities are separated again resembling ectoplasm or some thing This is the result of the super, basically they orbit in a clockwise direction. If the player remains still it will continue spinning till the 10 seconds are over
When activated both Phoenix orbit the user, depending on which Phoenix is directly in front of feng her immediate attack will be filled with its power. Regardless of which Phoenix is used however, they both extent the range of her moves (similar to lucario in SSBB when he receives more damage) as well as changing the properties of certain moves ie some moves causing stagger stages that couldn’t before. I am assuming that her attacks take a while to come out so that the extra range isn’t abused.
Outside of the range increase the Black and the White Phoenix have very different properties when used in moves. To aid in this demonstration below is a special move performed without activating the super (I tried basing it off of makoto’s bullet punch move, yeah it’s not perfect)
When performing the same move with the white Phoenix directly in front of her, it grants her the ability to regain a little more health with every strike. The damage dealt by the move stays the same. Illustration below.
Now performing the same move with the black Phoenix, it grants more damage than normal at the cost of recoil damage. Illustration below
Performing either of these will not stop the other Phoenix from orbiting, so mashing buttons to get the same ability again quickly will not be easy. Rather combos require timing to maximise damage or to recover the max amount of health. I don’t know what kind of character she would be so in game these ideas might not work well.
Below is an image of the wheel that spins behind her.
One last detail, when the super is activated and she is swapped to another character the effects remain and when feng is called as an assist the ability still enhances her attacks. However since the wheel still turns even when the character is off screen it’s hard to tell if the attack is amplified with the black or white Phoenix power, this mean if you are low on HP mashing the assist could kill you as the effect of the Phoenix is passed onto the active character
Phew that was a lot of work putting this together, all of this was done on an iPad (even drawings). Any way I hope something like this creates more interest in the character when it comes time to vote.
EDIT: I have change a few details, and beefed up the move a bitMar 12, 2016; Dallas, TX, USA; Dallas Stars defenseman Kris Russell (2) and left wing Jamie Benn (14) and center Jason Spezza (90) celebrate Benn's game tying goal during the third period as St. Louis Blues defenseman Alex Pietrangelo (27) looks on at the American Airlines Center. The Blues defeat the Stars 5-4 in overtime. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports
Dallas acquired defenseman Kris Russell on Feb. 29 in a trade with the Calgary Flames. Russell has been a league leader in blocked shots for the past three seasons, and continues on that pace this year, ranking second with 204 in 60 games. His blocks per game total of 3.4 leads the league.
Since joining the Stars, Russell has held steady with 30 blocks in nine games (3.3 per game), but the Stars have exceeded their average of 15.0 per game in recent performances. On Thursday, Dallas registered 20 blocked shots. On Saturday, the Stars had 26.
"I think it really is a team effort, where it gets contagious when you see guys that don't normally block shots give up their body and block a shot," Stars coach Lindy Ruff said, singling out Colton Sceviour, Ales Hemsky and Valeri Nichushkin. "It isn't your typical guys who lay their body out; and when that happens, it's a great thing for a club. The guys get up on the bench and some of those blocked shots are just like scoring a goal."
Stars goalie Kari Lehtonen registered his second shutout of the season Saturday, and said the blocked shots were noticeable.
"It all starts from starting and stopping in our own end and not curling away," Lehtonen said. "We are doing the hard work, and that's how our guys are in the right position in the shooting lanes. It's really nice for the goalies."
Russell is simply playing his same game, but the Stars seem to be catching on.
Twitter: @MikeHeikaIn 1901 it was obvious that the workers of the Chorro Falls and Gaitanejo Falls needed a walkway to cross between the falls, to provide transport of materials, vigilance and maintenance of the channel. Construction of the walkway took four years; it was finished in 1905.
In 1921 the king Alfonso XIII crossed the walkway for the inauguration of the dam Conde del Guadalhorce and it became known by its present name.
The walkway has now gone many years without maintenance, and is in a highly deteriorated and dangerous state. It is one meter (3 feet) in width, and is over 200 meters (700 feet) above the river. Nearly all of the path has no handrail.
Some parts of the concrete walkway have completely collapsed and all that is remaining is the steel beam originally in place to hold it up and the wire that follows most the path. One can latch onto the wire to keep from falling.
Many people have lost their lives on the walkway in recent years. After four people died in two accidents in 1999 and 2000, the local government closed the entrances; however, adventurous tourists still find their way into the walkway.
The regional government of Andalusia budgeted in 2006 for a restoration plan[1] estimated at € 7 million.
Via en.wikipedia.org“That does not bode well for the future,” warned John Cohen, who served in intelligence posts under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. | Getty Trump’s derision dismays intelligence specialists
Intelligence and foreign policy specialists were aghast Saturday at President-elect Donald Trump’s latest disparagement of the intelligence community and perturbed by the Republican National Committee’s accusation that intelligence officials are hawking politically motivated narratives.
The condemnation came after Trump’s transition team and the RNC rejected news reports posted Friday night that said the CIA and other intelligence agencies had determined in a secret assessment that the Russian government had interfered in this year's election specifically to help elect Trump — not just to rattle confidence in the U.S. political system.
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“Appropriate skepticism … is healthy,” said Raj De, the former general counsel at the NSA. “Outright denial is not.”
“That does not bode well for the future,” warned John Cohen, who served in intelligence posts under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee who has been pushing the White House to release more details about Russia’s alleged digital meddling, went further.
“This is dangerous,” he tweeted.
The reactions came after a whirlwind 12 hours that started when The Washington Post reported on the secret CIA assessment. The New York Times followed with a piece reporting that intelligence officials had concluded “with high confidence” that the Russians had also hacked the RNC’s computer systems but had intentionally withheld any pilfered information or documents.
In an unsigned, late-night press release, the Trump transition team blasted both findings.
"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," the brief statement said, referring to the imperfect claims that spurred the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’"
De said the outlash “just felt a little flip,” reflecting the sentiment of several former intelligence professionals.
But Sean Spicer, the RNC’s chief strategist and communications director, admonished the Times for what he said was simply false reporting and insisted the RNC had not been hacked.
“The intelligence is wrong,” he said in a CNN interview Saturday morning. “It didn’t happen. We offered The New York Times conclusive proof that it didn’t happen. They refused to look at that. They ignored it because it didn’t fit the narrative.”
He then accused intelligence officials of pushing the story for political purposes.
“I believe that there are people within these agencies that are upset with the election and are pushing a personal agenda,” Spicer said.
Cohen called the remarks “amazing” and “disturbing.”
“I don’t think the answer to making sure the intelligence community feels listened to is to attack it publicly,” De remarked. “I’m not sure that’s a productive solution.
“If there were really an agenda, wouldn’t this have happened before the election?” he added.
Spicer’s accusation echoed a line Trump himself had used last week in a Time magazine interview, when he said he believed politics played a role in the Obama administration’s late October decision to formally blame Moscow for the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and other election-related operatives. The administration suggested that the Kremlin had launched the digital campaign to broadly “interfere” in the election.
“Perhaps, once he has taken office, Mr. Trump will go to CIA and look at the rows of memorial stars in the lobby — each representing a fallen officer — and reflect on his disparagement of the intelligence community's work,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
“How can you serve as commander-in-chief while running a political campaign against your own intelligence officials?” Wyden tweeted.
Trump’s ongoing dismissal of intelligence community findings is especially disturbing to foreign policy experts after reports surfaced Saturday that the incoming president is expected to tap Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of energy goliath Exxon Mobil, to be his secretary of state.
Tillerson has long-standing business ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and was awarded the country’s Order of Friendship in 2013.
“With selection of Tillerson, all the most important for US Congress to establish an independent, bipartisan commission on Russian meddling,” tweeted Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia under Obama.
Lawmakers are pushing for such a commission, as well, calling on the White House to turn over its eventual findings from a just-announced review of election-related hacking so Congress can conduct its own probe.
On Friday night, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who will take over as minority leader in the new Congress — demanded a congressional commission, vowing to “join with our Republican colleagues next year.”
But it’s unclear how much Republican support there will be for such an investigation, outside of several vocal proponents, such as Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
The Post reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) “voiced doubts” when intelligence officials briefed him on their findings that Moscow had dispatched its hackers to help elect Trump.
Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell, said he could not relay “what did or didn’t happen in a classified briefing.”
“But obviously any foreign breach of our cybersecurity measures is disturbing, and the White House has just announced an investigation to see if that has occurred and will formulate a response,” Stewart added.
However, there’s no guarantee that Trump — or his allies in Congress — will accept the conclusions of the White House report, which is expected before Obama leaves office on Jan. 20.
The prospect is unsettling to foreign policy-focused Democrats.
“President-elect Trump should welcome such a review, rather than continue to smear the judgment and professionalism of the intelligence professionals who work every day to keep Americans safe at home and abroad,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Many see the report — which will present a thorough review of all election-affiliated hacking going back to 2008 — as the president’s attempt to put pressure on his successor to strike back at Putin over the alleged election hacks.
Critics have long feared that Russia’s cyber warriors will run wild under Trump, as the president-elect has shown little desire to castigate the foreign power over its digital mischief around the world.
“Having been around government for a long time,” Cohen said, “you can't govern based on conspiracy theory, you can’t govern based on conjecture, you can’t govern based on what you read on social media."Digital security and its discontents—from Hillary Clinton’s emails to ransomware to Tor hacks—is in many ways one of the chief concerns of the contemporary FBI. So it makes sense that the bureau’s director, James Comey, would dip his toe into the digital torrent with a Twitter account. It also makes sense, given Comey’s high profile, that he would want that Twitter account to be a secret from the world, lest his follows and favs be scrubbed for clues about what the feds are up to. What is somewhat surprising, however, is that it only took me about four hours of sleuthing to find Comey’s account, which is not protected.
Last night, at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance leadership dinner, Comey let slip that he has both a secret Twitter and an Instagram account in the course of relating a quick anecdote about one of his daughters.
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Who am I to say no to a challenge?
As far as finding Comey’s Twitter goes, the only hint he offered was the fact that he has “to be on Twitter now,” meaning that the account would likely be relatively new. Regarding his Instagram identity, though, Comey gave us quite a bit more to work with:
... I care deeply about privacy, treasure it. I have an Instagram account with nine followers. Nobody is getting in. They’re all immediate relatives and one daughter’s serious boyfriend. I let them in because they’re serious enough. I don’t want anybody looking at my photos. I treasure my privacy and security on the internet. My job is public safety.
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Both a noble sentiment and an extremely helpful clue for tracking down the FBI director’s social media accounts. Because, presumably, if we can find the Instagram accounts belonging to James Comey’s family, we can also find James Comey.
Unfortunately, Instagram isn’t exactly conducive to custom searching, and there was no way any of his five children or his wife would be using their full names. Twitter, however, gives us a little more leverage.
After some trial and error, I found that his 22-year-old son, Brien Comey, seemed to have the largest online presence as a basketball star at Kenyon College. Go Lords.
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It wasn’t easy to find Brien Comey on Twitter, though, because his first name is also the middle name of his father, who more people than you might think call “James Brien Comey” on Twitter.
After a few frustrated attempts, I tried the following Twitter search on a whim:
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This would bring up any mentions of the younger Comey while leaving out any references to his father.
That led me to this tweet from the Twitter account of the Kenyon College basketball team, on which the younger Comey played as an undergraduate. It showed Comey teaching basketball to some schoolkids, and @-mentioned the now-dead Twitter account “@twittafuzz.” That account, if you search through its mentions, appears to have been previously owned by Brien Comey—if you believe the folks on Twitter congratulating @twittafuzz for his dad’s ascension to the head of the FBI.
The trail ultimately led me here:
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Click through to the linked photo, and you’ll find that a well-wisher has left a comment in which none other than Brien Comey is tagged. Now, our FBI Director has trained his son well. His Instagram account is locked down. Instagram itself, however, offers a little loophole that is terrible for user privacy but wonderfully helpful for our purposes today.
Using the fake Instagram account I keep for the sole purpose of tracking Donald Trump Jr. and Newt Gingrich, I requested access to Brien Comey’s account. As soon as I did, this popped up:
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The suggestions were algorithmically selected based on the account I requested to follow, a significant number of which bore the last name “Comey” (Patrice is his wife). Among the various Comeys, only two of the suggested accounts lacked both real names and profile photos. And only one of these had anywhere near the “nine followers” that James Comey claimed to have. That account was reinholdniebuhr.
I still wasn’t sure that this was, in fact, James Comey. But a quick Google search turned up this article on Comey’s time at the College of William and Mary, and my doubts were assuaged:
By senior year, Comey was a double major in religion and chemistry, writing a senior thesis on theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and televangelist Jerry Falwell and on his way to the University of Chicago Law School
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With Instagram solved, it was time to move back to Twitter. Though there is an @ReinholdNiebuhr, based on the tweets alone I was pretty sure that he was not our guy.
But fortunately for us, there are only seven accounts on Twitter currently using some variation of “Reinhold Niebuhr” as a user name.
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And only one that seemed to be operating in stealth: @projectexile7.
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But how to be sure? There is only one person currently following the account: Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare. Wittes is no Twitter neophyte. He is an active user with more than 25,000 followers, and he only follows 1,178 accounts—meaning he is not a subscriber to the “followback” philosophy. If he is following a random egg—and is the only account following it—there is probably a reason.
That reason could be the fact that, as Wittes wrote here, he is a personal friend of James Comey. (We’ve reached out to Wittes for comment but have yet to hear back.)
Project Exile happens to be a federal program that James Comey helped develop when he was a U.S. attorney living in Richmond. And then, of course, there are the follows.
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ProjectExile7 follows 27 other accounts, the majority of which are either reporters, news outlets, or official government and law enforcement accounts. The New York Times’ Adam Goldman and David Sanger and the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and David Ignatius, all of whom have been aggressively covering the FBI investigation into Trump’s contacts with Russian agents, made the list, as did Wittes and former Bush Administration colleague Jack Goldsmith. Donald Trump is on there, too, but @projectexile7 seems to have begun following him relatively recently (its first follow was @nytimes).
There are two outliers: William & Mary News (where Comey attended undergrad) and our colleagues at The Onion (everyone deserves to have fun):
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And of the 39 total tweets the account has liked thus far, eight refer directly to the FBI or James Comey himself:
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One deals with an active FBI investigation:
And four refer to the Trump administration in general:
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Of course, none of this is definitive proof @projectexile7 is FBI Director James Comey, but it would take a nearly impossible confluence of coincidences for it to be anyone else. Take what you will from the fact that the director of the FBI appears to have liked a tweet from the New York Times about Mike Flynn and Jared Kushner meeting a Russian envoy in December.
We’ve reached out to the FBI for comment, and will update if and when we hear back.
In the meantime, @projectexile7, I would love a follow.
Update 3:56 p.m.:
Benjamin Wittes has responded with the following:
I actually commented earlier today on Comey’s Twitter account—on Twitter, no less. Beyond that public statement, I have nothing to say.
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Update 5:14 p.m.:
The FBI has officially weighed in:
Hello, We don’t have any comment. Thank you. FBI National Press Office
This story was produced by the Special Projects Desk of Gizmodo Media Group.Marine Le Pen, the populist frontrunner in France’s presidential race, has declared that “the economic patriotism” she wants “is impossible in the European Union”.
In a candidates’ debate held before small and medium business owners, Ms. Le Pen told listeners her “economic project is resolutely oriented towards small and medium-sized enterprises”, which she described as “the [foundations] of the French economy”.
She claimed her programme would ensure that SMEs struggling to compete with foreign firms and large multi-nationals were awarded public procurement contracts “as a matter of priority” in line with the principles of “economic patriotism”.
She warned, however, that these policies would be “impossible to implement within the framework of the European Union”. It would, therefore, become necessary “to make choices” – an apparent reference to the possibility of a referendum of France leaving the EU.
The bloc imposes strong restrictions on “state aid” and requires national governments to seek permission from Brussels officials before they can take action to support the domestic economy.
Anna Soubry, an ardent europhile and Remain campaigner, blamed these “extremely strict state aid rules” for the closure of the SSI Redcar steel plant in 2015, when she was still industry minister, telling unemployed steel workers “our hands are tied”.
Ms. Le Pen also reiterated her calls for the reintroduction of the Franc, urging her rivals to “leave the strategy of fear” and acknowledge “the influence of [the euro] on the economic difficulties in France “.
The economic patriotism which I advocate is impossible within the European Union! https://t.co/SdZi5vZxTQ — Marine in English (@Marine2017_EN) March 6, 2017
Ms. Le Pen provided details for some of her economic policies on March 3rd, including a tax of up to 35 per cent on French companies producing goods outside the country and reimporting them; compensation for companies which respect the ‘Made in France’ label; and a drive to create jobs by “reconquering” markets.
“No country has ever succeeded in building its industry without protecting it,” she said.
These policies put flesh on the bones on the Trump-style “France First” philosophy which she set out in February, declaring herself “the candidate of the people”.
Globalism, she said, could be summed up as “manufacturing with slaves to sell to the unemployed”.
“The divide is no longer between the Left and the Right,” she asserted, “but between the patriots and the globalists”.TAMPA, FL--(Marketwired - Jun 18, 2013) - Filmmaker and oceanographic explorer Fabien Cousteau will make his first public appearance following the announcement of his 31-day ocean exploration endeavor, Mission 31, at the nationally touring Sea Monsters Revealed exhibition presented by BASE Entertainment, currently located at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Tampa on June 25. Cousteau announced his ambitious plan to live and work aboard the Florida-based Aquarius, the only undersea marine submersible habitat and lab in the world, on the anniversary of his grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau's birthday last week.
Cousteau's Mission 31 marks the 50th anniversary of a monumental legacy left by his grandfather credited with creating the first underwater habitats for humans and leading ocean explorers on the first successful attempt to live and work underwater aboard Conshelf Two. Mission 31 will expand the 50-year-old Cousteau legacy by one full day, 30 more feet of saturation and will broadcast every second on multiple channels exposing the world to the adventure, risk and mystique of what lies beneath.
"The Sea Monsters Revealed exhibition is the perfect platform to discuss what we plan to do on Aquarius with Mission 31," says Cousteau. "The exhibit makes it accessible for anyone to experience the mysteries of the ocean without getting wet. It very much aligns with our efforts to expose the public to the importance of ocean exploration and restoration."
During the June 25 presentation at the Sea Monsters Revealed exhibition, Cousteau will give his first behind-the-scenes preview for Mission 31 (www.mission-31.com) that will conduct research on the underwater effects of climate change on corals, sponges and sea life as well as human physiological and psychological experiments. The presentation will include a candid question and answer session with the ocean explorer and an opportunity to experience the Sea Monsters Revealed exhibition, which contains an interactive replica of the Aquarius submersible where patrons can discover first-hand about the "inner-space" station located 63 feet under sea level in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Cousteau's Mission 31 presentation is open and free to the public, but seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Talk of Mission 31 has been trending on Twitter following tweets from Sir Richard Branson and Queen Noor of Jordan. When Cousteau's team submerges on Sept. 30 to start the 31-day mission on Oct. 1, all eyes will have access to the exploration through The Weather Channel, Skype and other major media outlets.
"This is a major event. Sea Monsters Revealed shares the Cousteau family's vision to advance the understanding and appreciation of the oceans," says John Zaller, creator of Sea Monsters Revealed who is known for the creation of other blockbuster exhibitions including: Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, Bodies the Exhibition and Bodies Revealed. "Fabien Cousteau's support demonstrates the significance of the exhibition for all those who have ever dreamed of exploring the mysteries of the sea."
BASE Entertainment's Sea Monsters Revealed is the most comprehensive exhibition of the deep sea ever created using a revolutionary polymer preservation technique known as plastination to bring real sea creatures onto dry land for a first-of-its-kind intimate experience (www.seamonstersrevealed.com).
IF YOU GO
What: Fabien Cousteau's Mission 31 at Sea Monsters Revealed
When: Tues., June 25
Lecture: 1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Book Signing: 2:30 - 3:30 p.m.
Where: MOSI
(4801 E Fowler Ave., Tampa, Fla. 33617)
Cost:
Lecture: FREE
Exhibit: $12.95 (children) $18.95 (adults)Pirate Latitudes is an action adventure novel by Michael Crichton, concerning 17th century piracy in the Caribbean. HarperCollins published the book posthumously on November 26, 2009.[1] The story stars the fictional privateer Captain Charles Hunter who, hired by Jamaica's governor Sir James Almont, plots to raid a Spanish galleon for its treasure.
Background [ edit ]
Crichton's assistant discovered the manuscript on one of Crichton's computers after his death in 2008, along with an unfinished novel, Micro (2011).[1]
According to Jonathan Burnham, a publisher of a HarperCollins imprint, Pirate Latitudes had been written concurrently with Crichton's then most recent novel, Next (2006).
According to Marla Warren, however, there is evidence that Crichton had been working on Pirate Latitudes at least since the 1970s; to substantiate her position, she quotes a statement by Patrick McGilligan in the March 1979 issue of American Film that Crichton was aiming "to complete a long-standing book project about Caribbean pirates in the seventeenth century."[2][3]
Additionally, in 1981, Crichton said he was working on a pirate story,[4] and he mentioned the project in his non-fiction book Travels (1988).
Historical basis [ edit ]
Alan Cheuse said, in review for NPR Books: "It builds on an actual event in maritime records, when a crew of English pirates out of the Caribbean port of Port Royal attacked a fortress on a Spanish island in order to plunder - I like that word, and it's what pirates do, they plunder - a ship filled with new world treasure."[5]
Though reviewers have compared Crichton's novel to Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean,[6] the Historical Novel Society notes: "Crichton’s portrayal of Port Royal and its inhabitants is far more grounded in reality than Disney’s portrayal. Crichton does not gloss over the slavery, addiction and brutality of colonial Jamaica, nor does he endow his characters with abilities beyond their training |
Funky Monkey Rick, in fact – always greeted us with a smile and serviced us with a smile too. Alongside Dave and Gary, he always gave us top tunes to play at the weekend. And as a DJ, what can you say? The man has impeccable taste.
Parisa Eliyon, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Rick's the kind of DJ you constantly walk up to asking, “What on earth is this?” or “Where did you find such a sound?” He's most certainly a master of wax, with immaculate taste, artisan collection and the sweetest charm a man could ever have.
Justin Turford, aka Ex-Friendly
Apart from being a great friend, Rick is one of the best and most committed DJs that I've ever worked with. He's always hungry for the freshness of a new sound and his support for music-makers, local or global, is invaluable. To be honest, he's always my first choice if I need a party rocking!
Joff Casciani, designer and DJ (Truth & Lies)
Ricky D is always a musical inspiration and a true pro. This is a man who doesn't need a laptop with a million tracks, he's got the records, they’re in his bag, and he knows what to do with them. Never stop spinning!
Charles Webster, Miso Records
One of the few local guys I’ll make the effort to go and see play, usually up at Spanky’s on Sunday afternoons. You need guys to inspire a generation, like DiY in the 90s or, before that, Jonathan from Arcade Records – if he was playing it, you’d buy it – and Rick is that, but he should be more recognised as that. He works bloody hard finding great new stuff. All the time. A proper DJ. If I ruled the world, he’d be David Guetta: playing great eclectic music on a beach in Ibiza for thousands of pounds a night. But it’s an incredibly unfair world.MONTREAL — The historic scope of the unrest in Quebec was illustrated in surreal scenes and statistics Thursday: more people were detained within a few hours — at least 650 of them, in mass roundups — than were arrested in the entire October Crisis.
More than 2,500 people have been arrested in a months-long dispute that has catapulted the province onto international news pages.
That is at least five times the number jailed during the 1970 FLQ crisis that saw martial law declared in Quebec.
[np-related]
While nobody has died, unlike the 1970 crisis, and most people arrested have been simply ticketed and immediately released, unlike those left to languish in jails back then, critics of the provincial government have spared no adjective to describe current events.
“The government has led us to the worst social crisis we have ever known in Quebec,” Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois scolded the premier during a legislature exchange Thursday.
“Six-hundred-fifty-one — that’s the number of arrests yesterday … of ordinary citizens, men, women, young people arrested because they wanted to voice their opposition to decisions of the Liberal regime…
“That’s where the Quebec Liberal party has taken us: mass arrests, more often than not arbitrary ones, to silence opposition.”
In that gloomy atmosphere, rays of hope emerged Thursday for possible progress.
There were plans for the government and student leaders to meet again, likely early next week. Education Minister Michelle Courchesne said she expected a “very, very important” session after having had positive discussions over the phone.
A new point man has also been assigned to help resolve the crisis: Premier Jean Charest has replaced his chief of staff with a well-regarded veteran who once served in that same role for him, bringing back Daniel Gagnier from political retirement with a mandate to make peace.
Restoring order in time for the tourist-filled festival season, which starts in only a few weeks, appears a monumental task given the events that unfolded in the wee hours Thursday.
A peaceful evening march that began with people festively banging pots and pans ended with police using the controversial “kettling” tactic on a crowd of demonstrators and arresting 518 people in Montreal. Scores of others were arrested elsewhere in the province.
The Quebec incidents have drawn the attention of the world’s media, with the unrest receiving prominent coverage in some of the biggest international news outlets.
‘That’s where the Quebec Liberal party has taken us: mass arrests, more often than not arbitrary ones, to silence opposition’
Some of that coverage has depicted the protests favourably, as an example of youth mobilizing for a brighter future, while other coverage has focused on the scenes of disorder like those that occurred overnight.
Kettling is a police tactic widely used in Europe where riot cops surround demonstrators and limit or cut off their exits. It has been widely criticized because it often results in the scooping up of innocent bystanders as well as rowdies. A recent report by Ontario’s police watchdog blasted Toronto police for their use of kettling during the G20 summit two years ago.
The Montreal demonstration on Wednesday was the 30th consecutive nightly march since the student protest against tuition fee increases began more than three months ago.
Wednesday night’s march was declared illegal by police the minute it was scheduled to start but was allowed to proceed for almost four hours before a line of Montreal riot cops blocked part of Sherbrooke Street as the marchers approached.
Riot squad officers had been marching on the sidewalk beside the front of the protest all evening. An order to disperse was given because police had been pelted by projectiles and other criminal acts had been committed, Montreal police spokesman Daniel Lacoursiere said. The group had also apparently resisted going in a direction ordered by police.
Montreal police said those arrested will face charges, some under minor municipal bylaws and others under the more severe Criminal Code.
Many of those detained for municipal infractions will face $634 tickets. Some protesters are encouraging others to contest the fines.
In the Montreal kettling scene, a few demonstrators reacted angrily while others sat dazed. There have been reports of tourists stunned to find themselves stuck in the crowd.
The police swiftly squeezed the mob together tighter and tighter. Officers advanced and some people begged to be let out, pleading that they were just walking by.
One photographer was seen pushed to the ground and a piece of equipment was heard breaking. Some protesters cursed and yelled at provincial police officers, who ignored the taunts.
Independent filmmaker Emmanuel Hessler had been following the march for a few blocks. He said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press from inside the police encirclement that he was surprised by the action.
“Suddenly, there were police all around us,” he said.
People were carted off onto city buses, which have been used as makeshift police holding pens. The bus drivers’ union opposes the practice and wants to stop it.
The crowd waited to be handcuffed and led away to the buses, one by one, to be sent for processing at a police operational centre — a procedure expected to take several hours.
Meanwhile, a man started reading poetry and the crowd hushed to listen.
Someone else sang a folk song. At one point a woman called out the phone number of a lawyer which the mob took up as a chant.
Hessler, 30, was able to tweet to friends: “We are about to get cuffed and off in a bus. Don’t know what happens after. Wish me luck.”
The mass arrests came after five days of escalating violence in a dispute that began over tuition fees, evolved partly into a struggle against capitalist practices, and in recent days has mushroomed thanks to opposition to the Charest government’s Bill 78.
That bill has not been invoked in any Montreal arrests — although it has been used elsewhere in Quebec and Montreal police say it could still be used to arrest some protest organizers.
There has been some violence every night of the long weekend and in the first part of this week.
Wednesday night’s demonstration looked as though it would break the pattern.
A festival-like atmosphere kicked off in many neighbourhoods as people marched and banged pots and pans in different parts of the city. The percussion-heavy protests have been happening every night at 8 p.m. in Montreal and each night it’s become bigger and louder and lasted longer.
The noisy cacerolazo tradition of pot-banging originated as a protest tactic in Chile under successive governments, before and during the infamous Pinochet regime, and it has spread to other countries as a method of showing popular defiance.
One woman joked on Twitter she had broken two wooden spoons and would be bringing a metal one to future pots-and-pans protests.
Wednesday night, there were suddenly thousands doing it in Montreal and they spilled out from their houses into the streets in different pockets of the city in crowds that included children, their parents, students and elderly people.
“It’s symbolic because it comes from the revolution in Chile, where there was a dictator in place and there was long tradition of protesting,” Sebastien Barraud, a union representative in the education sector, said in reference to Pinochet.
“It also shows that peaceful civil disobedience works. And we’re in the process of showing that the polls have no value. A majority of Quebecers are against this government.”
Originally from France, Barraud said he also benefited from cheap university fees.
“So I know it’s possible. It’s just a matter of a political choice.”
The Canadian Press, with files from Jonathan Montpetit, Myles Dolphin and Jocelyne RicherLooking for news you can trust?
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The small number of companies that dominate global meat production is about to get smaller. The Chinese corporation Shuanghui International, already the majority shareholder of China’s largest meat producer, has just bought US giant Smithfield, the globe’s largest hog producer and pork packer, in a $4.7 billion cash deal. (It still has to get past Smithfield’s shareholders and the US Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment, which reviews takeovers of US companies.)
Now, I hope this merger of titans doesn’t provoke a xenophobic reaction. Shuanghui has strong ties to China’s central government, but it also counts Goldman Sachs among its major shareholders. And the US meat industry is already quite globalized. Back in 2009, a Brazilian giant called JBS had already barreled into the US market, and now holds huge positions in beef, pork, and chicken processing here. And true, as China has ramped up its food production—and rapidly reshaped hog production on the industrial US model—it has produced more than it share of food safety scandals, including recent ones involving hogs.
But as I have pointed out, the US pork industry is no prize either—it pollutes water as a matter of course, hollows out the rural areas on which it alights, relies heavily on routine antibiotic use, recently inspired a government watchdog group to lament “egregious” violations of food safety and animal welfare code in slaughterhouses, and uh, has an explosive manure foam problem.
So forget about where HQ is for the vast conglomerate that ultimately profits from running Smithfield’s factory-scale hog farms and slaughterhouses. The real question is: What does this deal telling us about the global food system and the future of food? Reuters offers a hint:
The thrust of the deal is to send the U.S. made pork to China, a factor that one person familiar with the matter said would help during Shuanghui’s CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment] review.
If Reuters is right that deal’s purpose is to grease the wheels of trade carrying US hogs to China and its enormous domestic pork market, then we’re looking at the further expansion of factory-scale swine farming here in the US: all of the festering troubles I listed above, intensified. For Smithfield itself, the deal is savvy, because Americans are eating less meat. In order to maintain endless profit growth, the company needs to conquer markets where per capita meat consumption is growing fast, and the China market itself represents the globe’s biggest prize in that regard.
As for China, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed in a blockbuster 2011 report, the central government strived for years for self-sufficiency in pork, even as demand for it exploded, by rapidly industrializing production along the model pioneered by Smithfield. By essentially buying Smithfield, the government may be throwing in the towel—saying, essentially, let’s just offshore our hog production, or at least a huge part of it, to the US.
In an ironic twist, China appears to be taking advantage of lax environmental and labor standards in the US to supply its citizens with something it can’t get enough of. Industrial pork: the iPhone’s culinary mirror image.Library Books, ‘Hudson Hawk,’ Mail Among Things That Won’t Factor Into Outcome
MIAMI—As the San Antonio Spurs and the Miami Heat prepare to face off in Tuesday’s Game 6 matchup, a group of NBA experts reportedly ruled out all of the things that the Finals will not come down to, including library books, the 1991 action-comedy film Hudson Hawk, and mail. “For all the chatter that’s surrounding tonight’s contest, when everything’s said and done, pens, John Cheever, and whether ferns require direct sunlight just aren’t going to come into play,” said NBA On ABC analyst Mike Breen, while systematically listing every single person, place, object, event, and concept that likely would not impact the pivotal championship game in the end, such as ocelots, the Stockholm School of economic thought, and rice noodles. “The fact is, after that final whistle blows, sea levels, cotton, Minsk, cell phone data plans, faucets, Incan burial rites, selenium, ribbon, bulldozers, light-emitting diodes, romaine lettuce, spelling, napkins, sustainable design, Space Shuttle Endeavor, gravel, the Frankfurt Auto Show, pumpkin recipes, chairs, strategic petroleum reserves, Erik Spoelstra’s coaching ability, interstate commerce, hiking trails of the Great Smoky Mountains, acoustics, the deceptions of nostalgia, tunnels, wheat, and Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ video just won’t have been a factor on the court. This isn’t the Western Conference Finals we’re talking about, after all.” Though at press time Breen and his colleagues were just three hours into enumerating those things that would not influence the outcome of Game 6, sources close to the analysts have confirmed that the commentators are also planning on cataloging the things that will in fact affect the matchup, a far shorter list that consists solely of the Spurs and Heat rosters, how well these players perform, and Spanish Colonial architecture.Here stands Spike, a lonely stem with exposed spores.
When we visited last Wednesday, the Chicago Botanic Garden was hot with anticipation that the rare and odd flower, typically found in the jungles of Sumatra in Indonesia, was about to show it's smelly face to a Chicago crowd.
Officials said that all signs pointed toward a bloom either that night or the next, but the night came and went, and so did the next, and the next, until it was clear something was amiss.
"It looked like Spike wasn't going to open over the weekend, and it was already about four to five days past the time we thought it would open," said outdoor floriculturist Tim Pollak.
Botanists Pollak and Shannon Still say Spike simply lacked the energy to complete its bloom. The flower was supposed to look like this illustration, at left. It was to produce a nasty odor that smelled like Limburger cheese and dead mammals to attract dung beetle pollinators. So why didn't it?
"We just don't know," said Pollak. "Mother Nature. You can relate it to a tomato plant in your garden – it produces flowers, but it doesn't produce the fruit."
On Sunday, botanists removed the spathe – the outer covering of the plant – manually in front of dozens of curious onlookers. It wasn't the outcome they'd hoped for, but it wasn't a complete loss.
"There's certainly a disappointment, a let down," admitted Pollak. "But it opened up an opportunity for us to teach the public about the rarity of this plant. I think we turned something that was going south into something good."
The crowds were noticeably smaller and the enthusiasm was somewhat diminished when we visited Tuesday.
"Disappointment isn't the right word. It is what it is," said visitor Norman Eckstein.
"It would've been exciting to see the natural bloom. It's still a great opportunity to learn about the factors that would have to come together to let the bloom happen," said Matt Golosinski, who was also visiting the garden.
As for that patented stinky smell of death, you can still catch the faintest waft of it if you get really close the plant. Botanists say it would've been this times 1,000 had Spike actually bloomed.
And this isn't where Spike's story ends. In fact, he is still very much alive and will be put back into the garden's production facility for further research.
"We're going to let him go into dormancy," said Still. "This big stem will collapse and fall over. It'll shove all its resources back into the corm, and next year it'll send up a leaf."
No images.
About a half-dozen other corpse flowers are growing in the production lab – most as old as Spike. But a bloom is indeed rare, occurring 10-14 years into the life cycle of the plant, which consists of the repeated growth and death of leaves until something different emerges.
"You only know they're going to bloom when, instead of sending up a leaf itself, it'll send up a flower stalk," explained Still.
There's no way to predict when or if that will happen. It could be next year. It could be never. Which is why the Chicago Botanic Garden relished Spike's rare moment in the spotlight – even if it couldn't complete the show.
The Chicago Botanic Garden on Wednesday reports that Spike, despite not blooming, has produced some pollen. So, his offspring will live on. Spike was taken off display today and officials will conduct the final autopsy on what went wrong in the coming weeks. The garden estimates that 75,000 people came to see the famed corpse flower, including more than 8,000 on Sunday alone.
For Chicago Tonight, this is Paris Schutz.
More titan arum news
A titan arum named Stinky recently bloomed at the Denver Botanic Garden, which took more than 8,000 photos over 18 days to capture its lifecycle. Watch the incredible 43-second time-lapse video below.
Chicago Tonight's Paris Schutz visited Spike at the CBG on Aug. 26. Watch the video below.
Did you see Spike? Tell us what you saw in the comments section below. You can also share your photos of Spike with us by using the form below.Kimiko Date-Krumm and her love for professional tennis is showing no signs of stropping as the former world No.4 pledges to return to the tour after undergoing knee surgery.
The 45-year-old, who turn 46 at the end of the month, hasn’t played a match since her first round loss in qualifying at the Australian Open in January. She was forced to undergo endoscopic surgery in April after an MRI detected a crack in her left knee, casting doubts of her ability to continue playing. Despite the scare, Date-Krumm is planning to return next year, 28 years after making her WTA debut.
“I have been told it will take a year (to fully recover from the operation) and it’s just a case of how much more or less time it will be than that,” Date-Krumm told reporters in Tokyo.
“Everything has gone well up to this point and it has not put limitations on my daily life. As an athlete, you have to condition muscle and I want the injury to properly heal.”
Date-Krumm is a three-time grand slam semi-finalist, reaching the last four at the Australian Open (94), French Open (95) and Wimbledon (96). She retired from the sport shortly after her Wimbledon run in 1996 before returning to the tour in 2008. In her comeback, the Japanese player returned to the top 50 and won the 2009 Seoul Open. During an interview with the WTA Tour last year, Date-Krumm admitted that she enjoys life on the tour more since her 2008 comeback.
“When I was young I didn’t enjoy it because of the pressure.” She said. “Now I enjoy travelling also. When I was a kid – first career – I hated travelling. But it was a big difference – no computer, no mobile phone at that time. So it wasn’t easy to travel. And back then there were not so many Asian people on tour. And there was a lot of pressure because I was Japanese.”
Overall, Date-Krumm currently has eight WTA titles to her name with a 17-year gap between her first (Tokyo 1992) and last (Seoul 2008).Posted 30 May 2013 - 10:35 AM
that it? only 60 hours?
so everyone just afk and stays ingame get all 6 titles?
also what happen if you get disconnected and relog back in? does the previous hours still adding after relog?
the-_- you mean only 60 hours? its a period of 4 days, there's only 96 hours TOTAL in that 4 day period. 60 hours is a long time.and use common sense. if you get disconnected then obviously the time stops ticking cause you're not logged in the game. and yes, obviously when you relog the time will begin adding up again from where you left off.These are just bonus titles for the people who were to lazy or didn't know beforehand or just plain couldn't level alts to 30 for the title. Personally i see it as them catering to carebears but regardless its a nice event for them to have. The people who still lvled a bunch of alts to 30 will get those titles along with these extra titles. But i know there are people who have lvled every 2nd job class to 30 for this founder title so kinda sucks for them. But they have extras now for noel class(and who knows in the distant future if they'll have more classes)LEWISVILLE, Texas (AP) — The comedian Gallagher is telling jokes after being taken out of a medically induced coma that doctors put him in following his heart attack last week in Texas.
Doctors slowly woke up Gallagher on Sunday morning. His promotional manager, Christine Scherrer, says Gallagher immediately recognized his family and started talking to them. She says he's breathing on his own, moving and joking around.
The comedian, whose full name is Leo Anthony Gallagher, is known for smashing watermelons with a sledgehammer.
Scherrer says Gallagher had two stents replaced after collapsing Wednesday before a performance at Lewisville bar, near Dallas. Gallagher had a minor heart attack last March after collapsing while performing in Minnesota.
Scherrer isn't sure how long Gallagher will remain hospitalized. She says he appreciates his fans' thoughts and prayers.Last week I was working on AngularJS project which contains multiple JavaScript files (controllers, services, directives, etc…), good number of HTML partials, and some custom CSS files. This project started to grow and the number of JavaScript files and HTML partials started to increase quickly. I felt it is the right time to start minifing, and concatenating those files, usually I depend on Web Essentials for this kind of tasks, but this time I’ve decided to automate this process and depend on JavaScript Task Runner.
What is a Task Runner?
It is application that is used to automate the repetitive tasks like minification, concatenating, image optimization, etc… so you can forget about those tasks and focus on application development. Usually the task runner takes its instructions from a task file that you define once at the beginning of your project and forget about it. There are different task runners available, but the two common task runners nowadays are Gulp.js and Grunt.js. I find out that configuring Gulpjs is very simple compared to Grunt.js; all you need to do is to write your code in JavaScript file where you define all the tasks needed to be executed by Gulpjs, it is really follows code over configuration approach! I’m not here to compare between both, if you are using Grunt.js for a while and your happy with the results; then there is no need to switch to Gulpjs, both will do the same for you.
Where we’ll use Gulpjs?
Before installing Gulpjs we need to agree on the project we’ll use Gulpjs with, I’ll depend on the previous AngularJS tutorial (you can check the live demo), currently if we look at the application JavaScript references in index.html page as the code snippet below we’ll notice that I’m referencing (three AngularJS services, six controllers, one directive, and one filter) so in total I’m refrencing eleven small JavaScript files and the application is pretty small, you can imagine how many JavaScript files will be referenced for larger project!
<!-- Load app main script --> <script src="app/app.js"></script> <!-- Load services --> <script src="app/services/placesExplorerService.js"></script> <script src="app/services/placesPhotosService.js"></script> <script src="app/services/placesDataService.js"></script> <!-- Load controllers --> <script src="app/controllers/placesPhotosController.js"></script> <script src="app/controllers/placesExplorerController.js"></script> <script src="app/controllers/userContextController.js"></script> <script src="app/controllers/myPlacesController.js"></script> <script src="app/controllers/navigationController.js"></script> <script src="app/controllers/aboutController.js"></script> <!-- Load custom filters --> <script src="app/filters/placeNameCategoryFilter.js"></script> <!-- Load custom directives --> <script src="app/directives/fsUnique.js"></script> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 <! -- Load app main script -- > <script src = "app/app.js" > </script> <! -- Load services -- > <script src = "app/services/placesExplorerService.js" > </script> <script src = "app/services/placesPhotosService.js" > </script> <script src = "app/services/placesDataService.js" > </script> <! -- Load controllers -- > <script src = "app/controllers/placesPhotosController.js" > </script> <script src = "app/controllers/placesExplorerController.js" > </script> <script src = "app/controllers/userContextController.js" > </script> <script src = "app/controllers/myPlacesController.js" > </script> <script src = "app/controllers/navigationController.js" > </script> <script src = "app/controllers/aboutController.js" > </script> <! -- Load custom filters -- > <script src = "app/filters/placeNameCategoryFilter.js" > </script> <! -- Load custom directives -- > <script src = "app/directives/fsUnique.js" > </script>
So instead of letting the browser to request eleven small files simultaneously, it is better to concatenate all these files into a single file, then minify this file and reference it.
Minifying AngularJS controllers or services depends on how you define those services/controllers on the un-minified version, the controllers and services should be written in a minified-safe way. Unfortunately when I wrote this tutorial I wasn’t thinking of minifying my app files, so let’s see how we can write AngularJS minified-safe files.
Writing minified-safe AngualrJS files
Currently if we take a look on how I created the unsafe version of the controller as the code snippet below, you will notice that I’m injecting the $scope and a custom Angular service named placesDataService into myPlacesController which is added to a module named app:
app.controller('myPlacesController', function ($scope, placesDataService) { //Injected $scope and custom placesDataService into'myPlacesController' }); 1 2 3 app. controller ('myPlacesController', function ( $ scope, placesDataService ) { //Injected $scope and custom placesDataService into'myPlacesController' } ) ;
When we try to minify this file using any minification tool, the result will be as the code snippet below:
app.controller('myPlacesController', function (a, b) { //This is not correct and will throw exception at run time because (a) param is not valid //dependency and the (b) param will not represent the 'placesDataService' }); 1 2 3 4 app. controller ('myPlacesController', function ( a, b ) { //This is not correct and will throw exception at run time because (a) param is not valid //dependency and the (b) param will not represent the 'placesDataService' } ) ;
As you notice in the comments above this will throw run time exception when we invoke this controller, there is no way to tell angular that (a) parameter is equivalent to ($scope) and the same applies to (b) parameter, the dependency injector will not be able to identify services correctly.
To solve this issue we need to write the controllers in a different way, we’ve to annotate the function with the names of dependencies provided as strings which will not get minified, so instead of just providing the function only we provide an array which contains list of all the services injected, be aware of the order for array elements, they should match the order of function parameters. So the minified-safe version of the controller will look as the code snippet below:
app.controller('myPlacesController', ['$scope', 'placesDataService', function ($scope, placesDataService) { //This is the safe way to write controllers if you are planning to minify them, and I believe you should do! }]); 1 2 3 app. controller ('myPlacesController', [ '$scope', 'placesDataService', function ( $ scope, placesDataService ) { //This is the safe way to write controllers if you are planning to minify them, and I believe you should do! } ] ) ;
We’ve to modify app.js file, all services, all controllers, and any AngularJS JavaScript file which uses dependency injection and rewrite it in the above way by annotating the functions with the names of dependencies as strings. You can download the complete modified project (minfied-safe version) and compare it with the original one hosted on GitHub (This contains unsafe-minified version of AngularJS files.)
After we’ve these nice minified-safe JavaScript files we need to optimize our web application for faster loading and less bandwidth consumption, so we need to use Gulpjs to help us in achieving the below requirements:
Concatenate, minify, and remove debugger or console logs from JavaScript files.
Concatenate, add missing vendor prefixes, then minify CSS files.
Minify HTML partial views.
Automate the tasks above by watching any change on those files.
Now it is time to play with Gulpjs, I’ll implement all the requirements above in seven steps so you can follow along if this is your first time to use Gulpjs.
Step One: Install Node.js
Don’t panic, you do not need to be Node.js developer to use Gulpjs, you just need to have basic JavaScript knowledge to be able to define the Gulpjs tasks, to install Node.js jump to nodejs.org and select the appropriate platform installer, this installer will install two things: Node.js and NPM (Node Package Manager) which we’ll be using to install Gulpjs and Gulpjs modules.
Once the installation is completed open command prompt and enter: node -v and the installed Node.js version will be displayed, as well you can do the same for Node Package Manger so you can enter: npm -v
Step Two: Install Gulpjs
Now we’ll use the Node Package Manager (NPM) to install Gulpjs, all we need to do is open CMD and enter:
npm install gulp -g 1 npm install gulp -g
Notice that we’ve added -g in order to install Gulpjs globally for any project, so there is no need to do this step again if you want to configure Gulpjs with another project.
In order to confirm that installation took place successfully you can enter: gulp -v and the installed version will be displayed.
Step Three: Setup The Project:
Our web project is located on path: “D:\GettingStartedGulp\FoursquareAngularJS\FoursquareAngularJS.Web” so we need to use CMD to navigate to this path, this is very important step to configure Gulpjs correctly, so use CMD and make sure you are on drive “D:\” and enter:
cd D:\GettingStartedGulp\FoursquareAngularJS\FoursquareAngularJS.Web 1 cd D : \ GettingStartedGulp \ FoursquareAngularJS \ FoursquareAngularJS. Web
The path for CMD should be changed to the path above, In this post I’ll keep calling this path “ProjectPath” for brevity.
Now we need to install Gulpjs locally for this project only, so use CMD and enter:
npm install gulp --save-dev 1 npm install gulp -- save - dev
Notice the –save-dev command which will tell the package to appear in devDependencies, you can read about this here. Note: You can follow along with those steps and read this later.
After you execute the command above a new folder named node_modules will be created automatically under ProjectPath, this folder will contain all Gulpjs modules we’ll install later on, last thing to do here is to create manually a file named gulpfile.js under the ProjectPath, this file will be used to write all the code needed to define Gulpjs tasks.
Step Four: Installing Gulpjs modules:
There are more than 600 Gulpjs modules which will help you in defining tasks, we’ll use some of those modules to achieve the four requirements mentioned above, the first requirement I want to achieve here is to minify the HTML partials, so I need to install the Gulpjs modules which will help me to accomplish this, open CMD and enter:
npm install gulp-changed gulp-minify-html --save-dev 1 npm install gulp - changed gulp - minify - html -- save - dev
As you notice above I’ve installed two gulp modules which they are “gulp-changed” and “gulp-minify-html”, the gulp-changed will be responsible to minify only the changed HTML files.
Now it is time to write our first task inside the file gulpfile.js but before writing the first task it is important to mention that Gulpjs only provides 4 simple APIs you need to remember in order to define all your tasks, APIs are: task, src, dest, and watch. We’ll cover those APIs while we are defining Gulpjs tasks, so open the gulpfile.js and paste the code below:
// include gulp var gulp = require('gulp'); // include plug-ins var changed = require('gulp-changed'); var minifyHTML = require('gulp-minify-html'); // minify new or changed HTML pages gulp.task('minify-html', function() { var opts = {empty:true, quotes:true}; var htmlPath = {htmlSrc:'./app/views/*.html', htmlDest:'./appbuild/views'}; return gulp.src(htmlPath.htmlSrc).pipe(changed(htmlPath.htmlDest)).pipe(minifyHTML(opts)).pipe(gulp.dest(htmlPath.htmlDest)); }); 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 // include gulp var gulp = require ( 'gulp' ) ; // include plug-ins var changed = require ( 'gulp-changed' ) ; var minifyHTML = require ( 'gulp-minify-html' ) ; // minify new or changed HTML pages gulp. task ('minify-html', function ( ) { var opts = { empty : true, quotes : true } ; var htmlPath = { htmlSrc : './app/views/*.html', htmlDest : './appbuild/views' } ; return gulp. src ( htmlPath. htmlSrc ). pipe ( changed ( htmlPath. htmlDest ) ). pipe ( minifyHTML ( opts ) ). pipe ( gulp. dest ( htmlPath. htmlDest ) ) ; } ) ;
What we’ve implemented above is simple, we included the modules needed (gulp-changed, and gulp-minify-html) then we defined our first gulp task and named it “minify-html”. We provided for this task the source of the HTML partials we want to minify and the destination for the minified version, note: that the destination path will be created automatically.
The nice thing is how Gulpjs works, there is chaining for actions, in other words the output of a process will be used as input for the another process. In our case the first thing we will do is to watch which file has changed, then we will pass this file to minification process, once the minification process is done it will pass the output to the last process where the modified file will be sent to the destination path to be updated or created if it is new.
To test this we need to run this task from CMD by entering:
gulp minify-html 1 gulp minify - html
If all is configured correctly the response will be as the image below, you can now navigate to the destination path “\ProjectPath\appbuild\views” and check the minified version of the HTML views.
Step Five: Add More Modules:
I believe things are becoming clearer now, we want to achieve another requirement which is concatenate, add missing vendor prefixes, and minify CSS files, so first thing to do is to install the modules needed, open CMD and enter:
npm install gulp-concat gulp-autoprefixer gulp-minify-css gulp-rename --save-dev 1 npm install gulp - concat gulp - autoprefixer gulp - minify - css gulp - rename -- save - dev
Now we’ve installed four new modules which will be responsible of concatenating the CSS files into one file, adding the required vendor prefix, minifying the CSS, and renaming the output file.
We need to add a new Gulpjs task named “minify-css” so open file gulpfile.js and paste the code below:
// include plug-ins var concat = require('gulp-concat'); var autoprefix = require('gulp-autoprefixer'); var minifyCSS = require('gulp-minify-css'); var rename = require('gulp-rename'); // CSS concat, auto prefix, minify, then rename output file gulp.task('minify-css', function() { var cssPath = {cssSrc:['./content/css/*.css', '!*.min.css', '!/**/*.min.css'], cssDest:'./contentbuild/css/'}; return gulp.src(cssPath.cssSrc).pipe(concat('styles.css')).pipe(autoprefix('last 2 versions')).pipe(minifyCSS()).pipe(rename({ suffix: '.min' })). |
, particularly with respect to how it propagates political news items and their ensuing discussion. The “Understanding Reddit” portion of the study breaks down the basic mechanics of the site: People “upvote” what they think others want to see and “downvote” the stuff that’s best left at the bottom of a page. It’s a simple, empathetic model that works at least as well for news about the 2016 presidential election as it does for funny memes and nature snapshots.
The authors of the study found that those who browse Reddit specifically looking for news are “more likely to be male, young, and digital in their news preferences,” a phrase that perhaps simultaneously describes a typical Bernie Sanders voter. It ought to be no surprise that the Sanders campaign has an official and substantial Reddit following at the r/SandersForPresident subreddit. Pew’s statistical analysis of more than 1 billion Reddit comments showed that Sanders was by far the most frequently mentioned political candidate on the site, across sections. What is it about Sanders that gives him so much traction in this particular corner of the internet?
Reddit aka Bernie Sanders campaign web site — Chris Short (@ChrisShort) February 17, 2016
“Reddit has been known as one of those ‘goof-around’ sites, and it caters to many NSFW subreddits. But after what we have accomplished, that is a dead idea,” David Fredrick tells Inverse; he’s the co-founder of the grassroots Sanders for President organization, which maintains the official Sanders subreddit. “This is the new model for support. If you cannot get traction or gain appeal through online application, you are dead in the water or falling behind. And I mean true traction. Trolls and shills are flushed out with alarming speed. Fact-checking and informational counter-punching are almost immediate if you have a truly activated base.”
The r/SandersForPresident homepage.
Publicly viewable statistics on a subreddit’s subscribed readership underscore Fredrick’s argument that the Sanders campaign is the most Reddit-savvy. At the time of this writing, the Ted Cruz subreddit shows a little over 1,200 subscribers. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has just north of 5,000. Sanders is rocking more than 194,000 subscribers.
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And what of the intersection between the social news sharing site and iconoclast candidate Donald Trump? Pew’s further quantified look at Reddit comments yielded the finding that growth in conversation about Donald Trump spread faster than the growth of conversation about the election in general, like a lightning rod attracting lightning. Just as no one knows quite what to make of Trump’s run, there is debate over which of two Trump subreddits is “the official” one. Is it r/DonaldTrump, or r/The_Donald? (The pages boast 1,168 and 37,434 subscribers, respectively.)
The r/The_Donald homepage.
When asked about the difference between other candidates’ subreddits and the Sanders subreddit, Fredrick says that the major difference lies in that the Sanders camp “[takes itself] much more seriously. This isn’t a game to us, or a hobby. We are the far-and-away leaders and have publicly maintained that growth by remaining mostly inclusive and typically constructive.”
Reddit is easily likened to a libertarian idea-sharing platform, with people collectively working together in such a way that the friction in determining which idea is “best” at any given time is made invisible. It’s a system that also happens to work well in determining top news stories of the week. Yet out of all the presidential candidates putting forth the best media hustle they can to win your vote, only one is doing so to meaningful ends on Reddit. Doesn’t it behoove the rest of politics at large to figure out some way to leverage that platform? Fredrick thinks so.
“Political activism and constructive discussion is beyond simply pushing a message and waiting for responses,” he says. “The establishment will live on, but it will have to try a lot harder to make sure it can approach topics with a great deal more detail and honesty than it has in the recent past.”NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Feb. 7, 2017) – Bills introduced in the Tennessee legislature would reform asset forfeiture laws to prohibit the state from taking property without a criminal conviction. The legislation also takes on federal forfeiture programs by banning prosecutors from circumventing state laws by passing cases off to the feds in most situations.
Rep. Martin Daniel (R-Knoxville) introduced House Bill 4021 (HB4021) on Feb. 2. Sen. Todd Gardenhire (R-Chattanooga) introduced the companion bill in the Senate (SB316). The legislation would reform Tennessee law by requiring a criminal conviction before prosecutors can proceed with asset forfeiture. Under current law, the state can seize assets even if a person is never found guilty of a crime and sometimes without even filing charges.
The bills would also establish a trust fund for asset forfeiture proceeds. Currently, up to 100 percent of asset forfeiture money goes directly to law enforcement agencies, creating a perverse policing for profit motive.
ADDRESSES FEDERAL PROGRAMS
The Tennessee bills also close a loophole that allows prosecutors to bypass more stringent state asset forfeiture laws by passing cases off to the federal government under its Equitable Sharing forfeiture program.
A law enforcement agency shall not directly or indirectly transfer seized property to a federal law enforcement authority or other federal agency unless the value of the seized property exceeds fifty thousand dollars ($50,000), excluding the potential value of the forfeited property, if sold. A law enforcement agency shall not transfer property to the federal government if the transfer would circumvent the protections of this part that are otherwise available to a putative interest holder in the property.
The legislation only allows transfers if the criminal conduct that gave rise to the seizure is interstate in nature and sufficiently complex to justify the transfer of the property.
The inclusion of provisions barring state and local law enforcement agencies from passing off cases to the feds is particularly important. In several states with strict asset forfeiture laws, prosecutors have done just that. By placing the case under federal jurisdiction, law enforcement can bypass the need for a conviction under state law and collect up to 80 percent of the proceeds from forfeited assets via the federal Equitable Sharing Program.
For example, California previously had some of the strongest state-level restrictions on civil asset forfeiture in the country, but law enforcement would often bypass the state restrictions by partnering with a federal asset forfeiture program known as “equitable sharing.” Under these arrangements, state officials would simply hand over forfeiture prosecutions to the federal government and then receive up to 80 percent of the proceeds—even when state law banned or limited the practice. According to a report by the Institute for Justice, Policing for Profit, California ranked dead last of all states in the country between 2000 and 2013 as the worst offender. During the 2016 legislative session, the state closed the loophole.
As the Tenth Amendment Center previously reported the federal government inserted itself into the asset forfeiture debate in California. The feds clearly want the policy to continue.
Why?
We can only guess. But perhaps the feds recognize paying state and local police agencies directly in cash for handling their enforcement would reveal their weakness. After all, the federal government would find it nearly impossible to prosecute its unconstitutional “War on Drugs” without state and local assistance. Asset forfeiture “equitable sharing” provides a pipeline the feds use to incentivize state and local police to serve as de facto arms of the federal government by funneling billions of dollars into their budgets.
NEXT
At the time of this report, neither SB316 nor HB4021 had been referred to a committee. They will both need to pass their respective committees by a majority vote before moving forward in the legislative process.Smartphones, tablets, and computers are always getting more speed, storage, and memory to help them perform better with each new generation. A group of researchers has made a breakthrough with computer memory chips that could mean terabytes of memory inside future smartphones. The breakthrough could mean tens to hundreds of times more storage in mobile devices.
The memory is called resistive random access memory or RRAM and the chips are being developed by several companies. Making this sort of memory typically requires high-temperature or high-voltage making the chips hard to produce. Researchers at Rice University have made a breakthrough that allows the fabrication of these chips at room temperature and with much less voltage required.
RRAM is like flash memory in that it can store data without constant power supplied. RRAM stores data using resistance rather than charge in a transistor. Using resistance means each bit uses less space significantly increasing the amount of data that can be stored. These chips are also easier to stack leafing to more capacity.By Neil deMause
The approaching Super Bowl brings the annual battle between the NFL and economists over whether the game is a boon to host cities. Who's right?
On one side, you have the NFL. Last week, the league, as part of its non-stop hype-a-thon for the First Super Bowl Outdoors In Cold Weather Isn't Snow Just Romantic?, reported that the New York/New Jersey economy would see a $600 million boost as a result of Super Bowl spending. "Thanks to the Super Bowl, we're seeing more hotel rooms booked and restaurant tables reserved and even more excitement than usual for this time of year," U.S. Rep Carolyn Maloney told reporters.
On the other, you have the nation's sports economists, who say the actual number is a fair bit lower. Like, maybe, zero. "There still remains no ex post evidence of an economic impact," says University of South Florida professor Philip Porter, almost audibly sighing over email since, as someone who's been studying this topic for more than a decade, he gets the same question every year at this time. "Super Bowl attendees simply don't buy much that the local economy sells."
So, either more than half a billion dollars, or bupkis. Definitely somewhere in there.
Given that this debate has been going on for eons, you'd think that we'd have reached some resolution by now. And it's an issue that matters tremendously: The reason the NFL puts out its numbers (other than self-aggrandizement and a desire to drive the latest concussion news off the back pages) is because cities spend big money to lure the big game -- not least by sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into the brand-new stadiums that the league says is a condition of hosting -- and the supposed economic payoff makes writing those nine-figure checks go down a bit easier. (In New Jersey's case, at least, the public got off relatively easy, as the Jets and Giants joined to cough up for construction costs with the help of their not entirely happy season ticket holders, though they still got to cash in on a pile of tax and rent breaks.)
We can't directly evaluate the NFL's $600 million impact claim, because the league hasn't revealed how it came up with the number. According to Super Bowl Host Committee p.r. rep Alice McGillion (the former Yankees spokesperson who got to issue angry denials of things like the David Ortiz jersey burial story two days before Yankees officials themselves admitted it), the figures are from a 2010 study by the Super Bowl bid committee that no one's gotten around to releasing in the four years since.
We do have the NFL's reports from past years, though, which show similar numbers. Last year's Super Bowl in New Orleans, for example, was estimated to generate $480 million in local spending, generating $34.9 million in new local tax revenues, according to the NFL host committee's study. Read that study, and we find that to arrive at this figure, researchers simply surveyed Super Bowl attendees, asking them where they were from, whether they'd rented a hotel room, their total food expenses, and so on, then applying a multiplier to account for how fan spending then got re-spent in the local economy. (This multiplier ends up basically doubling the final economic impact number; more on that in a moment.)
You've probably noticed some potential problems here, beyond the dubious quality of survey results derived from asking drunken NFL fans how much they were spending on food. (Median answer: "WOOOOOO NINERS!") First off, a big chunk of spending is on things like Super Bowl tickets and Super Bowl beers and Super Bowl lawn gnomes -- but most of the money for such branded items goes right back out of town once the Super Bowl leaves (except for whatever small sum is paid to the vendors actually selling these items). As Holy Cross professor Victor Matheson, another economist who's studied Super Bowl impact, puts it, "Imagine an airplane landing at an airport and everyone gets out and gives each other a million bucks, then gets back on the plane. That's $200 million in economic activity, but it's not any benefit to the local economy."
Then there's the issue of displacement. When hordes of Super Bowl visitors descend on a city's hotel rooms, that fills up all the hotel rooms, which means -- wait for it -- no more hotel rooms for anyone else. So people who might have visited New Orleans otherwise are forced to steer clear. (The NFL study tried to account for this by subtracting out New Orleans' lost convention business, but as you may be aware, there are other reasons to visit New Orleans in the winter other than for a convention.) In fact, because Super Bowl rooms are often required to be rented by the week but many visitors only show up for the game weekend, some economists have suggested that all those incoming NFL fans only end up displacing people who would have spent more, on average, during their time in town.
So what do non-NFL studies find? Matheson says his research shows an average impact of between $30 million and $120 million in overall spending, which is more than Porter's nothing, but still a whole lot less than $600 million. And as for how much of that actually trickles down to the hosting city, the University of Maryland's Dennis Coates' study of the 2004 Super Bowl found that Houston received about $5 million in added sales tax revenues thanks to having the game in town, a number that would likely be somewhat higher today thanks to inflation. (It would be higher still if not for the fact that the NFL's tax-exempt status allows its employees to avoid paying any local sales taxes for their dinners or hotel stays during Super Bowl week; in New Orleans, this amounted to $800,000 in lost sales tax revenue.)
There are some indications, according to these economists, that a New York Super Bowl could actually work out better than the average. For starters, as Rep. Maloney noted, the freezing weather is actually a plus as far as the economy is concerned, because February isn't peak tourist season in New York, for obvious reasons. Holding the Super Bowl in a more typical locale like Florida may make for toastier fans, but it's a waste from an economic perspective, since you don't need to twist people's arms to go to Florida in the winter. (Plus, then you can't sell Super Bowl Santa hats.)
New York also has more hotel rooms than God, which makes tourist displacement less of a worry, even before accounting for all the Super Bowl visitors who will end up staying on docked cruise ships. "You could reasonably go to New York for something other than the Super Bowl in three weeks," says Matheson. "It would be absolutely insane to do that in Indianapolis."
None of these arguments are new, nor are they likely to change anytime soon. The essential problem with debates over economic impact studies is that they're way too easy to rig -- as a friend of mine who used to work in economic analysis recalls, clients would routinely ask him to come up with a methodology that would justify the desired result, and to dress it up in a clear plastic binder.
So it's not entirely worthless to host a Super Bowl -- or a World Series, or an NCAA championship game, or a World Cup, or any of the other things that sports boosters are forever prescribing as the cure-all for any city's economic woes. Given the findings of Matheson, Coates, Porter, and their colleagues, it's probably not unreasonable to guesstimate perhaps $100 million or so of new money changing hands within the New York area during the first weekend of February, and a few million of that trickling down to the public in the form of new taxes.
That sounds good -- until you realize that the state of New York alone will spend $5 million on advertising for Super Bowl-related events, leaving the only benefit as … advertising New York City as a place that's brutally cold in the winter? With economic strategies like these for NFL cities, the concussionpocalypse might turn out to be a blessing.
* * *
Neil deMause is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has covered sports economics for Slate, the Village Voice, Baseball Prospectus and a bunch of other places you wouldn't remember. He runs the stadium news website Field of Schemes, and co-authored the book of the same name.Photo of student debt via Flickr user Alan Levine
Yesterday morning I got an email from a young aspiring journalist who wanted to know if a master's degree was worth it. His plight was pretty familiar: Go deeper into debt in a gamble to give your career a push, or keep on the same path, working a job while trying to cobble together a real-world education equivalent to an advanced degree.
I gave him the usual spiel I trot out when I get emails like that: Go back to school, take a chance! Then, as soon as I'd finished patting myself on the back for taking time out of my day to dole out life advice to a stranger, I was hiding in the back of the office, whispering to a representative from FedLoan Servicing through my cell. My payments had just inexplicably increased from $70 to $1,100 a month, and I was only able to talk them down to $186—an amount I still can't really afford considering the insane cost of living in New York City, where you basically have to pay for every breath you take.
I usually try to forget that I'm almost $100,000 in debt as a result of my education (which is difficult when you have to dodge calls from creditors), but in truth, I don't have any regrets. If I hadn't gone to school, I'd still be an Office Depot employee living at her parents' house in Central Florida. Sure, I'd be financially solvent, but at what cost? Access to higher education might be criminally expensive in America, but if you're a kid from redneck country with blue-collar parents and no trust fund, these loans can offer a path to a new city and a life outside of what you were born into.
I'm far from the first person to make that mental calculation. Over the weekend, the New York Times published an op-ed that essentially advised people to default on their student loans. In it, Lee Siegel, a writer and cultural critic with three degrees from Columbia, argues that having poor credit isn't really a big deal, and imagines a rosy future where everyone followed his example:
"If people groaning under the weight of student loans simply said, "Enough," then all the pieties about debt that have become absorbed into all the pieties about higher education might be brought into alignment with reality. Instead of guaranteeing loans, the government would have to guarantee a college education."
This essay got hit with a fair amount of backlash, probably most notably from a Slate piece that called it "deeply irresponsible" and suggested the Times apologize for telling readers to "pickpocket the government." Writer Jordan Weissmann went on: "Astoundingly, Siegel never mentions, nor demonstrates that he understands, the fact that in most cases of default the government can simply start garnishing up to 15 percent of borrowers' disposable wages directly from their paychecks."
Not knowing what to think after that, I did what my young journalist friend did and sent off a missive to someone I thought might have an answer about what I should (or shouldn't) do with my life.
Heather Jarvis is a self-proclaimed student-loan expert. According to her website, she graduated from Duke Law School with $125,000 in loans and has been an advocate for borrowers ever since. "I think it's oversimplified when people take the position of 'people gotta pay what they owe,'" she told me. "It's much, much more complicated than that. When we find ourselves in situations where there isn't enough money to pay what's due, it's important to be informed about the way the law works and the options that are available." Here's what advice she gave me about owing the government the price of a house, and what she would tell a kid thinking about signing on the dotted line for the first time.
Related: President Obama, VICE, and US Students Talk Student Debt Issues in Roundtable Discussion
VICE: So let's cut to the chase. I'm almost $100,000 in debt. Why even bother trying to pay that back?
Heather Jarvis: The federal government has extraordinary collection powers. They can garnish wages without a court order, they can seize tax refunds, even intercept a portion of government benefits including Social Security. They can and do—literally do—pursue debtors to their graves. I think anyone who knows about debt knows that the government is the most persistent and effective collector. I think as an individual who's considering their options, defaulting on student loans is a dramatic decision that will have significant negative consequences.
I'm still not sold. What would happen if I just never made a payment again?
It takes nine months for a federal student loan to go into default. You have to not make a payment for 270 days. And after the loans are in default, they are typically sent for collection to the private third-party collection agents. It escalates at that point. There are significant penalties and fees—as much as 18 percent of the balance, which is a lot of money. Then the process continues. The federal government doesn't often sue, because they don't have to. But they will if they think it will get them access to other assets.
What if I literally can't afford my payment because I live in a city that literally eats money, but I don't believe having my paycheck seized will help the situation?
People should first pay for their housing, and their food, and their transportation, and their utilities. They should then start looking to prioritize their debts, so you would wanna stop paying your credit-card bills before you stopped paying your federal student loans. You would wanna stop paying your private student loans before you stopped paying your federal student loans.
One of the harsh realities for us as borrowers is that although federal student loans have more flexibility than a lot of kinds of debt do, they don't take cost of living into account or people who have extraordinary expenses like high medical bills. All they care about is your adjusted gross income. I guess I would say that your option to pay 15 percent or 10 percent of your discretionary income is much better than what people used to have to deal with.
The student-loan scheme is extremely complicated and convoluted and tricky to navigate, even for sophisticated and educated borrowers.
You're telling me I have it better off than people used to have it? That's dark.
Income-based repayment became available in 2009 right after the bottom fell out of the economy. Before that, there was no way you could pay less than the interest that was accruing on your loans every month. Now if someone makes like 40 grand a year, they can pay something like $300 a month, and that is manageable for most people who don't have special circumstances like living in Manhattan—which I guess the policy position is that if you owe that much money, you can't afford to live in Manhattan, period.
What if I have some sort of big windfall at some point, but it's not quite $100,000? Like I win the scratch-off jackpot or get an inheritance from a long-lost aunt. Should I put a big chunk toward the principal, or just keep making the bare minimum payment forever?
If you make payments based on your income for 25 years and there's still a balance remaining, the balance is canceled. There is an end in sight.
What?!
See, this is the thing. One of the things that's super frustrating is that the student-loan scheme is extremely complicated and convoluted and tricky to navigate, even for sophisticated and educated borrowers. It is absolutely bizarre in its complication, and it gets more complicated every day. So the best circumstances for someone in a situation like your own is to make payments based on your income for 25 years, expect some cancellation, and then also to be forewarned and prepared that under current law that canceled amount is taxable under income to you.
I feel like this should be common knowledge. Why haven't I read this?
It's too complicated to make for a decent story or decent reading, because it's really detailed in a way that can be really cumbersome. It's just not well understood. I think people tend to frame the questions and the debate in really stark terms. It's more cut and dry from a policy perspective that way, but that's not really the deal.
So was that New York Times op-ed writer a jerk?
There was some conversation within Occupy Wall Street about organizing people to default in mass, which really would be a way of protesting and being activists and sticking your neck out. You don't default on your loans to escape on responsibility or make things better for yourself—in fact, you make things worse for yourself and it's like an act of martyrdom for the cause to draw attention to the high cost of education, which really is the problem.
But he wasn't really making a moralistic argument as much as he was saying, "Having bad credit isn't a big deal." That seems like terrible advice based on what you're telling me.
It depends on your goals and what you value and what risks you're willing to take. When it comes to federal student loans, they will get their money and never leave you alone. And if you live off the grid or whatever that might be OK with you. But if you're someone who wants to have a more mainstream life financially in terms of being able to do things like qualify for mortgages, you might someday care about that. And I guess what I'm saying is debt to the federal government is not the same as debt to a big bank—which does have limits on their ability to collect. And in the end, it is only money. They're not gonna put you in jail or take your children away, thank God. You can pay or not pay, but I think people should be really informed before they make any such decisions.
What do you suggest to an 18-year-old kid thinking of taking out a loan—don't do it? Go to community college instead?
I would definitely say people should think carefully about how much they can afford and should give strong consideration to the less expensive educational options that meet their needs and goals. I think it's very difficult though to put that on the backs of people who are making these difficult decisions often when they're young.
All the research does continue to show that you're better off having an education than not. If you complete a program and have a degree, you're better off financially. You're more likely to work, you're more likely to be paid well, in spite of the student-loan debt. Obviously the debt diminishes the financial gain, but it does not erase it by far. Most of us would be much worse off without the education and the student loans than we would be with the education and the student loans. Now, of course, if we could have the education without the student loans, we'd be even better off. But that's not an option. If you don't come from a family of wealth, you need to access education somehow if you're going to have any shot at having the best kind of jobs and life. Most people are not Mark Zuckerberg who could do it without education.
But the most expensive education is not necessarily better than less expensive alternatives, and people tend to forget that the student loans permit us to pursue an education that we really can't afford. I think the idea that young people are supposed to be able to weigh that kind of significance—it's foolish to think that they could.
UPDATE 6/10: An earlier version of this article erroneously implied that Freddie Mac was involved in providing student loans. This error has been corrected.
Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.Recently I was fortunate enough to attend the “Women in Business — Leader’s Lunch” at the Dublin Web Summit. For the first time (and hopefully for the first of many) I was in a room full of hundreds of leading women in tech. It was inspiring to say the least. We met at the Four Seasons for lunch and dialog. All in attendance were women in tech but the similarities stopped there. We had CEOs, founders, managers, coders, geeklets, and journalists. I bet there was a woman representing almost every country in that room, and it was truly a sight to remember.
The goal? To share our challenges, offer our experiences, and sip champagne. I support all three of these goals whole-heartedly. We were also fortunate enough to have a panel full of women who have made a name for themselves in technology. Women executives represented companies like - Facebook, PayPal, Google, Vodafone, Microsoft and more. It was truly a great panel. I took tons of notes and will share them in a seperate post soon.
Right now though I have to admit something else is on my mind, something that came up at my table during lunch. There was a conversation I overheard that went something like this:
Lady 1: So do you have kids?
Lady 2: No I’ve decided to wait, I might not even have them actually. I’ve chosen to just focus on my career right now.
Lady 1: Well don’t wait too long, we can have it both now you know! {insert laugh} Forget the glass ceiling these days, this lunch is a great example of that.
Lady 2: {somewhat sheepishly and clearly not proud to be saying this} Yeah, so true.
Pardon me for this next sentence — but what the fuck. Seriously.
While I was so impressed to hear the women leaders on that stage say that they had children (as well as amazing careers), I can’t help but get a little worked up over hearing that conversation. So I started to think about my own experiences, and wouldn’t you know it — I do the same thing.
Sad truth: I’m almost embarrassed at times to say to other women I have consciously chosen to hold off on children to focus on my career. The looks. The feedback. It’s like I’m judged for either not choosing both when it’s now more possible than ever to have both, or I’m just not smart enough to want both. I’m not sure.
The funny part is it was a choice. I mean a real choice. I’m not just a career women without kids because I’m not married yet or ready to settle down. I have sat down the man I am going to marry and we have talked through this. I’ve decided (and he supports) the truth that I don’t even want to consider kids until my late 30′s. And even then…who knows.
Right now I choose late nights at the office, weekend blogging sessions at coffee shops. I choose {albeit somewhat selfishly} to be obsessed with my career. I am launching a mobile app in fashion. I’m taking classes on finances, learning how to speed read, and reading books on my kindle about business until I fall asleep on it. I have chosen to fill every second of my life with my work. I choose that.
What surprises me time and time again is the number of women that try to talk me into “more balance” or “rethinking my priorities” … as though given my choice, I clearly haven’t thought the whole thing through.
Let’s be clear. I commend women who choose the family and the career. I’m in awe of you. Two of the most amazing women I know just had babies…and both have not missed a beat of their careers. One is an independent creative, and one is the Founder of a start-up. They post pictures of holding babies at the computer, they talk of offices with cribs…it’s freaking amazing. I commend the woman at my office who has four children {FOUR KIDS!} and still kicks ass at her job. I commend their choices to do both and excel.
I also commend the women who have decided their career might be it. It might be all they want in their lives right now, and it gets everything. I don’t think you are turning your back on women, I don’t think you haven’t thought it through, and I certainly don’t think you are less amazing in any way than the women who have chosen both.
The women at my table that had that conversation eventually wandered away, and I ended up chatting with this brilliant woman who works in publishing in Dublin. She asked me what I did, and eventually asked if I was married or had children. I was afraid to be honest when I said, “I’ve decided to hold off marriage or kids for a while, just really enjoying my work and my projects.” She shocked me when she said “good for you, sounds like you’re doing well for yourself.” Support. Kindness. A genuine compliment.
If only that was the response always. Cuz it should be you know.
To the women in tech that have both families and careers– well done you. To the women who have chosen only a career –well done you. I don’t think choosing one or the other should have anything to do with each other. One is not harder, one is not more fulfilling, each is right for the woman that chooses it. I’ve found that women fill their lives in different ways, but leaders…innovators…shakers…they all fill their time and do great things for people around them (kids or no kids). I wish the conversation was a bit more supportive of both sides.
I don’t really see leading women in tech in two camps. I think it would be wise for us to make the conversation less about which choice we made, and more about our achievements during and after we made them.
I should probably note, I’m not well-versed in the challenges women have faced in technology. I mentioned in a recent interview, I think being a woman in tech has been an advantage as often as it has been a disadvantage (if not more often). With that said, I do know I’ve seen this sort of disrespect both personally and heard of it from others. I’m sure it’s happening on the other side as well.
With all that said, I would say it’s less about which is happening more often, and instead — asking why it’s happening at all? For real…since when did women who have both and women who choose one become different types of women? IMO, we should prob all get back on the same side of the coin…which for me is the “lets go make some moves, and build some epic things” side of the coin.
That has enough challenges. Let’s start supporting each other, no matter what responsibilities we’ve chosen to fill our lives with. It’s time to respect either road, not just the one we’ve chosen.
When I was in 8th grade French class I learned this phrase, “a chacun son gout” and it’s stuck with me over the years. It means “to each his own.” Well in this case how about “to each her own?” Let’s roll with that, and stop thinking the road we’ve chosen is harder, or says more about us, or any of that bullshit. Because it doesn’t.
Let’s respect the difficulty of the choice and commend the act of choosing. Then let’s start championing each other and get on with it already. #endrantOn Tuesday morning, the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) launched another desperate attempt to lift the siege imposed by the Syrian Armed Forces and the predominately Kurdish “People’s Protection Units” (YPG) inside the provincial capital of the Al-Hasakah Governorate.
The terrorist group conducted a fierce assault at the Red Villas of Abu Bakr from their positions at east Al-Taqadam, where they attempted to infiltrate past the YPG’s frontline defenses.
Unable to penetrate the YPG’s defenses, the terrorist group was forced to withdrawal west towards Al-Taqadam after sustaining heavy casualties as a result of their failed infiltration attempt into Abu Bakr village.
The purpose of ISIS’ desperate attack on the Red Villas was to clear a path to the outskirts of the provincial capital in order to reopen the supply lines to their embattled combatants that are currently trapped inside this city.
Despite their assault on the Red Villas, the terrorist group felt pressure from their western flank, as the Syrian Arab Army’s 104th Airborne Brigade of the Republican Guard – in cooperation with the Shaytat Tribesmen – carried out a powerful attack at the Martyrs Cemetery in the east district of the Al-Ghuweiran Quarter – firefights are ongoing.
Meanwhile, west of Al-Ghuweiran, the Syrian Arab Army’s 154th Brigade of the 4th Mechanized Division – in coordination with the National Defense Forces (NDF) and the Gozarto Protection Forces (Assyrian militia) – continued their advance at the Shari’ah District of the Al-Nishwa Quarter, capturing more buildings from ISIS.
AdvertisementsAMERICA might spend four times as much as China on its military, but one thing money can’t buy is the “tyranny of distance”.
To establish a military presence in Asia for global power, the US would be required to cross the largest ocean in the world and this would only be the first challenge.
Due to its proximity to the battlefield, China is in the perfect location to implement an anti-access/area denial (A2AD) strategy for its own territory.
The Chinese strategy places focus on restricting enemy access to a certain strategic location by combining advanced intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance with advanced targeting, communications, cyber capabilities and naval/air/missile defence.
According to the report China’s A2AD and its Geographic Perspective, the military’s ability to protect the region has increased dramatically in recent times.
“China’s A2AD capability is even more lethal than two decades ago, including cyberwarfare, anti-satellite weapons, carrier-killer missiles and the new-generation ships, planes and drones,” the report reads.
“One of characteristics of the A2AD strategy is the wide proliferation of ballistic and cruise missile technologies and the convergence of Chinese military power around a missile-centric, rather than the conventional platform-centric, model of mass-firepower combat.”
In addition to creating “unsinkable aircraft carriers” in its own territory, China continues to rapidly expand and build its military presence within disputed waters.
China’s latest addition to its increasingly powerful navy is the country’s most advanced domestically produced destroyer, which is equipped with the latest air, missile, ship and submarine defence systems.
The 10,000-tonne Type 055 destroyer is the first of four ships China is planning to produce.
“The launch of this ship signifies that our nation’s development of destroyers has reached a new stage,” the navy said.
The Type 055 is significantly larger than China |
below I-90 in an effort to stop homeless people from camping in downtown Spokane.
The rocks were dropped for a cost of $150,000, and city leaders say it’s just one of many steps Spokane is taking to get people off the streets and into the shelter system, which is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, due in part to city funding.
City Council President Ben Stuckart said he supports the boulder placement as part of a larger project to get homeless people to take advantage of homeless services. He added that the homeless people below I-90 have raised concerns among nearby business owners.
“I’ve been hearing from Divine, from the owner of the Taco Time property and the principal at LC,” Stuckart said, referring to Lewis and Clark High School. “But you can’t move people along. That’s anti-homeless. We’re purposely funding 24/7 shelters to give people a place. We want to point people to the resources, but at the same time we don’t want them disrupting private business.”
In May, the City Council approved spending $510,000 to keep House of Charity open around the clock. The city has also committed to spending $1.1 million in 2018 to keep the entire shelter system, which includes day and night shelter for families with children, single women and teens, operating.
Beginning next week, the city will launch a multipronged strategy spreading the word to the homeless community about what services are available to them, including signs below the freeway informing homeless people of how to access food, shelter and healthcare.
Stuckart said he believes the number of homeless people has not only risen in Spokane, but also in other American cities he has visited recently, including Seattle, Portland, Boise and Salt Lake City. He blamed income inequality.
“Things are continuing to get worse,” Stuckart said. “We’re trying to balance, make sure we’re providing and increasing the services while providing an environment that protects everybody.”
The idea to use boulders is a tactic of law enforcement and urban design that uses environmental design to deter criminal behavior. Better lighting and visibility, designing streets for more pedestrian and bicycle traffic as a form of “natural surveillance” and creating more open and visible public spaces are other ways to deter crime.
Using design to drive homeless people away from certain areas is used by many cities, and Spokane isn’t new to the use of homeless-deterrent planning.
Benches with vertical slats, large armrests or bucket seats are used in many cities to keep people from lying down or even sitting for too long. In large part, downtown Spokane doesn’t have benches, except for in Riverfront Park and near the transit plaza.
Notably, in 2013 city leaders banned sitting or lying on downtown sidewalks. Advocates say the law was intended to “clean up” downtown and was not aimed at homeless people. The police department said nuisance crime dropped after the law passed, but the majority of people cited under the law in its first years were homeless.
This time, Stuckart and others are clear: the rocks are aimed at homeless campers.
A short video produced by the city’s new in-house reporter, former KXLY police reporter Jeff Humphrey, said the boulders came after “the city council decided it was time to dislodge homeless people camping under the interstate.”
Humphrey made another short film in mid-August that gave a “point-blank look at Spokane’s homeless.” The clip, which looks like it was produced for TV news, talked about a clean-up crew from Geiger Corrections Center picking up the “stuff that even transients don’t want anymore.” The city pays Spokane County Detention Services $120,000 a year for the work, “costing taxpayers a lot more money than you might think.”
Steve Allen, executive director of Family Promise of Spokane, said he had nothing but praise for the city of Spokane’s work for the homeless, even though he suggested the boulder-laying work might not seem that praise-worthy at first glance.
“If this forces families and homeless people into what the city’s invested in, the shelters, then those are vehicles to help them get off the streets and into homes,” Allen said. “The services are there. There’s no need to sleep under the bridge anymore.”
On Thursday afternoon, homeless people watched as earthmovers put the rocks in place between Bernard and McClellan streets.
Jeremy Hinricks, 46, has been homeless a year. He doesn’t mind the new basalt.
“It looks nicer than a bunch of dirt and scraggily trees,” he said. “But it won’t stop us. We’ll just find somewhere else to camp.”
Hinricks said he hasn’t slept at a shelter because they’re “nasty,” but he goes there to shower. With winter coming, he’s considering giving the shelter a shot.
“I sleep where it’s safe,” he said.Was riding on the M4 heading West towards Heathrow Airport and a cloud of smoke appeared, pulled over behind the car that was smoking as I didn't really want to ride past it inhaling in all that smoke.After a couple of seconds I remembered watching a video on LiveLeak that looked similar and tried to help. Unfortunately the guy didn't know where his air filter was and whilst I was in there looking a coolant hose failed and sprayed all over me so I stopped looking any further, engine seized up on its own soon after that.I have since looked up other ways to stop this, if it was a manual gearbox I could have put it in a high gear with the brakes applied and dumped the clutch to stall the engine, didn't know this at the time so I don't know if it was a manual or automatic.This is caused by a faulty seal, usually at the Turbo, which lets engine oil into the combustion chamber and the engine runs on the oil, it is not diesel that is burning to make the engine run. Eventually all the oil is used and the engine gets so hot it seizes solid.For licensing/usage please contact: licensing@liveleak.comPolar bears diverged from brown bears surprisingly recently—within the past 500,000 years, researchers report today in Cell. Previous studies suggested that the separation occurred between 600,000 and 5 million years ago.
The latest analysis compares the complete nuclear genomes of 79 polar bears from Greenland with those of 10 brown bears from a variety of locations: Sweden, Finland, Montana and three islands off the coast of Alaska, Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof.
It finds that the two species diverged between 479,000 and 343,000 years ago, which would make the polar bear “remarkably younger” than most scientists thought, says Rasmus Nielsen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the study.
Long division
To determine when the split occurred, the researchers compared the length of DNA segments shared by polar bears and their brown bear kin. These sequences break up and shorten as species breed and evolve, so longer segments indicate a more recent split between two groups. The technique, called 'identity by state tract’, also takes into account the genetic effects of population declines, or bottlenecks, that occurred after two populations diverged.
“If you have a reduction in the population size, but don’t include it in the model, it can look like the two populations are much more different from each other than they actually are,” explains Nielsen.
The timing of the polar bear–brown bear split coincides with a warm interglacial period, when brown bears may have shifted their range northward and colonized higher latitudes. When the colder climate returned, these bears may have been cut off and forced to adapt to new conditions.
A relatively recent species split could help to explain the ability of polar and brown bears (including grizzlies) to interbreed and produce fertile hybrids, dubbed ‘pizzlies’, says Nielsen.
Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo in New York, had previously estimated that polar bears emerged 4 million to 5 million years ago. “Our model was probably too simple,” she says. But she is sceptical that the split occurred as recently as Nielsen’s work suggests. “This estimate may be based on better models, but it is still highly impacted by assumptions,” she adds. “I don’t think we’re there yet.”
Built for blubber
Polar bears consume a high-fat diet of marine mammals, mostly ringed and bearded seals. Nielsen and his colleagues find that they may have adjusted to this diet in fewer than 20,500 generations, “an unprecedented timeframe for rapid evolution”, they write.
A scan of the polar-bear genome found changes in genes related to cardiovascular function, lipid metabolism and heart development. One of the most strongly selected genes, APOB, has been shown to encode a protein in LDL, or 'bad', cholesterol that allows it to be taken up from the bloodstream into cells in humans.
“How on earth can anything eat that much fat? If you or I did that we’d be dead in a short period of time, but they’re thriving,” says Ian Stirling, a polar-bear ecology and behavior specialist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. “The evolution of this specialty to digest fat makes ecological sense.”
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on May 8, 2014.SEVERAL artefacts from Sikh history including weapons, shields, furniture and books of Ranjit Singh’s reign in Punjab were on display at the Lahore museum.—Photo by writer
WHEN one thinks of Sikh rule in Punjab — one that spanned at least half a century — who comes to mind but their leader, the powerful Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The man who later became known as the ‘Lion King’ became the official ruler of Punjab in 1801 but Sikh rule had already begun in 1799. Even today, the man’s formidable imprint cannot be shaken off. He constituted tough resistance for the British Raj — even at 22 years of age, he was a man to reckon with as he began consolidating his empire.
Sikh history in Punjab is replete with countless conquerors and while the Maharaja’s image is mostly that of a man with a sword, it was not war mongering that the man promoted, but peace. And much of this peace was promoted by art. At the Lahore Museum recently, a sampling of the arts he patronised were on display.
At this British-built structure, which itself is an edifice of historical value, were displayed several artefacts of the Sikh Empire, almost all of them reflecting the religion. Visitors marvelled at the fading but beautiful paintings, the weapons — rusty now, but still wielding intrinsic power — coins and intricate woodwork, symbols of a lost time. The exhibition was a world of its own, taking one back to the Sikh period when their unmatchable glory exerted influence — an integral chapter in the history of Punjab. And this last fact is fitting, for Sikhism is the only religion that rose from Punjab.
Globally, Sikhism is the fifth largest religion with 23 million followers, while Sikh history is more than 500 years old. That has been enough time for Sikhs to have developed unique expressions for art and culture, influenced heavily by their faith but also by other traditions, including Hindu and Mughal styles of art and architecture. Since Sikhism is an indigenous Punjabi faith, its art too is synonymous with that of the Punjab region. It was under the Sikh Empire that a uniquely Sikh form of expression was created. For his part, the Maharajah patronised the building of forts, palaces, bungalows and havelis (opulent residences), and colleges. In these were fitted archetypes including jharokas with intricate woodwork; domes featured often in their buildings and not one is without decoration such as inlay, carvings, and paintings.
The Lahore Museum has a rich collection of Sikh artefacts. There are gold, silver and copper coins, as well as Ranjit Singh’s gold medals, miniatures including portraits of Sikh spiritual and political figures, weapons, some clothing of the nobility, elegant furniture from the darbar (royal court), royal decrees and Sikh holy books. Those associated with this exhibition are rightfully proud.
“This is the first time that the museum has displayed what points to a unique Sikh identity,” said Iffat Azeem, research officer of the Lahore Museum. “Our most important relics are Ranjit’s gold medals that were minted in France. There are also some original edicts by Ranjit.”
“At the time Ranjit Singh took over Punjab, there had been a lot of chaos and anarchy,” said historian and writer Mushtaq Sufi, also one of the visitors. “In fact, it was the Lahoris themselves who invited the leader to conquer Lahore and subsequently Punjab. When Ranjit’s army reached Lahore, all the prominent citizens, including Mian Mohkam Din who personally opened the Lohari Gate for the army, presented to him the keys of the city.” Today, this meeting place is marked by the Punjab Public Library.
“In those days, miniature paintings depicted the apparel of the Central Asian states and that of the Persians,” said Sufi. “But soon, local culture began seeping into such artwork. Some Sikh and European artists also started visiting Ranjit’s darbar and so there was also a European influence.”
Since Ranjit Singh brought peace to Punjab through promoting art and culture, the king’s popularity grew.
A former director of Lahore Museum, Dr Saif-ur-Rehman Dar, termed the exhibition a good effort. Generally, it was felt that while the effort behind the exhibition was laudable, it was unfortunate that Sikhs from other countries could not be part of it. Dr Dar said that it could have been even better if the display had been put up during the Baisakhi festival when Sikhs make their way to Punjab for pilgrimage. “There is great importance to such an exhibition, with its display of letters and documents of the Sikh period,” he said, adding that visitors should have also had a copy of the list of relics on display.
For the museum’s additional director, Naushaba Anjum, this was not just an exhibition. “We are trying to send the Sikh community a message of solidarity,” she said of her brainchild. “And at the same time, it is not limited to being a message of love and peace. The exhibition raised a lot of awareness among the public about Sikh culture and identity.”
After all, Sikh rule can never be forgotten by Punjab.
Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2017MANILA, Philippines–Airport policemen stopped a Swedish man on Sunday from leaving for Iloilo province with his 28-year-old Filipino girlfriend after her family accused him of kidnapping her.
According to Philippine National Police Aviation Security Group (PNP-Avsegroup) head Chief Supt. Pablo Francisco Balagtas, his men took into custody Zohar Katz, 29, after he and his girlfriend Samantha Anne Cang showed up for their flight at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3.
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Earlier, Cang’s mother and older brother filed a kidnapping complaint against him with the PNP Anti-Kidnapping Group (AKG).
Aside from arresting Katz, the police also rescued Cang who insisted, however, that she was not being kidnapped. The couple told the lawmen that they were consenting adults who loved each other.
Based on the April 30 complaint filed by Cang’s 36-year-old brother Ian Henry with the PNP-AKG, he claimed that his sister was abducted on April 25 by Katz whom he described as her “stalker.”
He said he last saw her driving away from their Pasay City house with the Swedish national in a sport utility vehicle.
In a joint complaint-affidavit filed by Ian Henry and his mother, Betty, they claimed that Katz and Cang met somewhere in Europe after she went there by herself on a monthlong tour.
They claimed that Cang had complained about being stalked by Katz which prompted her to return home on April 24. The Swedish national, however, followed her to the Philippines the next day and went to their house in Pasay City. It was at that time that he kidnapped Cang, they said.
They added in their affidavit: “Every time we would try to contact her, Zohar Katz was the one answering the phone, telling us that we would never see our Samantha again, as he would be leaving the country with [her] very soon. [In] the background, we would hear Samantha crying. Unfortunately, since she was being held by Zohar Katz against her will, she could not talk to us and tell us her whereabouts. Zohar Katz started threatening us and even told us, ‘Enjoy your life because it will be very short.’”
The airport police said they would turn over Katz to the PNP-AKG for further investigation.
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MOST READThe drama surrounding the selection of the head coach of the Indian cricket team might have finally come to an end almost two months after it began, with cricketer-turned-commentator Ravi Shastri bagging the job on Tuesday as per reports.
Shastri was among the five applicants interviewed by the BCCI's Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) on Monday, and he beat the likes of former India batsman Virender Sehwag and ex-Australian cricketer Tom Moody to the coveted post, as per an update from ANI on Twitter.
The CAC had deferred the announcement after the interviews on Monday, with committee member Sourav Ganguly stating that there was no hurry in the process, and that they would have a word with captain Virat Kohli on the issue. However, the Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrators (CoA) asked the BCCI to make the announcement without any further delay earlier on Tuesday.
Former India captain Shastri was also the front-runner for the India coach’s role last time around due to his successful stint as Team Director, before Anil Kumble entered the fray and was handed the high-profile position over 56 other applicants.
However, Kumble’s relationship with Kohli soured inside a year and the former finally resigned in June stating “it was apparent the partnership (with Kohli) was untenable, and I therefore believe it is best for me to move on.”
According to reports, the BCCI had received 10 applications for the post of India’s head coach — Shastri, Sehwag, Moody, Richard Pybus, Dodda Ganesh, Lalchand Rajput, Lance Klusener, Rakesh Sharma (Oman national team coach), Phil Simmons and Upendranath Brahmachari (an engineer sans any cricketing background).
However, only five of these — Sehwag, Shastri, Moody, Rajput, and Pybus — were reportedly interviewed by the CAC, comprising Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman. Former West Indian coach Phil Simmons was not interviewed despite being in the list.
According to a PTI report, Klusener was kept on standby but had very little chance of getting the job to begin with.
More to follow
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — Amid international criticism on the Philippines' bloody drug war, a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey showed eight in 10 Filipinos are "satisfied" with President Rodrigo Duterte's anti-drug campaign.
Of 1,200 adults interviewed for the nationwide survey, 84 percent said they are satisfied with the government's crackdown on illegal drugs. Only eight percent said they are dissatisfied, while the rest are undecided.
The results yielded an "excellent" net satisfaction rating of +76. SWS classifies ratings over +70 percent as "excellent."
However, 71 percent of the respondents said it is "very important" for drug suspects to be caught alive.
Also read: Drug war critics urge priority on rehab and harm-reduction to curb drug abuse
Some 83 percent of respondents also said the government's crackdown on illegal drugs does not discriminate by social classes.
The poll was conducted September 24-27 and has a margin of error of ±3 percent. The results were first published on BusinessWorld Friday.
The same Third Quarter 2016 Social Weather Survey also showed Duterte bagging a "very good" satisfaction rating, gaining the approval of 76 percent of Filipino respondents.
The survey results validate Duterte's "landslide victory in the May elections based on his campaign pledge to eliminate the drug menace," Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said in a statement Friday.
Andanar added the government is putting up more rehabilitation centers to accommodate over 730,000 drug surrenderees.
Also read: Sociologist: Support for Duterte is personal
Bloody drug war
Official Philippine National Police data show at least 1,523 suspects were killed in anti-drug police operations from July 1 to October 7.
Over 26,000 individuals have been arrested.
The killings have drawn global attention and condemnation from the world's most powerful leaders, such as United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and U.S. President Barack Obama.
Also read: Duterte invites U.N., E.U. and rapporteurs to investigate alleged summary killings
The Duterte administration has repeatedly denied alleged extrajudicial killings, which is being investigated by the Senate.
"We reiterate: The Duterte administration does not condone summary execution or extrajudicial killing of drug suspects," Andanar said. "The Philippine National Police is investigating all cases of extrajudicial killings and will prosecute the perpetrators to the full extent of the law."
Critics have also pointed out that only the poor and small time drug users have fallen targets to the government's war on drugs.
But the President said it's because they are "easy targets" as compared to wealthy suspects who can easily fly out of the country. The poor also outnumber the rich, Duterte explained.This article is over 3 years old
Journalists fear naming contacts could put lives at risk, as Antonio ‘Tony’ Madafferi wants the Age newspaper forced to reveal sources of stories about him
Melbourne reporters should be forced to reveal confidential sources, court hears
A group of Melbourne journalists should be forced to reveal their confidential sources, a court has heard.
But the reporters fear naming their contacts could put lives at risk.
Four Corners reveals how Calabrian mafia aligned itself with Australian MPs Read more
Antonio “Tony” Madafferi claims several articles published by the Age defamed him and wants the Victorian supreme court to force the newspaper into revealing who supplied the details.
Madafferi was last year banned from Crown Casino by Victoria’s police chief commissioner because of his alleged ties to organised crime.
Counsel for the Age on Friday told judge John Dixon Madafferi did not need to know the sources’ identities for the purpose of his defamation claim.
“Why do they need to know who the sources are?” Matthew Collins QC said.
Madafferi’s barrister, Georgina Schoff QC, argued it was important for her client to determine whether the allegedly defamatory information came from a reliable source.
“It’s critical to know who the source is and what axe he has to grind,” she said.
The sources did not need protection for their safety, Schoff said.
“We’re not talking about police informants, we’re talking about outing people who have given information to an award-winning journalist,” she said.
“To suggest someone might try and knock off one of his sources is, in our submission, fanciful.”
But one of the journalists in Madefferi’s defamation case, Nick McKenzie, fears for the safety of his sources, according to an affidavit tendered to the court.
“I hold grave fears for the safety of any persons who speak to me confidentially about Tony Madafferi’s activities,” McKenzie said.
Schoff said the court needs to balance the rights of a free press and the rights of the individual not to be defamed.
“We see a recognition in court between... my client’s right to protect his reputation and the media’s right to protect their sources,” she said.
Dixon has reserved his decision.Joined: Member Since: 1/1/01
Posts: 5173
To clarify, there were initially two separate cases against Cameron. These cases and reports are archived and publicly available, search for Cameron Lee Earle born 1977. I will offer a quick summary to each case below before my reaction to each of the charges and Cameron's alibi.
The first and far more serious was the attempted rape charge. Early morning a girl was loading her car in a public parking lot for work and was attacked by knife wielding assailant. The assailant apparently tried to drag her into her car but she managed to fight him off, he then jumped into his truck and drove away. The assailant was described as tall, slightly built and speaking in broken spanish. Two weeks after the fact she saw Cameron in a parking lot, and convinced he was the one who attacked her followed him to an address, then got her brother who called the police.
I have no doubt this poor girl was assaulted. Whether the assailant was Cameron was a different matter. First it's very important to note that he wasn't the first person she identified, she had followed and called the police on someone else the week prior. Secondly, Cameron doesn't fit the description of being slight or Mexican (he's pretty well built and half asian) and I put his spanish on par with Beavis and Butthead's in that episode they almost get kicked out of school. There was a sketch done that could have resembled him, but no mention or recollection of one Cameron's most prominent features, his gnarly cauliflower ears. And finally, as even Cameron's biggest detractors would admit too, the idea of an "attempted rape" by Cameron seemed ludicrous. The girl was described as being small in stature. There is little doubt in my mind someone as well trained as Cameron would have little trouble controlling an untrained female who was much weaker than he was.
The second case was indecent exposure, and apparently Cameron flashed his genitals to a girl as he was driving by, calling out for her to come here.
In this case there was little doubt that this was Cameron, his car (a buick with the punisher logo painted on the hood) was way too distinct and he admitted to being this person. His explanation however was that instead of calling to the girl he was looking for his dog (Cameron had multiple dog which he loved but did not keep track of very well and they often got out). As far as flashing he claimed he was peeing out of his car which is weird, but not unheard of for him. (He actually once pointed out a bottle of urine in his car as I rode with him, much to my disgust).
When the charges and arrest came out the academy was initially supportive of him because we believed him to be innocent on the basis of mistaken identity and some incredible stupid (for anyone besides Cameron) circumstances. This wasn't just close friends and fans assessment of the situation but even folks who didn't like Cameron and the off the record opinion of a few police officers. His bail was set high, and Ralph himself even initially fronted the bail money until Cameron's girlfriend at the time could raise it, and one of his students even put up his house as collateral. We got him out just in time to compete in ADCC 2005 where he turned in a decent performance, for a man who spent the month prior in jail. Although I saw and talked to Cameron during this time, it was less frequently than years past when were near constant companions as he had long since moved out of my apartment (and I had moved in with my then girlfriend) and was splitting time between girlfriend and students. I was the best man at his wedding, a really quick affair in Las Vegas to a different girl he had only met a month prior.
Cameron was out on bail for sometime as he was fighting the case, which actually took awhile to come to trial and he had some high profile matches in that time with mixed results. He had a public defended on the case, and the strategy was to plead no contest on the lesser indecent exposure charge, and not guilty on the attempted rape charge. The cases were actually combined in court, and after about a week trial Cameron was found guilty on both charges. The judge did not take him into custody right away, but scheduled the sentencing for a month later. So Cameron then skips town.
Which was about the shittiest thing you could do. Firstly, his student's house is on the line, which is a terrible thing to do to a friend. Also, as Cameron and I were close so every one assumed I had something to do with his running, while the God honest truth is that I had no idea where he was. I did tell people I didn't think he was smart enough to stay inconspicuous for too long however (remember what i said about him being practically a savant). I actually tried to find him myself during this time (what I would do with him if I caught him I'm not entirely sure). He was eventually picked up in Oregon going by the name Ryan Garcia (Ryan Gracie Marcelo Garcia) while training at some dojo up there. Word is he tried to pass himself off as a new student, which was quickly figured out and an even darker rumor is that the knew who he was but let him train because he was just too valuable. An interesting coincidence is he got picked up the day before I got my black belt, and tried to call me that morning, to say that day is among the most memorable of my life is an understatement.
I did eventually talk to Cameron on the phone, but failed to see him when he brought back to San Jose. I was more than a bit pissed at him for putting me and everyone else through this, especially when did nothing but try to help him. Furthermore, I still believed him to be innocent (at least of the attempted rape) at this time and figured he could have appealed the case. He could have done a lot of things but he picked the dumbest, shittiest thing to do and it made it very hard to defend his character at this point. The judge was pretty pissed also and gave him the maximum sentence which was about seven years I think. I was still steaming until I finally decided to go see him at jail, by that point he was already transferred into the prison system.
We did keep up correspondence through letters, him about his daily routines and me about news from the outside. About a year later, his case is actually heard and conviction is overturned by the California State Supreme Court. This was a pretty landmark ruling in the judicial system because to my knowledge this had never happened in California before for these types of charges. It's also worth noting that the reason wasn't because they thought Cameron was necessarily innocent, but because combining two separate charges from two separate incidents in one trial was grossly unfair I believe what ruling said.
I got a call from a reporter from the San Jose Mercury news and I'm initially elated (again, I had thought Cameron innocent this whole time) when he dropped this bombshell on me: that Cameron's DNA proved a match for a cold case for rape unrelated to these two cases. Apparently a man masked man broke into some poor woman's house on Christmas Eve, raped her knifepoint, ejaculated in her hair and stole a coffee pot. The DNA turned out to match Cameron Earle's. Worst feeling ever, and however I rationalized his not being responsible for the first two instances, there was no way I can refute DNA, with this evidence there is no doubt in my mind that he is guilty.Five of nine protesters arrested in April and accused of blocking Central Avenue during a large protest of Senate Bill 1070 pleaded guilty Wednesday to a misdemeanor.
They were sentenced to time served, according to one of the protesters. A sixth protester was found guilty by a judge. His sentence was unknown.
Each spent the night in jail following the arrests on April 25, the same day the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Arizona's immigration law, known as SB 1070.
They were among about 500 people who blocked Central Avenue for about 30 minutes in front of the federal building that houses the Phoenix detention and processing facilities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Six of the nine people arrested had decided beforehand to get arrested in an act of civil disobedience. The other three were arrested after police said they did not respond to orders by police to clear the street.© BOBBY YIP/Newscom/Reuters Xyza Bacani, 28, poses on the street with a camera in Macau March 22, 2015
LONDON, May 26 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A Filipina maid in Hong Kong has published stark photographs of burned and beaten domestic workers to highlight the "modern slavery" she says has long been the city's shameful secret.
"Hong Kong is a very modern, successful city but people treat their helpers like slaves," said Xyza Cruz Bacani, whose black and white portraits won her a scholarship from the Magnum Foundation to start studying at New York University this month.
"The abuse happens behind doors. It's common but no one talks about it, so I want to tell their stories, I want to tell people it's not OK to treat your domestic workers that way."
Bacani is one of the 330,000 domestic workers in the former British colony, most of them from the Philippines and Indonesia.
She told how maids are frequently forced to sleep on toilets, kitchen floors, cabinet tops or even baby-changing tables because they are not given beds.
Many work up to 19-hour days. Some are underpaid or not paid at all. Others are denied food or beaten, she said.
"It was a big shock to me when I listened to their stories and they told me they slept on toilets, that their boss slapped them or their boss didn't even feed them," Bacani, a self-taught photographer, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone.
"It shocked me how people could treat other people like that. It's very barbaric. When I talk about it I feel angry."
SHELTER FOR ABUSED WORKERS
Bacani, who comes from a village in Nueva Vizcaya, moved to Hong Kong when she was 19, giving up her nursing studies so she could help pay for her younger brother and sister's schooling.
For the last decade she has worked alongside her mother for an Australian-Chinese businesswoman in the affluent Mid-Levels neighborhood on Hong Kong island.
She rises at 5:30 most mornings, serves breakfast, cleans the apartment and looks after her boss's six grandchildren, who visit almost daily.
But whether she is shopping in the market or taking the children to the park, she always has her camera in her bag.
Last year Bacani volunteered at Bethune House, a shelter for abused domestic helpers, and was horrified by what she saw.
"Many work until 1 a.m. and start again at 5. They work every day without stopping. I have friends who are underpaid and others have been physically hurt," she said.
"It's modern slavery. It's 2015 and people should be more educated, but still it happens."
THIRD DEGREE BURNS
Bacani's most shocking photos are of a Filipina woman called Shirley who suffered extensive third degree burns when a pot of boiling soup fell on her after someone left it on a rack.
Her boss said it was an accident, but Bacani says he refused Shirley medical leave and fired her after she fainted.
The maid started legal proceedings but appeared to be getting nowhere. Bacani says things changed when the CNN website reproduced her photos of Shirley's burns.
"After we published some of the images her boss paid her compensation for her injuries, her dismissal and three years of salary because she cannot work," Bacani said.
Shirley's story is not uncommon. The abuse suffered by the city's domestic workers made headlines this year when a Hong Kong woman was jailed for six years for attacking and abusing her Indonesian maids and threatening to kill their relatives.
The case sparked calls for Hong Kong's government to revise its policies on migrant workers.
Campaigners say domestic workers are often reluctant to report abuse for fear of being deported, trapping them in a cycle of exploitation.
The government stipulates employers should provide reasonable accommodation, free food and a minimum monthly wage of HK$4,110 ($530).
But Bacani says many maids are paid less, especially Indonesians who are often treated worse than Filipinas, partly because of the language barrier.
She describes herself as "one of the few lucky ones." She says her boss is a "great lady" who encouraged her to apply for the Magnum program, which aims to help photographers tell stories that can advance human rights in their home countries.
Bacani plans to return to Hong Kong later this year to mount an exhibition of her images of domestic workers.
"Awareness brings change," she says. "I hope my work can change people's perspective on domestic workers and help end this modern slavery."
(Reporting by Emma Batha, Editing by Katie Nguyen)PHIL Gould says the Brisbane Broncos should have won more than six premierships because of the significant advantages they have over rival clubs.
As part of his regular Twitter question and answer sessions, the master coach and Penrith football manager said Brisbane’s six premierships in 28 seasons was not good enough.
Gould’s comments are in part due to frustration at the lack of help Penrith receive from the NRL and the daily battle they fight with eight rival Sydney clubs for the same corporate dollar.
The Broncos have a population of 2.1 million in the palm of their hands.
Gould declined to elaborate on the tweets when contacted by The Courier-Mail but did confirm he held Paul White and the current administration in high esteem.
Gould even toured the Broncos in 2012 to help him transform the Panthers and he has spoken at Broncos functions.
Still, he was adamant the club should have been more successful since entering the competition in 1988.
Gould was asked on Sunday night if Brisbane had under performed during the past decade.
“6 premierships in 28 seasons, with all the advantages they enjoy?” he replied.
6 premierships in 28 seasons with all the advantages they enjoy? https://t.co/mpR0TLhSG2 — Phil Gould AM (@Gus10Gould) August 2, 2015
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Then told by a Broncos fan that Brisbane were the envy of rival clubs, Gould replied in kind.
“Thanks to a protected and monopolised territorial advantage, media co-ownership and private backing. Don’t start me,” Gould tweeted.
Thanks to a projected and monopolized territorial advantage, media co ownership and private backing. Don't start me https://t.co/W2hvuJfLVl — Phil Gould AM (@Gus10Gould) August 2, 2015
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, but I don’t know. As you said earlier, the structure of incentives that exists to put nonsense on cable television and the internet isn’t going away. I don’t see how the genies get put back in the bottle.
If I’m being honest, I’d say we’re probably screwed.The atmosphere was tense at the courtyard of the Thessaloniki city hall. Dozens of municipal workers in Greece's second-largest city staged a protest Monday morning against the planned lay-offs of 27,000 civil servants. "I have been working for the city for 22 years," said one of the city administration's 4,000 employees. He requested anonymity for fear of jeopardizing his position even further. "I fear for my job. All of us do."
A few hours later, city workers and journalists packed inside city hall to observe the city council meeting. The meeting ended with a decision to disobey the central government. Mayor Yiannis Boutaris had submitted the motion -- a refusal to send the Interior Ministry a list of workers ripe for dismissal. City administration and unions, so often enemies, were united.
Public sector lay-offs are a key condition set by Greece's international lenders for receiving further aid. Thousands of civil servants are to be placed on reserve for one year with reduced salaries. If they prove to have no useful function, or if they find work in the private sector, they lose their jobs. According to a report by the troika representing Greece's international public lenders comprised of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, 27,000 civil servants are to be placed into the mobility scheme over the next 12 months.
As SPIEGEL ONLINE reported earlier this week, the troika expects 2,000 public sector employees to be part of the scheme by the end of the year, and insists on concrete lists of people. Previous promises by the government to create a labor reserve failed miserably: While 15,000 employees should have been placed on reserve by the end of this year, fewer than 100 were transferred -- most of them part-time employees.
That resistance to shrinking the public sector is not going away. In a rare show of unity in Greece's infamously partisan politics and tense labor relations, both the national union of municipal employees, POE-OTA, and the Central Union of Municipalities, KEDE, have built up an anti-lay-off campaign. Starting on Monday, municipal workers occupied local government offices in Athens, Thessaloniki and other major cities. In some municipalities, protesters used wooden boards to seal off the personnel offices that hold the names of city workers.
Reformer Turned Rebel
Thessaloniki Mayor Yiannis Boutaris won accolades from the European Union and the press as a rare modernizer in Greece, yet he was among the first to rebel. "Both the government and the troika need to realize that such measures decapitate an already castrated local administration," he said at Monday's city council meeting.
Boutaris' position comes as a surprise to Nikolaos Tachiaos, a liberal politician who served as deputy mayor of Thessaloniki: "It is disappointing to see that even mayors like Boutaris who sponsor a modernizing agenda refuse to send the lists," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Was it not Boutaris who said last year that the city of Thessaloniki can operate 'with half the staff?' The message they are sending is that there is a huge gap between words and actions in Greece."
The head of the Central Union of Municipalities, Kostas Askounis, says no other branch of government in Greece has done as much cost-cutting as the cities, and that any further cutbacks will give the fatal blow to already overstretched local authorities. "More than 3,500 staff have left since 2010," he said. "Do they want to totally destroy us? Who will teach children in municipal kindergartens? And was it not Angela Merkel who praised local authorities during her visit to Athens? How are we supposed to perform the 200 additional responsibilities the law gives to municipalities in 2013?"
Tachiaos is not convinced. He says local authorities were loaded with redundant and often unskilled employees as part of rampant cronyism in local administration in the 1980s and early 1990s.
"Municipalities would hire literally everybody who came knocking," he said. "The workers who are targeted for the reserve scheme are people with low skills, who took on permanent posts by the mayors through back channels. And they are the same people who booed the city council politicians who appointed them."
Rebellious Greek mayors are undeterred by the criticism. They could even go as far as submitting their resignations en masse -- an idea to be discussed and decided on at an upcoming union meeting.Well, there’s some semi-good news. Our courageous National Intelligence Council has just judged [.pdf] "with a high degree of confidence" that Iranian authorities had already halted, way back in 2003, what the NIC inexplicably still characterizes as a covert "nuclear weapons program." Some details of that alleged program, obtained from the hard-drive of a laptop computer, allegedly stolen in Iran in 2004, had been supplied to us a few months later, apparently by the same wonderful folks who had earlier supplied us the "intelligence" on Iraq, obtained by them from "Curveball."
Now, a cynic, like Ebenezer Scrooge, might be forgiven for wondering who had provided us that "smoking laptop" containing details of what we now are told were already abandoned activities and why.
After all, a couple of years ago the Washington Post noted, that the smoking laptop did not even suggest that any chronicled activity was in any way related to much less constituted a nuclear weapons program.
According to the Post, the only laptop chronicled activity that was clearly nuclear related was the Green Salt Project.
"In the spring of 2001, a small design firm opened shop on the outskirts of Tehran to begin work for what appears to have been its only client the Iranian Republican Guard. Over the next two years, the staff at Kimeya Madon completed a set of technical drawings for a small uranium-conversion facility, according to four officials who reviewed the documents.
"Several sources with firsthand knowledge of the original documents said the facility, if constructed, would give Iran additional capabilities to produce a substance known as UF4, or “green salt,” an intermediate product in the conversion of uranium to a gas."
That’s it?
For years, now, the neocrazies have been running around in circles of diminishing radii, hysterically demanding that we nuke Iran, all because the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards asked a small Iranian design firm way back in 2001 to produce a set of technical drawings for a small facility to convert Iranian yellowcake even then all subject to Iran’s Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency into uranium-tetrafluoride?
Well, they don’t call them "neocrazies" for nuttin.
In 2001, the Iranians still had under construction but had already made subject to IAEA Safeguards a large facility at Esfahan, to convert (safeguarded) Iranian yellowcake into (safeguarded) Uranium-tetrafluoride and then into (safeguarded) Uranium-hexafluoride, to serve as feedstock for the Iranian gas-centrifuge cascades then under construction at the (safeguarded) uranium-enrichment pilot plant at Natanz.
The Esfahan facility was completed and commenced initial (safeguarded) semi-successful operations in 2003.
But, in the summer of 2003 Iran began negotiations with the IAEA on an Additional Protocol to Iran’s basic Safeguards Agreement and in December not only signed the Additional Protocol, but volunteered to immediately adhere to it in advance of its ratification by the Iranian Parliament.
Now, according to the IAEA Statute, even under a basic Safeguards Agreement, the Director-General and his designated inspectors “shall have access at all times to all places” in an IAEA member state as necessary “to account for [Safeguarded] source and special fissionable materials” and “to determine whether there is compliance with the undertaking against use in furtherance of any military purpose.”
And, under an Additional Protocol, the authorities of IAEA inspectors are considerably enhanced, to go anywhere effectively without advance notice they have good reason to believe they need to go and to interview anyone they have good reason to believe they need to interview.
And when IAEA inspectors do determine that safeguarded materials have been used “in furtherance of any military purpose,” they “shall” report such “non-compliance” to the Director-General, who “shall” thereupon transmit the report to the Board of Governors, the UN General Assembly and to the UN Security Council.
As of this writing, IAEA inspectors have made no such report to ElBaradei about Iran. In fact, ElBaradei consistently reports to the Board that “all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities.”
ElBaradei says he frequently asks himself these questions; “Have we seen any proof of a weapons program? Have we seen undeclared [uranium] enrichment?”
ElBaradei’s answer, then and now, is “There is none of that.”
In November 2004, Iran had entered into the Paris Agreement with the French-Brits-Germans, with the explicit expectation that the French-Brits-Germans would "provide [Iran] firm guarantees on nuclear, technological and economic cooperation and firm commitments [to Iran] on security issues."
On 23 March 2005, the Iranians confidentially offered to give-up, indefinitely, many of those "inalienable" rights, but thanks to "diplomatic" intervention by Bush-Cheney meanies, the French-Brits-Germans were not even allowed to acknowledge the Iranian confidential offer, much less make a corresponding offer of "security guarantees" against Bush-Cheney attacks or threats of attacks on Iran, using nukes should Bush-Cheney deem it necessary.
So, on 1 August 2005, Iran informed [.pdf] the IAEA General Conference that the French-Brits-Germans had failed to negotiate in good faith and so the Iranians were breaking off the negotiations. Furthermore, the Iranian Parliament had decided to not ratify the Additional Protocol and had basically directed the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency to cease voluntarily complying with it.
Accordingly, Iran announced it was resuming [subject to IAEA safeguards] some of the uranium-enrichment related activities including those uranium-conversion activities at Esfahan it had voluntarily suspended almost two years earlier.
Now, how’s that for a resounding triumph by the Bush-Cheney diplomatic weenies?
So, someone in possession of the "smoking laptop" was hurriedly rushed to Vienna to share some of the mind-boggling "intelligence" on it with Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei and his IAEA Secretariat experts.
The NIC had just issued a National Intelligence Estimate largely based, as we now know, on that mind-boggling "intelligence" that assessed "with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons."
But the IAEA experts were not boggled, dismissing most of the "intelligence" as unconvincing and, in any case, irrelevant.
Far from immediately demanding the Iranians explain the smoking laptop "intelligence," as of this writing ElBaradei has not even shared it with them.
So, in the summer of 2005, the Bush-Cheney diplomatic weenies proceeded to launch their so-far largely successful campaign to corrupt, first, the IAEA Board, and then the Security Council, getting them to require Iran in violation of the IAEA Statute, the NPT and the UN Charter to give-up all inalienable rights guaranteed them by the IAEA Statute, the NPT, and the UN Charter.
Why is the news arising from the courageous issuance by the NIC of the 2007 NIE on Iran only semi-good?
Well, on the basis of "intelligence" that may well turn out to be bogus about Iranian activities that were in no sense illegal or prohibited, Bush-Cheney diplomatic weenies have inflicted irreparable perhaps fatal damage to the international regime whose first duty was to facilitate the fullest possible transfer of the benefits of nuclear energy to all members of the United Nations, and whose collateral duty was to ensure "to the extent possible," that no diversion took place of certain proscribed materials to a military purpose.
Read more by Gordon PratherApr 1, 2016: Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker (1) reacts after a point is made in the first half against the Washington Wizards at Talking Stick Resort Arena. (Photo: Jennifer Stewart/USA TODAY Sports)
HOUSTON – Suns guard Devin Booker is undeniably a top NBA rookie, ranking near the head of his class in categories across the board.
There is one category where he tops all rookies – technical fouls.
Booker picked up his fourth technical foul Tuesday for briefly tussling with Atlanta’s Mike Scott. Suns interim head coach Earl Watson loved it and has implored Booker to stand his ground with opponents or officials.
The latest incident came during a tight fourth quarter, when Booker was blindsided by a Scott back-screen. As they broke away to position for a rebound, Scott gave a poke to Booker that left the Suns rookie with a 2-inch scratch across his jawline. Booker flung his arm backward at Scott and then had a verbal stand-off with the irritable Hawks fourth-year power forward before each player was issued a technical foul.
“You can’t get pushed over in this league,” Booker said. “If you have the reputation of being soft, every time you step on the floor, teams are going to try to bully you. I have to let my presence be known.”
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Booker has the billboard smile but he plays with sneers on his face and jeers from his mouth at times. He fearlessly drives at opponents, whose physical treatment of Booker has intensified since he stepped into the Suns’ lead scoring role after the All-Star break.
He also understands his place as a rookie, carrying out duties without complaint for Suns veterans and anticipating rookie treatment on the court.
“I’m the youngest kid in the league,” said Booker, 19. “I expect it. If I was playing against the youngest kid, I’d do the same thing. I expect it every time I hit the floor.
“People always think I’m trash-talking but I’m really talking to myself. ‘Let’s go, Book.’ ‘Nobody can guard you, Book.’ I’m just talking to myself. It’s really just something that keeps me going. Some people take it personal but, oh well.”
In Tuesday's tangle between Booker and Scott, Suns center Tyson Chandler was quick to step in as Booker incredulously looked at Atlanta’s Dennis Schroder for putting a hand on his shoulder and counseling him.
MORE: Download our Suns XTRA app iOS | Android
“He competes,” Chandler said. “He’ll get his respect in due time.”
Booker’s 34-point game at Atlanta, with 22 points in the second half, marked his fifth 30-point game since March 3. His six 30-point games are the most by a rookie since Stephen Curry had eight in 2009-10.
Booker’s season scoring average has risen to 13.7 points per game, trailing only Minnesota’s Karl-Anthony Towns (18.2), Philadelphia’s Jahlil Okafor (17.5) and New York’s Kristaps Porzingis (14.3) among rookies. It is the highest scoring average by a Suns rookie since Michael Finley averaged 15.0 points in 1995-96, before Booker was born.
“This is what I like more than the scoring and more than his presence all year – that he got a tech,” Watson said. “Players grab him. They wrap their arms around him. He’s not getting the calls and we don’t want him to get calls. We want him to have to earn it but he’s fighting and finally he said, ‘Enough,’ and he squared off on a guy. That’s what I love about Devin Booker, more than the 30-plus points he had. That speaks volumes.
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“I tell him all the time, ‘You’re 19. You’re going to be really good in this league. Always put some money aside to get these techs,’ Because as you see, dominant scorers in this league have to take a stand, and the referees are not going to catch every call. But you have to let the other team know that it’s not going to be allowed.”
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The $8,000 total of leagues fines from the NBA for his technical fouls is merely the price of doing business for a rookie making $2.1 million this season.
Booker has quarreled with whether he deserved each of his technical fouls but he also revels in the moment. After Tuesday’s incident, he walked to the Suns bench smiling at his coach.
“He’s not soft,” Watson said. “He’s not passive. He’s like a silent assassin and it motivates him. I love it when he does it. I love when Tyson does it. Tuck (P.J. Tucker) brings it every night. We all know A-Len (Alex Len) will drop any player at any moment. It’s just the way he plays. The tenacity moving forward has to be our style of play. Not do it every game. We don’t want to become like my former teammate Matt Barnes but we want to also let guys know we’re not going to be bullied.”
Reach Paul Coro at paul.coro@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-2470. Follow him at twitter.com/paulcoro.
Thursday’s game
Suns at Rockets
When: 5 p.m.
Where: Toyota Center, Houston.
TV/radio: FSAZ/KMVP-FM (98.7).
Rockets update: Houston is battling Dallas and Utah for one of the final two playoff spots in the Western Conference. The Rockets, who played at Dallas on Wednesday night, face four of the West’s worst teams in their final four games with three of them at home. Houston is going for its first-ever season series sweep of the Suns. James Harden, the NBA’s second-leading scorer, had 27 points, 10 rebounds and seven assists in the teams’ last meeting, a 116-100 Rockets win in Phoenix on Feb. 19. Houston attempted 56 free throws in the win.Before the 2013 election, Tony Abbott gave us fair warning that he would turn the clock back on the environment. As promised, his government has devoted itself to short-term economics and the sort of hardline ideas peddled by the Institute of Public Affairs. The result is that environmental protection is being given a lower priority than it has by any federal government since the first environmental legislation was introduced some 40 years ago.
Abbott made explicit commitments to reverse moves by the Rudd and Gillard governments, pledging to remove the price on greenhouse emissions as a first order of business. He also made clear his ideological opposition to the historic forestry “peace deal in Tasmania and his enthusiasm for an old-fashioned approach to developing northern Australia.
Yet beside the election commitments there have been nasty surprises too. As in other fields like health and education, the Abbott government has turned the clock back much further in ways that it didn’t warn voters about. While all governments are tempted to dismiss environmental problems that stand in the way of economic development, the past year has seen a dramatic increase in that trend.
Sceptics and economics
The issue which has captured most public attention is climate change. The government does not just have backbenchers who are still in denial about the science; it has climate-sceptic ministers, like Senate leader Eric Abetz, and senior advisers, like Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, and Dick Warburton, who has just handed down the controversial review of the Renewable Energy Target.
The government dressed up its attack on the carbon price as an economic move, framing it as "taking the handbrake off the economy”. Yet there was no evidence at all that the price was slowing the economy. In fact, the package of measures inherited from the previous government, including the Renewable Energy Target and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, have catalysed billions of dollars of investment and created thousands of jobs.
Future investment and job opportunities have been put at risk by the government’s approach. It is almost impossible to find an economist who takes seriously the claim that the so-called Direct Action policy will achieve even the basic promised 5% reduction in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
The situation would have been far worse if the government had been able to control the Senate, where the unpredictable Palmer United Party members have not supported most of the proposed changes.
Delays and dissent
While the scrapping of the carbon price was meant to be the first priority of the new government, it actually took 10 months to get it through the Senate.
The focus now turns to the Renewable Energy Target, a previously bipartisan policy to encourage clean energy technologies. Warburton’s review has recommended that it be drastically downgraded and parts of it scrapped. Again, it is not obvious that Senate cross-benchers will endorse this act of environmental vandalism.
The Abbott government has also supported moves by the incoming Tasmanian Liberal state government to undo the Tasmanian Forests Agreement, the result of long negotiations between industry, the union representing timber workers, the former Labor government, and environmental groups.
It even made an unprecedented approach to the United Nations to try and excise an area accepted for World Heritage listing, a proposal that was dismissed as “feeble” by the international body.
Beef over the Reef
The other decision which has attracted public attention was the approval of the proposed expansion of the Abbot Point coal port, requiring extensive dredging and the dumping of millions of cubic metres of spoil within the boundaries of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The level of outrage in the marine science community led to an ABC Four Corners documentary on the subject.
Given less attention by the media, but probably at least as significant in the long term, was the government’s approach of abandoning its environmental responsibility under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Protection Act, passed by the Howard government. Claiming that “green tape” and duplication of effort is holding back economic development, the government has proposed handing over its powers to State and Territory governments. For several decades, dating back to the Whitlam and Fraser governments, the Commonwealth has acted as a brake on the enthusiasm of growth-oriented States to approve irresponsible proposals.
Here again, the government has a problem in the Senate, which seems unlikely to pass this proposal in its entirety, and the entire policy may now be coming unstuck. PUP senators have said they will join Labor and the Greens in voting to retain the “water trigger” added to the law by former independent MP Tony Windsor, meaning that the Commonwealth will still be responsible for assessing the cumulative impact of proposed developments on both surface water bodies and groundwater.
More pain in the pipeline
There are plenty more environmentally damaging policies which the government did not flag before the election. It has sneakily undone the legislated network of marine protected areas by abolishing the management plans that gave the agreement legal teeth.
It has shifted transport funding away from public transport projects, even those proposed by Liberal state governments, in favour of the sort of urban road schemes that Infrastructure Australia had decided are a waste of public money. It has increased immigration, adding to the environmental pressure of human demands.
The government has fulfilled its pre-election promise of a great leap backwards on environmental protection, under the guise of economic advancement. While restrained by the Senate in some areas, it has exceeded expectations in others. There may well be plenty more surprises to come.
This is the final piece in The Conversation’s Remaking Australia series. You can catch up on the rest of the series here.CHENNAI: Do the words ‘hazaar’ and ‘bazaar’ mean different things?If they do, the freshly minted maximum value currency of Rs 2,000 denomination is faulty, say Chennai-based Urdu scholars. While ‘hazaar’ means thousand, ‘bazaar’ means market.‘Do Bazaar Rupye’. This is found to have been printed in Urdu on Rs 2,000 currency. Instead of saying ‘hazaar’ which means ‘thousand’, they have committed a spelling error resulting in a word ‘bazaar’ which means market or shopping area, said U Mohamed Khalilullah, an Urdu scholar and chartered accountant.On the reverse side of the new Rs 2,000 note, the value of the currency has been printed in 15 languages. In Urdu, it is printed as ‘Do Bazaar Rupye,’ said Mohamed Khalilullah. He said the Hindi phrase too was not correct, as it has been printed as ‘Dhon Hazaar Rupye’, instead of ‘Dho Hazaar Rupye.’“It has been printed wrongly. When there is a lot of confusion in the country now, whether the wrongly printed notes are valid or legal tender is to be determined,” Khalilullah said.The Patio Theater will screen "Night of the Living Dead" and "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things" on Friday, and "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park" on Saturday, all for free. View Full Caption Facebook
CHICAGO — The Patio Theater, 6008 W. Irving Park Road, will show a free zombie movie double feature on Friday to commemorate horror visionary George A. Romero, who died Sunday at age 77.
The landmark 1968 "Night of the Living Dead," written and directed by Romero and often credited with inventing the "modern zombie," will show at 7:30 p.m., followed by the 1972 horror flick "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" at 9:30 p.m.
The theater will follow up with another free double feature on Saturday, showing back-to-back action classics with "Jaws" at 7 p.m. and "Jurassic Park" at 9:30 p.m.
About 1½ years after the historic theater changed hands, it's ramped up operations in recent months, having secured a liquor license and finished a renovation of its bar last month.
The theater plans to "have free movie events consistently for the remainder of the year," interspersed with "independent and locally-made movie premieres and screenings," according to its programming director.
The staff is "working on having programming scheduled so we can be open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday permanently," he added.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
At first look, this is a seemingly normal advert for a push-up bra… until you realise that the sultry model with the boosted curves is actually a MAN.
Dutch retail chain HEMA has sent shockwaves through the world of fashion by using male model Andrej Pejic in its latest lingerie campaign.
The androgynous 20-year-old promotes the discount store’s new ‘Mega Push-Up Bra’ in a series of adverts that have shocked even the super liberal Netherlands.
The pouty star is pictured in two figure-hugging women’s dresses which flaunt the shapely curves the bra promises to deliver.
The controversial campaign has set tongues wagging on social networking sites, with the topic trending on Twitter just hours after the adverts were released.
One user tweeted: “That HEMA campaign is brilliant: Andrej Pejic sporting a push-up bra?!
“If a man looks good in that bra, it must be good stuff.”
Another added: “Andrej Pejic is the prettiest man woman known to man.”
The Bosnian’s androgynous good looks have made him one of the in-demand models of the moment.
And Pejic, who was raised in Australia, is no stranger to wearing women’s clothes.
The young star regularly takes to the catwalk in designer womenswear and even closed Jean Paul Gaultier’s haute couture bridal show in a see-through wedding gown.
Speaking to Frockwriter, Pejic’s agent Joseph Tenni said: “It's revolutionary. I've never known a man to do a womens' lingerie campaign before".The San Francisco 49ers and Colin Kaepernick are exercising patience in their staredown with Denver Broncos general manager John Elway.
Although Kaepernick has met twice with Elway in the past two weeks, the quarterback has informed the Broncos that he will not accept a pay cut from his guaranteed $11.9 million salary for 2016, NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport reported, via three sources involved in discussions.
Elway has known about Kaepernick's stance for several days, per Rapoport. All recent negotiations have revolved around the possibility of San Francisco paying a portion of Kaepernick's salary to facilitate a trade.
The 49ers are currently balking at that request, insisting they want Kaepernick to compete for the starting job this season. To that end, Kaepernick reported for start of San Francisco's offseason program on Monday.
Translation: Trade talks are on indefinite hiatus while the leverage game plays out.
Until the Broncos draft or sign a viable alternative to Mark Sanchez, Niners general manager Trent Baalke and Kaepernick have little incentive to cave. Elway views Kaepernick as a borderline starter worthy of a fourth-round draft pick in trade compensation, Rapoport has reported. Baalke, meanwhile, wants a second-round pick in return for a quarterback who was once viewed as the franchise savior.
The stances of all three parties involved beg obvious questions:
If Elway envisions Kaepernick as an upgrade on Sanchez, why not pay his $11.9 salary -- an eminently reasonable figure for an NFL starting quarterback in 2016?
If Baalke and new coach Chip Kelly are dead set on keeping Kaepernick, why have they allowed him to meet twice with Elway -- including once at the general manager's house?
If Kaepernick wants out of San Francisco desperately enough to request a trade, why not accept a 2016 pay cut with the potential to recoup so much more by resurrecting his career with the reigning Super Bowl champions?
A potential Kaepernick trade might not be dead, but it's on life support leading up to the 2016 NFL Draft later this month.Disclaimer: I do not own RWBY or any characters depicted.
This is a slight AU story. Events will not fully match up with canon.
Cover Art: Official commissioned art for this story done by the amazing Noxypep
Ruby pulled up her hood as she and Ren approached a large opening to a cave that was carved into the side of a jagged cliff.
She had always found it strange that the resistance had chosen to make their newest base on Patch. Ever since they had been driven out of their previous base to avoid Cinder's forces, she was sure they would try and find an area outside of the kingdoms to settle, but Ironwood had chosen here of all places to make a base. Surprisingly it had worked.
It seemed like hiding in the first place Cinder would have looked for them was just dumb enough that she didn't think they would actually do it. There had been few patrols to come over the island in the first months that they were there, and now one came on the same date bimonthly, making them easy to avoid.
They passed through the opening and into a small path tightly packed with rocks that created a small narrow walking lane leading to a larger open area. The only thing that they could see was an old wooden door along one side of the flat rocky cave wall. Old rotted signs hung on the door warning of a closed mine, and to keep out due to the danger of falling rocks from a cave in.
Ignoring the signs, Ren opened the door and held it as Ruby walked in. "What a gentleman." She teased placing her hand over her heart as she spoke. Ren rolled his eyes before following her inside making sure to shut the door behind him.
Inside was a narrow corridor created by the walls of the cave, the light from outside was blocked by the door so they were standing in complete darkness. Feeling around next to him, Ren found one of the many lamps that hung from a rotten wooden post built into the wall. He quickly lit the lamp illuminating the area around them. The now visible walls making them suddenly feel cramped in the small space.
"Come on let's get going, the sooner we get there the sooner we get this over with." Ruby said as she grabbed the lantern from Ren's hand and continued further into the cave.
The pair quickly navigated the many twist and turns of the cave, after about ten minutes they came across a dented and worn metal door, a single slit in the door rested at about eye level. A light hung above the door, illuminating black marks and scratches that looked like they had been created by grimm long before they ever found this place.
As they approached the door Ruby blew out the flame of the lantern and hung it on a similar post that had been near the entrance of the cave. She sauntered to the door she pounded on the door three times before she took a step back and waited.
After a few seconds, a sound came from behind the door as the metal slit was pulled back and a pair of dull blue eyes fell upon the two. "Password."
Ruby raised an eyebrow at the man behind the door. "Really? If we were one Cinder's goons we would have already blasted the fucking door down, and killed you all."
The man behind the door rolled his eyes at her response "Look I am just doing my job to make sure everyone is safe, now can you please give me the password so I can let you in Ms. Rose."
Ruby was about to retort when Ren spoke up from behind her. "O-G-Q-I-W"
"Thank you." The man shut the slider and the sound of a large latch could be heard. After a few seconds the door began to open.
Ruby shot Ren a dirty look as they began to walk inside. "Come on Ren I was trying to have a little fun." As they walked inside the base, Ruby met the cold stare of the soldier who was manning door. He quickly turned away from her as soon as she shot a glare of her own back at him.
"It was just faster to say the password, besides you delayed us getting here enough by taking us three miles in the opposite direction." He said as they walked through the small receiving room of the base. The tiny room was bare except for a small table that was littered with playing cards sitting off to the far left wall. The white fluorescent lights shone against the unpolished metal wall that surrounded them.
In front of them stood two more guards in front of an old steel elevator that led down into the heart of the base. One of the guards opened the gate to the elevator, and took a step back as both of them got on board. "Come on lighten up a little." She jabbed him with her elbow as she took her spot next to him before the guard shut the gate.
"Ironwood is waiting for you in his office. I know you don't need directions there." The guard slammed the button to send the elevator down below and turned his back as they started their descent, the elevator shaking loudly as it was lowered.
"Ruby I don't want to be here anymore than you do, but the sooner we get to Ironwood's office the sooner we can leave." Ren raised his voice over the sound of the elevator. Pulling out his scroll, he quickly sent Jaune a message that they were almost to the meeting.
"Fine, you have a point, I just wanna get this stupid meeting over with. It probably is just him asking us to go on another mission anyway." Ruby watched the walls outside the gate as the elevator slowly moved towards their destination. Her attention did not waver as she spoke.
After a minute the elevator finally came to a stop. The gate opened up to a grey hallway that seemed to go on forever as it branched off into other hallways that ran perpendicular to it. Doors of varying sizes lined the walls all clearly labeled as to what they stored behind them. The white fluorescent lights like above shimmered off the silvery polished metal of the walls. A people were commuting through the hall either carrying things, relaxing as they walked around, or just trying to get back to their barracks.
Ruby was always a little surprised when she came into the base, in the little time that they have been here they had turned what started as an abandoned mine into an actual working base of operations.
Ruby and Ren stopped of the elevator, Ren pausing briefly to hit the button to send the elevator back up. Ruby was not even able to take two steps forward before a resistance fighter walked directly into her. She fell backwards and landed on her ass, her hood falling in the process, she ignored Ren's helping hand and quickly stood up, dusting her outfit off with her hands as she stood back up.
"Hey watch where you are going next time bitch." Ruby raised her eyebrow as she looked up at the at the resistance member who stood in front of her. His standard uniform and helmet made him indistinguishable from the mass of others in the hall.
"You're the asshole who wasn't looking where he was going, don't be a dick and try and blame me." She threw back at him. The calm cold tone she was using only seemed to make the man more angry.
"Look here, if you get in my way again girl you're gonna have a bad time." The man was trying to sound threatening, but it had little effect on Ruby as she simply cast a sideways glance to Ren who was shaking his head at the scene in front of him.
"Oh, I doubt that." The man was about to continue his tirade when another soldier came running up from behind him. He quickly clasped his hand over her aggressor's mouth and began to drag him away from Ruby.
"I'm terribly sorry,, he is new and doesn't exactly know know who he is talking to, please continue on your way." The fear in his voice was rather evident from the nervous laugh at the end of his explanation.
"Whatever." She motioned for Ren to continue, and they began walking down the hall towards where Ironwood's office was. As she they departed she heard the conversation the two were having behind her.
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today have also made up their mind that the message of righteousness by faith through grace is heresy. They believe in God and His only begotten Son, but they reject His Salvation, His message of grace and righteousness by faith.” (page 31)
Women:
1. “Ever wondered what would have happened if Eve would have said ‘You need to talk to my husband.’ What if she would have said, “Do I know you? Who are you? Why would I listen to you? I don’t know you? I do know God. He created this garden, these trees, animals, and all these creeping things; he created my husband and formed me from my husband’s rib. He even created you! Why would I listen to you? You neeed to talk to my husband.’
‘Adam! Adam! Come over here right now. This snake can talk! He just called God a liar! He’s trying to convince us to eat from the one tree the God told us not to eat from lest we die. He told me “We shall surely not die!”
I believe these words coming from Eve would have empowered and emboldened Adam as the protector of Eve and the Garden. He would have responded with righteous indignation and killed the serpent on the spot- even cut off his head. The scriptural account could have possibly been ‘And the Spirit of the Lord came upon Adam and he cut off the serpent’s head and they lived happily ever after.’
Unfortunately that’s not what happened…” (page 47)
2. “After seven days of crying and nagging, Samson gave in and gave her the answer. His weakness for whining, nagging women would ultimately cost his destiny. He lost the bet because of her.” (page 116)
Public Servant:
1. “As a professional firefighter, from the time I began the recruit academy I was placed in uniforms provided by the city…[lists clothing/gear items]. After the initial issuance we are furnished a clothing allowance in order that everything we need to be properly attired could be sustained on an ongoing basis. The uniforms are paid for by taxpayers.” (page 57)
2. “Personal Life Application: God gave me my fire service land, field, career. He gave me the job of being a fire service leader, Fire Chief of Atlanta Fire Rescue. He also made me the head- United States Fire Administrator. My job description as a fire chief of Atlanta Fire Rescue Department is:
To cultivate its culture for the glory of God
To keep it focused on its mission of saving lives and property
To sustain its culture, its members and its capabilities both now and for future generations.” (page 76)Fundraisers for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., are selling him to donors who previously backed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's White House bid. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Photo
WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- Just two days after Jeb Bush dropped out of the Republican primary, big-money donors are flocking to support Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Fundraisers for Rubio tell The Hill that Bush backers are coming their way in the two days since Bush announced he was suspending his presidential campaign.
"I think the vast majority of Jeb folks will join Marco," said Brian Ballard, a former Bush fundraiser who came over to Rubio's team. "I'm not having to sell hard. The case is clear and people want to join. They are joining as we speak."
But Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's campaign is also making a case for the cash.
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"The Cruz campaign is very organized, very smart, and I think they have a strategy to go after as many of the Jeb finance and political people as they can," said Bush adviser Austin Barbour. "I can't imagine one Jeb Bush supporter is going to Trump. Not one."
Ohio Gov. John Kasich may also get a boost in the wake of Bush's exit from the race, but it may not do enough to raise his low polling numbers.
"To me, the only logical one is either Kasich or Rubio," Al Hoffman, former finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, told USA Today. "And poor John, I don't think he has enough to win that battle, so I guess my default has to be Marco. That would be a tough one not to argue."
RELATED Jeb Bush suspends campaign for president after primary loss
"It seems to me most mainstream Republicans will rally to Rubio's side," said veteran GOP fundraiser Fred Malek, who's neutral in this fight. "He bridges the gaps and brings everybody together. Bush and Kasich could have done that, too. But they didn't come in second place in South Carolina."
Then there is the question of Right to Rise USA, the super PAC backing Bush that raised a whopping $103 million last year. According to the Federal Elections Commission, the PAC ended January with more than $24 million cash on hand. The Hill reported by now there is about $15 million remaining.
The super PAC's website still prominently asks supporters to support Bush's White House bid. One must scroll down to see the statement released by Right to Rise on Saturday saying: "We are ceasing our activities in support of Gov. Bush's nomination."
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According to registration papers filed with the FEC, Right to Rise USA can back more than one candidate. If the group chooses not to back someone else, they can return the money to donors or give it to charity. Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for Right to Rise USA, did not respond to The Hill's request for comment.A series of Saudi airstrikes against targets in northern Yemen have killed at least 21 civilians and wounded scores of others, with the larger of the two strikes occurring at a water-drilling site in the Arhab District, due north of the capital city of Sanaa.
The first airstrike killed four workers at the site, and attracted local villagers who aimed to carry out a rescue effort. Five more strikes targeted the rescuers, killing at least 11 more civilians and wounding at least another 20, though locals reported that the toll was likely far higher. claiming around 100 casualties.
Saudi officials claimed that the attacks on the water-drilling site targeted Shi’ite Houthi members, though it does not appear that any were present at the time, nor does it appear the site was a “Houthi position” as they are claiming, beyond being nominally in Houthi territory.
The second attack targeted a local tribal leader in the Hajjah Province, destroying his home and killing at least six civilians. It is unclear if the tribal leader was among the slain, and Saudi officials did not specify why he was targeted in the first place.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz« Republican Rep. Charlie Dent: Say, Maybe We Need to Team Up With Democrats to Elect a Speaker Who Will Represent Both Parties | Main | We Had a Good Run » Hillary Clinton Forwarded The Name of a Clandestine Agent of the CIA via Her Private, Unsecured Email A very, very special lady. If I'm reading this right, she did not forward this clandestine source's -- this spy's -- name to someone outside the government. Issikoff's report says she forwarded it to "a colleague," I assume at the State Department. However, the identities of the CIA's spies (and note that a "spy" is a foreign contact recruited by the CIA, not a CIA officer himself) are among the very most tip-top secret secrets any intelligence operation has. Obviously, if the spy's name gets out, he will be lost as an asset, as he'll probably be hanged, after some torturing. The names of spies are always compartmented on the most stringent need-to-know basis. People who are allowed to receive the information disclosed by the spy are not usually permitted to know the name of the spy himself -- because they don't need to know, so that information is kept in the smallest possible circle. So the question here is whether this "colleague" was specifically authorized to receive this spy's name. The answer is almost certainly "no," as this information would be restricted to the case officer running the spy, his superior, and maybe a few analysts charged with running a background check or psychological profile on him to determine his reliability. But here's Hillary, blithely sending this guy's name along on a private unsecured server to an individual almost certainly not authorized to know his name. Also note that Hillary did not receive the name from official channels herself; she would also probably not be authorized to know the name (just his code-name, maybe, if she was permitted to know the information he was disclosing). She received the name from Sidney Blumenthal, who got it from Tyler Drumheller (the ex-CIA hand who served as her personal spymaster), who himself got it as an unauthorized leak from a CIA official. That doesn't make this better for Hillary; it probably makes it worse, because she not only transmitted highly classified information without any authorization to do so, but she received it without any authorization to do so, and the circumstances of her receiving it would demonstrate to anyone that this is an illegal disclosure of information. She should have reported Blumenthal and Drumheller for peddling high US secrets. Instead, she just hit "forward" to a "colleague." Incredible stuff. Hillary Clinton used her private email account to pass along the identity of one of the CIA's top Libyan intelligence sources, raising new questions about her handling of classified information, according to excerpts from previously undisclosed emails released Thursday by Rep. Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. On March 18, 2011, Sidney Blumenthal -- Clinton's longtime friend and political adviser -- sent the then secretary of state an email to her private account that contained apparently highly sensitive information he had received from Tyler Drumheller, a former top CIA official with whom Blumenthal at the time had a business relationship. "Tyler spoke to a colleague currently at CIA, who told him the agency had been dependent for intelligence from [redacted due to sources and methods]," the email states, according to Gowdys letter. The redacted information was "the name of a human source," Gowdy wrote to his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, and was therefore "some of the most protected information in our intelligence community.
Here's Team Hillary's defense: A Clinton campaign official, who asked not to be identified by name, said that as described in Gowdys own letter, "the information at issue was not only unmarked, but also was transmitted by no fewer than two individuals who were outside the government before it ever reached Hillary Clintons inbox." 1. It doesn't matter that it was "unmarked;" anyone would understand that the name of a human intelligence source in a foreign country (which itself has hostile terrorist forces inside it, eager for reprisals against spies) was "born classified." Only someone who was mentally deranged could fail to understand this. Unless Hillary wants to posit that her brain was malfunctioning due to a fall or illness, she has no defense here. 2. The fact that it came from "two civilians" doesn't help her either -- if a CIA agent passes classified information to a "civilian," and then that civilian passes it a third one -- everyone in that chain, including the CIA agent, is guilty of transmitting classified information to an unauthorized third party. You are either authorized to receive specific (compartmented) classified information or you are not. If you inadvertently receive such information, you are supposed to report this immediately -- not say "YOLO" and start hitting the "Like" button and sharing it with your friends. 3. This information is being transmitted via an unsecure private network. Surely such highly sensitive information was originally restricted, before Hillary's incompetent spy ring began blabbing it all over the internet, to a SCIF wholly isolated from the outside world. (In fact, it was probably even more guarded than that -- this name was probably written down in five or six places, the files of the only five or six people in the world deemed with a need to know the name, none of such places connected to the internet.) This is not the only disclosure in these emails revealed by Gowdy. Sidney Blumenthal, a man whose livelihood seems to depend on doing favors for the Clintons, also seems to have guided Hillary's Libya policy in such a way as to advance his own business interests in that country. "At the same time that Blumenthal was pushing Secretary Clinton to war in Libya, he was privately pushing a business interest of his own in Libya that stood to profit from contracts with the new Libyan government--a government that would exist only after a successful U.S. intervention in Libya that deposed Qaddafi," Gowdy wrote. Among the newly revealed emails were a pair of messages from July 2011 in which Blumenthal described efforts to secure Libyan government contracts for Osprey Global Solutions, a company in which Blumenthal has admitted to having a financial interest. Blumenthal warned Clinton that French companies were looking to scoop up security contracts from the Transitional National Council, the revolutionary government of the Libyan resistance, and plugged Ospreys ability to be an American counterweight. "It puts Americans in a central role without being direct battle combatants," Blumenthal wrote of Ospreys TNC contract. He described his efforts in "putting this arrangement together through a series of connections, linking the Libyans to Osprey and keeping it moving." In addition, Clinton seemed to be pushing the idea within the government that private security companies could be used to arm the Libyan opposition -- private security companies like, for instance, the Osprey Group, the company Sid Blumenthal had a financial stake in. If you saw this on 24, you would roll your eyes at it. You would not believe it. But this is what Hillary Clinton, frontrunning presidential candidate, was doing in the years of her Shadow Government, half inside the actual government like a parasite, half outside it in the form of the quasi-governmental/mostly-graft Clinton Foundation and her own private spy ring.
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Recent Comments Recent Entries Search Polls! Polls! Polls! Frequently Asked Questions The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick Top Top Tens Greatest HitjobsJava Scripting Programmer's Guide
Who is the Java Scripting API For?
Some useful characteristics of scripting languages are:
Convenience : Most scripting languages are dynamically typed. You can usually create new variables without declaring the variable type, and you can reuse variables to store objects of different types. Also, scripting languages tend to perform many type conversions automatically, for example, converting the number 10 to the text "10" as necessary.
Developing rapid prototypes : You can avoid the edit-compile-run cycle and just use edit-run!
Application extension/customization : You can "externalize" parts of your application - like configuration scripts, business logic/rules and math expressions for financial applications.
"Command line" shells for applications -for debugging, runtime/deploy time configuration etc. Most applications have a web-based GUI configuaration tool these days. But sysadmins/deployers frequently prefer command line tools. Instead of inventing ad-hoc scripting language for that purpose, a "standard" scripting language can be used.
The Java TM Scripting API is a scripting language indepedent framework for using script engines from Java code. With the Java Scripting API, it is possible to write customizable/extendable applications in the Java language and leave the customization scripting language choice to the end user. The Java application developer need not choose the extension language during development. If you write your application with JSR-223 API, then your users can use any JSR-223 compliant scripting language.
Scripting Package
The Java Scripting functionality is in the javax.script package. This is a relatively small, simple API. The starting point of the scripting API is the ScriptEngineManager class. A ScriptEngineManager object can discover script engines through the jar file service discovery mechanism. It can also instantiate ScriptEngine objects that interpret scripts written in a specific scripting language. The simplest way to use the scripting API is as follows:
Create a ScriptEngineManager object. Get a ScriptEngine object from the manager. Evaluate script using the ScriptEngine's eval methods.
Now, it is time to look at some sample code. While it is not mandatory, it may be useful to know a bit of JavaScript to read these examples.
Examples
"Hello, World"
From the ScriptEngineManager instance, we request a JavaScript engine instance using getEngineByName method. On the script engine, the eval method is called to execute a given String as JavaScript code! For brevity, in this as well as in subsequent examples, we have not shown exception handling. There are checked and runtime exceptions thrown from javax.script API. Needless to say, you have to handle the exceptions appropriately.
import javax.script.*; public class EvalScript { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { // create a script engine manager ScriptEngineManager factory = new ScriptEngineManager(); // create a JavaScript engine ScriptEngine engine = factory. getEngineByName ("JavaScript"); // evaluate JavaScript code from String engine. eval ("print('Hello, World')"); } }
Evaluating a Script File
In this example, we call the eval method that accepts java.io.Reader for the input source. The script read by the given reader is executed. This way it is possible to execute scripts from files, URLs and resources by wrapping the relevant input stream objects as readers.
import javax.script.*; public class EvalFile { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { // create a script engine manager ScriptEngineManager factory = new ScriptEngineManager(); // create JavaScript engine ScriptEngine engine = factory. getEngineByName ("JavaScript"); // evaluate JavaScript code from given file - specified by first argument engine. eval (new java.io.FileReader(args[0])); } }
println("This is hello from test.js");
java EvalFile test.js
Script Variables
Let us assume that we have the file named "test.js" with the following text:We can run the above Java as
When you embed script engines and scripts with your Java application, you may want to expose your application objects as global variables to scripts. This example demonstrates how you can expose your application objects as global variables to a script. We create a java.io.File in the application and expose the same as a global variable with the name "file". The script can access the variable - for example, it can call public methods on it. Note that the syntax to access Java objects, methods and fields is dependent on the scripting language. JavaScript supports the most "natural" Java-like syntax.
public class ScriptVars { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { ScriptEngineManager manager = new ScriptEngineManager(); ScriptEngine engine = manager.getEngineByName("JavaScript"); File f = new File("test.txt"); // expose File object as variable to script engine. put ("file", f); // evaluate a script string. The script accesses "file" // variable and calls method on it engine.eval("print(file.getAbsolutePath())"); } }
Invoking Script Functions and Methods
Sometimes you may want to call a specific scripting function repeatedly - for example, your application menu functionality might be implemented by a script. In your menu's action event handler you may want to call a specific script function. The following example demonstrates invoking a specific script function from Java code.
import javax.script.*; public class InvokeScriptFunction { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { ScriptEngineManager manager = new ScriptEngineManager(); ScriptEngine engine = manager.getEngineByName("JavaScript"); // JavaScript code in a String String script = "function hello(name) { print('Hello,'+ name); }"; // evaluate script engine.eval(script); // javax.script.Invocable is an optional interface. // Check whether your script engine implements or not! // Note that the JavaScript engine implements Invocable interface. Invocable inv = (Invocable) engine; // invoke the global function named "hello" inv. invokeFunction ("hello", "Scripting!!" ); } }
If your scripting language is object based (like JavaScript) or object-oriented, then you can invoke a script method on a script object.
import javax.script.*; public class InvokeScriptMethod { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { ScriptEngineManager manager = new ScriptEngineManager(); ScriptEngine engine = manager.getEngineByName("JavaScript"); // JavaScript code in a String. This code defines a script object 'obj' // with one method called 'hello'. String script = "var obj = new Object(); obj.hello = function(name) { print('Hello,'+ name); }"; // evaluate script engine.eval(script); // javax.script.Invocable is an optional interface. // Check whether your script engine implements or not! // Note that the JavaScript engine implements Invocable interface. Invocable inv = (Invocable) engine; // get script object on which we want to call the method Object obj = engine. get ("obj"); // invoke the method named "hello" on the script object "obj" inv. invokeMethod (obj, "hello", "Script Method!!" ); } }
Implementing Java Interfaces by Scripts
Instead of calling specific script functions from Java, sometimes it is convenient to implement a Java interface by script functions or methods. Also, by using interfaces we can avoid having to use the javax.script API in many places. We can get an interface implementor object and pass it to various Java APIs. The following example demonstrates implementing the java.lang.Runnable interface with a script.
import javax.script.*; public class RunnableImpl { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { ScriptEngineManager manager = new ScriptEngineManager(); ScriptEngine engine = manager.getEngineByName("JavaScript"); // JavaScript code in a String String script = "function run() { println('run called'); }"; // evaluate script engine.eval(script); Invocable inv = (Invocable) engine; // get Runnable interface object from engine. This interface methods // are implemented by script functions with the matching name. Runnable r = inv. getInterface (Runnable.class); // start a new thread that runs the script implemented // runnable interface Thread th = new Thread(r); th.start(); } }
If your scripting language is object-based or object-oriented, it is possible to implement a Java interface by script methods on script objects. This avoids having to call script global functions for interface methods. The script object can store the "state" associated with the interface implementor.
import javax.script.*; public class RunnableImplObject { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { ScriptEngineManager manager = new ScriptEngineManager(); ScriptEngine engine = manager.getEngineByName("JavaScript"); // JavaScript code in a String String script = "var obj = new Object(); obj.run = function() { println('run method called'); }"; // evaluate script engine.eval(script); // get script object on which we want to implement the interface with Object obj = engine. get ("obj"); Invocable inv = (Invocable) engine; // get Runnable interface object from engine. This interface methods // are implemented by script methods of object 'obj' Runnable r = inv. getInterface (obj, Runnable.class); // start a new thread that runs the script implemented // runnable interface Thread th = new Thread(r); th.start(); } }
Multiple Scopes for Scripts
In the script variables example, we saw how to expose application objects as script global variables. It is possible to expose multiple global "scopes" for scripts. A single scope is an instance of javax.script.Bindings. This interface is derived from java.util.Map<String, Object>. A scope a set of name-value pairs where name is any non-empty, non-null String. Multiple scopes are supported by javax.script.ScriptContext interface. A script context supports one or more scopes with associated Bindings for each scope. By default, every script engine has a default script context. The default script context has atleast one scope called "ENGINE_SCOPE". Various scopes supported by a script context are available through getScopes method.
import javax.script.*; public class MultiScopes { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { ScriptEngineManager manager = new ScriptEngineManager(); ScriptEngine engine = manager.getEngineByName("JavaScript"); engine.put("x", "hello"); // print global variable "x" engine.eval("println(x);"); // the above line prints "hello" // Now, pass a different script context ScriptContext newContext = new SimpleScriptContext (); Bindings engineScope = newContext. getBindings (ScriptContext.ENGINE_SCOPE); // add new variable "x" to the new engineScope engineScope. put ("x", "world"); // execute the same script - but this time pass a different script context engine.eval("println(x);", newContext); // the above line prints "world" } }
JavaScript Script Engine
Sun's implementation of JDK 6 is co-bundled with the Mozilla Rhino based JavaScript script engine. This is based on Mozilla Rhino version 1.6R2. Most of the Rhino implementation is included. A few components have been excluded due to footprint and security reasons:
JavaScript-to-bytecode compilation (also called "optimizer"). This feature depends on a class generation library. The removal of this feature means that JavaScript will always be interpreted. The removal of this feature does not affect script execution because the optimizer is transparent. Rhino's JavaAdapter has been removed. JavaAdapter is the feature by which a Java class can be extended by JavaScript and Java interfaces may be implemented by JavaScript. This feature also requires a class generation library. We have replaced Rhino's JavaAdapter with Sun's implementation of the JavaAdapter. In Sun implementation, only a single Java interface may be implemented by a JavaScript object. For example, the following works as expected. var v = new java.lang.Runnable() { run: function() { print('hello'); } } v.run(); In most cases, JavaAdapter is used to implement aa single interface with Java anonymizer class-like syntax. The uses of JavaAdapter to extend a Java class or to implement multiple interfaces are very rare. E4X (ECMAScript for XML - ECMA Standard 357) has been excluded. Use of an XML literal in JavaScript code will result in a syntax error. Note that E4X support is optional in the ECMAScript standard - a implementation can omit E4X support and still be a compliant ECMAScript implementation. The Rhino command line tools (Rhino shell, debugger etc.) are not included. But, you can use jrunscript instead.
JavaScript to Java Communication
For the most part, accessing Java classes, objects and methods is straightforward. In particular field and method access from JavaScript is the same as it is from Java. We highlight important aspects of JavaScript Java access here. For more details, please refer to http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/scriptjava.html. The following examples are JavaScript snippets accessing Java. This section requires knowledge of JavaScript. This section can be skipped if you are planning to use some other JSR-223 scripting language rather than JavaScript.
Importing Java Packages, Classes
The built-in functions importPackage and importClass can be used to import Java packages and classes.
// Import Java packages and classes // like import package.*; in Java importPackage (java.awt); // like import java.awt.Frame in Java importClass (java.awt.Frame); // Create Java Objects by "new ClassName" var frame = new java.awt.Frame("hello"); // Call Java public methods from script frame.setVisible(true); // Access "JavaBean" properties like "fields" print(frame.title);
The Packages global variable can be used to access Java packages. Examples: Packages.java.util.Vector, Packages.javax.swing.JFrame. Please note that "java" is a shortcut for "Packages.java". There are equivalent shortcuts for javax, org, edu, com, net prefixes, so pratically all JDK platform classes can be accessed without the "Packages" prefix.
Note that java.lang is not imported by default (unlike Java) because that would result in conflicts with JavaScript's built-in Object, Boolean, Math and so on.
importPackage and importClass functions "pollute" the global variable scope of JavaScript. To avoid that, you may use JavaImporter.
// create JavaImporter with specific packages and classes to import var SwingGui = new JavaImporter (javax.swing, javax.swing.event, javax.swing.border, java.awt.event); with (SwingGui) { // within this 'with' statement, we can access Swing and AWT // classes by unqualified (simple) names. var mybutton = new JButton("test"); var myframe = new JFrame("test"); }
Creating and Using Java Arrays
While creating a Java object is the same as in Java, to create Java arrays in JavaScript we need to use Java reflection explicitly. But once created the element access or length access is the same as in Java. Also, a script array can be used when a Java method expects a Java array (auto conversion). So in most cases we don't have to create Java arrays explicitly.
// create Java String array of 5 elements var a = java.lang.reflect.Array.newInstance(java.lang.String, 5); // Accessing elements and length access is by usual Java syntax a[0] = "scripting is great!"; print(a.length);
Implementing Java Interfaces
A Java interface can be implemented in JavaScript by using a Java anonymous class-like syntax:
var r = new java.lang.Runnable() { run: function() { print("running...
"); } }; // "r" can be passed to Java methods that expect java.lang.Runnable var th = new java.lang.Thread(r); th.start();
When an interface with a single method is expected, you can pass a script function directly.(auto conversion)
function func() { print("I am func!"); } // pass script function for java.lang.Runnable argument var th = new java.lang.Thread(func); th.start();
Overload Resolution
Java methods can be overloaded by argument types. In Java, overload resolution occurs at compile time (performed by javac). When calling Java methods from a script, the script interpreter/compiler needs to select the appropriate method. With the JavaScript engine, you do not need to do anything special - the correct Java method overload variant is selected based on the argument types. But, sometimes you may want (or have) to explicitly select a particular overload variant.
var out = java.lang.System.out; // select a particular println function out["println(java.lang.Object)"]("hello");
More details on JavaScript's Java method overload resolution is at http://www.mozilla.org/js/liveconnect/lc3_method_overloading.html
Implementing Your Own Script Engine
We will not cover implementation of JSR-223 compliant script engines in detail. Minimally, you need to implement the javax.script.ScriptEngine and javax.script.ScriptEngineFactory interfaces. The abstract class javax.script.AbstractScriptEngine provides useful defaults for a few methods of the ScriptEngine interface.
Before starting to implement a JSR-223 engine, you may want to check http://scripting.dev.java.net project. This project maintains JSR-223 implementations for many popular open source scripting languages.
ReferencesA man lies on the floor in a squalid bedsit, a rubber rope tied around one arm, a needle in his hand. The door bursts open and two armed police officers run in. They take in the scene and swiftly find a bag of powder. What should they do next? The answer depends on the country they’re in.
The Home Office has published a major report into drug use across various countries, apparently surprising even itself with the findings. “We did not in our fact-finding observe any obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country,” the report said.
It is a hugely counter-intuitive finding – common sense suggests that if the threat of punishment hangs over something, people will be less willing to do it. But, in the 11 countries studied, that does not seem to be the case. How strict you are on drug users – whether you punish them as criminals or treat them as patients – does not seem to have any effect on how many people actually take drugs.
Back to those police officers bursting through the door. In Britain, according to the law, they ought to lock the man up and charge him with possession of an illegal substance, which is a criminal offence. But there are at least two countries in Europe that would take a very different approach: the Czech Republic and Portugal. Neither would treat the man as a criminal – and yet the drug situation in the two countries is very different.
In 2001, Portugal was facing what Ann Fordham, the executive director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, describes as a public health crisis. “There was a large number of users of intravenous drugs, which had brought with it a mini-HIV epidemic,” she says. The country’s drug users had the highest levels of HIV in Europe. Huge amounts of money were being spent on imprisonment of drug users, as well as health care for the HIV-positive population. “Communities were seeing the same people go through the criminal justice system again and again,” says Fordham. “There was a sense that they needed to try something different.”
So the country did something almost completely unprecedented: it removed all criminal penalties for drug use. The police officers would not be allowed to arrest the man at all. Instead, they would only be allowed to send him to something called a Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser, which reported only to the department of health. The dissuasion panel had no power to imprison people; it could only refer users to treatment, and, if someone turned up before the panel again within six months, it could issue a fine.
There was understandable concern in Portugal that the country would see an increase in drug use – and it did, of a kind. “It’s important to note that decriminalisation was not followed by a drop in overall drug use,” says Fordham. By 2007, according to the Home Office report, the percentage of the population who had used cannabis in the previous year had gone up from 3.25 to 3.6; cocaine, 0.25 to 0.6; and heroin, 0.3 to 0.5. Not a huge spike, but not irrelevant either.
But, fascinatingly, that was only the beginning. By 2012, the figures had changed again. Cannabis use in the previous year had dropped to about 2.7 per cent; cocaine to 0.3; heroin to less than 0.2. Despite drug users no longer being punished, fewer people were taking drugs – and this was especially true among the young.
Perhaps more importantly, while the number of people taking drugs may have gone down slightly, the level of problem drug use fell much more dramatically, says Fordham, “because people were more willing to come forward and seek treatment”. According to research by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the number of people receiving treatment for HIV leapt from 6,000 in 1999 up to more than 14,000 in 2003. Meanwhile, the number of new cases was plummeting. According to Dagmar Hedrich, of the EMCDDA, there were almost 100 new drug-related HIV cases per million people in Portugal in 2001; by 2012, it was just five. The rate of HIV infection had dropped by almost 95 per cent in barely a decade.
How much of this is to do with decriminalisation? It’s hard to say. Brendan Hughes, legal analyst at the EMCDDA, says: “The decriminalisation is a red herring. It’s the dissuasion panels that make Portugal unique.” Everywhere else, he says, still puts drug users under the authority of their equivalent of the Home Office or the Department of Justice; it’s only Portugal which hands them over to the health ministry.
But if Portugal is apparently a success story for liberal drug policies, the Czech Republic is the opposite, at least on the face of it. After the fall of communism in 1990, drug laws in the country became extremely relaxed. “The law became, if you’re a drug dealer, you’ll be punished, but if you take them, you’re only harming yourself,” says Dr Tomas Zabransky, an epidemiologist at the University of Prague.
Regulations were slightly toughened in 1999, but still, as in Portugal, the police have no power to arrest people for drug possession – or at least possession of an amount that isn’t “greater than small”, as the legislation puts it. Anything less than that is considered a misdemeanour, similar to a parking ticket.
But whereas in 2007 just 11.7 per cent of Portuguese people reported having used cannabis in their lifetime, the figure is more than twice as high among Czechs: 27.6 per cent, according to 2012 EMCDDA data. While there is no real problem with drug tourism in Portugal, Prague has a reputation as a pill-popping, joint-smoking stag party capital. It also has high levels of methamphetamine (“crystal meth”) abuse.
But, according to Zabransky, there is more to the story in the Czech Republic than the bald numbers of how many people take drugs. The country began treating drug users very early, says Zabransky: “We had our first drop-in centre in 1991, our first needle exchange in 1992, and now there are six million needles exchanged a year.” This policy, according to Hedrich, is behind the country’s extraordinarily low incidence of HIV among drug users: less than one new case per year per million people (compare that to the figure of 100 per million in Portugal in 2001).
In response to the new report, the Home Office issued a statement: “This government has absolutely no intention of decriminalising drugs. Our drugs strategy is working and there is a long-term downward trend in drug misuse in the UK.” They’re absolutely right: drug use has been dropping for years. And there is no reason to think that decriminalisation will reduce it further: yes, use has gone down in Portugal, but so it has in many places. As the Home Office report notes, there is no obvious link between strict laws and levels of use.
What does seem to be true, however, from the experience of both Portugal and the Czech Republic and many other places is that treating drug use as a health problem, rather than a criminal one, has the effect of reducing the harms that drug use causes: the addiction, the crime, the disease, not to mention the cost to the state. “For chronic drug users, drug use is usually the least of their problems,” says Fordham. “They’re often homeless, or unemployed, vulnerable. But drug use exacerbates those problems.”A 21-year-old woman who was four months pregnant was shot and killed in Hartford in April and police said her boyfriend is accused of hiring a hitman to kill her.
Authorities said Carlton "CJ" Bryan, 21, of Windsor, hired a hitman to kill his girlfriend, Shamari Jenkins. On Friday, the prosecutor said they believe it was over Jenkin's decision not to have an abortion.
Jenkins was shot |
a Lie.
Louie Gohmert is a Republican House Representative from Texas. That right there ought to tell you that he’s going to be pretty wacky even by Republican standards: almost certainly he’ll be some brand of ultra-right-wing Christian, he’ll at least pay lip service to the persecution fantasy that his party’s lone voting bloc believes, and you know he’ll be such a happy member of Team Rape and Disenfranchisement that there’s no deed or ambition his party could have that’d be so grotesquely inhuman and regressive that he wouldn’t speak up in defense of it.
In an interview with hate group leader Tony Perkins, Rep. Gohmert said something about North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” (which I covered in great detail last time) that should be shocking even by his party’s standards:
“When it comes to this current legislation where — in most of the world, in most of the religions, the major religions, you have men and you have women, and there are some abnormalities but for heaven’s sake, I was as good a kid as you can have growing up, I never drank alcohol till I was legal, never to, still, use an illegal drug, but in the seventh grade if the law had been that all I had to do was say, ‘I’m a girl,’ and I got to go into the girls’ restroom, I don’t know if I could’ve withstood the temptation just to get educated back in those days,” he said.”
That’s a lot of awful stuff all packed into one repulsive paragraph! Let’s look at it together, shall we?
1. Most religions “have men and... women, and there are some abnormalities.”
Uh, being transgender is no more an “abnormality” than being male or female. In fact, a lot of babies are born with ambiguous genitalia and have to be shoehorned into one category or the other. The fact that most religions don’t recognize how common it is to be born outside the gender binary of male or female is a mark against those religions, not a mark in favor of Rep. Gohmert’s religious or moral worldview.
And that he thinks that being transgender is some kind of abnormality tells me everything I need to know about where he sees his own gender.
Transgender people are, in his eyes, “abnormal,” which makes his status as someone cisgender (that’s the opposite of transgender; it means someone who identifies as the sex they were assigned at birth–so I’m a cisgender woman, while Caitlyn Jenner is a transgender woman) the normal one. His cisgender status is the default by which Rep. Gohmert defines and measures every other option.
One might even say that being cisgender is the option that, to him, is superior and morally right–because he certainly seems to be saying exactly this. There really isn’t much of a leap from “abnormal” to “broken,” “inferior,” and “morally wrong” in Christians’ eyes, and that’s all the permission they need to try to control, regulate, and “fix” whatever it is they view in that way–whether their victims want that kind of help or not.
2. He was “as good a kid as you can have growing up” because he refrained from using alcohol and drugs.
I think of being a good kid as being a lot more than just avoiding illegal or contraband substances. And I’ve known some really good kids who got caught up in that stuff but were still the sweetest, nicest kids you could hope to know. He regards “goodness” as something measured by what he didn’t do, not what he did do. If I were going to describe myself as a child and teen, then sure, I’d call myself a good kid–because I tried to be helpful and kind, I did my chores, I was respectful to my parents and other adults, did well in school, and kept myself busy. Yes, I also refrained from abusing substances. But that’s not even a data-point on my radar when it comes to being good. A “good kid” also doesn’t murder people, but nobody except someone with extremely low standards for themselves would include that data in their assessment.
What he said reminds me of how Nice Guys™ describe themselves as “nice” because they don’t abuse or sexually assault women; not for nothing do Christians often remind me of them. We could probably spend a whole post about why “not doing something evil” qualifies a Christian in their own mind at least as “good,” but for now I’ll just say that it’s a piss-poor definition of goodness and makes me deeply distrust the rest of this particular Christian’s moral pronouncements.
3. When he was a teenager, he’d have lied about being a girl to get into girls’ bathrooms; the temptation to tell such a lie would have been so intense that he wouldn’t have been able to keep his mind on his studies.
See what I mean? I genuinely was a good kid, because it wouldn’t have occurred to me to lie or to invade other people’s spaces without their permission and consent. But Louie Gohmert, a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ who says he was a “good kid,” a Christian who proudly details on his biography page his Sunday-School teacher and deacon positions at his church, his work with Boy Scouts, and all the church speaking engagements that he does, immediately goes to this scenario as the reason why he supports North Carolina’s reprehensible new law.
This part here is the actual lie. The other stuff was just him being a delusional and hypocritical bigot-for-Jesus. This third bit, though, this is the part he’s actually lying about.
It’s not even a good lie, because it’s very obviously untrue, and anybody who even thinks twice about the matter would realize that.
Here’s Why It’s a Lie.
1. Louie Gohmert absolutely, positively would not have lied about being a girl.
Last year I wrote a series of posts about “Male Shame.” One of the posts, “The Lost Boys,” detailed how men–especially in deeply patriarchal, male-dominated cultures–define themselves by how not-female they are. Boys who are even a tiny bit too “girlie” get teased, bullied, shamed, and even physically attacked (and in extreme cases, sexually assaulted). And it’s other boys who are committing the bulk of this abuse. They have to keep the whole tribe in lockstep, after all. They can’t have one boy off doing his own thing and giving the rest of the tribe ideas about becoming their own people with their own ideas. (If you just thought of that old Calvin & Hobbes strip about the boy joining his school’s baseball team against his will, then you’re supposed to; it’s very much what I’m talking about.)
That’s one of the reasons why right-wing Christianity is so panicky about LGBTQ rights and women’s rights, and why those two culture wars are their hills to die on. I mean, it doesn’t even make sense that they’ve staked out those areas, does it? At least, it doesn’t make sense till you think about it a little. Then it makes absolutely perfect sense.
Those two subjects concern themselves chiefly with how men and women ought to behave, and with the marked lines between being male and female, straight and LGBTQ. If someone rejects the fundagelical life script about gender and orientation in such a fundamental way, then chances are they will see little reason to accept other fundagelical demands about how they ought to handle other parts of life (like childrearing and relationships), and worst of all will likely reject the hierarchical social structures that that culture insists are divine law–and which coincidentally maintain its power structure and organizational schemes of churches and denominations.
I’m not even going to try to say that women’s rights and LGBTQ rights aren’t a danger to fundagelical Christianity. To the contrary, I think that they are a big part of its coming fall into total irrelevance–and its leaders and most fervent adherents are very familiar with this fact already. They knew it 40 years ago, and they know it even better now. That is why they are clamping down as hard as they are on their children and trying to indoctrinate other people’s children, and also why they are trying harder than ever to restrict their female adherents and chain them to a version of repressed womanhood that even I, as a Pentecostal, would have found extreme and abusive. Last, it’s why they are trying so hard to push an extreme vision of hyper-masculinity onto all men, even men who aren’t even in their religion, that is as not-female as they can possibly manage.
So no. Louie Gohmert wouldn’t have pretended to be a girl to get into girls’ bathrooms. His culture wouldn’t have allowed it. As much as he might have wanted to spy on girls without their consent when he was 13, he would have had to have declared himself a girl to do it.
Would a Christian man make such a declaration nowadays, in modern Christianity’s polarized and aggressive climate? Sure, and I really wouldn’t be that surprised. Their idea of consent has been getting more and more shaky over the years, and their belligerence and pugnacity are getting so out of hand that abortion clinics are facing a huge surge in threats since fundagelicals began freaking out over imaginary stuff they thought those clinics were doing. Moreover, people who even try to speak out against their overreach or even declare themselves non-Christian routinely endure abuse, threats, ostracism, and vandalism.
Christians in Louie Gohmert’s tribe think that any abuse is okay if it proves some kind of point, even if that point exists only in their own minds. And when they’re reached some kind of stopping-place after having abused, vandalized the stuff of, threatened, insulted, and hurt whoever it is they were eagerly victimizing, they’ll turn away thinking that they just fought the good fight for Jesus and “planted a seed” that will “make people think.” (And it will, just not the way they intend.) So yes, I can see a Christian doing such a thing in today’s climate.
But Louie Gohmert, a Baptist kid who was born and raised in the 1950s in a tiny town you have never heard of in Texas, did not exist in that same polarized environment. If he wanted to spy on girls without their consent, he would have done it in a way that his culture would have found more acceptable. Which brings us to the next part of his lie.
2. If he’d wanted to spy on people, he could have easily done it without lying about being a girl. It’s not like people just like him weren’t spying on people.
The one single most obvious reason that we know that he wouldn’t have lied about being a girl to spy on girls is that he (apparently) did not actually do so.
Doubtless he saw girls going into their bathroom. Doubtless he realized that only girls could go into the bathroom marked “girls.” It wouldn’t have taken a rocket surgeon to figure out that if he looked like a girl, he could totally go into that bathroom and see all the rows of closed stall doors and completely non-sexual primping that goes on at the mirrors in such sacred chambers.
It seriously sounds like he thinks that when women go to the bathroom they strip to their unmentionables and have pillow fights and make-out sessions. I’m suddenly wondering just what’s in this guy’s porn folder, because it’s like his entire conceptualization of young people was acquired through watching Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds 600 times each. I mean FFS, that first movie even had a movie poster depicting a young man spying on women through a peephole!
Of course, if he had watched those venerable old teen sex romps, he’d know that if he had really wanted to spy on people, there were lots of ways of doing it that were totally acceptable to his culture. And these methods were known even in small towns of Texas in the 1950s and 1960s. Spying on women in their vulnerable moments wasn’t unheard-of in his day, by any stretch.
It’s like he seriously thinks that young men (and older ones) in his culture never spied on people before, but suddenly trans rights will open those floodgates and release the Krakens across a thousand, thousand small towns all over America.
Once he finishes lying, he launches into his next salvo, a pair of the usual threats we see out of Christians nowadays.
The First Threat: Oh Noes! The CHILDREN!
He’s using the time-tested Christian threat “Won’t someone think of the children?!?” but not in the way you might imagine.
Christians do love to shriek “WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?” like that character on The Simpsons, and Louie Gohmert can’t resist the tactic here in his lie. It’s been part of their playbook of tactics to deploy against hated groups for decades. It’s just too effective to pass up.
But he’s not using it quite in the way his group normally does.
He’s not talking about saving good, godly Christian virgins and wives from being spied on by actual trans women. He’s actually talking about saving them from all those nasty, lying cisgender teens like he was who will seize their opportunity if trans people are allowed to pee in gender-appropriate bathrooms. He’s actually thinking of himself here as a young man, which is why he specifically uses himself as the example: if he’d only known he could lie about being a girl, why, he wouldn’t have been able to study as hard because he’d have been stewing so much about the temptation to do it! He assumes that other young men are like himself, and that they only refrained because it was illegal at the time–so that if it becomes legal, they will start running wild.
Because HE can’t respect women’s boundaries, and because HE didn’t/doesn’t care about sexual consent, and because HE would lie in a heartbeat if it meant getting to spy on women, LGBTQ people cannot be given the same rights he has.
Sounds to me like he’s the one with the problem here, and like he’s the one who needs to address this issue within himself without making others pay the price for his shoddy upbringing.
I’ll mention again that he’s totally proud of being a Sunday School teacher. This guy works with children. He’s an authority figure at a fundagelical church.
Doesn’t that make you feel warm inside? It sure does make me feel–oh, that’s anger. Sorry. Never mind.
The Second Threat: THEY’RE GONNA GET RAPED.
His second threat spins around from himself to the women he’s ostensibly trying to protect: If trans people are given rights, then nice, proper, cisgender women will be sexually assaulted and spied on by cisgender men lying about their real gender.
It’s called “bathroom panic,” and it has been at the center of almost every single fundagelical campaign against trans rights so far: threats of the horrible things that would happen if trans people were allowed to pee in whatever bathroom fits their gender without fear of harassment.
At its heart, this threat is a lurid folk-Christian fantasy about what would happen if people like Louie Gohmert and his fine, upstanding tribe were no longer allowed to harass, humiliate, and persecute a group of people who they don’t like–and he is issuing that threat in the scariest way he can to his tribemates by invoking a group that they feel is one of their most vulnerable: their womenfolk, especially their daughters.
As long as Christians have sought to limit other people’s freedoms, they’ve invoked the specter of women’s safety. They are very quick to spring to threats of widespread sexual assault and rape whenever their stranglehold on culture feels challenged. Rep. Gohmert’s current boogeyman is cis men pretending to be trans women, but oppressors have relied for years on similar threats to keep people afraid of black people and immigrants–both groups that right-wing Christians are still demonizing even today with these same threats.
Threats of rape are a common and easy way for Christians to provoke proper, upstanding godly Christian men into feeling protective of “their” women and from there angry and inflamed against those Others, those monsters, those demons who would gleefully hurt what is “theirs” if given even half a chance, those enemies who must be stopped, those evil interlopers who want to take what correctly belongs to them.
Allowing these Others to roam unfettered and uncontrolled by their superiors will cause them to rise up in bloodlust and fury to vent their natural, animal urges on the beautiful, virtuous cisgender (or white, or Christian, or American) women that those Others desire above all their own women. And all that stands in the way of this orgy of rape are the good, godly cisgender (or white, or Christian, or American) men who refuse to let it happen.
Right-wing Christian men like to imagine themselves as the protectors of the women under their control, a protection that women outside their culture don’t enjoy (and don’t deserve), though there is no indication whatsoever that there’s any real truth to this idea–and more than a little indication that this “protection” brings along with it a license for men to abuse those women even more than one sees outside their culture. Such men imagine themselves as the owners, in a very real sense, of everyone in their power, holding their protection over those more vulnerable heads like an umbrella. So invoking danger to those under a right-wing Christian man’s imagined “protection” is a good way to get that man riled up.
You’ll notice, however, that the same exact men feel free to abuse and harass women who they think don’t have that protection, which is why Donald Trump and his supporters routinely say incredibly misogynistic, abusive, threatening, and demeaning things to women who they don’t like.
I will remind you that Louie Gohmert considers himself a TRUE CHRISTIAN™, and routinely makes decisions that affect thousands, if not millions, of people every year in his capacity as a lawmaker for his state. Many of those people are not part of his tribe. Some of them are not even cisgender. But he seems very unconcerned with their safety.
Bathroom panic is beyond ludicrous, and a number of states have thoroughly dismantled these examples of TRUE CHRISTIAN™ fearmongering and pandering as they researched the issue of trans rights. But one can’t really accuse fundagelicals of caring about stuff like science and facts. They’ve got The Truth, and when someone has a big-T Truth, they stop caring about little-f facts. Once they become enraged and terrorized, they stop listening to anything but that which confirms and validates their anger and fear.
What Happened to Christianity Making Believers Better People Than Non-Believers?
Tell me again, Christians, why this religion makes y’all better people and gives you a moral compass that non-Christians simply cannot access? Because from where I’m sitting, Rep. Gohmert isn’t actually moral at all. He obeys because disobedience would cost him something, because he fears punishment for disobedience. And his rhetoric about trans people is inexcusable. It’s not only a false fear he’s waving like a red flag in front of the fundagelical bull in the ring, but he’s actually saying that the real person to fear is cisgender straight men who want to prey on all those godly, virtuous Christian wives and daughters he imagines are in so much danger.
In other words, he’s saying that the real menace to society is a man just like him, a tribe just like his, a culture like the one his tribe created, and the view of gender that his religion endorses.
I don’t think it’s okay to deny other people their basic human and civil rights simply because Christians like him have so much trouble behaving in moral ways. If the only way to get him to behave himself in a civil and ethical manner is to restrict other people’s rights, then something’s seriously wrong with him, not them. That’s not how a progressive, freedom-loving society operates. That’s how a regressive patriarchal theocracy operates: it restricts every other group little by little until they are totally hemmed in, all because their dominant group is incapable of behaving like civilized adults unless they are totally in control of the whole world and have shrink-wrapped it all to the point where nobody can move without their permission.
And even then, it won’t be enough. It never is, to controllers and abusers.
LGBTQ people are going to have their rights soon. More to the point, they’re going to have every single right that non-LGBTQ people have. Human and civil rights are a genie that is not going back into the bottle.
And Louie Gohmert knows it. He knows this fight is lost; he can’t be so dense that he thinks otherwise. All he’s doing is swinging hard enough to make his fans happy so they’ll vote for him again.
Otherwise he’d have to find a real job, and I doubt that teaching Sunday School would be able to finance the lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed.
See you this weekend! We’ve still got some stuff to finish up about evangelical churn, and I’m finishing up that apologetics book so we can dive into that. It’s going to be busy around here for a few days.
H/t to the delightful and irrepressible Ed Brayton.
Also, if you want some brain-bleach, this was a really sweet article about a Christian’s response to the “bathroom bill.”CHENNAI: "India has emerged as an information technology power house of the world, but not Indian judiciary." So saying, Madras high court has slammed a subordinate court which had adjourned a five-year-old civil case 89 times with a simple remark, 'awaiting records', every time. Justice S
, lamenting poor computerization of subordinate courts, wondered whether judicial accountability would include creation of " paperless courts or at least less paper courts " to ensure speedy justice.
VimalaThe matter related to a case of partition of property. In 2009, an additional sub court in Coimbatore passed orders, against which two stake-holders filed an appeal in the district court. Since February 2009, though both courts are located on the same campus, the case was adjourned 89 times for want of'records'. The judge ordered immediate dispatch of the relevant records, and disposal of the case within a month by the district court.But slamming the delay suffered so far, Justice Vimala said: "The direction "calling for records" could have been complied with within 10 minutes, but it had not been implemented and the appeal is pending for nearly 5 to 6 years, only for want of records. There is no reason as to why the records were not sent to the district court, Coimbatore, from III additional subordinate court, both of which are situated within the same campus and within walking distance."Justice Vimala said there was no justification for the sub court not sending the records, and added, "there could have been no scope for calling for records had there been computerization at the level of subordinate courts." In the era of information and communication technology, where technology dictates life-style, is the court justified in not rendering timely justice and waiting for records for years together, when justice is the first promise of the Constitution; speedy justice is the fundamental right of litigants; and when the whole world is moving at a rocket speed, she asked.Citing a Law Commission of India's report, which said a judicial system that delayed disposal of cases or resolution of disputes over decades could be said to have out-lived its utility, Justice Vimala suggested certain measures to enhance timely justice and to improve the image of judiciary.She mooted a centralised digitalised record room. "Once the suit is numbered, its particulars are to be entered in the digital form and a bar-code can be created and it can be pasted in the docket, so that, when the bar code is scanned with a hand scanner all the basic details of the case will be shown in the computer," she said. Further, a security check can be created by authorizing only higher level staff and judicial officers to have access to the documents of the case.Justice Vimala said by introducing such a system, a uniform safety of records would be ensured to all documents pertaining to all courts, irrespective of the availability of space, character of the staff handling the documents and the physical handling of the records will totally come to an end. The possibility of missing records can be avoided to large extent, she said. The traditional method of filing a petition in courts has been in paper format. Frequent handling of physical documents often causes deterioration and mutilation of records. Digitalization of statutes, judgments, records are the need of the hour, she said.The Last Days of World War II "Monday, 19 March - Another nightmarish day. This time a so-called Bombenteppich (carpet bomb) dropped onto the hospital compound. [...] Seven other bombs landed in the hospital grounds. One hit the surgery and went through three floors before coming to rest. [...] One American plane crashed in the Türkenshanzpark nearby and some of our staff were sent out to bring in the crew. [....] Things have become particularly uncomfortable because the town has been virtually without water for several weeks now. [....] There is still no light and I am rapidly using up the Xmas candles Sisi gave me. In the evenings I sit in my room in the dark and practice the accordion." Marie Vassiltchikov, nurse, Berlin Diaries 1940 - 1945 General George S. Patton crossing the Rhine River, March 1945 On June 6, 1944, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy and invaded Europe. The Rhine river was Germany's ancient line of defense; when American troops crossed the Rhine on March 7, 1945 at Remagen near Cologne, it was all over for the Nazis. General George S. Patton showed his contempt for the Germans by pissing into the river. By the Spring of 1945, the whole country of Germany lay in ruins with every major city destroyed by Allied bombs. Churches that had taken 200 years to build were now empty shells. Bridges had been blown up, train tracks had been bombed and every road was clogged with German refugees. Thousands of women in eastern Germany were drowning themselves, rather than submit to rape by the Russian soldiers, who were advancing towards the capital city of Berlin. Boys of 14 and old men of 60 years of age were fighting in a hopeless last ditch effort to save their country from Communism. German soldiers, who had survived the bloody conflict on the Eastern front, were stripping off their uniforms and jumping into the Elbe river to swim naked across to the west side so that they could surrender to the American Army. Whether soldiers or civilians, the German people were deathly afraid of the Russians, who already had a reputation for committing unspeakable atrocities, even before they reached Berlin. There was complete chaos in Germany: the infrastructure of the country had been destroyed, the cities were nothing but huge piles of rubble, and everywhere there was complete devastation. Animals in the Zoo in Berlin had to be shot when they escaped after a bomb attack. German citizens were cowering in underground bomb shelters in the cities or waving white flags of surrender from the windows of their homes in the small towns. Former prisoners, who were now free because some of the concentration camps had been abandoned by the guards, were wandering aimlessly through the countryside, looting and stealing from the German civilians who still had a home left after repeated Allied bombing raids. Subways were flooded; phone lines were down; electricity was off. The water supply of the bombed cities was contaminated or non-existent. Thousands of homeless German civilians had taken shelter in the bombed-out shells of the churches, and were cooking over open fires in the streets of every major city. Refugees trying to flee from the war zone sat for days beside the railroad tracks waiting for trains which never came. Others were on the road, trying to escape on foot, carrying a few meager possessions, but there was nowhere to go. Allied planes were strafing everything that moved, including cows grazing in the fields and trains that were evacuating concentration camp prisoners in an effort to keep them from being released. Former concentration camp prisoners, bent on revenge, attacked the German civilians as they tried desperately to escape. Everything was in short supply, including food, clothing, medicine, coal and even wood to make coffins. The stench was unbearable; everything smelled of smoke from the charred remains of burned buildings. Corpses were dragged out of the bomb shelters and buried in shallow graves in the gardens of destroyed homes. Thousands of dead bodies of German civilians were still buried under the collapsed buildings in every large city. In the historic city of Nuremberg, there were 20,000 bodies still buried under the rubble when the trial of the German war criminals began in November 1945. Bomb damage in Nuremberg, January 1945 The Nazi war machine, that had once rolled ruthlessly across Europe and smashed every country in its path, was now suffering a crushing defeat by the superior forces of the Soviet, British and American armies. Soon the world would learn of the Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps and forced labor camps all over Germany. Dachau, the name of the worst camp of them all, would soon become a household word in America. In the last days of the war, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi concentration camp system, had taken it upon himself, without the authorization of Hitler, to attempt to negotiate a surrender of the German army to the Americans, but not to their Communist allies, the Russians. The American army had stopped at a predetermined line and waited for the Soviet army to catch up so the Communists could take eastern Germany and Berlin, as agreed upon by President Roosevelt and "Uncle Joe" Stalin at the Yalta conference. By this time, 60% of the soldiers in the Waffen-SS, the elite volunteer Army, were from countries other than Germany and Austria, as almost every nation in Europe, including Russia and Great Britain, had volunteer Waffen-SS soldiers in the fight against Communism. After the death of President Roosevelt, Himmler had the vain hope that the Germans could now become Allies with the Americans against Communism. The Nazis had always referred to Roosevelt as Rosenfeld and believed that he was not only a Communist sympathizer, but also a Jew. Himmler was the one who had the overall responsibility for the Nazi atrocities in the camps, and he was probably thinking about how he could save himself from charges of being a war criminal. As part of his unauthorized negotiations with the Allies in the last days of the war, Himmler agreed to release a few thousand Jewish prisoners to neutral countries. He was undoubtedly hoping to use more Jewish concentration camp prisoners as bargaining chips in future negotiations with the Allies. America had just built an atomic bomb, with the initial purpose of dropping it on Germany, and had no intention of negotiating anything. On February 19, 1945, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler met with Count Folke Bernadotte in Berlin; Bernadotte was acting on behalf of the Swedish Red Cross in negotiations to release the Scandinavian prisoners from the concentration camps. Himmler was very receptive because he wanted to open negotiations with the West. They reached an agreement by which all the Scandinavian prisoners would be evacuated to one camp, Neuengamme, via "White Buses" which would be supplied by Sweden. Norwegian resistance fighters, who had been evacuated from Natzweiler-Struthof to Dachau in September 1944, were transferred to Neuengamme where they were cared for by the Red Cross in the last days of the war. When around 15,000 prisoners, who had been evacuated from other camps in the war zone, began arriving at Dachau, the camp became seriously overcrowded. In March 1945, Martin Gottfried Weiss, who was the commander of the five sub-camps of Mühldorf, came back to Dachau when the prisoners of his sub-camps were evacuated to the main camp. A typhus epidemic was out of control in the Dachau main camp and up to 400 prisoners were dying each day from this disease. Weiss immediately proposed to turn the camp over to the Allies, but this idea was vetoed by the head office in Oranienburg. Weiss had previously been the Commandant of Dachau from September 1, 1942 to the end of October 1943; he was replaced by Wilhelm Eduard Weiter who was the last commandant of Dachau. When Weiter left the Dachau camp with a transport of prisoners on April 26, 1945, Weiss became the acting commandant. In the final weeks of World War II, the American public was bombarded with one horrendous news story after another. Almost every day, it seemed, there were huge banner headlines about another earth-shattering event. On April 4, 1945, American soldiers stumbled upon Ohrdruf, an abandoned sub-camp of Buchenwald, and were sickened by the sight of the decaying bodies of dead prisoners in a shed, and the smoking remains of other bodies that had been recently burned. On April 11, 1945, soldiers in General George S. Patton's Third Army discovered the Buchenwald concentration camp near the city of Weimar, and were astounded when they were shown lamp shades allegedly made from human skin. What the newspapers didn't report was that the liberated prisoners were given guns by the Americans and allowed to ride in American Jeeps to Weimar where they terrorized the population, raping, pillaging and killing civilians at random. When Hitler learned of this, he became enraged. As the former home of Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche, the city of Weimar was revered by German nationalists as the center of German culture. On April 12, 1945, our beloved American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died suddenly after 12 years in office. On April 14, 1945, soldiers of the 102nd Infantry Division of the US Ninth Army discovered the horrible scene of a barn, just outside the town of Gardelegen in eastern Germany, where concentration camp prisoners on a death-march had been herded into a stone barn the night before and 1016 men were burned to death or shot when they tried to escape. On that same day, the 14th of April, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler authorized SS Colonel Kurt Becher to negotiate the surrender of Dachau and other camps to the Allies because conditions in the overcrowded camps were now totally out of control. Becher had previously been involved in negotiating with the Allies in the infamous "Blood for Goods" deal in which the Nazis offered to trade a million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 trucks. Allegedly, Himmler immediately rescinded his order in a note hurriedly written by hand on plain paper, dated 14 April 1945 and 18 April 1945. The hand-written note from Himmler is now stored in the files of the International Red Cross Tracing Service and news of the existence of the note was released to the public in March 2007. The note which was signed "Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS" read as follows: A handover is out of the question. The camp must be evacuated immediately. No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive. The prisoners have behaved horribly to the civilian population of Buchenwald. Buchenwald was the name of a concentration camp, not the name of a town, and there was no "civilian population of Buchenwald," which Himmler, of all people, should have known. There were around 25,000 prisoners at Dachau at that point, and thousands more arriving every day, as the prisoners from the sub-camps were brought to the main camp. Keeping this mass of prisoners out of the "hands of the enemy" would have been virtually impossible. Arthur Haulot, a Belgian political prisoner at Dachau, wrote in his diary that he heard about this order, one hour after it arrived in Dachau, allegedly by telex. Haulot referred to the order as a "pessimistic rumor." He had heard about it from a German nurse in the camp, who was his lover. However, Marcus J. Smith wrote in his book "Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell" that the Dachau main camp had no telephone or telegraph service on April 27, 1945 so that acting Commandant Weiss was unable to contact headquarters in Oranienburg for permission to allow a Red Cross man to enter the camp; Weiss was forced to give permission on his own authority. The lack of telephone and telegraph service was due to damage caused by the Allied bombing of the camp on April 9, 1945, so presumably there was no telegraph service on April 14th or 18th. Smith wrote that, in the last days before the American liberators arrived, the electricity in the kitchens was off and the food was being cooked over wood-burning stoves; the water main was broken and water was being brought into the camp by trucks because there was no running water. The showers had not been operable for three weeks, according to Smith, who also wrote that latrines had been dug because the toilets could no longer be flushed. Negotiations for the handover of Bergen-Belsen to the British Army had already been in progress for several days. A cease fire was ordered on April 12th and on April 15, 1945, British soldiers entered the Bergen-Belsen camp. Hungarian troops were sent to Bergen-Belsen to keep order during the transfer of the camp; they were promised that they could return to their lines after six days, but some of them were shot by the British. A week or so later, horrifying movie clips of over 10,000 emaciated bodies being shoved into mass graves by British bulldozers were shown in the newsreels in every American theater. On April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler appeared for the last time in public; he awarded combat decorations to a group of young boys, not yet in their teens, who had fought bravely in battle to save the Fatherland from the Communist Soviet Union. Hitler strokes the cheek of a pre-teen German soldier The photo above is a still shot from a film made by the Nazis; it shows der Führer gently stroking the cheek of a child soldier. The photo below is a still shot from the movie "Downfall" which recreates the scene, showing Hitler's hand behind his back as he tries to hide the tremors caused by |
if the plans occurred during the hot summer months."
It has long been known that the Dutch and French had coveted territory in the southern Pacific and sent numerous voyages to Australia, though plans for a colony there were apparently abandoned because of a belief that the land was unsuitable.
The Spanish plan followed an expedition led by naval commander Alessandro Malaspina, who reported back to his government in the 1790s that Britain's transportation of convicts to the colony was merely "the means and not the object of the enterprise" and that Britain planned to control the territory and use it for commercial ends and the discovery of resources.
He warned the king that Britain could use the colony as a base for launching an attack on the Spanish military involving "two or three thousand castaway bandits".
The archival documents show that Jose de Bustamante y Guerra, the deputy commander of the Spanish expedition, subsequently proposed an invasion of the colony to King Carlos IV and his ministers. The government sent Bustamante to a new military post at Montevideo in Uruguay and he began to build a small fleet of attack vessels.
"As the military and naval commander, Bustamante was tasked to both defend South America from an anticipated British invasion, and to take the fight to the British in the Pacific," Mr Maxworthy said.
Historians said that even if Spain had seized the colony, it would have been quickly recovered by Britain, which had a stronger military and would have been reluctant to cede its commercial interest in controlling the southern continent. In any case, the Spanish plan was ultimately deferred and then, it seems, abandoned.
John West-Sooby, an expert on early Australian voyages, said the new archival findings showed that Spain was deeply concerned about the strategic threat of the British colony and "was intending to strike first".
"The irritation of Madrid with respect to British 'incursions' into the Pacific during the eighteenth century is well known, but this confirms the bellicose attitude of the Spanish," he told The Australian Financial Review.10. Clustering Illusion
Source
The clustering illusion is the illusion that random events which occur in clusters are not really random events. The illusion is due to a counter-intuitive assumption about statistical odds.
For example, it strikes most people as unexpected if heads comes up four times in a row during a series of coin flips. Now if you have got 3 consecutive heads, you’d think next flip can’t be heads, though there is still a 50% probability. Thinking that the probabilities have changed is a common bias. This has caused gamers to lose thinking the probability has changed.
9. Reverse Psychology
Source
Do you sometimes do things just because somebody said you shouldn’t? Aren’t you sometimes tempted to do them? When you do something that is forbidden, you may be demonstrating reactance as your motivation. Reactance is a drive to do something you’ve been told (threatened) not to do. We may respond with reactance because we humans just don’t like it when somebody takes away our freedom to choose how we behave. In fact, reactance theory is sometimes called “ forbidden fruit” theory.
The theory assumes there are “free behaviors” individuals perceive and can take part in at any given moment. The level of reactance has a direct relationship to the importance of eliminated or threatened behavioral freedom in relationship to the importance of other freedoms at the time.
8. Paramnesia
Source
Paramnesia also called as Déjà Vu, is when an individual feels as though an event has already happened or has happened in the recent past. The experience of paramnesia seems to be quite common among adults and children alike. Paramnesia or déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of “eeriness,” “strangeness,” “weirdness”. Certain researchers claim to have found ways to recreate this sensation using hypnosis.
The similarity between a déjà-vu-eliciting stimulus and an existing, but different, memory trace may lead to the sensation. Thus, encountering something which evokes the experience or sensation that cannot be remembered may lead to déjà vu.
7. Apophenia
Source
Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.
There have been many instances of perceptions of religious imagery and themes, especially the faces of religious figures. In 1978, a New Mexican woman found that the burn marks on a tortilla appeared similar Jesus’s face. Thousands of people came to see the framed tortilla.
6. Horn’s Effect
Source
Horn’s Effect, also called the devil’s and reverse halo effect is where individuals, brands or other things judged to have a single undesirable trait are subsequently judged to have many poor traits. Allowing a single weak point or negative trait to influence perception of the person, brand or other thing in general. Simplifying it, when we consider a person bad in one area, we are likely to make a similar evaluation in other areas.Metro Police officer shot, 2 suspects in custody Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. prev next
A police officer was wounded in the leg by a high-powered rifle and two men were arrested after a neighborhood search following a shootout in the backyard of a Las Vegas home.
The shooting happened in an neighborhood near Rainbow Boulevard and Alta Drive.
Police Sgt. John Sheahan says the second arrest was made and a lockdown was lifted about 7:30 a.m. Friday.
Sheahan says one suspect was bitten by a police dog shortly after the exchange of gunfire about 4 a.m.
That man, believed to be in his 20s, was hospitalized with head and arm injuries. The second suspect was arrested about three hours later several blocks away.
Sheahan says he's got a leg injury.
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo says the wounded officer is undergoing surgery and is expected to recover.
Sheriff Lombardo will hold a media briefing at 2 p.m. and release more information.From its first episode in 2010, HBO's "24/7 Road to the NHL Winter Classic" was appointment viewing. In an age when athletes are often guarded and impersonal in the public eye, the award-winning series gained a huge audience by providing genuine, entertaining windows into the lives of those on the game's biggest stage.
The documentary's widespread popularity made last September's news all the more surprising. After three successful years of production, HBO and the NHL parted ways -- creating a substantial void in hockey media, one thought difficult (if not impossible) to adequately fill.
Then, EPIX -- a new, relatively unknown network -- swooped in.
EPIX and the NHL joined forces when Ross Greenburg, a former HBO Sports president who oversaw the first season of "24/7," signed on to be the executive producer. Although many viewers felt lukewarm about the transition, Greenburg's presence helped subdue concerns, as did the fact that he brought many HBO employees along with him.
And so far, the new programs have been received well. Greenburg and EPIX did a fine job with this season's "Road to the NHL Winter Classic." While it didn't perfectly emulate the show's older versions, it certainly accomplished its goals.
Now, the same group is composing a four-segment doc for the upcoming outdoor game between the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks, titled "Road to the NHL Stadium Series," which premiered last week and continued on Tuesday night. The final two episodes will air on Feb. 17 and 24th at 10 p.m. ET.
Greenburg was gracious enough to talk about what it's like to work with an upstart network, Darryl Sutter's personality, California hockey and more.
SB Nation: Thanks for taking some time to chat. With the first two episodes in the books, are you happy with what "Road to the NHL Stadium Series" has accomplished so far?
Ross Greenburg: I am. We're hitting it hard and in stride. I'm glad we had the four ["Road to the NHL Winter Classic"] shows earlier. It's all the same crew, so it was nice to pick up here with no kind of training wheels attached. We just went right at it. Both teams have been very cooperative, and we're on our way.
With San Jose, I think we've opened people's eyes to [Joe] Pavelski and [Brent] Burns and [Joe] Thornton and Todd MacLellan. I think we're introducing them to the American public in many ways. The L.A. Kings of course are star-studded, but I don't know how many people got to know Drew Doughty, or [Anze] Kopitar, so we're having fun with that.
SBN: Do you believe there are added challenges at EPIX that didn't exist at HBO?
RG: Actually, there is no real change on the creative [side]. EPIX is open to tough language, and we're able to portray the teams, the players and the coaches the way they are on a daily basis with no real censorship. That helps a lot, because if you're in this kind of show, you need that kind of flexibility.
In terms of distribution, we're seeing an uptick in getting the shows out to the American public. The live stream on NHL.com and EPIXHD.com opens this series up to anyone who has a computer or a tablet or a phone. And that, I think, is the new world we live in. I salute EPIX for wanting to get the word out on the show and for using this as kind of a launching pad.
It's not a challenge, but a blessing.
SBN: Yeah, it's nice to be able to access the show without paying a dime. Has this freedom kept ratings from dropping off substantially?
RG: I think the numbers are fairly similar [to past seasons]. EPIX doesn't have the subscriber base that HBO does, but if you add in all the extra eyeballs off the Internet, you're getting similar numbers, I believe. All the colleges, the kids, they go right to the Internet, and they're all able to watch it. No subscription needed.
SBN: Do you feel as if the final product has changed since moving to EPIX?
RG: Not in my mind. I'll let everyone else be the judge, but I'm as proud of this product as anything I've put on the air. I think this team has put out a quality series. It wasn't around for the last few years at HBO, but I would measure this up with our initial series with the Caps and the Penguins.
SBN: It must be a huge help to have lots of your old crew at HBO working on this new project.
RG: They've been great. Aaron Cohen is one of the best writers in all of sports television. We've worked together for a lot of years. He's a special person as well as writer. Mark Greenberg [EPIX CEO and President] and I go way back. We have a lot of cameramen that we've used in the past. Great editors who have not only worked at HBO but Showtime, too, on the "Total Access" series.
It's fun getting a good, classy group together and putting together the kind of television we're used to.
SBN: Do you tape a lot of footage that's too inappropriate to air, even with the kind of leeway not found at cable networks?
RG: You bet. You're seeing the "Walt Disney" version of this show. We're taking out plenty. We can't cross the line, and we can't become the comedian that looks for the dirty joke just to get a laugh. So yeah, we're taking out a ton of language and moments that are not made for any television. You follow anyone around long enough and you're going to get stuck in those situations.
The coaches are getting a kick out of it. They warned me. In our meetings before we started, they said, "Hey, we curse a lot." We said, "Bring it on. We're not going to embarrass you. We're not going to abuse the privilege of putting the microphone on you. It's not going to happen."
SBN: Most of the teams in the Winter Classics have been from large, traditional hockey markets in the North. From your perspective, how do these California cities stack up?
RG: It's interesting. First of all, we have the Stanley Cup champions from two of the last three years, so that doesn't hurt. They have a national presence. Even though they weren't one of the Original Six, Gretzky introduced the great game of hockey to California. They've taken it to another level over the last few years.
And San Jose is a great market for hockey. We showcased the Sharks practice facility, which has become a haven for teams from around the state. They all come there for games, tournaments, practices. It really is a hotbed.
We want to show people how that state is at the forefront of the spread of the sport. We did that right from the top of the first episode, and we did that in Episode 2. There's been this migration of hockey to California, and it's fun. It's fun to document; it's fun to see the enthusiasm of the fan bases there... They sold out Levi's Stadium in about 48 hours. That didn't necessarily happen elsewhere in the other outdoor games across the country.
SBN: Darryl Sutter is one of the most entertaining people in the game. What's your impression of him?
RG: Personally, I've really enjoyed the time I've spent with Darryl Sutter. Last year we did "NHL Revealed," and we covered him and his team, and I turned around and met with him in November about this series. He couldn't have been more gracious to me.
He's a character. He's a sly fox, too. He knows exactly who he is. He knows exactly what he wants out of his team and how he's going to handle the media. I think that's coming through on the show. I think Episode 2 has some interesting moments with the media. He is who he is, he doesn't hide behind anything or anyone, and he's won two of the last three Cups, so it's hard to argue with his success.
SBN: My favorite part of the first segment was the focus on Darryl's son, Chris. His interactions with the players are fantastic and seem to bring out the best in everyone. How has it been to work with him?
RG: Chris is such a breath of fresh air. We knew going in that he had a real special relationship with the Kings. As Doughty said, he perks up the locker room when he gets up and speaks. We marvel at how confident he is. He's such a special kid, and I salute Darryl and his wife for bringing us someone so special.
It's nice to see that relationship and to also know parents with special needs children love them as much as anyone else. We had the good fortune to do this with Barry Trotz and [his son Nolan] and we're fortunate to do it now with Darryl Sutter and Chris.
SBN: What kind of future do you hope for EPIX and this program?
RG: I think this program will hopefully be a mainstay, because they see the success of it. In many ways, EPIX takes me back to my early days at HBO. It's grown because of the programming we put on the air. If you put it on, they will come. That's the whole point. What was AMC before "Mad Men"? So, I think this is one of many shows they showcase as their product to try to attract viewers.
That's what the business is about. I think you'll not only see this show stick around, but I would look forward to a lot more documentaries on EPIX. We're constantly looking for more sports programming to put on. It's fun to be there at the dawn of a new network, because you're able to build something based on the special programming.
Episode 3 of "Road to the NHL Stadium Series" airs next Tuesday at 10 p.m. EST. The first two episodes can be streamed at EPIXHD.com.A North Korean satellite launched Saturday may be tumbling in orbit and inoperable.
While the U.S. Defense Department has made no public comment on the status of the Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite launched by North Korea, a senior defense official said it appeared that the satellite was tumbling in orbit, and thus not able to carry out its Earth observation mission.
The official didn’t provide any additional details on the satellite’s condition, and North Korean officials continue to declare the launch a success. [CNN]
More News
A Delta 4 rocket is set to launch early tomorrow carrying a classified payload. The Delta 4 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 6:39 a.m. Eastern, with a 100 percent chance of acceptable weather. The Delta 4 is carrying a payload for the National Reconnaissance Office on a mission designated NROL-45. The NRO has not released additional details about the mission, but satellite watchers believe the payload is a Topaz radar imaging satellite. [Spaceflight Now]
The Obama Administration will roll out its fiscal year 2017 budget request today. The White House will release the overall budget late this morning, with agencies to follow up with additional details later today. For NASA, that includes a “State of NASA” speech by Charles Bolden at the Langley Research Center this afternoon. NASA received nearly $19.3 billion in fiscal year 2016, three-quarters of a billion dollars more than the original request. [My News 13 Orlando]
Scientists announced plans for press conferences Thursday that may announce the discovery of gravitational waves. Scientific collaborations that use the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), as well as the National Science Foundation, announced plans for press conferences in Washington, D.C., and several other locations Thursday morning to report on the status of the search for gravitational waves. The planned announcement, coupled with other rumors, suggest scientists will announce the discovery of gravitational waves in the cosmos, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity but not yet observed. [GeekWire]
Want to get these briefings even earlier? Here’s the signup.
Spaceport America is expected to get only a fraction of the state funding it requested for this year. A funding bill in the New Mexico Legislature would provide the spaceport with $1 million for operations, compared to a request of $2.8 million. The spaceport hasn’t discussed how it will make ends meet if the lower funding level is sustained in the final version of the bill, but spaceport supporters argue it would make “absolutely no sense” to close or sell the facility given the state investment in the spaceport. [Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News]
NASA offered a first look at some of the hardware being built for its next Mars rover. The hardware is part of the landing system for the Mars 2020 mission, similar to the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012. The 2020 mission will collect Mars rock and soil samples for return to Earth on a later mission. [CBS]
An organization that says it represents a group of NASA employees is threatening to sue the agency on grounds of religious discrimination. The Liberty Institute says that a group of employees, members of a religious club at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, were told by agency officials they could not mention “Jesus” in email announcements about the club’s activities. The institute said it will file suit next month unless NASA drops the ban. A NASA spokeswoman said the agency doesn’t prohibit the use of religious names in such newsletters. [The Hill]
A Mars One finalist is simulating a trip to Mars — by spending five days in a glass box in Australia. Josh Richards will stay in the box, a simulated habitat, located along Sydney Harbour in full view of passersby. He has various activities planned for the week, “including building a transmitter and undertaking an IQ test.” The event is less a training exercise than a publicity stunt for the Australian DVD release of The Martian. [Mashable]
Eliminating the Competition
At a technology awards event in San Francisco Monday night called the Crunchies, SpaceX won the award for “Best Technology Achievement” for its Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX beat out another Elon Musk-run company, Tesla and its autopilot technology, along with Apple’s 3D Touch, Microsoft HoloLens, and a nuclear power startup called Transatomic Power. Besides the SpaceX-Tesla link, SpaceX had a connection with another finalist: A HoloLens virtual reality system was part of the cargo of a SpaceX Dragon mission to the ISS. That mission, though, was the one in June that was lost in a Falcon 9 failure. [TechCrunch]Chief executive Alan Joyce says Qantas gives itself time for the market to correct. Credit:Bloomberg "Labour costs are probably the biggest cost now for many airlines after fuel prices have fallen," IATA chief economist Brian Pearce said. Industry profits are expected to rise to $US39.4 billion this year, after having more than doubled to $US35.3 billion last year, despite predictions the average fare price will fall by 7 per cent as airlines add capacity. Margins rising "The fact we have had more than a year of above-trend growth must be partly because of the sharp plunge in oil prices," Association of Asia Pacific Airlines director general Andrew Herdman says.
"That means that fares have been falling as the benefits have been passed on to customers, but airline margins have improved." IATA forecasts global airlines will report $US39.4 billion of net profit this year. Credit:Robert Rough Operating profit margins for global airlines are expected to grow to 8.8 per cent this year, up from 3.5 per cent in 2013, but the outlook differs by region. IATA forecasts North American margins will rise to 15.4 per cent, while in Asia-Pacific they will average 8.4 per cent and in Africa will be negative 1.1 per cent. IATA has not released a 2017 forecast but aviation consultancy CAPA Centre for Aviation believes margins could peak this year. "In a cyclical industry, the good times do not last forever," CAPA says in a report.
"Margins will not continue to climb indefinitely, even if they can now reach higher peaks than previously. History suggests that peak margins are followed by a downturn and it will be a significant test for the airline industry's capacity and cost discipline to maintain margins in the region of 7 per cent or more." Achilles heel In a cyclical industry, the good times do not last forever. CAPA Centre for Aviation There was something of a consensus among the chief executives at the IATA annual meeting in Dublin last week that the oil price remains low in relative terms. Just how much the fuel price would have to creep back up to return to what is deemed "high" is less clear. "The industry can and will adapt to any fuel price," Dunkerley says. "What has proven in the past to be the Achilles heel of the industry is when we have dramatic and unexpected changes, either in demand or in fuel prices. So it really isn't just the level of fuel. It is more demand and how predictable is it and how does it roll out compared to today's projections."
During the global financial crisis the fuel price fell dramatically, but so too did air travel demand, particularly in the premium cabins that airlines rely on for an outsized proportion of revenue. The current fuel price drop for the most part hasn't harmed demand, although there are some exceptions. United Airlines' Houston hub, which is heavily reliant on the oil industry for traffic, has taken a hit. Gulf carriers such as Emirates have also experienced a decline in demand from lucrative business travel as a result of cost-cutting by oil and gas producers around the world. Qantas has hedged Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce says his airline's hedging program should be sufficient to mitigate against any sharp increases in the fuel price. As of February, Qantas had already hedged 77 per cent of its fuel for the 2017 financial year, protecting it against any spikes. "What determines our ability to cope with a low or medium or high oil price is supply and demand," he says. "When you have a functional market where everybody is acting commercially, you can cope with a high oil price. You can cope with the benefit of low oil prices as well. So what we do is we give ourselves time for the market to correct. We are very well hedged."
IATA's Pearce says the period of high fuel prices had forced airlines to improve their profitability through cost-cutting measures and investment in aircraft with a lower fuel burn in a way that had set it up well for the current period. "It should give confidence if we are entering a period where fuel prices are rising or the economy is slowing there is some scope there for airlines to report an improved financial performance," he says. On average, airlines reported a 9.9 per cent return on invested capital [ROIC] last year, beating their weighted average cost of capital for the first time in decades. The average ROIC is expected to rise to 10.4 per cent this year. Short haul to growth Herdman says during the period of high fuel prices, growth in the Asia-Pacific region had been concentrated on shorter routes.
"The lower fuel prices have made the growth a bit more balanced with long-haul routes, both leisure and business both benefiting," he says. "Obviously, long-haul leisure traffic is quite sensitive to fuel prices. It is a big component of the overall cost mix." Delta Air Lines chief executive Ed Bastian said there was no doubt capacity had grown over the past few years, much of it driven by low fuel prices. Some investors, particularly in North America, have expressed concern about falling airfares. However, Bastian says it would be short-sighted to focus exclusively on average fare prices. "Demand is very strong," he says. "Fuel is stable in that $US50 [a barrel] range. It is a good place for us, and presumably the industry, to be. We are making record margins." The lower fuel price hasn't stopped airlines from taking delivery of new aircraft, and there are incentives other than the oil price to keep modernising the fleet. Newer aircraft emit less carbon, less noise and are more cost competitive in a market where full-service carriers are competing increasingly against low-cost counterparts for traffic.
Challenge for manufacturers Airbus chief operating officer Tom Williams, however, says the fall in the oil price has made it more challenging to sell A320s with a more fuel-efficient new engine option than when the price was higher. "We were lucky to build a stronger order book at a time when fuel was running against the airlines' favour," he says. Swiss chief executive Thomas Kluhr, whose airline will be the first in the world to take delivery of the next-generation Bombardier CSeries aircraft, has expressed no regrets about the cost of building a more modern fleet. "With the CSeries we will be able to reduce our operating costs significantly," he says. "I think we will see the impact on our P&L [profit and loss statement] very quickly. The CSeries will lower carbon-specific emissions by up to 20 per cent and noise emissions by up to 50 per cent."
*The reporter travelled to Europe as a guest of Airbus, IATA and Star AllianceCondom used as evidence in Assange sex case 'does not contain his DNA'
But its thought another condom, submitted by the second alleged victim, does.
Swedish authorities requesting his extradition from Britain to stand trial
First alleged victim claims that Mr Assange deliberately ripped a condom
Forensic staff could not find any conclusive evidence of Mr Assange¿s DNA on a torn condom given to Swedish police by one of the alleged victims
Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have revealed that a key piece of evidence does not contain his DNA.
A torn condom given to Swedish police by one of the alleged victims was examined by staff at two forensic laboratories but they could not find any conclusive evidence of Mr Assange’s DNA on it.
The same forensic teams found DNA thought to belong to the WikiLeaks boss on another condom, which was submitted by the second alleged victim.
The revelation is contained in a 100-page police report that was written after witnesses were interviewed and forensic evidence had been examined.
The report, which has been seen by Mr Assange’s lawyers, has led to the Swedish authorities requesting his extradition from Britain to stand trial, though he is yet to be charged with any offence.
Mr Assange, who denies allegations of rape and sexual molestation, has been fighting extradition to Sweden for the past two years. He claims it is a ruse to send him to the United States where he could face trial for espionage.
The 41-year-old is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after being granted asylum by the country’s president, Rafael Correa.
In the report, the first alleged victim, now 33, claims she was sexually molested by Mr Assange at her flat in Stockholm on several occasions.
She also claims that Mr Assange deliberately ripped a condom before wearing it so that he could have unprotected sex with her against her will.
Julian Assange is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after being granted asylum by the country's president, Rafael Correa.
His lawyers have said that the fact no DNA could be found conclusively on an apparently used condom suggests a fake one may have been submitted.
The report also appears to cast doubt on the claim made by the second alleged victim, who told police that she was ‘raped’ by Mr Assange when she was asleep.
But during a police interview, the woman, now 29, apparently suggests that she did not mind him having unprotected sex with her."My Generation" is a song by the English rock band the Who, which became a hit and one of their most recognizable songs. The song was named the 11th greatest song by Rolling Stone on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and 13th on VH1's list of the 100 Greatest Songs of Rock & Roll.[5] It is also part of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll and is inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for "historical, artistic and significant" value. In 2009 it was named the 37th Greatest Hard Rock Song by VH1.[3]
The song has been said to have "encapsulated the angst of being a teenager," and has been characterized as a "nod to the Mod counterculture".[6]
The song was released as a single on 29 October 1965, reaching No. 2 in the UK, The Who's highest charting single in their home country[7] and No. 74 in America.[8] "My Generation" also appeared on The Who's 1965 debut album, My Generation (The Who Sings My Generation in the United States), and in greatly extended form on their live album Live at Leeds (1970). The Who re-recorded the song for the Ready Steady Who! EP in 1966, but it was not included on the EP, and this version was released only in 1995 on the remastered version of the A Quick One album. The main difference between this version and the original is that it is heavily abridged and instead of the hail of feedback which ends the original, the band play a chaotic rendition of Edward Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory." In the album's liner notes the song is credited to both Townshend and Elgar.
Inspiration [ edit ]
Townshend reportedly wrote the song on a train and is said to have been inspired by the Queen Mother, who is alleged to have had Townshend's 1935 Packard hearse towed off a street in Belgravia because she was offended by the sight of it during her daily drive through the neighbourhood.[9] Townshend has also credited Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues" as the inspiration for the song, saying "Without Mose I wouldn't have written 'My Generation'."[10] Townshend told Rolling Stone in 1985 that "'My Generation' was very much about trying to find a place in society."[11]
On a later interview for Good Morning America, in 1989, the band was discussing the upcoming 1989 tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Tommy, and Townshend talked about the famous line "I hope I die before I get old." He said that, for him, when he wrote the lyrics, "old" meant "very rich."
Composition [ edit ]
Perhaps the most striking element of the song is the lyrics, considered one of the most distilled statements of youthful rebellion in rock history. The tone of the track alone helped make it an acknowledged forebear of the punk rock movement. One of the most quoted—and patently rewritten—lines in rock history is "I hope I die before I get old," famously sneered by lead singer Roger Daltrey.
Like much of The Who's earlier Mod output, the song boasts clear influences of American rhythm and blues, most explicitly in the call and response form of the verses. Daltrey would sing a line, and the backing vocalists, Pete Townshend (low harmony) and John Entwistle (high harmony), would respond with the refrain "Talkin' 'bout my generation":
( help · info ) "My Generation" vocal melody with call and response.
People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we g-g-get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
The vocal melody of "My Generation" is an example of the shout-and-fall modal frame. This call and response is mirrored in the instrumental break with solo emphasis passing from Townshend's guitar to Entwistle's bass and back again several times.
Another salient aspect of "My Generation" is Daltrey's delivery: an angry and frustrated stutter. Various stories exist as to the reason for this distinct delivery. One is that the song began as a slow talking blues number without the stutter (in the 1970s it was sometimes performed as such, but with the stutter, as "My Generation Blues"), but after being inspired by John Lee Hooker's "Stuttering Blues," Townshend reworked the song into its present form. Another reason is that it was suggested to Daltrey that he stutter to sound like a British mod on speed. It is also proposed, albeit less frequently, that the stutter was introduced to give the group a framework for implying an expletive in the lyrics: "Why don't you all fff... fade away!" However, producer Shel Talmy insisted it was simply "one of those happy accidents" that he thought they should keep. Roger Daltrey has also commented that he had not rehearsed the song prior to the recording, was nervous, and he was unable to hear his own voice through the monitors. The stutter came about as he tried to fit the lyrics to the music as best he could, and the band decided it worked well enough to keep. The BBC initially refused to play "My Generation" because it did not want to offend people who stutter, but it reversed its decision after the song became more popular.
The instrumentation of the song duly reflects the lyrics: fast and aggressive. Significantly, "My Generation" also featured one of the first bass solos in rock history. This was played by Entwistle on his Fender Jazz Bass, rather than the Danelectro bass he wanted to use; after buying three Danelectros with rare thin strings that kept breaking easily (and were not available separately), a frustrated Entwistle used his Fender strung with nylon tapewound strings and was forced to simplify the solo. The song's coda features drumming from Keith Moon, as well, whereupon the song breaks down in spurts of guitar feedback from Townshend's Rickenbacker, rather than fading out or ending cleanly on the tonic. There are two guitar parts. The basic instrumental track (as reflected on the instrumental version on the My Generation Deluxe edition) followed by Townshend's overdubs including the furious feedback on the outro. Perhaps taking a lead from The Kinks' "You Really Got Me" (also produced by Shel Talmy), the song modulates from its opening key of G up to C via the keys of A and B♭. Townshend's guitars were tuned down a whole step for the recording.
Live versions of the song often meander into extended jams, going on as long as fifteen minutes, as evidenced by the version appearing on Live at Leeds. Live recordings from 1969–1970 include snippets of music from Tommy as well as parts of what would become "Naked Eye."
Townshend's demo version of the song (together with a demo of "Pinball Wizard") appeared on a flexi disc included in the original edition of the book The Who: Maximum R&B by Richard Barnes.[12]
Personnel [ edit ]
Charts [ edit ]
Chart (1988) Peak
position Australia (Kent Music Report)[14] 88
Certifications [ edit ]
Region Certification Certified units/Sales United Kingdom (BPI)[21] Silver 250,000 *sales figures based on certification alone
^shipments figures based on certification alone
See also [ edit ]article
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranza are now on the money, literally.
Continue Reading Below
The two officials took a tour of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on Wednesday to see firsthand the production of new $1 bills, the first currency that will bear their signatures.
Mnuchin's signature is decidedly more legible than that of his predecessor Jacob Lew. Lew had handwriting that was so sloppy that former President Barack Obama once joked that unless he made his signature more legible, it might debase the currency.
Carranza and Mnuchin, accompanied by his wife Louise Linton, examined sheets of the $1 bills at the bureau's Washington printing plant. The currency will be shipped to Federal Reserve regional banks around the country, and |
oop talk. I contributed a brief glossary, which may possibly be helpful.
Why bother with typed transducers in Clojure
At the end of an earlier post, I noted that, despite some controversy on the subject, transducer's type can be defined with core.typed (I'll walk through this a bit further down, so don't panic...)
( t/defalias ReducingFn ( t/TFn [[ a :variance :contravariant ] [ r :variance :invariant ]] [ r a -> r ])) ( t/defalias Transducer ( t/TFn [[ a :variance :covariant ] [ b :variance :contravariant ]] ( t/All [ r ] [( ReducingFn a r ) -> ( ReducingFn b r )])))
in a manner fairly evocative of the way you'd do it in Haskell:
type ReducingFn a r = r -> a -> r type Transducer a b = forall r. ReducingFn a r -> ReducingFn b r
While these representations may be more explanatory (to some, anyway) than the graphical illustration
in Rich's talk, explanation is not the main point. Neither is the triumphal riposte that transducers are yet another thing that isn't a good example of the superiority of dynamic typing.
With or without types, you're going to figure out transducers eventually, and I doubt you're going to understand them by types alone. It might even be better to go untyped, since a good flailing of trial and error can have educational value.
That's is a less attractive option when writing code that's meant to do something real, and that's where a type system can be helpful. If you use transducers - and you will, because they're incredibly powerful - you will at some point be confounded by mysterious bugs of your own creation. You will get confused by the funny reversed order of composition. And then you will stare, despairingly, at long stack traces containing multiple anonymous functions. Then you'll festoon your code with more and more println s (or, if you're fancy, logging macros) until the head-slap moment occurs.
Slapless
I'll get into the details of the above annotations in a bit, but for now just take them as given. Accept also that, for some reason, there's a special composition function compt just for transducers.
Our artificial goal is going to be to take a sequence of strings representing integers, like ["1" "2" "3"], parse them, multiply them by something and then, for each integer calculate $\sqrt[n]{2}$, and finally add those roots up. Here are my three transducers (ignoring, for simplicity, the zero- and one- argument alternatives for the returned function):
( t/ann t-parsei ( Transducer t/Int t/Str )) ( defn t-parsei [ rf ] ( fn [ result input ] ( rf result ( Integer/parseInt input )))) ( t/ann t-repn ( Transducer Number Number )) ( defn t-repn [ rf ] ( fn [ result input ] ( rf ( rf result input ) input ))) ( t/ann t-root ( Transducer Double Number )) ( defn t-root [ rf ] ( fn [ acc in ] ( rf acc ( pow 2.0 ( / 1.0 ( double in ))))))
Taking the Transducer type function as given, these annotations make sense. The first transducer transforms a function that reduces over integers to one that reduces over strings; the last transforms a function that reduces over doubles to one that reduces over integers; and the one in the middle doesn't change the type at all.
If all goes well, I should be able to compose the transducers, apply them to the + reducing function and reduce,
( reduce (( compt t-root t-repn t-parsei ) + ) 0 [ "1" "2" "3" ])
but this doesn't get past type-checking:
Domains:[x -> y] [b... b -> x] Arguments: [[t/Any Number -> t/Any] -> [t/Any Number -> t/Any]] [[t/Any t/Int -> t/Any] -> [t/Any t/Str -> t/Any]]
Squinting at the last line slightly,
[ Number ] -> [ Number ]] [[ t/Int ] -> [ t/Str ]]
we see the problem: the transducers are reversed. That's an easy mistake to make, with all those functions of functions strewn about, but it's also easy to fix, once we have a timely and specific error. (I won't pretend that it's a particularly elegant error, but, once you get used to reading it, it's a hell of a lot more timely and specific than an exception and stack trace at runtime.)
Back on the straight and narrow, we get the result we wanted:
user> ( t/cf ( compt t-parsei t-repn t-root )) ( t/All [ r ] [[ r Double -> r ] -> [ r String -> r ]]) user> ( reduce (( compt t-root t-repn t-parsei ) + ) 0 [ "1" "2" "3" ]) 9.348269224535935
Type functions definitions
So, ReducingFn and Transducer seem pretty useful. How did we make them?
( t/defalias ReducingFn ( t/TFn [[ a :variance :contravariant ] [ r :variance :invariant ]] [ r a -> r ]))
The TFn indicates that we're making a type function, i.e. a function of types that returns another type. The two types it takes are a (the type we are reducing over) and r (the type we're reducing to). Since we ought to be able to substitute a function that knows how to consume Number s in general for a function that will encounter only Int s, the ReducingFn is contravariant in a, by the Liskov substitution principle. On the other hand, the exact opposite is true for the value returned by a function: if the recipient wants Int, it's not going to be happy with any old Number, but it could handle a Short or some other subtype. As r appears both as argument (suggesting contravariance) and return type (suggesting variance), it has to be invariant.
The Transducer type function returns the type of a function that consumes one ReducingFn and returns another.
( t/defalias Transducer ( t/TFn [[ a :variance :covariant ] [ b :variance :contravariant ]] ( t/All [ r ] [( ReducingFn a r ) -> ( ReducingFn b r )])))
If someone is expecting a Transducer that consumes a particular kind of ReducingFn, they should be happy with a Transducer that consumes a supertype of that ReducingFn, i.e. Transducer is contravariant in the type ReducingFn used as its argument. But, since ReducingFn s are themselves contravariant in the type they reduce over, the Transducer must be covariant in a. By contrast, the Transducer is covariant in the type of ReducingFn it returns, but since the ReducingFn is contravariant in the type it consumes, the Transducer must be contravariant in b.
Phew. It might come as a relief that the Transducer doesn't give a damn about the type r being reduced to. To advertise our apathy, while at the same time promising that we won't mess with r, we need the All keyword, indicating a so-called existential type.
( t/defalias Transducer ( t/TFn [[ a :variance :covariant ] [ b :variance :contravariant ]] ( t/All [ r ] [( ReducingFn a r ) -> ( ReducingFn b r )])))
Tricks and compromises with typed Clojure
You may have wondered why we had to define a special t-repn for repeating numbers? We could in fact have created a more general version
( t/ann ^ :no-check t-rep ( t/All [ a ] ( Transducer a a )))
with (since Clojure is still dynamically typed underneath our annotations) exactly the same definition. However, when we actually use t-rep, we need to inform typed Clojure exactly which existential variant we really want, by inst antiating it:
( t/cf ( compt t-parsei ( t/inst t-rep t/Int ) t-root ))
This is because typed Clojure only performs local type inference. You can read more about the limitation in this post and in the references it contains, but the gist is that nothing is ever inferred by working backwards from the return type of a function, so you need to provide a crutch. Most languages with some kind of automatic type inference perform the local variety; a few, like OCaml and Haskell, do a much fuller job; and of course the vast majority of languages do none whatsoever.
The other oddity is one I mentioned earlier: we're not using Clojure's normal comp. Why? Well, consider the type of a simple composition function:
( All [ a b c ] [[ b -> c ] [ a -> b ] -> [ a -> c ]])
That makes sense. The first function to be applied converts from a to b, and then the second converts the b to a c. Now, let's compose 3 and 4 functions:
( All [ a b c d ] [[ c -> d ] [ b -> c ] [ a -> b ] -> [ a -> d ]]) ( All [ a b c d e ] [[ d -> e ] [ c -> d ] [ b -> c ] [ a -> b ] -> [ a -> d ]])
The pattern is pretty clear, but there isn't an obvious annotation that would capture the type of all variadic possibilities. Instead, core.typed suggests
( All [ x y b... ] [[ x -> y ] [ b... b -> x ] -> [ b... b -> y ]])
which means the 2nd and succeeding functions all have the same signature. Even this limited composition type challenges core.typed if the functions are even slightly polymorphic. E.g.
( t/cf ( comp identity identity ))
will fail with an error, roughly like:
user> ( t/cf ( comp identity identity ) Type Error polymorphic function comp could not be applied to arguments : Polymorphic Variables : a b c Domains : [ b -> c ] [ a -> b ] Arguments : ( t/All [ x ] [ x -> x ]) ( t/All [ x ] [ x -> x ])
As noted above, we are allowed to instantiate a specific version of the polymorphic type, so
user> ( t/cf ( t/inst identity Long )) [ Long -> Long ] user> ( t/cf ( comp ( t/inst identity Long ) ( t/inst identity Long ))) [ Long -> Long ]
In summary:
(comp identity identity) fails, because identity is polymorphic (comp (t/inst identity Long) (t/inst identity Long)) succeeds, because we have instantiated a specific type. (comp (t/inst identity Long) (t/inst identity Long) (t/inst identity Long)) fails again, because comp is called with three arguments.
Haskell's type inference is of course more sophisticated, but it also makes the problem easier by eschewing variadics in favor of currying. There's one composition function, which takes one argument and happens to return another function:
(. ) :: ( b -> c ) -> ( a -> b ) -> a -> c
There are thus at least two reasons why Haskell can easily deduce:
id :: a -> a ( id. id. id ) :: c -> c
First, it does non-local type inference; second, it doesn't have to deal with variadic functions.
A slightly better variadic comp
We can't do much about local type inference, but we can write a comp that lets core.typed check an arbitrary series of composed transformations. The trick, as usual when we need to go easy on the type checker, is to use a macro to simplify what it needs to check:
( defmacro comp* [ & [ f1 f2 & fs ]] ( if-not fs ` ( comp ~ f1 ~ f2 ) ` ( comp ~ f1 ( comp* ~ f2 ~@ fs ))))
so (comp* c->d b->c a->b) unwinds to (comp c->d (comp b->c a->b)), and failure #3 now succeeds:
user> (t/cf (comp* (t/inst identity Long) (t/inst identity Long) (t/inst identity Long))) [Long -> Long]
Now, the general transducer (Transducer a b) is of course polymorphic, but even a specific- seeming one like t-repn (which is (Transducer Long Long) ), still has that (All [r]...), polymorphism in the type being reduced to. Thus, (comp t-repn t-repn) will fail with the now familiar "could not be applied to arguments" error.
Fortunately, we know that the transducer doesn't care at all about r, so, without loss of actual generality, we can lie:
user> ( t/cf ( comp ( t/inst t-repn Any ) ( t/inst t-repn Any ))) [[ Any Number -> Any ] -> [ Any Number -> Any ]]
Having lied, we can make it right again by casting the polymorphism back in:
( t/ann ^ :no-check lie-again ( t/All [ a b ] [[[ t/Any a -> t/Any ] -> [ t/Any b -> t/Any ]] -> ( t/All [ r ] [[ r a -> r ] -> [ r b -> r ]])])) ( def lie-again identity )
so that:
user> ( t/cf ( lie-again ( comp ( t/inst t-repn t/Any ) ( t/inst t-repn t/Any )))) ( t/All [ r ] [[ r Number -> r ] -> [ r Number -> r ]])
Now we combine the two lies and the de-variadification into a single macro
( defmacro compt [ & tds ] ( let [ its ( map # ( list 't/inst % 't/Any ) tds )] ` ( lie-again ( comp* ~@ its ))))
and, as demonstrated way above, we can compose transducers. Now you know why we need compt.
It's far prettier in Haskell
There's not too much to say about this. While the Transducer type definition
type ReducingFn a r = r -> a -> r type Transducer a b = forall r. ReducingFn a r -> ReducingFn b r
is essentially the same as in Clojure, everything else is easier. We can write fully general transducers
t_dub :: Num a => Transducer a a t_dub f r b = f r ( 2 * b ) t_rep :: Transducer a a t_rep f r b = f ( f r b ) b t_parse :: Read a => Transducer a String t_parse f r s = f r $ read s t_root :: Transducer Double Integer t_root f r i = f r $ pow 2.0 ( 1.0 / ( fromInteger i ))
and compose them with no special effort.
( t_parse. t_rep. t_dub. t_root ) :: ReducingFn Double r -> ReducingFn String r ( foldl (( t_parse. t_rep. t_dub. t_root ) ( + )) 0.0 [ "1", "2", "3" ]) :: Double
Scala is not Haskell either
Let's start out unambitiously. Trying to compose the identity function in Scala seems to run into the same problem as in Clojure
scala > identity _ compose identity < console >: error : type mismatch ; found : Nothing => Nothing required : A => Nothing identity _ compose identity ^
but what's going on here is a slightly different problem. While identity is defined polymorphically as identity[A](a:A):A, by the time we see it in the REPL, all type information has been erased. (We deliberately erased it, by instantiating the function with _ in a context where no other type information is available.)
If we put it back explicitly, composition works, and the composed function can itself be used polymorphically:
scala > def ia [ A ] = identity [ A ] _ compose identity [ A ] ia : [ A ] => A => A scala > ia ( 3 ) res39 : Int = 3 scala > ia ( 3.0 ) res40 : Double = 3.0
We can chain compositions in a manner that looks a bit like Haskell
scala> identity [ Int ] _ compose identity [ Int ] compose identity [ Int ] res33 : Int => Int = <function1>
but is really quite different. Scala's compose is a method of the Function1 class rather than a standalone function, as this less sugary rendition makes clear:
scala> ( identity [ Int ] _ ).compose ( identity [ Int ] _ ).compose ( identity [ Int ] _ ) res36 : Int => Int = <function1>
That's OK. Scala's OO nature gives us a set of tools completely different from those we got from Clojure's homoiconicity, but they can be deployed for qualitatively similar purposes - in this case, safe and reasonably attractive transducers.
In fact, I've seen transducers in Scala implemented as a trait, which then delegates to a virtual transform method, e.g.
type ReducingFn [ A, R ] = ( R, A ) => R trait TransducerT [ A, B ] { def transform [ R ] : ReducingFn [ A, R ] => ReducingFn [ B, R ]... }
To make TransducerT act more like a function, we would add an apply method, and to make chained composition pretty, a compose method:
def apply [ R ] = transform _ def compose [ C ]( t2 : Transducer [ C, A ]) : Transducer [ C, B ] = { val t1 = this new Transducer [ C, B ] { override def transform [ R ] : ( ReducingFn [ C, R ]) => ReducingFn [ B, R ] = rf => t1 ( t2 ( rf )) } }
This will work, but we it's more amusing to try to define transducers as existential types, using the semi-mystical forSome annotation, which Scala uses for the same purpose as Haskell's forall and typed Clojure's All :
type ReducingFn [ -A, R ] = ( R, A ) => R type Transducer3 [ +A, -B, R ] = ReducingFn [ A, R ] => ReducingFn [ B, R ] type Transducer [ +A, -B ] = Transducer3 [ A, B, R forSome { type R }]
(To be honest, I don't know if it's possible to do this without the intermediate ternary type.)
To assist in creating simple transducers that just modify individual elements of cargo, we write mapping, again with an intermediate ternary type,
def mapping3 [ A, B, R ]( f : A => B ) : Transducer3 [ B, A, R ] = { rf : ReducingFn [ B, R ] => ( r : R, a : A ) => rf ( r, f ( a ))} def mapping [ A, B ] = map3 [ A, B, R forSome { type R }] _
which we use like this:
val t_parsei : Transducer [ Int, String ] = mapping { s : String => s. toInt } def t_root2 : Transducer [ Double, Int ] = mapping { i : Int => Math. pow ( 2.0, 1.0 / i )}
Nice, so far, but let's try reducing something easy:
scala > println ( List ( "1", "2", "3" ). foldLeft [ Int ]( 0 )( t_parsei ( _ + _ ))) < console >: 12 : error: type mismatch ; found : Int required : String
Huh? Maybe it's having trouble understanding _+_ :
scala > println ( List ( "1", "2", "3" ). foldLeft [ Int ]( 0 )( t_parsei {( i : Int, j : Int ) => i + j })) < console >: 12 : error: type mismatch ; found : ( Int, Int ) => Int required : TransducerExistential.ReducingFn [ Int, R forSome { type R }] ( which expands to ) ( R forSome { type R }, Int ) => R forSome { type R }
Different but not better. Maybe it will work to cast explicitly to the ternary type:
scala > println ( List ( "1", "2", "3" ). foldLeft [ Int ]( 0 )( t_parsei. asInstanceOf [ Transducer3 [ Int, String, Int ]] ( _ + _ ))) 6
But that's a little ugly, and whenever something is even slightly ugly in Scala, you introduce an implicit to make it confusing instead. Hence
implicit class TransducerOps [ A, B ]( t1 : Transducer [ A, B ]) { def transform [ R ]( rf : ReducingFn [ A, R ]) = t1. asInstanceOf [ Transducer3 [ A, B, R ]]( rf ) }
to coerce automatically after hoisting the Transducer into the TransducerOp container class.
Since we've already crossed the Rubicon, let's bring some slick Unicode along for the ride:
def ⟐[ R ] = transform [ R ] _
Now
scala > println ( List ( "1", "2", "3" ). foldLeft [ Int ]( 0 )( t_parsei ⟐ ( _ + _ ))) 6
Finally, we're going to want chained function composition, so let's put a method for that, plus a nifty symbol, into the implicit class
def compose [ C ]( t2 : Transducer [ C, A ]) : Transducer [ C, B ] = comp ( t1, t2 ) def ∘[ C ]( t2 : Transducer [ C, A ]) : Transducer [ C, B ] = compose ( t2 )
so that:
scala > println ( List ( "1", "2", "3" ). foldLeft [ Double ]( 0.0 )(( t_parsei ∘ t_repeat ∘ t_root2 ) ⟐ {( x : Double, y : Double ) => x + y })) 9.348269224535935
I suspect that there will be more trickery further down the road, as we flesh out the standard library of transducer functions. To get sequence to work, I ended up performing multiple coercions:
def sequence [ A, B ]( t : Transducer [ B, A ], data : Seq [ A ]) : Seq [ B ] = { val rf1 : ReducingFn [ B, Seq [ B ]] = { ( r, b ) => r :+ b } val rf2 : ReducingFn [ A, Seq [ B ]] = t ( rf1. asInstanceOf [ ReducingFn [ B, R forSome { type R }]]). asInstanceOf [ ReducingFn [ A, Seq [ B ]]] data. foldLeft [ Seq [ B ]]( data. companion. empty. asInstanceOf [ Seq [ B ]])( rf2 ) } scala > println ( sequence ( t_parsei ∘ t_repeat ∘ t_root2, List ( "1", "2", "3" ))); List ( 2.0, 2.0, 1.4142135623730951, 1.4142135623730951, 1.2599210498948732, 1.2599210498948732 )
Conclusions
The type of one transducer is not obscure, and it's not much harder to understand than a callback. However, once you combine several transducers into a working program, the business of reconciling and checking their types can be challenging. Of the languages I know, only Haskell handles it gracefully. Building an entire system in Haskell might be intimidating, but, the transducer bits will be - bracing ourselves for a word not normally applied to Haskell - easy.
Transducers were invented for and clearly work in unityped Clojure, but I find myself wondering if they'll be one function abstraction too far for projects large enough to require many developers, and the argument that I find them beautiful might not carry the day. I do believe that a capable type framework would at least reduce the frequency of bugs, but typed Clojure is not at the point where telling someone to use it for transducers will obviously improve her or his life. It does not seem to be the case that a little macro cleverness can nudge the problem into the core.typed sweet spot.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
April 23, 2016, 5:14 PM GMT / Updated April 23, 2016, 5:14 PM GMT By Mike Brunker
The idea was intoxicating to lawmakers in more than a dozen states where medical marijuana was a political nonstarter: Give patients with certain severe medical problems access to a type of pot that might provide relief without producing the “high” usually associated with the plant.
First of Two Parts
But two years after 17 Midwestern and Southern states began passing a series of what are known as “CBD-only” medical marijuana laws, many people they were intended to help are rising up in protest. The laws, they say, help few patients, exclude others who could benefit and force residents to commit criminal acts in order to get relief for themselves or their loved ones.
Maria LaFrance holds raw cannabis oil with a high THCA content which is only available in states that allow medical marijuana, and a high CBD oil, which is available online but is low in TCHA, while with her son Quincy Hostager, 14, who has Dravet Syndrome that is helped by taking the high THCA cannabis oil, Friday, April 22, 2016, at their home in Des Moines, Iowa. Scott Morgan / for NBC News
“There is no amount of tweaking to a CBD decriminalization law that will make it work,” said Maria La France of Des Moines, Iowa, who gives her 14-year-old son, Quincy Hostager, an oil derived from marijuana to treat his Dravet syndrome, an intractable form of childhood epilepsy. “I don’t want to break the law, but I have to.”
The CBD-only laws allow residents with specified medical conditions to legally use marijuana-derived products that contain cannabidiol (CBD) but are low in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which produces marijuana’s “high.” (Both CBD and THC are among the scores of active chemical compounds known as cannabinoids that are present in the marijuana plant.)
For medical purposes, that usually means orally ingesting an oil derived from marijuana or hemp, though there also are numerous other products like body oils containing CBD for topical uses.
Supporters involved in passing the laws portrayed them as compassionate measures that would let patients avail themselves of the potentially therapeutic or pain-relieving properties of pot without risking the possibility of creating a new generation of drug addicts.
But political opposition — often led by some of the families the laws were intended to help — has emerged in many of the states that passed the legislation.
“We’re not lawbreakers and this shouldn’t even be an issue,” said Jennifer Conforti of Fayetteville, Georgia, who gives her 5-year-old autistic daughter, Abby, marijuana-derived oil with higher-than-allowed levels of THC to control dangerous biting episodes. “It should be a medicine that doctors go to when they need it.”
Conforti and others who want to expand the state’s CBD-only law to cover additional medical conditions, allow for higher levels of THC and provide for in-state cultivation and distribution of CBD products have mounted a “civil disobedience” campaign to raise public awareness about the issue.
In Utah, proponents of expanded access to whole-plant medical marijuana say they will conduct a campaign to unseat legislators who opposed a bill to expand the state’s current CBD-only law.
'Is this what we're going to do?'
Even some involved in crafting CBD-only laws acknowledge that lawmakers have ventured onto thin ice by intervening in matters that may best be left to patients and their doctors.
“Is this what we’re going to do? Are we going to vote on the next blood pressure medication or chemo treatment because of anecdotal evidence?” said Pat Bird, an executive for a Utah substance abuse prevention program who was involved in the failed effort this year to update the state’s CBD-only law.
The laws also have been harshly criticized by both medical marijuana advocates and prominent members of the medical establishment, albeit for very different reasons.
“These same politicians who have opposed legislation for whole-plant cannabis are falling over themselves to support this legislation that has helped very few people.”
Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), which advocates for the decriminalization of both medical and recreational marijuana, said the laws were a transparent attempt by conservatives to avoid appearances of a flip-flop on medical marijuana.
“These same politicians who have opposed legislation for whole-plant cannabis are falling over themselves to support this legislation that has helped very few people,” he said.
Those who believe medical pot should be broadly available have three main objections to what they consider “politically expedient” CBD-only measures:
They typically are narrower than broad medical marijuana laws passed in other states, often specifying a limited number of medical conditions — in some cases a single malady — that can be treated, excluding many other patients who could potentially benefit from CBD use. In Iowa, for example, only 65 patients had obtained medical marijuana cards as of early April under the state’s law, which allows the use of CBD products only for cases of intractable epilepsy.
Most of the laws do not regulate or provide for cultivation, processing and distribution of CBD products. So patients or their families are forced to break other federal or state laws by crossing state lines or obtaining the products by mail. (Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, which classifies it as an illegal Schedule I substance, meaning it is considered to have a high potential for dependency and no accepted medical use. That also applies to CBD products, according to most legal experts.)
By imposing low limits on the amount of THC that products can contain, they penalize patients who obtain relief only from products in which CBD and THC work in concert — a combination that medical marijuana advocates refer to as the “entourage effect.”
Raw cannabis oil with a high THCA content, in the jar, which is only available in states that allow whole-plant medical marijuana, and a syringe containing CBD oil sit on a table in Maria La France's home in Des Moines, Iowa. She gives her son Quincy, who suffers from Dravet syndrome, both to control his seizures. Scott Morgan / for NBC News
La France, the Iowa mom, for example, says that CBD oil with less than 3 percent THC — the limit under the state’s law — didn’t quell Quincy’s violent seizures alone, but combination of CBD oil and another product with higher levels of THCa — another cannabinoid that isn't authorized under Iowa's law — significantly reduced them.
That means she’s forced to break the law ostensibly passed to help patients like Quincy — a risk she’s willing to run because of the results she has seen.
“Last year he was not taking cannabis oil and he barely went to school (because of frequent seizures),” La France said. “This year, he’s going to school much more often and for longer parts of the day. His teachers and family have noticed that his eye contact is better, he’s more responsive.”
“That is really not the proper way of practicing medicine. That kind of decision-making, based on ‘I think it works,’ can result in very negative outcomes.”
Many in the medical establishment are equally dismayed by CBD laws — and the broader medical marijuana laws passed by 24 other states — arguing that they were passed based on anecdotal evidence, not hard science.
“That is really not the proper way of practicing medicine,” Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told NBC News. “That kind of decision-making, based on ‘I think it works,’ can result in very negative outcomes.”
A scientist at CW Botanicals' laboratory checks product quality and purity during the production of Charlotte’s Web, a popular CBD oil. CW Botanicals
Volkow acknowledges that research and clinical trials needed to provide scientific evidence of medical marijuana’s efficacy —and the roles that CBD and THC play — have lagged, burdened by marijuana’s stigma as a recreational drug. But she says that studies currently nearing completion will soon begin to show whether the anecdotal evidence holds up.
Volkow’s concern is shared by Dr. Amy Brooks-Kayal, a pediatric neurologist at Colorado Children’s Hospital. She said an observational study there of young epilepsy patients being treated with medical marijuana found that about a third showed improvement, but 44 percent experienced some type of adverse reaction — some of them life threatening.
That is why the hospital’s physicians do not recommend or administer medical marijuana or CBD products and underlines the need for clinical testing and development of pharmaceutical grade products, said Brooks-Kayal, who also is immediate past president of the American Epilepsy Society.
“If this is a good therapy, we all want to know that, and we want to know how to use it and understand the interaction with other medicines,” she said.
The lack of regulation of CBD products also raises other safety questions.
“There’s no patient, careful pharmacological work going on. It’s very scary.”
Sue Rusche, CEO of the Atlanta-based drug prevention group National Families in Action, noted that a quirk in Colorado law, where most CBD oil sold in other states is produced, requires recreational marijuana to be tested for contaminants like pesticides, but not medical marijuana.
“There’s no patient, careful pharmacological work going on,” she said. “It’s very scary.”
Law enforcement also has raised objections to the CBD laws, saying that it can provide cover for drug dealers — a concern cited in April 2015 when Idaho’s Republican Gov. Butch Otter became the first and only state executive to veto CBD-only legislation.
Extractor Frank Bianco breaks up a high-CBD strain of marijuana used to make Charlotte's Web on Aug. 7, 2014, in Denver, Colorado. Joe Amon / Denver Post via Getty Images file
“If you look at CBD or hash oil, there is no way for an officer on the street to tell the difference. It would have to go to a lab for testing,” said Elisha Figueroa, director of the state’s Office of Drug Policy. “That would really cause a big problem for law enforcement.”
While political support for CBD-only laws has shown signs of weakening, they do have their defenders.
Georgia state Rep. Allen Peake, a Republican who introduced the first CBD-only bill there in 2014, said he remains committed to improving the law by making additional medical conditions eligible for treatment and by creating an in-state program to cultivate marijuana and process it into CBD products so that residents can legally acquire them.
“This has become a passionate cause for me,” he said, adding, “From experiences I hear every day, it’s changing lives.”
“The first thing is to get people to understand that this really does work for a lot of people.”
And Joel Stanley, CEO of CW Botanicals, a Colorado company that he said exploits a “legal gray area” to sell CBD oil to patients in other states, said passage of the laws represented a step “to help some people and get a law on the books in conservative states that were not going to pass a medical marijuana bill for decades.”
“The first thing is to get people to understand that this really does work for a lot of people,” he told NBC News, adding that he supports patients’ rights to access different forms of medical marijuana.
Legal no-man's land
In the meantime, though, parents like LaFrance and Conforti and patients whose conditions are not eligible to lawfully use CBD products are left in a frustrating legal limbo.
Their risk of prosecution is likely minimal. The Drug Enforcement Agency has not targeted users of CBD products for medicinal use and says it has no plans to do so. The Obama administration also sent a memo to federal prosecutors in 2009 encouraging them not to charge people who distribute marijuana for medical purposes in accordance with state laws.
Oil containing CBD from "agricultural hemp" -- a strain of marijuana that is low in THC -- is displayed at the Marijuana Business Conference & Expo in Chicago on May 24, 2015. Carla K. Johnson / AP
And state and local law enforcers generally look the other way when it comes to CBD products, even those that exceed the limits prescribed by the law.
But there have been a few cases of parents facing prosecution for giving medical marijuana to their kids.
Angela Brown of Madison, Minnesota, for instance, was charged with child endangerment by local authorities in 2014 for illegally giving her 13-year-old son, Trey, cannabis oil she obtained in Colorado to ease his pain from a traumatic brain injury. A plea deal spared her from spending up to two years behind bars.
“The neurologists, many of them are sympathetic, but they’re all associated with hospitals and those hospitals have insurance companies that fear a liability if they recommend it.”
Concern over legal liability also is cited as a reason that Missouri — the first state with a CBD-only law to license growers and produce products for residents — had issued only 37 registration cards to patients with intractable epilepsy as of early March.
“The neurologists, many of them are sympathetic, but they’re all associated with hospitals and those hospitals have insurance companies that fear a liability if they recommend it,” said John Payne, executive director of Show-Me Cannabis, a state group advocating for marijuana legalization.
Volkow, the director of National Institute on Drug Abuse, said that studies and clinical trials now under way that will soon begin to provide some clarity for medical professionals and the public at large. And recent moves by the DEA to ease restrictions on clinical trials of CBD also should help speed additional research, she said.
Clinical trial of pharmaceutical-grade CBD under way
Volkow and others who say that legislators got out in front of the science on medical marijuana are closely watching an ongoing clinical trial of a pharmaceutical-grade version of CBD called Epidiolex for treating childhood epilepsy.
If the early promise shown in the trial, which is expected to be completed late this year, is confirmed, that could lead to approval by the FDA and eventually clear the way for insurance companies to start covering CBD products, said Rusche, the executive of the drug |
12][13] The alcohol apparently causes the ampullary cupula in the semicircular canal to become lighter than the surrounding fluid (endolymph), which causes the system to become sensitive to gravity in addition to rotational acceleration.[14]
The spins are often reported when alcohol is mixed with cannabis, since both may cause dizziness[2] and magnify each other's effects.[15] Smoking after drinking especially intensifies the effects of the alcohol,[5] often resulting in nausea.[2]
Treatment and prevention [ edit ]
Since at least some of the symptoms of "the spins" can be attributed to alcohol's disturbance of the vestibular system, many symptom relief strategies are based on increasing the body's ability to use other senses to regain balance. In addition to the vestibular system, vision and touch information from the body are extremely important in maintaining balance. In fact, the vestibular system is not necessary at all to maintain standing balance unless information from the other two systems becomes inadequate.[16]
Keeping one foot flat on the ground while trying to sleep is one popular self-treatment for people whose dizziness is exacerbated by lying down with eyes closed.[citation needed] There is no direct scientific evidence to support this treatment, however it is consistent with studies showing that postural balance responses to high and low speed tilts are primarily driven by force and velocity receptors in the muscles with relatively little input from the vestibular system.[17]
One way to mask the symptoms of the spins is to avoid staring at moving objects, such as people who are dancing or ceiling fans. Instead, it helps to stare at a non-moving object and slowly blink a few times. However, it will make things worse to keep one's eyes closed for an extended period. In minor cases of the spins, simply sitting alone in a quiet place or taking a walk is all it takes to make them subside.
The best ways to avoid the spins are to continuously keep monitoring one's alcohol intake, which involves limiting one's intake to a reasonable level[18][unreliable source?] and to eat before drinking, which allows alcohol to be metabolized more efficiently and steadily and will keep one's blood sugar levels more even.[18] Certain foods, such as crackers and cheese, have the right levels of carbohydrates, fat, and protein to help further slow the emptying of one's stomach.[10]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Someone getting or having the spins is mentioned in several books, including: Being Irish by Joseph Keefe,[19] The Girls' Guide to Surviving a Break-Up by Delphine Hirsh,[6] The Stranger Guide to Seattle by Paula Gilovich and Traci Vogel,[20] Rag Man by Pete Hautman,[4] The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke.[21] Visual depictions of the imbalance or dizziness associated with drunkenness were also featured in Mabel's Strange Predicament and other Charlie Chaplin movies. The cause of the spins is also described in Season 1, Episode 10 of the Netflix Original Series Marvel's Daredevil during a discussion between two main characters, Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson, after a night of drinking. Murdock confirms when asked by Nelson that he still gets the spins despite being blind due to disturbed equilibrium of the fluid in the inner ear. The Pittsburgh rapper, Mac Miller's album K.I.D.S featured a track titled "The Spins". Danger Ronnie and the Spins associate this into their name and music. Rock musician Brian Head Welch references experiencing the spins during his time as an alcoholic and drug addict. He mentions the symptoms were particularly noticeable when laying down with his eyes closed. These references were made in his self-debuted album track "Flush". The Philadelphia band Modern Baseball make reference to the spins in their 2014 track Rock Bottom, from the album You're Gonna Miss It All.In a very interesting interview in Catholic World Report, Jay W. Richards, co-author of The Hobbit Party, a new book examining the political thought of J. R. R. Tolkien, sought to distance Tolkien from the political views of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Whilst paying lip service to the romantic aspirations of distributism, the political creed advocated by Belloc and Chesterton, Richards suggests that the devil is in the practical details of distributism:
The difficulty, we think, is that Belloc in particular didn’t simply offer an appealing ideal. He proposed some very specific policies to bring about a distributist society, and he did so with economic ideas that we think were in some ways mistaken. For instance, in his Essay on the Restoration of Property, Belloc wrote that “the effort at restoring property will certainly fail if it is hampered by a superstition against the use of force as the handmaid of Justice.” In contrast, in “The Scouring of the Shire,” Tolkien describes a group of bossy outsiders who have infiltrated the Shire, “gatherers and sharers... going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage,” supposedly “for fair distribution.” It’s not a complimentary picture. Given Tolkien’s views about the use of coercive power to achieve presumably laudable goals, it’s hard to imagine him signing off on the details of Belloc’s program.
After admitting that the question of distributism is “complicated”, Richards concludes that “in order to glean wisdom from Tolkien’s economic views … it’s better to describe Tolkien’s views on their own terms rather than to identify them with those of other thinkers, such as Chesterton and Belloc.”
I am quite frankly perplexed by Richards’ line of reasoning. In “The Scouring of the Shire,” the hobbits, like good Bellocian distributists, are certainly not “hampered by a superstition against the use of force as the handmaid of Justice.” On the contrary, they are all too ready to take up arms to restore the distributism that the Shire had enjoyed prior to their departure. How on earth, or in Middle-earth, can the hobbits’ restoration of the property of the Shire, using all necessary force, be seen to contradict Belloc’s advocacy of exactly the same thing in his Essay on the Restoration of Property?
Apart from the self-contradictory nature of Richards’ efforts to distance Tolkien from Belloc, Richards himself openly advocates “the use of force as the handmaid of Justice” in his strident defence of Tolkien’s adherence to Just War theory.
At this point we are becoming somewhat confused. Not only does Tolkien agree with Belloc’s position but so does Richards!
We have to dig beneath the incoherent surface to understand what Richards is trying to say. His argument is not with the use of force per se but with the use of economic force. As an adherent to the nonsensical creed of the free market libertine, Richards advocates the legitimacy of using force of arms to restore property taken unjustly but not the force of law. It is legitimate to kill people and to drop bombs in order to restore property to its rightful owners but it is not legitimate to enact laws to do so.
Belloc advocates legal intervention to restore justice in the economy, such as, for instance, proactive measures to assist small businesses to gain and retain a place in the marketplace in the face of efforts by large corporations to exclude them from it. Richards makes the all too common and naive mistake of equating Belloc’s political philosophy with that of socialism and then, having done so, states, quite correctly, that Tolkien was not a socialist. The fact is that Belloc opposed the way in which both socialism and globalist capitalism concentrate property into the hands of a privileged few, i.e. politicians and plutocrats. The answer to this injustice was to promote small businesses and to use the power of politics to do so. Such political intervention is not liked by free market libertarians who seem to believe that it’s better to have the world run by global corporations who have free rein (and reign) to use and abuse their economies of scale to monopolize control of the market.
Richards’ reasoning is simple and simplistic. He begins by demonstrating that Tolkien disapproves of socialism, the “gatherers and sharers … going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage,” supposedly “for fair distribution.” He then suggests that Belloc’s advocacy of distributism is itself socialist, even though Belloc always vehemently attacked socialism. The problem seems to be that Richards does not make the essential and crucial distinction between socialist “redistribution of wealth” and the restoration of widely distributed private property which the distributists advocate. Whereas socialists believe that private property is bad and that it should be controlled by the state, distributists believe that private property is good and that it should therefore be restored to as many people as possible as a defence against the power of the state. It is simply incorrect to equate or conflate these diametrically opposed philosophies.
It is also curious that Richards is keen to quote Tolkien’s opposition to socialism but neglects to mention his graphic depiction, a few pages later, of the ravages inflicted by the laissez faire capitalism of the industrial revolution:
It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a streaming and stinking outflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled. As they crossed the bridge and looked up the Hill they gasped. Even Sam’s vision in the Mirror had not prepared him for what they saw. The Old Grange on the west side had been knocked down, and its place taken by rows of tarred sheds. All the chestnuts were gone. The banks and hedgerows were broken. Great wagons were standing in disorder in a field beaten bare of grass. Bagshot Row was a yawning sand and gravel quarry. Bag End up beyond could not be seen for a clutter of large huts.
As a boy, Tolkien had lived in the “rows of new mean houses along each side of the road”, i.e. the slums, of industrialized Birmingham, which, as the second largest city in England, had been, until the advent of the industrial revolution, a small Warwickshire village. Describing himself in one of his letters as “a hobbit,” Tolkien preferred what Birmingham had been in its pre-industrial past to what it had become in the wake of the advent of laissez faire economics. Like William Blake, who had lamented the “dark satanic mills,” and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had bemoaned the industrial “smudge” that man had left on Creation, Tolkien preferred agrarian sanity and simplicity to the poisonous fruits of so-called economic “progress.”
And as for the necessity of the so-called “force” of economic intervention to restore productive property to those who have been dispossessed by the onslaught of laissez faire, Tolkien would have agreed with Chesterton. “The foundation of the true doctrine of progress is that all things tend to get worse,” wrote Chesterton. “Man must perpetually interfere to resist a natural degeneration; if man does not reform a thing Nature will deform it. He must always be altering the thing even in order to keep it the same.” Chesterton used the example of a gatepost to illustrate this point, stating that we cannot preserve a gatepost by leaving it alone. If we leave it alone we will be leaving it to rot. If we wish to preserve the gatepost we have to be continually painting it. The sort of intervention that Belloc was advocating was of this sort. To conserve culture or property we must actively oppose those forces that seek to undermine it; to restore culture or property, once it is lost, we must be actively engaged in defeating those forces that have dispossessed us of it. Doing nothing, leaving things be, “laissez faire”, is not an option for the true conservative or distributist because it ensures the destruction of all that is worthy of conservation and restoration. It is in this context that we must understand Belloc’s advocacy of the use of force “as the handmaid of Justice,” It is also in this context that we must understand the hobbits’ use of force in achieving the restoration of property in the Shire.
It is true, as Dr. Richards maintains, that Tolkien never seems to have called his own political philosophy by the admittedly ugly name of “distributism.” It is equally true, however, that Shire economics and distributist economics are essentially synonymous. When all is said and done, economic sanity by any other name still smells as sweet!
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.People are often surprised to learn how common genital herpes (HSV-2) is. And looking at the data, about 48 million Americans would be in for a more personal “surprise” if they got tested for it today. To what extent is herpes common? Read on for genital herpes statistics that may surprise you. Fortunately, herpes is highly manageable and people who get it can still have healthy love and sex lives, as the data also shows. These numbers focus mainly on United States genital herpes statistics, and account for genital herpes caused by the HSV-2 strain.
Medically reviewed by Meagan Fleming, RN on Jan. 1, 2019 — Written by Editorial Staff
How many people have genital herpes?
About one out of six people in the United States has genital herpes.
That’s about 55 million people in the United States who have genital herpes.
87-90% of people with genital herpes don’t know they have it.
That’s more than 48 million Americans who are unaware they have genital herpes.
they have genital herpes. Genital herpes is the second most prevalent viral STD after HPV.
Planned Parenthood states that 1 in 6 Americans has genital herpes (1). According to the American Sexual Health Organization, close to 90% of Americans don’t know they have genital herpes (2). And according to the CDC, the statistic of infected people who don’t know is 87.4% (3).
Men vs. Women with genital herpes
About 23.5% of women have genital herpes caused by HSV-2 (4).
have genital herpes caused by HSV-2 (4). About 11.5% of men have genital herpes according to CNN (5).
Symptoms and Outbreaks
A study showed that of infected women, 60% had never had any symptoms or outbreaks (6).
The average number of outbreaks in those who have them is 4 or 5 outbreaks per year. However, some people only have one or two outbreaks and never experience one again (7).
Asymptomatic carriers, those without outbreaks, can still spread herpes, though usually half as often as those who have symptoms (8).
Transmission rates
The likelihood of passing genital herpes to a partner is highest during an outbreak (times when a sore is present).
When a person is not experiencing an outbreak, there is a still a chance of transmitting it. Depending on the study, transmission rates when there are no symptoms vary between 4-30%.
According to studies done by Valtrex, these are the rates of transmission per year of regular sex:
If partners avoid sex during outbreaks: 4% chance transmission from female to male; 8% male to female
If partners also use condoms or antiviral medication: 2% female to male; 4% per year male to female
antiviral medication: 2% female to male; 4% per year male to female If partners also use condoms and antiviral medications: 1% female to male; 2% male to female
Herpes Statistics in Specific Populations
Genital herpes affects more Black than White Americans: 39.2% of the overall Black population, with 48% of Black women affected (9).
The largest increasing population is white teenagers (10).
One in four American teenagers has an STD.
50-75% of unmarried American women between 45 and 50 have genital herpes (11).
Globally, an estimated 417 million people are infected with HSV-2 (12).
How Common is Oral Herpes? HSV-1 Statistics
Though this article focuses on genital herpes, oral herpes is extremely common and is a side note that puts it in perspective.
50-80% of Americans have oral herpes (HSV-1).
Conclusions
The big takeaways from these numbers are that:
1. Herpes is more common than many might think, and a lot of people are unaware they are infected and may not even have symptoms to tip them off. Unfortunately, when clinicians give “standard” STD check-ups, they don’t include tests for HSV-1 or HSV-2, unless it is specifically requested. This only exacerbates herpes’ prevalence and the ignorance around it.
2. Many couples have a healthy sex life and still never transmit it to the uninfected partner. Taking precautions like avoiding sex during and around the time of an outbreak, using condoms and taking antiviral medication like Valocyclovir (Valtrex) or Acyclovir drastically reduces the likelihood of transmission. The statistics indicate that it’s possible to get your chances of transmitting HSV-2 down to as low as 2.1% with condoms and antiviral medications.
3. Take charge of your sexual health and get regularly screened for STDs. You can specifically request a herpes test if the practitioner does not include it in standard checkups. You can order a confidential STD test from STDCheck.
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Note: Not all genital herpes statistics are consistent from study to study. Most say 25% of American women have the virus, and 20% of American males. Other studies show slightly lower numbers. The studies with slightly lower numbers refer to people from 14 to 49, while the higher number studies are based on all people over 12. This is the reason, at least to the best of our knowledge.
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/stds-hiv-safer-sex/herpes http://www.ashasexualhealth.org/stdsstis/herpes/signs-symptoms/ https://www.cdc.gov/std/stats17/other.htm#ref7 https://mchb.hrsa.gov/whusa10/hstat/hi/pages/223sti.html http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/03/10/genital.herpes/index.html http://goaskalice.columbia.edu/testing-asymptomatic-herpes http://www.ashasexualhealth.org/stdsstis/herpes/signs-symptoms/ http://www.webmd.com/genital-herpes/news/20110412/genital-herpes-silent-spread http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/03/10/genital.herpes/index.html http://www.globalherbalsupplies.com/herpes/stats.html http://www.npr.org/2011/04/15/135442942/even-without-symptoms-genital-herpes-can-spread http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=896698Australian model and actor, James O’Halloran, has just become the second male model in history to join the long-running game show.
Following a nationwide casting call and extended competition, which included various tasks based on personality, appearance, and ability to model a car, O’Halloran emerged victorious when the winner was announced on Tuesday. The 30-year-old model beat out two other semi-finalists, Jay Byars and Jonathan Morgan, and will serve as "The Price Is Right’s" sole male model for one week starting Dec. 15.
The Aussie is actually an industrial designer by day. “[I] worked three years in the industry," he tells People magazine. "But I was taking nighttime acting classes. Then, in the midst of a global recession, I quit my job to become a model. I think it worked out for me so far!"
PHOTOS: Check out Hollywood's sexiest, shirtless men
O’Halloran follows Robert Scott Wilson, who became the game show’s first ever male showcase model in 2012. He later parlayed that experience into recurring acting gigs on "All My Children" and, currently, "Days of Our Lives."
More On This...
Male models have recently become TV’s eye candy of choice. "The Ellen Show’s" Bill Reilich (aka Nick the Gardener) quickly became a fan favorite after several shirtless appearance. Since then, Reilich has landed a part in "Magic Mike XXL" and served as NewNowNext Awards’ trophy boy. And then there’s 26-year-old Keith Carlos, who became the first man to be crowned "America’s Next Top Model" when Cycle 21 drew to a close late last week. A favorite of Tyra Banks’, he beat out two other semi-finalists – both males – to make good on the show’s inclusion of men over the past two cycles.Some conservative and libertarian groups have long suspected that the Internal Revenue Service has targeted right-leaning non-profits for extra scrutiny, but such allegations were always difficult to prove (and often sounded a bit conspiratorial). Now, however, the head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations has admitted her division targeted “tea party” and “patriot” groups — and apologized for it. In addition, the IRS apparently asked some groups for donor lists, even though such requests are usually contrary to IRS policy. (Hat tip: Rick Hasen, whose first comment was”Wow.”) As they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you.
UPDATE: The New York Times offers a decidedly different view. [To be fair, this editorial is from last year.]
SECOND UPDATE: Hasen has posted the IRS statement. “Mistakes were made.” Hasen comments: “This is not one of the best days for the IRS. Conservatives are absolutely right to call for a congressional investigation of this one, even if it turns out to be an isolated problem.”
THIRD UPDATE: Here are excerpts from some of the relevant document requests, and a Congressional inquiry about some of these requests from last year.BEIRUT — In the aftermath of the horrific twin bombings of the Iranian Embassy here, streets remained strewn with rubble and burned-out cars. Two suicide bombers unsuccessfully attempted to blow up the embassy, killing 25 and wounding more than 150. It made the once peaceful, upper-income Shia neighborhood of Bir Hasan look like a war zone with violence and devastation Lebanese haven’t seen in Beirut's residential areas for years.
Many analysts say the Tuesday terrorist attack was retaliation for Iran’s support for the government in Syria’s civil war. An extremist Sunni Muslim group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, took credit for striking at Iran, which is predominantly Shia, thus stoking the already smoldering religious tensions in the region.
Groups in Lebanon and regional powers such as Iran, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have all taken sides in the Syrian civil war. While politics remains at the heart of the dispute, the battle has taken on an increasingly sectarian character, cutting along the Sunni/Shia lines of demographically divided Lebanon. Sunnis and Shia constitute about an equal percent of the population, with Christians and minorities making up the rest.
“Sectarian divisions between Sunnis and Shiites have come to dominate the narrative because that suited various powers in the region,” according to James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “The danger is that the imposition of a sectarian narrative begins to live a life of its own.”
Holly Dagres, a researcher at Cairo Review of Political Affairs, noted that the the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group, justifies killing civilians because it’s waging “jihad against the Shiites who are seen as kaffirs (infidels). In 2012, the AAB threatened to punish Lebanese Shiites for backing [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad. The bombings are blowback of such support.”
The Beirut embassy bombing is believed to be the fourth violent sectarian attack in Lebanon in the past five months.
* In July a car bomb exploded in a Shia neighborhood of Beirut, wounding more than 50.
* On Aug. 15 another car bomb killed 30 and wounded more than 300 in a different Shia neighborhood.
* On Aug. 23, two car bomb attacks in the northern city of Tripoli killed 47 and wounded more than 500.
Extremist Sunni groups were suspected of planting the bombs in an effort to support Sunni fighters in Syria. Tuesday’s Iran embassy bombing was a serious escalation because it involved suicide bombers, a tactic not used in the previous incidents.
The Abdullah Azzam Brigades named itself after an Arab Mujahideen leader who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and died in Pakistan in 1989.
The AAB spiritual guide, Sheikh Sirajeddine Zuraiqat, tweeted his group’s responsibility for the embassy bombing, demanding that "all Iran fighters withdraw from Syria and our families [be] granted freedom in Lebanon.”
The AAB and similar extremist Sunnis cloak their political views in religious rhetoric against Shiites, according to analyst Dagres.
Such groups “do not accept Shiites because of an array of reasons such as the culture of the sainthood [and] their means of seeking blessing through holy shrines. Although Bashar Al-Assad is Alawite, it is seen as a sect of Shiite Islam and therefore on the side of the Shiites.”
Such sectarian hatred is a distortion of Islam used to justify attacks on innocent civilians, according to Reza Sanati, a Research Fellow at the Middle East Studies Center, Florida International University.
“Al Qaeda ideology allows mass, systemic violence on civilians – Muslims and non-Muslims alike – for the attainment of political goals,” he said. “In this specific case, Al Qaeda’s goal was to attack a sworn enemy: Iran.”
The majority of foot soldiers in extremist groups “engage in this behavior for more than religious reasons,” said Sanati, “usually for political and for personal profit as well. Many come from poor backgrounds and find this line of work as highly profitable, but obviously very dangerous. The financiers of the extremists are almost always motivated by geostrategic interests, as opposed to just sectarian reasons.”
For example, he noted, “The Saudis do not attack a Shia-majority country like Azerbaijan.” Similarly, Iran backs Christian Armenia in its dispute with Azerbaijan.
Along the regional sectarian fault line, Iran is predominantly Shia. The difference between the Sunni and Shia dates back to the 7th century, following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The Shia denomination believed a direct descendant of the prophet, his cousin and son-in-law Ali, should inherit what was a political and religious position and that direct lineage is still what maintains the theological purity of the faith. Iran supports Hezbollah, a prominent and powerful Shia political and military force within Lebanon. And Iran has long supported the secular Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad for geopolitical reasons.
On the other side sits Saudi Arabia, predominantly Sunni, which split from the Shia in the 7th century and followed the rule of a friend of the prophet, Abu Bakr. The Sunni denomination represents approximately 70 percent of the Muslim world, and the Shia represent between 10 and 20 percent.
The Saudi monarchy adheres to a particularly puritanical Sunni set of beliefs, known as Wahhabism. This ultra-conservative view of Sunni Islam is embraced by the more militant regional Islamist movements and opposition groups in Syria. So Syria has become a kind of proxy war, broadly pitting Assad’s Iranian-backed government against a Saudi-backed opposition.
Most Western powers side with the rebels fighting Assad, while Russia supports the regime.
This Sunni-Shia tension is exploding elsewhere in the region as well, particularly in Iraq, which is also divided between Sunni and Shia Muslims, along with minority Kurds and Christians. The sectarian violence in Iraq has reached a level not seen since the worst days of the US occupation of Iraq in 2005-6.
While outside powers stoke the Sunni-Shia divide, sectarianism has become an increasingly dangerous force, according to analyst Dagres.
“Syria is a grand example,” she said. “Even if one is anti-Assad but Alawite, it can get one killed and vice versa. No longer does 'who side you support matter' — it's all about your religion, and it's becoming worse by the day.”
GlobalPost special correspondent Reese Erlich's reporting from Syria was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
This story is presented by The GroundTruth Project.TRANSCRIPT
President Kennedy's Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."
May 25, 1961
[I]f we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. Since early in my term, our efforts in space have been under review. With the advice of the Vice President, who is Chairman of the National Space Council, we have examined where we are strong and where we are not. Now it is time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.
I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshalled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.
Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their large rocket engines, which gives them many months of lead-time, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless are required to make new efforts on our own. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will be our last. We take an additional risk by making it in full view of the world, but as shown by the feat of astronaut Shepherd, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful. But this is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.
I therefore ask the Congress, above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activities, to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals:
First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations--explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the Moon--if we make this judgement affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.
Secondly, an additional 23 million dollars, together with 7 million dollars already available, will accelerate development of the Rover nuclear rocket. This gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the Moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself.
Third, an additional 50 million dollars will make the most of our present leadership, by accelerating the use of space satellites for world-wide communications.
Fourth, an additional 75 million dollars--of which 53 million dollars is for the Weather Bureau--will help give us at the earliest possible time a satellite system for world-wide weather observation.
Let it be clear--and this is a judgment which the Members of the Congress must finally make--let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action--a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs: 531 million dollars in fiscal '62--an estimated seven to nine billion dollars additional over the next five years. If we are to go only half way, of reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all.
Now this is a choice which this country must make, and I am confident that under the leadership of the Space Committees of the Congress, and the Appropriating Committees, that you will consider the matter carefully.
It is a most important decision that we must make as a nation. But all of you have lived through the last four years and have seen the significance of space and the adventures in space, and no one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space.
I believe we should go to the Moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the Members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment, to which we have given attention over many weeks and months, because it is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year.
This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, material and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts. It means we cannot afford undue work stoppages, inflated costs of material or talent, wasteful interagency rivalries, or a high turnover of key personnel.
New objectives and new money cannot solve these problems. The could in fact, aggravate them further--unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/167
"I wanted to start a discussion about the timers and an API that exposes the capabilities of the system timers. A couple of things I noticed were that the timers use CADisplayLink on the main thread and also listen to the UIApplication state notifications. To my knowledge this works well for timers that are coupled to the UI (requestAnimationFrame comes to mind, there may be other uses). I'd like to discuss timers that do other work e.g. interact with the event loop or schedule background tasks, and how they co-interact.
Event loop timers seem to fall into two categories - those that run at the end of the current loop and those that run right after. This is like process.nextTick and setImmediate. These aren't too hard to implement though there are a couple of gotchas like warning if a process.nextTick handler endlessly schedules itself before blowing the stack. I would also expect both of these timers to run even if the app is inactive or backgrounded (e.g. say you get a network response while the app is backgrounded and schedule some work to run soon after - it should run in the background).
Background task timers (setTimeout, setInterval) raise a couple of questions like the semantics of a zero-ms timeout. I would also propose that these run in the background as well to address the use of running code that does not need the app to be foregrounded. And, if the app is backgrounded there is little harm in running UI code anyway -- in cases where it does matter, the timer handler can check the UIApplication state.
Background task timers that repeat are also good candidates for energy optimization. One thing that OS X systems do is coalesce timers where possible, partly aided by the programmer providing a tolerance value. If many running apps schedule timers that can overlap within their respective tolerance windows, the system may wake the CPU just once to run all of those tasks together." - @{ide}Comcast has seen rapid growth in its broadband business in recent years. The increasing need for speed and connectivity is driving broadband growth in the U.S. The higher penetration of smartphones and use of multiple devices are aiding overall growth. Internet video, video-on-demand and online gaming account for the majority of Internet traffic in the U.S. Video streaming, for instance, requires high data volumes which explains why the reliance on fixed networks is far greater than that on mobile carriers. We believe these factors will continue to drive broadband growth for cable operators such as Comcast. We also note that there is enough room left for broadband to penetrate in the U.S. Currently, broadband coverage is around 70%. It is estimated to reach 74% of U.S. households in the next four years and cover more than 90% in the long run.
We currently have $56 price estimate for Comcast, reflecting more than 10% premium to the current market price.
See our complete analysis for Comcast
During the past few years, cable operators such as Comcast have been losing pay-TV subscribers due to rising competition from telcos, satellite operators and alternative video platforms. However, during the same period, broadband was fueling growth for the company. From 13 million subscribers in 2007, Comcast's broadband base increased to a little under 21 million in 2013. The overall industry (17 largest players representing 93% of the industry) acquired 2.6 million new broadband subscribers in 2013, taking the total subscriber base to 84.3 million. It must be noted that 59% of these were cable subscribers. This indicates a good growth opportunity for cable operators such as Comcast, which added 1.3 million broadband subscribers in 2013, representing 50% of total net additions in the entire industry. The following chart from Leichtman Research Group shows broadband subscribers and net adds among telcos and cable companies in 2013.
Comcast offers high speed Internet to more than 20 million customers, and we expect this number to reach around 33 million by the end of our forecast period. Driving this growth will be further market penetration in the U.S. and increasing demand for high priced tiers for video streaming. It must be noted that |
the events in future news reels was the important thing to Topical Budget and Pathé.
However, despite the ‘immoral’ act of violating someone’s exclusive rights, there is a very interesting cultural footnote to these acts of piracy.
According to Bioscopic, a site dedicated to early and silent cinema, Topical Budget’s footage of the 1922 Cup Final was completely lost. Without Pathé’s pirate footage, the entire event would have been lost forever.
Furthermore, in order to cut the cost of buying exclusive rights to the 1924 F.A. Cup Final, Topical Budget and Pathé decided to put in a joint bid to film the match together.
“It was turned down,” Bioscopic explain. “Consequently no film exists of the F.A. Cup Final of 1924.”
Come back pirates, all is forgiven.NEW DELHI: Intimidating phrases like "thok doonga" or "maar doonga" (Will hit you) may be common in our everyday lives but an Air India pilot was recently grounded after he threatened the ground engineer with "plane chadha doonga" (Will run you down with the plane) unless he cleared the aircraft for take off soon.This unprecedented exchange took place late last year in Mumbai when the captain was in the cockpit and waiting for ground engineers to complete their pre-flight checks so that the Airbus A-320 could begin taxiing and take off for Bengaluru."The captain was in a hurry to take off for some reason and said those words to the ground engineer. The engineers immediately completed their checks and removed chocks - wooden blocks kept in front and rear of tyres - after which the plane is towed back and then taxi to the runway for take off," said a source.The engineers were most upset as this threat had come just months after they lost a colleague in Mumbai near that very bay after he was sucked into an aircraft engine.As soon as the plane took off, the engineers lodged a formal complaint about the pilot’s behaviour with their own and AI’s flight safety department (FSD). The moment the plane landed in Bengaluru, the FSD ordered that the content of the cockpit voice recorder be downloaded."This exchange took place a few months back. We went through the recording and took a very serious note of that threat, irrespective of whether it was made in jest or anger. The pilot was taken off flying duties for about a month. During that time he was made to undergo counselling that included anger management," said a senior AI official."We went through the record of the pilot. He was neither found to be a habitual offender nor someone who had similar complaints in the past. He may have even said it in jest but we took a serious note of that. After the counselling was over and due to his past record, he is back flying," said the official.However, following this episode the FSD has told AI crew members not to come under stress as they are under tremendous pressure to improve the airline’s poor on time performance (OTP) record.AI domestic flights are among the least punctual ones, according to the data given out by Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) every month. The aviation ministry seeks a daily report from AI and the airline has to explain every delayed departure."The pilots and other crew members are therefore under tremendous pressure to fly on time. But FSD has issued an advisory to them not to operate under stress and fly with a cool head," said a senior official.You can watch the first-ever 360-degree livestream of a rocket launch on Tuesday (April 18).
Orbital ATK's robotic Cygnus cargo spacecraft is scheduled to launch toward the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 11:11 a.m. EDT (1511 GMT) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, or directly at the space agency's YouTube channel.
Cygnus has flown a number of such resupply runs in the past, but this liftoff will be special, from a viewer's perspective at least: You'll be able to get a pad's-eye view, in 360 degrees.
"To view in 360, use a mouse or move a personal device to look up and down, back and forth, for a 360-degree view around Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "Those who own virtual reality headsets will be able to look around and experience the view as if they were actually standing on the launch pad."
The Cygnus is packed with more than 7,600 lbs. (3,450 kilograms) of scientific gear, hardware and supplies for the ISS crew — so much cargo that the mission will employ an Atlas V rather than Orbital's own Antares booster, which is not quite as powerful. (An Antares is slated to loft the next Cygnus mission, which will lift off this summer.)
If all goes according to plan, the Cygnus — dubbed the S.S. John Glenn, after the first American to orbit the Earth — will chase the ISS down for four days, eventually reaching the orbiting lab on Saturday morning (April 22). It will then be grappled by the station's huge robotic arm and installed on the Unity module.
Both Orbital ATK and SpaceX fly robotic cargo missions to the space station for NASA. SpaceX, which uses its Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket, has launched 10 such contracted missions, one of which failed. Tuesday's launch will kick off Orbital's seventh contracted flight. Orbital has suffered one failure as well.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.When you land in Hawaii, you can immediately smell the sweet aroma of the islands’ many tropical flowers. It’s one of the many reasons visitors flock here. But, what if I told you the most popular flower in Hawaii right now smells like a dead body?!
That’s exactly what’s happening at Foster Botanical Gardens this week, as one of the world’s smelliest flowers is in bloom.
The amorphophallus titanium, also known as the Titan Arum plant, is about 5′ 9″ tall (although others have reached heights of more than ten feet)and is on display at the botanical gardens. On July 4th, “Miss Liberty” bloomed and should stay in bloom for three to five days, depending on temperature. The warmer the temperature, the faster the wilt.
According to Foster Botanical Gardens, because of its stench when in full bloom, the plant is also called the “corpse plant” or “corpse flower.” The plant is pollinated by carrion-eating beetles and flesh flies. So, in order to attract pollinators, titan arum uses several tricks to convincingly mimic a rotting piece of meat. The corpse flower’s deep red color and texture, along with the powerful scent contribute to the illusion.
Analyses of chemicals released by the spadix shows the fragrance includes dimethyl trisulfide (found in limburger cheese), trimethylamine (found in rotting fish) and isovaleric acid (found in sweaty socks).
This will be the first blooming of this particular titus arum plant, which has had eight years of growth from seed. After the initial blooming, there may be considerable variation in blooming frequency. Some plants may not bloom again for another seven to ten years, although others may bloom every two to three years. There have been cases of back-to-back blooms occurring within a year.
It is native to Indonesia, the Philippines and other islands of the South Pacific.
The bloom is actually composed of a large leaf that acts like a petal and a central stalk with many male and female flowers at its base. The largest flower in the world, also native to Sumatra, is Rafflesia arnoldii, which also deceives insects with the smell of decay.
The plant consists of a fragrant spadix (spike) of small flowers, which resembles a large loaf of French bread. The spadix is wrapped by a spathe, which looks like a large petal and is green on the outside and dark burgundy red on the inside.
After being pollinated, the spath on the corpse flower falls off and exposes the mature, orange-red fruits with seeds inside. The bright color probably attracts birds to eat the flesh and disperse seeds elsewhere. After several months of dormancy, the corm will send up a new leaf.
If you’d like to meet the titan arum face-to-face, Foster Botanical Gardens is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days a week at 50 N. Vineyard Blvd.Story highlights WHO warns 10,000 Ebola cases per week possible in West Africa by end of year
Peter Piot co-discovered Ebola virus in 1976, concerned about outbreak response
Piot has warned of 'unimaginable catastrophe' if the virus becomes lodged in a mega-city
The current Ebola outbreak is "running much faster" than the international response to it, the co-discoverer of the virus said Thursday.
"This is the first Ebola epidemic where entire nations are involved, where big cities are affected," Peter Piot, a microbiologist and a former undersecretary general of the United Nations, told Global Public Square host Fareed Zakaria. "And I continue to be worried that the response to the epidemic is really running behind the virus."
According to the World Health Organization's latest update, there have been almost 9,000 confirmed and suspected cases, with almost 4,500 deaths. However, the WHO warned there could be as many as 10,000 new cases per week in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone by the end of this year.
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Piot, a member of the team that discovered the virus in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, made headlines earlier this month when he told The Guardian newspaper he feared an "unimaginable catastrophe" if the virus became lodged in a mega-city such as Lagos.
"The three countries that are affected are being totally destabilized, not only in terms of people who are killed by Ebola -- their families, the orphans that now are coming up because the parents died -- but the economy has come to a standstill," Piot said Thursday, speaking from Oxford.
"People are massively dying from other diseases that are normally treatable, like malaria, or women die while giving birth because hospitals are abandoned or are full with Ebola patients. So that's a very, very destabilizing factor," he said, adding that the impact of its spread is "beyond Ebola."
Piot said that it is impossible to predict the number of cases. Asked about the WHO projections, he said: "10,000 per week, or 1,000, we don't really know."
"At the moment, there are about 1,000," he said. "It's still expanding, that's for sure. And it probably will continue to grow until all the measures have been put in place in a more efficient way."
Piot's comments came on the same day as Daniel Varga, the chief clinical officer for Texas Health Services, apologized over mistakes he says were made in the care of Thomas Duncan, a Liberian national who became the first person in the United States to die from the virus. Duncan was sent home despite saying he had a fever and that he had visited West Africa.
"Unfortunately, in our initial treatment of Mr. Duncan, despite our best intentions and a highly skilled medical team, we made mistakes," Varga testified to Congress. "We did not correctly diagnose his symptoms as those of Ebola. We are deeply sorry."
Writing for CNN earlier this month, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Tom Frieden said one way for the United States to prevent the disease spreading in the United States is to tackle it at the source, in West Africa.
"After all is said and done here, that is the only way to truly and completely protect the health security of America -- and the world," Frieden wrote.
This view was echoed by Piot, who added that there were some encouraging signs from two of the countries in the region that have been worst affected.
"As long as there is a major epidemic in West Africa, the rest of the world is also at risk. That is an additional reason for providing assistance to stop the epidemic. And because there will be people who will show up -- be it in Europe, in the U.S. or in China," he said.
"The good news is that both Nigeria and Senegal have been able to contain a number of important cases," Piot said. "In Senegal, there was never even any secondary case. In Nigeria, there were a number of people who were infected and died, but it has not given rise to an outbreak in Lagos, after all, a city of more than 20 million people."
"That shows that if you act decisively and early enough... it can be controlled."
Asked by Zakaria what steps he would like to see taken to try to halt the spread of the virus, Piot suggested that it is particularly important to focus on protecting health workers.
"Something that we've learned through Doctors Without Borders is how to treat patients, to care for them and isolate them so that they don't infect others. But also to reduce, more or less, mortality," he said. "We need to protect health care workers. We've seen it in the U.S. We've seen it in Europe. But above all, in Africa, where over 200 nurses and doctors and lab workers have died from Ebola. And that can be done by protective care."
But he added that the biggest challenge in slowing the spread of Ebola is changing the kinds of behaviors that allow it to spread.
"Stopping the transmission in the community around funerals -- that is still going on. And so we have to change people's behaviors and beliefs and also what to do with all the patients who are still at home, who can infect people while they're being transported to hospital units."
"So that's going to be a massive undertaking of behavior change. And it will have to come from within, where their beliefs are influenced and where safe behaviors have to be introduced. And that can come from traditional chiefs, from the opinion leaders in each community."
Asked whether he believed the United States was overreacting to the potential spread of Ebola, Piot said he hoped the extensive media coverage of the virus would ensure that people are more aware of how to protect themselves. But he said he also believed it was possible to get the current outbreak under control.
"I'm not worried about an epidemic in the larger population," he said. "There will be cases. I think we should not be naive about that. But I think it can be contained."While the continued return of vinyl rightfully draws a lot of attention, there’s another format that’s on the comeback trail: the cassette. Cassette album sales grew by 74 percent in 2016 with 129,000 copies sold (up from 74,000 in 2015) according to Nielsen Music.
Certainly, 129,000 is a tiny figure compared to the total number of albums and vinyl albums that were sold in 2016. Overall album sales totaled 200.8 million (down 17 percent), while vinyl albums sold 13.1 million (up 10 percent). But, considering that cassettes were effectively a dead format that had little love from audiophiles (unlike vinyl aficionados, who are devoted to the warm grooves of the LP), selling any cassettes at all is a pretty major feat.
Cassettes have seen growth thanks to specialty releases of recent albums, including Justin Bieber’s Purpose and The Weeknd’s Beauty Behind the Madness (each sold nearly 1,000 in 2016), along with reissues of classic albums like Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP (3,000) and Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain (2,000). The new cassettes typically come with a code for a digital download of the album, for those consumers who don’t own a cassette player.
In 2016, 25 albums sold at least 1,000 copies on cassette in 2016, compared to just eight in 2015. The top selling cassette album of both years was the Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 soundtrack, with 4,000 sold in each year. In total, the Guardians tape, which was released in 2014, has sold 11,000 copies. (Its sales are no doubt enhanced by how the tape is modeled after the cassette seen in the film.)
A fair number of cassettes in the recent past have been released exclusively to Urban Outfitters, including Bieber’s Purpose and The Weeknd’s Beauty Behind the Madness, along with such titles as the soundtrack to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Kanye West’s Yeezus and The 1975’s I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It. Non-traditional music stores, like Urban Outfitters, accounted for 21 percent of cassette album sales in 2016 (27,000). The bulk of cassette albums were sold through Internet and web-based direct-to-consumer settings (43 percent; 55,000), while the rest came from independent retail stores (33 percent; 42,000) and chains and mass merchants (a little under 5 percent; 6,000).
Cassette album sales also got a boost from Cassette Store Day, the retail celebration designed to bolster all things cassette. Last year’s event took place around the world on Oct. 8, and featured a bevy of tapes available exclusively at independent retailers, as well as in-store concerts and promotions.ISLAMABAD: The Pakistani Taliban has said that it will carry out more attacks on "secular" political parties like the ANP and MQM, warning people to stay away from their rallies, a day after a blast outside an ANP gathering injured about 10 people.
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan told the media in the country's northwest that his group would target the country's "secular parties" like the Awami National Party, which rules Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, part of the ruling coalition at the centre.
"The attack on the ANP gathering was just the beginning. The attacks will intensify on the political gatherings of the secular ANP and MQM," Ihsan was quoted as saying by the media. The ANP and MQM were on the Taliban's hit list because of their enmity to the militants, he said. Referring to other political parties, he said, "Though they are all one as far as their secular ideology is concerned, the Taliban will announce its strategy regarding other parties later".
About 10 people, including cops and ANP workers, were injured when a bomb went off in the parking area of a rally at Charsadda in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa on Monday.This research proposes a new theory of direct causation and examines how this concept plays a key role in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events. According to the no-intervening-causehypothesis, a causal chain can be described by a single-clause sentence and construed as a single event if there are no intervening causers between the initial causer and the final causee. Consistent with this hypothesis, participants used single-clause sentences (lexical causatives) more often than two-clause sentences (e.g. periphrastic causatives) for causal chains in which (1) the causer and causee touched (Experiments 1 and 2), and (2) an intervening entity could be construed as an enabling condition rather than another cause (Experiments 2–4). In addition, event judgments paralleled linguistic descriptions: chains that could be described with single-clause expressions were more often construed as single events than chains that could not (Experiments 1–3). Implications for languages other than English, for the linguistic coding of accidental outcomes and for the relationship between cognition and language in general are discussed.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Steve Marshall says entire communities have been isolated
North-eastern Australia's worst flooding in decades is continuing to cause chaos across the region.
About 1,000 people in Queensland have been evacuated, including the entire population of the town of Theodore.
The government has declared Theodore and two other towns in the region to be disaster zones, and forecasters say the floods have not yet peaked.
The cost of the damage is expected to top AU$1bn (£650m), including massive losses of sunflower and cotton crops.
Army Black Hawk helicopters evacuated the 300 residents of Theodore, where every building in the town apart from the police station has been flooded, local media reported.
Theodore county mayor Maureen Clancy said only a few police officers had stayed behind.
"Certainly the water is still rising. The heights are at such a new record it's not known what this is going to do," she said.
The town's river has risen more than 50cm (1.6ft) above its previous recorded high, Emergency Management Queensland spokesman Bruce O'Grady told Australia's ABC News.
Theodore farmer Keith Shoecraft told the BBC that vast areas of farmland were under water.
"This has been devastating for our town. Tonight that town will be completely isolated, empty," he said.
Mr Shoecraft said many farmers had stretched themselves financially but would be determined to survive.
"They're a pretty tough lot here, they won't leave. If... their bank managers will keep giving them money they will keep trying and trying and trying."
In the city of Bundaberg, residents in some areas were being advised to leave their homes as the Burnett River rose to danger levels.
The river was expected to reach 7.5m - about 0.3m more than the previous high water record of 1954.
In the Central Highlands town of Emerald, flooding forced the closure of the main bridge, cutting the town off, Australian media reported.
Brad Carter, the mayor of Rockhampton, warned that his city and more remote surrounding communities could be cut off by the weekend.
The floods are also hitting businesses in Queensland, which is Australia's key coal-producing state.
For many communities we haven't even seen the peak of the floodwaters yet, that's a number of days away Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard
Two of Australia's biggest coal export terminals - Dalrymple Bay and Gladstone Ports - together with Australia's top coal transporter QR National said they were cutting back on operations while the floods persisted.
Rio Tinto Group, the world's third-largest mining company, declared "force majeure" at four Queensland coal mines allowing it to miss deliveries because of circumstances beyond its control.
Peter Maguire, mayor of Emerald Shire, told the BBC's World Today programme the floods would have a huge economic impact on agricultural areas.
"There will be many, many cattle drowned. It will be devastating, fences are down on properties as well as farming land. Cotton... and lots of other crops will be affected."
Disaster fund
Inland towns such as Chinchilla and Dalby are all under water; the nearby town of Warra, and the towns of Alpha and Jericho, west of Emerald, have also been declared disaster zones, with hundreds of homes flooded or at risk.
Media reports said Dalby was running low on drinking water supplies after its water treatment plant was damaged by the floods.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh launched a disaster relief fund with AU$1m in state money and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard pledged to match the amount with federal funds.
"Some communities are seeing floodwaters higher than they've seen in decades, and for some communities floodwaters have never reached these levels before [in] the time that we have been recording floods," Ms Gillard said.
"For many communities we haven't even seen the peak of the floodwaters yet, that's a number of days away."
The state capital, Brisbane, has recorded its wettest December in more than 150 years. Cyclone Tasha, which hit Queensland on Saturday, also brought torrential rain to the state.
Image caption Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, centre, met evacuated residents in Bundaberg
Long traffic queues have formed outside isolated towns and police are arresting people who need rescuing after driving into badly hit areas, says the BBC's Steve Marshall in Sydney.
Further south, in New South Wales, about 175 people who had spent the night in evacuation centres have returned home.
But 800 people in the towns of Urbenville and Bonalbo are expected to be cut off for another 24 hours.
While the rain is now easing, water is continuing to flow from sodden land across central and southern Queensland into already swollen rivers, adds our correspondent.
Queensland's Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts told ABC the worst was yet to come.
"Over the next 48 hours rain will be easing but the real impact in some communities won't be felt for a couple of days when floodwaters begin to recede," he said.
"Once the rain finishes there will still be significant flooding impacts over the next few days."
Farming groups says the floods could devastate crops, badly hitting an industry which was already suffering the effects of a lengthy drought.
Cotton Australia said that about 7,500 hectares of the crop planted near Theodore had been destroyed.Are you average looking? Well, prepare to feel bad. You are a part of a privileged class group, without you even knowing it. According to an article called, "3 Unfair Ways Being Perceived as Physically Average Privileges and Protects You," the writer Rebecca Leys posits that the "more 'physically average' I look, the more privilege I hold, and the easier it is for me to live in my community."
She elaborates on her theory below:
It’s not often that we unpack the concept of “average” when it comes to physical appearance. In many feminist spaces, we make time to unpack the often idealized images we see in the media, and one thing I’ve noticed is that we often call out idealized images and media that demonizes or shames certain groups (for example, larger bodies), but we have yet to get to what it means to be seen as “physically average.” Where I live, what is portrayed as “physically average” is not a true representation of the range of people who make up the society I live in.
According to the piece, here are some of the benefits to being average.
1. People who are “average” get to “fit into seats on public transport"
2. People who are average can “easily find things in non-specialty shops that are branded ‘nude,’ which pretty much accurately represents [her] skin tone.” A
3. People who are average can “go to the beach, wear a swimsuit, go for a run, eat a salad or a giant plate of chips, and it’s not something that incurs mocking, praise or shame."
I don't know. I just can't muster the energy to feel bad about being able to sit in a bus, buying nude panythose, or eating chips without fanfare. Though I can imagine being disabled or obese has its own set of challenges -- and people can be cruel -- the answer to the depravity of the human soul is not to try to make every person on earth feel bad about things they can't change. As Kat Timpf concluded, "There are benefits to fitting in. There are also benefits to standing out. It’s great to count and think about your blessings, but believe it or not, it’s totally possible to do that without making it about identity politics."
Photo Credit: PixabayIn a parking lot between the Seattle shopping center’s current Apple store and the Microsoft store, a new retail building is under construction.
Apple is apparently building a new Apple store at University Village that, coincidentally or not, would put it just across from the center’s Microsoft store.
Documents filed with the City of Seattle discuss the building of “Village Green,” a new 2-story retail building in University Village being constructed on a parking lot just south of the shopping center’s three-story Crate and Barrel store. The location is between the center’s current Apple store and the Microsoft store.
While the filings don’t directly say an Apple store will be built there, they include references to Apple. One document is addressed to Foster + Partners, the architectural firm that built Apple’s new stores in San Francisco and Chicago, among others. The mailing address given is Apple’s headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, Calif.
One of the documents says the Village Green building, which will have a basement and ground floor, has about 11,600 square feet, with 6,321 square feet of retail space.
Apple declined to comment on the plans, which were first reported by GeekWire. University Village did not respond to a request for comment.All Actions Referred to the Subcommittee on Environment.
Action By: Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Referred to the Subcommittee on Environment.
Action By: Committee on Energy and Commerce Referred to the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management.
Action By: Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
Action By: House of Representatives Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
Action By: House of Representatives Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
Action By: House of Representatives Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
Action By: House of Representatives Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
Action By: House of Representatives Introduced in House
Action By: House of Representatives
04/25/2017 Referred to the Subcommittee on Environment.
02/10/2017 Referred to the Subcommittee on Environment.
02/06/2017 Referred to the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management.
02/03/2017 Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
02/03/2017 Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
02/03/2017 Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
02/03/2017 Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
02/03/2017 Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.
02/03/2017 Introduced in HouseThe classiest, calmest man on a cricket field, Hashim Amla's name is etched in South African cricket history. With his wristy leg-side flick and serene cover drive, Amla became the first South African to score a triple century in Test cricket, while also effectively shifting gears to become the fastest batsman to 2,000 (40 innings), 3,000 (57 innings), 4,000 (81 innings) and 5,000 (101 innings) runs in ODI cricket.
Amla's career began at Durban High School, the alma mater of Lance Klusener and Barry Richards, and a world away from his brother, Ahmed. Just four years apart, they grew up on either side of the Apartheid divide, which meant that Ahmed went to a school for the previously disadvantaged, while Amla was afforded better opportunity at a more prestigious institution.
After a successful school career, Amla toured New Zealand with the South African Under-19 team in 2000-01 and captained them at the 2002 Under-19 World Cup. After reeling off four centuries in his first eight innings of the 2004-05 season - in which he was also appointed, and stepped down as, Dolphins captain - he was picked to play for South Africa against India.
He was not an instant success, with serious questions emerging about his technique and his back lift, in particular, as he mustered 36 runs in four innings against England later that season.
When he was handed a second chance, he made it count with 149 against New Zealand at Cape Town, helping South Africa to a draw. He remained a consistent performer, even if not as prolific as South Africa would have liked, and made fifties against Pakistan in 2007. But he saved his best for the following year's tour of India, where he racked up 307 runs in three Tests. That included a majestic 159 in Chennai, his second score of 150 or more. He followed that with a pugnacious 81 in the second innings, in conditions that were trying, thanks to the weather, the pitch and the attack. In the summer of 2008, he got his name on the honours board at Lord's with a sublime century, and, in the process, silenced all whimpers about his pedigree for the longest version.
Still, doubts remained over his ability in the shorter formats, but Amla corrected that in 2010. He scored over 1,000 runs in both Test and ODI cricket. It started with a magnum opus tour of India, where the hosts threw everything at him, but could not find a way past his monk-like patience and ability to soak pressure. In the two-Test series, he scored 490 runs and was dismissed just once. In ODIs, he combined quick scoring with stunning consistency, scoring five centuries and four fifties in 15 innings, all the while scoring at over a run a ball, which saw him rise to No.1 in the ODI rankings that year.
He was promoted to South Africa's leadership core when he was named vice-captain of the ODI and T20 international teams in June 2011, and later that year, scored centuries in both Tests South Africa played against Australia at home. But Amla's crowning moment came the following year, when he got South Africa's quest to become the No.1-ranked Test team off to an epic start, spending 13 hours and 10 minutes at the Oval crease crafting a triple hundred, and not even needing a change of gloves. Amla also scored a century at Lord's as South Africa took the Test mace from the hosts.
A quickfire 196 against Australia in Perth ensured South Africa stayed on top, and in February 2013, Amla was the ICC's top-ranked Test batsman. He had also decided to keep away from captaincy promotions, and stepped down as the limited-overs vice-captain.
That was why it came as a surprise when, less than 18 months later, Amla accepted the Test captaincy. His tenure was off to a solid start as South Africa beat Sri Lanka 1-0 away from home in his first series in charge, and West Indies at home in his second, in which Amla scored a double hundred in the first match. But that proved a false dawn.
Amla had taken over a team in transition and South Africa's struggles came in 2015. They lost a four-Test series in India 3-0 and returned home to lose the opening Test against England. Amla's own form also suffered and he had not crossed fifty in a year. The New Year's Test of 2016 brought a change of fortune as he scored a double hundred, having decided to give up captaincy. He announced that he was stepping down after the Test was drawn.
Firdose MoondaPremier Kathleen Wynne and Mayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) are digging in on plans to build the Scarborough subway, despite growing concern about a lack of evidence to justify the $3.56-billion plan. The leaders’ unwavering support as they stood side by side at a Queen’s Park news conference Wednesday morning, has drawn criticism that the subway plan — which will cost at least $2 billion more than the light-rail alternative — is a political gambit not based on sound planning policy.
The subway can get plenty busy sometimes - but levels of ridership in Scarborough is just one facet of the proposed subway extension that's being questioned. ( Marcus Oleniuk / Toronto Star )
“My support for this was predicated on the notion that I think people want to see us move ahead and actually do something,” Tory said after meeting with Wynne to discuss various city issues. When asked whether the public can be confident when earlier justification for the subway was based on analysis deemed “problematic” by the city’s top planner, Tory said all three governments have already made their decision — one |
, according to court records. Daniel was born in 2009, and by 2011 all three were living in Gaithersburg.But two years later, the couple separated and went through a bitter divorce, previous court filings show. Joint custody was worked out, with Daniel staying with his mother four days a week and his father three days a week, according to court documents. But the acrimony grew.At one point, according to documents, Shafeirad told her husband: "I will make you cry. You will be sorry."Prosecutors picked up on statements such as that, saying Shafeirad was motivated by jealousy over a nanny her husband had hired, and by her financial insecurities."The defendant has demonstrated that she is willing to do whatever it takes, including murder her own son, in order to find peace in her own life," prosecutors Ayres and Steve Chaikin wrote in court papers.One of Shafeirad's attorneys, Melanie Creedon, said her client wasn't driven by jealous rage and that the 2015 crime did not follow a calculated plan. The custody battle, Creedon said, had left Shafeirad suffering from anxiety and a sense of "impending doom." Shafeirad lost her job caring for an older person, and found out she was about to be evicted. "This was an act of a helpless and hopeless, broken woman who had basically reached the end, and who saw no way out," Creedon said.Hamid Dana, Daniel's father, tried to address the judge Monday and tried to collect himself several times. He told the judge the last words he spoke to Daniel, when he was dropping him off at his mother's and was worried about problems his son was having around her."I told him, 'Please be strong,' " Dana said in court, his voice trembling. "He said: 'Daddy, I'm strong. You be strong.' "Dana had earlier composed a letter to Rupp."He was everything to me," the father wrote of the effect of the killing. "Since my Daniel is gone and left me alone, I am gone, too. I am a hopeless person walking."In the letter, Dana addressed problems he'd had with Shafeirad, but said he always wanted to do right by Daniel and "find a way where Daniel could have both mother and father."He wrote: "I knew she was not caring for Daniel and yet I could not hold Daniel just to myself. So I kept praying that we would get through this time."Dana also wrote of plans and dreams he had for Daniel: the two of them fishing together, his son playing guitar in a band, Daniel's succeeding in college.Now, he wrote, his thoughts go to what happened in the early morning of June 16, 2015."I wake up at nights with nightmares. I keep seeing Daniel's beautiful face being forced a bottle of poison. Daniel had a beautiful face but he didn't like medicine. So I keep dreaming how Narges forced the medicine down his mouth, and that was the last thing Daniel experienced in this world. Why?"The method, which involves sandwiching lithium ion and perchlorate ion between layers of graphene in aerogel electrodes, substantially improved the capacity of the electrodes while still maintaining the devices' excellent rate capability, the researchers discovered.
"This is a unique method that significantly raises the performance of our previous graphene aerogel super capacitors," said LLNL engineer and paper co-author Cheng Zhu. "We've modified the devices and found the best recipe."
LLNL researchers provided the UCSC team with the 3-D-printed graphene aerogel electrodes built using a direct ink writing process. Graphene-based materials are increasingly being used in supercapacitors because of their ultra-large surface area and excellent conductivity.
The method involves two ion-intercalation steps (lithium-ion intercalation and perchlorate-ion intercalation), followed by hydrolysis of perchlorate ion intercalation compounds.
"This two-step electrochemical process increases the surface area of graphene-based materials for charge storage, as well as the number of pseudo-capacitive sites that contribute additional storage capacity," said LLNL material scientist and paper co-author Fang Qian. said LLNL material scientist and paper co-author Fang Qian.
Capacitance of graphene aerogel is limited by its relatively small ion-accessible surface area as a result of aggregation and stacking of graphene sheets, according to UCSC professor and corresponding author Yat Li.
"This study presents a facile method to boost the capacitive performance of 3-D-printed graphene aerogel by exfoliating the stacked graphene layers and functionalizing their surface, without damaging structural integrity," Li said.
Zhu said the findings are the next step in creating more complex architectures using aerogels, enabling more powerful supercapacitors that could someday be used in custom-built electronics.
"In the future, I think every device will be customized, so you need the unique architecture or shape (for the supercapacitor)," Zhu said. "If you can 3-D print it, you can make any shape you want. In the future, everyone could design their own iPhone."
The Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program funded the effort.
Source and top image: Lawrence Livermore National LaboratoryAccording to a new Pew Research Center survey, US favorability ratings across the globe have declined “steeply” since a certain paranoid kleptocrat became our beloved leader, far outpacing even his piss-poor domestic approval rating. Who could have possibly, possibly predicted?
According to the Pew survey, a median of 22 percent of people across 37 nations have confidence in Donald Trump’s foreign policy, versus a 64 percent confidence rating at the end of Obama’s presidency. (For comparison, Trump currently has a 39.5 percent domestic approval rating, which is low for a president but fairly high for a half-sentient dinosaur egg.)
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Similarly, at the end of Obama’s presidency 64 percent had a favorable view of the US, while just 49 percent are favorably inclined towards us today. Only two countries—Russia and Israel, natch—think more highly of Trump than Obama; Russia, however, sprang up 42 percentage points from 11 percent to 53 percent, while Israel is more confident in Trump by 7 points at 56 percent. By comparison, Sweden had a 93 percent confidence rating in the US under Obama, and a 10 percent rating under Trump. It’s worth noting that this survey was taken before Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord.
Here’s another fun comparison: confidence in Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs is lower than confidence in Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. 75 percent view Trump as “arrogant,” 65 percent as “intolerant,” 62 percent as “dangerous,” and, somehow, 55 percent as “a strong leader.” Not shockingly, men see the US more favorably than women, with, for example, 58 percent of Australian men viewing the US favorably versus 38 percent of Australian women.
Ah, doesn’t it feel good to be in our comfort zone again? This global pariah is back, baby!Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds up his Bible during a Dec. 29 campaign stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Nati Harnik/AP)
On the lengthy checklist Donald Trump carries in his pocket titled, "FEUDS TO GET INTO," he's finally gotten the chance to cross off one of the big ones. Donald Trump is now in a war of words with Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic Church and a man considered by millions to be the conduit for the word of God on Earth.
Not that such things would give Trump pause.
Francis conducted Mass at the border this week, intentionally drawing attention to the moral aspect of the fight over immigration.
While flying home from his visit to Mexico, the pope referred obliquely to the Republican presidential front-runner when asked about the businessman's views on immigration.
"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," Francis said. "This is not in the Gospel." Francis hadn't heard about Trump's proposals about the border, but when informed of them issued a verdict. "I'd just say that this man is not Christian if he said it this way," he said.
Trump responded quickly in a statement on his website. "If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS... I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened," the statement read. Trump also blamed Mexico for feed the pontiff bad information, because the country "understand[s] I am totally wise to them."
After Pope Francis suggested Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is "not Christian," Trump told a rally in Kiawah Island, S.C. that the Mexican government manipulated the pope, calling the religious leader's statement "disgraceful." (Reuters)
"For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful," Trump said -- but Mexico is worse. "They are using the pope as a pawn and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing so."
This would seem like an odd fight for a politician to pick in any year besides 2016 and with any politician besides Donald Trump.
Since he became pope, Francis has been frustrating American conservatives. Last July, as Francis prepared to come to the United States, Gallup found that approval of him among Americans had fallen -- thanks in part to a steep decline in support among American conservatives. In 2014, 72 percent of conservatives supported Francis. Last year, that number dropped to 45 percent.
In part, that's thanks to Francis's willingness to opine on issues central to American politics. A month before that Gallup poll, the pope released an encyclical demanding action on climate change, a topic that is among the most politically polarized in the country. The pope took the Democrats' side, if you will, and that frustrated a lot of conservatives. On a range of other issues, Francis has shown more flexibility than some Catholics are comfortable with.
Francis's comments about immigration are generally in line with American Catholics. In a November Post/ABC News poll, only 37 percent of Catholics supported deporting all of the undocumented immigrants in the country -- a number closer to the 31 percent of Democrats who supported the idea than the 56 percent of Republicans who did. In January, another Post/ABC poll found that 60 percent of Catholics think that immigrants strengthen the country. That's compared to 65 percent of Democrats and 37 percent of Republicans that said the same thing.
But Trump isn't a Catholic, as he noted when he was asked about Pope Francis's comments disparaging capitalism prior to the pope's visit. In response, Trump trotted out the same argument about the Islamic State -- or as he referred to it, ISIS.
How would you reply, CNN's Chris Cuomo asked, if the pope confronted you about the evils of capitalism? "I'd say, 'ISIS wants to get you,'" Trump replied. "He talks to you about capitalism, and you scare the pope?," Cuomo replied. "I scare the pope," Trump said.
A Vatican spokesman responded to questions about the Islamic State targeting the Vatican. "There is nothing serious to this," he said. "There is no particular concern in the Vatican. This news has no foundation."
On Twitter on Thursday, a Trump adviser suggested one reason the Vatican might not be worried: It has walls.
Amazing comments from the Pope- considering Vatican City is 100% surrounded by massive walls. pic.twitter.com/g3iVLDVGe5 — Dan Scavino (@DanScavino) February 18, 2016
It's important to note that while the Republican electorate is heavily religious, it is also heavily Protestant, not Catholic. The largest religious voting bloc in Iowa and in many southern states is white evangelical protestants -- a group that's historically often antagonistic to the Catholic Church. (After conservatives started to grow wary of Francis, some evangelical leaders began trying to peel them away.) According to Pew Research data from 2012, 43 percent of Catholics are Republican, versus 48 percent who are Democrats (or who lean to one party or the other). By contrast, 70 percent of evangelicals are Republican. Evangelicals make up a quarter of the population, while Catholics are only a fifth.
Republicans don't really see Trump as particularly religious anyway. Among all adults, only 5 percent told Pew that they thought he was very religious when asked last year. His stumble while speaking to a religious college, referring to a book of the Bible as "Two Corinthians" instead of the more common "Second Corinthians" inspired mostly shrugs. Previously, Trump had declined to name his favorite Bible verse.
As with so many of Trump's other feuds, then, the smart money is that this won't have much of a negative effect on his political prospects in the Republican nomination contest. The Republican Party is more heavily evangelical than Catholic, and conservatives had already grown skeptical of Francis's politics. And, of course, people like Trump getting in fights and defending his positions.
The audience for Trump's comments was probably those voters anyway. When he was talking to Cuomo last summer, Trump indicated that he didn't think the pope would be scared by him anyway. "The pope, I hope," he said, "can only be scared by God."A White House spokesman on Monday couldn't say whether President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE had read the administration's new national security strategy in its entirety.
The comment came after CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked national security spokesman Michael Anton if Trump had read all of the 55-page strategy document rolled out earlier Monday.
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“The president has been involved in the drafting of it from the beginning, has been presented with sections of it over the past many months and was briefed on the final document several weeks ago,” Anton replied.
“The president himself personally led the presentation of the document to his Cabinet only about a week ago,” he added.
“But has he read the whole document?” Blitzer pressed.
“I can't say that he’s read every line and every word. He certainly had the document... and has been briefed on it,” Anton said.
He then insisted the document “is based on [Trump’s] words. It’s based on his campaign speeches and his major speeches this year.”
The White House published the new strategy shortly before Trump made a speech about it in Washington.
The document — the administration's first major attempt at forming Trump’s "America First" worldview into a comprehensive strategy — envisions confrontations with powers like Russia and China that are working against U.S. interests.The Obama Administration and the Russian government are both preparing to announce tit-for-tat “retaliations” against one another this week, with the White House making very public their plan to announce a whole series of new anti-Russia measures as soon as Thursday, and Russia vowing to respond in kind.
The White House measures are nominally “retaliation” for accusations that Russia “hacked” the US election against Hillary Clinton. President Obama has promised to make such a move, and with his term in office running out in a few weeks, he’s running out of time to make good on his promised revenge.
The public announcement is expected to include sanctions against Russia and some diplomatic measures. Administration officials have also promised cyber-attacks against Russia, though how much of them are public knowledge is as yet unknown.
Russian Foreign Ministry officials expressed annoyance at the constant “lies” about them hacking the election, saying that they view Obama’s moves as a deliberate provocation, and that Russia is preparing a retaliation as soon as the White House announces theirs.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzAs a fellow worker bee, the cosmic struggle is real when it comes to deciding whether or not I want to indulge in a pastime that some may call a distraction.
The crown jewels of distraction are television, video games, movies, books (yes even some books), and podcasts.
There are those people that work nonstop and shun such distractions. There are also those that live their lives around nonstop distraction and everyone else falls in-between
So who’s right and who’s wrong?
Does it matter?
The answers to these questions are subjective but this article is about my own two cents.
The thing is, distraction is okay if you’re okay with distraction.
Some people I know feel bad or don’t believe they deserve any distraction. They’re the ones always focused on what the next thing is with their business or how else they can optimize their time.
The main problem I see with up and coming entrepreneurs and young professionals is feeling guilty for enjoying something like video games or Netflix and chill.
The guilty feeling comes from believing they should always be doing something that generates income or helps them grow as an individual.
I believe that personal development plays a large role influencing the “always be doing something” mentality. The listicles never really mention distracting yourself. They do mention taking time for yourself but mainly for doing something “less” productive like reading a book…… about business or playing in such a way that you get your exercise in. It’s always about moving forward.
But who says distraction isn’t it’s own form of personal development?
You don’t always have to be doing that magical something to better yourself or your business. You don’t need my permission but if it helps….
Enjoy It. Make sure you’re enjoying the distraction in some way. Bonus points if what you enjoy makes you laugh and a huge dose of feel good chemicals flood the body. Be Mindless. Use the distraction to take your mind off things. I mean, that is the point of a distraction right? Relieve some stress and try not to think to hard. Zone out and just let the distraction overtake the senses. You’ve had a hard day and have earned/deserve it. Set a time limit. This ensures that you don’t necessarily go overboard on your distraction. This could range from setting a gaming marathon to an hour or finishing a movie in it’s entirety. Use your best judgement here.
When you distract yourself within reason, you enter into an agreement towards being a responsible consumer versus a blind one. People not on the path to achieving goals are generally caught up in blind consumption where there is no limit to the amount of distraction they incur.
But we’re all on the journey, and we know better! Heck, you might even find an inspiration or two in what to create next from one of your distractions. Keep an open mind (could be item number four on the list but I’ll leave it right here).Says RBpundit, “See what happens when you give people who call everyone Nazis the license to punch Nazis? They wind up hurting non-Nazis.” Right, but I take it the people who twisted the professor’s neck would say that she became a Nazi by association by defending Murray’s right to speak after being invited. A mob will always justify its violence as righteous.
We’re getting closer to the inevitable moment when someone is literally murdered on an American campus because a right-winger tried to speak.
As [Professor Allison] Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing. Burger said college public safety officers managed to get Stanger and Murray into the administrator’s car. “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus. “During this confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Prof. Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and (on Friday) is wearing a neck brace.”
The “event” mentioned in the first paragraph was actually the second attempt yesterday afternoon to let Murray speak. The first attempt was with a live audience, but watch the clips below (he appears onstage at 19:00 of the first one) to see how that went. The protest goes on for fully 20 minutes before Murray gives up. Middlebury officials warned the crowd beforehand that they could protest but not disrupt the speech, but “the students ignored those reminders and faced no visible consequences for doing so.” You’ll see Stanger come to the mic at the very end (at 41:00 or so) and, to her credit, refuse to capitulate: Rather than cancel Murray’s speech, they decided to move to a private location and have her interview Murray on closed-circuit TV, with the feed carried live onscreen in the lecture hall. Which makes this image of what followed revealing:
Protests continue as the conversation between Murray and Stranger are streamed into Wilson Hall. pic.twitter.com/lERQtOL1Vj — Middlebury Campus (@middcampus) March 2, 2017
Protesting Murray when he was onstage was an attempt to stop him from speaking. Protesting him when he wasn’t even in the building was an attempt to stop interested students from listening. They went the extra mile to make sure he wasn’t heard by any open-minded observers. It was after the closed-circuit interview ended that Stanger and Murray tried to leave and were attacked. Said Murray afterwards, “The Middlebury administration was exemplary. The students were seriously scary.”
Maybe CCTV is the future of right-wing speech on campus. Fliers could be put up advertising the speaker’s appearance and then he/she would fly into town and be driven to a secret location in disguise to deliver the lecture to a camera in an empty room. Anyone interested could watch online. But that wouldn’t work, would it? The mob would scramble to discover the location and set upon it. Having the speaker dial in via Skype for the lecture/interview from the safety of home would be easier, but without their actual presence on campus, the thrill of transgression would be lost. Charles Murray giving a speech in front of a hostile crowd at Middlebury is an event; Murray giving the same speech from his study via a webcam is really just an extended Fox News segment. Better figure out a solution soon, though, because someone’s going to die.Hello world! by B7hf_wi-Ajs72 Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing! Posted in Uncategorized
Sweating After Drinking Coffee by Lee What Causes Sweating After Drinking Coffee? Well, as most people know coffee contains a fair amount of the dreaded caffeine. Continue Reading Posted in Hyperhidrosis / Excessive Sweating
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Sweating and Cancer by Lee Sweating and Cancer – Introduction I’m going to discuss sweating and cancer here and try to look at the causes Continue Reading Posted in Hyperhidrosis / Excessive Sweating Tagged with: SweatMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Hands-on with LG's roll-up display
If you're in the business of making TV cabinets - look away now.
For the rest of you, feast your eyes on a remarkable innovation-in-progress.
LG Display has been working on its fully flexible screen for some time now, but it's at this year's CES the BBC was given the exclusive first hands-on.
The screen can be rolled up and scrunched around, and the display is full HD.
The one I played with was 18in (45.7cm) corner to corner, but the team at LG say they're aiming for screens that are 55in and beyond.
At that size they will be able to produce a screen quality of 4K, they say - that's four times HD.
Right now, the resolution is 1,200 by 810 pixels.
How did they do it? Of course they wouldn't share the precise details, but the crucial technological leap has been moving from LED TVs to OLED TVs.
The O stands for organic, and it removes the necessity of a back panel providing light to the screen. Therefore, it bends.
Why would you want a bendable TV? LG says it's ideal for making displays, like in a shop, but also for people who no longer want to sacrifice an entire corner of a room to a television.
With a bendable screen like this, you can roll it up and pop it in a cupboard until you need it again.
Dead pixels
Unfortunately - and you knew this bit was coming - LG isn't able to say how much it would eventually cost, or indeed, when it will actually be sold at all. At the moment, the team is buried in the prototype stage.
Image caption The screen can be bent but not folded flat
"The larger prototype is expected in the near future. But as for a commercial product, we're still planning the timing," says KJ Kim, LG Display's vice president of its marketing division.
That can be translated as it'll be a while yet.
Because while the screen is remarkable, it suffers a few flaws.
The night-time demo we saw, with quick flashing lights, was designed to conceal the numerous "dead" pixels in the display.
Dead pixels are those that have been damaged, so instead of emitting the correct colour just get appear as a tiny empty square.
There were several dead pixels on the screen and, after I played around with it a bit more, several more emerged.
Right now, the screen can only be rolled up in one direction, which isn't a limitation, really, but something they will need to suss out before it comes to market.
"The screen can be rolled up the other way as well, but we showed it to you using only one direction because it is more complicated the other way due to circuitry issues," a spokeswoman for the firm told me.
Also, it's crucial to point out that the screen can be rolled, but not folded flat.
Folding it flat would permanently damage it, and therefore the screen doesn't represent a chance for something many have lusted over for a while, an interactive video newspaper that feels just like the paper product.
But we're getting there.
Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC
Read more of our CES articles and follow the BBC team covering the show on Twitter.It’s no secret that Calgary spent much of the past year in a recession, but that didn’t slow down the creative efforts in Calgary’s restaurant scene. Diners were hungry (pun definitely intended) for new and diverse offerings, and restaurants new and old responded. Here we present the top three restaurants in 24 categories as voted by our readers*. Cheers!
By Breanna Mroczek
BEST AMBIENCE
The overall look and feel of a restaurant is often as important as what’s on your (teal, miss-matched china, small, etc.) plate when it comes to an enjoyable dining experience. Located in a historic brick building, Charbar exudes rustic charm with a contemporary twist and provides a comfortable atmosphere for all occasions. Their rooftop patio has a unique view of the city skyline and of the Bow River, providing an exceptional dining experience in the summer. Nestled in the beautiful Prince’s Island Park and accessible only by walking and bike paths, the tranquil, serene, nature setting of River Café is truly one of a kind. It makes every occasion, even a simple family Sunday brunch, feel extra special. “Between the casual feel of the building and the rich sound of vinyl being spun on the in-house turntable, Model Milk hits the right balance between chic and casual,” says Elizabeth Chorney-Booth. “You can relax and just have a good time, while also feeling like you’re having a special night out on the town.”
*Judging Process: Notable local food writers Elizabeth Chorney-Booth, Dan Clapson, John Gilchrist, Julie Van Rosendaal, and our dining columnist Gwendolyn Richards each submitted their best restaurant pick in each dining category. Their picks, along with restaurants nominated by the Where Calgary team (for a total of ten nominations in each category), were used in an online poll on where.ca, open to residents of Alberta. Readers submitted their votes in each category, and could select one of the ten nominees, write in their own vote, or abstain for voting in categories they were not familiar with. All restaurants in the city were eligible to win in each category, except in the Best New Restaurant Category. Restaurants considered in the Best New Restaurant category were restaurants that opened between November 1, 2015 and November 1, 2016, and had been open for a minimum of three months during that time frame. The Best New and Best Overall restaurant winners are editor’s picks based on the judges recommendations. Our list represents restaurants that visitors to the city can easily access, as one of the factors the judges considered was accessibility (location to transit, major attractions, and established neighbourhoods).
BEST ASIAN FOOD
Anju serves up traditional Korean small plates with a modern twist in a refined setting. One bite of any of chef Roy Oh’s dishes and you’ll see why locals love it here. At Raw Bar “Viet-modern” cuisine takes centre stage with sharing plates that fuse traditional cuisine and trendy ingredients. Thai Sa-on is the place for authentic Thai food. Vegetarians and meat lovers alike will be very happy with the expertly prepared variety of traditional dishes.
BEST FOR BEER
The Ship & Anchor is more than a bar, it’s a local institution where you’ll find people in leather punk rock jackets, suit jackets, and everything in between enjoying all varieties of beer. When you want beer, food, and entertainment in one convenient setting, head to one of National’s four locations. “With plenty of beers to try and a wide-ranging food menu, not to mention great patios — and in the case of the 10th Avenue location, a bowling alley beneath — National covers all the bases,” says Gwendolyn Richards. If you fancy yourself a connoisseur of the suds, Craft Beer Market is the place to be. With more than 100 craft beers on tap, they truly have something for everyone including local microbrews, imports, and gluten-free varieties.
BEST BARBECUE
Calgary is a very meat-centric city, but it’s not just about steak — many restaurants turn to the South for inspiration. The Palomino is a local institution that’s casual and just the right amount of gritty — no frills, just great barbecue, beer, and live music. Their slow-smoked meats are served all-day long (even for breakfast), so get your fill of ribs, brisket, pulled pork, and chicken. The communal tables and platters of meats at Hayden Block encourage sharing, so your party can sample a variety of the mouth-watering Texas-style meats (we suggest the short ribs and turkey breast — it’s definitely not the dry sort of turkey you have at Thanksgiving). Booker’s BBQ & Crab Shack is a pub-style restaurant with barbecue that will please any palate with house-made rubs, slow-smoked brisket, ribs, and chicken, and fixings such as baked beans and cornbread.
BEST FOR BUDGET BITES
When you want a meal without breaking the bank, there’s no need to sacrifice taste and quality. Cluck N Cleaver has devotees who can’t get enough of the juicy Southern fried and rotisserie chicken. “For a quick take-home meal, the perfectly crisp chicken paired with a side of potato salad and a ridiculously rich chocolate malt shake can’t be beat,” says Elizabeth Chorney-Booth, while Gwendolyn Richards notes that “Colonel Sanders has been demoted.” Those who believe bread is the most critical part of a sandwich must go to Sidewalk Citizen. Baker Aviv Fried pairs sandwich fillings with the perfect bread: breakfast on buttery brioche buns, cold sandwiches on crusty, handmade sourdough, and soft, fresh pitas filled with creative daily specials. Spolumbo’s is a local business loved for their endless varieties of homemade, all-natural sausages, cold cuts piled high on fresh bread, and meatballs made with Mamma’s secret recipe in their deli.
BEST BRUNCH
Calgarians love brunch, and while most bars and restaurants offer a brunch menu on weekends, there are a some stand-out places that serve it daily. It’s worth waiting in the long lines that form at OEB Breakfast Co. — the breakfast poutine is a local favourite, but their signature egg dishes are also tops. “Wonderfully conceived by chef/owner Mauro Martina, OEB elevates brunch to an art,” says John Gilchrist. Next door at Diner Deluxe you’ll find both traditional (think: meatloaf hash and buttermilk pancakes) and contemporary (mascarpone French toast) dishes served in a retro-style diner. For unique, contemporary breakfast dishes, head to Yellow Door Bistro. Be sure to ask about the feature pancake. It changes monthly and is always a decadent mix of flavours (it looks too good to eat, but you won’t regret digging in).
BEST CASUAL BUSINESS DINING
For a successful working lunch, striking the right balance between sophisticated and unpretentious is key. Whether you want to do some people-watching on the balcony or find a quiet place to dine indoors, Murrieta’s Bar & Grill has what you’re looking for, and a great wine list to boot. Briggs Kitchen and Bar has a cool but friendly vibe and a meaty menu full of updated comfort food classics — the Newf’s poutine with lobster has its own cult following. Barcelona Tavern serves Spanish tapas that are perfect for a group dining experience. They also pour unique versions of gin and tonics and have excellent daily and happy hour specials.
BEST CHINESE FOOD
Chinese food is undoubtedly a part of Calgary’s heritage — in fact, the prairie staple ginger beef was invented here. Silver Dragon Restaurant specializes in dim sum and hot pot, and their extensive menu with a mix of traditional and westernized dishes is popular with business lunch crowds and families alike. If all-you-can-eat is where your heart lies, China Rose Restaurant has an extensive buffet filled with fresh, tasty options that lean more towards the westernized side, including, of course, ginger beef. Szechuan Restaurant is not for the faint of tongue, but if you crave spicy food you’ll be in heaven. Stand-out dishes include kung pao chicken, ma po tofu, and (for those who can’t take the heat) tea smoked duck.
BEST FOR COCKTAILS
Every single cocktail on the menu at Proof is unique to this cocktail bar, though they do an exceptional job of shaking and stirring up the classics, too. “The extensive back bar at Proof speaks to the care and creativity that goes into their continually evolving drinks list,” says Gwendolyn Richards. You’ll feel like you’ve been transported to a sunny beach with one sip of a cocktail at Native Tongues Taqueria, which uses Mezcal in several cocktails including their tiki creations and signature Mezcal-garita. There aren’t any slush machines here, just the real margarita deal. If whiskey is your thing, the cocktails at One18 Empire will impress. You can even customize your old fashioned with a choice of bitters, syrups, whiskies, and even wood to smoke — then your server will mix it up tableside.
LES CLEFS D’OR ALBERTA SILVER SERVICE AWARDS
Hy’s Steakhouse in Calgary
By Warren Downs, Fairmont Gold Manager and Chef Concierge at Fairmont Palliser
Calgary is known for western hospitality and Alberta beef — two things exceptionally exemplified by Hy’s. Founded in Calgary in 1955, Hy’s reopened in 2015 after an eight-year absence in the city. Under the vision and leadership of Hy’s veteran Barb Steen, the new Hy’s continues to thrive. The design and layout of the location evokes the essence of a classic steakhouse, with the perfect blend of modern elegance. This is showcased in the custom millwork, antique brass, and dark leather that adorn the surroundings. The large restaurant features versatile dining spaces and lounges, along with private dining. On the walls you’ll find remarkable western artwork, photographs, and newspaper excerpts, a tribute to Hy’s storied history in the city and beyond. The menu is extensive and refined with all of the classics you would expect from an opulent steakhouse, along with creative and modern dishes featuring seafood, lamb, and duck. Many of the dishes are prepared tableside providing the highest assurance of quality and customization. Every member of the staff is extremely engaging and knowledgeable, able to answer any questions and make ideal recommendations, ensuring an exceptional dining experience.
Balkan Restaurant in Banff
By Kristi McClintok, Chef Concierge, The Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel
Joanna Karlos and her family provide the best in hospitality to our guests, welcoming everyone into their Greek oasis on Banff Avenue. The Balkan features warm and friendly service, authentic and delicious Greek cuisine, and award-winning cocktails and wines from Greece. We love Joanna’s classic Greek dishes such as the arni psito, a delicious dish featuring their slow roasted lamb shank. Their platters offer incredible variety and are fun to share with family and friends. There is nothing more unique than Greek Nights at the Balkan Restaurant featuring entertainment, belly dancing, and plate smashing! For Les Clefs d’Or Alberta, the Karlos and Balkan family makes the Concierge teams and our guests feel like a part of their family. By Warren Downs, Fairmont Gold Manager and Chef Concierge at Fairmont PalliserCalgary is known for western hospitality and Alberta beef — two things exceptionally exemplified by Hy’s. Founded in Calgary in 1955, Hy’s reopened in 2015 after an eight-year absence in the city. Under the vision and leadership of Hy’s veteran Barb Steen, the new Hy’s continues to thrive. The design and layout of the location evokes the essence of a classic steakhouse, with the perfect blend of modern elegance. This is showcased in the custom millwork, antique brass, and dark leather that adorn the surroundings. The large restaurant features versatile dining spaces and lounges, along with private dining. On the walls you’ll find remarkable western artwork, photographs, and newspaper excerpts, a tribute to Hy’s storied history in the city and beyond. The menu is extensive and refined with all of the classics you would expect from an opulent steakhouse, |
testing the difference between media query units when a user zooms will help to answer the question on whether we can use px based media queries now.
User zooms in
The results from this experiment is that Chrome, Firefox and IE showed the same behavior. px unit queries fired at the same time as em and rem queries.
Results from Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 11
And you guessed it… Safari didn’t :(
Results from Safari
Unfortunately, this means that pixel based media queries are out of the question. Safari doesn’t support them properly (unless you decide to forsake Safari?).
Once again, move on to our final experiment to see if anything unexpected comes up still.
3. User Changed Their Browser’s Font Setting.
Many developers like to believe that users don’t change their browser’s font-size since it’s hidden deeeep inside the settings.
Well, it’ll be awesome if all users exhibit this behavior because we don’t have to do this experiment! :)
Unfortunately, there’s no data to proof that users don’t change their browser’s font-size s, so it’s still our duty as developers to bake the flexibility into our websites.
In this experiment, I enlarged the default font-size of the four browsers I tested with in the following way (incase you wanted to follow along):
Chrome: Go to settings, show advanced settings, web-content.
Go to,,. Firefox: Go to preferences, content, fonts and colors.
Go to,,. Internet Explorer: Click on page, then text-size
The only browser I couldn’t figure out where to set the font-size was Safari. So I used a proxy instead. I change the settings such that the smallest font-size is larger than 16px. To do so, go to preferences, advanced, acessibility.
This was the only test that all browsers behaved in the same way:
Results from all browsers for scenario 3
As you can see, the pixel queries triggered earlier than em or rem queries.
There aren’t any bugs here. This is the correct implementation since px are absolute units. The breakpoint should remain at 400px no matter what the user set’s their default font-size to.
em and rem, on the other hand, is based on the font-size of the browser. Hence, their media queries should get updated when the user changes their default font-size setting.
So… I’m sorry to break your bubble, pixel fans, but it’s a no-go for pixel based queries. 😱😱😱
(Here’s a more detailed explanation for people who found this last experiment confusing.)
Try to imagine you’ve coded up a website that has a breakpoint at 600px. This 600px breakpoint is perfect for a font-size of 16px (the default).
Let’s call the viewport smaller than 600px the small viewport, while that larger than 600px the medium viewport.
Let’s further assume that you only changed the layout at 600px. You used a one-column layout below 600px, and a two-column layout above 600px.
Now, change your browser font-size setting to 20px and look at your website at 650px.
If you used em or rem based media queries, your user would see a one-column layout at 650px. This behavior would be consistent with the first two scenarios.
If you used px based media queries, your user would see a two-column layout at 650px. This behavior would be inconsistent with the above scenarios. (And the design would not fit the screen).
Concluding The Experiments
As you can see from our tests above, the only unit that performed consistently across all four browsers is em. There aren’t any differences between em and rem with the exception of bugs found on Safari.
px media queries performed well in two of the three experiments (with the exception of Safari, again). Unfortunately, px media queries remained at 400px in the third experiment, which makes it a no-go if you intend to support users who change their browser’s font-size value.
Hence, my conclusion after these experiments is: Use em media queries.
If you’re using a library that doesn’t do em media queries, point the developer to this article so they know the implications of their code. Otherwise, feel free to switch to a em based library like Mappy-breakpoints, Breakpoint-sass or sass-mq.
Thanks for reading. Did this article help you out? If it did, I hope you consider sharing it. You might help someone else out. Thanks so much!A few days ago, a TV journalist was verbally sparring with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House deputy press secretary – and it wasn’t one of the usual suspects. It wasn’t CNN’s Jim Acosta or NBC’s Kristen Welker, but rather Bill Hemmer of Fox News Channel.
“It seems like it is entirely more personal than it needs to be,” Hemmer told Sanders, referring to the tweets from President Donald Trump that disparaged MSNBC morning anchors Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. “Is there something we need to know more about this relationship?” Hemmer pressed again a few minutes later. “There is no backstory that has not become public that would lead him to choose this wording?”
Sanders didn’t budge. It wasn’t a “gotcha” moment, but the line of questioning was more aggressive than critics of Fox News might expect.
Hemmer is glad to be focused more intently on his job covering the news after months of watching his own network make plenty of headlines. In the 12 months since Roger Ailes was ousted as Fox News CEO in July 2016, the 21st Century Fox division has been turned inside-out by scandals, lawsuits, hasty departures and even more hastily designed changes to its primetime lineup.
Related New Fox Appoints Wayne Borg to Los Angeles Studio Role Fox News Channel Names Michael Tammero Senior Vice President and Entertainment Host
“In all candor, this was arguably the most challenging year in our professional lives,” Hemmer told Variety. “It was clearly the most challenging year in memory, internally and externally.”
Fox News’ internal drama isn’t entirely over. Just last week, Fox Business Network anchor Charles Payne was suspended amid allegations of sexual harassment — claims Payne vigorously denies. But from Rupert Murdoch on down, there has been a whirlwind of effort at the top of 21st Century Fox and Fox News to move the division past its annus horribilis and into a new chapter. The fact that Fox News has remained No. 1 for the year to date in every key TV news ratings measure is a testament to the loyalty of its core audience and the surge in news viewership overall as President Donald Trump keeps the news cycle churning.
The most important thing, said Jack Abernethy, co-president of the 21st Century Fox unit, is to listen to an audience that may not be the youngest among cable-news networks but is extremely devoted.
“Over most of last year, we had six of the top eight management positions turn over, and three of the four primetime people left. Some of that has been planned, but most has been unplanned. We’ve had big shifts,” Abernethy told Variety. “We have been tasked with putting in new people and training people and sending a signal that there’s a new environment.”
Nobody realized it at the time, but the new era dawned for Fox News on July 6, 2016, the day former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed her sexual harassment lawsuit against Ailes, which sparked an internal investigation by 21st Century Fox. Ailes, a towering figure in TV news and politics, shocked the industry by resigning 15 days later. He continued to vehemently deny allegations of harassment from Carlson and others until his death in May.
Ailes’ ouster prompted a flood of legal action from Fox News employees and contributors alleging that a culture where sexual harassment and racial discrimination ran rampant went unchecked by management and where private settlements were commonplace. That storm led to the departures of marquee host Bill O’Reilly in April and longtime programming chief Bill Shine in May, and it also contributed to Megyn Kelly’s decision to head to NBC News earlier this year. In the meantime, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is probing the specifics of the numerous Fox News settlements and whether illegal tactics were used in dealing with employees of the network.
Abernethy, who was present when Fox News started in 1996 before leaving to run the company’s TV-station group and returning in August of last year, declined to comment on the lawsuits or the federal investigation. For all the behind-the-scenes changes at Fox News in the past year, Abernethy stressed that the programming philosophy has not changed. Fox News die-hards, he says, fuel the network’s business. Acknowledging the older skew of Fox News’ viewership, he said the network is less focused on its all-news competitors’ ratings in the adults 25-54 demo, the target audience for most cable news advertisers.
“We have a very large, loyal audience that is somewhat older, but is still enormously profitable for us. Our growth is a function of something other than adults between 25 and 54,” said Abernethy. “We have very healthy subscriber growth. Many loyal fans are driving the pricing and depth of those revenues, and you can’t limit yourself to 25 to 54.”
Fox News Channel commands by far highest monthly subscriber fee among the cable-news networks, according to market research firm SNL Kagan/S&P Global Market Intelligence. Fox News is seen generating $1.55 per subscriber per month this year, Kagan said, compared to 79 cents for CNN and 26 cents for MSNBC. As a result, its revenue from distribution is significantly higher than the money it makes from advertising. Fox News Channel was projected to generate $1.67 billion in affiliate revenue in 2016, SNL Kagan said, compared with $952.8 million in net advertising revenue.
That doesn’t mean the network isn’t focused on its ratings. Despite a May surge by MSNBC in primetime, Fox News captured more viewers than either MSNBC or CNN in that demo and overall for the second quarter of 2017. It can’t afford to take its eye off rivals, however. MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” was the most watched cable-news program among the advertiser demo in the period. “Both competing networks spike from time to time, but we take the long view,” says Abernethy.
O’Reilly’s departure was accelerated by a wave of advertiser defections from his program amid a pressure campaign mounted by his fiercest critics. But there has been no lasting impact on the network overall. Upfront sales for Fox News so far are pacing ahead of last year, even with the tough comparable to a presidential election year. Executives expect ad volume and rates to rise.
Scandal-battered Fox News could be benefiting from CNN’s recent travails, suggests Jeffrey McCall, a media studies professor at DePauw University. CNN, typically the most centrist of the nation’s general cable-news outlets, has been thrust into an adversarial relationship with the White House as it continues to report on the controversies swirling around President Trump.
“CNN’s controversies and running battles with Trump remind Fox News viewers about why those viewers value Fox News in the first place,” says McCall, who notes that despite Fox News’ many executive and talent changes, “the channel’s ratings remain solid.”
Meanwhile, new rivals are courting the Fox News audience. Smaller conservative-focused outlets like Newsmax or One America News Network are cited as potential landing places for O’Reilly, Shine and former Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, who just left MSNBC after six months. There has been much chatter in TV news circles about Fox News being vulnerable to upstarts on the right after the loss of “The O’Reilly Factor” in particular.
Abernethy isn’t buying it. New entrants have a tough road to travel to achieve the scale of a Fox News. “There are many niche opinion offerings with limited distribution on cable, radio and online. A 24/7 fully distributed, strongly branded news channel with worldwide news capability is a whole different business,” he said. “Launching one today would be very difficult and very costly.”
And Fox News has hardly dropped its conservative voice in primetime. Tucker Carlson, who inherited O’Reilly’s 8 p.m. anchor slot, has maintained his predecessor’s legacy of calling out what he views as liberal bias in mainstream news coverage. He cites what he sees as misguided focus at rivals on the suspicions that Trump campaign officials colluded with Russia on cyber-malfeasance connected to the 2016 election.
“I think that the collusion story is a hoax,” Carlson told Variety. “This is not out of deference to the Trump administration. There are a lot of things you can criticize them for. But Trump did not collude with Vladimir Putin to win the election. For me, this has been a fascinating window into what mass hysteria looks like up close.”
At the same time, Carlson said he’s eager to do more in-depth reporting on his show, including week-long looks at specific topics. He has already focused on the nation’s opioid crisis and thinks he can do similar examinations of subjects that may or may not be politically divisive.
Carlson said he initially questioned whether he had a shot at succeeding in O’Reilly’s wake. Total viewership for “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is down 5% in the second quarter, compared to “O’Reilly Factor” – a signal some of the previous occupant’s oldest viewers have left. He has been encouraged by a 16% uptick in viewers in the advertising demo. “I’m grateful for it,” he said of the ratings.
As Fox News strives to move forward, several anchors said there is also heightened emphasis on breaking news and more ambitious editorial projects. “Rupert Murdoch is in charge,” said Hemmer, a reference to Murdoch taking the role of executive chairman at Fox News after Ailes’ departure. “I love to talk about the news with him, and he wants news,” he said.
Rupert Murdoch has been a big presence at Fox News during the past year but speculation continues that the parent company — led by his sons James and Lachlan Murdoch — is quietly trying to recruit a TV news heavy hitter to take the chairman reins from Rupert. “I can’t say that more change is not on the way,” Hemmer acknowledged.“We have a great and settled leadership team which I enjoy working with every day,” Rupert Murdoch said in a recent statement.
Shannon Bream was recently given a seat opposite Hemmer on the morning program “America’s Newsroom” after spending many years covering the Supreme Court and Capitol Hill. She said Fox News has made it clear to staffers in the post-Ailes period that there is a commitment to changing the internal environment for employees. “If you want to report something or have a concern about something, there are many different ways to do that. You don’t have to feel like there is one person who is the gateway,” she said.
Executives are open to tweaking the network’s primetime slate, said Abernethy, but see no changes in the immediate future. Shine’s post as co-president is not likely to be replaced, he added. Suzanne Scott, another 20-year Fox News veteran, was promoted to president of programming after Shine’s departure.
Fox News is used to taking a beating from critics for the tilt of its opinion programming. The intense public scrutiny of its internal workings — as detailed in legal briefs and tell-all interviews — added another layer of stress for those employees far removed from the center of the controversies.
After a year of tumult, Abernethy is hopeful that the worst is behind them. The primary focus has to be on serving the Fox News faithful, who have by and large stuck with the channel through thick and thin.
“We are going to get a continuing flow of critiques, but my view is we need to listen to the audience,” he said.
(Pictured: Bill Hemmer, Tucker Carlson, Shannon Bream)Creative is an intangible. There aren’t many great creatives in radio. In branding there are less. In strategizing there are even less. Most companies have no BRAND. The products and services are amazing, the businesses are often brilliant. There is just nothing for consumers to grab and buckle themselves into. The web sites are also no influence in creating the brand, brand strategy, ad concept or ads.
iNET creative has dozens of mind traps and hooks. Duplicitous meanings and meanings left for the listener to decipher or wonder at. While these traps can get a listener stuck in a thought midstream over two, three, twenty exposures they force acceptance of the message and action. When they discover the hidden hooks listeners feel like insiders, part of the story and part of the brand.Gas prices are plummeting across America thanks in part to the country doubling its daily oil exports, which is made possible by chemical fracturing technology that scientists have said wreaks havoc on the environment. Here are some pros and cons of fracking:
Pros
Blasts tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals deep underground, out of harm’s way
Prompts important conversation about whether or not people have a right to clean water
Chemical balance of breathable air getting a little staid
Fact that shale well blowout could happen at any moment emphasizes ephemeral beauty of life
Cancer research could use few more confounding variables
Those hardest hit will be the voiceless
Cons
Dilutes perfectly good chemicals
Family history providing enough birth defects as it is
Class action lawsuits always take forever and are super boring
Noise of drilling day and night could keep up the oh-so-precious rural farmers who live nearby and need all the sleep their sweet little heads can get
Fewer excuses to spend time with oil-rich dictatorships
Gas still not zero dollarsO blog estreia hoje uma série de posts que promete mostrar o time do coração de pessoas conhecidas. Para começar, apresentamos os clubes dos 27 governadores que atualmente administram os estados brasileiros. Há algumas curiosidades: nessa 'leva' de políticos, não há torcedores de Corinthians e São Paulo, por exemplo. O Flamengo lidera, seguido pelo Santos. Confira o mapa abaixo:
A arte é do craque Luis Penetra
Classificação:
1º lugar - 4 governadores
Flamengo
Tocantins - Siqueira Campos, Rondônia - Confúcio Moura, Roraima - José de Anchieta e Piauí - Wilson Martins
2º - 3 governadores
Santos
Mato Grosso do Sul - André Puccinelli, Santa Catarina - Raimundo Colombo e São Paulo - Geraldo Alckmin
3º - 2 governadores
Botafogo
Amapá - Camilo Capiberibe e Distrito Federal - Agnelo Queiroz
Fluminense
Acre - Tião Viana e Rio Grande do Norte - Rosalba Ciarlini
5º 1 governador
CSA-AL
Alagoas - Teotônio Vilela Filho
Nacional-AM
Amazonas - Omar Aziz
Bahia
Bahia - Jaques Wagner
Guarany de Sobral-CE
Ceará - Cid Gomes
Vitória-ES
Espírito Santo - Renato Casagrande
Goiás
Goiás - Marconi Perillo
Sampaio Corrêa
Maranhão - Roseana Sarney
Palmeiras
Mato Grosso - Silval Barbosa
Atlético-MG
Minas Gerais - Antônio Anastasia
Remo
Pará - Simão Jatene
Botafogo-PB
Paraíba - Ricardo Coutinho
Londrina
Paraná - Beto Richa
Náutico
Pernambuco - Eduardo Campos
Vasco
Rio de Janeiro - Sérgio Cabral
Internacional-RS
Rio Grande do Sul - Tarso Genro
Confiança-SE
Sergipe - Jackson Barreto
Colaboraram: Lucas Rizzatti, Vitor Vieira de Oliveira, Fernando Freire, Fernando Araújo, Sidney Magno Novo, Leonardo Simonini, Hélder Rafael, Fernando Vasconcelos, Leonardo Heitor, Rener Lopes, Eric Carvalho, Vilma Oliveira, Phelipe Caldas, Augusto Gomes, Roberto Leite, Bruno Alves, Flávio Victor Mascarenhas, Silvio Lima, Jorge Sauma, Emmily Melo, Chico Feitosa, Hugo Crippa e Wellington Costa.
Quer mandar sugestões, críticas ou colaborações? Escreva para:
bernardo.pombo@gmail.com
Twitter: @bernardopombo
Para conferir posts antigos posts do blog Pombo sem asa, clique aquiWTF, Target? You know I need my Liz Lange maternity and deep-discount So Delicious coconut milk, don't make me take my fat bucks elsewhere!
Susan Clemens points out this bunch of bullshit on Twitter:
This reeks of the whole Melissa McCarthy elephant grey episode, and I'm hoping/guessing this is some sort of oversight, and not some dummy in the garment naming department (that has to be a department, right?) who thinks they're clever.
And for the record — "manatee grey" is a much more adorable name for that color than "dark heather grey", so if you change anything, get rid of dark heather. Because manatees <3 <3 <3.
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UPDATE: Target did respond, and it sounds like it was a mix-up. Now, how about just having one color name for that color? And that name is manatee grey.
[via STFU Conservatives]We use a large dataset on retail pricing to document that a sizable portion of the cross-sectional variation in the price at which the same good trades in the same period and in the same market is due to the fact that stores that are, on average, equally expensive set persistently different prices for the same good. We refer to this phenomenon as relative price dispersion. We argue that relative price dispersion stems from sellers’ attempts to discriminate between high-valuation buyers who need to make all of their purchases in the same store and low-valuation buyers who are willing to purchase different items from different stores. We calibrate our theory and show that it is not only consistent with the extent and sources of dispersion in the price that different sellers charge for the same good, but also with the extent and sources of dispersion in the prices that different households pay for the same basket of goods and with the relationship between prices paid and the number of stores visited by different households.Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1894-1895 (detail)
Artists and critics should combat stylistic prudishness, overcome guilt and shame, and embrace discourses promiscuously
The characterization of Warhol’s noncommercial work here as the product of some lower-class fey hobby served to position it as a kind of “fag” art, and Warhol himself as swishy queen whose artistic pretensions just couldn’t be taken seriously. This is an explicitly “homosexualized” construction of Warhol which dominates in the 1950s, both in relation to his work and his social persona, was instrumental in making Warhol an unsuitable candidate for the artist-subject position well into the early 1960s. Warhol was a window dresser in the mid-fifties and put together displays for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany’s … Even though the Pop artist James Rosenquist, as well as Johns and Rauschenberg themselves, had also worked dressing windows, it was something that most artists tried to distance themselves from upon becoming successful as artists. Warhol, on the other hand, was famous for his commercial work and didn’t appear to be doing it just to survive. Thus Warhol appeared to be identified with window decorating in a way that other artists did not, and moreover, with a profession which was readily identifiable as a sissy occupation. —Gavin Butt, Between You and Me, Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963
Who’s crushing on whom? I like to think of artists’ usage of materials and themes in terms of flings, relationships, crushes and marriages. What do artists make, with love fresh in the air, in a new space when long-term relationships have fallen apart or are nonexistent, with no stakes beyond the present? Young artists are making due with minuscule studios, without past familiar art-education facilities, wandering, trying to find all the necessary supplies, devoid of disposable income. Those first few casual friends with benefits in a new city, in a small cramped apartment that lends itself to only half your sexual imagination.
Some artists have a type: big-breasted blondes, stocky Italian-Americans, neurotic catty introverts who just want to stay in all the time, older professorial types to help combat daddy issues. Other artists don’t want that. They want fun fun fun and take it as it comes, throwing themselves into whatever turns them on in the moment.
Art criticism, like an upset parent, often passes moral judgment on this promiscuity, scolding, judging indiscretions. There are attempts at keeping art pure, delineating what is what, and who is who, and where the boundaries are. Or in the attempt to redefine the boundaries, there is a tendency to violently sabotage what came before if it doesn’t smoothly fit into the new regime.
But it’s crucial to encourage brief brushes, longed-for encounters, and magical moments that pass into the night to be brokenly remembered in the hungover daze of the next morning. Flings, one night stands, and vacation hook-ups are just as ripe. For artists who tie the knot—explosive divorces, whimpered muttering and weepy withdrawals, quiet bitter unspoken tension.
Likewise, art writing must attempt to draw new connections, weaving in unpublished, hushed talk that always gets spoken but generally not on the record. The documentation of the piece, the Facebook posts, tweets, and vines that surround such work, the gossip about the work in the bathrooms of the gallery and outside during the smoke breaks and back in the patios and bars after the opening, the press releases both in unchecked email and listserv format, and the 10,000 art-opening invites that networked artists receive each day on social media, the write-up of the work, the studio visits, the sketching out of the ideas, the conversations that influence and sustain the practices—all these are rich and evocative and can provide tremendous energy and meaning to a work and extend its life out beyond.
Artists are keen to this, that every stage of the work’s life is up for play and that there is no such thing as a fixed neutral, ultimately true iteration of the work. In line with refusing criticism’s moralistic impulses, I want to outline the pleasures that manifest themselves through the sites of production—the constant onrush and stimulation of daily life, the influence of the day jobs artists carry on both the making and the documentation and presentation, the opening up of the game, and the heroic attempts to bypass shame.
I think of people getting made up and fabulous, ready for a night on the town, scoffing at such prudes who advise a more “natural” and “authentic” way of representing themselves—their elaborate play and fluidity as they cycle from situation to situation, conversation to conversation, adjusting on the fly and letting themselves take in the experience while also manipulating it.
Just as readily, in a flush moment at the gym, the activity of bodybuilders springs to mind. They are in a constant state of sexual satisfaction as they tear down their muscles, letting the body tremble and quiver and blood come rushing in, the everlasting pump. Bodybuilding has been transformed from its European roots as an attempt to mirror with the body the Greco-Roman sculptures being excavated in the 19th century and installed in the new museums. Early bodybuilders would sneak through the museum and tape-measure the sculptures head to toe, formulating the correct proportions according to wrist size.
Bronzer. Andrew Gorrie/Dominion Post
Contemporary bodybuilders are beyond such concerns and allegiances to an imagined history. Supplements, drugs, new machines, and other practices have allowed for bodybuilders to obliterate the past standards and achieve a new, more abstract result. They adjust their schedules in opposition to the socially approved distribution of hours and home in and work one specific aspect of themselves to exhaustion. After such elongated erotic performances, they step out under the bright lights, covered in extreme bronzer, to bring out the muscles that look incredibly cartoonish under any other circumstances but the bright lights of onstage competition.
It is with bodybuilders and their ingestion, consumption, refinement, and enhancement of past strategies and the conscious toying with their presentation and documentation in mind that I consider Michael Sanchez’s argument about the impact of the iPhone on art exhibition. In “2011,” an essay in the Summer 2013 issue of Artforum, he discusses the way such devices and image-aggregator sites like Contemporary Art Daily interact with and inform contemporary artworks. Art is rapidly referencing itself, speeding up the previous print- and exhibition-bound seasonal schedule that put forth the studio evidence of trends only every few months. Now, as Sanchez notes, things get posted when finished and shared instantaneously, and as a result, similar artists working with similar materials or similar ideas can no longer be tied to a eureka moment: A-ha! This must be the zeitgeist if these unconnected figures are all doing it once!
Instead, the proliferation of work on the Internet makes it easily digestible and citable. New practices, in Sanchez’s view, instantly devour themselves. I think it is necessary to flip the destructive, gluttonous connotations of devouring and focus on the more positive connotations of the word, that emphasis on avid enjoyment. What is so appealing about such fast distribution is how the institutionalized approaches that once suffocated, purified, cleansed, and straightened up the circulation of art are now infused with the chitchat and gossip of social life, and the work is tossed out onto the dance floor, knocked down from the balcony overlooking the frenzy. It isn’t, “Oh my, check out that stoic hottie—that removed, super-distant installation at Kunsthalle Wien. Man, I wish I could ask him if he wants to dance, but I’m so nervous, and he’s so up there.” Instead, in both the quick-feed call and response and riffing and sharing, it is shooting a flirty raise of the eyebrow, adjusting your posture accordingly, and striking up a conversation and making the advance. The stilting and privileging, the attempts to put one group up above another, are falling apart. Everybody is fucking everybody.
In thinking of such juicy tidbits and romantic affairs, I think of Warhol, who was always up to hear the dirt on the previous day and chat at great lengths about the things around him. Through Warhol, the shame and sexual guilt of commercial work is flattened and laid to rest. Also through him, the everyday, the sensational, the banal “low talk,” such as gossip and monosyllabic utterances and the carefully crafted considerations of the artist’s body and appearance, can be claimed and raised in stature.
A sexual response, arousal, and enrapture in the materials and rituals can form an artist’s work and structure what it draws from. Artists are giving themselves over and opening themselves up to those things that stick out, that linger, that give pause, that provide both evident visible pleasure and inwardly-kept satisfaction, that they can’t get out of their head, that horrify them but they come back to, that humiliate and punish, that build and nurture, that annoy and tease, that they find themselves needing more and more of. These are precisely what is so invigorating about today’s art.
Am I shocked that multiple people are getting excited about and engaging Axe, its body sprays, shampoos and deodorant? No, Axe is insane, its projections so ridiculous, the smells so pungent and easily dispersible, catching a trace of it when you aren’t even ready, getting smacked by those omnipresent fantastical video clips running in a constant stream online. Axe is so blunt and in your face that an artist was eventually going to have to go up and flirt a little bit with it.
Artists don’t have to sign a mortgage with the things they work with, and it is perfectly normal to kind of hate the people you’re attracted to. Gosh, she’s so wonderful and smart and well-read and funny, but she’s a horrible drunk and she farts in her sleep. Or: he’s such a belittling and abusive asshole, but I kind of need that deprecation in my life right now, it is hot, I can’t help myself, I know it isn’t “normal” but it is working so well right now. Please keep the stories coming, and the encounters memorable.
Dyson Hot + Coll Fan
There should be no guilt in the little tricks and joys that the photographer takes as she shoots yet another wedding or another shampoo commercial. No guilt for the studio assistant as he minutely changes the slightest tone of the shadow in Photoshop on a hurried, last-minute assignment. No shame for the sculptor achieving bliss as she gazes out at the perfection that is the Dyson Hot + Cool fan or for the painter as the hairs on his neck stand on end as he takes in a perfectly luminous, kinky kids’ plush toy. No guilt for the performance collective as they assimilate the back-and-forth exchanges between pro wrestlers and their audience.
The little welds on the underneath of the chair, the otherworldly quality of the Ped Egg suspended in some floating advertisement, the catalogs for car shows, all those marvelous oddities that are liberated from art’s guilt complex, strutting flamboyantly through such longed for and un-actualized concerns.
Ped Egg
There’s something to be said for the repetitious, paying-the-bill qualities of getting the thing right, getting it to look exactly how it needs to look, and making sure that it looks damn good and not dejected. That seems to be an undercurrent of the sculpture that wants to cleanse you, as it builds on the minimalist introduction of plastics, resins, metal, and other industrial materials in their stark punctuality—slickness and play with space along with the straight-out fling with branded body products, as configured by a generation of artists who aren’t guilted into previous high-low, worthy-unworthy binaries, using the commercial skills and craft that they acquire in their day jobs.
Artists working today don’t own this fact enough. They’re still too meek about it. America always had a Warhol problem when he was alive, in that his flamboyance was too much for some folks who preferred their artists, like Johns and Rauschenberg, to deny their commercial activities and keep themselves pure from such daily occurrences, taking up residency in certifying institutions that still believed art was above everything else. There’s still this leftover anti-market stigma that sneers at both those who sell and those pay the bills in less pure and wholesome fashion. As if the only way to be a valid artist is go to pro, shuffling through the residency cycle, taking adjunct positions with only one semester of your life planned at any moment, hoping for some fantasy placement so you can be above the daily fray. The shame of selling, and the shame of admitting that you might find certain qualities of your day capable of being relevant to the things that art struggles with is still taboo, amazingly.
Such practices apply not only to the production of work but also to documentation and circulation. Artists are getting more honest about what turns them on across the board, and this includes browsing, looking, staging representations, and resharing—owning the way you like to browse, the way you like images to look when you see them, hiding the muffintop you’ve got creeping over the side of your pants by wearing high-rise jeans, putting on a little cover-up, turning your good side to the camera, standing next to someone smaller than you in every picture, making the lights a little bluer in every photo, obscuring the information inscribed on the situation, making pointed removals, and any other playful actions.
Sticking up one’s nose at practices previously rejected as serious art—fashion photography, car painting, furniture and website design, among other commercial trades—seems further and further removed with each new MFA class, as young artists let more in and open themselves to wider possibilities.
Although I’m not an artist, there’s a personal story that plays in my head when I view a lot of work that touches on these arousals. I’m reminded of an experience I had as a tween at a summer camp where my mom worked as a nurse. It was the first week, everyone still sunfree, completely new to each other, feeling out the situation, the potential for incredibly awkward encounters rampant. One day we all waited in line to get in the showers with our towels and Adidas- or Nike-brand flip-flops, and talk inevitably turned to dicks, in all of their varieties.
What amused me about this not-so-uncommon encounter was the eventual turn in the conversation to shampoo. Everyone at the time had the new fish-like bottles of L’Oréal for Kids, with its emphasis on the no-tears, no-pain qualities of its chemical makeup and constant allusions to the earthy and bodily sexual qualities of fruit. Everyone proceeded to measure their dicks against said bottles, terming the new discovery a L’Oreal boner, each one of us with a different bottle.
L’Oreal for Kids bottle
The way artists actually talk about spaces, casually at lunches and on the way to things, has always been in my experience closer to the language used to describe music: Things are harsh, ethereal, fuzzy, stark, amplified, severe, ringing. Out of context, if you missed the first few words, you might think they were discussing guitar pedals or a set of sounds on a drum machine.
Music hasn’t traditionally been as reliant on proximity to or participation in certifying institutions in the way visual art has. A producer from the middle of nowhere can throw up a track on Soundcloud after being inspired by some other, more-well-connected artist and quickly enter into the dialogue.
Visual art should be jealous of this fluid accessibility, these leveling maneuvers. Kids far from the art capitals can give themselves a playful legibility that is constantly up to be teased out and undermined. It isn’t realistic for young would-be gallerists to acquire a space like the De Vleeshal, but with a little paint and lighting know-how, they can transform their crappy garage, bombed-out basement, or parent’s attic into their own gallery space that is gonna look great all done up and out there.
Way Huge Electronics WHE401 Swollen Pickle mkII Jumbo Fuzz Guitar Effects Pedal
Why privilege one level of the art speech act over another? Sure, some work |
spending bill, she replied: “Not on my watch.”
Jennifer Haberkorn and John Bresnahan contributed to this report.Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain's lack of support for the DISCLOSE Act signals just what kind of trouble the bill may be in. Rocky road for campaign finance
A sweeping overhaul of the campaign finance system seems destined to stall in the Senate – adding to tensions with House Democrats who have grown tired of taking politically risky votes only to see their proposals die on the Senate steps.
The DISCLOSE Act, crafted in response to a landmark Supreme Court case lifting corporate campaign contribution restrictions, could end up in the pile of dozens of bills — including a cap and trade proposal, domestic funding bills and a tax extenders package – that ended up in purgatory after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) forced vulnerable members to take politically risky votes.
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“Another bill, another fight with the Senate,” said one exasperated House Democratic aide. “Most of the frustration is directed at Senate Republicans who have absolutely no desire to work to get anything done, so hunting for one or two Senate GOP votes is a painful fact of legislative life.”
What’s particularly galling to House Democrats is that the party is unified on the subject of campaign finance legislation, yet the Senate can’t seem to line up the votes. But the House bill now has exemptions for the National Rifle Association, labor unions and potentially other large special interest organizations, creating a major problem in the Senate.
Still, Majority Leader Harry Reid has made multiple guarantees — both in public and behind closed doors to top House officials — that he will bring the DISCLOSE Act to the floor before the August recess. Yet Reid keeps losing key moderates while he makes these promises.
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) threw a major wrench at Reid's voting calculus with a statement slamming the legislation as not "honest" or "genuine." And late in the week, other key Republicans started to bail on Reid.
"I just can't see it happening this summer," Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) told POLITICO, before listing a series of bills left on the Senate docket, including a small business jobs package, the war supplemental spending bill and unemployment benefits.
Snowe, who has joined Democrats on major legislation such as Wall Street reform and temporary unemployment extensions, added that while she has begun to review the campaign finance language, changes would be required before she could support it.
"It's going to take some work,” Snowe said.
The legislation would require corporations, labor unions, trade associations and advocacy groups to publicly disclose financing of TV ads or mass mailings during the closing months of a political campaign. Foreign-controlled corporations and major government contractors would also be barred from paying for such political activities. Republicans – who back the Supreme Court’s decision – contend that the DISCLOSE Act is yet another crack down on free speech that wouldn’t hold up in court.
Even John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was the namesake for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that was partially overturned by the Supreme Court, is a strong opponent of the DISCLOSE Act.
McCain told POLITICO there isn't a single Republican senator who would support the legislation as it stands now, calling the bill "a bailout for the unions." McCain said the issue has been raised in several caucus meetings and he says fixing the campaign finance system is important, but he sees the Democratic version of the DISCLOSE Act as partisan.I’m pleased to say that the topic of oligarch and corporate welfare finally seems to be getting the much needed attention it deserves. While billionaires like Sam Zell (read my open letter to him) continue to spout nonsense about how the poor just need to be more like the rich, objective folks are catching on to the joke.
Ironically, the biggest welfare queens in America are the oligarchs and multinational corporations themselves, yet many of them constantly like to blame growing inequality on the supposed character deficiencies of the lower classes.
Earlier this week, I wrote a very well received post titled, A First Look at a New Report on Crony Capitalism – Trillions in Corporate Welfare, as well as the post, Walmart Admits in its Annual Report that its Profits Depend Heavily on Corporate Welfare.
The New York Times has now thrown its hat in the arena with an article titled: A Nation of Takers?
Here are some excerpts: In the debate about poverty, critics argue that government assistance saps initiative and is unaffordable. After exploring the issue, I must concede that the critics have a point. Here are five public welfare programs that are wasteful and turning us into a nation of “takers.” First, welfare subsidies for private planes. The United States offers three kinds of subsidies to tycoons with private jets: accelerated tax write-offs, avoidance of personal taxes on the benefit by claiming that private aircraft are for security, and use of air traffic control paid for by chumps flying commercial. I worry about those tycoons sponging off government. Won’t our pampering damage their character? Won’t they become addicted to the entitlement culture, demanding subsidies even for their yachts? Oh, wait … Second, welfare subsidies for yachts. The mortgage-interest deduction was meant to encourage a home-owning middle class. But it has been extended to provide subsidies for beach homes and even yachts. In the meantime, money was slashed last year from the public housing program for America’s neediest. Third, welfare subsidies for hedge funds and private equity. The single most outrageous tax loophole in America is for “carried interest,” allowing people with the highest earnings to pay paltry taxes. Fourth, welfare subsidies for America’s biggest banks. The too-big-to-fail banks in the United States borrow money unusually cheaply because of an implicit government promise to rescue them. Bloomberg View calculated last year that this amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion to our 10 biggest banks annually. Fifth, large welfare subsidies for American corporations from cities, counties and states. A bit more than a year ago, Louise Story of The New York Times tallied more than $80 billion a year in subsidies to companies, mostly as incentives to operate locally. (Conflict alert: The New York Times Company is among those that have received millions of dollars from city and state authorities.) But, perhaps because we now have the wealthiest Congress in history, the first in which a majority of members are millionaires, we have a one-sided discussion demanding cuts only in public assistance to the poor, while ignoring public assistance to the rich. And a one-sided discussion leads to a one-sided and myopic policy. Get the joke yet? In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Follow me on Twitter.Humans have always been endlessly fascinated with our evolutionary history, and discovering a new species of human that once roamed the Earth is certainly cause for interest. When scientists announced the discovery of a tiny hobbit-like bipod called Homo floresiensis in Indonesia way back in 2003, they thought perhaps it was simply an evolutionary fork of the well-documented Homo erectus, but now they’re not so sure. New research by the Australian National University suggests that the “hobbits” evolved from a much earlier human species, painting an even more interesting picture of their existence.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Human Evolution, ruled out a number of theories as to the origin of Homo floresiensis, including the possibility that it was simply a singular dramatic mutation of Homo sapiens. These ancient humans were extremely small compared to what we consider normal today, measuring only about three-and-a-half feet in height, which made determining their specific origin a matter of much scientific curiosity
To accomplish the task, researchers thoroughly studied the remains of florensiensis and were able to come up with 133 data points to compare with other known primitive human species. By determining that the hobbit-human skeletal structure had much more in common with our most ancient ancestors from Africa, Homo habilis, and that the pint-sized people were likely an evolutionary offshoot that occurred alongside habilis. If that is indeed the case, it would mean the hobbit-like species lived somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three million years ago.[In which I attempt to write like Scott Alexander. I have little experience in trying to mimic the writing styles of other people. I’m unsure how well this turned out (current estimate is that it sounds ~25% like Scott, optimistically). Still, it was a fun exercise that ended up taking longer than I thought. Also, I don’t have a medical background, but I do have a magical one. Hence the change in domain knowledge to that of magic.]
I.
Magicians are pretty badass.
Max Malini, whose name sounds like a comic book character straight from Stan Lee’s highly imaginative naming schema, was especially badass. First off, Malini was a well-known Jewish magician in the late 1800s and early 1900s who performed for several US Presidents and at Buckingham Palace.
His most famous trick is probably the one with the ice block.
As the story goes, Malini had a habit of of performing some charming coin magic with a borrowed hat. At some point later, in full-view, from the hat, Malini would spontaneously produce a solid block of ice.
This happened at the dinner table during dinner, where, prior to the illusion, he’d been sitting and eating with everyone else the entire time.
(Remember, this is the 1890s where the only place to get ice was from human drone delivery.)
How was it done?
As the rest of the story goes, Malini actually acquired the block prior to the performance. Then he kept it somewhere on his person and proceeded to head to dinner. Meaning he had to deal with hiding an unwieldy chunk of ice for several hours before even considering whether or not he’d perform the illusion during that night.
The secret to the trick may not be 100% accurate (Malini never quite revealed how he did it). But the point here is that magicians are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve their seemingly impossible results.
Magic is…an interesting field, to say the least. There’s some amount of innovation spurred by things like technological advancements (e.g. magic with an iPhone), but there’s also a certain amount of reverence for the past (e.g. lost secrets that past magicians took to the grave).
It’s also a very strong example of how susceptible our brains can be to bias.
This is part of why I can get a little irritated when I have disputes with people and they won’t even entertain the notion that their memories could be at fault. It’s simply not a thing that crosses their mind, and they quickly dismiss as obviously impossible it when I bring it up.
But, like, even without the huge amount of (albeit now perhaps more shaky) evidence from cognitive psychology showing that our judgment is often led astray, we have literally hundreds of years of a performance art that thrives on manipulating people’s perceptions of reality.
Imagine an alternate universe where, for some reason, things become pitch-black at night. It’s totally dark, no one can see anything. And of course we jump to the reasonable conclusion that everything actually disappears from existence at night, removed entirely from the world.
(Nobody in this universe has had the bright idea to turn on lights at night, save for the Illuminati.)
In lieu of a unifying theory that explains light and vision, then, ad-hoc explanations are used to account for the interactions we have with objects that aren’t really there, postulating things like a “Shadow Realm” where we can somehow affect objects by affecting their shadowy anti-counterparts.
Now it turns out that at night, there are also these theatrical performances which utilize lighting. At night. Everyone goes to these shows where they’re amazed at how these Illuminati folks are able to give the impression that things exist in the darkness.
“How marvelous!” they conclude, “It’s almost as if there truly are objects that exist in the pitch of night!”
Then the performance ends and they are once again forced to navigate the world of Shadow-objects, which can be felt and detected and have a correspondence with their true counterparts, but of course the true objects aren’t really there.
In the above universe, these people have somehow created a separate magisterium for their thoughts about light. Their observations from the lighting performance somehow don’t carry over to their total worldview.
I think this very awkward analogy sorta somewhat represents how I feel about most people’s attitudes to their own brains.
My impression is that people don’t always appreciate how much of an insecure system they are. Humans are easily compromised.
Here’s an example from my own work: At the climax of my shows, I often perform a trick where a spectator merely thinks of a card. I then correctly divine what their card is. From the outside, this is a big deal; the spectator hasn’t said anything, and I’ve seemingly gained access to their inner thoughts.
The reality, of course, is far from appearances.
All I’m actually doing is shifting attention and recollections. From the start, from the words that I choose, I’m looking for ways to set up the situation in my favor. I take care to emphasize the parts that will become important later when you reconstruct your memory of the whole performance. This is all done within the context of the trick, so in some sense the very architecture of my illusion helps with this.
But, really, it just boils down to a few flashy distractions and a few choice phrases.
Just these few tools give me a ton of power to suggest and control what you will ultimately remember.
Remember, this isn’t a boxed superintelligence using superhuman tactics convincing you to let it out.
This is me, a human, with some practice and some words, convincing you to let me in.
(Okay, so obviously the thing I’m trying to point is actually more like self-deception, where you create your own false memories or misremember. It’s less about other people hacking you.
Clearly, it’s not exactly the same as an experienced practitioner of magic giving you messing with your mind, but I think the general argument still stands: People should be far more wary of their own memories, given that a huge body of evidence exists that demonstrates their unreliability.)
Also, do let it sit with you that there’s apparently an entire domain of people out there systematically iterating on their models of the human brain, optimizing for memory control.
II.
If the award for “Most Statistically Unethical Profession” existed, it would probably go to the magicians. We literally make our living off p-hacking. Even more so than psychologists.
What possible reason could there be for us magicians to p-hack?
Remember that the whole point of magic is giving the impression of a miracle. This is best demonstrated by performing feats that would occur less than 5% of the time if you were a muggle.
Once you perform something this impressive, like guessing which integer from 1 to 20 the spectator chose, they will have no choice but to yield to your suitably significant demonstration and accept the alternative hypothesis that you are a wizard.
Here, then, are the tricks employed by the dark side of magic:
1) We run different hypotheses depending on the observed outcome: There’s a classic ESP trick where the magician lays out five cards: a circle, square, wavy lines, cross, and star.
You’re asked to select a card. Say you choose the circle. Then I turn over all the cards to show only the circle had an “X” marked on the back of it.
Impressive! (Although we note that the p-value shows it’s not quite that significant…better repeat the trick twice!)
What you do see is that all the other cards are unmarked from the back, which is the whole point of the trick.
What you don’t see is that the image of the square was tattooed on my chest, the wavy lines were printed on a card hidden under the tablecloth, the cross was on my necklace, and a copy of the star card was stashed under my hat.
You see, for every outcome, I’ve got a way of selecting an impossibility that matches your choice.
As the old adage goes, “If it passes by a spectator, it passes by a peer review board.”
2) We abuse degrees of freedom all the time: Do you know why magicians love playing cards? Because there’s 4 suits, 13 values, and 2 colors. That’s a hell of a lot of variables under my control.
Say you select a card and it is the 4 of Clubs.
What are my options?
For an apparent miracle, I can match the color, suit, value, or even letters in the card’s name (of which there is “4 of clubs”, “four of clubs”, “four clubs”, among other spellings). And that’s all with regards only to your own card.
Is your 4 of Clubs six cards away from the 6 of Hearts? Then I’ve got a miracle. Is it 9 cards away from the Two of Spades? Then I’ll spell out “t-w-o, s-p-a-d-e-s” and I’ve got another miracle.
With these factors, randomness is actually a welcome friend. In a deck of 52 cards, enough shuffling is bound to give me some choice combinations of cards I can utilize in some way.
For magicians, every piece of information is something that can be twisted in such a way to conform to the desired outcome.
And I mean everything, from the letters in your name to the color of your shirt, to your birthday. With just these variables, I’m practically guaranteed a significant result every time.
(Admittedly, magicians have yet to incorporate kabbalistic significance into their practice. If they did, I fear to think of the miracles they could bring about.)
3) We just make up our own data: Sometimes, when swapping out hypotheses and messing with degrees of freedom isn’t enough, we’ll venture into the third circle of Statistics Hell: tampering with the experimental results.
Say you catch on to the above two sneaky tactics. I decide to show you a new trick: I declare that you shall select the Ace of Spades.
Your eyes widen. I have boldly stated my hypothesis in advance.
I show you a fair deck and mix it up face down. I ask you to select one card. You nod. So far so good.
You pick out one card. It’s the 4 of Clubs. It’s not the Ace of Spades.
I am visibly disappointed, and I toss the card face-down onto the table.
Now I make a mystic pass with my hands. We turn the card over again.
Magically, it’s now transformed into the Ace of Spades!
What’s the secret here?
From what I’ve said above about how magic operates, you might think that a dialogue between two magicians on how to achieve the above effect looks like this:
Alice: “Hey, so what if we first subtly crafted our presentation as to give the impression that the spectator chose the 4? Then, we could redirect their attention to how it’s really an Ace.”
Bob: “I dunno about that. Doesn’t seem clever enough. I think we should also give them the impression of having thought that they might have been given the impression that it wasn’t a 4 but then verified that it was indeed a 4. I mean, obviously it’s not, but we could give them the impression that such a verification happened.”
Alice: “What if the spectator doubts their impression that they had doubted and then verified that no impression was there?”
Bob: “Stack overflow at line: 4.”
What it really usually looks like, though, is something like this:
Alice: “Hey, so what if we first subtly crafted our presentation as to give the impression that the spectator chose the 4? Then, we could redirect their attention to how it’s really an Ace.”
Bob: “I dunno about that. Let’s just switch it for the Ace when they’re not looking.”
Alice: “Okay.”
You see, we’re not afraid to make our experimental results come out the way we want.
III.
And there you have it. You too can sacrifice your statistical chastity in a bona-fide bid for dark magical power.
In the comments, someone will probably point out how I’m reading too much into this whole magic business.
“So what if people can accept that magic affects their perception and yet still maintain faith in their own memories?” someone might say.
“Too much doubt leads to Descartes and spooky demons, and you obviously don’t want to go that far. Plus, people are often contradictory. Obviously that’s sub-optimal, but that’s how a lot of people function.”
I think that’s generally true, but I’ve found navigating discussions far more fruitful when I assume the other side thinks they’re internally consistent. They don’t have to be, but it’s a lot easier if I model them as such. Basic interlocutor decency and all that.
As for the bit about most people not integrating magic into their worldview, I guess that’s true as well. (But we really should know better.)
Still, magic or not, everything influences us.
It’s probably best to imagine influence as a spectrum, with things like “a cool summer breeze” on one end and “direct thought insertion” at the other end.
In fact, it’d be great to have a real physical scale that we could use, one with a large slider that could easily indicate the level of influence present in any situation. Then we’d be able to calibrate it when other people gave their judgment calls on how manipulative they felt a certain thing was.
With some basic slide of hand, we’d match a call.
AdvertisementsGreenlanders win Danish support for attempt to justify ‘humane’ shooting of seals, as they claim their communities are under threat
The gamey, fishy aroma of barbecued seal will be assailing the nostrils of gourmet MEPs in Strasbourg this week.
Greenland’s Inuit chefs, clad in sealskin outfits and trousers fashioned from polar bear fur, will not be offended if MEPs decline morsels of the whiskered marine mammal from the grill. But the chefs hope that their planned cookery session will help to convince European lawmakers to reverse what they regard as a misguided ban on the importation of seal products that is driving a centuries-old way of life to the edge of extinction.
Exports of seal pelts have plummeted by 90% since the introduction of the European ban in 2009. The impact on subsistence economies in Greenland’s 60 coastal communities has been catastrophic. “It’s a tragic situation for us,” says Karl Lyberth, a hunter who used to be Greenland’s minister of fishing, agriculture and food. “A lot of people in the EU don’t understand our way of life.”
A delegation of Greenland seal hunters will board a bus in Copenhagen on Monday for the journey to Strasbourg to lobby parliamentarians.
They are steeling themselves for a clash of cultures and a struggle to change public perceptions. The hunters’ main hurdle is to overcome the image promulgated by animal welfare campaigners of helpless cuddly baby seals being clubbed to death on ice floes in Canada.
International public outrage at the annual Canadian cull contributed in no small way to the European moratorium. “To a large extent it’s the last call for a lot of the hunters,’ says Rasmus Holm of Inuit Sila, the Greenlandic Hunters and Fishermen’s Association. “If the current crisis continues, they won’t have any alternative but to claim social security.”
The Greenlanders say that their methods for dispatching seals are humane. Most hunters use rifles. Seals, they argue, enjoy much more exuberant lives in their natural habitat than farm animals destined for consumption at European dining tables.
Denmark’s foreign minister, Martin Lidegaard, is bewildered by the EU’s lack of empathy for their plight and a policy that prioritises the interests of animals over those of humans. (Greenland is part of the Danish Commonwealth, but not part of the EU.)
“The seals up here have lived a very good life,” said Lidegaard during a recent visit to Ilulissat, in western Greenland. “They are hunted in a very sustainable way. The meat is eaten by the Greenlanders and the fur is then sold. That’s as sustainable as it gets.
“If we don’t get exports to the EU up running again, then there will be no business for the hunters in Greenland. I don’t get it. I don’t see any fur being more sustainable than that which comes from seals.”
An estimated 12 million seals inhabit the waters surrounding the world’s biggest island and the population is exploding because of the European ban. Hunters “harvest” approximately 150,000 seals a year, and biologists calculate that a figure of 500,000 annually would be sustainable. With its voracious appetite, an average seal consumes 17kg of fish a day, threatening the livelihoods of Greenland’s coastal fishermen.
“For us it’s a tragic situation,” says Kai Andersen, Greenland’s deputy foreign minister. “We can watch on TV that in Denmark they are culling seal and burning them. This is a resource that we have used for thousands of years to export and to live off and make our livelihood from, but we’re not allowed to export it any more. But you’re destroying it in Europe to get rid of it as vermin.”
The Inuit hunters have also suffered from the increasing effects of climate change. Rising ocean temperatures of between one to two degrees Celsius have eroded the sea ice from underneath, which means that the traditional method of hunting – using a sled pulled by a pack of huskies – is too perilous to undertake. In some places, the ice is so thin it cannot bear the weight of the hunter and his dogs.
The ability to place meat on the table is regarded as a matter of national pride. From lawyers to carpenters, every Greenlander hunts seal as a crucial source of nutrition.
Like other marine mammals, they are rich in vitamin C, and vital for a balanced diet, especially as it is only possible to grow vegetables in southern Greenland during the summer.
Packed sea ice isolates scores of communities for long periods of the year, making the delivery of food impossible. “Your only source of food is what you can catch and hunt yourself,” says Andersen.
One substantial irony for Denmark, Greenland’s colonial matriarch, is that while the sales of seal pelts are at an all-time low, exports of mink fur are thriving, despite the animals being kept in cages.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inuit hunter Nukappi Brandt steers his small boat as he and his daughters scan the water for seals. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/Associated Press
Mink’s revival is due in part to fashion designers such as Dolce & Gabbana and Tom Ford incorporating it in their collections. But sealskin has failed to land a high-profile champion in the fashion world, although Denmark’s Crown Prince Fredrik and his Australian wife Mary, regarded by Hello! magazine as one of the world’s best dressed women, did sport seal garments during their tour of Greenland last summer.
The EU has given the Greenlanders a special exemption so that traditionally hunted seal skins can be exported. But this dispensation is largely academic, by the admission of Hans Stielstra, head of international environmental issues at the European commission. “Their problem is that the general ban has destroyed the market in the EU,” says Stielstra. “It’s not so much that we are limiting the possibilities for the Inuit in Greenland to export seal products to the EU because they can, but the overall ban will remain in place unless the council and the parliament decide otherwise.”
The EU is about to tweak its legislation on seal imports to accommodate the World Trade Organisation.
The Greenlanders will appeal to MEPs to fund an information campaign to counter anti-sealskin propaganda in an attempt to make their pelts more attractive to consumers and restore exports to pre-ban levels.
“To punish a whole population, many of whom live on the margins of existence, on the basis of wrong facts, is very sad,” says Andersen.
In March, the Greenlanders lobbied France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, when he visited the city of Ilulissat to grasp the extent of climate change in advance of Paris’s hosting a United Nations conference on the issue in December. He was sympathetic to the hunters’ plight, but was not optimistic about influencing change within the EU.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest An Inuit fisherman and his family have a seal meat barbecue in Greenland. Photograph: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
“Public opinion in our countries disapproves of seal fur,” said Fabius. “We must try to find a solution, if it exists, to help these people to live. But it’s not easy, not easy at all.”
Greenpeace, which spearheaded the anti-seal-hunt campaign following the Canadian cull, is belatedly coming to the Greenlanders’ aid. The organisation is blamed by Canadian Inuit for plunging their communities into poverty. In an op-ed in the Canadian website Nunatsiaq Online, the new head of Greenpeace Canada, Joanna Kerr, signalled a major U-turn.
“Our campaign against commercial sealing did hurt many, both economically and culturally. The time has come to set the record straight,” she wrote.
“Like the corporations we campaign against, we too must be open to change. Open to examining ourselves, our history, and the impact our campaigns have had, and to constantly reassessing ourselves — not just by apologising, but by humbly making amends and changing the way we work.”
Jon Burgwald, Greenpeace’s spokesman in Copenhagen, is more circumspect. “Greenpeace recognises the right of Arctic indigenous peoples to the sustainable use of natural resources,” he told the Observer. “The EU must increase the effort to inform the public and the relevant authorities in the member states of the differences between the sustainable hunts conducted by indigenous communities and the commercial hunt.”
These remarks should salve the conscience of any Euro MP who is tempted by the exotic bouquet of a seal kebab this week.Following IMSA’s move of the Virginia International Raceway round to Aug. 26-28, Pirelli World Challenge has now moved its scheduled race at the Utah Motorsports Campus – formerly Miller Motorsports Park – forward two weeks.
It will now see the Utah/VIR date clash created be avoided, as the new World Challenge date in Utah will be Aug. 12-14. The Utah round is also the second Sprint-X weekend of the year.
While many drivers are still yet to confirm their 2016 plans in either or both championships, the removal of this clash frees a second IMSA and World Challenge conflict; both championships race on the same docket at Long Beach in April.
The only head-to-head conflict right now is the Sept. 16-18 weekend. IMSA is at Circuit of The Americas but ends on the Saturday, while Pirelli World Challenge has a doubleheader at Sonoma Raceway.One of the wheezes I get from my leftist friends in Berkeley is how highly evolved their sense of morality is, as if 21st-century Berkeley were some New Jerusalem of higher moral thought. These are folks who calibrate their exquisitely sensitive moral barometers with a protractor made from renewable soy plastic, a straight edged icon with Germaine Greer‘s photograph in it, graph paper and a copy of the New York Times Editorial Section. You may get a chuckle out of this, especially after looking at some photographs of the local color, but if you are forced to watch the type of agonies such people have over the purchase of the correct varieties of Free Range Organic Cruelty-Intolerating Pasta the way I have, you might begin to suspect there is something to what they say. Fortunately, I am equipped with a modest education in history which confers immunity to such nonsense.
About 1500 years ago, there was an advanced civilization known as the Sassanid empire. We generally think of them as “Persians” or “Iranians right before Islam.” Of earthly civilizations of their day, they were among the most advanced. Their armies regularly defeated the Romans, Byzantines, Huns, and everyone else they went up against. The empire was much larger than present day Iran, it encompassed much of what we now know as the Middle East, Afghanistan, parts of Turkey, Pakistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, North Africa and even parts of modern Russia.
They had a powerful and helpful civil service. People who lived in the Sassanid Empire enjoyed fruits of prosperity that had been rare in human history before the industrial revolution. By all accounts, the Sassanid Empire was a pleasant, prosperous, tolerant, and wonderful place to live. If I had to choose to live someplace in 500 AD, I’d have to go with the Sassanids. The Western Roman Empire had fallen to the German barbarians, and other than poor Belisarius; the Eastern empire was a wreck, too. China was being invaded by Mongols and was split into a low-level civil war between Buddhist and Taoist camps. Korea divided in one of its interminable civil wars between North and South, and Japan was doing no better. I’m not sure anyone knows what people were up to in the Americas, probably eating each other.
No, I’d take the civilized and decent Sassanids, with their reverence for Greek Philosophy, their multicultural mixture of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and various forms of Christianity, and for their pleasant climate.
The Sassanid empire also had people who believe in the exactly same kind of nonsense that modern Northern Californian buffoons do.
Mazdak is sometimes described as a “reformer.” In reality, he was a cultural revolutionary. Active at the turn of the 6th century, Mazdak preached the virtues of pacifism, though his followers often took part in riots where they’d kill lots of people they didn’t like. And like most “highly evolved” people, Mazdak was a vegetarian. He wore various forms of hair shirts, looking like a slob being seen as a sign of dignity in his faith. His faith also required the total abolition of private property. Mazdak, despite being a sort of priest, was a radical anti-clerical type. His ire was against the dominant Zoroastrian religion of Persia. He managed to have most of the fire temples closed; in this, he was even more effective against the powerful Zoroastrian clerics than the Bolsheviks were against Russian Orthodoxy. Mazdak opened the state granaries to the people so they didn’t have to work: these were store houses against disaster or for military uses. Mazdak even required sexual ethics much like those presently known as Polyamory. Yes, Mazdak was all for free love”especially for himself. At one point, Kavadh I, the soft-hearted (to say nothing of soft-headed) king who allowed this highly evolved nincompoop to ruin his country, was even going to have a go at wife swapping with Mazdak.
Kavadh’s son, Khosarau talked King Nitwit out of prostituting his royal mother to this impostor, which is a pretty good indication of what a simpleton Kavadh was. Mazdak’s followers proceeded to tear the nation apart, destroying and looting as they went. Eventually, thousands would die in a decades-long civil war against these avowed pacifists in a nation that had known internal peace for centuries. Eventually, after years of this, King Kavadh’s eminently sensible son Khosarau managed to put Mazdak and his followers to the sword. Since Mazdakites believed in a complete inversion of Persian society, Khosarau had them buried upside down with their feet in the air.
Really, the whole thing sounded an awful lot like the 1960s in America, or 1919 in Russia, except the Hippies and Bolsheviks mostly won. Khosarau, more or less, ran the place from that day forward, and when he actually achieved the throne, he put his empire into some semblance of order. But the damage to the moral fiber of Persian society was done. When Islam came a few decades later, the Sassanid empire was easy meat.
While this admittedly sounds like an all-too-easy coincidence, it wasn’t the only occurrence of this sort of thing in late civilizations. The late Romans had similar problems with the Gnostic religions, whose adherents believed in much the same grab bag of anti-civilizational garbage. This religious heresy also happened right before Roman civilization fell. You can read about the beliefs of some of the Gnostics in St. Augustine’s Confessions, as he was a member before his career as a Catholic.
The Albigensian or Cathar crusade occurred in a similarly prosperous time: the High Middle Ages. Everyone knows that late Roman times were a nice era to live in, but people don’t realize that the population densities reached in the prosperous High Middle Ages were unequaled until the Industrial Revolution. This was the era that saw the construction of the Gothic cathedrals. I doubt modern day, technological Chartres is capable of building anything like a Gothic cathedral. So, once again, in comfortable times, people get the same stupid idea. As far as we can tell, the Cathars and the Mazdakites had the same bundle of bad ideas that late Roman Gnostics and modern Berkeleyites do. The Cathars didn’t cause the downfall of the High Middle Ages any more than the Gnostics caused the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, but they were a symptom of the disease of over-civilization. The type of society in which such thoughts can flourish simply cannot survive long. I suppose I’m a Spenglerian with my history: this sort of mass mental illness is a disease of too much comfort and insufficient moral fiber in leadership. The Cathars and the Mazdakites are a lot like a shelf mushrooms you might see on a mighty oak tree. The tree must be strong to support the mushroom, but the presence of the mushroom is a sign of internal rot.
The exchanges in the court of Kavadh could be something out of the opinion pages of modern American newspapers if we had more writers with sense (like Pat Buchanan). It doesn’t get much better than this speech from an establishment Zoroastrian priest, addressed to Mazdak:
You are a seeker after knowledge, but the new religion you have made is a pernicious one. If women and wealth are to be held in common, how will a son know his father, or a father his son? If men are to be equal in the world, social distinctions will be unclear: who will want to be a commoner, and how will nobility be recognized? … This talk of yours will ruin the world, and such an evil doctrine should not flourish in Iran. If everyone is a master, who is he to command? Everyone will have a treasure, and who is to be its treasurer? None of those who established religions have talked in this way. You have secretly put together a demonic faith: you are leading everyone to hell and you don’t see your evil acts for what |
mar, paved the way for Indigenous players in the game.”
“When I came here, I understood what the Club had done, especially for the Indigenous players and I was very pleased to be drafted to this football Club.”
Adam Cooney revealed he’s excited about the prospect of his Dreamtime at the ‘G debut.
“I’ll play this week and then hopefully the Dreamtime at the ‘G game, which will be massive,” Cooney said.
“It’s always great to play in front of big crowds and the Dreamtime at the ‘G is a great way for both Club’s to celebrate the great Indigenous players and their contribution towards the game of AFL football.”
Visit the Bomber Shop to purchase your 2015 Dreamtime Guernsey - we want to see it worn with pride on the night.The Environmental Protection Agency has said it caused a large release of hazardous water from a mine above the town of Silverton, in Southwest Colorado. Which begs the question: What was the EPA doing with heavy equipment at a mine in the San Juan Mountains?
To understand that, you have to understand the history of mining in Colorado and the West.
For most of the West’s history, miners were basically allowed to run willy-nilly across the landscape, burrowing for gold, silver, or other valuable minerals. According to Ronald Cohen, an environmental engineer at the Colorado School of Mines, whenever you dig into a mountain, “at some point you are going to hit water.”
That water, when it runs through the rocks in a mine, hits a mineral called pyrite, or iron sulfide. It reacts with air and pyrite to form sulfuric acid and dissolved iron. That acid then continues through the mine, dissolving other heavy metals, like copper and lead. Eventually, you end up with water that’s got high levels of a lot of undesirable materials in it.
Which brings us back to the historic miners, putting holes in mountains across Colorado. For years, miners were not required to do anything with this water. In fact, most of them would dump it right into a creek, or put it in ponds with their tailings, where it became even more acidic.
“In the old days there was very little control and not much attention paid to control [of acidic water from mines],” said Cohen.
Fast forward to 2015, and the state of Colorado is dotted with abandoned mines -- 22,000, according to the state’s Division of Mining, Reclamation and Safety -- filling up with water that runs into its streams. And the mines outside of Silverton? They’re some of the worst. Here’s what a 2014 Durango Herald article had to say about the area above Silverton, which includes Gold King, the mine that released its toxic holdings August 5:
“Scientists say it’s the largest untreated mine drainage in the state, and problematic concentrations of zinc, copper, cadmium, iron, lead, manganese and aluminum are choking off the Upper Animas River’s ecosystem.”
Enter The Environmental Protection Agency
For years, the EPA has wanted to name areas around Silverton as a Superfund site. This brings funding for cleanups. The town, in turn, has resisted, fearing the label would be toxic to tourism. (pun intended.)
Recently, the town and the agency came to a sort of detente. The EPA wouldn’t list the site as Superfund, also called the National Priority List, as long as efforts were made to improve water quality near the mines. The EPA agreed to pay for those efforts, which recently got underway.
Somewhat ironically, the Gold King mine was not the object of the cleanup. The agency had planned to plug a mine [.pdf] just below it, the Red and Bonita Mine, with the goal of reducing acid runoff from that mine.
#NoFilter: the water really is this color in The Animas River in La Plata County after 1 m… http://t.co/8GNGL3JuQw pic.twitter.com/2pMhStvKkb — 9NEWS Denver (@9NEWS) August 7, 2015
Since mines are interconnected, however, and a plug in one can lead to more water flowing out the other, the agency planned to “remove the blockage and reconstruct the portal at the Gold King Mine in order to best observe possible changes in discharge caused by the installation of Red and Bonita Mine bulkhead.”
That project began July 2015. The Gold King Mine released its toxic load at 10:30 a.m. August 4, 2015.
Peter Butler, who serves as a co-coordinater of the Animas River Stakeholders Group, a roundtable, said the EPA knew there was water sitting at the mine.
“It was known that there was a pool of water back in the mine, and EPA had a plan to remove that water and treat it, you know, slowly. But things didn’t go quite the way they planned and there was a lot more water in there then they thought, and it just kind of burst out of the mine.”
Butler offered cautious support for the EPA’s work at the mine, in light of the spill.
“I think that they were doing a reasonable job, maybe there were some other steps that could have been taken, that could have prevented it. But I think it was a big surprise for almost everybody,” said Butler.
Even without agency mistakes, mines do experience blowouts from time to time -- although generally not on so large a scale, said Butler.
When asked if this would curb the appetite for additional mine cleanups, Butler said he thought it would have the opposite effect.
“I think it highlights the issues of water quality related to mines. And that getting a lot more publicity, a lot more people are going to be interested in doing stuff about mines.”
Read More: Animas River Spill A Stark Reminder Of Colorado's Mine Pollution LegacyLayer-structured oxides are studied for their essential roles in various applications (e.g. high-energy batteries and superconductors) due to their distinctive physical structures and chemical properties. Most of the layered A x MO 2 (A = alkali ions, M = transition metals) are composed of MO 6 octahedra and various A coordination polyhedra such as octahedra (O), tetrahedra (T) or trigonal prisms (P). Herein, we report a new layered oxide material, anti-P2 Na 0.5 NbO 2, which is composed of NbO 6 trigonal prisms and NaO 6 octahedra. Its lattice shrinks as sodium (Na) ions are intercalated in it and expands when the ions are deintercalated (a negative volume or strain effect). Analysis by X-ray absorption spectroscopy and density functional theory (DFT) calculations indicates that the negative volume effect is mainly a result of the enhanced interlayer (Na–O) interaction and the weakened Nb–Nb and Nb–O bonding in the O–Nb–O slab upon Na intercalation. Moreover, Na 0.5 NbO 2 exhibits high structural stability, a long cycle life and prominent rate performance for Na-ion batteries. These distinctive features make Na 0.5 NbO 2 an ideal “volume buffer” to compensate for positive-strain electrode materials. These findings will arouse great interest in anti-P2 layered oxides for materials science and applications, and enrich the understanding of novel negative-strain materials for energy storage either as excellent independent active electrode materials or as volume buffers for constructing long-life composite electrodes made of positive-strain materials.One of the many joys that new Tesla owners may come across are situations where they’ll need to leave the vehicle parked for a prolonged period of time and at a location that doesn’t have a charger. The natural thought is, what will this do to the battery? I inevitably came across this same situation recently and wanted to take this opportunity to share my experiences around it.
“Tesla approved” Spot
My first mission in any parking lot is to find a “Tesla approved” parking spot. That’s a spot large enough to fit the Model S but also minimize the chance that neighboring cars will leave me with unwanted door dings. This is especially the case when driving through a busy city like Boston where space comes at a premium.
RELATED >>> S in the City: Model S Owner Experience in the Big City
If I can find a parking space that’s adjoined to a curb on one side, it’s a bonus — I get close enough to the curb (without scraping it!) to maximize the distance to the next space and minimize ding chances.
If I’m making my way to an airport, I know to avoid the busy short term parking garages where the hustle and bustle of pick-up and drop-off traffic is just enough for me to not want to be there. Instead I head towards the long term economy lot where my chances of any unwanted run-ins with other cars is at a minimum. There I look for my “Tesla approved” spot between two already parked cars. There’s a good chance that I’ll come and go before the other cars in the long term lot. Some parking lots also rotate parking locations for new entrants which further reduces the risk of having a new incoming car park next to me.
Minimize Vampire Drain
While Tesla has made some really great firmware improvements to address the dreaded vampire drain, there is still some battery loss when the car is not in use. Even when the car is off and stowed away for long term parking the Model S battery will still discharge albeit at a slower rate as it continues to provide power to the onboard electronics.
You can help minimize battery discharge by enabling “Energy Saving” under the “Power Management” settings on your Model S. I was able to quantify some of this loss which I’ll describe later in the post.
Battery Discharge Notes via Tesla Motors
From the user manual, Tesla says this:
Even when Model S is not being driven, its Battery discharges very slowly to power the onboard electronics. On average, the Battery discharges at a rate of 1% per day. Situations can arise in which you must leave Model S unplugged for an extended period of time (for example, at an airport when traveling). In these situations, keep the 1% in mind to ensure that you leave the Battery with a sufficient charge level. For example, over a two week period (14 days), the Battery discharges by approximately 14%.
However based on my experiences “Tesla math” when it comes to range is often optimistic and not necessarily what you’ll see in the real world.
Real World Experience
I took a short business trip to Las Vegas recently which required me to leave my Model S in long term parking for a couple of days.
It was 11 degrees fahrenheit out when I parked and I had 186 miles of rated range left (71%). When I returned my Model S reported 172 miles of rated range left (65%).
I lost 14 rated miles over the 2.6 days at an average temperature of 16 degrees fahrenheit. So I lost an average of 2.3% rated range per day which is quite a bit higher than the manual indicates. This wasn’t long enough to qualify as long term parking but it’s still important to take note that the rate in battery discharge can be more than double of what you’re expecting. Plan accordingly.
While the loss was higher than I expected, I still had plenty of range to get back home and give my Model S a much needed bath.
Summary
Be smart and plan out your Model S long term parking strategy, especially if there isn’t going to be a charger on site or nearby. Be sure to have enough battery range upon return so that you can get to your destination or to the nearest charging location.
Tesla suggests a 1% battery discharge loss per day but you may want to consider a more conservative 3% number to ensure you have plenty of range left upon returning.
There are reports of Tesla owners having parked at the airport with a low state of charge only to find car the the battery was drained upon returning. Bjørn Nyland of YouTube notoriety had an experience with long term parking (27 days at an airport with no charger) which resulted in less than a 1% loss per day – obviously a much better result than I had. The video showed a temperature of 8 degrees celsius, or about 46 degrees fahrenheit which is much warmer than it was for my test which may account for the difference in battery drain.
That said, the Tesla Model S can be safely left in long term parking without a charge and still have plenty of range left to get you home. Just be sure to take into account the number of days the car will be left unattended multiplied by a 1-2% battery discharge per day and you’ll be greeted with a happy Tesla upon returning.A Russian general says the recently negotiated deal to allow the United States to place a missile interceptor base in Poland "cannot go unpunished."
Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the Russian general staff, made the comment to reporters on Friday.
Nogovitsyn was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying Poland was risking attack by agreeing to the deal.
"Poland, by deploying [the system] is exposing itself to a strike —100 per cent," he said.
It is the strongest language so far from Russian officials in reaction to plans to install a missile defence battery in a former Soviet satellite nation.
Poland and the U.S. reached the agreement Thursday to base American missile interceptors in Poland in exchange for augmenting Polish forces with U.S. Patriot missiles.
The agreement comes in the wake of increasing tensions involving Russia and its former satellite states. Poland and other republics in eastern Europe have been unsettled by Russia's recent military incursion into Georgia.
The White House said the system, which is not yet running, is needed to protect the U.S. and Europe from possible attacks by missile-armed "rogue states" like Iran. But the Kremlin is convinced it is aimed at Russia's missile force.
Referring to the "mutual commitment" part of the agreement, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that NATO would be too slow in coming to Poland's defence if Poland were threatened, and that the bloc would take "days, weeks to start that machinery."
The U.S. has also reached an agreement with the Czech Republic to place a radar component of the missile defence system in that country. The deal still needs approval from the Czech parliament.Your Bitcoin transactions The Ultimate Bitcoin mixer made truly anonymous. with an advanced technology. Mix coins
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minerbobbert
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MemberActivity: 166Merit: 10 Re: ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread June 17, 2014, 05:30:22 AM #285 Cross posting here to see if I can get some help with a mining error on my new rockminers using BFGMiner.
One miner is being flagged as "Idle for more than 60 seconds, declaring SICK!" and a big red "sick" flag pops up. IF this continues, the flag turns to "dead."
Obviously, this is not a comforting thing.
Does anyone know what this error means/what causes it/whether to worry/and how to fix it? My Google-fu is weak, as I have yet to discover what this error even means...
Phosphorous
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Hero MemberActivity: 559Merit: 500 Re: ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread June 17, 2014, 05:33:20 AM #286 Quote from: minerbobbert on June 17, 2014, 05:30:22 AM Cross posting here to see if I can get some help with a mining error on my new rockminers using BFGMiner.
One miner is being flagged as "Idle for more than 60 seconds, declaring SICK!" and a big red "sick" flag pops up. IF this continues, the flag turns to "dead."
Obviously, this is not a comforting thing.
Does anyone know what this error means/what causes it/whether to worry/and how to fix it? My Google-fu is weak, as I have yet to discover what this error even means...
That's what mine was doing. Luke says it might be the pool, and he also updated BFG on his Git site which I have downloaded and have been running with no problems so far. That's what mine was doing. Luke says it might be the pool, and he also updated BFG on his Git site which I have downloaded and have been running with no problems so far.
minerbobbert
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MemberActivity: 166Merit: 10 Re: ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread June 17, 2014, 05:47:10 AM #287 Quote and he also updated BFG on his Git site which I have downloaded and have been running with no problems so far.
Do you know what version he meant? I am running 4.2.0, which appears to be the latest release... Do you know what version he meant? I am running 4.2.0, which appears to be the latest release...
-ck
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Ruu \o/
ModeratorLegendaryActivity: 2800Merit: 1154Ruu \o/ Re: ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread June 17, 2014, 12:34:18 PM #289 Quote from: jjdub7 on June 17, 2014, 04:37:57 AM Are they just not programmed to interface with OSX? Am I just doing the proverbial it wrong by trying to mine through a Mac? The reason I ask is that after testing with the U2's it seemed to output more consistent overclock voltage to the chips (arranged in series via a Kanex 3.0 hub). Granted, this doesn't matter, as the R-box uses a separate PSU, but still, it'd be nice to have at least one of my laptops for something other than mining room decor.
Definitely open to any comments/suggestions. Like I said, I've got everything running on a Lenovo right now, but cross-system compatibility is always reassuring.
These use a usb1.1 chip for communication. There's a good chance you're plugging them into a usb3 slot which may not work with some usb1.1 devices. See if you have separate usb2/3 slots and try the 2. If not, try plugging a usb2 hub into your mac's usb3 slot and plug it into that hub. You could also try the official cgminer which only just got full support for these. These use a usb1.1 chip for communication. There's a good chance you're plugging them into a usb3 slot which may not work with some usb1.1 devices. See if you have separate usb2/3 slots and try the 2. If not, try plugging a usb2 hub into your mac's usb3 slot and plug it into that hub. You could also try the official cgminer which only just got full support for these. Developer/maintainer for cgminer and ckpool/ckproxy.
ZERO FEE Pooled mining at ckpool.org, 1% Fee Solo mining at solo.ckpool.org
-ck
coolmusic
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MemberActivity: 87Merit: 10 Re: ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread June 17, 2014, 12:50:47 PM #290 Quote from: jjdub7 on June 17, 2014, 04:37:57 AM Quote from: mstrongbow on June 17, 2014, 02:09:27 AM Quote from: minerbobbert on June 17, 2014, 02:05:45 AM Quote
Just install the new/proper driver, it should cancel out the old one as my PC did
That worked. I had this pointed out to me on another thread. Thanks!
For those who have the same problem, the updated driver is found at:
http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/pages/usbtouartbridgevcpdrivers.aspx
That worked. I had this pointed out to me on another thread. Thanks!For those who have the same problem, the updated driver is found at:
You bet, glad to help.
You bet, glad to help.
Just for the record, I tested the R-box to the maximum range of my know-how and couldn't get the USBtoUART Bridge driver to recognize it on my late-2012 Macbook Pro (running 10.9.2 Mavs)...
No matter which versions of bfgminer/cgminer I compiled, regardless of which specialized drivers I subbed in (even tried subbing and integrating drivers between bfgminer and cgminer), and irrespective of which parts of the codes I manually forked, the device wouldn't appear anywhere on the system, let alone in cgminer. I've been mining with Bitmain's U2's on said Mac for weeks, so the UART bridge definitely works on Mavericks.
Now, I'm no coding whiz, but I know my way around a few different languages and at this point can read luke's code better than I'm able to read in Spanish (6 years academic). However, the box works with remarkable ease on both my Lenovo Carbon X1 Thinkpad and Lenovo Yoga 2.
Are they just not programmed to interface with OSX? Am I just doing the proverbial it wrong by trying to mine through a Mac? The reason I ask is that after testing with the U2's it seemed to output more consistent overclock voltage to the chips (arranged in series via a Kanex 3.0 hub). Granted, this doesn't matter, as the R-box uses a separate PSU, but still, it'd be nice to have at least one of my laptops for something other than mining room decor.
Definitely open to any comments/suggestions. Like I said, I've got everything running on a Lenovo right now, but cross-system compatibility is always reassuring.
Just for the record, I tested the R-box to the maximum range of my know-how and couldn't get the USBtoUART Bridge driver to recognize it on my late-2012 Macbook Pro (running 10.9.2 Mavs)...No matter which versions of bfgminer/cgminer I compiled, regardless of which specialized drivers I subbed in (even tried subbing and integrating drivers between bfgminer and cgminer), and irrespective of which parts of the codes I manually forked, the device wouldn't appear anywhere on the system, let alone in cgminer. I've been mining with Bitmain's U2's on said Mac for weeks, so the UART bridge definitely works on Mavericks.Now, I'm no coding whiz, but I know my way around a few different languages and at this point can read luke's code better than I'm able to read in Spanish (6 years academic). However, the box works with remarkable ease on both my Lenovo Carbon X1 Thinkpad and Lenovo Yoga 2.Are they just not programmed to interface with OSX? Am I just doing the proverbialwrong by trying to mine through a Mac? The reason I ask is that after testing with the U2's it seemed to output more consistent overclock voltage to the chips (arranged in series via a Kanex 3.0 hub). Granted, this doesn't matter, as the R-box uses a separate PSU, but still, it'd be nice to have at least one of my laptops for something other than mining room decor.Definitely open to any comments/suggestions. Like I said, I've got everything running on a Lenovo right now, but cross-system compatibility is always reassuring.
ok lets try.
only UART bridge driver installed and anything else
launch bfgminer and put your pool info
press m for manage devices and + for add a device
type: rockminer:\\.\COM41 (replace 41 with the port number of your device)
ok lets try.only UART bridge driver installed and anything elselaunch bfgminer and put your pool infopress m for manage devices and + for add a devicetype: rockminer:\\.\COM41 (replace 41 with the port number of your device)
rockxie
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Sr. MemberActivity: 284Merit: 250 Re: ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread June 17, 2014, 04:53:51 PM
Last edit: June 17, 2014, 05:04:05 PM by rockxie #292
Here are the main updates:
1. We are still making every effort to produce miners. Rocket Box and R-Box are our key products at present. For R-Box, another 2K production planning is expected to be completed by this week. The first batch of Rocket Box has 2K units. So far, the sales of Rocket Box is basically satisfactory. We will start shipping on June 25.
P.S.: Due to production issues, RX-BOX will be delayed indefinitely. Customers who joined Project R60 will receive 6 units of Rocket Box instead of 4 units of RX-BOX.(For domestic China customers: 3 units of Rocket Box instead of 2 units of RX-BOX)
Assembling
Mining Test
2. We have been developing our own stock exchange platform, of which basic functions have been finished at present. Partial functions need to be optimized. In consideration of calls for share exchange, in addition Havelock has always been in active touch with us, we decide to list RM shares on Havelock. Before that,shareholders who want to trade on havelock please follow instructions below to help us to list,and submit following information to
1) your account on
2) your wallet address associated with RM shares, shares quantity, signature and verification of THAT address.
VERY IMPORTANT： Only complete signature and verification information can prove you are the owner of that address.
_________________________________________
Email template:
1) Account: Adam@gmail.com;
2) Wallet address: 1KEyDoC85BBh251REWwZwbTFWrA6xmFBAe
shares: 100
signature: I'm the owner of 1KEyDoC85BBh251REWwZwbTFWrA6xmFBAe,my havelock account is Adam@gmail.com.
verification:******
__________________________________________
3. Due to fierce competition of miner selling, profit has been greatly compressed. Dividends for all shareholders will be delayed. We have to give priority to ensure the subsequent production plan. We believe no one wants to see that ROCKMINER has no fund for further production after we distribute dividends. Time for dividends may be delayed until July.
P.S. We updated the running command of OC R-BOX:
https://github.com/rockminerinc/cgminer-for-R-BOX/blob/master/handbook.md 1) your account on havelockinvestments.com 2) your wallet address associated with RM shares, shares quantity, signature and verification of THAT address.Only complete signature and verification information can prove you are the owner of that address.___________________________________________________________________________________3. Due to fierce competition of miner selling, profit has been greatly compressed. Dividends for all shareholders will be delayed. We have to give priority to ensure the subsequent production plan. We believe no one wants to see that ROCKMINER has no fund for further production after we distribute dividends. Time for dividends may be delayed until July.P.S. We updated the running command of OC R-BOX: Being tied up with mass production of Rocket Box lately, we hereby would like to extend our apology for not updating the progress in time.1. We are still making every effort to produce miners. Rocket Box and R-Box are our key products at present. For R-Box, another 2K production planning is expected to be completed by this week. The first batch of Rocket Box has 2K units. So far, the sales of Rocket Box is basically satisfactory. We will start shipping on June 25.P.S.: Due to production issues, RX-BOX will be delayed indefinitely. Customers who joined Project R60 will receive 6 units of Rocket Box instead of 4 units of RX-BOX.(For domestic China customers: 3 units of Rocket Box instead of 2 units of RX-BOX)2. We have been developing our own stock exchange platform, of which basic functions have been finished at present. Partial functions need to be optimized. In consideration of calls for share exchange, in addition Havelock has always been in active touch with us, we decide to list RM shares on Havelock. Before that,shareholders who want to trade on havelock please follow instructions below to help us to list,and submit following information to transfer@rockminer.com AM Hash
ASIC MINER ● ROCK MINER ● Purchase from:
Cloud-mining contracts: 0.0012 BTC per Gh ● Maintenance fee: $0.001551 per Gh per day ● Upto 6% Christmas Bonus ● Purchase from: AM Hash (20Th/s min) ● Havelock (1Gh/s min) Hashie (20Gh/s min)
ManeBjorn
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LegendaryActivity: 1288Merit: 1003 Re: ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread June 17, 2014, 11:45:34 PM #296
I got an account recently on Havelock I will have to look into it.
Quote from: rockxie on June 17, 2014, 04:53:51 PM
Here are the main updates:
1. We are still making every effort to produce miners. Rocket Box and R-Box are our key products at present. For R-Box, another 2K production planning is expected to be completed by this week. The first batch of Rocket Box has 2K units. So far, the sales of Rocket Box is basically satisfactory. We will start shipping on June 25.
P.S.: Due to production issues, RX-BOX will be delayed indefinitely. Customers who joined Project R60 will receive 6 units of Rocket Box instead of 4 units of RX-BOX.(For domestic China customers: 3 units of Rocket Box instead of 2 units of RX-BOX)
Assembling
2. We have been developing our own stock exchange platform, of which basic functions have been finished at present. Partial functions need to be optimized. In consideration of calls for share exchange, in addition Havelock has always been in active touch with us, we decide to list RM shares on Havelock. Before that,shareholders who want to trade on havelock please follow instructions below to help us to list,and submit following information to
1) your account on
2) your wallet address associated with RM shares, shares quantity, signature and verification of THAT address.
VERY IMPORTANT： Only complete signature and verification information can prove you are the owner of that address.
_________________________________________
Email template:
1) Account: Adam@gmail.com;
2) Wallet address: 1KEyDoC85BBh251REWwZwbTFWrA6xmFBAe
shares: 100
signature: I'm the owner of 1KEyDoC85BBh251REWwZwbTFWrA6xmFBAe,my havelock account is Adam@gmail.com.
verification:******
__________________________________________
3. Due to fierce competition of miner selling, profit has been greatly compressed. Dividends for all shareholders will be delayed. We have to give priority to ensure the subsequent production plan. We believe no one wants to see that ROCKMINER has no fund for further production after we distribute dividends. Time for dividends may be delayed until July.
P.S. We updated the running command of OC R-BOX:
https://github.com/rockminerinc/cgminer-for-R-BOX/blob/master/handbook.md
1) your account on havelockinvestments.com 2) your wallet address associated with RM shares, shares quantity, signature and verification of THAT address.Only complete signature and verification information can prove you are the owner of that address.___________________________________________________________________________________3. Due to fierce competition of miner selling, profit has been greatly compressed. Dividends for all shareholders will be delayed. We have to give priority to ensure the subsequent production plan. We believe no one wants to see that ROCKMINER has no fund for further production after we distribute dividends. Time for dividends may be delayed until July.P.S. We updated the running command of OC R-BOX: Being tied up with mass production of Rocket Box lately, we hereby would like to extend our apology for not updating the progress in time.1. We are still making every effort to produce miners. Rocket Box and R-Box are our key products at present. For R-Box, another 2K production planning is expected to be completed by this week. The first batch of Rocket Box has 2K units. So far, the sales of Rocket Box is basically satisfactory. We will start shipping on June 25.P.S.: Due to production issues, RX-BOX will be delayed indefinitely. Customers who joined Project R60 will receive 6 units of Rocket Box instead of 4 units of RX-BOX.(For domestic China customers: 3 units of Rocket Box instead of 2 units of RX-BOX)2. We have been developing our own stock exchange platform, of which basic functions have been finished at present. Partial functions need to be optimized. In consideration of calls for share exchange, in addition Havelock has always been in active touch with us, we decide to list RM shares on Havelock. Before that,shareholders who want to trade on havelock please follow instructions below to help us to list,and submit following information to transfer@rockminer.com That is good news indeed.I got an account recently on Havelock I will have to look into it. Genesis Mining | Vaultoro
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LegendaryActivity: 1848Merit: 1001ASIC Wannabe Re: ROCKMINER ASIC miner official thread June 18, 2014, 12:45:41 AM #298 placed an order for a pair of rockets - looking forwards to it!
No longer a wannabe - now an ASIC owner! 24" PCI-E cables with 16AWG wires and stripped ends - great for server PSU mods, best prices https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563461 No longer a wannabe - now an ASIC owner!NEW DELHI: The Centre has decided to drop ‘Surya Namaskar’ from ‘asanas’ to be performed by people across the country to commemorate ‘International Day of Yoga’ on June 21. The trimming of the drill is aimed at catering to the sensibilities of the minorities in the wake of opposition from Muslim groups.Launching a nationwide campaign against making what it dubbed “Hindu religious practices” compulsory in educational institutions, the All India Muslim Personal Board (AIMPLB) had demanded that the order making Surya Namaskar compulsory in schools be also cancelled.Surya Namaskar, a yogic practice for comprehensive development of the body, is considered a crucial component for improvement of holistic health.Earlier in April, the government had come under attack on the use of “Aum”, a chant, while issuing a common protocol for celebration of the International Yoga Day Meanwhile, preparations are on in full swing for the mega event on June 21, which is expected to witness almost 40,000 people from across the country performing ‘asanas’ at Delhi’s Rajpath. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the gathering, minister of state for AYUSH Shripad Naik said.The programme, which will be conducted between 7 am and 7:35 am in the entire country simultaneously, is likely to be attended by celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Shilpa Shetty and Indian Test skipper Virat Kohli.“Our ministry is also trying to register the mega event in the Guinness Book of World Records,” Naik said. He said free yoga camps are being organized in 651 districts while 100 such camps will be held in Delhi to observe the day. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, along with Naik, will launch a special portal for the event on June 9.In December last year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted June 21 as International Yoga Day after PM Modi urged the world community to celebrate the ancient discipline on a global scale. With over 175 nations supporting Modi’s proposal, the move was seen as major diplomatic win for India.Besides the function at Rajpath, the capital will also celebrate ‘Yoga Parv’ with art exhibitions, dance and music performances, as well as theatre shows and events like talks, meditation sessions and yoga workshops held across venues between June 21 and 27. According to official sources, the Lalit Kala Akademi, Sahitya Akademi, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and National Museum have joined hands for the event. Over 300 selected works of art, dance and music performances, and other presentations by 150 plus artists from across India and overseas will be showcased to depict the importance of yoga.Various yoga schools and centres like Isha Foundation, Patanjali and Morarji Desai National Institute of Yoga are also collaborating to conduct workshops and yoga sessions along with showcasing different kinds of ayurvedic, herbal and organic products to visitors at the organic and wellness haat in the capital.The AYUSH ministry will also organize an international conference on yoga which will focus on holistic health. The theme includes traditional basis of yoga and its role in prevention of diseases along with therapeutic potentials of yoga. The conference will also discuss the importance of yoga for global peace.The railways has urged its over 13 lakh employees to celebrate the day in a big way.Former Blue Jay and Sportsnet commentator Gregg Zaun has been fired by the broadcaster after several female employees came forward with allegations of inappropriate behaviour. Rick Brace, president of Rogers Media, which owns Sportsnet, said in a statement emailed to the Star on Thursday night that an unspecified number of women at Sportsnet complained about Zaun to management.
Sportsnet has fired Blue Jays broadcaster Gregg Zaun for "inappropriate behaviour." Rogers Media said "multiple female employees" complained about him. (The Canadian Press)
“After investigating the matter, we decided to terminate his contract, effective immediately,” Brace said in the statement. “This type of behaviour completely contradicts our standards and our core values,” it said. “We are grateful to our employees who spoke with us and we will take every measure to protect their privacy.” It isn’t clear exactly what the behaviour entailed, or the number of the women that came forward. Rogers Media refused |
60 53 66 58 Not so good 28 27 30 26 26 30 24 25 Poor 11 13 11 11 8 14 5 14 DK/NA 1 - 1 1 1 1 1 1 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Excellent 5% 3% 1% 4% 4% 2% 3% 3% Good 48 60 60 55 63 60 62 42 Not so good 31 26 28 28 25 24 25 36 Poor 14 10 10 12 7 12 10 17 DK/NA 2 1 1 1 - 2 1 2
TREND: Would you describe the state of the nation's economy these days as excellent, good, not so good, or poor?
Not so Exclnt Good Good Poor DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 3 56 28 11 1 Mar 07, 2017 4 51 33 10 2 Feb 22, 2017 5 55 26 12 2 High Exclnt+Good Jan 10, 2017 4 42 34 19 2 Nov 28, 2016 2 37 37 23 1 Link to full trend on website
21. Who do you believe is more responsible for the current state of the economy: former President Obama or President Trump?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Obama 63% 55% 67% 65% 67% 60% 69% 63% Trump 22 34 18 19 21 23 20 23 DK/NA 15 11 16 16 11 17 10 14 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Obama 57% 64% 71% 60% 67% 65% 66% 56% Trump 22 17 21 28 22 21 22 23 DK/NA 21 18 8 12 11 13 12 21 ECONOMY IS Q20 Exlnt/ NtGood/ Good Poor Obama 68% 57% Trump 23 21 DK/NA 9 22
TREND: Who do you believe is more responsible for the current state of the economy: former President Obama or President Trump?
Obama Trump DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 63 22 15 Mar 07, 2017 67 19 14
22. Do you think the nation's economy is getting better, getting worse, or staying about the same?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Better 40% 66% 20% 40% 50% 32% 46% 45% Worse 16 5 27 15 12 20 12 14 The same 39 28 49 41 34 44 39 36 DK/NA 4 2 5 4 3 5 2 5 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Better 36% 42% 40% 45% 55% 37% 45% 26% Worse 19 12 19 15 9 17 13 26 The same 41 42 38 37 34 41 37 44 DK/NA 4 5 3 4 2 5 4 4
TREND: Do you think the nation's economy is getting better, getting worse, or staying about the same?
Better Worse Same DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 40 16 39 4 Mar 07, 2017 41 15 42 3 Feb 22, 2017 37 15 46 2 Jan 10, 2017 40 14 44 2 Nov 28, 2016 30 24 45 1 Link to full trend on website
23. Would you say that you are better off or worse off financially than you were a year ago?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Better off 43% 51% 39% 39% 52% 34% 46% 40% Worse off 18 13 21 20 14 21 15 18 SAME(VOL) 38 36 38 39 32 43 39 40 DK/NA 2 1 2 2 2 2 1 2 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Better off 53% 52% 42% 26% 53% 34% 43% 43% Worse off 16 16 20 21 14 19 16 21 SAME(VOL) 26 32 37 51 32 46 39 33 DK/NA 5 - 1 3 1 2 2 3
TREND: Would you say that you are better off or worse off financially than you were a year ago?
SAME Better Worse (VOL) DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 43 18 38 2 Mar 07, 2017 48 15 35 2 Feb 22, 2017 45 18 36 2 Nov 28, 2016 39 30 29 2 Link to full trend on website
24. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - the economy?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Approve 42% 85% 12% 38% 49% 36% 44% 54% Disapprove 48 8 78 53 41 54 48 38 DK/NA 10 7 10 9 10 9 9 8 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Approve 37% 42% 42% 48% 55% 43% 49% 24% Disapprove 51 51 48 43 38 48 43 62 DK/NA 12 7 9 9 7 9 8 14
TREND: Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - the economy?
App Dis DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 42 48 10 Mar 07, 2017 49 41 11 Feb 22, 2017 47 41 13 Feb 07, 2017 44 41 14
25. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - foreign policy?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Approve 34% 77% 5% 30% 40% 30% 36% 46% Disapprove 58 15 90 64 54 62 58 45 DK/NA 7 8 6 6 6 9 6 9 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Approve 25% 34% 35% 41% 46% 37% 41% 15% Disapprove 70 60 58 49 48 55 51 78 DK/NA 5 5 6 10 6 8 7 7
TREND: Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - foreign policy?
App Dis DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 34 58 7 Mar 07, 2017 38 54 8 Feb 22, 2017 36 56 7 Feb 07, 2017 38 56 6
26. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - terrorism?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Approve 42% 84% 12% 38% 48% 37% 43% 53% Disapprove 50 10 80 55 44 55 50 38 DK/NA 8 6 8 7 9 8 7 9 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Approve 32% 40% 45% 49% 54% 43% 48% 24% Disapprove 60 53 48 42 39 49 44 68 DK/NA 8 7 8 9 8 8 8 9
TREND: Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - terrorism?
App Dis DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 42 50 8 Mar 07, 2017 45 46 9 Feb 22, 2017 44 49 7 Feb 07, 2017 44 49 7
27. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - immigration issues?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Approve 38% 80% 6% 34% 44% 32% 40% 50% Disapprove 60 18 92 63 55 64 59 47 DK/NA 3 2 2 3 2 4 2 3 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Approve 28% 34% 42% 45% 50% 41% 45% 16% Disapprove 71 64 57 49 49 56 52 81 DK/NA 1 2 1 6 2 3 3 3
TREND: Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - immigration issues?
App Dis DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 38 60 3 Mar 07, 2017 41 56 3 Feb 22, 2017 40 58 2 Feb 07, 2017 41 56 3
30. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling - the federal budget?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Approve 34% 74% 7% 31% 42% 28% 36% 44% Disapprove 54 14 87 55 49 58 54 43 DK/NA 12 12 6 14 9 15 10 14 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Approve 29% 33% 33% 40% 46% 35% 40% 17% Disapprove 62 56 55 45 46 50 48 71 DK/NA 10 11 12 15 8 15 12 12
31. As you may know, the stock market has been doing well in 2017. Who do you believe deserves the credit for that: former President Obama or President Trump?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Obama 32% 7% 50% 34% 30% 34% 28% 29% Trump 55 88 33 51 58 51 57 61 DK/NA 13 5 16 15 11 15 15 10 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Obama 39% 33% 30% 29% 28% 29% 29% 43% Trump 44 53 59 60 62 56 59 42 DK/NA 17 13 11 11 10 15 13 15
32. As you may know, unemployment in the U.S. has stayed under 5 percent in February 2017. Who do you believe deserves the credit for that: former President Obama or President Trump?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Obama 62% 28% 85% 64% 59% 64% 63% 50% Trump 27 57 9 22 28 25 27 34 DK/NA 12 15 6 14 13 11 11 16 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Obama 75% 62% 57% 56% 54% 58% 56% 77% Trump 19 25 30 31 31 30 30 15 DK/NA 6 13 13 13 15 12 13 8
33. As you may know, over 200,000 jobs have been added to the U.S. economy in February 2017. Who do you believe deserves the credit for that: former President Obama or President Trump?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Obama 48% 12% 77% 52% 47% 49% 50% 37% Trump 41 82 13 36 43 39 40 52 DK/NA 11 6 10 13 10 12 11 11 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Obama 54% 49% 49% 42% 43% 43% 43% 64% Trump 37 37 42 48 48 44 46 26 DK/NA 9 14 10 10 9 12 11 11
34. Do you think Congress should pass a law requiring future presidential candidates to release the previous few years of their tax returns, or not?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Yes/Should 63% 30% 86% 66% 57% 68% 63% 54% No 33 65 11 31 40 28 34 41 DK/NA 4 4 3 3 4 4 3 5 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Yes/Should 64% 63% 63% 64% 52% 63% 58% 77% No 31 35 35 29 44 32 38 20 DK/NA 5 2 2 6 4 4 4 3
47. As you may know, President Trump tweeted that he had found out that former President Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential election. Do you believe that former President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 election, or not?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Yes/Believe 19% 41% 4% 16% 22% 17% 19% 26% No 70 39 94 74 67 73 71 60 DK/NA 11 20 2 10 11 10 10 15 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Yes/Believe 14% 17% 23% 22% 22% 23% 23% 10% No 76 73 66 68 64 66 65 84 DK/NA 10 10 11 11 13 11 12 6
48. Do you think that President Trump truly believes that former President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, or do you think he deliberately made a controversial statement that he does not believe?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Yes/Trump believes 48% 68% 32% 46% 49% 47% 49% 58% No 42 20 61 44 39 43 39 29 DK/NA 11 13 7 10 12 10 13 13 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Yes/Trump believes 40% 50% 52% 48% 52% 54% 53% 32% No 52 43 35 39 33 34 34 63 DK/NA 8 7 12 13 14 12 13 4
73. How concerned are you that President Trump will try to limit the freedom of the press: very concerned, somewhat concerned, not so concerned, or not concerned at all?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Very concerned 43% 7% 70% 48% 40% 46% 42% 36% Somewhat concerned 18 17 22 19 15 21 17 15 Not so concerned 12 20 4 11 12 12 12 16 Not concerned at all 26 54 4 22 31 21 29 30 DK/NA 1 1 1 1 1 1 - 2 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Very concerned 44% 45% 44% 40% 36% 42% 39% 55% Somewhat concerned 28 13 15 20 14 17 16 25 Not so concerned 8 15 12 13 13 15 14 6 Not concerned at all 21 27 28 24 36 24 30 13 DK/NA - - - 4 1 2 1 1
TREND: How concerned are you that President Trump will try to limit the freedom of the press: very concerned, somewhat concerned, not so concerned, or not concerned at all?
Very Smwht NotSo Not Concern Concern Concern Concern DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 43 18 12 26 1 Feb 08, 2017 41 16 14 28 1 Nov 22, 2016 23 20 23 33 1 *President-elect
74. Do you think Donald Trump should publicly release his tax returns, or not?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Yes 66% 31% 91% 69% 61% 70% 67% 56% No 30 62 7 27 33 26 29 39 DK/NA 5 7 1 4 5 4 4 5 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Yes 70% 66% 64% 66% 56% 66% 61% 79% No 25 29 33 29 38 31 34 16 DK/NA 5 5 4 5 6 4 5 4
TREND: Do you think Donald Trump should publicly release his tax returns, or not?
Yes No DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 66 30 5 Mar 08, 2017 67 29 5 Feb 23, 2017 68 27 5
75. As you may know, Donald Trump made controversial statements throughout the campaign on his personal Twitter account. As president, do you think Donald Trump should keep his personal Twitter account, or not?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Yes/Should 36% 52% 20% 36% 42% 31% 36% 39% No 59 43 74 60 54 63 58 56 DK/NA 5 5 6 4 3 7 6 5 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Yes/Should 33% 41% 34% 36% 43% 33% 38% 31% No 66 53 62 57 53 59 57 65 DK/NA 1 6 5 7 3 8 5 4
TREND: As you may know, Donald Trump made controversial statements throughout the campaign on his personal Twitter account. As president, do you think Donald Trump should keep his personal Twitter account, or not?
Yes No DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 36 59 5 Jan 26, 2017 33 62 5 Jan 10, 2017 32 64 5 Nov 22, 2016 35 59 6
76. How often do you think that President Trump and his administration make statements without evidence to support them: very often, somewhat often, not so often, or not often at all?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Very often 52% 13% 80% 57% 48% 56% 51% 44% Somewhat often 21 36 11 20 23 19 22 22 Not so often 16 33 6 11 15 16 16 20 Not often at all 8 13 2 9 10 6 8 10 DK/NA 3 4 1 4 3 3 3 4 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Very often 58% 56% 52% 45% 44% 51% 47% 66% Somewhat often 25 16 18 27 25 19 22 18 Not so often 12 16 17 17 16 20 18 9 Not often at all 4 9 10 8 11 7 9 5 DK/NA 1 3 3 4 4 3 4 3
77. When it comes to presidential elections, which do you believe is the biggest problem: voter fraud, voter suppression, or outside interference?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Voter fraud 30% 55% 15% 24% 33% 27% 29% 35% Voter suppression 35 13 50 37 39 32 38 28 Outside interference 26 21 30 27 21 31 23 28 DK/NA 8 11 5 11 7 10 10 9 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Voter fraud 25% 30% 33% 30% 36% 29% 32% 24% Voter suppression 50 38 34 24 37 29 33 43 Outside interference 18 25 27 33 19 31 25 29 DK/NA 7 7 6 13 8 11 10 5
TREND: When it comes to presidential elections, which do you believe is the biggest problem: voter fraud, voter suppression, or outside interference?
Voter Voter Outside Fraud Supprn Intrfrn DK/NA Mar 22, 2017 30 35 26 8 Mar 08, 2017 33 34 26 8 Feb 23, 2017 31 33 28 7 Feb 08, 2017 30 33 29 7
78. Do you believe that 3-5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election through widespread voter fraud, or not?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No Yes 29% 50% 14% 24% 31% 27% 24% 38% No 63 38 82 68 62 63 69 53 DK/NA 8 13 4 8 7 10 7 8 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht Yes 26% 30% 30% 27% 33% 30% 32% 21% No 66 61 64 63 60 61 61 70 DK/NA 7 8 6 11 6 9 8 10
79. Does the election of Donald Trump make you feel more safe, less safe, or just as safe as you did before?
WHITE...... COLLEGE DEG Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No More safe 27% 66% 3% 22% 32% 23% 30% 37% Less safe 52 10 87 54 45 58 53 39 Just as safe 20 23 9 22 22 18 17 23 DK/NA 1 1 1 1 2 1 - 1 AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE..... 18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht NonWht More safe 16% 22% 34% 35% 37% 30% 33% 10% Less safe 55 51 53 49 40 51 46 69 Just as safe 27 27 12 15 22 18 20 19 DK/NA 1 1 1 1 1 - 1 2
TREND: Does the election of Donald Trump make you feel more safe, less safe, or just as safe as you did before?Center Evgeni Malkin was echoing a line from Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers in the Penguins locker room Friday at Southpointe.
R-E-L-A-X.
“When you lose a couple games and aren’t playing right everyone gets nervous, coaches, players, the organization,” Malkin said. “(The situation is) not bad, but it’s not good. We know we can come back. I believe this team has good guys and good players. We need to support each other, relax and we’ll be back.”
The Pens are 0-2-1 in their last three games and haven’t found the consistency that they desire from their game. As a result, the Pens have fallen into fourth place in the Metropolitan Division and seventh overall in the Eastern Conference.
But Pittsburgh is just one point from second place in the division and only six behind the New York Islanders for the top spot. And there is still a lot of hockey left to play on the season.
“You’re looking at the whole playoff picture. The division is important, but there is a logjam and everybody is so close,” captain Sidney Crosby said. “You just need to make sure you’re playing the right way and getting points. The division stuff will take care of itself. You worry about your own game and making sure we’re playing the right way and getting points out of it.”
Head coach Mike Johnston put his team through a four-drill, 20-minute rigorous practice Friday. He’s trying to find the right buttons to push to get his team going.
“It’s always a balance,” Johnston said. “Sometimes when you don’t feel like your game is in check you have to work harder. Other times you have to try and relax and play looser. It’s always a read.”
Even though they’ve lost their last three games, the Pens haven’t been completely dominated by their opponents. All three contests were tied in the final minutes of the third period.
Pittsburgh lost 2-1 in a shootout in Chicago and allowed late third-period goals to Washington and Columbus. The Capitals scored on the power play while the Blue Jackets tallied shorthanded.
“It is (frustrating),” center Brandon Sutter said. “We just can’t get that one or two goals that we need, and we’re giving them up. We are beating ourselves. We have to get better at staying with the game when we’re in a tight one.”
The Penguins defensive play has been strong, particularly the play of goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury. But the offense has produced only three goals in the last three games, and the power play has gone scoreless in the past nine contests.
“It’s an approach you have individually, individual things you can do, and team things, how can we generate more from our offensive zone plays, generate more off the rush, generate more off of faceoffs, how can we generate more from the power play,” Johnston said. “There are different aspects of the game that you have to break down offensively to see if you can generate more.
“Do we have to score more? Yes. But we also can’t break our defensive habits to score.”
In the past two seasons the Pens have wrapped up the division title fairly early in the season. It’s been a while since the team has faced this type of adversity during the regular season. However, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“It’s how you handle it and how you find a way to get out of it,” Crosby said. “There is no better test than this time of year when the games mean the most. That will bring the best out of everybody. It’s been a while for our team to face something like that, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing as long as we handle it the right way.”
The players in the locker room still believe in each other and are confident that they will break through the adversity and come out stronger in the end. In the meantime, the players are trying to stick together.
And relax.
“We have to stay positive, support each other,” Malkin said. “We know we’re a good team and we know we can play better. Every game we need to take small steps forward and play right, D zone, offensive zone, keep our heads up and stay positive.
“We have a good team, and in the playoffs we have a chance to play in the Stanley Cup Final. If we play right, we win.”
Notes: Defenseman Christian Ehrhoff practiced and took contact with the team. He will travel to St. Louis with the team, but will not play against the Blues Saturday night.As the 2016 presidential primary race comes to a close next week, many Democrats worry that their likely nominee, Hillary Clinton, is struggling in her campaign. Her Republican rival Donald Trump has seemingly changed the race and has many Democrats wondering if a more provocative campaign against him is needed.
Kathleen Dolan, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said that she thinks the former Secretary of State and first lady should change tactics in her faceoff against Trump.
"I think the Democrats have to worry that they don’t panic too much," said Dolan.
However, she said that there are a lot of things known about how elections and campaigns work and getting rid of all the tried and true methods "just because it’s Donald Trump" might be a mistake.
"This is certainly going to be a different campaign than we generally see, but I don’t know that we can safely say that the only way to be successful is to do things completely differently," she said.
According to Dolan, Clinton isn't likely to be successful trying to engage Trump in a policy-oriented campaign.
"I don’t think you can get him on the issues. I think she has to decide what her strategy is and at some level, stick with it," she said. "I think she has to guard against being sucked down the road of some of the more salacious and more outrageous things he says."
Instead, Dolan said Clinton ought to articulate her own vision and articulate concerns about the kind of president that Trump could be and ask the American people to think about who we are as a nation.
She said that Clinton can't plan to influence Trump's campaign style.
"I don’t know that she is going to have much success in anything that will structure his behavior," she said.Share
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After a few early hits like House of Cards and Arrested Development, Netflix has ramped up the rate at which it releases new programs. And because it drops binge-ready seasons all at once, a twisty science fiction thriller in the vein of Lost seems like a natural fit for the site. Enter Sense8, a fantastic, mind-bending new series co-created by the Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski.
Sense8 stars a diverse ensemble of eight women and men scattered across the globe: There’s a nervously closeted leading man in cheesy, Mexican action films; A sharp Korean businesswoman who vents her frustration about an extremely misogynist corporate culture by moonlighting as a brutal kickboxer; An Indian chemist who has second thoughts about her engagement to the wealthy and charming son of her boss; A kind, but short-fused German safe-cracker who’s embedded in a violent criminal family; A prodigal Icelandic DJ who’s fallen in with a bad crowd in London; An idealistic Chicago cop whose desire to help people doesn’t always jive with department politics; An affable driver in Nairobi, whose JCVD-themed bus, the Van Damn, is having trouble competing with the ever-popular Bat Van; And a transgender lesbian living in San Francisco who’s also a former hacker.
With race and gender representation such a frequent talking point in media lately, Sense8 proudly wears its inclusive heart on its sleeve.
All eight of these people are mysteriously connected, first by sharing visions of a woman they’ve never seen before (Daryl Hannah) in the violent final moments of her life, and then they start to appear in one another’s thoughts, able to instantly communicate and be virtually present with each other, or even take control of their bodies, from opposite sides of the planet. These eight people have essentially become a single entity, spread across multiple bodies. A man (Lost’s Naveen Andrews) is also there at their initial connection, and he serves as a sort of guide to help them navigate their newfound abilities as so-called sensates. Over the course of the season, they gradually encounter one another by uncovering the mystery of their communal bond and the greater outside forces at play.
With race and gender representation such a frequent talking point in media lately, Sense8 proudly wears its inclusive heart on its sleeve. Much more than mere tokenism in its diverse casting, the show frequently puts issues of inclusion and discrimination front and center. Transgender lesbian hacker Nomi’s story, for instance, begins during San Francisco’s Pride celebration, and involves her hateful mother who refuses to stop calling her Michael. One thematic way to interpret its mind-melding premise is that by crossing barriers of race, gender, culture, and sexuality, we are all made stronger, better.
The sensates’ power comes from more than just the sharing of literal skills like fighting, hacking, and chemistry, but also from mutual support and the sharing of perspective and experience. Just the knowledge that someone on the other side of the world, ostensibly completely different from you, has had experiences applicable to your own struggles can be a meaningful motivation in difficult times.
The Wachowskis’ playful sensibility and eye for cinematic action is strongly felt throughout the season. The cinematography is slick, and all of the fight scenes throughout the season are thrilling. There is also a charming degree of self-awareness on occasion, such as when Lito, the Mexican actor, films an absurdly over-the-top action scene that calls back very directly to The Matrix’s famous lobby sequence.
The series’ third and considerably less-hyped creator is J. Michael Straczynski, whose best known previous televisual opus is the underappreciated early 90s science fiction series Babylon 5. With its sweeping character and narrative arcs that were meticulously plotted out beforehand for five seasons, Babylon 5 was a decade ahead of its time, and failed to gain major traction with broadcast audiences before DVDs and then the internet allowed for convenient binge-watching. Straczynski’s fantastic sense of character and plot development serves as a perfect foil to the Wachowskis’ cinematic flair.
Straczynski’s fantastic sense of character and plot development serves as a perfect grounding foil to the Wachowskis’ cinematic flair.
In the wake of Lost, numerous science fiction television programs have tried and failed to recapture its magic by mistakenly putting all of their focus on plot twists and relentless cliffhangers. Although eager water cooler speculation about what was really going on comprised the meat of Lost fandom, it succeeded largely because of viewers’ investment in its compelling characters, often in spite of the loosely-constructed plot.
Sense8 is the most promising science fiction television series since Lost, and that is largely due to its commitment to placing its |
will take at least nine months to rebuild, keeping tourists from the community known for its luxury spas, posh hotels and scenic retreats. The area is also without law enforcement and public services.
Officials hope to make a portion of the Highway 1 passable for locals only later this month.New Delhi: Pitching for removal of superiority of one parent over the other, the Law Commission on Thursday recommended joint custody of minors to both the parents in case of a divorce, saying Indian custody laws must change with times.
The Commission's recommendations on custody laws assume significance as in India the idea of shared parenting is still new to custody jurisprudence.
"Neither the father nor the mother of a minor can, as of a right, claim to be appointed by the court as the guardian unless such an appointment is for the welfare of the minor," it said in its report submitted to the Law Ministry on Thursday.
It said wherever possible, courts should now grant joint custody of minors.
Recommending changes in the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act and the Guardians and Wards Act, the panel said even after the Supreme Court's judgement in Gita Hariharan vs Reserve Bank of India case, the mother can become a natural guardian during the lifetime of the father only in exceptional circumstances.
"This is required to be changed to fulfill the principles of equality enshrined in Article 14 of the Constitution," the law panel said.
The Commission said the amendments are necessary in order to bring these laws in tune with modern social considerations. Major amendments are recommended to the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890, by introducing a new chapter on custody and visitation arrangements.
It said amendments to the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890 will be relevant for all custody proceedings, besides any personal laws that may apply.
The two draft bills proposed by the panel to amend the existing laws also deal with removal of preference for the father as the natural guardian under Hindu law. It says that both parents be granted equal legal status with respect to guardianship and custody.
The draft law also empowers courts to award joint custody to both parents in circumstances conducive to the welfare of the child, or award sole custody to one parent with visitation rights to the other.
Besides recommending changes in the two laws, the Commission has also provided specific guidelines to assist courts in deciding such matters, including processes to determine whether the welfare of the child is met; procedures to be followed during mediation; and factors to be taken into consideration when determining grant for joint custody.
The guidelines introduce several new concepts in this regard, including parenting plans, grand parenting time, visitation rights, and relocation of parents.
They also elaborate the position on related aspects such as determining the intelligent preference of a child, access to records of the child, and mediation.
The draft bills also empower courts to fix an amount specifically for child support to meet basic living expenses.
Financial resources of parents, and the standard of living of the child must be considered when fixing such amounts. Child support must continue till the child turns 18, but may be extended till 25 or longer, in case of a child with mental or physical disability.
PTI
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.DEMOCRATS LEARNING WRONG LESSON FROM MASSACHUSETTS? EVEN SCOTT BROWN VOTERS WANT THE PUBLIC OPTION, WANT DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLDER HEALTH CARE BILL OPPONENTS THINK IT "DOESN'T GO FAR ENOUGH" by 3 to 2 among Obama voters who voted for Brown
by 6 to 1 among Obama voters who stayed home (18% of Obama supporters who voted supported Brown.) VOTERS OVERWHELMINGLY SUPPORT THE PUBLIC OPTION 82% of Obama voters who voted for Brown
86% of Obama voters who stayed home OBAMA VOTERS WANT DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLDER 57% of Brown voters say Obama "not delivering enough" on change he promised
49% to 37% among voters who stayed home PLUS: Obama voters overwhelming want bold economic populism from Democrats in 2010. See more results here.
In the last 24 hours, over 100,000 people have signed this petition to Democratic leaders:
"The loss of Ted Kennedy's seat -- due to a lack of enthusiasm among Democrats and Independents -- sends a clear message to Congress. The Senate health care bill is not the change we were promised in 2008, and it must be improved. The Senate must use'reconciliation' to pass a better bill with a strong public option."
You can sign it at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, or CREDO Action websites -- progressives are working together.
And we're making big waves. From today's Daily News article featuring this petition:
"Let’s do a public option, or let’s go back and do a single-payer plan," a frustrated senior Democrat told the [Daily News]. "You can have people say, ‘Look, if we’re going to do reconciliation, let’s get more, not get less.’" "If you’re going to use reconciliation, then use it hard," the Democrat said, adding that it’s a serious option.
Amen! Let's be bold.
Two things you can do to help the cause today.
If you know staffers in Congress or other Democratic insiders, send them today's big poll results.
Thanks so much.THE man believed to have fired the shot which fatally wounded Michael Collins had met the revolutionary leader at least twice before his death, newly discovered military intelligence files reveal.
THE man believed to have fired the shot which fatally wounded Michael Collins had met the revolutionary leader at least twice before his death, newly discovered military intelligence files reveal.
Denis ‘Sonny’ O’Neill also said he was only in Beal na Blath by chance when Collins’ convoy was ambushed in August 1922.
Irish nationalist politician, soldier and Sinn Fein leader Michael Collins (1890 - 1922) in London for the treaty negotiations between representatives of Sinn Fein and the British government which resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 Michael Collins Michael Collins Michael Collins in Clonakilty Scanned from the NPA/Independent archives. Michael Collins
The documents somehow survived an order by the Government in 1932 that specified files relating to 1922 and 1923, the period of the Civil War, be destroyed by burning in case their contents led to reprisals.
They have now been added to an online military records archive, which is set to boost interest in the approaching centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent War of Independence and Civil War.
Researchers have combed tens of thousands of long forgotten files to compile the archive which sheds fresh light on Ireland’s struggle for independence.
The material released through the Defence Forces is the second tranche of documents to be published from Military Services Pensions Archive.
Under laws enacted between 1924 and 1949, people who were involved in military service or intelligence work between 1916 and 1923 were able to claim a pension from the State, while dependants of deceased fighters could also claim benefits.
But to prove they deserved a pension they often had to give incredibly detailed accounts of their actions and provide corroborative evidence from other witnesses.
The result of the latest batch of research, carried out at the Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin, is a veritable treasure trove of historical information, containing 1,158 individual pension records, 77 administration files and around 173,000 scanned images of documents, photographs and letters.
The archive is searchable online at www.militaryarchives.ie and contains interactive maps showing areas where fighting occurred in 1916.
Born in 1888 in Timoleague, Co Cork, O’Neill was one of five brothers who were all active during the War of Independence and the Civil War.
He had served as a mounted constable in the RIC and fought as a marksman for the British Army in France during the World War I before being discharged after he was shot in the arm.
After returning home he joined the IRA and was considered a prized intelligence asset as he had free access to the RIC Depot, Dublin Castle and various British Army clubs.
During this period he said he was introduced to Collins in 1920 and was given a number of handlers close to Collins to pass information to.
He said he met Collins on a second occasion in 1921 after being given a message to pass to him in connection with negotiations in London.
But when the Civil War broke out he took the anti-Treaty side and returned to Co Cork.
Although he did not say he had killed Collins, O’Neill detailed being present in Beal na Blath in a sworn statement after he applied for a military pension in 1934. He had been returning from an IRA divisional meeting when he heard a Free State convoy was in the area.
“We accidentally ran into the Ballinablath (sic) thing,” he said. “We took up a position there, and held it until late in the evening.”
Military intelligence files described O’Neill as 5ft 8ins tall, of stout build, and weighing around 16 stone. He carried a light bamboo cane when walking. “A very downcast appearance, hardly ever smiles, never looks a person in the face when speaking,” a report by ‘Agent 145’ noted in 1924.
It said he frequented the “mountainy districts” of Templederry, Kilcommon, Rearcross in Co Tipperary and Doon in Co Limerick after the Civil War and never remained in the same house two nights in a row.
Another file written by an army intelligence officer in December 1924 described O’Neill as “a first class shot and a strict disciplinarian”.
A separate memo the same month described him as “undoubtedly a dangerous man”.
One those who supplied O’Neill with a reference when he sought the pension was Frank Thornton, an ally of Collins and a pro-Treaty fighter.
Eunan O’Halpin, professor of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College, said this and other files demonstrated that the “cliche of Civil War bitterness” was often overstated.
“Here was a Collins man pushing the boat out to someone not only from the other side but who actually killed his hero,” said Prof O’Halpin.
O’Neill was eventually awarded military and RIC pensions worth £135-a-year.
In later life he became a peace commissioner in Nenagh, Co Tipperary and also acted as a director of elections for Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail in the county before dying in 1950.
Online EditorsAll the Reasons I Should Have Kids, Explained to Me By a Mother Whose House is Burning Down
You will LOVE having kids! It’s the best. I mean look at that little face. How could you say no to those chubby cheeks? Honestly, I don’t even know how you’ve waited this long. Oh, don’t worry about that, it’s just a small stovetop fire, Chris can put it out. When you’re a mom this kind of thing happens all the time and I’ve become a much more patient person because of it. God, where is Chris. CHRIS! Can you get down here and put out the fire, please?
Anyways as I was saying, kids are a freaking miracle. Are you going to freeze your eggs? You really should if you’re still waiting for the “right one” or whatever. Oh will you look at that, the fire spread to the hand towel. CHRIS THOSE FLAMES AREN’T GOING TO PUT THEMSELVES OUT! Honestly, you can’t get him to do anything. But then if I do it it’s like, I’m doing everything, you know?
What were we talking about again? Oh, right. Babies! They make you so happy. You might think you’re happy right now, but you’re not. I mean look at that baby, do you really want to miss out on all that joy? I literally have no regrets, and I’ve never felt like I’ve had my life so figured out. Ugh, now the carpet’s burning. No, don’t worry. Our therapist said I need to wait for Chris to be his own solution. But then if I yell at him it’s like, I’m the bad guy. I mean, really. Come on.
I guess I just don’t understand why you’ve waited so long? Your biological clock is ticking away, you know. Every year you wait is a year you miss out on life’s biggest, most beautiful… one second. CHRIS! YOU’VE BEEN IN THE BATHROOM FOR OVER A FUCKING HOUR! GET DOWN HERE NOW! It’s like, is he really going to spend an hour in there just so he can get out of doing one thing?
Anyways like I was saying, sure it’s tough sometimes but so is everything… that’s… [cough]… [cough] …worth it. Wow, it is smokey in here. CHRIS! GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE AND… [cough] …[cough]
Ah, so much better outside in the fresh air, isn’t it? Little Gabe loves the outdoors. I keep telling everyone that one day he’s going to be a famous mountain climber or one of those slackliners on YouTube. I guess he’s going to love it even more now that we’ll be sleeping in our backyard — just until Chris gets around to calling the fire department.
Now as I was saying, you need to decide what you want. Do you want stability and a beautiful family, or do you want to be alone for eternity? Sure some might argue that marriage is an outdated institution, but honestly I couldn’t be more happy with my life and — oh would you look at that, Chris has been engulfed in flames. Well, at least he died doing what he loved most.
Now, let’s talk about when you’re going to get married, because you really need to do that sooner than later, you know.Picture: Margie McDonald, Shannon Byrne and Fiona Bollen in a nondescript boardroom.
Sports journalist for The Australian newspaper Margie McDonald spoke with Shannon and Fiona earlier in 2016 about her life and career, which includes covering 10 straight Paralympic Games and being the first female journalist to go on a Wallabies tour - where she quickly realised why no woman had done it before. She talks about some of the fascinating experiences the Paralympics have exposed her to, and how she pretty much fell into sports journalism during a time when it truly was a man’s world and some of the issues that can arise being a female sports scribe.
They delve into tennis and who may be the next great. Will Serena surpass Steffi? They talk about the Aussie brat pack of Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic, which to be honest, may run a little different if they sat down and had another chat now the rest of the year has passed… but they wouldn’t be the first athletes to make someone regret their defence of them and leave you shaking your head, would they? That’s sport it seems.
The women also discuss Margie’s sports bucket list, finding that little escape and swap notes on badminton. Plus Margie explains how a broken coccyx took her to playing with a glow in the dark frisbee in the headlights of a Datsun 1200 and why she thinks men should see tits early.
Listen and Enjoy.
Want to listen elsewhere?Marc Maron, WTF: ‘It’s not difficult to do a podcast … but it’s hard getting people to listen’
It’s not difficult to do a podcast. What’s hard is getting people to listen to it. I’m not going to mislead anybody, there are a lot of podcasts out there. What anyone has to do to get anyone to listen to it, who knows? I don’t know. Before you were chosen by a network or a label or a comedy club and given an opportunity, here it all rests with you and how you find your way out of the tremendous pile of stuff. That’s the trick. I think that once you start having big ideas about how much money you’re going to make from your podcast, or how you’re going to get this or that out there or what needs to happen and a lot of energy goes into that, it sort of amplifies the possibilities for disappointment. It’s a difficult entrepreneurial venture, but we didn’t go into it because of that.
The 50 podcasts you need to hear Read more
Podcasting is a great technology. It’s a medium that anyone can do and you can just throw your hat into the ring. But getting people to it, that is just as hard as anything else you can create and put out in the world. But with podcasting you don’t have much to lose. Just temper your expectations and try to create what you want to create. Figure out how to get people to hear it and like it. Don’t think that you necessarily have the million-dollar idea or that everything is going to turn around. Just do the best that you can do and try to realize your vision and see if other people like it. If they don’t, that’s on them. And if that bothers you, well, you can just keep trying to get people to like you, I guess, but that’s never been my approach.
Lauren Lapkus, With Special Guest: ‘The secret to podcast success is making it fun for yourself’
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lauren Lapkus: ‘The connective tissue between storytelling, advice and comedy is passion.’ Photograph: PR
One of the perks of my show’s format is that I don’t have to prepare in advance. My guest is the host, and they determine the theme of the show and the character I’ll play. They don’t tell me anything until we’re already recording, so the show is fully improvised. But I do 10 hours of vocal warm-ups before each show and refuse to record until I’ve done a thousand crunches in total silence. Because the guest is playing the role of the host, it’s important for them to feel as comfortable as possible – choosing a theme and character for themselves that they enjoy makes it much easier to jump right into the conversation. I’ve never felt like anyone did a bad job at that, though! I’ve been lucky to have a ton of amazing performers on my show.
The secret to podcast success is sticking with it and making it fun for yourself. The podcasts that keep my attention are those where I can feel the hosts and guests are enjoying themselves or are really passionate about the subject matter. The connective tissue between storytelling, advice and comedy is passion.
Aaron Mahnke, Lore: ‘I spend 30 to 40 hours preparing each episode’
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aaron Mahnke: ‘All successful podcast do one thing: they deliver consistent quality content that exceeds the listeners’ expectations’ Photograph: PR
There’s no secret or magic pill to ensure a podcast’s success, but there are some best practices. I think all successful podcast do one thing: they deliver consistent quality content that exceeds the listeners’ expectations. I spend 30 to 40 hours preparing each episode – that includes research, reading, planning, writing, recording, producing and launching the episode. The rest of my time is spent on the television show, press interviews, live shows, bookkeeping and admin, and fan email. I get hundreds of those each month. I started Lore by accident, and have just been trying to figure it out as I go. The fans are amazing, though, and they’re like cheerleaders. This is a non-stop job, and it’s growing every day, so having them along for the ride to cheer me on is powerful.
There’s one thing that makes me subscribe to a podcast: quality. I give a lot of shows a try. A friend will recommend a show, or I’ll see one highlighted in an article online, and I’ll click the link. So I’m happy to try things out. But if it’s not good, I won’t come back. My time is too limited to listen to mediocre content when there’s so much good stuff out there.
Reggie Ossé, The Combat Jack Show: ‘My advice? Just do it’
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reggie Osseé: ‘Just jump in.’ Photograph: PR
For anyone who wants to start a podcast, my advice is simple: just do it. Don’t be self-conscious. Don’t worry about whether you sound like this person or that person or what level of expertise you’re on – just do it. Just jump in. It’s really important to train your audience to expect something that is going to be delivered on schedule. If you have a weekly show, deliver it weekly. I am very meticulous with regard to my preparation before interviews. I spend a lot of hours researching and finding just random interviews and anything random that I can find about my guests to bring a different texture, a different element to the interview. I want to make my interview with my guests really unique. It’s all about preparation.
A podcast can be a very intimate experience with your audience, your listeners. Be forthcoming and honest with your audience, particularly when it comes down to your personality that’s involved in the podcast. Let them know your shortcomings and let them endear themselves to you and let them feel as if they can champion you as you champion your audience.
Linda Holmes, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour: ‘Embrace other podcasts’
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Linda Holmes: ‘Think about where you want the show to end up.’ Photograph: Larry French/AP
Modest expectations are a very important starting point, especially with conversation-based podcasts. People have a really inaccurate understanding of how much work they are, both from a content point and especially from a production standpoint. People don’t understand that people who produce high-quality chat shows spend a lot of time editing and cutting them. Don’t be in the position of thinking that for the low, low price of a couple of hours of work a week you can make something that is going to make something that sounds like it came out of BuzzFeed.
When you’re starting a podcast, think about where you want the show to end up and what you can do to get yourself to that point. Think about who you want involved in your show and what kind of quality control you want to put on it. There is so much benefit in embracing other podcasts, other people who make podcasts. If you listen to people who make other shows, if you engage with people who make other shows, you can learn so much about what you want to do with your own show.
Now Hear This Podcast Festival will take place in Anaheim, California, from 28-30 October.
Did you know The Guardian has been making podcasts for a decade now? Why not check out our range of podcasts from Football Weekly with James Richardson to our sex and relationships podcast series Close Encounters.Ann Hsu and Ken Jeong pose for photographs during filming at Confucius Temple in Taipei, Taiwan, on August 4, 2016.
By all pop-culture and entertainment-industry measures, Ann Hsu is a huge star in Taiwan. She’s won a Golden Bell Award, the Taiwanese equivalent of an Emmy, for her role in The Way We Were, and she’s been nominated twice for a Golden Horse Award, Taiwan’s version of the Academy Award: Once for a best new performer in 2014’s Design 7 Love, and again last night, for best leading performer in The Tag-Along. What, then, drew the 32-year-old former model to a guest-starring role on Fresh Off the Boat this summer?
“I love Ken Jeong! I really love him!” Hsu, who also goes by Hsu Wei-ning, exclaimed. Guest star Jeong plays Louis’s (Randall Park) brother, and Hsu plays his fiancée, Margaret, who marries him in the season-three premiere, which was shot on location in Taipei (read the backstory on the premiere here). “My friends all know that I want to act with him. They are like seriously? He’s so famous in Taiwan because of The Hangover. I really can’t believe it.”
Fresh Off the Boat is Hsu’s first stab at comedy, an area she’s always wanted to explore. Producers scouting for Taipei locations were also looking to cast for the role while they were there, and asked local producers for recommendations. Hsu’s name was on the list. “I wanted it to be someone from Taiwan, someone famous,” executive producer Melvin Mar said. “I get these names and I start Googling.” He recalls standing on a corner in the city’s Da’an District when he asked, “Who’s this Ann Hsu?” A friend replied, “She’s super-famous — turn around!”
Hsu’s face was staring at Mar from a billboard cosmetics ad. Mar got in touch with her manager, who arranged a Skype call. “She was really funny when I talked to her,” Mar explained. “She has this cool, bubbly thing about her. You instantly recognize her star power.”
The Fresh Off the Boat boys pose in front of an Ann hsu poster, which they saw in a subway terminal before they met her./Photo: Jeff Yang
Hsu, who is of Taiwanese and Italian descent, told Mar she would love to be a part of the ABC sitcom, which is hugely popular in Taiwan. “It’s very funny and it’s also a lot like my family,” she told Vulture, with some translation assistance from her manager, Lyn Fang. “My grandmother is like Jessica. She’s about free air-conditioning and fighting with vendors for more spring onions. Louis is just like my grandfather: mild and good-tempered.”
When Mar told her she would be playing opposite Jeong, “She had a moment,” he said. Hsu never quite got over it. “I finished the script immediately after I got it and I couldn’t stop imagining how I would act,” she said, of filming her first scene with Jeong at the Grand Hotel, a Taipei landmark. “How can you act when you are face-to-face with Ken? I might have to hold him and cry.”
After the three-day shoot in Taipei, Hsu visited Los Angeles for the first time to film other scenes, including a reenactment of Ghost (a running joke throughout the episode). If Hsu were at all concerned about breaking into comedy, she’s already made one, well-connected fan. “I was very impressed with Ann Hsu’s comedy skills,” Jeong said. “I ruined many a take that night, and I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.”Mark Cavendish has won 30 stages on the Tour de France
Britain's Mark Cavendish pulled out of the Tour de France after breaking his right shoulder in a crash.
The 32-year-old collided with world champion Peter Sagan before hitting the barriers in a sprint finish on stage four in Vittel.
Cavendish, who has won 30 career stages, said he was "massively disappointed".
Sagan was disqualified from the Tour, although his Bora-Hansgrohe team protested the decision.
Cavendish added: "I feel I was in a good position to win and to lose that and even having to leave the Tour, a race I've built my whole career around, is really sad."
He dislocated the same shoulder when he crashed out of the Tour on the opening stage in 2014.
Team doctor Adrian Rotunno said Cavendish suffered a fracture to his scapula but there was no nerve damage and he would not require surgery.
Team Dimension Data confirmed Cavendish's withdrawal via Twitter
Only the legendary Eddy Merckx, with 34, has won more Tour stages than Cavendish.
The Manxman had fought for three months to overcome the Epstein-Barr virus to make it to the Tour start line in Dusseldorf on Saturday.
He was in contention for the stage victory on Tuesday when Sagan, battling for space with Cavendish on the right-hand side of the road, moved to his right.
The Slovak appeared to flick out an elbow as Cavendish was forced into the barriers at about 60km/h.
Sagan was initially docked 30 seconds, but the race jury looked at the crash again before disqualifying him.
"I was just following Demare and Sagan came over," Cavendish said immediately after the stage.
"I get on with Peter well, but I don't get the elbow - I'm not a fan of him putting his elbow in me like that."
Wednesday's stage was won by Arnaud Demare, who became the first Frenchman to win a bunch sprint stage at the Tour since 2006.
Briton Geraint Thomas, riding for Team Sky, kept his overall lead, despite also crashing in the closing stages in a separate incident.
Defending champion Chris Froome remains second in the general classification, 12 seconds behind compatriot Thomas.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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What if they held an event on the future of labor, and no workers were invited? That’s something you’d expect at a conference of CEOs or venture capitalists. But when the government hosts a meeting on firms like Uber, TaskRabbit, and Postmates, and neglects to find workers—or even labor advocates—to speak, that’s shocking. Ad Policy
The Federal Trade Commission workshop “The ‘Sharing’ Economy” purported to focus on “issues facing platforms, participants, and regulators.” But calling an Uber driver a mere “participant” unfairly predetermines the most fundamental labor issue of the digital economy: whether those who work for massive digital platforms deserve the protection of employment, or can be treated as mere “independent contractors” bereft of traditional labor protections. By siding with the industry’s preferred categorization, the FTC tipped its hand in advance.
The agency compounded its bias by failing to invite workers and organizers to speak. So many others offered advice: economists, business school professors, lawyers, corporate lobbyists, the Better Business Bureau, and digital economy giants like Uber and AirBnB all flashed their credentials and got a respectful hearing. They debated a wide range of issues, from antitrust to privacy to public safety.
Everyone was there, that is, except for those who do the real work.
The lack of voices from below meant that the discussion was shaped by a sense of miraculous inevitability. “These markets are going to take over our lives whether we like it or not,” said Stanford economics professor Liran Einav, making it sound as if there is nothing that social and political pressure can do to shape the future of work. Business elites reassured their government peers that “the people want this.” No one was there to call that bluff, to point out the extraordinary struggles over pay, fair labor practices, and dignity that we’ve been chronicling since at least 2009.
Sure, the new platforms bring new efficiencies to consumers. But the on-demand workforce—the ones fueling this economy with their bodies, possessions, and time—needs to speak about the dark side of being bossed around by unaccountable apps. There’s no lack of organized resistance to arbitrary, brutal platform labor conditions. Organizations like the Freelancers Union, the NYC Taxi Alliance, TurkerNation, or the Domestic Workers Alliance, have spoken up for labor for years. THE NATION IS READER FUNDED. YOUR SUPPORT IS VITAL TO OUR WORK. DONATE NOW!
The time is now right for digital workers to be heard.
We have been listening. And we have found that the problems for workers in crowd work, online freelancing, and online marketplaces for physical services like Uber and Taskrabbit are similar. All of them hover in the same legal gray zones of the Internet—they are deeply connected and must be considered in tandem. Interestingly, crowd work and online freelancing—areas of the sharing economy that affect tens of millions of workers—were not even mentioned at the FTC’s roundtable.
Why should the digital economy fly below the regulatory radar? Business models that flourish on an hourly wage of $2-3, with zero benefits, should have no place in a country as rich as the United States. And even when wages are adequate, the terms of digital employment need to be fairer. Platform owners change labor conditions on a whim, assuming privileges that would make a feudal lord blush. A job review system does not protect workers from abuse is backward and archaic.
Firms that sack workers on the basis of one fat-fingered mistake of rating a ride or task with one star (instead of the intended five) are also chilling. It’s a world of bureaucratic indifference to the most basic concepts of fairness and accountability.
Sadly, many participants at the FTC roundtable invoked the old canard of business “self-regulation”—lobbyists’ favorite euphemism for letting the strong exploit the weak. Speakers suggested that platform owners will be “disciplined” by the ability of workers to shift to another platform, ignoring the obvious trends toward monopoly already clear in so many other parts of the digital economy.
Franklin Roosevelt called the business grandees of his day “economic royalists,” and brought them to heel after their greed and disregard for basic worker rights crashed the economy. Today’s platform capitalists exert the same type of feudal power, glamorized by media and regulators too dazzled by their riches to ask tough questions about their source. Digital labor codes could promote flexibility, dignity, and decent pay. Let’s hope that, as the FTC continues to take comments this summer, it reads the views of the labor advocates it failed to listen to last week.
The FTC is accepting your comments until August 4.'Thank you, Russia, for protecting us'
In Sevastopol in the Ukrainian region of Crimea on Thursday, people wave Russian flags after hearing that a local council supported the Crimean regional Parliament's preference to join Russia.
Supporters of Russia have been out and about in the
Ukrainian region of Crimea
.
"Our grandparents protected our land from the SS, and we will protect our land from Western extremists," a woman shouted yesterday in Simferopol
, the administrative center of Ukraine's Crimea region, where a pro-Russia crowd gathered.
"Thank you, Russia, for protecting us.
"
Normal life continues in some parts of Crimea --
people still go to work, to restaurants, to bars.
But tensions continue to mount in the region, where lawmakers voted Thursday in favor of rejoining Russia and having a referendum in 10 days.Attempting to engage fans during the very slim annual window in which the NBA is irrelevant, the Clippers posted a light-hearted poll on Twitter yesterday.
“What’s your preference?” Los Angeles’ social media team asked, listing dunks, alley-oops, threes, and blocks as the options.
The Blazers responded with some heat, a GIF of DeAndre Jordan air-balling a free throw in a Blazers-Clippers playoff game this spring.
The Clippers swiftly deleted their original tweet.
The moment came from Game Four of the first round of this year’s Western Conference Playoffs. That was actually the first of two consecutive free throws that Jordan airballed.
Jordan shot 43 percent from the free throw line last year, and that was one of the best efforts of his career. His free throw woes are an easy punch line. Credit to the Blazers for taking advantage of an opportunity to jab a conference rival.
Send all complaints, compliments, and tips to sportstips@complex.com.11.48 am: Both black boxes found
Divers have found the second black box from the AirAsia plane that crashed more than two weeks ago, but they have not yet been able to free it from debris on the floor of the Java Sea, says an Associated Press report.
Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi, the operation coordinator at the National Search and Rescue Agency, says the cockpit voice recorder was located on Monday just hours after officials announced the data flight recorder had been brought to the surface.
He says it is stuck under heavy wreckage, and divers are working to lift it. Searchers began zeroing in on the sites a day earlier after three Indonesian ships picked up intense pings from the area.
9.54 am: Flight data recorder found, hunt on for cockpit voice recorder
According to an AFP report, the recorder, one of two black boxes containing vital information which is called the flight data recorder, was brought to the surface at 7:11 am.
National search and rescue chief Bambang Soelistyo told reporters, "We succeeded in bringing up part of the black box that we call the flight data recorder."
Divers were still hunting for the second black box, the cockpit voice recorder.
12 January 8.51 am: 1 black box retrieved
According to an Associated Press alert, Indonesia search official confirmed that divers have retrieved 1 black box from the crashed AirAsia flight on bottom of Java Sea.
"The navy divers in Jadayat state boat have succeeded in finding a very important instrument, the black box of AirAsia QZ8501," said Tonny Budiono, a senior ministry official. The recorders were at a depth of 30-32 metres (99-106 feet), he said in a statement.
End of updates for 10 January
12.00 pm: Indonesia deploys divers to investigate underwater pings
Divers were today sent to investigate underwater pings that may be coming from the flight recorders of the AirAsia plane as efforts continued to retrieve the jet's tail from the bottom of the Java Sea.
"Each team comprises 10 divers," Commander of the First Squad Indonesian Diver, Ebram Harimurti, said.
"We will work for a week, at least every day. We will attempt to dive four times to the location of the tail section," he said, adding the first team has been sent to verify the pings.
Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency has deployed 20 professional divers to lift the tail of the ill-fated AirAsia QZ8501 flight that crashed on December 28 en route |
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